Upgrade - 349: Six Colors and Not a Color

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

New iMacs and iPads! The long-anticipated debut of AirTags! Podcast subscriptions! A new Apple TV remote! Ted Lasso's secret shortbread recipe! Fresh from viewing Apple's latest event, Jason and Myke break down all the announcements.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 349 today's show is brought to you by privacy pingdom and gabby my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley you've caught me wandering wandering around the deserted streets of Apple Park. Hello. Are you also incredibly muscular all of a sudden, or is that just Tim Cook? I've used the pandemic to get jacked. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Tim making me feel bad. I did the opposite of what Tim has done during the pandemic. That is a muscular 60-year-old fellow, we decided. Bravo, Tim.

Spying, going on wires wires he's a busy guy so we've just about 30 minutes ago from when we're recording uh the event wrapped up so usual disclaimer at the top of the episode uh there is potentially more information out about all of these products by the time you're listening to this uh both of us will cover any additional parts next week i did get a chance to look at the websites a little which is not normally something I get a chance to do before we record. But there's going to be a bunch of things. People are going to be getting briefings today and the rest of the week. And so you're going to see journalists start to tweet things that are like assertions of facts.

And you're going to be like, wait a second, we didn't know the answer to that. And the answer is somebody at Apple told them that fact. So that's still to come. So we'll have all of that kind of stuff next week for sure to talk about. For sure. We should start off by assessing the results of the draft. I'm just going to say it. I beat you.

I did it. You beat me. You did it. Year of Mike, everybody. See, now it's interesting again. Just. Just. It was.

And it's funny because I kept score. I kept score i took uh i kept score um and then steven hackett just popped up in the slack with a screenshot of his score which is not the official score but i think is an interesting measure of of uh what he thinks uh an unbiased person would score it at and it matched my scorecard exactly yeah i had so basically where it kind of fell down on was the new magic keyboard i gave you that point but would have argued that point if otherwise yes it's the most arguable point is does it does adding a does adding a white version of the existing magic keyboard make it new or alternately if they introduce a bunch of new Magic keyboards for the Mac that might work with the iPad,

but this is in the iPad pick section, would that count? I think the white is arguable, but it didn't matter because we ended tied. We ended tied. And you won the tiebreaker, so it didn't really matter. Because it was under 75 minutes. I should have picked a number lower than 75, although there was a point early on where I thought, oh, my God, it is going to be longer than 60 minutes because Tim is introducing lots of things before we even go to the products. But, no, clearly they're very disciplined. They're like, no, we're going to make this run at 60 minutes.

So much so that I'm really glad we didn't set the over-under at 60 minutes, because I don't know how I would judge that. It felt like they landed right on 60 minutes, but it might have been a second over or a second under. I don't know. I think it's clear that they want to keep it to an hour, because they blasted through the first section. And arguably stuff like many of those things needed more time and they just refused to give it. Probably. Yeah. Probably could have been a 70 minute, 75 minute thing, but it wasn't.

No. No. I think, you know how everybody needs guidelines, right? I think that they have settled. This is three in a row where they've done this. I think Apple has decided that for an event like this, you should shoot for 60. Like you should fit in a 60-minute time window. And that's what they did.

And maybe the fall, one of the fall or the fall event can go longer. I mean, you know, if you think about it, they did three one-hour events for fall this year. So I could imagine maybe the September event, if it's still presented this way, would go over an hour because there's more stuff going on. But other than that, they keep to an hour because there's more stuff going on. But other than that, they keep to an hour. So just a very quick recap. So we will score you on 5G support on iPad Pro, new Magic Keyboard, iMac of Apple Silicon, new iMac with new colors,

podcast-related announcement, and Apple Fitness Plus mention. I got one iPad Pro using a new screen tech, USB 4 on iPad Pro, new iMac has smaller bezels, new iMac has iPad Pro design, AirTags, Apple TV, and I got the tiebreaker. So we have started the year with some order restored to the universe. That's right.

Finally, it's a competition again after I swept you out of last year. And I love that. I did not throw this but i love that and in fact i would say mike for me i think the entire event in terms of the draft scoring came down to us trying to divine a specific marketing decision on our part which is you and i both figured the chip in the new iPad Pro would essentially be an M1.

And we had two options on our draft sheet. One was chip in the iPad Pro is an M1. And one was chip in the iPad Pro is a variant of the A14. Even though it's the same chip, we knew what chip this was going to be. And I picked, they're going to just call it a 14x and they didn't they called it m1 they just they decided to roll their m1 marketing and have that halo also fit around the ipad pro and by not making that guess um i fall into the the tie with you and you take it on the tie break so congratulations thank you very much um i'm excited for a some competition now yep

now it's on now next week's episode is going to be episode 350 of upgrade which is very exciting stuff ended up coming a week sooner than we expected because we did the emergency draft episode uh and to celebrate we have a couple of special guests that are going to be joining us next on next week's episode oh this is exciting so we will be rejoined as we were quite a while ago now by colleen ovielle and also navpreet kaloti and we're going to be talking all about the new imax that's going to be on next week's episode that's great i'm very excited to have colleen back on the show yeah we talked to her a couple imac releases ago and um and so it's good and then i i talked to her at one point in person i think because of

the pro display xdr because she was um out in front on that one too and obviously imac it's her thing and so it's going to be great to talk to her about these new imacs which are um much newer and more different than the last few imac releases have been so there's a lot to talk about yeah we'll talk about the the imac of course in a minute and also nav was who showed off the camera stuff so ah cool it's very exciting but i thought calling was amazing uh so basically you've seen them on the live apple event now hear them on upgrade next week let's talk about apple podcasts to begin today we got to do it now we tried to order the show in the order of most important and interesting things to us. Yeah. But with one little asterisk, which is also we are podcasters.

And so we're going to at least touch on the podcast announcements Apple made today. Now, I've read the press release and I saw the video. Yeah, me too. I don't know. I have so many questions. Me too. a subscription function that it's interesting because this is not apple podcast plus as a service it is more like the app store where apple is basically going to act and the apple podcast app is going to act as a uh an interface i was going to say a middleman which is kind of what it is between listeners and podcasters and basically take money for premium podcast content, which is something that up to now we've all rolled our own systems to do this. Yeah. So to do this, you have to go into the Apple Podcasters program, which is 20 bucks a year,

which is basically like the developer program. It's just the podcasters version of that. And it really is, as as you say it is the app store model so you set your own pricing um and it's monthly by default but you can also have annual options and you can also do free trials and sample episodes but it's not part of apple one or premiere or anything like that it is purely like la carte. People can buy in and out of what they want to. Now, the subscriptions go at $70.30 for year one per subscriber, and then it drops to $85.15 for year two. So after somebody is subscribed for a year,

your cut of their money goes down by half. So this is just like subscriptions in the App Store. I mean, I have a real problem with that 30%, Jason. I mean, I'm just going to say it now. Oh, I should actually, big asterisk around all of this, both me and Jason operate subscription models and we have podcast networks that we manage. None of what we are saying here is official for the network.

So me and Stephen have not yet even spoken about this. Like there is no decisions one way or another being made right now on this show about what RelayFM or The Incomparable will be doing. I just want to state that. Right. This is just a quick reaction. Plus, we don't know all of Apple's story. I will say about the 30%. I hear you. One of these days, I need to look and see if I calculate out Memberful and Stripe and all of that, what my revenue split with my enabling technology providers is.

Yeah. I should probably do that. I think it's probably relatively close to 15. And so 15, I have no problem at all with because, well, again, I'll have to do it. I have way less of a problem,'ll say 15 right when i was thinking about this before because their rumors have been circling for the last couple of days and i was talking to friend of the show underscore david smith about this he actually said to me that he thought they would do it this way and he hadn't even considered to me to do it more like the app store than a streaming service right like then and that it's much better i i much better i was dreading the the conversation with somebody at

apple saying really sign up for our program which is this right we would be those people we'd be like the apple news conversation with newspapers right which is just please opt into this thing it's like no i don't really want to do that in fact this is probably what apple news should do too is just make it a conduit where apple takes a cut. So Apple's argument here is going to be for the 30% and for why this is good in general is Apple Podcasts is an incredibly popular podcast client. It's hard to do what we do in Apple Podcasts. You have to set up a whole external system and you have to walk your users through, your customers through getting in there. They will also probably talk about how Apple is going to use the podcast app to promote stuff. So they're going to say basically, look,

by being on our platform and our very popular app and by driving users to you, that's why we're taking a cut, especially in year one, is because we're setting all of this up for you. And my skepticism comes from the fact that I really doubt that very many people discover what we do on podcasts by tapping around in Apple Podcasts, right? Let alone if they discover us, would they then blindly pay us, right? Right. No, they would discover us and then they would sign up and all that.

So really the argument is it's a lot less friction if you are a fan of Upgrade to press the subscribe button, pay us money from within the app, and get Upgrade Plus, right? Just as one example. That's Apple's ultimate argument is it's just a lot less friction for people who are living inside the podcast app because they built everything in. So all you have to do is tap a couple of times and we'll see what the details that for me. It all comes down to the details because the challenge here and I was fascinated that the co-founder and CEO of the athletic was one of the people in Apple's pod in Apple's press release about this podcast initiative. And he was like, this is great. We have a lot of people listening to our podcast. This will be easy. And I thought, this is really weird because, and it goes to the big problem I have with this on initial response, which is The Athletic is a subscription-based sports content website.

You can't read The the athletic stuff without paying. And they've had this podcast strategy and it's sort of been weird because you can listen to their podcast as a subscriber to the athletic. Some of them, or maybe most of them are now available publicly with ads. It's always been this kind of thing, weird thing where they haven't done something like we've done. And so it's like, okay, I can see why for them having a system inside Apple Podcasts is actually a nice integration, except for one thing, which is they have their own subscriber base. And I, as a paying subscriber to The Athletic, am not going to pay them more for their podcasts in the Apple Podcasts app. I'm not going to do that. for their podcasts in the Apple Podcasts app. I'm not going to do that.

And I don't think most subscribers would. I'm going to pay for two subscriptions to The Athletic. But my guess is going to be that Apple is not going to, like, let you log in with your outside username and password to get access to subscription podcasts, right? They don't want that. That's not what they're trying to do. You might be able to generate codes, maybe. I don't know. There's a lot of technical details. It's a mystery. So, for example, with our memberships, you get a newsletter and Discord access, right?

Now, my assumption would be there's no way we could honor that with an integration like we have through Memberful. Unless Apple provided some sort of API where you could authenticate that they're a subscriber. But for a first cut at this on Apple's part, I really doubt something like that is there. But it might be. We don't know. We don't know, right? So what you risk is having parallel membership plans if you're outside of Apple Podcasts like we are, where you've got two different membership plans with two different sets of functionality. Within Apple Podcasts,

you've got one thing, which is the podcast, which is great because that's the primary thing. That's what you're really paying for. And the rest of it is like the community and all the other extras and stuff like that. So that's weird. And then I just want to lay one other thing on it,

which is there's no app review for podcasts, as far as I can tell. It's not like they're listening to podcasts. Well, not for each episode. There is a review team, a human review team that's been around for a long time. Oh yeah. No, that's not what I'm talking about though. What I'm talking about is when you submit an app to app review, they check it. They don't check podcast episodes. No. And I know that there may be some terms, but which is complicated itself because those are terms of what you're allowed to say on your own podcast, which I have a problem with. But does this lead to people saying, oh, we also have a community.

If you want that, here's what you need to do. Unsubscribe from Apple and go to our thing where we get more money and then do it there, which is something that would get you rejected if you were an app. But in a podcast, what happens then? I don't know. It's fascinating. I really am looking forward to hearing more about it from Apple. My overall feeling on this is they have done this the right way. And I'm really pleased about what they have actually implemented here because it is by and large focused in the best way for podcast creators. I unequivocally believe that like this is the way to do better who who more qualified to talk about how a bunch of a pain it is to set up a podcast support and

subscription system than people who've done it right it's like this is this is so good from the side of it which is easy to pay as a user uh uses apple Apple's existing stuff. You're going to have Apple's credit card information feeding it. So people are much less likely to let their credit card expire or something like that. There's like a lot to be said for it. I actually think if you're a podcaster, the problem is that this should have happened two years ago or three years ago. Because if you're a podcaster who wants to do a thing like this, this is a really great option because it's so easy. As far as I can tell, it seems like a really great option.

The problem is if you're a podcaster who wants to do this, you probably already did it. So I don't know. So yeah, I mean, because as well, like all the big, big podcasts have worked this out this past year if they wanted to do it, right? People have this stuff. Really, it's an interesting time to have launched it.

You should say it's a little late. I'll say from my perspective, I'm happy this didn't exist before we did our own because we would have done this and I think it would have been a hard sell for a lot of our listeners who don't use Apple Podcasts and how we would have navigated that. So my top level

on it is I am not saying that we will do this, but I'm definitely not saying we won't because the model that they have given here is pretty fair. I mean, for me, I just think it should be 85-15 always because I don't really understand how they can justify $70.30.

I can foresee using it. It's all in the details. And what I don't want to do but might be required is, like I said earlier, to essentially offer it two different ways. Where, you know, if you're're using apple podcasts and you want to pay us you can get access to the stuff but everybody else will pay us a different way and we'll get access to the stuff and more stuff and it's going to be a two-tiered thing and that's not great but you know again that's somebody who spent time building things and cultivating things. And then I look at this and I think, yeah, but so many people listen to an Apple podcast,

and I have helped so many people through the process of trying to subscribe to a members-only feed. I have spent so much time, and I know you guys have done this too, and I know Marco has done this with ATP, trying to come up with ways to build a website that has links to a members-only feed per person that you can tap in the right places and it opens in the right client and it does the right thing. And it's hard. There are bugs in the client apps i've discovered literally discovered bugs in podcast clients while working on the incomparable subscription stuff where it's like oh that doesn't work even though it's documented and they're like yeah that's a bug we'll fix it so like all of this effort because you can't just go in the podcast app and go uh yeah i'll just i'll just pay for that and it's not for everybody because not everybody uses the podcast app. But for people who do use Apple Podcasts,

which is wildly popular, it's going to be a much nicer experience. And it's going to enable podcast creators to make money, which is a thing that I support. So yeah, we'll have to watch it. It's fascinating. And it has been like, they mentioned when they announced podcast support,

which 2005, I believe. I think I was at the D conference the day that they announced this. And Steve Jobs was there on stage with Walt and Kara. That was 16 years ago. And Apple has largely been hands off about podcasts. This is the biggest thing they've done. They said it. And they're right.

This is the biggest thing that's happened. Other than launching a podcast app on iOS. This is the biggest thing they've done since 2005 you know and as the wagons are circling on the podcast industry like facebook is getting into podcasts now as of yesterday apple's always been like the beacon of like oh they're doing it right because they didn't really do anything and from what we know about other companies that are trying to make money from podcasting, to be honest, this seems like the fairest to podcast creators that I've seen so far. Because look, I'm going to understand the realities of it, right? Like you can't subscribe to premium Apple podcast content in Overcast or Pocketcast.

And I would never think that that would be a thing, right? So you've got to respect the business aspect of it and i think ultimately from what i've seen so far and we'll be spending a lot of time looking at over the next multiple days this at least seems on the face of it to be the the truest to what podcasting can be in this new age i would assume because they're not like inserting their own ads trying to make a monetization platform and then taking a bunch of stuff away from podcast creators which it seems like companies like spotify are trying to do like right anchor just published this big blog post talking about how they want to move away from rss

it's like great thanks so pleased all right well we will there will be more on this yeah uh dear listener but um but we will move on to shiny new apple products uh for the rest of this show well first let's take our first break and talk about gabby when it comes to car and home insurance so many people know that they deserve better so they're putting their policies to the test and turning to gabby gabby stands for Get A Better Insurance. And getting better insurance with Gabby means finding a better price for the same insurance coverage. Who knew something like this was so easy it could even exist? They are the one true comparison platform with real rates.

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And then it goes away and it churns for a little while and then comes back with a bunch of quotes of, based on the same coverage that you're getting currently, here is what other insurance providers are offering. And it's funny because a few insurance providers were like, we are not going to display this information. You have to go in directly. And those are listed in Gabby as well. And then you click on them. Basically, you click on them and it's a pre-formatted query to their website where they display those. So if they're going to not play ball with you, you can click to get those too. Gabby customers can save $961 per year on average.

They'll never sell your info, so you're not going to get annoying spam or robocalls. Put your policy to the test like so many others have. Get a better insurance with Gabby. It's totally free to check and there's no obligation. Go to gabby.com slash upgrade that's g-a-b-i.com slash upgrade to check it out today that's gabby.com slash upgrade our thanks to gabby for their support of this show and relay fm let's talk about that iMac oh my god do i want one it's beautiful beautiful. We got colors. We got colors. I have thought at several points today that I want one.

And then the more I read about it, the more I realize I want the... It's a very deep thought. It's like, I want the iMac that comes after this one. Yes, of course. Right? It's got a lot of really interesting things, but it's also got, I think, the limitations that we were expecting we might see in an iMac introduced at this place in time, which is it's an M1 iMac. It's got a bunch of limitations. It's also the small iMac, which means presumably there will be the bigger iMac at some point, which is probably what I want. But it is, there's so many things they did here

that are such a relief. And I wanted to just start with color because the color the color like i mean yes apple silk and iMac is great they made iMacs with colors again seven colors not just two colors three colors and not just all various boring shades of gray they made seven different colors it's like the old days of the iMac and they are brighter than i thought because it turns out that various rumor type people who have incomplete information sort of thought that the muted colors were all over the device. And it turns out that the chin, which still exists beneath the iMac screen, it exists in part, I think, because it's a nice place to put color,

is a more muted color, whereas the reverse of the iMac is super bright and the sides too yeah and the sides uh so if somebody who lives and works alone and nobody ever sees the back of your computer you're like well who cares about what the back looks like but as we know from talking to uh Colleen a couple of years ago so many iMacs are in public places they're in hotel lobbies or they're in big office groups or whatever right there are places where the iMac is being seen and having those bright colors on the back like I was thinking oh man every hotel front desk that has they're gonna have to pick the color that best matches their color scheme but then it's gonna be almost like if it's a hotel with orange highlights or

purple highlights or whatever it's like well we'll get the purple iMacs. And then it'll be like, it's our custom branded iMac. That's going to happen because that's a big appeal of the iMac is in those public places too. So it's six colors, blue, green, pink, yellow, orange, purple, and then silver. I don't really, I mean, like, I just want, it's like silver is like. Silver color.

Right. I mean, it's tech. i just wanted to say like not because not color it's like available in six colors and a not color and then i love it you know i wanted to also just say six colors right because yes thank you i appreciate it six colors and then although the brightest most fun colors cost extra isn't that interesting yeah the yellow orange and purple i believe so you there are four options available in the base and then there's seven uh at the higher price it's the two price configuration options yes yellow orange and purple are more expensive and you also go from the seven core gpu the the differences are so minute you go from the 7-core GPU like at the 999 MacBook Air to the 8-core GPU. And then

there are a couple other very... It's fascinating. I'm looking forward to taking a deep dive with our guests next week about it because there are other questions I've got about sort of like what the low-end one has. Does the low-end have an ethernet port it doesn't it doesn't look like it and has less well none of them have an ethernet port on the back but there's

an ethernet port on the connector the power brick because the iMac has a power brick again which they spun in a very interesting way as being oh yes but we get it out of your way and there's a beautiful little cable and then then the brick can be on the floor and there's an ethernet jack in there so i'm unclear gigabit ethernet is standard on the expensive one and not on the base one i'm unclear whether that means there's no ethernet at all on that power brick of the low-end model unless you upgrade or whether it's it's there but it's not gigabit it's a little mystery because that's fascinating too, right? We have a brand new, in a long history, a very quirky Apple connectors, going back to like the ADC connector

on Power Macs back in the day. This is like that. There is a magnetic connector that is apparently ethernet and power that attaches to the back of the iMac. And then on the floor, you put the box. So looking at the tech specs page, the lower one,

the cheapest one only has two USB-C or USB-4 slash Thunderbolt ports. And the more expensive gets an additional two USB-C, USB-3 ports. And the cheaper one says configurable with gigabit Ethernet. So my expectation is that the little power brick doesn't

have Ethernet in it for that one. Well, that's the question. Does it have Ethernet at all? Or is it not? I would think it doesn't. I would think that it's literally an iMac that doesn't have wired networking at all because I can hear somebody at Apple saying,

who needs it? And also, we need to make this thing cheaper. So what are we going to kick off of there? Like two ports and yeah. How cool is that power thing? I think it's awesome. I like it. You know, again, Cynic in me says they've innovated their way back to an external power brick for their iMac. But the fact is, are they right to prioritize a thin, you know, thin all the way back, right, on the back of it? Not bulgy like the current iMacs are. A very thin iMac and put the power on the outside. Yeah, I mean, I can see the argument there. I mean, who cares about a power brick on an iMac?

Like, it's just going to live under the desk next to the power cord thing that you've got well who cares is people who who don't have that setup but you're right i think having it be under the desk is probably better and having the ethernet there as somebody who has my ethernet plug threaded through and often is the thing that is is restraining the movement of my iMac I don't mind I mean I already have the power plug coming out if I had the power plug coming out and going down to the floor and ethernet also in there I would that would be a benefit to me that would actually be an upgrade for me but I'm sure there's somebody out there who will be very angry that I would just say I said who cares I'm sure some people care but like ultimately what does it

matter right like the thing just goes on the floor like the rest of the million power bricks i have under my desk on the floor or velcroed to the bottom of your desk how they deal with this with laptops if they're gonna have something like that will be different and i'll be intrigued because the reason i say that is this this all but confirms that magsafe is coming to the laptops because they bother to make a magnetic connector for the iMac when ultimately it doesn't need to be magnetic. You could just plug it in, right? The magnet feels very superfluous for the iMac. But I think that that's super cool.

And to be honest, I think the design of putting the Ethernet port on the power adapter to be really cool because it's like, look, we're bringing back a power adapter. Obviously, it'd be better if we didn't have one because it would just be like, why add something back? So we're going to actually give you additional functionality by having doing that. And I think that's super cool. I would love to see in the future, like some kind of upgrading thing where like I could

get like a full dock of expanded expandable ports on one of those i want a usb hub on that thing right yeah i do so right and i can get all that stuff i hope that that's something we could see in the future like more and more io on a you know make it more expensive i don't care like that all of this stuff is so expensive these days anyway all of these ports since everything went to thunderbolt like every dock is like cost you the moon so have something that apple makes have it will go through some kind of upgraded magnetic power connector like i would be into that i think it looks super cool sure so we didn't mention this runs the m1 no changes uh to the m1 by and large it seems no it's the same it's the same chip with the same limitations um base models are eight gigs of ram

upgradable to 16 um the big difference is that the more expensive iMac has the four ports on the same shape have different characteristics on the mac i don't know yeah yeah it's on the same machine right it's a it's it's not something they like to do but i think obviously the m1 has some limitations because we we've seen it with the the macbook air and the macbook pro 13 and with the mac mini which has usb a ports that they added and here it's not a it's c uh but again like they they added ports and there's a headphone jack on the side which made me laugh but uh yeah it's uh it's still the m1 with everything that is limited about the M1.

1080p camera. Better? Yeah. Still not what I would want, but better? Well, one of the things that I noticed throughout this presentation, and it has to do with how Apple, again, it's marketing. They're going to put their best face forward, right? But so many of their comparisons are to the previous iMac

and so it's like you know twice the resolution of the previous iMac so yeah the previous iMac camera was terrible and it's much faster than the previous iMac it's like well yeah the previous iMac was slow so sure all of that is true and all of that is good uh and with the the image signal processor in the M1 I'm sure that 1080p camera looks nice but uh but yeah it's it you know it's sort of table stakes but they weren't at table stakes they couldn't sit at the table before i really enjoyed best camera we've ever put in a mac it's like wow i mean it's not a high bar guys right no it's not so the the macbook pro has a 720p camera so this is better 1080 is better than 720 it's a bigger number um i would have wanted to see more here uh but i think the imac

pro has a 1080p but it doesn't have fancy um m1 image signal processing i think yeah so yeah i think you're right though speakers look great i mean sure okay yeah i all right so i as somebody who attaches an external speaker to my imac i have always had this sort of skepticism the imac speakers in my imac pro sound better than i expect every time i hear something go through them i'm'm like, oh, that's actually not bad. It's not as good as my external speakers, but it's not bad. And that's, so this is the thing is like, they're talking about Dolby Atmos and all of that. And it's like, all right, well, I would love to hear these because honestly, I would love to not have a speaker sitting on my desk and have the music come out of my iMac and have it be good enough. But my concern is always that, yeah, but it's not, it's okay. And for people who don't care enough to have external speakers and stuff, you want that experience to be really nice so they can watch a movie on the iMac and have it sound good. But my skepticism is Apple talks a lot about the quality of the sound on their laptops and the quality of the microphones on their laptops because we got studio quality microphone array on this too.

Check the box. It's what they've been talking about for a long time on their laptops. And here it is on the iMac. And, you know, it's not what I would consider studio quality. They are doing some stuff to make it sound better. I like that they more pitched it for Zoom calls now than they used to where they were like,

oh yes, musicians are using it with GarageBand to write songs that they release. where they were like, oh, yes, musicians are using it with GarageBand to write songs that they release. And I was like, I'm very skeptical of that. So I'm mixed between some skepticism. I think Apple overreaches sometimes with the claims they make about these things. But, yeah, a built-in microphone that's better and has more noise reduction so that you sound better on Zoom is a good feature that should exist because most people don't buy external microphones and most people don't attach external speakers. So the speakers should sound better

and I'm glad they do. I'm looking forward to hearing them. I'm just applying a little bit of skepticism about how good they are. I would like to hear them for myself, please. New peripherals are super interesting. Three keyboards, apple getting into that sweet keyboard game like i guarantee i'm like convinced that they've put these things in

color because everybody likes fancy keyboards now uh they're all color matched including trackpad and mice are color matched they have a standard one and then they have uh like the regular kind of what is 65 keyboard and then they have the one with kind of what is 65% keyboard. And then they have the one with the number pad as well. Yeah. The in the regular one and in the one with the number pad touch ID. We'd stop talking about that. We used to predict this as a future direction for them.

And it didn't happen for so long that I when they announced it, I was like, wow, why wasn't that on our list? Like that's a thing that's been hovering up there so long that it almost has just faded away, which was like, could they put, well, originally it was the touch bar, right? And the touch bar distracted us, but it's literally, can they put touch ID on a keyboard, external keyboard? And the answer is, yes, they can. And they did. Wireless as well. I mean, you know, that was, I mean, again, like when we were talking about this originally, stuff like the Apple Pay, stuff that you could do on another device and have it work on a Mac, that didn't exist.

So always the question was, if they were going to do Touch ID, does the keyboard have to be wired again? Will we accept that? And I think we stopped talking about it because it seemed like, well, then obviously the next thing to do here, considering they've never done this,

is just to put Face ID on these machines. Now, what we can see now is that's not happening anytime soon no um which look i think that's fine because they now have this now i was begging for them to say we've also put touch id on the trackpad because i don't and do not want to use one of apple's keyboards so which is a shame but like i can live with it uh but you know i hope that in the future they're able to do that because i mean the trackpad seems as useful for having something like that on it as the uh as a keyboard but i think this is a really great addition um i think this is an awesome thing that they've done um i know that like and also you get it in the box so i think that's super cool so the low-end one you don't get touch id obviously yeah uh you have to pay extra for it the higher end one comes with the

touch id uh the small touch id keyboard in the box it sounds like and yeah we'll have to see where it goes um i do i do think there must have been a moment where they decided on the colors for these things which is great great move i've been i have been banging the drum about colored max for so long now and here we are it's very exciting but i also realize that at some point everybody who's in charge of like the peripherals is like yeah but all our peripherals are silver aluminum and you're now going to make seven different colors of iMac. What are we going to do? And the, and it's like, well, we got two options. We can hide all the aluminum and make them plastic or something, or we're going to need seven different keyboards and seven different mice. And, uh, it, that became since there's

three different keyboards and, and the mouse and the track pad, right? So became since there's three different keyboards and and the mouse and the trackpad right so that means there's one two three four five times seven so that's a lot that's what 35 uh 35 different skews of peripherals attached to these imax that's a lot of keyboards and mice and trackpads because they could have just made them white because every single one of these imax has a white part on the front also they didn't make the left and right arrow keys half width to match the half height uh and to leave some space for orientation and it makes me sad but oh well yeah they went for aesthetics on this more than because also as well something that i can't i'm already looking at and i can't abide the the there's a corner radius on the keyboard and so

the right arrow key is a different shape to the left one because. There's a corner radius on the keyboard. And so the right arrow key is a different shape to the left one because they've taken the corner radius out of the right arrow key. I don't know. I don't know what to say. I'm not going to use this keyboard. Bottom line is, right,

I'm not going to use this keyboard how good it is because I like other keyboards that are not this. And so I still hope that they will one day, at least maybe on the higher end iMac, do Face ID at some point, or they will find another place to do Touch ID

for people who are not using this keyboard. But I'm not going to hold my breath because it seems like this is their official answer to that question, which is just use this keyboard with Touch ID. I think this is perfectly fine for most users. I am an Edge case user. It's great.

I'm aware of that. But I think that for the iMacs that most people are going to buy, I would expect it will be one, either the middle or the top M1. They're going to get this in the box. But I think that for the iMacs that most people are going to buy, I would expect it will be one either the middle or the top M1. They're going to get this in the box, which I think is great because it is worth noting

there is three different features that Apple's selling of the 24-inch display, which is a 4.5K retina display. And it's the only one they're doing right now. Like the 27-inch iMac is still available

because presumably that will not get revised until there is a new M1 chip. Faster, more capable chip? Yeah. So it's $1299 for four colors and $1799 for the rest of the colors shipping in May. Dior beloved 21-inch is still kind of available on apple's website the the bad uh fusion drive option low not retina uh we sell this because there's somebody out there who is buying for schools or something that wants this thing that won't spend more than whatever

its price is 10.99 on a on an imac but I imagine that it will it will disappear I'm not surprised but what I do like about it is it's it's really buried on the website um like they don't really make much of a point of trying to sell this to you so I think that's good personally but I understand why they still have it because this is what they do but yeah overall I think this is so one of the the things that John Turner said is this is the first machine built from the ground up around the M1. I mean, and if you look

at this compared to the laptops, it's like they come from a different company, right? This iMac is, I think, very clearly a signal of the future of the Mac. And I'm telling you, if they are this impressive, I am really excited because this thing looks,

it just looks fantastic. So I'm really excited about it. I have a couple other notes, by the way, I want to back up because you said something that was incorrect. It's $14.99 for the higher end. Apologies. $12.99 for the low,

$14.99 for the high end. And then they have like an even higher skew for $16.99. Yes. I was12.99 for the low, $14.99 for the high end. And then they have an even higher skew for $16.99. Ah, yes. I was putting seven colors into the price, which was obviously the wrong thing to do. You don't buy all the colors. You only buy one, you see, is the challenge there. So I can see why you did the math wrong. I want to talk about the chin. Does there need to be a chin there? I think because this is so thin, it does because they literally can't tuck that. That's where the computer is and everything else is the display. And the speakers.

And the speakers, right. So it would be very hard to hide all that behind the display without making the whole thing thicker, which they could do. But they really want this to be this super thin slab. It reminds me also of even the earliest days of the iMac. There were always these complaints about the iMac that it was really... One of the innovations Apple had in early iMacs was they essentially used laptop parts for a desktop computer. In the old days, there were laptop parts and there were desktop parts. And it was heresy almost to use laptop parts in a desktop computer. But Apple has done it a lot

because they're really good at making laptops. And they say, for most people, laptop performance is plenty on the desk, too. And I was thinking about that while I was watching this rollout, because this is a laptop, right? Like, it's so thin. I know it's big and it's got a huge screen. But if you look at it, not only is it the M1 chip, which is in those laptops, but like, it's still kind of the the idea here is uh they're using their laptop tech to make this thing thin uh and yes it could be huge on the back and if you sit in the front of it all day you wouldn't notice that but like that's not what apple wants to do with the imac

they want it to be thin so it looks great from all angles and so they use their laptop tech to do this this is basically a macbook air or a 13 inch macbook pro except with a bigger screen and uh i think that's okay uh but it is a choice they made that's why the chin exists still even though the bezels are much thinner which is uh which is good because the bezels i'm looking at my iMac right now my iMac bezels are enormous and these this iMac bezels are not and by having the chinmax bezels are not. And by having the chin there and the foot as well, they're color matched and they're that little color. So the color shines through. If the color was only on the back, you would never see it. So that's all good. And very important to me. And again, you talk about niche features, but these are available

with a VESA mount instead of a foot. So you don't take it off. You order, as has been true in the consumer iMac for quite a while now, you don't take the foot off and then attach a mount. It comes in two configurations. And I was thinking about that and thinking, well, this thing is so thin and light that it would actually be really interesting on an arm. My disappointment here is that if you look at that arm, know it would be a lot of engineering work and because i know that that thing is not light but like i look at that arm and i think it is a shame it's not more adjustable it is one height and then and then you tilt it and that's all you can do is tilt it at the one height and i do wish apple would redesign its imax stand to be more adjustable. And we make a lot of jokes about the Pro Display

XDR stand, right? And mostly about how much it costs and therefore it's probably over-engineered. But like, I would love it if Apple offered a couple different styles of iMac stand in the future, right? Not just- Wait for the Pro one, Jason. Well, maybe the high-end one could do something like that. And that would be great because I look at this and I think, well, yeah, of course you want a simple stand that doesn't cost a lot so that you can get the price down, but it would be great if your options beyond that weren't just, well, get the VESA mount and stick it on whatever versus we also have an upgraded stand. If you want a more adjustable stand, we make one that you can order on your iMac instead. And they didn't do that this time.

Maybe they'll do it down the road. So the foot's a little bit disappointing just because there's no real innovation there in terms of adjusting the height of your display, which isn't a kind of important thing. And that means that some of these beautiful new iMacs will end up on top of a dictionary because you got to get it at the right height. All right, this episode is brought to you by privacy.com. So look, we've all been there, right? You go to buy something online

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Go to privacy.com slash upgrade and sign up right now. A thanks to Privacy for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason, they did it. What'd they do? Those mad people at Apple, they did it.

M1 in the iPad Pro. Yeah, well, this is why I lost the draft. Yep. And like we said at the top, we knew that this was essentially what they would do because we knew the M1. When they announced the M1, we're like, that's the A14X, right?

Like, they're going to make an iPad chip. They've already been making a more capable version of their iPhone chip as a variant for the iPad for a while. And so when they announced the M1, it looked very much like that. And so the question was, are they just going to use that chip in the iPad Pro? I think the answer, obviously, was yes. Always, clearly, that was what they were going to do. The question was just, what is the marketing behind it? And what they did was they chose to call it M1 because they've been beating the drum on M1. And so why not? Honestly, why not just take all of the work that they've done that has accrued to the M1

and roll it into the ipad pro because it allows the ipad pro to kind of like get the glow of all of the praise that's been given to the m1 as a result though also mike right it's been since 2018 fall of 2018 i believe was it or was it fall of 2018, right? Since the iPad Pro with the A14X came out? Is that right? I think so. It's been a long time. The A12X. Sorry, the A12X, yeah.

It's been a long time because the last update was last spring, and it was just that, you know, another GPU core update and LiDAR, right? So in terms of the amount of time we have been living with essentially the same iPad Pro... A12Z. Well, yeah, it was A12X and then it was A12Z.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, sorry. Because the A12Z just added the one core. So A12X to this, like, it's a big deal. I think that there's... Obviously, Apple will talk about how much faster it is, and it is. It's a big deal i think that there's obviously apple will talk about how much faster it is and it is it's a much more powerful chip i think a lot of people are still straining

to find ways to use the power on 2018's ipad pro right like that's always been the challenge that was the the thing that we talked about a lot back in 2018 was great that there's all this power, but how can you use it on the iPad? And those are software limitations. So I still have those questions, even though this is a much more powerful chip. Now I sit there in Ferrite recording studio and I export out, I compress a project in order to, when I'm done with it, I compress it and compresses it into a zip file. And that takes a while. And I think, oh, on M1, this would go a lot faster. So I can find some cases where I want it to be faster,

but really what I want is on the software side to take advantage of all this power that they poured in there, because this thing with an M one is going to be that much more powerful than the previous iPad pro, which was already probably more power than most people could use. If I can run iPad apps on my M one Mac, why can't I run M one Mac apps on my iPad? Now, like that's the question that we're not like Apple have done this to

themselves. We're going to be asking these kinds of questions now. look we had spoken about this so many times fundamentally we understood that the m1 is a variant of the a14 chip right like it just seemed obvious that that's the way that they did it apple apple never said it well now they've said it right like in in like that the m1 can run in both an ip running iPadOS and a Mac running macOS. So now these kinds of questions will start to get asked more and more directly. Because if we can go one way, why can't we go the other? Or why can't you do the work necessary to go the other way?

Like, why can't I run mac os on my ipad pro now well i mean it's not it's not a mac it's an ipad but yes it's a harder question to ask i i still had you know i had that item that we didn't pick in the draft about like mac compatibility it's like i don't think it's impossible to imagine a scenario where there's a virtual mac that you could run or something like that like like down the road, these look, the choice of calling this an M one and an iPad pro, this is Apple deliberately pushing the iPad and the Mac together. Yeah.

They've been doing that for a couple of years now, right? The whole catalyst conversation is about pushing the iPad and the Mac together. When they talk about catalyst apps running on the Mac, they talk about iPad apps. It's a path from a good iPad app to and the Mac together. When they talk about Catalyst apps running on the Mac, they talk about iPad apps. It's a path from a good iPad app to a good Mac app. So I don't know what their intent is.

I know that Apple's intent fundamentally is to keep the iPad as a touch tablet at its base, but it can go to all sorts of interesting places. And so, you know, how far does that go if you add you can already add a keyboard and a trackpad to an ipad at what point could you not say all right why can't i run something from the mac on this it's practically a mac already and so i think look they they've put an incredible amount of power into this iPad Pro, including adding Thunderbolt 4,

a Thunderbolt USB 4. That's never going to not be confusing. And really, they haven't, in my opinion, really delivered on anything from the iPadOS side that would suggest why you would do this. So my hopes now are focused solely on WWDC because I'm now expecting Apple to show me enhancements in the software side

that argue why this amount of power should be in an iPad. Because one of the things that I was thinking, I was convinced about, is that, oh, they're going to bump the battery life. But there was no indication to suggest that that was the case, right? I was like, well, you know, surely they're just going to increase the battery life now

because the battery life's so good on my MacBook Pro, it's better than my iPad. The iPad already benefited from that because it was already running on Apple's chips. So they already were optimizing for that and they can't, you know, the iPad has to be one, a single plane. And so they don't, they have to stuff everything in there, including battery and display. And that's harder. And so there's less battery. No, I understand all of that. But like my thinking was just like, well, surely there's going to be some benefit that I can see right now, because ultimately the things

that Apple show you that the ipads can do like i mean it can already do all this stuff like no one you know even the most intense ipad users are not being like oh i feel so like handcuffed with this let's say i mean rejoice if you're somebody who uses an ipad in i guess mirrored mode in a pro display xcr or is using it for for output while you use a video app on the iPad screen and then you're outputting to the Pro Display XDR because the new iPad Pro will support the XDR at full resolution. And this is my point too, which is, like we said last week,

okay, what's the story about Thunderbolt? Why do you have it? And they did what I thought they would do in saying, oh, fast storage for video or photography. Isn't that great? Which is like, okay, that is what I would have predicted is the bare minimum. If you can't say anything else about Thunderbolt,

at least you can say it's fast importing photos into Lightroom and it's fast importing 4K HDR video into your video editing app that isn't Final Cut Pro because Final Cut Pro doesn't run on iPad, by the way, still. Well, I just say, while we've been recording today,

there has been some information shared that apparently Apple has made reference on some press briefing calls that final cut for ipad is in the works well we will i'll believe that when i see it but yeah this is this is i think the point here which is that thunderbolt Thunderbolt port is nice, but has no real story behind it. And zooming out a little bit, honestly, isn't that the case with the iPad? It's sort of been the case with the iPad Pro for a few years now, which is sort of like, okay, we get it. You are building amazing hardware. hey, we get it. You are building amazing hardware. What can we do with it? And believe me, I am trying all sorts of interesting things with my iPad and Federico is and other people are. There are people who are doing lots of really interesting things with the iPad,

but the iPad's hardware is not the problem. So if they are going to do something like, you know, they nod toward the Pro Display XDR, but the use of it right now is so limited, it does make me think, you know, this is a great setup for a new version of iPadOS that actually will properly take advantage of external displays. And, you know uh whatever whatever other stuff high

speed data transfers and all that in a bigger story or oh this is perfect final cut pro on the ipad pro so it should be there so that's great we'll get there it's just in this announcement we got the bare minimum which is well yeah you can plug in faster stuff now. This reminded me very much of the USB-C edition. When they put USB-C on the iPad Pro, they kind of couldn't really do anything. Great, can I plug in a thumb drive and read the contents? And at that point, it was like, no, you can't. So again, I really feel like, I mean, look,

this is a cool iPad Pro. There's other things too, which makes it cool. It feels like a very pro iPad Pro. But they've taken some moves like calling it m1 and then putting thunderbolt on it which feels like okay i am confident they have a story for this but we're not going to find that out for another seven weeks but i feel confident that iPadOS will take advantage of this. I do feel very confident about that. I hope so. Center Stage, which is a new feature that's coming as part of the addition of an ultra-wide camera,

which is very interesting. This is one of my favorite features to this iPad. I thought it looked super cool. I feel like we were just talking about this too but not in the context of the ipad we were talking about this in the context of an amazon echo like thing for from apple that had a screen on it or something that was on a tv but the idea is the same which is you get a wide lens you can take a really high quality view of everybody in a room and then you use machine learning to do some intelligent zooming on the subjects

so that a stationary device will dynamically photograph whoever is a participant in a video call and the the other way i could describe this is do you ever watch a tv show or a movie where somebody's on a on a it's usually sci-fi because it was the future a video call with somebody and the person talking there's like camera movement and stuff where it's like they're zooming in or they're panning over or they're zooming back and you're like wait a second i thought this was a video phone why is the camera moving around and it's because they directed it like a tv show and not like an actual video camera and i mean those scenes make me laugh but this is that this is that which is of course silly 20th century mortal as i'm watching you know star trek or something like that um well in the future

they'll just be a really high quality camera and an intelligent computer will choose where to point the camera and that's what this is basically so um we'll we'll see how uncanny it is in practice but it's a cool idea i think it's a really smart idea and there's also an api for it federico confirmed that um so you know it won't just be FaceTime that uses this. What is it? Open standard. Remember, FaceTime is an open standard.

But it's not like that. It'd be an API for this. Well, it makes sense. So if you use Zoom or whatever, it's going to be able to tap into this. And I think it's really cool. I like this feature. I wouldn't have expected that. But it feels like a very post-pandemic world feature.

Yeah. It's funny that it's on an iPad because an iPad is a camera you actually can move. Yeah. But we have this we do zoom uh conversations with um with family and we have the same issue which is it's like getting a good angle for shooting us versus getting a good angle for seeing the people and all that like it's a it's kind of a mess and seriously mike when we were talking about that apple tv homepod combo soundbar kind of thing and they said it might have a camera on it for facetime it's like this is what it would do this is literally the feature they would if that product exists it

will have center stage the idea is it's going to shoot everything in your living room and when you do a facetime it's going to zoom in on the people who are participating in the call because you can't move that camera. It's just going to be locked in place. And that's probably what they would do if they did a HomePod with a screen and a camera that was like the Amazon Echo Show, they would use center stage. It might even be something that they bring eventually to the Mac as well, right? Because those can be sometimes, especially desktop Macs, more stationary kind of things too. So it's fascinating to see them doing this. Again, I want to see how uncanny it is. Is it weird or does it seem natural? Does it move around a lot or does it settle? I don't know. Liquid Retina XDR display on the 12.9 inch. It is a mini LED display. It features 10,000 tiny LEDs. The

previous 12.9 had 72. Okay, so I'm going to add a callback here to what I just said about Apple builds all this great hardware. We get it, you make great hardware, which is as a 12.9 inch iPad Pro user, having them say, well, it's basically going to be like a Pro Display XDR now. We've raised the price and we've done this incredible engineering to make you have this incredibly better display. It's like, that's great.

Personally, I don't use the iPad Pro for that, for stuff that needs that feature. Again, that's fine. It doesn't need to be for everybody. But I had that moment where I just thought to myself, I guess Apple knows the game it's playing here. The game it's playing here is they're going to load all of their hardware with these high-end features that could be used by pros.

And everybody who's not a pro looks at them and goes, well, if it's good enough for the pros, it's certainly going to be good enough for me and they buy it and and so that's why you know most people are not going to shoot high frame rate uh hdr 4k video on their iphone pro right but you could and isn't that cool that's what this feature looks like to me with a mini led it's like i'm sure it's very impressive i'm sure it's going to be great for watching movies and for editing photos and all of those things it i did have a moment where i thought is this overkill like yeah to put a pro display xdr in an ipad like um the ipad pro itself is overkill in a lot of ways i think you're right i think maybe it is an overkill product in general, so why not more overkill? I would have been much more excited about this myself, well, for two things.

One, if it was on the 11, but also if it didn't increase the price. I think that that does make it a little bit like... How much more has it gone up? What did the fourth generation start? I don't remember, and Apple's website isn't helping me. Did it start at $999? I think it was 999 i think it was 799 and 999 and now it's 799 and 1099 which goes absolutely a prediction that i would have made yesterday that didn't come true is that i thought with the existence of the ipad air that that 11 inch ipad pro would get a higher price they didn't i don't think they added anything to it what they. What they could justify.

Like, look, it also gets an M1. It also gets everything except for the new display. Right. So that new display will happen at some point down the road to the 11-inch iPad Pro, at which point it will be $899. Which is what we saw from them, you know, all the way back in the iPad Pro. This has happened.

It's only really been the last year or two where they've actually released them exactly the same time with the same features they had this for the first few revisions like this one will come out and then there was a small one and a small one had this and then the big one came out and it had that like they you know they've kind of been out of step a little bit um but i mean this does seem like a really cool iPad. Yeah. It's not, I don't think this is an iPad for me anymore. Like I use an 11 inch and I use it a lot,

but I'm using it for most of the time, more iPad-y things. This is my iPad. So am I going to get one? Yeah, of course I am. Yeah. I mean, you didn't upgrade though, right? Like you're a couple of years away from when Yeah, of course I am. Yeah. I mean, you didn't upgrade

though, right? Like you're a couple of years away from when you upgraded. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, right. Because the last one had nothing to commend it, you know, especially, and the magic keyboard works with both models and all that. But this one, you know, again, I'm a, I'm a 12.9 inch ipad pro user and there's probably not a lot that would could happen to to change that and so i am interested in this because of the processor honestly more than the display just having the faster processor because i do use at least some things i use on my ipad do stress out the processor and so uh but but you're right also there's this question of yeah but in a in a months, will it perhaps be more functional?

Never buy hardware because you're hoping that the OS update will enable more things. But it's something to watch that this hardware may be that much more impressive come summer when they've announced what the next iPad OS features are, if they really can roll out some things that take advantage of this hardware. Yeah, like I could imagine we get one of these for Idina. So she is a comic artist and uses the iPad Pro solely for that. And I could imagine better screen, brighter screen would be helpful for her in a bunch of ways. And she uses Procreate and really pushes procreate and she uses a mild 2018 ipad or yeah or 2019 whenever 2018 one and the 2020 and now 2021 ipad pros they have more ram in them and procreate can have more layers in it with those devices so that might be enough for her to want to want to get one of these so maybe there'll be one in my home uh but i can't imagine upgrading even my 11 inch until apple show me that i will want to do that post wwdc because i mean i i love my 11 inch ipad pro it's

my favorite ipad pro uh that apple made. I just think it's perfect. And I've said that. I think for most people it's the best one. We didn't mention 5G. Of course they put 5G on it. 5G and they put, what, it can go up to 2 terabytes of storage now, I think.

Which they tried to give examples for. It's like, you might need this if you're, I don't know, whatever. Yeah, so that's that so i think yeah this ipad pro it's all of the things i expected plus some additional good parts like i expected to see the usb4 thunderbolt thing but i didn't expect them to have anything to tell me today why i would want that and that's what happened i'm excited because it's an actual proper update to the product, to the iPad that I use the most. But there needs to be more here. There needs to be more to this story.

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couldn't stop laughing for a while and and lauren looked at me and i said you got to understand this product's been rumored for two years and it actually happened it's got the name we thought it explains hey everybody remember the iphone event in 2019 where they unveiled the u1 chip It actually happened. It's got the name we thought. It explains, hey, everybody, remember the iPhone event in 2019 where they unveiled the U1 chip and it didn't do anything? Well, now it does something and it'll help you find your AirTag

even if it's in the cave that's in your couch cushions. I like that. It was a cute little ad. That was a cute ad. It was beautiful too. There isn't really much to say about this because it's everything we thought.

You can buy them for $29 for one, $99 for four. It uses Define My Network and all the Bluetooth stuff, but they have U1 chips in them so you can do what they call precise finding if you have a U1 device in them. So you can do what they call precise finding if you have a U1 device,

which means you can basically just keep moving your iPhone around until it's like, hey, it's here. They have tools to prevent unwanted people tracking and they have a bunch of accessories for physically connecting them to things. Leather loops, key chains, other types of loops. They have an Hermes option as well,

which comes engraved with an Hermes logo on it because I guess why not um and they're available later this month uh to to oh they're pre-ordered Friday everything else is pre-ordering later in the month but pre-order Friday coming by the end of April I mean I do need a new key ring Like I have a keyring that I don't like and I've been thinking like, I want a new keyring and I want to try this product out. I'm going to get one.

I'm going to get a little tag on it. And I mean, I'll probably get a four pack and then also have one from like my backpack or whatever. I want to see what this thing's all about. I actually, from a fundamental level, I like the idea because I think Find My is really cool. And I like the idea of being able to have more things, arbitrary things in Find My. And I love that it's a user replaceable coin cell battery.

I think that's fantastic, right? Because I could have easily imagined them saying like, it comes with a charge and when it's done, it's done, right? Because I could have easily imagined them saying, like, it comes with a charger and when it's done, it's done, right? Or like, you need to charge it via lightning. You have this adapted charger thing every now and then. So like, I'm happy all that's there. This isn't an exciting product because we've known about it, all of these details basically for two years

and have been talking about it at least every couple of months. But it is a thing that i think makes sense and i'm you know i'm kind of like yeah cool like as a customer i'm up for it yeah i don't know if i have very many things that i would actually use this on but i'm intrigued by it and i like that this is they are really pushing the engraving hard here but i get it right like basically they want you to engrave these things with a custom initial or emoji or whatever. And then you identify that that's what it is.

And you're like, oh, that's this one. And where is it? So, you know, interesting stuff. We've talked about the technology behind it. It is a privacy based thing that is, you know, there's low energy Bluetooth and it's finding IDs that are obscured and locations. And everything is sort of like handed off in a way that you don't know who saw it and you don't know where you you just know that it was seen and where it was seen um and you know i think that's all really interesting we had

we talked about stalking on this show um and one of the things that it does is there's there's air tag detection so like if somebody plants like it's like somebody plants an air tag on you or on in your car or whatever um it will actually notice if there's an air tag that is that is not near its owner but near you if there's an air tag that is not near its owner, but near you. And if it, like, it will send you an alert saying there is an air tag near you, which is interesting, and you can actually find the air tag. And this has two purposes, right? One is, oh, did you know that there's this object that's separated from its person, and you could actually, like, maybe find it and return it to the person but also if somebody tries to track you you will know at least if you have an apple

device i wonder if there's also a uh if it chirps or something every now and then to let it know that it's out in the out in the wild somewhere i don't know but they're trying to make they're trying to anticipate this stuff which i think is interesting too i like the amount of engineering that seems to have gone into just that one specific part of it you know like it is there it's one of these things where it's like who's responsibility right like is it apple's responsibility to do this i think it's very uh easy to argue yes but i also could imagine an argument of no, right? I don't think that would be the right argument, but I could imagine someone making it.

I'm happy that they've gone to this kind of level for adding a feature like that. And it seems to be so built into the product, which shows like, I mean, we see this a lot where there are decisions that companies make that seem to be like, you didn't consult everyone on this decision. And this seems like something where from the beginning, they have had this in mind. And I appreciate that as a feature.

I think it's cool. There's lots of accessories. Apple makes them. Other people are making them. Belkin's got one. The one that made me laugh was that there's an hermes uh set of accessories so if you want an expensive hermes leather key ring or a luggage tag you can get those um i i know that they won't call it this so i will call it this these it's an um hermes tag air is yeah tag oh oh man that took me too long yeah okay air a i r m e grov s

air h e r t a g sure that could be air tag yeah anyway there's something there we'll workshop it we'll workshop it but uh it's here it's never has so much virtual ink been spilled for such a kind of minor product uh but it's interesting like that's that's where now in the light of day it's like oh yeah this is kind of interesting and some people like it and people find uses for it my only other air tag comment here is um 29 for 1 99 for 4 it's actually priced more reasonably than i thought it would be so yeah there it is apple tv i can't believe this so the apple tv 4k continues to exist as a brand name they've just put a new processor in it the a12 bionic um the big new feature that that enables is high frame rate hdr which they're working on partner

with partners in or something okay this is one of those classic things where it's like hey it can do this you can't watch anything yeah other than other than the high frame uh rate hdr video you shot on your iphone 12 yeah like literally that's that's what you've got um however how do you make this product interesting few things right again can we there's the color balance stuff where they're going to use sensors on your iphone to detect the output of your tv it's like stop even messing with your tv we will filter the output of the device to make it look good on your tv which there are other devices that do stuff like this. Obviously, various game consoles will actually have you hold up like a controller or something, and they will do some calibration.

Usually it's for delay. It's for like sync detection and stuff. But this is kind of like that. But I like that. It's a great idea that how can we make it so that it looks good on your TV without you actually having to know what looks good. I like that. The phone will do it. You're doing a color profile for your television. This is a great feature. Like this is the kind of feature.

So like, okay, one of the lines that the presenter mentioned is like, what, you know, it's kind of, why do you want this? Because it has power that smart TVs just don't have. And my favorite thing was that power then was just a list mostly of services that Apple provides. It's like, it's not really power. But look, if you're going to still charge me $179 for this thing,

you've got to make it worth my while. And I actually think this color balancing thing, it's obviously not worth it for that, but this is one of those things where it's like, okay, this is one of those things where it's like okay this is one of those things where like now that i am in the apple ecosystem i get a benefit like that so i'm up for that like that sounds great like this is a good feature thank you for adding it i'm excited about it but the best thing there's a new remote and it's visually i mean i haven't used the thing

but visually it's like every complaint I had seems to have been addressed. It looks fantastic. Yeah, and actually, the thing that I was afraid of losing was that I actually kind of like the trackpad on the Apple TV for certain things like scrubbing. Yeah. And so they've got, it's a five-way clickpad with swiping gestures, and you scrub around the ring uh to do the scrubbing gesture and it's like yeah actually that right it's it's very much a classic ipod kind of thing which i swear i mentioned at some point in the last couple of months is could they go back to just something like the ipod um and and here it is so this is like a baby of the front row remote

and the apple tv remote yeah yeah exactly. And then there's a Siri button on the side. I'm sure that won't be annoying and you won't accidentally touch it or something, but we'll have to see. In the end, it's got to be used by real people in the real world, and we'll see how it works. But it certainly seems like Apple has finally tried to address all of the problems

with the Siri remote. It's much bigger in all of the dimensions. It's longer, it's chunkier, all the dimensions it's longer it's chunkier and i think that's great though to be honest because that makes it more findable one of the biggest issues in my home is like it just gets lost in the sofa like there's like you know a piece of paper on top of it you'd never know there was a remote can you can you find this with the find my network do you do something with that maybe maybe? I mean, it should have a new one in it, but I don't think it does.

Or even if it's just Bluetooth, low energy, something in there. I mean, I'm just saying. But yeah, it's something, right? It still costs $179, still has storage options. Yeah, I mean, that's just ridiculous. Like, I can't believe that they're still doing the storage options thing on this.

You can get a 32 or 64 gigabyte, and the 64 gigabyte is $200 more expensive. I don't know who's buying that 64 gigabyte Apple TV or what they're doing for it. I really don't understand it. Yeah, I think that this is... The remote is super cool. I'm into it overall.

This is, the remote is super cool. I'm into it overall. You know, like I honestly wasn't, I wasn't expecting a change to the remote at all. Like I didn't think they would change it and they've done everything I would have wanted from it. Did I say $200 more expensive? You're just raising all the prices today. So I meant it was $20 more expensive.

I am making everything more expensive today. But this remote is kind of everything I would have wanted it to be and makes it, I think, worth, for me, I'm going to upgrade to this. So it's funny. This is the one product that I immediately knew I was buying

after everything announced today. It's like, yes, I'm in on it. Because I'm sure you can buy the like i'm sure you can buy the remote uh i know you can buy the remote i assume it will work with the old one but i'm into those other features like this the the color thing and all that sort of stuff i assume that that's just part of the new uh apple tv not only part of the new chip so i don't mind upgrading for for that so i'm this will be a product uh that will be making its way to the Hurley household. Before we wrap up, a couple of tiny extra

things that popped up. There's a purple iPhone 12. Yeah. Surprising. Apple Card Family. Seems cool. I would really like them to try and expand the Apple Card outside of America at some point. That's what I was kind of hoping they were going to

say today, but that wasn't it. and there's a headliner trailer yeah i'm excited about the apple card thing just you know yeah i have i signed up for one but it's just me and now it can be the rest of the people in my family because it's a good deal especially if you're paying for something so i'm very happy about that and that it feels very much like they are addressing some of the issues that have been uh they've been criticized for um which i think is interesting because i think it's very much like apple chose the ways it wanted to break the rules of credit cards when it launched apple card and then it went and everything else is like okay you just do everything else the way you always do credit cards and then they got a lot of criticism because they're like, hey,

you said you were going to change how you do credit cards, but you didn't do this. And you didn't do this. And this is an example of that, of Apple being like, all right, so next round, here's another thing that we want to change. And based on criticism and feedback they've got. So I think that's a good sign. And I'm happy that they've done that. and feedback they've got. So I think that's a good sign. And I'm happy that they've done that. Ted Lasso, I just, I love the fact that when we were talking about Apple TV+, there were all these shows that were like, oh, these are the launch shows. These are going to be big. Which one's going to break out? Are people going to watch it? Are people going to want to do it? And even now, I think it's funny, even now that when Tim Cook talks about it, he's like,

think it's funny even now that when tim cook talks about it he's like an apple tv plus is great it's got things like uh like everybody loves the morning show and then there's oprah um but ted lasso and i think it's like okay first off you're still trying to make the morning show happen okay um it's fine it's fine there's nothing wrong with it. It was for all mankind. Well, it was used in some demos, but yeah, I know. For all mankind. We're having a great second season. Finale is Friday. Sublime television show.

So, but I think it is funny that in the end it's like, yeah, but it's Ted Lasso, right? Like, it's actually Ted Lasso. That's our breakout show. And this was the admission of that, right? It's actually Ted Lasso. That's our breakout show. And this was the admission of that, right? It was like they literally showed the season two Ted Lasso trailer in an Apple event. It's July 23rd is the announcement of the release date of the premiere of Ted Lasso season two.

How far we've come. But Apple has recognized it. Like, no, Ted Lasso has all the momentum. That's the one that everybody's talking about. And I just want to say my favorite little Easter egg from this event. If you watch to the end of the scrolling credits at the end where they talk about how they made this with the rules of the county health departments and all of those things. The very last thing that begins to scroll is Ted Lasso's biscuit recipe. And it starts to show the first line of the recipe and then it goes to black and the apple loco comes up and that's the end of the show

that's a good i didn't see that because i had already furiously started making notes uh but that's a very good easter egg it's interesting to me how they've leaned into to ted lasso like this i mean obviously they had to right because like it's such it's their big success you know it's kind of funny like and ted's like tim's like oh i oh i love ted lasso it's my favorite show and it's like okay tim i'm sure you like it but like you know you went to the premiere of the morning show you actually had a premiere for the morning show right like you know ted lasso snuck its way in there but it's you can't deny it and that's actually the the sign of of apple tv which i was gonna say maturing apple tv plus maturing but really it's just like look they had a word of mouth hit

it's it's big like they need one you you want to have people you want more than one but like there's this question like well what is it is it really the morning show is it for all mankind like what are what are people talking about and then ted lasso happened it's like oh there it is that's it that's the one so i think that's it it's a big event there was a lot of stuff it was exciting yeah yeah this was pretty good they did in an hour they packed it in they should have taken more time they should have gone above 75 minutes i said you would say that wouldn't you i'm excited to see more about the product i'm very excited next week when we get to talk to colleen and nevbrie on the show from apple then we talk about all about the imac so that's to be really great. If you want to find links and info and stuff like that about the episode,

you can go to relay.fm slash upgrades slash 349. If you would like to get longer ad-free episodes of Upgrade every single week, you can go to getupgradeplus.com. Hey, podcast subscriptions and memberships. Remember those?

That's an interesting idea. So you can go and do that. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com. I'm sure Jason will be writing lots over the coming days about what we've seen today. And you can also find Jason.

He's at jsnell. I am at imike. I-M-Y-K-E. Let me take a moment to tell you about another show here on RelayFM, and that's Focused. If you're struggling to focus, you're not alone.

All the distractions we have these days, focus seems like a superpower. David Sparks and Mike Schmitz. If you're struggling to focus, you're not alone. All the detractions we have these days, focus seems like a superpower. David Sparks and Mike Schmitz can show you how. Go to relay.fm slash focused or search for Focused wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Upgrade. And next week, we'll be back with episode 350.

Thank you so much for your support. If you're a member, especially, thank you to Pingdom, Privacy.com, and Gabby for their support of this episode as well. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.