Upgrade - 383: Dongletown Hotel

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Myke checks in from mid-vacation to discuss his visit with Jason, and shares some observations from his first extended travel in a couple of years. Then Jason takes a deep dive into his adventures Shortcuts on the Mac. And there's still time to discuss Mac AirPlay quirks and Apple lawsuits!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 383 today's show is brought to you by squarespace set up and memberful my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike how are you i'm pretty good i'm pretty good i'm looking out a window. I sat here before at this window. I've got hills and palm trees and all kinds because I'm back again in Beverly Hills today. Is it the same window? Did you get the same room or are you using the same? We actually got the exact same room since the last time we stayed here. So I'm feeling pretty happy about that.

So I have a hashtag snow talk question for you, Jason, which is how did you enjoy brunch on Saturday? I had a great time at brunch on Saturday, but that's because, well, I mean, first off, it's Southern California in late November, which means it was sunny and warm, just a breeze. It was a Saturday, late Saturday morning, and you're sitting outside at a cafe that does breakfast all day, and that alone, it would have been pretty great. But who was across the table from me?

Mike Hurley. Well, technically, Adina Hurley was across the table from me. That's true. And Mike was kind of diagonal. And it was lovely. It was great to see you after two years, right? Two plus years. Yeah, we worked out that the last time we'd spent any time together was August 2019. At the Relay 5th anniversary event in San Francisco. That was it. That was the last time.

So it has been a historically, horrifically long time. So I found it, like you you pretty wonderful to spend time with you and your lovely family so yeah we had a great time it was it was and i had some french toast you know i would like to thank myself for that uh hashtag snow talk question if you would like to send in a question you can either write it directly in our document if you have such powers very few do or you can send in a tweet with a hashtag snow talk or use question mark snows walking to relay fm members discord which i'll mention now actually if you want to become a relay fm member maybe you want to support this show usually you would go to get upgrade plus dot com but if you or someone you know wants to join relay fm for a whole year now is a great

time to do so because until december 17th all of our annual plans are 22 off for new subscribers so if you're a new subscriber go to give relay.com this will include upgrade plus so you can get a year of ad free episodes and more content for just 39 dollars go to give relay.com and you can find out more about how to do that so So, you know, this is our... Deals! Cyber Monday. Yeah! It is Cyber Monday today. Oh, it is Cyber Monday.

Happy Cyber Monday to those who celebrate. And our gift for you on Cyber Monday is the ability to get 22% off an annual plan and you become a RelayFM member and you support the show and you also get bonus content too. So we have some follow-up on airplay and uh music on the mac right uh yes uh listener sam wrote in last week we i was complaining about uh trying to use home pods as my external uh my music playback speakers on or or my sonos is actually either one uh instead of wired connection to my

ipod hi-fi and sam wrote in to point out and this is this is very much what you can do on ios and you can do it on the mac too which is you can do a remote control where you're basically controlling what the home pod is playing um and since there's native Apple Music support in the HomePod, what you do is in the AirPlay menu, Sam wrote in the music app, AirPlay devices should appear at the bottom of the list under the heading Switch To. And if you click that, you are now controlling what the HomePod is playing without AirPlay. And the keyboard media keys still work, he says. More on that in a second. If you shut down the Mac, the music will continue because no airplay is involved yeah uh so this is this is true when you can do this on ios too i actually think this is one of the very one of the very confusing things about music playback on all of

apple's devices is that you have two ways of doing it you can do airplay or you can do this like play via remote control and sometimes i find that that is handed off and so you get in weird device states i mentioned this last week where you've used uh you've airplayed music to the home pod and now all of a sudden you realize that it's on the home pod and not on your phone anymore and your phone maybe sometimes gets confused and and so then you press play and it plays the same thing on your phone instead of what it's already playing. It's very confusing. So I don't know what the solution is there,

but I think it's very strange that Apple has these two different modes to do what is effectively the same thing when it comes to something like playing music from the music app. I mean, honestly, that is not surprising to me with some of the stuff on the Mac, right? Like I feel like there are a lot of things like, hey, you can do it this way.

But this is true on iOS, too. It's true on iOS. The same thing applies on iOS, right? You can AirPlay to that or you can switch to that. And so you end up in this weird position where you can play music on a HomePod and then also switch where your current device is output to. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? output too right and it and it's for a company that doesn't want to give people sound settings on ios apple has given people very complex sound modes on ios so i don't know what's going on there

i i want to zero in on and the keyboard media key still work though because this sent me down a rabbit hole this morning um on the mac so you go to this mode where you switch to, and basically the music app is controlling the home pod, but it's doing it, uh, remotely. And like the home pod is the one streaming the music at that point, essentially, which means if you shut down your Mac,

as Sam said, you, uh, the music keeps going. Great. Um, your Mac crashes, whatever you need to restart.

You don't lose your playlist. Great. Theoretically. But, uh, for example, I use the volume up and down keys on my keyboard restart you don't lose your playlist great theoretically but uh for example i use the volume up and down keys on my keyboard and they don't adjust the volume of the music they adjust

my system volume um i think play pause will do the right thing but i'm not 100 sure about that because as i mentioned in a previous episode i've turned that uh hardware keyboard off because it kept getting bumped and so i i i got better touch tool and literally I just said, the play pause next and previous just don't work anymore. Please stop. Because it was every time I pushed my keyboard tray in, I was messing up my music. It was not good.

So I have a bunch of keyboard maestro shortcuts that do this instead, right? Using those preferred keys that I've been using since the nineties and they use Apple script to control the music app and it works great. You say, you know, you press, uh, what is it? Command option space and it gets the mode. It basically does a play pause. If it's playing, it pauses. If it pauses, it plays.

Um, and I also have ones for volume that say, set the volume up five or down five. And those work great. Guess what happens when music's in AirPlay mode? When music is in AirPlay mode, none of the Apple script features work anymore. Because they say music isn't playing. What's happening? Well, the music app is looking at the target which is the airplay device uh the the home pod in this case and is remote controlling it but the scripting interface as far as it's

concerned uh it's the mac isn't playing music so therefore it's not happening it's like this completely weird case and there is a way i found, I looked around in Script Debugger and found a way you could get the volume of the target AirPlay device. And you can set that volume, but it doesn't do anything. Nothing happens when you set the volume. It doesn't actually change. The volume doesn't change. It remains the same. Now, if I go to the slider in the music interface, the music app interface itself, and slide it up a little bit, it gets louder. And if I run that script again to tell me what the volume is, it will show that it's louder, but I can't actually set that. So it's one of those cases where I can choose between two different frustrating experiences with HomePods on my Mac, but neither of them is satisfactory.

And despite what Sam said, essentially controlling everything easily from the keyboard in that mode doesn't work, so far as I can tell. So it may be more reliable, although I did notice the first time I tried this this morning, using this different mode, one of the HomePods still started playing the track for a second, just by itself. And then the stereo pair popped in. So some of this stuff is not any better, but I would imagine it's probably more reliable. The problem I have where I pause the music on my Mac and then I come back 30 minutes later and press play, and it gets really confused about where the music is supposed to go and sort of plays it into the void or doesn't know how to play it or plays it on the Mac speakers. That would probably not happen because once it's handed off to the HomePod, I would imagine the HomePod is pretty resilient. But if I can't control my music playback, including immediate volume control and play and pause and next track from the keyboard of my Mac, it's not going to work.

Like, I'm not going to do that. So this is just a separate way to be frustrated, an alternate path of frustration for playing back music via two AirPlay devices on the Mac. So, hooray. There's no, it doesn't feel like there's a resolution to this. There isn't, they don't feel like anything's improved for you. No, not, this method does not improve things at all. It's a non-starter as long as I can't control it via keyboard. So the other method is probably what I will keep trying to use

and hoping maybe it gets a little better or at least that it is not entirely annoying. Just for those who didn't hear me say this last time, I'm not interested in putting bookshelf speakers on my desk and running a cable. If I wanted to do that, I'd just go back to the iPod Hi-Fi, honestly. My goal here is to get some speakers that are probably off my desk on either side of the room, which is where the Sonos's are, and use wireless technology to get a nice separate thing. Adding more wires to the audio setup in my office is something I desperately do not want to do.

So, you know, but then that said, it's not great. And it has to be Apple Music, right? You don't want to switch to Spotify or something. Yeah, that's not going to happen. It's going to be Apple Music. And in fact, I'm also not going to wire up the Sonos player app on my Mac and start using that full time to play music to the Sonos speakers. I'm not going to do that either.

I'm going to use the music app because that's what I'm comfortable with. So we'll see if it gets better. But right now, it's just, you know, I was excited about this. I'm like, oh, yeah, that is a different mode. I wonder how that works. And, you know, the solution here is that that should be controllable. It shouldn't be any different because you're literally, it's the active device in the music app. You should be able to say pause.

You should be able to say volume up and have it work. And they wired it into the interface, but it's not wired into the the remote control the scripting interface that functionality is really reliable when you do it from the iphone like the using the iphone's up and down volume controls then controls the home pods volume yeah for as long as it lasts to thing yeah i mean it can disconnect sometimes and get frustrating but but yeah it's pretty uh, but yeah, it's pretty reliable. And all I want is I want my keyboard controls, which are not the standard controls. But as I said, the volume doesn't actually change the volume of the speakers.

It changes the volume coming out of my iMac speaker, which is not helpful because there's no music coming out of the iMac speaker. Just on like a tangential thing, the hotel that we're in, the TVs have built-in Chromecast support. I really like the way Chromecast works. I much prefer it to AirPlay because your device doesn't need to be doing anything. Like you can just continue using your device as normal. And then the app that you're casting from just has some,

like we use in Netflix. Yeah. And you're just basically, all you're saying is like, hey TV, just go and get this Netflix thing. And it's just so much easier than like needing to sign in or anything. And then the Netflix app just gets some PlayPause controls. Like, I really like it. Like AirPlay, I've always found a bit like, can I do, am I allowed to use my device anymore

when I'm AirPlaying? I will say, I think that that's gotten a lot better on airplay because i've had a couple of cases recently where i've used airplay because i've been i've been in places where there's an airplay tv because so many tvs now have airplay support and this happened this weekend at my in-laws place like they had uh they have a tcl tv kind of like mine it's a roku and it's got airplay support and so i was able to take um my fubo tv so my over-the-top streaming to like a like a cable channel that they didn't get and just put it on their tv and it worked fine and i was able to do that and still use my ipad and it ran for you know an hour plus and it wasn't a problem okay so i think that that can get better i you know there's a there's more going

on there but i agree the either way the the ideal scenario and we're getting toward it especially if you're in a place where there's a tv and you want to put things from your computer on your or your device on your tv to watch it you should be able to do that without logging into something on the tv without like you should just be able to go put this there and chromecast and i think airplay are getting closer to that goal the upgrade is jason it's it's almost december which means we are entering upgradey peak upgradey season peak it's always upgradey in the past couple of days i have discovered how difficult it is to spell the word eighth yes that's a tricky one because we are doing the eighth annual upgradeys and the voting is open go to upgradeys.vote and you can submit

your nominations your votes for the upgradeys Award winners for 2021 in the 8th Annual Upgradies. If you want to find previous winners and maybe get some inspiration, we have a history of every single Upgradie award given over at Upgradies.com, which is managed and maintained by the wonderful Zach Knox, moderator in our Discord. But you can go to, if you want to vote, there's a Google form. Go to Upgradies.vote. Voting will close on Tuesday, December 21st, and the episode will be released. The eighth annual Upgradies episode will be released on December 27th.

So between the 21st and the 27th, we will be tabulating your results and we will be using, and as I mentioned it again, we'll mention it many times. Your nominations, they are guides. They are help. They are indicators for us.

Me and Jason ultimately pick the award winners for each category. But we very much need your help sometimes to break a tie. And often because there are some categories where we don't have any. I was looking through it. So in case you're not familiar, one of our categories is best movie. And I'm thinking, I don't know if I've seen a movie this year.

I can't think of one. The Upgrading nominees from the listeners serve a couple of purposes. One is to remind us or point out something we should check out. That's very helpful because you always... I'll tell you,

I get to the end of this process and then I listen to some other podcast awards or I read Federico's awards on Mac Stories, you know, and I'll be like, oh, right. I forgot that one. Right. And that's terrible. So we instituted this nomination process and the collective wisdom of the Upgradians helps a great deal.

And then the second part of the process, which you mentioned in passing, is this makes the listeners basically the third person in the room to discuss who wins. We include the preferences of the listeners as part of what we're doing. And so that is very helpful because sometimes we disagree or we don't have a strong opinion and the opinion of the listeners can be very, very helpful. So don't forget, you want to get your nominations in sooner the better. Why not? Go to upgradies.vote and you can get your nominations in and we'll be recording and publishing that episode. I think it's going to be our last episode of the year this year.

I think it tends to be. Unless there's a surprise Apple event later that week or something. So that's literally the last Monday of 2021. So that's our last episode. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Setapp. Getting things done is a challenge that everyone struggles with. And one way to tackle it is to make sure that you have the right tools for your computer and for every task. And that means having the right apps. Setapp is on a mission to help users get more done. With Setapp, there's no more worrying about

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CleanMyMac Access there. You can get iStamp Menus, Paste, which is a really cool clipboard manager, Ulysses. There's so many applications available and they're really excellent. One of my favorite things about Setapp is that they are the full pro versions of these apps. They're not like watered down apps at all. So it's really great. And it's great value as well as being convenient because instead of paying for hundreds of apps, which could be, you know, 100,000s of dollars for separate licenses, there's just one flat monthly fee. New apps are added to Setapp regularly and you do get those full featured pro versions. So go to setup.com slash upgradefm

and you can try out Setapp free for a week. If you like it, just pay $9.99 per month. That's setup.com slash upgradefm. Our thanks to Setapp for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, so Apple put out a press release kind of thing where they're talking about the fact that they're going to be suing the NSO group. The NSO group makes the Pegasus software.

I don't know if you call it software. I can't think of the right term for this. It's like spyware, but it is software. Spyware, yeah. This was being used by a number of governments to spy on people in the media and political opponents and stuff like that. This is like a big news story from a few months ago. So you've probably heard of it.

Well, Apple has decided to take legal action against them because of these exploitations of security flaws. They want to make the NSO group take responsibility for how their software is misused, even though they claim it's provided only to trustworthy government bodies. This was what the NSO group say, but there are lots of governments that have used it to do these terrible things.

Apple's able to go after the NSO group because they broke Apple's terms and conditions by creating a bunch of fake iCloud accounts to test their exploits, which is a really interesting way. It's like they need grounds right to try and sue them this is the case that they're building and they've broken the terms and conditions so they're going to take them to court but this is just a way in for them to go after

them right that's what it is yeah this is uh you agree uh when you sign up for an iCloud account you agree to very many things including abiding by California law, all sorts of stuff like that. Apple will be also donating $10 million as well as any of the damages from the lawsuit to organizations pursuing cyber surveillance research and advocacy

like Citizen Lab and Amnesty Tech. I thought this was really interesting because NSO is apparently already in some financial trouble right my expectation is apple's just attempting to bankrupt them like that's the yeah the path and my my take on it when this first happened i posted something really quick to six colors and uh what i said was this feels to me like apple has the ability because they have all the money to just spend lots of money on very expensive very good lawyers to make to inflict as much pain in nso

group as possible and if this is like one of those cases where um you know so often the story is oh the deep-pocketed corporation will be is impervious to your, um, you know, your claims as a consumer because they can just pay their lawyers and it's not worth it for you to sue them or you need to settle or whatever. This is a case where it's sort of the reverse kind of story where, um, they can, they can just keep this going and inflict maximum harm in the legal system on this company. And that seems to be my, my view from be my view from that press release and all that is that's what is going to happen here. They're going to make life as difficult as possible for NSO Group. And you know what? I say good.

This stuff shouldn't exist. This stuff just should not exist. This is a company, yeah, it's had trouble. It's anrael-based company but like the whole idea here is at some point if there's a corporation that literally their entire business is to find exploits in popular computer operating systems and sell them to the highest bidder to do awful things with them uh it's hard to see how a company like that is allowed to stay in business outside of outside of a country that is itself lawless right and so um it's hard to hard to

see how that's going to happen with an nso group i'm i i remember at the time when this is happening i had this kind of thought in my mind of like why isn't apple doing anything about this and i guess they had to try and find a way right like maybe what they're doing is not necessarily inherently illegal right they had to find some kind of grounds to pursue them and i'm pleased that they found them yeah and you know it's it's complicated it's complicated. It's complicated. And there are other cases where this exact same strategy would make us feel uncomfortable. But this is a company that literally profits on selling security exploits to awful governments who want to expose people who are opposed to their authoritarian regime, right? It's dissidents

and it opponents in other countries and it's just it's ugly and and uh and makes devices less secure so i'm because there's no there's no way to to do the ideal right like the ideal is like oh this software is only used to find terrorists right like that there's an ideal idea in the ideal is like oh this software is only used to find terrorists right like that there's an ideal idea in that it's like oh if that was the case sure okay i'll allow it but that's just not that that's not the way that these things are done you create any tools and someone's going to misuse it and the way that this can be misused is pretty terrible so yeah when uh moving on when the uh Apple Silicon Macs were coming out, we were all wondering what the future of bootcamp was

because it didn't seem like Apple was going to continue making bootcamp. And also, right, like we needed Windows on ARM and there kind of wasn't Windows on ARM at the time. And that started to change. Windows is running on more and more ARM machines, but there was no kind of indication that we would be able to get a native version of Windows running on more and more R machines but there was no kind of indication that we would be able to get

a native version of Windows running on Apple Silicon there was a quote that Craig Federighi gave in an interview where they kind of were just like yeah we're fine with it but it's up to Microsoft and it seemed like kind of a weird thing for Microsoft to be dragging their heels over right like this is their whole business

like why not just sell it to more people where it turns out that Qualcomm currently has an exclusive agreement with Microsoft. Turns out that part of the deal to get Microsoft Windows to run on Qualcomm's ARM processors was an exclusivity window, which leads me to believe that Qualcomm

basically paid Microsoft or cut a deal with Microsoft that involved a discount. Money changed hands. Or did the work for Microsoft. Or did the work for Microsoft. So money changed hands, I think, for sure. And that's fair. That's perfectly reasonable.

It actually reminds me a little bit of the whole iPhone exclusivity with AT&T, right? That it was a... Yes. It was a, we're getting this off the ground and we need you as a partner, so we're going to give you an exclusivity arrangement. But this report that's out there, which is lightly sourced, it's from xdadevelopers.com. It's from xdadevelopers.com. But this report says that it is expiring soon. That's all we really know. And I've said all along, and I continue to say that I think it is inevitable that Windows forearm processors will run on Apple Silicon. I don't know about bootcamp.

Bootcamp's not impossible because of the way that Apple architected bootcamp on Macs with the T2 chip in them. There's a secure signed operating system process, and they support Windows secure signed boot just as they do Mac OS. So like, I think Apple is fine with it essentially like if you want to do that go right ahead so if there's a way to technically make it work uh on apple silicon in boot camp great but i think that more broadly this is that moment where microsoft can finally make available a an official version of windows that runs natively on arm processors to be used with something like

parallels or vmware on apple silicon max so it runs at full speed now keep in mind it is the arm version of of windows not the regular intel version of windows uh i think apple the um oh no it was it was a was a vmware somebody said basically we're going to let Microsoft handle the translation layer, right? But Microsoft has to build an Intel translation layer for Windows itself. And so that would run. And so you should be able to run Intel stuff on Windows for ARM. So it's all kind of coming together. And I think this will be, I think it'll be a real thing. Right now, you can sign up for the test version through their early release program and then just put that in Parallels on an Apple Silicon Mac and it works fine.

It works just fine. But I think Microsoft is not allowed, it looks like, from this deal to do anything but bundle it with ARM systems running Qualcomm processors. And when that deal ends, we may see this resolved quickly. And that's the goal. I mean, ideally, what you want is the ability to get VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop and even potentially just buy ARM Windows from them or from Microsoft directly. And I think it will happen. And this is just another sign of why it hasn't yet. But it just feels inevitable to me because you look at what

Apple wants and what Microsoft wants. And like, there's no reason that they would not want their customers to be happy, right? Their joint joint customers to get what they need, which is the ability to run Microsoft's operating system on a piece of Apple hardware. Like everybody wins in that scenario. I mean, except for Qualcomm and Intel, but that's okay. They don't care.

I mean, Qualcomm's fine. Intel's, you know, like Qualcomm's still going to make the chips, right? I meant, you know, Microsoft and Apple don't care, I guess is what I'm saying. It's like in the end, Microsoft and Apple just want to make their customers happy and this makes them happy. And I know that people who are thinking about the old days of apple and microsoft may think differently about this but it's uh everybody everybody is

going to want this and uh so they'll they'll give it to them that is microsoft's business model now like let's give everything to everybody all of the time make the paper yeah and we already have seen i mean you could say well they don't want qualcomm doesn't want those uh benchmark tests that are disappointing because they show how far ahead apple is with their arm processors than qualcomm is well that's true but there have already been stories you know using vmware or using parallels on apple silicon there have already been those stories so you know it's and apple is ahead of them so you know that's just how it is so anyway yeah i'm i'm not super excited about this because there's not a lot i use windows for even though

i do have boot camp on my imac but i know it will be meaningful for a bunch of people so i've done something that i haven't done for a while. A lot of people haven't done for a while, which is travel, like big travel. Yes. So across the globe, travel. And I have some tech travel observations. I remember when people talked about tech travel.

We used to do this. What? We haven't done this a long time. And a lot of my technology has changed. So one MacBook Pro, 14-inch MacBook Pro, got it sitting right here in front of me today. what we haven't done this a long time and a lot of my technology has changed so uh one macbook pro 14 inch macbook pro go to sitting right here in front of me today i love all the power i i'm excited to edit on this afterwards because i'm not going to be able to get things done quickly actually faster than my uh my and one iMac at the studio uh i'm enjoying the additional screen space

what i will say is this is a big, thick, bulky laptop. It is, I notice it in my bag. My bag is a little tighter with this thing in it. We talked about this when we saw each other on Saturday. I said, I got the MacBook Pro with me and I got to send it back. Actually, probably in the next week or so, I got to send that back to Apple.

It's my review unit. I asked them for an extension so that I could travel with it a little bit. I took it to Arizona and I took it with me to Southern California this week or last week. So yeah, it's big and heavy. It's so great. But as somebody who has traveled with a MacBook Air for a very long time and then an iPad when I wasn't traveling with a MacBook Air, it's a lot. That said said it is also all the power of a desktop basically in that thing and that is you look at and this is the this is ultimately this is the trade-off between macbook pro and macbook air is this which is do you want it to be lighter and thinner and just

not take up as much space and not weigh down your bag and are willing to have it not be the full on high performance desktop experience? Or do you not care about the size and the weight because you just really want to have the high performance desktop experience everywhere you go? And that's the trade-off. And I was talking to you about how as we were leaving it was sort of like I keep telling myself reasons why I can't buy the MacBook Pro including the fact that I my son's going to college next year and so I'm going to buy him a brand new laptop then so I can't even do my oh I'll roll down my existing MacBook Air to other members of my family trick that's not going to work because I'm going to still have to buy him a new laptop. But the truth is that for me, which is it is kind of a load,

and I'm not sure I really need it when I'm traveling because my needs when I'm traveling are not that intense. But it is great. Having spent this time with it, the screen is great. Again, I keep saying we don't pay attention to the screen because we got that processor the m1 pro and m1 max and it makes such a huge difference and the look of it is different uh and there's a notch that we can all talk about but that screen is just gorgeous so i i do i do love it even though i'm i'm uh almost certainly not getting one as much as it would be fun to get one this has also been my first trip with my ipad mini so this is the only ipad that i brought with me this is my ipad now and it didn't bring any of the larger ones uh i

found the ipad mini to be excellent for watching movies on a plane because it's really small and it fits onto any like tray table any space right and also my my big my ipad pro always had the magic keyboard and i wouldn't bring an extra smart cover so that was just the cover and the magic keyboard would make the ipad pro like difficult to place yes on a plane sometimes but because the ipad mini just has the smart cover it's perfect and smart covers are so good for video watching i just make the ipad mini really great for that i'm surprised when i've heard several people say this, but especially you, about the smart cover. Because I always use a smart cover.

And I only use the keyboard when I want to use the keyboard. is that the smart cover for most use if you're not typing is uh really nice and it's light and it lets you put it in all the right little angles and it's great so and i agree the smart cover on the mini is nice too and uh what i will say the 256 gig that's what i got i got tons of content on that which is awesome i'm very pleased that i got the larger one because I just put loads and loads of video stuff on there the mini is difficult for using outside in the sun the screen doesn't get as bright it's tricky for me to be able to read on it especially if I'm wearing sunglasses my iPhone I can deal with

but the mini just doesn't seem to get bright enough for me which if you want to read it can be tricky but this i think this still kind of reinforces like if reading if you're going to read a book you're going to get an e-reader right like that's the it's probably still going to be the thing for a very very very long time you want to read outside e-reader yeah is the way to do go read my review of e-readers on sixcolors.com we're going to get to that at some point i want to talk about these e-readers with you at some point yeah but yeah i feel it's the glossy screens too they just reflect the light and it

just it just makes it not not an awesome experience for using outside i've also this is the longest trip that i've taken with my airpods max um i continue to love the way that they sound um they're great like the noise cancellation is excellent on an airplane like it just cuts all the noise out and i use i wore them basically the entire 11 hours of the flight and found it very comfortable the only problem is they take up a ton of space like they don't close down like adina has those sony ones like the over-ear sony ones that everybody loves and the case is really small because they fold up right but the airpods pro don't everybody loves. And the case is really small because they fold up. But the AirPods Pro don't do that.

And plus the case that they come with, I'm not comfortable with the protection that they provide. So underscore David Smith had this case. I saw it and I bought it. It was on Amazon. It's just like a hard shell case, which is great because then it has a little space. I put the ridiculously expensive cable in there if you want to plug it into a headphone jack

that it goes into. But it's huge. It's just so big. And so it works for what I want, but it takes up tons of space in my bag. That's kind of my only knock on them. I wish they would have made them more foldable, more compact as a way to travel with them.

I get the feeling that airpods max is going to get a revision at some point here that addresses a whole lot of things that are not quite right with the first version yeah yeah and i'm using them for podcast recording today i have the little cable the lightning to uh audio cable i find it very weird the set so transparency i hate transparency mode for recording i found out because i hear myself way too much yeah well and you've got you've got your voice feeding back to you anyway so you don't need exactly to hear it again which is why it's weird because you know which i said the way i get you way set it up like i hear my own microphone a little bit in my ears

which is helpful for recording um so i don't also then i get it double which it doesn't sound right noise cancellation doesn't work i don't know why it feels strange so i've got it set to off yeah but these it just feels different the seal is much more intense than the seal on my usual headphones and so i don't know it feels a bit disorientating today to record these on all right that's what it sounds like me all the time because i got the in-ear monitor so they're it completely blocks off the sound and so the world is kind of dropped off other than what i can hear of my own voice through the microphone but my usual headphones i use the beyerdynamic dt 770 pro like that's the headphones that i use they also have a good seal to them it's just

different i think it's just because it feels different. I'm finding it a little disorientating. But I'm happy with it because I didn't want to pack two pairs of headphones to travel with. And you haven't done a lot of remote recording the last couple of years. This would be the first one. I also, this is not exciting for anyone maybe

except me and you. I upgraded some of my audio gear. I got a new, better travel stand and a really small XLR cable. That was a life hack for me. Like short? Yeah, it's a tiny one. It's a tiny little XLR cable. I would usually bring like a big full,

I don't know, a couple of meter one or whatever. Just one of the ones I had in my audio gear kind of closet. But I bought a really tiny XLR cable this time, which is making cable management a lot easier. I have one of those and it's great because you don't have this giant cable that you don't need because you only need to connect two little tiny things together. I've done that.

I've got some short USB-C cables too. Same thing. This doesn't need to be... I don't need to carry all that wire. Speaking of USB-C, I have an observation. The international charging is becoming more complicated because all of my cables are USB-C, I have an observation. The international charging is becoming more complicated

because all of my cables are USB-C cables now, but hotels have USB-A ports in them. Yeah. So previously I had USB to USB-C, right? Because that's what Apple was shipping with everything, or USB to Lightning. Now it's all USB-C to USBbc or usbc to lightning so i can't plug my newer cables into any of the wall sockets unless i have the full-on wall thing with the adapters and stuff which i don't bring as many of those

because they're too bulky and so i could i've arrived and i'm like ah i don't have the right cables anymore so i feel like i need usb like some kind of usb a to usb c dongle for hotels now dongle town hotel uh you can check in every anytime you like but you can never because i thought that like oh i will change all my cables to usb c cables now because now i only have to have one cable type but and it's great for if i have using the power bricks but I can't always use all the power bricks so there we go I have a footnote here too one is I always travel with an adapter

USB adapter thing of some kind but I realized that for you it's a bigger challenge because you don't have the right plug type so it gets even more complicated for international travel I will say i recently changed my uh and my method was i actually have the same adapter by my uh by my bed and i just unplug it and take it with me when i travel um that's been a method that i've enjoyed a lot because it means that i always know exactly what it is um and where it is and what it's

plugged into i recently bought a new thing that i traveled with um the last couple of times that's pretty great um it's a uh it's a it's a gallium you know it's a gan charger so it's it's super tiny it's got all the gans in there and it And it's two USB-C and a USB-A. Is that from an Anker product? This one is TechNet. TechNet. So who knows what that is. But it is, you know, it's real small.

I mean, I guess that's my point is that the other ones I've used have been like an anchor one and it's a big block with a long cable snaking out of it to go somewhere. And this one is a flip down cause it's the U S right. So it's a flip down the two prongs, plug it in and you've got two USB, uh, C and a USB a, and that for my purposes, that's all i really need in terms of like ipad iphone apple watch um and so that's been a nice little addition to to my little travel maybe i just need to get i have one of these i have an anchor one for the uk it's really great i use it in the studio to charge those things right like to have a iPhone

and Apple Watch dock I have on my desk and then I have just like an extra port for like a cable to plug stuff in maybe I need a US version of one of those and then that will just be everything that I need I was going to say invest in your future return to the US

get one of those you should get one of those and just uh ship it yourself while you're here in america i might do that and use it for the rest of your trip but uh but i kind of have enough for now but it's just like i was yeah i had it all set before covid right like because we were usb a everywhere and now if the if the um hotels have taught us anything if hotel dongle town has taught us anything it's that um we can convert our lives to a new cable standard but the hotels will always be five to seven years behind right like it's like how long did we see the 30 pin connector around in hotels like i stayed in a hotel in colorado a couple months ago that still had a dock connector.

And I was like, what is happening? It's like a horror movie, right? It's like the dock connector is in the building. So, yeah, we can control our own lives, but we can't control what's in the hotels. So that's why I always travel with... Because yeah, the last thing you want to do is then carry a bunch of USB AC connector dongle-y things with you. That's no good.

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and RelayFM. Let's talk about shortcuts for the Macintosh OS. So you have published article after article about this. I have. And I've been saving them all up because I wanted to talk about it probably this week because I didn't want to spend a ton of time trolling through all the news this. And I've been saving them all up because I wanted to talk about it probably this week because I didn't want to spend

a ton of time trawling through all the news this week because I am on holiday. So we're going to talk about shortcuts. Can we talk about like kind of like an overall perspective? What have you been trying out with macOS?

Like you're trying to make some of your shortcuts go across platform, right? That you're using on iOS as well. Yeah, I i mean it's a couple of things going on there one is can i can i some of the things that i've built for ios are really convenient and i'd like to replicate them and i've tried to replicate some of them using uh different means using services and keyboard maestro and things like that and i and i wanted to see could i make one version of this that runs on my ipad my iphone and my mac and so i've done that a little bit um which has challenges right because there are just kind of holes in um in mac

os actually where there are are actions that are not available and you know i know you talked about this with federico on connected um they're like safari especially but like this the the share sheet on mac os is is not a real share sheet and so uh you end up having to do these things that i've been doing where it's sort of like, if device is Mac, do this. Otherwise, do that. And it would be taken to its most ridiculous extreme. You'd literally have two totally separate things in the if and else statements. And at that point, why are you even doing it?

But the truth is that a lot of the work is the same. But the truth is that a lot of the work is the same. And they're just very specific actions where you go, oh, I can't do this on the Mac in shortcuts. So you end up doing, if it's on the Mac, you run this Apple script, do this other thing, get the result. And then on iOS, it just runs these actions and gets the result and then continue with whatever that result is on whichever platform. You kind of build it to have that little block throw out the same bit of information by two totally different means. So you can do that. So that was my first step was really like, can I take my shortcuts and make them run my iOS shortcuts and make them run on the Mac? And that was pretty successful. I have to say, I was able to do that in a fairly short amount of time. Once

I figured out some methods of working around some of the peculiarities of the Mac, especially of Safari, not wanting to give me information. And then I moved on to the second step, which is, could I take my automations that I built in apple script and automator on the mac and make shortcuts out of that that was step two so that you're saying about some of the things that are missing like because it's easy to think that it's apps that are missing you know like certain apps use an ios they don't have mac components or they haven't integrated shortcuts for the mac but as you mentioned there is also stuff that just isn't in this operating system. Like there's things you can't do with Safari.

But I did want to know, are you having to get any workarounds for applications that aren't available? Like are you having to rewrite some shortcuts to use different methods? Yeah, I mean, that happens, right? There are things that you can do in a particular app on iOS and that app's not on the Mac or I don't use that app on the Mac.

Yeah. But, um, a lot of it is, I mean, that's the brilliance of user automation on the Mac is that most of the stuff you can get via command line or Apple script, right?

Not everything, but a lot of things you can get. And so on iOS, you have to have an, give me an action that does this. So when you're converting iOS actions, it's actually pretty straightforward because anything that's got an action on iOS, pretty much you can do it on the Mac. You may have to do it via a script, but it's not an outlandish action that's locked down, right? Because you're coming from the locked down interface, the lockdown operating system to the anything goes operating system. So if you start with iOS and then move it to Mac OS, you're pretty much going to be able to

figure out a way to do it. The challenge that I found is with the second thing, which is if you want to do it on the Mac based on what you're doing with current automation technologies on the Mac versus this new one, then, uh, can, can you do it? Because sometimes you could ultimately just build a shortcut that is just,

just run this script. It's like, okay, you could do that. But what I would like to do ultimately is use a shortcut and not go out to scripts, except when I have to. Um, cause I've definitely done the shortcut that is literally run this script. It's like, well, that great. It's a, technically it's a shortcut, but it's not any different than what I had before. So what you want to do is then say, can I do this with what actions are available

and shortcuts on the Mac? And sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't. And you did that with a pretty complicated one, right? Like I kind of gave you a bit of a challenge because you have a thing that I think you called the template gun, right? Which was every time you start a podcast, you would run a script

and it would create a bunch of files for you, like unzip some files, put them on your desktop name them correctly and it would be like so you could edit say an episode of the incomparable and i thought that was really cool and i was like hey why don't you try and make a shortcut of it and you did you did how was that you sort of challenged me to yeah to do it and i i wrote a post about it and I shared the shortcut. Basically, I ended up with a, I think it's a 54-step shortcut, which sounds like a lot, but actually if you know Federico Vatici, it's not. Yeah, I know Federico has hundreds, but the 54 steps coming from it being an Apple, it was an AppleScript before, right? Yes.

Does 54 steps seem like a lot compared to how long the Apple script was? It is, I mean, no, honestly. It's hard to say because the Apple script thing, it's written in like a language and shortcuts isn't a language. It's a series of blocks attached to each other. Um, the Apple script is 220 lines.

So it is like a lot of lines to me, but what do I know? It is. Well, and one of the challenges, one of the things that I actually have realized in doing this, and this is, I'm sure Federico has been saying this for years now, but one of the things that is frustrating about shortcuts is that it doesn't have subroutines so if you build a thing that can do this very certain thing over and over again and you need it in different places in your script um you can't you you would have to make a separate uh shortcut and then run that shortcut and the problem with that is then when you say i want to share this, you have to say,

actually, you need to install these five shortcuts. And when you send out an update, you have to update all five shortcuts. This happened when I borrowed that Tesla for spring break. And he had written a bunch of really great shortcuts for the Tesla. But it was like eight different shortcuts that all were interconnected and you needed them and some of that was subroutine kind of stuff so i wish it could do that but i did take the tablet gun and tried to reimagine how it would work in shortcuts and i managed to get it to work entirely in shortcuts no scripts used at all um which required me to rethink a bunch of stuff because shortcuts behaves differently. It doesn't have subroutines. Shortcut interacts with files in this really weird way because it

came from iOS. This is the best example I can give, which is in macOS, if you want, and even if you're not a scripter, I hope this will explain how weird this is. In macOS, if you want, and even if you're not a scripter, I hope this will explain how weird this is. In macOS, AppleScript really is a remote control language for apps. And so you can do flow, you know, subroutines and if-thens and all of that. But really what AppleScript was made for is tell this app to do something, run this command on this app, or tell me what this app is doing and then change something about it. That's what AppleScript is for. And so if you want to take, say, a zip archive from your Dropbox, which is what I want to do,

and unzip it, the way you do that in traditional AppleScript form is you tell the finder to take that file and copy it to the desktop and then tell i think the archive utility to unzip it and then you tell the finder to throw away the zip file because now you've got this folder and then you tell the finder to act on all the files that are in that folder and rename them and all of that. That's how you do it on Apple script. Shortcuts is so weird because it comes from the fileless operating system of iOS shortcuts. I did this. I started this and I'm like, okay, get the file and extract it. There's an extract action. You can just unzip it right there. It's great. So I just ran that and nothing happened.

But what's going on? And I looked at the shortcut and the shortcut said, result all of these files. And I looked for them on my Mac. I'm like, where are they? They're nowhere. They're nowhere.

They are in the shortcuts phantom zone. Where? What's that so so this is the thing is until you tell shortcuts to put those files somewhere they don't exist when you extract an archive what it does is shortcuts is okay here's what's in the archive what would you like to do with them so in shortcuts to take a zip file and save it to the desktop what you need to do is say extract the archive create a folder with that name on the desktop and then repeat through all the items that you extracted and save them into that folder okay because it's not remote controlling an app. It is doing it entirely itself. And that's just really different from the way that AppleScript works.

I think in a great way, right? Like there's something freeing about saying, no, no, my automation system has powers of its own instead of is completely dependent on other apps to do all of its work. In fact, one of the big failures of AppleScript, I think, and one of the reasons why it isn't more broadly popular and never was more broadly popular is that while they talked a good game about everything being natural language and all of those things, every single app had its own language, basically. And they were often impenetrable. It's like, how do I script the finder? And I still have to Google search and use script debuggers, weird sort of debugging modes in order to figure out how to script applications.

And that's where it failed, is if every single app behaves differently when you try to control it, how are you going to figure that out? And so having shortcuts say, no, most of the stuff, I can just do it. You don't have to figure it out and so having shortcuts say now most of the stuff i can just do it like you don't have to figure it out i will take care of it either internally or i will tell the app what to do there's something really powerful about that it has like its own inbuilt i don't want to use the word language because i think that complicates the matter but you understand what i'm like it's it's it is doing things in a certain way to the user it's always doing them the same way and then you can just build from that right right because you're just

building this and this like every block looks similar exactly right so say here's the block and you've got the ins and the outs right like and and if it says get the get this file you don't have to be like oh but where am i getting it how does that app look at files you can just say get this file or do this thing and and shortcuts they are like to they're just like sometimes ask you know like they ask for input you know like it's just it's all very easy right so um but the the the the shortcut phantom zone thing was a real moment of of of realization for me which is like right just because i said extract the archive doesn't mean that shortcuts went to the finder and said extract this archive right that didn't happen it's doing

it itself uh and so from there i was able to build it up and then i've got a bunch of like like repeat statements and i had to i i built it using what's called a dictionary, which basically in my Apple script, I literally have like, if the podcast is named this, or if the archive is named this, do this. I have this. It's cheating, right? I'm literally every time I add a podcast, I have to write more lines of code in Apple script in order to get it to work. Apple script in order to get it to work. And in a shortcut, there's just a dictionary at the top that says you put in an item for each podcast that you want with a couple of preferences for how you want it to behave, because it does some different things in terms of renaming based on what podcast network it's on and based on what kind of show it is. And what this also means is

that this is far more portable. Not only did I share this with the world via Six Colors, but I can give this to you, and the only support you're probably going to need from me is asking me exactly what you should put in your dictionary. But I even was able to write a comment that says, here is how to do the dictionary. So it's much more kind of usable by other people

because of the way it's structured in shortcuts. Same portable. It's also portable for you, right? Because it syncs to iCloud. So it's on your laptop when you travel. It's perfect. This is what happened to me last week is I did a podcast and I needed to post it.

And I was thinking, oh, I didn't bring the template gun app, the Apple script saved as an app that I have in my application folder on my iMac and my iMac is shut down because I'm gone. And I don't have that. Do I have to dig into a time machine backup? And what do I want to do? And then I thought, well, wait a second, I rebuilt that as a shortcut. And I went up to the menu bar and looked in the little shortcuts menu in the menu bar, having never thought about this, about needing to do this on the laptop. And it was there. And I ran it and it ran and it worked perfectly.

And that was a moment where I thought, oh, you know, Apple could have added iCloud syncing of services and Apple scripts and stuff into the OS years ago, but that technology was ignored and basically treated as dead. And so they would never prioritize like your scripts can be in iCloud, your services, your finder commands can be in iCloud. And so they never did. They could have. It's not like they couldn't iCloud and so they never did they could have it's not like they couldn't have worked but they never bothered and shortcuts syncs via iCloud and and it and it I hate to say it but it just works right like it was able to run template gun and put and since I have those files in my Dropbox and I had Dropbox installed on this

laptop those files were right where they thought they were. And it happened. And what it's doing is it's unzipping and it's looking at that podcast RSS feed to find what the latest episode number is and incrementing it by one and then renaming a bunch of stuff to be the episode number. So I don't have to look up the episode number. It knows it and it's already labeled. It's a lot of fun. So that was a great... Every one of these, and the reason I've written about this a lot is not only it's fun, new Mac stuff that didn't exist before and it's user automation, which I love, but also every one of these little projects I do teaches me something about how I think about user automation or about how shortcuts works and how shortcuts is philosophically different uh it makes me kind of grapple with what's missing in shortcuts on the mac and in shortcuts in general and what is there and where they need to go next i'm learning a lot with every

single one of these i'm trying because every one of them seems to have some sort of challenge that uh gives me another insight even if it's as, right, iCloud syncing of automations. That's powerful. Are you building these on the Mac? I know there's been a lot of talk about the Mac version not being that great. Are you dealing with it? Is it getting better?

What is your experience? The app is super weird and does things that don't make sense. And you have to do a lot of, there's a lot of right-clicking or in the case of, because I got a trackpad, right? Two finger clicking. We have to two finger click into various places in order to get a menu that does the thing you want. It's not very Mac-like I would say,

but that's just sort of how it is right now. I think that that has is a combination of them building the app in Swift UI and coming from iOS and sort of not thinking about how the mac equivalent is going to work but um it is uh you know it's it's improving um i'm actually on the mac os betas right now still which i normally wouldn't be because every beta it seems to get a little bit better i'm in the 12.1 beta now and they keep fixing things. It seems like shortcuts for Mac is still in active development, which is exactly what I want, right? The last thing that this thing needs is to be kind of broken for a year and then be better. They need to just keep making it better. I know that there's a dedicated team working on shortcuts. Every OS release, every beta, it should keep getting better because it needs to um and

it is getting better and and and there's still a bunch of stuff missing um there's still like in a short term what i really want is a clever uh developer to write the equivalent of toolbox pro for the mac toolbox pro is an app on iOS, maybe on macOS too now, I don't know, that adds a bunch of functionality. We're basically like, it doesn't do anything except add a bunch of functionality to shortcuts. That's its only purpose because apps can contribute actions to shortcuts.

So Toolbox Pro just adds a bunch of stuff that shortcuts doesn't do to shortcut. And the shortcuts should do, but it doesn't. And i was thinking about this because so many things that i do and that federico is doing and the john vorhees is doing that anybody who's playing with this stuff is doing matt cassinelli like we're all doing this stuff where it's like oh here's how you get a selection in safari you have it do a javascript it's like okay short term what i really want is i want a clever developer to sweep a bunch of these common things up together and make an app that just contributes them all as actions, if that's

possible, right? The idea is like, because I would rather just say, get the selection from Safari and have embedded in there the whatever workaround is necessary to get that to happen so that I don't have to go look up the AppleScript code and paste it in every time or the JavaScript. In the long run, and this is a future, you know, next gen 2022, 2023 kind of thing. I want, the thought occurred to me that AppleScript has had plugins

for different functionality for a long time. I would love it, especially on the Mac, that we had the equivalent for shortcuts. I can share a shortcut, but what I really want to do is if I can come up with a clever way to do something in shortcuts or AppleScript or some combination thereof, it's a little like a subroutine. That is, it takes an input, it does a thing and it outputs something. I'd love to be able to share that with people, including myself as an action, right? This is now an action. This is Jason's action that does this thing and share it with people and include it and say, this, this shortcut requires Jason's action to do this and you can get it. Um think that's got to be a direction for

them right okay right because because it's really a drag to say okay to do this you need to do this same apple script that you use 90 different times in 90 different places i'd rather write it once and save it and say it does this and it shows up in the list of actions and shortcuts and you drag it in and it does what it says it does just like it does for shortcut actions and actions from apps. I would love to be able to do that. But I guess the ultimate goal, though, right, is that you would never need a script. Yes. I mean, the scripting, you could make it that the ultimate goal is that the only time you use scripting is to build a custom action for yourself.

And then you use it. And then people don't have to do that. But if you can write a script that does that and then you use it and that people don't have to do that. But if you can write a script that does that, then you do it. But yes, the ultimate goal is you never need to reach for that. But on the Mac, I'm realizing now that there's actually probably a place for that where I could write a complex script and say, you can save things as apps out of Apple script. save this as an action. It takes an input, it generates an output, it does something, save this as an action.

And now I can give that to people and I can use it myself and I never need to look at the code. It's just another action inside shortcuts. It's just another little block to drag into the shortcut. That would be great. And I think on iOS, I never really considered it because there isn't scripting support and stuff on ios but on mac os you could do it and i think that would expand things a lot i mean apple needs to do a bunch of the stuff itself like the idea that we would write some app that says get a selection

in safari like come on apple needs to do that right? Safari needs that. And there's a broader context that Apple needs to do a better job of evangelizing user automation and shortcuts inside its team. This is the modern version of why aren't Apple's apps scriptable is why do Apple's apps not have good support? Federico talked about this.

Like there are new features in apple's apps and there's no shortcut support for them it's like if you do a new feature why is there no shortcut support focus mode big brand new feature this fall no shortcut support can't detect focus mode can't change focus mode can't trigger on when a focus mode changes it's very frustrating so there's a lot more work to do here because you can do some of that on ios though right you can't do you can do some of that on ios although not all of it and then on the mac like good luck good luck detecting there's a way to do it but you have to like read a p-list file somewhere using a script in order to figure out what focus mode you're in and you can't change it so it's it's you know i my overview of this is for something that is rightly criticized

because it's kind of half-baked the truth is enough of it is there for it to make a big difference and show the potential of the future for this technology. They just need to keep improving it. And that is making shortcuts itself better and more reliable and evangelizing within Apple. They need to have the leverage with all the other teams working on products within Apple. It needs to be clear that it's a company priority that you have to work with the shortcuts team

and put proper actions in your shortcuts whether you're the os building focus mode or whether your notes and reminders this is like a thing that you have to do to get your feature out of the door like this is just one of the parts of the the checklist if you add a new new feature to notes you need to add support for that one of the check boxes needs to be also this is implementable via a shortcut action. And you have to put the shortcut action in there. You can't just add a whole new feature to notes and say, no, you can't.

It's not scriptable. It's not accessible. It's not. And that goes across iOS and Mac, right? You just, at Apple, if you're in charge of an app like that, you can't skate away from shortcuts. You need, it's part of what you need to ship. And right now, that's just not

the case. And so that's got to change. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform to build your online presence and run your business. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace has you covered. They combine cutting edge design and world-class engineering to make it easier than ever to establish a home online and make your ideas a reality because they have everything that you need to create the beautiful and modern website that you have in your brain. You start with one of their professionally designed templates. You use drag and drop tools to make it feel like your own. You can customize the way that things look, the way that things feel,

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This comes from Henry, who says, one of the big advantages of focus modes is that they can activate automations on your devices, but the Mac doesn't have it so on ios and on ipad os you can set a focus mode and that focus mode will set off a shortcut by the personal automations thing yep but the mac doesn't have them so he's got two questions about this one do you think that they will add some kind of personal automations thing to mac os yes it doesn't it obviously they just haven't gone to it i guess they said it's a multi-year transition right i think it's yeah it's clear that mac already has all this automation technology in terms of things like when this

launches when this file is added to this folder i think it's only a matter of time before they implement that it's just not they just weren't ready yeah and this is like all of this stuff lives inside of the shortcuts app and it's like this weird mixture of shortcuts and the home app like they kind of go together um but henry also wanted to know if either of us have any ultimate like shortcuts automations on our devices like what we're using it for i do have a few oh if you'd like to hear yes so uh i have a fitness focus mode and i but i only want it to activate when i'm doing two types of workouts so if i'm uh doing strength or if i'm doing the rowing machine which is what i would tend to do one of those two then i want it to activate i don't want it to activate when the apple watch

attacks on walking or something right because then it shuts everything off right so in in shortcuts you can set that up which is not a feature that focus modes has which is so weird uh but there you go um i have uh some kind of home kit related ones where when i arrive at my studio or leave at my studio, it can adjust the lighting and the heat tank. And we also have some lighting stuff for my home. So if we're not at home, the lights go on and lights turn off at different times. That's the stuff that I have set up.

Love it. I don't have any shortcuts-based automations right now. I do have one that I run uh sometimes i actually need to check because i may do a version of it for the winter too but it's this i've talked about it before it's the idea of sensing temperature or humidity and then um running some their home automations they're not like in the shortcuts but you know running some things that adjust stuff that happens in the house but in terms of like just pure i'm running this shortcut to change my status or stuff like that uh no not yet brant wants to know is now a good time to buy an apple watch se or is it better to wait until

september for a hopefully likely apple watch se refresh i mean, look, I don't mean to sound mean, but I don't think there's ever a good time to buy the current Apple Watch SE. I do not think it is a worthwhile product for the price. I would... Honestly, if this is the watch that you want, I would recommend waiting.

Maybe they'll have a new one in September, but I don't know. Or maybe they'll get rid of the Series 3 and cut its price. Yes. Who knows? But I do not think that the Apple Watch SE is a good value. I really don't. I think it's missing a few features, like especially the always-on display.

Yeah. At that price, I don't think it's worth it. And it's a year old now, right? So there might have been a good time to buy it when it was brand new, but now it's it's like over a year old now right like it's now like 18 months or something yeah i i would wait like if you don't need it i would wait i mean alternately i would try maybe find a refurbished series four or series five as i think would be better honestly than a than a new SE. Because really, if I'm remembering right, the Apple Watch SE is like a Series 4-ish

with no always-on. And I'm not... I don't think that's worth the price. I just don't. I think it's an overpriced product for what you get from it. It wasn't very helpful at Abrants, but... Sorry. Mark was saying that we don't always promise

answers in ask upgrade well i mean you got a clear answer which is you think uh don't buy it yeah yeah fair enough wait wait or wait or pursue a refurbished um right of a model mark asks when setting up a new ipad do you prefer to restore from a current backup of your iphone so that your ipad experience mirrors your iphone do you start uh fresh from a current backup of your iphone so that your ipad experience mirrors your iphone do you start uh fresh or like and create a completely separate ipad experience or i guess if you're coming from another ipad set it up to mirror another ipad what do you do for ipads uh my ipad uh line and my iphone line are completely different and i set up new iphones based on my iphone and i set up new ipads based on my iPad. And that for me includes the iPad mini, which I set up as an iPad. I actually

regretted setting it up a blank and I went back and erased it and set it up as my iPad. Because the dock, the dock is ridiculous. But it is, but it's like, it is an iPad and the stuff I do on it is still iPad stuff. And so why would I not want my iPad stuff on it? So, um, that's putting iPhone stuff on an iPad and the stuff I do on it is still iPad stuff and so why would I not want my iPad stuff on it so um yeah that's putting iPhone stuff on an iPad I guess if it's your first iPad and you want to have it be just like your iPhone but for me the iPad and the iPhone are just completely diverged and that's how I like it yeah I recommend doing like what you did is having like, they're distinct. Yes.

Right. So like, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't set up my first iPad mirroring my iPhone. I would just set it up new. But for me, I have backups for each line. So like the mini is new. And if I get a new mini, it will come from the mini. If I get a new iPad Pro, it will come from the old iPad Pro.

Yep. Because I use them so differently. Right. That's true. It doesn't make sense to me to have all of the apps that i would use on my ipad for me it's like would if it was even possible would i set up my ipad mini as a backup from a macbook no because they're completely different to me and that's kind of how i see the difference between my ipad mini on my ipad pro like there are apps on my ip iPad pro that I do not have on my mini and never will because I don't if I don't have a keyboard and mouse for me there's no point using them on an iPad I would just use it on a Mac right like yep because the iPad mini you just like I'm not going to have big writing apps on the iPad mini like it's just not a thing that I'm going to do

because it doesn't really feel great to do that to be honest because there's no keyboard um and matthew asks do you use live photos still some okay i remember when i remember to turn it on um sometimes then i turn it off and i forget and then i just don't use it for a while and then i turn it on for some reason um the place that i have found the best thing and i know that i'm i'm stealing your thunder here because you put this in the notes document, but I swear I have the exact same feeling, which is the new memories feature in iOS 15. It uses the memory movies as part of the memories that it builds. And it's so great at unearthing. You have this photo that you like, and you may never watch the memory movie or the live photo, but all of a sudden, there it is.

And that photo that is so familiar suddenly is a short video. When that works, it's magic. You hear a laugh in the background. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that I like. You're watching the video, and it's an image that you know well,

but when you hear it, you hear people laughing, and it puts the sense of that time. I think live photos is one of the best things apple has ever added to ios like i think it is absolutely a fantastic feature that unearths joy in moments like i love swiping through my photo library and seeing things move because it immediately transports me back to like, I can actually give you an example of something that happened about 15 minutes ago. So I'm sitting here and looking outside of a window.

Right. And I just saw a Dino walk past the window and she looked at me and she waved and I got my phone out and took a picture of her cause it was funny. Right. Yeah. And now in that live photo, cause I looked at it, I waved and i got my phone out and took a picture of her because it was funny right yeah and now in that live photo because i looked at it i have her actively waving and that makes that image so much better so when i'm scrolling through in the future of this holiday i will see this moment and it's not just her of her hand up she's waving at me and like that is just amazing i love it like if i i actually found a couple of

days ago i had accidentally turned off live photos for like three days and i was so upset about it because now i have these images that don't have a live component to them i think i was messing around with photo styles those buttons are too close to each other um but i i love the feature i have so many little moments that are so much better because there's a live photo attached to them um and also like using live photos can sometimes help you improve an image because you might get an image where like two people one person is blinking with live photos you can go in and choose a new keyframe you actually might get a better image out of it yeah the um for me the definitive one is we took that photo in indianapolis that was

the selfie with the selfie flash yeah and the selfie flash i think we hadn't used before and it was super bright and so the photo there's a photo of us that's just a selfie which is fine but the live photo is us smiling having this bright light flashed in our eyes, and then you look like you are going to die because the light was so bright. Yeah, because I was not prepared for how bright the light was going to be. It's so great. And that wouldn't exist if it were not for the live photo. Exactly. So I really love this feature.

I think it's really great. And I have some problems with the new memories feature like i i think it kind of is a regression in some way but the memory movies uh are really great and they are enhanced by the live photos i was to say again like i just wished it was easier to get to the actual images that a memory movie is presenting like sometimes i just want to see show me the photos i don't necessarily want a video and also the music is so bad for me like it i know different people have had different um like uh experiences of this the music feels like i don't know who it's picking it from just pick stuff from my library yeah sometimes sometimes i think it works most times i think it doesn't

but the truth is i generally keep this is like an answer to a uh stilt talk question that hasn't been asked but i generally keep my volume on my ipad at nothing yes so i don't hear that that music at all and i only increase the volume when there's something that i actually want to hear and then i put it back down yeah me too so if you would like to send in a hashtag ask upgrade question for us to answer on the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade or you can use to answer on the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade, or you can use question mark askupgrade in the Relay FM members Discord, which you have access to if you're an Upgrade Plus subscriber. You can go to

getupgradeplus.com to sign up. But don't forget, if you're a new subscriber, you can get a 22% discount by going to giverelay.com giverelay.com Basically, the reason we did this, by the way way i don't think i mentioned it it's because the holidays are coming up if you wanted a membership and haven't

been able to get one this can be a gift that you can put on your list for somebody that you love to buy it for you so there you go go to give relay dot com uh if you i would like to thank our sponsors for this episode that is squarespace memberful and and Setapp for their support of the show. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com. He is at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. You can find me. I'm at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. And we'll be back

next time. Well, I won't, actually. I'm going to be off next week. Jason's going to be getting a guest. Surprise! Guest upgrade. He's going to be a guest next week. Next week. uh there will be another episode next week i just won't be here until then say goodbye jason snell goodbye my curly