Upgrade - 373: We Will Give You Color... But It Will Not Be Fun

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Myke and Jason review the iPhone 13 and iPad mini, settle on their preferred iPhones, and wonder if Apple should appoint a Color Czar.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 373 today's show is brought to you by text expander from smile amazon music and details pro my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley big episode today so much going on huge two product reviews two in one show you know the september october high season for apple stuff it's great but it's also very busy and there's lots and we have to pack stuff in and you know it can't all even fit we were talking about this i think last night and we said oh big big got a big show tomorrow and and i i realized like what we would also usually have around this time is the Apple Watch, which we don't yet.

And I will say just as I have been getting more excited about replacing my Apple Watch. I think actually watchOS 8 has been one of these things. I really like that the buttons are bigger, just everywhere. Like touch targets are larger in watchOS 8, which I like. But that also makes me think, oh, a slightly bigger screen would probably be good too that's how i get you that is we have hashtag snot all question comes from marlies who asks do you enable low power mode when your phone warns you that's at 20 or do you like to live dangerously well i need to stipulate that i don't actually go places and do things

anymore and so i remember oh low power mode i remember low power mode oh that's when you're out somewhere for a long time uh i would absolutely turn it on at 20 unless i knew i was literally just being lazy and not walking over and plugging my phone in, which sometimes is the case, right? It's like, no, I'm going to run it all the way down because I'll just plug it in when I'm done doing what I'm doing. But if you're out and about and you get that warning, I absolutely turn it on. And in fact, I have over the course of the existence of low power mode, a bunch of times I've looked my watch and or my phone and seen it at like 50 and and thought oh boy i'm in trouble and i will enable low power mode preemptively

before i hit 20 because i realize i'm going to be out for a while and this is going to be a marathon and i'm in trouble if i was traveling somewhere i will always put i'll just put low power mode on as I leave it. Like it's like it goes on, you know, which is actually thinking about that focus mode stuff. I'd probably, because I've started working on my travel focus mode, just getting it ready for when that happens.

And maybe I could set up a shortcuts automation that whenever that one is enabled, low power mode gets turned on immediately. You know, it could be kind of cool. I like that. But I pretty much always turn it on when a device warns me, including my iPad now. My iPad now will say, hey, low power mode.

Which is nice. I'm happy they added that finally. If you'd like to send in a question to help us answer to open an episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk or use question mark SnellTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. For the final time this year,

we would like to tell you about the work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Believe it or not, Jason, this is the final episode of September. Well, that's okay because it keeps going. I don't need more weeks. Can you imagine if September was longer? It's fine the way it is. 38 days is plenty.

This is enough September. It's enough. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and so we are supporting the life-saving mission of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which is finding cures and saving children. Because for almost 60 years, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has been on the front lines of research, care, and treatment of childhood cancer. Treatments invented at St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80% since they opened. But with one in five children not surviving, St. Jude will not stop until no child dies from cancer. But they need our support. This September, the RelayF FM community has come together to raise

over half a million dollars for the kids of St. Jude. We're currently at $564,000 while we're recording this, which is a truly unbelievable astronomical number. You can be a part of our best year ever by making a donation at stjude.org slash relay, and if you donate a

single gift of $100 or more, you'll receive an exclusive Relay FM sticker thanks pack at the end of the campaign. Don't forget, if your company matches donations, please send us an email at steven at relay.fm, and we can double your donation in some cases. So go to stjude.org and you can give today and support the work of St. Jude and Let's Cure Childhood Cancer together. It's been an incredible month. As we're recording, what's the current number? 564,000? Is that it? the work of St. Jude and let's cure childhood cancer together. It's been an incredible month. As we're recording, what's the current number? 564,000?

Yeah. Is that it? All right. Well, I'm setting a new goal by the end of this month. Relay needs to reach a million dollars. Why would you do that, Jason? Everybody go out there and donate. This is the Snell goal. Yeah.

Yeah. Only four days left to go or whatever. Three days left to go? It's totally doable. People just need to go donate before. Let's get that number as high as we can. How about that? By the end of the month.

Because remember, the higher we set the bar this month, if you haven't donated yet, if you decide to wait till the end, the higher we set that bar this month, the higher the bar will be next year for Mike and Steven. Only if we meet it, Jason. For the more ridiculous things. No, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. If you finish at 560,

everybody's going to remember 560 and you're going to have to go above 560. No, I'm just talking about your million that you've decided to set. Oh, my million go well. I was just trying to be aspirational there. But my point is, if we get them to 600,000, it's going to be like, oh man, we've got to beat... Whatever number it is,

they're going to have to beat oh man, we got to beat whatever number it is. They're going to have to beat it next year. And that means that I don't know what strange things they're going to do. Mike and Steven are going to do to each other. What stickers are going to have to go where, uh, what clothing they're going to have to wear, what devices they're going to have to use, but it's only going to get better or worse depending on whether you're them or not. So just keep lifting up that number. I have hundreds of more stickers arriving this week because I ran out and then I have

to go back to finding somewhere to stick them on this desk. I think I'm going to start with the legs. So that's still got that going for me. Yeah. How long do they have to stay on? Oh, I'm keeping them on. They're not coming off. Okay. that's terrible it's staying on everything

everything this whole desk I'm keeping it I'm actually gonna I'm planning on clear coating the desk oh well that that would be better

yeah at least but the stickers the Stephen Face stickers they're staying on this desk forever that's kind of like part of the pain of it all really so thank you stjude.org relay uh follow up follow up that probably nobody cares about but me

but i'm doing it anyway i have decided to give the shared with you for photos another try because something's broken about this feature jason tells me this, that it's what I'm having, which is I get these images that show up in my photos library that are sent to me mostly. I think it's pretty much just stuff that Adina sends me while we're not together. So like she's at home, I'm maybe at the studio or somewhere else. She sends me an image of something at home and then it shows up in my photos library. And Jason tells me this should not be happening. So I am going to keep this feature on to see if it gets fixed. Yeah, we're going to monitor this. I do wonder if it knows where your home is.

And since those photos are from your home, it is fudging. It's like, well, Mike lives there and Mike was there recently. And so he probably was there now, right? I wonder if it's a little too fuzzy and it's encompassing your home. Maybe. Even though you weren't there. The other thing that I thought is maybe because I would typically have a device at home, but... Yeah.

Also, the photos you sent involved, it was Dina and a friend and a dog. Yes. And I said that the other thing could possibly be that apple photos thinks that you're the dog maybe that i'm the dog i did check and it did do you know that feature he was talking about last week with like where it's like hey this is a dog let's tell you what breed it is or whatever uh-huh i have not seen that on any of my images like nothing i i do not to me this feature is non-existent you You're not missing anything. It's not great. The dog breed part of it is real dumb.

Like, and the cats are even worse. The cat, if you have a picture of a cat and the tail is not visible, like as often happens, a cat has curled its tail around itself or is sitting on its tail, it'll say, oh, this is one of the rare, this is a Manx, it's a tailless cat.

It's like, no, it's a tailless cat it's like no it's just a cat like what are you doing machine learning is so stupid sometimes oh man so bad i can't see a tail so there must not be one there's no other way that to identify this breed of cat so it's a very rare tailless cat that you've got here or it literally, you just can't see the tail, dumb computer. That's incredible. Yes. If you have a purebred-ish dog, it will probably recognize the breed properly. If you have a mutt, it will make hilarious guesses about the breed. And the answer is, it's a mutt. So it's a little bit silly, but yes, if I search for boxer, I will find my dog and all the other boxers that

i've taken pictures of muhammad ali but yes exactly right uh sugar ray leonard will appear in my photo library my extensive sugar ray leonard photo collection yeah you don't know i don't know it's very true and whenever i see a billboard or a espn documentary about sugar ray leonard i'm like oh sugar ray leonard and i take a picture of it and add it to my my my album oh you know the my leonard spinks album because also there are pictures of leon spinks in there you did not know about my my catalog of boxers is this including underwear all right so we have another dogs all in the same it's a very confusing uh album i want to read a great headline mostly just because i want to read the headline because the headline's so good tim cook says employees

who leak memos do not belong at apple according to a leak memo this is i just find it very fun this is a zoe schiffer from the verge wrote this uh schiffer's been one of the lead reporters on all of the worker unrest at Apple over the last few months, mostly regarding to the worker harm stuff. Basically, Apple had an all-hands meeting, and information from the all-hands meeting got out,

and then they put out this memo, and then that got out. With this memo, though, I think this is a little bit of an issue where I do see both sides of it. So one of the things that Tim talks about is he mentions product leaks and then also leaks of like internal communication.

Now, the internal communication stuff, like I have no issue with that stuff leaking out there right because i think i actually encourage people to think out like to speak out if the company if they think the company's doing wrong right we spoke about on the show in the past but i do personally wish there were less product leaks i think it's too much now we know too much i i don't mind there being a little bit of stuff but i would like to know less than we currently know i think it's really funny that tim cook said that he would double down on product secrecy and in fact the the leaks are worse than they've ever been that's a good point right like because they're leaking

from all over the place this is different from the the kind of management memos and things which i mean that's journalism 101 by the way is if if you get a memo leaked to you about stopping memos from leaking, you publish that. I mean, you got to do it. But yeah, I agree on the other side of it. at Apple who are leaking. There are leaks coming from Apple in Cupertino, but I really do believe that the bulk of the leaks we get are sourced from the supply chain because Apple is using contractors and has less control over the supply chain.

And we see so many things that leak from the supply chain. That said, I think Mark Gurman gets people from Cupertino. And I don't know who those people are. Yeah, because it comes so early. think Mark Mark Gurman gets people from Cupertino and I don't know who those people are so early yeah like people that you know when he was talking

about the potential new Mac Pro right which we may see so early in the yeah and the process or that 16-inch MacBook Pro when that came out

or whatever yeah it's much further I just I don't know if Tim Cook is conflating these issues or or not and if it's effective or not, because I don't think the message saying, look, don't say anything is as effective, right? Because some of these leaks matter more than others in a way. And I would think that the product leaks should be what concerns him.

in a way. And I would think that the product leaks should be what concerns him. There has been some theory, by the way, you and I didn't really talk about it, that some of the things that were wrong last week might have been an indication of Apple trying to determine who is leaking. And I don't think Apple necessarily was leaking false information, but I do sometimes get suspicious when things that sound like they should be legitimate reports and then are completely wrong. It does make you wonder sometimes. More likely, it's something that got delayed or changed and was true at the time. But I do wonder sometimes if that's part of Apple's strategy. That would give them still, though, the roundabout way of that solution. So if something was true but didn't get released, then there could only have been an even smaller team that would know about it because of the way that Apple disclosed things internally.

be that maybe some of the reasons Apple has the issues it has with product releases where there are bugs or where there are things that don't seem to make a lot of sense is because Apple silos too many parts of Apple off and means that other parts of Apple don't know what's going on until announcement or release and they aren't prepared for it. I think both of the products we're going to talk about today have these exact issues. Yeah. Where the left hand doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing. And I think literally the left hand was in a silo and was unable to communicate to the right hand about what it was doing.

I don't know. How does that new MagSafe wallet work, Jason? Oh, yeah. I wrote about this really quickly. It's something that's easy to misunderstand um and so i thought at least mention it so there's a second the way i wrote about it is iphone leather wallet second generation it's like how how could that be but it is it's actually a different piece of hardware because it has a an nfc chip and i think the old apple wallet

magsafe wallet had an nC chip, but I think that it just was there to identify the color, essentially. It's the same as all the cases, right? All the cases have something in them where they can communicate the color. And I remember at the time Apple said like, and other pieces of information, but nothing else did anything. Right. So what's new in the second generation magsafe leather wallet is that it has an nfc chip with a unique identifier per wallet and that's important because that's how this new feature works the idea is your wallet becomes detached from your phone and find my basically logs where the detachment happened.

Now, that they could have done before, and I'm a little bit baffled about why they didn't do this before because the phone knows when the MagSafe item has been detached. So I don't entirely understand. My best guess is that they may have even wanted to do this feature last year, and it didn't work well enough. And so they just didn't do it. And they re-engineered the wallet, and they did a new version of the wallet. So this new one, when it detaches, it's like AirPods, right?

AirPods don't have a Find My transmitter in them, like an AirTag. But what they do is they log the phone logs the last time it saw your airpods and where that was but at least they have bluetooth so you can get some way of finding them when you're close right so the wallet doesn't have any of that all it has is a little nfc tag the nfc tag cannot be used for for find my ranging it doesn't work it's got to be right next to it to do that but what it does so what it's doing is it's logging when the wallet detaches. So if you take your wallet off and leave it somewhere and then are like, where did I put my wallet? Your phone knows where you, at least where you took it off. And if the wallet hasn't been moved from that location-

So it logs the location? Yes, where it detaches. Because I was going to say, if all it does is like, hey, the wallet's not here anymore. It's like, yeah, but the phone tells me. I was going to say, if all it does is like, hey, the wallet's not here anymore. It's like, yeah, the phone tells me. Find my logs, the location. Optionally, it will actually, when you detach, it can optionally send you an alert that says your wallet detached.

If you find that useful, you can turn that on. And then the reason the NFC chip with the unique number is relevant is that optionally, again, you can choose this, optionally, you can choose to have your phone number that's associated with your Apple ID appear on someone else's phone if they find your wallet and attach it. So this is like, well, what if my wallet falls off in public? How do people know that it's mine? And the answer is, if somebody finds it who's got an iphone with magsafe they could actually put it on their phone and it'll say this is the phone number of the person who had who owns this wallet which is a very it's kind of esoteric but like that's very apple thinking of like well of course everybody's going to have an iphone with magsafe and they're going to be able to do this um so

anyway but it is a feature you can turn on to share, essentially to share your phone number with whoever finds that MagSafe wallet with that particular ID. It's like a disclosure thing. It's using iCloud to do that. You're allowing some random person to see your phone number if you choose to show it and they've got your wallet, and they can call you and say, I've got your wallet, give me $50,000 and I'll give it back to you. Or they could just give it back to you. One of those.

Only one of those. Also, it works with all the MagSafe iPhones. It's not an iPhone 13 feature. It works with all of them. I put it on my iPhone 12 mini, worked just fine. It pairs. You choose what you want to share and how you want it to alert you

and that's it so it's not what it's not is an air tag because apple i you know apple has not miniaturized air tag technology like this wallet only fits three cards in it all right it's too small for actual air tag technology to be in it, maybe one day. But what they are doing is trying to get it to be kind of like smart enough. Now, I've seen people on Twitter respond and say, this is useless. And I don't really understand that because it's useless if somebody picks up your wallet and runs away with it. That's true. It's not an AirTag, but it's not useless for what I would think is the most common way anybody loses anything, which is they don't remember where they had it last, whether it fell off or whether they took it off. And that's what this is for.

This is literally the, I lost it. Well, where did you last see it? And now you can ask your iPhone, where did you last see the wallet? And they're like, oh, over there. And you're like, oh, that's where it is, right? That's what this feature is for. Matt Van Ormer, who's one of the very awesome moderators of our members discord, made a good point.

He wrote about the wallet too. That the, Find My has a thing for item left behind, which is a new feature. So if you like leave your iPad somewhere, it can notify you if you leave it and he was saying basically he would like some of that to be extended to this so that the wallet didn't notifying him about being just disconnected when he's at home which i think is a very good point you literally you disconnect the wallet and then like a minute later it says

wallet was disconnected when what you really want is to look at location and then i leave the place where the wallet is and have the option of being warned then you know you're leaving without your wallet but that's not in there right or even just don't alert me when i'm here which is something that you can do with the devices stuff so you can say like you can list some locations so i for mine, like my home and my studio, because like, for example, if I left my studio to go get a coffee, I would get like four notifications of all of the things that are mine that I have walked away from. So I like that. I'm very happy you can have multiple locations and that thing. But if you take the wallet off, then it alerts you. I don't, I really don't know why they needed, why this wouldn't work with the first one.

If the phone knows that a wallet's connected, it will also know when the wallet has been disconnected. Yes. I feel like this is one of those things where Apple may have overthought it and like, oh, but there has to be an individual connection of a number. You know what I mean? Like I said, it may be simpler than that. It may be that the,

that they fancied this as a feature for, for the wallet last year and they, and it didn't work reliably. And they're like, well, just ship it and we won't worry about it because you're right. I, I don't understand why the old wallet couldn't do this because it does

note. It does know when you connect it and presumably then when you disconnect it. And yet that old wallet doesn't have this functionality. And I don't think it's because Apple got so precious that they're like, well, no, it needs a unique ID because we need to have a finding strategy here that involves somebody else. It's like, okay, I mean, that's nice, but I spent the last year with the first gen wallet and it would have been nice to have this feature for the last year. And I don't understand, even if it didn't have this extra feature of having a unique ID, but I don't know. I don't know. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Amazon Music.

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Our thanks to Amazon Music for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Let's start by talking about the iPad Mini. You wrote a great review on Six Colors. You had the iPad Mini in advance, right? So how long have you had yours for? I got it the Wednesday,nesday maybe of announce week so i i've

had it for more than more than a week now okay and i got mine on friday so i've had mine for like four days or whatever um i love it man i love it it's just what i wanted i I love it. It's such a great little device. It's super... What do you think about the size and weight? How do you feel about it? I think it's really great. I think it is about as small as an iPad could probably be. Yes, it's on the edge, right? Yeah, but having the new you know the the new modern

design where it doesn't have the space for the home button uh opens it up and makes it that much more kind of pleasing and uh you can hold it in one hand although you you know you can hold it in one hand but you won't want to and it's not one hand use you can like hold it in one hand, but you won't want to. And it's not one hand use. You can like hold it in one hand and then use your other hand to control it. You can't really, you know, just hold it in one hand and use it like a phone. It's not a phone. It's not a phone. You can thumb type on it, which is kind of nice because it's so small. Yeah, it's just, it's a really good size.

It is, I think for people who are looking, obviously, look, my review basically says, what doesn't it do? The whole purpose of it, like with the Mac Mini, honestly, is to fill all sorts of little niches that other devices don't fill. And so it is for kids. It is for people in cramped spaces. But it is also for readers, for people who want an ipad as a content consumption device as a as a thing to read um and the great thing about it as a reader is that it will run all your ebook apps it will run twitter it will run uh your newspaper apps it'll run an rss reader like whatever and safari so whatever you want to read on it you can read on it. And in this kind

of compact size. So it's good at a lot of different things. But I think the reader thing is the one that jumped out at me because I've been hearing people talk about it. And I used the last iPad Mini as a reader for a little while, just as a trial. And I was really kind of unhappy with it. But this one, I think, is a much more pleasant experience than that one I think something about this design and the feel of it and the size of it like I think they got it right this time yeah it's for me it is perfect for what I want this type of iPad to be which is like reading stuff social media stuff watching video at home um very like kind of like light very light work stuff like communication right maybe sending the occasional email answering a slack message that kind of thing because it's really nice to type on you say you hold it in

portrait you can thumb type on it and so it's basically like it's basically typing on a big phone which really works there There isn't another iPad that is as comfortable to thumb type on as this one, because even the 11 inch, it's not comfortable to really type on that in portrait mode like it is on this iPad. And it does feel like a little book, especially if you get one of the smart covers,

like it just feels like a little book. And I hold it, you know, a little book and i hold it you know like i would hold a phone you know like your pinky supporting it and you just hold it like a book and read on it like it's a book and it's great i love love those smart covers i i yeah me too i ended up with uh an orange smart cover for it that's the same as the one that i got from my 12.9 inch ipad pro and that's a hilarious contrast it's like a big big buddy and little buddy that's a hilarious contrast. It's like a big, big buddy and little buddy. That's funny. Yeah, it's because they're the same thing.

But the smart cover, I really like the smart cover. I think it's a good accessory. And the one for the iPad mini now having that, it's nice. I'd kind of forgotten about the smart cover, like a smart folio cover thing. Because I hadn't had one for a while, right? Because I'd just been purely in ipad pro land and always used keyboards whatever the keyboard version was and i'd forgotten that the smart cover folio thing has the little fold it back into a triangle pop prop it up you know like and i was like ah like i've forgotten about that and i was super excited about it because i mean like for watching videos so like a good uh use for the of this device for me is i'm doing the dishes and i want to watch a video of some

kind so i could just put it on top of the bread bin sits perfectly there it is really great like this is like i've been using my 11 inch ipad at home for the last little while like for ages and doing these kinds of things on it and this is so much better than that at this job all of the things that i want it for which is this mostly like consumption and the occasional thing you know you mentioned about size a minute ago about like it being on this kind of the smallest that an ipad could be i think ios 15 does show that in a bunch of places like it feels like it barely fits in places right like the dock is incredibly small so i migrated uh my i cloud backup from my ipad pro to it just for fun that's not a good idea and then i turned it into into vertical orientation and the dock

was like a series of very tiny dots that you could tap on and maybe you would get the right. I ended up pulling a bunch of things out of the dock because it's like, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, That's hilariously too small. Also the layout is weird. Like I railed about the iPad OS home screen last week about how it's not really good enough. And the changes they made are just kind of patching an existing thing.

That's not that good. And hasn't been that good ever since the start. But it's even worse on the iPad mini, where there are these enormous margins on the left and the right when you're looking at it horizontally. Enormous. Like the margins are there on the other iPads. They are. But they're not as egregious.

It looks like you're only using, I don't know, two-thirds of the home screen. Yeah. Yeah, I don't get it i i don't get it i i don't understand how in ios 15 especially knowing that this product is coming and not rethinking how the home screen on an ipad works well it's like they did didn't they but they did it wrong for this i felt it with the ipad pro but i really feel it with the mini yeah and you know it just exacerbates all the feelings i already had about how the widget placement is weird and all of that because now on this you've just got just space to the left and the right where there's nothing there um and it is small i mean bottom line is you got to have pretty good near vision to use this thing because you can crank up the text size on it but like it's it's everything is tiny because

it is a higher resolution screen so everything is very small so which is again why it's probably a device more for the young but yeah you can crank up the text size and you will if you are over the age of 40 you probably will need to crank up the text size on it i did because it's tiny it's too small i on all my devices i actually have dynamic text set to the smallest i had to bump it up on the ipad mini is it's too small even mike hurley small text hurley even me even small big small text boy over here uh like you know we were saying earlier about like we have referenced in the episode places where it feels like maybe apple's teams aren't talking to each other this does feel like one of those because

it does feel like that home the home screen it's like wrong in a way that it doesn't feel wrong on the other ipads in the same way like Like we have said they could be better. Yeah, but like we all agree it could be better, but on the iPad mini, it does feel like something's broken. It feels like it got shrunk in a way. My first reaction when I started it up was, whoa, what is happening on the home screen? And yeah, it's...

There's something odd going on there. On that about the text size, I want to talk about the display. I feel like the display isn't as good as my 11-inch iPad in a way that I can't put my finger on, but it doesn't feel as good. Do you, have you come to that?

I don't know if I've compared it to that but i mean i've accepted that it's not it's not the state-of-the-art screen anymore right because the ipad pro is the state-of-the-art screen that's but like my 11 inch ipad hasn't got the mini led right yeah maybe oh you know what davis said maybe promotion is one thing that could be but i feel like when i'm looking at it the colors don't look as good to me in a way. But I don't know if this is like, it's like a trick in my mind or something, but like, I feel like it's not as high quality as the 11-inch iPad Pro. But when I look at the tech spec pages, it seems to suggest it's the same stuff. But I feel like that the Air and the Mini

probably don't get the best screens. I think that's probably true. And so it might be a case of just like, this isn't as high quality as the Pro one, even though they seem to suggest they have all the same features. You were very excited to order a purple one. I got Starlight.

So, and Starlight, like literally, i had to put it next to a silver ipad and then put take my glasses off and put my face down at the level of the two ipads in order to barely detect the extra yellow cast that makes it starlight instead of silver but then i saw pictures online of everybody who got that purple one, like you, and who are very excited to have a purple iPad. And I got to say, everybody had the same reaction, which is, this is purple. It's gray. Okay. In some light, it has a purple hue to it but it's not purple like what i thought i was gonna get

it was gonna be purple like that iphone is purple yeah but the difference is and i know why the difference is that's glass with a color underneath this is aluminium and for some reason apple on or can't put the same level of color but i feel like they do a good job with the imac yeah my mac is really yellow i don't understand quite what they did with the ipad mini which feels to me like a fun product and yet they have made it in boring colors like that purple should be far more vibrant and we know they can make brighter purples because the backs of the imax have brighter purples and the ipad mini strikes me as the device that you'd want to do that with and instead it seems really conservative and

you know i don't want to say boring because some people want something more muted and muted doesn't necessarily have to be boring. But like, I feel like- Yeah, but you wouldn't buy the purple one, would you? Right? Like if you wanted a muted color- When your color choices are imperceptible unless you really work at it,

they're not really good color choices, are they? No. You know, you mentioned Starlight. So I want to give a bit of follow-out. I do another show here on RelayFM called The Test Drivers with tech YouTuber, Austin Evans. We interviewed Stephen Tonner and Tom Boga,

friend of the show from Apple, about the new iPad mini. And I asked them to tell me what Starlight was. So if you want to hear what they said, you can go check the episode out. It's episode 40 of The Test Drivers. I said, what is it? What color is it?

The best answer I got from somebody at apple was just what we've said before which is it's a it's silver but with a yellow more yellow undertone uh which is accurate but boy it's so like they could have called it silver and everybody would have been like, hey, did you notice that Apple silver is slightly yellower than it was? And people would be like, yeah, I did notice that. Still silver though. And that would be the end of it.

Yeah. Look, the folio I'm happy with, my cherry folio, which is actually purple. I'm very happy with this. But the... I mean, now really the only part with my cherry folio which is actually purple um i'm very happy with this and my and but the the i mean now really the only part that i see is the rail around the outside which is a little bit more purple than the back so i guess i got that going for me i want about apple come on like you did such a good job with the imac like those colors are all so big and vibrant and bold.

I wonder whether Apple's kind of weird approach to colors in these products is actually an effect of we can't blame everything on the pandemic, but I don't even want to choose the reason why. I just want

to say I wonder if it is an effect of these products all being kind of out of sequence from one another in the development process. Because there should be a head of color at Apple, of materials, who's in charge of the colors, who is your color czar at Apple, right? And they should have formulated a philosophy of what the colors are and how Apple's going to move. And you see it in some categories, right? Watch bands, smart folio cases. There are places where Apple's color philosophy, they come out with new colors and you're like, oh, great. This is great. But with the iPad being so muted and the and the iMac being so forward like I don't know what's going on here

like and they and they with the iPhone 13 they dropped the number of colors like they made that big deal about that purple phone and like purple phone's gone purple phone's gone so what what is happening and and why you we know you can anodize aluminum to be bright and cheery, and this is an iPad mini and it's not bright and cheery. Why? Why is it that way? But I do wonder if maybe the reason why is because this was a plan that was done a while ago. And since then, they did the iMac plan, and this one had to kind of proceed the way it was. I don't know.

I don't understand it. I feel like their color story is all jumbled up. Well, these colors are close, like on the iPad, are close to the iPad Air, which they have colors, but they're also gray, right? Like, Federer's got, like, a blue one, but it's a gray one. The same as his purple is actually gray with a little bit of purple on it. Yeah. So you might be like, and then the iMacs are much more vivid.

So maybe, I don't know, maybe the next ones. Why wouldn't iPad not be vivid? That's the part that gets me. And again, maybe it's just because they're out of sync, but I don't understand why. I can maybe understand, look, I don't want the iPad Air or iPad Pro, which I like to be boring,

but I think we've all accepted the fact that Apple thinks pro means boring. So, okay. But the iPad Air and the iPad Mini are not pro products. They should be fun. And the colors are like, we heard you,

and while we're not willing to be fun, we will give you color. We'll give you the name. But it'll be not fun. You can buy a purple iPad if you want, and it'll say purple on the receipt. Yeah. And it's purple on the box, which is the color you the name. But it'll be not fun. You can buy a purple iPad if you want. It'll say purple on the receipt. Right. Yeah.

And it's purple on the box, which is the color you really want. I don't understand Apple's reluctance to make their products fun. I really just don't understand it, especially now that we've seen the iMac. Because the iMac is fun. Even, I mean, we could argue, well, the back of the iMac is fun. The front of the iMac is muted, but the back of the iMac is fun. The front of my iMac is very yellow. This of the iMac is fun the front of my iMac is very yellow like there's no this isn't any other color other than yellow yeah oh yeah I'm looking

at this orange uh orange iMac right now and it's it's undeniable what color it is it is and yet on other parts of their product line that should be more fun so now this actually gives me concern about the new MacBook Air because I gives me concern about the new MacBook Air because I've been hoping that the new MacBook Air would be in iMac colors. No, I think it will be. And I'm worried now that it's going to be in starlight and it's going to be in purple that's not purple.

No, I'm confident that it's going to be in full-on color. I think something's different. I don't know why between the Mac team and the iOS or iPad or iPhone team. I don't know what's going Mac team and the iOS or iPad or iPhone team. I don't know what's going on. Colors are. Help us. Help us.

Colors are. Please. This iPad mini has buttons on it. One of the buttons is a touch ID button. This is my first experience with the touch ID button. I haven't tried out the iPad Air. It's fine. I wish it was faster. and I miss Face ID.

I think the problem with Touch ID on the power button is if you're used to Face ID on your phone and you're used to Face ID on an iPad Pro, then it's just a different way of using it and you have to get used to it. I think if you don't have... Everything feels like more work. I think if you don't have an iPad Pro, it's probably much, much easier to adapt to it. But yeah, I am reminded when I use one of these devices, whether it's a mini or an Air, I'm reminded when I use one of these devices, whether it's a mini or an air, I'm constantly reminded of all of the ways that I've just assumed face ID and just skipped authentication as a thing I even think about on my iPad Pro.

And now suddenly it's like, oh, right. I got to lay my finger down on that. Where's the button? It's over here. Okay. Yeah. And there it is. Oh, I pressed the button. Now it it went to sleep i can't do that i gotta just lay it there and hold and then it will

open you know it's just it's it's very clever but if you're used to face id it's not it's not the same and it's uh yeah it's it's it's fine it is what it is they they didn't want to put the face id stack in these uh lower cost devices i get it i do't want to put the Face ID stack in these lower-cost devices. I get it. I do like that they put the rest to open thing in there. So if I tap the screen, I can just put my finger on it, it will open up. I don't have to swipe up to open the thing. Yes, that is very clever.

You don't have to make that additional gesture, the laying of your... Right? Because your face is always there, right? So you need to do an affirmative thing to say, yes, my face is here and I want to unlock. Whereas laying your finger on the button is the affirmative gesture. So that's all you should have to do. They moved the volume buttons to the top edge because the pencil takes up the whole side. And they introduced a feature here, which I don't know why it's only on the iPad mini, because it could be on every iPad. They're all the same. Where the volume buttons are contextually aware of rotation.

So up is up and down is down depending on which is facing up and which is facing down for volume rather than it being the up and down volume buttons always the same buttons no matter what orientation you have the iPad in. It's very clever. That said, this is the most... i know apple always has thought that ipads

were vertical and that horizontal was um lesser which is weird because i always use my ipad in horizontal orientation um this is a very vertical ipad i feel like this is like the most vertical ipad ever the most i mean they made it more vertical than the one that came before it, right? Like it actually became a little bit taller. This is the most vertical. This is the most portrait iPad. But yeah, I actually like this. I don't, I think they should bring this to every iPad.

I think it's smart because I never think about what's up and down for volume on this one. It just is always correct, which I kind of like talking about the uh portraitness of it very easy to to type there uh in landscape if you bring up the software keyboard you lose basically the whole display yep which is interesting because this is the only one that apple doesn't sell with a keyboard which i understand understand why they don't. But it's funny for that reason of like, it's maybe the one that most needs a keyboard.

So I have been using the split and floating keyboards a lot. Right, which are in there. Yeah. And again, the split keyboard works great on this one because then you're back to thumb typing again. And I definitely recommend, and I put a picture in my review about this, but like, either get a a keyboard that's got a little case that is a place where you can set it, or use the Smart Folio to do it, or get a little stand. It doesn't even need to be an iPad stand. It could be any little art stand.

I got a thing that came with my desk set, my pen holder. It came with my desk when I bought my desk. It was a throw-in and one of the items in this six-piece bamboo office desk stuff was a um a phone holder which i always thought was so weird like why do you need a phone but it fits that ipad mini and i just used that and a random bluetooth keyboard and I put it in vertical mode and I wrote my entire iPad OS 15 story for six colors on it. Um, so the point is, um, I don't think, and somebody will probably make something that's like a case that also is a keyboard for the iPad mini. Don't buy it. Um, the iPad mini is too small to have a decent sized keyboard on it.

don't buy it. The iPad mini is too small to have a decent sized keyboard on it. So get a keyboard that you can, or if you already have a keyboard, just get a Bluetooth keyboard that you can take with you and either a case that lets you put it up, prop it up, or like a little stand. And that's how you write on the iPad mini. And you bring that stuff with you. And it's, you know, you can get a tiny, thin, light keyboard and throw it in a bag and have it at the ready. So that's what I would recommend. And also like Bluetooth will work. And because it has USB-C on it, you can plug in any keyboard with a USB-C cable.

Yeah, also true. You can literally just plug in any USB-C keyboard. I really enjoyed writing in vertical orientation just because the screen is so small. And that was a better, I mean, I like writing in vertical anyway, but on the iPad mini, I felt like it was a really good fit. And if you use a USB keyboard, then you have to have the port on top and then you have to stare at the cord coming out the top of the iPad, which is like a little thing, but it's weird.

So yeah, anyway, that's my, I think this is actually a pretty thing but it's weird so yeah anyway that's my that's my i think this is actually a pretty great little portable writing tool um but you know it's not something where you can turn it into a little teeny tiny laptop without a keyboard that's bad so find a you know like something i was using i actually tried the um studio neat canvas with it which is like an apple magic keyboard kind of in a little protective case canopy that's right and you you snap it back and you put the ipad in it and then you've got a thing that's kind of like a laptop but kind of not you weren't use it on a tabletop like lots of options out there choose your favorite or just find a keyboard you got laying around that's all you really need so this thing has a version of the a15 and it we spoke about that last time that it is a binned

version so it's it's uh has less gpu cores and a slower cpu than the phone but you really put that thing through the ringer for your review didn't you yeah so the a15 on the ipad mini is is a lower clock speed so it it scores essentially the same as the iPad Air, which is an A14, other than the GPU is a little bit better because it's got the five GPUs that the iPhone 13 doesn't have, but the 13 Pro has. Oh, it has the five. So it has more than the regular phone. Yeah. Yeah. They lower the clock speed, but didn't throw out a GPU core, essentially. Bottom line is, whether it's A14 or a15 performance ipad air ipad mini the point i wanted to make and i did i edited a podcast on it with the apple pencil i needed to do it in vertical orientation because again it's a very small screen i need to see all my tracks but i

did that i did the incomparable or the uh the relay fm balderdash uh bonus episode that's in the departures feed on relay.fm uh i did that on entirely on the ipad mini with the apple pencil in ferrite recording studio it worked great i did i wrote an article like i did all the things that i would do on my ipad pro and all i can report is that it did them all fine like it literally these the air and the mini are full featured and the ipad line has been so overpowered for the last few years that while it doesn't have m1 power it has all the power it needs essentially to do whatever you want so the screen may be small but the uh capability is not limited it pretty much will do whatever you throw at it i this is it right like this thing uh will handle mightily more than you would probably want to do

on it in most cases because like yes editing a podcast in uh portrait mode on an iPad mini is the worst and best way to do that, right? Because you want to have it in landscape so you can see what's coming in the audio. But if you don't, but if you put it in landscape, you then can't see all the tracks, right? So it's like, this kind of isn't a great way to do this. But if you want to do anything, the A15 will run on it. But hey-ho. Yeah, and it's much faster than the iPad mini from 2019. That much is certain. Definitely.

It has 5G too, which is... Yeah, if you buy the cellular model, which again, you're going to pay extra for that. And you're probably going to get the one that's not the base model. And at that point, it's a much more expensive product. But it does have 5G support. does not support millimeter uh wave though so the version of 5g that's kind of like a hotspot where you can get two gigs of internet and it's mind-bogglingly fast uh that version is not supported it won't do that it's just the regular old kind of like 5g connectivity thing yep which is all you can get here anyway.

So we don't have millimeter wave. Yeah. Charger in the box. I was surprised about the charger in the box. Wasn't expecting that. Speakers sound good. They're pretty loud. I don't know if you had much time.

Were you editing with headphones on or were you using the speaker? I was using the speakers and they were fine, except that I discovered that in vertical orientation, I was editing with the bottom speaker pressed against my body and that didn't work. But the top speaker was making the noise, so it was fine. And I readjusted a little bit so I could get both speakers to play. Just as once again, just because we're big fans here in the Upgrade program, yay for Center Stage.

Just happy that it's there. Got to be everywhere. Glad it's there. Works great. Should be everywhere. Everywhere. Glad they put it on this. So to temper my disappointment with the color story, at least they got the Center Stage story right.

That's the right thing to do. That should just be everywhere. Put that thing everywhere. USB-C, of course, just because. Even just for charging i prefer it because i have more usb charges usbc charges in my house than lightning at this point because i have so many devices that charge via usbc so to round this part out who is the ipad mini for who is this ipad mini for what i said at the beginning is what I mean here, which is it fills a whole bunch of different needs.

And that means that it's not going to be Apple's highest profile product. They're not going to prioritize it, right? None of that is going to be true, but they keep it around. So when Apple says, oh, well, you know, pilots like it because it's small. Like that's the story of every use case for the Mac or the iPad mini, like the Mac mini. It's, uh, if it's in a small space or it's for kids or it's for somebody who wants the most, uh, you know, the smallest thing possible. It's for people who want, you know, say, oh, I don't really want to an ebook reader, but

an iPad could make a good reader for, for eBooks and other stuff. Like, but I don't want to do complicated stuff with it. I just want to do this. I mean, that's literally what the base model iPad mini is for. It doesn't have a lot of storage. It doesn't need a lot of storage. It's going to do what you want, which is that pretty basic stuff. Other than the fact that, I mean, really, it's essentially an iPad Air with a small screen.

And so the screen, you're trading screen size for a small physical device and it is you know that screen is small so you're gonna have to crank up you're either gonna need good eyes or you're gonna need to crank up the text size on it but other than that like it's for anybody who wants a small ipad um and i think especially it'll do anything so it really is like no compromise is just tiny so do you do is this the one that fits in your life because it fits where other ipads don't by definition i think for right now like this would be my top pick for somebody who wants an ipad for all of the things an an iPad can do that aren't work. Because it's like so small, but it still does everything really great.

Like it's great size for video, great for reading. I think probably the best one for reading because you can, it's so thin and light. But my only caveat with this is it's great right now because of its specs and design right now I don't know how long this iPad Mini is going to be this exact iPad Mini the iPad Mini has had such a strange

life you know where it's gone from being like the darling to like swept under a rug for a long time and I don't think it's possible to guess at this point what apple's plans are for the ipad mini for the next five years if i had to put money on it i would be that they will update this ipad mini in two and a half years and do nothing but put a new processor in it and that this is going to be the same for five years and at the end of five years

everybody's going to be like oh that ipad mini still looks like it did in 2021. What are they doing? And that's just the nature of it. But if you buy one of these, you know, Apple's not going to come and take it away from you. So it's yours to do. And it is so powerful again, because the iPad line has been so overpowered for so long, it is going to do anything you want to do with it for years. It really is. Cause it does more. Um, even to do with it for years it really is because it does more um even if you push it like you're like i'm gonna buy this and do video editing like all right well that you're pushing it then that's a little bit more but like for most people it's gonna have enough power to serve them for many years really many many years because even the one that was

before it you could still get stuff done on it and you would still do most of the things you wanted it to do it was just old i will give a piece of advice to people who are going to plan on using this as a reader which is embrace focus mode because i think the biggest virtue of something well i love the e-ink screen on the kindle or a kobo i love e-ink screens problem is that the e-ink readers are not multitaskers the unitaskers they're really only good at reading books and i'm testing actually an android tablet that's an e-ink tablet that will run apps and stuff and honestly all it's done is reinforce the fact that uh that purpose-built unitaskers are better because an E-Ink screen is not

an LCD screen and it does not have... Anyway, it's complicated. There are things about that device that are fascinating to me, but what it really makes me want, again, is that a Kindle or a Kobo just have apps on them that are designed for them because apps for phones are for phones. My point here is if you get an iPad mini to be your reader, that's great. Use focus modes because I think the best other than the screen, the best thing about a Kindle or a Kobo is that you aren't being interrupted by a text message. You aren't being interrupted by a push notification from a news app. You aren't being interrupted by a push notification from a news app. You aren't being interrupted by a mention on Twitter or anything like that. They don't have

any concept of that. They really make you focus on what you're reading. And now with iOS 15, you have focus mode. And so I would just recommend like the reading experience is vastly improved by not having or leave it and just do not disturb all the time if you really want to. But like don't be interrupted because I think that it really degrades the whole reading experience to be constantly interrupted, which I am on my iPad and I am on my iPhone. So now that we have focus mode, you could set that up and use it. And I think that would make this a much better reader.

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textexpander.com slash podcast, where you can learn more about TextExpander. That's textexpander.com slash podcast. Our thanks to TextExpander from Smile for their support of this show and RelayFM. It's time to talk about the iPhone 13. So I have just an iPhone 13 Pro Max. You have all of them? I Max. You have all of them? I do. I have all of them. Big money Jason over here. Well, no.

Jason, we're Jason. Robbed an Apple store. Sends me iPhones every year. Can you give me a rundown of the models and colors that you have? I have a, I guess they're calling it midnight, a black iPhone 12 mini. It's got a little bit of blue in it, right? I actually do think that the midnight on the regular phone looks really nice. I actually do like that color. So I have a black iPhone 12 mini and a midnight iPhone 13 mini. They look exactly the same oh okay fair enough maybe i

just like the black then who knows i have a is it silver or starlight on the 12 i think it's starlight silver is silver is on the pro the only the only thing they added to the pro was sierra blue the rest of the colors are the same names as before graphite silver and gold it's a professional uh starlight professional wait are you saying 12 or 13 the discord's saying a lot of things what are we talking about on the 13th we're talking about 13 i was just comparing the iphone 12 mini to the iphone uh 13 mini yeah and their their blacks are the same and i can't tell the difference and that's just how it is and uh get used to it um so okay starlight i guess is what this 13 is um i have a gold iphone 13 pro and i have a sierra blue iphone 13 pro max okay so at least you got one bright color, which is the gold one. Cause the gold one's the best one.

Uh, I think obviously my personal opinion, pop that right in a case. I have seen the Sierra because Adina got a Sierra. It's fine. Like it's a blue, it's a blue. It's me,

Chris Pratt over here. I don't know. It's like, I am, I love, I love blue. Blue is one of my favorite colors in my life it's been my favorite color orange is coming on strong but blue always there

love blue I'm super disappointed with Sierra Blue it's not blue enough I feel like it is once again gray with a little blue in it okay it is blue. You can't deny it.

And that's not even an anodization thing, right? And yet in certain light, it's blue. And in other light, like in lower light, it's just a very gray. I don't know. I was disappointed because I was like, yeah, blue phone. And it's not midnight blue where it's so black

you can't even tell that it's blue. It's a real, no, I phone. And it's not midnight blue where it's so black that you can't even tell that it's blue. It's a real, no, I was disappointed by it. Once again, it is Apple's color conservatism coming out where not every phone has to be muted, right? Like, you can make some that are not. But this Sierra Blue is only stunning if you consider the grand sweep of the color palette of Apple's conservative color choices. And in fact, I would agree with you. If you want a phone that is stunning, that like shouts out, look at me, you get the gold one because the sides of the gold one are super shiny and gold and beautiful. Although even then,

the back of the gold one's kind of muted. It is. But I like it enough. Because really, for me, the only thing I like about the gold is all the gold. So the gold on the camera, the gold on the sides, right?

And then the back of it, they can do whatever they want with it. I actually don't want the back to the camera, the gold on the sides, right? And then the back of it, they could do whatever they want with it. I actually don't want the back to look gold, honestly. Like I don't, because that would be too much, right? Like it doesn't. For me, it's kind of like, it is a very yellowy hue, right? Which works for me. Because I actually find it, honestly, one of the things that I think is different about the gold is that it gives you just the right amount of gold, I think,

before it being too much. And then the back color is much more of a good like companion to the gold part where all of the other colors, it feels like they're trying to match it. And I don't think it works. So, I mean, this continues my disappointment with the iPhone 12 Pro, which is I don't like the design as much as I like the base model 12. And I don't like the 13 Pro

as much as I like the base model 13 in terms of the design. I prefer the shiny back to the matte back. I think that I prefer the aluminum sides to the shiny stainless steel sides. I feel like they chose these two phones to be kind of mirror you know like opposites of each other and i think the other way is better the low-end choice actually looks better by the way i have to say uh i i take it all back about my iphone 13

apple trolled me on my iphone 13 okay it's. It's pink. And I can't see it. So you thought you had starlight, but you have pink. No, I, well, I couldn't remember. And now I'm looking at it and thinking, oh, right, it's pink. The back looks completely white to me

because I'm colorblind. And the aluminum sides really pretty much look silver to me. But I have confirmed with independent experts within my house that it is a pink phone. Okay.'t know so thanks apple um fortunately they sent along a silicone case that makes it like extra pink so on their website the pink one looks very pink but that but to be

honest all on apple's website all of the colors look more than they are i can't judge how very pink it is but i will say that i can see some pink but it needs to be very pink if i can't tell that it's pink it's not very pink it's subtly pink and i can't see it it looks white to me so it is subtle it doesn't look gray it looks white so it is very subtle uh which is the story i mean i i we talked about colors with the ipad mini i'm going to say it here too I'm really disappointed Apple feels like it feels to me like they took a step back with the colors of the iPhones there are fewer options on the 13s uh the blue one is still kind of a bold color but like where are the bolder colors for the fun 13s there's the red and the blue the red doesn't count I feel like product red doesn't count because like it's not really good red you know i feel like it's a it's a when it

comes to like being a color it's kind of like a cop-out that apple didn't actually really choose the color they just support the charity which is cool that they continue to do it we established i think last time that there there's more than one color that's allowed for product red and they chose this color but it's a bright at least it's a bright bold color and the blue is a a pretty good color but like i don't know again i'm not to it's an bright, bold color. And the blue is a pretty good color. But like, I don't know. Again, it's an incredible piece of technology and I'm complaining about the colors,

but like I still am a little bit baffled because our iPhones are kind of a place to, yes, a place to express our personality. And while I absolutely endorse, as we did with the iMac, you need to have silver. You need to endorse, you need to not force somebody to have like a bright, shiny color thing. You need to have silver. You need to endorse, you need to not force somebody

to have like a bright, shiny color thing. You need to give them options. But I wish there were also options that were more fun. And I'm disappointed in the limitations of these phones. That said, you know, there are some options, but I just, like they made the big deal about how fun the purple phone was and there's no purple phone. I't I don't get it I don't get it so by and large the design of this phone the industrial design is the same as last year which was expected it's the same the camera bump is is different and bigger but um the other otherwise the industrial design choices of last time are the same other than the color choices being limited and um and you know i like the design of the 13 more than the 13 pro just like i did with the 12 and the 12 pro

i can't help but laugh about laugh with regards to uh iphone 13 pro cases and like case users now have a bump too which i think is hilarious uh yeah because i'm not and i've i'm not a case user anymore i moved away from case life and i deal with the bump on my phone right and it's like oh you just put a case on your phone it gets rid of the bump uh not anymore it's got a bigger it's almost like a protective bump now i think that they're doing there which makes sense because otherwise the lenses would just be protruding from the case. But it is just funny. The camera bump is big, but like I'm immediately used to it.

It's just like whatever. But I do think like I can't, I mean, you could say this now. I just can't imagine it getting bigger. I don't know. I mean, don't say that. Yeah, because it's gonna. I mean, it will. I know it will, but I can't imagine it.

Can you feel any weight difference? It's hard for me because I have the two... I've been using a mini. I mean, I immediately felt it. I took it out of the box and I was like, oh, I know, I can tell. Like, they all seem huge and heavy to me. But yes, it feels...

Yeah, they all seem huge and heavy to me. I did the device to device transfer thing this time. How'd that go? Took a few hours, like two and a half hours, which is fine because I was setting up my iPad mini, so that was all good. And it went mostly okay. So the main benefit of doing this is that I didn't have to download all my photos again, right? And I have like a hundred and something gigabytes of photos on my device. And most of my applications were already logged in for me. There were a few that I still had to log back into. But by and large, most applications were I was already logged into. And that's like, big thumbs up. That's why I would do it. It was great. I did get no notifications for 12 hours,

which is very strange. I have no idea if this was related to the device to device transfer, but my old phone was getting notifications and the new one wasn't until the next morning. And the only other thing that went wrong for me is I had to manually transfer my watch. It didn't do that automatically and it should with this. And I am also one of the people, I don't think this is related, but I am one of the people that is affected by a bug that apple was addressed and will apparently fix is that face unlock with the watch isn't working for me right now so i try and turn it on and it just fails yeah that's a known thing this is a known issue yeah which is a shame but i don't know what it is that causes it it feels like it's actually pretty inconsistent. Like I know people that did the device to device transfer and it was fine. And I know it feels like this is a pretty

random thing, but like there's some set of circumstances which makes it feel like it's random. But I would say overall, like I actually kind of liked this way of doing it. It's nice and clear. You get a bit of customization to it as well you can you can choose some things you do want to transfer over and some not um and really all it is you have to just wait a little bit uh but by and large worked fine and dina's is a little bit different like has worked and her phone was working but then the old one still said it was transferring for a long time but it was done so i don't the old phone kind of got stuck but the old if the old phone stuck whatever you want to play with a new one but i think i'll do this because you know icloud but it was done, so the old phone kind of got stuck. But if the old phone's stuck, whatever,

you want to play with a new one. I think I'll do this. Because the iCloud backup, you get into the phone faster, but then you're dealing with everything downloading. And depending on the time of the day when you are doing that, you can be in a real bad mess because stuff's downloading. And I still had a bunch of apps that were downloading from the store,

but it wasn't as many. And I didn't have to sync a bunch of data, which is the thing that takes the time, right? That most of like the large chunks of data that was already done. So, you know, the only thing it didn't transfer over for me at all were TestFlight apps,

which I hoped it would do. I had to re-download and sign into all of those so i just sign into slack and stuff again i did an icloud backup restore which now it it offers it basically looks at your iphone that's there that is the iphone backup and says let me do a backup right now so that i can be completely exactly where this phone is right now which i think it didn't used to do maybe it did did that last year, but it used to be like, is this a recent backup or not? And now the iPhone just says, let me run a backup run right now so that it's completely exactly what this phone is. And then I did a restore. And the nice thing about the restore is that it comes back to life

fairly quickly, but then it's sitting there in the background restoring a bunch of stuff and the difference is yes there's different stuff that gets that remains logged in with one process versus another like i think i got all my test flight apps back but i needed to re-log into oh let's see do i need to re-log into slack i think i did i mean I had to because Slack wasn't installed. But if I would have had Slack installed from the App Store,

it probably would have worked. So I think what I would do next time is I would just install the App Store versions of a bunch of apps, do the device-to-device transfer, then go back to TestFlight. And then I would probably get what I needed, because then everything stays

in salt if you switch between one or the other. But it was fine. What I'll say is it was fine. It worked as I wanted it to, and as we've noted many times on this show, that isn't always the case. I had issues, but I expected to have some, and the issues

that I had weren't that bad. Because, you know manually transfer on the watch doesn't really do anything i don't lose anything like the the watch transfer thing is actually very simple because it does this weird thing i don't know what it's doing but it moves from one to the other it does like a backup and moves it over to the other device and it's and it works fine and now it's paired to the other watch of a phone no issue so really i didn't expect it to be perfect and it did most of the job right and i had in some ways a better experience than i usually do because i don't have to spend the next two hours with one password open yep it makes sense i i again go back to what we said many years ago about the iPhone upgrade process. It's a lot less painful than it used to be.

They've done a lot of work here and I migrated four phones last week, right? So it's better. It's a lot better than it used to be. So I feel pretty vindicated in my prediction about ProMotion. I've been saying ProMotion was going to be the thing for me. Like I was very confident it was going to be the best feature of this new phone. And for me, it is the best feature on this new phone.

It looks so good. What do you think of ProMotion before I wax lyrical about it for a bit? I fear that I am going to be a dissenter about ProMotion. Okay. I've been using ProMotion since it came out on the iPad Pro, right? Like, I absolutely understand it and I like it. And I look at it on the iPhone 13 Pro, and I can tell that it's there. There's no doubt about it.

It's smooth. All the animations are smoother. The scrolling is smoother. I think the biggest point to it is that the text is still readable while you're scrolling, right? In a way that it was maybe less readable while you were busily scrolling. Animations, you definitely can see it. When you flick from the bottom

to go back to the home screen, like that's all just much smoother. It's nice. That said, I don't pick up an iphone 13 or 12 and go ick this is only 60 frames a second i wish i had promotion and so for me what i have to say is it's a nice thing and i look forward to it coming to all phones i would not buy a phone just because it had promotion i don't think it's that important cool we feel opposite uh i think it's friggin

amazing and i am completely sold and i would never go back i absolutely adore it let me bring in the clincher mike i bought an bought an iPhone 13 mini. We need to get to that in a minute. You've got, okay, we've got to get through all of this and then we can come back to the mini part. Because I have, well, I mean, the point is I have seen, I have been tempted by ProMotion and the other features of the Pro phones. And I've decided that I like my life

pretty much the way it is. So I bought a 13 mini. We will come back to that at the end because we've got a lot of other stuff to talk about and we can come back to it. But anyway, the display I think is amazing. It feels so much more noticeable to me than on the iPad, like in apps, in the OS.

I think everything feels faster and more responsive and just overall more nice to look at. This is for me the like the for me the reason to upgrade like if somebody said to me hey why would i upgrade to this i would say to them for the promotion display like because i love it and there are there's a scale like steven can't stand it turns it off right there's never like promotion and then jason's kind of like yeah take it or leave it and i'm like it's the reason to buy the phone. And I think that it is going to be a personal taste thing. I don't think it's going to be the same as Retina in that way.

Like Retina was just like, you try it and you can't go back. But I do think it has a similar thing as Retina. You have to experience it to know what is different. I agree. And it is superior. I guess my point is, and I feel this way more on the iPhone than I did on the iPad. I will say you see it more in the Pro Max because it's just more. And you see it more on the iPad because there's more pixels that are moving. And I wonder if

that's part of it too. But what I'm saying is not that it isn't a thing, because it is a thing and it is really nice. I guess what I'm saying is when I use a non, because I've done this for the last week, I've gone back and forth between all these various models. And the difference for me is that I am not, it's not like Retina, where you go to a non-Retina Mac and you think, oh, no, this is terrible. It's not like that. this is terrible. It's not like that. And honestly, when I was using the iPad mini, I didn't even think, oh no, no promotion, right? Like I didn't think that. It's fine. And then you see the promotion and you're like, oh, that is nice. That is nice. It is definitely nice. I guess what I'm saying is when I use a non-promotion phone, I don't miss it. I just don't miss it. It's nicer when it's there, but I don't miss it when it's not there. And I feel like you, I mean, if you care about it, that's great. It's another little brick in the wall, another reason to get a pro phone. But I feel like the camera is a much better reason to get the pro phone than ProMotion.

much better reason to get the pro phone than uh than promotion but it but it's a good feature it's undeniably a beautiful thing to see that stuff scrolling by at 120 frames per second um but i don't miss it when it's not there there are some bugs with uh with with promotion um on the iphone 13 apple have addressed them one going to be fixed, and another is kind of like, I think it's a bug, it's like an unexpected thing where developers sometimes have to make a plist, amend their plist, I don't know how to say the right phrase, plist entry to say that they want to be able to take advantage of 120 hertz at all times,

rather than just when the device is saying, hey, do it. I did also note that low power mode locks the ProMotion to 60 hertz maximum. That makes sense. I will say, there's a use case thing here too. If you're somebody who is a scroller, which I mean like you are reading content as it scrolls, you sort of scroll slowly and read the content as it scrolls by, you want promotion because it makes the readability of scrolled text so much, scrolling text, so much better.

If you're somebody who doesn't do that who reads a page if you're a pager and not a scroller it doesn't really matter to you that may be a a simple use case difference it's like if you're trying to get content while you're kind of slowly scrolling along in twitter or whatever this is going to be a way superior experience let's talk about the camera what do you think of cinematic mode this is the mode that I guess, this is the thing in the cameras Apple seems to care about the most. Yeah. Do you? I think it's a lot of fun. I feel about it a little bit like I feel about portrait mode. They are, you know, cousins. I think it's fun. I think it take videos in it and they look different and you show them to people and they're like, oh, look at that. That looks so different. I shot a video of my dog on a path out in the woods and I showed it to my wife after we got home and she was there. But I showed her the video and she's like, oh, look, the background's all blurry. That's really nice. Like that's what cinematic mode is. It is a mode

for regular people to shoot videos that feel more cinematic. And you couple it with the amazing, amazing stability stuff that Apple does that they've been improving over the last few years. And, you know, I'm walking along on a trail with my dog and it looks like I got a steady cam. It's bananas how good the stability stuff is. And then you throw in the soft focus background kind of stuff. And it's like, wow, this is so movie-like. It's just a huge fun feature for regular people. I'm frustrated that Apple talks about professionals because it's not like portrait mode. It's like, it's not good enough for professionals. I saw like, it's yeah, everything gets fuzzy. The

glasses on the top of somebody's head are fuzzed out. The dog's, sides of the dog's face are fuzzed out weirdly. There are places that are in focus and then other places that are the same distance that are not in focus. And it's confusing. Like if you're going to break it down and care about the level of professional quality, whatever, it falls apart. And I wish Apple would stop making it about, we talked to a professional cinematographer and here's a movie we shot and made it much more about here are home movies that look cool because that's what it's for. made it much more about here are home movies that look cool because that's what it's for. And I think Apple's mismessaging this. And I don't know why. I think other than putting it in a pro context because it's a pro phone, but I don't think this is a pro feature. It's a fun feature for regular people. And it's really fun. It looks amazing and it's fun. And you can overlook all of the limitations of it because it doesn't matter. The only question is, is it fun? And if it passes that test, it is fun.

They look great. I think it's like a very fun feature, right? I just, this is the thing I could come back to too. Like, this is very fun. I have enjoyed playing around with it. I feel like it will only get better like portrait mode did, right? This is the portrait mode of video. It's the same kind of technology

for me the killer feature is that you can edit it after the fact sure and that's fascinating because they actually have to put like little keyframes in and have you adjust and like there's a whole interface there that they've built in that i have to add to my book about the photos app because it's a new feature uh but they are giving you that kind of control over, which also means that if you have part of it that you don't like, you can change it. I think that's important because if you're using this feature for a precious moment in your life and the feature screws it up, you can fix it. I think that's why it's the most important. I don't think this is the kind of feature where regular people just shoot it and use it. And then the pros will come in and tweak it and make it perfect. Cause I don't think this is the kind of feature where uh regular people just shoot it

and use it and then the pros will come in and tweak it and make it perfect because i don't think again it can't really be made perfect um but i do like that you can fall back if it did something that's not quite right you can fix it because you don't want to have a feature like this and then shoot your kid's birthday party and have it get messed up and be like, Oh, I can never use that video because the, the, the experimental,

you know, cinematic mode feature focused on the wrong thing. So I like that it's there. So you can rescue stuff that, um, that doesn't look right. And it just makes it as well that like, I don't have to.

So here's the thing that I would say makes me feel like a professional using it. I don't have to... So here's the thing that I would say makes me feel like a professional using it. I don't have to be smart enough to catch everything when I'm immediately shooting, but I can fix it in the edit bay. And that feels like a professional thing to me from where I come from, right? Of like, we can do what we're doing here. Something can go wrong.

I can fix it later. Yeah, sure. That comes from my world of being a professional i mean this is probably not i mean it's definitely not how professional video works right like you can't change the focus afterwards that's why it's a prosumer feature to use that that buzzword is it's giving you a pro kind of vibe for something that a pro would never use but you are using. And then I get to look like, oh, look at this cool thing that I did. And it looks cool, right? Like, I mean, that's the, it really does.

Like that's the bottom line is that it's a super fun feature and it is only going to get better. And I feel this 1.0, I feel more positive towards than portrait mode. Like I like portrait mode, but it took a while really to get good or even that you know it feels it feels similar it's got it's got problems yeah but it's fun

like it's got problems but it's fun like i take portrait mode pictures all the time because they're fun um and i'm aware of the failures and i know that i could turn it off i don't like it but uh but it is fun. And this is, I'd say this is more dramatic because we are all so well-versed as 21st century people in visual, reading visual media, reading what a movie frame composition is. And that's what this feature is playing on. And it just gives you that extra little vibe of it while you're watching it like oh it's like oh it's literally i just took a video of my dog out in the out on a trail but now the background is blurred out and she stays in focus and it's like oh my god it's like it shouldn't be that cool but it is because of cinematic mode that's the whole point of it uh tyler stormont had a

great video on youtube uh because he is a professional and he talks about it and he's pretty excited about it too and because he's a professional what he shoots of it is very beautiful plus he's he's shooting in hawaii so i'm gonna put a link in the show notes to this he explains it and goes through it and has some really great examples of what you can do with this mode um so people want to see it they can it's better than me just shooting things on my desk right which i could also do but it's not as exciting yeah i love the macro mode i wanted this for ages and i'm really happy that they that they put it in there um this is also something that apple said they're gonna improve because currently right now it's like automatically switches and they're going to add the ability for you to manually turn it on and off, I believe.

So yeah, I think that's the right call there. Yeah, the macro mode is really fun and you can get, you're going to take a lot of pictures of keyboards with it, right? I've been taking, I've already taken pictures of like keycaps and all that kind of stuff, which is one of the things I would want. I have these really cool Pokemon artists in keycaps, and I've wanted to be able to take pictures of them, but I can't get it to look the way that I want, and I already did it with the macro mode

because you can get really close up to stuff and take really good-looking photos. I think it's awesome. I'm very pleased with it. And the photo styles thing. So this is something that we were talking about, I think, quite a bit last time because I'm pretty pleased with it. And the photo styles thing. So this is something that we've been talking about, I think, quite a bit last time, because I'm pretty pumped about it.

But the thing that I wanted to just mention, because I've only tinkered with it a little bit right now, I feel like this is something I'm going to need more time with, because Ian in the Discord reminded me, obviously, you do macro video too, which is even better for keyboard stuff. So I'll be doing a lot of that. I've forgotten about macro video. It didn't even cross my mind i could do that um but

the i i the photographic styles thing where you can uh you makes me sound like it's a person photo styles sounds like a person to me terry styles his brother exactly it's like hey it's his photo styles like and subscribe because i feel like i need to like spend a bit more time with it and take a lot of photos of it and tweak it and stuff which i'm excited to do but the thing i was surprised about is when you open the camera app for the first time it prompts you to try it out and i would not have expected them to do that i know right all right check this thing out i it's everything we already said about it which is is, is this a pro feature? Well, probably the pros are going to use raw, but it's a feature that gives you more kind of

control over the look of your photos, uh, in default mode, non-raw burned in Apple's pipeline is doing magic things, taking multiple shots, putting them all together, making some artistic decisions. And then you can choose a bunch of different artistic decisions about the pipeline and get the photos that you want out. So if every photo you want, you want to be kind of like cool, you can do that. I am somebody who loves, in the terms of photographic styles, warm, rich photography.

That's what I like, warm, rich photography. That's what I like. Warm, rich. Is he a friend of photo styles? Warm, rich. Warm, rich is photo style's best friend. Oh. Warm, rich. I don't know what his last name is.

They never say it. They just call him warm, rich. He's always taking off his shirt and stuff because he's too warm. Because they do this thing where if you tweak it, because you can tweak them, right? that gives it a new name for you so you can go in they have standard and then you got rich and warm and cool and then if you tweak it they rename it based on what it is so i ended up with warm warm rich vibrant warm is where i am right now so but i

don't know how long it's going to stick around we We'll see. I kind of like it, though. And it's fairly easy to toggle it on and off, which is also a nice kind of feature. But the idea, like, literally the idea is if you can make every photo you shoot more aesthetically pleasing to you, do it, right? Yeah, isn't that good? Yeah.

Do it. Yeah, I haven't left it on yet because I haven't decided yet. But this would be something I play around with. I could imagine wanting to switch depending on what I'm taking a picture of as well. So we'll see. I have no thoughts about battery life yet.

Well, I'm intrigued because obviously you've buried the lead with the Mini or you've already given it away. I can't remember what the phrase would be. I'm assuming this has got to be a part of that. Yeah, right. Again, I don't go out of the house that much, but if the 12 Mini had a problem with battery life,

just because it's small with a small battery, and now it's got a little bit bigger battery, and all of the battery life improvements that apple has thrown into the 13s and so the 13 mini undoubtedly has better battery life i have not tried to um run down all four phones and see how long they last i but other people have done that and it seems like apple's claims are essentially valid that apple is doing a whole bunch of different stuff here to um extend the battery life of all four of these models and uh that's great i know that you know my battery was already great before and so just

more hours of it is going to be continued even greater no the pro max battery life i can't even imagine that's the that's all day that's like all day on a on a long flight battery life uh it has an a15 it's faster yeah i did i did some benchmark tests of it and the answer is yeah it's faster it is actually kind of in line it's not quite as big a jump as as the previous uh chip generations have uh in cpu but it's not as but it is a jump. And then the GPU is a bigger jump. Obviously the GPU is, is more impressive in the pro models than the regular models. Cause they have the extra core that's turned on. Uh, but it is, it is faster. I think it's, it's good in the sense that Apple's chip, uh, generation still are progressing from, from generation generation generation we are getting a you know

whatever it is between 10 and 20 percent um core boost every year so they keep rolling on with that but they do seem to have this is a lighter um update 14 to 15 than kind of the previous generations but um it's still progress and presumably this will be the foundation for a whole bunch of mac chips that are coming next year so i saw quinn nelson say on twitter that he thinks that this is a bigger update than the 11 was to the 12 and i wonder what you think about that i don't know i mean the 11 has the 11 had the big visual changes to the phone. And I think for most people, that's the most important thing, is actually what it looks like on the outside. I think if you care about the cameras and if you care about the display, I could see the argument.

I feel like these are both differently incremental updates but i i think it's the my disagreement would be i'm sure he meant it in a very specific way my disagreement would be that the 11 to 12 i feel like was a physical change a visual change i think that's kind of what he was getting at um which is like the biggest thing in the 12 is that it looked different. But the 13, I think, is going to have a bigger effect on my usage than the 11 to the 12 did. Because you get used to the design really quick. But the things that I like in this, which is all of the new camera stuff, where there's the camera improvements this year,

the camera changes way more than last year. Yeah. Like, you know, across the board, right? There's just so much more stuff. Especially if you're on the difference between the 12 Pro and the 13 Pro, where you're going up from the lesser of the two telephoto lenses, and now both of them are getting that 3x telephoto lens, right? That's a big jump for that.

You're not getting that as a Pro Max user, but other people are getting a bigger jump there. But this brings me back around to the post that I wrote on Six Colors, which is the iPhone 13 Upgraders Guide. Because the fact is, most people aren't buying an iPhone 13 after buying an iPhone 12.

They're upgrading from a previous model. So I did a story last week. Yeah, this is a really cool article. Thank you for mentioning it because I forgot to bring it up earlier. It literally i just went back to the iphone 7 up to the uh the 11 and the se and said here's what's changed since you got your last phone just to try to give people an idea of like we roll all these upgrades together what does it look like and what that what that told me, I did that and I had to go through it a few times. And I'm sure there's still some mistakes in there, but like it's a lot of data that I

was trying to collate. And I linked to the Apple's comparison pages so you can compare for yourself on specs. But what struck me about it is where the big kind of era shifts have been. And obviously the shift to OLED, the shift in the iPhone 10 to OLED, so big shift and, and getting rid of the home button and doing face ID, like a big shift. It also struck me that,

you know, if you look at it from this vantage point, like from the seven or the eight or the nine, and then you compare it like to what's different in the, in the, in the 10 and the 10S and then the 11. It is an incremental thing. I see why people don't update every year. There are details that get better every single year. But when you sweep three years of changes into one upgrade, then it's a real upgrade, right? And the truth is that's what most people are doing. So full credit to my friend Monty, who said, you know what I want is a review

that tells me what I'm going to get when I upgrade from my iPhone 8. And I thought, that's a good idea. Monty's in for a good time. So thank you, Monty. Yeah it he did get a new phone actually this this cycle so he inspired this but he went ahead and and bought a new iPhone so uh congratulations Monty actually he bought a new iPhone and he has music that's only on his own old iPhone that is not on a computer because he got he changed computers and that music didn't come and we had to like try to figure out how to extract music off of an iPhone on Windows. Oh, man. And I think the end result of that is Monty said,

I'm just going to treat my old phone like an iPod that has nostalgic music on it if I want to listen to it. I was like, wow, that works, I guess. So anyway, if you are still thinking of upgrading, it's kind of a fun article that tries to put these year over year iterations by apple in a in a bigger perspective so if you're coming from the seven here's everything that's going to change and it's a lot i just want to say this there's a lot like the rhetoric online right now this is an ass year this is not this is more this is a big this is i think this is big like. This is, I think, this is big. Like, people are just focusing on the visual.

I think if Apple just, if Apple, like, just dropped this on us any other time, this is, I think this set of features is fantastic. Isn't that always the story? I feel like every time there's a visual design year, the next year, the visual design doesn't change at all,

and Apple does a bunch of improvements under the hood and everybody uh that there are people who are like oh it's so boring it's exactly the same and other people are like but no all the internal changes are interesting and they have this debate it feels like this is the like visual design is important right because like i absolutely love the visual design last year and i still love it right like it was it was my favorite feature of last year's phone because in my opinion. It was my favorite feature of last year's phone, because in my opinion, it was the only real noticeable feature of last year's phone, from the 11 to the 12, was the visual design.

Because Apple was saying, massive improvements for the camera. What they did last time didn't really change anything, I feel like. I could not really tell any difference. But what they've done this time, it's like tangible features that I can use without being like oh but if you use raw then you'll really get these are things I've added

to the camera that me and Mike Hurley can use and enjoy and the screen is awesome I think this is a fantastic upgrade I'm very happy with it and I think we'll continue to be more happy with that upgrade as time goes on happy with it. And I think we'll continue to be more happy with that upgrade as time goes on. So, I think it's awesome. Okay.

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haven't answered to, but I do want to talk about it. Why do iPads with Touch ID, like the new Mini, not work with the new Magic Keyboard with Touch ID? Is there a technical limitation or an oversight? So when it says not work, what I'm assuming Paul means is the Touch ID sensor doesn't work

because the keyboards work. I tried it. The keyboards do work, but the Touch ID sensor doesn't work. I am assuming it's because it's just all Mac focused, right? Like this isn't a thing that will translate because it's like this is a Mac feature. Like this keyboard works with Mac.

It does not work with other stuff in the same way that like it only works on M1 Macs. So I think that's right, is that this was a priority for M1 Macs and it would require iPadOS work that they didn't prioritize because why? It's not made for the iPad. That said, I have a theory. I have a conspiracy theory, Mike. Come through the looking glass with me. Come down the rabbit hole you're ready yep what if apple was thinking of making an ipad that worked better or or updated ipad os that to work better in a desktop configuration

you know the much ballyhooed never to be seen so far idea of letting you plug an iPad into a monitor and use it using a keyboard and a mouse as opposed to what it does now where it does screen mirroring the idea that you'd actually be able to control it in a desktop configuration that would be a good time to add support for the touch ID on the magic keyboard but that hasn't happened yet so that would be a thing that you could say let's just update that feature later. We don't need to update an iPad OS now because we're not going to support this use case. We'll do it later.

And I'll throw in there, what if they made a magic keyboard for iPad that had a Touch ID sensor on it? I don't know. They maybe do that too sometime. Why? What would that be for? I don't know. I don't know.

I'm just saying. Probably not, right? Because Face ID is better. But anyway, that's my thought is, I don't see the use case that's enough for them to invest iPadOS resources on it yet. And

perhaps there will come a day when they do. Because they would have to, I mean, literally, they would, I know it sounds like it's the same thing, it's just Touch ID, but it's Touch they do because they would have to i mean literally they would i know it sounds like it's the same thing it's just touch id but it's touch id over bluetooth and you have to you have to train it and it's it's different it's different on mac os and they would have to build that feature into ipad os and i think they just decided that not enough people are going to use that feature for them to care maybe they will care someday it will probably be tied to some use case that we don't have yet.

Yeah, I don't think they'll do it because I think it's not going to be now, right? It's going to be sometime in the future they would add this feature because you can't even buy this keyboard. You can now, can't you? You can. That's why I think the triggering moment

is the ability to do external display support because once you can do external display support, theoretically, you can put the iPad in a dock or have it not facing your face and then you need an alternate authentication system for it and you could argue at that point that they want to make the magic keyboard work in that scenario and look it even works with touch id and that would be enough for apple to roll that feature in but not until then maybe yeah i just think in the long run it's face id on everything though but maybe so right yeah but then maybe an issue you'd run into is if you were somehow making like if you ever were going to do the um external display support for ipad face id wouldn't be

optimum then unless what they're assuming is you would use Apple's monitor which had Face ID in it. Which has Face ID. Which is probably what they would do and if you didn't want it well that's your own problem. We've entered a second rabbit hole now. We're in so many. We're in a warren now Jason me and you. That's right. There's like interconnection rabbit holes everywhere. Sorry rabbits. Get out of here

we're talking. But yeah I just think this is one of those things where like for now even if it could work it's just like we're not gonna spend a ton of time focusing on this for uh the keyboards for the ipads because really they only have one ipad that they don't sell a keyboard product for and i think apple would prefer to sell you one of the keyboards for ipads to answer paul's question, I don't think there's a technical limitation, nor do I think this is an oversight. I think they could do it, and I think they might do it someday, but there's just not enough of a use case here right now for them to care about it. Jay Mush asks, Apple has seen big battery jumps for macbooks and iphones isn't it time for the

ipad to get in on the fun well the macbook thing is unfair right because it's going from intel to apple silicon and the ipad has always had that advantage which is why the ipad's batteries have always been what they've been the iphone there's probably some battery life help in the a15 that could come to the ipad but they also put in a bigger battery to make it heavier are they going to do that on the imat or the ipad maybe maybe i would like to i mean look ipads have great battery life right but like why does it just need to always be 10 hours why can't it i know i know well i think that's the question is, is really to rephrase Jaymush's question. Is Apple ready to redefine what iPad battery life is and raise their target from 10 hours

to something more than that? As somebody who uses an iPad Pro in the magic keyboard and at its podcasts and all sorts of other stuff with my iPad Pro, I can run my iPad Pro in the Magic Keyboard and at its podcasts and all sorts of other stuff with my iPad Pro, I can run my iPad Pro battery down pretty fast. I really can. A lot faster than 10 hours. So I would love more battery life. There is the expense of losing the weight thing and having it be thin and light is nice. But I hope so. I hope Apple, I guess my answer would be, I would love for Apple to say, we improved iPad battery life by 1.5 hours or 2.5 hours, right? I would love to see something like that to start. It doesn't have to be 20 hours of battery life, but I would love to see Apple start pushing that iPad battery life number up every iteration by an hour or two. That would be great.

John asks, what is a good source of making Siri shortcuts? Or perhaps there's a website with pre-made shortcuts. So John's just getting into shortcuts. I said Siri shortcuts. I wished I wouldn't have said that. Now I can never take it back. They're not called that. They're called shortcuts. I shouldn't have just read the question as it was. I wish I wouldn't have said that. Now I can never take it back. They're not called that. They're called shortcuts. I shouldn't have just read the question as it was. I would like to apologize to the entire shortcuts community. I have four sources for you here. The Mac Stories shortcuts archive, which Federico just updated today,

and there's like a billion there now. The shortcuts subreddit. Matthew Castanelli has a Shortcuts archive of his own. And then also the RelayFM podcast, Automators, where they talk about all kinds of stuff, but Shortcuts comes up a lot and you can pick and choose some episodes. The great thing is there is a great community for this

and it's people that really care and they put a lot of work into it. So you can definitely dive in. And one of my favorite things about some of this stuff, some of the shortcuts are too complicated for me to understand. Like some of the stuff that Federico makes is like, oh, I can't get my head around it, right? But I love that I have it,

but I can't really learn from it myself. But a lot of stuff, because of the way shortcuts is made you can kind of poke around in existing ones and start to learn and that's how like i have some knowledge of how to build shortcuts just from installing some shortcuts and poking around and see how they work i do really like it for that and i'm very excited for them to come to the Mac. Yeah, it's shortcuts in iOS 15. It's a little bit of a rough ride and there are some fixes in the new 1501 beta, but it's still buggy. And I think shortcuts on the Mac

is going to be buggy too. It's going to be a rough fall for shortcuts, but I think in the end, the future is bright. And the final question today comes from John. If you had to pick a job within Apple, and it could be any position that you choose, from store employee to CEO, what would it be? Wow. Clearly not color czar, because I'm not qualified. Well, I mean, you really care about it, but you wouldn't be able to do the job effectively enough, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah.

Don't worry about qualification in general for this question, right? Because we can choose whatever we want, and neither me or you is qualified enough to be the CEO of Apple. But we could take that job if we wanted, based on the construct of John's question. Yeah, I would feel bad for Apple. Well, it would be really good, but just for people like me and you uh otherwise probably wouldn't be great i know mine by the way like i know what it is worldwide head of product marketing oh you want the uh you want phil and jaws job yeah yeah schiller and jaws his job the reason is because one i care about marketing stuff anyway. It's like, I like that. I'm interested in that.

But that job, I bet other than Tim, you'll maybe clued into more stuff than anybody else. Because if you are head of product marketing, the way that works at Apple is like multiple things. It's not just the marketing of products, but it also goes into the development of products. It seems like there is like a, it goes in both. They got like feet in both they got like feet in both camps you must know so much stuff in that role right things that come in things

that's happening now i feel like that is a real like pull in the strings kind of job i feel like fascinating i oh man uh so many potential answers here. I'm not qualified to be like John Ternus's job, which is Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering. But what I'm really trying to get at is it would be an better and much happier making things than promoting things right like i would be as a as a journalist i would be uncomfortable in a role where i was having to speak the party line about a product that I was selling. I could do it. I don't consider myself a journalist. I consider myself a communicator. So I just communicate a different thing.

And you sell ads, right? I am not a salesperson, right? I am not a salesperson. So I don't want Jaws' job. So something where I'm making products would be the job that I would want. Arguably, though, you don't want turnus's job either then because john turner's like a big part of his job is doing that as well but but it's making the products and then and then selling the products you chose to make a little bit different

than being just like they hand you a product and say sell this yeah but you see i am also imagining that that my role as worldwide head of product marketing, I do have also a foot in the creation camp. Because I believe that everything that I have heard seems to suggest it's all interconnected. I mean, of course, there are people in Apple that are just pure marketing. They don't know anything until a week before. So here's my answer, though. I want Eddie Cue's job. I want to have meetings.

I want to make deals i want to go to hollywood i want to i'm gonna get i'm gonna go to nba games is that part of the job i don't know i'm gonna go to nba games i'm gonna like get a boat i don't know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna be eddie q that's my job i don't know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna be eddie q that's right and then and then you'll get thanked on stage at the emmys that's you know it thanks eddie jason yep and t-dog and thank you for listening to this week's episode if you'd like to send in a question for us to answer at the end of the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade or use question mark ask upgrade in the relay fm members discord uh which is you will get access to.

If you sign up for Upgrade Plus, go to getupgradeplus.com and you can pay either $5 a month or $50 a year and you will get longer ad-free episodes of Upgrade every single time we publish an episode. If we do an extra episode, you still get an ad-free longer. So drafts, right?

You get ad-free longer drafts when we do those too i wonder if i'm still not sure we're gonna have another draft this year who knows it could happen at any point so at any point emergency drafts are the most terrifying of drafts i don't like it uh but thank you if you signed up for upgrade plus or if you're considering it and also thank you to details pro smile and amazon music for their support of the show but most of all thank you for listening and we'll be back next time if you want to find Jason in the meantime go to sixcolors.com he is at

jsnill, Jason hosts a bunch of shows here at RelayFM and at The Incomparable as well and I am I'm Mike I-M-Y-K-E we'll be back next time until then say goodbye Jason goodbye Mike We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason. Goodbye, Mike.