Upgrade - 358: Apple Watch Extreme or Whatever

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

We discuss the future of the Apple Watch, from new materials to new shapes to all the sensors Apple might want to put on any product that touches your body. And then we talk about the risks Apple might face by failing to learn the right lessons from the pandemic about altering its corporate culture.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 358 and today's show is brought to you by hollow squarespace and the public sector future podcast my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason hello jason snell hello mike hurley i have a hashtag snow talk question for you oh okay comes from jd and jd wants to know do you use the swipe typing feature on your iphone oh oh jd why you got to do this to me mostly not mostly not i know it's there it's great that it's there i do occasionally use it but um mostly i i end up just sort of reverting to habit of uh tappy typing i'm a big swiper often what happens is that there's a word that i think oh i should swipe this word and i do and it if it works it encourages me to keep going

but they're also they're also i think i would need to really put some thought into it because there are some words that i find the swipe typing is really bad at that frustrate me, the short words. So I would need to build up like a system where I know there are certain ones that I type and certain ones that I swipe, but I don't use my phone enough to put in that kind of time, honestly, right? Like my iPhone, as somebody who works at home and all that, and I don't even go out for runs or dog walks with my phone because I just bring my watch. So I'm not using it enough, I think, to put in that kind of intense time. I would probably push myself to use it more if I was doing lots of text input on my iPhone, but I'm not really. Yeah, I use swipe typing a lot. I think swipe typing is one of the many, but a big reason

for why I have so many errors, especially when I text people, because I'm swipe typing and not really paying attention. One of my favorite things about swipe typing is when you get like a particularly long or complicated word, like congratulations. It's almost like you're doing figure skating with your fingers if you swipe type congratulations because not only is it long the word is actually pretty nicely split out between both sides of the keyboard so if you've never done this before you know you could just try swipe typing the word congratulations and you'll see what i mean you really you really go for it so yeah i'm a big i'm a big one-handed swipe typing person with my big phone. Swipe typing is really good for big phones. Very good for big phones.

Yeah, and I'm on the iPhone 12 mini, which is definitely not a big phone. Which brings us to follow-up. It brings us to follow-up. Here we are. We've reached follow-up now. Thank JD for the hashtag SnowTalk question. If you'd like to send in one of your own to help us start the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag snow talk

or use question mark snow talk in the relay members discord follow up according to Taiwanese research firm trend force production of the iPhone 12 mini has stopped earlier than would have been expected it is quote end of life now people may remember this if you've been

around for long enough and have a good enough memory. End of life was a big phrase being thrown around a lot for the iPhone X because a similar thing happened with the iPhone X where it got, quote, end of life earlier than expected. And that basically just means Apple feel like they currently have enough inventory of this product to sell through its expected period of being available. Right, because it's going to be replaced, presumably. The rumors are that there will be a new mini in the fall, but not next year. That's the current story. And so if they've made enough, you don't want to make excess, right? So they're done making it. They know how many they're selling. They know how many they expect to sell. And it's now reached a point where they have stopped making them.

However, this is sooner than you would have expected if the product was selling well. I suspect that I'm going to be holding on to whatever this coming falls model is for a while. Could be. If it's the end of the line. Because I do love it. It's perfect for me. I love it. But yeah, this is also the kind of thing that happens where, you know, sometimes a product isn't ready

to be replaced, but it stops being available on inventory, or it's running out, or it disappears. And you're like, well, why aren't there any available right now? And the answer is that they've run out because they're going to replace it. And it's because this is the thing that we don't get a lot of insight into, but Apple has so much complexity in their supply chain and they're doing this stuff so far in a dance in a lot of ways.

And you don't want to build thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of phones. And then when you replace it with a new model, realize that you've got those hundred thousand phones in the warehouse somewhere unsold. That's not great. That's super inefficient. So they seem to have figured that they've made enough. And the flip side of it is that story that we don't know if it's true or not, but it might be true that they made so many HomePods in advance of shipping that product that they made too many and that they were still selling from their initial run after it was discontinued. So that's the flip side of misgauging. I think they're just gone now. And people are talking about Tim Cook is the killer of inventory like this is obviously tim

cook's thing right this it is a global um production thing this just in time uh supply chain management it's we've seen like the pandemic disrupts it and then there's lots of problems because you don't have stuff in the queue you just have everything right the moment you need it and if you don't get it then you can't make your product and all of that. But I will say when Tim Cook took this over, like Apple was really bad at this before Tim Cook and Steve Jobs sort of like made, exerted an effort here. Apple used to have so much excess inventory, so many weeks of inventory in the channel. so many uh weeks of inventory in the channel um and that was a long time ago now but like and i'm sure this is a trend again across all the industries that are out there that do all this kind of manufacturing stuff but like that was like one of the things tim cook was

very much brought in to do was apple supply chain was super inefficient and and the result would be super inefficient and and the result would be that they would they would have at any given time months more product than they that then they could sell out in the channel so like you know on any given day if you wanted to buy two months worth of saless, you could do it because they were just sitting in boxes somewhere. And that's not great. You got to store them. You risk depreciation of the value if you cut the price or if you discontinue it. And that was Tim Cook's thing. And Apple has obviously gotten really good at that now. Picture in Picture is finally making its way to the YouTube app on iOS. YouTube have announced and confirmed that it's rolling out now for all YouTube Premium subscribers. And then later on to all US-based users, free or premium.

There is unsure of a later international rollout. So the way this seems to be, I haven't gotten it yet. I keep checking. If you're a YouTube premium subscriber anywhere, they're going to give it to you. And if you're in the US, they will eventually do that for everybody. My understanding

of why US is they've worked out a new advertising system, I believe, that will work with Picture in Picture. Ah. And my understanding is this is only working in the US right now

and or they're still testing it. So they're just doing one market at a time and they're probably going for their most important market, which is the US. My not knowing anything about how YouTube is put together, I'm just going to make a guess here, which is that the way that the YouTube web player not knowing anything about how YouTube is put together, I'm just going to make a guess here, which is that the way that the YouTube web player works

and the way the YouTube app player works as well is a thing where they've got a video file and then they've got some logic about the ad insertion and then they stop playing the video file and play the ad. I think they're doing something more with actually embedding ads in rather than. This is what I think is I think the current way it works is that they've got a video file and they've got ads and that the players are doing the work.

Yes. And that doesn't work with picture in picture because picture in picture is taking a video stream and displaying it and it's not a web page. So it may be that their new system is actually you know dropping the ads right into the video stream i will just say as a long time youtube premium subscriber i actually think this is the best money that i spend on a streaming service if you would call it that when i see a youtube video with ads on it i'm surprised because i've been since it became available i have been a subscriber um and what i like is that a lot of that money goes to

the creators that i enjoy like they get money from the youtube premium program um yeah and i i watch more youtube than any other streaming service so yeah i i don't watch enough youtube for it to be worth it for me but whenever i do use youtube oh ads are bad. There's so many of them. And they're so disruptive. And then certain campaigns, depending on what target market know unskippable portion of the ad um and it's awful but i don't use youtube enough uh to pay for premium so there you go forensic overtime we spoke about this a while ago the game from the icon factory is now available via apple arcade um it popped up i think on friday i've been playing it over the weekend uh i really love it so it's really good quick review for you the core gameplay if you remember the old forensic it's very similar it's faithful to the original they've modernized it in places they've added some variations in

places but the core gameplay of you know you you it's like a matching game you know you you have like almost imagine like a Trivial Pursuit, like the little pieces in a Trivial Pursuit circle. You have a bunch of these circles, you get different tiles and you have to match them together in colors. And it's like, there's some pattern matching stuff. It's very fun.

They've added in power-ups and this whole new game mode and stuff. But overall, it's very polished, more modern feeling version of the original. Easy recommendation for me, especially because it's a part of Apple Arcade. So I really love it, and I'm so pleased that they brought this game back and made a new version of it. It's an absolute classic, and this one lives up to it.

Super good. Yeah, I have had it for a few months. It is very good. It is, yeah, it's an intense puzzle game right so it's you you have to um you you don't sit back and think you have to react fast quickly here was one and the timer and as you would expect from the icon factory yeah so much of it is about like the sounds and the graphics and everything like that that that makes it look really good so they did a great job they did a really really great job all right should we catch up on some upstream headlines Jason a lot to catch

up on yes let's do it all right so there's a bunch of stuff that Apple's working on they've got some more teaser trailers that they've been showing off uh they have one which is just like a blanket summer teaser which is doing a lot of work really uh there is some lots of quotes and stuff about all of the press reception and the critical acclaim that they've received so far there's a bunch of clips for shows that are already um movies that already exist and then they're also showing stuff some for stuff that's coming on the service later this year um like invasion and the foundation series we see more of these than we've seen before i'd forgotten what invasion was um and it is an alien invasion uh yep focused science show science fiction show yeah um there's a lot of interesting stuff there um but they also

had some extended trailers as well uh one of the new ones is for the shrink next door which is the will ferrell paul rudd katherine hunn uh show which looks like a movie but it's a tv show it's a limited series tv show it's a mini series yeah it's the it's really an idea that was bigger than a movie. The visuals of it, though, it looks so beautiful. It looks movie quality. If you cut a movie trailer and said, this is a movie, you would believe it, but it's not. But I think the distinction is literally that they're putting it out in installments and it's longer than a movie would be

but otherwise it's indistinguishable from a movie yeah i'm mega excited about this like i was excited about it anyway because the cast is so good right so it's just like you know will ferrell paul rudd like i'm in right but the i didn't really know a ton about the premise and it looks funny but also complicated and a little bit dark. I'm really excited about this show. I think it's going to be great. When I saw this, it made me think of something. We've said it on this show before

but for me, this really solidified it which is, I can think that Apple has the real shot here being the next hbo i think that's the world that they're going to start playing in like big stars good content compelling shows that you want to sign up for i was thinking um and yeah we talked about this quite a bit that hbo in turning into hbo max is becoming you know more stuff like there's still hbo but hbo max has really subsumed it and so that means that hbo max is also you know anime and it's also dc tv shows and it's also friends everything literally and it's friends reruns yeah it's literally all those things um and apple tv plus because they're basically just focusing on originals and not catalog stuff feels more like original hbo the other thing that struck me about

this is there and it's funny i know that this is not for everybody but that's okay not everything is for everybody but like i was on we were looking for something to watch last night and i was on netflix i was like kind of poking around there and i was thinking and saturday night too it was like maybe you want to watch a movie you know is there a tv show but i i was kind of open to whatever. And what I noticed is that on HBO Max and Hulu, and especially Netflix, there's so much content that it's overwhelming. And even when you go down to like Netflix originals, there's so much that it's overwhelming and honestly i don't think netflix does a very good job of marketing their stuff i know they've got the algorithms they've got the data they're programming our brains to figure out what we want to watch next

but the problem with that is like in terms of like really showing off the stuff that they think that that's original and that they presumably think that i will like you know it's just a they have like one featured area but like it's just a bunch of little tiles it's just and that they presumably think that I will like. They have one featured area, but it's just a bunch of little tiles. It's just not that interesting. And I went over to Apple TV Plus, to the TV app, into the Apple TV Plus tab. And what I admired about it was because they don't have that much stuff, they just have their originals and it's a limited amount. It felt way more focused. I felt like I could get a really good sense

of what was on offer at any particular time. And then from that, I could choose, is there something I want to watch? And I guess what I'm saying is there's an argument to be made that focus and simplicity is a feature. And that even if Apple only has a fraction of the original content that Netflix has, there's something to be said for having sort of like picked their lane a little bit.

And again, they're appealing to a bunch of different people right like ted lasso and c and the morning show and the shrink next door and like they're trying to do a bunch of different stuff but still like hbo tried to do that too but like still kind of kind of goal is high quality kind of prestige TV and limited selection. So you know who they are and what they've got on offer. And I don't know. I find some, I find that valuable. I think that,

that when you end up releasing as much stuff as Netflix does, it kind of devalues all of it. And certainly in the app, like the only way that I know what to watch on Netflix at this point is friends of mine recommending things. if i had to look if i had to stumble upon it in netflix i never would there's a new ted lasso trailer came out today another season two we had a little teaser and now there's a little another little glimpse at what the i'd actually say if you really want to go into ted lasso season two not knowing what's going on uh maybe don't watch it because it's ted lasso it's all recognizable but

i think i suspect it gives away a bunch of what's going to happen in season two i was able from one viewing to think about a lot of it yeah i watched it and i wouldn't if you know you're going to watch the show uh i wouldn't recommend watching it. But maybe more exciting is the Ted Lasso official merch store opened today as well. This is confusingly on the Warner Brothers website. Now, Ted Lasso is very complicated licensing-wise, and Warner Brothers is one of the companies that's involved in the distribution and creation of the show and they have everything they have personalized jerseys and hoodies and mugs and glasses and hoodies and a blanket and stickers and everything they have so much stuff uh but I actually kind of like it because there's something for everyone and this is not the amount of merch

that would exist I think if if Apple were running the merch store sure of course i have no idea what the quality of it's like but you figure it's probably gonna be okay right you imagine like a company like warner brothers probably has a pretty decent merch operation at this point um so yeah i'm gonna poke around this i'm definitely gonna buy something uh but i don't know what it is yet yeah so there you go it's finally uh although what they say they say that there's more to come because like there are no uh afc richmond like there's one jersey i guess yeah and you can personalize it with your name on it which is cool yeah it's funny it doesn't have the uh it doesn't have the fake sponsor. No. Yeah, I wonder about that kind of stuff.

New fake. In fact, among the things in the trailer, I was like, oh, they have a new fake shirt sponsor. And I think, you know, there's probably... I actually thought to myself, there's probably at least a joke, if not a plot line about that. And I've now been spoiled on it because I saw the trailer. But anyway, don't watch the trailer. It's fine. It's dead lasso. It's coming back. Don't watch the trailer. But anyway, don't watch the trailer. It's fine. It's Ted Lasso. It's coming back.

Don't watch the trailer. Take a look at the merch. Yeah. It's very fun. The Apple TV Plus free trial is dropping from one year to three months. If you buy a product, you've always gotten a year of Apple TV Plus. That's now going to be three months of Apple TV Plus. It starts in July, aka Ted Lasso season.

And this is also actually actually believe it or not when the initial trial period will finally be coming to an end yep so this is the free trial that we've all been on uh since it started it's been extended extended extended and it's it's actually coming to an end in july uh and it's kind of funny really because i think the initial thinking that we all had was like oh that's going to come to an end in time for for all mankind in time for the morning show but now it's ended up being for ted lasso it's not necessarily what we would have expected but and you know and the morning show was coming after that and all that but yes yeah they're clearly doing it in july for that right like that's why because like you know morning show september and they've got a bunch of other stuff coming up this year disney plus

is committing to wednesday releases for their original content shows going forward this change was made after loki became the most popular premiere to date. Yeah. So they put Loki. Obviously, they were thinking about this because they scheduled Loki on a Wednesday. Although they have like the Bad Batch is running and that was on Friday. So they had some other stuff that was rolling out on Fridays. But they pushed Loki out on Wednesdays. And the result was that it was very successful. And they said the most popular premiere of a show that they've had i think it was going to be that way wherever it was whatever day of the week

they brought it out i think so but they wanted to experiment and it's a funny thing you know tv scheduling is weird um in the u.s traditionally the big day that everybody wanted to schedule shows their biggest shows was thursday and that was not necessarily because it was the day that was the most watched but because it was the day where the all of the money for ads for movies for the weekend would run um and so that was that was the most lucrative day and that's why you wanted your biggest shows to be programmed on thursdays is because all the movie studios would come in with their ads for the movies for the weekend on a thursday because friday they're out seeing movies and over the weekend um it used to be in the u.s that like saturday and sunday were the biggest tv viewing days and now saturday is a complete

dead zone so now in the streaming world we're remaking the weekly schedule um netflix drops everything on friday apple drops everything on friday there's a real log jam of content on friday and um so this is really interesting because it's disney saying we're gonna we're gonna back it up to wednesday it's weird because it means like we had our you know friday night mandalorian night and now loki is is wednesday and now all the other disney stuff is going to be on wednesday too i guess um i sent you when this was going on a couple of tweets by tv critic alan sepinwall who's at rolling stone and he made the point which i think is spot on that ultimately what's going to happen is different shows are going to have different

release days and we're going to go back to the world of network tv essentially replicated on streaming which is different stuff's going to come out on different days and on tuesdays you get for weekly releases especially because the great thing about a weekly release show having a certain day is it's appointment television because people want to watch it on the day and talk about it. If it's really a big word of mouth kind of thing. And the reason you do a weekly release is because you want people talking about it week to week. So for now, all the Disney stuff is going to be on Wednesday and that's fine. But I look for different services to experiment this with a little bit more.

Obviously, HBO Max, because HBO has air dates on their linear channel for their shows, those release weekly on a certain date. But what I noticed is that even their originals are releasing on a date. We watched Hacks, which is a really good show, by the way, on HBO Max. And it's an HBO Max original. Comedy, eight episodes, 10 episodes, really great show. Highly recommended, actually. And it had a weekly, two episodes a week, because it's a comedy and so they dropped two a week,

weekly Wednesday release schedule. And even better than that, when you pressed play, it said, it had a little title card that came up before the show starts. And it says, Hacks, new episodes Wednesdays. It's like, yes,

remind me to be here on Wednesday for new episodes. And it totally worked. So it's fascinating to watch this happen and to see companies like Netflix roll in and say, oh, we're going to change everything. We're just going to drop everything in a binge watch on a Friday and just take over the weekend.

And that's what we're going to do. And then you've seen other services go, well, what if we experiment with some different stuff? And I suspect that you are going to end up with something that looks a little more like what network television used to look like then you would have maybe guessed from what Netflix is doing. Because I think they're actually, just as I am a firm believer that there is power in releasing things weekly because we talk about it as it's going on instead of having Netflix sort of just sweep in, drop it, and then go away again. But I think that there's also power in making that appointment. And your release day

is the appointment that you're making. And with The Mandalorian, it was Friday. With Loki, it's Wednesday. What will come next? I don't know. But I really like that idea of saying, we're releasing this weekly, and you can get it on Tuesday or whatever that day is. I like it because a weekly release is an appointment making release schedule, so you should do that. This episode is brought to you by Hello. Hello make incredibly comfortable buckwheat pillows. These are very different to your regular fluffy pillows. Buckwheat pillows have an inherent support that they provide because they're not fluffy. It's not feather. It's little buckwheat hulls. They're almost, I think, close to like tiny shells or like beans in a beanbag. It's closer to that really, but also not like those things. But they're the closest

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So this year's watch, we'll call it the Series 7, just for the sake of conversation, should be outfitted with the following. Faster processor, obviously. Sure. Improved wireless. That's all the report says. I'm assuming not 5G, probably Wi-Fi 6, right? I don't know. I don't know. I

don't know. I don't think they could deal with the battery drain of 5G in the product of that size. Seems unlikely, right? Yeah, it doesn't seem very likely to me. Thinner display borders, and again, this is

sometimes, we've already had this with two points you have to look at what is not said to try and work out what is said right so like improved wireless we can only we assume is something probably wi-fi related right or bluetooth or bluetooth yeah it could be bluetooth but i don't know like is Bluetooth. But I don't know. Like, is there better Bluetooth? I don't know. Maybe. Like, thinner display borders. Does that mean a larger screen? Hmm. Right.

Are they expanding the screen or shrinking the border? Which do you think they'd be more likely to do out of those two? Shrink the border. Yeah, I think so, too. Because they only just changed the the screen size like two years ago you wouldn't want to bifurcate that again right when especially when they're still keeping the the uh series three around it seems like yeah i app design and development would have to completely change which is not to say that they won't do that but it seems like there's a little bit of a barrier there i know that a lot of developers

make trouble that focus on the apple watch were really surprised to see that the series 3 will continue to be supported with watch os 8 you know like it feels like at a certain point apple have to draw the line and it's not now well they have to support hardware that they're selling though is the problem so even if they stop selling the series 3 or the se or whatever all of that old tech they could stop once they stop selling it all they can stop supporting it after a certain all right it could be that way around maybe they stop selling it this year but right they've got old tech that they're still selling and so they still have to support it for a while even though they probably shouldn't be selling it but they are so we'll see that that to me is going to be one of the big questions about uh the apple watch this fall is

just like are they going to change their low-end strategy are they finally going to put push some of that old hardware out of the market is the is the se going to be more of what we thought it was going to be last year and ended up not being? Where it's like, it's the low-end watch, except for the other one that's lower. So I'm curious if they changed their approach there or not. Well, let's pause talking about this Series 7 and talk about the SE for a minute. Because one detail in the report is that there is a new SE model coming in 2022, that the SE will not be revised in 2021 yeah i wouldn't expect it to be because they just announced it i think i'm more wondering

if they will drop um their cheap old watch and lower the price of the existing se to fill that role rather i think that's what they need to do. Because that's what we all assumed last year. And honestly, when you look at it, it looks to me like that was the intent. And then they realized they couldn't get away with it. They couldn't do that and keep the margins where they wanted them. So they kept selling the Series 3. So it could be that this year we see them finally get down there with the SE and kick the Series through to the curb and then next year there's a new se in order to kind of keep the keep refreshing that model because yeah clearly i don't see how anybody can look at we're selling a six an se and a three and think that that was what they wanted to do um i mean and when i say that it's very much like

they wanted to do that but but the asterisk is, and make the profit margins that they expect on the product. Yeah. And set the price that they expect. And they couldn't do it. It looks like they overshot a little. The SE was a little too ambitious for 2020. So maybe for 2021, the SE can get there. And then I think going forward, I would not be surprised if there's always an SE that, I mean, that's a classic Tim Cook Apple kind of model, which is we've got a new model that's

kind of old tech, but it's new, just kind of old. And then we've got the super new model that is actually new. And then we've got the super new model that is actually new. But the SE is, I think, a much more appealing product name and concept than the Series 3, right? Which is literally, it's just an old watch. So we'll see if it finally dies. At least it looks, currently looks like the new one. They can't sell the Apple Watch Series 3 up until the day that they finally release the

new version of watchOS that doesn't support it and then go like whoops well you're stuck. I got that wrong it's the other way around you want to see them get rid of Series 3 this year so they can drop the support in watchOS 9 maybe or watchOS 10 but hopefully watchOS 9 for developers but like I've said watchOS 10 I'm just imagining a big X

watchOS X I mean I've said it before I'll say it again I mean it's probably one of these things that frustrates people because I say it too often. But I think that the SE is a bad product. In its current guise, I think it's too expensive for what you get. Right. Especially considering the Series 3 is out there. Clearly, they thought that they were going to hit the Series 3 price.

They messed up. And they failed. So, try again in the fall. It's a Series 4, right, for $329. Like, I don't know. There's so many things that the Apple Watch SE does not have that you think that it would have. Like, it doesn't have the ECG.

It doesn't have an always-on retina display. But it still costs 330 dollars like it's it's it's i just find that too expensive it's too expensive but it is sensible to have a product in the cheaper lineup oh yeah for all of the things that they spoke about when they announced the se was like that whole family thing it's just whatever they calibrated is what they could do. And I think part of the problem is that they made a tech transition. Right? They changed the display size. They did a bunch of

stuff that means there's a divide between Series 3 and Series 4. Yep. And so you end up in this position where you're like, well, what we want to do with the SE is make a cheap version of our modern platform. And they did that, but they couldn't make it cheap enough to satisfy what they wanted as their base price point for the Apple Watch.

And so they kept the last version of the old platform around way... I mean, and we're not even getting into the fact that, like, I don't know if we talked about it here or not, but as I know several people who have a Series 3 and like Apple has, there were a series of problems, right? Where it wouldn't do a software update because it said there wasn't enough space available. And Apple finally just changed their tech note to say, if you want to update the software, you just need to erase the watch and start again. And it's like, it should not be for sale. That product should not be continue to be sold there's no there's no way um and and so actually speaking of inventory i wonder if one

of the reasons that they're still selling it is they made too many but um right and they're like sell them until they're gone but uh clearly the se is what they want that watch to be and and but it's based on the new stuff and it clearly costs more than they were willing to uh eat in pricing it down at the price that they're selling the series three so we'll have to see what they do there because what you want is it to be good but not cutting edge you want it to be cheaper like but instead of it being a three-year-old watch what you want it to be is sort of like the decontented version of the current watch right you want it to just be sort of like current watch light um rather than it being you know just old ancient old model continued to be sold right because that se the idea there is that the se doesn't feel as old as series three where

you're like you're literally we're saying in the name you're three behind where everybody else is right now. It's not so great. Just want a quick bit of real-time follow-up from Zach in the Discord. $329 is the GPS and cellular version of the SE. It starts at $279. Still too expensive compared to the $399 or $499 Series 6, in my opinion. I think it's still too much.

So going back to the Series 7, as well as a change in the way that the screen looks, we expect thinner borders by making it smaller. Apple's working on a new screen lamination technique to bring the display closer to the glass. I remember this was a big deal for the iphone like whenever they would do that like it it made the display look so much better because it felt like it was closer to what you were touching um so i bet it looked cool i don't

feel this about the apple watch though i just don't i don't feel like the apple watch is deep down beneath a layer of glass now maybe if maybe if with a thinner laminated display, you end up with something that feels more tactile. But to me, I feel like the illusion's pretty good as it is. I have another theory here, which is this could just be a way to get the display portion to be thinner so that they can pack some other stuff in or make the watch thinner. However, Gur german's report says

it's slightly thicker so that leads me to believe that maybe the lamination is less about trying to get a more visible screen and more about reducing that portion of the thickness so that they can because they've got some other thing that they're doing whether it's uh battery or other kind of watch tech that that is gonna bloat the thing and they're like trying to shave off in other areas in order to get it to be back down. Cause I would, I would say I don't, I have never considered the Apple watch too thick.

It is chunky, but it works okay for me. But like, I would not mind it being thinner and it's not, it has not gotten thinner. It has gotten a little bit more bulky. And that's the report here from Mark Gurman, is that that's going to happen again. It's like, I feel like they're pushing it.

At some point, you know, at some point it gets to be too much, I think. I have another random piece of real-time follow-up, but I want to address it for all the people that will have tried to tweet us so far, and I just did just confirm it. The Ted Lasso merch is US only, which sucks. Oh. That's so bad. Warner Brothers, shame on you, Warner Brothers.

What's that about? But that slight thickness, I mean, I don't want to keep saying it, but maybe it is for 5G. Pick a battery in there. I don't know. For 5G, they made it is for 5G. You can pick a battery in there. I don't know. For 5G, they made the screen thinner so they can get more space inside. I don't know.

In regards to sensors, again, this report is more about things Apple wanted or are working on than what will be in the Series 7. Because Mark Gurman talked to people who knew what they were working on and that it didn't make it in, right? Like behind the scenes is people who were like, oh, we couldn't get that in. And they're sad. And they talked to Mark Gurman about it. Body temperature sensor pushed to 2022. That one seems really logical to me. I know that it must be difficult to do that.

But it would be nice. And it's right up against your skin right it would be really nice if if it could say not only chart your body temperature maybe but also alert you if your body temperature is out of uh is out of norm and that that's like feels genuinely super useful like one you could use like more people would get more frequent use out of than a heart sensor or the blood oxygen right and i'm thinking of the applications of it i'm not a doctor obviously but not not only is it like you might be running a fever but you could warn against heat stroke you could warn against hypothermia like there's all sorts of things you could potentially do beyond just you might you know are you feeling okay you might have a fever uh have some chicken soup that kind of the mother the the mom feature of the Apple Watch.

There's other stuff you could probably do with that too. So that's interesting. But I get it that you've got a fixed position on a wrist and you've got to infer, you've got to measure lots of stuff using a very limited amount of space that's in a very particular part of the body. And that's a hard problem. get it they also want to include something for blood sugar sensing this is something apple's working on but is years away that seems really complicated we we uh heard about this uh one of these times we've been talking about perspective apple watch features somebody was saying about how you know there is a lot of research going into blood sugar sensors for diabetics,

and the technology is improving, but to compact all of that down into something that you wear on your wrist, that's a hard problem. It's a hard problem for dedicated blood sugar monitors for diabetics to solve that stand alone, let alone a hard problem to put in an Apple Watch. But I get the appeal, right? I mean, Apple, look, Apple wants this thing to be a tricorder, like from Star Trek. Apple wants the Apple Watch to sit on your wrist and know everything it can possibly know about your health. And the challenge with that is that it is sitting on the back of your wrist and that's not necessarily the best

place to get all of collect all that data and that is why there will probably be other accessories we talked at one point i think we talked about uh airpods as a potential sensor you know for apple health and i i was thinking about that regarding regarding this story because you could argue like like apple's gate detection that it's talking about doing an ios 15 that's an apple that's an iphone feature right and i think there's something to that that it's like it's in your pocket and there's detection that it can do there that is interesting. And AirPods, I think about like it wouldn't surprise me at all if at some point down the road, Apple started looking at AirPods as another sensor surface for Apple Watch. And if you don't have Apple Watch, maybe it logs that data to your iPhone and it does something with it. But like, it's really starting to think of all of its products that touch your body as being surfaces that could be used to detect personal medical data.

And I think that's going to continue. I think that anything that Apple does, if they make glasses and they're on your temples, they're going to be like, oh, well, we're touching the temples. We're touching their forehead. We can learn things there too. Because I think ultimately that's what Apple wants is even beyond the Apple Watch and its health application that it will be wild for them to not put that into more products if they can, right? Especially if there's an application for it. If they're like, oh, there's this feature we want to add to the Apple Watch and we just

can't do it because the wrist is a terrible place for it. But you know what a good place to measure somebody's temperature is inside their ear. And they're like, get the AirPods people on the phone. We're going to put a thermometer in the AirPods. And the AirPod, and that's another example of Apple, the way Apple is run, Apple thinking kind of holistically about its products, where if you were just making wireless earbuds,

you would not put a temperature sensor in them. But if you're Apple, you're thinking big picture, which is, ah, the Apple Watch could really use the temperature sensor from the airpods there's also an extreme sports option of the apple watch plan for 2022 along with a new se there have previously been a rumor about a more rugged apple watch and i guess that's this. What do you think about how this would be branded? Do you think that this would be a separate watch like the SE, or could it be a part of Series 8? You know, they have two.

My feeling is that this is the equivalent of materials options. That this is the equivalent of offering it in stainless steel or titanium. Right. Is that they'll offer a ruggedized option of it was just like a rubber version of the apple watch yeah i mean i i don't i don't think that's beyond the realm of possibility right basically you take the uh the core of the apple watch but you put it in something different this would probably also you know this would break band compatibility it would probably have an integrated band, right? And just be this super rugged kind of G-Shocks thing. But that's okay, right? Like,

I think that is a great new territory for Apple Watch to go, is specializing it like this. And that would be how I'd argue, you know, you roll it out is like, literally, you're now going to make an Apple Watch Extreme or whatever version of your current Apple Watch, just like you make a titanium version or a stainless steel version, and you buy it and you get it and it comes in that form. And it's just it's the same watch bits. But the container is made of different material. And up to now, the different material has been the same shape, just different metals. But it would be very,

I don't want to say very easy, but you could see how it would be a parallel development for them to take this. So that would be my guess, is that if they want to do a sport, like an extreme sport, rugged version of the Apple Watch, that this is what it would be.

And maybe they also vary the glass, right? They vary the glass on um this is what it would be and maybe they also vary the glass right they vary the glass on the top so that would be another thing where they would probably put the you know the most rugged uh glass on top of it and then they'd have the ruggedized container for it but ultimately i think it would still be a series seven so while we're talking about the watch um john prosser had a report in late may that there is some more details on the design and that the apple watch would be the next apple product to feature a flat edge design with the possibility of a green apple watch um but potentially more colors like the imac what do you think of flat edge coming to that product as well? I don't know.

I mean, the Apple Watch design hasn't changed at all in the, what, seven years? Yeah, like the kind of general case design. You know, all they did was change the way the screen looked, I suppose. Right, but like it's maintained all they did was change the way the screen looked, I suppose. Right. But, like, it's maintained all compatibility and it looks the same. You look at the original Apple Watch and you look at the current Apple Watch and, like, it's Apple Watch. Two arguments there, right? One is it's old.

Time for something new. The other argument is it is iconic at this point. It is recognizably what an Apple watch looks like. And when you see one, you go up Apple watch. Like every time I'm watching a TV show or something like that, Apple watch, there it is, right? It's just, you can, you can see it and you know it and that has power so i don't i don't know um also look i'm not a watch person so i don't know about there there's so many different kinds of watch design out there maybe a iphone and ipad and you know and new i i mean they're all going in that direction right new imax all that, the flat sides thing. Maybe that would look great on a watch.

And if so, it would certainly fit into the sort of design family of Apple's products. Maybe it wouldn't. I mean, it's a round rect, right? Like it would be, what would it look like if it was shaped differently? What would it feel like on your wrist to have kind of a flat uh a flat side instead of a little curvy side i don't know um it's probably beyond my capacity as somebody who is not uh up on watch design i'm open to the idea that they would change the apple watch design i think at some point they probably have to evolve it but i also think like they've come this far establishing that apple

watch looks like this and that there's a danger in going away from it at this point what do you think you you care about watches yeah i think flat edges is fine you know like the watch i'm wearing today i mean it's round the face is round but it's the way the case attaches to the back of it is a right angle you know and so that that so I think that's perfectly fine. I think it's needed. I think that the Apple Watch has looked too similar for too long. And I think they need to start changing the design up a bit. I mean, I stand by the fact and still want a round Apple Watch

because I just don't like the square, like rectangular shape anyway. Like I just prefer a round shape. I would prefer a round shape. I would prefer a round shape. I would like to see them changing a little bit more about what the Apple Watch looks like rather than just the bands that you attach to it or the color of the cases. I think it's time for some change there personally. I don't know what I feel about, you know, flat edge design. If they're going to make it look like a flat edge from an Apple product, it could be kind of cool if they do like some of the shinier finishes that they've had on some of the pro phones could be interesting. I'd be intrigued to see what they would do with it. Could it make it potentially look too much like a computer?

Maybe. But I would like to see them do something a little bit more for me personally the the kind of like rounded design on the apple watch just kind of feels old now um in a way that i don't find appealing i think that's i think that's the give and take and honestly i think that there is an interesting dilemma for apple because i think um it does provide them with familiarity that's actually powerful for a lot of users and for potential buyers um but it's also been around a long time and so other people are going to have a reaction like you have which is it's boring and it's old and give me something new i'm not sure where apple watch is in its life cycle in terms of uh people who

look at it like you do versus people who look at it and there's value in having it be recognizable and familiar are they building you know so many new buyers that that's more important to them is sort of like or or would they have a huge you know sales boost by offering it in a different uh different shape there's also the question of like would they do would they have a huge you know sales boost by offering it in a different uh different shape there's also the question of like would they do would they do both uh i have a hard time believing that they would offer the same watch in like two styles but i just said that they could do an extreme sports version so you know could they do actually two different case styles of the same model watch that's a possibility it It seems unlikely, but you know,

never say never. It's funny that you mentioned the circular face. When you earlier mentioned, like, what do you think about the display borders changing and would they change the screen size? I feel like there's so much development challenge in dealing with the screen size. And it's not just app developers. App developers are going to figure it out. But it's also Apple's own software development where every time you change the screen size, you have to support. When they changed the screen size, they left a whole bunch of watch faces that they had designed for the smaller screen size basically behind and have not updated them. And they're like, oh, well, those are old. And they use the old stuff. And now we're like, they couldn't be bothered

to update all their faces to be on the new screen size, right? Like, so it's a challenge for Apple when they change the screen size, which is why what I think is, I would never change the screen size on incrementally on the existing screen template, I would save that. I would keep my gunpowder dry because a circular display is really interesting and would require

a lot of work to support. Yeah, you've got to start over. Yeah, so if you're going to go there, you've got to lay the foundation for that that and then you gotta put in a lot of work to go there um and and i think i actually think they will go there eventually because how could you not um the circular you know circular watch face is such a uh classic and common kind of thing especially when it's not like Apple don't try their best to make their watch faces

look like real watches. They try very hard, almost to a fault sometimes, of making their computer watch look like an analog watch. Right. So why not go the last step? Yeah, so I'm not saying that that's,

you know, I think that we have seen no reports that Apple is readying a circular Apple Watch. But I think it's inevitable. I think it'll be a few years. And I think that they will do it when they feel ready to offer a circular version of, you know, everything they do and guidelines for developers about how to deal with a non rectangular screen and all that. But I think in the short run, you know, I think it's going to be a fun question because I do I see both sides. I see the desire to make something that looks new and also the advantages of having something that looks familiar in a new product category. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace,

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and you'll get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of Upgrade and RelayFM. So Apple has announced their returning to work plan for its employees. They're doing three day weeks in the office starting in September with this hybrid approach running until 2022 at the earliest, which is only three months if they can in January. But it will be for review potentially to last longer. They're going to see how it goes.

potentially to last longer. They're going to see how it goes. The set days in the office for people at Apple Park and probably in some of their other locations is Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. We have the option to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays. You can go into the office if you want to, but you don't have to. Employees also get the option for two full weeks of at-home working per year. What did you think of this plan when you heard it? Honestly, I was disappointed by it. Okay. I'm going to do all the disclaimers here up front. I work in my own garage now, but I worked for several decades at an office where I commuted

every day. And I hired people, and I hired remote people, and I hired people in the office. I've seen all the sides of it. And I want to say that I do not think that every job can be remote. I don't believe that. I am sure that there are lots of jobs at Apple that really do require people being in the office for various reasons, right? What the pandemic taught us, though, is that there are certainly some jobs that don't. And it's not just the ones where it's obvious that you don't need to be in an office, but the corporate culture demands that you would be.

But also what we learned with the pandemic is that there are some jobs that seemed like they couldn't possibly be done remotely that could be done remotely. I'm reminded of the fact that the entertainment industry discovered that all sorts of video editors and VFX artists could literally do their jobs from their house, which, you know, I think culturally there was like, well, the computers and the power, you know, all of that stuff and the size of the files and like

all that stuff, you just have to be in the office. And some of that was a legacy of back when computers weren't as powerful and network connections weren't as fast. And some of that was a legacy of back when computers weren't as powerful and network connections weren't as fast. And some of it was that they just hadn't tried it. But I know for a fact that a lot of people in that industry made it work during the pandemic, not necessarily doing all of their renders and edits on their own computers at home, but using remote access software to control a powerful computer in a data center or at the office somewhere and sitting at home and doing the work remotely and that they made that work just fine. So like there's a bunch of different levels here. There's the stuff that probably should have been remotable from the beginning and wasn't. There's the stuff that we thought wasn't possible that we found out it was. And then there's the stuff that maybe we managed to muddle through, but we lost something. It was less efficient. It wasn't as good. I think all of those things exist. So the problem I have, and again, I don't work at Apple, and I also don't know the purpose of Tim Cook's message.

Tim Cook's message may indeed be the base model message, which is everybody at Apple gets this, but individual groups beyond this can decide policies. It doesn't seem like that's the case yet. So this is the challenge is, well, no, there's some weaseling in there, right? There's some weaseling where it's like individual groups,

blah, blah, blah, right? Like I think there is definitely, because the truth is Apple does have remote employees. They do. They do. Uh, they just are the exception and right. So like, there's a question of like, how blanket is this statement? But, um, why I was disappointed with it is not, I think it's great that Tim Cook is in this memo saying, um, we get that there's a lot of benefit to not just working from home if you want to.

Again, also something I should say up front, not everybody is built for working at home, either mentally, like they're just, they need to focus better, their physical workspace at home. You have to have a physical workspace at home that makes sense.

And a lot of people don't have that. So having it be an option to work from home, I think is good. It's not possible to say that one is better than the other. It isn't a thing that you can just equivocally say, right? Yeah. So, but what he is saying is we recognize that a lot of you have found value in this and, and a lot of you have commutes and you have found a better set of sort of like, it's better for your life and better for your health to not be commuting every single day. So we're going to throw a couple of days on the pile and say, you don't have to come in those days. Plus we're going to give you a little work from home allowance, which I use that. I could

work from home whenever I chose essentially when I was working at IDG. And I didn't work from home all the time. I couldn't do my job that way. But there were times when I was working on something and I realized I needed to just be heads down on this thing for a day or two, and I would do work from home. And it was great. So I think that when he says a couple of weeks of working from home available as a benefit, essentially, that's good. So I get what this is. The disappointment I have is that not every job needs to be the old style job of you've got to come into an office and sit. And I'm disappointed because I would have hoped that Apple learned over the last year that some of their corporate culture, that is, you have to be in the room. We're going to bump up against each other in the hallways and brilliant things are going to happen. That sort of serendipity fantasy that I believe is a fantasy because I think serendipity can happen in all sorts of places. It can happen in Slack channels. It can happen in video calls.

And it can happen at the lunchroom counter when you're getting some coffee and you bump into somebody. I think there's a little bit of fantasy there. I had hoped that the last year would have instructed Apple on the fact that some of its insistence on that one way of working, which is be in an office chair every day or three days a week is not necessary. And that some jobs and some groups don't need to be that way. Now, I'm also not saying that companies can't tell their employees what to do. They can.

The employees recourse is to find another job. What I am saying though, is that if Apple approaches this with this philosophy and this culture that comes from Steve Jobs, which is everybody's got to be in Cupertino, essentially. And they have other offices too, but you get my point. Everybody's got to be in the office in Cupertino. What you're going to do if you're Apple is you're going to lose talent because some talent's not going to want to live in the Bay Area.

It's not going to want to live with the cost of living in the South Bay. It's not going to want to do an extreme commute in order to afford a place to live. It's not going to uproot their family or live in a tiny house with a long commute in order to work at Apple. And that's Apple's decision. But I will say, as somebody who hired remote people, I got way, way better people by being willing to hire somebody who was not present and they did great work not every job can be that but some can so my my disappointment to this memo is more that it feels very one-size-fits-all and it doesn't seem to have learned the lesson that some jobs don't need to have everybody working in the office all the time. Because this memo is very much about for the people who are in the office all the time, you don't have to be in the office

a couple of days a week. And that addresses something and is nice, actually. But there's other parts that I'm like, hmm, yeah, but I know for a fact that there are also jobs within Apple that are much more like what I used to do, where we had a really great team and half our team was not ever in the office except for like special events or off sites or things. And it was great. And you've learned presumably over the last year what groups those are. yet i didn't it's not in this memo it doesn't mean it's not happening but i didn't see in this some recognition that um maybe that part of this uh should be a lesson learned that maybe there are some groups within apple that it doesn't make sense to hire everybody and force them to be in cupertino because um it's really expensive in cuupertino and a

lot of talented people aren't going to move. And maybe you could hire somebody somewhere else and make them not move and see them a couple of times a year, which I am a believer in, especially, you know, the younger your workforce is, the more online they are, the more capable they are, the more understanding they are of, you know, of Slack and Zoom meetings and stuff like that. Now, it's not for everybody. It's not for every group. So much of the conversation about this is, well, in my whatever, or in this experience I had. And I just want to say that every group is different. But I will also say that I have seen firsthand and through people I know that Apple's corporate culture of everybody needs to be here is still pretty strong.

And it leads to them having some jobs and groups that everybody has to be in the office, even if all they're doing is sitting at their desk looking at a screen and they could do that from anywhere. And I had hoped they had learned more of a lesson from it. This memo doesn't suggest that they did. Perhaps those individual groups did. And this was true before the pandemic, but it's going to accelerate. Apple's going to lose some talent because lots of people don't want to live in Silicon Valley. And everything that comes with moving to and living in and commuting through Silicon Valley. So The Verge obtained an internal letter sent to Apple management that detailed that the steps that they had taken were not enough for many employees and that the company is not being flexible enough and they want the policy to be rethought. works better for them at work, but also allows them to kind of better balance the lives that they want to live. They want that, especially when they're now looking at other companies in the Bay Area tech scene who are allowing like permanent work from home schedules or have more flexible policies. I will just say like, I was surprised by the fact that they did have a mixed

approach. I kind of expected them to either say like, we're going back to exactly how we are or it was going to be more flexible than this. Like, I was surprised that they did that two-day-a-week thing. The two-weeks work-from-home policy thing just seems so small it's pointless to me. Like, why two weeks? Like, what is that? And that's what makes me raise an eyebrow at the whole memo because it comes across a bit as, again, this is for everybody. And yet, you know, it isn't. Like, it can't be. Like, I would imagine that the way you really want this to work is you're a manager. You've got an employee. They're mostly not in the office. They do great work. I don't care. work i don't care you've got another employee when they're working from home their productivity drops i do care they need to come in right like that's that's how it should work instead of it being like well you've got two weeks of not of of staycation right like it's weird right you should

depending on what you're doing you should have unlimited work from home or no work from home it really just depends on what the job is and who the person is. So this letter basically was coming from a large group of people inside of the company who now feel that the approach for them is not that this stance of being at work is best kind of works for them, kind of left them feeling a little alienated. And this letter that was kind of circulated internally and sent to Apple management, it asks for a bunch of things some of them are that work from home decisions should be the responsibility of each team rather than a company-wide mandate so this is what i was saying earlier right like i i agree with you because we you know know it to be true that there are some people that work from home but it seems like maybe the teams that are allowed to make that decision

might be smaller than it could be. And they're also asking for a company-wide survey to be taken so they can actually get the understanding of the group at large. And that more consideration should be taken for those who are now less able to return to an office environment. well and what they're talking about here in this in this letter which um which people who listen to this probably have seen it john gruber basically um demolished this in a post that he made that i thought was unfortunate it's one of the least favorite things he's ever written for me like i think it was a real unfortunate embarrassing post where he basically uh seems to be defending the big the giant company against their mean old employees, which is, I think, the wrong bad take. It's a bad take. But I will grant this memo is bad

and embarrassing. The way it's written is bad. It's bad. But I will say this, changing corporate culture is really hard. And that's what basically they're asking for is they're saying, you know, hey, pandemic was a thing. And now that we're back, can we change the corporate culture? And I actually kind of think that it's hard to change corporate culture while you're away. Right. You're just trying to hold it together. And now this is sort of like Tim Cook's reopening memo, which is let's come back and we learn some things. And I absolutely understand the idea that this seems more of a blanket decision than maybe it should be and that there are a bunch of groups that really should be given license. Here's the thing. People in charge of groups are going to look at Tim Cook's memo as permission to do it business as usual with this very slight variation. Very, very slight variation. And that is not a recipe to reconsider or change corporate culture. And changing corporate culture is already so brutally hard. And I say this as somebody who spent years trying to haul a print magazine culture onto the web, right? And everybody can agree, but you know what? It's not just about the people. It's about the structure, and it's about how people feel they're valued, and it's about how it's like permeates an organization, makes it very hard to change.

Even Apple, right? That was Steve Jobs' greatest trick, arguably, when he came back, was he had to not just build products. He had to change the culture and build ways to reinforce the corporate culture like Apple University. So I think what's going into the employee frustration that you see in this memo is they're saying, we think the pandemic has taught us an important lesson about how some of Apple's assumed from Steve Jobs corporate culture decisions aren't accurate. And we would like management to really take a good look at what's best for the company and the workers of the company in terms of how work is done. Because the truth is not all the parts of Apple really need to go back to being the way that they were. That we've learned that we can do this job in a very different way. And I would

argue it's not just about the employees wanting to not come back into work or not have a commute or have to come back home from Lake Tahoe where they've been living for the last year. But it's also about Apple being able to hire a much broader group of people because they could hire somebody anywhere for those certain jobs where they can do that. But I think there's just a disappointment here of an opportunity to revisit the corporate culture, not even necessarily to tear it up,

but to revisit it in a moment where there's enough that's gone on that you might actually be able to affect a little bit of change and say, oh, you know, when Steve Jobs said that James Thompson had to move from Ireland to Cupertino, or he couldn't continue working on the Finder team, even though he'd been working on the Finder team just fine from Cork, maybe that was not so great. And Apple missed out on not having James involved as one of their developers for the last 20 years because he's a very talented developer. And the only thing that was against him was that he wasn't going to move to California.

So maybe this is a good opportunity for us to say, let's rethink things a little bit. Let's analyze this and determine where our culture maybe is off a little bit. And the Tim Cook memo can be seen by them, at least, as being a restatement of the status quo and say, we're not going to revisit this. Not in the way you think. We're not going to revisit this fundamentally. Fundamentally, if App Store editorial, which is just people writing and editing articles about apps, has to be every day in a building in Cupertino. Like that doesn't make sense. That's pretty much what we used to do at IDG. And we had people all

over the country and the world. Like maybe that's not great. Maybe we should rethink it. Maybe we should at least consider it. So I don't love the memo. There's a whole lot of, you know, we formally request that stuff. It's such a bad bit of bureaucracy and it's eye-rolling, but I totally get the motivation behind it, which is people who love Apple and work at Apple and have found that they find that Apple is better with some of the lessons learned in the pandemic. And they're feeling that this memo basically tosses away all those lessons in order to go back to something as close to the old way as possible. And I totally understand being disappointed by that. So I want to build on something that you said earlier, and also

in referencing something that John put in his article, which is that companies are not democracies. So this idea that if people are unhappy about something, they can request it, but they can't force a change. And I agree with that. Companies are not democracies. I mean, they are companies. You don't get paid to be a part of a democracy. companies, you know, you don't get paid to be a part of a democracy, right? But I think it is up to the leaders of a company, like a democracy, to decide how much they want to listen to the people within it. And if you have thousands of people telling you something, maybe listen, because they

might have a point. You can choose not to agree, right? That's fine. That's actually your decision. But then you need to be comfortable living with that decision and accepting potential ramifications of it. And this idea of democracy seemed interesting to me because I think what you can draw from here, if we're going to get metaphorical with it, is a parallel to another system of power. So authoritarian governments, they can allow people to freely leave, right? It's not necessarily the same as dictatorship, but it's like we're going to tell you what to do and you have to do it.

And what happens in a lot of authoritarian government regimes is a huge talent drain of young and educated people who decide that they do not want to live in that country. They're going to go somewhere else and they're going to try and start a life outside. Yeah. And that's what I mean when I say that Apple has risk here too. A lot of people, including in Gruber's post where he's basically punching down at employees and defending the big company, are saying, look, you signed up to work at Apple.

You knew these were the rules, so live with it. It's like there's truth in that, right? They want to make a change from the inside, but it is true also that they signed up for it. And that if their employer tells them it's too bad, this is the way it's going to be, they either need to like it or leave. The big picture is if you've got really talented people and they're going to leave, that's not great. And then right behind that is who do you replace them with? And when you grow, who are you going to hire? And now you're dealing with a post-pandemic workforce that is going to look less encouragingly on your insistence that people move to the Bay Area and three times a week commute in to an office in the South Bay in order to do the job. And that means you're going to hire, you've already cut yourself off from people who are never going to move to the Bay Area. But now there's a whole new strata of talented people. And keep in mind that a lot of these people are hiring, they are very talented tech

workers. They got lots of options. And now so many other tech companies are going partially or fully virtual that it becomes even harder for Apple to hire, and especially to hire good people. And then the next step is, then the rubber meets the road. And somebody at Apple is like, oh, I want to hire this person over here. And she's great, but she's not going to move from South Dakota. But she's really great. And her job doesn't really need to be here. And we've got Slack, and it be fine. And we got, you know, Cisco meetings and it'll be fine. And I want to hire her. And what do they do? And that's the other way this could go is that Apple's corporate culture changes from the bottom up, which is at the top, Tim Cook's like, we're all coming back to work.

And at the bottom, they're like, I have to hire this person because they're very talented and my other options are not as good, but this person can this person is not going to come here. And they have no leverage over that person. I mean, they've got limited leverage over that person. Some people will move. Some people won't. And it's like, do you want to hire that talented person? Or do you want to hire this less talented person? Or you found nobody else who is as good? That's going to be hard for them too. So it cuts both ways, but this isn't just about, oh, these employees are spoiled and they signed up for this, so they need to suck it up. It's also, if you look at it from Apple's perspective, a brain drain. I mean, you described it, the people leaving a country because that country is not conducive to what they want to do with their lives. That's bad. And the pandemic has not made that less of an issue for Apple. It already was an issue, but it has not made it less of an issue for Apple. It's made it more of an issue for Apple. And that's about retention

and about hiring. We know all sorts of people who used to work at Apple and they left and they moved somewhere else and they're very happy. And that's part of the brain drain. You talk to people at Apple and some of it is about, it's a grind, it's hard work, it's brilliant, it's very rewarding, but it's also hard work. You also talk to some people who are like, I just couldn't stay in California anymore. I couldn't stay in the Bay Area anymore. And you're risking more of that. And believe it or not, Apple acts like it is the pinnacle, the big leagues, and that you have to work at Apple. And it's like, there is some truth to that. But also, there are a lot of people in a lot of jobs at Apple where that's not true, right?

It's like, if you're designing Macs or iPhones or anything in know, anything like in the core, it's probably true. And I get it. But there's also a bunch of other stuff that is not true. And so to see people who work at Apple or who used to work at Apple and made, you see a lot of this too, made sacrifices. Like Michael Gartenberg, the analyst, was pretty much outspoken about this, like Gruber was. And, you know, but I know for a fact, like he took a job at Apple. He had to move, his whole life was in New Jersey.

He had to move to California and he lived in California for as long as he worked at Apple. And the moment he left Apple, he moved back to New Jersey. And like, I can see from that person's perspective saying, look, I sacrificed in order to work at Apple. Why can't you? It's like, fair enough. But from Apple's perspective, I'm saying,

that might be kind of dumb to force everybody who wants to work there to sacrifice like that for jobs, footnote, for jobs that probably don't require it. Some do, some don't. This episode is brought to you by Public Sector Future from Microsoft. I love finding new podcasts to listen to. I'm sure you do too. If you're looking for a new show to listen to, why not check out Public Sector Future?

It discusses real stories from public sector leaders who have been successful at driving change. You can hear firsthand experiences and challenges that users face and the lessons learned from it all. Throughout the series, they discuss technology and trends as well as cultural aspects of change, like what we were just talking about. Host Olivia Neal digs deep into the uses of digital approaches to help public

sector work better for those that it serves. She is the Director of Digital Transformation in Microsoft's Worldwide Public Sector team. And before, Olivia spent her career in the government of Canada and the government of the UK. So public sector work, she knows of which she speech. There's tons of interesting show topics, including mixed reality, rules as code, digital policing, digital strategy, digital access, so much more with fantastic guests as well. So I checked out an episode with Mark Polyphase, who is a professor of computer science at ETH Zurich and the director of science at Microsoft. And this one was all focused on mixed reality. And it was super interesting to see, like to hear

about how what we see currently as AR on our phones is like just this tiny step in the overall future of this technology. It was really interesting to hear someone who is like just this tiny step in the overall future of this technology. It was really interesting to hear someone who is deep in this stuff all the time and how they think about it as like, yeah, we can only see of it so much right now. And there's so much more to grow from this. And they were talking about how mixed reality devices can be utilized for tasks like showing instructions overlaid right in front of you and how this can help break down super complicated things. And they were talking about how people in the medical sector in the UK have been using that during coronavirus. So like a doctor can basically

instruct multiple juniors or multiple nurses at the same time by giving instructions because they can see them in like mixed reality instead of needing to be in all these places. It was really fascinating stuff. So go and listen to it yourself. Go just search for Public Sector Future wherever you get your podcasts. That's Public Sector Future

and we'll have a link in the show notes as well. Our thanks to Public Sector Future for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions. First one comes from Zach, and Zach wants to know, how much value have you as non-developers gotten from WWDC sessions this year?

Is there any that you would recommend to people to check out? I'm going to point people to the WWDC page at Six Colors, where we watched... You did a lot this year. It was really cool. I enjoyed it. We brought in Stephen Hackett to join me and Dan. We watched all the sessions that we felt had value to people who are not developers to glean things from them, and we wrote those up. And those are all in those posts from six colors so i would recommend starting there and if any of those things seem worth diving into further then go find those sessions and dive in but uh we did that work for you in in terms of if you're not a developer we tried to watch all this stuff and glean what we could from it yeah i mean for me any sessions that i did watch i typically would just watch the first kind of half because then the code stuff begins and it's too much for

me it's a lesson i learned in the 90s actually when i started going to wwdc is as soon as the code comes out you get out run gone yeah i used to be physically leave the room and now it's just close that window and and move to the next session but yeah like the one i enjoyed the most personally was shortcuts for mac os it was just that's just really interesting it's a great session i i'll tell you the one that i thought was brilliant uh and entertaining is called discover built-in sound classification and sound analysis you know because it's got an amazing demo. It is literally using machine learning sound analysis

to every sound that gets made in the room, it recognizes what it is. And like he's talking and it says voice and he turns on music and it says music and you're like, oh, well, that's cool. It can tell the difference between voice and music. And then, but then the drums come and it's a guitar and then it shows

guitar and then the drums come in and then it shows that it's recognizing the drums and then the vocal comes in and it comes in with singing and like it knows the details of what's in the music and then he turns that off and you know he he pours himself some tea and it it recognizes the sound of the water pouring or the tea pouring and then then when he puts in some sugar and clinks against the glass, it recognizes the glass clinking. And I sat there thinking, this is amazing. It has great accessibility possibilities. And also they showed there's a great demo of it running on shortcuts on the Mac with a folder full of videos. of videos and basically this shortcut says take this folder full of videos and find a clip that contains the sound of a cowbell it's wild and you press the button and it goes bloop here's the file

and that file is one of the presenters roller skating while playing the cowbell which is also hilarious so that was my that was my most entertaining session. And you know, you're not going to probably write an app that uses the sound analysis APIs, but that's okay. It was a really, really fun session. So I liked that. Yeah, that was the screenshot that you put in your post. It was really fun. I'll include a link in the show notes

to the six colors right up on both of those, which obviously will have links to the session videos as well in case you want to check those out. Yep. Brance wants to know, Mike, did you end up using a pop socket and not MagSafe so far with your iPhone 12 Pro Max? The answer is yes. I've stuck to MagSafe on the phone itself. No case the entire time. And I know that PopSocket have MagSafe compatible PopSockets now. But two things. One, I'm fine with how I've been using it and not using MagSafe. It's not a problem for me. I still have all of my docks. I have lightning connectors on them and my phone goes great onto those um and uh i've seen mixed reports of those mag safe the magnetic mag safes not working so well just straight onto the back of the glass of the phone like it's better if you have them on a case right i don't want to wear a case which is the whole

point yep uh buzz asks i'm planning on doing a clean install when i upgrade to a new macbook pro hopefully not too far in the future what is the best thing for me to do to ensure that i don't lose any files in the process uh well i mean a clean install that's sort of what you're trying to do is lose your files otherwise you should just use time machine or migration assistant. Right. Although you can migrate, I mean, you migrate from a backup is a thing to do. That's not quite a clean install. It's a clean install. And then it puts back the files that it thinks you need. That would probably be my number one would be do a time machine backup wipe install, and then restore from the time machine backup that, that via migration assistant, that does a pretty good job of,

you know, Apple is copying over the files that are yours, that are personal, but not anything that the system doesn't need. And so it will be cleaner. It will still migrate a bunch of old stuff that you could probably get rid of, but short of, you know, manually pruning your preferences folder and stuff.

I think that's probably the safest way to do it. I just did that in fact with my wife's MacBook Air. It had a giant freak out. I had to reboot it from recovery. It failed to reboot from recovery. It went into internet recovery. And then it failed to update on internet recovery. So I had to do a special recovery

where it recovered to big sir which meant it went from mojave to big sir um and at this point i basically i erased it and then installed big sir on it um and she had a time machine backup that runs every day so it was fine and i restored so i wiped it installed big sir and then i migrated from the time machine backup and she got all her files back she was on big sir and she had to log into some stuff and all that but basically lost nothing that's the safest approach and i think that's good enough honestly i think that you don't if all you're trying to avoid is sort of like an overlay update and you want to start that from scratch that's good enough honestly i think that you don't if all you're trying to avoid is sort of like an overlay update and you want to start that from scratch that's the way to do it i mean i'm not really an authority on this as such but i would just use migration assistant like yeah i mean it

it migration assistant works when you're moving from computer to computer but the time machine aspect of it means it works if you're wiping. So if you're upgrading to a new MacBook pro, you know, use migration assistant, right? Like have one, one device next to the other, ideally like close to each other or on ethernet or something like that.

Cause you're going to be transferring a lot of files and the migration assistant will take what it needs and leave the rest. And that's the way. And in my experience, you don't lose stuff when you do that. Migration Assistant's gone, really. It's good. It does a good job. All right, next up comes from Jimmy, and Jimmy wants to know,

do you think Apple should support dashboard-style widgets on the Mac desktop next year? Yes, I... Ooh. Oh, here's the problem with widgets, is I don't know what the right thing to do is on the Mac for widgets. Like they're pointless and notification center.

I find, because first off, I don't want to use notification center. And second, they're completely out of sight and out of mind. The whole point of widgets on iPad and iPhone is that they're right there. And you, you know, when you go to that screen, you see them. What's the equivalent of that on the Mac? I guess it's the desktop. So yeah, I feel like having a widget layer on the desktop or hovering over the desktop would be nice because I do think out of sight, out of mind is a problem. That's how I felt about dashboard too, is some people love dashboard, but I always felt like I never thought to look at dashboard and

glance ability means that I can glance and see it and not like hit a keyboard shortcut in order to see it. So that would lead me to believe that, yeah, there probably should be a visible layer that's just out. You can call it on the desktop, but maybe it's floating, you know, and it can float at the top or float at the bottom or however you want to float those things. I think that would be pretty good. My other hesitation here is if Apple decides at some point here to go all the way with iPad multitasking and do something that's more like a floating window system. multitasking and do something that's more like a floating window system. One of the great unexplored questions is what's beneath the floating windows?

Like, is it just a wallpaper? Is it a desktop? Do you see the like app icons back there or something? That kind of doesn't make sense but i i say this because if you could attach an ipad to a big display and have a like a wallpaper and a bunch of floating windows could you put widgets back on the background too i don't know it and if you could this is a conversation that apple today would probably have about the Mac and the iPad together. Right. Which is like, how do we want this to work?

How do we want widgets to be presented on the desktop of a windowed interface? Because we'll want it to do the same way in both places, maybe. And so that gives me a little hesitation, but in general, I'm just going to, complexity aside, yes, I would like to be able to add widgets on my Mac and see them without having to do a swipe or hit a keyboard shortcut. That would be nice. I would love this because I don't put files on my desktop. This is no judgment. I just don't do it. I have a couple of folders that are there, but one of them is just an alias to another folder, right? And I don't really use them.

So my desktop on my Mac is just nothing. So why not put widgets there now? So at least if I use the trackpad gesture to show me my desktop, I can get some information because right now it's just a picture. So I would love to put widgets there personally. I understand why dashboard went away. Like dashboard had its time in the sun. It was time for dashboard to leave. But now widgets are back, baby, big time, right? And so I want to have them in a better way like to be used better on my mac right it's now

you know apple has deemed my iphone and my ipad screen good enough for widgets what about my mac home screen you know and i'll throw in um they could also make widgets available in the menu bar yeah little apps another another mac like option right like what if i have a weather widget put a little weather icon in the menu bar and i click on it and i see the widget that would be a way that you could do a max spin on it where maybe the weather bar is not an icon maybe you could put the temperature up there or or a little mini forecast up there in the menu bar and then you click on it and you get the widget you could extend the widget interface to have a menu bar component there are a bunch of things they could do um but i i agree i would like them to do something because the only time i ever

used dashboard widgets was using that trick where you could like drag them out when you were in the middle of the transition you like press the dashboard button to close it but you're already clicking and dragging there was a way you could basically sneak them out of the dashboard layer and onto the desktop layer. And that's the only time I ever really use dashboard widgets because I never hit the F key to get the dashboard to show. I just out of sight, out of mind with me. So I don't want that.

And that's why I don't use widgets on the Mac today. Same reason. It's just, I don't see them. And I'm not, I don't like Notification Center. I don't like that whole place over there. I don't want to, I don't want to see it. I don't want to go there. Last question comes from Starling. Do you think the improvements to Swift Playgrounds are a stepping stone for Xcode for iPad? Or do you think that Apple wants coding on the iPad to stay somewhat limited to a simpler learning environment of Playgrounds?

I think the problem with coding on the iPad is that there are so many complexities in Xcode that go back a long way. And you have to have compilers, you have to support all sorts of different kinds of code, you know, C, Objective-C, like there's lots of different stuff that goes into Xcode. Xcode is very complex and includes stuff that Apple would have to run on the iPad that I'm not sure Apple wants to run on the iPad. So I think anything is possible. My guess is that Apple wants to evolve Swift Playgrounds into a full featured coding environment on the iPad for the next generation of apps. Yeah, when the time is right to say, we're all good with Swift and SwiftUI now, you know?

Yeah, I think, well, and you can do, I mean, honestly, they're sort of almost already there. They will probably need to not call it Playgrounds anymore. They'll probably need to actually call it something else. But I think Apple's goal with it is that it will become more common to write new apps, just using Swift and Swift UI. And those can be done on the iPad. But if you want the legacy of like using the old stuff,

using objective c using other stuff like that and having all of that weight of xcode i could see them just saying that's why you have a mac that's over there but what we're doing you know so they are they are arguably building their next generation um app development environment in public on the ipad that's the simplified environment that's just using swift um i know that's frustrating to people who are who would like to be able to use and unrealistic for a long time because there's going to be legacy code base uh that's not using swift so what do they do about that i don't know maybe they could go down that path. They just haven't yet. I hope they do, but I could see them just saying, no, you know, this is just for the future. And it's for these

idealized apps that are just in Swift and that's it. But, you know, they have the ability to do, you know, virtualization and they could put, you know, they could put all the, all the old stuff in a, in a box that was locked down, but you could still use it. They could do a lot of work and make Xcode work on the iPad, but I feel like that there's also a lot of security issues there. It's a complex system, and I could see why they're hesitant to do that. So I think it's going to become more full-featured, to answer Starling.

More full-featured, but it's an open question about whether Apple is content at being this sort of like Swift only environment or whether they really have some goal to make it Xcode on the iPad. And I think the more they add to Swift Playgrounds, the less encouraged I am that they're actually going to do Xcode for iPad, if that makes sense, because less encouraged I am that they're actually going to do Xcode for iPad, if that makes sense, because they're taking measures in their existing thing to kind of do half of that. And it seems like they're kind of blunting the fact that the other thing is not there. If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade. That's the name of the show. Or just use question mark Ask Upgrade

in the RelayFM members Discord. Jason, would you like to tell listeners of Upgrade a little bit about another show here on RelayFM? Sure. How about Parallel? I remember when Shelley Brisbane, the host of Parallel, pitched Parallel

to us. It was in Austin, Texas, where she lives, and we were there. She was a regular guest on the Upgrade, or not Upgrade. What was my other podcast called? Download. Parkway's Download. Okay. Download.

She was a regular guest on the Download podcast, which is dead, RIP Download. Anyway, so she did bring Parallel to RelayFM. And I think you'll like it. It is a tech podcast, but it also has accessibility sprinkles, as Shelley puts it. So the intersection of tech and accessibility, good show. Shelley's great. She's a pro. And it's a good podcast. You should listen. Relay.fm slash Parallel, or just search for Parall parallel in your podcast app of choice. I'd like to thank our sponsors for this week's episode. That is the Public Sector Future Podcast, Squarespace, and Hello.

And of course, thank you to the people who support us directly with Upgrade Plus. If you would like longer ad-free versions of every episode of Upgrade, just go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up right now. If you'd like to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. Oh, hang on a second. Do you hear that, Jason Snell? It sounds like... The crashing of waves? It sounds like beach sounds wait is it the sound of summer why yes jason snell it's the summer of fun see you next week everybody Thank you.