Upgrade - 441: Qi2: Qi Harder

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

As the new year begins, reports about Apple's forthcoming headset product arrive to confuse and perplex us. We also discuss a potentially quiet year for the rest of Apple's product line, the fundamental dignity of a circular pizza, and a handful of things we cared about at CES 2023.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 441 today's show is brought to you by express vpn text expander and capital one my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by mr jason snow hi jason snow hi mike hurley how are you i'm very are you? I'm very good, my friend. I'm very good indeed. I have a Snow Talk question for you to begin today's episode of the show. It comes from Michael, who wants to know, does Jason cut his pizzas into six or eight slices,

and does he use a pizza cutter or a knife to achieve this? Are we back on the pizza? We're back on the pizza question, huh? We talk about pizza a lot on the show, sometimes during sponsored content. Sometimes during sponsored content. Upgrade Plus subscribers may not hear that content, but it's there.

The answer is eight. I cut pizza into eight slices. Okay. In part because it's the most logical thing to do, and in part because I have, when they're all home, a family of four, and that gets two pieces to everybody. So yeah, you slice it halfsies, and then you slice it the other halfsies,

and now you've got four giant, unwieldy pieces of pizza. And so then you slice it at a, you know, rotated a little. You slice the halvesies again two more times, and you got eight pieces of pizza and so then you slice it at a you know rotated a little you slice the halvesies again two more times and you got eight pieces of pizza it's the right way to do it that's i i i'm not gonna people will debate you know pineapple if we need to but uh there's no somehow i feel like i feel like the judgment of john syracuse is hovering over me right now. It's very strange. Anyway, and I use a pizza cutter. I use the Zyliss pizza cutter available on Amazon.

Maybe we'll put a link in the show notes. It is a weird thing where it's like a big stainless steel circle cutting blade inside a plastic holder. circle cutting blade inside a plastic holder um so it grips really well and uh is great for cutting pizza or uh quesadillas or anything else that you might need to cut uh in a radial fashion i have a pizza cutter similar to this made by a company called joseph and joseph and it looks kind of like yours that it's like the wheel but with the plastic thing you can hold on the top and you can just wheel it along and put your full force into it which is the good thing as opposed to the one that has the handle on it i feel like i'm able to put more force into the cutting of the pizza yeah i prefer smaller slices of pizza so i am on board with you with

the eight slice rather than six slice you know although i should be i want to be clear here because i've heard and not you but i've heard people say this that they think the slice is like the atom of pizza but of course the slice scales with the size of the pizza if you cut eight pieces eight slices out of a small pizza or a large pizza the slices change size right yes so so when people say i prefer one piece or one slice two slices or whatever like well you're gonna get uh a slice so if you had an enormous let me put it this way if i had a a pizza the size of my dining room table i would probably cut it into more than yes. Although at that point, that's why they do in Chicago, they do that party cut thing.

I'm sure Detroit, and I'm sure there are other places that do this, where they cut it, they give up. Beyond a certain point, they give up because the slices are going to be very long and narrow. And so they start cutting them into squares, essentially. But if you're maintaining the fundamental dignity of a circular pizza,

at some point, as it enlarges, it will become unwieldy, and that involves a lot of math involving pie, and not just the pizza pie, but the actual number of pie, and we're not going to get into that, because this is not a podcast about math. Thankfully, because I'm bad at it.

So, it wouldn't be a very good podcast. It wouldn't be a very educational podcast, because I'm bad at it. So it wouldn't be a very good podcast. It wouldn't be a very educational podcast because I'm not good at math. If you would like to send in a Snell Talk question of your own, we have a new way for you to do that. But another way that you can do it is question mark Snell Talk in the RelayFM members Discord. You can send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk.

But let's talk about the brand new way that you can send in feedback feedback for the show so let's do it on the relay fm website now for every show that is currently using this we're developing this tool some shows are using it some aren't but hopefully over time more shows will be there is a new button that says uh submit feedback and you can send it opens a form on our website where you can write your thoughts comments send in your follow-up whatever it is and it goes into our system so we can read that before the beginning of every episode each week and pick out what we want to talk about we actually kind of mentioned

on the last episode that it might be available and it did like i think on tuesday so we actually got quite a bit of feedback for this episode so there there's some follow-up I've got here. And so I believe this Snow Talk question and I think all of today's Ask Upgrade questions were submitted via the new feedback tool. So it's in the link of the show notes for every episode. But you can also go anytime to upgradefeedback.com and it takes you to the form.

You gotta have URLs, man. I'm all about it. I love it that you bought a domain for this. That's a surprise, genuine surprise to me. And I don't know why I should be surprised that there's upgradefeedback.com. Of course there is. I like new URLs. I think that they help people remember things. Who needs slashes?

You say a slash and you've already lost. Yeah, if it's a horror film, that's fine. But otherwise, no slashes around here. You know what I mean? Horrorfilm.com. We recommend that you use this now for follow-up and ask upgrade and snow talk. Hey, Mike, what if there

was a top-level domain that was.slash? Would that be confusing? I would love that, actually. I would buy a lot of those. HTTP colon slash slash, but not the word slash. Dot slash. Upgrade dot slash, but not the character slash, the word slash. Not the guitarist from Guns N' Roses slash. Actually, he could run it.

Get off topic here, Jason. He could run the dot slash top level domain. He could. Slash could. Okay, come on. Guitarist dot slash. We're on focus here. So you can use the new feedback tool to send in anything you want.

In the future, because we're developing this as part of our CMS and website, in the future, we're going to have probably like a dropdown. So you could say, this is Ask Upgrade.

This is Snow Talk. People have been very kindly saying right now, but you don't have to worry about it. You can let us decide for the time being. This is very much a 1.0 of this feature uh but going forward this and the discord will be the best places to send feedback and questions i would say like for the moment at least this is the best way to send him follow up for the show i think for for us um so so we really appreciate if you used it.

And if you have any thoughts about the system, also feel free to put those in a feedback for us. Sure. So thank you to everybody who has already tested out the system, and thank you to all of you that will use it. We've been talking about this on and off, but especially for me not being on Twitter anymore and not using Mastodon, I want to make sure that we still have a good free way for people to send in feedback to the show.

So we worked on this at RelayFM and here it is. Jason, should we tell people about the Upgrade Plus Challenge segment? I think we should just to clue them in on what we're doing here and one is under one is being undertaken even as we speak although you can't tell i assure you uh it is so when you have a new recurring segment on upgrade plus it starts this week and we'll probably do this at least once a month but but maybe in an increasing frequency, where we're going to pick a challenge that we will complete as part of Upgrade Plus, thanks to our innovative friends at Dubai Friday and Reconcilable Differences for pioneering the challenge format on podcasts. So the challenge for this week's episode was to

use and is to use freeform for our show notes planning so this came from a conversation that jason and i had uh between the two of us and you were saying that you know you tried out freeform and you weren't really sure how to use it and so you said what if we use this to plan an episode of the show so here we are um mac power users just did this for their freeform episode as well which i listened to in preparation for this episode to be clear we came up with this idea separate from mpu um and in fact when i mentioned to david sparks when i visited him that we were thinking of doing this he said oh we just did that so all right fair enough but we're doing it now this episode if it seems disorganized or especially extra greatly organized it's because we are using a different tool for it and we'll

report on our feelings about it after the show is over at the end of upgrade in the upgrade plus segment for members so that's where it'll be. And then what will happen after that? Like I said, I think last week, listening to your state of the apps on Cortex, I was thinking about how I need to get more out of my comfort zone with stuff because I've got such a refined, let's say, suite of tools that I use every day. I like the idea of being pulled out of my comfort zone, either by you challenging me or by me challenging myself, but to do things differently or use different apps or whatever. So we don't know what form this will take. We really don't, but we are starting it now and it will not even be every week. It will be an occasional recurring segment in Upgrade Plus, but hopefully no less than one a month. Yeah, it will be.

It will be recurring. Like this is the beginning of a new part of Upgrade Plus. So we'll still be doing the typical things where we bring up different types of content, but this is going to be like a structured thing that we do every now and again. If you want Upgrade Plus, go to getupgradeplus.com. That's another URL, Jason, that I got. I know that one's been around. That's not a surprise domain though. getupgradeplus.com That's another URL, Jason, that I got. I know. That one's been around. That's not a surprise domain, though. Getupgradeplus.com

You can sign up and we'll appreciate your support and we hope you enjoy this additional content. I have just a couple of pieces of follow-up before we get on. We have, I think, a pretty packed show today. There's been a lot. I can't tell. Are we doing that based on the

surface area in Freeform? We're not talking about Freeform now. Okay, sorry. None of that. Josh wrote in to let us know that titanium can in fact be anodized. We were talking about this on the last episode and I was wondering if Apple moved to titanium, would the colors

have to change for the phones if they moved to titanium on the iPhone? Apparently they can not only be anodized, the colors can be quite vibrant. So it seems like they can make that work for them if they wanted to. And spoilers for our next segment, but there's a rumor that that's what they're doing is titanium

for the iPhone Pro. And Apple's Q1 results are coming up February 2nd, it has been announced. Oh yeah, that's going to be what a day that's going to be. I can't wait. I'm really excited about it. Like, I always am.

I feel like with all the headlines and with all the warnings, what Apple has done is we're going to say that it's a bloodbath. But in some ways, the bloodbath has already happened because everybody expects it to be bad. ways the bloodbath has already happened because everybody expects it to be bad. And of course, it's like Wall Street, sorry, investors, Wall Street's like gambling in the sense that it's all about you get the information and you make your choices. And so everybody on the street has heard all the bad news. So the stock has gone down because they're like, okay, well, bad news is coming. They're anticipating the bad news. So what that might mean is in February 2nd, even though the numbers look bad, Wall Street may react positively to it because it might not be as bad as they thought it would be. So that's going to be even more interesting to see. And how is

Apple spinning? What's happened in the month since the end of the quarter? If they say, look, by the end of December, we were back online and things are going great and that would buoy the the stock and how apple is viewed in the market so it's going to be i think the most interesting apple results uh release in years really so can't wait to see it but as is typical for this show whatever wall street say we don't care about we're in you know what we're intrigued in is how they tell this story. Yes. How is Apple, when pushed,

going to tell the story of their terrible, horrible, no good quarter? And so I'm fascinated. Yeah, exactly. And that is, I know that, I mean, there are definitely people who invest in Apple and care about Apple as a stock who read my stuff and listen to our podcasts. And that's fine.

But yes, I think it's important to say that that's not the lens we use. The stock price is not the lens we use to discuss or evaluate the company. We're much more concerned in sort of the products and the business as a whole, like how successful the products and the other business things that Apple is

doing are, how that's all going. But it's not, you know, we don't have Apple stock. We're not Apple investors. That's not our focus, just to be clear. So the street will do what it will do. But yes, it's going to be fascinating to see what the details are and how Apple explains itself, right? Like this is Tim.

What does Tim say? Like this is Tim. What does Tim say? Explain yourself, Tim. Yes. That's our first question. Our first question comes from Mike Hurley of Real AFM. Explain yourself. Tim Cook, explain yourself. This is Tim.

How'd you get on this call? We try our best to keep you away. Yeah. You're not a financial analyst. You listen to that. You're the host of that podcast that was once behind me at WWDC. Get off the line. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by ExpressVPN.

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this with Formula One, for example. We're able to use ExpressVPN to say, hey, no, I'm in the UK, and then it'll let me watch the content. ExpressVPN will let you control where you want sites to think you're located. You can choose from almost 100 different countries. So just imagine all of the Netflix libraries you could go through. If you love Korean dramas, you could use ExpressVPN to watch Parasite and South Korean Netflix, for example. But it's not just Netflix. ExpressVPN works with any streaming services. You pick your favorite. You can even go YouTube because some content's geolocated there, Hulu, whatever. There are hundreds of VPNs out there, but ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast, which you want when you're watching TV shows.

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of ExpressVPN for free. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for the support of this show and all of RelayFM. Jason, the horses have bolted out of the corral. Oh no. And they have run amok across the whole town, making for an absolutely gargantuan-sized

rumor roundup today. It's true. So we've got a few areas to focus on. One is like- Different pastures, different fields to go in to bring the horses back in to round them back up okay got it got it we're gonna go down to german town right now this is i think a pretty typical thing from mark german at bloomberg to have like a here is my thing for the year or whatever right so like he'll come out and say like this is what i'm

expecting and he maybe brings together some things that he's been working on or some like uh areas that he has been focusing on so get a few quotes we're going to read jason we can talk about them sure so just a few quotes from mark a larger imac pro has been on and off apple's roadmap and i would be surprised at this point if it arrives in 2023 i'm sure you're very sad about that. Yeah, I have heard elsewhere that the same story, basically. I've heard elsewhere that, I don't want to say my own sources, but kind of my own sources that-

Ooh, look at you. Oh, hello. Hang on, breaking news on the rumor roundup. We have a new sheriff in town. I just want to assert that it is also my understanding that the larger iMac has been on and off. That the existence of doing displays seems to have been a little bit of a bargain to not need to do a big iMac anymore. Because the displays would cover that and the Mac Studio and all of that. So anyway, I just want to corroborate what,

what Mark is saying here. Mark is saying it's been on and off, which is actually more encouraging than what I heard, which is that it's off. But I think that this is the thing is they, they go back and forth about it. I'm surprised because they sold that larger iMac for so long. And, uh, the 24 is not the 27. And, uh, but maybe the answer is anybody who wants a bigger iMac than a 24 should just get a studio display and a Mac Studio. Thus far, that is essentially what they're saying. Or a Mac Studio and a Mac Mini if you want. Sorry, Mac.

A studio display. So many studios, so many Macs. A studio display and whatever you want to attach to it instead of a 27-inch iMac. So that may not happen. I'm also surprised at what he says about, which you didn't mention, but he continues to insist that the iMac won't be updated until the M3, which I'm also, I'm just surprised that they would just skip an entire chip generation with the iMac. It's their chips. Is the iMac, Apple talks so much about the iMac being the flagship of the Mac in many ways. And it's used in so many cases and it's in hotels and it's in classrooms and it's all these places.

And then for them to just sort of be like, meh, we'll wait to, you know, wait an extra chip cycle before we even bother updating it. I just, I'm surprised that the iMac seems to be so, I don't know. I don't know whether it's lower priority or whether maybe they just think it's good enough, but I continue to be surprised that they aren't more enthusiastic about it. I think we're too early on in Apple Silicon to understand if this might be a typical thing

for a lot of products. Right, whether they just skip a generation. Yeah, maybe so. We don't know. On the Mac Pro, Apple plans to release a Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra, making it unclear beyond the machine's expandability why most users will buy it over the cheaper and smaller Mac Studio. In another disappointment, the new Mac Pro will look identical to the 2019 model.

It will also lack one key feature from the intel version user upgradable ram that's because the memory is tied directly to the m2 ultras motherboard still there are two ssd storage slots and for graphics media and networking cards this is information in the sense that it's saying here's what here's what is upgradable in this thing. They're going to use the existing case, which he says it's disappointing. I mean, I guess that's Mark Gurman putting his own little editorial spin on it. Although I think there's an implication there that they were investigating a smaller enclosure and they've decided, maybe this is one of those cost-saving things, right? That we heard the reports about how the Mac Pro, they didn't want to over-invest in it. And so they weren't going

to do the quad-core chip. Well, using the existing enclosure from the last Intel Mac Pro would be another way to save money. But within that, he's saying, look, the memory is inextricably linked, so the memory is going to be on the chip packages, and that's just how it's going to be. But he is saying expandable storage, expandable media and networking and graphics cards. So that's, it sounds to me like that's going to be the big change in the Mac Pro from previous Apple Silicon Macs, right? Is that they seem to have, I guess, done the work to be able to use external graphics cards of some kind. That's not a capability that Apple Silicon has had up to now.

It's all been the onboard GPUs. But whether they're third-party graphics cards or whether Apple has built its own custom GPU thing that they do as an interconnect, I don't know. do as an interconnect and i don't know but like i think this is actually kind of an encouraging report just in the sense that it's uh more upgradable yeah more upgradable than we maybe thought even though ram is not a part of it yeah i'm i mean like i i will profess to not understanding this enough but it is intriguing to me that they have seemingly done the work to allow for graphics that are not part of the chip or like part of the package but they haven't done that for ram so like they're obviously prioritizing i actually think that's the right priority like i think these days you kind of it's easier to maybe understand how much ram you want you just get

whatever you need and i think for people that want this particular type of machine i feel like graphics media and networking cards along with ssd like storage solutions or whatever could be interesting um i'm intrigued by ssd storage slots like is it are they just doing like m2 like you know like the little guys that you plug in or are they going to be able to allow you to put bigger hard drives in there? I don't know, but it doesn't matter. The point is it's going to be upgradable. I am intrigued by what identical to the 2019 model means. Like, is it the same one or is it a smaller version of it? Cause I really do wonder if it needs to be as physically large, but we'll find out, I suppose. Well, I think the answer, based on Mark Gurman's report here,

is that they're going to use the existing case, whether you need it or not, they're going to use the existing case. So it may seem awfully empty in there, but that seems to be what's going to be happening here. So it's fascinating to me

because it does seem a little bit like they had big plans and then they kind of scaled them back. Yeah. The 15-inch MacBook Air is still planned for release this year. We'd also spoken in the past on Room Around Up about a 12-inch model that Apple is also looking at that is no longer on their near-term roadmap, which I think is probably the right thing.

I'm disappointed, but at the same time, I'm actually encouraged because I had kind of, you know, I keep wishcasting and dreaming for a smaller laptop, but I never really expected them to do it. You know, I wanted them to do it, but there's a difference, I guess, somewhere in there between wanting it and thinking it'll actually happen. And I always thought it was unlikely to happen. So even though it's no longer on their near-term roadmap, I'm fascinated that it was and that it's actually happen. And I always thought it was unlikely to happen. So even though it's no longer on their near-term roadmap, I'm fascinated that it was and that it's still kind of bubbling out there as something they might do in the future,

that the 13-inch Air might not be the smallest Mac laptop available at some point in the future. But for the near-term, it's that larger Air, which we talked about several times on the show as being a nice way for people to get a larger display without having to spend two grand on a MacBook Pro. Apple has been working on larger iPads, but I'm told not to expect those this year. Who's telling you? The people, I guess.

The people. Yeah, the people. People are telling you. Don't expect those this year. Yeah, so this is my prediction about that they were going to do a larger iPad. And he says, no, not this year. It's not going to happen, which means it's going to be a real quiet year for the iPad. Like I thought that the larger iPad might be the only thing that they did this year, but it sounds like they're not even going to do that this year.

The return of the larger HomePod size is still set for this year, but I wouldn't expect anything revolutionary about it. What's the point? Unless, okay, if they bring back a bigger one, but it's like $200, right? Maybe fine,

right? Yeah, that's the point, is that it's going to sound better than the HomePod Mini. Yeah, but if it still costs $400, then there's no point. No, well well of course it won't yeah i think that's the the example is it's going to be a big home pod mini it's going to be uh maybe the size of that home pod that was the original model but it's going to be again sort of scaled down in terms of the the what's in it all the different speakers and stuff right it's

going to be more like a scaled up uh home pod, which I think is fine. I think that's the right thing. And then if the HomePod Mini is $99 or whatever, then you do it at $199 for the larger one that's got some more speakers and sounds better. Because the HomePod Mini is nice, but it does not sound as good as the HomePod. And there's room there. Even if it doesn't sound as good as the original HomePod, there's room for it to sound better than it does and, and to get a bigger model in there. So that's, I think that's fine.

Mark referenced that devices like the Apple watch are going to probably see a pretty quiet year. But did reference that quote, the iPhone hardware could be impressive. I'm told to expect the same screen sizes as the iPhone 14 family, but the dynamic island will expand to all four models, as Jason called out.

A titanium frame replaces stainless steel on the Pro, and there will be haptic volume buttons. That means not real buttons. The iPhone will also switch to USB-C and faster processors.

Right. Now, I just want to caution people, although Mike, in an earlier segment here here said that titanium can be anodized and in fact can come in bright colors. I mean, it's on the pro, it's not going to be a bright color.

I mean, it's just good. Yeah. Do not expect that to happen. I might still get my gold. It's all I want. Yes. Yeah.

And then there'll be the, your, your, you know, midnight tree bark and your evening. I don't even know evening leaves and your you know something like that or or uh yeah yeah like the dark rainbow on campus at night or like your your 3 a.m uh gray whale i don't know like it will be the same unimpressive color scheme even though titanium can withstand more than that but uh titanium make it lighter uh-huh that phone could be lighter

that iphone pro could really stand to be lighter so that's good but all of this is like table dressing really for the bigger thing which we all know is coming this year which is the headset and yeah mark mentions so like leading on into that apple's focus on the he calls it xros operating system i hope it's not that i mean it's just zros i guess we'll call it in in that instance the zros operating system system. XROS? TVOS? We already do it. Yeah, but XR sounds horrible. It's not TVOS. If it was AROS, that would be better, or VROS.

But no one's going to call it XR. We're not going to call it that. They are. Do you think that Apple will call it XR? If Apple calls it that, then all of us will go along. XR? XR. If Apple calls it that, then all of us will go along. Yeah, sure. XR? XROS.

Now, I genuinely don't think Apple's going to call their device an XR device. They might call it a mixed reality device, but I don't think they're going to refer to it as XR. That is what people call mixed reality. Some people do call it MR, which I hope that they would be more likely to call it an XR. Well, it's a marketing decision, ultimately. We'll see. So along with the focus on this operating system, along with iOS 16 snags, has also cost some new features in iOS 17

and iPadOS 17, the same goes for MacOS 14. So they're going all in on this thing, which makes sense to me. Like I think there will be stuff coming out this year. There will be new things, of course. But I'm expecting the overall focus of 2023 will be the headset and the operating system. And, you know, as we've been talking about before,

that's going to start at some point in the spring and it's going to hit every single time Apple's got something to say this year, they're going to be talking about this in some way. And it's already been happening, right? Because they've already been working on this. And this is the, when we think about how like, oh, the Mac needs to get attention,

but if it does, it's got to take attention away from the iPhone and the iPad and the iPhone needs to get its share because it's the biggest product, but then you can't ignore the iPad and all that. What's been going on for, you know, over the last several years, but it's been increasing, and especially in the last year, I'd imagine, is this product that's beneath the surface still, but there's huge amounts of work going on on this product. still, but there's huge amounts of work going on on this product. So that's going to obviously continue because then they're going to get it out there and it's going to be pre 1.0 and there's going to be all that work that needs to be done to it. And when we finally see it, we're going to

be like, oh, it doesn't do this. It doesn't do this. It doesn't do this. And Apple's going to have to scramble. Remember the early Apple watch days when sort of like their app, their app approach wasn't quite right. And the hardware wasn't quite there and they had to do a lot of work on it. And Apple thinks that this is a strategic product for them. So Apple is going to be and is already distracted and is moving resources to this thing. Which is how it should be. This is how you got to do it. If you mean it, you got to do it.

If you mean it, yeah, you do. Otherwise, it's just a hobby. And this is just a hobby. This is not a hobby. Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple has already shared the device of a small number of high-profile software developers for testing and letting them get started on third-party apps for demos.

The company is aiming to unveil it this spring, ahead of the WWDC conference in June. All of this is making sense to me. Especially if they're sharing it with people now, these people have got eight weeks. That's the goal, right? Those are the people who are demoing at the launch event. And then they will promise at the launch event more details about it for third-party development

in June at WWDC, right? That'll be how it goes. And the SDK will come out then. And I think this is super smart, right? Because then companies that want to do it or developers that are interested in it, you've then got like three months to start whiteboarding, thinking, like brainstorming, like what could we do without seeing the stuff, right? So you start thinking

big picture then you get the development kit and then you can start seeing what you can bring to life of it right like that this all this is the playbook right we have been talking about this for ages this is the we have a new thing playbook right they did it with they've done it with the iphone they did it with uh the apple watch i don't know if they did it with the iPad. I don't remember the timeline. I don't think it was as far in advance from announcement to release. I think it was a short period of time, but still time. So more from Mark Gurman. With the current plan, Apple could introduce the device to consumers,

likely under the name Reality Pro, and then get developers up to speed on its software features in June. On this timeline, the company would then ship the product later in the fall of 2023. They're going to call it Apple Reality Pro, right? It's not just going to be Reality Pro, right? Sure. Yeah. Right? We're in agreement on that? I just think that's just what he said, but I don't think that's the name apple is branded uh on everything now yeah and apple reality by the way is a device name i'm kind of fine with i don't know if my feelings on this have changed or not over time but apple reality pro is like a perfectly okay name

for me yeah it's it's what apple is doing now with names right it is the most obvious uh generic name with apple in front of it yeah and this is my favorite quote maybe ever i love this so much all right while apple still has many kinks to work out with the device involving hardware software and services as well as how it will be marketed and sold. The company is banking on the product as its hot new introduction for this year. So other than the hardware, software, services, marketing, and the way it's sold,

it's ready to go. It's all ready to go. It's ready to go it's all ready to go is it it's ready to go it's incredible like yeah mark german we are such big fans of you on this show you know that right you know that this is bananas what you have said here right like oh aside from everything they're ready well i i think that i mean not to speak for mark but my guess is that that is the strong implication when when he wrote this sentence he was very much trying to get across they're not ready or like the people that he's talking to are like i don't know there are

parts of this right flux marketing and how it's going to be solved they have nine months at least from now to work that out right and so like sure hardware software and services at least one of those three has to be a state where they're ready to to start talking about it or like to say they've got a plan especially the hardware right right i i do think that maybe there are some questions about uh yeah if hardware it seems a lot i mean if they're not going to ship it until the fall though they, they're just going to have samples. They may be able to make changes. But yeah, software, I could see them being like, you know, their features were going to drop out of initial release because we just can't get there.

Keep in mind, this is a lot harder of a problem than the iPhone in the sense that the iPhone launched without a software developer kit for third parties, right? But it was so successful when they introduced it that now everything has to ship with a software development kit, which makes sense because it makes the products more interesting. But it means that when they do this, they do have to have a developer story. And that's extra complexity. And you frustrate the developers if you keep messing around with the software because they need to rely on it. So, yeah, this is it's going to be really interesting to watch and see what's going on here. It does feel like maybe this is just a function of of it being around so long and being delayed that Mark Gurman has more information about it. And more people have more information about it. And that because it's been delayed and because there have been changes,

we are seeing into the development in a way that maybe we might not have otherwise. But it sure sounds like a product that is not focused and not ready. And yet they seem to be saying that you know it's coming not ready or not but that like they keep delaying it and now they think they probably will get to it in time but again they're still working on it it seems from this report that's pretty wild but i'd see the thing that i'm struggling with this is if the hardware has been delayed multiple times how are they still struggling with the software and services part because in theory the software and services had to be ready for the hardware so the hardware's being delayed right well the hardware being delayed is not not the way to phrase it i think think of it as the product

has been delayed the hardware could be ready it's it's probably not but like they could have finished the hardware a year ago and said we're ready ready to ship this. And they would have to delay the hardware, so to speak anyway, if the software is not ready. Right. So the product's not ready is the best way to look at this. The product has been delayed. And why has it been delayed? Is it the hardware? Is it the software? Is it the services? Answer's probably yes. Right. But it's probably all of those things. I don't think it's just the hardware necessarily. Although, I mean, to your point, if it was just the hardware, then they wouldn't say the software is still in flux, right?

Other than if the software has to be in flux because they keep changing the hardware, which is a possibility. That makes more sense to me. Could be. The Information also had another big report about this with a bunch of details that uh we've not heard about before so there's a lot of little hardware tidbits so one of them is that you know so you've got the the the screen signal on your face attached to your head with a headband right so the headband is said to have speakers built into it this is very normal

for other types of um vets. So, you know, you can put it on and you can hear and they'll kind of like fire into your ears or whatever. But speakers are speakers. And if they're going to be like actual speakers, not anything like bone conduction or whatever, it would be audible to people that are around you. They will be able to hear. So if you're sitting next to someone and you're using the Apple Reality Pro, they're going to be able to hear what you're doing. So the information references that AirPods could be required for some use cases. Like communication, they said, like if you want to have a private communication.

Although one side of the communication is going to be audible in the room anyway, right? Because you're going to be talking. But it is true that they sound... Like on my Quest to um it sounds really good even when i'm not wearing a headset but when i'm not wearing headphones but um you know if i'm playing ping pong my my wife can tell that i'm playing ping pong right she's in the other room and it's right like it's ping pong it's it's happening there's table tennis ping sounds going off and like so you probably want headphones just just because if there's if you're if other people are

around especially plus it's going to shut out the outside world a little bit but i bet those speakers in headband will have like spatial audio and stuff i bet they will sound really good uh i'm sure they will it's funny that this report is sort of like well the airpods 2 is gonna be like the the required in some use cases or airpods i i don't sure i don't really like the way it's written because yeah i think the it can be easily taken that that means oh you the apple are gonna mean you have to have them. I was like, no, I just think it means practically. From a practicality standpoint, you're going to want headphones. But the issue is then, it is apparent that the only headphones,

this is the catch, the only headphones that will work with this headset apparently would be AirPods Pro 2. And that is part of the um you know we've been talking about this before like some of the stuff that apple mentioned about the frequencies and how it's got like a wider what was the phrasing that they used oh like capable of more bandwidth or something like that that apparently that was for the headset so these would be the only headphones that would work at all and then anything that has the h2 chip in from this point they're obviously not going to have a headphone jack

on this device um and you would probably want small in-ears anyway because it's easier for the fact that you've got a big strap around your head right we haven't talked about the price yet, but I will just say, if the information's report on the price is true, which I am very much skeptical of, but if it is true, all I'll say is AirPods Pro 2 should come in the box if that's the price. right like if you're going to require for truly immersive whatever airpods pro and the product costs a large amount of money they just need to be in the in the box that's it i actually agree with you on this one yeah i think that i think that that would be not just a courtesy but like that should be the way that this thing works as it comes to them do i do i think they will do this absolutely not but they should and we'll talk about it when it happens right i'm actually a Should be the way that this thing works. As it comes to them. Do I think they will do this? Absolutely not. But they should. And we'll talk about it when it happens.

Right? I'm actually a little surprised. That they aren't using headphones. Or you know AirPods Max. Or AirPods Pro. In a more integrated way. At least as a possibility here. With transparency.

Because the reason you don't want to cover people's ears is because they might need to interact with people in the real world, but there's transparency. So you could make it that you put this thing on and it's got headphones, right? You could just do that where it's playing. It's playing right into your ears. You put the headphones in or the act of putting it on also puts headphones on you i know that there are a lot of ergonomic reasons you might not want to do that but i'm a little surprised because like transparency that's the whole idea but yes if it's going to be very expensive and for best use you're going to need to put something in your ears or over your ears uh should should be in the box

from the information a special alternate headband will be available for developers likely allowing for the device to be hooked up to a mac for development yeah this is the developer kit thing and it totally makes sense right that this is how it needs to be a way to hook this thing up to a mac directly so that you can be running your code on the mac and debugging it while using the headset which is bananas but that's like that's how br development works yeah this is not a special alternate headband this is a development kit right like you can it's not like you get a headband and then buy your thing and no they will send you the whole thing you'll pay them a lot of money for the

privilege and it will come with a headband that has a cable attached to it right you know what i mean that's a detail that i'm not confident in either one whether whether developers will be able to get it with the headband and that'll be all part of it or whether they'll say go get this product and then we'll you can separately buy a headband and attach it whatever well the report also says that the idea for user swappable headbands has been removed from the product so you wouldn't be able to do that right but it says but it says that the idea for user-swappable headbands has been removed from the product, so you wouldn't be able to do that. Right. But it says that the developers will have swappable headbands. So I

think that the jury is out about whether it's not important, but developers will be able to get a thing where they can tether. However, the details don't matter. They'll be able to get that and that'll be for developers and that's it. It's not going to be one of these things where it's like,

or you can hook it up to a Mac and play real games. It's like, that's not the point of it. The point is the tethering is just going to be for developers. As of last year, the headset used an external battery pack tethered by cable as opposed to a battery integrated into the headband. The design choice has been controversial among Apple's engineers, given the company's preference for cable-free designs. I am on team battery pack.

I can't see, okay, I can't see this product having a mandatory external battery that you have to wear. I can't see it. Well, I i agree i can't see that it will happen but i think they should do it because then it will be lighter on your head like so that's the goal yes but but it means that to get into it you've got to equip even more and that equipping phase is no fun in at the point where you're like, putting this thing on your face, putting the earphones in your ears. It's different having a cable snaking away from your body

and going somewhere that can get snagged or it can be tense or all of that. So what I'm going to say is, because I'm not finished, right? The idea that to get good battery life, you need to attach a thing and they will sell you a thing or it comes with a thing to get good battery life, you need to attach a thing and they will sell you a thing, or it comes with a thing to get good battery life. I'm okay with that idea. But the idea that this thing, when it's in use, always has a cable snaking from it to somewhere else on your body

where there's a battery pack. Ughuck yuck three thousand dollar price tag is still expected uh from the okay okay let me stop you there three thousand dollar price tag i believe that the technology in this thing might mean that that price is justified but i can't envision them selling even if they put pro on it i can't envision them selling enough three thousand dollar plus headsets to make an audience large enough to justify any app development for it. That $3,000 sounds like a developer kit, a developer preview of something that will be eventually available in a consumer-friendly product down the road so that developers can start working now on the Reality Pro so that they're ready when reality comes out, Apple Reality, for way cheaper.

I mean, I thought the $2,000 plus was a ridiculous price point. $3,000 plus is what's above that? Ludicrous? It's, yeah, that's, I don't know. I don't know what to do with this report because i i i said i think last week um i am strongly of the belief that apple basically needs to eat its profit margins on this product when it comes out so that and whether break even

or lose money or whatever but like they need to get some volume going for the developers to build for their new platform and And if Apple is going to sell this thing for $3,000, like who's it for corporations and very, very rich people as a toy. Well, I mean, that's great. You'll make a profit on the few that you sell, but who's going to develop for that other than like very expensive apps for corporations and very, very rich people. But like, it's not a mass product at $3,000. It's not a mass product at $2,000. So no matter how good it is. So yeah, I'm troubled by this. Although I'm not, I'm also not necessarily convinced by this report. More than the price. Another quote troubles me

more, which is Apple sees video conferencing as a potential killer app with virtual conversations conducted using digital avatars. People who have worked on the headset say apple doesn't appear to have focused much on gaming that so i'm potentially drawing here in my mind a link between three thousand dollars and video conferencing and it worries me that you just said right is it going to be for corporations like i really hope that this is a hololens yes sort of thing that they're not that they don't think that this is where they should be going look i can imagine right apple not putting a focus on gaming is apple always right like yes they never put a focus on gaming so they don't have to have focused specifically

on gaming at all for this product to make any sense, right? Like, one of the things that they say in the report is they don't have any plans for a game controller. Yeah, well, welcome to everything for them, right? Remember, if you die in the meeting, you die in real life. So, So, look, it's possible, but Microsoft selling a VR, AR, mixed reality product for corporations makes sense with the Microsoft brand, right? But that's not Apple's brand. That's not the kind of stuff Apple does. see that they're working on this right because because we've seen with share play and with memojis and with the collaboration tools including freeform like apple is trying to build a whole suite of collaboration and communication features it's very clear that they all have an application on a virtual reality headset. Right? That's totally clear.

I get it. But, again, first off, this is the company that wants everybody to come back into the office. So that's amazing. And maybe you don't have to come back into the office if you agree to wear a headset three days a week. I don't know. And just my skepticism. Look, I used Meta's horizon worlds thing it was fine but like the idea that you spend your work time or your meeting time and with a thing on your face looking at other avatars like it it it's interesting and there's

something to the idea that it feels like you're more present with other people than even a facetime does i will absolutely grant you that but that's not something to hang your product on there has to be games games should be as much as a focus on this as everything else now again apple shouldn't make the games but they've just got to make it possible for people to make the games honestly i expect they will i you know like how you you question the price thing i question this oh i agree if it's three thousand dollars it doesn't make sense as a game console i suppose right that would be the answer there but it doesn't like the bet the only i would say okay not, not the only. The only real proven VR applications that exist right now are games, fitness, and esoteric corporate whatever. Meetings.

I think meetings, people seem to like it. With HoloLens, Microsoft's done a bunch of stuff where it's like if you're working in 3D and CAD and other stuff like that where you can do visualizations of the objects in 3d space and walk around them and all that before you print them or build them or whatever like okay that's cool and then yeah okay well i'll throw in meetings although i'm not sure that meetings is the killer app but it is an app that could be used for this but it's very hard to imagine that apple is going to build this platform and ignore um those lifestyle features the only way that this works is, again, if we're misreading Apple's strategy here, and it's hard because all the focus of reports

has been on this first headset. And if it's truly a ultra-premium slash development environment, what we're missing here is, what does the one that people will buy look like and when is that coming right because maybe their their deal that they've made here their bargain that they've made is this first one is way over engineered it's like the home pod writ large it's it's a huge expensive spared no

expense kind of thing and nobody's gonna buy it well okay but we built it so who who's gonna get it like all right well how about developers and corporations we'll do that but what's the other part of this right because you don't spend this kind of money building a new platform that's going to be used by a small number of people especially if you're going to evangelize developers about it so what next they're going to put apple rk games on this thing like i you know i don't have any concern about that sure but if it's three thousand dollars it's not going to matter so that's my question is like what's what's phase two of the strategy if this is phase one and if it's we'll eventually lower the price well it's a long way to go to lower the price is it because

you put pro on it that there's also an Apple reality and that's coming next year and that's going to be the one that everybody's going to buy? But in the meantime, we're doing this for people in, I mean, it gives them an out. It gets, when people are like, why do you expect everybody to buy this thing at this price? It lets them say, no, no, no, no, no. You misunderstand us. This product is for developers and for corporations and very high-end uses. We do believe in this space and something else is coming, we promise, that everybody's going to want.

But for now, it's like this. I mean, I can see them building that narrative as a way to explain why they put this at a price that nobody is going to buy it other than corporations and developers. But the developers aren't going to buy it either unless they're reassured that there's going to be a real product that people will actually buy and that will ship in volume so that they will actually be getting a return on their investment in developing for it. James Thompson in the chat's made a really good point, which is if it does not have any hand controllers, it cannot be used to games because nobody will be able to port their games.

games because nobody will be able to port their games it's that's that's true i i wonder if hand controllers are an option or if apple really believes that their hand recognition is so good they don't need controllers which might be uh it might actually lead to the apple doesn't appear to focus much on gaming information from the information right like that could that could be the source of something like that which is like well if they really were focusing on it they would they would go beyond their own hand scanning and put in controllers and they haven't bothered with that because you do want the hand controllers and just a video game controller is not going to do it because the whole idea is that you're moving your arms around and stuff and you're interacting with objects so it's really mysterious but if is true, if the information's got,

again, I don't think they're making it up, but if the information has got it right, and Mark Gurman's got it right, and that this is where Apple's going with this, it's hard not to see this as what I just described, which is a product that is so expensive that it really isn't for the public, and that Apple is going to have to weave a story about why regular people are not the audience for this product. That one, I think they're going to have to say that product is coming, but we have to get started with this thing for right now. And because they're going to get, I mean, they're going to get savaged in the media anyway, if they try to release a $3,000 product, everybody's going to laugh real hard at them and that's okay.

They're tough. They can take it, but they might want to not take some steps to not poison this category so that anything Apple does in this category after this product is considered a joke, right? Like they need to not poison the well here. And I think that that's going to be They need to not poison the well here, and I think that that's going to be an interesting challenge for them if these are the facts of this product. iPhone apps will be able to run in an overlaid 2D format, and that'll be kind of fun. Little iPhone app windows in various places that you can... Yeah's like a stage manager but uh in 3d there will be a dial and as uh john gruber called it a digital crown for switching between ar and vr which i think would be unbelievably good that is a good idea yeah on my quest you double tap on the side of your head basically and it and it flips

you from from not reality to reality having something tactile where you can be like it's like you're opening up the visor essentially even though it's not what it's doing uh it's not a bad idea it's a nice little nice little touch it's like i want to see a little bit like that you know like just a little bit give me a peek like i like that idea if that's gonna be how it works right that it won't just be you're either in ar or in vr you could be like halfway i don't know that seems kind of interesting to me yeah and you know that that three thousand dollar price is based on apparently premium components and it being thinner and lighter than the quest pro which i think goes back to the battery thing potentially um i'm wondering my kind of feeling on this because i the more we talk about it the more i move backwards and forwards as to what i think this

thing's going to be and going to cost like during the course of this conversation today i've changed my mind on it all like four times i'm expecting the information has seen a bill of materials and that's where they come into this for $3,000. But that is, I assume, that they are including a margin in it. And as we've spoken about before, we're both on the team of Apple needs to eat the margin. Even if it's also, I mean, yes, you're probably right. It's a bill of materials thing. It's also possible that inside Apple, there is a standard way that the rough price of a product is calculated based on the bill of materials. And I'm sure the final decision about pricing is up at a very, very high level.

And that's why we don't get a lot of rumors about actual prices in advance. And that's the truth here is that it's basically Tim Cook and company are going to have to make the decision about what margins are acceptable for this product. And we'll see. Like, if this product is really not meant to ship in high volume, and that was a rumor we had a few months ago, then this price is like, sure, well, that'll do it. Right? But if they expect to ship a lot of them, that price is not going to do it so they're going to need to lower it and that that that comes back to tim which is like everybody else knows how much it costs to make it but tim and company tim and luca and the rest are going to have to look

at it and say well i know it's going to cost us twenty three hundred dollars for each one of these we make but i'm going to price it at $2,300 or $2,000 or whatever, right? Like I'm just making those numbers up, but like that's a, that's a CEO decision of, are we going to lose money on this? Are we going to break even on this? We're going to make a little, or are we going to make our customary profit margin on this thing? And, and that's because it's a strategic product release, right? like it's not a normal apple product in the run of business apple products have a lot of margin built into them for good reasons right that's apple's business model but when you're trying to start a category and induce developers

into a a vacuum of like literally these first developers who are apparently working on it now there are no items sold at all. It's an empty market. They're going on faith that people will be there to buy these products or Apple's paying them to develop them, which is also possible. So you need to price, you need to set the price of a product like this differently than you would normally price a product. And that's why it's possible that all these reports about the price being over $2,000 or over $3,000, they might be accurate, but they also might be based on kind of some assumptions about pricing that might be changed at the very high levels for a product that's this important. This episode is brought to you by TaxExpander. When you work in a small team, every moment counts.

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first year. That's TextExpander.com slash upgrade to say goodbye to repetitive typing. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's cleanse our palate and talk about CES. Oh no.

Don't eat it. Don't eat it. Do not eat CES. You don't know where it's been. It's been someplace. It's Vegas. It's been someplace really gross. Don't do it. Yum. Oh. No. You wrote in our document, monitor madness. Monitor madness madness lots of monitors

it's always tvs monitors monitors and there's always gaming monitors and we're not talking about those there are some bananas gaming monitors but that's not yes really uh important for this conversation there were two products one from sam Samsung and one from Dell, that seemed to be kind of targeting the Studio display or the Pro display in its sight. Yes. What were your thoughts on these? mac users uh in terms of the dpi to uh or yeah dpi essentially or the the uh the resolution to size of the screen ratio right apple finally came out with something that's basically the 27 inch imac display in a standalone product the studio display uh they had the pro display xdr which is very high-end, but

is also there and has been there for a while. And then we had that LG UltraFine, and that's about it. And now here we are at CES 2023, and what do we get? We get a Samsung 27-inch 5K display, so a competitor to the Studio Display. It's got ports. it's got a 4k webcam that's detachable that's not part of the actual display we don't know the price yet but what we see here is a samsung alternative to the ultra fine in the studio display which probably has two forms. One is if you're a PC user and you want an Apple-level style of resolution, here it is. And also if you're a Mac user, then this might be an alternative,

assuming it's cheaper. I mean, it's an alternative regardless. We don't know the price though, but it's basically Samsung has decided to make a studio display. So that's interesting. It's nice looking I think. I think this is a good looking display. It comes

with a stand. I don't know if the stand is high adjustable. The Verge article doesn't seem to indicate it and I can't really tell by looking at the images. It's got an anti-glare is just the standard. I think this is a good-looking display. And it has a detachable 4K webcam.

Yep. Looks good-looking. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we don't know. Again, it's CES. We don't really know anything about it. Apparently, as well, it will come loaded with the same software that runs on Samsung's smart TVs.

So you get apps on it it it's got the ties and stuff so so basically it's also a smart tv which is cool you know why not yeah so uh that's interesting and then separately dell it's these it's like the usual suspects right of samsung and dell from ces dell is going to do a 32-inch 6K display. Sound familiar? With a height-adjustable stand, only 600 nits peak brightness. It's basically like, what if you wanted something the size and resolution of the Pro Display XDR, but not all of the kind of like wild HDR color kind of things. HDR color kind of things.

A more of a consumery, prosumery monitor, but at the size and resolution of the Pro Display XDR. That is what this Dell monitor is. And unlike the Samsung, which actually has a pretty nice design. This one's an ugly duckling. Apple-inspired. This one looks like a Dell monitor,

as you might expect. It ain't good looking, this monitor. It has like, I think that's a camera on the top. It's like this very large bezel on the top with a big circle on it. I assume that's a camera. I don't know what's going on up there. It is. It is.

It's bad looking, this thing. And it's, I'm sure, not made of very premium materials no and and again there are lots of special things about the pro display xdr and that make it xdr right uh but it's five grand and and and this won't be you know whatever this is it will not be five grand uh and and i think that there are people out there probably who are like you know i might do a 32 inch display but not a five thousand,000 one. And so they're like, well, oh, well. And now it's like, well, here you go.

32-inch 6K display. I wonder if Apple is going into this category, too. We've heard rumors about Apple working on other displays. Would it be a 27-inch or would they do something that was like a more high dynamic range at 32 inches that is not the Pro Display XDR, but is something different. Who knows? But what I will say is if these products ship and are okay and are priced reasonably, we have some monitor choice for Mac users.

And that's good because, wow, we were in the desert for a very long time chi is back chi 2 it never it never left the sequel to chi chi 2 chi harder too furious uh is it chi 2 too magnetic we'll go with that one that's it that's what we're going to land on chi 2 is a new unified wireless charging standard that is built on magsafe charging technology supplied by apple to the consortium this is the wildest piece of this story to me because like when i saw this story i was like oh the new chi is going to have magnets they knocked off magsafe yeah but it turns out well apple is a part of chi but they were like yeah sure here you go they gave the information uh and so this is how you do it and we're going to work with you on it

and now the new chi will support magnets and it will work uh to allow for faster charging the reason that magsafe could do faster charging than chi is because you can confirm the connection is secure with the magnets right so you can supply more power without there being heat issues because you know where the charger is and you know where the coil is in relationship to each other. I've read some articles about this. Currently, it's unknown. It's just unknown if Qi 2 products

and the current MagSafe will work well together. Yeah, that's weird right right so and apple is going to use chi2 apparently according to the consortium right so we may have a magsafe schism or we may not yeah we just don't know and like this is what so i read an article on the verge where they were interviewing someone from the Qi standards body. And they were- Consortium, yeah. Consortium. They're just kind of like,

Apple's going to do its thing. We don't know. It's like, all right, fair enough. Yeah. But Apple is in the consortium and contributed this. And this is not, I mean, this is what happened with Thunderbolt, essentially.

Matto's the same. Yes, that's true. This is the way Apple does standards, which is they participate and then they invent their own thing and contribute it as a standard yeah we would really like it if you would just do the thing we did yeah they roll into the chicken sourcing and they're like oh this is pretty good this is pretty good okay we fixed all your crap here nice standard you got there yeah be ashamed if something happened something happened to it but no in this place

it'll be great if something happened to it. But no, in this place, it'll be great if something happened to it because Apple's going to fix your broken standard. Anyway, so in the end, what this essentially means is that MagSafe-like things are going to come to Android phones at some point and that

presumably they'll be compatible with future iPhones, but as for the present MagSafe, will it be compatible? It's unknown. I would be surprised if it's incompatible, but who knows? Jason, would you like to hear

my conspiracy theory on this? If you want to pop your conspiracy theory hat on? Mm-hmm. It's a beanie with a propeller. Perfect. So, if Qi 2 works on like on iPhones works on Android phones or whatever that is a common charger

yes it is building the future for no USB-C port on the iPhone right? I don't know if they can make this work but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple wanted to really play ball on this to try

and help them out for the future right that there could be a future where this could be seen as common enough and then they can really just go down the route that they want to go down to which is just max safe for everything i feel like chi was already that more or less i don't think the magnets make that much difference but sure i don't know sure i'm gonna let you have your conspiracy theories they're not all they're not based in logic right that's just no you're right to talk about you're right that and finally the ports can be closed off and and uh apple's grand vision will come to pass of the portless iphone stronger magnets are the goal with g2 as well that's that's right well it's how do

they work that's the whole thing the last thing I wanted to mention in CES is that matter was everywhere. Everything's got matter in it. It's fitting that CES, a place famous for product announcements that never quite ship, would embrace matter, a standard that sort of hasn't happened. I'm going to put in the show notes a YouTube video. Bad news for matter. Matter is now part of the indeterminate, unknown state of CES products of does it exist or not?

Like, I don't know. Maybe, eventually, or maybe not. I'm going to put into the show notes a YouTube video from Shane Whatley, who was one of the kind of home kit creators that were introduced to me when I spoke about this in the show a while ago. He was at ces and just has a rundown of like all the major players and the products that they're bringing to market but there were two specific ones that i wanted to talk about particularly so akara have two products coming out which are very interesting one is the first home kit secure video wireless video doorbell that is exactly what

i want from a product so i'm really intrigued to see how this works out the next is a smart lock with home key support so this their lock is actually really interesting it's like a little panel with a keypad on it so you can use a keypad or it has a fingerprint sensor so you can use a fingerprint it also has the ability to have a key and home key it's like everything so everything what doesn't it do i think this is a really interesting uh product from akara and i've been very happy with my car stuff so far so i'm hoping that i will be able to get that doorbell and make it work for me because that is the product that i've been looking for and then lastly is uh you know ember mugs right they're the mugs that have the heating elements in them yeah i'm holding one right now i forgot

that you had one of those did we talk about this on the show we did because because i think because two things um one is i got it on a i think prime day or pre-prime day kind of thing i got it for cheap yeah uh and and because people are like oh i just i just microwave my whatever i was like well you know i i leave my tea sitting here and it gets cool and now it doesn't it stays that temperature forever which is great or for until the battery runs out which happens pretty quickly but it was a snell talk question apparently says sava who submitted that snell talk question and the timely part of it was that the m rishi sunak the prime minister of of great britain and northern ireland uh he he owns an ember mug and somebody took a picture of him with an ember mug before he was the prime minister

and it was used when he became prime minister as an example of how he is a an out-of-touch rich guy who doesn't understand regular people's needs because he's using an ember mug which i'd be like i think that maybe you could count how many houses he owns and that might be a better example but okay sure the the ember mug splurge on amazon is the reason that he is out of touch can i ask a question of you real quick great britain and northern ireland what was that united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland right he's the you gotta because united kingdom okay so he's prime minister of the united kingdom but i started to say great britain and then i had to say oh okay okay that makes sense then because he's not just the prime minister of united kingdom he's prime minister prime minister of all of uh all of gb right but the

the he's the president of england mate i wish i very it was just very like brain i had to throw northern ireland a shout shout out to belfast i see you were just gonna say great britain right and then so then you you did an about that's not accurate he's not just the prime minister of great britain right but we call it the united kingdom so like that yes but i i went down the wrong president of california and all of the other states yes well for now if you buy an ember mug uh anyway so yes you do have an ember mug uh the new ember travel mug they have a travel mug i think the travel mug was their first product and then they had the regular mug which i think is what you have like like yes i just have the regular mug i don't have this giant travel thingy i just have it's it's literally a mug with a thing in the bottom that keeps my tea warm but the new one so it's a travel mug right so you take it out

and about is gonna support the find my network which i think is genius and more products should support this right because it's actually a thing that you would take out of the house whereas my ember mug doesn't go outside the house ever because that would be no ridiculous but this is a travel mug so it makes sense sure why not if you make a product that leaves the home and has bluetooth in it it should support find my my opinion i think it's a great idea by the way um i want to mention this because i did have a conversation with people about the ember mug where they're like i don't understand why you would have that i don't want a mug that's got an interface and all that and all i will say to that is i don't i mean this this travel mug um has i'm looking at the mac rumors story by friend of the show joe rossignol um and he uh he so he he put a an ember supplied art of their mug

and it's got like a plus plus and minus like interface area and a temperature readout on it the mug that i've got has no interface there's a button on the bottom that you can use to turn it on and off and you can pair it with bluetooth in order to set your your target temperature so i did that when i got it since then i use it like a mug there's no fiddling with anything you know its interface will say oh i've heated up your tea it's like i don't care all i do is put it in its charger yeah no all i do is put it in its charger and then when it's morning and i want tea i take it out of its charger which is like a little saucer basically in my kitchen counter and put to put the tea in it and it comes it knows that there's hot stuff in it it comes on when the temperature goes below the threshold it keeps it back up to the threshold there's no interface to it and and so

i just wanted to say that because if i had to fiddle around with my phone every time I drank a cup of tea, I would have sent it back. Like, I'm not interested in that at all. But at least there are on-device controls for this travel mug, so you're not having to go to an app to do it. But still, I don't think I would endorse a product that requires me to mess around with a display on it or something like that for something like a teacup i just treat it like a teacup that's the that's the good thing about it i want to give you one last piece of like support on the amber mug is like a thing of why it's not ridiculous and why uh it's better than microwaving so i follow a very popular youtube coffee guy called james hoffman and he did a review of the

amber mug some time ago like four years ago and i'm assuming this is the same for tea but one of the things that he talks about is like if you let a cup of coffee go cold and then put it in the microwave and heat it up again it changes the taste of it because the reheating of going cold and then reheating again will change the taste. There's some science to that. Go watch his video if you want the science. So what the Ember mug does, it never lets the tea go cold, so it will keep it tasting the same.

So there is a benefit to this product if you enjoy the thing you're drinking from the mug. Right, and if it goes for an infinite amount of time, it's going to be terrible, but in the short term, it makes it better. And I'll tell you, again, I've got it on sale. It is kind of a ridiculous thing. I resisted it for a long time. I don't think you need to do that, but you can buy whatever you want.

But I got it, and there are moments where I'm reminded why I have this thing instead of using one of my fun mugs that I own. And the answer is, I've got half a cup of tea still left in it and I stopped drinking and put it down. And then I pick it up and I taste it and it's exactly the temperature that I would want it to be right out of the pot when I wanted to start drinking it. And it's delightful because that's that moment where you go, oh, in a normal mug, you'd be like, oh, it's gotten cold. And you go back out and maybe put a little more tea in it

and put it in the microwave and heat it back up and then go back to bed or whatever. And I just pick it up and I'm like, oh yeah, it's still, this is the little thing doing its job. So it's otherwise invisible in terms of interface. I think we've said this before about smart stuff. My favorite smart tech stuff is after you set it up, does not need to be played with, right?

Like it'll just do what it needs to do. And like, I don't need to know about its Bluetooth. I don't need to know about its battery. All I know is that I wash it out and park it on its little home and drink tea out of it. And otherwise I know nothing about it as a technology product. And that's how i like the best kinds of smart products are when the app allows for you to say setup and troubleshooting

and then other than that you just use it like you would want to like life yeah like life use it like life dennis that's the new slogan of our richie sunak says Richie Sunak says these are like life this episode is brought to you by Capital One. Have you ever hit a technical snafu while shopping online? Is filling out payment fields giving you a headache? Has a mobile banking app ever been down

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One, what's in your wallet? Thanks to Capital One for their support of this show and RelayFM. what's in your wallet and thanks to Capital One for their support of this show and RelayFM let's finish up today with some ask upgrade questions Jonathan asks with the holidays ending

what do you do with the holiday specific items you have in HomeKit we have a smart outlet for our Christmas tree the Siri constantly reports isn't responding I wanted to ask this question Jason

because yesterday I took down my Christmas tree and we had the hue lights it's a bit of follow-up the Siri constantly reports isn't responding. I wanted to ask this question, Jason, because yesterday I took down my Christmas tree and we had the Hue lights. It's a bit of follow-up. Really nice. I was very happy with that purchase. I bought the Hue Christmas lights, remember? Way back when they came out. Really liked them.

They are very good. You can obviously go wild with the colors, but they have some really nice effects. I was very happy with my purchase of the Hue Christmas lights. But then this morning, I was doing something in my home kit kit and had the little dot and it's like the christmas lights aren't responding because i've unplugged them and now i don't like what am i supposed to do i delete them from home kit like what do you do yeah i mean that's what i do is well depending depending i have some uh let's see it varies when i'm just putting them away i

usually just take them away and i leave them i don't rename them um but if it bothers you then yeah you just remove them and then you re-add them next time if you're next time you need to use them so it really it varies for me i i don't do as good a job of that i have some some like i can't connect to this one uh switches that are just unplugged um but you can always just remove them and that'll be fine just repair them and just make sure you've got a little pairing code it'll be fine yeah i mean that's probably what i will end up doing i wish there was just a way to be like don't worry about this one you be like, don't worry about this one. You know, like, just don't worry about this one. It's fine.

I agree. I agree. You should be able to put it in timeout or something. But I think the answer is you remove it. And that's how you put it in timeout. Put it in the penalty box? Yeah, exactly. You think about what you've done, which is your job.

Well, good job. But now it's over. Andrew asks, if you use a MacBook and an external display, do you keep the MacBook open or closed? Personally, I can't stand using a tiny MacBook screen next to a big display. It feels off balance. Do you ever do this? Do you ever do this? Like plug your laptop in? balance do you ever do this do you ever do this like plug your laptop in no i used to at work and i started i i had a i had a stand that was a uh it was a visa mount for a display and then it had a little laptop thing right next to it so you could put your laptop in it and it would be kind of like next to your display open and what i very rapidly realized was the little display set back uh i never used it so then i ran them closed and then at some point i got rid of that stand and just ran with lid closed so my answer from back when i did this is i always ran it lid closed yeah i do it exactly the same so like when i use it right now it's just like it just feels i

know i could have extra screen real estate and i do like having multiple screens but i feel like there has to be some kind of relative size consistency and a 14 inch screen next to a 28 inch screen just feels off right like there's just something about that that's not right to me. So I also will close it. And like I tried doing the thing where you raise the screen, right? So maybe that would help, but that didn't help either. There was always just an issue

with the relative sizing that I did not like. And so I also run a lid closed on my laptop when plugged into my studio display every day. Kevin asks, Jason thinks that the regular iPhone 14 will get the dynamic island, and Mark Gurman does know too, but what about MacBook notches? Dynamic islands for everyone? I mean, in the long run, on laptops, I mean, we're already there, there basically for any laptop that matters so yes uh

but will it be a dynamic island i think no because i think the menu bar is your dynamic island on the mac if that's what kevin means and on desktop i again i kind of don't see it because the menu bar is there and there's no need to do a cutout on the Mac so I don't think it's going to happen there um iPad's an interesting question whether they might do a dynamic island there but you know I don't know iPad is that weird middle child right like does it do what the Mac does or does it do what the uh what iPhone does because it has a status bar right so it could just sort of expand the status bar and use that and not and not need a dynamic island um or apple could really push the design on the ipad out even closer to the edges of the display and have a cutout and and do the

dynamic island it's really sort of a question of how they want to do it but on the mac the menu bar is the dynamic island and i think the notch is there as long as they needed to be there. But I think it's just going to be, I don't, I don't see how, I mean, it's possible that they would add a dynamic Island to the, to that notch,

but it would just basically be like a, around the outsides of it. And I don't know, you're just kind of replicating the Mac menu bar at that point. I don't see the point. Okay. Have you both seen knives out glass onion what did you think uh yeah i loved it we watched it uh christmas night yeah boxing day

night something like that uh the whole family and we uh we loved it absolute delight of a movie uh no spoilers particularly bring me more benoit blanc i want more i mean they signed for two movies so there will be more benoit blanc on that well these movies make me happy because i feel like daniel craig is happy like uh-huh i feel like he's only doing like you would only take these movies on for the fun of it because he does the accent which he does not need to do right it is not necessary the accent is like you know it's not needed for the character but he does it and i just think he just looks like he's having a great time in these movies which makes me happy because i love daniel craig but also these movies are just fantastic like i think they have a proven formula now of like he goes and does a thing and it's now

like a bunch of people whose faces you know or like you really know who they are you like this time way like bigger budget cost i feel like right um and yeah i hope they just continue to make these movies for as long as you know daniel craig and ryan johnson want to make them because this movie like i love knives out and knives out 2 i think is better than knives out in every way even though i already love knives out you know what i mean like i just think they had an increased budget and i think that that really helped them the second movie is just a treat it's fantastic if you you should go watch it if you haven't already. Watch both of them, you know, if you haven't seen them. If you would like to send in an Ask Upgrade question,

just click the link in your show notes to submit feedback or go to upgradefeedback.com or you can send them in with question mark Ask Upgrade in the RelayFM members Discord. And you can send in your questions to us that way for us to answer on a future episode of the show if you want to find us online in the meantime go to sixcolors.com for jason's work what else the incomparable obviously lots of shows here on relay fm but then you know what's the next part for you right now what do you mean

is there like you can is that jason l what what's what's next at jason l at mastodon.social is that the correct let's not talk about social let's just not do it i'm all right fine follow up how about this if you want to follow up about anything we talked about uh i pay attention to the show follow-up channel in the Really FM member Discord. Lovely. Also fantastic. And you can get access to that and you can hear about our experiences of using Freeform for today's episode

by going to getupgradeplus.com where you can sign up and become a member and you'll get ad-free longer episodes of Upgrade each and every week. If you want to find me online, you can go to mikehurley.net where you can find all of my various projects. And I'm

iMike on Instagram. I'm still going for that one. That's my social place. But of course, I am here on RelayFM on many shows, and there are lots of wonderful shows here at RelayFM that you can add to your podcast queue. Thanks again to our sponsors of this week's episode,

the fine folk over at TextExpander, Capital One, and ExpressVPN. But most of all, thank you for listening and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.