Upgrade - 430: Other Kickstands Are Available

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Jason's got new reviews of macOS Ventura, the tenth-generation iPad, and the M2 iPad Pro. We discuss Stage Manager, System Settings, the Magic Keyboard Folio, and the curious pace and nature of iPad innovations.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 430 today's action-packed bumper episode is supported by memberful doordash uni pizza ovens and express vpn my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley 4 30 oh yeah busy day for you busy day we're going to be talking about ipad reviews we're going to be talking about mac os so much stuff going on today but we must start as we always do with a hashtag snell talk question this one comes from dylan We are continuing the e-reader discussion with this question. Slow segment. Yes.

Okay. Dylan asks, as a fan of physical e-reader buttons, do you use the top one to turn the page forward or do you use the bottom one to turn the page forward? You would think that this would be a pretty straightforward answer, right? Yeah. The answer is the page forward button is the button that my thumb rests on naturally when I hold the e-reader. So it is device ergonomic dependent. It is. Generally, I think with the Kobo that I'm using right now, and generally this is the case,

the bottom button ends up being the one that's the forward button because generally i just want to go forward and i want to rest my thumb on the page turn button so wherever my thumb is most comfortable and in the grip that is most comfortable to me that's where my thumb goes so uh they let you choose right which one is forward and which one is back and i think i'm using the bottom one for forward and the top one for back. So what you're saying is wherever I lay my thumb. That's it.

It's home. That's my home. If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question of your own to help us open a future episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snow Talk or use question mark Snow Talk in the RelayFM members Discord. Snell Talk or use question mark Snell Talk in the RelayFM members discord. I have a

Where is Tim and Eddie update for you Jason Snell. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time. Start your segment. Love it. Tim Cook and Eddie Q spotted together at the Circuit

of the Americas this weekend for the American Grand Prix in Austin, Texas. Is that like the Straits of Magellan or something? Circuit of the Americas? I mean, that's what they call it. It's called that. I don't know. Oh, oh, oh. Is it because Apple has a manufacturing facility in Austin and so they're doing circuits there?

I mean, yeah, sure. If that's what you want like they're you know tim cook and adq uh were the uh or the grand prairie this weekend uh this led to lots of speculation on my timeline that apple's trying to vie for f1 rights let me give you two pieces of information on this one well let me give you three pieces of information is one no is piece of information one piece of information two espn already renewed their rights with because the espn would be bananas not to do it because it is probably the fastest growing sport in america i've just said that but i

believe it to be true uh is at least growing very quickly um you know i feel like maybe a lot of people could attest to this right i feel like you must see it in your timeline more than ever right people talking about formula one that's just the same bloody europeans it's a lot of americans i know a lot of americans getting into the sport now and this is all because of netflix's drive to survive and this is like if those rights were available netflix would take them. 100% Netflix would take them. They would move heaven and earth to get them, right? I believe that to be true.

Anyway, what they were doing there was they were with Brad Pitt because Brad Pitt is making a movie about Formula One, which will be on Apple TV+. So one of the things that was announced this weekend as part of Brad being there, which I reckon is probably why Tim and Eddie were there, is that in next year's season,

they are going to be filming some parts for the movie at the courses, like at the tracks. They're going to be doing some form of filming. So I expect that they were all there together. One of the things that happened was, for some reason, Tim Cook was given the honor of waving the checkered flag. It didn't look like

he wanted to, so I don't know why he did it. You have never seen a man look so unhappy to be doing basically anything and then to put on the worst flag waving performance anybody has ever seen. I will direct you to a 9to5Mac article which has both of these things.

There is a picture which shows just how unhappy Tim Cook looked. And then there's a video of him waving the flag. I'm going to dispute this. Okay. I don't think, and especially this is as a parent of a couple of children, I don't think he's unhappy. a couple of children. I don't think he's unhappy.

I think he is very, very serious about doing a thing he doesn't understand how to do. It's like, I don't know how my face should look right now. Yeah, I think he's very focused and he's doing like, wave it back and forth, Tim. Just wave it back and forth. They're all looking at me. I'm going to do this. Did I do it okay?

I will say, I've thought this a lot, right? That feels like a very scary job because you do not want to drop it because the cars are still going. I've always been nervous about the checkered flag waiver because, you know, if you drop that flag and it lands on the racetrack, that's bad news. You know, there's probably like a tether that there's a guy standing just off the camera who's got the tether to make sure or like a little net or something. It doesn't look like it, but I would hope so. We saw a number when we were in Minnesota, we went to a Twins game and we saw a number retirement ceremony.

And that's the retiring an old player's number. And they had the family and we were standing literally right behind where the number was going to be drinking beer

and eating hot dogs and it was a pretty great vantage point they brought his son and daughter he was down on the field they brought his son

and daughter up they are there and they're gonna they're gonna pull off the thing to reveal the number that is permanently gonna be on the side of the stadium, inside.

And first off, there is a guy with a rope who's behind them and off camera. And then they try to pull it and they kind of can't do it and it doesn't really work right. And then they look back at him and he just kind of pulls it and they pull along with it and then it really goes. And it's like you've got the back, like the off-camera backup plan so that it doesn't become a disaster, right? So if Tim Cook dropped the checkered flag, there's like a flag catcher thing somewhere because otherwise that would be terrible. Anyway, I,

he strikes me as just being like a kid who's just super focused on not wanting to screw it up more than it does that. He disdains it and is bored. I think he's just like, I don't know how I'm supposed to look or how I'm supposed to do this. So I'm just going to really focus on going left, right, left,

right with this flag. And can I go now? So that's where they are. Right. What he's not see if they wanted an ebullient dynamic flag waving finish giving it to eddie man eddie q's your guy would have been the one right why he's your guy you know he's gonna give it a little like a little loops oh and he's gonna do a woohoo and he's going to pump his fist flown it up in the air like yeah baby checker flag because look eddie was excited so like they would they would you'd see them around eddie was having a great time like he was there they were there with ferrari

for some of it because eddie's on ferrari's board eddie was having a great time also mike mike mike schiller is a big formula one guy he's having a great time? Do we really need to even... Of course Eddie's having a great time. Phil is a big racing fan, you know? Phil's on the roof. He's not part of the... He should have been there. Maybe he was there, but you didn't see him.

Some breaking news for you, Jason Snell. Breaking news. Is it Formula One related in any way? Not this time. It's breaking news. Thank God. Okay. Apple is increasing the prices of some of their subscription offerings as of today comes apple music's monthly price has been

increased by one dollar for individual plans two dollars for families apple tv plus is rising by two dollars and apple one is going up by three3 per month. Wow. So obviously you won't pay for all of these things depending on, you know, if you're an Apple One, you're not going to pay like six more dollars a month. You'll pay three more dollars a month. But if you just subscribe to one of the two entertainment services, then you're going to see some increases in price there. And since Apple One is essentially a family plan of music and TV, those individual plans are going up $4, but the bundle's going up $3. So they're keeping some bundle savings in there, too. Interesting.

They've got to get that APU up, I guess. Well, they said in turn this means artists and songwriters will earn more for the streaming of the music because it's a percentage, right? So they raised the price, and that means that there's actually more money also going to the artists so that's something i'm glad they mentioned it there is a secondary way to do that though which is just reduce what apple takes so let's not treat it i know you're not saying they're not a cherry it's like it's altruistic but like if they're going to come out and say it like that they're trying to like say hey guys i like that they say well well i like that they said it because what they're saying is this is not all going to us. This is going to us and the artists and the record companies.

Don't talk about them. Nobody likes them. Yeah, but it goes for Apple in two ways, right? Because now services revenue just automatically increases again, which is good for their share price. It is. I know I'm not directing this at you. I'm directing this this like

but don't try and make it out like you're doing this for the good of creatives right like because there are other things that you could do like it just so happens that that happens for them as opposed to this is why we're doing it that's how i look at it anyway i well i mean i think that if you're a pr person you absolutely make it out to? Like, that's your job is to do that. And also, they're throwing the record company under the bus in that sentence. It is a marvelous sentence because the change to Apple Music is due to an increase in licensing costs, right? They're like, it's not us. It's not us.

It's the record companies. And in turn, artists and songwriters will earn more for the streaming of their music so they're like we it's not us it's the record companies but at least the artists that you love will also get more money in addition to the record companies i think they totally threw the music industry under the bus there right they're like it's not us it is due to an increase in licensing costs that's that's you know they're throwing some shade. I think that's a pretty good PR sentence. Let me tell you about a subscription plan that hasn't gone up and isn't going up. Upgrade Plus. Go to getupgradeplus.com

and you can get longer ad-free episodes of Upgrade every single week. No ads and bonus content and tons of other perks of being a RelayFM member. Go to getupgradeplus.com. It's just $5 a month, Jason Snell. Or $50 a year if you want a discount. You can buy.

That's a bargain. That is a nice discount. I'm a little hesitant to have you say it's not going up because what if it does someday? I mean right now today. I just meant not going up now. Unfortunately, due to Mike, it's now going to be $6 a month,

but it does also help compensate Jason. Jason. I feel like I want to create a compensate Jason plan now, which is $6. Oh, no. You don't? No. No, it's okay. I will take a cut from it, but it will also compensate Jason.

It will also compensate me more. Thank you. Thank you, Apple PR. Very good. Very good. We're going to talk about iOS 16.1 and iPadOS 16.1 more over the next few weeks. It's not on our docket for today. There are going to be lots of articles out there about Stage Manager.

Please enjoy them. I put, and podcasts, I put all of my effort into my macOS review for two reasons. One is because iPadOS, you know, it's mostly stage manager. And I really was trying to focus on macOS stage manager. And also, I feel like, honestly, I had that moment this morning where I was thinking, you know, Federico's going to get his stage manager. It's out now as we record his stage manager piece. And I kind of want to give him the space. I have opinions about Stage Manager on the iPad,

don't get me wrong. And they're not the same as Federico's. But I feel like he's taken the most bullets. He spent the most time with it. He needs to get out there with it. And honestly, I prioritized macOS. And then the last week i prioritized the new ipads because i've had those for the the last week so that's that's been

my priority so we're gonna so we will definitely be talking more about uh the 16.1 release uh but it's not on the docket for today yeah because there's stuff like i still want to try out more apps with live activities and stuff like absolutely and so i want to be able to talk about those later on and as you say we have more than enough stuff to talk about today so we're going to focus on the things uh that we do and one of those is a rumor roundup jason's now of course we're gonna have a rumor roundup i wasn't to today, but then there were too many rumors, so someone's got to round them up.

That's how it happens. They get out of the pen, you've got to round them up. Yeah, you can't just say there's sheep, I mean rumors, in the field and they'll be fine, right?

You've got to go get them. You've got to bring them in. Otherwise, the rumor coyotes will, rumor wolves will get, anyway,

you've got to bring them in so they're safe. The wolves are the other podcasters. we are building we are building a world here with the room the world of the rumor roundup and one of them is now that the rumor wolves will devour all rumors that are not brought in to safety by us we're building the ucu right this is the upgrade cinematic universe now i mean is it or is it connected to the rest of it, or is it just the Room Around Up universe? But anyway, we'll let the fan sites debate it.

It's a spinoff. Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple is still working on multiple Macs at this time that will be launched within the next few months, maybe some coming in November. New MacBook Pros with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, some coming in November. New MacBook Pros with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. A Mac Mini

with an M2 possible M2 Pro which is interesting. And a Mac Pro featuring an M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme likely coming in 2023. The articles from Mark

and I'll put a Mac Rumors article in the show notes as well. Lots of numbers about cores. We said some of these before. We'll talk about them again in the future.

All very powerful stuff. But to say. It's what we've been talking about. We said some of these before. We'll talk about them again in the future. All very powerful stuff. But it's what we've been talking about. It's what we would expect. It's the only... I felt... You say a possible M2 Pro in the Mac Mini. I mean, I actually felt that was... He's hedging a little.

He doesn't know for sure. Yes. But I have a hard time imagining that they're going to do a Mac Mini and not have an option for an M2 Pro. I agree with you, but he seems to have changed his tune a little bit, which makes me just, I pause a little now. Yeah, I think he doesn't have that as clear. who do rumor stuff is Mark is reporting on what's going on at any given moment inside Apple, or at least when his source knew something about what was going on inside of Apple and Apple changes

its plans. So sometimes reports are what Apple was planning at the time and then six months go by and they don't release that. It's because they changed their plans. But looking at the Mac desktop lineup, I have a hard time imagining that there wouldn't be like i feel like the existence of that intel mac mini is essentially apple saying we know we we have we have to do a higher performance uh apple silicon or at least like so there is a placeholder here right like we are we're leaving one spot exactly which would be the the you know a m2 pro option to go make your mac mini that much more powerful but otherwise it's yeah it's it's revising the macbook pros with the m2 versions of the m2 the m1 pro and max just the next version and then mac pro ultra and extreme

i mean he's basically talking about right it's the two two chips or the four chips which we've been talking about for a long time and that's's, that seems like a next year thing. I think it's interesting that he equivocated a little bit about this year, um, that he, it seems to me, I don't know if I would read this as that he's now got Intel that they may not be this year. I think it's more like he's got kind of an old source that said those Mac revisions, the MacBook pros and the Mac Minis, were coming this fall. But it's unclear if he has been able to reestablish that as a fact. So he's hedging a little and saying,

or maybe next year because he doesn't really know. I still think it's entirely possible that we could get a Mac release as a press release tomorrow or a week from Tuesday or a week after that. I think it could happen any time, but Mark's report says if it doesn't happen before Christmas, you know, don't be too surprised if it's something that's more in January. Because he even said they tend to release mags in November, January, and March or something like that. And it's like, well, actually, that's kind of right. So if they don't hit the next few weeks, it'll be January instead.

So we're going to talk about the iPads today. One of the things that the 11-inch iPad Pro did not get when they were announced last week was the Liquid Retina XDR display, the mini LED display. Display analyst Ross Young expects that the iPad Pro lineup will switch over to OLED in 2024. Yeah, we'll talk about this more when we dive into the iPads, but it starts to give a sense of where Apple is and is not with iPad Pro hardware. The idea that this is basically confirming what we all just saw last week, which is no properly new iPad Pro right now. It's the ones you've already seen.

But in 18 months, when the cycle to refresh hits again, there will be, at the very least, because he's a display analyst, an OLED iPad Pro model or models in 24. iPad Pro model or models in 24. So that suggests to me, we can talk about it more, that that's what they've got pinned as their next major iPad update, which is funny because if you think about it, that's more than five years since the last body change to the iPad Pro of substance. It's pretty wild. Question for you. Do you think that 2024 is the next ipad revision or do you think there is one in 2023 um well the 18 month cycle suggests that 2024 is the next ipad revision if it's if it's the first half of 24 you know there is a conversation about like are they going to go to m3 and if they do when do they do that right like that's yeah i think and i think there's some questions first off there's a question about the m3 because i'm still not entirely given the the

the timeline of m1 and m2 versus a14 and a15 and a16 i'm not entirely convinced that the m3 is going to be based on the a16 right i think it's possible that they're going to skip it and put the m3 on the next falls ipad chip base i mean next falls iphone chip base instead of this falls iphone chip base if that makes any sense so um they might actually like because you're doing a sort of 18 month ish mac Mac chip and an annual iPhone chip, depending on especially what the process changes are at TSMC, would they skip an A-series generation and then go to the next fresher M-series generation? So I think that's out there. And then the other thing I'll throw out about the iPad Pro, just as pure speculation, is we've heard some speculation about a larger iPad. And in fact, Mark Gurman said there's a 14-inch iPad Pro of some sort in the works. And we've heard that from other people.

That one could come out before 2024, right? If you think back to the iPad Pro, they did the first big iPad Pro alone. And then they did the smaller iPad Pro. So they could definitely introduce like a mega iPad Studio, iPad Pro 15, 14, whatever they want to call it, out of sync with the ones that we got this week or getting this week that were announced last week. They could do that, but it feels like the 12.9 and 11 ipad pros that we know today kind of makes sense for me that they wouldn't get updated until early 24 because it's an 18 month cycle they've been doing that since 2008 or 2018 not 2008 2008 there were no ipads i am starting to wonder if they ever already should have put the mini LED on the 12.9.

If I just am not sure that was the right move, if they were never going to bring it to the 11. It's just like, I just think it lessens the product line. Nevertheless, we'll talk about that later. Mark Gurman is also reporting that Apple had plans to create a sub $500 iPad and keyboard combo. had plans to create a sub $500 iPad and keyboard combo. Quote from Mark, Apple was internally considering launching an iPad of a plastic back and a plastic keyboard that would ship in the same box for below $500. The idea was seemingly abandoned, but that was probably Apple's only real hope of ever giving Chromebooks a run for their money in most schools. Apple, you should make it. Make this product.

It feels like this is one of those pieces of information that he was given that was like, you can write about this after they ship this new iPad. Almost, like from the source. It's like, after they ship this new iPad, I'll let you share my disappointment about the fact that they didn't go in this other direction. For the record, the new iPad that we're going to get to in a minute,

the new iPad 10th generation with the keyboard that Apple is selling is a $698 device. Not close to sub 500. In fact, their only sub 500 anything is the ninth generation iPad with the old smart keyboard. No trackpad. That's $488. So I think it feels to me that this report is that people argued to go cheaper with the iPad and have it be plastic so it was cheaper to produce and include the keyboard in the box, which is really interesting, right? And have it be, at least for schools, let's say, and have it be under $500. And that would be basically their, this is a laptop replacement kind of thing.

And I would say that that would have been a change for Apple strategy and that the current iPad is very consistent with Apple strategy. But it's an interesting idea that they were even thinking about it. And lastly, while we're talking about hardware, this is a rumor that got confirmed. Apple have announced that industrial design lead Evans Hankey is leaving the company. Hankey will be staying on for six months as they transition her role to someone else. have not named a successor yet hanky was in the role for three years this is fascinating to me yeah i don't know anything about the behind the scenes but this is this is a um so who knows right who knows what causes this but it is it is interesting when you're talking about that narrative of what's apple's design leadership like post-Johnny Ive, that they made a big deal of saying that Evans Henge was in this position and that she was in charge.

And it's like, it's okay, everybody. And now she's – not now, but in six months, but she's gone. And I guess the question – there's internal questions that it's very hard for us to even understand what they are. Externally, I think the question is, does this concern Apple's investors, essentially, so that they would get punished in the stock market? Or has the fear of Johnny Ive leaving faded? Because I view the way they really talked up Evans Hankey as in part being a relax everybody, Apple's going to be okay, even though Johnny's not here anymore kind of thing. A PR thing, a PR move. And I'm not sure with her leaving, if they feel the need to do that again with the newly designer. I don't think so.

Maybe they will i don't think but it feels a lot less imperative right right yeah yeah i don't and like this is nothing on evans i think it's pretty i mean i'm pretty sad about this because apple's hardware design especially on the max has been so freaking good the last few years like yeah so this worries me we just don't know right we just don't know like that's that's my problem is i'd like to ascribe this to her leadership but you know we're not on the inside so somebody on the inside could say yes she's the one who really cleaned up all the mess somebody inside could be like yeah she wasn't really involved in that one and that was really

this other couple of designers who did that and they were really great about it but i but ultimately you know she may not have been put in pen to paper but like she's going to be saying yes or no on this stuff right and three years would suggest like stuff that's coming out now that may have been some of her first work i don't know but like i'm just gonna say that i like her leadership has been good for for products i think i think apple's designing some really good stuff right now. So I am a little concerned about this, but we'll have to wait and see. Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth being concerned about it.

I just, I, and she gets, she's the one in charge, so she should get the credit for it. It's just, I just want to remind everybody that just as with Johnny Ive, there's this moment of like well who actually is the author of this stuff it's probably lots of people and have we seen we may only have seen because of time dilation the end point of her output is what we're seeing now and because there is so much time sometimes between a product being conceived and a product being shipped um and that's all the stuff we can't know so um maybe mark german sources will tell us but uh but it is it is something to note and be concerned about if for no other reason honestly than losing your lead means there's going to be uh there's going to be a shake-up and some instability and that's um not great for any company especially a company that cares about industrial design like Apple does. If I was to armchair quarterback this, my feeling would be I think maybe this role should not be reporting into Jeff Williams.

It is very strange to me, considering Apple's lineage as a company, that they never put a chief of design in or they did not consider their head of software and their head of industrial design part of the leadership team. That's always felt weird to me. Yep, I think so. I saw somebody make this point maybe it was German, maybe not that I thought was very good is talk about pressure being the head of industrial design at Apple that is a pressure job

that is a very serious job because Apple cares so much about industrial design because of the legacy of Johnny Ive. So that's tough. Maybe this is only supposed to be a three to five year job, but Johnny just did it for a really, really long time, right? Maybe so. Keep in mind also, a lot of these designers are elite designers who've been at Apple a long time. They got a lot of Apple stock. I don't know if that's the case for Evans Hankey, but I kind of assume it's one of those things too, as with a lot of Apple

executives where they don't need to stay there. They actually don't need to stay at Apple to support themselves and their families. And that's a challenge for Apple to motivate them to be there. And so for a tough job like this, you're right. I mean, maybe it really is something that you do for a few years and then you're like, I need to step off now and let somebody else have a have a crack at it kind of like johnny like i now need to go and do the thing that it is i want to do i don't need to continue doing the thing here right like i'm gonna go i'm gonna go make a small practice and i'm gonna just do the work right not the work work This episode is brought to you in part by our friends at Memberful, the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on the web.

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So it is iPad embargo day. It is. As we're talking today. It is. And you have had, we're going to talk about just the iPad for the moment. Okay. How long have you had the iPad? Well, I got to see it Tuesday and I got it Wednesday.

So I've had it in my hands since last Wednesday. So four or five days, something like that. What color do you have? I have yellow. Do, like, four or five days, something like that. What color do you have? I have yellow. Ooh! Do you like the yellow? Yes, I do. It's bright. It's not... I mean, because it's metallic,

it's hard not to read it as a very, very, very yellow gold. Probably like my eye makeup. Just because... I bet it's like my eye makeup. Metallic yellow. Yeah, but it's nice. And then they dress it up. They have a yellow smart folio that you can put on it, right? That pushes it even further in the yellow direction, in the big bird direction. But it's nice.

I like it. I would not choose it myself. I would choose the blue probably because I'm like that. I do that. Also, I got to see the pink one, which is very, I mean, it's pink, but it's very red. It's beautiful too. I walked into the meeting room where they had all the colors, Mike, and I have to say my immediate thought was, I may have said it out loud actually, which is, wow, the colors are really was putting an extra time on this one. Because it uh yeah because this is this is i i approve again

but this is the low-end ipad right so this is where apple feels somehow like it's okay for them to to get um you know get colorful yeah whereas mostly they you know they don't do that so it was good to it was good to see it so this is an unprecedented thing that's occurring right now and it's not good for you as the listener but jason's just turned on his video in zoom we're recording zoom and he's showing me a yellow ipad and i will say that that is definitely more colorful than the ipad airs are and and i will say look at that that actually looks very much like the yellow that is on my iMac

that is the anodized part, the goldy part. I think so. I think it's pretty close to that. I had a thought about this, alright? I want to just share this thought with you, and I know you're going to agree with me, because we're real big on color around here. So the iPad and the iMac both got fun colors.

Why didn't the MacBook Air? Because isn't the MacBook Air in the same class as those two products within their lineup? And there were rumors that they were going to do that. So I have two theories. I have two theories. I would love to know, by the way. We don't do this that often here. But somebody at Apple knows why. I'd love to hear it. We'll never tell anyone. We just want to know. I just want to know by the way we don't do this that often here but like yes somebody you know knows

why i'd love to hear it even if you want to tell anyone we just want to know i just want to know um the that would be also not speaking of things that aren't good for podcasts is us knowing and saying we can't say anything about it so two theories one is the theory of the supply chain which is even though apple was fine making you know a bunch of different imax and different colors they have to make so many MacBook airs. And they had, and remember they had a lot of production delays that it's possible that what they said is,

look, this is terrifying. Let's just do the tried and true MacBook air colors. And maybe we'll do the colors later. So that's part of it. Maybe they just were afraid of the extra complication when they were trying to get out a product that was a very complicated and hard ship. My other theory, and this goes back to that 20 Max for 2020 story I did about the original iBook that came in orange and blue.

And those are the only ones that were ever colorful, right? After that, they made them white plastic and black plastic. And then we've had various forms of boring in aluminum shades. I wondered at the time if the reason we don't see colorful laptops in the world is because laptops get taken into the world and there's this feeling like in professional environments. And there's this thing about like, do you want to be known as the person who's got the orange laptop? And that the result is that people don't buy colored laptops because they don't want to have to commit to that color. And so at that point, if they're not buying them, why are you selling them? And I wonder if there's been market research about that or whatever.

My argument would be, I know if I'm buying a blue MacBook Air, just let me buy it. But I can see the other side, which is, yeah, but then what if you take your orange MacBook Air into a meeting? And they're like, whoa, look at that orange laptop. Who are you? Which I think is dumb, but I think is also possibly real. But I don't know. I just would like to see it. I mean, I'd like to see it across their product line, that they'd be a little more bold with color with boring options as a choice if you feel you need to go that way. But it's very clear that from Apple's perspective, it's just on these low-end models. And yes, I know you can take the iPad out into the world. I did that.

I took this iPad out into the world. iPads are for real work. You know what I mean? Yeah, but that's it. Yeah, people don't take iPads seriously anyway, so color's not a problem. Well, I mean, if you did, though, you get the iPad Pro, which just comes in a range of boring colors.

In boring, yeah. But yeah, that was my thought, right? The MacBook Air seems even weirder to me now than it did before because now the lower, the entry-level quote-unquote products of these other two lines or what is considered the every like

you know every person product of these lines got fun colors and the macbook air didn't maybe there's going to be a really colorful 12-inch macbook in the future one can only dream maybe or or they'll revise the macbook air or i'm still holding out some hope that that they might even do a mid uh mid product line correction where they come out with another, like with a fun MacBook Air color or something. Probably not. Who knows? I'm quoting now from the one and only Jason Snell.

The new low-end iPad suggests that Apple is stepping into the future of the iPad as a sometimes laptop from its default orientation to the use of a trackpad and full function key row so we're going to talk a little bit later on about the quite perplexing lineup that they've got right now but i think the thing that i took away from your review most keenly was this idea of like this is potentially the first signal of a continuation of the line like the furthering of the iPad line,

because it has some features that we've wanted for a really long time on the entire lineup, but just this one got it, which is also very weird for how Apple updates the iPad line, of like the iPad gets features before anything else. Yeah, although we had it where the iPad Air got features before the iPad Pro did. But the iPad Air is still the iPad Air. You know what? But like I'm talking like just iPad.

It's not the iPad Pro. I know it's weird. It's weird. I'm just saying that Apple's, this is not unprecedented in Apple being real scattershot with where it introduces products. But I tried to take, it's funny you called out that sentence because I think that was literally the last sentence I wrote in the whole thing. It's in the introduction,

but I think it was the last sentence that I wrote. And pro tip, sometimes you save the intro for the end because then you know what you said so you can lead into it. Anyway, so yes, this was my thought about this iPad. And we can talk about the iPad as a product, but there's also the iPad line as a product line. And I think when you look at those things, moving the FaceTime camera to the horizontal aspect so that when you're doing a FaceTime call, it looks like you're looking at the camera and not off to the side of the camera when you're doing it in horizontal orientation, which I would argue is the primary iPad orientation. And then Apple making keyboards was like the first nudge of like even Apple recognizes that horizontal is now a primary orientation, not just when you hold it, but also if you've got it in a keyboard. So let's put it there.

So that was number one. got it in a keyboard so let's put it there so that was number one um they put a trackpad on a keyboard for the it's not technically not the lowest end ipad because they kept the ninth generation around but let's say the the new low-end model comes with a keyboard and that keyboard has a trackpad on it so that's number one right where they're like no no we're serious about keyboards with trackpads on the ipad and just like, well, on the low-end models, you can get a keyboard, but it has no trackpad. This clearly is a direction that they're pushing down from the high end all the way down. And the function key row that they added is another one of those things where in absence of it on iPad keyboards from Apple, you have to ask yourself the question, is Apple just

fundamentally opposed to it? And you know, I have briefings with Apple people that are on background and know Apple says and all those things, so I can't really quote them. I just have to know things that I learned there. I have asked, when they introduced the Magic Keyboard, I asked. I've asked since then about the function row, because the lack of the function row on the magic keyboard for iPad is very frustrating. And, you know, they're PR people. They got to come up with an answer. So sometimes I get an answer and the answer is like, well, the control center is very convenient or something like that. It's like, okay.

But, you know, what would be more convenient is not taking my hands off the keyboard in order to pause my music. Because I have the keys that are on every other freaking keyboard that you guys make yeah but you know there was no way to know whether apple agreed just like with the facetime camera there was we could say say wouldn't it be nice if the facetime camera was on the other side and they'd be like well you know our users love holding the ipad and you're like okay uh but but they can hold the iPad the other way too. And they won't give you an answer because they're not going to talk about future products and they're not going to admit to any flaws in anything. It's not their job to do that.

I get it. the trackpad down to the this lower end ipad suggests to me that now apple is saying yes those are all the things you wanted are things we understand and also think the ipad should have and i find that very encouraging because when they're absent mean, there's no telling whether it will ever happen, right? Like until last Tuesday, we had, as iPad users, no idea if Apple even thought that putting an escape key and function keys on an iPad keyboard was something anybody should do, right? Like literally, did they just decide, no, you don't need that on the ipad or not and now we know that they that that they think you do because they put it on their keyboard and i i find that encouraging uh doesn't mean that they won't say oh no it's just for that one and we can't put it on the others they may yet disappoint us but i like the idea here that apple is seem to have

really internalized the idea that sometimes you use your iPad as a laptop horizontal orientation is important trackpad is important function key row is important I don't know if I put this in the review but I had that thought last week which was all that remains is for them to rotate that Apple logo on the back 90 degrees but they haven't done that yet let's talk about the Apple pencil I mean, it's just less than great. I think you sum it up so perfectly. I don't particularly want to like redo the whole conversation about like the charger or such, but you just said, if you're someone who cares about the Apple Pencil, just don't

bother with this model. Spend the extra money. Get the iPad Air. It supports the superior Apple Pencil 2. Yeah, that's the bottom line is overview here by the way i really like the 10th generation ipad i think it's great i think it is a14 is so powerful on its own that you really have to start looking for uh use cases where it's simply unsuitable. It's pretty good. It's got a good price.

It doesn't have the stupid home button anymore. It's on Touch ID on the wake sleep button. It looks good. It just looks nice. It's got the flat side design. It's got the colors. The borders are bigger than the borders on some other devices. The iPad needs borders. You do need a place to hold it. Absolutely. All of that is good. know the borders are bigger than the borders on you know some other devices but the ipad needs

borders it does you do you need a place to hold it absolutely so all of that is good however there are cases like yes if you're doing high-end video and if you're doing like if you really need that memory bandwidth and you're doing like big media applications which again most people aren't like for a writer like i mean other than the other than the keyboard which we'll get to in a minute but like as our the idea i always think about like leaving aside my podcast editing and things like that. What about being a writer? And I take something like this little iPad out there and it's like, I took this iPad over to Starbucks. I sat at a table and I tap, tap, tap and wrote notes and stuff about the iPad. And it was great. I'm like, this is a great little,

little computer for writing. All of that is good. However, rather than jumping around and saying, look at this, I mean, we could talk about the, why is the pencil one supported on this device that doesn't have lightning? So they have to create a weird adapter where you plug the pencil one in and then you plug a cable into the other side. And that's a little adapter that people are going to lose, especially in schools. It's not great, right? I can look at that and have, and I wrote last week about like the, why did that happen?

And it's like Apple painted itself in a corner. They made some design decisions for the Apple Pencil 2. Bad compromises. They made a set of bad compromises. Yeah, which was like four or five years ago, they made a decision about that. But they, and they had previously made the decision that like, we're going to just take a lightning port and jam it into an iPad. And that's how you're going to charge the original, which was-

They drew themselves into a lightning corner. Okay. So I'll give you that. Thank you. Under protest. But those are decisions made five, six years those are decisions made like five, six years ago and like eight, nine years ago. Yeah. Those two Apple Pencil designs.

And they get to this model and they're like, oh, what are we going to do? Because they are now stuck with those two decisions. And my guess is there's probably an Apple Pencil 3 in the works, but it's not ready yet. And they're not going to launch it here. And it's probably got lots of expensive things and all that. So they're left with, do we support one or two? And for whatever reason, they said, we're going to do this kind of embarrassing adapter and support the Apple Pencil 1. Because to support Apple Pencil 2 would require X.

And I don't know what that is. Would require some more changes to the internals that they're not willing to do or use of the magnetic space on the opposite side, which is where the buttons are because they've got the smart connector on the one side instead of on the back. There's lots of conversations about ways they could have done it. But the fact was, it was an additional complexity that they decided that they didn't want. And so we ended up there. Okay, that's my pencil talk. But here's the bottom line is, if you care about the Apple Pencil, don't buy this iPad. That's the bottom line, right?

Like, just don't do it. Because first, you're going to get the bad pencil. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not as good as the Apple Pencil 2. You're going to have to use the original Apple Pencil, which will never work on another iPad, probably. Yeah, this is the last one. You're going to have to use the original Apple Pencil, which will never work on another iPad probably. Yeah, this is the last one. And you've got to get the adapter, and you've got to get the cable, and it's all really inconvenient. And at that point, if you care enough about the Apple Pencil, you should get the iPad Air because then you get the Pencil 2.

Or what I would say is if you want this iPad and you maybe sometimes might want to take notes, logitech crayon exists get the logitech crayon for 70 it's less than the apple pencil one and it works with this ipad and it's got all ipads yeah it's usbc you know like to charge and i think that's great that that would do it you know that would do the job for you uh that's it absolutely yeah so so that's the bottom line is do it you know that would do the job for you uh that's it absolutely yeah so so that's the bottom line is we can we can talk about the weirdness of it and why it happened and that's all kind of fun from an academic perspective from the sheer well tell me if i should buy this product perspective the answer is do you have some very kind of higher end needs do you really want the magic keyboard which has some although it doesn't

have a function row has some features that this this thing lacks do you use the apple pencil and like if any of those is true i'm going to wave you off of this one but um you know that's all that needs to be said i appreciate that apple gate has given it Apple Pencil compatibility through this ridiculous means, but I don't think it's worth it. I mean, like if you're starting fresh, I wouldn't do it. I have a question for you. You didn't mention it in your review,

so maybe you don't have a particular feeling about it. What do you feel of the display on this device? Do you have any particular feelings about the display? I think it's fine. I mean, it's not as good. I have a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, right? So I am coming from the highest, high-end iPad display. And this display is not laminated, so it's a little bit further back from the glass. And it's not XDR or anything like that. It's just an LCD iPad. And what I would say is what I said about a lot of other stuff, which is it's fine.

Again, it's not the best you can get. The A14 is not the best you can get. Although I will say for a lot of tasks, the A14 is going to be faster than an A12X iPad Pro from 2018, right? There is a lot that did advance, that pushes it higher than um even some ipad pros in some ways but it's fine it's not as good but it's fine and i think that that's just that's my that's really my my take on it is that if you if you care enough to get the very best spend more money on an iPad. But what I won't say is that this low-ish priced iPad is, like, that's not one of the compromises I would say is major. It's noticeable, I guess. It's not as nice, but it's also the cheaper iPad. So it's not surprising it's not as nice. I don't think it's as big a deal as like the Apple Pencil dongle or something like that. Because I think in the end, you know, one of the challenges with the iPad in general

and Apple's devices in particular and computers in 2022 in particular is that they're really very good. Right. And like even the cheap ones are really very good. It's just like how I felt about the MacBook Air, which is, yeah, the MacBook Pro is better. Do most people need it to be that much better? Probably not, right? Like for most people, the MacBook Air is fine. In fact, for most people, the M1 MacBook Air is still fine. It's very nice. So it ends up becoming more of a calculation of like, how much extra do you want to pay for extra niceness? And there are fewer roadblocks, which is like, like I just said for the Apple Pencil, which is, whoa, now, if you want to use the Apple Pencil,

just don't buy this, I think. But mostly it's just like, well, I mean, yeah, pay more for a nicer screen if you like. But this one's fine. I really just feel, and I'm not trying to damn it with faint praise. I'm trying to say, I don't think most people will care. It's a good iPad.

It's a really nice iPad. Actually, I had that moment while I was using it where I thought, other than the 9th still being around, right, that complicates things. But taking that aside for a moment, this is the base model iPad. It's really good. It's really nice. And I think that a lot of times when we talk about iPad, we get hit from people who are like, yeah, but I don't care that much about the iPad. I'm not going to buy an iPad Pro. Do I need to buy an iPad Air?

I use my iPad some, but not that much and not for a lot of serious stuff. And can I get away with buying the cheaper iPad? And to them, I would say, hell yeah, you can get away with buying the 10th generation iPad. It's really good. Always consider the iPad Mini, though. iPad Mini is so good. iPad. It's really good. Always consider the iPad mini though. iPad mini is so good. iPad mini is good too. I mean, you got to have,

it's small and everything's a little smaller. So you got to have the vision for it. And ergonomically it's good for some people and bad for other people. But yeah, it's also good. But if the question is like, I don't want to spend that much money on an iPad. Is it a crappy iPad?

And this goes back to that idea of the plastic iPad in the box with a plastic keyboard. Like Apple goes back to that idea of the plastic iPad in the box with a plastic keyboard. Like Apple didn't make that product. They made this product. And I would say this product feels really nice. Like it feels like a premium product, as I would argue, you know, probably every Apple product should. I think that that's their design goal. It's good. It is a good product. It is more expensive than the ninth generation. It's not a cheap iPad, but it's good it is a good product it is more expensive than the ninth generation it's not a cheap ipad but it's gonna you you can buy this ipad and you're gonna get a really good ipad experience tell me about the keyboard oh boy okay so smart it's what magic keyboard folio is what

it's called it is reminiscent of other third-party ipad keyboards I've reviewed in the past in that it's got a smart connector, which is the one that was used in the smart keyboard, just to do the ones that were just keyboards. It's got that smart connector on the side. So it does a side attach. Like if you've been using a higher end iPad, you have to think back a few years to back when there was the magnetic attach on the side instead of the back. That's what it's using. And then there's a second piece. So that's for the keyboard part. And then there's a second piece, which is a magnetic back, very much like the magnetic back that you find in all the other modern Apple iPad cases. So there's strong magnets in the back of the iPad that it attaches to.

And what the magnetic back is, is it's a back plate with a kickstand. So it's thicker and heavier than you'd think because it's a layered thing with a, it's all the same flatness, by the way. They've made it thicker on the top part that isn't a kickstand so that when the kickstand is not folded out, it's all the same flatness by the way, they've made it thicker on the top part. That isn't a kickstand. So that when in the kickstand is not folded out, it's flat, but, um, there's a kickstand.

So, and it's adjustable to any angle. I mean, up to, I forget what the exact angle is, but like it's got a, it's got a wide angle that goes back to like, I don't know,

30 degrees. And then it will come closer. If you want, um, it won't go flat or anything. Okay. So there's some limitations but within that there's not like one angle you can you can kind of slide it to to any angle you want above that point that's really good that's good i was wondering about that i assumed that would be the case but like i was happy to hear that it wasn't like uh it has a few set positions or whatever you know like how the magic

keyboard has that like parts where it locks right no it's free free positioning here basically until you get to the the edge of beyond which it won't go like it's not gonna it's not gonna let you flop it way over it's got to be pretty upright but then it can be really upright or a little bit less upright i feel like i'm currently this is like mike hurley in the multiverse of madness because i do two apple focus tech shows right i have upgrade yeah with jason snell and i have connected where one of my co-hosts is federico vittigi yes and between my two co-hosts here we occupy the exact opposites of the spectrum about kickstand feelings. Yes. This is very intriguing to me.

You hate them. Federico loves them. Right. The fun polarizing simplification is that I think kickstands are garbage. Okay. But. But. And we talked about this on Twitter today. Is there a but to garbage?

No, no. Yeah, no. I mean, well, like I said, that was the fun polarizing one. It's fun just to say on Twitter, kickstands are garbage. End of tweet. But here's the thing. I don't like kickstands. And the reason I don't like them is that I actually use my iPad in my lap.

And I think my opinion is kickstands are bad on the lap. They're bad because they put all the weight on the edge of the kickstand, and so you're feeling that. I think it is less stable because so much of the weight is going on the kickstand. And because of the angles, you have to, because the whole keyboard is in front of the iPad, and then behind the iPad, there's another angle with the kickstand. It means you actually need a fairly long amount of space.

And so what I always find is that I end up, for me to be comfortable typing and looking at the screen, I end up having to have the kickstand at an angle where it's practically going off my knees. an angle where it's practically going off my knees and i find it really uncomfortable okay and unstable and unpleasant if all you do because i i was we're having this conversation um on twitter this morning uh with our uh friend uh dan from the verge and big fan of the orange dongle town t-shirt is my understanding from twitter i I love Dan. He does great work. Dan's the best. And what Dan said that I thought was really telling, because Dan's a pro kickstand person, although he says Apple's kickstands aren't as good and there are other better kickstands

out there. Other kickstands are available. Other kickstands are available, exactly. What he said is, I just don't use it in my lap very much. And I would also say if you use it on a soft surface, like a, like a pillow or a cushion or something like that, kickstands are also not very good. You kind of need to use them on a table. If you use them on the table, they're fine.

Other than that, you need the extra depth because again, very deep kind of thing. So look, what I'm saying is if you like kickstands, oh, and I didn't even mention, I'm going to say something in positive about kickstands, and I didn't even mention, I'm going to say something in positive about kickstands, you can tear the keyboard off this thing. And that back plate still has the kickstand on it, which means now you've got a kickstand for your iPad that's a magnetic attach, which is very nice. Because then you can prop it up for video, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, just not on your lap. It needs to be on a table. But yes.

But it's so much more usable and useful than the smart folio in that regard it is also thicker and heavier which i don't love and then the sheer awkwardness and federico has a great gif of this uh the sheer awkwardness of the kind of squishiness of that keyboard you don't like i i don't think it's a very good case you can use it as a case but it doesn't really offer protection and then you've got to either have the keyboard going up against your screen, or you can flip it around and have it on the back, and you can flip it around either direction. It's not great as a case. It's better as a case than I would argue the Magic Keyboard is, because the Magic Keyboard, basically, you can only use it as a keyboard in that orientation. You can use it as a stand, but you've got to have the keyboard there. It's not as good. This is better than that,

but in that way. But I don't think it's a very good case. I think you, if you buy this, you, you will probably want to seriously consider buying a folio case too, and only using this when you're really, you know, using it. But I just, if you care, if you like kickstands or you don't use things on your lap or you use kickstand stuff on your lap and you don't care, then it's great for me. It's not great. I would not use this because I use my iPad in my lap. And it's just not, it's just not right. you this as being a, uh, when we say like, oh, they put the trackpad and they put the, the, um, the horizontal camera and they've got the function row, like, ah, maybe I should get the iPad. I go,

yeah, but they make, they make you have a kickstand. That's how, you know, you're using the low end product is they forced you to use a kickstand. Uh, but that's me. I just don't like kickstands. I'm, I'm against them, but it's an option. It is good. And some people will like it. I would say that it's just such a compromise that as somebody who uses an iPad in my lap, I am not willing to make it. And I feel like if it wasn't a compromise, we wouldn't have laptops anymore. We'd have slabs with kickstands

and floppy keyboards. And that hasn't... I mean, we do have those, but that hasn't really replaced the laptop, I think, for some good reasons. Like, you know, obviously the Microsoft Surface is the king of this. Yeah. Yeah.

And I have a, I have a Surface and again, it's a thing I use on a, on a table. Yeah. Right. I like,

I pick it up and I'm like, oh, I'll go. No, I'm going to go to the table and use it because I just don't, if I'm, if I'm actively typing

and it's got the kickstand open and the floppy keyboard is on the front, it's like, it's just, I just don't like it. I find it very uncomfortable. So, and the floppy keyboard is on the front it's like it's just i just don't like it i find it very uncomfortable so and the angle i actually find the screen angle uncomfortable because i can't get it far enough uh back so that i can see it the way i want to without it sliding off the backs of my knees so i don't like that either so anyway but it's there it's a good keyboard keyboard. It's identical to the Magic Keyboard in every other way as key travel and all of that.

It isn't backlit. It does have the function row. Bigger trackpad, you said, right? The trackpad is a little bit bigger. That's true. I think maybe it's Federico. I read that too. Yeah, well, the Magic Keyboard for iPad, there's so many different keyboards now, has a lot of dead space at the top because it's under the overhang of the cantilever.

And this thing doesn't have that problem. So it's got more depth to work with. So the trackpad's a little bit bigger, and they have added that function row. It makes me wonder what they'll do if they ever revisit that cantilever design, whether they will try to jam some more stuff in there that's further back or they change the physics of it. The physics of suspending an iPad so you don't need a kickstand are hard. It's totally true that they're hard. Oh, the other thing I didn't mention about the case that I need to mention is that it costs about 55% of what the iPad costs costs more than half of what the ipad costs and i mean it's apple this is the kind of thing that happens but it sure takes the wind out of

my sails when i try to say oh well yeah you can get the cheaper ipad and the and the k and the keyboard and oh yeah then then you're already up at 700700. Yeah, that's expensive. Right. And for another, again, just to put it in perspective, for another $200, you can get the iPad Air, and it supports the Pencil 2, and you can get the kind of proper magic keyboard case instead. So that's the iPad, right? That's it. Like I said, I actually think it's really good. Um, I don't like

the kickstand part, but, um, of the case, but as an iPad, like I think in the end, what it's going to mean is most people are going to buy this thing as I want to get a new iPad. Like I said before, I want a new iPad. I'm not that serious about the iPad. I want to get an iPad for me or for my kid or whatever. Is this new iPad good? And the answer is yes. But right, all those notes, pencil, kickstand, like there are issues. But like if those issues don't matter to you, it's great. Like it is a very nice... I'd never used the 10th generation iPad other than with the Apple Pencil dongle thing and thought, ugh, what a bad iPad.

It's so cheap. It never happened. Never. This episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at DoorDash. Look, you may be here in back-to-back meetings today and then you've got some errands to run. Then you've got to pick up those last-minute sweets and treats for the upcoming Halloween party you're throwing.

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One last time, that is UPGRADE2022 for 50% off, up to a $20 value and zero delivery fees of DoorDash. Subject to change. Terms apply. Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. So let's talk about the iPad Pro. I will start with two quotes from your overall iPad review, which included iPad Pro as well.

It's a good design, yes, but it's a little frustrating that it's been in stasis for four full years. And there are several iPads available at the 11-inch size, so it would be nice if the iPad Pro were a bit better differentiated from, for example, the iPad Air.

It's not. I think this does a very good job of encapsulating my outside observation of the iPad Pro, which is the 11-inch has just become a worse product, I think, ultimately, because it did not take the jump that it should have, in my opinion. So it's become an even harder product to recommend. And the 12.9 didn't get, I think, well-rounded meaningful updates. If you are a particular type of illustrator, maybe this is meaningful to you.

But otherwise, I mean, Apple's already kind of proven that the M chips won't give you much because Stage Manager was supposed to be M chips only. But now it's just if you want to plug it into a monitor which is like right we're going on thinner and thinner wedges at this point right so this ipad pro honestly i don't understand it it is well i understand it in the sense that it is apple basically saying let's just let it ride. It is a company that has an iPad design that they want to push out there for another cycle. And they've got new chips. They make their own chips. So they're like, well, why don't we just stick the M2 in it and call it

a day? I have some theories about it. My theory is that we've heard from Mark Gurman, right? And we heard from Ross Young. OLED display on iPad Pro, larger iPad Pro. I have a theory that they were probably targeting this period for a new body for the iPad Pro. And at some point they said, not going to happen. Let's push it off 18 months to the next cycle. Because this is unlike, you know, the iPhone now has the same body for three consecutive cycles, which is three years.

Well, we're on cycle four for the iPad and it's an 18-month cycle, not a 12-month cycle. So it is four full years since that Brooklyn event where they did the, uh, thick, the retina, I put iPad air and the, and the new 2018, a 12 X iPad pro same body. I mean, they changed, there's a camera with a LIDAR and the screen got upgraded on the 12, nine and like, there are changes, but like, you like you know what i mean it's the it's the same body and it's a good design but it does sort of feel like they probably didn't intend to do it four times where it's gonna end up being five and a half years between revisions of it uh Maybe they did, but I would like to believe that Apple's iPad Pro design people were,

you know, they've got a new one in the works and pandemic, supply chain crisis, like for some reason they're like, let's wait. Maybe it was price of like, they want to go all OLED and they're like, not yet. We can't do it yet with confidence.

But or a confluence of those things, But something I think happened and made them say, no, we got to let it ride. And so what you get is again, in, out of context as a standalone product, it's perfectly good because it's like the M1 iPad pro except faster, you know, M2, 1900 Geekbench instead of 1700. I mean, it's literally the same scores as I could have just pasted in a paragraph from my M2 MacBook Air review, comparing it to the M1 MacBook Air, because M1s are M1s, M2s are M2s. The numbers don't change. They don't. They are literally the same. So it's a little faster, but you shouldn't really upgrade for an M1 other than for the one feature, which is a very, very specific niche use case. And it only pushes the platform forward in a

couple of places. So like out of context, it's fine. Like if you're looking for an iPad pro, your iPad pro breaks, you have a 2018 model and you want to get something that's faster because X, uh, you've been holding out because you've got the older, older model and you finally want to update. Like you could get this one, although knowing that there's probably a bigger update coming in 18 months. And it's not bad. It's great.

The M2 iPad Pro is great. Also it lacks, right? But it's like a message in the bottle from 2018. And so when Apple has said, aha, we're going to add a function row and we're going to move the FaceTime camera to the horizontal edge and all that, it's like, well, that's a 2022 thing.

Well, it's probably a 2020 decision, right? Well, yeah, but it's a 2020 release decision. Yeah, but you know, so the iPad Pro is a 2016 set of ideas and then the iPad is a 2020 set of ideas. And we the ipad is a 2020 set of ideas and we all know what difference those four years would have made you know what i mean actually i think it's more than that because you can't you can't do the release date for one and the invention date for the other so let's just say the ipad is a 2022 release with this message that it sent us last week

and the ipad pro is a 2016 no 2018 release, right? Yeah. That's why I said, so 16. Oh, you said 16. All right. Yeah. So, so you can subtract a couple of years off of it, but that that's the point, right? Is that, is that this iPad pro is new? Yes. But it's also four years earlier in Apple's thinking about the platform than where it is now. in Apple's thinking about the platform than where it is now. And that's, it's dispiriting, right? Like again, as a product, it's fine. But then you look over the iPad and you're like, oh, but I see where they're going. And this makes this design feel old, even though it's perfectly good. It feels old because it feels like it's coming from an era where it's literally, we can pinpoint it, right, Mike? We can pinpoint it to that Brooklyn event and say, or it's even more than that because maybe they knew about it

at the Brooklyn event. We can pinpoint it to March of 2020, right? Which is when the magic keyboard came out as the moment where Apple was like, all right, we're doing a pointing device and pointing device support and now we now we're we're getting there right but that was the kind of initial pointing device thing and the hardware hasn't even changed since before that for this ipad pro whereas that new ipad is obviously their next thought about that design where it's like we're going to do a bigger trackpad we're going to add a function row and we're going to move the camera like because they could have moved the camera theoretically they could have moved the camera on on the m1 because the 2020 model uh 2020 march well actually they could have done it on the A12Z even, the slightest of iPad updates ever.

When they came out with that keyboard, they could have said, ah, yes, we're moving the camera now. And they didn't do it. Because even then, they're like, no, that's too much internal work, too much design work. We're just not going to do it. We're going to push the same design out again. And so here we are, fourth time out. It's wild. But again, as a product, it's fine.

I mean, it's a good product. It's just the same. It's exactly the same. I swapped it. I copied all my stuff over from my M1 iPad Pro to the M2 iPad Pro and put it in my case. And other than having to reenter passwords occasionally, right? Because I did an iCloud migration. I can't tell the difference. Other than, I'm sure that with Apple Pencil and the hover feature,

I will be able to tell the difference on something, somewhere, sometime. But for the most part, it's just the same. It's just a new chip. That's it. I guess the only meaningful change is the Apple Pencil Hover. So this is the ability that... What's the distance from... Oh, I forget. Close. We'll call it close.

15 millimeters, something like that. If the Apple Pencil is close to the display, but not exactly touching it, it can enter a hover state. So before, this is just like a Wacom tablet, like I use, you know, if I hover my Wacom over, I'm moving the cursor. If I touch it down,

it's going to start dragging things around. And, you know, there are some interesting things like Procreate obviously got advanced warning of this. They've put out an update, which has a bunch of stuff in it. You can hover over

and it will show you what brush you're going to be using, what color you're going to be using. And you can then use pinching gestures to make some changes to size and stuff like that. So if you're an artist, this is cool. That's the thing. So they're leveraging all the pointer stuff to do hover states in just generic apps, right? It's sort of you're getting the mouse over effect from that that they already did because of the trackpad support.

Which is fine, but it gives you a little bit of feedback. It's nice. If you're somebody who is navigating an iPad with an Apple Pencil, it's going to be great because it's a little extra something. What I like about this feature is it manages to add a new vocabulary to Apple Pencil without having to update the Apple Pencil itself. And if you think about it, the way it does this is now, before, the device only really knew, is the pencil down or is it not? And now it knows three things. It knows, is the pencil down? Is the pencil hovering? Or is it not? And obviously, when the pencil's down, something different happens because the pencil is down. But now this hover state means you can do stuff when hovering.

So the preview is a do stuff when hovering. The demo that I saw was Procreate, where they've modified their app. And there's an API for this that has been released for developers. That you can do, like, hover state, you can have different things happen when the pencil is in hover state. So Procreate has it that if you run a finger up and down, I think it changes, like, the opacity. And if you pinch and spread while it's in hover, it actually changes the brush size. So you get a whole other vocabulary of where gestures mean something different when you're hovering. When you can also, the hover is previewing what you're going to do.

So when you change the brush size, you see the brush size change. But you're not actually painting. You're just seeing the preview. That's really cool and then they actually they also wired in a feature that's based on the you know double tap on the pencil that you can set double tap on pencil when hovering to mean something different than when you double tap on the pencil when you're not hovering um and also i think uh it's my understanding that scribcribble has been updated where if you think about Scribble, which is the thing where you write words on your iPad and it

gets turned into text, if it knows only whether the pencil is down or gone, it has to make some guesses about whether you're going to keep writing letters, but now it knows when you're hovering. And so the pencil algorithm apparently has been tweaked to use that information to decode things faster. If it knows you've removed the pencil out of hover range, it's like, oh yeah, they're done writing that stroke. I can start translating now. Whereas if you keep it hovering, it knows that you're probably still going. That's really interesting too. And it knows your hover location. So that's

a fun little thing, which is like, well, they have more data about where your pen is than they used to, so they can do a better job with it. So I think it's nice. Again, this is a very niche feature, but it's a nice feature. I imagine it will be a feature on every you know ipad with a pencil too from now on and uh i hope it is because it's it's a nice little thing and if you are a procreate user who uh you know i i uh i met one i met somebody who who does videos about procreate and all that and she and she was levitating about this new feature because for her, this is a game changer. But again, a very limited niche in which it's a game changer.

One of the things you mentioned is double tapping on the pencil while hovering can kick off a completely different command than double tapping when it's not hovering. That will be maddening. I mean, it's optional hovering that will be maddening uh i mean it's optional yeah but that's the idea but like i feel like if you did that for the double tap on the pencil i feel like if you're getting used to if you're used to what that means at what like i don't know like a couple of millimeters difference to perform a different action and like do you always mean it

you know what i mean i feel like that's not that specific part is maybe not so great but it's a choice that the app developers have to make and procreate it was basically grabbing i think it was grabbing colors from a palette so the idea that you could you could actually keep your pen the demo was uh you keep your pen over the thing and you've got that you've got like your color selection um so while you're hovering you can go like double tap tap on a thing double tap tap on a thing and you're you're doing that gesture um entirely while working with the pencil and the canvas and in the pre in the current version basically that is not this new version that's going to come out um you would have had to tap

on an item go up to the Chrome around the app, pick the next color, come back down, right? It's that kind of thing that there are probably, again, talk about a niche within a niche, but I think, like I was thinking about Ferrite, which is the app that I use the most with a pencil by far. 99% of my pencil use is Ferrite. And I thought, there's probably something there. Like, i don't know if it's the double tap gesture or i was thinking like maybe he does like an audio preview when you scrub on hover or something like that like maybe it'll be interesting to see what developers do with it but make no mistake like most of the people out there listening to this are like i don't care

and that's i think that's true that the people who care will care a lot and that'll be great but it is it is a very limited niche feature you wrote an article after the announcement um which was kind of talking about as you called it the ipaz erratic odyssey continue that was my big that was actually why my review is shorter is because i already wrote a couple thousand words about the big picture stuff just based on the announcement. And basically, you know, to kind of try and sum this up a little bit, there's just so many things here

which are hard to... I'm just going to... Actually, I'm going to read from you. There's an iPad for everyone. If you can figure out which ones have which features and whether those features are worth the extra price. So, like, you know, as we look at each, I think you mentioned this in your review too, like, as you look at each product on its own, you could be like, oh, that's interesting or not.

Like, you can kind of weigh it up to what it is as a product in the iPad line. But when you zoom out and look at the whole line it's wild right and like you know like the iPad mini being in there is also wild right it's smaller but it's more expensive you know

like there's like parts of that which is like you can see the price go up as the size goes up except for this one which is you know it's just like which is a very strange lineup of products that are, yes, hitting each area, but at this current point, some of the fundamentals, like where does the camera go?

What pencil's supported? What's on the keyboard? Which keyboards are most flexible? It differs wildly across the product line yeah yeah i mean and and i've gotten some feedback from people who have said um as a guy i used to work with who i had lunch with and he was and he said um i don't know i mean some of it is is a little i think what he was getting at is it's a little esoteric. It's sort of like, well, you know, as observers of the whole product line,

we have complaints about the consistency of the entire product line. And isn't that a little academic? I think on one level it is. I think that's accurate. I think my counter argument would be it's not academic if you're somebody who is trying to buy an iPad and is confused about all the options. Because now you have iPad 9th generation, iPad 10th generation, iPad mini, iPad Air, 11-inch iPad Pro, 12.9-inch iPad Pro. You've got six currently selling models, all of which have different features. They don't necessarily go up with price. Some of the features are outliers at different price points. There are multiple accessories with different device compatibility. There are, as you quoted in my piece, there are essentially three 11-inch iPads, four, I guess, but really three current 11-inch iPads for sale at different price points.

And it's a little bit of a mess, not in the academic sense of I wish Apple would get its story straight, but in the marketing sense of which one is for me. of which one is for me. And there are clear advantages that the Air has over the 10th generation iPad. The non-laminated screen, Apple Pencil 2 support, the processor, which enables Stage Manager. There are things, right? There are things.

And it's Magic Keyboard support. But if you're just somebody who's looking for an iPad for Christmas as an update, and you go to that page and you start comparing, it's a little bit wild. That would be my argument to your lunch friend. If you are a regular customer, which is 99% of Apple's customers, maybe,

it's a very high number, right? And they're like, I'm going to go to the Apple store. I want to buy an iPad. You go into the Apple store and you find a lovely person who says, I'd like to buy an iPad.

It is like a flow chart now to understand which one. Because, do you want to get the cheapest one? the cheapest one you know what i would like you know like do you want to get the biggest screen or like what do you want the screen to be made of it's complicated yeah this is why i said last week and that was a moment of realization during the show last week is my moment of realization thinking, oh, I wonder if the 11 inch iPad pro is dead. That was that moment I had, which was where I put together the larger iPad pro rumor, the existence of the iPad air at 11 inches. That's got most of the features that the 11 inch

pro has. I just had that moment where I thought, oh, maybe that's what, maybe that's what we're seeing here. Because remember, this whole thing is in slow motion, right? This is a slow motion product line. And so we get months to dwell on every little item. But I'm sure there's somebody at Apple who knows the whole picture of where they're going. And it totally makes sense to them. But you got to get there.

And they're not there. And so we devour these little items. And we're, they're not there. And so we, we devour these little items, but, and we're like, why is it like this? And it's entirely possible. There's somebody at Apple who's like, well, yeah, but like that 11 inch is going away because we're going to do the 15 inch or the 14 inch and the 12.9 inch. Then we're going to have a two high end iPad pros. And then the air comes up a little bit and it's in the firm middle. And then the other iPad is down there at the low end. And then it makes a lot more sense. It's like, okay, that would actually make a lot more sense, but we're not there yet if we are going there. So it is, it is weird. The three, the three almost exactly sized iPads that have

three different price points. And that one of them has a totally different set of compatible accessories is it's weird. Right right and i think that the people will stumble on that and that's why i probably should write an article at some point that's like uh what ipad should you buy but um as i said earlier on in this show i do think that that you should start with that 10 10th generation ipad if you don't care about list of things and then go up from there. The iPad Air to the 11-inch iPad Pro is a tougher conversation to have. For a long time, I said that the 11-inch iPad Pro was the best iPad for most people, I think. It gave you the most flexibility and features. Now, I mean, if anybody is keeping track of which iPad does Mike Hurley recommend, I say the iPad Air is that product now.

Because the difference between those two products, I think is kind of there isn't really one anymore. And the iPad Air, like at least for me, I think in ways that matter. And the iPad Air gets pretty much all of the good that the iPad Pro has. You know, it has the good pencil. It has the good keyboard. It has the good keyboard. Yeah, you're losing face ID, but I actually don't think that's massively important on the iPad.

It's a nicety. And so I have an iPad Air. I bought one during WWDC week so I could try out iPadOS. And I think that it's a great product i use it uh as still as my status board ipad but like i just think that that's the one that most people would get if you want the ipadiest ipad like if you're looking for just like content consumption the ipad mini i think is the best one but the like that yeah i'm talking like if you want like the most well-rounded ipad experience i think the ipad air is the one to go for yeah and i would i would make a case i think i can make a case for

the 10th generation ipad oh you sure can yeah if you if you don't need the things that the ipad air brings to the table which i mentioned earlier because if you literally don't care about any of that stuff it's really nice that you could get the ninth generation and save some money ninth generation feels real old tech, right? Like it's got the home button and all that. It's headed out the door. I wouldn't, unless that is the only price point that you can manage, in which

case, get it, because it's also pretty good. But the 10th generation is, you know, it's real nice. In fact, so nice that a couple of years ago, we would have looked at it and thought it was an iPad Pro. That's how nice it is. And it nice that a couple of years ago, we would have looked at it and thought it was an iPad Pro. That's how nice it is. And it still looks a lot like an iPad Pro.

It's not. But it's got a lot of the niceness baked in, and it's only some of the extra stuff that a lot of people don't ever... I don't know how many iPad users use an Apple Pencil ever or use a keyboard ever. It's got to be a vast majority of people don't do those things. So for them, there's the 10th generation iPad. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Uni Pizza Ovens, the world's number

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There's more. As we said earlier, we're not even talking about all the things that there is to talk about today. We're talking about earlier, we're not even talking about all the things that there is to talk about today. We're talking about macOS Ventura. Let's do it. Does macOS Ventura feel ready? Do you think that it is ready? Yeah?

That it's good that it spent the time? I have been using it on my, well, I don't know. They're going to put macOS out in October anyway. Like they didn't delete macOS. This is always when it comes out. I think it's fine.

I've been using it for, I would say two or three months now as my primary, maybe two months as my primary on my, on my desk every day. Uh, and it works fine. I haven't had any real, um, buggy issues or anything like that. Like if you update to it and you don't use any of the new features, you're just going to sort of say, okay, Mac OS update. All right. It's, it's not, we had a few mac os updates in

recent memory that were sort of like what did they do to my menu bar what do they do right like what do they do to my computer i didn't feel that way ventura is uh pretty chill in that regard let's talk about something that makes you not chill system settings ah apple finally addressed its old outmoded system preferences app by replacing of a new app that isn't any better just bad in different ways it's not just a misfire it's a frustratingly wasted opportunity yep not happy still huh you know i try to think about why this thing happened and i think the answer is somebody said, we've got to do something about system preferences.

It is a design from Mac OS 10, 10.0. And all of our iPad and iPhone customers use this settings app, and it has a totally different metaphor. And so why don't we change the system preferences app to a system settings app and have the scrolling list and have it be more like people are used to from their iPhone or their iPad? I don't think that's a bad premise at all. This summer when I criticized the system settings app, I heard from people who were like, I like it because it's like the iPad. It's like, well, yeah, that's not my problem with it.

My problem with it is that the old system preferences app was a mess. And while they changed the look of it, it's still a mess. They didn't do anything to make it less of a mess. It's just a different mess than it was before. And that's when I say it's a frustratingly wasted opportunity. That's part of my frustration with it is I don't think it's good, but I also am frustrated that they put all this effort into something that needed effort and they didn't make it better. They just made it different. It is early on in the beta cycle. There were a lot of bugs. The bugs aren't there. I think it's actually, I mean, there might be bugs, but I don't run into bugs. It's more consistent. It doesn't

have, there was that Twitter thread that went viral back in June that showed all the things that were super weird about system settings. It feels like somebody on the system settings team literally went through that fit that thread and fixed every single one of those. They're gone. Like it is completely functional. And I know I've ranted about this before, but I'll just say the short version of it is this thing needs to be organized better.

It needs to be more consistent. It needs to be friendlier to users who are trying. Because something I say in the review is, is it purely academic? Is it purely from a Mac aesthetic critic point of view that I criticize the organizational structure of system settings? Because all everybody really does is search and find the thing and they click on the thing. search and find the thing and they click on the thing. I would say yes, but one is when you are, when your computer is broken and you're desperately trying to fix it, system settings is where the rubber meets the road. And it would be great if it was a friendly, understandable thing in that context. And I don't feel it is. And two is not everybody is search dominant and

just says, well, I'll just search for it. Some people look at the, you gave me a list of 30 things for me to scroll through, like on the iPad or the iPhone. I'm going to scroll through them and see if I can find the thing that I need. And those people will be let down. Almost certainly will be let down because the list, the iPhone and iPad style list that you're scrolling through is not organized in any way that makes any sense and has labels that conceal some of the things that are behind them. So in the end, you have to search because you're like, well, where is this thing?

And the answer is, well, like I put a, I saved a, what is it? I want to turn off or on this photo book plugin that lets me make books in the Photos app. Well, where do I go for that? Well, the answer is you go to the privacy and security pane and scroll all the way to the bottom. It's like six or seven pages down to a thing labeled others that includes links for extensions. Okay.

It's very much the Douglas Adams line about how the plans were placed on public display in the basement of City Hall in a disused lavatory that was boarded up with a sign on the door that said, beware of the leopard. It's that sort of thing. It's like, but it was on display. It was available for the public. You just have to find it. And that's how I felt. Beware of the leopard is very much how I felt in system settings. So what I would say, understanding what the charter was for this app, my hope is, and this is a recurring theme in my review, my hope is that the people at Apple look at this and say, okay, for this release, this is all we could do. We need to get it out the door.

We don't want it to be buggy. We want the system settings to be in this new paradigm. And then now that we're there, we're going to make it better. And I wrote a whole piece over the summer about how they can make it better in a bunch of different ways, make it better organized, maybe show a history of where you've been recently, maybe let you add favorites or something like that. So that if you've got your systems that you go to and they're three levels down, could you like fave that and have it show in the sidebar as a fave so you could get there fast? Like there are user friendly things they could do. They could also reorganize the way it's structured because even though it's got 30 different options at the top level, a bunch of those have sub menus that have long scrolling lists inside them. Like it doesn't make any sense at all. So my hope is they'll ship this

and then they'll say, okay, now the work can begin. And over the course of hopefully this year and not waiting for next year's WWDC, we'll see macOS updates that actually address some of the other problems that this app has. But as we'll get to with other stuff in macOS,

I have to say it, Apple's track record here historically has not been good, right? Apple's track record is they ship it and then nothing changes for a year or two. And that would be a shame for system settings because it needs help. And if the argument is, look, they brought it over and it works, okay, fair enough. But it's not good. And if Apple is going to take pride in its craftsmanship, they can't leave it in the state that it's in because it's bad. And I get it that they're replacing an app that was also bad. But just saying that it's new and just as bad as the old one, that is not an endorsement, right?

Like, it's got to be, it should be better. The users deserve better. I assume the other thing you're referring to there is Stage Manager on the Mac. Yes, I feel the same way about, see, in my review, I kind of tried to soften the blow about the things that I don't like with the things that I do, but we're going right to the,

well, all right, let's get to it. Stage stage manager on the map people could go read the review if they want the full picture yes we're also not going to talk about everything here today i want to hit the biggest items i get it no i get it i just it's we're coming on we're coming on i have some praise later uh stage manager uh i used it this summer and i think i've decided it doesn't work uh i think they could make it a lot better and it will work a lot better. But right now, I think the simple version of my feelings about Stage Manager is it takes too much effort to get things to go where you want them to go. And at that point, why are you wasting the effort?

If the whole idea of something like Stage Manager is to make your life easier as a Mac user by simplifying the interface and getting stuff out of the way that you don't need to see. If you give back all of that brainpower and more wrestling with where your windows are going, just turn it off. And that's how I feel about Stage Manager right now is I like the idea. I think the concept of trying to reduce the cognitive load on having, you're probably not using all 15 of those windows at once, and you could break them up into smaller bits and switch between them, sort of like spaces, but a little bit more present is not a bad idea.

But the way it works now, it's so easy to just get things. I mean, it still assumes that sort of almost anything you do needs to open a new space. And I think that's a fundamental mistake because if I'm working in an app or a set of apps and I do a thing that opens another thing, I want it to open here. But you click on a link and it like says, oh, let's open Safari in a new space somewhere else. And it takes you away from where you were to this new Safari thing that's out on its own. And, you know, maybe some people want to work that way, but I found that, you know, I don't know, nine times out of 10, eight times out of 10, whenever I did anything in Stage Manager, it did something I didn't want

and took me to a place I didn't want. And then on top of that, mystifyingly, it doesn't really let you do things like set keyboard shortcuts or gestures to move around between them. Some of which actually exist on the iPad and don't exist on the Mac. But if you go into aforementioned system settings app and find the place where you can do settings for all of these things, where they're the mission control settings,

and then there's also a little button that you can push for stage manager settings. And the stage manager settings are like, show the desktop or not. And showing the desktop in stage manager is great because that's what I don't like about full screen mode is that you are like show the desktop or not and showing the desktop in stage manager is great because that's what i don't like about full screen mode is that you can't see the desktop and i have files on the desktop that i might want but uh the stage manager setting is not the same as the mission control settings in terms of style that's weird and uh if there are ways to set keyboard shortcuts or or trackpad gestures for things in Stage Manager, I can't find them. I don't think they're there. So in the end,

we end up with yet another window manager in macOS, which is fine because not everybody uses window management, manages their windows the same way, right? It's fine. I don't think Apple intends any of these to be the 100% solution for all Mac users. They're trying to cater to some different use cases to give you some options from which you can pick the window management you want to do. But as somebody who was inclined to like the idea of what Stage Manager was trying to accomplish, the net result was a negative. The net result was I was wasting more time,

more brain space. My work was getting derailed and I spent my time managing windows on my Mac instead of doing work. And if that's what the window management tool is going to bring is a net negative, there's a really simple answer and that's don't use it, turn it off.

And that's where I ended up with Stage Manager is they got to do like uh system settings uh there's something here that could be good they got a lot of work to do and i hope they don't ship it and forget it similarly because um it's already going to make a bad first impression i think on a lot of people but if they leave it there as if they've done it and solved it and fixed it and it's perfect and then leave it there laying there for a year or two, then it's a dead feature. As a prolific Spaces user, which I am, I am still very keen to try this. And I don't know. I do wonder if maybe it will be a smaller barrier for me to get over than you.

Because I know you don't like spaces, right? I don't. So I use spaces constantly. And I am wondering if maybe I will get more benefit out of it and might be more willing to shake off some of the issues. I'll find out. Maybe. I'm downloading Mac OS Ventura right now on my MacBook Air, which is the only place I plan to put it on of the issues i'll find out i'm downloading mac os ventura right now on my

macbook air which is where the only place i plan to put it on for the foreseeable future um and we'll see we'll see what it seems like a more present version of spaces so for spaces users it might actually be an improvement i don't know about the differences in opening new stuff in spaces versus in um in stage manager and whether there's frustrations there or not because i'm not a space user it's like so maybe this is why spaces works if i have safari in space one and i click on a link in space two i will go to space one where safari yeah i i hate hate that. And I don't like that it works that way, but I'm used to it, you see, right? Right.

And I think, I mean, there's, again, if we theorize that Apple's going to keep working on this, which is the big open question, it's possible that the existence of Stage Manager will force Apple to reckon with some of these what do I do when I click on a thing questions that it didn't ever reckon with with spaces. Maybe it will finally have to reckon with that

in terms of APIs, in terms of guessing the default behavior or having a modifier that lets you change the behavior. Maybe it will kick into gear some like more consideration about the interface issues there. It gets even worse if you're me specifically, where I am both a prolific spaces user

and a prolific tab groups user. Because then what happens is, if I'm in Slack in space two and I click a link, it will take me to space one and then open a new window if I'm in a tab group. Oh, and then it's in your tab group. Oh, it'll open a new window and not put it in your tab so it takes me to the space where safari is and then opens a brand new safari window to show me

that if you're going to do that why didn't you just open the window where you were exactly right and there should be a shortcut or a gesture or something that you know that would be you know the equivalent of command click or option click or something shift click that would force it to open in the existing space and not the other space. Yes. And that feels like something they should add. My understanding is if you open Safari, if you put a Safari window in that space and then click the link, it will observe it. But if you don't have one, it doesn't ask nor does it. I get that this is hard.

I'm just saying it's hard hard but this doesn't solve it and and it's a new feature that is it feels like it's incomplete so more more work see me after class more work required so let's talk about something that i think from my reading of your review is pretty complete which is iCloud shared photo photo libraries. It works pretty well. I used it over the summer with kind of a fake user. It's good. It's a feature that should have been there. I don't want to apply it too hard. This is a feature that should have been there like six years ago. like six years ago. But I get that Apple was reluctant to have it be an all or nothing. And so what they've done is instead they've built this system where you choose your initial import. You can choose after a certain date. So let's say you're in a relationship with somebody, you could share photos with them after the date where you got together, but not before then. You can set it to suggest or move things in based on like people um on an ongoing basis it will

suggest like oh you were together for this or this there's photo new photos of these people would you like to contribute them um you can manually contribute or remove things from the shared library and there's even a toggle in the camera app on ios that lets you say put this in the shared library directly or turn it off and they don't go in the shared library and And you can always add them later. You can always remove them later. I think they did a pretty good job. I've had some duplicate issues. My understanding is that it tries to de-dupe when you are contributing to a shared library. So the idea that if you've taken your partner's photos and imported them into your library and then you do the shared feature, they shouldn't double. I have seen doubles.

I've also seen ones that aren't doubled. There's also in photos now a duplicate detection feature. Yes. But I didn't see it working with the cloud photos, the shared photos. So I don't know what's going on there. And so when I say they've got some, they still got a little work to do. I feel like there are probably going to be some weird edge cases where there's duplicates across shared and that they're going to have to do some more work to kind of get that all to work. Right. And of course, um, there's also some weirdnesses

because you know, some metadata is shared, but some metadata is not. I ended up with some faces that I needed to reclassify or merge with existing people because it had done face detection and it had identified people or Lauren had identified them, but I, they were separate, right? So there's like two people and I needed to merge them. So there's some weirdness about that.

It's trying to bring over as much as it can, but not like the machine learning algorithm doesn't migrate off a device. So it's using the other metadata to say, oh, that's who this person is. And so I think if you do this, you may need to do another round of naming and merging faces in order to get your people library to be better if you use the people feature i like the way that you described it yeah as basically they give so many different ways in which you can share right where you can like share everything or share everything from a certain date or just choose things to share or choose in the camera, app what you want to share or not, or it makes suggestions, which is meeting the different types of groups.

Like me and my wife want to create a shared photo library. We don't want every photo we ever take to be in that library because there's a lot of crap. Like I take a lot of screenshots. I have a lot of work stuff in there. She doesn't want those in her camera roll, right? Like where similarly, Adina takes a lot of pictures for things to remind her to do something later on i don't want all of those in my camera roll but i would like it if when we go and do things together when we're on holidays

that just all of that stuff is automatically shared or like that there is an easy way for us to just be like all right just add those to the library rather than like i'm gonna text these to you or airdrop these to you. So I like that they have all of these options for different types of family groups. Yeah, they have... Look, this is the excuse they gave me about why they didn't have this feature many, many years ago.

And I'm glad that when it finally arrived, it actually does address that issue. Jason, why don't you tell us how you really feel? Well, I mean, was it not? I mean, anybody who listened to Accidental Tech Podcast knows this too, right? Like it was very clear when iCloud Photo Library came out that the logical next, and they had families, iCloud families, that the next step was you got to let families share photos. And for six or seven years, Apple was like, no, families can't share photos. And when I asked them, they're like, well, it's complicated, right? They're like, oh, well, do you want to share every photo? And we don't want just the people who want to share every photo. We want to get other people involved who want to contribute, but only certain ones because your kids off at college are only going to want to contribute certain photos, maybe in certain circumstances. And then you would have to build that and all that and i was like okay but like in the meantime could my wife and i just check a box and share our photo libraries because we don't need any of that they're like no so cut to six or seven years later

at least what they have is a more nuanced sharing thing that is trying to get beyond like seriously you can set this up if you're somebody who's like creeped out about the idea of sharing your photo library with another member of your family or whatever, you can set this up to not contribute anything by default and then just push things in when you want to. And it differs from past sharing that they've done in that this is a full on iCloud library. Um, whoever creates the library owns all the space. It goes against their account. But it's fully functional. Like it's designed in the apps to be integrated completely. There's a little badge you can put on this as well. This one's in shared library and this one isn't. But otherwise, they're just, you know, it's like they're all mingled together, or you can choose a view where they're not mingled together

and you're just viewing one or the other. So they did it right. I mean, they really did do it by and large the right way, and with broader appeal than I think it would have had if it was all or nothing. I was surprised in, like, poking around in the betas and also in the

release today, because I just updated my phone. It doesn't really seem like it's surfaced as a feature you can enable. Yeah, I think there's a... Like you kind of got to go in through the settings app. That's the way to set it up, which is odd. On the Mac, that's not the case. Okay.

On the Mac, you go to settings and there's a shared library settings and you press add people make a library and add people and that's a logical place on the mac yes but it's the same thing you're still going in through settings i mean yes it's true it's true it's not i don't know if there's a pop-up i don't i haven't seen that but there may be like a pop-up this is shared libraries are now available you can do it or they may not have done that yeah i mean if i've updated to the shipping version of ios 16.1 that came out today and in the photos app i can't find anything in the app itself that would seem to suggest that this is a feature that exists which is intriguing to me uh you know i want to feel confident about this feature that kind of

stuff doesn't make me feel super confident but maybe they just want to take it easy i don't know but it is weird to me i don't know if they want to get everybody get in everybody's face uh actually that would not be a bad rollout plan is to not get in everybody's face let people who want to use it try it out and then and then uh push it later just to reduce the load of everything getting transferred on the servers or something but but it worked uh really well for me and finally continuity camera so this is i mean an interesting looking feature You had some screenshots. I'm still like really keen to see like how often it's going to suggest

that I switch my camera to this camera or just decide to do that for me. I mean, it looks good. I'm happy that it exists. For me personally, I want it because I'm still having the light flickering issues intermittently with my studio display, which is not an issue that i ever have with my iphone

so i want to be using it however there currently is no option for me to be able to mount my iphone to my studio display the the belkin mount that is available right now is for laptops so i'm still going to be waiting on that but it is a feature that i'm excited about using even if it is kind of like a consolation prize kind of feature which is an interesting thing anyway right my take on it is the i like the phone the phone is so good the phone camera is so good you know you probably should never even bother you might need to get them out or something but like it's so good it's going to be superior to anything that's on a on a monitor or a laptop so so like for me although one thing that i i i learned is the issue like people are like oh i'll replace my center stage camera on my studio display with my iPhone camera. Well, let me tell you,

if you put it in center stage mode, you're back to the exact same image quality you were before, right? Because it's going to take the ultra wide and it's going to pan it. And it's not, it doesn't look any different to my eyes. However, that main iPhone camera is so good. So that does look really good. My big complaint about this is there are no settings other than turn on center stage and turn on studio light and turn on a portrait mode. And that kills me because like, you've got this huge camera. I, uh, other apps like camo will let you crop it. Um, and, and like choose a crop or choose a zoom and Apple just doesn't give you any controls and it's

frustrating so i don't like that about it but like kind of camera is a great feature that lets your mac uh do better video by putting your iphone to work and you don't have to connect it you don't have to launch an app you don't have to do any of that you just sort of other than other than turning off airplay because if you're airplaying something to speakers and then you try to use it it doesn't let you which is so weird but there there we are so um other than that it's uh yeah it's a good feature i like it it's more of an iphone feature than a mac feature but it's good and the desk view app is good um although i think it's going to have limited use because you really need to have a lot of space in front of your camera in order for it to work but it's just cool that it exists even if it's not useful for you as an individual.

It's just like, I like that they did that. That couldn't have been easy. I do too. Some people will use it, but they're just going to have to. I just want to warn people, like the setup, you need to have a lot of space in front of your device in order for it to work. And so your ergonomics of your standard use case are probably not going to work with DesView. And you're probably going to have to move your computer or your display or whatever in order to get DeskView to work right. But when it works, it's pretty nice. And also this feature

will force and is forcing Belkin and other third parties to develop little camera mounts for phones, right? Because it's like, oh, well, you could use your phone as your camera. Maybe even your older phone would have a very good camera that would be better than the current webcam. And so like, I know Belkin's got one for a laptop and they're working on one for external displays. And like, there will be, because I don't know if you remember this, but like Camo wrote a whole blog post about like trying to find a way to mount your iPhone and use it as a webcam because they wrote the software. And then I was like, well, how do I do this? And the answer was there are no satisfying camera

mounts out there, which is really disappointing. But Apple creating this feature will be enough to create decent iPhone camera mounts for various displays, and that's a good thing. I mean, they went to Belkin I assume, right? I assume they did. I think Apple has

this relationship with a couple of companies. Belkin is one of them. I think Logitech is another. We want this to exist, but we don't want to make it. Can you just do this for us, please? And they do. So that's Mac OS Ventura. Yeah. I had one last note before we go, which

is I made a big thing earlier about Apple leaving features untouched and how I don't like that and they need to do more work on it. I want to give Apple a little bit of credit. Safari tab groups, which was introduced last year, they actually improved this year. They added pin tabs and custom backgrounds and, uh, shared tabs feature.

That is a feature that I thought that after last summer's, uh, kind of debacle and all the things going on, I, that was a feature. I kind of expected them to just let sit there and they didn't. And so I want to call that out since I was complaining about Apple leaving features by the side of the road for years.

Um, they didn't really tweak it during the year, but they did actually do substantial improvements to it in year two. And that's a good thing. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. You've probably heard by now that you want to be using a VPN in times when you're connected to the Internet. But adding an extra step to anything you do every day can be a hassle, right? You don't want to have one hassle in their life. Well, if you knew how easy it was to protect your connection with Express VPN, you'd be doing it already. Express VPN is the easiest way to browse safely, securely, and just better. Express VPN gets rid of all of the things that you hate about VPNs. It's a VPN done right.

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Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's finish up today's episode with some hashtag AskUpgrade questions. First one comes from Rob. Rob says, I would be curious on your thoughts in regards to the

iPad lineup by comparing it to the quote dark days of the Mac. Seems like a lot of worry, but maybe it takes apple some time to transition lines to a new plan um the dark days i i i don't think it's the same because i think the dark days of the mac were apple making some bad decisions and then being stuck with them or choosing not to rectify them fast. I don't think that's what's happening here. I think that this is a more run of the mill.

Apple doesn't want to make the effort to do a complete redesign of the iPad across the line and then leave it for four years. Instead, what they want to do is roll out changes over time across models. And so, as Rob says, maybe it takes Apple time to transition lines to a new plan. I think that's exactly what is going on here. I could be wrong, but I think that's what we're seeing. what is going on here? I could be wrong, but I think that's what we're seeing is just that, that it,

it's actually like a corollary to the, the fallacy that people have where it's like every time a new Apple product comes out and it's just a speed bump and it's not a redesign, everybody was like, why didn't they redesign it? And the answer is they can't, they, they not even Apple is going to do a complete hardware chassis redesign every single time they release the product.

First off, that would be really jarring for users, right? Also, I think we would start to criticize them for doing change for change's sake. So they've got this kind of nice rhythm where every few years they have some new design language and some new fashion and new things they want to try. And every few years they make a change. But they keep it stable on the other years. And so, you know, those hardware changes happen every two, three, four years. So that's what's going on with the iPad. Like I said earlier, it feels a little bit like the iPad Pro maybe was supposed to change.

And at some point they're like, we can't do it. So let's just push it off again because Cause it feels a little stale now. But that said, it's also fine. Like it's just that you end up with this weird thing where the low end iPad has, is exposing things about potentially the direction of the platform that the high end models aren't. And we get used to those high end features, those new features rolling out as high end features. Right. And that didn't happen this time. And that's jarring.

out as high-end features right and that didn't happen this time and that's jarring but i don't think it's anything like the dark days of the mac because that very much felt like they made a major misstep and then took a bunch of years to um or made a bad decision and then started to put that plan into the works and i realized it was a mistake multiple yes and and uh and then had to rectify but then it took years for them to kind of get all their ducks in a row where really right now i've been thinking about this a lot as you know this has been coming up a lot uh over the last week or so like you know last five days that like you know come to the round table moment you know that the mac pro was a disaster the iMac was just kind of not really going anywhere Apple decided that they were going to get rid of the mac pro and place it the iMac pro

the laptops had the touch bars which nobody liked the macbook basically failed the macbook air just wasn't going anywhere and it had that huge bezel around it the keyboards were broken like it was just like the entire product line had some kind of problem, right? You know, they were still shipping Fusion drives in the iMacs as standard, right? Or not even as standard. I think as standard was a spinning hard disk.

It was every product had big issues, where I think the iPad line right now, just the iPad Pro, where it's a bit like, it's getting creaky. But I think the rest of the line is doing okay. But I do understand the fear, if you care about this product lineup, to be like, is that where we're going here?

Especially at a time where iPadOS has struggled and continues to struggle and is struggling now in new catastrophic ways depending on what you do with it I understand the fear Nate asks, for all of the weirdos Nate's words, not mine, for all of the weirdos that have the dock on the left

on their Mac, what happens when using Stage Manager, because that's where the kind of what is called the strip I don't know what they call it left on their Mac, what happens when using Stage Manager? What is it called? The strip? I don't know what they call it. Whatever that's called. The strip thing? What happens with the dock and that? Because you've got where you pick the stage windows and the dock.

What goes on there? You're going to make me turn on Stage Manager. The answer is that the Stage Manager stuff goes to the right. Oh, okay. That's good. There you go. There you it, yeah. Turn on stage manager. The answer is that the stage manager stuff goes to the right. Oh, okay. That's good. There you go.

There you go, Nate. So you can go and be a weirdo and use stage manager if you want. Yeah, and your stage manager will be just as weird as your doc. So good for you. Let it fly. Let that stage manager doc flag fly. Good job. And Zach asks,

while Apple did press release announcements for these new iPads, they also dropped a nine-minute video on YouTube at the same time that looked and felt an awful lot like an event video. Is this possibly the remnants of what the events team was working on? What do you think this quote, sort of like an event but not, means for a future

strategy? It's funny because what they've done in the past is play videos during events and then say watch the watch the video later and that's what they did without an event right is that they had watched the video i'm sure they've done something like this before but yeah i'm sure it's a very similar if not the same product team. It's a good question. I mean, was, was, did they make it thinking it might need to be in a, in a video? Um, maybe, I don't know. I don't know. It's an

interesting question. I think the overview I would, I would say is Apple is constantly exploring what it means to launch their products and what's the best way for them to do it. And having a video that is a commercial essentially, but it's completely controlled by Apple is one of the ways you do that so that you're not just having it be press reports and stuff like that. So they do a press release, but people don't necessarily read press releases. People do watch videos. So I'm sure that they will continue to explore that is it something that might have been an event and ended up not being an event i don't know maybe maybe not it was interesting right like there were i think this was one of the potential strategies we assumed they could have taken right which because it was reminiscent of the first kind of video they did during covid where

like craig federighi was in a room right which was a video that they shared with press and then you were allowed to post it on your youtube channel which is like i don't think i don't think that was the right strategies particularly but the video portion and i guess it's and who knows that i can imagine that this was meant to be part of a potential event that they were supposed to do. And I am, I will say now, having seen these product announcements, I am surprised they didn't do a 30-minute video event. Because that iPad is cool. Well, with Mark Gurman's thing about like, oh, maybe the Mac is this year, maybe it's next year. It's also possible that they were planning on doing a video event double-barreled with the Mac and the iPad.

At some point, the Mac got pushed back. And they're like, well, we're not going to just do it for the iPad. Although you're right, they could. Why not? That would be another way to do it. I think that they want to kind of modulate. They don't want to oversell a video event because they're going to get, you know, they're going to turn some people off.

We're like, that's it. And maybe they felt they had nine minutes of content here. And so that was good enough. I think the truth is that their marketing teams will always be making films, quote unquote, about their new products because so many people, their media consumption is YouTube, right? It's video and a press release or again, just letting YouTubers be the conduit for their product announcements.

Like if I was an Apple PR person, I wouldn't, I mean, I love the YouTubers and they're giving me publicity for my product, but they also have these opinions and they highlight things that matter to them and not that matter to us. So I gonna do my own video too and i'm gonna drop that at the time nine million views on youtube that video so you know did the job i would say yeah if you would like to send in a question for us to answer in a future episode of upgrade just send out a tweet with the hashtag

ask upgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord. I would like to thank our members for supporting the show, along with ExpressVPN, Uni, DoorDash, and Memberful. And of course, thank you for listening. This has been a great episode of Upgrade, Jason.

Thank you for all the work you've done today. Finally, we did one good. That was good. Hey, they're all good. This one was extra good. We don't say that about our show. We make a very good program, me and you. We talk about it in those terms. Yeah, I always just like it

when somebody promotes something and says, this was a good one. I think Merlin did that last week for one of his podcasts. It was like, this was a good one. And I'm like, okay, I believe you, but also what are you saying about the other this was a good one. And I'm like, okay, I believe you, but also, what are you saying about the other ones?

Extra good one, right? This is an extra good one. Over the top. There you go. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. You can find Jason online

at sixcolors.com. It's earnings report week, so stay locked to Six Colors. Jason is at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E.

We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Bye!