Upgrade - 403: This Episode is Forbidden

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

This week we're imagining the right and wrong improvements for the Apple Watch, speculating about the first wave of M2 Macs, lamenting Apple's process for replacing a defective product, and buzzing (in a bad way) about CNN+.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 403 today's show is brought to you by squarespace capital one and doppler my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike uh 403 forbidden okay this episode is forbidden it is forbidden by web servers i don't remember if we spoke about this on the show or not but obviously next week's 404 right yeah episode 404 it's big and get ready for 420 because man oh we're gonna blaze that one oh man also 403 the uh area code of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. So hi. Shout out to Calgarians. The first time we had a episode 404, I was very nervous.

Yeah, you thought you were going to break the internet with your 404? I was just worried that the episode would not publish, but it went through perfectly fine. Yeah, Mike, but you know, technically that's like saying, don't do an episode 13. It's bad luck. This wasn't a bad luck thing. This was a legitimately can our website handle this thing? No, but it's the same level, though. It's literally the same level.

It's like saying if I publish episode 420, will I be arrested? It's like, no. They're not related. The flow of if you can put emoji in your titles, you can have an episode 404 and it'll be okay. But I get the trepidation. Like I said, I bet there's a podcast out there that won't do an episode 13. Just skip right over it because they're superstitious. Could be.

Anyway, shout out to Calgary and also forbidden. I have a hashtag Snell Talk question for you, which maybe some people would have wanted for this so far. Mark's question is, do you use the skip intro button? Do I use the skip intro button? Okay, so our friend Todd Vizzieri. I put this question in specifically to trigger Todd Vizzieri. Yeah. Because I knew it would.

Todd, you know, the original question was going to be about what bottled iced tea i like and unfortunately i don't drink bottled iced tea so i have no preferences because i literally don't drink it my daughter drinks arizona iced tea but i don't drink iced tea that i don't make myself answer the question that you asked me not to put in the show i know now it's much more interesting because now it's it's that we've replaced that question with this question that will bother Todd. Because Todd, you know, works in the business and thinks that you should watch the intros and you should watch the credits. And my answer is not going to please Todd. Because if it is a long credit sequence that I know by heart, I skip it. Unless I love it.

I mean, I guess that is what it comes down to is if i love it i will watch it because i love getting in the mood that the intro sets to me but honestly there are some intros that are just boring or um or i don't like them i find them unpleasant and i skip those because i will watch them all once i have a i have a policy new season of a show you watch the skip it you watch the opening credits one time you watch straight through intro you watch the skip intro button come and go see what i did there come and go and you just keep going through it but after that if it does not please you to i i skip it yeah so with some of them i skip and some of them i don't it really does depend on whether i find

them the disturbing in a bad way or whether they i feel like they're a great there are definitely intros that i'd never skip and then there are ones where i'm like yeah i don't need to see that again i know what i know what you're doing there and it goes on because streaming series have no rigid time constraints remember broadcast started not doing opening credit sequences. They started doing like just showing the credits over the beginning of the show or like famously Frasier. See, I'm getting back into Todd's good graces now. Frasier just had like the shortest theme song ever at the beginning

where they just showed the Seattle skyline and went do-do-do-do-do-do-do and that was it. And then they also had a banging final credit song that you couldn't miss. They did. Absolutely. But it was over the end credits. And but now with streaming, you just have endless amount of time. So people make these minute long opening credit sequences.

And unless they vary from week to week, like Game of Thrones did that. And that was kind of fun because we would always watch the Game of Thrones credit sequence because it would tell you like what the settings were for that episode. But like a lot of these things that are on streaming now, they just have very long opening credit sequences because no one cares. It's why not make it as long as you like. It doesn't matter. And some of them are boring. So the answer is, Mark, I don't drink bottled iced tea.

Oh, wait. I do occasionally judiciously use the skip intro button. Todd Vaziri, please forgive me. At least I mentioned Frasier. And MASH, I guess. Todd and I both love MASH, so I'll throw that in there too. So he forgives me. Yeah, I will watch the credits if the credits are good.

If you want me to watch them, make them good. You know what I mean? Both the intro and the credits are good if you want me to watch them make them good you know what i mean both the intro and the credit opening credits final like so like uh ted lasso watch it peacemaker loved it just every single time more of it sure right uh severance incredible just you know so if you if you want me to watch it do a good job of it you know yeah and and have it not be it can be beautiful but if it's boring that like, do I want to take that ride again? Does it set the mood? Do I want to take that ride again? Or is it like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.

I get it. And sometimes, you know, it's boring and you just got to skip it. That's just how it is. Look, I know people worked on it, right? I know that. I know. I know. I actually like it when the skip intro button takes you to

the writer and director credits at the end because those vary from episode to episode and i like to see who the writers and the director on the episode are but i don't need to see like literally i don't need to see every executive producer on the show every week i don't i'm sorry i i don't and it's got to be a mixture for me of song and intro, because I love the opening credits theme for Mad Men, but the intro animation is one of the most boring ever committed to film.

So it's like, you've got to find the balance, right? You've got to do both. There are a lot of rules. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnowTalk or use question mark SnowTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. You'd put in our document, Jason, that you had some follow up on CNN+. I do.

I do. We talked about this a lot on Downstream. Very fine podcast. You should check out if you care about the sort of upstream things that we talk about here. That's the podcast all about that with me and julia alexander um i did sign up for cnn plus for a month just to try it out because we talked about it so much on downstream and i'll leave my it's a misgu i get why they did it but it's a misguided kind of misexecuted i think and probably doomed thing that'll get rolled into hbo max probably some point. But what I wanted to point out here, because I thought it was funny, is that in addition to the fact that it's a news product without a linear news channel streaming, they can't put CNN on because CNN has carriage agreements with cable and satellite providers, and they make a lot of money because every single cable and satellite TV subscriber,

some percentage of their or some amount out of their bill goes in the pockets of CNN. And so you can't, if they took it to streaming, it would, I think, violate their contracts or they'd lose all their money. So they can't do that. But they didn't create like a CNN plus parallel stream, which I find infuriating. Cause that's one of the things you want from news is let me turn on the news and you know, it's pricing is a little bit weird and it's getting launched during the

merger of Warner media with discovery, which has just happened now. So there's the new Warner brothers discovery. Are they going to want to keep it separate? Are they going to merge everything into HBO Max? Who owns CNN Plus then? CNN Plus is owned by

CNN was owned by Warner Media, which is now Yeah, it was, they bought all of Turner Broadcasting, which includes TBS, TNT. Oh, okay. Right, and they moved all of that inside to network. of Turner Broadcasting, which includes TBS, TNT. Oh, okay. Right?

And so they moved all of that inside Cartoon Network. And so now it's all part of Warner Brothers Discovery. And so there's a lot of things about it that are kind of bumpy in terms of its launch. And they launched with a catalog of their docu-series that CNN ran on Sunday nights. So Anthony Bourdain or like Stanley Tucci going to Italy, like all that stuff is there. And then they've got some daily shows, but it's very much like after Wolf Blitzer does two hours on CNN,

he does a half hour show on CNN Plus that you can watch live, but it's just archived. And, you know, I've got lots of, there are lots of things about it that are complicated and weird and i get why they're doing it because you don't want to miss the streaming bonanza with your brand but you're also preventing going all in on streaming because you can't move your cash cow which is the cnn cable product off and so what do you do and the

answer is they're kind of doing a little bit of a little bit, but not fully committing to it. And it's like, I think they're falling in this uncanny valley between fully committing and just saying we're going to milk the existing thing until it dies. an interview with Jason Sudeikis about Ted Lasso with Rex Chapman, who was a basketball player who is now popular on Twitter and they gave him a show on CNN+. Can I just say,

I cannot stand Rex Chapman's Twitter account. I feel like I see retweets to this account all the time and I've muted the account because a lot of the time it's just like low effort content that for some reason goes really viral. Yeah, that's his whole Twitter stream is low effort content that he didn't create that goes viral.

I'm sorry if I've upset, if I've said this is one of those like counsel me for my controversial take kind of moments. But like it does my head in. No, it's just as bad as some of these other accounts that are like super 70s sports. Like Barstool and stuff like that is what it feels like to me. There are lots of garbage Twitter accounts and a lot of things with low quality content or just viral content that's getting passed through. And Rex Chapman is one of those. I also muted Rex Chapman at some point because I didn't want to see that stuff. I love how in sync we are about these kinds of things.

We are always in sync. So anyway, he's got a show and he interviewed jason sudeikis and like jason sudeikis played basketball in kansas and rex chapman played basketball and then was in the nba and um okay so i'm like all right i'm gonna watch this because it's a jason sudeikis interview it's on cnn plus i have cnn plus and this is all i just want to say as a podcaster their entire interview is in the bar that basically is the inspiration for the bar. It's the bar in Ted Lasso. It's in Richmond.

It's the bar in Ted Lasso, right? That's where they're doing the interview. Actual bar, actual pub in London, right? There's a hum in the background of the entire interview like the whole interview they're talking to each other in the background you hear he just it just keeps going and i had that moment where i thought is this me is it something did i do something wrong and then i realized they would cut away from the bar interview and the hum would be gone and they go back to the bar interview and the hum would be there and now you know you're not if you're not a podcaster you're thinking to yourself well obviously what

happened is that there was some device that was keeping the beer cold or who knows what that was uh throwing out a hum in the background in the bar and what are you gonna do um you're not gonna throw away your interview with jason sudeika so you're gonna use it and you're not going to throw away your interview with Jason Sudeikis so you're going to use it and you're just going to have to grit your teeth around the fact that there's a there's a hum except that there's like a piece of software for a couple hundred dollars that that I own and that I think you own and that lots of other podcasters we know own that is a very simple hum removal plug-in that will can, you can do it either automatically or you can zero in on the frequency and it will take it out and everything else will sound perfectly normal and you will no longer have going in the background. And it was just a moment where

I thought, God, CNN plus can't even get their productions production, right? Like they can't even, they can't even do this, right? If they're putting on a half hour episode of a show with an extended like 15 minute long 20 minute long interview with a star and nobody said could we remove the awful background hum from the interview i mean i don't know why it wasn't thought about beforehand i mean you're in the pub clearly they took charge of the pub for the night, right? Because you can't just like have a pub, like, oh, we're just doing an interview in here. Like you can't,

because that's an uncontrollable environment, right? It's like, I just don't understand how they couldn't have fixed it. And in the chat room, people are saying like, you can buy iZotope RX, the base model for $30 right now. It's like, yeah, you know what? I think CNN plus could probably afford isotope Rx professional even right like which has even more impressive plugins but like

a basic broadband hum removal is like table stakes and again I know it's a little thing that I'm picking on there but like nobody at CNN plus said there's something wrong here. We've blown our interview with this star because the sound is crappy. Like was nobody in. I just I don't know. Anyway, it made me laugh because it's such a troubled launch for CNN Plus. And I watched the whole Jason Sudeikis interview. But I also just shook my head throughout the whole thing because I can't not hear that hum in the background and wonder why did nobody make any effort to get the background hum out? Because it's like, I've seen this on other things too. There are other TV shows

that occasionally I'll see where there's something and I'll think, oh, you've got a serious buzz on that microphone that nobody fixed. But at the highest levels, you don't usually because people fix that stuff. And this wasn't live. This was recorded. So they had ample opportunity to fix it. Anyway, I don't want to beat them to death, but it's really unprofessional and bad. And CNN is bad and should feel bad. CNN Plus is bad and should feel bad. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. You can stand out with a beautiful website,

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Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of this show and all of RelayFM. Saddle up, Jason Snell. Yeehaw. We're heading down. It's time for a rumor roundup. Alrighty. And the sheriff's back with a couple of reports that we want to talk about this week. Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple is currently working

on a variety of new health features for upcoming Apple Watch models. This is spread out over the next couple of years. Some of this stuff's been mentioned in the past and some stuff we have a little bit more detail on. So Apple has been working on a blood pressure monitor for the Apple Watch, and it has hit complications during their process so far, meaning it is likely to be unavailable until at least 2024.

Accuracy has been Apple's big issue. Now, I will mention here, the first time I ever heard about this, I'm like, is it like an Apple Watch band that contracts? How is that going to work? It isn't as reliable as that. This is not how the blood pressure stuff would be monitored. Samsung have a watch currently for sale that does blood pressure monitoring. currently for sale that does blood pressure monitoring and they use uh sensors like the heartbeat stuff to give an approximation of your blood pressure i i have to wonder and this goes

for some of these other things here is you have to use the lens of like what can be done in a fixed position on a wrist and what can't be done. And, and I feel like I'd love that Apple is investigating this stuff, but some of this stuff, I think the answer is going to be, you probably need a different device that talks to your iPhone or your Apple watch and does the work for you because some of this stuff is not going to be good enough on a little thing that's parked on the back of your wrist i i just feel like um they should investigate this stuff but some of the stuff is just not going to be

good enough um and that you'd be you'd be better off with a an accessory also the fact is not everybody needs all of this stuff like it's great that you've got heartbeat tracking and all of that but like if you can't make it work um or you can't make it work without lots and lots of effort, the advantage of having a separate sensor is that a separate sensor can be bought by the people who need it and nobody else. Like, I've got a smart blood pressure cuff that talks to an app that will log my blood pressure in the health app, right? But it's a separate product and it's a blood pressure cuff and you put it on and you press the button and it takes your blood pressure in the health app, right? But it's a separate product and it's a blood pressure cuff and you put it on and you press the button and it takes your blood pressure and like it's made to do that

and it's accurate. Whereas whatever this is, it's just sort of like, what's the best we could guess based on our position on the back of somebody's wrist? And I don't know, a lot of this stuff I I think, falls aside.

It is worth just mentioning that the Samsung thing requires calibration with an external... I'm not saying this makes it work, but just so I can give the full information as people don't know. You have to calibrate it and you have to update that calibration over time. And then it's using sensors.

But I think that you are hitting on the point which it's which what mark german is talking about there is an accuracy issue with the blood pressure stuff that apple is clearly struggling with i would say personally i don't know if this is something the apple watch needs because i as you said i don't know how you could make this something that you could rely on right because if you could look anything that they can build into an apple watch that is reliable the brilliance of it is it's monitoring you all the time when you wear it you don't have to remember to run these things this is the brilliance of tracking your heart rate is it just does it.

And it can track your blood oxygen with the newer models. And it just does it. And that means that if you have something weird going on with your heart or if it detects something weird going on, you can be alerted for it. Now, the ECG that they've got is less useful because you actually have to run it. And, of course, it has its own limitations, but it's like a utility add-on that you have to be actively doing, which is still nice because it's in the footprint of the watch, but it's not as good as the stuff that just runs in the background. And so, yeah, if you could accurately measure blood pressure so that without doing anything, you've got a record of your blood pressure at

various points throughout the day for weeks on end to send to your doctor and say, here's how I'm doing with my blood pressure. Great. But if it's an estimate and they can't make claims in certain countries and all this, like, that's where I think don't do it. Like, if it is not, the bar needs to be fairly high. Like if it is not, the bar needs to be fairly high. And like if you can't get over it, don't say you sort of can sort of tell blood pressure. Like you shouldn't do that. You should instead make an effort or make an external device to do that if you want, if you're really so great.

But, you know, Apple's mostly relied on third parties. And this goes for blood glucose too, right? This is something else that they're apparently working on a non-invasive blood sugar monitoring system. And again, if you can do it, that's miraculous, right? If you can monitor somebody's blood sugar from the back of the wrist and it actually will

be useful to... Life-changing. Especially diabetics, right? But people who are pre-diabetic or warned and say your blood rush your blood sugar levels are actually high and you should see your doctor like that's all great but it needs to be across the line if it's just a sort of like this blood sugar measurement is for entertainment purposes only like no no that's not no don't do that so i appreciate that this is hard stuff, but also we get these reports

about Apple Watch sensors every year. And I think maybe what's going on in the background is Apple really does have a whole list of things that they're like, what could we fit in the watch? And they come up to a bunch of them and think this isn't good enough. And even the blood oxygen is arguable, right? Like you can buy a $15 thing

that you put on your fingertip that is accurate blood oxygen. The thing on the Apple Watch, like, is arguable, right? Like, you can buy a $15 thing that you put on your fingertip that is accurate blood oxygen. The thing on the Apple Watch is like, don't make any claims. And also, like, just to close out the loop on the blood sugar monitoring thing, this is something that's still apparently several years away. They have no target for it. In the interim, the company is looking at improved support for third-party glucose meters for the watch and the iPhone's health app, which is a smart thing to do.

I think, you know, you're saying about these sensors. I think it's pretty clear now that they've hit a wall as to what they can realistically do in the near term for censoring, right? Right. Maybe there will be breakthroughs in terms of censors. I'm sure there will be in the future. Geography, I think, is just a seriously limiting factor is the geography. And again, we have that theory about what if you have a watch band that is actually contracting and doing blood pressure. But also, you could have a watch band. The watch band contracting and doing blood pressure. But also you could have a

watch band. The watch band is territory that they own. They could have a special watch band with more sensors in it that talk to the watch. And maybe they'll get there if that's the limiting factor. But I think the truth is that even with that whole ring around your wrist as a surface for the geography of these sensors, there's a lot of stuff that you're just never going to be able to measure that way. And if they want to have breakthroughs, what they need to do is make the watch and the phone the center of this kind of constellation of devices. And so if you've got high blood pressure, maybe you have a different thing that you wear that monitors your blood pressure throughout the day and talks to your watch and talks to your phone. And that would be

great. And obviously, if you need to monitor your blood sugar, you've probably got a monitor for that and you want it to be really well integrated into the ecosystem. Not everything's going to fit inside that Apple watch. And that's okay, right? In fact, what I'm saying here is what I don't want is sort of a half-assed sensor that doesn't do anything that is there so Apple can make a very light claim that is not really a claim because they can't legally make a claim, but they have the sensor and isn't that nice? It's like, I have no time for that. There's no point in entertainment sensors, right? Like, if they don't work, leave them out and work on your infrastructure. This is where the wheels fell off with the blood oxygen sensor yeah like all the previous i mean this was my you know again long-time listeners

have heard me make this point and complain a bunch of times but every other sensor they've added to the apple watch they were talking about what it could do you know they would they would give the asterisks where they would give them but they would talk about what they believed it could do and they've followed up as well over the years with you know look at all these lives we've saved and the blood oxygen sensor was kind of like yeah you know yeah like well you know that's kind and it was such a strange thing for isn't it fun to have a number yeah okay great no i mean when you think about look at it write it down whatever you like enjoy uh the the. I think the life-changing things that have happened with the Apple Watch in terms of health are just the active tracking. That's one of them.

And the active tracking and prodding and saying, close your rings and stuff like that. The heart rate stuff is good because it is a fitness tracker at that point. And I use that. And it compiles some data over time that I find very useful in terms of like, are you getting better with your fitness or worse with your fitness and like i like all of that that has had a positive impact on my life um so so i would say the heart rate sensor does make sense um and like things like fall detection are great right even the hearing detection it's a usable thing right and it gives it tells you clearly this will damage you. It's not great.

Good to know. Speaking of which, another thing that we've talked about is AirPods. That's another piece. If I talk about the geography of these sensors, there have been rumors that Apple has experimented with health sensors in AirPods. has experimented with health sensors and AirPods. And I have the same thought about that, which is like, if you can measure something better on the inside of the ear than you can on the wrist, or even as good, because not everybody has an Apple Watch, then yeah, you should totally do it. If you can't, and you can't find a reason, maybe find a third party that sells an armband that I could wear every day that will take my blood pressure or whatever, right? You could do that. But yeah, performative sensors, entertainment sensors,

just not, Apple needs to just stay away from that. And I think they know that. I think what happened with the blood oxygen thing is that they really thought it was going to be more than that. And they weren't allowed to say it was more than that so they're sort of stuck with it as it is so one temperature one sensor i've just given it away one sense that we might get this year would be a body temperature um with the initial focus being on fertility fertility planning uh as the right focus for that and this ties in with Apple have some software-focused things that they're working on as well this year. One is improvements to women's health, as well as sleep, atrial fibrillation detection, and medication management, as well as continued work on the fitness tracking in general. I know who have talked about how they're either they're older or their their parents who are older have gotten Apple watches And you know, my mom has an Apple watch now and one of the reasons is the fall detection I want her to not only if she takes a fall for it to be able to call for help

But I want her if she's got if she's mobility limited to be able to use the Apple watch To call me or whatever right even if she hasn't had a fall, if she's somewhere and she can't get to her phone and she's got her watch on her, that's great. This pill management, like, I'm so excited. I mean, my mom has a, has a, an alarm on her, hand me down for me, a little canister lady that tells her to take her pills. lady that tells her to take her pills. But I love the idea of the Apple Watch actually doing the medication management instead of it being repurposing an alarm or something to do it. Because a lot of people have to do this. They're taking medication at different times. It can get real complicated. And having a thing on your wrist that taps you

and says, hey, it's time to take that thing. And if you don't say I took it, it keeps bugging you about it. I think that this is a great example of, yeah, you can do this now, but some carefully crafted software that knows what all the issues are and could help a person do this, that's great. That's the kind of stuff. And it doesn't require bending the laws of physics to make a new sensor to fit on the back of your wrist. I am one of these people. I have medication I take in the morning and evening. If I forget to take it, it can make a massive impact on my day. So I have a combination of I use the app Dew for a reminder.

And I have a pill box with the pills laid out in them, right? So I can easily check in case I forgot. You're such an old man. I'm an old man now. You I have a pill box with the pills laid out in them, right? Oh, classic. So I can easily check in case I forgot. You're such an old man. I'm an old man now. You've got a pill box. Because my thing is, if I can't remember if I took the pill or not, because it's one of the first things I do when I wake up, well, I'm stuck.

I can't take more, because if I take more, I've gone over my dosage, right? So I have to have this dual system. So the pill management would allow somebody to scan their pill bottles in the health app and then get reminders of when these pills should be taken based on the instructions. And I think that's absolutely fantastic. I love it. I hope that they do this. Yeah. Again, it could be implemented badly. It totally could. This is the thing where we talk

about it and we express optimism. And then somebody writes in and says, oh, think of all the ways they could get this wrong. And it's like, well, sure. You could literally say that about anything, but I'm optimistic because I feel like this is an area where Apple could really add value by saying, no, no, no, you don't need to repurpose your timers and alarms to do this. We are going to, or download a third-party app to do it. we are going to do it right so that you can, because so many people only use the stuff that's default, and we're going to put it in there. And it could potentially be something that's very helpful for a lot of people,

and that's the kind of thing I love to see. Mark Gurman expects, moving away from health stuff, a proper low-power mode to come to the Apple Watch, so you can still have access to some features and some apps without it just being that black screen with the green number on it when you're completely dead. There are plans to update many existing watch faces. Oh, could it be?

Could it be that finally some of my favorite watch faces that are still in their Apple Watch Series 1 configuration get updates. That would be nice. I would prefer that to new ones, personally. Yeah, I would too. Yeah, fewer novelty watch faces and more good refreshes, functional refreshes of old ones. I love modular, and modular is still stuck in Series 1.

And I faked a lot of modular using the California face, but like, it's not right. Like modular should be the one that you use for this. And the watch face design has come a long way on the Apple watch since modular came out. And I would really like a better update to that. I wanted to mention the low power mode thing. I just wanted to say, I love the idea that low power mode actually has a little more to it than the blank face. That's just one of those things that if you've ever been in that mode, sort of like it just turns your watch into a dumb watch. And wouldn't it be nice if you had some basic functionality beyond that?

But yeah, that's a good one. And watch faces, yes, I would like... I don't need more novelty graphic. I mean, they'll probably still do novelty watch faces because they like to show it off and have everybody go, ooh, pretty. And that's fine. But like, oh, the old watch faces desperately need a revisit. So I hope that's true. The satellite connectivity rumor is back.

For emergencies. I thought we proved it was happening and then also proved that it was physically impossible. And now it's back apparently coming back again and mark german is doubling down on the expectation of three watches being released this year a series 8 model a new se which would presumably be based on the four therefore getting the removal of the three and everything that's kind of like the three maybe when i say the four like that four slash five maybe it gets more features than the current one and also the rugged model for extreme sportists g shocks watch i think it would look super cool maybe i i i think that i mean i don't know i think that the fanning out

that product line with some purpose-built variants is a great idea. I know we've talked about it here. It's a really great idea. Yeah, sounds good. New SE, I think we're all assuming that new SE, the idea there is that, yeah, they'll finally be able to put a stake in the heart of the Series 3 by making an SE that is actually going to be capable of replacing it because it's so old now that they basically have to. It wouldn't surprise me if this is essentially that. It's a 4-ish or 5-ish or whatever kind of model, and then it allows them to keep selling Series 6 or 7 or both, but that the SE is hitting their price point and hopefully consigning some of the older, especially if they're changing the watch faces, consigning their original screen size to the trash heap

would be a good thing, right? That they're like, no, no, no, we're not doing any more with that. We're able to update our faces. We're going to make a new SE. And now that's it. Sorry, existing SE people and Series 3 people, but at some point you

gotta you gotta move on because the se is based on the four right the screen size and layout i i think so but it's not it doesn't have always on yeah and and yet they they couldn't get the price down to an acceptable price so they still have to have their bargain bin one i wonder if the se will fill the three space and then the se2 will fill the se space in the price lineup could be i mean new se right like we we all were thinking sort of like well no you just need to keep the se and get rid of that always should be the plan but i just don't know if they're going to be able to get the se to 200 i don't know i don't know or maybe maybe this is the time um or it's a subtly changed se that allows them to get to 200 for it we'll see maybe over time that series

three is sold less and less like who knows right maybe they've realized that they can they can shuffle that around a bit who knows uh one looking at this report today yeah i was just once again struck by the idea that realistically now the apple watch is a fitness and health tracker first everything else second right like that they landed on this a long time ago and i will just use this as another place to just say i just wished apple made like just a fitness tracking device doesn't have a screen on it like it's just a bunch of sensors that's what i desperately want i don't know how long they're gonna it would take them before they would do that if they would ever um but i would just that would be my ideal if they just made

that i like my apple watch perfectly fine but I like more what it does with the fitness tracking than I do wearing the Apple Watch every day. I like my Apple Watch a lot and I wear it all the time, but I would say that it does feel like maybe there's a place for a product that has sensors and stuff and talks to the iPhone so that you've got a third-party thing. I guess the argument would be there are other fitness bands that do that.

So does Apple need to make one if you've got a fitness band? I assume there are fitness bands out there that will download all their stuff into the health app. But I'm sure Apple would make it more integrated and all of that. But that's the – they've – you know, depending on what you want, they've overshot with the Apple Watch because it's a complete computer. Although I think that is kind of

what they're getting for, getting at with the low end, but it's still a watch. It's a fitness tracker, but it's still a watch. It's not, you know, if you want to wear a watch and a fitness tracker,

you are now a two watch person. So that's not, that's not ideal for some people. All right, Mark Gurman is also reporting that Apple currently have at least nine Macs in development featuring four variations of the M2 chip. Now, will you permit me for a moment to read a bunch of stuff?

Please stand for the reading of the nine Macs. The reading of the historic nine Macs. Okay, so this includes- Easter Monday, it's time for the reading of the nine max reading the historic nine max okay so this includes your monday it's time for the reading of the of the nine max a macbook air with an m2 chip features eight cpu cores 10 gpu a mac mini with an m2 chip so it's the same spec um but also there's an m2 pro variation in testing sure an entry-level macbook pro with an2 chip, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. The M2 Max chip would feature 12 CPU cores and 38 graphics cores and would start with 64 gigabytes of memory. A 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips and a Mac Pro.

Quote, this machine will include a successor to the M1 Ultra chip used in the Mac Studio computer. Now, there are two things I want to point out here. I haven't read through this. I don't know why, but there's no listed specification of the M2 Pro. I don't know why. There's just no listing it, right? M2 Pro is going to be

a cores turned off version of the Mac. So he's reporting what the Macs has, which is how they're all built. And then they will obviously have reduced core options, multiple probably reduced core options from there. So I understand why they didn't do that.

I'm more saying, where's the iMac and the Mac Studio? Well, these are well these okay so this is the the another part in this article is the this like where they are in testing like when it's when it's reported as testing is to indicate that these computers would all be introduced within the next few months so those those two you just mentioned would be later like be further out it's not to say those product but like these are this level of testing where these all machines are now is i've waited five weeks for a new max studio they haven't introduced a new max studio

in five weeks what's what's wrong with them the iMac i'm a little more yeah no this is this is your first wave first and second wave m2 max uh roundup here what i would say this is the second thing i wanted to mention and this is very intriguing to me it's something that we spoke about some time ago i believe the the mac pro will include a successor to the m1 ultra so is the mac pro never going to have an M1 in it? This report suggests, yes. That it will feature the M2 Ultra chip. Well, if in his roundup here,

he's saying M2 Max is coming, right? M2 Max is coming. And M2 Pro and M2 Ultra. Because we had speculated that what they might do is start releasing, now that they've got the whole m1 line closed up they might start releasing some m2 products but also some m1 max products might still come right that that how do you do you really turn the page on the m1 or do you still introduce some new m1 based products no not new m1 chips they said that's over but do you still introduce some new M1-based products

after you've broken the seal on the M2? And Gurman here is suggesting, no, you don't. Like that the Mac Pro has waited long enough, perhaps because it needed functionality that is not available in the M1 series, that it's going to be an M2 product. And that maybe that's when we talk about the quad version, which is like the ultra Ultra, the Plus Ultra,

the, did I do that right? I don't know, the Uber chip, Uber Ultra, Ultra Plus Max Pro. Max. That comes in a quad configuration because the Ultra is a dual. And the M1 doesn't have the, the, the stuff for four connections. It only has the stuff for two. Well, maybe this is the answer is that's because the M

two is the one that's got the connections for four. And so the M two is the one that's going to be able to have the four chip thing instead of the two chip ultra. Um, and maybe that's the answer is that the, the Mac pro has has to wait but then it's going to get an m2 super ultra uh when it when it finally appears and i i think that's plausible only because he's talking about um m2 pro and m2 max happening soon um because that's a requirement right you can't the m2 max is the basis for the mac pro and it's actually kind of exciting right because it's it is the basis for it like once an m2 max is out there you can connect those up and make dual or quad configurations and so maybe that's what

this is all about yeah so i guess my expectation on this would be if we were to be shown a mac pro in june it will be as i've done many times shipping at the end of the year most likely um because that's when they would be able to have out these other machines you know if we are going to see that right because that's potentially quite a bit to go um yeah i mean this is my he he says this is all kind of in the works it does feel like there's an m2 wave and then there'll be an m2 pro slash max wave that will happen later that you get your macbook air and your mac mini um on an m2 in in june and then in the fall you get macbook pro and mac pro with the with the pro chips and maybe the mac mini pro variation as well at that point because i do think they want to do that that's

that several people have written about the fact that there's no desktop pro mac it's you're either on the m1 or you're on the m1 max or ultra uh so this is next so on that note the m1 pro and m1 max chips have been tested in a mac mini according to mark german but it is expected that the studio has made this redundant from apple's perspective especially with m2 variations on the horizon right and i love the idea that the some of the products that have M1s will have optional M1 or M2s will have M2 Pros, because we talked about it in the context of the M1. And I see that here, which is, okay, M1 Mac Mini, that's fun. But M2 Mac Mini, where you can, because Apple loves to tempt you to spend more money, where you can upscale it to an M2 Pro.

And maybe, you know, M2 Macs, no, we're not going to let you do that. money where you can upscale it to an M2 Pro. And maybe, you know, M2 Max, no, we're not going to let you do that. You need to buy a Mac Studio for that when we upgrade it. But the Pro, we'll put in there. And maybe that's true with the entry-level MacBook Pro as well. Like, it comes with an M2, but you could spec it up and get an M2 Pro in there. Or not. I mean, that would be a nice differentiator for it. I don't expect the MacBook Air will have an option to put an M2 Pro in it, right? But maybe the MacBook Pro would.

So, but the Mac Mini is a perfect example of that. So I would love to see that. This episode is brought to you by Doppler. In software development, secrets are private pieces of information that acts as keys to unlock protected resources or sensitive information. So you can imagine the stressful days of configuring, managing, and sharing these secrets across different teams and cloud services. Those days

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that's doppler.com slash L slash upgrade you'll have a link in the show notes too so you can click it and go right there thanks to Doppler for their support of this show and RelayFM Jason Snell, we talk me and you, this isn't the only time we talk

we talk very frequently throughout the week especially along with in a group thread between me and you and steven we're always chitty chatting as the kids call it they don't uh throughout the entire week and i know that you have been suffering with a uh a delivery that arrived at your house would you like to tell the story to the upgradians yes let me tell you the story so i bought a studio display i bought the vesa mount version because i have had two different imacs and before that an external display on a vase amount above my desk because i like having a thing that hovers above my desk and is not sitting on my desk blocking access to the desk i like it I ordered it on basically day one, day two. And after a long delay, right, of waiting,

waiting for that product to come, it arrived on Wednesday. Unfortunately, I was at an appointment that I made long before. And so I came back and there was a post-it note on my door that said UPS couldn't deliver. By the way, and Stephen Hackett informed me that this is apparently a UPS policy. My meal box service with perishable food in it was also delivered that day by UPS. And because Apple requires somebody being present to receive the studio display, apparently UPS policy is since I wasn't home, they don't deliver anything to me, thereby making my meal box for the week unviable. So that was awesome. Hey, UPS, dumb.

What are you doing? Perishable stuff. Deliver it. If it doesn't require a signature, just leave it. Leave it at the door. They leave things at the door. They leave that stuff at the door all the time. But it came with a monitor this time they didn't that's dumb anyway so thursday i am home they deliver it it's great very exciting get it in here open up the box put

it down screw on the little screws that were left over from taking off the last one from the visa mount, put it on my desk. And now I have a floating studio display. Great. Plug it in to the Mac studio. And I sit down and I'm like, okay, it's floating. And I,

and, and I see a horizontal line of static appear on the screen. And I think, that's not great. And then I see another one. And then I see another one. And then I see another one. Is this really happening to me? Am I going to do this?

Okay. So first thing we do is replace the cable, right? Like what if it's the cable? I'm using a third-party cable. Easiest thing, right? New cable. Try it out. I'm using a third-party cable. Easiest thing, right? New cable. Try it out. I'm using a third-party cable that I bought from OWC that's longer.

Let's go back to the cable that comes with the monitor. It's shorter, but it comes from Apple. What if it's a cable problem? I can go to OWC, get them to send me a new one, whatever. That cable hasn't had any problems with my existing display, but the new display is flickering. So I get the new cable out. Still doing it. So I restart my computer. Still doing it. So I get my MacBook Air, my M1

MacBook Air. I plug it into that. Still doing it. Okay, at this point, I've changed the cables, I've changed the computers. Guess it's the monitor this is the problem um so i call apple online store support because i realize i'm gonna have to get them to take this back and send me a new one yeah i mean this is a new one but it doesn't work out of the box brian as i'm sitting there waiting on hold fascinating i my macbook air is still plugged into it so i'm still watching it kind of out of the corner of my eye and it's turned at an angle but i can still see the screen sort of at an angle and it's one of the most fascinating things about this um the flicker

keeps building like a like a storm or something so it's flick flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker. Over the course of like five minutes, it builds to a crescendo where it's almost entirely horizontal statics firing off. And then it stops. And I thought, well, that's weird. I wonder what will happen now. I'm returning this thing regardless.

Like, even if it never does it again, like, this is crazy. I should never, ever, ever use this product. And then as I sit there on hold and then talking to somebody, after a minute or so, click, click, click, and it begins to build up again. So this is seeming to indicate, because there was someone asking in the discord that like it didn't seem like it was a physical damage to the panel kind of situation oh no there's an electronic problem inside and these are these are horizontal going away and stuff like that yeah this is absolutely a yeah very clearly and i think it has to do with an electrical build-up that's happening somewhere too because it's actually growing and changing.

That building to a crescendo made me realize there's a process at work here where there's like excess whatever, excess built up and then it discharges maybe and then it starts again. It's very bad is what I'm saying. And unacceptable for this. So I'm on the phone to Apple support.

And what's interesting about that is that their response is something like, let's do a return and new order. So the idea here is we return this one like you didn't want it. And then you just make a new order. But this is a new model that's backordered. And so what that would effectively do is put me in the back of the line for a sold out long wait time product. I didn't really want to get in the back of the line because this is Apple's fault. Apple sent me a bad display. So I want to

return it and get one from the front of the line because they sold me one that's no good. I feel like the internet has told me over the years that the expectation is Apple always have stock for this exact purpose. That if they messed up, they can replace it for you. Yes. And they keep stock in the Apple Store. Apple Stores will say they don't have stock, and they do. But the reason they say they don't is they keep some around for people who have defective units, right?

But this is backordered and rare, and this is a rare configuration too. I did think, later part of the story, I did go to the Apple Store, and I did think of saying in a very five easy pieces kind of way you can look it up people saying do you have a studio display back there do you have the apple care tools to swap the studio displays basic mount for a VESA mount? You do? Why don't you do that and give me the, put my VESA mount on a good monitor and give that to me. But I didn't even go down that path because I'm not even sure they're capable of doing that right now. This is a new product. They might have to ship it out for that. So I didn't do that. But the idea here is that a VESA mount, uh, maybe a studio display in general, but certainly my, my version it's rare.

And so they don't have them. Apparently they don't have them like squirreled away to send out to somebody who had a bad, uh, a bad one. So I talked to the rep on the phone and they say, all right, well, here's what we're going to do. We will try to do a return and an expediter replacement or something like that. But basically, we need it back before this whole thing kicks off. So I can generate a mailing label for you and you can have FedEx come and pick it up or you can drop it off at the Apple Store. And I said, well, I'm one exit away from the Apple Store and I'd really like to not wait around for this. And this was probably my mistake. I probably should have just said, look, it's all the same to me, send me the mailing label, and

I'll take it to FedEx. But the guy was like, oh, no, no, you can just go to the Apple Store. That's fine. You don't even need a Genius Bar appointment. So I go to the Apple Store. And I discover a few things. One is you do need a Genius Bar appointment. Two is they don't have any. And three, apparently online sales support, the phone people for the Apple online store, are really good at punting to Apple retail and basically saying, let the suckers in the store deal with this. Because I go there and the people in my local Apple store are very nice. They are very nice and very helpful. And I was very apologetic because it became clear very quickly that they should not be seeing me. That the guy on the phone should have said, look,

don't go to your Apple store because I wasn't insisting. Don't even mention it to me. I'm going to send you a FedEx thing. FedEx will come and get it and we'll replace it. But instead he sent me to the Apple store. So they had no Genius Bar appointments. They sent me back the next day. I went the next day and the guy, again, very nice. All the people at the Apple store are nice. This is not about them. He was like, yeah, they probably shouldn't have sent you here, but let's call. I will try to escalate this with the online store people on the phone and let's see if we can get a resolution for you. And so after waiting, you know, an hour at the Apple store for the second time, I got

a, uh, I got a guy on the phone, literally handed to me by the person in the retail store, a guy on the phone who took my information and said, I'm going to email you a FedEx bill, and you're going to put that on the box, and you're going to ship it back to us. And then I will try, what he said was, I will try to get you, I will mark it as an expedited replacement, which is, I don't know if I really believe it. I still kind of think what they're going to do is put me at the back of the line. It's going to be two months before I see this thing. But at least I got somebody to claim they were going to put a flag on it saying, no, this guy really should get one soon, not in two months. was the thing that he could say to me to make me stop asking for help and just send the freaking monitor back already so it's like just tell the man it's expedited and then we'll i'm not sure i

believe it right i'm not sure i believe that it's expedited but whatever so i came home there's an email from apple with a fedex label i repacked the display which was already in the case but i repacked it into its cardboard box that it came in from FedEx and taped it up and put the label on it. And it is now sitting in my house. And after upgrade, I will take it to the local FedEx orifice and drop it off. At which point, theoretically, they will scan it and Apple's next thing will kick off. At which point they will tell me, you know, wait eight weeks. And then the mystery happens because the guy said, when you get the first note, it will say that you're going to wait a long time. But don't believe it.

We are going to behind the scenes. We've got a flag on that for it to be sooner. And I'm like, OK, I don't believe you, but I don't understand this idea of a flag. How can one appear sooner? Well, here's how. Apple has a production line of these things, and they're coming off the production line. Uh-huh. And, you know, what I'm saying is if you have a defective one, you should get the next one off the production line.

Not put in the list among all orders for that model. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. And get the last one. So it sounds like they have a way, again, or this could not be true, to say, no, no, this is, because what this is is an edge case, right? This is a case where they don't have those secret stash of ones to send out as a replacement for something that's bad. They don't have them now because they don't have enough. They haven't made enough to have the stash. So it may be that they have a workaround where if

there is no stash, they put a flag on it and say, no, this needs to go to the front of the line, more or less, or front of the line within certain conditions in order to get one out sooner. I honestly don't know. And of course they are, there's all sorts of reasons that they may be, um, in short supply, including conditions at the factories and all of that. So it may, even if it's expedited, it may be a long time. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm fine with that. I have a setup that is perfectly fine that I can use in the meantime. I just, I fell in like a real uncanny Valley in the Apple, um, sales and support

process, which is what happens if I get something that's dead on delivery, um, dead on arrival display. And the answer was they should have been clearer with me on the phone. The retail people were very helpful, but did not feel empowered to, to do anything short of just a return and replace, and they have no replacements so it would just be a new order um eventually the phone people made the noises like i was not going to be at the back of the line and they would try to get me one sooner um and i understand like in normal circumstances when they these are everywhere i would be irate about the fact that like why don't you send me a

replacement for the product that you sent me that was not functional? I get why they can't do that, but it's a very weird situation. So it may indeed be that I waited five or six weeks for a display that I will now wait another eight weeks for because Apple sent me one that was bad. And I don't know why it's bad. There are some posts in various forums about issues that don't seem to be the same issues that I saw. Brand new product, made it volume. Guess what? They're going to be lemons. I'm not offended that it doesn't work. They're going to be lemons. And I'm glad it didn't work right out of the box because I didn't want to set it up and commit to using it and then find out that something was broken on it. But it is kind of funny that Apple, I think I caught Apple wrong footed essentially where they're like, they don't have

stock of this thing. And it's like, really hope it isn't defective. And the answer is, oh, it's defective. I don't have a product to make this right right now. And so I stepped in it, but I will say this is a hole in their process that they need to fix. Because the answer should be, I will say this is a hole in their process that they need to fix because the answer should be, if it's defective and we don't have any in stock, here's what you do. And at no point did I feel like anybody involved in the Apple process knew what they should do in that scenario. They all just fell back on cancel your order and return it and make a new order. Which if I could get it tomorrow via a new order, wouldn't be a problem, right? But what if we're in a scenario where you can't do that and it's backordered? And here we are. So I think Apple honestly is so... This is a supply chain thing too. They're so wired with

their supply chain that I think they never built their processes to have something like this happen because why would it ever happen? Why would anything be backordered like that? Because they'll just get one to you in like a week at most right yeah like like they are so other than all of their supply chain issues during the pandemic like they are so solid with this stuff that like why would they ever need a contingency like that but they seem to have fallen in that and i unfortunately um am the one who who fell into that trap So anyway, I got to go to FedEx today. Two questions for you. Yeah.

One, did you ever try to update the firmware or anything? Was it possible for you to do like have a laptop? It came with the current firmware. The most, okay. Because I'd wondered, you know, you never know, right? Like maybe an update will fix it. But if there's no update for you to do. No, this is an electronic problem.

It's the current firmware and it doesn't work it and it doesn't work so like bottom line at this point once i saw those horizontal lines it's like i don't want this this display right like even even if somebody is like well maybe it'll settle down or maybe when it warms up in your house or whatever it's like no no if i plug something in and it has a storm of horizontal lines on it it's just a bad monitor yeah you're gonna wait they should be spending all your entire time waiting for the next time it's gonna happen right right and and also talking to some people i know who work at apple they're like this is such a new product that they probably want to capture it and take it back to apple and say what made it do this so that they can analyze the way these things are produced uh to not right? Like that's one of the ways you prevent

lemons from happening down the line is you're like, oh, this solder was wrong or this cable was loose. And you go back to the factory and you figure out why that happened and if you can improve the processes so that they don't happen again. I will ask, I don't know quite why it passed inspection because presumably they inspected it and I literally plugged it in and within five seconds there was a horizontal flicker. Do you think that every single item's inspected? Yeah, I think they have hardware inspection. Okay.

Of some sort. I think so. I think they've got to start things up or run some sort of diagnostic on them. In the case of a display, you would presume that you would plug it in and make sure that it displayed properly because you catch those before you ship them out because what you want to do is stop them at the factory right you want to at some point in the process they fail a test and you're like pull it off like that one doesn't go out um and and you use that as part of your, that's probably the most vital part of your loop of, um, tweaking your processes at the factory so that you are efficient, right? Is you pull the ones off that are broken.

You're like, okay, why are these things broken? Stop, stop the line. Let's make a change and we'll fix this problem. Um, so I'm a little surprised it came to me so obviously broken. Um, it's possible that in transit there was something loose and it was shaken looser in transit. And so it passed with flying colors in China. And then somewhere between there and here, it got a little shaken just enough to make this issue appear. appear. But I don't know. It's fascinating when you think about the job of people at Apple to make sure that the production lines work and that the level of failure is acceptable. So I hope if

they do take this thing back, they learn from it and figure something out. And then the last thing I wanted to know is, do you still have your review in it? I do. No wonder. I would be much more upset than you are right now. That's why I'm okay. Yeah. I would be like ready to burn it down. I was ready to decommission it, right?

Fortunately, the review unit length for this is much longer than a Mac review unit usually is available. And so I'm going to have to take advantage of that for a little while longer, um, which is fine. Like I said, I'm not hurting here. Um, but I can, you know, other than not having the one that I bought that is on the arm, like I like and all of that, it's fine. I'm just more fascinated by how, um, Apple's processes did not solve the problem. Like it was very weird. And I talked to people who are involved in Apple retail at various levels,

and they say that like, this is a common thing. Sometimes the phone support sends it to the stores. There are those moments where you aren't really sure quite what to do. And when I described my situation to people at Apple retail, they definitely gave it some pause and were like, hmm, that's a tough one because if we don have stock, and you've got a defective unit, we can't swap it for a new unit. And then the next thing we do is we go to you return it, and we just place a new order, and you'll just get it at your house or in the store the next day or in a week. But we can't do

that. So what do we do? And it's just, I think it's, like I said, I think this is exacerbating or exacerbated by the supply chain issues that Apple's processes just aren't built for a situation like this. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Capital One. Have you ever hit a technical snafu while shopping online? Has filling out payment fields given you a headache? Has a mobile banking app ever been down

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I have some hashtag ask upgrade questions for you, Jason. The first comes from Greg who wants to know Jason. Hey, Jason, what made you choose to go with a base amount for your desk in the first place? What a perfectly timed ask Upgrade question, Mike. It's like somebody chooses them.

You know what I'm saying? You mean they're not inserted randomly by a script? Believe it or not, no. They're not. You know, when I bought my first desk for my home office, I was thinking about they offered a VESA arm, actually. And I thought, oh, put my monitor on an arm. That sounds great.

Because I hadn't done that in my corporate office desk at all. I thought, that actually sounds pretty cool. So I bought it. I mean, it was really like, that sounds like a good idea. I like the idea of getting the display off the desk. And I had a Dell monitor with a little plastic kind of up-down thing that I would adjust. And I was getting a sit-stand desk. And the idea there is that if you're doing sit and stand, they sort of need to be in different positions. And I thought, well, the arm sounds great for all this. So I bought that arm. And that Dell monitor, you could just

unscrew the mount. It was a VESA mount on the back. So you just unscrew it and put it on. And so I did that. And so my first setup here was a MacBook air attached to a Dell external display. And then, um, I liked it. I liked the idea that my, my desk was clear. And when the 5k iMac came out, I was at that point, um, working here a 100% of the time instead of when it was my work from home, which is when I started configuring it that way. And I got a review unit of the 5K iMac and I put it on my desk and I thought, well, I really like the 5K iMac and I want to buy one, but I don't like that it's sitting on my desk. I had really gotten used to the idea that I could adjust it however I wanted and it floated above the desk and I've really gotten used to the idea that I could adjust it however I wanted it floated above the desk and desk. And I had all the open space under the desk

or under the iMac on the top of the desk. So I bought the 5k iMac in the VESA mount configuration and, and really the rest is history. Cause then I bought the iMac Pro and that one you bought standard and you converted it with a kit, which I did. And so this display, it's the same deal. And really that's it is that I like the idea that it's adjustable and I can move it around and it's floating above my desk and that my entire the space on my desk is entirely open. And it's just nice. And VESA is good because you have a bunch of options available to you right of how you want to mount it and stuff like that different companies make different arms that work in different ways a lot of people use it to mount things like my tvs are vaso mounted on

on walls some of them and that's you can do a wall mount that's not what i have my desk is in the middle of the room and i don't want it at the back end of my desk against a wall. That's not how I use it. Um, so, but I like the flexibility of it. I could buy a new arm. I'm still literally using the arm that I got in 2013. I think when I bought my previous desk, it's still, I'm still using that arm. It's fine. I'm sure that they make better arms now. And maybe at some point I'll get a better mounting arm, but it's, it's very nice. And, uh, and it works pretty well for me. And it gives me that flexibility when I'm, I've occasionally done like shooting videos or stuff where I will push the, uh, I was able to push the iMac like off, off the desk or all the way to the back of the desk. If you want a configuration where I'm,

I mostly work with a, um, with a keyboard tray, but if I'm having a particular like ergonomic issue or something like that, you can also raise the height, push it back, put the keyboard on the top of the desk and not use the keyboard tray. And I've done that too. I think I prefer the keyboard tray, but that's another way to go. Like Stephen Hackett's desk, as we saw last week on Connected, he's got all of his stuff up on the desktop and then the computer or, and the display are like further back. Mine is mostly the, the, um, display is closer to me, but like I can choose where I want it to be. It's great. So that's, I mean, I, I'm sure I could survive. I have a, a studio display sitting on my desktop right now, and it's fine.

I'd prefer not, but it's fine. I just, you know, again, I just prefer having the adaptability and adjustability, and it just pleases me to have that empty space on my desk that I can put things on or I can clear out, and it's just a desk. Andrew asks, what accent colors and highlight color options do you choose on mac os um mine are multi-color what do these do again like and accent color multi-color and accent color so um every app can say um for an accent color, what is it? So every app can say what the highlight color is and the accent color is also it's on things in the system.

The accent color is basically there. So if you have like a yellow iMac, you can have it in yellow and then a lot of UI elements will match the yellow. But if you set multicolor, it's basically like, don't match it. Just do whatever the elements want to be. They're that color. Highlight color, similarly, you can choose an accent color like yellow or orange or whatever when you highlight text and stuff. Or you can let the system or the app choose the accent color.

And so you end up in a situation where um different apps this is this is something that's more visible on um on ios i think well no i mean it's a mac os thing now too so the idea there is that yeah if you're a blue app if you're microsoft word you know everything will be blue and and in microsoft excel everything every highlight will be green because it's a green app yeah and like you can like every app can be green because it's a green app. Yeah. And like you can like every app can say, oh, we've got a special accent color, but you can also take control and say,

no, I want everything to be orange and then everything is orange. So on my MacBook Pro, I also have multicolor and accent color. I expect this is the default, but my iMac is set differently to its default, which is this Mac, which is only something that exists on the iMac right now.

On the iMac because it knows that it's yellow. Yeah, so all of my highlights are in yellow on this computer, which I enjoy immensely, honestly. I think it's very cute. Yeah, that's what Apple wants to do with its colored Macs is it sets it to this Mac.

So if you get a blue iMac or a red MacBook Air someday, that accent color will be the same color. It'll be like on the red Mac, all the highlighted text is red. And on the blue Mac, all the highlighted text is blue. And that's cool. And if you don't like it, you just change it

because you can set your highlight color. But yeah, the accent color, I think by default it is like a light blue, but in mac os um monterey and maybe big sir but definitely monterey you apps can say i don't like that color i am a yellow app all of my highlights are yellow because i am a yellow app and in fact notes is a good example of that um notes is a yellow app and its highlights are yellow because it's notes. I think I have discovered a bug in macOS 12.3 today, by the way. This has happened to me two

times today and now I can draw a correlation where my dock has become completely unresponsive and I cannot switch between spaces on my Mac. This happened to me earlier today. I was like, oh, that's weird. What's happened? It just happened to me now. This is after I changed the highlight color and accent color just to see what they did. And then my Mac, in many instances,

became completely unresponsive. And restarting Finder in force quit does not change that fact. Everything that I can see currently in front of me is working absolutely fine I can go to Safari I can use Safari I can see audio hijacks doing its thing discord I can be in there and I can type but I can't leave

this desktop I can't go to any other app they're all unusable to me right now even command tab doesn't work so that's very funny to me right now. Oh dear. Even command tab doesn't work. So that's very funny to me that that's happened. So earlier I had to restart my Mac Pro to fix it and once we're done recording

today I'll be restarting my iMac. So there you go. And Charlie asks, Jason, have you tried the Kobo Ellipsa? Are you interested in it? Mike will ask, what is it? Kobo Ellipsa is a um it's a very large 10.3 inch e-ink product oh just quickly ryan in the discord has had just had the same thing happen

and now needs to restart the computer yeah oh my god so many upgradians will be listening to this in front of their computer and have this issue occur to them as they change the color in there what have we started jason you what have you started so the kobo ellipse is a big e-reader it's like a 10.3 inch touch screen uh i think the idea and it's got you can get a uh stylus for it and the idea is there you're highlighting things like you would with a pen except you're using a stylus and you can look at pdfs because it's got a big screen i i have no i've not tried it charlie i have no opinion about it i am not interested in it the kobo sage which is a smaller e-reader is still too big for me i And it's nicer than the one that I'm using. But the problem is,

I like the smaller size. So I'm using the Kobo Libra, which is a seven-inch diagonal screen. And it's not as nice as the Sage, which is the eight-inch screen, but I just like it because it's smaller. So my wife is using the Sage, but I'm using the Kobo Libra. The Ellipsa, way too big, and I don't do pen on... I don't do stylus PDF markups. I know that there are people who are doing a lot of markups, especially

PDFs, who really like these e-ink products with the styluses, and great, but that's not my use case. I really am just reading novels. 10 inches feels pretty big for an e-reader, like a primary e-reading device. Yeah. Like I said, I think it very much is a markup thing where you're taking PDFs and eBooks where you actually want to take notes and you want that stylus note-taking experience. And that's cool. It's great that it does that but um and if you like that idea you

know you know you know who you are but i just use these things to read books and i don't need a stylus and i don't need a screen that big what was the name of the big kindle dx dx dx catchy name huh kindle dx oh amazon oh Oh, Amazon. Oh, your naming. It's so great naming things. Kindle D-X. They only made one of those, right? I think so. I think two. Maybe they did two of them.

I think there were two versions of the Kindle D-X. But yeah, there was an era of the super mega e-reader. There was also a company that did it. It was like a newspaper reader, basically. It was a huge screen. And the idea was you would download your e-newspaper to it, and it would look like a newspaper. And those never really went anywhere. So this seems to be a new use case.

There are bigger e-ink screens. And so people who are making e-ink products are like, could we make a version with a stylus? And there are several like this. And is there a use case there? And it sounds like maybe there is. People who want to go paperless, maybe attorneys and people in academia. I see that there could be use cases for it. It's just like, I just read books, and so I don't even like the 8-inch diagonal reader. I prefer the 7-inch diagonal reader, even though it's inferior in a lot of ways. So I'm not interested in the Ellipse app, but thanks for asking. And I will ask, the Libra then, is that your current e-reader of choice still? Yeah. Yeah, for me. I mean, there are other... I think it's the best combination of functionality

and price. I think it's better than the Kindle Paperwhite. It's got some features that are not as nice as the Kindle Paperwhite, but it has a bunch of other features that I really like. Um, I'm wondering what Amazon's going to do with the Kindle Oasis if they're going to new, that's their high-end reader. I wonder if they're going to do a new one of that and how that will fit in. Um, I really like the Kobo ecosystem. I, I, um, I don't miss the Kindle really at all. I still have Kindles kicking around, but I don't use them. Like I have a Kindle Oasis, which is the high-end Kindle, and I don't read books on it. I read books on the Kobo Libra.

I just like it. I like the typography. Kindle typography has gotten better. The new Kindle Oasis is pretty good. But if you're looking at the Kindle Oasis, you could look at the Kobo Sage, which is, I believe, cheaper than the Oasis and good, just as good.

So I don't know. There are a lot of good e-readers out there in this little niche category and I'm liking the Kobo stuff. So that's what I'm using right now. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer

on a future episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or you can use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which you can get access to if you sign up for Upgrade Plus, where you'll also get longer ad-free versions of every single episode of Upgrade. Just go to GetUpgradePlus.com and thank you so much to everybody who has supported us and

the show by doing so. I would also like to thank Capital One, Doppler, and Squarespace for their support of this episode. If you want to find Jason online in the meantime before our next episode, you can go to sixcolors.com. You can go to incomparable.com. He's at jsnell. And Jason hosts a couple of other shows here on RelayFM. Go to relay.fm slash shows.

You can find those and many more to peruse for your listening enjoyment. I am imike at I-M-Y-K-E,-E and I too host many shows here at RelayFM. Maybe there's something new which you can add to your podcast list today. Is that it? Have I done all the things? I think I've said all the things. I need to go restart my computer now.

So I'm going to go do that. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.