Upgrade - 385: Millie Metre

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

Myke's back from vacation and he has a lot of follow-up for Jason about last week's show. We unveil the official Upgrade Draft championship pennant. Then we discuss the increasing reality of Apple's forthcoming headset and the company's complex relationship with China.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 385 today's show is brought to you by uni pizza ovens door dash and set up my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snow hi jason snow hi mike hurley welcome back to upgrade a podcast you host with me every week. I do. Yep. When you're not gone. There or thereabouts. I have a hashtag Snell Talk question for you that comes from Ryan.

Ryan wants to know, do you have family members that listen to your podcasts? Ryan, no. Nobody in my family listens. Actually, that's not true i have my i mean he's my brother-in-law but just to elaborate my my sister-in-law my wife's sister's husband listens to total party kill i'm not sure he listens to the incomparable but he listens to total party kill because, but he listens to Total Party Kill because he will comment about that.

It's very nice. He'll say nice things about it. I'm sure he's listening to a million D&D podcasts, but he says nice things about it. That's it. That's it. My family is not interested nor understands anything that I do.

Although I will say, as a sidelight, my in-laws, Lauren's parents, read the Six Colors newsletter every week. So every time I write something on Six Colors, I'm sort of thinking about how my mother-in-law is going to read this. So it's in there. So you got, okay, you got that part.

I had that thing where I had to try and work out wife's sister's brother. You know, like it's a brother-in-law, but it's like- No, wife's sister's husband. That's what I meant. Wife's sister's brother you know like it's a brother-in-law but it's like wife sister's husband that's what i meant wife sister's husband yeah he's a brother-in-law but it's two two marriages linked there yeah yeah interesting um only my wife adina listens to my shows i think i think my younger brother sometimes listens to this show and remaster like on occasion. Like he'll go for long stretches of time not mentioning that he ever does. And then he'll say something.

Oh, I heard you say that on such and such places. It's difficult for me to know. But I know Idina listens. But that's it for me. That's very nice of her. I think so. She listens to this show. Which I appreciate.

That's great. Hi, Adina. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to send in a Snell Talk question of your own, you can send it in over Twitter with the hashtag Snell Talk or in the RelayFM members Discord with question mark Snell Talk. I have a couple of things of note, and then we've got a lot of follow-up to get to today.

First up, the Upgradees nominations are open still go to Upgradees.vote the nominations are going to be closing on the 21st of December so if you want to get your voice heard you can go to the Upgradees you don't need to vote in every category if that's intimidating to you when you go to the voting list

you can just nominate for the things that you want and get them in and you may help us uh with the upgrades for this year yeah it's not just about um you know having your voice heard and voting it's also helping us so we appreciate the help and reminding us who we have forgotten most of what happened this year so please remind us i uh skimmed through some of the nominations so far, and it already helped me make some adjustments to my own potential pick list. So thank you to that.

It's very helpful. I've looked in there too while you were gone. I looked in there. I was assembling some lists. I was like, let's see what the listeners suggested. See, I thought... Okay, so you did a... What was it?

Like a Mac app pick? Was it a Six six colors member thing six colors no it's a for everyone it's our favorite mac apps of the year and we're gonna do we're gonna do some more lists of that and before i finished my list i went and looked at the upgrade list and made sure that i had not forgotten some things that did because it did make me wonder because i know it's one that we have struggled with in the past so i wondered if maybe you'd peaked you peaked i had it it didn't It didn't really prompt too much in that category. It did.

There were a couple other categories that were really helpful in reminding me about some iOS apps and things like, was that this year? Wow, I guess it was. I'll put it in. It was easier to come up with those lists anyway this year. There was a lot more happening this year. It was actually kind of nice. But yes, please vote in the Up upgradies and help us remember things from 2021

uh next week uh unbelievably we're going to be uh doing the upgrade holiday special um which i can't believe it's we're hurtling towards the end of the year i know get your ugly sweater ready i know so we want to do uh some holiday ask upgrade next time that's going to be our holiday special theme because I was away and we didn't really have much time to plan anything else. So we'll do a regular episode, but we'll do a double ask upgrade segment.

And so we would like your holiday questions for that. So question mark, ask upgrade in the Discord, hashtag ask upgrade on Twitter. Please send us in your holiday questions for our next ask Upgrade segment. We would appreciate it. Do you want to tell the listeners what you did? Yeah.

Okay. You make it sound a little bit like I committed a crime. I did not commit a crime. I did a nice thing. But you did do something. Well, it's not completely nice. Yeah. It's half nice, half good.

And I would say also inspired by connected so somewhat theft there um yeah so uh people who don't listen to connected what's wrong with you but you may not know that that show which is full of uh of japery and hilarity has a a contest that that i mean all it all comes around again because right we started doing the upgrade draft and then came the rickies a competition based on apple events that's different from the draft in in that it has a complicated rule set and point structure and there's a lot of adjudication and and there's a lot of things going on but really it's just a peacocking contest ultimately it is there's a lot that's that's well federico he is really interesting and competitive about that show it's hilarious anyway but out of the

rickies came the the trophy the tricky trophy which is this amazing thing that listener matt made out of wood that is and it's got like little plastic sheets and it it replicates the connected logo but it's got like little marks for where the current annual and keynote champions reside among the three of you. It's beautiful. And I got to be honest, I was jealous. I was like, why does the upgrade draft not have a similar trophy for whoever is the champion? And I was trying to think about how we could do this um because there would need to be two one for you and one for me and they would need two different states where you won the draft or

you lost the draft and i looked up at my walls where i have um so when I was a kid, I had two felt pennants, which are these little sort of triangular things that you're supposed to put on like a stick back in like, I don't know, the 70s or whatever, and wave at the sporting event with the color of your team. But I had two of them, and I had them on my walls of my house, of my room in my house as a kid. And one of them is lost to history. The other one is actually on my wall in my office. It's a, it's the San Francisco giants candlestick park pennant that I had when I was like nine and I still have it.

And then I've got another one that's the same size and shape above it. That is for the three world series of the giants one. It's great. It's fun. And I looked at it and I thought, Hey, what about a championship pennant for upgrade? But again, how do we handle the fact that one of us is the champion and the other one is not at any given time?

And then it hit me. What if I got a reversible felt pennant? And so that's what I did. I actually went, I designed it in Affinity Designer and I found a person who makes custom pennants on Etsy. And I asked her if she could do a two-sided custom pennant. It's in upgrade gray, and then on it, there is the upgrade logo on the front. And around the upgrade logo, it says upgrade draft. And then in large letters, it says champion.

And I thought, okay, that that's great what about on the other side though what's the what's the side that you know do i want to have it be like loser and i consulted with steven hackett about this we went through several different iterations loser sucks because you would have to have just the word loser on your wall until the next draft. And again, upgrade draft is a gentlemanly competition, right? So what we settled on, and I did consult with Steven on this, is the upgrade logo is upside down on the loser side. So it's pointing down to indicate sadness. But it says challenger.

So that's the optimism. It's right. You are now the challenger so that's the optimism it's right you are now the challenger there's someone's a champion someone's the challenger every time and you are the challenger so uh that's what i did and i got those and i i had one brought to you in california on your way back to london yeah And now we are both in possession with identical felt pennants of the Upgrade Draft Champion and Challenger for us to place somewhere in our workspaces in a position of honor. And then of course,

honor being gentlemanly like by flipping it over if our status changes. So that's there. You've got yours, I've got mine. And we now have the official upgrade draft trophy, which is the championship pennant. I think this is very fun. And I love that you did this and I enjoy it very much. I think you did a good job with this. I think it's a fun thing and I genuinely appreciate that it says challenger and not loser

because I might be looking at the word challenger a lot prefer that to loser yeah right i feel like it's a uh well yes of course i and i feel like that that is in the spirit of uh of the you know you you want it to be positive yeah you want it to be like come on you can any day do better so i'm looking it was back in late october that i that i worked on this with uh with steven uh the other option that i gave him actually was was it says champion on one side and on the other side it says champion but above it it says former that's also pretty good that's also and he said i think challenger is better i like the positivity like like the positivity it's the I'll get you next time kind of thing so anyway that is now on the line

for future future upgrade drafts I'm gonna hang mine behind me because I have these sound panels that go behind me on where I record from the studio and I'm they have a kind of felty texture to them so i think

just a couple of pins will hold that up really nicely it's got the little streamers on the back so you can put like a little pin in one of the streamers and then you can use a pin to like prop up the other corner and because it can't be permanently fixed unless i don't know one of us is particularly braggadocious you've got to be able to flip it. Yeah, exactly. You flip it right over and it goes from up to down. And then the great battle continues. It's very fun.

So today, I think we have a pretty follow-up heavy episode for a couple of reasons. I have a bunch of things that I wanted to attribute to last week's episode. And also, there's just been, weirdly, a lot of new news about the same things that you and Dan were talking about in last week's episode. And also there's just been, weirdly, a lot of new news about the same things that you and Dan were talking about on last week's episode. So that's funny for me when looking through what I wanted to talk about today.

I would like to thank Dan Morin for stepping in on last week's episode. It was a very fun show. I loved listening to it over the last couple of days. He hasn't done that before. I've had him on as a guest with Discovery Multi

way long, long, long ago. But since then,'t done it and it was uh it was funny having somebody who i do a podcast with every week um it was just easy to do in a way that it's i i definitely make it harder for myself and stress myself out more when i've got like a a very special guest who hasn't been on before or who who isn't a usual person I talk to, whether that was having Julia on or having Merlin and John Syracuse on at various points. Like I get worked up of like, oh, I got to do this right because this is very special and all that. And not like talking to Dan isn't special, but it's like we do it. It's just we do it. We're doing our thing. And it just, you fall into those rhythms.

And it was, so what I'm saying is it was really nice to have him on because I didn't feel any of that stress. And we just had a nice conversation. It was great. No, it was really fun. So I would like to just state that I do delete questions from our Google Sheets. Okay. So we have the Snell Talk and Ask Upgrade questions.

So one, I delete them when they're used. So I did go back into the Sheets and deleted all the questions you used and Ask Upgrade questions. So one, I delete them when they're used. So I did go back into the sheets and deleted all the questions you used. Okay, thank you. And I just straight up remove questions that we have no good answers for. So every week I review the new stuff that's come in and remove the stuff that we use,

remove the stuff that I don't think we can use. And I leave things in there. There are questions that I have gone back to like six months, a year after they've been asked. One day, I'll need them. And sometimes I get questions that came in too late, but they could be used in a year from now. So, you know, they're all in there. I have a plan. So for people wondering, oh, are all the questions left the bad questions no the bad questions are deleted it does it did look like you had a uh a limit it looked like there were not questions before a certain date uh see this was a thing that happened so the snell talk questions they're all in there the ask upgrade questions at one point I decided that I

was going to use this system because previously I wasn't deleting anything and then at a certain point I was like all right I need to start deleting these because it's taking too long to load and so I just went to a certain point I deleted all of the questions and I just kept everything and started filtering from there the beginning of 2020 2020, it looks like, for Ask Upgrade. Snell Talk, indeed, the oldest question was from Graham in April of 2017 that I answered last week. And I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to delete that one right now. Because that was a fine question. There was nothing wrong with Graham's question.

I just hadn't gone through it. Asking me for my favorite law of physics, that's never going to get old. That's a nevergreen question. Yeah, now it's done. Okay. All right. And I also have some comments on the Ask Upgrade questions

that were asked in the last six episodes. So I just want to say, I literally never look in the Ask Upgrade or Snell Talk spreadsheets because I want to be surprised. And so I legitimately didn't know the answer when it was asked about how old they were. And that episode yesterday or last

week was very much me finding this out with the listener what was in those spreadsheets so you were talking about trackpads yes and i'm a trackpad person but i did just want to for people that are not trackpad people because you were talking about um mouse mices recommended a mouse yeah yeah i wanted to recommend what I think is the best mouse available for most people, which is the Logitech MX Master 3. This is the mouse that I use, and I love this mouse.

But what I wanted to just suggest when I make this recommendation is that people do not buy the version that is called Logitech MX Master for Mac. Don't buy that one because it's just Bluetooth. You want to buy the regular one, the MX Master for Mac. Don't buy that one because it's just Bluetooth. You want to buy the regular one, the MX Master 3, because then you get the choice of either Bluetooth

or the receiver that Logitech make. And I recommend using the receiver. The receiver is more reliable than Bluetooth, I find, especially with the original M1 max it was a nightmare uh with bluetooth but if you're using a unifying receiver it wasn't a problem but i think the little unifying receiver is better but it also has bluetooth in it but the one they sell for the mac doesn't and i don't know why because logitech make the software for the Mac for the unifying receiver. So I don't know why the Mac one

has no receiver, but that's just the way that they do it. But that's why I wanted to recommend the Logitech MX Master 3 because I think it's my favorite mouse. It's a very good mouse. I have two printers. They are both Epson printers.

Is one at the house and one at the office yes but the one at the studio is the only reason I wanted to mention it the one at the studio is an A3 printer and it's massive it is the WF7840 by Epson so if I remember my grey videos

correctly A3 is twice the size of A4, which is sort of your version of our letter paper. Wait, yeah, A4 is letter paper, yes. And WF8470 is for A3, which is, no, 7840. I'm horrifically jet lagged at the moment. So I'm reading things incorrectly, which is kind of hilarious. I just read four numbers in the exact wrong order. Oh, okay. So an A3 printer though,

that's what we would call probably tabloid size. This is actually the size of my college newspaper. It's in the US tabloid sizes, I think 11 by 17. Yours is basically 11 three quarters. For those who are not in UK paper sizes, 11 three quarters inches by the paper sizes are not uk paper sizes they are international okay whatever just so you know you

know i just want to make this isn't this isn't a me problem 297 millimeters by 420 millimeters for those using the foreign concept of the uk concept of a millimeter millimeter sounds like a character in a kids tv show oh yeah about the metric system yes hey everybody it's millimeter millie you've grown several inches actually i've grown centimeters that's good That's how that goes. Okay. So yeah, I have two printers. One's a really big one. And I have tap to click on, we spoke about this before. I use both. I'm primarily an actual click person, if you'd call it that.

I don't know what the phrase would be, but I like to have a tap to click as a fallback. But I did think Dan was really weird about like I tap to click for certain tasks because I don't feel like i'm committing i found that that i was like that is a really weird thing to say so sometimes you want to click a little bit less and for that you tapped you tap to click instead i don't want to fully commit like a half click it's like a half click it's maybe it'll be a click and like i said in

that segment about how i i discovered when using nonApple trackpads that I have all sorts of these gestures, which, again, I have built up over decades and didn't realize I was doing until I was called to consider it by the fact that suddenly nothing was working right. And I had to, like, take a video of my hands on the trackpad and discovered that old PowerBook design decisions still affect how I use a trackpad to this day. It's only at that point that I realized that my fingers are doing lots of weird things on the trackpad. And that's probably why I don't like tap to click is because my fingers are probably tapping in various places that the standard trackpad with tap to click turn off ignores, but that tap-to-click recognizes, and that's why I have to turn off tap-to-click. So thus concludes my comments on last week's episode.

Well, thank you. And you seem to enjoy it. Do you have a little out-of-body experience when upgrade happens and you're not on it? It is weird. I mean, it's weirder for another reason, but that's an Ask Upgrade question for later on in the show today. All right.

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Yes. And at one point during our trip, we were moving around a bit. We got to, we stayed in LA. And we got there pretty late from the u.s yes and at one point during our trip we're moving around a bit uh we got to we stayed in la and we got there pretty late in the evening and we didn't want to go out to eat so i thought i know what i can do i opened the ads on upgrade the popular program before i've heard them and so i opened up the doordash app i looked about for what was around and we just wanted something simple and so we just were able to order in some cheeseburgers and some fries and some chicken nuggets very easily from DoorDash. And it just arrived in, like, minutes. It was so good.

So when you get cheeseburgers, fries, and chicken nuggets, are you getting it from, like, popular fast food restaurants? Or was there, like, a nicer, higher quality place that you got them from? It was a popular fast food restaurant. Popular fast food restaurant. All right. Well, see, that shows you how many different options you have on DoorDash. You could have gone for like the Burger Bistro. Could have.

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Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. So a friend of the show, Ming-Chi Kuo, had a couple of reports about the Apple headset. This is what I've decided to just call this from now on rather than saying the Apple AR, VR, like just Apple headset that will work for us for the time being. So a couple of reports, one suggesting that the tracking of hand gestures and movements

is going to be the primary interaction method for this device, with four sets of 3D sensors to be used to detect this. In total, Apple will detect, quote from Ichikawa, gesture control, object detection, as well as eye tracking iris recognition voice control skin detection express detect expression detection and spatial and spatial detection i don't like skin detection is there skin here oh i'm not 100 sure what skin detection means it means that if you're a skeleton you can't use this locked out sorry not for me locked out um i so i have a an oculus quest 2 and they added some

gesture controls i think it's called meta quest now i saw an ad for this is it yeah i think they dropped the oculus brand and they now call it the MetaQuest. Okay, great. Well, that's not what I bought. I didn't buy something with Meta in the name. I'm Oculus, damn it! Whatever. But what has struck me about it, I mean, it wasn't initially designed

with this hand detection in mind, and it is kind of janky. Like, the hand tracking on the controllers is really good and then they kind of added in this hand detection so you can not use the controllers and just sort of like move your hand in the virtual space and you see it and you can you know tap with you know your index finger and your thumb to select things and all of that. And it doesn't work very well. But I will say this. That has given me a window into Apple talking about gesture control

and hand gestures and movements being the primary interaction method. And I get it. I actually do get it, especially if this is not something that they want to outfit everybody with little hand controls, but they want to just, you put it on and then you just wave your actual hands. And so I can see this. This is actually really important and I think could be a key to having it be more usable by more people is if you could do that well so that it seems very natural to just move

your hands around to select things and do all of that. And I'm not going to make the quest seem bad because it does it poorly. I think that it was added to the quest. It was not initially part of the concept. And it's nice that they added it and are trying it out. But I expect that a next generation headset from meta would be uh better at it and i expect that apple um that's one of the reasons apple is doing this so i think it's a good thing having having being having been impressed by the controllers that the quest has they're very good

they're very good um i love those but there is but there is something more natural about using your hands it's just got to work right and the meta stuff uh honestly when you've got those hand controllers and then you put them down and you then you pick up your hands and you try to do things you're like oh i'm just gonna pick up the hand controllers they're perfect but if apple could do that level or close to that level yep um with its headset i think that would be a winner yeah like i've used the hand detection on my quest as well and there is that thing where like you oh you know you just look down at your hands and move your fingers and they move and that's very impressive right like and and you're

right like they they put this feature in i don't think they built the device for this feature and i would expect that the next one would be more built for this because it is clearly the best possible thing you could do right for this type of hardware i would imagine that for for certain games and things like it will be much something to hold on better to do something and it's got some very detailed kind of controllery kind of things um i get that right i mean there but there are a lot of games that are just mimicking hand movements in some certain way you know what i was trying to think is like thinking about playing beat saber with just my hands and on the quest you can't do that but uh if if you had that uh kind of hand and arm tracking so good that you could do

the same level of precision, but just with your hands, that would be pretty great. So yeah, this product is starting. I mean, there's more information that we're going to get to in a second here, but this product is starting to come into focus. And will it be a huge hit no um but it's a first step and it having used that quest i'm i'm interested i'm i'm interested it a lot of it's going to come down to the software and to the apps but um i i don't know i i think there's something there one thing i would be interested in is if Meta would put Beat Saber on Apple's device.

I don't know. Is that their game? They bought Beat Saber, yeah. It didn't used to be, but they bought it. They've bought up a bunch of studios that make the best games. Basically all of the best Oculus games Facebook, now Meta, bought them.

Interesting. I don't know whether they will work with a competing platform or not. Like, do they see it as an opportunity for their software to be in front of more people and that generally improving the experience of AR and VR everywhere? Or are they going to keep that to themselves?

I would say that if they keep that to themselves, somebody else will create a Beat Saber-like yeah beat saber exists on the playstation system but it predated right the acquisition i mean and there is like you know there's precedent for it like minecraft owned by microsoft is still available everywhere but at the same time uh microsoft bought bethesda and they're not putting um new games on anything outside of their own platforms so right you know who knows i honestly i don't know what the what the right answer would be there i mean i can't see it i mean they would like make a lot of money but i don't know if that's core to their strategy right like. Because Beat Saber is one of the killer apps for the Oculus.

Exactly. And that's why you buy an Oculus. And if they do a new version of the headset where you just have to hold your hand like a fist and do Beat Saber and it works great, then that's going to be another reason to get a Quest instead of whatever this Apple thing is. But again, I think Apple's going to take advantage of the fact that there are

all of these iPhone games and they're going to get iPhone game developers to, you know, add in, you know, 3D, 3D layer and support for, for, you know, hand controllers or whatever you call them and, and get a bunch of stuff too. And the question is will there be killer apps in there and is somebody going to make a something that's like beat saber or another rhythm game that's similar that has you moving your body that will solve this but beat saber is really good for people who haven't played it like i've got i don't give away some of my nominees for the upgrade ease but i've got a couple oculus quest things that i'm going to

mention because they're really they're really fun and I've had a Quest for the last year, so I've enjoyed those. I would hope that Apple would be smart enough to work with some of their Apple Arcade game developers to produce VR experiences. Oh, yeah. Apple Arcade VR would be good. And I'm reminded by James Thompson, our dear friend, friend of the show, dear friend of the show in the in the discord right now we know james will be there right james is going to be there there'll be you'll be able to roll dice or flip coins in virtual reality on day one i predict i just want to have a really big calculator and just like punch the buttons oh can you imagine like a calculator that's like like uh you gotta run around on it

to press and jump to press the buttons or something? It's like a giant calculator. Like the keyboard in Big. Yes, exactly. That's what I was thinking. It's like that keyboard in Big. You got to jump around on the calculator in order to calculate things. And then the tape, the tape on it is actual like tape, paper tape that just keeps growing and spooling out. And if you want to clear it, you've got to walk up to it and you've got to rip it off. Rip it off. There you go, James. Easy. Now all you've got to do is make it.

Solved. So Ming-Chi Kuo had a second report. It was mostly talking about the second generation of this device, but it did mention that the first generation device is expected to weigh 300 to 400 grams, which is heavy. That's kind of like in AirPods Max territory.

But it all depends, as we know of these things, on the balance and the way that the device is weighted. Like, weight doesn't really mean anything. The Oculus Quest 2 is 500 grams, so it would actually be lighter than the Quest 2, which is good. I'm also going to say, and I don't mean to

demean Oculus slash Meta because I know that they sweat this stuff too but I would hope that Apple would have done a lot of work on the ergonomics of this thing so that it isn't like painful to put it on your face. I hope so too. I mean

there are ways to make this stuff really comfortable. I think the most comfortable that I've used is the PSVR. That feels good to wear. Yeah, the Quest is okay. I had to buy the comfort strap for it because it comes with the discomfort strap. The comfort strap is very similar to the PSVR where it's anchoring it on the back of your head,

not on the front of your face. Exactly. It's kind of a must buy for the quest so yeah i'm hoping that they'll be better about it but talking about a second generation of this though like that that really does lock it in as that this is this is really happening that they've already designed the first generation one that we'll see next year and they've moved on to Generation 2, right? They're designing the 2023 headset now. If not beyond. I know everyone talks about the headset as like, oh, it's just a precursor

to glasses. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think they'll make two types of product. Because, you know, I really know there's a lot said about this, but who knows how it's going to play out but this idea of the metaverse is being pushed on by basically all of the major tech companies now so you know you might not like the sound of it you might think it's weird but they're really going to try and make it happen and everyone's trying

i think that the way i look at this and i think this is the way they're looking at it too is that the glasses thing is the obvious end result of this product march but you've got to start it's like um but there's always going to be things that wouldn't work with glasses right like they're not going to be immersive or at least not anytime soon i would say it's like um the pc universe where there was pcs and then much later there were laptops and then much later there were smartphones like it takes time and you have to iterate you can't just jump to the end product because i think glasses that just go on your face and that can be all of those things is something that will probably be accomplished but you got you got to start way before there and then iterate. And especially if you're Apple, right? That's what Apple does,

is start at an early space where they think there's a viable product, and then they just iterate and iterate and iterate. And so this is like that. I think that this is something where there will be AR glasses that regular people will wear, but it might not be for five years, 10 years, 15 years. We don't know and you got to start somewhere i think it's interesting that the the second quo report says that these products will seamlessly switch between ar and vr um again talking about the quest the quest has this mode second one and this is the second one right one yeah okay so again you see the advancement here so it's ar but what does that mean well the quest has a mode where you tap it a couple of

times and it uses its cameras to show you what's around you which is cool but it's like grainy black and white yeah um and it's really just sort of there because you don't want to take the headset off and you need to find something um but i look at that and i think about the rumors about these high quality screens and all the cameras and all the sensors. And I think, you know, maybe there's a shutter there that flips open, but probably it's just going to, the AR mode is just, it uses its cameras to show you what's around you. And that's how we augment reality is we don't show you reality. We show you our camera's view of reality and then lay things over it. So, you know, but this is it, right? That's going to be the iteration is the first one's going to be heavy. The second one will

be a little bit lighter and be better at AR and, and then they'll just kind of progress. And I think they have to, I think the whole Apple glasses thing, like that's the dream, but it's going to take them. We've, we've just seen this recently with the Apple watch, right? You got to take time to iterate. The first Apple watch was big and slow and the app story wasn't very good, but they got there in the end and it took a while. And that's, that's what's going to happen with this. That first one is going to blow us away in some ways and make us shake our

head in other ways. But that is, and a lot of people who kind of don't follow Apple that closely miss this, but you know, that's the starting gun of the of the race for apple then they then they begin iterating so the second generation headset will be coming in 2024 and it will have a lighter design new battery system and a faster processor right so that that thing about the arvr was in the report of the second one um i actually i think

i misspoke it is also intended for the first one so i can't envision apple not doing what what the quest has at the very least right and probably better than that which is i'm really viewing this as being this first generation apple headset will probably be comparable to the Quest 3, right? A newer version that may or may not exist, I assume will exist at some point here, where it's better than what we've got. And so the grainy black and white, it's like,

that's nice, but it's really not that nice. It should be better than that. And I'm sure Apple will make that better. Even if it remains to be seen whether people actually use it in that mode for for very much it is nice when you've got something covering your eyes to be able to see what's around you uh that's a it's good it's a good thing yeah there's a there's rumors of a quest pro ah probably similar-ish to that like

they're gonna make an expensive version right because we obviously know Apple's is going to be expensive. Whatever it's going to be. I remain intrigued. As I've said before, the idea of just pure AR glasses, that doesn't excite me. But I do like VR

experiences, so that excites me a little bit more. I'm still not 100% sure about this idea of having a computer in my eyes all the time. Yeah. But I remain curious. Sure. All right. So one of the things that you and Dan also spoke about last week was Apple's lack of some features that we are expecting to come this year. Announced and yet not yet in existence. Exactly. So the release candidate of Monterey 12.1 has come out.

I think there's been two of them now. And it does not include universal control. So I think it's pretty set. We're not going to get universal control this year. It's probably going to come next year. This 12.1 release candidate does include some fixes for the way that the notch behaves on the new macbook pro so there was some weirdness with some menu bar items um and some uh menus getting hidden behind the notch or doing and like or like covering each

other up uh and this version explicitly calls that out as something that they're fixing. Oh, iOS 15.2 is rolling out right now as we're recording. Breaking news. So we can assume that... All the finals are coming out. It's all happening. It's all happening. That's good because I want that macro toggle

on my iPhone. I wanted to say about something that I hope that 12.1 will fix for me. I've been having really weird Wi-Fi connectivity issues on my MacBook Pro, and it's something that I've only really noticed as I've that 12.1 will fix for me. I've been having really weird Wi-Fi connectivity issues on my MacBook Pro. And it's something that I've only really noticed as I've been traveling because I've been connecting to new Wi-Fi networks.

But there are times where my MacBook Pro just cannot find any Wi-Fi networks as if none exist. And I have to turn Wi-Fi on and off like multiple times before they show up. It's very strange. And it's not a bug that I've come across because I'm in fixed connections all the time, right? Like that's the entire time I've had this MacBook Pro.

I've not been going to new places. But every time I need to connect to a brand new Wi-Fi network, it's really been struggling to find them. Weird. Well, you'll have to report back. I will. I will let you know. On 12.1. i uh i'm reminded you talked about like fixing the way the notch behaves and all that it's like i can't check any

of this out because there are no longer any uh notched macs in my house i sent back my review unit of the macbook pro um last week last fr Friday. And I used it as an opportunity to test out a live streaming setup. Yes. Okay. I gave you credit. You suggested that it might be a smart thing for me to do these occasionally.

And I think you're right. When I've got products that are interesting that people might want to see see that I could do that. And so, yeah, I tested it out last week with an irony-laden concept, which was the reboxing video. So I went live to put my MacBook Pro review unit to wipe it using the new features in Monterey to erase all on a device. And then I closed it up and I packed it up in its box and I put it in the box that it came in and taped it closed and put the label on. And that was my live stream. And then I went to FedEx's website, which I didn't do on the live stream, and they came and got it like an hour later.

So it's gone. But if people want to watch a guy put a MacBook Pro back in a box, there's a video for that on the internet. You streamed on YouTube, right? I did. I did. I did. Steven and I had a conversation, Steven Hackett, obviously,

about your embrace of Twitch, which is great, but you really need to embrace Twitch because Twitch is its own culture. And I think Steven and I both agreed, probably more work than we wanted to. So YouTube is there and it's easy and I already do it for Total Party Kill. And I don't really want to have to learn

all there is to know about Twitch, especially when I'm not sure how much I'm going to do this. So I'm just going to do YouTube. It's very easy. I think it makes sense for the two of you, if you're going to stream to stream on YouTube. Like, it's just, you know, that's just more of a thing that the two of you are in.

Going on to Twitch, you've got like a whole set of things that it does. However, YouTube is slowly ripping those things off so maybe it's gonna come for you anyway excellent like all of the different ways that people can give money and stuff like that if i want to support the stream youtube is slowly incorporating all of these things so maybe it's going to come for you you don't even know it that's fine that's that's fair but it was in order to get this going, it was making some decisions about what was I comfortable committing to.

And I already have live stream setups for Total Party Kill for YouTube. And so it was very easy. And I can stream to Twitch too, and maybe I will someday. But right now, I think YouTube, and I already have subscribers on the Six Colors YouTube channel. That's what makes it a good reason to do it and like it's for steven tickles plus as well like i think for the two of you like youtube is still a going concern for your businesses yeah so this is an easy way to like have more content on the youtube channel as well so i do think it's smart i think it makes sense so i did go out and buy a uh an overhead camera

and um some other all the stuff that has to come with that and all that but i think it makes sense. So I did go out and buy an overhead camera and some other, all the stuff that has to come with that and all that. But I think it worked pretty well. I think it looked pretty good. Having a modern camera that I bought just for the overhead instead of repurposing some crappy camera helped a lot. What camera did you get? Oh, the Sony Alpha 6400. That's what I got. Yeah. It's great. That's what Steven has too. Yeah. Yeah yeah if you have problems with it overheating i can help you out thank you because i just had

to deal with that myself but no i'm really pleased that you're doing this so this came up on our uh keyboard club stream that we did right where i kind of was always i've wondered for a while that there is nobody that gets review units does live streams of them, like trying them out on embargo day. And then it's because it's a busy day for everyone. There's a reason. Yeah.

And there's a big reason that people who are super video savvy are making their videos. They're not doing live streams. They're making their videos. And they want you to watch the video. And the writers are writing their articles. But there's probably a place in there,

and I mentioned this on the live stream, but especially if you're somebody who doesn't get it on embargo, although sometimes even then, but when you don't get it on embargo, what you end up with is you end up with a product that nobody else has except the reviewers. Because the embargo dropped

and all the reviews posted on Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning, and then the product comes out Friday. And you're sitting there thinking, well, I can write a review, but it'll be really quick and I'll be competing with reviews that people had a week to write it. So that's not good. So what do I do? And the answer may be, well, I could do a live stream and then people could see it and ask me questions. And it would be a product that I have that they don't't have so i would be able to show it to them and that might be a little place to fill so i'm gonna experiment it'll be fun i did have to take the upgrade champion pennant off my wall before i did the live stream so that nobody saw it because

we hadn't mentioned it yet that would just seem like you were really proud of yourself. Yeah, exactly. Like you made yourself a pennant. I mean, you kind of did. That did happen. It's worse if I don't have one, right? Like if I have one, then it's fine. We're on a level playing field here,

but it just is like, here's me congratulating myself on my great wins. We can now do some follow-up for previous episodes that were not last week, because there's been some news in the last week that i think has been uh interesting and wanted enough note so according to bloomberg via mac rumors apple have lost three key engineers on their car project so they have lost the chief for radar systems the engineering manager for the battery team and a hardware engineering manager which makes for a total of six key departures from the team in 2021 and they're largely leaving to two different flying taxi startups that doesn't even seem real to me that phrase flying taxi startups

that seems like a joke like somebody made that up well i i you know i made a joke on twitter about this i said like what do you think is more likely the apple car or flying taxis but i think the truth is that if you're somebody who's working in this field and you're really excited um flying taxi thing they've got investment money so you know you're you're probably going to get paid or at least get some uh stock options and so there's maybe a chance of that as well as excitement like well i have a question actually yes what is a flying taxi is it a car that can fly or is it just a plane you take short distances taxi or not taxi or not which one is it? Do you know? I mean, it's a flying device. It's like a flying, it's like a plane, except also like a helicopter.

But yeah. No, the idea is it flies to you when you get in, and then it flies to your destination and you get out. Wow. I'm looking at the website. Archer, it's called. Yeah. There's a couple of them, but yeah.

It looks scary. Itcher, it's called. Yeah. There's a couple of them, but yeah. It looks scary. It looks like a spy plane. Yeah, well, I'm really skeptical if this thing is going to ever, these things are actually going to ever exist. But anyway, if you're well compensated and you've got the challenge of doing something that's really cool because it's not just a car, it's a flying car, flying thing, that's awesome.

Okay. But Apple, it seems to be, you know, wherever Apple's project is now, it's probably a little more mundane. And they may also be bogged down. And so I can see people saying, I'm leaving because it's a better job or more prestigious or more money or something like that. That all said, if I had to make a bet about which one would be a viable commercial product in the next five years, the Apple car or a flying taxi, I'm going with the Apple car. I can't believe it. I can't believe there's something out there that I feel like is even less likely than the Apple car. But flying taxis, I've read articles about them i think it's really interesting but no no the ninth circuit court of appeals has given apple the stay that they were looking for this was on the um alternate

payment processing thing from the epic case uh so apple have not had to make the changes to the app store rules as of yet to allow for third-party payment processing and the appeal process that the stay is in kind of conjunction with on the original ruling is going to take about a year and apple are not going to be compelled to make any changes until the appeals process is over the appeals process will now most likely go in apple's favor so it's probably the end of that unless they do something of their own which i still i'm holding out hope for right and there are other other countries and other venues where you might see something there but this is the uh the stay of that decision that was you know gonna make apple make some changes and apple

basically said oh no we can't make changes and uh the ninth circuit has said fair enough we'll we'll stay this while we uh consider it and and uh i i shared this link with you while you were on your vacation and i believe your response was boo yeah so i just i just want to see them moving in this direction and they're not moving themselves and now none of the judicial processes are moving them either i just think that we've gone on too long in this and it's just frustrating to me apple should make some changes yeah but well it's not going to do it because of that one judge in this one case. That seems certain. I also have a couple of Apple TV Plus upstream headlines.

Don't want to go over. Just a couple of things. Apple Studios is going to produce and distribute the film Adaptation of Bad Blood, the book about the rise and fall of Theranos. And it will star Jennifer Lawrence as Elizabeth Holmes, with Adam McKay writing and directing. This is part of Adam McKay's first look with Deal with Apple.

That they got this. He's got a movie actually just out I believe but this is... December 24th I think on Netflix. Is that a Netflix movie? Is that the one you're talking about? The one with Leonardo DiCaprio? Yes. Yeah that's out on... I think it comes out in December.

Well, it's playing in theaters now. Ah, okay. Sorry. Sorry. Yes. Because they do the thing, right? Where they put it out first. So it's out now, but it will be coming to Netflix.

That's a Netflix movie. So this is interesting. It's part of his first deal with Apple. This is interesting. It's part of his first deal with Apple. And I saw somebody on Twitter joke that Apple is finally making its own Steve Jobs movie because, of course, Elizabeth Holmes sort of fancied herself as a Steve Jobs-esque figure. But of course, she's on trial now and it all went horribly wrong so jennifer lawrence good casting i think you do really well in this role i think i'm pretty excited for this movie to be honest yeah uh jonah hill will be playing grateful dead's jerry garcia in a martin scorsese biopic produced by apple studios um there's a lot of names there's a lot going on in that one jerry garcia martin scorsese well martin scorsese understands that era of music um he we think of him as making like crime movies

and things like that but he also did what the last waltz um which is considered the greatest uh rock movie or one of the greatest rock movies ever you know vinyl too right the tv show yeah so that's definitely i think an aspect of scorsese that doesn't get enough attention and that he may be um you know i i'm i'm not that interested in the grateful dead to be perfectly honest but i think this is an interesting project and i people have opinions about jonah hill as jerry garcia but like you know people had opinions about Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison too, and that turned out okay. So we'll see. What do people not like about Jonah Hill as Jerry Garcia?

I don't know. I think there are a lot of Grateful Dead people who just think that Jerry Garcia is sort of a saintly special figure and that Jonah Hill is just that that guy from those movies yeah see yeah okay I mean Jonah Hill has put in some incredible performances like if people just think of him as the super bad guy I you know I think oh I agree it's it's almost like thinking oh Adam McKay just makes stupid movies right which he now doesn't do it's the discourse it's people getting upset and that's gonna happen but you But, you know, we'll see the final thing. But I think Scorsese wanting to do a biopic of Jerry Garcia is interesting. That's an interesting move for him.

And Invasion has been renewed for season two. Have you watched any of that yet? Nope. No, neither have I. I will. I've been told it's good, but start slow. So I kind of decided I would let it run and then we can we can binge the whole thing i have so many shows that i have not even cracked because there's just so much going i haven't yeah

i haven't seen the i've been the shrink next door yet either and i haven't really wanted to see that i just haven't gone around to it yet i haven't either and i have i have so many uh homeworks for the incomparable too on top of that plus there's the stuff that i watch for for fun pleasure plus then i watch get back which is six hours i haven't seen that yet but i i desperately want to watch it that's that's that's something i've really been enjoying the dexter show the the dexter season like i don't know if you have watched dexter i watched the first few seasons of dexter yes okay and then i got to the bad one yeah there's a good one after that but i got to the bad one and we gave up and that was that yeah the the the it's called dexter is it called new blood i think it's called it's really good like if you're a fan

of the show uh thorough recommendation it's like it's so good i want them to do more of it but i think they were just going to do it as one season and leave it at that but like it's really really good I've really been enjoying that so there you go this episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Uni Pizza Ovens the world's number one pizza oven company they make surprisingly small

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ooni.com and use the code upgrade fm21 to get yourself 10% off thanks Our thanks to Uni Pizza Ovens for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. So the Information have published a pretty large report about Apple, Tim Cook, and their relationship with the Chinese government. And there's a bunch of stuff in this report that is basically collecting up a lot of things that we've heard about before and expanding on them about Apple's relationship with China. a lot of things that we've heard about before and expanding on them about Apple's relationship with China. But the report hinges on a new piece of information that back in 2016, Cook signed an agreement with officials in the Chinese government that promised they would invest, Apple would invest more than $275 billion into the country over a five-year period through various means.

Now, I want to give a couple of pieces of information from the report, and then we can talk about it. So, Cook secretly visited China many times to make this deal. Secretly is like, I think, you know, people could know he was in China, but not knowing what it was about, right? Was maybe going for visits, but was also meeting with officials. And this was after there were threats made against some of Apple's services continuing to be offered in the country.

The agreement was drafted between Apple and China's National Development and Reform Commission to formally agree on a set of concessions Apple would make in return for some regulatory exemptions. The agreement included pledges from Apple to improve technological advancements

in Chinese manufacturing, support training of high-quality Chinese talent to use more Chinese components, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate with Chinese universities, directly invest in Chinese companies, and assist with Chinese government causes. Apple's $1 billion investment in the ride-hailing company Didi

was a part of this deal, which finally gives us an answer for this perplexing deal that they did in 2016. And Apple has lobbied with international governments on issues that could impact China. Great, great piece. Really well reported. Wayne Ma, if you don't have the information, I think you can sign up, give them your email address, and they'll give you this as a sample. And then they'll send you lots of emails about how you should pay. Not a lot of money for the information uh but it's a really great report by wayne ma

um couldn't be more impressed with the detail of it and despite the you know the secret seems all titillating like a secret 275 billion dollar deal i feel like this is a really good portrait of the level i i like to mention that uh what is it the new york times story uh from during the trump administration when um when they referred to tim cook as uh an ambassador to china right because he was so connected. This is about diplomacy and about give and take. Any portrayal of this that you

see that suggests that it's all of the ways that Apple does the bidding of the Chinese government has missed the point because this is much more complicated than that. This is Apple navigating what it means to be in business in China as an American company. And it's complicated, right? And you could say, and I know some people

say, well, the option Apple has is to just walk away from the Chinese market. And they could, although that would be really hard. And they have so much manufacturing in China that would then be in jeopardy and that could jeopardize their whole company. But Apple has actually gone the other way and integrated itself even more in terms of sales and support and all sorts of other things in the Chinese market. They're not just using China as a manufacturing hub. They're, I think, the leading phone maker this year in China.

So what does that entail? And the other thing you get out of the article is very much that this is a two-way street. Like China benefits from having this international brand be a player in China and work with the Chinese government and follow its rules. So you're never going to win an argument with somebody who says the Chinese government is terrible. You should never deal with them. You should just not be involved in China at all. I think that's unrealistic.

But if you've got a view like that, then OK. I mean, that's obviously Apple has chosen not to do that. But this gets into the details of like, and it's nitty gritty stuff. This is not a story of Apple being told what to do and doing it. This is a story of Apple being told what to do and not doing it and feeling the pain and doing something different and Apple being told to do something else and saying, well, this is not something we can do and working in other directions in order to never have to do that thing. And the one example that I thought was an amazing, and this may change, especially

after this article came out, but an amazing detail that we hadn't heard before is we know that Apple had to move, it had to have its iCloud servers in China in a data center owned by a Chinese company. That was a law in China. And if you're in, Apple has always said, if you're in a country, you got to follow their laws. That's just how it is. you're in, Apple has always said, if you're in a country, you got to follow their laws. That's just how it is. We've assumed that because they're in the data centers, that that means that the Chinese government, or at least the Chinese corporation that will do what the government says, has access to the encryption keys for those iCloud accounts. This report says that's not the case, that Apple has managed to

hold on to the encryption keys of its customers in China. It doesn't necessarily mean anything because if the Chinese government says, I need you to decrypt this thing, then they probably would have to do it because it's probably the law in China. But I thought that was an interesting little detail of Apple trying to negotiate a level that they're comfortable with and that the Chinese government is comfortable with. And it is a two-way street. And there are sometimes functionaries in certain parts of China that say, we want you to do this thing. And Apple's looking around like, is this the Chinese government or is it that guy who wants us to do this thing? Or is it that guy who wants us to do this thing?

And then like working their political connections in other parts of China or at a higher level in order to get some of that stuff kind of swept off the board or they look the other way. Just fascinating detail. This is a huge, huge complex. I mean, this really is like international relations, essentially, between this enormous corporate entity and this enormous government entity. And so I guess my takeaway from this, number one, is anybody who simplifies the Apple-China relationship is doing it a disservice because it's way more complicated. And you really need to portray it as being an incredibly complex series of concessions and

investments and give and take. It's definitely not the case that you can just roll on into China and do whatever you want and pay your taxes and be done with it. The Chinese government has some very particular things they want you to do, which is why Apple is putting money into various things in China.

But Apple has also gotten back, like the best example in the article is um the u.s and and other countries in the west have basically made huawei persona non grata china's homegrown top-ranked smartphone company which seemed to have been a move that was surely like just to spite china like there's no well there's there's some feeling that i mean it's purely a feeling though like about about yeah i don't know the details there is there are accusations that that huawei was doing some bad stuff but it's never been proven it would have been very easy and this article points this out for china to retaliate by making things hard for Apple in China because haha take

that Americans who ruined our phone maker we're going to ruin yours and it didn't happen and this article suggests that one of the reasons it didn't happen is because Apple has made a lot of effort to be connected to the powers that be in China and it's an intertwined relationship that would not be the easy retaliatory move because it would hurt China as much maybe as it would hurt the US. And so they didn't do it. And that's the value that Apple gets out of that. So I don't know. Again, you got to look through the lens of how you feel about China, and that's going to be how you're going to feel. I take away from this most of all that this is exactly, or even more,

as complicated a relationship, as difficult a relationship as you might expect. There's a lot of moving parts and a lot of effort and a lot of people at Apple who have worked very hard to navigate all of the constraints of this particular market. And Apple does this with the European Union too, right? And Apple does this with the US government too. It's not just China. China's challenges are unique, but it's not like big companies like this don't need to have all sorts of ways that they navigate the rules required by them. Or in Russia is a good example, right, where they navigated that. You must install these apps and got to a place where they got put up a screen that says, here are some apps, which is not what the law was initially supposed to be.

But somehow they made that happen. So, you know, this is they do it everywhere. It's just that China is this enormous market that Tim Cook has been focused on. And yeah, can't say enough good things about Wayne Ma's article because it really does paint a detailed picture of just how complicated this whole thing is. Yes, like I've been saying for a long time, like Tim Cook is basically one of the most powerful people on the planet, like more powerful than world leaders of many countries. people on the planet like more powerful than world leaders of many countries i mean it depends on how you uh how you determine power but i mean yeah i i think we do live in a world where corporations are incredibly powerful and apple is one of those corporations they have huge resources and huge influence and that's why i liked that new york times story saying that he's kind of the u.s

ambassador especially at a point when the relations were very very uh very negative very bad between uh the u.s administration and china yep um and this is yeah i mean how is how is this not the portrayal of a head of state essentially well he acts like one i mean in a way that i think makes sense. But like, you know, like every possible holiday around the planet, right? Like public holiday in every culture around the globe, Tim Cook will wish people, you know. He's got a tweet for it. Happy whatever on that day, you know, like in a way that the CEO of a company doesn't need to do, right? Like there is not, I don't believe, an expectation on the CEO of a public company to wish, you know, like happy whatever

on whatever day it might be, right? But he does it or it's done for him in a way that feels interesting. I'll tell you, I came away from this piece feeling a little uncomfortable for one reason, right? So, you know, I've said this so many times on this show that people need to understand that Apple is the biggest company in the world

and does things that the biggest company in the world will do, which is this kind of stuff, right? But I think people like to believe that Apple doesn't do these kinds of things because they love Apple and think that Apple is above everything, you know, like is above big company stuff. But the idea of a CEO of a company

doing some kind of secret backdoor deal with a government makes complete sense in my mind. The thing that I don't like about this is Apple have never said anything about this. And if it was the US, they wouldn't stop talking about it. Well, if they did this deal with the US government, there would be 25 PR posts talking about it. They'd have websites created to it. But because it's China, they don't say it. And that annoys me.

I guess what I would say to that is that i think some of this stuff they do say they say it in china like that there are events in china and they appear and it gets on the news in china and it's part of the the the feel-good message to whatever country you're in possibly but apple tell the whole world about their u.s stuff that's true that's not how china works i know but like but you know like why not yeah why not say like we have invested 275 billion dollars into the chinese economy why not say that you know like but they won't and i know why they won't yeah that's what annoys me about it yeah you know and and and again i i think there are a lot of legitimate reasons to dislike the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. I get it.

I totally get it. At the same time, it's one thing to have your personal beliefs, and it's another thing when you're the person in charge of a giant profit making corporation. And this is the path that Tim Cook has decided to walk. I think that in some ways he's been validated in his approach because there was a time when the consensus was you put companies from the West into China and it changes china and the truth is it did change china in one way which is chinese society is more egalitarian than it used to be there's a much larger middle class than there used to be um and they have a form of capitalism and private property and things that a a traditional communist country would not have right and they become an economic engine but there was this other fantasy

that the existence of uh countries from the west in china was going to make it a free country uh politically and that hasn't happened uh Quite the opposite, in fact. It's become less so and more authoritarian over time recently. And now they have a leader who's basically a president for life if he wants to be. So the question then is, well, do you do business there or not? And you can walk away away i think apple's argument would be what does walking away get anybody and that apple apple feels like it can be it's beneficial for apple as a company and it's also beneficial for uh the people in china uh and that they think it's you might as well be in in the in the game if you're going to be in the game be in every country and uh and participate in how they uh in how they do business i totally see the other

argument which is you can't you can't and you got to walk away i think the truth is apple was so entwined with china in terms of manufacturing that was going to be really hard to walk away. And so Tim Cook was like, well, we're going to do the other one then. We're going to make close ties so they can't walk away from us and we can't walk away from them. And also, just going to say it, Tim Cook is the CEO of a big profit-seeking company and there's a lot of money to be made in China. And that's one of his decisions. And you can like that or dislike that, but I think that that is clearly part of it too. And so this is not just Apple too, right? There's a lot of pressure right now on the International Olympic Committee, which is about to have the Winter Olympics in China.

The women's tennis tour just canceled all their events in China because one of their tennis players made a sexual assault allegation against a former high-ranking part of the Chinese government. And then she basically disappeared. And then when she reappeared, it was in staged videos that said, I'm fine, but nobody believes that she's actually fine. And so the one group has basically said, we're out of China because we can't guarantee the safety of our members. And yet you look at the IOC and the IOC said, did you see that video where she said she was fine? Everything's great because they're about to do an event in China and they're tightly tied to China. It's complicated and everybody's going to make different decisions.

And I think if you want to say Apple is wrong to play ball with China in any way, I think that's a perfectly valid opinion. I think what's great about this article is you can see all the consequences of them playing ball in China. For good and for ill, it lays it all out. It's hard and complicated. And it's a path that Tim Cook has decided to walk. And as we've discussed several times on this podcast, at this point, it would be impossible for them to unwind this relationship. It really would. Because at this point, Apple's so much more intertwined that if they were to walk away, I think there would be

even more retaliation against Apple. And as we've said, Apple kind of doesn't have a plan B for its entire manufacturing process. And maybe it's trying to build one in the background, but for right now, Apple can't get out of China. It just can't because it makes its products in China. And it's just too tightly tied. And I would call that a liability. I would say that you always want to have, you don't want to have some piece of the puzzle. It's the Steve Jobs thing, right? Like if it's something important, you shouldn't just have to rely on someone else for it. Well, Apple is kind of relying on China for this major part of their business and that's that may be one of the motivating factors in them doing all of this to connect with china is it makes it almost impossible

for china to kick apple out and that's good because apple has no plan b for a lot of what it manufactures and it's not just the manufacturing because it's not they want to sell them there too because it's the biggest market yeah they want to make money but i i would say that there are two things going on here there's do you participate in the market and there's are you using china to make your stuff and if you're just using china to make your stuff and not participating in the market i feel like you're just using China to make your stuff and not participating in the market, I feel like you're more open to retaliation. You don't have those tight ties. So it would be easier for China to threaten Apple's supply chain.

And I think that's the choice that Tim Cook made is, no, we're going to make tighter ties and we're going to get into that huge market. And it's going to make us money, but it's also going to tie us to China. The problem is that their manufacturing base still is tied to China. And as we saw during some of the days in COVID, like when the Chinese factories shut down, it's like, well, Apple doesn't have a plan B for this. So maybe they want to work on that in the background over the next decade. We'll see. 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 that you need. And that means having

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A couple that I'll mention, Bartender, CleanShot X. These are just great apps that I use every single day on my Macs. And honestly, for the subscription fee, it's worth it for just those two. But there's hundreds of applications that you can check out for yourself. It's more convenient. It's also great value because instead of paying for hundreds or even thousands of dollars for separate licenses, there's just one flat monthly fee. New apps are added to Setapp regularly. Updates are free, and all the apps are their full featured pro versions. You don't get a watered down version, which is really great. Head over to setapp.com slash upgradefm to try

Setapp free for a week. If you like it, pay just $9.99 per month at setapp.com slash upgrade. It's just $9.99 a month and you get access to all these wonderful applications. Our thanks to Setapp for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's finish up with some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Did you like Dan's lasers, by the way? I did like Dan's lasers. He did some

lasers. It was fun. They were different, but they were good. They were. They were space spy lasers, which is the best kind. Probably kind probably tim asks in reviewing e-readers do you go into great detail about the advantages of buttons to turn the page versus swiping and tapping on the screens what are your thoughts on scrolling instead of page turning uh well on e on e-ink scrolling is not an option i had that android um based e-ink reader the books nova air that i tried and it since it's running android apps you could scroll and it's e-ink is just not no it's a bad interface for scrolling it gets it's super weird like it's really built for page turns in general like if like if I'm reading on a phone,

I prefer page turns when I'm reading a book to swiping. And I don't know, cause I swipe through, I'm scrolling through Twitter and stuff like that. And I'm used to that scrolling through timelines. But the truth is even there, I mostly scroll up a page or thereabouts and then read down. For reading, like reading a novel where I know that I'm literally going on forever and I'm just keeping on scrolling, like I don't want to do that.

I would much rather be at rest and then read the whole page and then tap or swipe to see the next page. That's just, I prefer that as a way to read especially long things um versus kind of internally scrolling i have no opinion opinions no okay that's fine uh marg asks how many christmas cards you usually send out oh uh we are ordering we just did this yesterday we are ordering like 140 or something like that wow we have a spreadsheet with everybody's addresses in it and then and then we send those out so yeah it's about 140 i think that we are ordering so we do like 30 or 40 okay and we only do this because we have so many american friends like the idea of sending christmas cards to everyone you know not so much of a thing in the uk maybe to like family but outside of that it doesn't really happen um like you know like if

i wouldn't send and had never sent a christmas card to any of my friends and their families before i started getting on the christmas card lists any of my friends and their families before i started getting on the christmas card lists of american friends then we start sending them out to everyone and now some of my uk-based family friends or like friends and like my uk-based friends get cards so like i will send a card to james thompson and saskia this year, like I do every year. Well, this is the other thing I wanted to get to in a second, but only because James is used to getting them from Americans and therefore has also sent, right? So now the people, like the families living in the UK

that also have American friends also get cards because we're all sending them out anyway. I have our spreadsheet here, 135 entries, 134 because there's a header row. 134 entries. That is a big list. So what I wanted to say and ask a secondary question of you and maybe the Upgradients. We're really late this year because we've been traveling.

Because in other years, what we have done is we've made them. Acadena has made a card and we get the card made. We've used Moo a bunch of times in the UK to do that. And then we write the cards and send them. This year a bunch of times in the UK to do that. And then we write the cards and send them. This year, we do not have the time to do that. And I know that some people, some of my friends, they use like a service to make the card and they don't personalize the card

and they just send them to a bunch of people. So I want to know if you have a recommendation for a service like that because we don't have the time otherwise. Well, first off, I'm going to extol the virtues of the Happy New Year card. We're going with the Happy New Year card this year. Yeah, that's what we're going to do. Like, happy holidays and a happy new year.

That's what we're going with. Yeah, we're just going straight to happy new year. And then in the U.S., I actually use Paper Culture, which does ship internationally. And you can upload a a context file and they will yeah they will mail it out and so you can make you know you can make a card with a with a message you could even potentially depending on whether they let you put an image you could even like sign it but not personalize it uh i think we are going to do a postcard so it's going to have a picture on the front a postcard so it's going to have a picture

on the front and on the back it's going to have some text saying what we did this year and happy new year um and you can use their surface uh paper culture anyway use their service to have them mail it out or you can just have them mail you a box and then you can get the stamps but for your for your contacts in the u.s the very least, that might be a way to do it because then they're just mailing in the US from the US and you never have to deal with it. So that's the one that I use. I'm sure there are lots of them out there, but I've been pretty happy with the quality and they have a bunch of templates that are pre-made.

So you can find one that you like. But they send international too, though. They will from the US. Yes. Oh, amazing. Yeah. I mean, that's what we'll do. I mean, because we would send international from the UK.s yes oh amazing yeah i mean that's what we'll do i mean because we would send international from the uk so if anything this would be cheaper i guess i'm saying

that you you might want to if depending on your balance you might want to make a paper culture order to the u.s and then find a place in the uk and do a different order in the uk um but that's up to you but yes because it might be a little funny for international shipping for your card to James in Saskia. That's up to you. But anyway, I use that and it's good. This year we're not having them mail it. We are going to mail those ourselves.

We've saved a step, I guess, or we've made an extra step for ourselves. They'll watch us here and then we'll mail them out. You've saved them a step. I've saved them a step. It is cheaper if you mail it yourself, but then you've got to mail it yourself so that's it means that you can sign them right but some some years we have not done that some years we've very much like no no just mail them out we don't want to get it back ryan asks jason when you do buy a like when sorry when do you buy a book and when do you check out a book from the library? What's the difference for you?

So many book questions after last week. We spoke about books for a while. My strategy these days, since I've really gotten into using the Libby app and Overdrive to check out books from my library, is when I see a book I want, I check and see if it's at the library. And if it's at the library

and it's not a book that I need to read right this very minute, I just put it on my library holds list and it will come up and be part of the delightful surprise about, oh, look, a book is available. And it's fun to have the random books come off the library stack. If it's a book that is not available at the library or as an e-book or I want it and I want it now, I'll buy it. I don't have a problem buying e-books, but I'm trying to be a little more disciplined of saying,

do I need to buy this or is this at the library? And if it's at the library, I'll just check it out from the library. That makes perfect sense. Ryan asks, can focus modes change what is in your dock? Like it can change what home screen is active no it cannot nope no it cannot because all it's doing a nice feature right seems like that would be a good feature yeah maybe i mean yes it would be

but all it's doing is it's not like changing anything about the phone right like it's just changing what home screen is visible right in the way that like if you swipe between home screens it doesn't change what's in your dock because the dock is fixed right i guess what i was would say is that though that this is maybe what the mac equivalent could be of of a focus mode change is like first off the mac just needs a some way to automate based on focus mode change right like in the system it would be nice if the system included some things that you could do just like it does on ios and it doesn't do that and maybe that would be um the dock what's in the dock

or maybe so you get different docks for different statuses or maybe it would show or hide the dock or or maybe it would just be you can run a script or a shortcut oh i see so you're saying like on the mac the dock is like the home screen me right i mean it sort of is interesting unless you're using like launchpad or something anyway uh yeah that was my thought was that the dock could be sort of what the home screen is on ios i don't know if it is i don't know if people would actually want that or not um and maybe apple looked at that and said no that's not something we want to do but the my my greater frustration is that there's no way to do big changes like that when focus modes change on the mac and that's a mistake they need to fix that yeah that'd be interesting but yes uh

ryan you cannot change what is in the dock on your iOS device via a focus mode change. It's just what's on the home screens. Greg wants to know, final question today, why does Jason have a different version of the theme song than Mike does? Well, Greg, first off, thanks for

noticing. Second, Greg is not a member, an Upgrade Plus member, because for noticing second greg is not a member uh an upgrade plus member because the upgrade version for members had the regular theme song i think that's how i did it no i have fun that was the opposite you had the the whole like uh synth version in upgrade plus oh okay so greg is a member well then thank you for your support, Greg. You got the bonus, and regular listeners did not.

So I did... I have fun when I edit Upgrade because it happens so rarely, and although there is a version of the theme song file that Mike uses every week, we also have our complete version of the theme song, and we have the first version of the theme song that Chris Breen did did for us which had an

electric guitar sound and i asked for it to be replaced with a uh a synth synthesizer sound instead um because i thought it was more beepy boopy 80s kind of sound but we have both and so i often use the other one because i think it's fun that there's this variation that never gets played and that i can throw it in there um editing last week's show was interesting because it was you know we now do two versions of the show and so i actually called mike at some point or i sent a slack message to mike who was getting massaged at the time and so that did not answer my question you were not you did not you did not receive the bat signal from your location being relaxed in hawaii so i had to just deal with this myself so basically what i did is i created a mega version

turns out this is what you do a mega version of the show that has all the ads and all the extras and save that and then i made two versions from there and delete the ads and and keep the extras in one version what i do in logic so i yeah i do the whole thing right ads with the the all of the plus content all chaptered right the whole thing then i go to file save copy as well like you can duplicate as or something like that there is in logic there is an option to like create take this but give it a different name yes and so i do that and then i call that one plus then i remove the plus content from what is the standard show bounce that out then i go to the one call plus

remove the ads bring it all together so probably similar to what you did yeah so what i did is i used the electric guitar version in the plus version which i built first and uh then i came over to the regular version and i deleted all the intro stuff. And I got to the music and I thought, I'm just going to use the regular intro here. For why? I don't know. I just decided maybe I deleted the electric guitar and I thought, well, okay, I got to put it back. I'll just use it.

I don't always ape the exact timing of how you do it. No, I was disappointed. In both versions, the timing is a little bit different. I was disappointed in where you start it's funny because i actually know how you do it i just didn't want to do it this time you also didn't bring the volume of the music down to a level that i would bring it down to yeah talking we all have our own ways the problem with that the intro that you've got is you've got an intro that like fades and all that but it doesn't fade enough so you still have to manually fade it it's anyway oh yeah i have

manual manually faded like yeah yeah right see so the answer is i could and there are episodes that i've edited where i uh including sometimes where mike is on the episode but he can't edit it for some reason and i usually make those identical to the way mike does it it's just that i kind of like it when it's different and weird and that was an episode with dan instead of me and me instead of mike and so it was from the moment we started it's clearly not the usual upgrade and so at that point i feel like okay well then i'm gonna i'm not gonna even try to make it sound exactly like upgrade because it's clearly not the usual upgrade. And so at that point, I feel like, okay, well, then I'm not going to even try to make it sound exactly like Upgrade because it's not.

It's a weird episode of Upgrade. It's Jason Upgrade. That is the version of why that theme song changes and it's a little bit different just because, I don't know, it's fun. So when something like that is going on, you know you're in for something special. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show next week, send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade or question mark askupgrade. And remember, we are looking for extra holiday themed questions for next week's episode. So whatever it might be holiday related,

send it in and we will answer it. Don't forget to go to upgradies.vote to get your vote in go to upgradies.vote to get your vote in uh for the upgradies um and uh don't forget about giving the gift of relay if you or someone you know wants to join relay fm for the next year now is a great time to do so because until december 17th just a few more days all of our annual plans are 22 off for new subscribers go to give relay.com to learn more and set up your gift. Thank you to everybody that does sign up normally

or has signed up. You should go there, but if you want to join monthly, you can go to GetUpgradePlus.com and do that. Let me tell you about one more show here on RelayFM before we leave, and that is Automators. If you like this show, there's a good chance you'll love Automators because if you want to make your devices do more for you, you can join David

Sparks and Rosemary Orchard at relay.fm slash automators or search for automators wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade and we'll be back next time. Thank you to Setapp, Ooni and DoorDash for their support of this show. Until next week, say goodbye, Jason Snell.

Goodbye, Mike Hurley.