Upgrade - 420: I Don't Want Your Jolly Ranchers

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

What bothers Jason more, bad candy or App Store ads? Tough call. We also discuss some possible iPhone price hikes, Jason's HomeKit (sort of) cameras, a return to macOS Ventura, and the pronunciation of Apple silicon.

From RelayFM, this is Upgrade, episode 420. Today's show is brought to you by TextExpander, Squarespace, Sourcegraph, and Member4. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. It's great to be here on episode 420, which is 10 times the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

Shout out, James Thompson. And that is indeed the only reference to that number. That's the canonical reference. It's 42 times 10. I have a hashtag Snell talk question. It comes from Brantzz brantz wants to know what's your favorite candy mike will add in case you're hungry you know you got the munchies what candy do you want i gotta be nice to brantz because i was kind of mean to brantz last week

in jason's defense he apologized in discord before the episode went out it's true and brantz saw that first and then was worried that I'd said something terrible about him, which I actually didn't do. I asked if he was Johnny Ive in disguise. So, what's my favorite candy? Boring answer is dark chocolate. Does that count as candy? I don't even know if it does.

If it's like mass-produced candy, I don't know, like Butterfinger maybe? Because I love peanut butter in all its forms uh yeah sure let's say that do you have a favorite halloween candy does that change or is it just a mini butterfinger well if you can get a mini butterfinger then that is absolutely number one on the list and then there's there's probably a ranking list that goes down from there like a like a like an almond joy or a mounds and then you go down to like a rhesus peanut butter cup and uh you know i like uh i like sweet tarts sweet tarts are pretty good yeah it goes

down from there but like basically what i'm saying is if you if you're bringing me your jolly ranchers get out i don't want your jolly ranchers we jolly ranchers are at the bottom heart the hard can they're at the bottom of the bowl at Halloween. And back when I worked in an office, they were at the bottom of the office candy bowl. You could tell they'd fill the bowl. And then two days later, the bowl was empty except for the Jolly Ranchers at the bottom. Because nobody likes them and who cares? I don't mind them.

I noticed a big thing on Rocket. But do you ever start some candy corn when we're talking about Halloween candy? Candy corn. It's neither candy nor corn. Discuss. No, I think candy corns are fine. And yes, I mean, you undercut me there by saying that you actually like Jolly Ranchers.

They're fine. I'm just saying that I have no enthusiasm for them at all. But yeah, I think candy corns are okay. They're waxy and a little bit weird, but you know, it's the spirit of the season. Yep, it's its own thing. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode of Upgrade,

just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnowTalk or use question mark SnowTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. As always, if you love Upgrade and want more of it, you should subscribe to Upgrade Plus. You'll get no ads and bonus content every single week. Go to getupgradeplus.com. Just $5 a month or $50 a year.

Thank you to your support, for your support, and to your support if you do it. Thanks to your support specifically. And if you're somehow involved in the support, we appreciate it. We just did merch recently. We did the Summer of Fun tee. tea i actually got mine i got mine like two days ago and i'm wearing the blue one today very nice i i went to uh the university of oregon uh a few days ago for the new student orientation because my son is going there and and yes my daughter goes there too they're both ducks now. And their colors are green and yellow.

And that summer of fun with the yellow on the green, it's good. I wore it on campus. It was great. I felt spirited and also upgrade related. And that was a perfect feeling. You have a paddling of ducks. I do have ducks. There's a flock.

It's a flock of ducks now that I have. So, you know, attack the quack. I don have ducks. There's a flock. It's a flock of ducks now that I have. So, you know, attack the quack, the, I don't know. There's, it's all duck puns, by the way, at the University of Oregon. They really lean into it. Oh, I have no doubt. The orientation is called intro duck-tion. Oh, that's a bad one. Is that?

That's not a good one. And, you know, a few years ago, we were talking about it, and I had forgotten what they called it. And I was like, what was the bad pun? What was the bad pun? And I came up with Inductrination, which I think is a way better name for it. But that's not what it is. It's introduction. To be fair, though, I say that's bad.

That's 100% the pun I would come up with. Right? I know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, when they move in, there's Unpack the Quack is what they call it. I'm serious. You cannot escape the duck puns in Oregon. It's just how it is. Well, I guess you know what you're getting yourself into before you really settle in, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Before you make a nest. and he was at the thing. He appeared at the thing to get them all hyped up. Yeah, it's a thing. You just got to embrace it when you go there. So anyway, the Summer of Fun t-shirt was really nice and I'm very happy to have gotten them. So yeah, awesome.

But they're gone. But they're gone. You can't get them. Can't get them. So there's no upgrade merch anymore. Incorrect. Again. Incorrect.

There is now, we are introducing the permanent upgrade merch store okay there's a reason for this all right so we've been at relayfm we spoke about a couple of weeks ago we've been experimenting with some of cotton bureau's on-demand printing so the summer of fun shirts their campaign printing the printing process is slightly different um it's like a thicker screen print which for some designs can be better like for the summer fun you really want the yellow to be very strong in the design right so we do them for a couple of weeks and let them go and plus some stuff is like limited i have wanted to do a draft shirt for ages because i love the draft logo that simon made for us and

we still use it we just adapt it with what the draft is each time and I love it I've wanted it for a long time but the problem with the draft is you never really one does not know when the draft is coming until it's too late and so if we knew the draft you know if we know the drafts here we can't then put up the store because then by the time the campaign has ended and then you was mailed the draft t-shirt i mean you'd be in draft desert again right like waiting for the next one and honestly sometimes if you did it in september we could end up like getting to the next draft again before the shirts even ship so yes we're now going to be doing a few designs on the print-on-demand that Cotton Bureau does. So whenever you want to, Upgrade Listener, you can just go and buy an Upgrade Draft T-shirt or the two versions of an Upgrade Logo shirt, Upgrade Max and Upgrade Mini.

Do you like the naming, Jason? I do. Do you like the naming, Jason? I do. And the upgrade mini gives everybody out there who likes shirt pocket logo designs instead of centered big logo designs an upgrade option for the very first time because I don't love the shirt pocket logo.

The Max is the Jason shirt. The mini is the Mike shirt. That's what happened here. I wanted this because I like the small designs as well as the big. I like the big designs too, but I like diversity in my designs. So there's a bunch of colors, both of them, so you can get

some cool colors. These will always be here. There's no reason why they can't be. And the way that this works, you order it and then a couple of days later it gets shipped out. It's great. And also there's hoodies and all kinds of stuff. What I will say about the Upgrade Mini shirt is that they do something that you don't see very often with Cotton Bureau is a zip up hoodie on demand because the artwork's not

in the middle. You can do a zip up hoodie so you can get that. So this is a cheaper version of an upgrade hoodie than the big embroidered upgrade hoodie that we do. Oh, yeah. You can go up. You can under type, you can choose sweatshirt.

Uh-huh, for all of these. So you could get sweatshirts instead of t-shirts. And it's not going to be the embroidered hoodie that we offer normally. Correct. But it's more affordable and you can get it whenever you like. Yeah, I bought the t-shirt.

At some point, I'm going to definitely get a sweatshirt of the upgrade draft logo because i think that will look really good and it's still uh you feeling like the summer of fun you can get a tank top yeah but not with the summer of fun on it no but but the tank top implies summer and fun it most do you know it most definitely does yeah you can get it get an upgrade draft tank top and royal blue tri-blend and just go to town i really appreciate the people that buy summer of fun tank tops like we've had a couple of upgrading and send us pictures of them in their tank tops and like it's amazing there's even a

onesie for a baby you can get your baby into the upgrade draft immediately although i think more fitting would be a onesie with the upgrade max logo because what is a baby but an upgrade very true when me and steven we we do the the backstage membership show right we offered a membership bounty for the first member to send us a photo of their baby in a relay fm onesie and we got it within like a week or two and we gave that person a free membership to a show of their choice amazing because we just thought it was really cool now so you can go get onesies awesome okay so this is all available upgradeyourwardrobe.com whenever you want it all right Jason this is awards season uh I mean it's all I mean the Oscars are in March and the

Emmys are in September. So that's coming, I guess. It's like there's some, it's always award season, Mike. Always. But the Hollywood Critics Association TV Awards were last night. Right, right. So this is the TV critics basically vote on their favorites. So in some ways, if you're like, like oh it's all just a popularity contest like well here is the critical acclaim award essentially where the tv critics all get

together and hand out awards severance won five awards the most of any show because they split these into broadcast cable and streaming there's like three sets of awards which i didn't know until i was looking into this today um and but severance won the most of any of these oh i need to i need this is the hollywood critics association which is different from the tv critics association which is yet another critics association award what we're saying is hollywood is really good at giving itself awards that's what i'm saying well of course i mean why wouldn't you you know uh these These are the Hollywood... Are they critics of Hollywood? Probably not.

Let's be honest. They're probably not critics of Hollywood, but they love Apple. When I was in LA last time, I walked past the building, the Hollywood Critics Association buildings, like just a little house somewhere. Yeah. And I was like, oh, I know them. We talk about them. They give out the walls to Apple.

Anyway, Severance won five. Give them a rainbow Apple decal or something. I'll knock on the door next time. Ted Lasso won two. So still picking up the awards. But I think this is an interesting indication Severance might do really well this year. Yeah, well, and they won Best Comedy and Drama

for Streaming Series. So they got the big awards, which is quite a thing. So, yeah. Tim Cook loved it. Tim Cook tweeted tweeted about it of course he did i thought that was uh interesting where they have the tim cook tweet where he has to figure out how to how to refer to severance right so it's like i'm proud of the richmond footballers and um lumen's macro data refiners and their Audis. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Don't look too close.

It's kind of dark. We're proud of it though. We're proud of them. It's definitely not like our office in any way. All right.

Leave us alone. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Text Expander. When you work in a small team every moment counts.

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I love TextExpander. We use it here at RelayFM for these exact things. One of the things that I do a lot is send my Zoom information to people. So I just type, when I'm on my Mac, ZZOOM, and it just pre-fills all of the Zoom information, so I send it to someone in Slack or any email or whatever. Very easy, very simple. If repetitive typing is getting you down, you need TextExpander. Check out TextExpander today at textexpander.com slash upgrade, and you can get 20%

off for your first year. That's textexpander.com slash upgrade to say goodbye to repetitive typing. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and Real AFM. It's time for a rumor roundup, Jason Snell. Okay. So Ming-Chi Kuo is reporting that the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max

are likely to be more expensive this year. So the Kuo did not state what he believes the new prices will be, but did say that he estimates the average selling price for the iPhone 14 lineup as a whole to be around 15% higher than the iPhone 13. Now what this does not mean is that there will be a

15% increase, necessarily, to the iPhone 14 lineup. It could be. It could be 10%. It could be 20%. But what Kuo is saying is that the mixture of all of the phones sold when put together will be higher than the

iPhone 13 line, right? Yeah. Now, what that could mean is that Ming-Chi Kuo is expecting that there will be more of the more expensive iPhone 14 phones sold than the iPhone. What they call favorable mix, I think,

is how they refer to that on the analyst call. Tough compare. Favorable mix. Tough compare. No, no, it's a favorable mix, Mike. It's not a tough compare. It's a good compare. It's a favorable mix.

So basically, there could be a bunch of things here. be a little bit more expensive and also they're expecting to sell maybe more of the pro phones which i actually would expect considering that the pro phones are expected to be making the leaps this year where the regular phones might not be so for just consistency sake the pro phones should be getting always on display, removing the notch and replacing it with the cutouts, a 48 megapixel camera, and an A16 processor, which rumors are suggesting the iPhone 14 and 14 Max wouldn't get any of these features. Yeah. So I ran some numbers. Oh, yes. I made some guesses.

Love it. Woo! love it i put in i put in the existing existing phone line and their prices and what i you know a vague guess about how they sell percentage wise and then i i i copied that and i changed it and what i did was i just did removing the mini and replacing it with a max that's priced a hundred dollars more than the than the 14 would be or the 13 and changed the mix a little bit so that there were more Maxes sold. And that came out of maybe not only the Mini, which is gone, but also out of the regular model. And I can't get – I mean, that was my initial thought was

they must be figuring that the new mix will push them up because it would, if the new phone that's the bigger low-end phone is $100 more, that's going to increase their average value. And the answer is yes, it will. It's not going to increase it by 15%. 15% means everything's going up 100, 10 to 15%. Everything's going up $100. And there's a change in mix that's favorable to apple um you're right it may also be that when they're not doing a new processor in the low-end models that the low-end models will lag and the high-end models will be even more of it

but my my initial reaction was oh this must be about mix, but 15%, or even 10%, it's too much. It's a very large number. And if you really look at it, the thing that makes the most sense is what was $7.99 becomes $8.99. What was $9.99 becomes $10.99. And that is just, given what's going on with the strength of the dollar, given what's going on with inflation like it it would not surprise me at all if apple just lifted every iphone by a hundred dollars and kept the old ones on sale right of course of course okay so what we're probably looking at here is like some mixture of all of it but as you're saying no matter like as in like it could be the mix it could be the mix it could be the

fact that there's a max not a mini so that can be more expensive but even it but you still have to most likely increase prices to get to a 15 increase if quo is correct if quo is correct that's what i'm saying is that you're looking at a scenario where you have an iPhone 14 at $799, an iPhone 14 Max, no, an iPhone 14 at $899 and a 14 Max at $999, 14 Pro at $1099 and 14 Pro Max at $1199. And there are some rumors about specs improving. So it might be one of those things where you're like, well, it doesn't sound like Apple to just raise every price. It's like, yeah, but they might start the storage higher than they did before and say, oh, but look, it's not really that big of a change. If you look, if you compare the storage to what it was before, we just eliminated the lower storage tier. to massage that price increase of the base model.

But we talk a lot here about how there's marketing and buying psychology that goes on when Apple positions its products. And one of the ways it does that is it creates that low-end price so that you can quote a number, like you can get in the door for this price. But then you look at that model, whether it's a MacBook Air or an iPhone or an iPad, and you go, yeah, but I don't want that one. I want the one that's even more expensive. So that low price got you in the door, but it's not the price you're going to pay. So there are ways for them to do that with this.

But when Kuo's saying, like, bottom line, it's going to be 15% more in average selling price, I think the only way you do that is by raising the prices. You mentioned about the storage thing. So there seems to be a bit of back and forth from some analysts as to whether they're going to do this or not. I think this might be a bit of conjecture really more than any particular reporting. But it seems like

that some people are suggesting that we could see an increase in the starting storage of at least the pro phones. Yeah, I don't think the storage is yeah i guess it's profit but it's not that it's not that expensive for apple to vary the storage i feel like i feel like the the storage is a great place for them to force people to pay more for more because it's the only time you can do it is right then but i think that's a pretty easy

easy way for apple to raise the base price um throw in something so they can say ah but you get more without it actually hurting their uh profit margin very much at all yeah i expect that they still do what they used to do which is buy just obscene amounts of storage at once yeah right like this was that thing about there was that particular ss like that's that drive that small drive right wasn't ssd it was a small drive for the ipod and they just bought basically all of it and then they used to do this for nan flash as well right like there was always reports back in the day that like oh well they apple bought all of what was available for the ipod nano and you just can't get it and i expect that obviously they're not doing that anymore because everyone uses this stuff now but you've got to assume that they just buy obscene

amounts of storage and just have it around so like that the price changes there are not going to be as huge as they might be if you were just going in and buying one yourself and keep in mind we're talking about 128 128 it's not really a great number of for storage on a phone right it's not great so they could they could lift those especially on the pro models they could lift those up to 256 as the base as and basically say it's the same price right it's literally because right now that $100 shift is just going up to $256. So they could eliminate the $128, keep it at $256 at a higher tier for even more money, and say, yes, the base price is higher, but if you compare it to the existing models, it's the same price. That would allow them to do that.

if you compare it to the existing models it's the same price right like that would allow them to do that but it but it means that you've eliminated all the 799 phones because they're all eight all of those now are going to go up to 899 you can't buy in for less than 899 and you just say 256 is the new base they definitely could do that on some or all of these phones again conjecture but it's definitely something they could do i wonder if this will lead to all those like trade-in, trade-in, trade-in things from the last time that they did that. Do you remember when they raised the phone prices and people seemed to be a bit cool on it?

So then they just like blitzed all of the retail stores who trade in signs? Trade-ins and discounts and things like that, sure. Well, keep in mind, this is also a really weird time because it's the third year of the same model, right? And so Apple, this is where Apple makes more of an effort. Remember when Apple didn't make any effort at all to sell iPhones? They just happened. Well, now they make more of an effort and we're going to revisit that third year of the cycle where Apple has to make a

greater effort to move iPhones. But not to get ahead of ourselves here, but like the reports are that they are making as many phones as they would normally make. They're not like some of their competitors are cutting manufacturing orders because they see a slowdown here. And Apple doesn't seem to see that. So Apple seems confident that they're going to be able to sell a whole bunch of iPhones anyway. They may have to work harder at it. way, they may have to work harder at it. Yeah, Debbie at Bloomberg says that Apple are expecting demand to still be strong,

ordering at least 90 million iPhone units, which is on par with the iPhone 13 line. I just wanted to come back to what you said about the third year thing. I think as an asterisk, yes, the overall design of the phone is going to be the same as the 13 and the same

as the 12, but what we're going to get this time is big regular phone. That's new. And the pro phones, they're going to look visibly different, especially at the screen, right? Look, when I say I assume the upgradians are well-versed in all of this because we talk about it here a lot. Third year doesn't mean nothing's changed. we talk about it here a lot. Third year doesn't mean nothing's changed. There's always, in fact, Apple has to go out of its way every year where there's not a visual change to make some reason why you might upgrade. And people are on a multi-year cycle for their phones. So they're

probably upgrading from the old look anyway, although in year three, they may be coming from the first year of the existing look. Apple always, I mean, you could make an argument that many of the iPhone's greatest tech leaps happen in the boring year, right? Because they're changing it on the inside, but not changing it on the outside. And yeah, I mean, there are absolutely things to be interested about in the 14. It's just that in the larger market, if you look at phone sales, the big bump comes when they change the outside and then it goes, it kind of flattens off from there and it's that year. So I, I, I'm not saying that they won't sell phones. They obviously think

they will. I'm just saying they have to work harder at it. And I would say upgrading the specs and doing things like making a new model that's the that's a uh 14 max and putting in the new camera this year that's all part of working harder good point yeah yeah yeah and also as you say right like the chassis being the same but changing the screen right it's like that's working harder right because you're realizing what can i change without changing the entire thing right we're not changing the stainless steel band and the glass back and all that this time you know we have an idea for next time and oh boy just we'll get there but what can we do this time and the answer well

we could change the the cutouts in the screen now and not wait for a year and we can we finally got that new camera system we'll put it in this year um you know and then and then next year it'll be in the in the new one that everybody goes people who are concerned about the look uh i mean i i think there's some truth in this people who are concerned about the camera will rush to buy the 14 pro people who are concerned about the look yeah maybe they wait for the 15 and that's fine like because again there are different audiences at different times and the goal is just to get apple to their you know 90 million iphones or whatever that they want to sell for this cycle. I think even if Apple wanted to, they couldn't sell an iPhone to every iPhone customer every year.

Right? Certainly not. They can't tailor to that. There's not even an attempt to try and do that because they would not be able to do it. And they've got the different constituencies. and do that because they would not be able to do it. And they've got the different constituencies. In fact, there's probably something written on a whiteboard somewhere at Apple or was written on a whiteboard at Apple before it was erased in order to protect everybody from

all the secrets getting out. But there probably is a philosophy somewhere that is, what are the upgrade propositions this year and over the three-year span? So you can say sort of like, we want to make sure, right? It just makes sense. First year, the look is going to sell it. Second year, though, what's going to sell it? Third year, what's going to sell it?

Because you want selling points every year. Otherwise, why are you even doing this, right? Like you've got to, no new iPhones this year, everybody. Nothing interesting, nothing new here, just some colors. They're not going to do that. So they have to plan out what the different things are, and those will appeal to different people. And then I think also there are some iPhone buyers that do it based on time, where it's literally like every two or three years, they're like, oh, I'm going to get a new iPhone. What they get is the accumulated features of the last two or three or four years. And that works for them too.

So I think Apple probably knows all of those constituencies. And it's also good for Apple because, yeah, they can't do a brand new, entirely different phone every year. So you upgrade the camera system this year. You change the look this year. You upgrade some new whizzy sensor or processor or something this year. And you make it all kind of progress. In his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple is looking to triple the revenue that it makes from ads. So there have apparently been some restructuring at Apple

with the head of their ad business, someone named Todd Teresi, now reporting directly to Eddie Q. Teresi is now apparently looking to increase the revenue that Apple makes from ads from around $4 billion per year to a double-digit figure. It's being reported that triple, right? You could triple it. So we've recently seen Apple add the Today tab app store ads, right? It was previously just search.

And now they're like adding what looks like kind of sponsored content kind of stuff into the whole mix, right? So you could, I don't know, create some graphic and put it there and make it look like it's part of an ad in like a part of the content in the app store but it's actually an ad I should say this is like you know more inventory right more placements let's keep putting the ads everywhere that we possibly can Mark Gurman believes that maps could be a place to add more ad inventory to in the future and there's been some internal exploration to this as well as more of

their digital storefronts like books podcasts etc when i saw this report i recently uh so i immediately thought for that this seems like somebody at apple disagrees with the approach and told mark german about it yeah it's always the question of why did something leak and what was the motivator in having it leak? And that is definitely a possibility. If somebody is not happy with this and wants to call it out so that people will talk about it. It's the naming of it to me. And just more details in the story of this figure, Todd Teresi,

being really into it and like wanting to push it and having lots of meetings because it kind of feels to me like the way i look at it is on the surface do i believe this is something they're going to do yes but this also sounds like an executive that wants to be really important right so maybe todd teresi's walking around saying i want to triple ad revenue and like that's just their thing that they want to do you know yeah you could you could see how somebody might somebody at apple who doesn't like this approach of like we're going to try to put ads as many places as we can who thinks that apple is not an ad company and that it junks up the customer experience. And I would say most of Apple is probably at least inclined to believe that.

The people who sweat on the hardware and the software and want, you know, we're Apple. We make this great user experience. And then there's the group that, you know, they talk about on the calls with Wall Street where they're like, you know, we're growing services and we're growing ad revenue. And isn't it good that we're making more money? And it's, it's not hard to imagine that somebody discovers that the, that the IAD guy has been given more direct has, you know, who was walled off for a while is now reporting directly to Eddie. And it's like, oh boy, that guy, right? And I don't know anything about this guy. He might be a nice guy or not, but he's the ad guy regardless.

And how somebody else might look at that and say, this is not what Apple should be doing. And I mean, my feelings on this are pretty clear, which is I think that I'm not allergic to ads. I'm really not. I think ads have their place. However, Apple jamming ads into its products that we're already paying for feels for, I mean, I would be more, I mean, this is a hard one. I would, I would be more, I mean, this is a hard one. I would be more understanding of it if I felt like, well, this is how Apple needs to do business to survive. Yep.

And maybe that's unfair. Maybe the answer should always be, I'm sure Wall Street would tell you, the answer should always be, if you can make money, do make money. If you can make more money, make more money. That's always the answer. do make money. If you can make more money, make more money. That's always the answer. I would argue, um, and I used to argue this as part of my job, actually, uh, that you degrade the product when you insert ads everywhere, because while ads are not fundamentally bad, ad placements tend to get out of hand and they get out of hand quickly to the detriment of the user. of hand and they get out of hand quickly to the detriment of the user. And because of that,

you have to ask the big picture questions of, do we turn away revenue because it makes our product worse? Or do we not care that it makes our product worse? And when I look at a lot of the stuff that Apple's already doing, I think it makes their product worse. I think the App Store, they talk about the App Store ads being like, oh, well, it helps people find stuff. It's like, okay, but you got ads up at the top of search for things that are not what people are searching for. And then below, you've got the thing people are actually searching for. So what you're doing is you're allowing people to eclipse the right answer with their answer based on payment. And since these are all app developers, what you're also having them do is bid against each other for the right to give back the money they earned from Apple to Apple in order to get better placement to make more money, which they will then presumably give back to Apple to do more placement. I don't think it is more helpful than having a good search algorithm.

Certainly not the way that it's implemented. It's like another tax on top of the one they're already paying. Right. No, it is. And I felt that for a while that the App Store ads is just like, I felt that for a while, that the App Store ads is just like, people are mad about the 30%. How about this? How about that if you don't take an ad out for the name of your product, your competitor will be there when people search for your product name? It's like, what a racket, is what I'll say. What a racket to say, well, you know, if they search for Overcast and they find Spotify, you could pay us more money, Marco. And then they wouldn't find Spotify. It's like, it's,

it's just a, anyway. And again, I'm not allergic to ads. There are places where ads are probably fine. The idea that if you had a maps search and somebody paid to have their item also appear on the search or something like that, I don't love it, but like, you, but I can see the argument for it.

But as the person who's always the editorial person jousting with the salespeople at a website, which is the product, right? I think a lot of people who are involved in ad sales make terrible decisions based on small amounts of revenue because they believe that all new revenue is good and it never has deleterious effects. And it's not true. You junk up your product. And I think the app store is junked up. I think that if they're going to put apps in Maps, maybe it'll be tasteful, but it probably won't be. They put them in the bookstore or in Apple Podcasts. Are they going to be good or are they going to be junky? And it's not very hard to make them crappy, which is not to say, again, that all ads are bad.

But it also, I think, is a problem when you've got this feeling that Apple is like searching around in the couch cushions for change when it's one of the richest companies in the world. And I think that is, I get why they might do that to satisfy Wall Street, but I think it is one of the worst traits of modern Apple is this idea that they need to make more money even if it means junking up their product because they make a lot of money on their product. And one of their selling propositions is that their product is not full of junk. This is like, I'm not saying that they would do this. But this is like putting crapware on new Macs.

That would increase revenue. Right. Like charging companies. Like, hey, Microsoft, give us some money and we'll yeah i don't want to give todd teresi any ideas but like i mean there's certainly incremental revenue to be made pre-installing trial software on every mac that gets sold how about pre-installing apps on iphones too i mean you can take this pretty far and they haven't yet which is good but like i i think there's maybe an attitude of like,

oh, but it's just ads. It's just ads. It's fine. And it's not always fine. So them ruffling through the couch cushions for another, you know, $6 billion of ad revenue, you know, it strikes me that this is some executive, probably Tim Cook, saying to Eddie Q, more revenue from ads, but in a tasteful way. It's like, okay, we'll see. We'll see about that.

I am very skeptical about all the places that they're sticking ads. In general, for a premium product, the fact that there are ads you can't escape, I just don't like it. I don't like the idea that there are ads you can't escape because this is a premium product. And when the ads are getting in the way of the actual content, ads can be content, right? But there are a lot of times when ads get in the way of the content that you're actually looking for. And that leaves aside the whole other issue, which is the fact that Apple has cleared out a lot of third-party ad networks like facebook with the app tracking transparency but that's not going to stop them from doing first party ads which are basically all ads that are sold by apple and shown on apple's platforms are allowed because apple has defined those as fine so that's which

is nice for apple you know obviously we're an ad supported program but if the percentage of revenue we made from ads was the same as what apple does from ads we wouldn't run ads you know like if there was if the upgrade merch store right made us however much money it made and then our ads made us like whatever percentage like one percent we just wouldn't do the ads anymore right right but it doesn't work like that for us it's a it's a difficult balance and like i said again ads i don't think ads are fundamentally bad i would also say we also sell a premium version of the show without ads right but i've always felt like apple's promise was that it was the premium version like all apple products are the premium version of the product, right? But to have, I, and I don't want

to live in a world where you buy a, an iPhone for a thousand dollars. And then like Amazon, there's a, for an extra hundred dollars, you can turn off the ads. I don't want to live in that world. But that, that is what makes me uneasy is that I'm not sure that this push toward ads, easy is that I'm not sure that this push toward ads is something that it's not that it can't be done in a way that is seen to benefit the user and be a kind of wholesome thing. I think there are ways to do it that way. But if the app store searches any example, like again, it feels like a protection racket to me and it gets in the way of your actual search results. And I do not like it. that's what i'm saying if people haven't gotten that approach just i want to be clear here do not like what i

don't like about it is it just feels hypocritical to me even though it like technically isn't it just feels it and i don't like it i think apple's gone to such great lengths to try and make it seem like online advertising is bad and like they're just everyone's trying to steal your information and sell it to each other people but our advertising is fine and like they're just everyone's trying to steal your information and sell it to other people but our advertising is fine and and their sales pitch for their advertising will be we know everything about our users right yeah but it's okay because we're apple and we're the first party german says oh they're probably not going to bring iad back that's not part of the plan right now the iad was apple's own in-app ad network and i was sitting there raising my eyebrow when i

read that on Sunday morning. Fortunately, today on Stratechery, Ben Thompson wrote about it and said exactly what I was thinking, which is they'll totally bring back iAd. They're totally going to do that because once they've cleared out all value from in-app ads, because they're from third-party trackers, step two is you come in with your first-party ad solution, and nobody has a choice but to use Apple's ad solution because Apple's the only one with the data. And again, the report says that they're not currently planning that.

I would say common sense suggests that if they're doing all of this, they are absolutely going to start selling ads into apps too because why would they let anybody else make that money when they can make it themselves? And I think that's the attitude here. I do think the only reason that they wouldn't do it is if they think that they legally would, it would be too difficult.

Well, I do agree. If they, if they release that, it would make the screams from the likes of Facebook even louder and would probably open them up to more scrutiny. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, now that we've killed your business, open them up to more scrutiny. Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, now that we've killed your business, we're going to take over your business. It's like how many more shoes could drop at that point? There's the whole shoe store. Yep. The footlocker. The whole footlocker is happening right there. Yep.

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get 10% of your first purchase and support this show. Thanks to Squarespace for their support of Upgrade and all of RelayFM. I had a note in my little show notes document which said Jason's HomeKit cameras. And I don't know what this is in reference to. So I wanted to ask you, Jason, do you have HomeKit cameras? Technically, yes, but asterisk. Okay. I have cameras that show up in the Home app.

They are... Homebridge? No, it's... This is great. That's right, it's invasive. Sorry, I'm on the advice of my attorney. I have been told to take the fifth here. So I have Arlo cameras.

Okay. Which is... um now i have so i have arlo cameras okay uh which is uh are they still part of uh netgear i think they might have been spun out but like it's basically netgear made them uh and i've had them for a while i've actually upgraded them all during that time arlo cameras are wireless and they are their own thing so recently they did a software update that allows them to work with home kit but it's a weird situation because they're not home kit secure video okay but they do show up in the home app but because of the way they're built they don't quite work the way you would expect a home kit camera to work because basically they're um they're because they're wireless they basically go to sleep and they've got motion triggers to

wake them up because they're trying to in most cases trying to conserve battery now i actually have two of them are plugged into power and two of them are attached to solar panels on my roof little tiny solar panels that keep them the top up their charge so for the most part they are actually powered but the way the whole system works they they kind of go to sleep and then they wake up so when i watch like i open just open the home app and i've got like uh one that says it's been, it's the view of 10 seconds ago and one's the view of six seconds ago and one's the view of now,

but the view of now is not actually the live view. If I click on it, I get the live view. So it's iffy. Like they're present and I can theoretically like watch them on Apple TV by they have a little camera view. They're in the home app, but they're not,

they're sort of vaguely HomeKit compliant. That sounds like a HomeKit camera to me. It's just they're not HomeKit secure video, right? Well, that's true. Well, and I think they're refreshing. I think that they are doing some cheating on the server because there's like a base station. I think they're doing some cheating

on the base station level to, like I said, seem like an immediate thumbnail of what's going on outside and it's a lie maybe all home kit cameras are like that maybe i mean like cameras that like you know we have a canary camera which i can't believe is still working uh we have none of us can we have a ring thing here at the studio and like they're none of them like a live life there's always a delay it's gonna go up to the server and then push to you right so it's not like no but this is the case where like i'm looking right now at my side yard and there is a view that i don't think well

maybe it is live when i click on it yeah i guess so i guess it is it's so they're refreshing every so often with a with a thumbnail of what's going on out there. Um, but it's not all the time. And then if I click it, it brings up the live view. So it used to be, everything was just in the Arlo app,

but now I can see the live views in home kit. If I want to see the past stuff, I go to the Arlo app and that's where it's got its past stuff. I actually, because I have the Arlo base station, it's got a little drive attached to it. So I've actually got even more video kind of archive on there that it just writes to it.

So if I had something particularly interesting or exciting happen, I could go to the footage and see if I could find it there. Yeah, they're fine. I got them part because I thought it was cool. And then there was a break-in down the street and they asked if I had video because they saw my camera, if I had video because they saw my

camera if I had video and honestly I'd left that I I let the battery run down on the old camera and I had to say no I don't actually have any any video that might have caught somebody passing by and I realized okay well if I'm going to have these cameras I need to actually keep them powered so I got a couple new cameras and I got the the uh and I plugged two of them in to power directly. And so now that's what my setup is. To be honest, the most exciting thing that it shows me is what cats have been in my backyard. So the cameras, they're wireless, right? Cameras are wireless.

But they work with HomeKit. But they work with HomeKit, yeah. So they're wireless right cameras are wireless but they work with home kit but they work with home kit yeah so they're wireless they talk to a base station that uh is the arlo base station but it's basically a netgear it looks a lot like a netgear wi-fi base station except it's built for the for the arlo cameras and like i said they're meant to be because you know you don't have networking or even power in some places. The Arlo infrastructure was always sort of like, you don't need to have power to a place where you put your camera. And I now have two positioned in places where I do have outlets that can run to them. But like I said, the other two, there's no power near them at all. And so for them, you know, you can either

charge the battery every two months or something, which is what I used to do. But now with the new cameras and the solar panels, even in the winter, it does a pretty good job. Occasionally, I get a low battery warning and I have to reposition the panel that's literally just laying on my roof. So you have the solar too then? You do have that? I do. I have two solar panels, one attached to each of the – so the unplugged cameras recharge themselves with solar now.

I haven't had to recharge them at all. Even in the dead of winter, it gets enough sun in order to keep the battery charged because it's got a battery in it that's supposed to go for months and months um and so it generally that's that's close enough and if i had a problem i would go and charge it and then bring it back out but i actually haven't had to do that that's very cool i see because i came across allo recently because i was looking for a HomeKit video doorbell. And they make one, but it's the wired one. And I want a wireless one. And I don't think...

Please, Upgradians, tell me if you found... I don't think a wireless video doorbell that works with HomeKit exists. And I don't know why. But I think it's just... I've only been able to find wired products that exist. Because this is the thing, like you're saying, I know that the wireless cameras with HomeKit

is sometimes a newer thing, but also doesn't necessarily work exactly the way that you would think and or can't get all of the features, right? It seems like that something being wired is like seems to be pretty important or at least it being like a hub or whatever but that's good i didn't know that they did the solar panels like i don't know how well that would work in the uk probably in the uk i i i honestly don't know but if it works for you in the winter maybe at least it worked for me in the summer maybe maybe yeah for sure

for sure and it's i think i'm i don't know if i'm even using their panels i may be using the works with arlo panels that i got on amazon because they're cheaper the the arlo solar panel is like 40 pounds it's not like wildly expensive and it's small they're they're all they're very small and like they've got a whole mounting thing and all that and i'm because of my roof and the status of my roof and all that it was actually easier for me to just toss it on my roof. It just lays there. It just lays there and drinks in the sun. It's fine.

It's like it's not going anywhere. It's not a problem. You just come out one day and there's a bunch of solar panels just like hanging from cables, you know? I guess, except I don't know. That would be unusual weather to have the solar panels be disturbed. I also have an Ethernet cable snaking over the top of my roof. So my roof is a- What was that for again?

I know we were talking about that. It's connecting the back of the house to the front of the house. But what is it- With Ethernet. Okay. It comes out of here and then goes over the roof to my back bedroom where there's more stuff and another Eero. Which is instead of doing some kind of wild thing in the house, right,

which would be really complicated. Well, yeah, we don't have an attic, and so really the only way you can wire things is by punching holes in the walls. So there is a hole punched in the wall over in the bedroom for the cable. I'm going to rewire my house at some point here. This is really verging on, Casey List territory now, but I am going to rewire and do it sort of more properly and not over the roof and run it along under the eaves. But I just haven't had a chance to do that yet.

So I've got a giant spool of ethernet cable here. But yeah, anyway, my roof has got all sorts of stuff on it, including solar panels. That's fine. It works great. I also wanted to ask you about your smart lock. Oh, yes. Sure. Let's talk about it. What do you want to know? How is smart lock life for you? So smart lock life is okay, but it feels very much like a first generation product. And I want the second-generation product. And the problem is that due to legacy nodes, the second-generation product is basically not available anywhere. So there are starting to be locks, theoretically.

Some shipped, and then they stopped stopped and they're out of inventory and hopefully there'll be more inventory at some point. But there started to be some new locks that use home key, basically. They use NFC. And that's what I want. Because NFC smart lock,

the way Apple's written their software for NFC stuff like locks, you literally can tap without doing anything. You tap with your watch or your phone and the door unlocks. Yeah, this is like the fast pass thing for travel. Yeah, same idea. So that's what I want. What I have is a couple years old and it uses Bluetooth LE.

years old and it uses Bluetooth LE. And you know, okay, what I like about the smart lock is it does things like auto lock when you leave the door unlocked. After a couple minutes, you can set the time it locks itself. That's nice. If you leave the door open, it sends you an alert saying, oh, the door is open. Watch out. What I don't like about it is that the Bluetooth LE thing is unreliable. It's a really clever hack, but the way that they have to do it is the lock is looking for your phone via Bluetooth LE. And when it sees it, it knows that you're there and that's great. And then what happens is your phone leaves the vicinity of your house and you have to set a radius. And then the app on your phone basically says, I'm gone. And then when your lock sees the phone again, it goes, yay, you're back.

And it unlocks the door. There's lots of reasons for this. And it's very kind of clever're back. And it unlocks the door. There's lots of reasons for this. And it's a, it's a very kind of cleverly done and it works sometimes. And a lot of times it doesn't work. And when it does work, a lot of times it works so slowly that you're standing at the door waiting for it to open. And I don't want that. I want to be able to tap and enter. I want to use my phone or my watch as a key. I think it's a much better approach. The other problems I have with those first generation locks, cause I have the Yale August smart lock that does HomeKit. The other problem is the lock is sort of a generic smart lock. And then there's a module that you put in

it. And so it's got the HomeKit module in it, but because it's using some sort, I don't even know what it's smart home tech is if it's Zig ZigBee or something like that. But it's basically, you have to have a dongle, you have to have a little white block that you plug in to an outlet somewhere. And it's a bridge between the Bluetooth, maybe it only does Bluetooth. Actually, I think it only does Bluetooth. So it has to be close enough to be in Bluetooth range plugged into a wall. It talks to the lock in Bluetooth and then talks to your network in Wi-Fi. And let me tell you, this is where it all starts to come apart. Because the little dongle can lose track of the network or the lock. The lock can lose track of a dongle.

The lock, when its four AA batteries get low, but not so low that it tells you that the batteries are low, can start behaving erratically and not seeing... So you'll open the app and it'll say, your door is locked and your door is not locked. Or your door is unlocked and it is locked

because the app is talking to the dongle. The dongle thinks it knows what's going on with the lock, but either the lock is unlocked and it is locked because the app is talking to the dongle the dongle thinks it knows what's going on with the lock but either the lock is lying to it or the lock is not talking to it right now but it doesn't say i can't find the lock it says oh no no i see the lock and it's fine and it's not fine and that does not give you a great sense of confidence when when the battery so and this is i think the fatal flaw of this aug lock that I have now, the Yale August lock, is if the battery, once the batteries start to run down, it starts to behave strangely. And I've discovered now that whenever we have a weird moment with the lock, first thing I do is unplug the dongle and plug it back in. Second thing is I take out a battery and put it back in to reboot the lock.

And then after, if it's been a little while since we changed the batteries, I changed the batteries. And a lot of times changing the batteries solves the whole thing for a while. And it's not great. Like it should do a better job of saying, I help, I need new batteries than it does. And so, you know, so it's fine, but none of it, it, like, it's a first-generation product. It is the kind of tech you buy saying, hey, smart lock, that's fun. And then you realize all the things that they need to make better for smart locks to be a thing. And the reviews are pretty good from the people who've gotten them, but they ran out. They basically only made a few thousand or whatever, and then they can't make more and they haven't come in from the factory because of supply chain. And so we're left kind of waiting. But, you know, I've got my eye on that next generation smart lock and I will swap it out because the auto locking is great. The auto unlocking when you come home is great. I can leave my house with when I like go for a run or something i don't i don't bring a key with me right like and

you can do that with a dumb lock with a number pad i mean the bottom line is that when it when it is in super dumb mode you can still just key in the the code and it opens the door right which is fine that's um the you know know, some locks now that are smart locks have an actual key hole too. So you can actually have a key if you don't want to deal with the smart features all. And that's fine.

Mine doesn't have that now and it's fine. But certainly if the battery died completely, the best way to get into the house would be if you could actually stick a key in it, which you can't. Do you have a lock that you are interested in i do mike i kind of don't want to talk about it because they're going to

come into stock and i want to buy one okay all right okay upgrading it's fine you know if you find them in stock here's the deal upgrading i'm going to tell you what it is but if you find it in stock somewhere at a home depot or a low's or something like that, if their website says they're in stock, you got to let me know. Jason eats first, all right? I mean, well, no, but like they're going to come in stock soon, probably. And then they'll sell them all and then they'll be out of stock again for another few months. But that's what I'm saying. If Upgradians see it, they got to tell you that they've seen it and then they can buy one.

But they got to tell no one else. Yeah. Until I've confirmed that I bought it. they gotta tell you that they've seen it and then they can buy one but they gotta tell you first until I've confirmed that I bought it okay it's the I don't know how this company pronounces its name in America Schlage or Schlage is how we would say it in German Encode Plus the Encode Plus is a

home key is this the one I think it is the home key. Is this the one? I think it is. The home key compatible. Tap your watch. Yeah, that's what it is. Tap your iPhone or Apple Watch to unlock. That is the thing.

Oh, okay. And there are reviews out there from April. Since those reviews dropped, they have not been available to purchase. Kills me.. It kills me. It's killing me. Schlage? Schlage?

Anyway, it's an NFC door lock, smart lock. Very interesting. Encode Plus. It's got to be the Encode Plus. There are other ones, but the Encode Plus is the one with NFC. Other encodes are available. They are not the one that you want. They are, actually.

And so I'm looking for, you know, I'm looking for one of those. It's got to be satin nickel because it has to match the rest of my door. And I hope that they come into stock at some point soon. That would be awfully nice. This episode is brought to you by Sourcegraph. So you've hired a brilliant developer. It's awesome. But now you have to get them onboarded. Awfully nice. they're going to be working on with their new team. This can be tricky if the code bases that your developers are working in are already large. Well, thankfully, Sourcegraph will make it easy to move fast in those big code bases.

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Ah, yes. After eating an Alburga. Social distance episode of Upgrade. other uh yes after eating in and out social distance episode of upgrade where i was very full of coronavirus and you were very kind at the other at the long end of the table like like long end of the table yep long end of the long end of the table yep uh we were talking you were telling me the story of how you accidentally uh upgraded your mac studio to ventura to mac os ventura yep well you've done it again i did that i did it again it's true oops i did it again and as i wrote in in the document jason's second ventura upgrade and this time it's personal

because you've done it by choice now right i? I did it on purpose. Yeah. This time it's purposeful. Yeah, I did it. I did it. Gotta live with it. This is the reality of writing about betas is at some point you have to live with them. And live with them is not reboot into them occasionally as a tourist and then go back to your actual work. It isn't running it in a virtual machine. At some point, you actually have to use it because otherwise you're not experiencing it, right?

Like I can't write about the details of an operating system I'm not using just by like kind of flitting around and looking at menus and stuff and then leaving. You got to put yourself through it, even if there are bugs. And so I had to do that. And the difficulty with that is that there is software that we rely on to do podcasts that doesn't work in it. So I have to commit to this. And I also have to commit to a janky recording setup where I'm recording and talking to people for podcasts on a separate computer because that's the only way. So I'm sitting here at my desk looking at my studio display on my Mac Studio that I do every day, like I used to do with my iMac. And then off to the left is a laptop

that is running Zoom and Audio Hijack, and that's where we're actually having this conversation. So all of your audio gear is connected to the, what laptop is it now? MacBook Air. MacBook Air. Is it the new one? The M2 one? It's actually the Apple review unit because it doesn't have to go back for another month.

And by then, hopefully Audio Hijack will run on Ventura. So we'll see. So you've got all of your audio gear plugged into that. And that's doing the recording. But you're looking at all the show notes and Discord and everything on your Mac studio in Ventura. On the studio display in front of you and i'm able to use universal control to click the buttons i need to click over on the macbook air but mostly it just sits there now that's cool isn't it that's that's a cool feature that wasn't there i guess the last time you tried to do this was not there the last time i tried to do this so that that part is nice that

part is nice because you do this every every year anyway and it's not just because like this year it's special because audio hijack just doesn't work like by developer choice at the moment right is that still the case last year last year was also the case i mean yeah that's it's still the case okay that was like i couldn't remember if because i know in the past it hasn't worked which is why they have decided to just yes keep it to themselves until they that's the answer is two years ago it broke horribly last year and this year they decided they were just going to turn off support for it yeah because otherwise they're going to get people complaining that it doesn't work and the truth is i talked to paul kafasis of of Rogamiba about this. The truth is OS updates tend to break the audio subsystem.

They just do. And Rogamiba's concern is that they're going to get blamed for bugs that are Apple's bugs in the betas. And when somebody's recording fails, it's really bad. And so they basically have made the executive decision to not let you make a bad decision about using Audio Hijack on a beta by saying no. Yeah, because at least this way they can't be blamed. However, you don't necessarily know this is going to happen to you until it happens to you though, right? Indeed. And in fact, the thing that bothers me about it is I have no evidence that it actually doesn't work fine in Ventura.

It might. At least for what you want to do. For what I want to do, I don't know. But it doesn't matter because it doesn't work. It's disabled. So second computer it is. Last year I used my Mac Mini, which I've since moved out of my office, and it's in another room in the house.

But last year I had the Mac Mini, and I had a big, big USB extension cord so I could run from all the way where the Mac Mini was over to where my audio interface was and plug in and use remote desktop to control everything, use screens for that. But now I just have a laptop sitting here.

It's fine. I had to buy an Ethernet adapter for it. I mean, also though, in the past, there has been like a, I'm just not going to use Ventura to record the podcast because if something goes wrong. Sure. Right? Like, that's definitely been a thing. So, how long have you been using it daily?

Couple weeks. How has this experience been so far? It's fine. Okay. It's fine. I notice very little that is an issue. I think Safari is, I've had some weird things in Safari, which I think are extension related, but I think it's one of those cases where extensions get out of sync with Safari, where you've got like a beta of Safari, but the extensions are not beta. beta and so i've had to turn off a bunch of browser extensions and i've had cases where safari just gets really slow or it loads really slowly or it can't see a web page i also related to that i had private browsing turned itself back on so i turned that back off and that helped some but i think extensions are still an issue what do you mean private browsing turned itself back on? What do you mean? Well, I never

I haven't had the iCloud private browsing feature on, but it was on. Oh, you mean iCloud private relay? Private relay, yeah. Right, because private browsing is different. Sorry, it's just the other thing. Yeah, because that was a little confusing. I thought you could turn it off. No, it's the iCloud relay thing that I don't want because

it doesn't work right even though it's not in beta anymore or is it still in beta? I don't know. know anyway I turned it off again and then everything was okay uh except for all the parts that weren't okay because of extensions and it was slow and I have apps that are that are slow like bb edit is sluggish and I don't know why um I filed that as a feedback I asked barebones about it and they said, Hmm, file that as a feedback. I was like, okay, well that suggests that something is going on that they don't like. So yeah, there's it, but it's fine. Generally I can get my job done and, um, and it's usable. I have opinions that are, you know, I'm putting together about some of the decisions they've made. I think the settings app is still kind of a disaster.

But, you know, I'm still using it and forming my opinions, and we'll go from there. But I did write last week on Six Colors about how they took a feature that's been in macOS since 10.0 and removed it in this version. What was this feature? I don't feel like I understand. Network locations. It's basically you can set,

you basically can set presets of your network settings and switch between them, switch among them if you have many of them. And it's gone. It seems to exist still in the command line, but it's been removed from the interface itself. And it's been there since 10.0. I checked.

I used Stephen Hackett's library of screenshots to check. It's been there since 10.0. I checked. I used Stephen Hackett's library of screenshots to check. It's been there since 10.0. So I wrote about that. And there's some utilities that used to sort of like go beyond that have been largely abandoned that I wonder if they will come back because of that. And I don't know whether they abandoned that because the system settings interface was too complicated or whether they thought nobody used it or what but um i thought it was interesting that that feature is gone and in general i think that the the settings app is kind of a mess and ugly and inconsistent and i will say this network locations thing it definitely feels like something that like it's fine to get rid of this like i mean you know well so so here

is the thing i think you're probably right And it actually sounds like a great third party opportunity to me. Sure. Somebody wanted to make a new app that switched between network locations and maybe did some other stuff and maybe even offered shortcuts actions so people could use shortcuts to control the network locations. Like, there's an opportunity here. Somebody on Twitter, and I don't know, it was not a real name, it was just a handle, suggested that the act of Apple removing a feature and therefore creating a third-party app opportunity should be called a moriarty yep love it into it reverse sure i love that sherlock um and i think probably i think this is a good example where where this utility didn't need to exist because it was just in the os for the people who used it and i did hear from people who use this feature so this seems like a perfect kind of thing it's esoteric enough that it doesn't need to be done by apple as long as there's an option for the people who need it james thompson in the chat network locations by peak elk oh man so what you do is you literally you open network locations by

peak elk and you're in a you're in the peak elk car and if you want to go to a different location for your network you have to drive there yeah get in there and drive. While we're just taking this brief pause in the conversation here, I'll just say that Sava in the Discord has posted a link to build.com, whatever that is. You can put an order in. It will arrive in 9

to 14 weeks of the Schlage Enclosed Plus Century touchscreen electronic deadbolt with Wi-Fi. I don't believe it. You don't believe it's true? I don't believe it. Yeah, 9 to 14 weeks sounds like they're just going to email you in 8 weeks

and be like, sorry, this isn't happening. What I like about it is that they're actually taking orders, whereas most places are like, we don't have it in stock. Whether they would actually ship the order remains to be seen free shipping maybe free shipping uh stage manager do you use it stage manager do you use well let me ask the second question before you answer the first question do you use it as more than a curiosity

if you do use it i am not i have not spent a lot of time in stage manager uh and this is one of the telling things there's the kind of uh experimenting with new features to review them and there's the doing my job and i have not yet taken the plunge of saying oh no i'm going to try to do my job with stage manager so i need to go back to that i've spent time in it but um since i moved my primary to it i have not spent any time with it i remain excited about stage manager on the mac i think think I'm going to really dig it. I think I'm going to dig it. I assume one of the things you are spending a lot of time in, though, is the photos?

Yes, so much. For the book, right? Because this is going to be a big update year for your photos book. Yeah, I think it's going to be a full brand new edition, the whole thing. It's take control of photos, right? Take control of photos. Yeah. This must be a pretty daunting task.

You're going to get that thing done. Yeah, and it's the middle of August now, so it really feels like the time. You know, it's right around the corner. The summer's going to be over and there's going to be new iPhones and all that. Yeah, photos. I mean, the big change in photos, though, is the shared photo library stuff, which is they've actually done a really good job with it. There are a lot of quirks that I get to detail in the book, but it's good. It's smart, and it seems to work pretty well. So that's all good. I had to make a new Apple ID or revive an ancient unused Apple ID in order to share

a photo library with myself in order to test that feature which has been amusing because I'm not going to force it on my family and I'm not going to force betas on my family so I've got like an iPhone that's logged into my me.com Apple ID

just so I can do all that kind of test stuff. Did you create a separate library to do this sharing? Are you doing the sharing of your real library? It's my real library. Okay. And again, that comes back to the tourist thing, which is I can't log out of my... I just can't do it.

I've got my library. My library has been through a bazillion photos, betas. It's all backed up in case something disastrous happened, but I've never had something disastrous happen. And I need to have the real photo library to test it out. That makes sense. Do you have any other thoughts of Ventura? Is it going to be, do you think like,

really it's like photos and stage manager and then just keeping up with iOS features like messages or whatever? Is there anything else that interests you about it so far? No, I feel like it's pretty quiet right now. Obviously

the big stories on the iPad side, it's stage manager, and on the iPhone side, it's the lock screen Ventura you know the I mean it picks up all those other features that everybody else gets and I've used the continuity camera a little bit and that is fine but it is you know you use it and you're like oh there it is right that's that's that's what it is oh you know, you use it and you're like, oh, there it is. Right. That's, that's, that's what it is. Oh yeah.

Continuity camera. Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that, I feel like that's the big Mac feature is, which it's actually an iPhone feature, but it's a Mac feature too. It's a continuity camera. And then everything else is sort of for everybody. So yeah, I've unsent and edited messages and that was, that was fine.

I've unsent and edited messages and that was, that was fine. I have not, I've not yet, uh, actually used a shared tab group for something that was not silly, but that's okay. Um,

and I need to force myself. Another thing I need to do is I have to force myself to use mail on Mac because I don't use mail on Mac and I do on iPad and iPhone, but on the Mac I use. Oh, right. Yeah. There's the like um modern mac modern email features right right right which which are i have to test out because it sounds

like this is we'll we'll we'll test them out but it's one of those things where like apple silicon macs don't really ever sleep you know they're they're they're kind of always awake at a low level just like iphones and ipads and yet my i believe when you queue a message to send it does at like 2 a.m and you put your computer to sleep it doesn't wake up at 2 a.m and send the message but i gotta test it john voheys said that on a yeah and i it doesn't make sense stories and my mind blows like what is the freaking point of that feature well well let me tell I'm going to file that away with the one that kills me to this day, which is I am so used to listening to music on an iPad or an iPhone. And if I'm listening to music on my Mac,

on like a MacBook Air that I've got my headphones in, or I've got AirPods connected to them, and I close the lid and the music playing, and I go, what? Because on Apple's other devices, when you close the lid, and the music is going, it keeps going. But on the Mac, they're like, nope, show's over, nothing to see here. And this is just like that, which is, oh, yeah, you can cue that thing to go at 2 a.m., but the Mac won't actually send

it which doesn't again apple silicon theoretically isn't doing the dark wake thing where it's like uh the on intel max they would you know they would wake up power certain tasks power nap yeah dark wake was the developer title for it like there's theoretically no PowerNap on Apple Silicon Max because they don't need to PowerNap because they're always around. Except, apparently not. I don't know. This episode is brought to you by Memberful.

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It is time for some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Oh nice. The first comes from TV Wonder today. This is not a TV-related question, but her name is TV Wonder. You thought there was going to be TV-related, but it isn't.

They would like to know, how do you pronounce apple, and the S word that talks about the chips. I don't want to say it yet because I'm going to say it in two different ways. Do you pronounce it Apple Silicon

or Apple Silicon? And did this change since Apple released the M1 Macs and people started pronouncing it like Apple Silicon, like fun at the end rather than on at the end?

They say they've always pronounced it like on at the end, like Apple Silicon've always pronounced it like on at the end like apple silicon so it always sounds weird when anyone pronounces it like apple does okay so i think that this is a an alternate pronunciation that is pretty common that that people say silicon instead of silicon what's funny is i hear it both ways. I've always heard it both ways. Silicon Valley doesn't seem strange. Silicon Valley actually doesn't seem strange. So I think there's a, it may even be a California silicon because that's the, to me, that feels

like the pronunciation of the element silicon. But so many words in, I think, California English, you kind of shrink them down to n at the end instead of on in pronouncing the vowel sound. You swallow that vowel sound. And I think I'm sure that there's a linguist out there who could probably say exactly what this effect is. But I think it's pretty common. So I think it's pretty common, just California at least, way of swallowing that vowel sound. just California at least way of of of swallowing that vowel sound however once Apple starts referring to it as Apple Silicon pronounced that way in every single communication they make it's kind of hard not to just go with it especially since you internalize it like that

especially since it's one of the pronunciations that I would consider fine. I don't care. It's not like they called it Apple Silicon, you know? Yeah, if they called it Silicon, we would have a problem because just for the record, Silicon, totally different thing. And people do that all the time. How many times have we computer nerds heard about Silicon Valley? And it's like, that's LA that you're thinking of there with Silicon Valley. This is the Silicon Valley.

It's just, it's chips, chips, chips, chips, chips, and sand, I guess. Sand, Silicon, Silicon. It's fine either way. So the answer is yes, it's sort of an Apple thing, but also sort of not. It's more like a Californianism and they've decided to standardize on it. Honestly, they also have decided to standardize on not capitalizing it so it's capital a apple silicon lowercase s and that drives me nuts like uh but that's i mean i think it's right but it's like such a brand name that it would be kind of easier if it was capital a capital s but it's not it's just apple silicon So you kind of go with it because why? Yeah. I mean, like if that's how every single communicator from Apple refers to it and it's a not, you know, it's a variant, but not to my ears wrong, then I just am going to go with it. But TV Wonder is not, which also sounds like Stevie Wonder, which I think is maybe what they're going for there, is not wrong to say it seems weird.

Because, yeah, I mean, silicon is the standard pronunciation. What do you do in England? Do you call it like silicon-in-ium? Oh, don't ask me, man. Don't ask me what people say in England. Silicon-in-ium? Because everyone's just going to get mad at me. Silicon-in-ium?

You say things like an American. So, like, I can't be trusted of any pronunciation of anything um oh and they said that like an american yeah no you say things like an american dude dude yeah that's that's how british people sound i think thanks i say howdy y'all i'm from somerset uh the i assume i will assume i used to say silicon, like silicon, like on, right? Silicon. Silicon. Silicon.

Silicon. So now I can't do it right. But now I say silicon. Silicon Valley. Not like that. Silicon. Silicon. That's how I imagine it's said here normally.

But I say silicon now because Apple say it that way. And so we just internalize it. This is just a thing. It's the same as like when, you know, if Apple say a thing a certain way, everyone starts saying it. Like everyone said secret sauce for a long time because they said that they were doing that with AirPods. So everyone was just saying secret sauce,

secret sauce all the time and that drove me mad. But I like the way silicon sounds more than silicon. Because it's just easier to say. Silicon. It's easier to say. That's why we swallow the vowel there like because it's easier to say silicon it's easier to say that's that's why we swallow the vowel there is because it is easier to say absolutely no silicon this is some silly fun with silicon uh leon asks do you think the rumored always on display on the iphone uh feature on the upcoming models would be something you'd be able to turn

off i can't think of a single reason i'd need or want it what i will say to you first leon is don't worry about that yet let apple tell you what you might want it right that's what you want um i will refer you to the apple watch which has a setting in display settings called always on that you can turn on or off i'm sure it'll be the same way um i can think of lots of reasons that I would need slash want it, Leon, and maybe you will be surprised. But if not, I'm sure they'll let you turn it off. Leon,

do a deal with us. When Apple announce it, then say if you don't want it. Let us know. Once Apple has shown you what it could do, let me know. You can tweet at us again.

Hashtag AskUpgrade. Let us know then if you're interested. So what you're saying, Mike, is that Leon can't think of a single reason, but Apple probably can. I mean, it's Apple's job too, right? Like, Leon, you might just not know why you want it yet.

Because you haven't... Isn't that Apple in a nutshell? I don't know why you want it yet because you haven't you haven't like it hasn't been apple in a nutshell yeah i don't know why i'd want this thing apple says things and you're like oh i do want that exactly do you take my money luke says with the talk of two sizes for the iphone 14 what's the thinking on calling what would would be the thinking on calling the larger phone, the Max phone versus the Plus phone? Is it just for unification? Has Apple ever had a non-pro larger phone called the Max?

Do you think the Plus nomenclature will ever return? No. There you go. Do you want to know why? Why? Services get Plus. I think it's confusing. think i think you want parallel

nomenclature so it would be weird to have four different phone names larger phone is max and plus then it's like well plus isn't pro plus isn't pro plus is actually the same as the non-plus which is just the 13 um or 14 it's the same but so it's plus is only its size, but then there's the pro and the pro has more features. And then the pro max, which like it's too much. It's too many things. I think,

I think it will be 14, 14 max, 14 pro 14 pro max makes the most sense. Pro max is a ridiculous name. I know, but it's, it's the name we have. And so calling it a max,

I think it's the right, I think it's the right decision not to muddy the waters with yet another word that's used to describe literally the same thing which is it has a larger screen as the pro max i think it will be cleaner like you know as you say right you've got 14 14 max 14 pro 14 pro max like that's nice and clean clean. Just in the naming, you can understand what these products are, potentially how they might differ from each other. It's good. I think the Plus name has gone away. Max.

Max is here to stay. All right. Ian asks, Ever since my Mac LC2 in 1990, every desktop Mac I've owned costs $2,500. It's finally time to replace my 2015 27-inch iMac. What is the best

desktop Mac I can get for $2,500 today? I got a lot of respect for this game. Uh-huh. I feel like I've played this game. I think at some point I said before I bought my iMac Pro that almost every computer I've ever bought was $2,500. So I'm right there with Ian.

Okay, play the game, Mike. Go for it. Well, I looked it up today. Obviously, you're going for a Mac Studio, right? Right? Ooh, you know what I didn't consider for Ian here? The display. The display.

Ooh. Now I don't feel so good about what I said, because what I said was, Mac Studio with 32 gigabytes of RAM and a one terabyte SSD is $2,199. But then if you want to bump one of those specs up, the RAM or the SSD, $2,600. But now,

now I don't know what to do, because you're going to need a display. Now you could just go with the $2199, and I bet you could find a decent display for $400. It's not going to be a studio display, but you could get a display. Yeah, I think so. The display is the question. Does Ian have a display?

Since he's got a 27-inch iMac, my guess is no. Yeah. So this is the challenge because what I think you should be able to buy and can't just yet is an iMac Pro that's about 27 inches that's got a you know m2 pro chip in it for 2500 that's what you should be able to buy right now you can get a maxed out m1 iMac for only 2000 save yourself that money you get a studio display you could you could yeah you get a studio display. You could get a nice, like a Mac studio and a display that you find somewhere on the street or on sale

and attach that. Or otherwise you get a Mac, you get a Mac mini and a studio display. And then in a couple of years, you replace it with something. Once you've got the display right, then your computer upgrades can go back to being $2,500 a shot because you can just keep the display.

But it's a tricky one now because, yeah, it's either going to be a Mac Mini. And Ian specifically said desktop Mac. And that limits it, right? Because you could get like a MacBook Air and a studio display, but that's not what Ian wants. No, I have assumed that Ian is looking for a desktop computer here. I took that as an assumption and just remembered it. But this is the, well, yeah, what's the best desktop Mac I can get is the question. So it's right there.

So I think the answer is this is the hole in the desktop market where Apple either has an M1 iMac at 24 inches, or you have to buy, you have to buy a display and a Mac studio. And that's where a 27 inch iMac would fit. And it's not there right now, you know, maybe next year, but not right now. It's not there. So you either have to commit to an external display and then a Mac Studio or a Mac Mini or save yourself money and get the M1 iMac. Those are your choices. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode of Upgrade,

you can send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which you get access to. If you sign up at getupgradeplus.com and you're an Upgrade Plus subscriber. Thank you so much to everybody that has and also thank you to our sponsors of this week's episode.

Memberful, Sourcegraph, Squarespace and TaxExpander. But as always thank you for listening and we'll be back next week if you want to find us in the meantime. Go to sixcolors.com, go to theincomparable.com and at Jason L. That's where Jason is. Jason also hosts

some shows here on RelayFM like I do. Relay.fm slash shows. Go find something new and add it to your podcast queue. I am at imyke. Until next time, say goodbye Jason Snell. Goodbye Mike Hurley.