Upgrade - 405: Too Many Numbers

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

This week we check in on Studio Display firmware, ponder what form the iPhone 14 might take and whether it's different enough from the iPhone 13, and break down the results of Apple's record fiscal quarter--including some trepidation about the future. Also, Myke finally got his Playdate!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 405 today's show is brought to you by electric text expander and trade my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snow hi jason hi mike oh how well i mean if we're on a first name basis here it's very friendly you know it's a podcast where we sounded quite trepidatious to me i think uh well you you know you just you just said my first name so i i wanted to counter and it's just it got all personal in here that's what i'm saying you know and what's better for a podcast are you saying i need to call you jason snell now mr jason snell no i don't i i don't i i um just let's get tangential here before we even do the snell talk question which is i just want to point out that that in the atp

show notes last week they referred to stephen hackett as stephen they referred to me as snell and they referred to john gruber as john gruber and i don't understand what's happening over there that's interesting i prefer to be called jason and not snell um because it's more you know personal it's like oh we don't need to call you snell because there's not another jason in like that immediate group right well and i grew up i honestly and i grew up with that you always had to specify which jason so i i get it but if if it's clear i'm just saying why is steven because when i say i understand john gruber right because it's there is a john there's so many johns i get it right but like steven incredibly common name and they're like no no it's steven

you know y'all know you'll know steven it's like sal who y'all know it's steven who y'all know but but then snell with his uh with his story that he wrote. So I don't get it, but hi, Mike. Hello, Mr. Jason Snell Esquire. Oh, no. I have a hashtag Snell talk question for you. It comes from Victor, who wants to know, Mr. Jason Snell Esquire, how do you animate the cycling six colors in the menu bar of your website? Well, I stand by the server and whenever a beep

comes in and it means that somebody's watching the site, there's a crank. People don't know this, but on the side of the Linode box there's a little yellow crank that you fold out and you crank it and the colors change. And that's how it works. It's JavaScript and CSS and Krista

Mergen did it. There's not much more to it than that. That's what it is. If you would like to send in a hashtag Snell Talk question for us to open an episode of the show with, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk or use question mark Snell Talk in the RelayFM members

Discord. I have some real-time follow up for you, Jason, based on the ATP show notes for episode 480. James Thompson is referred to as James Thompson. John Gruber's name is crossed out. Casey's referred to as Casey. John

Syracuse is referred to as John. Yes, but that makes sense though, right? John, Casey, Marco, that totally makes sense. Because they're the host of the show. But I'm Snell, Stephen is Stephen, and james is james thompson yep i don't know i have some real follow-up well you do the studio display firmware has been updated to quote unquote improve the camera that's what they said and did they

did that uh so i'm i i was out running and i got a text from apple pr saying we're releasing a firmware update i'm like oh boy uh so i get back to the house and i update the firmware on one of the displays but not the other one because i have a review unit that i haven't sent back yet and i have pretty great that you've got two displays right now isn't it right so i updated the firmware on one and that took a lot longer than you thought you would think because you have to update to a beta of the os and then you have to update from the beta the firmware when you say the os you mean mac os where you have to update to a mac os beta then yeah to a developer public beta and then it updates the monitor which is not great because now i'm on a beta again and it's it it broke stuff it broke shortcuts it broke a bunch

of stuff so i'm not happy about that. And the truth is you could just, all you need to do is update something, some Mac to the beta, update the display, and then it'll work the same on any Mac it connects to because it's standalone software running on this thing. Anyway, so is it different? Yeah.

Is it better? I guess. Like in our show doc, you've got like image looks a little better crop is better and i added question marks at the end of them because it's like what what and it's hard to say but i had them placed as closely together as possible and i did a bunch of video so i have i have one on on an arm and so i had that one basically kind of spooning the other one that it was right in front of it. So that the cameras were very, very close. One of them was about a half an inch higher and maybe a half an inch back, but they're as close as they could possibly get to one another

and not interfere with the wide angle camera on either one of them. Because when I was setting it up, I was like, oh, that looks good. And then I realized that I could see the top of the other display. So I had to adjust a little bit. I got them as close as I could. And as far as I can tell in my setup, and of course, every environment's different because it is dynamically changing its settings based on who knows what, what it sees. It looked like they backed off on the crop a little bit so that gives them more pixels to work with which is kind of smart i think maybe the crop was too aggressive and um it seems to be maybe a little less aggressive when it's moving around that it does that a little a little bit less um but and oh and key point if you turn it off the crop when you turn off center stage is a little

bit lower it's still not as low as it probably should be but it's a little bit lower than it was before where you turn it off and it would be like the top half of your head when you were sitting in front of your display which is just terribly framed they seem to have moved it a little bit um so is it better a little little. Does this solve all the problems? Well, no. I mean, it doesn't change the fact that this is a wide angle 12 megapixel camera that they also used in the iPad and that it is not ever going to provide, hardware wise, it's just never going to provide the same experience as a camera that is devoting all of its pixels to the perfect frame of you sitting in front of the display. That's just a decision they made that they thought it was more important to forego some image quality in return for getting center stage.

And as you pointed out to me privately last week, and then also I think mentioned on Connected, I am a big proponent of center stage on the Mac. So it's my fault that this happened. I apologize to everyone. Mike literally wrote, you did this. It was very funny to me because I don't remember what it was, but I think at a moment you mentioned like maybe center stage was a mistake.

I think we were talking about this and to which I said, you, you for months, months. And I was like mistake i think we were talking about this and to which i said you you for months months and i was like i think i went back and found your first article yes like where you said like this must you know i'm in the bag for center stage so here's the thing three quarters of the macs that are sold are laptops right it kind of makes sense on a laptop you're doing a zoom call you put it on the on the coffee table you're sitting back it auto frames you you know you're talking to family and a family member comes in like it makes more sense on a laptop i still think that there's a use case for it on an imac or something like that because

it's sitting on a table somewhere and you may be moving around or it's in the kitchen or they've got all these different places where you might use an imac theoretically uh i have yet to see a kitchen imac in the wild i'm sure they exist anyway the a a standalone display to sit at a desk and use it is probably the least likely max scenario that requires center stage but they ran with it right i think they made the wrong call i believe the studio display is collateral damage in an overall product decision that Apple has made, which is that all front-facing cameras will get center stage except the iPhone. Maybe the iPhone one day.

I think you're probably right. And I think that although I think that our little corner of the world is not necessarily representative of the whole user base. For a standalone display, it's a lot closer, right? Like the people who focus on Apple stuff and listen to podcasts about Apple and stuff like that, probably not representative of all Apple users, certainly all iPhone users, probably not even of all Mac users. But when you get down to the level of the standalone $1,600 display, that's for people who care about the resolution of that display and the fact that it's 5K at 27. And like,

that is actually kind of us. And so seeing this reaction, it's very clear. And I'll just say it, like, I'm not as strident about this because I kind of don't care. I like center stage and I doesn't, I can perfectly accept that the quality is lower because it's like, okay, you know, whatever. But center stage is cool. Like I get it, but it's clear. I think that most people just want a nice webcam that works and that if Apple had built in a static 4k webcam, properly framed in a way that we have come to appreciate it that would be good enough and um and and they they didn't and i think that center stage still has its place on the mac but um one they might want to consider upgrading the optics on it like using a

better camera and two let's not just to step back a second. I still think the firmware is bad. I still think that, that, that a turnoff center stage crop is still wrong. It's better than it was, but I think it's still too high. I used it over the weekend for a D and D session and I had to like lower my display and raise my chair in order to try and get it to the right height. Um,

I don't know. It doesn't seem like it's, it still doesn't seem right. So there's that and then I think if you people looked at like the white balance and looked at a histogram of the image and did some like contrast stuff and it's like I also feel like the software is making bad decisions that make it look worse than it needs to even if the hardware is so limited so I think that the the firmware shipped in an unfinished state or an unacceptable

state, and that's unfortunate. And then the big issue, which is the Apple, it just works black box kind of thing is out there too, which is why is there not a settings panel somewhere for this thing? Why can I not choose to reduce the color saturation or change the contrast or something, anything? And maybe it's because they're using their image pipeline. Do we need photographic styles for our webcam? I don't know. This would also solve your problem, right? A webcam settings app for a separate webcam, frequently those have a little box that lets you say, what's the refresh rate of your lights so that it doesn't flicker? And Apple's like, no, no, no, we got this.

We got this. You don't need any settings, but they don't got this. Not on the studio display. So listeners may remember me saying that on my iMac and on my MacBook Pro, the flickering issue that I was having here at the studio because of the overhead light that I have had gone away that Apple seemed to have in macOS 12.3 fix this the studio display is not fixed weirdly in about one in five attempts of me opening and quitting an app like zoom it will fix itself but it is incredibly inconsistent so like I can open an app and it's flickering. Quit, open, quit, open, quit, open, quit.

Oh, it's fixed. So I don't understand why I think I'm using the current shipping firmware. I don't know if there's any change in the beta firmware. But at the moment, I'm having this annoying situation where I'm at my desk on my studio display. I need to do a video call. So I then need to go over to my iMac,

turn on my iMac and use that one instead because my iMac's camera is fine. I find it is very frustrating. I don't know why this is happening. It seems like it's, you know, if you could fix it in one place, why haven't you fixed it everywhere? And like Jason said,

if they just allowed me to change the rate from 60 to 50 Hertz or whichever way around it is, I could fix this. Like I've been able to, like every Logitech camera lets me fix this. Settings, settings, settings. Just let me change it. You can put this in system preferences.

Just put it in system preferences. Like it's fine, you know? Like if you want to turn off center stage, but you want to have the framing you want, why is there not like a little interface with a little box where I can drag out how big I want the frame to be

and where in the frame I want it to be and have it be like I want it to be a little bit lower. But Apple's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we got this. And again, they don't, they don't, they don't got it. And, and I can like setting aside the, should they have put center stage on the desktop? And, and clearly from everybody in our sphere, not everybody, a majority of people, I would

say in our sphere, the answer is no, it's not really necessary. We really just wanted a good webcam that was solid and that did its job. People pining for the iMac Pro webcam which is just a 1080 webcam it's nothing special at all but it was okay right and people are like oh remember that that's a bad sign right but but there is this whole other level which is which is if you're gonna do center stage and you're gonna have it be like this software should be better. Like the software should be better. There's no doubt. It doesn't look good. And it looks like that the software could do a better job. And then separately, if you, how about, how about user settings? How about letting me, I get you want everything to be a default, but like, let me adjust a setting. I would like to be able to say, um, I did this on webcam settings for my Logitech webcam all the time.

I was like, wow, it's too saturated. My whole face is glowing red. I would like it to be a little less saturated. Can't do that either. It just is what it is. It's ridiculous. This Friday, May 6th at 9.30 a.m. Pacific, 12.30 a.m. Eastern US

and half past five British summertime, I'm going to be voiding a warranty live on twitch at mike.live as i rip open a touch id magic keyboard with mr jason snow esquire's help and i'm going to try and pull out all of the components to get an external touch id button uh so and i don't think i told you jason i've decided to drop it now i'm my overall goal now is to try and embed this in one of my keyboards oh man i don't know if or how this is going to be possible but that's my like later goal um but yeah first i have to get it out of there so i've got all the ifixit tools um and

we're gonna have a blast next friday may 6th so come and join us it'll be fun well yeah at the very least i would love i would love for it to to lead to a get a like a 3d printed enclosure or something um if i can't get it inside of a keyboard that's the plan right get a little box i can right so i will just be there to cheer you on, I guess, as a guest star. Yep. And maybe to help me with the iFixit guide. Oh, sure. Oh, help.

Love it. Love it. So instead of just sitting there going, boo, you screwed it up, boo, I can actually be helpful. Wow. I don't know why I didn't assume that I would be helping, but I did not. So, okay. I'm going to be there to shout at you. And also, you know, to contact the emergency services in case of a thermal event. I dial 9 helping, but I did not. So, okay. I'm going to be able to shout at you. And also, you know, to contact the emergency services

in case of a thermal event, you know. I dial 999, right? That's what I do in the UK. Yep. 999. If you were in the UK, yes, you would dial that number. Yeah. So I'll do one and then plus 44 is the country code.

Plus 44, 999. 999. And then I say, hello, UK emergency. My friend soldered his hand to a keyboard. I have one room around up for you, Jason. It's a small corral. There's only a couple of heifers in the corral today. And this is also kind of follow up

because last week we saw mock-ups of the back of the iPhone 14 line, right? So we've got the kind of the sizes of the iPhones. Now, we have images via MacRumors of the displays. These are again shared on Weibo. What we can see here is the kind of the regular phones, the standard phones, the iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 Max, looking pretty much as you would expect with the notch.

But the Pro phones now feature two cutouts, one for the camera, like a hole punch, and then a pill-shaped cutout for the Face ID sensors. The bezels are slimmer across all of the phones, but also apparently the Pro phones are slightly taller, giving them a revised aspect ratio of 20 by nine rather than 19.5 by nine. So I read Mark Gurman's newsletter this weekend and, and he's the sheriff of,

of the room around up, of course he, by the way, I I'm enjoying that newsletter a lot, but I also have noticed that, you know, when you have to write a thing every week, instead of just when you've got breaking news, he's ventured into our sphere of speculation and what I would like instead of here's what I report. Honestly, I think that's part of why it exists.

So he can do that, right? Because he can't talk like that in a kind of official capacity, I guess. Right. Here's a big Bloomberg story about Mark Gurman speculating about what he would like to see in the next right they don't do that right so so no it's it's it's fun to see him putting on his his uh punditry hat uh what's confusing is where you you start reading and you're like is this you know a report no it's just a dream um it's just kind of wish casting and you just got to keep those separate. There was a Reuters pushed out an opinion column last week.

Without getting into the subject more than this. It pushed out an opinion column by somebody at Reuters. You know, it's a wire service. So you can see why people sort of take it as like fact. And the opinion column was, I don't think the elon musk twitter deal is going to work and i saw that spread everywhere as like report tesla you know elon musk deal for twitter is falling apart and was like i read the story it was an opinion column so i don't know if they changed it but i think originally this went around because the the opinion column was called breaking

views yes like breaking news so people just read it as breaking news but it's not it's just it's it's just an opinion it's a decent opinion so i would say and i'm not and i'm not criticizing mark here because i actually really like it but but since we're so used to we're so trained that he's doing reports that when he starts talking about what he'd like to see that's not a report right that's just what he'd like to see unless it's coded but i don't think it is i think it's literally just what he'd like to see unless it's coded, but I don't think it is. I think it's literally just what he'd like to see. While we're talking about the new iPhones, I wanted to mention something that Mark Gurman said this week, which was, I'm interested how you feel about this. He said,

yes, the notch will be replaced in this phone with the little pill shape and the little circle. And what he was addressing was like, what are the benefits of that? And his response was, there are no benefits. All it really does is make it look different. And so if you want to have a new phone and say, look, aha, I have the new iPhone, look how different it is. It's got these two little dots instead of a notch, then great. But in terms of functionality, that's a safe area. You can't put anything up there anyway. I thought it was good analysis because I think that in the end,

while it is, the goal is to make the notch disappear entirely and the less stuff that's covered on the display where you can have like background color and stuff, the better. In terms of functionality, it makes no difference because it's still in a space

where nothing can happen. I think it will be visually more appealing, but I think this is just a step, right? Like the step being to eventually hide all of this behind the display, right? Like that's the ultimate goal here. Lots of companies are trying and failing to make this work,

but like, that's how all this technology goes, right? The ideal here is that we don't have to see any of this the sensors are hidden behind the display the camera's hidden behind the display so i can imagine this being more visually appealing takes up less space we'll see though i mean it could be more distracting to have these two little like black dots in the middle of your phone i don't know somebody can create a game with a bunch of

little black dots and pills all over the screen and some of them of your phone. I don't know. Somebody can create a game with a bunch of little black dots and pills all over the screen and some of them move around, but two of them don't. But I do agree with Mark Gurman's analysis that this is purely to make the new phone, at least the pro models, visually identifiable.

Because I think over time, what Apple has learned is that's when they have the big quarters. When the phone looks different. I mean, everybody knows this by now, right? We've said it a million times. Everyone's said it a million times. You can look at the charts.

When they change the design of the phone, they see the biggest impact. Of course, when they make physical changes, I actually think that the iPhone 14 is going to do great anyway, because for this and also the return of the large phone that's not a pro phone. Large non-pro phone will sell a bunch of units. Between the two of these, I think the 14 is going to be very good for them.

And I love my iPhone mini, and I'm probably not going to replace it at all. But I will say, even I feel the pull when they create a pro level that's differentiated the more they do that the more i'm like oh i could get the pro it's going to have that camera right the 48 well this is the thing so they already added they've got promotion they've got the third camera now they're going to do a camera upgrade there's a processor upgrade there's the the replacing the notch with this stuff like you're talking about a bunch like even more things are are differentiated and that does have a gravitational pull right that's going to pull a lot of people who who are

like spec interested away from the cheaper model because they're going to be like uh whereas when they were basically the same except for maybe like an extra camera, a lot less appealing. But when they're like, oh, and the processor's better and everything's better in it, it will be a little more tempting. And so I agree. Do you want to hear my A16 speculation?

Yeah, because I was thinking about this. I don't think we've touched on this, right? So the report is that from Ming-Chi Kuo, the marshal of the Roundup touched on this, right? So the report is that from Ming-Chi Kuo, the marshal of the Roundup, I guess, right? Is that what we decided? That's what we decided, yep. Ming-Chi Kuo said that the pro phone will get the A16.

The regular phone will stay on the A15, which is weird, right? Because it's like, well, we upgraded the new iPhone, but it doesn't have a new processor. It's just got the A15 that you all know. And maybe that's the case. But I had a moment of clarity because, you know, the challenge here is that are they committing then to having every year, like next year, it'll be the A16 in the iPhone 15 and the A17 in the iPhone 16? It's very complicated, right? What if, just throwing it out there, just spitballing, this is all it is. What if instead of it being the A15 in the iPhone 14 and the A16 in the iPhone 14 Pro, right? Right. pro right right what if apple says hey the a16 is here and what what the a16 really is is a very small improvement on the a15 it's using new cores maybe but it is otherwise essentially the A15. And then there's an A16 Pro chip

that's better that goes in the iPhone Pro. And I say that because it allows them to claim that the new chip is in both models, but that there's a better chip in the Pro phone. And I think,

from a marketing standpoint, I think that's a better move than saying it's 15 in the old and 16 in the pro phone and i think from a marketing standpoint i think that's a better move than saying it's 15 in the old and 16 in the new is to differentiate like they do on the mac and say there's a there's an a16 and an a16 pro and then we all do the benchmarking on the new iphone that's got the a16 and we're like wow this is really just basically an A15. Uh-huh, it is. Maybe they do the binning of the graphics processors like they've done in some other devices. Maybe so. Maybe it's, yeah, it's purely based on binning and the cores are the same

or the cores are a little bit better, but you can't really tell or they save some efficiency. So it's more efficient, but it's slower on the A16, but the A16 Pro gets to i'm just saying the more i think about this and this is based on no reports i am literally just making this up i if i were in that room at apple i'd be like can we can we make it different enough that we can call it the a16 and the a16 pro rather than having last year's chip and this year's phone and also this year's chip

and this year's Pro phone? Would that be a better look for us? And maybe not. Maybe Tim Cook's like, nah, it's fine. It's a cheaper phone. They're going to be a step behind. We're already more than a lap ahead

of the competition, so we can afford to do this. But I just think, I keep thinking, calling it the A16 when it's not particularly better or different than the a15 just a little bit and then saying we also have the a16 pro keeps everything in lockstep a little bit more um anyway i also think it's very confusing that we have these chip numbers and model numbers and they're off by two that also drives me uh batty so to have it be three different numbers that you have to keep track of iphone 14 with a 15 and a 16 that also is a lot so you know they got issues but anyway that's my

that's my completely idle speculation is what if they instead of having a 15 and a 16 they had a 16 and a 16 pro and the 16 was essentially the 15, but, you know, dressed up a little bit. Here's what I'll just put this out there. I don't think this is going to happen, but I'll put it out there. What if they say that there's the A16 in the iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 Pro has an M2 chip in it? Could. Now, that's, I mean, okay, so I want to just unpack that a little bit because that's quite a thing i've said right so what we could say is that the a16 what we think of as the a16 is

probably the base of the next m chips anyway right it's the expect an expectation that we can make and you would say well it's going to have a Thunderbolt port. No, of course it won't. And I think Apple could design it however they wanted to, and et cetera, et cetera. And it's all branding at the end of the day. The reason I would say this is a possibility is just that the M line, I think, has a very good brand right now.

Maybe a better brand than the a-line just like in general um technology media and like observation I think the challenge is how much has the m diverged from the a yeah right how how much has it done I mean is it really because the impression I've gotten is that it really is appreciably larger and uses more power and is more appropriate for an iPad and a Mac than it is for an iPhone. I see what you're saying. And this is the larger point I really support, even though I'm not quite sure that the calling it an M2 works, is Apple, these are Apple's chips. They can brand them however they want. I just don't think that the branding of holding the iPhone 14 back a year in school to help the teacher makes as much sense. All of their other chips now are like coming

pro and ultra and max and their phones are in pro max and all of that. So why not just say, hey, here's our non-pro phone. It has the non-pro chip and here's our pro phone and it has the pro chip and be done with it and it call it the same thing like that that makes more sense to me i agree with you because pro is now in the in the chip lineup i will just say you know in case i can stop people from sending their tweets to me i don't believe this thing about the m i just want i just wanted to put it out there as like hey it's a thing because like because they can do what they want i mean that's the bottom line they can call things what they want and and that's fine yeah they can they can call it whatever they want and this is why i mentioned that because as you said like they might just call something the a16 that's not actually really an a16 at all but they've just

decided to call it that because they want to keep bumping the numbers up and so that's why i would say this right that like it can share some architecture and they can just call it the m2 i do like honestly the idea of a16 pro because of the fact that they use pro and max and like they have these names now that are like their branding can let you kind of forget the confusing part which is the number right and then, you know, I honestly, I think maybe it's time to rebrand the A-line of chips anyway, just because we're getting up into way too high numbers and there's too many numbers now. And the iPhones are also numbered, right? Like it's too many numbers. That's our big analysis. That's right. Thank you, Apple. Thank you for hiring us as your consultants.

Too many numbers. That's what we say. Also, I'll throw out there, you could also just call the A16 the A15 Pro and do it that way if you wanted to. If the A15 is literally no different and you're not putting a new chip in that base model iPhone, you could call the new thing A15 Pro instead of A16. Because you can call it whatever you want and say, yeah, this is the A15 Pro. And then they're in lockstep again, one number ahead of the iPhone number, by the way. But there it is. Too many numbers. This episode is brought to you by Electric. When leading your small business, it's not all glamour.

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It arrived on Friday, and so I've had like three or four days with this beautiful little yellow device. I got one play date with the purple pouch. And I wanted to talk through some of my feelings with you, Jason, and then maybe touch on some more games, because obviously I've had two sets of games. I think you've had three now.

And I think I only have had two sets delivered so far. Okay. Maybe today a third set has been delivered. I think today you're going to get another two, I think. You should if I've got my internal clock right there so the packaging is wonderful this beautiful yellow packaging it is i did have to chuckle and it's a mean thing to laugh about but i did chuckle that the copyright date and the packaging is 2020 yeah that was the easy part well i mean that just that's when they thought

they were shipping it right just they printed it with 2020 on it i've been there right i am there still with some products you know this is how it goes and if people want to see the packaging and all that i did unbox it as you chastised me about last week because i didn't know how to play the games i know how to play the games now uh but i hadn't played them yet anyway so there's a youtube video where i take it apart and i show you the packaging and it's adorable. Yeah, so I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah, it's definitely worth going to see

just because it's cute, I'll say. Like they did a good job. They've really, I think the branding has been completely knocked out of the park overall with the play date. But yeah, we spoke a little bit about that last week. My unit arrived totally dead. The battery was 100% dead.

This came up on the live stream. Um, I had to plug mine. Mine was not so dead that the screen didn't show a thing saying you need to plug me in. No, mine was 100% nothing. But I heard from other people who had nothing and, and it came out. I mean, we were, we were thinking, because mine had to sit for quite a while. And it came out that if you did plug it in and you just waited a long time,

it would eventually get to the point where it would be responsive. They just, a lot of them have been sitting for so long that the batteries were completely discharged. Mine was like half an hour and it was ready to go, which I thought was fine, to be honest. Like it wasn't an issue. I'm just happy I saw this on the Playdate twitter account because i would have been pretty worried

well that and they did that because it we were all figuring it out like in the those of us who got them right in those first few days and this happened and then and so then they're like oh yeah we need to relay this to everybody that you may get it it's okay just plug it in and wait uh the setup process is great one of the things that i really enjoy is text input with the crank you don't have to intertext a lot if you did this would be annoying um but it's like kind of my passwords and stuff it's like kind of like a slot machine you have like these three drums and you can just spin them with the i like it it's fun um like you mentioned last week it becomes apparent very quickly

that this device needs a backlight. It is the only thing that I have negative to say about the PlayDate. The screen is amazing. It's incredibly crisp. And if you have some light behind you, it's fantastic and really visible. But the problem is you don't always.

Like sometimes, you know, kind of just i just hold the device at the comfortable angle for me and now i've locked out the light you know and so like that is it's an issue i hope somebody honestly i hope panic will i know why they might not but i hope that they will just make a light accessory like we used to have for Game Boys. Clip-on light, yeah. Just do it. It's fine. Embrace it. I understand what they're saying. The screen technology that they chose

with it being so reflective cannot be backlit. I get that. My question is why did you make that? I'm really intrigued as to why they made that decision anyway. but it's where they went you see it with kindles and things that that they that you know with a kindle um they engineered side lighting where basically you add a little bit of thickness but you've got

lights on the sides that are that are there's like a little guide a little light guide that shines the lights just down onto the screen and i guess that's hard and it would make it thicker and like it's a first i i get it i get it all but it is unfortunate that that is one of the things where you're playing it and you get you readjust your posture to be more comfortable and you can't suddenly you can't see what's going on on the screen it's not great but i let it go because when you do have the right lighting the screen is like unfathomably excellent to look it is it is just fantastic it is similar to if you have played an analog pocket which is the kind of the game boy machine right that is similar right the screen is just like i can't believe how good

this is um and so yeah as zach has mentioned in the Discord on the Panic podcast, they said they saw the screen first and then wanted to design a device around it. I understand that. I would have maybe said that they still should have found some kind of way to implement some kind of light system. Or sell it as an add-on immediately. I hope they do it in the future. But anyway,

the speakers are amazing. Really clear, really loud, and all of the music in every game that I've played so far is great, which works really nicely. I'm sure because of there being no lighting in it, the battery life is great. I've been really happy with the battery. I've been playing the system a bunch over the weekend.

I've charged it once, and it charges really fast. So overall, before I get into some of the games and touch on those a little bit i just think like what i like about the play date is it is pure fun like in a way that games aren't always like playing games isn't always that this just like it doesn't take itself too seriously um it has a crank on it which i've actually really enjoyed the crank mechanic in the games that i've played so far a podcast that i was listening to uh recently um one of the hosts two of the hosts uh blessing eddie junior and janet gar on Kind of Funny Games Daily, they referred to Playdate as, this is a game system for art kids and hipsters.

And that is not... I can hear someone hearing that, that sounds disparaging, but I completely understand it. The types of games that are on Playdate are very artistic in their creation. playdate are very artistic in their creation like in a way that is not going to sell millions of units but for people that have 180 to put down on a yellow thing which is tiny the size of a post-it note with a crank on it those people probably want games for art kids and hipsters because they are one of

those two like you are a hipster game person if you buy this and so the games should be focused on that and like one of the games i'm going to mention in a minute called bloom is like that which is a it's a third party game but like it hits nicely and and i mean okay so and hipsters and art kids right those are those are like stereotype terms and all that but i think what what has struck me about it and it's not just because we know the people that panic although it is that too is a a group of regular people who love games and are techie people but and they have a company, right, which allows them to do this, but they are not a giant entertainment conglomerate. A group of techie people who love games said,

we're going to make a handheld game device. And they made it happen. And that's my favorite thing about the Playdate is that it is not part of a, although there is, I'm sure, corporate strategy involved and they had to spend all those years working with their factory in Malaysia and doing all these things, right? Like, it is a corporation. Panic's a corporation. And they're trying not to, you know, have this bankrupt them and maybe be successful. Panic is now a big company getting bigger all the time. Right. But I will still say, Playdate is a product made out of love.

Yes. the time right but I will still say playdate is a product made out of love yes and I defy you to find any piece of gaming hardware or at least any piece of original game an original game device that is made out of love I'm sure there are a handful out there and in fact

that your analog pocket is probably in that category. But even there, it's playing old software, at least as one of the primary ideas here. But it's like Panic just wanted to make a fun piece of hardware because they love games. And again, it's more than that,

but I just am trying to say the impetus for so much stuff in the gaming world especially, and really in the world, is it comes from the top. It comes from, I'm a giant corporation. What is our new product going to be? And how do we compromise it?

And how do we tie it into all of these things? And although the people who are working on that love games, undoubtedly, it's not the same as making it out of love, which is what panic did. Yeah. And that's like, again,

like I want to bring it back to what i mentioned right the arc is in hipsters like the art part is and why i think this works is the play date it's for people who love the art of video games it's like that video games are a work of art and you feel that in this device where it's like we have a great appreciation for what video gaming can be and it can be this it doesn't need to be all black and gray and army suits and guns right like it can be there's a little robot and he's late for a date and he can move forward and backwards in time. Right? Yeah. It's kicked if he's too late. Yeah, we'll talk about it.

Yeah, it is adorable. One of the games, Casual Birder, which is one of the first games that you get. Casual Birder is a joke about casual gaming. And you are referenced as a, oh, you're just a casual birder like the it's this joke in this rpg about bird watching is the idea of like you are not a hardcore gamer which i yeah i said this last time the mean kids come out and say what are you some sort of casual birder it's really good

and so uh casual birder i really enjoyed a lot um it is a i thought you would i thought that was the one where i thought this is in my kind of game that i was so in i've finished the game i didn't 100 the game you can you have to like take photos of a bunch of birds around the environment and i think it's like 26 and you can complete it earlier than that which i did if you solve enough puzzles in the in the right order because it's very much like a an rpg in the sense of you can tell you need to do something but you don't have the thing to do it so you have to go around the environment until you come across the like the the key for that puzzle as it it were. And it's hilariously funny.

I was having a great time with it. The music is amazing. It's a really funny, weird, cute little game. This is one of the first games, along with Whitewater Wipeout, which is the surfing game, which I will say, Jason, I enjoy it, but I'm not good at it.

I have gotten way better at it. And I'm really enjoying it now that I figured out how to play it, which you were very angry about. You didn't know how to play it. I've done some 360s. I've done some triple 360s, whatever that is. I'm still – I wish there was like a help screen. Yeah, I have this with a few of the games.

Yeah. And this one is like there are controls in white water wipeout to help you get better at the game and they tell you them through the game i would just like to be able to to see them uh right at any i also don't know what they all do like they're like try holding down left when you do a jump i'm like okay yeah and i'm still something i think it moves the board quickly like it helps you complete the move but i'm not sure it does that like as a kid going to arcades if you stood in front of the arcade and nobody was playing you stood in front of the arcade console

it had like a little demo screen where it said here's how you play basically press this to do this jump over trees to stun them you know turn the turn the ghosts blue and then eat them right like it explained how to play the game and that if i have a criticism of these um these games it's that is i kind of want the the little screen that's like the help screen or the intro screen or the you know press here to get some tips and it shows you like here's how to play this game and i get that maybe the argument is the fun is figuring it out but i almost abandoned whitewater wipeout because i could not understand how to play it and only after you've told me them let me see them then right like if part of it is like sure i played a game i don't remember which one it was now one of the many third party games

i've tried out when you pressed the kind of menu button like the little circle button that you press uh to go back to the home like it kind of brings up like a pause screen first they had the controls listed on that screen which i just thought was like a smart place to put them because there's another game boogie loops which is in the second uh week where i do not understand what this game is or what I'm supposed to do. I think it's a more like a software toy. I think, yeah, I think it just helps you make music. Right.

But I don't know how you make music and you get the characters to dance. I don't know how I don't, I don't know how and I don't know what I'm missing. And again, again, I, I get that the learning... My son is obsessed with games, right?

Yeah. I get that learning to play a game is part of the game narrative, right? Of like, we frustrate you, but then you learn. But there is also a school of thought that says, you are not welcoming people who are not figuring it out and are not going to figure it out to your game. You are excluding people by not being welcoming enough that somebody who doesn't get your very potentially esoteric gamers will get it, other people won't kind of thing. You don't want to be that. You want to be a welcoming game.

You want to be able to game. You want to be able to say, oh, you're having trouble. Let me help you. And a game that doesn't do that or doesn't offer it again, offering is something you can do where you're like, no, I'll figure it out. That's like every computer nerd where they don't read the manual, right? It's like, I don't need to read the manual. I'll figure it out. And then if you have trouble, you go get the manual, right? That's how you do it. But to not offer and to not have it and just be like, good luck trying to figure it out. I think it is a failure of game design if you do that. And that's how I feel about that game is that it doesn't want me to understand it.

And I don't like that. I don't think that's my failure that I don't understand it and that you don't understand it. I think that is the game failing to communicate properly about how it works. But, you know, this is, so this comes back to it of like that set, this game,

I'm not into it. Like it's not for me. But I also got Crankin's Time Travel Adventure today, which is really fun. This is the game they have used in most of the marketing because of who has created this game. This game, the idea of the game is, and the design is the game they have used uh in most of the marketing because of who has created

this game this game uh the idea of the game is and the design of the game is by keita takahashi who created uh katamari damacy and like the katamari games legendary video game uh individual and it's you know sean inman helped with the pro like this is a uh this is this game is like oh okay like serious people behind this game and uh I know that Cable Sasser is like a big fan of of the um the Katamari Damacy games and that whole franchise so like this was I know this is a big game for them and it is the most crank heavy heavy game it's like yeah's like you are moving forwards and backwards in time as a way to solve puzzles. Yeah. Well, okay.

So it's not really, even though it's called Time Travel Adventure, you're not really moving forward and backward in time. But that's part of the discovery of it. I love this game. I think it's amazing. I now understand why it took me a little while to figure it out, but I figured it out. And the mechanic is so simple that you can figure it out fairly quickly. It's a good example, actually, of your failure teaches you how to play the game.

Yes. Because I was like, I don't understand. Why do I keep failing this level? I was like, ah, patience. Why do the birds or whatever keep killing me? It's like, oh, I see what's happening. But I'm a little baffled that it's not on the console at launch, that it's week two.

I don't get that. Yeah. Because it's so inviting. And it's brilliant. I love it. I love that it is puzzle solving. And then for those who, I mean, the way I would put it is, it's not really about time travel because your enemies in the game, the obstacles in the game, move in regular time. What it really is, is your little robot guy is on his animation loop.

And you use the crank to move him to different places on his animation loop. With the goal being that he gets to the end and gets to his date. But there are obstacles in the way that are moving at real time and they're going to stop him. And so you have to adjust his animation loop to be in the right position at the right moment to avoid the obstacles. It's a really brilliant mechanic. It makes me laugh out loud there is a moment that i'm not going to spoil here i think that i had yesterday where i laughed for minutes like i almost was crying at how funny the and i failed it was a failure how funny uh that failure was so yeah i i uh that that game is genius i love it so these are all the games that have come uh with the unit right so these are the ones so far now we spoke like last time

about like how are people going to take that it's like is it the right uh thing like what if you don't like a game right i think that it they are i would say not lucky i think it is very fortunate there there are third-party games and you can just download them and play them now like you can they you can buy them on itch.io you can download them from places we included in the show notes last week the playdate wiki um that has a large selection of all of the games that are available right now. And like software, like there's some stuff is not games. It's just like software. So I'll put a link in the show notes of the wiki

and that's where I've been finding stuff. And I found a game that I'd actually heard about already called Bloom. And Bloom is a $10 playdate game. And it is superb.10 Playdate game. And it is superb. It is so good. It's my favorite game on the Playdate so far. It is exactly what I'm looking for.

So it is a really chill game. It's played in real time. You are playing a woman who has quit school and wants to start a flower shop, and you're in Japan, and you have not told your parents that you've done this, and you've opened your flower shop, and you have rent to pay,

and you have flowers to grow, so you've got flowers to sell, and you have a little phone, and on your phone, you can exchange text messages with friends and family and you get to choose your responses. And so there's like some visual novel elements as the story's unfolding. But then there's also like you plant your flowers, you water the flowers, and then you come back later on in the day and pick the flowers and sell them.

So it's got that kind of like mechanic of like, you see this kind of mechanic in free to play games a lot, right? Plant, wait. But the idea is because it's in real time, you're supposed to just throughout your day, just pop in, check in on bloom and pick some flowers and then plant some more flowers. It's just beautiful. The crank is used really nicely to move between the elements of the game. There's games within the game. It is the writing is excellent the visuals are really great i adore this game like for me it's like this is exactly the type of experience that i'm looking for out of this device the idea of having these little games where i can check in on them throughout the day as when i told adina about this she's like oh you got a tamagotchi and i'm like

oh my god please let somebody make a tamagotchi for the play right like like this is the kind of stuff i'm looking for out of this device so tiny that i can just check in on these little things have a little game experience you know and and leave you know and so yeah i if you have a play date if you're gonna get a play date please try out bloom it is a wonderful game there's like a video there's a bunch of information on their uh itch page so you can see like if it's if you think it might be for you but like i am like smitten with this game i think it's amazing i love it um the other games that i'll mention that i think i mentioned last week but the bomber panda which is a bomberman game and it's funny

and it's pretty well done. I want a lot of like takes on old arcade games on it because I think that that's a fun sort of, they all, a lot of them have very simple mechanics that will apply well. That's why I like Playtris,

which is, he has a name now for the Tetris ripoff and he's actually updated it a few times and he fixed the, on my live stream, I think I die and you can see the frames

start animating at like one frame per five seconds because he only built it on the simulator and the guy changed the animation and fixed that. And he's added a bunch of stuff to it. So it's like he woke up, he was like, oh geez, people are getting play dates and they're playing my thing and it doesn't work that great.

I better get back to it. And he's done some updates to that. So that's great because I like having a tetris on there and a joke that's worth 99 cents i've decided is worth 99 cents it's actually a very clever use of the it's hard and you won't play it for that long but it's actually it makes me laugh at how hard it is because there's a song that plays and the song continues to play every time you fail and so as you fail you're like it goes cuts right back to the song and you're like oh song it's very funny and you use okay cool because i've been i've seen this game referenced a lot and i was like yeah am i going to enjoy this

but if you like it i'm going to give this one a go too yeah i mean the idea is that you're you're bouncing a thing on the crank there's a version of the playdate on the screen and the crank matches where you position the crank and you're supposed to bounce a little baby actually but you're supposed to bounce a thing that um that hits these stars that appear across the different screen and every star advances the joke one line um so you you know see basically you try to see how long you can keep the little baby bouncing um and how many stars you can hit and when you fail and the baby falls, the song cuts right back in and it's hilarious, I gotta say. It's not a game that you're gonna play for a lot of hours,

but every now and then I get back to it and make, yeah, well, I mean, it's telling the joke, but it's also, is it worth 99 cents? Like the animation is really good and the whole mechanic of using the crank to bounce is brilliant um so yeah it's totally and it's literally it's a 99 cent game on itch so it's totally worth it okay this is actually kind of funny too because it's like it's one dollar with a one percent off so it's 99

cents but i also can't pay pay less than 99 cents so you can't. You have to pay a dollar on it. That's part of the thing that makes me laugh about it. You have to pay a dollar. It's a joke that's worth 99 cents, but you have to pay a dollar for it. Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate the commitment to the bit there. So what I will say,

I know they're working on it, but they desperately need to get the catalog together so I can find these games and install them on my Playdate. Directly, yeah. The sideloading works really well. I've just been doing the version where I upload it. You download the file,

you just drop it onto the webpage, and then you just download it, and it works really well. I think that whole thing is pretty simple, but I want to be able to go to one place and read stuff and see like information about the games and that kind of stuff but i would tell you man i have waited a really long time for this right like everybody and i've been really really excited about this device and it has not disappointed at all. I adore this thing.

And I'm so happy they did it. And I'm just like, I'm in. Like, I'm in for the next, like, 10 weeks. I'm super excited every Monday to get my new games. And also to keep an eye on what the community is building and that kind of stuff. Like, this is super cool. I love it. I really love it.

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of TextExpander. Go to textexpander.com slash upgrade to learn more today. That's textexpander.com slash upgrade. Our thanks to TextExpander for the support of this show and RelayFM. Apple's Q2 results were posted last week. Surprise, there was a lot of money made. Yeah, I mean, that part is not surprising at all, is it? No. So here's a rundown. $97.3 billion total revenue, up 9% year over year, which is another record quarter for Apple. This is the highest Q2 of all time. That's $25 billion in profit.

$50.6 billion of revenue for the iPhone, up 5% year-over-year. $10.4 billion for the Mac, up 15%. $7.6 billion for the iPad, down 2%. That's two down quarters in a row. I want to get to that in a minute. $8.8 billion for wearables. That's up 12%. And $19.8 billion in services.

That is up 17% year-over-year. This is the first sub-20% year-over-year growth since Q4 2020. So all of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, the year-over-year growth was over 20%, and now it's less than 20%. Did you make anything of that? Like that just really stood out to me

when I was looking at your wonderful charts. Thank you for the compliment about my charts. It is, it didn't. I mean, the truth is the numbers have been going up for so long. And there was a spike that was in the 20s. So to have services cool down to 17, you know in 2020 and 2019 there was an extended period where growth was in the teens and it's back in the teens um and so i i just i i kind of shrugged it off i think i think occasionally they have moments where they have a a burst of

growth but to come off of that burst of growth and then just go back to growing in the teens. Because when you grow a lot, it's harder to grow by that percentage again because the growth is so... You're starting from a much larger amount that you have to grow from, right? It raises the bar. And so for them to go off of that four quarters in the 20s or 30s back to 17, where they kind of were before, yeah, I mean, there are other things you could complain about before you complain about that. Yeah. Especially as well, like, and I know, obviously, services doesn't just include Apple TV Plus, but like, from a Wall Street perspective, services can mean for Apple whatever they need it to mean at that moment, right? But like at a time where we've been speaking about the past couple of weeks, right? Like Netflix and CNN+, like not great. And then for Apple to say like, hey,

we add growth and they can, in that growth, talk about TV+, doing so well at a time when it is critically doing so well, right? Like it's good for them to continue to be having growth is good for them. And it's, you know, I guess probably Q3. So the next quarter they will crack 20 billion in the quarter for services. They're just under now at 19.8, right? So like that seems fair that maybe Q3 2022 will be the first 20 billion dollar a quarter services revenue yeah just keeps on going it's it's blasting up that's just the chart goes up like they say yeah so the only down right the only down is our friend the ipad

which has had its second down quarter in a row as i mentioned what do you what do you take from this i just don't have i mean it was only down a little bit and as apple has pointed out um it is severely supply constrained right like it's severely supply constrained is that the only product that's seeing these kind of supply constraints? No, they're all seeing supply constraints. But I think the idea was that the iPad was growing slowly and got knocked down by it. I just wouldn't worry about it.

The iPad is at a pretty good level. It was only down 2%. Between supply constraints and Russia being cut off, like, I don't know. I think you could over obsess about it. And I'm not particularly concerned about it. supply constraints and Russia being cut off. Like, I don't know. I, I, I think you could over obsess about it and I'm not, I'm not particularly concerned about it.

It is, um, it's at a whole new level. It, it had that really burst of, of growth in 2020. Um, but I mean,

last quarter it was down 14 year over year. This quarter it's down to it's, it's, it's minor. I just am not, I'm just not going to sweat it yeah given the environment of that's fair minus two percent like down two percent is basically you're pretty much level right like you know it's not obviously it's a lot of money but

it's not hugely off we're like down 14 that's a double digit like that's more of a concern right and they said very specifically it was severely supply constrained. So that's part of it too. If people want them and can't buy them, yeah. I'm just not going to – I refuse to do an iPad freakout. Okay. The iPhone, 52% of the business for this quarter. Services at 20, Mac at 11, wearables nine ipad eight yep apple really has three really nice 40 billion ish a year businesses um 30 to 40 billion a year businesses wearables home

and accessories mac and ipad and then it's got services which is shooting through the roof and it's got the iphone and like and they're not services obviously is not unconnected with all the others so it's kind of a different kind of beast but it is funny to think about if you take services out of the equation for a second apple's got these three similarly sized businesses mac ipad and wearables and then it's got the iPhone, which takes up half the revenue. And I think when, and we've talked about it here extensively, it is actually a management, an interesting management challenge, which is on one level, you should just manage Apple for the iPhone because Apple is, you know, is the iPhone at this point. On the other hand, how can you do that when you have these three other very successful businesses that you need to manage too?

And so we've seen that and I think they're in a better place now. Right. But there definitely was a feeling that the Mac especially was kind of not being paid attention to. And, you know, I do think that's going to be a continuing challenge for Apple is the iPad is a great example. Like calling it iPad OS, you know, maybe it was a stake in the ground, but like one of the challenges is iPad OS is basically iOS and it's, you have to will it that you will have iPad stuff in your iOS product cycle. Cause there will always be more iPhone stuff and the iPhone stuff will always be a higher priority overall because the iPhone is so huge and somebody has to have the discipline and, and it's not just like last year, it's every year, every decision, somebody has to have the discipline to say, we're going to do iPad stuff too, because the iPad is an important

product for our company, even though, you only throwing off $30 billion a year, whereas the iPhone is throwing off $50 billion a quarter. I get it, but that's part of their challenge because otherwise they should just shut it all down and be iPhone incorporated, and they're not going to do that. I'm fascinated by that challenge that they have because that iPhone number is always enormous. And they have to acknowledge it and do good things with the iPhone. But they can't keep those other product categories around if they devote themselves to the iPhone. So it's always back and forth. Imagine the debate about,

do we implement this iPad feature or this iPhone feature? And having it be like, how much gas does the iPad get in this? Because the iPhone will always win every single individual argument. So you have to balance it and say, no, no, no, we need to do this much with the iPad, even though that means we're not going to be able

to hit everything for the iphone and that's okay because it can't all be about the iphone i just think it's fascinating and that's because they have that real i think you know maybe somewhat unique to apple problem of the scale of its percentage and relativeness, right? Like 10% of your business, no matter what business you have, it's like, that's a big chunk. But this is $40 billion a year, right? So it's like, well, yeah, the Mac or the iPad might only be 10%,

but the relative amount of money and resources that can be brought through that money is astronomically large in a way that I'm sure not a lot of other companies have to think about with their products, right? Where like, as you say, it is that of like, the iPhone is 50% and it's hundreds and hundreds, you know, it's like hundreds of billions of dollars a year. But then you also have this other one that's 40 billion, which is so much money, right? And it's super weird. It must be very strange.

Like, yeah, but it's only a small part of our company. Yeah, but look how much revenue it generates, how many customers we have in this bucket. It's really weird. It is very strange. And you can't set off a division, right? Because Apple's structure doesn't work like that. The way another company would do this is it would say, look, the iPad division has its own budget based on how much money it makes.

The Mac division has its own budget based on how much money it makes. Wearables. You're the CEO of Wearables Incorporated. Yeah, like what Google does or like what Facebook does, right, where they kind of spin them out. And Apple can't do it. Apple literally can't do it because all its products are intertwined. The silicon is intertwined. The base operating system is intertwined.

And then big chunks of it are intertwined with other products. Like Apple Watch cannot be Apple Watch incorporated because Apple Watch is entirely dependent on the iPhone. And so you end up in a situation where of their own making, and it is greatly beneficial to them, but it does mean that they can't wall it all off. Instead, you got to make hard decisions. I guess this is nothing new, but this is my regular rant that I appreciate the fact when they do things for the Mac and they do things for the iPad and the Apple Watch and AirPods and all these things. On one level, I appreciate the fact that they are paying attention to these businesses because I think they are very important businesses. And yet, if you think about it, the iPhone business is more important than them each by about 5x.

So, you know, if push just came to shove, the easy thing to do would be to let them all kind of die on the vine. And I think there are points in it's the engine that really runs this company. But at the same time, we don't want to screw up these other products that are also by themselves very large, successful product categories. It's tricky, is what I'm saying. So in listening to the earnings calls, as you do, you were able to pull out some points that were interesting. And there was a couple that I noted down from your Macworld article. One being that the iPhone is kind of interesting that they were able to beat up year over year

because they were beating a very tough compare in the industry. Because the 2020 iPhone came out late. So the sales were pushed further into Q2 of 2021 than they usually would be. So most of the sales from the iPhone, like the big bump, usually you see in Q1,

which is the holiday quarter for Apple. But of the iPhone 12, there were way more sales into Q2 than there would be otherwise. So the fact that the iPhone 13 was able to beat 2021's Q2 shows that demand for the iPhone 13 is very, very strong. Yeah, yeah. I will accept this statement by them because they're obviously going to say whatever is self-serving.

But this is true. Like, it seems like a long time ago now, but the iPhone 12 launch was late, right? They spread it out. The Pro phones shipped a lot later. And as a result, what they said is the buying cycle was later. And they didn't have any in Q3, really. It was really more of a Q4 thing and then rolled into Q1. So a year on, the iPhone went back to the standard cycle, which means that they're later in the buying cycle than they were a year ago.

And so you'd expect that to be a tough compare. But they still went up. So, yeah. And there are also some supply constraints out there, I think, too. So, again, it's interesting that, like, it's easy to write off. Obviously, they get a huge bump when they change the look of the product, but the iPhone 13 demand has been pretty strong. They said as much, and you can see it in the numbers, that they're still selling iPhone 13s. It's not like everybody got their iPhone 12s and said, we're good. They're still selling iPhone 13s and doing well with that. doing well with that. You mentioned supply constraints. There are, quote, substantially larger supply chain constraints on the horizon for Apple. It seems like there is a mood, as you referenced, that potentially Apple are about to get hit by supply constraints in a way

that they have been able to mostly shield themselves for. Yeah, there's two things that are affecting Apple's supply chain, right? There are the silicon, they refer to it as the silicon shortages, or the, you know, it's the legacy nodes. Tim Cook likes to talk about the legacy nodes. He's reached the point now where he's like, you all know about the legacy nodes. It's like, okay, thanks, Tim.

But the idea that, and you see this throughout industries, there are all the stories about the car industry having to struggle with this, where it's like, okay, thanks, Tim. But the idea that, and you see this throughout industries, there are all the stories about the car industry having to struggle with this, where it's like commonly available parts for computers, like USB chargers and Bluetooth chips and stuff like that. Commonly available. But what happened was COVID happened, factories shut down, then they had to get restarted. And there's a huge backlog of orders for that stuff. And it has meant that the just-in-time supply chain is still not back in shape where you've got things. It's the story. Yeah, it's not in time.

It's out of time. Well, this is the story. My favorite example of this is Tesla shipping cars without USB chargers in them and saying, we'll fix it later. And I actually love that idea. And I'm sure there are other car makers doing it where it's like, okay, we can either make all these cars that we've sold and then not ship them and not actually get paid for them because of a legacy node somewhere. Or we can just ship without and say, we will take the hit and we will, you bring it into service and we'll install it later. But do you want your car now or not? That's what a lot of industry is dealing with now. Now, Apple is not going to be able to say,

hey, would you like your Mac Studio without Bluetooth? We'll add it later, right? They can't do that. So it becomes a supply constraint. So that's been going on and they've dealt with it. And they initially had a bunch of stock that they were able to do to mitigate it. But obviously there are still issues where they've blown through their stock.

They said that last quarter that they were kind of run out of their padding that they had. The other issue, though, is COVID. And specifically, a lot of Apple's products are assembled in the greater Shanghai area. And there have been lockdowns and therefore shutdowns of factories in Shanghai. And what Tim Cook said was their assembly plants are coming back online, but another term that I love is,

but they have to ramp. There's a ramp there. The ramp. Oh, the ramp. You know, because you don't, it's not a factory. Doesn't just flip a switch on and off when you, you got to get the factory back in motion again, it's actually very complicated and they don't start at full capacity and it takes

time for the factory to reach full capacity again, because you've got the stuff coming in and then you had the stuff going out and the people on the line and all of those things. And Apple said that is a major factor in their supply chain getting slowed down too, is that they have had shutdowns and you can see it. I mean, you can see it, go to, um, go to apple.com and try to order a Mac studio with the high end configuration. And it'll be like, you'll get this in July. um like across the board so many products are just not available anytime soon except in some configurations mostly the base models that are available like at your local apple store you can get them pretty soon you're seeing this everywhere and that's a big

part of it is the shutdown in the shanghai region here's the big part though and this is the part that made wall street go excuse me what and all the analysts on the call last week were like, Tim, can we talk about this a little bit? Is they think they will have between four and eight billion dollars in product revenue that they will fail to fulfill in the fiscal third quarter, which is going on right now. fail to fulfill in the fiscal third quarter, which is going on right now, because of the inability to fulfill demand. That there are $4 to $8 billion that people are standing, you know, like the meme with Fry from Futurama saying, shut up and take my money. Saying, take my money, Apple. I want your product.

And Apple's like, I don't have it for you. And that's what those long lines on the apple store are and all of that and and four and to eight billion dollars even for apple is a lot of money so i and they didn't give any other like hints about like we expect it to be probably a record or whatever they didn't say anything else about that third fiscal quarter. So my guess is they're not going to have a great quarter next quarter, not because of a lack of demand, but because of their lack of supply and that they're, they're, um, if they're sandbagging it, they're doing a really good job of it because they seem pretty sober about it. Like to call it out and say between four and $8 billion in product sales that will just be bypassed because we can't give them the product and when

somebody asked one of the analysts like tim about the four to eight billion um what what because they were all like asking about it was amazing because it's a big number it's a scary big number um and one of them was do you have an idea of how much of that will just be deferred to the next quarter versus lost forever you know it's one of those kind of questions. And Tim Cook's response was, who can tell? Probably both. A little bit of A, a little bit of B. We don't know how many people want a laptop, want an Apple laptop, can't get one, and immediately have to have a laptop so they go buy someone else's laptop.

Versus, I can wait until July for that Mac studio. It's fine. Like they don't know. So they were looking, the analysts were looking for reassuring words from Tim. Tim did not have reassuring words for them. And just again, like that's about,

could be about 10% of their revenue for the quarter. You know, they probably would lock in, in a regular scenario between 80 to 85 looking at previous history like if all things were good um so that could be if we get up to that top end of that scale which probably won't but if we got to the top end of that scale that's like 10 of the revenue for the quarter just a lot right off like that's no joke and traditionally apple's

q3s have actually been a lot less they've been in the 50s to 60s so it could be a it could be a scenario here too where they're looking at 81.4 last quarter and they're thinking wow we were actually thinking it'd be down and it'd be more like 70 and now it might be 62 or something like that like again see yeah in the grand scheme of things, is Apple fine? Apple's fine. I got a very, my Macworld column posted with a, sometimes they're inflammatory headlines.

I didn't mind this one so much, but I got a very angry email from somebody who was like, how dare you say that Apple is doomed? I'm like, didn't say that. It's like, they're so rich. I'm like, I did say that part, but Apple must be defended at all costs. We know that.

Anyway, my point was just like, they're going to be fine having $8 billion of extra demand in one way is a good thing, right? People really want to buy your products. But if you can't convert that into sales, that's painful. And I think what they're going to do is I think they're going to have a

painful quarter where they're going to be down and everybody's going to freak out. And then, you know, what's probably going to happen is that they're going to have guidance for the next quarter that say, Oh, we're going to,

we're going to be fine. We're going to get it all back. That's probably what's going to happen. But, but I would, I would say I would expect that next quarter will not be like the last kind of eight boring quarters where they've just done great. I think it's going to be one of those, yeah, let me tell you about the impact.

Maybe it'll be like, great news, everybody, only $4 billion, but still $4 billion in lost sales is not great. And it's the supply chain. It's just this is how it's hitting Apple. chain it's just this is how it's hitting apple and everybody who's trying to buy an apple product right now and discovering that they can't get it for months um they know they have felt this very thing that that you are your money that you want to put toward an apple product that you can't buy right now is part of that 48 billion like you're you're you're in this story is my like if i paint a doom and gloom picture of like what if this issue carries all the way through to new iphone like that there are people in september that go to the apple store to like you know they log online to go buy their phone and they cannot

get one until 2023 right because that's like similar to what the Mac Studio has been like, right? Two things there. One is, I do wonder if you're, if you're talking about the ramp, if you're ramping up manufacturing of iPhones, and I don't know when that starts to happen, but it probably will happen pretty soon, right? I mean, the fact that we've been seeing these screens and as soon, right? It's coming. So they're going to start making this fall's iPhones.

They start in advance so that they can make lots of them because they sell lots of them. I do wonder if one of the things that may be going on here is actually them saying, we have to prioritize building the iPhone. So everything else is going to kind of not ship. Sacrificing. And we're going to take a hit this quarter because we can't not have iPhones in the fall. So that may be going on here. That is a...

Very fair. And when analysts ask, like, do you prioritize? Tim Cook does it very much. I mean, he doesn't say we love all our kids equally. He says more something like, that's secret. And if I told you, I would have to kill you, is more of the line of his thing. But it's... I talk about prioritization and the iPhone being worth half of Apple's revenue.

Well, I'll tell you, if there's like, does the Mac Studio slide? I'm not saying this is actually an issue because they're probably assembled totally differently in different places. But it's like, you've got a choice. iPad Air sales are going to be held for a little while. Or we're going to not have enough iPhones. There's no decision to be made there. We got to have iPhones for launch. We got to have iPhones to sell. It's our most popular product and they sell all in the holiday quarter. We've got to make sure we make enough for that. So it wouldn't surprise me if that's going on in the background

and quite rightly so. I also, the other thing hovering over this, my second point here is COVID, which is okay. Like in the United States, especially everybody's like, oh, we're over COVID now. All the mask restrictions have been dropped and stuff like that. It's like, oh, we're over. Except people still are getting COVID. My favorite baseball team just had like five guys get COVID and not be able to play for a week. And they were all vaccinated and boosted, but it's Omicron and, you know, it happens. So, but like, look at China, like, and the lockdowns in Shanghai and like, it's serious. It's like really serious because they have these zero COVID policy. China being authoritarian state can just say, no, you stay inside now. Whereas in the US we're like, okay, people are tired of it. I guess it's over. We move on. China's like, no, uh-uh, no, we don't want COVID cases. And as a result, they've had very few COVID deaths. But the result is that COVID is very much a thing in a place that is super important for Apple. Mark Gurman wrote about this in his newsletter

this week. It's like, this is one of Apple's issues. We've talked about it here. It's like they are so dependent on China. And in this case, it's not about the government in China doing something that upsets Apple as much as it is this knock-on effect of the government in China saying, we're going to be really serious about controlling the spread of COVID in Shanghai. But the net result is that the factory shut down. And they're still dealing with those effects and it's going to affect Apple to the state of four to $8 billion. Well, that's for this quarter. But what it also says is how do you forecast when you don't know, because it's COVID

and it's the Chinese government's policy, like what if there's another outbreak in July and they close the factories again? Like that's, I think, the scariest thing from, if you're Tim Cook, is, okay, we'll take this hit now, but what if there's another hit that precludes us from manufacturing and hits our supply chain even harder and we can't get these things out there and we miss the moment for the iPhone again like they did two years ago.

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This is some hashtag ask upgrade questions to finish out today's show. This one leads in from what we were just talking about and this comes from Crumbledore. I'm a wizard Harry Apple CFO said they quote plans Apple quotes plans

to add new services to their offering what services do you think they're going to add what services do you want them to add oh wow so the one I'm not sure what I think they'll do is that stuff we've mentioned in the past, right? So I think more around finances and personal financing

and also financing of iPhones, right? So like that you pay every month and you get an iPhone or you pay every month and you get an iPad every year. You remember we talked about that? Yeah, they're going to bring the iPhone thing that's out there now that's like a separate kind of loan thing and they're going to bring it and make it a service. They're building the financial system for that. They're building it for a pay in four, pay in three kind of thing where they'll do that themselves instead of using a partner. You're on the iPad Pro plan and you pay.

And whenever there's a new iPad Pro plan, iPad Pro, you just get it. And you send in the old one and they just kind of do that because some people want that. And they are happy to have your credit card and charge you monthly. Like Apple's all about that now. I throw in sports. I think there will be a higher tier for Apple TV Plus if they get NFL Sunday ticket. I think that they may end up creating a kind of like a sports plus thing that will be maybe in a bundle, but it'll be something that you buy extra

or even separately, which I think would be interesting, right? What if you don't want Apple TV Plus, but you want the Apple TV Sports, they could make it a separate thing instead. I don't know. I think classical music is another one, right? Like I know that that's coming

are they gonna add that on right is that an add-on for some things probably for other things probably not keeping in mind that it's not just what new services but it's also things that it could add to a bundle which is interesting because then it doesn't necessarily have to stand on its own it could be a sweetening of the bundle even if they offer it on its own. It's also just like it makes the Apple One bundle look nicer. God, what else could they do? The idea of what would I want them to do is the one that

I find the most complicated because there are things that I want that they're just not going to be able to do. Like, I want Apple to offer a service where I pay them every month and can watch a bunch of new movies from iTunes, but that's not going to happen. Right. Oh, I got one.

I got one that will make people very angry. Pro apps. Yeah. Like Adobe. Yeah, do it. And Microsoft. Yeah. Where you pay a monthly fee for Final Cut or a monthly fee for Logic or you pay a monthly fee for a bundle.

for Final Cut or a monthly fee for Logic, or you pay a monthly fee for a bundle. Right now, their model is you buy it and you use it for a long time without paying, and then they do a new version and you have to buy it, which is very old school. And I get why you do that, but even the App Store now works with subscription models. So I wonder if they will do a milestone update of Final Cut and Logic. And in addition to offering them as a, you know, you can do a paid upgrade, maybe, they'll just roll that into a subscription thing.

It would be something they could call subscription revenue. And their model now, I'm always surprised because as much as I like it, I think it's a really good deal. Like I buy Logic once and I use it for years and never pay Apple for it. And if I were apple i'd be looking at that saying can we get money out of this guy who's using logic all the time um and the answer is yes you can you just have to do it so people will hate that idea but i think it's a possibility yeah i mean if it would bring uh i was gonna say

more features but logic does a really good job with that anyway, I think. But maybe we'd bring iPad versions. I would be keen. Sure, sure. I also wonder, another wacky idea, but I still think they should offer an iCloud extension that is Mac backup. Which I know Mac backup is complicated because there's a lot of extra data there but it just means you're selling people extra data like it like i mean again what's i know there's a lot of competition out there for backup but to have it be os integrated time

machine that works over the cloud and it says sorry you need to pay for an extra four you know terabytes of backup data whatever it is i would love it if time machine could just sync to the cloud like that i didn't have to have a drive anymore it just was synced to the cloud like i would love that personally i use backblaze but i would also like to pay for time time machine to just be synced to the cloud. Time Machine in the cloud. And again, does that feature already exist in competition? Of course it does. But the advantage of being the first party, the fact that they already do it for their iOS devices, I think there's more money to be made there.

I would also say an internet security thing, speaking of them just doing other people's business, if they're not going to build their own routers or whatever like that, they could totally do a VPN that was built in. And again, this is the case. Look, I'm suggesting a lot of things that will make people very angry here. I'm not saying that I love these ideas. None of these are like, yeah, we're into it. Same as like charging every month for Logic and Final Cut. We're not like, oh, yeah, man, great. It's just like, these are like good ideas for things we think Apple could do. But like there are a lot of consumer VPNs out there and, you know, we've had them as sponsors and like there are a lot of them out there, but they don't have first party advantage. Right. They don't have the you trust Apple and we've built it into our operating system and you flip a switch and they can't do it like for everybody, but they could certainly do it.

They've already, you know, they've already had added some iCloud features to the OS that you have to be a paying subscriber to get, right? The iCloud privacy stuff. It would be a logical extension for them to say, we're actually going to enhance privacy further. And if you pay us this, you can get a full-on VPN that's run by Apple or at least vouched for by Apple. Not saying they will do it. It's just like it's there for them to do. And I wonder, I think the real question is, who at Apple is rifling through the couch cushions,

essentially looking for places where they can find the loose change? I don't know why I use the couch cushion metaphor, but there it is. Dom asked, this is in relation to us talking about spatial audio. How do you feel about apple's spatialized stereo feature being used when somebody listens to your show it dramatically changes the sound that you obviously create deliberately so i'm interested to hear your thoughts on that so you can turn this on if you have airpods you can if it's not already on some apps turn it on by default i don't know why but like you're listening in the podcast app right now you can long press on the volume and there'll be an option called spatialized stereo and you can turn it on and it sounds like we're all around you

like it's it's a terrible feature i think honestly but how do you feel about people listening to upgrade and specialize stereo the idea that we're creating it deliberately, I mean, our podcast is mono. I mean, the theme is stereo. That's not completely true. Well, but the theme is stereo. You don't pan us, though, right? No. We're both dead center.

We're both dead center. We are both in mono. So the mp3 file is stereo. It's stereo for the music. But the only thing you ever hear that's in stereo is the theme song. Uh-huh, correct. Right, everything else is just mono, and it saves the the space and it uses the bit rates to do the mono because we're not panned or anything other than that episode where we took a walk in the

woods and that was all 3d with sound effects and people were angry and that's summer of fun's coming up i mean spatial audio version of upgrade you never know who knows but right now it'd be less interesting because it's just me going back over. Hi! Spatial audio! Oh, I'm back, Mike. I left space behind there for a moment. So I don't know. It's silly. I don't think spatialized stereo sounds very good. I think it just adds reverb, which I find to be kind of odd.

But the thing is, I'm not going to be precious about it because people listen to us at 3x. So I lost that battle a long time ago. Right. Hello to those people. You know, like I've given up on that feeling ages ago. Yeah, yeah. Hard to be precious about it. I mean, what we always say is like,

this show is made to be at 1x and then you do what you want. So if people want to listen to us in a reverb space that's fine the truth is though we're not supplying any information it would be different i would feel different about it if we if we even subtly panned us left and right because then you would have this like oh wow my yeah now i can see it mike is over there and jason is over here but we don't even do that so anything that it's doing there is is going to be lackluster because it can't pull us apart like i already get what i want right which is i uh this this this

show is encoded at 128 kilobit per second stereo which is not what people usually do but it's what i want to do because i think the show sounds better our voices sound better with the higher bitrate so typically upgrade or actually pretty much any show that mike hurley edits will be a little bit larger in size than maybe some other people do but that's my prerogative as the editor of the show and the other shows that i edit which is i like them when our voices have a higher uh clarity to them like because i i mean for me the reason for this is when i edit i hear our voices and I hear them uncompressed. So everybody can go back to last summer

where we released the different versions of Upgrade at the different bit rates. If you want to hear our high quality, lossless, lower quality bit rate voices. But yeah, that's what we're using the stereo for. We're actually not using stereo. It's stereo 128. It uses the way MP3 works. It is using the stereo differences is we're actually not using stereo. It's stereo one 28. It uses the way MP3 works.

It is using the stereo differences for the theme song, but once the theme song is, and I don't even know the theme song is not even that stereo. We, but it is a little bit, it's a little bit, especially the one you use. Yes.

It flies around your head. Like, like the bonus, the bonus stare, but then it gets to us and it's just using all that. It's it's what joint stereo or whatever so it knows that it's mono so it just uses the whole bit rate for us yeah yeah what episode was that when we did the the various versions i want to find it for the show notes

in case people don't know what we're talking about like we did an episode where we encoded and uploaded the show in various bit rates yeah including a lossless version because people were it's episode 360 thank you it's called big minimizers great title and then we have it we made it available in apple lossless 56k 8k which sounds like we are at the end of underwater somewhere you gotta listen to the 8k version like i did that one just for me because it was just so it's unlistenable it's it is it's it's nonsense you can't hear us but you can hear so that and the regular one's 128 so you can um that was that was our little ironic thing of like well if you really want to hear us lossless you can for this episode and discover that it really doesn't sound

any different no and that is because genuinely like I encode higher than most people would, and it's kind of at the edge of where I think you stop hearing any difference, which is like 128 for voice. So the lossless version of our show kind of just sounds like the regular one, but maybe at some other shows, it would be different. It would sound a bit richer.

Maybe. Anyway, Logic lets you now do spatial audio mastering. So you never know. I'll put that on our list for the summer of fun. Maybe we'll get there. You can put it on the list,

but I do not want to learn these tools. So if the spatial audio version of Upgrade is going to happen, which I would like it to, I don't think it's going to be me that puts that one together. I might do that or I might master it for you.

You do the edit and then send it to me for spatial mastering, 3D mastering. Yes. What is it, like mastered by Jason? Yeah, yeah. I'm a regular Bob Ludwig at MasterDisc. That's a reference. All right. Finally today, Luke asked, Jason, if I upgrade to the Mac Studio, what can I do with my 2018 Mac Mini?

You could sell it. You could donate it to somebody in need, a family member or a local school. You could do what I do and use a Mac mini as a server. I like having a computer that's separate in my house that is a server that is attached to extra storage. It does my time machine backup. It serves some web pages. It does some scripts in the background. It does a whole bunch of stuff. I've had a server in my house for like 20 years, more than 20 years now. And it's just, I always find some use for it of having a little computer that's always on that's in a closet or in the corner or somewhere else in the house. i can run stuff on i can use screen sharing to control it i know mac os so i i prefer that to running a like a like a uh uh one of those

network attached storage things right where it's like unix uh with big hard drives on it like i just have a mac running with a big hard drive attached to it. And then I can use the Mac and I'm more comfortable with the Mac. So I'm a big fan of using a Mac mini as a server. But failing that, you know, you, you really could sell it or hand it down or pass it off to somebody. Or I'd say the other thing is if you're using a Mac studio,

now you're losing Intel support. If you ever use windows or something like that, you should, you could install windows on it and use it as a little Windows box. Again, if you use Windows Pro, you can actually just keep it in the corner and use screen sharing to control it. And then you don't have to worry about it. You've got a little local Windows machine that you control from your Mac because obviously Apple Silicon has issues with Windows right now. So those are my suggestions. Mike, do you have any?

No. Mine would have been the ones you mentioned at the start, like find someone to give it to or whatever. This is why I wanted to ask you this question specifically for the server recommendation. I've never done any of this. Plex, you know, is I guess you can do that. You could

do all kinds of stuff with it, but these are not really things that I do or really have an inclination for. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer in a future episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord,

which you can get access to. If you go to GetUpgradePlus.com, you can sign up to support the show, and you'll get ad-free longer episodes of Upgrade each and every week. I think I'm, today in Upgrade Plus, going to let Jason loose on the New York Times article after Steve, how Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost its soul, which was not something I really wanted to talk about on the show today. And I was intrigued that Jason put it into Upgrade Plus as a potential topic today. So you can sign up and you can hear Jason probably say some stuff about that article in case you're wondering about it.

So go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up there. Thank you so much to Electric, Text Expander, and Trade for their support of this show. But most importantly, as always, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. You can find Jason in the meantime at sixcolors.com and at jsnl on Twitter. I am at iMike. And don't forget to join us on Friday, May 6th

at 12.30 p.m. Eastern Time, U.S. time, over at mike.live, where we will be working together to disassemble a touch ID keyboard for funsies. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then say goodbye.

Just as now. Bye Mike. Early.