Upgrade - 442: Zombie Arms and Toaster Fridge

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Does the report that Apple may build a touchscreen Mac laptop mean that the futures of the Mac and iPad are about to converge--or is nothing much really going to change? Then Jason and Myke then pour one out for third-party Twitter apps. It was a good run.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 442 today's show is brought to you by rocket money and ladder my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley shout out to our friend james thompson as we do every 100 episodes when we hit 42 there you go it it's nearly James' birthday so this is an early birthday present to James Thompson, creator of Pico Happy birthday James Thompson

Is it a momentous birthday? Is it a big birthday? Who could say? They're all momentous when you get to this age Psst, it is I have a hashtag Snell talk question or aka just snell talk question i'm still trying to work the hashtag out of my vocabulary phil asks jason if you podcast in your garage does your car always have to live outside i haven't parked my car in

garage in my garage for years. California, baby. Our cars are wet right now. But yeah, we bought a minivan in 2010. Are you having the rain that I'm seeing everywhere? Well, you know, still talk is not supposed to be about weather, Mike. But blue sky right now. But yeah, we've had an enormous amount of rain. Enormous, enormous amount of rain.

Washing the dirt off our cars. We bought a van in 2010 that basically didn't fit in the garage. And at that point, we committed to just not parking our cars in the garage. At which point I realized, slowly over a couple of years, I could actually use the garage and thus began our soft conversion of the garage. Which is, you know, I hung the curtains and move stuff out of half of it and we move the door so it opens to the inside of the house instead of the outside of the house. But yes, Phil, you've figured it out. We don't park our cars in our garage. Our garage has essentially become half storage and half my office and our cars live in the driveway and the elements and the birds and the leaves and the sun it's all on the cars but as john syracusa likes to point out uh when he comes to california he looks at the car all the older cars we have

here and it's like it's like he's in a museum he says because all those cars would have just rusted out to nothing and even driving around in boston let alone sitting out on the street but yeah no our car sit outside that's it like cuba or something then right isn't that the thing they have all the really old cars in cuba because they do they do because they don't they didn't get imports for a while from anywhere except like travis from east germany or something yeah yeah if you would like to send in a question for us to open a future episode of Upgrade, just go to UpgradeFeedback.com and send in your Snell Talk question. Or use question mark Snell Talk in the RelayFM members Discord.

We're going to talk about Twitter later on today. Because it feels almost pointless to even mention that you can send them in via Twitter anymore. Because who's there? But that's a conversation for later on. We have some follow-up, Jason Snell. First, I would like to thank everybody who sent in follow-up via the feedback tool. I think we got more follow-up in the past week

than we have gotten in a really long time. So I appreciate everybody's excitement about the feedback tool. There was a ton of stuff that questions that we got sent in that we're going to use in this episode, later episodes. Lots of people just telling us that they love that we have the feedback tool. We're reading all of it.

Even if we don't use some of it in some episodes, we do read all of it. So thank you to everybody that's been sending it in and you can send in your feedback for the show by going to upgradefeedback.com. We had a bunch of people write in with fixes for the seasonal home kit items thing that we mentioned last time so like if you what do you do if you unplug your christmas lights and then it just shows that you're have an item as unresponsive in home kit so if you go to the accessory detail view inside of home kit and turn off the status options that are at the bottom. This will remove it from the home summaries and then you won't get those errors anymore. And then there's a second

part of this that a bunch of people wrote in because I was thinking about this. If I turned it off from the summaries, I would lose it. I was like convinced that I would just, where are the lights, right? Because then they're not showing up in any of the summaries and I'd forget that I'd have to go into the specific room, quote unquote, in HomeKit to find it. So then a bunch of people said, create a seasonal or holiday room or section in the Home app and just move all that stuff there. So then you'll know where to find it later on.

I just thought it was very clever and just like a good way to handle this. I'm going to say Apple, this is an opportunity for you to do something better here with this right because it makes perfect sense that there would be things that you'd only need at certain times of the year not even just like holiday things you know like as the seasons change it's just like certain devices that you might not need so you unplug them completely and then you know it's all going wild so i would like to see something to maybe designate of like this device is not always

plugged in like don't worry about it you know i like it i have created a deactivated room and my christmas lights item is now look at that living in there so thank you to the many upgradians who sent that in we've still got something from curtis who says no one's buying a two thousand dollar apple headset that does not already own the latest airpods pro this is a non-problem so this is in our complaint to the idea in rumor roundup of the airpods pro may be required to use the apple headset because of like bandwidth and stuff like that for some things. And I said, if I spend $3,000 on a headset,

I want you to throw in the AirPods Pro that are required for free. So I disagree with Curtis that it's a non-problem. I think it's a problem for Apple if this is a product that can only be sold to a subset of a subset of Apple customers.

You also need to have this other thing. I think the idea that if this is a product that's only sold to people who have the latest AirPods pro, I would also say that's a problem because again, subset of a subset, uh, not great. Also let's all media coverage of the product include a free shot at the product by saying, not only do you have to buy this thing, but you have to buy this other thing from Apple too. And Oh, Apple gets rich on that because you got to buy their expensive headphones in order to even use it,

in order for it to even be usable, even if that's not true. And it's got built-in speakers. They will take the shot. I think it's just an own goal. You don't want to do it. And more than that, being seen selling a product for $2,000, $2,500, $3,000,

and then being seen as also including a whole bunch of extra purchases on top of it that you have to add in order to have the best experience when it's already very, very expensive. I mean, I guess if you're selling a luxury car, that's how you do it. But that's my point. Is this a luxury car? Because developers aren't going to build for a platform that is a super narrow luxury tech object. They need some belief that a lot of units are going to be sold so that they can sell a lot of software to the people who bought it so i appreciate the feedback but i i just don't agree yeah and i think that it is a i don't know if i necessarily agreed it like just

because you would buy that product that you would own every single product like what if you just didn't want the airpods pro right? There just wasn't a thing that you wanted. Non-problem. I just think that I agree with everything you said. You open yourself up to

more criticism over the already expensive product for the sake of $67, $80, $90, $100, whatever it ends up costing, right. For the AirPods pro to be produced, just put them in. And I know that that is like, not an Apple thing to do, right. To bond, like give you something for free or bundle it in the box. Like I was thinking about, uh, iPhone charges, right. Well, like, you know, I have a good random piece of followup. so i bought my mom an iphone

for christmas i think i mentioned this i got her an iphone 13 right she had an iphone 10r i got a call from her a couple of days after getting it and she's like there's something wrong with the battery on this phone and so what are you talking about she's like oh the battery's running down and i'm running out of battery at the end of the day. So I was like, all right, well, sometimes it takes a few days for some processing to occur. Just keep your eye on it and let me know. She's like, OK. And I was like, just take your charger to work with you.

Do you have a charger at work? She's like, no, I just have a charger at home. I was like, OK, take your charger to work with you. She's like, OK. So, you know, a couple of days go by and she's like i'm still having problems i'm like what's going on here and then i realized she had an iphone 10r she had like a 5 watt iphone power adapter yeah so i had to then buy her a power adapter right because she also had a usb-c cable in the box now anyway right so it's not like even the cable does nothing and so it's kind of just my point of like going all the way back to when they took the power adapter

out of the box like it doesn't work like that like that whole idea of like everyone has these things it doesn't work like that because you over many years the amount of power required for these things changes and just the secondary part of like if this was purely an environmental thing just give people the option to have one added in for free then every now and again you know the people that update every their phone every five years they need a new power adapter but you know they're now having to buy that on top of what they would have otherwise i'll also say that um this is the argument that they don't they don't need to do this is missing the point, I think, of the fact that it's a design failure, right? If Apple releases, regardless of the price, but especially if it's $2,000 or $3,000, if Apple releases a headset that can't properly do audio in a way that really is immersive or can be used for communication or

whatever without an additional purchase, doesn't that suggest that they failed at something in the product? If they're like, yeah, we couldn't do that. And again, I can see the argument that's like, well, actually what we did is we decided everybody's ears are different and everybody's audio preferences are different. And so we wanted to make that a separate feature. I'm like, okay, but like, if you're charging $3,000 for it, it's very hard for you to say, well, what we did was we cut the price from 3,200 down to 3,000. So now it's a deal and you can go buy a set of headphones. It just, it seems like a miss just to even be talking about the fact that everybody's

going to go like, like the Quest 2 has a headphone jack, right? So you can listen using the Quest 2 audio. If you want headphones, you can plug into the headphone jack and put whatever headphones you want in there, theoretically, right? With this, though, it's like, well, no headphone jack. It's Apple. They need to be wireless. And then the specific report is that they need to be a very specific, newest version of the AirPods Pro 2. So suggesting Apple's very latest and greatest tech is going to be required to do something that then, again, according to Gurman's report, is a key feature of the product, which is communication stuff.

It's like that's where it all kind of like piles up. I could see it being sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you want a nicer experience, you get some headphones. But that's not what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you want a nicer experience, you get some headphones. But that's not what it is. It's like if you want part of the key experience, you must get the newest chip that's in only a couple of Apple products. That's where it starts to become a little bit ridiculous when you're talking about a product that is not. We're trying to keep the price down, all of this, it's cheaper than we think, which is, by the way, feedback that I've gotten from several listeners by various channels, which is a lot of people have talked about the iPad introduction. And it being, you know, everybody thought it would be the iPad be over $1,000 and it was $500. And wondering if Apple is actually sandbagging a little bit here. I'm not sure if that's true or if people are looking at the bill of goods and calculating a markup in their head.

But I have heard from people who say, yes, but that way they'll dazzle us. How could people be possibly impressed with a headset that costs $1,500 or $1,800? It's so expensive. And the answer is prime the pump by telling everybody it's $3,000. And then when it's $1,500, you're like, oh, what a relief instead of what? 1500. But, you know, the cheaper it is, the more you can make the argument. Look, if you want the best experience, pay a little more for accessories.

But the more expensive it is, the harder I think it is to make that argument. Again, unless you're a luxury car maker and taking that approach. The problem is if you're trying to popularize this platform and get developers to develop for it coming out with the ultra high-end product is probably not the best way to do it i think i mentioned the ipad thing on the episode too it was like a hope of mine that they would do this but you may uh in fact you did in episode 440. You mentioned it. An almost original iPad-like price surprise, and I know that because

I now have a secret tool that lets me search old episodes of Upgrade. We'll talk about that one day. One day. I'm going to round up for you. Saddle up, Jason Snell. All right. I'm in the saddle. According to Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has cancelled their plans for a full screen iphone se4 in 2024 quo i think this is due to the consistently lower

than expected shipments of mid to low end iphones this se4 was expected to be like a full screen experience um and maybe apple is just not completely sure of what's going on with this like tier of phones that they make so they seem to have at least uh put on hold or completely cancelled the se4 but this has an interesting ramification according to ming chi quo due to concerns that the performance oh sorry over apple's own modems their 5g modems quote due to the concerns that the performance of the in-house baseband chip may not be up to par with Qualcomm's, Apple initially planned to launch its

baseband chip in 2024 and let the low-end iPhone SE 4 adopt it first and decide whether to then use it in the iPhone 16 to use its baseband chip depending on the development status of the iPhone SE 4. A cancellation of the iPhone SE 4 has significantly increased the chances of Qualcomm chip depending on the development status of the iphone se4 a cancellation of the iphone se4

has significantly increased the chances of qualcomm remaining the exclusive supplier of baseband chips for the 2024 iphone 16 series yeah well so again you don't want to make a mistake and ruin your iphone right and we remember that time when Intel modems and Qualcomm modems were shared across an iPhone release. And it turned out that the Intel modems weren't as good as the Qualcomm modems. And I think Apple even did some speed gating of the Qualcomm modems so that they would all seem the same, but it was one of those, it was a, it was a bad thing. And the iPhone's too important to let that happen. So they have the smart idea, right? Of saying, let's test this in our iPhone SE, right?

It's a low volume product. It's a low end product. We can put our chip in there and even if it's slower than Qualcomm, what do you want? It's a cheaper phone. And if it goes well, we can look at the results and then we can release that chip elsewhere or not and now the the test bed is killed because i think like you said and we talked about this previously apple

seems to be struggling with the identity of portions of the iphone line right like the iphone mini and then the iphone plus and neither of those seems to have worked according to reports that well. And the iPhone SE now being another concept that's sort of like, you know, maybe not. So they're struggling with that. But yes, the spinoff is really interesting, which is that was also going to be their testbed. And if they can't test it with that, then better safe than sorry to just kind of commit to Qualcomm for 2024. to just kind of commit to Qualcomm for 2024. But Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple continues to work on their modem chips with the hopes of a 2024 release.

So who knows what's going on there? Maybe they're still hoping that they can get them to work well, but if they do, they're going to have to take the plunge on it. Maybe they sacrifice another phone in the lineup. Who knows? An interesting tidbit on this

is it's not just the modem. Apple is looking to combine the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips together too and make them themselves to drop parts from another supplier. Well, at least to design them themselves. And that seems to be closer to fruition that Apple... Apple's already done some Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in some of their products, but to take it to the iPhone, for example, and take those over, it's all part of their plan. But Broadcom definitely took a hit in their stock when the

report came out that Apple was working hard and felt like they were getting closer to being able to build their own chip to do Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and not have to buy that chip from Broadcom. Mark Gurman and Ross Young are both reporting that Apple is looking to develop its own micro-LED displays for the iPhone and iPad, but starting with the Apple Watch Ultra first. There's some debate on the timing of this. It's either going to be 2024 or 2025 for the first models to appear in an Apple Watch Ultra, but it's expected that the production will begin in 2024 at least, no matter when the devices are released you may think to yourself what's the benefit of this or mark german says

the display is intended to offer improved brightness color reproduction and viewing angles making images look more like they are painted atop the display glass and replace parts currently supplied by companies like samsung and l However, it's worth noting that someone actually has to make the displays. This is just Apple designing them and designing the technology. Ross Young suggests that it would still be LG display that does this, but Apple would be moving away from using their technology and designs, not their manufacturing capabilities. So it's actually a little bit more like with apple silicon where apple takes over design of the thing but there's still somebody else who makes it right

taiwan semiconductor tsmc does that um this is going to be like that potentially and also this is want to remember it's like apple's smallest display right and then this rumor's been out there for some time i think it's very easy to jump to the conclusions like, oh, Apple going to make all their display technology going forward. This is going to take years, if ever, for this to happen. But I do think it's interesting that Apple decided that this was tech that they could push forward themselves and gain some sort of an edge. and gain some sort of an edge. And so they have done it. Whether it goes beyond this, who knows? But it's interesting, right?

You can see in all these areas, Apple trying to push a little bit on taking control of the key aspects of its own hardware. And this was similar to the original Apple Watch had OLED, right? And it was OLED so, much uh sooner than any other devices that apple may got oled so it makes sense here too right oled apple watch and then eventually oled iphone and still not oled ipad right or or mac display so the you can see the slow roll of display tech and how it might become economical in something like an Apple Watch display years

before it might even remotely become economical in something like an iPhone, if it ever does, right? Because there's competing display tech and it might turn out that, you know, like a lot of us thought that maybe OLED would come to the iPad faster and it hasn't. And some, you know, there's different display techs with different price and performance characteristics basically and something that makes sense on a screen this size for a product this price might not make sense ever on a larger device compared to some other tech that has different characteristics when you weigh them and say, actually, we're better off with this other thing. So it'll be interesting to see what happens here. But I like that this seems to be moving

forward. This was a rumor that was out there like years ago that Apple was trying to push the micro LED stuff forward. And 9to5Mac is reporting that Apple could have Mac news this week. The quote, Apple could be making its first announcement of 2023 as soon as tomorrow, sources say. The company is holding Mac-related briefings with influencers and select members of the press this week, and an announcement could be made via Apple's newsroom website on Tuesday,

which is tomorrow as we record this. Certainly, you know, we're talking about a lot of stuff that apple could have done and didn't do like i don't know different uh updates to maybe imax macbook pros mac minis that kind of stuff yeah that macbook pro mac mini thing that everybody seemed to say was primed for the fall and never happened and they did that statement where they're like and that wraps up the year for us like oh wait oh, wait a second. Okay. I guess that wraps up the year. And it did. That suggests that that announcement's just kind of floating out there. And I know Mark Gurman at one point said, oh, they don't introduce products in January. So it'll probably be March.

And I remember at the time thinking, well, I mean, no, they've introduced products in January, so it'll probably be March. I remember at the time thinking, well, I mean, they've introduced products in January and if this report is correct, it would suggest potentially that that thing that they couldn't ship in November, they can ship in January. So, maybe we'll have something to talk about next week about new stuff. That would be great. It would be nice.

Well, hoping that they're exciting. You know what I mean? Right, I mean, yeah, the rumor of, you know, MacBook Pros are always exciting. You know what I mean? Well, right. I mean, yeah. The rumor of, you know, MacBook Pros are always exciting for a certain category, even if it's just a speed update. And waiting for the other to shoot a drop on the Mac Mini, that could be good. But who knows? I mean, Apple Card. Like, there's lots of things that could be that are not as exciting.

Like there's lots of things that could be that are not as exciting. We wouldn't expect like the bigger MacBook Air or Mac Pro or anything like that, right? Anything's possible. Based on the rumor of like the chain of events for all these products, the ones that are the clearest as sort of like they've been on the verge of being introduced are the are the mac mini and the macbook pro m2 um which would mean we get a look at what the high-end uh higher-end m2 chips look like which would be fun um but yeah i mean german's not hot on the imac as a whole but the the mac pro is floating out there the 15 inch macbook air is floating out there there are some other other options that could surprise us. It feels like those two are... I mean, for a long

time, everybody was pretty convinced who had inside knowledge that they were going to roll out in November or October, and it didn't happen. So, like with that MacBook Air M2 that we were waiting for forever, it felt like it was about to come, and then eventually it would

have to. These feel like that, but they could surprise us that absolutely um anything's possible it's also possible that this is not right or it's possible that it's something maybe eddie q's got another blog post i don't know but we'll find out this episode is brought to you by rocket money if If your New Year's theme, your New Year's goals is to do something and manage your budget better and save money, you need to check out Rocket Money. Rocket Money, formerly known as Truebill, is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills all in one place. Over 80% of people have subscriptions

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Over 3 million people have used Rocket Money saving the average person up to $720 a year. How fantastic is that? I mean, recently when we moved, I had to go through and find a bunch of subscriptions for things like change addresses and change card numbers and stuff like that. That was a nightmare,

let alone trying to find those sneaky ones that are hiding from you somewhere and still charging you every month and you're not using them. So stop throwing your money away, cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses the easy way by going to rocketmoney.com upgrade. That's rocketmoney.com. Our thanks to Rocket Money for their support of this show and RelayFM. According to Mark Gurman, Apple is looking at adding touchscreens to the Mac. Quote, Apple engineers are actively engaged in the project apple has been long making comments about this being a bad fit for the mac product suggesting that the ipad is the way to go right and i have jason see if you can help me right i have these two phrases in my mind that i'm sure

i've heard at some point but google was failing me today one was zombie arms uh yeah the other was toaster fridge were either of these ever said and about the idea of touchscreen max uh zombie arms yes toaster fridge no toaster fridge was about an ipad imac ipad mac, like combining the two. Uh-huh. And you can get to a touchscreen Mac sort of being like that, but that's not, I don't believe that that is what that was about. Okay. Correct me if I'm wrong. Zombie arms, the idea is if, and again, totally overstated by people. Ergonomically, if the primary way you interface with a screen that

is basically perpendicular to your keyboard that you have to reach out for, so not in your lap, not in your hand, but where we put our computer monitors, if the primary way you interact with it is by holding your arms out and you try to do that all day, it won't work. And you'll get the zombie arms, right? You're stretching your arms out like you're looking for brains and you're reaching. And it's not great ergonomically. I don't know of any computers like PCs or Chromebooks that have a touchscreen and don't have another pointing device too, right? That are in that traditional configuration.

I'll make all those statements. And having, I know many years ago I talked about this. My daughter had a Chromebook with a touchscreen for a long time. And I would use it occasionally. And because I've been trained with the iPhone and the iPad, there would be a button, you know, like an alert would come up on the screen and I just tap it with my finger or I'd scroll with my hand and I wouldn't even think about it of like reaching down to the keyboard and using the track pad or whatever. I just scroll because it's such a natural gesture. That's not the same as saying, I'm going to do a four hour Photoshop job on my studio display, essentially by stretching my hands out. And like ergonomically, that's a totally different situation. So, um, you know, it's one

of those things where like, I think Apple was making a very specific point about primary touch interface. And I think in some ways they were kind of cloaking the fact that they just didn't want to do it because nobody was really asking for a primary touch interface. They were asking for an additional interface type, which was touch. Because wouldn't it be nice if in addition to this beautiful trackpad and keyboard that you've given me, if an alert comes up on the screen and I absentmindedly tap on it because you've taught me with your iPads and your iPhones that I could tap on that OK button and it works, that it would work on my Mac too. And Apple says, no, no, you don't do that. I'm like, all right. I mean, that is, I don't think I agree agree with that but that was sort of what was going on there in general how do you feel about the idea of a touch screen on your mac laptop

if it's if it's a traditional laptop it feels incremental to me. Seems nice, right? Would you agree? It seems nice. Oh, I'd love it. Just for the convenience sometimes. I mean, have you touched your MacBook screen? 100%. Forgetting that it doesn't have touch?

Yep. I do it all the time. And especially now that I have an iPad Pro and a Magic Keyboard, which we've had for almost coming up three years now, I think, which has a laptop-like configuration, but also has touch, right? It has a pointing device, but it also has touch. And so, yeah, that happens all the time now where I'm like, oh, I'll just scroll this. Oh, right. It's a Mac. I need to put my fingers down here

and do two fingers scrolling on the trackpad instead. And is it better to keep my hands down there? Sure. Would I want my primary thing? Would I want them to take my trackpad away on my MacBook Air? Absolutely not, right? Like, no, I don't want that at all. But I would like it, but that seems kind of incremental, right? That's like, oh, that's nice. That's a nice little addition, but it's not really groundbreaking. What would be groundbreaking is what it unlocks. Because once you have a touchscreen, What would be groundbreaking is what it unlocks. Because once you have a touchscreen, a lot of shapes and features of what we think of as MacBooks today are up for grabs, right? Apple, I think we would all pretty much agree, Apple has kind of perfected the laptop design, right? design, right? I think everybody in the computer industry would probably agree that if you talk about the traditional laptop design, which is a top and a bottom and a hinge, and you open it up,

and there's a screen, and there's a keyboard and a trackpad, like everybody, the PC industry already agreed because they knocked off the MacBook Air. Every laptop is like a MacBook Air now. Not every, but you know what I'm saying. Like everybody really realized that is kind of the platonic ideal of a laptop in in for the last decade but the pc laptop world is full of like weird other kinds of devices that are still running windows but do different stuff and apple's has not played in that other than via expressing it via the ip, which is its own issue, right? Like, what are these two products? Apple sort of said traditional laptop, macOS and the Mac, and then tablet touch interface primary that you can put in a case that has a keyboard and all that, iPad. And they're separate products.

Apple has missed out on is the idea of, well, what if I want a device that is a PC, a desktop device, a Mac OS device that can have the level of interface flexibility that the iPad has? The iPad starts as a naked touch tablet, and then you can add on keyboard or keyboard and trackpad or pencil or external keyboard and mouse or external display. You can stack all of the things on top of that bare iPad. But the Mac can't do anything. A MacBook Air can't do anything other than be a MacBook Air. I mean, you can close it up and attach it to an external display. Its great act of transformation is becoming a block of metal that runs other computers or other things right so that's what they're missing out on and that's what gets me excited about talking about touchscreen

max is not the incrementally nice thing of like yeah i can scroll on the screen but it's like what could that free apple up to do with the mac interface and the mac hardware design. Because we've only seen iterations of these kinds of alternate products from PC manufacturers. And I personally don't feel convinced that let's let the PC manufacturers do it. They'll solve it. You know, as a longtime Apple product user, I actually don't believe that's true. I don't believe it. It's like, well, you know, as a longtime Apple product user, I actually don't believe that's true. I don't believe it. It's like, well, you know, we gave Asus and Dell and Samsung and Microsoft a decade to innovate here and they solved it. Maybe they solved it, right? But it's like, what would Apple do? What would Apple do if they could make a convertible where you could take a standard

laptop and turn the screen around or fold it down or whatever and turn it into a tablet? What would that be like that you could have a Mac that was also a touch tablet or had Apple pencil support? What if you could tear the keyboard off of a Mac and still use it because its brains were all up in the screen? What would that be like? Like they've experimented with this stuff, but I wonder if Apple has something to add to the conversation. Are you excited about the possibility of a touchscreen MacBook? I've wanted one for years

because I can't see any reason why you wouldn't do it. Like, and I don't need a full scale rewrite of macOS to make this happen. I just want the ability to scroll the web page and sometimes hit a button with my thumb like yeah this is a very easy thing incremental to deal with like it doesn't have to change the world no like i really don't need them to do more than that like i i just don't feel the requirement for it you know like you were saying about like um pc

laptops and the weird and wonderful designs do you know what's were saying about like um pc laptops and the weird and wonderful designs do you know what's not considered weird on a pc laptop touchscreen like all of the weird things that happen in the pc world touchscreens are not one of them in fact standard it feels like these days if a pc laptop doesn't have a touchscreen on it that is a point to bring up. I feel like just at this point, go ahead and do something to macOS to make it more touch-friendly. Sure, there are going to be some things that might be a bit tricky, but do you know what, Apple? You really understand how to make

touch-friendly user interfaces and or the ability to try and guess what someone's doing. We've all heard about that right like the you know it's not just where you're touching it's what they're expecting that you're touching and so much goes into that like especially with the keyboard and stuff like right you know it's going to be tricky it's going to be complicated but just start with like all right we have a touchscreen on this thing so now people can pinch and zoom and scroll and just go for it now here's the thing I wanted to bring up

from Mark's piece. Based on current internal deliberations, the company could launch its first touchscreen Mac in 2025 as part of a larger update to the MacBook Pro. Does this feel like the right Mac to start with, the MacBook Pro? Well, if they're adding a touchscreen

and it adds cost, the MacBook Pro does kind of make sense. I do wonder, I have two thoughts about this. One is doing what you're describing, which is just saying, it's cool. There's a touchscreen now, whatever.

And like, it doesn't change the world. It's just like, we've got the, you know, we got all these touch APIs that come over in Catalyst and all of that. And like iPad apps will recognize it automatically.

And it's cool. But it's a MacBook Pro still. It's not any different. Right. The MacBook Pro is a good choice for that because a touchscreen is going to add some cost and the MacBook Pro can bear it. And they can make some arguments that like, you know, this is the this is you pay more and you get more. You get this feature and then eventually it'll come to all of its other laptops but not on on square one and then the the wild idea here is what if this is more than a macbook pro or or not a macbook pro what if it really is sort of like a new laptop um that has

support for some of this stuff like touch and maybe even apple pencil again and it's a you know macbook studio or something it's like the mod book come comes back but like something like that because we we're you know we're on the we're obviously uh you and i big fans of the studio concept and what other studio products could there be um i could see that that might not be the 2025 macbook pro right like the question is is apple's idea here well when we do touch on a mac it's going to be radical when we do touch on the mac it's going to change everything because it's going to free us up to make this mac we've wanted to make for years and now we're going to make it or do they do the thing where they're like it's cool no big deal right like it's just yeah we have touch whatever we don't care

and then maybe they're freed up to do more down the road, but they start with just sort of like, it's just a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen so you can scroll stuff. Don't get too excited about it. And honestly, it could be either. Right. It depends. I think ultimately it depends on how Apple's hardware designers feel about the opportunities that touch screens bring to their product line and to macOS specifically. And do they think, well, no, because that's just the iPad. Then something like the MacBook Pro where it's sort of like, no, no, no, it's cool. It's just a basic touch screen. You're not meant to use it as the primary interface device makes more sense if they are like we've been dying to make a convertible and can't because of the touch thing then then they might get more radical you mentioned in your link post on six colors that you think it would

require some design changes to mac os to make it more appropriate do you have any thoughts on kind of the areas that you would like to see them tweak to make this a reality some stuff needs to be bigger although honestly they've already been doing that work right remember we've been speculating about touch screens for a while now because they've been doing that work they made a lot of targets larger the menu bar is taller the each menu item is a little bit taller because that was a whole thing with ventura right where like everyone was saying i don't hang on a minute and then craig federighi was doing interview after interview saying we're not doing it we're not doing it and i also mentioned in that post like i have actually i use the screens app to connect to my uh to connect to my mac mini server

and for whatever reason the uh sort of use the screen as a trackpad to drive the cursor around the screen stopped working. And so for the last month or so, I've been using the tap to select interface instead, where I actually, instead of moving, you know, sliding my finger on my iPad screen to move the cursor on the Mac and then tap, um, I have to actually like literally put my finger on the thing I want to tap on and tap it on the iPad and it goes straight through to the Mac. Very different experience. And what I'd say is it works fine. It's not great. Everything could be a little bit bigger. But other than that, and they could make it they could make everything a little bit, they could scale the screen and make

all items on the screen interface elements bigger if they wanted to but like it's usable and certainly for stuff like scrolling or tapping on an okay button or like it's completely usable so i don't think it's i think that there's work that they would want to do but they've already done some of the work and we're talking about a release in 2025 so they've got some time to do the work if they have decided to go down this road um i don't think it's a this is one of those things that people say it's like oh no they'll never do it because they have to totally change the mac interface it's like yeah they already changed it some also it's kind of usable as it is and again it's not the primary use case it's not meant to be now if they're going to make a convertible that's going to look like mac os when you put it into

tablet mode yeah they're going to have to make some changes, but who knows, right? Like does a convertible Mac in tablet mode look like a Mac at all? Or does it go into like an iPad like mode where it's still Mac OS, but it, it, it, the interface changes when there's no longer a pointing device available and you're just using a touchscreen. That would be more work for them. Although they could crib from the iPad, but it wouldn't require a redesign of standard mac os it would be like an alternate mode and i think safe to say we are both not expecting by any stretch that this is a combo ipad os mac os

product only well no although i think that it's if Apple decides to go with something that has a pure touchscreen mode in a conversion, I think there's a question of, is iPadOS essentially embedded inside macOS at that point? That it's a Mac that can also run basically in an iPad mode that is still a Mac, which is weird, but like they could do that if they wanted to, if they thought that was the best approach. I want to take a step back though, because when we talk about the toaster fridge,

this is the collision of the iPad and the Mac, which have come together in a lot of ways over the last few years, but are also still separate. And look, I don't have the answers here. And I appreciate how hard it must be for people inside Apple to make these decisions. And we see it with that iPhone story, right?

Like sometimes they make the calls and they think, I think this is how it's going to work out with these lower end iPhone models. And then they look at the sales data, the real answer, and they're like, oh, we got it wrong, right? Like it happens. These are hard decisions to make. But that said, there's a little part of me that says to myself, okay, I love the iPad. And now I don't have an iPad laptop, which I wrote several columns about a few years ago, but the magic keyboard makes iPad, when it wants to be, pretty much a laptop.

However, my Mac can't be more like an iPad. Apple hasn't allowed it to be more like an iPad. Sure, it's thinner and it's got the curved edges and it's got that nice screen. But in the end, there are places that the Mac platform is not allowed to go. Allowed by who? that the Mac platform is not allowed to go. Allowed by who? Allowed by Apple's own decision to stake out ground for certain product shapes

for iPadOS. And I guess my question is, one, how's that going, right? How's iPadOS pushing into those areas going? Because what I'm not talking about is like base model iPad. I'm not talking about the iPad Air. I'm talking about the iPad Pro with all these accessories and with Stage Manager and all of that. And I could make the argument, and I don't want to,

because I like my iPad Pro, but I could make the argument that Apple would be better off making a convertible Mac that can go into an iPad mode than making an iPad Pro. Because the iPad obviously is struggling to become more Mac-like. And maybe the Mac would struggle to become more iPad-like. I mean, sure, it probably would. But sometimes that boundary between the Mac and the iPad feels artificial, and it feels like neither product can reach its full potential as long as there's this wall between them that a Mac can't look more like an iPad and iPadOS struggles to be more like a Mac. So are you envisioning a world where they do merge the product line? I mean, no, because I think Apple is very conservative about this stuff, honestly. But if I were at apple i would have that conversation which is

are we happy with how the ipad is going at the high end are we happy with all the effort we've put into making the ipad pro more like a mac and are we happy with mac os being limited to sort of traditional laptop shape and not going further down the path of touch and if we look out in this product line especially i mean especially since you're you've got generations of people raised in touch interfaces now and so to have a computer that doesn't have a touch interface at all it's kind of weird but the ipad at the high end like this is that struggle and i think if i were at apple i would at least have to ask would we be better off considering ipad os a basis for a touch mode on Mac OS so that the people who say that their iPad OS power users can get what they want

on a computer that is built to have more power as opposed to a device that's been scaled up to provide more power, but without the software being able to be there. Like the Mac OS software has all this stuff.

The iPad still struggles to catch up. And what if we had said a long time ago, instead of doing a higher-end iPad, an iPad Pro, what if we make an effort to start making Macs that can be converted into tablet-esque things that can run an iPad mode, essentially, or something kind of like it. I know there's a lot of complexity here. I know there's like, but what about what apps would it run? And what would the interface look like? And like, I, I get it. I totally get it. This is hard stuff, but I'm combining, I'm just, I'm just putting out there my two separate thoughts. One of which is it feels to me like Mac laptop design is stalled in part because apple doesn't want to experiment at all with touch screens or do anything that's

sort of like happening over in the ipad space and secondly that the ipad pro especially has really struggled on the software side because when you try to make the ipad do more you end up having these solutions that sometimes are great, like the pointer support, I think is legitimately great. But that on the software side, especially, you know, in terms of third-party apps and in terms of things like file management, that even when Apple tries, they do kind of struggle. And I'm not sure there's an enormous audience for pushing what we think of as pushing the iPad to the highest esoteric high end. Whereas on, in a Mac context, we would think of it as like using a computer, right? Like on the iPad, it's like, you're a, you're a complete, um, maniac to use an iPad like

this, but the, like, this is literally like a Mac. It's right. And yet there's a disconnect there. So I don't know. That's a lot of thoughts engendered by one report about touchscreen Macs, but it does make me think of the fact that it is, we're talking about an iPad feature being inherited by the Mac. And what does that mean? But in my heart of hearts, my guess is because Apple is so careful and apple is so conservative about this stuff that it's not going to mean any of that and that the ipad pro is still going to be kind of a product that is kind of mac-like but never really verges too far in that direction and the mac becomes a little more ipad-like in some ways especially using like catalyst and in the long

run swift ui apps that are built with some touch sensibility on top of them. And that maybe Apple down the road experiments with some different shapes. But for now, I think is going to be mostly happy that Mac OS laptops look like laptops. That that's I am excited about the potential for change here because, you know, it's been whatever, 13 years since the MacBook Air sort of defined what the laptop shape was and what's next. But I do feel like part of today's Apple is this restraint of saying, look, it works, so we're not going to mess with it. And if that's the case, then throw a touchscreen screen on there satisfy some people and um and then walk away and don't push it beyond that because i guess at that point in this in this scenario we're looking at here of the mac gaining some kind of ipad like mode really what you're left with is

if the because the ipad would continue to exist in that scenario, is what are you looking for hardware-wise, right? Like, what is, you know, that's what the customer is asked. And actually, like I was thinking about this as you were talking, I'm not sure most people are buying an iPad for iPadOS. Like, oh man, I want iPadOS. Right. And I'm not saying that as a bad thing to iPadOS.

I just mean that I think people are buying, they want an Apple product for its apps, services, whatever. And then it's like, well, which one do I want? And like, I don't buy an iPad for iPadOS. I buy an iPad for what the iPad does. And it's good at what it's doing because of its form factor, right? Like, I want something to read my news on a slightly larger screen. iPad mini is perfect. I want something to watch some video. You know, the iPad Air is perfect for that, right? Because then I've got this big keyboard in the way

or whatever. And so in that scenario of like, well, the iPad Pro can still exist for people that want all of that form factor. But for people that really like iPadOS, they could use it on their Mac too. Yeah, I just, I keep coming back to thinking, why do I have an iPad Pro with a magic keyboard? And the answer is I do like iPadOS. But what I really like is that I like that I have one device that I can use in a tablet mode and I can also use in a keyboard laptop-esque mode. And there's nothing stopping Apple from saying, well, why not a Mac laptop that can become a tablet instead of a tablet that can become a laptop?

And that's a good question, right? Like I have a MacBook Air and an iPad Pro now, aside from the fact that that means Apple has sold me two pieces of hardware instead of one, which is a consideration, although I would I think that I'm probably a little more of an outlier. something that was a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro-like device that could also be an iPad Pro-like device. And I could just turn them. And whether that's disconnecting the keyboard or whether that's flipping around the screen or whatever, some version of what you see in all these Windows laptops or convertibles that are out there. Would that be my primary computing device? I think it probably would be. I think it probably would be. I think that would be enough for me to say, well, now I have everything in one place and it's a laptop when I want it to be and not when I don't. Also, there's a certain level of artificiality of the fact that iPad Pro can be put in that case and look like a laptop, but it can't actually run Mac OS in that scenario. laptop, but it can't actually run Mac OS in that scenario. Only, I mean, I know why. And yet on another level, it's like, but it's a laptop. Why not? And the answer is, well, no, it looks like a laptop, but it still has to behave in accordance with its base mode of being a touchscreen. And so all these things that I can do on a Mac, I can't do on my iPad. Like I was doing a thing

this weekend where I had to collaborate with a bunch of people in discord while also using Google sheets. And I tried, and I tried to use an iPad for it. And about like five minutes in, I just went and I got my MacBook air because as much as I love my iPad pro can't, it's a bit terrible for that same screen size, but, but it just, it can't, it just is bad at it. It's just really bad at it. And that's just the lot of an iPad user is sometimes you hit that wall and it's like the shape of this thing suggests that it could do everything my laptop could do, but it can't. And I think, and this is why I say these are big picture things and this is hard decisions for people at Apple to make is people at Apple have to decide what does the laptop look like in five years or 10 years? And what does our laptop look like there? And where's the iPad going? And is the iPad high-end stuff successful enough for us to continue investing lots of money and time in paying people to develop new software for iPadOS that makes it creep toward, but never really reach MacOS? Or is there

another path? And maybe the answer is no, right? I mean, absolutely the answer could be no. It doesn't really make sense when you pencil it all out. I'm just saying it's a hard question. And when Apple does something like potentially commit to doing touchscreens on on mac os you have to ask the question like where to did you redraw the line is this where the line is now or is there no line and we need to decide where to draw the line because they could have easily drawn the line at no laptop like thingy on ipad os and they didn't do that they made the magic keyboard and they introduced, you know, pointer support. So they didn't draw the line there. So where is that line? I don't know. It's just that that's, that's what's all swimming in my head. And I think it's fascinating. And I think

it's a hard decision for people at Apple to make. And I hope they had those conversations, right? I hope it isn't a culture where they're just like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We'll put a touchscreen on the laptop. That's fine. But otherwise our laptops in 2030 are going to look exactly like they did in 2020. They'll be thinner and lighter and more powerful, but otherwise it's still going to be those two planes that you open up and that's it. That would be a shame if they weren't open to the possibilities of this. And I honestly don't know if that's the case. But that's like high pay grade level stuff at Apple. That is product vision stuff.

And I'm not going to be out here as a pundit saying I could do that job or I've got an easy answer. I probably could not do that job. It's certainly not an easy answer. But it's interesting to consider the paths that Apple has and, and maybe, maybe where they're choosing to walk. And also based on German's report, really you get the impression that this is a potentially a change,

right? That somebody said, I've reconsidered where we need to take this. And that's led to this decision. And that's interesting, right? Because that's Apple questioning its path forward for that product.

And I wonder where that will lead us. things off to the very last minute. I am 100% speaking from experience, whether it's going to the DMV, arranging my next dental checkup, don't at me, all right, I'm going to go eventually, or getting to that next home improvement project. You know, these kinds of things I'm talking about. We all have this laundry list of someday items that we want to get to. And while most of the time it will work out, the one thing in life you can't afford to wait on is setting up term coverage life insurance. You've probably seen life insurance commercials on TV and thought, I'll look into that later, because maybe it's just not something you want to think about. But this isn't something you should wait on. Choose life insurance through Ladder today.

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costs more as you age, there has never been a better time to cross it off your list than literally right now. So go to ladderlife.com upgrade today to see if you're instantly approved. That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com upgrade. One last time, go now to ladderlife.com upgrade. Our thanks to Ladder for their support of this show and RelayFM. On Thursday evening, Twitter cut API access to a variety of the most popular third-party apps, rendering them unusable. Literally can't log in, log you out, can't log in, can't do nothing. This seemed to be a targeted thing. It seemed to be that the most popular apps, typically iOS apps,

TweetBot, Twitterific, for example, there were some smaller apps that stuck around. Twitterific on the Mac had a different API key, so it was still available because it had fewer users, that kind of thing. There had been no communication from Twitter about this to anybody, including developers. There had been no communication from Twitter about this to anybody, including developers. There's been no response from any questions to Twitter from reporters, developers, or whatever. This isn't just iOS, Android, you know, basically it seems like all

of the most popular third-party apps, the ones that maybe showed up somewhere uh this was bubbling a lot over the weekend lots of people talking about it obviously the information had a report suggesting that this was an intentional decision based on conversations in the twitter slack that they were shown seemed pretty clear from that yeah and i heard from somebody who, again, it's somebody who knows somebody at Twitter, so it's secondhand. But somebody who, I think, I believe this person who sent me a note that said, yeah, I heard from a person I know at Twitter

and this is totally intentional. That's the bottom line. Yeah. I mean, and I think it was, I mean, it was obvious but was proven by the fact that the developers of Tweetbot, Tapbots, switched their API key on the backend to test if this was a targeted thing. So they switched their key to a new key.

It was very limited, but users could sign in. It got cut off again. So, so ends another part of Twitter for a large portion of our listenership, at least. Because I have no doubt that there are many people that use third-party apps that would not use the official app, which is why they were using third-party apps

in the first place. And I have no doubt that this whole situation would not kind of engender people to wanting to make that switch, right? Like that if Twitter pulled the rug from under you as a user, let alone as a developer, you as a user, you might be more angry about doing what they want you to do, right? So I expect that there are even more people now moving over to services like Mastodon than there ever was in previous, at least in our kind of

corner of the internet. Yeah, or dumping out of it entirely. I'm sure, you know, in our audience, there's definitely portions of Twitter's user base that don't seem to be going anywhere. My sports list is still, you know, going strong. I have now bookmarked it in Safari to just literally go to that page and read that list because I can't view it in Twitterific anymore on my iPad. I can on my Mac in Twitterific anymore on my iPad. I can't on my Mac, which is weird. They haven't killed the Mac API token yet. Curious, Ben Thompson wrote about

this a little bit on Stratechery today. He had the exact same thought that I had about it, which is it does feel like maybe they've given up on Twitter Blue as a revenue driver because you would think, and I is, I think this also shows you how Twitter doesn't seem to actually have any plans or anything that they've, they can think through. If anything takes five steps and, and takes more than a few days to implement, they are just not going to bother doing it because a logical thing to do with your super engaged and enthusiastic user base who loves your service so much that they use a third party app in order to get all these whizzy features. But the third party app has some issues that they don't display your ads and they don't display your algorithm, et cetera, et cetera.

You could come up with a plan that allows API access, but only for people who pay for Twitter blue. Or allows API access, but they have to include your ads in the feed. And that the way that the ads get turned off is via Twitter Blue, or reduced is via Twitter Blue. And that they have to implement an algorithmic timeline. And would all these things make the users of those apps complain because they would degrade the experience? Sure, but you could use those people

as a you know you could you make those developers jump through hoops for you potentially and uh and do that but twitter has obviously decided it's just not worth it let's just it's actually strange because it's a move that comes from a position of power it seems where it's like well we'll just kill those clients and then everybody will have to use our app or our website it's a move that comes from a position of power, it seems, where it's like, well, we'll just kill those clients and then everybody will have to use our app or our website. It's like, yeah, but a lot of them you'll lose, you know, I don't know about a lot. You will lose a bunch of them. You will lose some percentage of them because that is how they've interacted with your service from day one. Like I have used Twitter to the extent that I have over the years because I have native apps.

And that's why I used it more than I used Facebook or Instagram. It's because I had native apps on my Mac especially, but also on my iPad and iPhone. And the Twitter native app was never really any good and it's still not very good. It's got its moments. I did use it for a little while off and on. But like they're proceeding from this, I guess they think a position of power, which is like, what are they going to do?

They obviously have to keep using Twitter. So they'll just come to our app, which is, I think maybe an assumption they shouldn't make, but also the way it was handled shows just how classless this company is because they obviously don't, not only did they have the attitude of like, well, we'll break these apps and then those users will come running to us, but they didn't have the respect to the apps and the

developers, but especially to the users of saying, we're going to do a shutdown. You have a week or 21 days or whatever, or a month to shut down the API and migrate people. And here's how you do it. And you can put a message in your app and don't renew anybody's payments for your apps anymore because your apps aren't going to work after February 1st or whatever. And they could have done that. And that would have been the right thing to do. I was going to say the classy thing to do,

but it's literally it's the right thing to do. Right thing to do for your users. Right thing to do for these partners who have been partners of Twitter for often more than a decade. Just make it clear. Instead, not only did they do the wrong thing, the classless thing, but I would

say they did the cowardly thing. Also, it shows their own ineptitude because they just turned it off. They didn't tell anybody. They let everybody figure it out. And they only turned it off for certain apps and even for certain versions of certain apps. Because like I said, my Mac Twitterific still works for now, which is bizarre. So they did that badly.

They didn't communicate it. They still haven't, as we were recording, communicated anything about this. These things just broke. So you've got your users who use those apps and rely on them. It looks like the apps broke, but it was actually you, and you never explained yourself. And I'd say it's also fitting that this is a company that no longer has a communications department or anybody who's supposed to communicate for the company, because Elon Musk doesn't believe in communications departments. He just fires them

and shuts them down. So Tesla doesn't have one, SpaceX doesn't have one, right? So yeah, is it the right business move for Twitter in the long run to not have third-party clients that don't show their experience and don't show their ads. From a purely business standpoint, it is the right thing to shut them down. You either have to build a program where you are using those apps to make you money as well, which would require a lot of effort, I think, that they don't seem to be willing to have so okay i i you know it it's never ben thompson's point he's right so it's sort of never made sense they've sort of kept them around kind of out of some sense of odd one out right like twitter's

the only company yeah like this to have an api that they're still using. This is what I think is the main thing that's going on here is there is no desire or even ability at the moment inside of Twitter to maintain the API and make significant enough changes to it that Twitter the company will benefit from these users. Yeah, and that's what I'm saying is that you could do it, but it would be a real effort.

And why? Facebook doesn't let people build Facebook clones, and the people who try to do, they tend to bring the hammer down on. This is a historic thing. It has to do with the founding of Twitter and Twitter trying to become popular by leveraging their API, which absolutely happened. And apps like Twitterific that were there at the beginning, not only did they help define features of Twitter for Twitter,

but also helped give Twitter stickiness by making pleasant apps in which to use the service. That's all true. But if you're at Twitter in 2023 or arguably 2017, there really are only the two paths, which is you either make a real effort to make Twitter different in the sense that it's got this open API with a bunch of, and you make the API terms make sense for you financially, or you turn it off. Those are your choices. But the problem is, again, you announce a sunset, right? You announce that you're going to do it. So I don't have a problem with Twitter saying, look, why are we letting people view Twitter without ads? That's how we make all our money.

Totally get it. The jig is up. I really enjoyed using Twitter for more than a decade without ever seeing any ads. That was awesome for like 15 years. Great. I get that you don't want me to do that. Okay, great. I get that you don't want me to do that. Okay, fine. But the way they did it showed

how clueless and classless they are, truly. That this is the best they could do is, and cowardly, let's make it a threesome. Clueless, classless, and cowardly. They did it scattershot. They did it basically in the dead of night. They didn't tell anybody that they did it and they left their users and their longtime partners in the lurch. And I just believe that it would not have been hard to say, we're going to turn this stuff off in a week or in a month, but they chose this other path and it's their business they can make their decision but i think i think it says for all of the talk about pronouncements by elon musk and the way he has comported himself on

twitter and the wisdom the wisdom of of this guy buying this company in the first place and how he tried to get out of it all of that aside i look at this and i think this is a great indictment of how badly run the new twitter is is that they did it this way and nobody's going to stop them but i i would say that showing this utter lack of respect for your um for your users is going to bite you in the end. And I'm just going to twist the knife a little bit. And you didn't even do it right. You missed some. You missed some.

Why is Twitterific on the Mac still working? It's because you blew it. You couldn't even settle all family business competently. You blew that too. You did it scattershot because this is not even just a betrayal. It's a half-assed betrayal. So well done. That says it all about where Twitter is right now. And like everybody else who I respect, who has said this in the past that's pretty much it for me. I'm

going to look at my little sports list using their web interface but like this isn't a company that's doing anything that I'm interested in and they've shown through their actions they've shown just how badly run this company is. I didn't think some

company could be worse run than the old twitter but the new twitter is managing to do it it's this seems pretty clear that like elon musk found out that there were third-party apps on wednesday and said shut them off yeah yeah because that's what that's what modern twitter seems to be today's twitter seems to be a uh completely dysfunctional company ruled by fiat by a child king if i owned it if it was my company right if i was in the situation where i ended up having billions of dollars and decided i wanted to buy it i would shut down the api i wouldn't do it the way he did it but i would do it because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make business

sense long-term to do this. Because it's even like, alright, okay, you could charge people subscriptions, right? But as we've seen in the past, every single feature that you may ever want to add to the platform, you then have to consider the API.

This is why Apple tried to get rid of the why this was so it's why they tried to get rid of the api right group messaging they tried to get rid of it already and they couldn't do it and then they decided all right let's try and make it work out and then they tried to make it work out and now it's gone right like i it is a legacy weird thing that they never got away from. And I think like Ben Thompson mentioned, again, I mentioned Ben a lot. Shroud Hacker is great. You should read it.

Every single one of the previous CEOs should have gotten rid of it, but no one could get their act together enough to do it. And look, please don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. If you are a person who loves Twitter and loves TweetBot, I'm not saying that you shouldn't get what you want right like this is different but like as a user and as the

owner of the company but like from a realistic standpoint to run that network properly right it has to be advertising and the advertising has to be good and done well and that means it needs to be in a controlled environment where you can get the statistics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like to make Twitter as good as it can be, all of Twitter's users need to be on Twitter, which is why Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, none of these apps have third-party services.

Whereas Jason mentioned earlier, some of them used to. Like there was an Instagram API. There was a Facebook API because at web 2.0, that's what you did, right? Right. But now you don't do that anymore because it makes everything more difficult.

But as you say, the way that they did it was just ridiculous, bad, and just half-butted, I will say. I already said half-assed. You can say that. I know, but I don't want to say it. All right. Because then I have to say it the way I say it, and it sounds weird.

Right? Like as an English person. Half-arsed. Yeah, it just doesn't roll right. The, yeah. We're going back and forth now. The bottom line is that I think it makes business sense for them to do it. I agree. They should have done it long ago.

I'm not happy about that because I, like I said, I feel like I've gotten away with it for 15 years, right. Of using their service without seeing any ads. It's great. It's great. The only money I've ever given to anybody was to Twitter client developers. It's great. It's bad for Twitter.

Good for everybody else. Bad for Twitter. And you're right. If you're trying to rapidly, if you're trying to fix Twitter and rapidly develop things, the last thing you need to do is go into a hole where you're like, Hey, we did polls. Well, we can't release polls yet because we need to do a polls API and then communicate that to the developers of our third-party clients and then give them time to, in order to, it's like, no, no, no. I just want it so that I roll out polls and with the things I control, which is my app developers and my web developers.

And then we're done. Right? I get it. I totally get it. And there is a counter argument to be made, which is the other way to do it is open source media like the Fediverse and like Mastodon and all of that, where there are open clients and it's a completely open environment. And that's fine. You've got to find another business model there. And maybe the business model is people are paying for servers and clients and all of that. Maybe that's a

different ecosystem. But if I'm the CEO of Twitter, that's not my business, right? That's not my business. Dick Costolo tried at one point to kill the clients and then Dick or Jack or somebody tried to then start a project where they were going to support sort of like an idea of a federated social media. But the bottom line is that, yes, Twitterific created so much value for Twitter, right down to the bluebird and the word tweet. All of that is true. And the clients popularized the service. All of that is true. All of that is true. But if you're standing at Twitter in 2023, you know, the right business decision is to say, well, that's all well and good, but I need to make money and the clients don't make any sense in any business sense. And I think it's true. So kill them. But to do it like this, I mean, to do it like this shows that they're either incompetently managed or realize that this is going to be a problem. Yeah, or realize this is going to be a problem, like I said, cowardly.

And so they just want to like not say anything and kind of whistle as they walk away from the crime scene instead of just sort of like standing up and taking it and saying what we've said here, which is it doesn't make a business sense. We appreciate all the contributions these people have made. Here's what our users who are using those apps should do in order to migrate to our apps and website. January 30th, February

1st, whatever, is the last day. Goodbye. But they can't even do that. So not necessarily the wrong business decision, but just done poorly and in the wrong way. Craig Hockenberry of developer to terrific,

the icon factory just wrote a beautiful blog post and which I really encourage people go and read. It has an interesting ending to me where, you know, Craig is interested in what's going on now in the kind of federated social media space and says he has some ideas. And, you know, I really hope this is like a Phoenix-like moment.

Like Twitterific was so, like, it's hard to explain unless you were there at the time, right? But it built Twitter. It built it. Like, without it, it wouldn't be the same. And it's not even just the words and the contributions like that. It was just like, it made it a beautiful, wonderful, usable thing. And I'm really interested to see if Lightning can strike twice here, you know? And I hope it does for them, them because they a great bunch of people who

deserve it but obviously you know the the the app of the moment is ivory right from tap bots everyone's excited about ivory uh if you can get on the beta and i'm sure that there'll be a shipping version of ivory faster now than there was going to be otherwise um so i guess they're the apps to look out for at the moment. It's what it seems for people that are using Mastodon, although it seems like something from the Icon Factory is probably sometime away. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, they all seem kind of burned out,

but I will say that Craig and Ged and Sean from Icon Factory, factory sean heber who did most of the i think is the primary developer on twitterific for quite a while now they're all on mastodon right and they have and as craig's post says they have been and obviously the tap bots people are also on mastodon and and paul is over there talking about ivory and a lot of us are trying to it's great it's great app And Paul is over there talking about ivory and a lot of us are trying to, it's great. It's a great app. So I wonder, and Craig's post is interesting in that what Craig's not doing, it seems to me, is hinting saying, well, we've got this code base. Is there a product we can make with it since Twitterific is goingastodon, but let's think about it more broadly. And he mentioned federated social media and he mentioned microblog by name, for example, which is Manton Reese's

Fediverse-compatible microblogging environment. It's cool. And that strikes me as being Icon Factory saying, yeah, we're looking at this stuff. But one, we're kind of burned out because they've been fighting these battles with Twitter for a long time. Yeah. And two, we want to do it right. And we want to not rush in. And he's not casting shade on anyone i think paul haddad is is very smartly

saying we're just gonna we're gonna do this ivory thing and we're gonna make it happen and we're gonna give people a place to go that's nice and it is nice and they had started to do it before this yeah i think i think icon factory is sort of saying after this difficult time, we're going to take the time to pause and consider what we would do. And I think that's a great approach too. That when they come out with something, you know, TapBots is going to get the first mover advantage here.

I mean, they're not the first movers, but they're the first very serious developer, app developer company to take a very serious product and build a version of it essentially on mastodon i know there are lots of mastodon apps out there i think twitterific may benefit or icon factory may benefit from taking the twitterific source code and thinking about it a bit more and trying to do something different because honestly that's how they were successful on twitter back in the day was thinking those deep thoughts about

what Twitter should be and how it should work. And a lot of the things that are in the Twitter product are because Icon Factory had to spend time thinking about the Twitterific product. And a lot of those decisions they made ended up influencing the Twitter product. So I'm interested in the idea that they're going to use their brains to sort of think what does a federated decentralized social media posting and reading app look like. And great. I'd love, I'd love to see it because Twitterific was in my dock for, of my iPhone and my iPad for more than a decade and it's not there anymore and that's sad. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Upgrade Plus.

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at getupgradeplus.com Let's finish out today's episode of some Ask Upgrade. Patrick asks if you were Tim Cook and you could add either a touchscreen or a cell modem to the next generation MacBook Pro

which would you choose because you think it would sell more computers? Wow. What a question. To sell more computers. That's the specific part. I'll say for me, touchscreen all day. I think a touchscreen

is easy to market. How do you market? Do you want to use what most people call wi-fi but is actually set like it's too complicated right like i feel like it's not a great ad i think a great ad is you know someone's using their mac and just reach out and touch it and scroll like i think enough people go oh i want that then like oh hey i'm outside and i can sign up for another data plan how awesome I agree with you although I think that both of them will probably sell a similar number of

computers but yes it's also a much it's just a much clearer thing to market and you can almost see the ad right that it's just like somebody a finger reaches out and touches the screen and a thing happens and you know popular music plays and you could see it. You know what that's like. I got a free ad for you, Apple, right? Two people sitting next to each other. One of them reaches out to touch it. Someone goes, no, don't do it.

And then they do it and it scrolls, right? Like, oh, you know, like, yeah, I've seen that in my life so many times. Brant asks, if you could wave your magic wand over the MacBook lineup and bring either cellular connectivity or face ID to the entire line, which would you choose? Now, Brantz wants to know just which would we choose? Yeah, cellular because Touch ID is fine. And cellular is a great feature that, although we just said, may not sell as many computers as a touchscreen, I think it's a very great and convenient feature.

And I know you can tether, but you know what? I don't like tethering. It's not always reliable. It's kind of inconvenient. It drains the battery of the device that you are tethering to. I think that there's real value in being able to pay that upgrade to your cell provider and get data wherever you go with your laptop. And Face ID, while nice and i would like to see it uh we have touch id and on like this is a macbook question every macbook has a keyboard with a touch id sensor on it it's that's good enough like it's on a on a display on an imac something like that face id would be nice but um is it necessary on a MacBook I don't

think it is we're in agreement on that one like I would like tethering for that reason like it's wild to me like I'm going to use the battery of two devices so I can get an internet connection like just that just so inefficient frustrating I would prefer that of a face id because as you say especially on a laptop touch id is really easy really easy it is it is it's there on all of them and it works great right it's it's it's different if you're like i am sitting at a desk here where i've disassembled the keyboard and made a little touch id thingy like it would be great if the the the screen could just go oh it's jason and that would be fine. But on a laptop, I'm never like, oh, no, I must move my finger to... It would be nice to have, but it's not like I would take cellular over it any day.

Christian asks, what was your favorite or most listened to album from 2022? Being Funny in a Foreign Language by the the 1975 it turns out that if the 1975 release an album in a year that's pretty much going to be the album i listen to the most that's what i've learned they're my favorite band of the moment and they have been my favorite band of the moment since i discovered them whenever that was five years ago so yeah yeah definitely the 1975 very good album mine is surrender by maggie rogers Very good album. Mine is Surrender by Maggie Rogers. Also a good album. Similarly, if Maggie Rogers releases an album,

it's going to be my album of the year. I think she is incredible. Her body of work across two albums is about as good as, for me, you could ever find a singer-songwriter. The opening song, Overdrive, on her album Surrender, is legitimately one of my favorite songs of all time it is a if you just listen to that one song if it doesn't blow you away like i'm surprised uh

you know then you can just stop there but there's another song horses where sometimes you know i noticed somewhere or sometimes just listen to the album horses comes on makes me cry completely random it's just a beautiful song she has just one of the greatest voices uh yeah maybe ever so i don't love i love her she's a um i loved her album heard it in a past life yeah um i don't like surrender as much as heard in the past life i think that's my i think that's my issue with it more than anything else but it's a good album and she's a great artist and i love that she is a she's like a folk singer who also understands like modern lots of modern music techniques and styles and it's a great i know we've talked about her before it's just a fun fusion of those things that it's like

what if somebody with real strong folk impulses was making modern music in 2022, which is Maggie Rogers. You've just described Maggie Rogers, and she's great. She has this talent, which I feel like she can sing while she's breathing in and out. Because sometimes she just continues making different noises for a really long time in a way that does not feel like it is humanly possible. And so Maggie Rogers is awesome. Maybe she's a robot.

Jason wants to know, I don't know if this is you, you can tell me, and I assume this is directed at me. Why have you gone from HomePod minis to a Sonos system? So, clarification, I had HomePods rather than HomePod minis. But I can give you a Sonos system. So clarification, I had HomePods rather than HomePod minis. But I can give you a bunch of reasons. So the Sonos app is awesome.

The fact that you can sign in to multiple streaming services from multiple people and have it all in one view, all accessible to everyone in that house is fantastic. Right? So like Adina has a very good curated like favorite list on her Spotify that i really like

there is literally no way for her to share that to me on apple music and stay up to date but at home i can just choose that and so on as an asanas app it is so easy to group and ungroup speakers on an ad hoc basis inside of the app like if maybe i want to turn it off upstairs i want to turn on these two downstairs or i want to change it. Same with the audio levels. You can control them all independently or as a group. It's so much easier to control music in general and where it's playing

rather than using the very clunky controls that are built into iOS to do this. Like the control center thing is a nightmare. What I like is that this is Sonos' entire business. Like this is all they do. So they have to put the best effort into making this overall experience and hardware the best it can be.

Then they have options with their devices. They have devices with line-in support. So I have a device where, like a Sonos 5, I've plugged my turntable into it. I can put records on it and play that music in my entire home. Apple don't have that. They have battery-powered options options if you want that they have soundbar options it goes on and on and on like i just for me for what i want with music and even i think now television audio sonos is the right call that's why okay i i use sonos speakers in my office and i like it i use home pods in my living room

and i like them too yeah i'm not as enamored with sonos's app as you are mostly again that's because i do a lot of music listening on my mac and the sonos app on the mac yeah it's not that great it's i mean i like that it exists but like i don't really manage my music on my mac well and i also listen i have an itunes library that includes my music and it includes um apple music stuff and they're intermixed in the music app uh and sonos app doesn't really have that experience it's it's yeah so it's it's it's fine what i have learned is that um that i think it's more stable when i do it from the mac well no actually no the stability is about the same um using sonos and using the music app um the part part that surprised me is that i i had a trial for spotify

which i no longer have um and spotify's app has the sonos protocol built into it so it just directly connects to the sonos speakers and tells them to stream from spotify and that was way more reliable than air playing from my mac but i also didn't like the spotify app on my mac so here we are yeah i think that's called spotify connect yeah i think sonos built in spotify's system to allow that to work. It's basically Chromecast for audio. And it's basically like AirPlay 2, right? If you do AirPlay 2 right, what you do is you say to the HomePod or other speaker,

go play this audio file and it does the work and your device is controlling it, but not doing all of that work. But strangely, not as reliable. Sonos is AirPlay 2, but yeah, who knows? Sonos is as reliable doing AirPlay 2 as reliable sonos is airplay too but yeah who knows sonos is as reliable doing airplay too as as the music app is reliable doing airplay too which is

kind of reliable sometimes exactly and dr arden asks would you ever attend ces and i will amend this to be have you as well what mike would you ever attend ces yes just to have done it i don't want to go and report on it but it just seems like a weird thing to do once but that's it friends i got a little story for you it's very little i've been to ces many times when it was not uh with Macworld Expo, they would sometimes send me. As I rose in the company at IDG, they wanted me there, that Macworld and PC World did stuff together, how we had a trailer on the parking lot and we'd do coverage and it was a whole thing.

I hate CES. I hate it. I hate it. I don't really like Las Vegas and a lot of the things that appeal about Las Vegas are things that don't appeal to me. And if you love Las Vegas, great. I have friends who love Las Vegas. It doesn't really appeal to me. I don't really like it. I think it's kind of gross. Las Vegas, when it's entirely full of tech industry people and hangers

on and marginally related to tech industry, but they come to CES because they've got a booth in the giant airplane hangar warehouse number five on the giant campus. It's unwalkable. You can't see it all. It takes days to walk through it all, all these things. So that Vegas is even worse than the Vegas I don't already like. So there's that. You can't, as a person, unless you have a very specific area of specialization, you can't really cover CES. You have to very much focus because it's enormous. So from a journalism standpoint, it's not great. CES are a joke because they don't ever come true. And there's a lot of ploys and a lot of, a lot of like showbiz nonsense that doesn't go anywhere and do anything. So on that level, it's kind of a waste of time too. So suffice to say, I don't like CES. Would I ever attend CES? Let me put it this way. There was a period, a low period in my, in my final year at IDG

where I decided I was going to leave and i quit and they asked me uh where are you going and i said nowhere i just can't work here anymore which is not what you want to hear as a supervisor of somebody who's quitting because it's like oh no what's happened and they're like please please please stay please please please stay and i had basically two conditions under which i would stay because they're like we're new management We're going to do things different. We're going to turn this around friends. They didn't turn it around. Um, the person who said this to me was, was fired. Uh, but I was like, okay, I was a sucker. I should have quit. I should have said no, but I said, yes, my two, my two things that I said was one, uh, if we're going to go through another,

cause we were about to lay a bunch of people off. And I said, okay, one, if we go through another big layoff like this down the road, please just lay me off. Because I don't want to, I'm not going to go through that again. And that's what they did. Thank you very much, people who were remaining after you got rid of everybody. My second argument about what I would have to do if I was going to be convinced to stay was don't send me to ces literally number two was don't send me to ces and you know what we had a whole they agreed to it and then like a week later they're like what do you mean he somebody said what do you mean jason's

not going to ces and they came back to me and they said about the CES thing. And I'm like, guys, I told you no CES. And in the end, what we negotiated was I went to CES for one day. I flew in in the morning. I flew out in the evening. I was there for a single day. Didn't sleep in Vegas. Just did whatever stupid stuff they wanted me to do. So would I ever attend CES?

No, no. You would have to pay me. you would have to pay me you have to pay me a lot of money i guess is what i'm saying everybody's got a price uh if you paid me a lot of money but willingly to just go to ces to do my job no no no no no no i hate it it's terrible if you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, you can use question mark ask upgrade in the RelayFM members discord, or you can send in some feedback for us. Go to upgradefeedback.com or click the link in your show notes, and you can fill in the feedback there, follow up,

and also you'll ask upgrade questions. Thank you to everybody that has done that. If you want to find us online, go to sixcolors.com for Jason Snell. Jason also hosts many shows here on Relay FM and at The Incomparable. I am also

hosting many podcasts here at Relay FM, and you can find products that I make along with CGP Grey at cortexmerch.com. Thank you to Ladder and Rocket Money for their support of this week's episode. And thank you for listening. Also, thank you to our members

who listen to us on Upgrade Plus. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Have fun at CES, Mike.