Upgrade - 406: Are You Phishing Me Right Now?

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

An unlikely alliance of tech giants beckons us toward our passwordless future, but in the meantime there's a new version of 1Password. We also discuss Apple Car rumors, hope for the future of AirPods Max, our disassembly of a Magic Keyboard, and more!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 406 today's show is brought to you by fitbud bombas and capital one my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike how are you i'm very well my friend well indeed. I have a hashtag Snell Talk question for you. It comes from Nathan. Nathan wants to know, do you remember the first photo you took with an iPhone? Well, I mean, the honest answer is no, but I looked it up. Yeah. That's what I hoped you would do.

Yeah. And so the answer is, and I have told the version of this story before, I wrote my review of the original iPhone in a tent up in the mountains. And I had to actually drive downhill in order to get a cellular connection so that I could send my review back because we had no cell connection at the place where I was writing the review of the iPhone, which was hilarious. phone, which was hilarious. So to get there, you've got to drive from the Bay Area up through the Central Valley and then up through the foothills and you get up into the mountains and to the camp where we went. So Lauren drove that whole way and I sat in the passenger seat and did as many things as I could do with the iPhone that required the cellular network as I possibly could before we got up to the high parts of the mountains where there was no cellular connection. Along with that, I took a bunch of pictures. And in fact, I found in my photo library,

a photo that is the earliest photo taken on an iPhone. It is marked as image underscore 0002. My guess is I took another image that was nothing or bad or didn't make any sense but all of the images starting there are of my family it's my it's my son strapped in a car seat and my wife driving and then my daughter uh sitting in the back seat um as we take our trip my son's got his sippy cup uh There's a picture of traffic out the front windshield. Perfect. So that's the first stuff I took, first photos I took with the iPhone are all of my family in the car driving to the place where we were going to camp for a week. And then I was using that as some of my data points for my iPhone review.

I have no idea what the answer is for me. I have kind of pre-2000 and something. All of my photos are on a drive somewhere. I don't know where this drive is. I know I have it at home somewhere. I've just got to dig it out and do something with it. It's like I understand that that might make some people recoil in horror but it's just like photos I don't care about like I really don't care about them um so there's just there is it there in a number of years where I

just don't have those pictures in anywhere reliable but you know so I have no I can't answer this question because uh all of my my the original my like the earliest set of photos that I have in my photo library start in let me check when this is 2013 2013 the rest are somewhere else

one day I will do something with them I have in my photo library it's funny I have a scattering photo library. It's funny. Um, I have a scattering of photos before 2001, but that was when we bought a digital camera was in the, in the fall of 2001. And that's when the onslaught of photos begins. Although it leads, it's funny, it leads to this different era. So the first off there's the era before digital photography where I've scanned some of those in and I keep meaning to gather up basically like all my old negatives and have somebody scan them all just so that I can have those. Cause there's this era of film cameras where you didn't take a camera with you

everywhere and you didn't take very many shots cause you had to get them delivered and eat or developed and then you had to go get them. And then even if you got them, they're not in your digital shoebox, right? So that's an era. What I didn't understand when we bought our first digital camera is we were entering another era, which is the era when you had to take pictures with your digital camera and you didn't have a smartphone with you. And so it's all of those pictures we took are in my library, but they're not as consistent because I didn't have a camera with me everywhere.

Right. It was still sort of taking, I can take more pictures now because the concept of a, uh, the cost of taking a picture is way less when you've got a digital camera. And then there's this little tiny window where it's smartphone pictures without geotagging. And I find myself being like, I know I took this picture here. Why does it say there are no pictures here? And it turns out it's from before they did geotagging in photos. So I can't search based on its location. And then there's the modern era, which is everybody's got a smartphone, based on its location. And then there's the modern era, which is everybody's got a smartphone, all the pictures are geo-tagged, and that's the modern era. But yeah, my library starts in 2001, where we bought a digital camera, and then it just explodes. And then the past before that is just a mystery, essentially. I feel bad about it, because I know that I've got some photos around,

but it's almost as if the photos before then other than the few that i scanned in just don't exist our friend john syracuse every now and then and in a slack that we're in with him he'll post a picture from the past and i can tell that john's still scanning in old film very slowly scanning in all of his old film and he'll be like hey here's a picture of my computer from the 90s and i have some of those too what else has he got to do these days you know what i mean yeah we also some family like slides from lauren's family and and i i want to just send them out and have them scanned and then you know and then i'll throw them away i just because i don't want them but i also don't want to throw them away i feel like we need to actually have them scanned in so i'll get to it at some point.

If you would like to send in a question to help us open an episode of Upgrade, just like Nathan did, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnowTalk or use question mark SnowTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. Please send some in. Help us start out an episode of Upgrade.

It could be about whatever you want. So as we are recording today, it is May 9th, 2022. We are exactly one month from WWDC. I mean, four weeks. I mean, WWDC, well, on June 9th, it'll be the Thursday of WWDC.

Why do I keep doing this stuff? I was convinced that it was the 9th of June when WWDC was. What is wrong with me? I'm really struggling. My conception of May and June over the last few weeks has been horrific. Nine is just six upside down.

It's fine. That's true. It must have been what it is. They're very similar numbers. And it is 28 days. It is four weeks away from today. So I think that by, yeah, sure. It's soon. That's I think that yeah sure it's soon it's what we're saying it's soon

and today May 9th Apple has opened the registration ability for developers to sign up to attend the day long event happening at Apple Park I actually saw on Twitter

some Apple employees referenced that as well as the keynote and State of the Union, the Apple Design Awards will occur on this day. I haven't seen that reflected in any of Apple's official materials. So, you know, you can take that as hearsay from me at the moment. But yes, developers can apply, they can submit their request to join between May 9th and May 11th. And then everybody will be told by May 12th, so Thursday of this week, if they're going to be visiting. I'm still remaining intrigued about what on earth this event is actually going to look like, and how or if it's going to change the

presentation of WWDC. Yeah, it's still a mystery. I guess we'll find out. I mean, at some point, we may find out beforehand or not. It's, I don't know, it's something new. Apple hasn't done it before. It's harder to predict. So we've been talking in the last couple of weeks about Jason and I were going to be ripping apart

a magic keyboard to extract the goodness of the Touch ID sensor inside. We did it on Friday. There's a YouTube video I include in the show notes of the entire process if you want to go and watch it. I think it was really fun. We had a good time hanging out. It was full of trials and tribulations, I will say.

Could not have scripted it better, in fact, I would say. There were lots of twists and turns to up the drama of will they do it we've already spoiled it we did it but yeah we did um but there was a lot of like uh twists and turns and shocking moments and and popping sounds and and but it all worked out it all worked out we were very lucky actually during that uh stream in to be joined in the Twitch chat by Chaos Tian, who is the person who inspired this entire thing, the person who extracted the Touch ID sensor and confirmed that it worked.

We were lucky because the iFixit guide that we were trying to use wasn't great for this particular keyboard. I mean, some of the stuff I didn I mean, I wouldn't necessarily... Some of the stuff I didn't like. I didn't like the way I fixed it, wrote some of the guide, and I had some issues with that. But really, the internals of the keyboards had changed

from the non-touch ID version to the touch ID version. So after observing some of these struggles, Chaos actually put together some instructions of their own, which kind of, I think, add a little bit more necessary context for some of the things that you would want to know if you're going to attempt this yourself. I would say that this is not a complicated thing. It just requires an equal measure of brute force and very careful extraction, which is an intriguing thing, but that are the two things that you need.

One of the things we were talking about a lot afterwards, and I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do personally, is where this is going to go. Right now, I just have a logic board and some very thin ribbon cables and a button, and I need to do something with it. Like, ultimately, I want to put it inside of a keyboard case, but the issue is I need to be able to run two cables, or need to be able to run the lightning cable inside,

because I don't want to get a Bluetooth radio and attach it to a battery, because that just seems like a nightmare. But Chaos made their own 3D printed case, which I'll put a link in the show notes too. And they also included like some instructions on how they did that, like 3D print and stuff. So I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to do something with it.

For me, this was more a, can I do this? You know, this has been like a big thing of my last couple of years with these types of electronics projects is like, do I have the ability to do this? And thankfully the answer was yes, I did have the ability to do it. And I think we had a great time making it work together. So go check it out. It was really fun. I think. Yeah. And it, it inspired me. I definitely want to do this too, but I need to, you know, I want to have it end up being usable, which means that I am going to need to figure out what that case situation is.

So we'll have to monitor that. If we find out that there's good, like Chaos has a simple 3D printed case, maybe other people are working on something, I want that to be part of the process because i i don't want to have a just a yeah i wouldn't recommend doing it just to do what i've done as such like i think the next part is important i showed this project to lauren and her immediate response was oh they should just make that yeah they should make it like i mean it was just immediate and she's got a she's got a laptop that she uses when she's at home a lot of the time at a desk with an external keyboard

and then has to reach up to do the Touch ID. And she was like, oh yeah, that makes so much sense. And I admit, maybe Apple will never make this because it is such a weird thing to just have a standalone Touch ID thing and they're admitting that people aren't using their keyboards and all that. But something we said on the stream that i think really needs to

be restated is it would be um i i think the perfect place for this is in the magic trackpad um that they doing a version of the magic trackpad that just has a little tiny corner with the touch id button touch id sensor on it is all you know all you really need and then you've made it not a requirement to use apple's keyboard because i know not everybody uses apple's keyboard yeah i would expect more people use magic trackpad than use apple's keyboards i don't know probably because you always need some kind of input device and i think the trackpad does i think the trackpad does really well so i would love to see that too. You just put it on the little top corner there.

Oh, man. I'd be off to the races. It'd be fantastic. Studio display. I don't think we're going to touch on this too much, but there's been another beta which has included yet more tweaks to the camera processing. So they're clearly continuing to tinker with this right yeah i i haven't noticed

much of a difference it is a little bit different but um i one of the things i did not do last week was go through the whole process of putting the two um displays front and back and also what i'm doing is i'm leaving the other display that i've got on the original firmware not playing a game of like one up miss upsmanship along the way i'm trying to keep the original firmware there so i can compare all these betas to the original firmware but there it seems like they're tinkering there's definitely more that they can do um and you know settings is ultimately what they really should do is let us us set the settings for the camera, please. According to Zoe Schiffer from The Verge, Apple's director of machine learning has resigned over Apple's requirements for in-office working. Ian Goodfellow has been at Apple for just over four years.

In an email to team members, he said, quote, I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team. Yeah. I don't know. What's unclear here is, was he leaving, you know, because what we know is he left and he said that this was bad. Doesn't necessarily mean that this is why he left but he he took a shot on out the door and it might have been a motivator for him to leave so it's a data point it's a data point i like to see well schiffer says in her tweet is leaving the company due to its return to work policy okay i mean that's all we have is that tweet. Yeah. That's the report. I don't know if based on what was quoted, it's clear to me that that's accurate, but maybe it is. She's seen the email apparently. I will say that I like to see managers standing up for their team, right?

Because so much of this seems to have been individual motivated by individual workers saying, we don't want to do this. And having a manager say, this is bad for my team, and they are making us do this without flexibility. And it is bad for my team. And that's good to hear. But obviously, if that was the case uh it didn't stop it didn't prevent ian goodfellow from leaving like he left so that's not great yeah maybe we don't know how many people there are that have done this right like i expect it's more than just this one person but they're high up enough that they would send an email out for example to a team that could be leaked which is what's happened but you've got to assume that he's not the only one but then

but there's also the argument from apple's perspective of like this is what they want and probably when they were thinking about this plan that they have assumed that they would lose people and that they i guess weighed it up and felt that it was something that they would lose people and that they, I guess, weighed it up and felt that it was something that they were willing to do. But well, I think time's going to tell as to if this becomes more and more of an issue going forward. You know, we don't know what's going to happen, but obviously some people are pretty unhappy about it. And it is that idea, which you've spoken about before. They made it work, right about before they made it work right apple's made it work the company is not ground to a halt um there is clearly the ability for there to be more

distributed working they obviously believe it to a point because they're allowing for it at least a couple of days a week right it's not like apple's won't move to a three-day work week i don't think they're expecting no work is done on the two days a week on people who are at home. But the wide ruling is weird to me. I think that it should be given as a more, as Goodfellow says, more flexibility for their team. I think that answers the question that we had of, will Apple be giving a lot more control

over individual managers to make their own decisions? But it seemed like in this situation, the answer was no for the machine learning team, right? Because that's clearly what Goodfellow was asking for, more flexibility for his team and he didn't get that.

Jason, let's travel back to the netherlands we're back oh boy we're back is it time for some dutch dating tulips everywhere it's time to date in the netherlands it's dutch date and time so you i would assume everybody remembers a number of weeks ago uh apple revised and altered its plan for dealing with external linking and alternative payment models. So like the ability for somebody to pay with a third-party payment company. This is in the hopes of appeasing Dutch regulators, right? So remember, there was this ruling. Apple tried to ignore it for a while. Then they created a set of rules and guidelines on how they were going to do it.

They then revised them. They changed the language of the interstitial screens, et cetera, et cetera. They were then giving this like, here it is, this is what we're going to do. And it went off to the Dutch regulators and they are still not happy. They have said that this new approach

is an improvement over what Apple provided before, but still not sufficient enough to comply with their rulings. They have now, Apple has now hit the maximum fines of 50 million euro because they were doing 5 million a week. And they've now hit that. But now the regulators are considering alternative penalties because Apple has still not provided them

with what they were looking for in the first place. I don't know where this is going to go, right? It seems like a very weird game of 20 questions happening behind the scenes. It's like, is this enough? No. Try again. How about this? Closer.

Warmer. Because my assumption is that from the regulator's perspective, they've been pretty clear. Because Google got it right. Right? Google made their proposal, and it's been accepted. Right. But Apple's like, we want to do the least possible. Because it's clearly not the fees thing either, right?

Because we were talking about that, like about what the fees are, because Google is still taking a pretty hefty fee, not as hefty as Apple's, but pretty hefty. It's clearly just the way that it's being shown and they're just not, for whatever reason, meeting the rules. And I just wonder how much time, effort and attention is this really taking from Apple?

And if they should, how many more times are we going to have to go through this? This is just one of many, right? Anyway. But that's an update. I'm sure we'll come back to this again at some point in the future. Apparently we will because they haven't resolved anything. Nope. Nothing is resolved.

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Yeehaw, partner. We're going to go to Mark Gurman for a couple of rumors this week, Jason. Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple is working on new features for Fitness+, hoping to be introduced this year. This would include new workout types, which seems like an obvious addition. You just keep kind of increasing that over time. Different instructors, different types of workouts. It seems like an obvious addition. You just keep kind of increasing that over time, different instructors, different types of workouts. It seems like the obvious upgrades to the Apple TV experience. We don't know what they are, but I know people have

had frustrations with that, especially like if multiple people wanted to do a workout. I hope that Apple try and find some way to do that, which would be pretty cool. Oh, yeah, that'd be good. Also, this one's weird to me. I don't get this. Also, apparently Apple are exploring, quote, an Instacart-like service that integrates with nutrition data in the health app.

Now, if I'm following right, that means Apple wants to deliver your groceries? Like, am I following that correctly? And wants to log your meals? I don't know. Right? I don't am i following that correctly and wants to log your meals i i don't know right i don't get this i don't i don't understand this at all or is it a service that they're partnering with that will bring little you know boxes of food to your house and lay you know labeled for you and then you eat them and i don't need my computer company to be handling my groceries for me no this seems this seems like too far.

Also, any experience that I've had with even apps that are like, oh, we'll build your shopping list and all that, it doesn't work for me. It has never worked because the level of specificity that I have about what I want to buy is way more than they're capable of doing. I don't understand this. It seems like an unnecessarily complicated thing. If they want to get more into like nutrition tracking, calorie tracking, like as a thing for the health and fitness teams, fine. But the idea of integrating it

with real world grocery delivery services, unless it's an API, I don't understand it, right? Like if they're developing tools for companies that do this to integrate into the health app, that's one thing. But them trying to develop some kind of system, I don't know, this seems like someone heard something and it got spit through somebody else. It didn't make any sense.

I just can't think of the logic in this at all. No. Mark Gurman also gave a little bit more detail. This is all coming from his Power On newsletter, of course, on the hardware subscription plans that Apple's looking to do. So this is the idea of you paying monthly and getting your iPhone, your iPad, or your Mac and getting them refreshed and stuff like that.

So, you know, doing more than the upgrade program to the actual subscriptions for hardware devices. Apple wants to make this experience on par with the other services that you already have. So you would use your iCloud or App Store account to subscribe and it would all just be managed like any service. It seems like they don't want to make it this whole big thing like the, you know, the iPhone upgrade program right now is like a huge big thing, right? You are going through credit checks and doing all that stuff. I don't know how Apple could make this work. Like if they want to make it as simple as signing up for Apple TV Plus.

Like how do you manage that? Like that the person is not just going to pay once and then cancel their account and they've got your device I'm intrigued to see what that ends up looking like if they want to make it simple, you potentially run into some problems there the current expectation for this is late 2022 as a launch date at the earliest Apple are prioritizing their buy now pay later installment plan option first and this is like the idea of like you could

go to the apple store and you'd be able to split your new ipad purchase over four payments which is yep i think as you've mentioned what all the kids are doing these it's a hot thing with the kids right that you're when i walk to my Apple store, there are signs throughout the outdoor shopping center, basically, for various services that are, you know, pay in three, pay in four. The idea that it doesn't cost $800 if you pay in four. It costs $200 for four months months there's some logic to it right

no the logic is that people um people have that will be able to pay the payment stretched out over four but they don't have enough money in the bank to buy it right now and rather than doing it like on layaway or something like that they they uh they just get it and then know they're committed you know and then we can have a discussion of of i saw an article today about like how many of those things do the people fail to make the payments and what is that what are the penalties and all of that is it's still paying on credit essentially so you can get yourself in trouble but it has also proven to be a pretty popular way for people who don't have a lot of money sort of in the bank but are are willing to make the payments and stretch it out to get the thing that they want so and if i'm remembering rightly like a lot of money sort of in the bank but are are willing to make the payments and stretch it out to get the thing that they want so and if i'm remembering rightly like a lot of these if like

a lot of these things they're not actually charging you interest either it's just right oh no that's generally they are if you pick if you make the payments in four or whatever then it's just it's literally one quarter of the price every month for four months it's just interest-free credit and like you know at that point i think there's some logic to doing it like even if you have the It's literally one quarter of the price every month for four months. It's just interest-free credit. And at that point, I think there's some logic to doing it. Even if you have the money, just split it out. Make it less of a hit on yourself. You know what I mean?

Why not? Well, especially if it's Apple doing it. And so it's just sort of like coming out of your same credit card is all your other Apple stuff and all of that. And then you're like, put it on my account, basically. I don't know. It's very much Apple trying to take control. I mean, this is obviously part of being a person at Apple is to always survey your partnerships and the places where you're outsourcing to other companies and say, should we be doing that ourselves? And a lot of times the answer is

probably no. But occasionally I do think that they see something and they say, yeah, maybe we should do this. And the financial stuff clearly is an area where they would like to eliminate those partners and just do it themselves. And then a couple of little bits on AirPods. Apple's still planning to release new AirPods Pro later this year. Mark mentions this would be prudent because the batteries are probably starting to fall off for early AirPods Pro customers. Like me, my AirPods Pro batteries are real struggling now. This is what happened with the original AirPods for me too. When I replaced my original AirPods of AirPods Pro,

you know, been out for a couple of years and they brought a new one. I'm having to charge my AirPods much more frequently, like the case and the AirPods themselves. I'm not having this issue mostly because I had my AirPods Pro replaced due to the rattling issue. So they seem to have a little more life,

but I love them. And so I would be happy to see what a new set looked like and how they're improved because I love the current ones. So hopefully they'll just get better and it'll give me a reason to get a new set because they're my favorite. This is an Apple product that they do not feel the need to update every year. They just wait. A couple of years.

I think it's fantastic. It works for me. Mark also mentions a refresh of the AirPods Max with new color options, but probably no other changes. Hopefully a price drop, says Mark, which I would agree. I think they should probably reduce the price.

I love my AirPods Max, but they are not worth the price I paid for them, I would say. I still want to see an AirPods Max 2 with lighter materials because that would be better for a lot more people and would help make them cheaper. And folding.

Folding is the biggest thing that I want to see from that product. Otherwise, it's a fantastic product for me, but I don't think that it is great for everybody. So I would love to see more. AirPods Max, maybe AirPods Studio. That was the rumored name, right? Back in the day.

And now they've got Studio products, so it's a better name. It's a better name. It's a way better name. It's a way better name. Studio is the best. Max sucks. Sorry if your name is Max.

Studio has a music connotation. Yes, it's a perfect name. Max does not. It may purely have been like they were going to call them AirPods Studio a music connotation. Yes, it's a perfect name. Max does not. It may purely have been like they were going to call them AirPod Studio or marketing and was like, nope, we have got that name

for something else. Come up with something, come back to the drawing board. Yeah, or they're like, well, we don't want confusion with Beats, which has some studio, but it's like too bad.

I don't think that matters. AirPod Studio, it's fine. We're going to go back to a not often news segment here, Jason. No? Time for upshift here because we have some Apple car news. Apple has hired a Ford veteran. Mark Gurman and Keith Nelton are reporting at Bloomberg that Apple has hired Desi Udekovic from Ford. Her previous roles at Ford were in vehicle safety and engineering. She's been at Ford for over 30 years, most recently as the

global director of automotive safety engineering, as well as assisting on engineering of various car components. Ujajkvic has history with working on regulatory issues as well. So an interesting person to bring over. As a reminder, just to get everybody up to date, Apple has had a ton of issues retaining key talent in the car project. It had previously been run by another Ford veteran, Doug Field, who left. It's currently being overseen by Kevin Lynch. Yes, the guy from Adobe who did the Apple Watch is running the car project. This report doesn't give any indication as

to where UJK Visek will sit from a leadership perspective at this stage. Right. It doesn't seem like from the way it's written that she'll be heading the project, but would be high up. But it is a you know a serious uh well thought of person who's been a uh ford executive for a long time i think that's

interesting in terms of how seriously they're taking it it does also possibly say something about her wanting a new challenge about what ford's reorg around evs looks like and maybe she wasn't happy with where she ended up in that i mean there's a lot of reasons that this could have happened but it is somebody who's a serious auto industry executive who's coming to work on this project which i think is if nothing else it's a data point of like oh i guess this is still happening and they're still taking it seriously still hiring because otherwise somebody this seriously entrenched in the auto industry would not. And in fact, if you look at like safety and regulatory, you could even say this suggests more of an intent to ship something, right? At some point you need to start getting your ducks in a row in order to have your vehicle be approved and

street legal, right? You need somebody who actually has experienced what it's like to work with regulators to build cars that are acceptable and safe and legal, and that this is what she's been doing. So they may be like, oh, we need somebody who actually can make sure that this is not just a theory, but it's a product that we can actually sell. I mean, especially considering all of the report and continues to indicate that Apple's current plan is to aim towards a fully self-driving car with no

steering wheel or pedals. They're going to need this kind of assistance to try and get people to let them do that. Or, or I hope that, that she comes in and says excuse me what now well but here's the thing like you you put something in my mind a minute ago about like the seriousness now i'm assuming that someone like this is not uh they're not answering a um like a job posting they're being headhunted right probably yes right you would be it would be my assumption that this kind of you know my my father-in-law was a high-level executive headhunter so absolutely right i could picture it it's like they come

they come and say we need a higher we need a vice president or president level person to come and do this thing and then they go and they find the four people who could do that and they and especially you know it you know it's possible that uh ujjikovic was on the list because that dog a list that doug field made it could entirely be right of like here's a bunch of people that would be really good either they already like field had already made it or left it or whatever you know what i mean exactly yeah on his desk he was like people who could replace me uh yeah exactly yes and so you would think also that desi would not have um who would not have taken this job without very clearly knowing what apple's aims are and what right exactly they're sitting down and she's gonna say all right so what's what's the plan here what you for? Exactly. So while it's funny to imagine her getting there

and then on day one, they're like, okay, what we're going to do is there's going to be no steering wheel. Where's the wheel? Excuse me. In reality, I do wonder though, again, this is, look, this is us expressing the same skepticism we've expressed in the past, which is I think that there is literally zero chance of Apple releasing a car that only self-drives and doesn't have controls for people to drive normally.

I think, I'll say it again, zero chance. Because it's just not like, and certainly not in the next decade, right? Like this self-driving tech is not good anywhere. The companies that have been working on it for ages, it's still not good enough, and it's certainly not good enough for you to not have the ability to take control or to drive it in certain circumstances where it can't be run. I'm willing to go—and this is just summarizing a past episode—but, like, I'm willing to go down the path of, like, on highways, it'll be fully self-driving and all that. It's like, okay, I'm willing to go down the the path of like on highways it'll be self fully self-driving all that it's like okay i i'm willing to at least accept that it's possible that like tesla software will be good enough that in certain places you can set it and forget it even though right now the full self-driving beta stuff is you, on highways, it's pretty good, except when it's terrible. On streets, it's much more difficult and problematic than that. But to make it so perfect that you don't need controls is never, I mean, never with an asterisk saying, let's say,

in the next decade, as a part of this Apple project, ever going to be the case. It's ridiculous. A project like this as well, you've got to be able to build something that consumers are going to feel comfortable owning and getting behind the wheel of. I am such a fan of Apple, obviously, and love everything

that they make. I wouldn't want to get Apple's first generation car, even if it was a normal car. Because they are not a car company yeah i think yeah you'd be in for a ride but i will say if apple like i can imagine an apple car i can it's been long enough that we've been talking about this that i can imagine an apple car i can imagine apple sort of you know they missed their shot in the sense that they should have been out there competing with Tesla and Rivian. And now all the big automakers are coming in.

But I can still imagine an Apple car that's luxurious. It's more expensive. It's got really nice tech on the inside. It's got integration with cellular networks in your phone and all of that kind of stuff that the software on board is really, really good. Like I can imagine all of that and that it has great safety features and that it has great smart driving features and all that. Like I can picture all of that.

The question has always been with this project, where does Apple draw that line in terms of below here, we can't ship it because it's just too much like all the other products. And is a really nice car that's more like a Lucid Air or a Tesla Model S kind of like a really nice, expensive, but very good electric car. Is that enough for Apple? Or does Apple need to have that feature that's going to blow them away? And that's my concern about this project is it seems that rather than doing a really nice electric car, they're trying to find that feature that'll blow them away. And I'm not sure that that

feature is one that they're going to be able to execute on. So if this rumor was, well, they're going to do a car, but it's going to have really good self-driving software that's going to be much better than what Tesla is doing or something like that. It's like, okay, they're going to do a car, but it's going to have really good self-driving software that's going to be much better than what Tesla is doing or something like that. It's like, okay, I could believe that that was their goal. Leaving aside, again, the analysis of would it really be that way? I could believe that that's their goal. But when it's like, you won't even have a steering wheel, there'll be a secret steering wheel that will only pop out in very specific circumstances for legal reasons, but it won't

even look like a steering wheel. It'll look like I don't even know what, right? That's where they lose me because I don't think that that is within their reach or quite frankly, anyone's reach. To have a car so good at driving itself that you don't need a steering wheel just seems impossible. that you don't need a steering wheel just seems impossible. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Capital One. Have you ever hit a technical snafu while shopping online? Has filling out payment fields given you a headache? Or has mobile banking, your app that you use,

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to create the future of banking. Search machine learning at Capital One. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Our thanks to Capital One for their support of this show and RelayFM. Hey Jason, what's your password? Uh, it is a long series of, is this really

Mike? Are you phishing me right now? It's a long series of numbers and letters. While I still can, Jason Snow, I'm trying to steal your password. Well, better be quick about it because pretty soon I'm not going to have one I will read from press release on Apple's newsroom page

it's a joint press release it's even better indeed in a joint effort to make the web more secure and usable for all Apple, Google, and Microsoft what an unholy alliance Apple, Google, and Microsoft today announced plans to expand support

for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the Fido Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. The new capability will allow websites and apps to offer consistent, secure, and easy passwordless sign-ins to consumers across devices and platforms i got distracted by the idea of like i'm so happy that they added microsoft to this because the last time apple and google got together to do something it caused so many problems remember the the exposure notification stuff how much of a nightmare that ended up being for them? Basically... Don't forget the new

smart home consortium that hasn't happened yet. Matter. Right. There's too many of them involved in that one. It hasn't happened yet. These are...

This whole thing, if you're not understanding what I'm talking about right now, because it's pretty complicated, is end-to-end passwordless options. Basically, allowing you to sign into a website or an app or a service with the same method you use to unlock, say, your phone.

This could be biometrics, Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode or password that you use to unlock your phone. Let me give you a good example. If you go to Apple's website and you try to log in to see your orders or something, on a modern Mac OS or iOS browser, you don't get a password field. You get a system authentication request that has you do

touch ID, or I don't know whether the watch ID thing works, or you put in your password for your computer your your device password not or face id on ios right you you don't you don't put in the password you don't put in your apple id password you you authenticate at which point you're logged in the idea here is you would be able to do that everywhere yes and also that that system dialogue is just giving you an easier way to sign in. You still have a password, right? You still have the password. This system removes passwords completely. There aren't any. You have a username and then your device takes over with the authentication. I actually don't know. I think maybe there are cases in Apple's system where you're authenticating using biometrics

or with your device password that I don't know if it's sending your Apple ID password at that point or if it's sending the signed cryptographic blob that verifies your identity. But that account, I still have a password though, right? Like there is one. The service has a password for me. Sure. And I think in the future, I mean, we can, we can talk about some of the details here, but I think there will probably

be lots of cases where you also have to have optionally a password depending on what, you know, or there's a per device password, a one-time password, whatever it is. But yeah, the idea is that you're not just putting in your authentication so that your system can look up in its little password manager what your password is and send it. The idea here is you basically sign up on this website and say, this is me. And there's a cryptographic exchange. And then the next time you come back and it wants you to log in, you pass the proof that you're you via a cryptographic exchange and it lets you in and that's it yeah i read about i read in detail a little bit more from this is something you linked to uh dan moran of six colors yes wrote up an article about a wwdc session from 2021 where apple introduced their take on this so

and this was like because it is based on a standard, but now the large tech companies are like trying to make it a public thing and push it forward. Right, right. So this is, yeah. So Apple's already doing the work on this. There's WebAuthn and Fido. And the press release that came out last week

is essentially all three major operating system vendors saying, yes, this is what we're going to do. And so Apple's already been working on it. It's in iOS 15 and Monterey, but it's disabled by default. It's just meant to be used as a test so people can test to this. And you can watch the session if you want to. And Dan's write-up is really good. He wrote quite a lot about what's in the session. And then you can also watch the session if you want to. But it makes things way easier and way more secure because it's not even using a password generator. It's using this whole cryptographic thing. And it's doing a lot of things that you're familiar with, like a barcode where you're're in your browser and your browser sees the barcode and says oh here's the setup and it it's all supposed to

happen automatically and like they're they are it's not here yet but we're getting if you've ever been like i'm really tired of passwords being compromised and password managers and all of those things um just know that the the three major os vendors are all working on this new standard that should make everything way more secure yeah i will say there is a part of me i can't get my head completely around how this couldn't be spoofed but i'm just going to assume that obviously this has been considered and would be basically impossible to do it's a little bit complicated it's like a little bit confusing to me like because you pass this key right but like why could the key not be intercepted i don't fully

understand that part um but i'm just going to assume that it's fine i think it's i think it's all based on on public key encryption so the idea idea there is that when the original link is made, a secret is exchanged, and then you're the only one who's got the ability to make that secret, essentially. And that's how public key encryption works in the most simplified version ever. Here's my issue with that. The word public, that's where I start to get stuck. Oh, yeah. Well, no, but it's the public key

means anybody can anybody can um decode but only you can encode um okay or anybody can encode but only you can decode yeah that's one way anyway it's it's a one way it's a one way thing okay um they should get better words public is not a good word for passwords right okay you see what i'm saying here well it is okay private key encryption but that sounds better do you not do you not agree with me right like just as a way to try and explain this to someone like me if it was called private it makes me feel better than the word public it's super secret private encryption i know you're making fun of me now but you understand what i'm saying right like this is where stuff like this can start to get complicated for someone when you're trying to explain it to them.

That's why instead of calling it that, they're just going to call it WebOften or Fido. Well, Apple call them pass keys, which I think is a pretty good way of describing it. So part of the thinking around this is like what it should do is reduce a couple of things quite significantly. One would be phishing attempts because there isn't a password you can give to a malicious website.

There isn't a password that you can give to somebody over email or over the phone or whatever. Because there is no password. And SMS interception of two-factor codes would go away because, in essence, there can always be a second factor which is another device i don't understand how that would work exactly on say if you were logging in on your phone right there isn't a two-factor part and there's a question about what happens if you've got a shared account where like multiple people need to be logged into it but again i'm without diving deep into this i'm pretty sure that the people working on this are anticipating all of these uses and are working on ways around it right the idea here though is that the i that that you you would put in a username and a password and submit it as a way to control

your presence on the internet is going to be replaced by something more secure and that's the big picture thing right that's good personally i think is i think this is a good idea i think as our lives are moving increasingly online the requirement for for individuals to have strong passwords and two-factor and a system where both of those things are not linked to anything else that you own, right? You only use the same password twice. You want to make sure you use two-factor, but ooh, not SMS messaging.

Like the level of complexity that just an individual user has to have to try and keep any kind of modicum of security these days because even if you do all the right things a service can be hacked and your password stolen your account is compromised right like everything that you have to do to still only be partly secured is it's becoming too complicated and things like you know like the apple doing the iCurl keychain and the strong passers and all that kind of stuff that's only part of the way right like it only stops like half of the stuff from going wrong you know and the truth is that

even this is a frustrating from very technical people For non-technical people, it's terrible, right? Like lots of people don't use a password manager. Lots of people still use the same password everywhere. Or they've got a sheet of paper or a notebook and they write down their passwords, right? Like passwords are bad, not just because they're insecure, but because they're hard to manage, right?

Passwords are bad because they're hard to manage. And I know we're going to talk about 1Password, the product, in a second, but one of the ideas behind 1Password and other password managers is you reduce it to sort of a single way of authentication, and then everything else is handled for you. And that's better, right? But you have to get there. And even Apple adding password managers to iOS and macOS, like still a lot of people don't use them. A lot of people don't understand them. And then the more complex it gets, well, now you need a two-factor thing and you probably shouldn't put that as an SMS message. It should be on your phone. And how do you get it in? John Syracuse on ATP last week was talking about how hard it was to get

barcode authentication for his son's college login, right? And that was a highly technical person who couldn't get it to work. Like it is even for technical people, it's hard for non technical people. It's very, very hard. And that is the going to be the weak point where people try to exploit them and rob them and, and it's bad. So there has to be like a new way of doing this. And this is it. And it's exciting because a lot of smart security people have been working for a long time to try to find. This is like email being totally open because the Internet was invented when there were no security risks and everybody was trusted. And as a result, email is just broken forever.

Right. Well, this is kind of like that for passwords, which is when the web came into being, things weren't even secure. It was unsecure. And you would just send your password insecurely. And it's got to change, right? There's too much valuable stuff on the internet. It needs to change. been adding all these other multi-factor security things on top of it and telling people to create have a password manager and have these long chains of unrememberable uh things in order to get those things in there and it's all too much right so i'm i'm excited that this is not only happening

but that this is not one of those cases where the big tech companies are all walking around like look we're the coolest we've got the best idea they all realize for this to work they have to work together and that's why there's this alliance and fido and and uh the w3c is behind this and they're gonna they're gonna make this a thing even if it does take probably you know half a decade or a decade for it to be everywhere at least the end is in sight now for passwords i I think that's a good thing. Yeah. And there are still things I would love to know more about.

What happens if you lose a device? How do you get access to your stuff again on a new device? Sure, sure. And Apple and Google and Microsoft will probably need to be involved in that, right? They're going to probably need to be able to make it. It's a little like Apple warning you about not having a backup access code for your iCloud or whatever it's like they're that's going to need to be part of this is how if i lose my phone how

do i get back in that's going to have to be part of the deal like if i switch from ios to android right like that that should be a seamless process which is why these companies one of the reasons i'm sure these companies work together is to make that happen because if they all believe that this should be the case they have to work together as the three dominant companies in this space right and then stuff like enforcing security like if if i only have a four digit code on my iphone and that's how i use for this like that's not enough right so yeah you would need to do your face id or something else like that they're going to have to be authentication standards for this stuff i think it's much more likely going to be

um stuff like that than it is uh one two three four your which we as we know is your password everybody knows that one two three four um well i have other passwords and they're stored in one password and one password at8 just got released. You had an article that you wrote on Six Colors about it. I kind of just wanted to get your opinion on this, like thinking about, you know, we're talking about passwords today. This is what we're both currently using for our password management. Obviously, 1Password8 was controversial when it was first unveiled. Right, late last summer. It's been in beta a very long time um controversial primarily because um it of what it represented okay there's two things

and you and i you were a guest on the six colors podcast last friday for six colors subscribers we talked about this that's one of the things you get by being a six color subscriber is a podcast it's usually me and dan but it was it was mike this time um and and like part of one password is what it represents uh on one level it it um one password eight doesn't use the traditional method of mac app development they basically threw away their mac app and they're using a cross-platform um based on web standards, electron interface on top of a cross platform binary that they wrote using the Rust programming language, which again, you shouldn't ever need to know what programming language your program was written in, but just they have a new approach.

And this is what powers their Linux version and it powers their Windows version and now their Mac version as well. And so people who are concerned about the health of the Mac and the future of apps on the Mac were concerned about that. And I was concerned about that, right? It's like, it's not a good sign. I understand why they did it, but it's not a great sign. I will say 10 months later, the app is good. The app is good. I think the interface is good. Maybe it's the Apple Silicon talking because I upgraded to this when I went to the Mac Studio. But I think it's fast. I think it's responsive.

I think it looks good. They got rid of a lot of kind of Chrome around the UI that they didn't need. They did make some changes to try to make it feel more Mac-like and less like a fake app. Like the preferences window when I tested the first beta in August last year

was a fake window, kind of like you see in Catalyst where they put up a window, but it's inside the other window suspiciously. And if you try to drag that window somewhere else, it doesn't go anywhere because it's not really a window. It's a fake window inside the other window. Well, their preferences window is a real window now, right? Like they, there are a lot of interface niceties that they have added. They put a lot of effort into this. It doesn't look anything like a Mac preferences window.

However, you know, I would say I'm one of the first people to say, I don't think that any developer should be forced to design anything any specific way. I think they should be able to choose their own. I think its preferences window is kind of modern Mac-like in the sense that it's got the little sidebar with the little colored icons. And I think that that's a direction that Apple's been going to. It doesn't, but it doesn't look like it. Like, you know, if I go to quote unquote, a good Mac app, it doesn't look like that.

But I'm just saying, right? Like they've made it better. It's got its own look, but I think 1Password is a big enough company that they can dictate the way they want their apps to be designed. Yeah, it feels modern to me. It doesn't, it doesn't, what it doesn't do is make me feel like I'm looking at a Windows app that's been brought to the Mac. So whatever they did, it doesn't feel to me like an intruder on the platform, which is

the big... For me, that's the big concern, is there's variation on your platform, but there are also the things that are using the metaphors wrong. And those feel like alien intrusions on your platform. And when I use Streamlabs or something, I'm like, oh, this is a cross-platform application that is not really made for the Mac, even though it works on the Mac

and it doesn't work like it. 1Password doesn't feel like that. Anyway, the other thing 1Password represents is a lot of people who don't like changes in how software business models work. And I get it, right? This is a version of the Marco Arment is sad because the HomePods are dying and there's no new HomePod and there's no other product in the market that really fits what a HomePod is. And so

even though not a lot of people bought HomePods, the people who bought them liked them and there is no replacement and that sucks. And that's totally true. Well, with 1Password, it's they went to a subscription model, and they put everything in the cloud. And so if you're somebody who doesn't want a subscription, or you don't want your stuff synced into their cloud, you can't use 1Password. And I would say, yes, that is, I'm not one of those people. I don't mind the subscription and I don't mind the cloud syncing. It's very convenient. But if you're somebody who has been left behind by changes in one password's business model, also plenty of reason to be angry.

I get it. Perfectly natural. That all said, if you take those things out of the equation and you don't have to, but I'm going to right now, the app is actually pretty good. It's got some really nice features. It's got this new quick access bar that's kind of like a launch bar or spotlight bar that lets you very quickly look up any password and copy it to your clipboard. It's got an autofill feature that uses the accessibility settings in Mac OS so that if you're in an app that's asking for a password,

you can very quickly autofill that apps with a password out of one password, which you couldn't do before, which is really nice. So there's a lot of good new features in it. And, um, and it works really well for me. And I've got,

I've got this touch ID on this keyboard. That's a Velcro under the bottom of my desk. You maybe you've, maybe you've heard of that, Mike, uh, I haven't yet taken it apart and reduced it to just a button. Uh,

and that, so I authenticating with touch ID is super easy. I know that yet taken it apart and reduced it to just a button. And that, so I, authenticating with touch ID is super easy. I know that's not a new feature, but like, it's new to me to be able to do that. And yeah, so I'm pretty happy with it. I think it's actually a pretty good update that adds some very useful Mac features and like the, the autofill that they have to use Apple's, you know, frameworks in order to do that. And they did that. So it doesn't feel like a tossed off cross-platform product from a company that doesn't care about the Mac. And so we have the background of what they did. But if you look at what the product is,

I don't think it fits the narrative. Do you think this passkey future would be a concern for 1Password? Yeah, I mean, there's this question of, okay, if we're in the passwordless future, what do password managers represent? I think what you're seeing is, well, one, they are positioning themselves for more kind of like group and corporate use where you've got shared identities and shared information across, which makes sense. information across, which makes sense. And I think if you are a smart product manager, you are looking at the development of the passwordless future and saying to yourself, where does this fall down? Where are the edge cases here? And it's just like when Apple Sherlock's something, right? It's like they already know that Apple's doing a password manager. So who do we serve? We serve people for whom the built-in system stuff is not enough. So my guess is that there's absolutely still going to be a business here

because of the limitations of the new passwordless sort of system. All the edge cases, all the, yeah, but what if you're in an organization that needs this, or you have to share your identity here, or you need to share this identity here, or you need to share this identity automatically, and this is a way to do that. I'm sure they will find ways, but I don't know the details enough of the new stuff to know what those are, but I'm sure they exist, and I'm sure that it's on their roadmap to make sure that there is an audience that will pay them for whatever they offer. That all said, it may be that the percentage, it's already the case that the percentage of people who are on the Mac or iOS who need one password is less than it was before because

of Apple, because Apple has built a password manager in and it's pretty good. And assuming Apple keeps working on that and improving that, it's going to make the percentage of people who need to buy a password manager on macOS and iOS smaller and smaller. And this passwordless thing will make it smaller and smaller. Doesn't mean there isn't a good business there. But I think one of the reasons that they're focused on growing their small business and enterprise part of 1Password is because those are places with more stringent security requirements and complex situations that will probably be more likely to need something like 1Password than a random person who just needs to save their passwords. They know that those people

are going to increasingly just use what's built in. And so you need to find the edge cases. I'm sure they will. This episode is brought to you by FitBud. Between balancing your work, family, and everything else that you have going on, it can be really difficult to make fitness a priority. What you need is a program that works with you, not against you, and that's why you need FitBud. FitBud has an amazing algorithm. This algorithm will learn about you and your goals, and also your ability, like what you're able to do when it comes to training. It then takes all this information and crafts a personalized exercise plan that is unique to you, and their app makes it incredibly easy to learn a bunch of new exercises

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for 25% off. Thanks to Fitbod for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's finish up today's episode as we always do with some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Dotisopropyl, which sounds like a, I don't know what that is, but it do with some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Dotisopropyl, which sounds like, I don't know what that is, but it sounds like some kind of chemical. I think it's dot isopropyl, like rubbing alcohol, dot. No, I'm going with dotisopropyl.

I don't think that's it, but okay. Have you, Jason, looked into any news reading service for your e-reader? Do you send longer articles to it via email or file transfer? Basically, do you ever read stuff that's not books, right, on your e-reader do you send longer articles to it via email file transfer basically do you ever read stuff that's not books right on your e-readers and if you do how do you send stuff there i do um and since i'm using a kobo kobo has um pocket built in so i just use pocket i have i have a pocket extension on my um on my devices and safari on the mac there's a pocket button in the toolbar and on ios you just do share to pocket and it shares it and then those sync with the kobo in the little pocket app basically that's on the kobo and it's it's kobo doesn't

have an app store of any kind but it has pocket integration so it's like a little weird app inside of kobo but that's what i do if there's a really long article and i'm like oh man i'm not going to read this now uh and it's and it's a long article that it's probably evergreen i send that to pocket and it shows up in the kobo and i can read it there is that all you use pocket for yeah yeah so you you don't use like a read later service for stuff anymore? I haven't used a read later service for stuff like that in a long time. I used to use Instapaper and send it to the Kindle when I had the Kindle. But otherwise, I'll just leave a tab open and read it if I'm going to read it sometime soon.

It's really for longer stuff where I'm just not going to get to it. And I'm like, wow, this is a really long article and I'd like to read it, but I don't know when that's going to happen. And then that's when I'll send it off. I do a lot of reading in NetNewswire now. I know I wrote about this, but like newsletters and stuff get collected in there. And if it's a sub stack, it's also in the sub stack app. So I've got a bunch of other places where I do reading that the Kobo is really only for books and the occasional pocket saved long article. And honestly, I've thought about making it be that instead of using pocket, I just use some

method of emailing that article to my NetNewsWire instead. But that brings- So remind me, does NetNewsWire have an email address that you set in, say, Substack or are you doing it? No, it's your RSS service. So I'm using Feedbin. So Feedbin has an email address that I can send anything to. The problem is with an article, you've got to grab the text out of the article and email it. And that can be difficult because the websites will fight you and Pocket's already taken care of it so I just sort of

embrace that and send it to the Kobo I just wish everybody would do what you and Max Barkey and Max Stories do where you just create an RSS feed for members like I wish everybody would do

that like that's what I want i don't i have i use feed bin but i don't want to do all of that i just want an rss feed instead of the email if there's anybody out there from substack um do an rss feed please like you can authenticate it you can tie it to you can tie it to the membership well they don't want to because they want you to use their app now right but i don't want to become i know you to use their app now, right? But I don't want to use their app. Neither do I, but that's what they want. They want you to use their app. I'm sure they do.

So instead, I'm forwarding all of their mail to Feedbin and doing that instead. And that's fine. That works fine. I do my morning session, my morning reading when I'm drinking my tea and eating my breakfast. I am looking at newsletters and RSS feeds in NetNewsWire on my iPad. So basically that's the answer is most of my reading happens on my iPad,

but there are longer articles that I will send to Pocket and read on the Kobo. Rick writes in and says, have either of you tried the Keychron Q3 keyboard? It looks like a solid upgrade for my current K2 model. Neither of us have tried it. I can speak for both of us on that one. You are my keyboard representative here.

Yes, no problem. But what I will say is the answer is yes, it will be an upgrade. The Q models of Keychron keyboards are the custom, quote unquote, versions of these they are made of better materials they are made in such a way that you can customize them in ways that you would want to with different switches switches different keycaps that kind of stuff it is their premium offering i have used the q1 jason has that q1 and is used way more than me. They learned a lot from that initial Q1. The new Keychron Q1 is updated

and then the Q2 and Q3 were both made with those learnings. Just about some tolerances, some sound stuff. They've made some great improvements. So if you are using any of Keychron's K series of boards and enjoy it but would want something more, move to their Q series of boards

they are great, they're like legitimately great, available constantly at, for what you get, incredible prices, like for what it takes to get something outside of what Keychron's making, you can go into

many different areas as I do and get way more particular with it, but if you're just going to get started, they have a bunch of colours they're really good, and so you can go into many different areas as i do and get way particular more particular with it but if you're just going to get started they have a bunch of colors they're really good and so you can check them out um i say there are companies that do things that i much prefer but if you're getting started or you're looking for some kind of in-stock thing kikron do a great job uh morky asks aside from the apple watch do either of you use smart health monitoring devices like scales or sleep trackers or blood pressure monitors or anything like that do you use any of this kind of stuff i have i think i mentioned it here before i have a blood pressure monitor

that is smart in the sense that it's got bluetooth and it will sync with an app that puts it in apple health although the real point to it is that I put it on my arm and I press the button and I can get a blood pressure reading, which is nice. Do you know the name of the company that makes that? Oh, no. Do you think you could find it so I could put it in the show notes at least? Yeah, I can put it in the show notes.

Cool. That is probably the only, other than the Apple Watch, right, is the only thing that i'm using for that i had the wything scales you know like the the the the old school bluetooth scales that everybody has i guess if you have these kinds of things uh mine are wything scales that then got rebranded the app got rebranded to nokia and now it's back to why things again which is hilarious the guy in case you're not familiar, the guy who made that company was bought by

the company was bought by Nokia. That guy then bought it back from Nokia for less than he sold it to them for. And it's back to being Why Things again. And so I've kind of gone a complete 360 with mine. But yeah, I like them. It's just like a good scales. And I just like that. I don't need to do anything.

And it automatically updates my stuff in Apple Health if I want to do my weight and all that kind of stuff on it. So it's great. And now we have the answer. My blood pressure monitor that I bought is the Omron Evolve. Ooh. Yes. Well, you know, what are you going to do?

You got to evolve. And it's a Bluetooth syncing fancy thing. Omron Evolve. Look at that. Oh, it looks scary to me. Oh, it's like, you better put it on your wrist or it'll zap you with a laser or something.

Evolve without an E. Without an E, no. They've evolved past the need for an E. At the end. The beginning still has one. It's not the evolve. The redundant E has been dropped. And Jajara asks, Mac Pro, do you have some price bets?

And are you going to apply the Snell algorithm for pricing? What is the Snell algorithm? Is it double it and add 50 or something? What is it? It's, no, it's consider the price you want. Raise the price by, I mean, raise the price by a, I mean, it should probably be a percentage, but raise the price by $50 or $100 or $200.

For a Mac Pro, I'd say raise the price by $200 from that, maybe $500 from that, and then round up. Basically, the Snell algorithm is more of an art form, and it's find the price you want, increase it to a painful price that you don't want, but you might pay for, and then raise it a second time.

And that will be the price. It's not always the case. I applied this algorithm to the studio display and I came up with something like $2,000 and it was less than that, $1,600. So sometimes Apple surprises you. Mac Pro, Mac Studio, to start with a Mac Studio, what? You've got to start at $5,000 with the high-end model, right?

$4,000. Is it $4,000 for the base? The Ultra. Ultra? Yeah. Because I think to figure out what the Mac Pro price is, you have to start with the Mac Studio Ultra.

That's a good point. I wasn't thinking about that. But yes, of course, you have to start with that, right? And that's 20-core CPU, 48-core GPU. Yeah, so we're going to add 1,000. We're going to add 1,000 to it. Okay. Because we're going to add a thousand to it because we're going to

go to the 64 core GPU, 32 core neural engine. And I'm going to say that's $5,000. So I think the Mac Pro could not start for less than $5,000. It currently starts at $5,999. The Intel model.

Yeah, so I'm going to say $5,999. The Intel model. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I'm going to say $6,000 is the least it will cost. And that will be for a disappointing version. It's got fewer cores than you'd like for your $6,000 Mac Pro. And like 64 gigabytes of RAM. Right. Yeah. It's going to be pretty sad.

Yeah. And they might start it at $128 or something like that oh my god jason it currently stuck the six grand one i forgot about this currently starts at 32 oh okay well then we'll say they started 64 so what we're saying is it might be 6 000 to start gigabytes of ssd storage yeah that's what it starts at now yeah that's not even gonna be yeah so so actually i think that shows you something right whereas the level of the content in the base model mac pro is actually not great which is why nobody i mean people buy it but but they don't expect you to buy it at that level it is absurd right now how much of a deal the mac studio is the mac studio

when it's like if we bump it up to the 20 core one, which we think would be the starting, you get 64 gigabytes of memory and one terabyte of storage. For five grand. For five grand. Yeah. Yeah.

So more storage, more memory. It's faster. And it's five grand. So yeah, I'm going to say, to answer the question, I think maybe it will be six thousand

i think i think six two i i think that they would just say like it's the same price i don't think they're gonna bring it any closer to the mac studio it doesn't make any sense because otherwise why put the mac studio in there but it's gonna be for a base model that's gonna have disappointing base specs and so you're gonna say oh but just for a thousand more but then you're gonna look at the mac studio and you're gonna look at the mac studio and you're going to look at the mac pro and you're like oh but it's it i could actually get more computer for less because i do think that that the argument is going to be the mac pro is really for people who need the mac pro and that the studio is is going to steal you know what what maybe the creation of the mac studio means it is absolutely pointless

to even bother with that starting configuration of the mac pro anymore i mean for people who need whatever the mac pro is going to deliver in terms of expandability um but i could imagine them maybe even starting it at seven or 8? Could be. Well, you're doing the Snell algorithm now, right? So what I'm saying is I think that 6,000 is your, that's what the Mac Pro costs now price. And the question is, are they going to try to hold that, but it'll be disappointing?

Or are they not going to make a disappointing base config and instead they're going to kick it up to 7,000, which means that it's 8,000 or 10,000, depending on how you want to handle it. But if I had to put a bet down in one price, I would say 6,000 or $59.99 because that's the existing price. If I were to set an over-under, though, I would put it higher, right? If I was setting an over-under, I it at um at uh 69.99 maybe i think i'm gonna say my my my number would be starting at 69.99 like that's what i'll be yeah and i'll go 59.99 but um but it'll be expensive and and like i said i i also want to reinforce it'll be expensive and it'll be for a config that you'll look at and go oh well i don't want that

so yeah i wonder if the ultra has some kind of minimum amounts of ram and storage that it needs i wonder i don't know well it it will because it's two M1s, right? So it has to have the memory, minimum memory of each of those. So times two. But, you know, having it have fewer GPUs or fewer cores, all of that is possible. I also anticipate that it will be, you know,

Ultra only, the Mac Pro. So Ultra or Ultra times two, whatever that is is possible i also anticipate that it will be you know ultra only the mac pro so ultra or ultra times two whatever that is ultra max yeah mega ultra do you think do you think if they do that they will give it a different name like it will there will be another name or do you think they will just be like, it's the Ultra with the highest specs? I mean, they're maniacs in terms of naming. Maybe it's the Mac Pro Maniac, you know? I would recommend that they just call it 2M1 Ultras, but I guess it really depends on how it's built.

If it really is the four interconnected thing that was rumored, but seems to not be happening for the m1 then they could call that something else if they want a a step above ultra just to be monsters like i just wonder if it's like if it's even necessary like it's just the ultra but here are the specs like at a certain point do you need to brand everything right well i mean and even even if you did you wouldn't need to brand it to say it's two m1 ultras or m2 ultras or whatever it is you wouldn't need to necessarily say it's uh it's the new m1 ultra max especially because you're marketing to

people buying a very very expensive computer do you need marketing of that kind at that price point i don't i don't think so. Yeah, considering it is likely that that chip will probably only ever be in that computer, I would expect. I don't think it needs its own name. Where the Ultra is going to find its way into other stuff, I feel like.

It's not just going to be in the Mac Studio. It will be in the Mac Pro. It will be in an iMac one day. Could be in a MacBook Pro one day. I can't imagine whatever that top-of-the-line chip is really finding its way into other stuff. Maybe the iMac Pro,

but I doubt it. I don't think it's going to be necessary. So, yeah, so we'll see. We'll see. We'll see maybe in four weeks, not in a month. Four'll see. We'll see maybe in four weeks, not in a month. Four weeks. Maybe we'll find out in four weeks. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show,

just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use the question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord that you get access to. If you sign up for Upgrade Plus, go to GetUpgradePlus.com and you will get longer ad-free versions of every single episode of Upgrade. Which, you know, could be great. We're moving into peak season, then summer of fun, then peak season two, you know?

Like, there's a lot of great content. You can get even more of it with no ads at getupgradeplus.com. But thank you to our sponsors for this week's episode. FitBud, Capital One, and Bombas. And of course, thank you for listening. If you want to keep up with us in the meantime, you can find us online. You can find Jason at

sixcolors.com, and he is at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. Jason hosts many shows here on RelayFM and on The Incomparable. You can find me, I'm at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E, and I also host many shows here at RelayFM. You can go check one out, maybe add something new

to your podcast subscription list. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.