Upgrade - 454: The Home Home

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

This week we're pondering future directions for watchOS complications and iOS Control Center, reacting to extremely early reports about future iPhone displays, and digesting Apple's slow build of alternative manufacturing capacities outside of China.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 454 today's show is brought to you by express vpn and uni pizza ovens my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snow hi jason hi mike how are you i'm very good. How are you? Happy Easter. Yeah, sure. Hi. I went to a baseball game yesterday. Oh, was there chocolate involved in the baseball game? I had some marshmallow peeps.

No, there was no chocolate at the baseball game for me. I did have some marshmallow peeps yesterday, so that was great. A tradition like no other. I don't think I've ever had a peep. Have you had a marshmallow? Yep. It's like that okay with with a little bit of like uh i don't know sugar sprinkles on top it's basically just which is unnecessary but that's what it is that's all it is marshmallow peeps they're marshmallows

i have a snow talk question for you to start off this week's episode. It's about marshmallows? No, it's not. It's about audio logos. Marley's asks, I personally really like the Apple TV Plus thunk, but the THX and HBO ones are absolute classics. What's your favorite? By thunk, does Marley's mean the C chord that's the startup sound for every Mac and then also is the startup sound for Apple TV Plus. I assume.

Yep. Audio logos. THX is that kind of thing. And then HBO is like. Yeah, exactly. I have two. Actually, what I found out was what the things that i like the most are uh sitcom tags from production companies i enjoy those i thought of a couple of classics

uh the simpsons always ends with uh the gracie films which i think think is, is that, is that James L. Brooks? It's the Gracie films thing. So it's do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do followed by the 20th Century Fox logo. So I always think about that one, the Gracie one. And, and Sit Ubu Sit Good Dog,

which was the Gary David Goldberg title card for Family Ties begin back in the day. That was very memorable. A dog. Actually, his, I think, dead dog. And he had a picture of his dead dog. He named Ubu Productions was named after his dog.

So those are classics. And there are some modern ones that I suppose are like that too. And I'll throw in a runner-up for um back in the 90s 2000s the cnn's bumper was uh james earl jones saying this is cnn and there's nothing like darth vader to snap you out of it like whoa okay darth vader i get it it's cnn i get it those are classics what about you you have anything i mean the, the HBO one is a classic to me because like so many of my favorite shows then start, you know, like after that sound.

So I think that one is a classic of mine, I think. If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question of your own, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send it in and we may help open a future episode of upgrade got quite a bit of follow-up today jason oh a big chunk of it is in regards to car play and general motors so you wrote a blog post sometimes will happen when you you you know we record an episode and you're like

fired up about a topic i talked about it a lot and realized i hadn't written a word about it. And sometimes I had that moment where I think to myself, if I wasn't a podcast listener and only read Jason's writing, did I just skip over this entire topic by only talking about it on podcasts? And the answer sometimes is yes. And so I try to make sure

that those kind of get in sync. So I did, I wrote what was going to be a brief link to that verge story that basically says everybody's mad about general motors saying they're going to drop car play and it uh did not turn into a brief link it i was going to do the like look i'm tired i'm not going to rant about it now and then i proceeded to rant about it and i was like okay well i guess i did that again uh so we got a lot of out there, but we also had some stuff coming in from listeners. So Matt wrote in and says,

I have a Polestar 2, which features an Android automotive. They added CarPlay last summer. I prefer the built-in Google Maps because it's more EV-friendly, but use CarPlay for everything else. There are so few apps for automotive, Chrome isn't even available. And I found that interesting polestar seemed to be doing it right they got all of it a little bit of all of it in polestar yeah i got a a nice listener letter from uh don who said something very similar which is

android automotive operating system has deep integration with car systems it's much more than just nav and entertainment it's got the climate control and other car stuff. It's that low-level stuff. We receive regular over-the-air system updates, and it brings more stability. Navigation is excellent. And I'm sitting here reading this thinking, okay, this person really loves their Android automotive. But Don says the kicker is CarPlay is always available as an app. And frankly, it's a more robust implementation of CarPlay than in our Chevy Bolt. So the point here is Google certainly has an API

for CarPlay to be part of Android Auto Automotive. The decision to not include it is GM's. And I think that's great at getting at the point here, which is there's nothing that precludes GM from also offering people who have an iPhone the opportunity to look at some of their stuff through CarPlay while offering a full-featured Android automotive experience. They just don't want to. So I thought that was a great bit of feedback from our listeners who have the Android automotive experience with CarPlay, right? Yeah. And it's competition, right?

That, that way, uh, if GM is really lagging, it's good for the user. If you're like, well, I got a brand new iPhone with brand new software and it's got this great feature and it's better than what's on my car.

So I'm going to use that. Uh, and GM doesn't want to do that, right? Like they don't want to risk that there's going to be things outside of their control, uh, which is, is infuriating. A friend of the show, Sam Edelsamid, wrote in with a bunch of information about, well, kind of follow up on what we were talking about.

Sam, who is a, I would say an expert on cars and technology and how these two things kind of intersect. And he was on the verticals last year. So he says, in contrast, I mentioned there was an article that I found which had a list of car makers that were going to be integrating with the new CarPlay. Sam says that no automaker themselves has publicly committed to using the new CarPlay.

That list came from Apple. So I don't know. I feel in the way that sam was writing in was like this is wrong and it's like well it's only i feel like it's only half wrong right like apple's saying it so it's not like it's not being said but just the car companies aren't committing to it but apple was saying that there's a list of like 14 or 17 companies that will have the new carplay so unless they know unless they think they know something that's not going to happen, I don't know what, what's going to happen there. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the point is that was an announcement made last June. Have the car makers changed their minds? We wouldn't know. I imagined at the time that what that was is we're going to tell you that these car makers support us, but we're going to let them announce their new cars that support this

feature. And as Sam points out, that hasn't happened. So you're ending up in this limbo state, which is sort of like, are they going to still or not? And we don't know. So that's all we can tell. Maybe there'll be an announcement at WWDC about it. Who knows?

Because the other part of it is maybe Apple hasn't wanted anyone to talk about it yet because they want to show it off properly when they're ready too, so who knows? Maybe so. Sam also says, the system in these vehicles, so the GM vehicles, is Android and therefore the Play Store is present, which means any Android developer

can submit apps that fall into the vehicle-appropriate categories like media streaming and messaging and they can appear in the Play Store on GM EVs. So, you know, like CarPlay,play in a way you can have an application that can be kind of rubber stamped to be used in that environment and android auto is the same you have to specifically like with carplay you have to specifically have it be flagged as being approved for automotive use. And I don't know if it's a rubber stamp or if there's actually some more attention paid to, because there's some liability,

I think if like, if, if something that just plays video, like it's not legal. So I think that there is some stuff that they have to probably check before they allow it. I don't know the details. I don't know if they're just doing an automated scan or if somebody has to actually approve those or what. And this is good to know. I will point out though that first off, it does actually have to be properly tagged as being something for automotive use. So even if the app you use on your iPhone

has an Android equivalent, is it in Android Automotive? And then secondly, is the experience of using that app comparable to using it in CarPlay or is it not? It's sort of an up in the air thing. And then I would anticipate, and this is just me inventing something, but based on observations, I would also anticipate, I wonder if GM will exert a level of authority over what is available to be installed on their cars, right? Because that's the other, the way they're acting with something like saying, oh, no CarPlay, we're not going to allow that. I don't know if there's anything to stop them from saying, we're only going to let certain apps be installed on our cars, right? From the Play Store.

I don't know. I don't know if they're able to control the Play Store experience, right? I don't think phones can do this unless there's something about the phone that doesn't support it. Yeah, but cars, right? I just don't know if they can blacklist apps on Android Automotive. I don't know. So on the android developer site i

found your app is reviewed for compliance with driver distraction guidelines and the technical quality criteria described in these sections so it's got a bunch of lists the detailed review process might take more time than you're accustomed to when submitting phone and tablet apps until your app or update is approved it's's not published. So unlike, just to confirm what we thought, kind of like CarPlay and unlike regular app review on Android, if you want to be able to use the requirements and you want to use the entitlements that are available and the features that are available to have your app in the car,

it does go through an additional approval process to make sure that it's, as you say, not like, hey, here's a video app to watch videos when you're driving. While you're driving, exactly. It's not going to happen. Yeah, yeah. So the fact that, and I'm really grateful to Sam for sending in this feedback, the fact that, in theory, Android apps that have essentially would display like Android auto apps, but they're running on the Android automotive platform and in the play store and all that. That's great. It depends on

GM's implementation. And then it doesn't actually change my argument in a lot of ways, because while you might rely on an app that has an Android equivalent that is flagged properly and allowed on GM's hardware, and therefore you can put it on the GM hardware platform. Like that's a lot of steps, but it's going to happen for a lot of stuff. And that's great. But my larger point was also like, I certainly use at least with Overcast,

the podcast player, one app that will never be on Android. And so for me, CarPlay means I can have my podcast app on my car. And this decision means I can't. And that's the carmaker saying you need to change everything about how you live your life in order to be compatible with our car. And like, that's a power move. And, and I'm, I'm completely open to the idea that while Apple talks about 79% of people saying CarPlay has to be on their new car that they buy of, of new car buyers. I'm, I'm also open to the idea that, that General Motors looks at that and goes, it's soft. It's soft. In the end, if they want to buy our car, they're not going to care. We're going to show that we have an equivalent infotainment system. It'll be good enough. But will it be good enough? I don't know. That's like, I look at this and I think as we saw from our previous comment, commenters about people who have Android automotive cars, like they could also just say, look, if you want to use overcast, sure.

Use CarPlay for that. And they're like, no, no, we don't want anything on our system from your iPhone. And that, that's the part that infuriates me. So we'll see how it plays out, right? Like either it'll matter or it won't, right? In the end, either people will be like, I don't like this. I'm going to avoid GM cars because of this. And the GM sales are going to be a problem.

And their salespeople are going to be like, this lack of car play is killing us. Or it won't matter, right? And those of us who do care will just have to try and avoid the cars that don't have carplay, which is what's happening now, right? I heard from a lot of people who are like, I'm never going back to a car without carplay. It's like, I get it. And that's potentially a problem for GM if it turns out that people are. At the end of this, I didn't write this. I haven't said this anywhere.

But I think in the end, what my point really is, if I want to boil it down, is what are people more loyal to? The software running in their car or the iPhone in their pocket? What are they more loyal to? And I think the only person who believes they're more loyal to the software in their car is the car maker i don't even know if it's the software part either as well right like i think that people like car brands but i think for the average consumer is there that much differentiation between car a and car b like if you want to get like a hatchback or whatever i think unless you're really into cars that you just drive a bunch to just find one that you like.

Like I don't, I don't know. I mean, I'm not a car person, but like, I don't know if the typical car buyer has an affinity towards a brand, like a strong one. Do you,

do you think that's the case? I think it varies. Yeah. I think it varies. I think it varies. I think most people know, right? Yeah. Because I feel like that's where you're going to end up in a problem, right? I wanted to give a kind of a clarification of terms, which I found helpful.

So about Android Automotive. So Android Auto is CarPlay. So it is a platform that runs on your phone and extends to the car. Exactly. Android Automotive is effectively Android, the open source project. So what Android, the open source project, is to phones,

Automotive is to cars. It is an operating system. The car is the phone, right? It's running on the car, not projected into the cars. Like, it is a operating system. The car is the phone, right? It's running on the car, not projected into the car. It's Android running on the car. But like Android is for a phone, you can use Android Automotive

and have no Google stuff on it, no Play Store or anything. That is Google Automotive Services, which is a different layer on top which is like google play services for a fun so right and that's and it allows the automakers to uh use the basis of android automotive and tie it into their systems and all that this was the question about like next gen carplay is what's apple doing with next gen carPlay? Is that a version of iOS that's running on the car all the time? And when I talked to Sam last summer about it, he said, I can't see it. He's like, I

really can't see that because what you have to do is build a car real-time operating system. And is Apple really going to do that? But that's what Android Automotive is, right? Android has been set up and Google has set it up to say, yeah, we want to be the basis for your car OS, which is fine, right? Like, that's cool because if you're GM or Polestar or whoever, you're like, well, this is good. We don't have to build our own operating system and we get an app platform with it. And that's nice. And then we can put CarPlay and Android Auto on top of it. So we've got our fundamental, like in the car stuff, and then the things people can project from their phones that they carry around with them. You know, it's just the GM chose to not

make that last step and say, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to, we're going to close that door. And what, you know, what I've realized in all their statements is they, they keep, it's such deflection. I mean, in my piece on sex colors, I basically said they're lying, right? It's spin, it's lies. What they keep saying is, well, we have to do it because of this and this, but they don't have to do it. They're using those as excuses. They've chosen a platform that fundamentally can allow projection as well as allowing everything that they want. They just don't want projection because what are they afraid of? They're afraid of losing control of their platform

and letting people make choices that aren't the choices that GM wants to make. And I would argue that the navigation part of it that GM is so hot on, like, well, we're going to have self-driving cars or driver assist, and we need to know where you're going, so you need to use our navigation.

It's like, well, that's the carrot, right? That's the reason that you're going. So you need to use our navigation. It's like, well, that's the carrot, right? That's the reason that you, you are going to motivate people to use the in-car navigation system is that if you want to use all the advanced features of the car, you got to use the in-car navigation system. That's fine. But the way they're acting is more that they're just fearful. Like, and it leads me to think that the truth is not about that at all. The truth of it is they want to limit what's on the car so that you have to use the services that they approve and probably have to pay them or the services have to pay them for access to GM cars. I think that's really what's going on here in the end is that is it it's not this sham about uh navigation the truth is it's about like what other things are on your phone and the answer is well it's like

music and podcasts and and and they're like well yeah they don't want that they they want you to pay for their connectivity and pay for you know maybe they only have spotify on there and they've cut a deal with spotify or they dream of cutting a deal with Spotify to allow Spotify to be pre-installed on their cars and they get a cut for that. Like, and I think that that's their big strategy is we're going to use the exclusivity of our platform as a lever to pull money out of our customers after they buy the car, either directly or indirectly. I think that's what's going on, despite everything they say. Because everything they say makes no sense. None of GM's justifications for this move hold water. That's why I say it. They're lies.

They are lying. They are lying because having Apple Maps on your phone doesn't preclude their navigation system from being required for using their features. It doesn't. But they say it does. Why is that? It's because they're lying because they have a grander strategy at work, which involves taking complete control over the software platform of their cars and not letting anyone else on board. Good luck. software platform of their cars and not letting anyone else on board. Good luck. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Using a streaming service like Netflix without using ExpressVPN is like buying tickets to your favorite artist but only being allowed to watch the opening act. The opening act might be great, but there's more available to you. If you didn't know this, some streaming services, they have different content libraries available for different countries. So there are tons of shows available in other countries that you're not seeing. Like, for example, on Netflix in the UK, there is all of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

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currently running timer interface, if you set a 15-minute timer or whatever, to actually see it running all the time. This sounds a lot like the use of the Dynamic Island. Maybe a revamped watch UI could center around Dynamic Island concepts for the watch face. Curious to hear if that gives you any additional thoughts. It's live activities,

right? Can they do something? Live activities watch face? Yeah. Maybe? Kind of like the Sirii watch face i always feel like that was something that apple didn't fully express right which was a frustration for me i was actually a fan of the siri watch face what i liked about the siri watch face was it made the apple watch feel like a computer like it is because it felt like it was surfacing things for me which were relevant at a certain time right so like if i had an appointment coming up it would show me that

and so like you know complications are great and all but they're very static in a way like this is i think we were talking about this like more you know kind of more dynamic complications I think we were talking about this, like more, you know, kind of more dynamic complications. Like for example, I don't,

I have like the fantastic L complication on my watch and, but I only really need it a few hours a day. Like when I've got appointments going on, like in the evening, like when it's, you know, I'm not going to have anything for another, say 12 hours or whatever. I don't need that there anymore.

That complication. It's still like so much of watch os feels like it's stuck in this idea of like being a watch the lack of dynamism in the individual so like yeah you can create a complication that's got that's dynamic but the complication slot itself isn't dynamic the complication slot is whatever is in it and we've seen like you know widget smith experiment or watch smsmith experiments with this, the idea that the data that goes in your complications changes depending on context. You can do shortcuts that do things like change your, which face is open at a particular time.

That's clever. But what would really be clever is Apple thinking about this from the top down and saying how do we solve this problem on a level that isn't sort of like a hack but like is is is built into the the the watch because what i so and what i mean by that is imagine something like watch smith which for people who haven't used it, has a little clock. And you basically can draw out different segments of the clock and say, show this data here and show this data here. And it's very clever because it means like during the workday, it shows this kind of data in its complication slot. And the rest of the time it shows this other kind of data in the complication slot. Okay, great.

it shows this other kind of data and the complications. Okay, great. So if you're Apple, you're like, do we really want people to do that? To have this clock? We appreciate, I'm sure, this theoretical Apple person,

what David Smith has done with Watchsmith, but is that the UI we want to give people? Or we're Apple. We can do better than that. We're going to do... We're going to reconceive it. Siri intelligence. And that's...

Well, so what I was thinking is, we're talking about the live activities in the dynamic island and things like that. Like I could see Apple saying, what we're going to do is we're going to create a dynamic complication that has a base complication mode that you select, but that in certain contexts,

it's replaced by the dynamic complication. And if there's a series of them, you can swipe between them. And like, I'm making this up off the top of my head, but you can see Apple doing something like that, which is, oh, no, no, no, we're not going to have you say from nine to five, show this and then otherwise show that. That's not what we're going to do. Instead, we're going to create a developer API and we're going to build a new class of complication and it's going to have a base state and then the developers will be able to insert theirs contextually based on certain data that'll be from their apps pushed into the same complication spot on this one watch face that we're enabling it for, right? That sounds much more like how Apple approaches this. I'm not saying it's the right

decision. I'm saying that that sounds like something Apple might do. And they've already got the live activity concept and the dynamic island concept. So taking that dynamism and existing APIs basically and saying, okay, here's a dynamic complication spot, which is not necessarily what I want, which is, can I just, you know, but, but it might have the same effect, which is I leave that dynamic complication spot open. And when I am running a timer, the timer shows up in it, right? Like, okay, that is actually kind of, you're giving me what I want, but not exactly the way that I wanted it. I told you I wanted it. And you know, that's not, that's not wrong. That's right. right like you you can tell a tell an artist draw you know i want uh this person to be blue and this person to be green and have an

angry expression like or you say just draw me the picture and here's what the picture is and micromanaging them you're destroying like the thing that makes them the artist and you not the artist and this in user interface this is a similar kind of thing where it's like, I just want to be able to have this timer go in this slot sometimes. And Apple's like, yeah, but what you really want is and the sort of step back and then build the whole API around it.

So I think it's an interesting idea. So you have also experienced Friday Night Baseball. So we were talking on a previous episode that the radio, the local radio broadcast could now be piped into Friday Night Baseball. So we were talking on a previous episode that the local radio broadcast could now be piped into Friday Night Baseball. And the season has begun. The balls have been rolled out from the gates and we're off to go off with the races.

They open the gates. How was your experience with this? I assume you... Did you do this as a tester? Is this what you want from Friday Night Baseball to listen to the local announcers? I mean, if it's my local team, I probably would. So there's the two biggest complaints about Friday Night Baseball.

One is you got to be now an Apple TV. It used to be you had to use Apple TV to watch the games. And this year it's turned into you have to pay for Apple TV Plus to watch the games, right? The number two complaint, though, is Plus to watch the games, right? The number two complaint though is who are these announcers, right? Because so many fans are fans of a local team. They are living with their local announcers day in, day out for the whole summer. 162 games of baseball. It's a lot of baseball. You're used to those people. And then you get a national broadcast and they're not your announcers. They're other announcers who cover lots of different teams and move from place to place.

And I hear from a lot of people who are like, oh, those announcers are so bad. It's like, you know, are they? Are they especially bad? I think they aren't personally. I think it's that you expect your local announcers, bottom line. It's not like, yes, they're not necessarily great, but I think the state of national baseball announcing is not particularly great in general. So anyway, leaving that aside, now you have this feature where you can switch over just as you could already on MLB TV, their TV package, the MLB app let you switch to other audio and you could watch, you actually

watch your home team's TV and then switch it to your home team's radio for the audio, which is kind of funny. But here with Apple, what they're doing is exactly what they're doing with MLS actually, which is they're letting you overlay the national broadcasters with your local radio. So on Friday, it was the first Friday night baseball and I tried it out. There was a Cubs Rangers game. The Rangers strangely are the one team that does not offer road radio. I don't know why, but the Cubs radio was available and I was able to flip over. And then in the second game, it was Atlanta and the Padres. And you could choose from the Atlanta or San Diego radio broadcast.

They're synced perfectly. I think what's going on is that Apple is actually taking a feed of just the announcers and then underlaying their, um, their stadium audio so that the crack of the bat is actually coming from their stadium audio and sounds and is perfectly aligned with the video. But, um, it, it may be that it may not, I'm not a hundred percent sure on that, but whatever it is, it's not out of sync or weird. And they fade it out at the end of the inning before they go to the commercial of sync or weird and they fade it out at the end of the inning before they go to the commercial break on the radio they fade it out so you you know if the tv stays a little longer you got the stadium noise in the background sort of like with silence and

then it goes to their local or it goes to their tv ads um and then it comes back the same thing if it needs to fade it in it's really really really well done so if people were wondering uh it means that if you want to experience your local broadcasters for on a friday night baseball game you will still get the very good looking picture that apple is providing and you can have your local audio and it sounds good so i'm intrigued about this from a technical perspective. Like, you said there's no delay. No delay. So how are they managing that?

Right. Well, I, so my theory, and I would love, I should probably ask somebody at Apple. Maybe they can actually walk me through it. Or if someone knows, please write to us and let us know. But like, how are they managing that? My guess is that they are taking the audio out of the radio booth at the stadium.

That there is a feed that's coming out of the stadium of the audio for the home and away radio. And that they are taking that into their, consuming that and putting it into their tv truck um so it's as if they've got three different sets of announcers that's my guess so i guess so my my question is then because i again i don't know enough about this these announcers they're at the stadium right yeah okay so they're just you wreck okay see i don't know why for some reason i was imagining they might not be there i don't know why i would have thought that well this is well this is the funny thing though um they're not always all there oh um and the angels i think are not even sending their their announcers around they're they're doing it all right see that's what i don't understand then

like if they're not there because if they're there it's oh, it's just like having any announcers. So the other option here is that MLB. So MLB TV, like I said, also does this. So the other possibility is that there is a there is a place somewhere where they are taking the feed from Apple and they're taking the feed from the TV or from the radio stuff that's coming in and they're mixing it somewhere. And that, and then that is what's going out that they're almost like overlaying the other two audio streams and then sending it on to the CDN. And then they're in that case,

they're using major league baseballs infrastructure that they've already built up for MLB TV. And they're essentially just sort of like making it, you know, having it be apple and then the other two and then it's going out and maybe that's what this is is maybe they're really using the existing mlb tv infrastructure for this um what's what what impresses me is that it is synced right because uh it means that if there's any delay like they either have to delay like if if

one of them is ahead they have to delay it and then get have to delay, like if, if one of them is ahead, they have to delay it and then get them to match. And that takes some calibration, which, you know, it's their job. And they do that before the game. Uh, but whatever they're doing, it's solid. Like it's not a second ahead or a second behind or something like that, which often happens if you're like tuning it in on the radio and setting your radio on your coffee table while you turn the volume down on the TV. Sync is all out of whack for that, but it's not out of whack on Friday Night Baseball. So I don't know what they're doing there, but given the Angels broadcasters, actually, it may very well be that they're just

running it through Major League Baseball's own platform for this and then out to Apple instead of out to their app. Ridley Scott's Napoleon movie, which is a movie I didn't know. I keep getting surprised at the breadth of Apple's content right now. They have a show that I want to watch. It's called Monster Factory. And it's about a group of aspiring professional wrestlers. It's an actual documentary series, which speaks to me. And they've got a movie about Michael J. Fox's life called Still, which is coming soon,

which looks awesome. I saw a trailer for that. The funny thing is I am finding out about these shows from my YouTube recommendations. I keep getting recommended trailers for Apple shows. That's how I'm finding out about new content on Apple TV+. But this is a movie about Napoleon starring Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Ridley Scott.

It's going to be on apple tv plus but first it will be shown in theaters for this movie apple has chosen to work with sony pictures entertainment to handle the distribution and it's going to be the first movie that is distributed under this new plan that apple has that we were talking about recently to put movies in theaters this is the first one they've confirmed at least will be put in theaters with the help of a third-party production company right this is in the long run apple is planning on having uh all most of their originals have a theatrical release or at least some of them and so here here is one and and it's a,

the first ones we see, a lot of those are going to be that they may, they agreed for theatrical to close the deal. Martin Scorsese is the, is the best example of that. We're like, they needed to guarantee him a theatrical release or he wasn't going to make the deal.

And so they did that. But in the long run, they're going to do this as policy because of what we said before, the shorthand version is marketing something, uh, in theatrical benefits in terms of people being aware of it that's good for when it comes on apple tv plus and they can make some money from theatrical so that's good too so there's lots of reasons that um streamers that aren't netflix are trying this and a bit of information for you jason apple will be announcing its q2 2023 earnings on may the 4th may the 4th be with you mike they're going to feel the force and they're going to announce

their earnings they're going to feel the fourth so everybody will be there they'll be wearing costumes uh you know tim cook's going to have the han solo outfit on i think a little vest and in the annual question or the quarterly question, did Jason, how did Jason learn when the earnings call was going to be? My, my very professional planning system where I place a calendar event early in the month saying check for when the Apple financials are succeeded.

It was last week. It was last Thursday. I had the, I am on my calendar called check for Apple financials. And I went to investor.apple.com and found the date. So I, I, I win this one.

Excellent. Well, I'm happy that you're already new. Anyway, look forward, everybody out there, just an alert for upgradians that on May the 8th. Woo.

Money time. That's going to be good stuff. It's going to be chart palooza. Did they hype this one up at all or were they still trying to be like, oh, it's going to be bad? No, this is going to be bad. It's going to be bad. It's going to have weak max sales and it's not going to be great. At least the thought is this is going to be another rough one and that they said it's going to be another rough one when they did their last one.

They said that? Okay. Yeah. Although, again, rough for Apple. Yeah. You know, still huge profits and all of that. It's one of those good-bad problems for them typically. So it's one of those good, bad problems for them. Typically, it's good, bad. It's not a result you kind of like, but it's good, bad.

It's not bad, bad. It's good, bad. Yeah, I like it. We should do that from now on. We should rate every quarter at Apple on based on Flophouse recommendation levels. So was it a good quarter, a bad quarter or a quarter you kind of liked? Well, we could try and judge that based on Tim and Luca's comments. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Uni Pizza Ovens,

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And they also have tons of accessories from peels to cutters to thermometers to oven tables and so much more. Listeners of this show can get 10% off their purchase of an Uni-Pizza oven, which is up to $50 off the Ooni code of 16. Just go to Ooni.com and use the code upgrade 2023 at checkout. That's upgrade 2023 at checkout at Ooni.com and you'll be able to get that 10% discount. Ooni pizza ovens are the best way to bring restaurant quality pizza to your own backyard so that is uni.com and the code upgrade 2023 for 10 off a thanks to uni pizza ovens for their support of this show and relay fm time for a rumor roundup saddle up saddle up everyone uh ross young has got

he published like a roadmap for the next few years of things that he's expecting apple to be doing in the display technology of their phones so the iphone and iphone pro line so we've got a few little there's lots of pieces of information but there were a couple of things here that i thought were particularly interesting so young is predicting that the iphone 17 pro that is the 2025 iphone i will tell you today, I sat and counted on my fingers for about five minutes to try and work out what year the iPhone 17 would come out, and it took me quite a while. So if that's wrong, you know, there you go. The iPhone 17 Pro 2025 will be the first iPhone to get an under-display Face ID sensor.

Okay. There would still be a circle cut out for the front-facing camera at this point. So it would just be removing the pill shape, moving those to under the screen. This would be the new kind of design language until the iPhone 19 in 2027, where this is all removed for an all screen design with both the camera and the face ID sensors sitting

beneath the all screen design. Okay. Great. Wake me up in 2027. Every phone until then, I don't even want them. You know what I mean? They're all garbage. Holes in in the phone no thank you uh young also says that he expects that pro motion will remain a pro only feature until the iphone 17 in 2025 and is unsure it seems at this moment as to whether

always on will be a feature of this phone or if i say is a pro feature so it'll be getting an ltpo display at this point and i thought it was super interesting how these features lined up so that like once the pro phone in 2025 takes a step they will allow the regular iphone to take a step like it's not going to get promotion until the pro phone has something else it can offer on this in the screen display kind of area you know what i mean so it was really interesting it's like we're gonna wait and we'll make those jumps at the same time fascinating i love i love this i guess we should check back in our our successors can check back in in 20 late 2027 you think we're not gonna be doing this in 2027 i don't know i don't know i don't want to make any assumptions about 2027 that's far away so but yeah sure we'll we'll check back

in then what what episode of upgrade we need a little calculating app it's like what episode of upgrade will be that's a long way off so we gotta go ahead 2027 is four years from now right four and a half years from now, right? Four and a half years from now, right? Four and a half years. Are you calculating this? I am. Okay.

I'm excited to know. Let me make a guess. So this is 454. I'm going to say like episode 1912. I feel like I've way overshot that. I've way overshot that. Episode 688. Can you see why I had to do the counting on my fingers today

no good no good all right six that's not too many that feels like nothing we'll still be doing this by then okay through reporting with various leakers and sources nine to five mac put together some very pretty images of what they expect the iphone 15 15 Pro to look like. So these are some computer-assisted, is it computer-assisted or aided CAD? Is it aided? Computer-aided design. They made some models, basically, some digital models. This features some imagery of the curved titanium frame coming to the Pro phones, the thinner bezels.

But one additional detail that I'd not seen yet was the color for the new Pro iPhone. 9to5Mac is saying it will be a deep red, which is almost like a wine color. I don't like this color. Of course it's deep. I don't like this color at all, personally. Not exciting, obviously, because it's the Pro phone color.

But that's a piece of information for you. It's just a deep red iphone excite you jason take off that red phone it's better it's better no i can't because i couldn't take it to a football game uh or i'd have to leave it in my pocket but i'm glad that it's a color like that's good but again it's it it feels like it's a you know boring color i i wonder how these phones will be received because changing the the frame to be titanium and bringing the bezels in a little bit like it's super subtle right like would you look at one of these phones and say whoa it's the new iphone because i wouldn't it feels very much like a continuation of the existing design language.

Yeah, it is very much so. I think, as you say, these changes will be minimal because, yes, they're curving the edges, but realistically, they photograph the same. I think that Apple will be pushing this phone on whatever is going on in the Pro Max this year. So like the new camera layout and what that will enable. I think this will be another year where they can maybe try and get away with what's on the inside

rather than what's on the outside. But this is definitely not looking at these images anyway. This is not going to be a year where it's like oh wow look at the new design no this very much is in the iphone 12 kind of uh design language it's not changing i am personally happy about that because i like the iphone 12 design language a lot i think it's aged way better than the sixes did i like it but again i you know as i've said a million times before i don't like how understated the Profones are, and I wish the Profones would have, by having the kind of frosted glass back

with the bright camera bump, that they end up being kind of subdued in a way that I wish they didn't have to be. However, I will say titanium instead of stainless so the presumably they'll be lighter that's good that's a very good because while stainless steel is a nice material it was adding weight to those phones that is not necessary it's just not necessary and i understand them wanting to create a premium kind of feel and all that but like it was not um you don't want those phones to be heavier than they need to be and they didn't need to be that heavy mark gorman is reporting he put a big piece together on bloomberg with some more details about apple's plans to make stronger moves for their manufacturing over to places outside of china namely namely, mostly India. I have a few quotes from

this article to read, Jason, if that's okay. Okay, sure. Its most ambitious plans are for India, where it will work with a swath of partners to make iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Pencils, as well as components for the Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac. Apple has already tapped three of its main assembly partners from Taiwan to build devices in India. Foxconn, Pegatron, and Wistron. Why are they all on? Why do they all end in on?

That mark didn't say that. That was me. It's also recently brought on an additional key supplier in India, Tata, to build iPhone exteriors and ultimately assemble the whole product. Apple produced more than 6.5 million of the 200 million iPhones it made in 2022 in India. It aims to produce 10 million units in 2023. People involved in the process believe that

this number could exceed 15 million units next year. Some think it could move as much as 25% of iPhone production to India by 2025 if it sticks to the most aggressive timeline. The company has discussed moving the majority of aluminum iPhone production out of China. It expects to ship the iPhone 15 from both countries simultaneously, which would be a first. So I want to stop with that part because there's some interesting detail here, right? So at the moment, the only phones they are making in India are the aluminium frame phones.

They're not making the pro phones there. Right. And Mark's piece actually said that even as they continue to go down this and even for this 2023, 2024, they're still going to continue making the pro phones in China and the plus phone as well is still going to be made there.

We're looking at like the SE and the standard iPhone is going to be made in India. But they are looking at, and I find that super interesting, that now they're aiming for the majority of aluminum iPhone production to be outside of China. Yeah, it's creeping in that direction. I think it was Mark Gurman is, you know, reporting on all of this as a way, and I appreciate it. This is a very different kind of story from,

you know, a product-based report from Mark. And, you know, it highlights all the reasons that it's hard for Apple to move production and that they're taking and that, but, and that they're taking these steps right to diversify their, uh, their production locations and, and the pandemic, uh,

closures of various factories in China, I think, you know, gave Apple a thing to point to and say, see, we need to have, um, we need to have factories all over

the world so that we aren't just in China. But also I think this gives you an idea of just how extended this process is where they're like, we're hoping that, you know, if we push this really hard, we might have 25% of our iPhones produced in India in a few years and that's like the most aggressive version but keeping in mind that a lot of stuff is still coming from China and a lot of stuff still being made and assembled in China and and uh it's you know it's a long ongoing process and the it's not like yeah Apple's moving out of China and then it won't be a problem that's not what's happening here they also mention, well, saying about, there's also David in Discord is talking about Taiwan

as another issue, and Mark talks about that, but it wasn't particularly interesting or new for the story where he's talking about, you know, like Apple looking at making some chips. Isn't Arizona is where the TSMC plant's going to be? Yep. But we know this from talking before of like, realistically, they're not making much of anything

that seems to be exciting from that plant for many years. But like, yes, it's diversifying, but it is also still TSMC. So like, and this is the same, I do still continue to find this funny of like, it's the same companies they're still using, like Foxconn and Pegatron. Like these are the same companies that they use i don't know if that diversifies them or not like i don't fully understand the corporate structure of some of these companies right and like how that

could affect it where it's like right there if apple has an issue with china and the chinese government potentially is that going to make it complicated for the companies they work with that have huge chinese presences that like even if they're working with them in india could it still not cause a problem like one thing to do is to diversify yourself from a geographical perspective but you also surely want to diversify yourself from a supplier perspective as well, which it seems like they're doing with Tata, which I believe is an Indian focused company.

If I'm, if I'm remembering correctly. So like that is kind of what I would expect and hope to see them do more. It's like a further push. And I understand, you know, from reading our favorite book, how complicated this can be and like

apple has to do the work which i'm sure they're doing of getting these manufacturing companies up to their standards and doing what it takes to get them to their standards which is why they continue to use foxconn and pekatron because they put all this work for many many years to get them to the level of like okay this is what we're willing to accept and which is different to maybe other companies and what they're willing to accept so we'll see what it ends up being there but uh mark german also says managers in apple's operations department have instructed employees to focus on sourcing additional components and locating production lines outside of China for more new products coming in 2024. More new products, not necessarily the iPhone just, but other things. And that is the basically challenging people to say,

when we roll out this product, are we going to build this whole supply chain and manufacturing structure for this product inside China too? Could we not do that? Right. Could we build this new product? Because then it's not taking that product out of China, right? It's not ever making that product in China, which is part of the long-term strategy here, right, is to do that. So yeah, this is a, and it's, and it's a challenge because they don't want to give offense to China, but they do need to send the message that they can't be entirely reliant on China for their operations. And I think leaving aside, which is hard to do the global sweep of

geopolitics for a moment, I think it's also just smart on a larger level of not keeping all your eggs in one basket happy easter to everybody right just like maybe it's wise to not put every single regardless of china's status politically every single product that you make in a small section of a country, like when they had those shutdowns and they couldn't make Macs for a while, like that's probably not great, right? That's probably not what you should be doing. And they got so, it was such a great deal to build everything in China for Apple that they did it. And now this is the sort of latter day Tim Cook era of, okay, we need to back off of all of that strategy. MacRumors is reporting that iOS 17 is going to see some, quote,

major changes to Control Center. Don't really mention what these might be, but it comes from a source of theirs. And it did just make me sit and think like about control center as a thing and how it kind of i don't know feels a little bit old and weird to me now and is also one of these things in ios kind of like notification center really all the centers where they've never it never really feels like they have nailed what people are looking for out of right this part of the operating system it's when I use Control Center now, I feel like overall this design feels tired. It still looks very iOS 7-y to me, these kind of opaque buttons.

Right. And I would love to see it kind of just generally get a fresh design with different kinds of information density like i've seen a lot of people uh post concepts online like i was like googling around for concepts today to kind of just like what things might we what you want to see added to this and a lot of people like you know different toggles and switches and dials and like you know like maybe putting the volume as a horizontal rather than a vertical because it would take up less space. And I just thought little things like that I thought were interesting.

But there were a couple of features that I thought for myself rather than just out of design that I would like to see. One of them is better access to home controls. So like all of the HomeKit stuff. Because it feels like, well, it is. iOS is trying to guess what it thinks I want, right? Which is fine. I would like to have

more of them there and I would like to be able to like pin some. Just be like, I always want these controls to be there. Just show me these controls. And then I was thinking

just like conceptually, let's put some shortcut buttons in there. What about some widgets? You know, I could put lock screen widgets in there what about some widgets you know i could put lock screen widgets in control in control center too and also could maybe finally like developers be able to put a button in there something like that yeah that that is i mean you mentioned home and

that's one of my great frustrations is like it just guesses what i want in home and like i can turn don't show this and it will just it will and then so i just turned off my lava lamp was um in there yeah and so now i i turned it off as show it in home view and it disappeared and it just replaces it with like another random light bulb that's somewhere else in the house and it's like it's so frustrating because I'm playing the game of what switch do I flip deep down in the home app in order to get that one to, to disappear from control center. And the answer is, I guess,

you know, show in home view is the answer because it will show me six of them. But then by doing that, you end up with like other ramifications and now it's not going to show a certain part of the Home app, which isn't necessarily what you want. You're just trying to hide it from Control Center. Right. So number one is I should be able to say what things show in Control Center. And if they wanted to make that another switch in the Home app, that's fine.

But it's intuiting things from my home decisions that it should not. And it's intuiting things from my home decisions that it should not. And it's frustrating. And I've had to do it both ways where I want to take things out of the home app or out of control center. And then there are also things I want to put in control center. It's like, okay, well, how do I do that? It's frustrating. And nothing like having to tap and swipe like eight times in order to get something off of your control center. And then it replaces it with something else that's worse.

Like, okay, I don't want that either. Also, I have a very particular issue, which is like a weird one. But most people won't have this situation. I just do. In HomeKit, you can have multiple homes, which I always found that, I remember finding this funny at the time

when I got the studio, because I have a home at the studio and I have my home as a home, right i have home kit in both places and it was funny to me at the time because when i was looking at google and amazon and home kit to like try and work it out the only one that i could find that had robust support at that time for multiple homes was home kit and there was something funny to me there of like apple's design for multiple homes we have multiple homes you know so we've got you got like the beach home and the home home and we're going to have a home kit set in both places but i have my studio is a home right in in home kit and you have the

ability to geo fence them and for the home app to auto switch the home app works about 70 percent of the time to do the auto switching control center is maybe 40 or 50 percent of the time that like i'm in my house and i pull down control center and it's showing me controls for my studio like that's not good right like that's like another thing for me personally why the home controls annoy me in control center is i'm trying to get... And that's why I'd like to pin things because there are a couple of things that I access a lot. And I actually...

There's one. I want to turn on my heat controls at the studio when I'm at home. So I've set up a shortcut for this and I put it in the widget so I can do it. But what I would like to be able to do in control center is pin that scene for the studio's controls in control center so it doesn't matter where i am right let me turn the heat on and off you know so like i would like to be able to do more of that around home i mean honestly j for me, what I would like Control Center to do is have my music,

some quick toggles, and then just be the home app. Like, that is what I'm using it most for. Like, if I just had access to everything in the home, that's in the home app in Control Center, that would make me a happy man. Like, they're just basically the same thing, because that's what I'm using it for it's like media volume turning wi-fi on and off and then just using the control center using the the home kit part like the home yeah that would be great i would love that so yes i i agree with you 100 on home i love having home access in the control center, but I don't love that. I have no control ironically over what goes in there and the context that

it's in. I also say would like to say that they changed the behavior of lights that have a dimmable area that drives me crazy that they, it used to be that if you tapped on a dimmable light, it would open up the dimmer, and then you could swipe it up and down to make it brighter or dimmer. Now, if you tap on the button,

it just turns it at 100%. If it's off, you have to tap and hold, wait for it to come up, then slide it, then tap away. It's like, that's worse. That's worse. I guess it's worse unless you're somebody who normally just flips it on and off but sometimes wants to adjust adjust the dimming that's not the case with me if it's dimmable i probably want to choose the brightness level so that's not there so i agree the whole home thing needs to be fixed it does feel kind

of old i love that it's customizable now but it's customizable with such a limited set of things. And that's what, so when you mentioned shortcuts, I immediately thought, well, that's the beauty of something like shortcuts is that you can open the door to other things you want to do on your device that you can nest inside control center and make it switchable with with one tap i really like that also i find it you know yeah i i think they need to refresh the language here um in the home app they've got this whole thing where they're the the the circles are inside the rectangles and you can't tap on the rectangle you have to tap on the circle inside the rectangle that's the button it's very confusing so i hope they don't go there with that because that's that's awful but it is when i look at the like the the big square with the four um circles in it on my ipad now right for airplane cellular uh wi-fi and bluetooth i'm like i don't know like there's something about the circles inside the the squares it's like i don't know what we're doing here and it does yeah like it does it it has remnants of a of a different era in it i think like throughout control centers had

very similar kind of design language for quite a while. Right. It has no organizational principles either, right? Like, it seems to me that it's just sort of like, they're not like sections of it, other than those big rectangles that have a bunch of buttons inside it. They're not sections in it. So you end up with sort of like just icons all the way down. I just found an image of iOS 7 Control Center. It's actually the image that I found and pasted in the Discord was of a jailbreak tweak to emulate it, but nevertheless. And it's just a reminder.

So this was when Control Center was you swiped up from the bottom, right? In iOS 7 times. But the design is still incredibly similar that it is like a translucent layer and the buttons are circular and then there are some buttons at the bottom that are round racks and it's just like yeah that is that it's been this way for a very very long time now kind of like fundamentally yeah i mean talking about home the other thing is i have a home uh rectangle next to all my home items and if you tap that it brings up kind of like a version of the home app and that's got my favorites on it but um the favorites are not what appears in control

center so i don't understand that at all, right? Again, it's inconsistent and frustrating. It's also a little weird that I've got the whole home app inside Control Center, plus I've got all these little tiles that I can't control. I appreciate that this is hard, but I think what we're saying is when we hear there are going to be major changes to Control Center, I say, yes, please. And after that, most of what I say is I would like to be able to customize this at a much higher level think about how you can customize widgets i actually would like to be able to tap and hold in control center and then start deleting items and have a little plus where i could add items and i definitely want to be able to add something like shortcuts so that i can um i can very quickly change what i'm doing uh with more sophistication than is allowed by what's on control center right now

i think that that's all good and and we'll throw in since we talked about it with the watch how about dynamic uh dynamic items in in here too like i have a big uh square that says not not playing right now because i need to have a big square that tells me i'm not currently playing any media on my ipad it's like well if i'm not playing media on my ipad maybe i don't need the big square maybe it should get smaller maybe it should change based on context but but it doesn't. So, yeah, I would love to see a new take on Control Center because I think Control Center as a concept is great, but right now it's limited to stock things from Apple and a bunch of home things that are a guess,

and it could use some rethinking. We are eight weeks away today from maybe finding out if iOS 17 will include something like a control center change. If you enjoy this show and want more of this show, let me tell you about Upgrade Plus. If you go to getupgradeplus.com and sign up for $5 a month or $50 a year, you will get longer ad-free versions of this show each and every week. Did you even know there was more upgrade available to you?

All you have to do is go to getupgradeplus.com and sign up. You'll be helping support the show. You'll be getting longer shows. You won't hear ads anymore like this one. If you're an upgradian who's signed up to upgrade plus you don't hear me saying this it's just not there it just goes straight into ask upgrade and you just get your content faster but then longer you get more of it at the end of the show every single week we produce additional content for the upgrade plus members they get

to listen to me just and talk about extra things I think today we're going to talk about some inside baseball things in the show, like how we've been playing around with webcams for video clips of the show. We have some follow-up on that. And some issues that Jason has been dealing with the bot that we were using on Twitter to

post that we were live. So Jason's had a little bit of time with that. So we'll be talking about that in Upgrade Plus today. Go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up. Thank you if you do. It is time for some new and improved

Ask Upgrade. The lasers have reached from inside of the show and into your podcast app. We have brand new Ask Upgrade artwork, courtesy of our designer, J.D. Davis. So this was part of a... I think we were talking about... You mentioned to me, there's a hashtag on the Ask Upgrade.

And I'm like, oh yeah, we don't call it that anymore. And so we decided it was time for... We originally like seeing if we could find the old artwork file which actually i didn't have this one but whatever but also that the artwork had like a tweet is the central part so it's like all right it's time to rethink this we have brand new ask upgrade artwork and it is now going to be a part of every episode so you'll be able to see it there it's beautiful it's full of lasers of course now. Now, the actual first Ask Upgrade question of today's episode is going to come from Steve,

who says, I just got an M1 MacBook Air, and there are a few bits of software, mainly printer-related, of course, that require Rosetta 2. Is there any downside to installing Rosetta on my new Mac? I'm wondering if I should maybe be looking

for different Mac apps that work directly with Apple Silicon to replace this into an error software instead. Look, there's no reason not to install Rosetta. It's funny that Apple makes you. There's probably some very specific legal requirement why they do that that way. But don't worry about it. Go ahead and install it. Get the compatibility you seek. Of course, you should see if there's any app that you're using that you rely on for lots of stuff, and it's only available as an Intel version. You should probably look into whether they've got an Apple Silicon version. I'm not sure if there's an app that you use and you like, and it hasn't been updated and it still works. Either they're going to need to update. I mean,

it does say something right. If it hasn't been updated, that maybe they're're going to need to update i mean it does say something right if it hasn't been updated that maybe they're not going to update it and at some point here apple will ship a version of mac os that doesn't have rosetta 2 on it right like that that is going to happen eventually that is their track record is eventually they'll ship an os version and say sorry no intel compatibility at all at this point and you'll just have to deal with that but in i don't think that is a i don't think you should worry about it like rosetta is fine if you've got a powerful piece of software that you use all the time maybe you should get a native version of that maybe that maybe that's a good idea but in general rosetta actually works great and is fine and you're not going to really even notice for most things so don't sweat it just install

rosetta and don't worry about it yeah i had forgotten completely about rosetta until i saw this question from steve but just because like on the new ample silicon chips rosetta is unnoticeable basically so it's not an issue install it if you need it especially for stuff like printer stuff eventually as i said you you'll get around to it. But it is also worth checking, because I've seen this where sometimes apps don't offer you the right version. And there is actually sometimes on people's

website, like, oh, if you download this version, it's actually the absolute conversion. I don't know why some developers do it this way, but just as the way it tends to be. Weird stuff. Yeah, I have like nine processes currently running on my mac that are intel and they're all like little helper apps and stuff that are not that important but they're there activity you go to activity monitor and when you see all the process

loads kind kind how kind um be kind rewind i'm oh boy i was gonna say i was 100 but i'm not i have uh like 20 yeah i have like the keyboard maestro stream deck plugin and the km link are both this way i don't know why skype helper well skype is not open on my computer. OSA script. That's hilarious. That's Apple script. I've got keyboard and mouse script. Most of mine are Wacom for my tablet. My drawing tablet. I've got like six of them here that are doing their thing.

And there's a bunch of stuff that I obviously, I have no idea what these things are. They're just like effectively codes for things that I don't understand. But there's quite a few things going on in there. Jeremy asks, do you think Apple's headset will allow hot swapping the external battery pack, which has been rumored, without losing power to the headset?

For long sessions, it seems like a clunky user experience would be to have to turn off the device in the middle of a work meeting or a game, switch to battery and wait for it to boot back up again. Maybe. I was wondering if maybe it would have a very small internal battery to deal with this. It's possible. If it allows you to actually do it all, like the swapping.

Because there is the idea of the battery pack, and we think it will probably allow for swapping, but we don't know that it will do that. No. Or they've got some sort of a what is it a transformer or resistor i forget what it's called but the one of those things where it holds power for like a very small amount of time so you could swap it in and out and it would still hold the power and it would be okay i don't know i it's a good question i it would sure be nice if you i think the question is are people

going to be chain battering these things right where they're using it so long that they they have to just keep on swapping in new batteries or whether that's not a real uh uh common use case but then that's the mystery We just don't know. Frank wrote and says, I hear more and more people talking about the VR goggles projecting a Mac desktop in front of your eyes and how that could be useful. But not everybody is a touch typist. How are we supposed

to see what keys on a physical keyboard we would be pressing whilst wearing the goggles? Now, obviously, that's no problem for you, Jason, because you can type away. I see it in my mind right but i cannot do this and i need to look at my keyboard and so i will use my experiences of the meta quest products and their ar modes so it's a couple of things that they do so this is i can say like in meta's Horizon Workrooms thing, where you can designate an area of your desk to be shown to you through their pass-through. So this is where the AR comes to the fore.

So you're in a VR environment, but you look down and you can actually see through the cameras on the front of the headset your actual desk in front of you. So that's one way to do it. They've also built the ability to recognize certain keyboards apple's magic keyboard is one of them so if you have a magic keyboard on your desk if you look down there is a virtual one like on your desk and when you hold your hands over it it just shows pass through of just your actual real fingers it's super weird and cool so you can actually type away so i expect apple will do things similar to this at least i would hope they're not going to expect us all to be typing on a virtual keyboard

the whole time that would be sad right so there are ways to deal with it it's mixed reality right so the idea that you could detect a keyboard probably just from the key layout right i mean this is the thing as you say certain models but like ideally it should be able to detect a keyboard and that's it and then and then it could pass that through or it can make a virtual version of the keyboard it gets or it can show your hands or it can show virtual hands but it's matching your hands like there are lots of different ways to do this where you can you can um have a physical keyboard and have it be part of the environment along with your giant virtual uh display that's in front of you yeah like i don't use an apple magic keyboard but i've

been able to trick the uh horizon work content to think i'm using one i could just put one of my keyboards in front of it and most of the time it's like, oh, I can see your keyboard and it just shows me in the virtual environment a magic keyboard, but that works because I can still just type away. And is that the keyboard that you're using for input? No, I'm using one of my other ones,

but it thinks, oh wait, when you say for input, what are you asking me? Well, I think the question is if I have just a completely unplugged nothing keyboard and I start typing on it, does it know what keys I'm typing and types them in for me? Or am I typing on a keyboard that's connected to the computer that's being projected in front of me? I'm only using a keyboard when I'm using like a virtual desktop inside of the space. So I haven't tried that the other way. I think it's just probably

not yeah but i'm just saying you know what if you had an unplugged keyboard and you're like here's my keyboard and it was like great i'll type for you i don't know i don't know if it does that i don't know or or the virtual thing right which is like i'm just at the table here but i'm going to do a hand gesture and it's going to make a virtual keyboard come down in front of me at which point i can type on the on the table and it knows what the keys are that i'm pressing that would be the other way you can do it and sava wrote and to say recently you were discussing tim cook's legacy and i think we were talking about that in the sense of the headset right of like could this be the thing where he's like does this huge thing it's like an iphone like thing and

that's his legacy why do you think airpods are not discussed more as a game-changing product that were released under his leadership they have pretty much single-handedly changed the headphone market with budget players getting into true wireless earphones as well i don't know it's an accessory that's why it's an accessory and so people don't think of it the same way as they think of the platforms it's absolutely a very successful product. It wasn't the first at what it did, but it did it so well that it popularized the whole category. And that's the truth of it. And it still does very, very well.

I talked to some people who say it's not even the best deal. You should just get these others. But if you're on Apple platforms, it actually is the best and and they but yet they've also transformed the market around it so yeah they're they're great and they will be on the list of his achievements i think the reason that they're not more widely um viewed that way is that they're an accessory that lives inside an ecosystem and part of the the secret of the product is the extra stuff they put in their platform to support it you know it's it's it's complicated but it's definitely on his uh it's going to be on his resume when well not a resume

because that means he's looking for another job on his carved into his statue on the campus at the apple campus or whatever when he retires because i would say that like even for steve jobs people don't mention the ipod as much you know and like the ipod is a similar thing to airpods if like there was a market but apple came in and owned the market and everyone wanted that one thing like people tend to talk about the mac and the iphone maybe the ipad and then maybe the ipod and so like you know there might be a time when we're like oh under tim cook's leadership it was was the Apple Watch, the headset, and AirPods, but they're not

the new computing platform. That's what we're talking about when we talk about these big, huge legacy items of you change the way people use computers. It is slightly different to you change the way that people listen to audio. Which is, look, AirPods are one of these things that

when I first saw them, I just thought there's no way it could work. And so it really is. If I'm thinking back to it now, it is the most potentially jobsy thing under Cook's leadership of like, there's no way that can work. People

aren't going to understand it. People are going to think they're silly. It's not going to happen. And then in a few years, absolutely dominant. I don't know what it is, but there's like people say you could break it out and it would be a Fortune 500 company of its own, like AirPods, just on their own i think i think that's correct it may even be more than that um but yeah so it's a that is a huge thing but i just don't think people consider it as like a legacy product as such right yeah i i think and that it may not be fair but that's the truth of it so yeah and hey if the headset doesn't work out maybe that's i would think of him as the airpods the airpods ceo which is no joke apple watch and airpods

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Is that how we do that? Relayfm.social. That's what it is. that's how we did it interesting i was no there wasn't wait i think this was all steven i don't i don't really pay attention to the to that one so much maybe that makes me a bad co-founder it's upgrade at relay fm.social check it out we are at upgrade on relay fm.social that's it you nailed it thank you to our members who support us of Upgrade Plus. Thank you to ExpressVPN and Ooni for their support of this week's episode.

But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.