Upgrade - 362: He's Posting More Chickens!

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Jason's back, and Myke has a lot of questions about his vacation. They also discuss a load of Apple TV+ news, new Safari betas, the MagSafe battery pack, and a bunch of Apple hardware rumors.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 362 and today's show is brought to you by instabug privacy and doordash my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snow hello jason hey is this upgrade a podcast that i listen to that i'm occasionally on you're completely back now welcome back to the show i am completely back i guarantee that i will be on this whole episode and not disappear in the middle for a while probably probably how would you know right you have to wait and see what happens summer of fun i don I don't know. I don't know. Hashtag Snow Talk question comes from Mark, and Mark wants to know, do you use a screensaver on your Mac, or do you just dim your screen?

Yeah, I use Arial like everyone else. It's fine. I like to see it. I like to see it on the Apple TV. I don't know why I use it. I don't know why I don't have some other screensaver or no screensaver. I just do. It's on for a very small amount of time. I've got some sort of window in between when it dims the screen entirely where the screensaver runs. My answer is, Mark, yes, I can tell you I do. Why I do, I don't know. I think it's more like a mistake i have no i find no value on it ariel is the the one where it flies around and shows you the you know the the scenery the international space is the apple tv screensaver is the ariel

screensaver on your mac yeah is this built in is it or or did or did i maybe i think if i think you've got an app called ariel a-eE-R-I-A-L maybe? Because they're not built into the Mac, the Apple TV screensavers. Well, maybe I downloaded a thing that lets you do the... Yeah. I mean, I've got it. I've got Arial as my screensaver, and it's literally the Apple TV screensavers. Okay.

I'm going to put in the show notes what I think you have, which is... Oh, you're right. Yeah. So this is how little care I put in to my screensavers is a million years ago. There was a story about how you could get the Apple TV screensavers on your Mac. And I downloaded the thing and promptly forgot about it. So it's there. You can get your Apple TV screensavers on it,

but I'm going to invalidate this whole Snell talk question now by changing it to something else. Maybe. Okay. Or, or not. i did arabesque for a while which is like all the weird patterns and of course back in the day flurry was the classic but really it doesn't it doesn't matter i i don't see it very often and then my screen blanks after a short amount of time so i've got show screensaver set to 30 minutes and i've got to turn display off to an hour. So for half an hour, if I step away, which I'm very rarely gone,

but yeah, I am gone sometimes for an hour, that half an hour, it will play the aerial screensaver. And in Monterey, I can do that cute little hello screensaver. Or is that in Monterey? I can do that cute little Hello screensaver. Is that in Monterey? I think so, yeah. Because I have that one, the Hello screensaver, on my iMac set after 20 minutes. And it's the color-matched screensaver

that comes with the new iMacs. So I have that. I have that set for 20 minutes. I never otherwise would have a screensaver but i really like this screensaver and it comes as default on these macs with the color match one that you're using and uh it fills me with joy whenever i see it so i do have that on there so i while we're talking about screensavers and i used to be a big fan um i i was on the screensaver beat briefly at Mac User when I started there.

I wrote about After Dark and all of that back in the day, flying toasters, all those things. I even judged. They had a contest for people wrote screensavers, and the After Dark people had a whole contest of what were the best submitted screensavers, and I was a judge in that. Things were really different back then, weren't they, Jason?

It was a wild time. People were very excited about screensavers and i was a judge in that things were really different back then it was a wild time people were people very excited about screensavers and then there was underwear which was the screensaver that ran on your desktop while you worked so stuff happened on your desktop right yeah while you worked which was a pretty wild thing but the the screensaver my favorite screensaver of all time and i used it for a very long time. It doesn't work anymore as far as I can tell. And I liked it because it was funny and because it also made a statement about bad network security. It was a screensaver called Surveillance Saver. And basically what Surveillance Saver did is there were whole networks of webcams.

And this is in the, I'd say say early 2000s where they're internet connected security cameras and if you didn't change the default password anybody could see what was on the camera and surveillance saver had a catalog of all of them and would just take you to random security cameras every 20 seconds it would flip to a different one and it first off that's hilarious like don't do that but the thing that i i loved about it is that i think in the end its list wasn't that large and so you'd get favorites and there was this bar in somewhere in russia and i loved that camera so much because you flip and you're like oh we're in the bar and it would be like these russian guys like with their heads down on the bar like passed out or maybe they're maybe they're active and they're moving to the music or and you never

know what you're gonna get uh there was also a lot of like a corridor or a dumpster outside some building that was also, I thought, very, very funny. But anyway, Surveillance Saver, that was from a different time. Although we still live in an age where people have the default password for things. So it's not great. It's not great.

Sometimes you truly never know where a Snow Talk question is going to take you. It's true. You never do do it could take you into uh the flying toasters for all we know if you would like to send in a question to help us open an episode of the show just send in a tweet with the hashtag snow talk or use question mark snow talk in the relay fm members discord so jason let's just uh do a bit of summer of fun here. You were gone last week. Where were you? As was revealed, I think, in the Upgrade Plus.

And you never know when you're doing... So we recorded my portion of that episode last week, two weeks ago, right after we recorded episode 360, Upgrade 360, your high quality audio. We didn't even talk about that, right? Because we didn't know. We got several people who wrote in after we released our lossless edition and our incredibly low resolution edition. And we had several people write in to say, oh man, the lossless edition, it sounds so

much better. You should always do a lossless edition. And my response was, I think probably what you're sensing is that you're listening to it like in a web browser instead of in Overcast with voice boost and smart speed turned on. And so it sounds different, not that it sounds better. Although there is at least one emailer who has insisted that it does sound better on his iPad speakers, which I find also a little bit hilarious that like, oh yes, really you have to use an iPad speaker

for the true lossless audio experience. I don't know. Anyway, thank you to everybody who wrote in about our little ironic experiment. There was more people who downloaded those files than I was expecting. I kind of assumed it would be like 100 people or something.

I'm actually going to look right now. I haven't looked since like the first couple of days. But let me see what we've got here. It was kind of for each one of them. It was about 3,000 people went and did that, which I think is kind of hilarious that that many people decided to go and check out our weird and wonderful audio

and the low resolution one where it's like you're listening to it at the bottom of a swimming pool is amazing it's so bad that one's so bad i was so pleased about how just how bad it was so um anyway after we were done with that episode we recorded my portions of 361. We talked about streaming services and we did Snell Talk and we did Ask Upgrade. And then you, over the week, you recorded in the middle. But what's funny about that is that you're making promises about the future. So it's like, oh, Jason, where are you today? I'm like, okay, on a beach in Hawaii, probably. And then we finished doing upgrade. And I literally then

I got in the car and drove to the airport. So that was my Monday two weeks ago. It turns out that on that following Monday, I was indeed at one point on a beach in Hawaii. So it all worked out. We did a family trip. My daughter was down from school for a few weeks after the school year let out. She's going to go back up to Oregon, but she's been down for a few weeks. And we went for 10 days to Maui, where you went on your honeymoon. We were in Kihei, which is the sort of sunny beach town part of Maui. And yeah, 10 days. I've always thought, usually my vac, yeah, 10 days. I've always thought I very, usually my, my vacations are that long are not that long.

And, um, this is the point where somebody said, uh, I think last week I saw a tweet went by that said, uh, you know, you're listening to an American when they talk about a 10 day long vacation as being a long vacation. I'm like, yeah, it's true. It's true. I'm not denying it, but I always have felt like the 10 days is where you get that sort of, you're able to fully, fully kind of unclench from your life and be there and let it that that's actually true. That after a week, it feels like we just got here and now we have to go. After 10 days, I would have, don't get me wrong,

would have liked to stay longer, but it was also like, okay, we had a good time. That was really nice. And it was, and so 10 days, haven't done that in a while. I like Maui. We were there two years ago for what was essentially my daughter's graduation from high school trip. But she broke her foot while she was dancing in her dance class.

And so that was our trip to Hawaii where we couldn't walk anywhere because she was in like a boot. The ugly shoe, we called it. She was in the ugly shoe. And so we go to the beach, but she had the ugly shoe we called it she was in the ugly shoe and so uh so she we go to the beach but she had the ugly shoe um so uh this was kind of like a replay of that because we had such a great time and we wanted to go back and also at this time she wouldn't have a broken foot and uh and we did have a great time so like i love hawaii um it's my favorite and you know i go there and i'm like oh man i built up hawaii way too much and it's not gonna it And I go there and I'm like, oh man, I built up Hawaii way too much and

it's going to disappoint me. And you know what? It never disappoints me. It really doesn't. It's warm and breezy. And going in the summer is a little bit weird because as a kid, my parents took me to Hawaii a couple of times, which is why I fell in love with Hawaii. But there, when you're leaving the cold and rainy, going to Hawaii, it's like, oh my God, this is so much better. But the truth is, this time of year here where I live tends to be foggy and cool. So it was a treat to be in actual summery kind of conditions for that 10 days. So it was really nice to be there and to get away and to not bring a keyboard. I didn't bring a laptop. I didn't bring my iPad a keyboard i didn't bring a laptop i didn't bring my ipad keyboard i didn't bring a microphone podcast or tip i didn't didn't do that either

i didn't edit any podcasts while i was there i posted a couple of links where i'm like scrolling through twitter and i saw something interesting because you know i do have a website and the first week i was there dan mor Morin was also on vacation. So it's like sixcolors.com was just abandoned for a week. So like I pre-wrote an article the previous week that posted and Stephen Hackett wrote his members only piece that week. And I posted a couple of links from there and it was enough to like keep the fire burning while we were both gone. So I did that, but that was about it. And it was, it was what I said to Lauren is, I'm not going to do anything that I really consider work,

but posting a link to Six Colors is like, that's not, that's nothing. That's, it's not a problem. That's that, that those posts tend to be, that's as easy as doing a share button. And it's like replying to a tweet. Like it's, it's that level of, of difficulty. So that was pretty easy as doing a share button and it's like replying to a tweet like it's it's that level of of difficulty so that was pretty easy so yeah it was great i would like to talk to you about your instagram because i feel like you were punishing me for some reason

so it's really i'll give you i'll give you an example of what happened here so just as we're finishing up our recording and i say to jason i'm really pleased for you have a great time i can't wait to see some photos right uh-huh and like yeah okay great so jason goes on his trip and then a couple of days in he posts a picture of some chickens chickens and i'm like all right fine i'm looking forward to the better pictures the next day more chickens like chickens you are in one of the most beautiful places on earth all i want is oceans and beaches and like mountains and you're just like two especially one of them is like one of the like you basically i don't know what you did like 10 times optical

zoom on this chicken or something like why were you why were you nagging me with chickens for three days one of the things that i like about hawaii is especially since the the hurricane blew through on kawaii but even on maui this is the case there are loose chickens everywhere they're everywhere like when you're eating outside and stuff there's just chickens everywhere especially yeah we found that yeah we went to a shave ice place and um they were just like roosters and hens and little chicks i think i know that exact place so i think we had shave ice there there's a beautiful really nice shave ice yeah exactly so and so they're cute and they're fun and i took pictures of them and um i'll tell you it's a side effect also of being with the apple watch where i'm not always... So Lauren brings her phone with her, but I didn't bring my phone with me a bunch of places because I have my Apple Watch.

And that means when I don't have my phone with me, I can't take pictures. And I can't post pictures on Instagram. So that was part of it. I did finally get around to posting actual nice pictures. But the first few days it was uh it was just chickens basically for two days it was just me at home screaming to adina he's posting more chickens that was kind of all like i was very frustrated so we went yeah we went to lahaina to the banyan banyan tree in lahaina and there was all these chickens around there and i

took a picture of that and then we were on a little walk on a beautiful, just absolutely beautiful by the coast and all of that. And we were on this resort that's kind of under construction. And so you have to walk through this different path to go around the shoreline. And they have this, it's essentially like a putting green kind of quality grass. And there's these benches and we sit down to take a little break on our hike. And in front of us, there are a bunch of chickens. And so, of course, have I taken a picture of the beautiful scenery? No, but look at those chickens. So I took another chicken picture.

So I'll endeavor in all future vacations to post chicken pictures for you, Mike. Thank you. I'll appreciate that. You're welcome. You're welcome. How did it feel to take a break? You're welcome. You're welcome.

How did it feel to actually take a break? Were you, you know, were you anxious in any way? Like, how did it feel to take that trip? I mean, I felt like I really needed it. Like, as somebody who works at home and very rarely leaves my house, and we'd done a couple of trips during COVID where we went to our friends who have a rental in Sonoma for a couple of days where they had nobody else going. And we just sort of slid in there for a couple of days. We did that in September and we did that in February. And being somewhere else was nice, but it's been quite a while since I've gone away somewhere and just sort of not worked.

I can not work here, but it's not a way. And I've gone away to like visit my mom and I've also worked. But to get those two things together, it reminds me that vacations are important for me just to get away and to kind of heal a little bit. And with the pandemic, it's been impossible to do that in certain ways. I think also, one of the things that I was thinking about is the difference between an isolation trip and a an isolation trip and and a kind of not isolation trip like this is not we didn't go to a place where there's no internet right like and part of that is a decision that i made which is i mean first off there's a reality that like my kids would mutiny if there was no internet but also for me like i i want to read stuff on the internet too. That's not the burden that

I bear as a person in the 21st century. It's like, I want to read that stuff too. I'm not trying to get away from that part of it. I'm trying to get away from the grind. So I was on Twitter and I was in Slack and I saw what people were doing and people were talking about. And so you could make an argument that there's a whole other level of vacation that is this isolation. And, you know, I, I could do that, but that was not, I didn't feel like I needed to do that. And I didn't bother.

And I was okay with that. Like I, I, I don't know, because sometimes I feel maybe I've just got an internal judge, but sometimes I feel like I've internalized the, the judging of the internet, which is like, well, you're on vacation. Why are you looking at Twitter? Why are you in Slack? It's like, yeah, I like those things. Those are not the things I'm trying to heal from and escape from. Reading about the soccer or watching the baseball all-star game or seeing what's going on

or watching you know disney plus or like i'm not trying to escape those parts of the world really i'm trying to escape the grind of doing podcasts and writing articles and doing all and scheduling things and doodle and all of those things that i do i am you know i'm trying to step off of that and not bring a keyboard and all of that. What I found about Hawaii, which I found very enticing when I was there, is the time zone makes it really difficult to do any work even if you wanted to. It's true. Because you're far away from everyone, you know? Yeah, this time of year, it's three hours behind California.

So it's just as far behind California as California is behind New York. That means you're six hours behind New York. And of course that means you're 11 hours behind the UK and 12 hours behind Western Europe. So I, yeah, like everything already happened by the time I woke up and I was not waking up. I was not trying to wake up early either.

So as the week went on, like everything had already happened and everybody was back asleep. And then in the evening, everything was kind of quiet on Twitter until the British people woke up. In fact, a funny thing about my Monday two weeks ago is we did upgrade. Then we did part of the next upgrade. Then I went to the airport and I traveled and I did all of this stuff and we ran our car and then we drive across the island and we check in and we stop by the grocery store so we have stuff to eat in the morning and all of that. And we finally sit down. I sit down in our condo and I open a beer and I open Slack and I think, hey, hey, Mike, and you were awake because it was already Tuesday

morning. Yeah, that was really funny to me. It was a very big, long Monday for me. So long, in fact, that we did a podcast, I got on a plane, I traveled and all that. And then you had slept and woken up and it was Tuesday morning because that's how far away Hawaii is. And that's a nice thing, too. So I see the value in the kind of like total isolation thing, but it's not what I was looking for. And I got what I was looking for, which is, again, didn't have to write any articles, didn't have to record any podcast, didn't have to edit any podcast, didn't have to do my what I consider my job part of my job. my job part of my job, I just got to kind of not, there's just the freedom of kind of not caring.

Of like, I can get up whenever. I don't have a reason that I have to wake up at a particular time. I don't have to go a particular place. And I also read like eight books. So there was that too. I love that. Yeah. Well, I'm very pleased.

They weren't all like full, like thousand page novels. I've been going through a bunch of the Hugo Award nominees for like short fiction and stuff. So I read like five novellas and a handful of novels too. And it's just, you know, nothing better than sitting on the beach and you read a little bit and then you go in the water and bob around in the warm water for a while. And then you come back out, sit on the beach, read a little bit more. for a while and then you come back out, sit on the beach, read a little bit more. Oh, also, speaking of my Apple Watch, I did at one point just, I was sitting on the beach listening to the waves, had my AirPod Pro headphones in pass-through mode so I could hear the waves and

stuff and was listening to Connected while sitting on the beach. It was pretty fun, actually. I decided I didn't want to read anymore. I was a little tired of reading at that point. I just wanted to kind of look out at the clouds and stuff, but I wanted a little more stimulation than just the sound of the waves. So I had the sound of the waves and the sound of Connected. Perfect, really.

What a mixture. Living the dream. Yeah. Well, I'm very pleased for you, very jealous. I hope that I can have a similar trip some point later in the year i hope so that would be nice next week's episode we're gonna do a mic at the movies well yeah we're gonna talk about loki i really want to talk to you about loki uh so you can if people want to finish loki before next week's episode they can and And I'm naturally assuming that we will not be able to stop ourselves talking about the opening of Ted

Lasso. So I figured that will probably come into conversation as well. So if you want to catch up by next week's episode, there's a couple of things for you to go and listen to. All right. Let's check out that next week. Are we done? Is that it? I think so. Is this how the podcast works? No, we continue from here. I'm afraid you have to stick around. I have to do more than one segment? There's way more than this. I have a lot more

for you. I need more tea. Let me give you a break then. This episode is brought to you by Instabug. Building mobile apps presents some challenges from bugs and crashes to performance issues. It can be a nightmare for developers. But what if you could not only detect all of these issues, but understand the quality of your app from your user's point of view? Instabug's lightweight

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So Jason, I have some Apple TV Plus news for you. So much. I was collecting links. That's another thing I did while I was on vacation is that there was all this news and I was like oh man we're not going to cover this and upgrade for two weeks but I just kept adding we have we now have a little shared Apple note and so I just I keep seeing things and instead of pasting them into our Slack chat I just append them to the end of the note endlessly and there was so much Apple TV

Plus and upstream news while i was gone so we got to get to it so the apple are possibly attempting to require the film and tv show a24 a24 produce a lot of stuff a lot of documentaries a lot of movies some television shows and they already have an existing deal with Apple, which has included some stuff that's already come out and some movies and shows that are in production. But this is a rumor that they might actually buy the studio itself.

It seems like A24 is attempting to put itself up for sale. And apparently, according to Variety, this was something that they had potentially looked at in the past, but A24 seemed to not be interested then, but seemed to be now interested. The potential asking price is $3 billion. I have no real sense as to what that equates to

when it comes to entertainment industry acquisitions. I feel like I'm much more clued into tech into tech stuff three billion seems like a lot of money but i guess if you get a lot of ip out of it maybe it's worth it so my question is i don't even know if it's the intellectual property and this is this is the question about when we talked about uh reese witherspoon's company right hello sunshine the same rumor about apple being possibly interested in that is like, well, what do you buy when you buy a studio, right? Like Apple already is sort of booting up a studio. I mean, I guess one of the things you buy is you buy talent in the sense of the people who work there and the machinery of the studio. So maybe it's a way to build and grow a studio fast um you do get whatever they've produced you know archivally and whatever they've got in the works but that would be my question

for people um who are more in the know which is like if you've got an independent studio that's got a catalog of a small catalog of films but like not a franchise or anything that you're getting out of it, not a huge catalog. When you spend $2 or $3 billion, is that what tech people would call an acqui-hire? Are you really just trying to build out your studio ability and you're willing to pay for it as opposed to just spending money hiring people, which you could also do. Like that's my question is, we've seen these stories about Apple potentially buying this stuff.

And I think Apple's clearly kicking the tires here, but I do wonder if some of this is just a perception thing of like, oh man, Apple's got a lot of money. Maybe we can get some of that money, right? Like it's sort of wishful, like maybe they will acquire us because I do think Apple could just not, right?

Apple could just keep building out its own studio structure. And in fact, instead of spending $3 billion on a studio, spend that money on hiring away the talent and paying them better, right? You could do that and you could build a studio. Buying a studio doesn't mean all those people are going to stay, right? That's the trick, right? Is they could do like certain people, they could do it where there's like a deal, right?

Where they get money if they stay for a certain period of time. But that's not going to be everybody. Right. So that's my fear to be everybody right so like that's that's my fear about something like this is you're kind of buying an empty box uh and at that point like if if because i look at this and i think well 824 it seems like a nice company but like i don't understand why what they produced assuming that they they have ownership stake and all that stuff that doesn't seem like it's worth it and maybe they like the executives there but i'm not sure that's worth it when you could just spend that

money to build up your own thing so that's that's the struggle i have with this and the hello sunshine hello sunshine at least it's sort of like maybe apple just really likes reese witherspoon and her sensibility and the and the work she The Hello Sunshine one I understand a little bit more because it reminds me a bit more of Beats. Because you get, if they buy Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon is going to work at Apple for a period of time, right? Like that just feels like a done deal.

And Hello Sunshine has been, has got a really great reputation. They already have multiple projects in the works. And if I'm Apple, I don't want another company to own any part of the morning show. And that might be a scenario, too, where they're like, we love what Reese's company does and we love working with her. And so what we're going to do is we're just going to own it all. And then the other question is, do you own it all and fold it in? Or do you say, we're just going to own it all and let it run. And all of those projects are going to come to us first. And if we sell it

somewhere else, well, it's us. So we still get the money, but we just want to be in business with that person and that company that the person has built. Like I get that. And so maybe that's also the case for something like a 24, but I just, I struggle with it a little bit because if it's somebody who's really good and has built a good system and you think like, I don't want to mess with it and I don't want a competitor to buy it. So we'll just buy it and let it run. I kind of get it. But if it's literally just, we could build it or buy it why

don't we buy it um other than if apple just wants it to happen fast and they're like we can just sweep in a24 and a24 becomes part of apple studios and we're done also a24 presumably will be a processor in uh in 10 years so because you know I was thinking, like, it must frustrate Apple that Ted Lasso has so many companies involved in it and they're just one of them. Right. I mean, it is... Look, they had to do this to get off the ground, but it is the least Apple thing of all to think that Apple's banner project, the most important project, it turns out, on apple tv plus at this point is a warner brothers product well see that ouch ted lasso why i bring it up specifically is it has it's got doozer which is the production company which is phil lawrence yeah universal studios and warner

brothers all involved yeah universal's involved because of the nbc thing yeah but they're still a part of it yeah and that's got to frustrate them where it's like they have one or two partners for some of their other shows right of course yeah for all mankind is sony like of course there are partners and that that's part of it but like i get why it's like that now, but it's not very Apple-like. And I think that Apple wanting to produce more of its own things, like how Netflix produces and Amazon produces its own things, it's inevitable. It's inevitable.

I don't think Apple's ever going to be in a situation where Apple will never buy a show from another studio. That stuff happens. It will continue to happen. There are people that we're going to want to work with a show from another studio. That stuff happens. It will continue to happen. There are people that we're going to want to work with that are with another studio. It happens in that business all the time. But, you know, the big stuff on HBO Max is from Warner. And the big stuff on Netflix is from Netflix.

And the big stuff that's on Apple TV will be from Apple. It's inevitable. So that might be a reason for this sort of thing is we just got to get going on on being our own studio and buying other studios helps helps us get there so maybe that's their rationale apple is apparently trying to get in on nfl sunday ticket yeah what is nfl sunday ticket okay uh yes hello sports fans NFL Sunday Ticket. What is NFL Sunday Ticket? Okay. Yes. Hello sports fans. American sports fans.

NFL Sunday Ticket is the package from the NFL that allows somebody to watch any NFL football game. So the way it works in America is every NFL football game is broadcast by a TV network, but the Sunday games

are only shown locally. And I know that seems a little bit weird if you're not an American, but the idea there is if you're in Cincinnati, one of your channels is showing the Bengals game and the other channel is showing a random game that they've chosen. If you're in the Bay Area, one of your channels is showing a 49er game and the other channel is showing a random game. It used to be a Raider game. Now it's a random game, which means that there's this, you can't, if you're a fan of the Bengals and you live in the Bay Area, you can't see your team play unless they're on a national broadcast because that game isn't being shown in the local market. Instead, they're showing the chargers, let's say.

So Sunday Ticket, you buy it and you get all those games, access to all those games. So you can watch all of them. They have their own Red Zone channel, which shows sort of like switches back and forth between all the games, or you can just park it on one channel and watch that game. I used to buy this.

Now I just get the Red Zone, but I used to buy this. It's an exclusive to DirecTV, which is a satellite provider, which is a really interesting wrinkle. It drove a huge amount of DirecTV sales because they were literally the only place that you could get this package. But that contract is running out. contract is running out. And the general feeling is that it's going to go to a streaming service that the NFL, again, the NFL could sell it themselves direct. But, and I know we've talked about this before, why sell it direct and just get money from people when you can instead get more money from a streaming service that's desperate to use it as a cudgel to beat people with, to force them to subscribe.

So basically as a consumer, the idea is they will overpay for this service in order to use it as a customer acquisition tool. So Apple being involved in it doesn't surprise me one bit. I think anybody who is serious about streaming in the US, about live streaming in the US, I guess I should say, has to view this as a super important possible product. Because it will, I mean, the NFL is the number one entertainment product in the U.S. essentially. And this is giving you access to the entire NFL via streaming. It's a big deal. And in fact, if you're a sports fan and a cord cutter, presumably this package might even give you everything. Um, and you wouldn't even need the rest of it.

I'm unclear on what the local blackout rules are. So it's a, it's a big deal. And we've talked about it here before. Sports is a huge, because it's live, it's a huge, originally tool to be used by cable companies to keep people from cutting the cord.

And now we're starting to see it switch, which it's also a tool for streamers to get people to land on their streaming service. If Apple were to get this, do you think they would, how would, would you think they would obviously charge for it? Would it be included in the deal? Well, it's a good question. Like, would they make this like an Apple TV channel or an add-on? We haven't seen an add-on for apple tv plus yet right but this could be something like that right i would i i would have a hard time i mean apple has all the money they could do it however they want they

could make it a pure acquisition thing it feels more like they would do a uh like the disney plus premiere access thing where there'd be like apple tv subscribers and you have to pay a price to get it for the uh for the year because i was looking i don't know because i don't really and it's like 75 a month at the moment to buy the nfl sunday ticket thing on its own i think if i look correctly i yeah i mean it's it's only for during the football season my memory is that it's it's like a few hundred dollars to get it. Yeah. Okay. And you have to get a satellite dish because it's only on the satellite, right?

That makes sense. It's serious, right? I actually think this is also exciting because it's going to provide this service to more people than are currently able to even get this service because it's been locked to this one distribution mechanism. There's some shady ways that, well, they're not shady. There's some ways that you can qualify to not get it on DirecTV, but it has to be like literally I'm unable to receive a satellite signal and then they can sell you a streaming version of it. It's not from DirecTV.

It's a whole thing. So this is a big deal for apple uh or any other streamer if they if they want this and i think the end result is going to be somebody is going to overpay because they're going to want to use it for customer acquisition like i said and retention uh right right it's that idea of like it's not worth it it's not worth it to pay beyond this if if it only was just worth it as an entertainment product i think the nfl would just sell it themselves and keep all the money but they can get more money from someone else who wants who adds that value in of acquiring and it could be peacock it could be like they had existing deals with most of the broadcasters like espn

nbc cbs so it could be a paramount plus thing it could be a peacock thing it could be an hbo max They had existing deals with most of the broadcasters like ESPN, NBC, CBS. So it could be a Paramount Plus thing. It could be a Peacock thing. It could be an HBO Max thing. I mean, it could be anywhere. ESPN Plus. But Apple has been... Obviously, Apple is intrigued by the idea of sports and by the idea of live events.

Not live TV and the sort of cable over the top, cable replacement service sort of thing, as much as in the, what if there was a live event thing? And they haven't really broken that seal yet, but I think maybe there are strategy people at Apple who think they're going to need to do this because this is going to be an important strategic move to get people to subscribe to your service apple have done some new ideas with some large creators um i couldn't think of a better word than creators but i think it works okay adam mckay has done a multi-year first look for feature films mckay is recently most famous for movies like the big short and vice and is an oscar winner mckay is interesting because mckay had a long-term

relationship with will ferrell and basically made all comedy movies for a long time and the great ones and then started making really good and serious movies so he's an interesting figure and has set up a production company of his own recently, which is where some of these newer movies came from. And there is now a multi-year first look with Adam McKay is quite intriguing to me. Yeah, I'm unclear whether all of his work is from his company or not, because this is technically a first look deal with his production company but i would assume that other than whatever existing deals he's got that the goal here is to is to have his work come from this company but first look is a big deal right because

that's basically saying um if apple wants it you can buy it now i'm unclear what i don't see here in the in the story about this is what that first look means in terms of theatrical release, because sometimes there's first look that means that Apple can buy it, but that part of the deal will be you still need to screen it in a theater. Right. And then it will go on Apple TV. And I don't know that, right? Because that's a different thing. Does this go direct to streaming or does it go to a theater and then go to streaming? I don't know that part. But it's another example of Apple getting in business with somebody who they consider

a talented content creator. And this is Apple playing the HBO game to a certain degree, which they are absolutely playing the classic HBO. Like we said last week when I was pre-taped, being the old HBO and being seen as having money and paying for quality and wanting to create kind of a quality selection of content, not do too much, but have it all be of a certain level of quality. One of the ways you play that game is by tying in creators who you like and you think do good work also including misha green who has also signed a multi-year overall deal for tv projects green is the creator of

lovecraft country on hbo yeah so she this is interesting too because her show on hbo just got canceled and nominated for a bunch of Emmys, which is so painful. She's been tweeting out like her her story outline or like the headings of her story outline for season two of Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft Country is it was a really good show. And it's now been nominated for all these awards. And HBO canceled it the week before it got nominated for those awards. I'm starting to wonder if the reason they canceled it when they did is so that they didn't have to cancel it after it got nominated for all of the Emmy Awards. But this is like quite literally Apple kind of coming in and saying, we know that HBO didn't take care of you, but we will take care of you. Interesting.

And it's Ted Lasso season, baby. This Friday, season two begins. And the Ted Lasso marketing machine is at 100% top gear, full throttle right now. So season two reviews are out. I haven't read any of them because I don't feel the requirement to do it. But at the moment, it is a 100 is a 100 on rotten tomatoes with 24 critics reviews so yeah the reviews are positive and say that it sort of picks up where it left off

for those people who are worried that its initial success might have an effect on it my understanding is that they wrote the whole season before there was any reaction to the first season the whole second season so the whole second season was conceived before they even knew that people loved Ted Lasso. Which is great. They were already on it. Obviously they shot it afterward, but they were already writing it and conceiving it beforehand.

So this is great. By the way, a note for people who are excited about Ted Lasso, Apple is dropping the episodes one at a time. They're not dropping three for the premiere and all that. They've already got a whole season of Ted Lasso in the can for people to watch. So they're going to drop them one at a time. And I think there are 12 episodes this season.

It's an expanded episode order. It's not 10 like last year. So it'll be weekly for, I guess, 12 weeks as it rolls out. So you only get one episode at a time, folks. Now, because of the way that TV and awards work it's kind of strange because now is when a lot of the uh awards season is occurring for stuff that happened previously so season one of ted lasso is now receiving all of its award nominations it picked up 20 of apple's 35 emmy and emmy nominations so apple TV Plus got 35

Emmy nominations across its whole slate, including Mythic Quest, For All Mankind, and others. But 20 of those went to Ted Lasso. This makes Ted Lasso the most nominated first season of a comedy show in history, beating Glee, who was the previous

holder of that title. Ted Lasso is also leading nominations in both the Hollywood Critics Association Awards and the Television Critics Association Awards. And again, the TCA also gave love for For All Mankind and Mythic Quest. Disney

has got a bunch. It's obviously a big story, but Ted Lasso is leading the way in everything right now. I mean, if we pull back for the bigger picture, it's kind of funny too that the Emmy nominations, which there was this whole story like, oh, look, Cable is on the Emmys now.

And then it was, oh, some streaming is on the Emmys now. And I think there's one network TV show nominated in the drama category and in the comedy category and everything else is on streaming and it really is like it's netflix and amazon and disney plus and apple tv plus and hbo max um it it has it's really just sort of reflecting what reality is which is that it's all completely flipped over now but the idea that uh apple of all companies has like some emmy favorites at this point is hilarious but i think that ted lasso um is a favorite for a lot of these awards i think

that's uh apple's gonna get some some real hardware remember when you and i would be like oh apple just wants to get that oscar well okay and they they want to get those emmys it's like all right well it's gonna happen now this is uh i think uh ted lasso's cleaning up at the emmys i think it's gonna do really really well i think it is like probably at least 10 like they're gonna win a lot of emmys which is great um they're also like on all of this awards hype is just perfect timing for them because this is all happening like if you don't you know like if you hadn't heard of ted lasso wasn't sure of it now it's like oh like this is really heavily awarded like or nominated and it's just the season two is getting ready to begin

there have also been some really great stories this week about how jason sudeikis basically just seems to be a lot like ted lasso which is again just like only warming people to the idea there's a really amazing uh article that i don't want to spoil by mike ryan over at uprox which is just really touching and really beautiful that i'll put in the show notes that people should read yeah jason sudeikis it's funny too because he played he's played a lot of jerks like he's he's the he's the strapping you know broad-shouldered white guy uh jerk role in lots and lots of things like yeah yeah he must be a jerk right and and and so ted lasso yes it seems like it's much more he is a much more kind of thoughtful sensitive guy and

that ted lasso is channeling a lot of that what i found funny i'm not sure if it was in that uprox article or if in a different article but somebody somebody several people have asked him like are and that Ted Lasso was channeling a lot of that. What I found funny, I'm not sure if it was in that Uproxx article or in a different article, but somebody, several people have asked him, like, are you Ted Lasso? And his usual response is, well, I'd like to be. I feel like the best parts of me are Ted Lasso. But there's one interview with Sudeikis that revealed that he would use that line and then his friends would receive would see it and respond

and they would say no that's not right you are ted lasso so like the people who know jason sudeikis are like you're not giving yourself enough credit as a as being a a good person so that's also kind of fun to hear and then he went again and like he did another like so they had a uh uh premiere for the show which which tim cook attended which is really interesting to me because yeah he's got his arms around jason sedekas and yeah he only attended the premiere for the morning show i think it didn't really have a lot of premieres but i know he attended the morning show premiere and i could not find any uh i was looking around for this today i couldn't find any other premieres that he seemed to have attended of course he attended the morning show premiere and i could not find any i was looking around for this today i couldn't find any other premieres that he seemed to attended of course he attended the ted i don't even think they had a premiere for the first season of ted lasso but at this um sudeikis is

wearing a shirt which is in support of some english footballers who've received racial abuse after the european cup final championship final and so i you know it's just again it's like oh look he's ted lasso because he's just a genuinely good seeming person yeah it's nice yeah really great and the show is great i i and i think yes i think there's some truth in that that that the show being what it is it is among all the other things that are great about it it feels very authentic i don't think people who were faking it could make that show yep so i love it looking forward to it friday or uh if you want to stay up late midnight pacific on thursday you can tune that in you know we

watched loki the loki finale yeah on tuesday night when we were in Hawaii because those episodes drop at midnight Pacific. And so at 9 PM on Tuesday, why people, again, I'll just say it. Hey, streaming services, you really should drop your shows at 8 PM Eastern time. That's when you should do it. Come on, come on, do it then. Or just do it so late that it has to be the next day right sure like that you know anyway uh i also want to give a recommendation for shmigadoon which is a new apple tv plus show that may have gone under the radar because the name is so complicated to think about say or like this is the musical. It is a musical-based show. It is really weird and kind of cute and funny.

I thought it was a movie, and it turns out it's a TV show. So that's one thing. I had that exact thing, too. I originally thought it was a movie. I had no idea. Because it looks like a movie. The problem I have with the name is it's like Brigadoon. And I saw the trailer, and again, I thought the trailer looked interesting, although I did think it was a movie. I had no idea. Because it looks like a movie. The problem I have with the name is it's like Brigadoon. And I saw the trailer.

And again, I thought the trailer looked interesting, although I did think it was a movie. But calling it Schmigadoon, I feel like it's too much. I think it's a bad name. Because first off, I think it's a hacky joke. really kind of playing a loving tribute to this to name the location of your show and name your show after this sort of really dumb brigadoon reference is i don't know i think it was a creative mistake but uh have you heard good things about the show i will give it a try it's it's charming and funny and weird uh and the cast is superb right like the people that they've gotten uh and i also i something about me that kind of likes when um a tv show does

something musical and then just hires a bunch of people that were clearly in musicals like i just kind of like that there's just something about it it feels very authentic to being a musical like the way that people move and talk it feels like it's a musical and but what's funny is the main characters they are not in the musical so i i recommend it it's really good it's really really good this episode is brought to you by privacy.com privacy is a tool that makes it easy to manage your financial lives online while keeping your most important information secure. What it does is generates virtual card numbers for you. It masks your bank information so you never have to worry about giving it out to people you don't

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which is basically free money. Go to privacy.com upgrade and sign up right now. Thanks to Privacy for their support of this show and RelayFM. So considering we took our week off, I wanted to do a bit of catch-up time. A lot of little stories to touch on. It's a weird time of year as well. So Beta 3 of

iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Monterey came out and the biggest changes is the Safari stuff. So a bunch of tweaks on iOS but the most notable changes have been on the Mac. So on the iPhone, the address bar,

the little floating address bar, now stays pinned to the bottom. It lives above the keyboard when you bring the keyboard up rather than flying to the top of the screen like it did before which is kind of wild. And they've made some other little tweaks and stuff to iOS. But the Mac has seen the biggest changes. Have you been playing?

Have you had time to check out the new Safari at all yet? Only on iPad where it hasn't changed because that's the only beta I had with me. And so no, I haven't looked at the others. The iPad had some tweaks but not a lot like they changed some of the spacing and they put a share icon back in the in the kind of top toolbar which is good yeah on friday when i was very jet lagged i did um update my beta mac to the new beta and took a brief look at safari enough to say that while it's nice that they brought back the address bar and all that,

I actually think it's worse in some ways than the previous beta because the tabs are completely disconnected from the content to the point where I can't tell which tab is active when I'm using it. Like, I think it's still really bad. The good news is that it is a work in progress. And it's like the PR cycle for this is they announce it and they announce it with pride. And then behind the scenes, I think some of us who have been paying attention could tell that even the PR folks

and even the product manager folks, when they, when they talked about it after the announcement, we're not fully behind it. I just got a sense that, that maybe, maybe it was, there was a little bit of uncertainty there. Hard to quantify that, but that was the sense I got. And now we have, there was a John Gruber post last week where he basically said, talking to folks at Apple, there are more changes to Safari coming. So we've entered the second phase of this, which is essentially damage control. It's basically saying, I know that the initial Safari thing was really dramatic, but we know that it's a problem and we're fixing it. And I would ask, why did this not all happen before you announced it? Why did you have to

announce it and then have everybody yell about it? Why did you have to announce it and then have everybody yell about it? And now you're going to spend the summer trying to fix it. But it's encouraging in the sense that what Gruber is reporting is, according to people inside Apple, this is not the end product. This is they are now and it's very clear, right? Like they had time to do something on the Mac and nothing on the iPad, essentially, with this interface. So I think we're going to be spending the next couple of months watching Safari kind of drift from beta to beta and hopefully land somewhere decent.

Something I think about with this stuff is like, we'll get Safari, it will come out, and it will be probably changed in some way, but much closer to what we had before, at least on the Mac and on iPadOS. I think it's going to look really different on the iPhone still, but they're just going to tweak it and make it a better experience. But it's always so...

I find it interesting to think, like, that WWDC keynote, it's, like, wrong now, rightDC keynote, it's like wrong now, right? Like they should, it's like, here's Safari and here's all the stuff it does. But then by the time it comes,

by the time we get Safari at the end of it, you go back and watch it. That's not the same thing anymore. And I find that just like, it doesn't mean anything, but it's like an interesting thought to me of like, you know, just in these three months,

it goes from like, we had this, we've been working on this and we have this great idea and it comes out and it just, it changes. So I've had this conversation a couple of times on podcasts the last couple of months where there's an argument to be made that one of the reasons that Apple sticks with features in the beta, even though that they're, even though they're controversial, is because Apple believes in them. And sometimes the argument is that there's a precedent that is set, like you announced it at WWDC, so that there's some sort of weight there on Apple to release what they announced at WWDC the way they did it. I don't agree with that. As somebody who's been writing about in this beta cycle since they started doing it, where they announce a beta in June and then they

roll it out in September or October, I can tell you that beta amnesia is real. That nobody except the super wired in technology nerds even remembers other than the most vague sort of announcements, if that, from WWDC. The truth is we can write about it all we like and talk about it all we like in June and July and August, but most people are not paying attention until it shows up on their device or they're prompted to install it on their device in the fall. And so I think Apple, if having to choose between, oh, this is going to be a PR disaster and people hate it. And yes, but the precedent of WWDC, they're always going to go with damage control and getting a better product that people like better in the fall. And so I think it is a weird historical document.

It will be not what they ship. But I think the truth is almost nobody cares about what they announce other than us. And by the fall, we won't even care that much. So that's my argument is that I know that they put a lot into that. And it's a little bit baffling that they immediately were like, oh yeah, that was a bad idea. Like, well, then why did you put it in the keynote? But the keynote, it drifting away from what the keynote shows, Apple's going to be fine with that because they just like, really, it's like whistling past the graveyard it's like nope nope nope it was safari was always like this what are you talking about and they're just not gonna even

like wwdc is forgotten right that's why they restate os features in the fall and those of us who follow this stuff are like yeah yeah yada yada yada because we've heard it all before and it's like a rerun but the reason they do it is they know nobody else was paying attention and if they were paying attention they didn't remember so that you know but when it's on a new iphone or a new mac then it's a big deal for them magsafe battery pack has appeared into existence it is 99 dollars it is just a little battery brick that you stick to the back of your phone with magsafe and it will wirelessly charge for you there. Apple recommends a 20 watt charger for the best performance, but this is of course sold separately. But any charger will recharge the battery pack in your

phone if you have them together, but it will just take a bit longer to do it. It appears to have a slightly smaller or not so slightly smaller battery than the previous cases that Apple made, like the battery charging cases. And somebody has been posting images on Reddit, I think, that they pick one up from in Memphis. So I don't know if Stephen is involved. Probably not. But who knows? It is a person called Stephen.

So I don't know. Maybe it's actually Stephen Hackettett uh of this one and i'll be honest i think it looks super ugly like it looks really weird uh but it kind of what does it matter how it looks it's just a little battery that sticks on the back of your phone i think it doesn't help that this person had a max they had a the 12 max uh which i think it looks super weird on that you'll notice in apple's uh marketing materials they do not show what this thing looks like on the largest phone it's just on two smaller phones i think that might be uh for a good reason um so yeah um oh actually they've updated the marketing

materials actually there is one with the max for now but it doesn't look as bad as the images that i put a link to in the show notes um what do you think about this product? It's not for me and that's kind of the end of that. I'm going to go with you here and just say it's also not for me. I have heard

from people who are very excited about it who talk about the ease of not having to have a cord or anything, and you just attach it, and it almost fills your battery. But, you know, and like, okay, if what you want is a super clean and simple, this is a blob, it magnetically adheres to the back of my phone, and then it gives it more power,

and I don't have to carry around a different blob with a cable in order to do that and that's worth it to me then i can't stop you from buying this product however i think this is a terrible product yep and i'll tell you why um it's not that big a battery no Inductive charging is super inefficient, which means that it's not going, it's going to lose a bunch of what's in the battery and not transfer it properly to the phone. If you look at how much it will refill a phone,

like it's really not very good. Like it won't refill your phone from nothing. It'll get it up some, but it won't refill it. The stats I saw suggested only the Mini could get a full recharge. Yeah, and I'm just going to top it off by saying if you've got a big heavy battery

blob in your pocket, is it really that much more work to also have a little cable and have an efficient data transfer? And the answer, again, if the answer is yes, I just don't want that. I want this.

It's super clean and simple. I get it. That's why Apple makes it. That's why they sell it. And you should get it. But I would say for most people, if you want a battery to carry with your iPhone, there are better options that are going to charge it more

and charge it more efficiently and cost less. So that's what I think about the MagSafe battery pack. I'm glad for the people who are excited about it and they know who they are, but I would not buy one of these.

If somebody gave me one, I guess I might use it, but I would not buy one of these. If somebody gave me one, I guess I might use it. But I would never buy one. It seems like a really bad value to me. Yeah, I agree. If you're the type of person that wants it, you know you want it. And this is probably everything you wanted. But I agree with you.

I think it's expensive. I think it's wild that the charger that's best for it, you don't get it with it for $100. I don't think it looks that great. I think it's super thick. And the battery best for it, you don't get it with it for $100. I don't think it looks that great. I think it's super thick and the battery's small and it won't charge my... If I'm going to buy any of these products, I want to get at least one full recharge of my phone out of it. Otherwise, I would look elsewhere.

And plus, look, I'm not a MagSafe charging person anyway. I am a PopSocket user. I use the regular PopSocket and the magnetic PopSocket. And so, you know... I am a pop socket user i use the regular pop socket on the magnetic pop socket and uh so you know i am a magsafe charging person and in fact my my iphone um has not been plugged in more than it was plugged in when i was on vacation because i didn't bring a magsafe charger with me on vacation and i i came back to the magsafe charger i'm like oh magsafe charger i like it i like it but yeah the truth is that this is, we're getting reaction to this in our chat room right now too. Like, this is it. The reason you buy this is because you don't care that it's inefficient and you don't

care that it's thick. The point is it snaps on magnetically and it puts more juice in your phone and then you can take it back off and you just want to keep it as simple as possible. And it is, it is as simple as possible. You pay for that in numerous ways, but if like, that's your top priority is just, I want it as simple as possible. This is the product for you. And so I, and that's why I'm not saying don't buy it. I'm just saying that like, if you're somebody who wants to save money and get a better product, like there's literally,

you can spend less money and get something better, a lot better than this thing. So that's your trade-off. And just be aware of it. Like if I'm irate about this product at all, it's because I think a bunch of people are going to buy this

who are just wandering into an Apple store and it'd be like, oh, this looks really great and assume that it's better than it actually is when there are much better options. But, you know, that's life. That happens all the time that people buy things that are more expensive and not as good because they're in front of them or because they've got the right brand name on them. So that I'm I just I wanted to let it out there that like it's great that this product exists.

I wouldn't buy it in a million years. This isn't saying that if you want it, that it's bad or you shouldn't get it. It's just different. Go ahead and... Well, I'm going to reference back to last week's show. One of the things I loved about last week's show is that you and Merlin talking about what we had said the previous week, which is like, look, if it makes you happy, right?

Like if putting a beta on your phone makes you happy go ahead and do it life's too short put it on your phone if this product is the one that delights you buy it i just i i but i do want to put out a note of caution there which is there's actually a lot of asterisks attached to this product and if you're somebody who would rather get a better deal and is willing to trade some of the simplicity for more battery power and uh and less money there are better options than this i've got some reports from bloomberg debbie woo is reporting an ltpo display will be featured on at least one iphone 12 this type of display is similar technology that was using the apple watch so for variable and therefore higher refresh rate

displays as well, looking at promotion. We talked about this. I feel like we speculated about this on the opposite side for the Apple Watch. And it's the idea that the Apple Watch has an OLED display that allows this refresh rate to be variable, which on the Apple Watch, what they want is they want to crank it way down, right? Like they want to save, when they're not animating something on the screen, they want to crank the frame rate way down and save energy. And this is saying now that Apple, and this is Apple invented technology,

which is interesting, Apple patented technology. So other device makers are creating like- I did not know that. LTPO-like technology, but I believe LTP itself was an came from apple um but you know in the end this technology will be everywhere anyway there are other ltpo phones and stuff but my understanding is that apple's the one that kind of like has a bunch of the patents and that there are like alternate versions of it that don't use apple's patents but it's a it's a clever idea i

think it originated because of the apple watch but regardless regardless of all that, the idea here is, how do we do a ProMotion OLED display on an iPhone? And the answer is, you use this technology to do that. The next iPhones as well will feature camera improvements to the whole line and a smaller notch, which is, I think, all stuff that we were assuming. Makes it seem a lot less like a minor update cycle update cycle huh yeah i've seen people saying that this seems minor but i think they're not understanding it's i think the difference that this high refresh

rate display could feel on iphone is this not the usual iphone story too which is that there's definitely a group of people who think that the only way that the iphone has a major update is when it looks different and those those people exist. And then those consumers exist, right? Where it's like, what I care is that it looks different. And then there's the truth of it, which is Apple often changes the exterior design on a year where the interior isn't, I mean, the specs aren't as radically different. And then the next year, the phone looks exactly the same, but it's actually quite different in terms of what it's doing. And some people are like, oh, man, but this is so much different.

And other people are like, eh, it's the same as last year, whatever. And it's just we're all looking for different things in our phones. But this sounds like this is not a 12S boring update kind of thing. If they're putting in ProMotion and improving cameras across the line and reducing the size of the notch. Like, that's a lot of stuff going on in the iPhone. Mark Gurman says that this display technology in the iPhone could actually result in the first always-on display in an iPhone as well. Right.

Which is really interesting. Goes back to the Apple Watch, right? You know, what you want to do is keep it on, but basically knock off the refresh rate because you just want to keep some static images on and maybe you update it every second, but you're not doing it 30 or 60 times a second and you save a lot of power that way. So if they can bring the always-on watch technology to the iPhone, sounds great to me. I've been hoping that they would do that since they went to OLED. the iPhone. Sounds great to me. I've been hoping that they would do that since they went to OLED. Mark Gurman also suggests that the mini-LED screen MacBook Pro refresh will be coming sometime between September to November. So we're just getting further reports about this thing now,

which I think continues to lend to its certainty around that period. And I think this is Mark Gurman's newsletter again. So thank you to Mark Gurman for putting his newsletter out over the weekend so that we get to be the first podcast up to talk about all of his reports. Love it. Thank you, Mark, friend of the show. And the detail I gleaned from this also is that the mini LED screen has been kind of targeted as the holdup.

Yes. That this is an ambitious set of laptops that are using the same mini led, uh, technology that we saw in the 12.9 inch iPad pro M one iPad pro, um, which was, uh, which looks great. It's an amazing screen. And you try to imagine on a Mac and you're like, wow, that'll look great. And I'm sure it will, but it's also led to some production challenges. So it may not be as much about the legacy nodes after all. And it's about the ambition of that display that's led it to be kind of slipping to the fall. But a fall MacBook Pro announcement is not, outside of the rumors that it would come sooner it's actually like the right

time for that kind of announcement right it's not surprising at all that you might get some fancy new macbook pros in the fall that that happens a lot it seems to me ming chi kuo is reporting that we will see mini led come to the 11 inch ipad pro next year which i i don't know if i would have expected quotes because it quote seems to suggest that there will be new ipad pros next year like that there will be a refresh to 12.9 um at the same time which is well so here's the thing if there's going to be an m2 and we're going to see it across the mac line and they're going to rev this is the Mac line, and they're going to rev... This is the question, right?

It's the chip question to me. If they're going to do an M2, and these MacBook Pros are probably M1X, right? They're the M1 technology scaled up with more cores. Whatever they call it, we'll call it M1X for now. We'll see what they call it. If there's an M2, which is just next generation, it's based on the next chip generation,

it's going to power the next generation of MacBook Airs and all of that and other low-end systems. They'll be faster than the M1, but they're not the high-end ones. This is like the lower-end chip next generation. If they do that, and there is a rumor that we'll get to in a second about an M2 MacBook Air coming in 2022.

If they're taking the new chip architecture that rolls out in the fall with the iPhone and doing the more coarse version of that for the low-end Macs and the iPad Pros. Well, if you've got an M2, why would you not, even if you don't add a whole lot else to the iPad Pro, if you're making the M2 anyway, why would you not put the M2 in the iPad Pro at some point during the annual processor cycle. So it may be that we see updates to the MacBook Air and the iPad Pro and some other products that are using that base chip. Now that they're all on the same chip, it may just be in Apple's best interest to move them all to the

new chip every year. I wonder. So on that chip, there's been more reports. This one comes from, well, I've got this from 9to5Mac. They're reporting that a leaker known as DylanDKT suggests that Apple will release a new MacBook Air in various colorways with an M2 chip in the first half of 2022. This is, you know, similarly, this kind of reporting is coming from a lot of areas, but it's just one of the many reports that makes this suggestion. And it makes a lot of sense, right? That like there is the M number, right? It's kind of, it's the iPhone model, right?

The lowest chip is the one with just the letter and the number, and then they add another letter on the end, and then that's more powerful and goes into the other, like to iPads and stuff like that. This is how they've done it before. Yeah. And this, so the same thing, right? letter on the end and then that's more powerful and goes into the other like to ipads and stuff like that this is how i've done it before yeah and this so the same thing right the um what we don't know right okay apple silicon there's the m1 that's literally it that's literally it we have rumors but all we have is one single chip so what we don't know about apple silicon going forward is where to from here and some of that is what does a more powerful apple chip on a mac look like is that m1x what does it look like we don't know we got some ideas they're rumors great we don't know for sure what is uh you know and what's

the path for things like the mac pro all of of that is a, is a question. The other big question is what is the cycle? What is the cadence of releases for this stuff? Uh, and what does that do to Apple's product releases? Cause remember with Intel, Apple couldn't control when the new generations of chips came out and came out in the volumes that Apple needs in order to ship, right? All that was up to Intel. But on the iPad and iPhone side, like Apple does the chips for the products. And when the product that needs the chip comes out, the chip is ready and chip goes in the

product and the product ships, like Apple controls the whole thing. So with M1, we've seen now M1 is in all of these different products. So how often do you go up a generation? How often, when will we see M2? And when will we see M3? And is it going to be on a regular cycle? Is it going to be every year or every 18 months or whatever? Given that the iPhone chip cycle is 12 months, right?

There's always a new iPhone every year with a new chip design. right? There's always a new iPhone every year with a new chip design. I kind of feel like the M1, M2 cadence is going to be annual. And if that's true, then I'm really interested to see what Apple does with product refreshes, right? That's the other mystery here is this rumor is about new MacBook Airs. Well, we just had new MacBook Airs. And it's not quite a year. It's a little bit later, but we just had a new MacBook Air. We're going to get about new MacBook Airs. Well, we just had new MacBook Airs. So, and it's not quite a year, it's a little bit later, but like, we just had a new MacBook Air. We're going to get a new MacBook Air again. We just had a new iPad Pro. We're going to get a new iPad Pro again. But like, maybe the answer is yes. And maybe us being used to these kind of long time periods between Apple product updates, especially on the Intel Mac side,

time periods between Apple product updates, especially on the Intel Mac side, have gotten us sort of down on Apple's ability to refresh its devices. But now that Apple's making its own chips, I mean, you could argue that once that chip is out there, it actually, you need to update your systems because it's going to make those old systems look bad. There's an M2. Why is this still in the M1? Why is this not an M2? So I don't know what they're going to do, but I think that's one of the things I'm most looking forward to over the next year is starting to figure out what is Apple's product release philosophy for these things. If Apple could control everything, and now they can, they're not under Intel's thumb, how often would they do a new MacBook Air? Maybe it's every year.

And it's M1, M2, M3, M4. And it's just like a new iPhone. There's a new Mac. There's a new everything every year with the latest year's chip in it. Is that there? That's ambitious, but they could do it. Is that the plan? We'll see.

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Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's finish up with some hashtag ask upgrade questions. George would like to know, why do you think, and this is actually relating to that last point that we spoke about, why do you think there are or seem to be more public Apple leakers than there ever was before? I don't know. I mean, Apple's a big company and there are, there have always been people within

apple who have wanted to get information out because they get i think excited about it right and we had a long discussion about this a while ago like consider the source where's this coming from but there are definitely people who just enjoy the fact that they know things the public doesn't know and like to leak that stuff out. And those are the real Apple leakers, right? Apple leakers are people who work at Apple and then leak information to the outside. That's the true leak. I think the difference now is that not only is Apple bigger and higher profile, but that information that might have just kind of laid there, unless it was to a very particular person in a media, a position of media authority. Now, it's so much easier to be a person with information from a friend or a friend of a friend and put it on Twitter and put it on YouTube.

And I think that that makes a difference is that it's just easier for it to get out. There's more clout available to you too than there was before for that, for those reasons. I feel like, you know, there seems to be an increasing reason for somebody to want to be the person who gives that information to the world more so than there was years ago yeah and i think that there's also you know the same thing that motivates somebody on the inside to leak that information is the thing that motivates somebody to set up a twitter account or whatever and uh or a youtube channel or whatever it is and uh and get that information out there the twitter stuff

is really interesting because that's just a completely anonymous at least the youtubers are like people and you see them and they talk. But the Twitter accounts are generally these kind of anonymous accounts. And I think that really is just this chain of events that just used to not happen, or at least used to not happen in public where somebody hears something from a contact and maybe they tell their friends, oh, you know what I heard about Apple? And now they post it to Twitter and the whole internet sees it. So that's part of it too. Now, I also am fascinated by that

because they're risking their friend, their source. They're risking their job over what? And if you're just a random person on Twitter, what are you even getting out of it? Your random Twitter account is popular? I guess people are excited by that. But I don't know. That's the dangerous part of this is that the people at Apple, the more information that comes out, the easier it is to figure out who is leaking that information.

And there's also just so much wrong information there that also happens right and there's a lot of stuff that people could just guess at and there's just incorrect stuff and even even the stuff that we've seen that is uh that like what we just talked about before the break, it could be real or it could just literally be a re-spinning of existing stuff. And there's no real way to know that. That's part of the problem. So you get restatements. And the other thing about right and wrong is sometimes the people who are judged as right because they get things right all the time are are less legitimate because as we've talked about when we discuss mark german like things change inside apple so you get there's there's a i forget what side it is that records like everybody's right and wrong predictions but like there are a lot of wrong predictions that

were probably right at the time and then they change direction and i know that seems weird of like well if it didn't happen it's a wrong prediction well it's like but probably right at the time. And then they changed direction. And I know that seems weird of like, well, if it didn't happen, it's a wrong prediction. And I was like, but if Apple, at the moment that that was reported, Apple planned on that being what would happen. And then things changed and it, you know, like air power, right? Like Apple's working on air power. I mean, just because air power didn't come out, it doesn't mean that they, they didn't work on it. They thought they were going to release it and they didn't. And that happens internally a lot. They rarely announce the product and then don't ship it. But internally, they change direction all the time. They remove features all the time. So sometimes the people who are wrong are actually the most accurate because reality reflects the end result of the process, whereas these rumors are based on an earlier point in the process.

It's like, I understand why people get frustrated with, like, say, some of the stuff that's written on Bloomberg and how it's written, but this is why, right? Like, they have to say at least one of things may change or that kind of stuff. Like, it has to be couched a little bit because they're a much bigger publication and they know that things can still change. So I think they shy away from definites for that reason. I think that it's potentially a more responsible way of doing the reporting if you're going to do it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's fascinating. It gives us grist for the mill, which is great. Yeah. The challenge is it's more noise, and that's why we are always going to give more weight to reports from Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo, because they're not anonymous and they have a very good track record. And I think they have multiple sources. And it doesn't mean they're always right, but I think that they are usually accurate in reflecting what is going on at any given time, even though those things can change. And it's nice to know that stuff in advance because it gives us so much to chew on on this podcast. But it gets dicier when there's sort of random things that come through that sometimes, again, sometimes just don't come to fruition or are just restatements of what we already knew. again, sometimes just don't come to fruition or are just restatements of what we already knew. Rajiv asks, do you think that other Apple services like AirPlay and Fitness Plus would make it to Amazon's Firesticks in the future? You know, there was just a report about how there's a new

Fire TV powered TV or two that have AirPlay on them. Oh, they have AirPlay on the TVs? Yeah. So I feel like this is already happening. I know that's the thing. As far as I can recall, AirPlay only exists on televisions. Because there are a bunch of TVs that can do AirPlay. But I think it's just televisions.

I can't think of any sticks. I don't think that's true. I think Roku lets you AirPlay. Roku can do AirPlay? Okay, great. And so Rajiv's asking about Fitness Plus. And one of the reasons I want to put this in there is you won't need fitness plus anymore because fitness plus will work of airplay right well now it works with airplay it's not quite as good but it does

work with that and i also think that it's only a matter of time like would apple find a way if apple finds a way to get uh the challenge is that it's like the tv app so does fitness really fit in the tv app maybe it doesn't but um but i think if apple cares about it enough apple will put it in there and failing that yes there's airplay i think apple is is not inclined to let any of its stuff not be available like they've they've flipped all the way around on this but i think airplay is probably you're right mike the the path that is the easiest because it's like well we've got our entertainment offerings here and airplay and airplay gets us everything else that's on our devices i expect that's one of the reasons they added airplay to fitness plus because

where else would you be airplaying it to exactly you don't need to air play it to an apple uh apple tv because it already can do it so yeah exactly that's all part of the all part of the plan well i mean you can do it to a mac now you can air play it to a mac is the fitness app not on the mac no i don't think so i was surprised when i see it on my ipad i think it's got the wrong icon on the iPad because I can't get my activity rings on my iPad. It won't show me them. I know, which frustrates me immensely, but yes.

Brian asks, why do you think Disney are not putting their new Pixar movies behind the Premiere Access like they have for their live action movies? Do you think Disney is losing faith in Pixar? I'll listen to Brian. Hi, Brian. I think this probably has more to do, I don't know for sure, but my guess is it has more to do with contracts,

that the Marvel movies especially have very specific profit participation for people involved with them, And they were made for theaters and that it is a harder thing to unravel those contracts and just put them on, on Disney plus rather than what they've also been doing, which is doing this hybrid release. So like black widow was in theaters and on Disney plus. And if you just put it on Disney plus for free, I think it's a harder sell in theaters than if you put it on Disney Plus for 30 bucks. But I also think everybody

involved with that expected that to be in theaters and had their money based on how well it did in theaters. And they probably had to renegotiate to do premier access, but at least there, it's still a ticket sale of a sort so it's probably easier to make that deal so i think that's probably part of it is that the contracts on pixar movies are probably not quite as complex as on a marvel movie i was thinking there hasn't been a pixar movie that has been big enough i think i think there may be some truth in that that if it was like a really big if it was toy story 5 they would put it behind premiere access but like what have they done soul luca and onward yeah i think so i don't think that those movies well they could

have been big in theaters but that was a different era. And they also didn't get the hybrid release, right? It was really much more like this is just on Disney Plus now. This is not me saying that these aren't good movies, right? But I think that there are tiers of Pixar movies. Blockbuster. And these aren't those, right? Like I think, for example, if Inside out was coming out now they wouldn't put it on premiere access interesting even though i love that movie i just don't know if it like

would necessarily sell itself without you know because i remember when they spoke about inside out everyone was like what is going on at pixar that doesn't make any sense right and like it was i remember that being a conversation at the time like this i don't understand what this movie could possibly be um so yeah i just think that they haven't had that hit or what they think might be that hit during this period of time and i think first off well let's see what happens with the next pixar release and are they going to be in a situation where that will be in theaters and they will also do it with disney premiere access because this is a model going forward it's going to be really interesting to see how disney handles premiere access because it's not the same as putting everything on hbo max

right premiere access it's 30 bucks plus you have to be a subscriber to get that movie the same time it's in a theater. Will they do that with other stuff? Because it's less money than a family of four would pay. Because I looked, we could have gone and seen Black Widow in Hawaii and it would have cost us 40 bucks. And we paid 30

and we watched it on the TV in the condo instead. And I was fine with that. It's 30 bucks is not nothing. But if you're a family, it very rapidly is actually a money saver. And Disney keeps all that money and doesn't share it with theaters. So there are arguments to be made that the future model might be something more like the Disney Plus Premier Access rather than the HBO, let's just throw it on streaming that they tried this year. I do think though that another part of this to keep in mind is who the audiences are. Disney is building Disney Plus as a reliable place for content, including animation and for families.

That is the company's number one priority. And I think they look at Pixar as a great way to build that service, Pixar releases. I think that Pixar releases aren't going to all just become Disney Plus releases. I think there will be, I mean, what you said, Mike, I think there's a, in the long run, and this is one of the fascinating things about Black Widow versus the Disney Plus Marvel TV shows is going forward, we have to figure out what is a movie and what is a TV show? Because the Marvel stuff, it's like, it looks like they spend the money on the TV shows that they spend the money on the movies to do. Like they're not, they're quite comparable in terms of the material. It really is more about format.

So it's like, what is a movie and what is a TV show? And with Pixar, I would say, Pixar does, there is a Pixar based TV show, but it's not produced by Pixar now. That's the Monsters Inc show. But like going forward, they need to decide like, what's a Pixar movie that goes in theaters and is like a hit. And what's a Pixar movie that we make for Disney Plus? And I think they should probably make both. Because why not? Like, because it's so important

to put content on Disney Plus. So anyway, I don't know what that's going to be in the future and what their strategy is. It's not an easy question. It's very hard. I don't envy them having to figure that out. But what I will say is, I think Disney is more willing to use Pixar content to drive Disney Plus and make it more valuable than it is to do that with Marvel releases, especially since they've got Marvel shows to release on Disney Plus, and they probably got contractual issues and stuff. But this is, but Brian is picking at a very interesting corner of this whole issue,

which is like, what do you do with your movies? Do you put them on your streaming service? Do you charge for them? Do you not put them on and just put them in theaters? How does that all work? And over the next few years, we're going to see everybody experimenting with this and Seku asks have either of you run into issues with the two terabyte iCloud storage limit I personally haven't but I can see my parents running up against this limit in the future so I took a look today we have a two-person family we both have multiple devices that go into

it for backups probably like three each and we're only using 500 gigabytes of that 2 terabytes I think you'd struggle to fill 2 terabytes I don't really know what you'd be saving in iCloud to hit that to be honest I have a lot of photos and stuff and it's not an issue for me yet I think Apple will I'm sure there are some edge cases, but I feel like Apple will

increase this limit over time because they'll recognize it and they'll find a way to charge you for it. And the truth is, if you're in the big bundle, you get two terabytes and you can add two terabytes. So there is actually a way to get four terabytes of iCloud space, right? So I don't think it's going to be a big issue. And if it is an issue, I'm trying to think of how you would have that much data and have to have it all be in iCloud. So I don't know. My guess is that it's not going to be a big deal,

but I'm sure there will be an edge case. It'll be like, oh no, the bundle's not available where I live and I hit the two terabyte limit and it all has to be in iCloud. And too bad for them, I guess. But I think Apple will continue to grow this over time because it's more money for Apple.

If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, you can send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which you get access to if you sign up for Upgrade Plus. Go to getupgradeplus.com and you'll also get longer ad-free versions of every episode of Upgrade which is really great. You can sign up it's five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year.

Thank you so much if you have signed up we really really appreciate your support. Thanks to DoorDash, Privacy and Instabug for their support of this week's episode. And thank you for listening, of course. 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 imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. And we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Curley.