Upgrade - 455: QUADBOX!

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

What's happening at WWDC? The rumors are... confusing. Also, Jason gets excited about watching four things at once, Myke tries to bring iOS 17 into focus, and we've got a book review of 'Make Something Wonderful' from the Steve Jobs Archive.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 455 today's show is brought to you by electric text expander and sofa my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike i'm gonna give you a bit of Mike's more talk today. So as we're recording in April, it's 5 o'clock in the evening for me is when we start recording. Automation April. Yep. As we all know. Automation April.

And what I like about this time of year is it's still light out when we start recording. And I like that. I don't like the clocks changing, personally, but I enjoy that Daylight Saving Time provides me with this extra bit of light when I'm recording with you. Yeah, spent inside recording a podcast. I have a window, so I can feel that the room has more light in it,

which is nice. That's good. That's good. I feel that way when I'm recording my evening podcast too. It's nice. Other than when the sun is blasting into my eyes and I have to lower the shades. But other than that, yeah.

So like originally they said that they liked Saving Time was for farmers. And then they said it was for Halloween. But now it's for podcasters. That's who it's for. It's for podcasters. That's right. I have a Snell Talk question for you.

It comes from Mark, who wants to know, Jason, when you go to a baseball game, do you keep score? Now, Mike, before I answer this, I have to ask, do you know what this means? Well, I mean, the funny answer is, every time you go to one, you just make a mark on the wall. Yep, that's another baseball game. I went to that one.

Now, I'm aware of that, like, you can... There are, like, a lot of notebooks I've seen in the past for this where you can, like, keep score, but there is a very specific way of counting the in-ins and the outs or something. The in-e's and the out-e's in baseball. Do you count everyone's belly buttons? Is that how that happens that what that is it's only on opening day okay the balls are rolled out everybody lines up on the baselines and they count the belly buttons nobody wears

jerseys on opening day that's right they say we need a pitcher not a belly itcher that's what they say um well uh yeah you actually record every every outcome of every at that so it's like single double out you know ground out fly out whatever it is those details total them up can you record where the balls like go like from each hit i think i've seen that before everybody has their own uh who's keep score has their own scorekeeping style. So some people will make a little X or make a little mark about, was this to the outfield, was it to left field, whatever. Obviously, the announcers do that because then they can say, oh, well, it was the last time I flew out to left field. He can say that because he's looking at his little scorebook and he's kind of like, oh, I can see backward in time. And there's an official scorer and the statistics are kept and all of these things happen.

But Mark's question is, do I do it? of pieces of paper and a pen to a baseball game so that I can sit while on a beautiful day while a baseball game is going on in front of me and mark little things down on pen in a game that is being televised and put into computers and does not actually need any record keeping of any kind yes absolutely I do what I like about that is you said an adult human being as if a child would ever fathom to want to do this oh well that's i think i think that's not true but like i was just sort of implying that like with somebody who has other things going on the answer is yeah absolutely i do i really enjoy it it creates a um uh how what do i tell people uh keeps me focused a little bit right like keeps me focused on the game baseball you know you can get distracted if the pace is slow even now the pace is faster it's

still slow um i learned to do it uh boy we're gonna get into some things here uh i didn't play dungeons and dragons when i was in high school i played dice baseball we had a league we had little teams where it was like players were on cards and you'd roll dice to see if they got hits and you had to keep score is this also known as dice ball it is not there's probably other dice ball game that's a board game okay okay uh i played a very particular kind of dice baseball there are lots of different kinds so anyway that was my high school um no i didn't have any dates uh and uh but i did learn i did learn to do that and i yeah i just kind of find it pleasant i find it pleasant to do it and it becomes a souvenir so i like i've got a i've got a book that's got like all the baseball games that

i've been to i'm on my like third book now but yeah so it's like this is the world series and this was that i've got like a spring training game from 2010 where's the first time i saw buster posey play and he would then come up to the big league team later that year and they'd win the world series. I've got like memories in there of like, did this with this friend. And we took Jamie, I took Jamie to a spring training game one time.

It was just her and me. And I've got that one in there. And I, you know, this weekend we went or last weekend when we went to a game and I, I was able to look back and say, what was the last game we saw here? It was like,

oh yeah, it was, it was actually the game where we were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks, the team that my mom follows because she lives in Phoenix. And we were sitting right behind the Diamondbacks dugout and I texted her and I said, watch the game. You will see us. And she's like, oh, I see you. And that was the last game we had been to. uh yeah anyway i do i do i don't like we went to minnesota last summer to visit friends and i did not bring the scorebook there i did end up for that one keeping score on a little minnesota twins you know scorecard thing that you could get uh and

that was fine but it doesn't go in the book now which is too bad and uh and and so sometimes it's not like an inviolate like 100 of the time i do it uh but if i uh if i can make the effort to do it i absolutely do yeah i understand it like i've been to a major league baseball game it's a slow day right like it's faster now they're half an hour out of it but yeah like but but there's a lot of like slow so like having something that keeps you extra engaged what happened to that guy and there's a legendary story about an announcer I believe it's Phil Rizzuto

the announcer for the Yankees who everybody's got their little quirks somebody was looking at his scorecard one day and they're like Phil what does what does WW mean and he says, Oh, wasn't watching. Yes.

Okay. Somebody, he got out somehow. Now, if I miss an out, I can go on the MLB app and like find out what happened. Or actually now they put it on the scoreboard. They literally put up there,

this guy struck out and you just missed it because you were talking to somebody or whatever. Wonderful. So yeah, it's true. It's true. If you would like to send in a question to help us open an episode of Upgrade, just go to upgradefeedback.com and submit a

Snell Talk question for us. Thank you to Mark who did that. We have some follow-up. So we were talking about the sometimes poorly functioning HomeKit integration in Control Center when we were talking last time about what we'd like to see change in Control Center, Ben wrote in to suggest that the Home button, so there's like, not only is there HomeKit controls in Control Center, there is also a button that you can press that basically replicates the Home app in Control Center.

So it gives you a view of everything that would otherwise be in the home app just right there in control center i always forget about this and i just find it incredibly weird that it exists in the first place to be honest strange yeah i don't like it because i mean yes you can get to it but the point of the top level is that I can have the things that matter to me and just swipe down and go boop and control them. With the home rectangle inside Control Center, you tap on it and it brings up the whole home app basically, you know, scrolling list. And then you're like scrolling up and down. So I've already tapped.

Now I'm just kind of scrolling for the thing and then I tap on that and then I have to go back in order to get out and like it's just that's what i don't like about it is it's not i appreciate i guess that they went to the trouble of it being there but what i really want is to select some items in my home and say put this in control center which it doesn't let you do yep yeah and it still doesn't solve my biggest issue where it still doesn't know where I am half the time. Like, you know, I just get all of the buttons for the studio when I'm at home rather than just some of them. So you can turn lights on and off at your studio

while you're not there. That's great. I mean, some people do want that. Some people do want to control things remotely. But yeah, you should also, having the ability to have it be like location-based. And yes, a lot of work to be done here. But it is true.

If you want, you can just tap on that home rectangle and it will bring up essentially your home app inside Control Center. I'm going to consider this as follow-up because we've mentioned the company's name in the past. Apple has partnered with French TV provider Canal Plus to offer Apple TV Plus to its subscribers for no additional fee. So if you're a Canal

Plus subscriber, you will just get Apple TV Plus. Yes. Is this the beginning of bundling? I don't know. Will they call it Apple TV Plus? Maybe they do. I don't know. What is French? Is it like Pomme Television Plus?

Maybe. It could be. So, it's an interesting idea. It's unclear whether this is, I mean, they use,

Canal Plus for their cable company, like, they use Apple TV as their box, right? Like,

that's a really tight, it's a really tight relationship there. embedded. Yeah, that's a really tight relationship. And then apparently tight relationship there. Embedded. Yeah, that's a really tight relationship. And then apparently there's a cross licensing deal for some content too, where there's going to be Apple TV content that Canal Plus is going to actually be able to put on their stations too, I read somewhere. So there's a bunch going on there. I don't know if this is just, this feels like it might just be a one-off because this happens to be a region where they've got a particularly tight relationship.

But it's worth watching because that's another way for Apple TV Plus to get out there. I mean, Apple TV Plus already does that with, what is it, T-Mobile has a deal where you get free Apple TV Plus with your subscription. And there are some things like that that are out there already. So I think Apple will do what it needs to do to market their service. But this is a case, this may be the strongest case because they have such a tight relationship with Canal Plus.

Because, you know, there are things where I think, I believe, I'm just speaking of something I believe, I'm not 100% sure about this, that the French government requires an amount of programming to be in French and to be produced in France. It's a part of the perpetuation and continuation of the language.

And so I know that Apple, I believe, had to work to create French language content if they wanted to be in the region. Maybe Canal Plus helped with that, or Canal helped with that, because they're also a television production company right right studio canal i think studio canal um and so you know maybe this is all part of just like a very good relationship they have with that company

but i do you know i know you can get it like um we have ee here which is a a cell provider and they believe offer that you can get Apple One with them as part of your bundle. But the thing that I'm interested in specifically is could we see other streaming services, other cable companies,

that kind of thing, just offer TV Plus like any other channel might be in a bundle and i just find that as an interesting proposition it could be good for apple i think to just be able to give this content to more people yep yep could be null point indeed uh slightly different note now uh we have a little bit more follow-up to get to, but I want to take a moment to recognize Katie Cotton. Katie was Apple's head

of PR during the Jobs era. She had a 20-year stint with Apple. She very recently, unfortunately, passed away. It's terribly sad. I want to read very quickly a statement that Apple gave to Bloomberg to say, we're deeply saddened

by katie's passing she was an extraordinary person and she made countless contributions over the course of her two-decade career at apple our thoughts are with her loved ones and everyone who had the opportunity to work with her and i'm assuming that you knew katie so i thought you might want to say a few things honestly most of the um i feel like my when i was not the editor-in-chief i think my boss rick lepage worked with her quite a bit and and just to give you an idea of what level katie was on our ceo um colin crawford um talked to her a lot yeah like i always got the you know we would always hear Colin being like, Oh, Katie, Katie said this. And Katie said that, and Katie's complaining about you essentially the sorts of things we would get from Colin. Um, so she was at a high level. I, I dealt mostly with the head

of product PR who is, uh, Natalie lingo. So, um, but I did, I talked to Katie a bunch of times, saw her. She, I was always, always super intimidated by her. She was partially because Colin would be like, Katie, Katie complained about a thing you did. I'm like, oh boy. But she, the one thing I always wondered about is whether she was the perfect fit for Steve Jobs or whether she read what Steve Jobs wanted and knew how to provide it for him. But either way, they were, I would say, almost like inseparable in terms of how marketing and public relations was handled and how Steve wanted it to be handled. They were just in perfect alignment. And the things people complained about in that era about Apple PR and the things that people maybe in that era about apple pr and the things

that people maybe appreciated about them i will say having dealt with apple pr before katie was put in charge and before steve came back they were so erratic and confusing um and and she got them i mean like they they got it together a lot more after she came um and brought in, you know, brought in presumably people that she liked and trusted and built a team there. But yeah, she was, I always was intimidated by her, but she executed perfectly and worked perfectly with Steve. And the, when she left, and I know we've talked about that way back

in early episodes of Upgrade, when she left, and I know we've talked about that way back in early episodes of Upgrade, when she left, I think it was a great example of how different times call for different strategies that I think Katie was going to play it the way Katie played it. And then when she left Apple, the new regime and she left sort of after Tim Cook came on board, but as CEO, but not a lot longer than that. The PR changed, right? Their strategy changed. They started doing some new and innovative things and had different approaches to access and different approaches to events and different approaches to how press got briefed and all sorts of stuff like that. And I thought what I took away from that was, um, that's naturally what happens when you've got somebody in charge for 20 years, right? Is that they, they set up a machine and then it really does take somebody else to,

to take it in a different direction. But yeah, she was super powerful. Um, everybody knew who she was. She was great at her job. And she was like, like I said before, I don't know the details of it, but in the end, the perfect fit for how Steve Jobs wanted to approach dealing with the press. Perfect fit. They were perfect partners. Yeah. I kind of think of a legacy that she has left. especially in tech, like the way that they deal with secrecy and the way that a lot of companies would like to have an approach, how products get rolled out and marketed and all that. I think you could point at Steve jobs for sure, but also Katie cotton and Phil Schiller and say that, that trio was super

influential because they were the ones behind how Apple chose to roll out products from all aspects. And honestly, everybody in the tech industry took notes and tried to do what they do. There's just no doubt about it. If you don't know what tech industry was like before Apple-style PR and marketing, what tech industry was like before Apple style PR and marketing. If I took you in a time machine back to like 1995 and showed you what the tech industry did for marketing, you would be, or even 2000, honestly, you would be aghast. You'd be like, what?

Because now Samsung does events and Microsoft does events. And like the way all of their approach to this stuff is very Apple-like in a way that it wasn't before. And that goes to, like I said, Steve, for sure, but also Phil and Katie. Rest in peace, Katie Cotton. So Apple announced something today, Apple Cash becoming Apple Savings. This is something that you mentioned before we started recording that I hadn't seen.

So I would like you to explain this to me. it's it's for people who've got the apple card okay you you get apple cash back because you can send apple cash anyway but if you get the apple card you get apple cash back and um and so you probably have a lot of apple cash and generally what you do is you either use it to buy something like I bought burritos with my Apple cash the other day. Great. Cause it was like, Oh, you need to buy burritos. Uh, I have Apple cash. I'm like, great, do it. Let's just make that happen. Um, but, uh, you can also transfer it back to your bank, right? So what this does is it creates essentially a bank account at Goldman Sachs that you can put your Apple cash in and it earns 4.15% interest, which is actually a very good interest rate right now. And no fees, no minimum deposits, no minimum balance requirements, right? It's like just kind of a magic

bank account that is essentially, if you're an apple card uh subscriber member whatever uh you you now have access to this thing for your for your apple cash um and once you set it up all future daily cash from the card is automatically deposited into the account so the idea there and you can deposit things from your, you can transfer things in from your bank account or, right, or transfer things in from Apple Cash that you got from some other, from somebody paying you, you can transfer all that in there. So what I find interesting is that it's like dipping a toe in the water a little bit. I don't know what the end game is here, but I think it's interesting in that they're touting

this very high interest rate. And that feels to me like they're really they really want you to leave your money in their hands right not transfer it to another bank and so they're at least starting with the daily cash from apple card users you sign up for this uh and it's it's not bad right like why why let your 140 or whatever that's sitting in your apple cash, why let it sit there when you could put it in this thing that is, I think, functionally equivalent in terms of the interface and everything, and it gets interest? I don't even really understand how this is different to the user realistically than what it was doing before. I think that's the plan. I think the plan is this should feel like because because what was apple cash apple cash is like a paypal

balance yeah right where it's just kind of in a limbo state where they've got your money they've got your money in the bank somewhere earning money for them and this is apple sort of like trying to build a new interface where it still looks like a little box that is your cash. But what it really is, is a bank account that you access just like you would access Apple Pay or cash. And it just sits there earning interest. And, you know, I think that there is a long game here and they want to get people used to this idea of keeping a big balance in their Apple account and using it to pay for things. But yeah, you could also theoretically transfer a lot of money in here and say, Apple is my bank account. If you wanted to, you could do that.

I don't think I would suggest that, but it's an interesting idea. It's an interesting idea. It's wild to me to offer a 4.15% interest rate with no minimum interest. Yeah, I mean, yeah, why wouldn't you? To me, it feels like this is maybe the way they wanted it to be initially, but couldn't get it set up that way or something. Because it's just like, it is functionally the same

right yeah it sounds like it uh at least for i think you have like i said i think it's a separate account from your general cash wallet thing um but then they're going to plow the cash back from uh and maybe there's a benefit to them and golden Sachs there too, that rather than that cash back moving into the limbo zone, it's going to stay essentially at Goldman Sachs and just be part of this other account you have access to. Yeah. I also, we,

a lot of talk Mark Gurman's reported about it a lot about Apple wanting to build its own financial services like the, the Apple pay later. This is not that right. This the Apple Pay later. This is not that. This is Goldman Sachs. This is essentially an extension of the Apple card. For now.

Still want to see it come world? Let's break outside of America, Apple. You have the ability to do that. I believe in you. It's only been 75 years at this point. Whenever you're ready uh and quad box quad box quad box quad box what is the quad box sports features that come out what it is like it's the quad box quad box aka multi-view. Basically, Ben Mayo reported this in 9to5Mac. Basically, in the tvOS 16.5 beta, Apple has added multi-view, which is a way, it's in the TV app, and it's basically, you know, picture in picture.

It's sort of like you get the one picture, and then you've got the little tiny postage stamp version that's in the corner, and you can move it around. This is not that. This is like a level up from that. And it allows you to put up to four items, four videos live on your screen at once. And you're thinking to yourself, why would you want to do that? The answer is simple. Multitasking. Four classic movies all up together. You watch them all at the same time. You're more cultured. Four times as cultured. No, it's for sports. That's the number one thing. And so Apple built it in, and it's really, Ben Mayo tried it out this way.

It's for MLS at this point. Apple wants to do more sports stuff, but it's for MLS especially. So you can put four MLS matches that are running live, and you put them in four boxes in the corner of your screen. I'll also mention that if you've got a 4K TV, each one of those boxes is basically a 1080p TV, just small. Uh, it's pretty cool. So I use this all the time on Fubo, which is my TV provider for sporting events. So I can, if there are different games on different channels, like college football is a great example of this. I can put four college football games up. Or yesterday I had a couple of baseball games up. Um, and it's great. Um, YouTube TV is working on this because they're going to have NFL Sunday ticket. And, and one of the things you're going to want to do with Sunday ticket is put four football games up at once. The problem with all of this is that this is a TV app feature and it needs to be a core feature of tvOS

because what you can't do is put up videos in those boxes from different apps just in the one app. And what they really need, because sports rights are so fractured, what they really need to do, I should be able to put a Friday night baseball game up from the TV app, a different baseball game up from the MLB app, a basketball game up

from ESPN Plus, and a different basketball game up from Fubo. I should be able to have four apps streaming video into a quad box on my TV, on my Apple TV. That is not yet possible with the operating system, but I feel like they have to go there because quad box is great for sports. But if every quad box is its own silo, you'll never get to four items or rarely get to four items because you um are stuck with this uh these silos everybody you know there's this board is over there and this board is over there and this the game is over there and this other game is over here so i feel like that's that's on my wish list now for the next version of tv os is multi-view quad box for all um and there need to be an api for it and all that but like every time i use their picture and picture thing i hate it

it's terrible it's even bad like i use it in the mlb app um mlb app on the web you can see four games at once in the mlb app on apple tv they just use apple's picture and picture api and it's awful because it covers part of the screen and you have one big one and one small one, and then you're doing all these kind of fiddly gestures in order to move between them. It's terrible. So bring on the quad box. Realistically, two APIs should be made available here,

one being let your content be watched outside, but let's be realistic, right, about what some providers will allow. The second is we're going to give you an easy way to show four streams at once inside of your own app both would be true right they yes like this is this looks very suspiciously actually in the app in the tv app it's added into the player interface it looks very suspiciously like this may be available as an api for other apps i don't know that for sure but i wouldn't put it past so like and that

would be great for major league baseball where i often do have two, three, four games going at once in the MLB TV app. Uh, that would be great. But so that's, that's like request. Number one is make this an API. So other, so that there's a standard way to do quad box on all TV apps. That would be step one. Step two is make it so that you can offer your video to be in a quad box in any app and mix and match what the apps are doing so that you can have three different apps supplying video to a quad box, four different apps.

That would be perfect, but we're not there yet. So anyway, it's step one, but of course I want more. So thank you, Apple, for putting this new feature in the first beta. And all it does is make me say, great, next. But it's a good thing to see. And if you've never tried it, or if you're not a sports fan, trust me, it's great. I mean, I don't use the quad box as much as I use a side-by-side two, but it's nice to have side-by-side two or three. I had that at one point where I had a basketball game

and two baseball games going last night. And the quad box, when you're interested in four different things and kind of flipping around between them, it's really nice to just,

because I should say the way this works is it doesn't just stay at four. You can click with the remote and zoom into any game. So you can swipe around and get the audio from any of the four boxes. And then if you click, it zooms into that game. And then you hit the back button and it zooms back out into the quad box.

It's really nice. This episode is brought to you by Sofa. When you hear about a great new TV show or a book or a podcast or an album or whatever, what do you do? Do you scribble it down on your notebook? Maybe you put it in your to-do app, maybe put it in reminders. In any case, you're likely going to forget about it and instead feel stuck not knowing what to watch, listen or play next when that time comes.

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Rumor roundup time. Yeehaw. So after all of the conversation we've been having, Ming-Chi Kuo is now reporting that the plan for solid-state capacitive buttons on the iPhone 15 Pro has been scrapped at the final hurdle available. This is for, quote, unresolved technical issues before mass production. And this is a quote from MacRumors.

Kuo said there is still time for Apple to modify the iPhone 15 Pro's design given that the device remains in the EVT development stage. He believes, Kuo believes, that the change will have a limited impact on the mass production schedule and shipments for the Pro models. I got some theories. I would love to hear them.

I was listening to you guys talk about this on Connected. I think you made a very fair point, which is we hear all these stories about how the iPhone can't be changed. It's like pre-planned a year and a half in advance and you can't change anything. It's a slow, it's a big ship turns slowly.

So here are my theories. One is that, I mean, first off EVT, there is a, there, they run test hardware to find problems, right?

Like they, they definitely do that. Yeah. And so what I would say is, what happens if there's a problem? And there's two paths you can go down. One is, oh, fix the problem. And the other is, oh no,

we can't fix the problem. There's not enough time to fix the problem. At which point you've got to have a fallback, right? Which I imagine is revert, right? It's like either wave off the whole product or in the case of an iPhone and this particular thing, let's just go back to the old buttons because the new buttons aren't working.

The assumption is, right, that you've got to make that any logical company would make in this situation. If you are going to change something about the hardware design, there's a new component, a new way of doing something. When you're going into like product development cycle you are including two designs right that you have the design that has the new thing and then the design that has the new elements you know you can do like materials colors that kind of stuff but without this new feature that you've

not done before right yeah they must in some cases and in some cases where it doesn't require particular hardware changes they probably have like you know we've all seen those stories that are we took it apart and there's a open pin that could be something but isn't there's just an empty space in here yeah there was something that they were going to put there and they're like no at some stage they're like no we're gonna just pop that out and not make it. And so that's, my only question is like what it is, right? Because there's two options here. I was talking about like two paths and it's like, is it that it wasn't reliable in some way?

Like maybe the software was complicated and they, and they weren't happy with how it was behaving or was it a production issue where it up to this point, everything worked and they thought this is going to work. And then they put it through the EBT stage, which is again, not mass production, but it is a production stage of like, when we make this product, what's it going to be like? And and i my spider sense tells me i'm not actually spider man by the way and if i were i wouldn't tell you what i just thought you took pictures of spider man so yeah i just write a blog about spider man i do a podcast about spider man but i assure you i'm not spider man nope no i know him really know him really well, but I've never introduced you to him

because he's never around when we're talking. Anyway, my spider sense tells... What are we even talking about here? My spider sense tells me that it might be that second one, which is that they put this into production and the production units came off for EBT and they're like, oh no, this doesn't work right. One out of every eight is failing or, right.

And, and again, you know, if you're Apple and the iPhone has to ship, you look at that and you're like, pull it out of there. Right. That's what you have to do because you got to ship it. And there isn't, I know it seems like a lot of time between now and September, but there is very little time in terms of ramping up production, getting the factory ready and starting to make these things because they make a bunch of them in advance you got to have it locked down very soon so that's my guess is they put it into evt and whether it was a little quirk that they decided they couldn't fix or whether it

was the act of putting it into production revealed a problem that they couldn't address um that that's my guess about what's going on here i like to think that you know someone told someone finally found out about the idea that you needed to go in and customize pressure sensitivity levels to get the bumps to work and they were like no that's that's the net one back to the drawing board we built a uh a new made-for-iPhone spec where every case manufacturer will embed an NFC chip in their case that indicates how much pressure they require for their buttons to work. Wave it off, everybody. We've got to go back to the drawing board. Nope. Not going to do it. Nope. Forget about it. Apparently this one's going to the back of the queue and may find its way into the iPhone 16.

Sure. Why not? That's one more iPhone. MacRumors is reporting on some potential iOS 17 features that could be announced at WWDC. There are quite a few things in this list, some stuff we've seen before. It comes from a leaker that they consider to be verifiable from the MacRumors forums. It's one of these people that have been correct a bunch of times in the past. But I just wanted to touch on a couple of these. Heavily improved search being one of them. Don't really know what that

means. There isn't much more information in there. But the thing that I found interesting about this is I think it would be difficult for Apple to stand on be on a stage, be on a presentation at the moment and say with a straight face anything to do with siri intelligence in the age of ai like i think that's going to be a hard sell like whatever that

might be and maybe they just call it something else but back in the old back in days your anything like this was considered part of siri intelligence right that you would search in the search thing like powered by siri's intelligence like that's not going to fly now i feel like unless they're going to tell us they're using a large language model for their search now which i don't think is the time right well i think i think they might but but i think this is so so um i don't agree with the idea that siri as a brand is so burned that it if apple goes to a new model it needs to be be liquidated. However, Siri intelligence, I always thought was a little bit of a stretch. They're trying to sub-brand Siri in some ways.

And it never, I don't know, it was always very amorphous and it never really worked that well. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But in terms of the broader picture here, like, yeah, heavily improved search. What does that mean? Does it mean that they are using, you know, machine learning based assistant tech? And it, look, it doesn't have to be large language models, right? They don't, Apple, there's a lot of conversation about like, well, Apple's going to have to get on the large language model train, the chat GBT train here. but like they might have a different approach that they feel works better for what is happening on their devices. What if there were different models that were queried by like a top level model, different models and data sources

and return back information? Like I definitely want Siri to have a conversational aspect where I can kind of like refine what we're talking about until I get the answer I want. Large language models are good at that. But like, I'm open to the idea that Apple does it a little bit differently, but yeah, I'm a little worried. I think the point you're making here is the bar has been raised and heavily improved is doing a lot of lifting there. So can it get over the bar now that it's been raised or are we going to look at it and be like uh no it's like more of the old thing search is better right and like that's that and i think that's fine it's just like more for me of like the idea where these things used to be said they were powered by siri in some way right i just i i would struggle now

honestly i would be surprised if Apple talk about Siri for the next couple of years because I would expect that they are internally talking about like okay how do we develop our own on device models right?

unless they have it I expect they have it I don't think it's now though but I expect they're working on it but who knows honestly I would love to see it. I don't think it's nailed, though. But I expect they're working on it. But who knows? Honestly, I would love to see it, right? Because I think it would be, I would be really interested to see what that means for Apple.

Like, how does it run and work? You know, I wouldn't put it past them. It would probably be something like opt into our, you know, super Siri beta, right? Or something like that. And I think they will do that at some point. The question is just, yeah, when?

Is it this year? Is it next year? Is it the year after that? But they may also take it in a different direction, right? Because I strongly believe that what they don't want is hallucinations right that they view siri as a as a tool that's grounded in reality and that uh they they can't and i would say that this is the problem this is the problem with search engines with apple implementing these things it's like it's fun to be in a playground and look at a large language model and watch it hallucinate things that aren't real. But if you're an information tool, you can't do that.

It has to be based on reality. And if there's an approach that makes it a little more constrained and a little less fun, but actually accurate, that's the approach they need to take. And that may be a lot harder to do than just opening up chat GPT-4 and saying, good luck. And then like, I, I was experimenting with GPT-4 the other day. Uh, we did an incomparable game show over the weekend. And I thought, what if I asked these questions to chat GPT-4, what would it answer? And one of them was name four Beatles songs and a Beatle. And it correctly listed three Beatles songs and a Beatle. The fourth song was a Wings song.

Okay. And I looked at it and I thought, well, this is actually funny. If this was a contestant on the show, they got the answer wrong. But if I'm Google, Bing, if I'm Apple and Siri, like, no, you can't get that wrong. You can't get answers to my questions wrong. And that is, I think, the thing that is the biggest gate to companies like Apple really embracing this stuff is how do you do accuracy detection because this tool may demo really well, but if it's not giving you proper information, it's useless essentially. So it's, boy, I'm not sure there's anything more interesting and sorry, VR headset, anything more interesting in terms of Apple's long-term strategy

than what they've been doing behind the scenes with AI and machine learning models. And because of their secrecy, we don't really know, are they kind of on pace, but keeping it secret and it's not ready yet? Or are they way behind? Are they somewhere in between? Like, we don't know.

We just don't know. But it feels really like they've got to catch up or they're going to be lost yeah i wonder how much they can like this is like one of those things where if they're not going to talk to the internet and if they're not gonna you know it'd be complicated this is why i'm interested in whatever apple's eventual thing will be like what will their stance be? And maybe they won't keep it on device, right? Because Siri wasn't on device for a really long time.

I think they won't. I think there'll be elements on device and your data will be on your device that they'll use. But what they'll do, my guess, is they'll do like plugins essentially to trusted data sources, whether they're run by Apple or elsewhere. And they're going to have some sort of a privacy system where like each request is anonymized so that, you know, it goes to the server at Apple who knows who you are, but

then that server passes the information to a server who doesn't know who it is, gets the result back and then passes it back to you. So you're, you know, you're essentially anonymous. result back and then passes it back to you so you're you know you're essentially anonymous um that's the kind of thing i would imagine that they would do is is that using because so much of this is the importance is using good internet data sources for this information like that example of gpt getting hooked up to wolfram alpha and suddenly being able to do math, which it couldn't do. That's a good example of like, you know, you build, you build out a knowledge engine that includes the ability to hold a conversation with a human, but you try to make it more of that intelligent assistant thing

where it's like, it knows where to look and how to find the right answer. Uh, instead of it being, it will make up an answer if it can't find it which is sort of where we are with these chatbots a couple days ago i was um building a lego set that i've been i've had for a couple of years and i finally got around to starting on it it's the original mandalorian ship set i've forgotten its name now and i was like you know i was just sitting there just building it and it was silence i was like oh i thought to myself why don't i put on the mandalorian soundtrack that sounds like fun so i asked my home pod played the mandalorian soundtrack and it said playing mandalorian soundtrack season three i was like that's not what i want so i was like i'll sit again and play the mandalorian soundtrack season one playing the mandalorian soundtrack season two oh. So I asked it a third time,

and it played season two a third time. My point of this is the idea of Apple potentially being hesitant about Siri hallucinating. Siri has such a bad reputation for getting things wrong. It's so bad now. Right? I think that their appetite should be different to Google, where Google gets things right currently right like google's whole thing you go to google and you type a thing and you're

expected to get an answer that's correct i'm not sure if people currently expect accuracy from siri en masse like i feel like in our audience we do expect that. I don't know what general people do feel. There are different levels of what you're trying to do with Siri, though, right? Sometimes you're trying to ask Siri for facts, and you need to get accurate facts. I actually think Siri is pretty good at facts. Something like Apple Music, it's really unforgivable that it's so bad at that. Yeah. And that's one of those cases where I feel like Apple could do

a properly trained model, but also for Apple Music, for the Apple Music catalog, literally. They have the data, right? They have it. Exactly. They can build... So you can just point something at it.

Exactly. But on top of that, that's where the value of the language model that knows context comes in. Because it would allow you to say, no, the one of the language model that knows context comes in. Because it would allow you to say, no, the one from the first season, after your first query. And then it should get it right.

Maybe it doesn't. But you having to make the same query over and over again to an amnesiac voice assistant is part of the problem. And that's one of the things that Apple's behind on. Actually more was then when I opened Apple Music and typed Mandalorian season one into the search box,

the first result was exactly what I was looking for. So like, why can it not perform the same search that I'm performing with my fingers, you know? Yeah, I guess it's called chapter one and that probably confused it yeah that was what i thought it's still but when i search for season one it gets it right it gets it right that that's that's that's it's like yeah i like i went through this too of like okay so technically it calls it something else but the fact that the the the apple music apps search does the correct one why can't siri just hear me and perform that search and then just do the thing i just look it's also got the little icon in the quarter that shows that

uh among my friends who's listening to that it's mike it was me going back to this uh mac rumors report about ios 17 apparently the dynamic island will be able to quote do a lot more this is kind of a thing that we've been talking about right of like now that it's out and available are other teams inside of apple realizing what they might be able to do with the dynamic island right and and they've got a year or at least they've got many months of feedback from developers saying, I can't implement this because or I implemented this, but, and they get to use those and prioritize those and actually find out internally and externally, like what's missing. Right. Because, I mean, I think that's a fundamental thing that happens with software like this is you build it internally, secretly, and you've got your ideas that you've all come up with but then this is like we talked about shipping the headset like then it meets reality and everybody's

like oh why doesn't it do x and the answer is oh we didn't think of it or we didn't prioritize it because we didn't think people would want that and then you get that from five different people and you realize oh yeah that is something we should do. So I'm very excited that they are bringing it to the non-pro phones and making it do a lot more because that suggests that Apple thinks that there's something here. It's important for the platform and that they can keep building on it, which is always the fear is it's going to be like the touch bar and they're going to throw it out there and then ignore it until it fades away. But in this case, like I like the dynamic Island,

I wanted to do more, but I really like it. So I'm excited that it might do more. And I hope that they've been listening to everybody who's developing apps for it and telling them what's missing. I mean, now that baseball season is going on, I've been using dynamic Island in the MLB app and it's so great to be like

using my phone and I look up and it's got the score it's just so great it's great interactive home screen widgets that could include quote one tap buttons sliders and other dynamic content is something that apple is exploring this is maybe uh the shakiest of all of them based on the way it was written it's kind of just like this is a thing that they're looking at this one interests me i am definitely in the camp of i was nervous about widgets when we knew that they had no interactivity of like oh this feels like it's going to be a regression right from the the widgets we had before which were just in the today view when you swiped over and you could have a bunch of buttons in them you could do things in them without needing to ever

open an app and then basically as soon as the new style of widget which could be put on the home screen was introduced i was very happy with them i thought that overall they were better designed you had more visibility of them and i haven't felt the requirement really to have buttons in widgets i agree i think widgets are good um i can see the value of like what if i am always checking the weather for three cities yes i could put three weather widgets on my screen yes but what if i could put one weather widget on my screen and then tap to cycle through them yep that would be nice right i have stacks of widgets like this that are the same app and the app just offers multiple widget types and you and you swipe

through a stack in order to do it yeah you can do that then it doesn't take up the space but you've got the that that is a kind of interactive widget right so what if you had the ability to have some fundamental interaction i don't believe that they're ever going to get to the point where it's like our friend james building a whole calculator inside a widget right i think they don't want it to be that well maybe not i mean maybe they do but i like the idea of more dynamic content like like some different layers of information or something that can rotate through, like cycle through some things every 30 seconds or every minute or something like that. And little sliders or buttons that do basic information. Because I think what they want is not to break the concept that the home screen widget

is not a live app that's running. It's some code that puts some data somewhere where Apple can display it. So this interactivity is going to be like showing other content that it has inside it, if that makes sense, right? I don't think it's going to be like tap to load the new whatever. It's going to be like, okay, here's all your data. Here's the data. Here's my weather widget with three cities, right? And it'll just say, here's the weather data for city one, two, and three. And it does that every however often it updates.

And then you get the little slider or button to tap or whatever that lets you cycle through them. But it's not truly interactive right it's more like it's an interactive mode of displaying static information i feel like is probably what's going on here i think there are a couple of simple ones if you have a media widget that you can pause it you know if you have one of the ones for me time that's true timer he has a little stop button on the widget and when you press it it opens the app and stops the timer running. The shortcut widget lets you tap individual shortcuts, right?

That's the only one. That's it. No, that's actually a good example of something that goes beyond information, which is can I have items that launch apps and perform behaviors or allow an app to perform a behavior in the background. That's a great example because Timery is a good example of that. Wouldn't it be nice if I could make a Timery widget with buttons on it? And when I press the button, it just does it. It doesn't launch the app and tell me to press the button. It just presses the button for me in the background.

I don't even need to do anything about it. Or media controls, sure, being able to just press pause on the media control or next and have it do the right thing. Yeah, sure. But again, I think they're going to keep it simple if they do this. Mark Gurman has a couple of pieces of Mac related news. He's kind of joining the throngs of people at the Corral saying that the 15-inch MacBook Air is coming soon. Mark has apparently seen logs from developers that show that these machines are being tested

with third-party apps to validate their compatibility, which is just like an interesting thing that they do. Why would it not work? It's, you know, like, hey, you know, do your testing. And that these Macs will, as expected, feature an M.2 processor. And a piece of information that I think is new, I haven't seen before,

is that the 15-inch MacBook Air will have the same screen resolution as the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Which makes sense. So they've got another resolution to have. And then obviously it won't be as high quality as crisp as the full team will be because it'll be a little bit bigger so parts of Mark's report this week are

are very weird okay look I mean one of the things he's doing is that he is trying to roll together previous reports of his and I assume when he does that he's only including things that he's still confident about,

but some of the reports are older. Like, I saw somebody report excitedly about, what was it that they were doing? It was something that he reported before about sideloading, right? He was like, oh, iOS 17,

they're working to overhaul the software to open up the phone to sideloading. And he links to his story from December. I don't, I can't tell whether he's saying I checked with my source and that's still happening or whether he's literally just pulling a link from December and saying, in December I reported that they're doing this.

I can't, and I know that's a fine difference, but it's like, it does matter because things do change. And I'm unclear whether he still is confident in this or whether he's got a report from December. That's the last he knows of it. But he's rounding up all of his reports, so heaffled me was about the M2 processor. So he says, Apple has several new models in the works. At least some of the new laptops will be introduced at WWDC, but the models coming in June probably won't boast major new M3 chips. Instead, they'll run something in line with the current M2 processors.

I don't know what this means. He says plural models coming in June and then says they won't have the M3, but they will have something in line with the current M2 processors. What does in line mean? Is it M2 and a half? Is it just the M2? Is it that there'll be an M? I mean, I have a hard time believing a MacBook Air is going to have an M2 Pro option, right?

What I would say is maybe the chips could be binned differently. So it might not, right? Like it might not be the exact M2 that's available in the current okay okay but but new laptops plural and they i don't see a new laptop here other than the 15 inch macbook air while the revision of the 13 what how do you revise an m2 macbook Air on the M2. Yeah, I don't know. How is that a revision, right?

It doesn't follow. Yeah, I agree. So I don't know. This is what baffles me. I don't know if what he's saying is Apple's actually going to do an M2 Air refresh with some different colors or something and maybe some different chip options with different, you know,

like maybe like you say,ning maybe they make a cheaper version with fewer cores that's available i don't know or again maybe we're reading too much into this and what really he essentially means here is that they're just going to do an m2 15 inch air and the rest of it's going to come later yeah yeah which is. Which is, oh, by the way, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, that's something where I think they could do a revision and just say,

oh, it's got M2 Pro as an option now because it's got a fan in it, right? Yeah. They could put an M2 Pro chip in there in the base model 13-inch MacBook Pro

with touch bar. They could do that. So maybe that's it. Maybe it's a in line with current M2 processors update for that model. But I don't see how you update. An M2 Air already exists, so I'm not sure it can get updated.

And it's in a brand new enclosure. Unless, as you said, they actually, they finally put color in it. You know what I mean? They might actually do it. But if they've got an M3 Air waiting in the wings, the last thing you would want to do, right, is I would think, unless it's not coming for six months or nine months. I don't them three air waiting in the wings the last thing you would want to do right is is i would think unless it's not coming i don't think it's waiting in the wings i'm not sure how much in the wings it is because if it is then why like what so then the 15 and the 13 will be on completely different chip years yeah right like that well yeah that's super weird though right okay so that would be the other

way to go is say you know we're not going to even do i mean we don't know maybe m3 is delayed yeah and we don't know that yet and that m3 is going to come later and maybe they're like well we got to refresh the air and they do it with the phone so maybe that's the answer is also we've got some new colors in the in the m2 air that everybody loves also we've got some new colors in the M2 Air that everybody loves today. We've got this new 15-inch M2 Air and then we've got the 13-inch M2 Air

and it's got some new colors. Yay! It's got a dark brown and a very dark green that look like they're black. But colors! Or they could do something bright.

Wouldn't that be nice? And that would be... I think they might even spur some sales. Wouldn't that be nice? Like how do you spur sales on a one-year-old laptop is like make it make it an orange orange yeah maybe mark is also reporting that apple is working on an updated version of the mac studio it actually says multiple so this is two mac studio follow-ups are planned but their timing

is less clear than some of the other things that you have less clear clear than what? Less clear than a lot of things are unclear here. Well, in that report that you're referencing, he references in the next six months, they've got a bunch of things that they're working on. And this is like, he doesn't have a timeframe at all, but they are working on it, which is good because there has been concern and discussion of like,

hey, is this another one of those could have replaced the Mac Pro? They make one of them of like hey is this another one of those could have replaced the mac pro they make one of them and then don't do another one like the iMac pro yeah no it's great to hear that the mac studio follow-ups are being planned that's fantastic um i just so so what we're getting is this idea that there's going to be something in june and then there's going to be some stuff in the fall as there always is and maybe that's where the m3 debuts and there's max studio follow-ups coming but it's unclear when my guess would be next spring for an m3 pro or m3 m3 max and m3 ultra that would be my guess because it feels to me like what they're really settling on here is that desktops go every other year and laptops go every year.

Or at least every other generation, chip generation, if it's not a year, and laptops go every chip generation. And if that's true, then, you know, yay. And two Mac Studio follow-ups, also the question is, what does that mean? Is that two different kind of variants on the Mac Studio, or are they thinking out two generations with it? Either way, happy to hear it as a Mac Studio owner. I love that idea that it's going to survive. I love this for you. I think there's a good place for it because it is faster than the Mac Mini, right?

The Mac Mini is M2 and M2 Pro, and the Mac Studio is M1 Ultra and Max. So they both serve kind of like, it's a nice product ramp there. So yeah, we'll see. But that report made me happy. As frustrated as I was with the mysterious multiple laptops on something in line with the M2 processor. I don't know.

I think he's just hedging there is what's really going on. And he's not doing his kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing. I think he's just hedging. This episode is brought to you by Electric. When leading your small business, it's not all glamorous.

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Solo 3 headphones today for scheduling a meeting. Our thanks to Electric for their support of this show and RelayFM. So we have some more from Mark Gurman. He had his kind of like pre-WWDC report. I don't know if this is going to be the the actual one that we

will go into wwdc with or if there will be anything sooner he usually has kind of a a report like this before every apple event right that we're expecting yeah and he'll and then things are gonna right as things get closer he's gonna hear things yeah he's gonna update it but this is one of those things with bloomberg especially that they want that refresher kind of thing of like because he trickles it out during the year and i think it's fair to say that a lot of people aren't paying attention and so this gives him a chance to say all right they've announced wwdc let me tell you what i've already reported about what's going to be there and then throw in some new stuff if he knows it and there are a couple of things that this uh report that i thought could be interested in touching on uh obviously

mark says what we're expecting is that the headset will be the star of the show. It will feature the hardware, the accompanying OS, and the SDK for developers. A quote from Mark's story, I'm told the device will come with a clear story for developers in terms of how they'll want to use it.

And much of the week-long conference will showcase the headset's onboard app store and accompanying tools. Right? Makes sense, right? It's what you'd hope. This is actually last year when the rumors were that this was going to happen, maybe last year, or we were hoping. This is the scenario, right? Which is, it's a new platform.

You're at the developer conference. Now's the time to lay everything out about how this thing's going to work, and what we want from developers and give them all the details and then they'll ship it later in the year. Also, from that, we're talking about iOS and iPadOS, not going to introduce major features, it will focus on smaller improvements. We've touched on these in the last couple of weeks. You mentioned a minute ago about the opening up, right? The side loading. Gurman mentions that they are still working

on the potential ability to open up the iPhone to support third-party app stores in iOS 17, but not expecting for that to be a part of WWDC itself. That made sense to me, that in iOS 17's lifecycle, this may occur. I would not expect this to be a part of the WWDC presentation. Like, do you remember there was many years ago, I think it was The Verge where Phil Schiller sat down with The Verge

like a week before WWDC to talk about the, there were like subscription price changes that were coming. I think it was the year when they introduced the 15 if someone was subscribed for a year or longer and they they got out in front of the keynote so that everybody was already sort of diffused about that issue before apple made its news and i imagine that when and if apple ever do third-party app stores, they do it, I reckon it's often or before, but in that idea of we're not going to ruin, quote-unquote, our presentation by just having everyone focus on this one thing, which is not the thing we want people to focus on. It's the last thing they want them to focus on. Also, it sounds like these regulations are going to happen later in the year and it sounds like everybody's scrambling to do this.

And so it's not something that they would talk about and they'll leave it for a later time. I think you're exactly right about that. I will put in one thing for people to look for. We'll probably come back to this when we, maybe even when we draft. I don't know. Watch for shapes and silhouettes and hints and and and faint smells of this in

announcements right because that's where i think you might see it is if there are curious mechanisms for app security and maybe and it might even not be in the sessions. It may be in the developers digging into the beta. But that's where I might expect first confirmation of this existing is people looking at features, and they do this from time to time, people looking at features that Apple just says, this is a feature.

And you look at it and you go, yeah, but why is this a feature? And you think, oh, this would be a feature you would need to do if you were going to do third-party app stores or sideloading in general. And I'm, you know, I just I'm not saying it'll be there, but that would be one

of the things that I would watch for in terms of a sign, a little hint that this is where they were headed, even if they're not ready to announce that feature yet. Yeah, it's like I could imagine there could be like, hey, we have this new API for how to handle payments. Don't even worry about it, right? But if you could just implement it, and actually you have to,

and we're going to make you, that'd be super good. If we just change something, but you don't need to worry about it. Here's a session about it later on. Just watch that. You know, I can imagine this kind of thing going. Or not even that of like, why is there a session about this? I was thinking of something like,

hey, so we're going to introduce a new thing. It'll be in State of the Union or something. We're going to introduce a new part of app review. And every developer is like, oh God, a new part of app review. And developer's like oh god a new part of app review and it's like well no we're going to have an explicit you know you all know notarization from a friend mac os right yeah notarization who y'all know how about you know our friend sol he does the notarization he's gonna look at your apps we're gonna have a

it's gonna be very familiar because now all apps that go in the app store are gonna have that process in addition to the existing process and developers i mean i'm making that up but something like that i know developers are gonna be like it already does scans and it already does i know i know it does but just watch that right because there'll be something in the process where you're like why did you change this process oh because every app's gonna get that now a couple of things this reminds me of one is when they had the session on size classes that's the classic one people mention right classic right what if things could be different sizes a scenario in which your iphone screen could be a different size

why would an ipad app need to change its physical size? Who could tell? Yeah, interesting. Well, it's because, you know, the iPhone and iPad are different sizes, and that's totally why. Well, why don't I just do an iPhone version and an iPad version? No. Don't do that. What if you didn't, though?

You know what I mean? What if you didn't? The other one was a few years ago where they were like, hey, look at all these developers coming back to the App Store. And it was like, wait, what? The Mac App Store was like, no, but these apps won't work. But look, don't worry about it, though. It's fine. Yeah, Adobe and Barebones

and Microsoft, they're all coming back to the Mac App Store. It's great. Watch OS X will be the biggest OS update, which is interesting, but we spoke about that. We're looking at potentially a redesign here. And Mac laptop

announcements, most likely the MacBook Air as we mentioned, is kind of rounding it out there. I'm actually a little surprised that they would put that in the event. I feel like if you've just got a MacBook Air, just drop it in May. I feel like, what, you're not going to be busy enough with the headset? Why do you need

more hardware? I would not put it past them to kick it out of WWDC and have it be a few weeks before or a few weeks after just to get it out of there. It's a distraction. Unless they want it to be a

distraction, but I don't think they do. Hardware doesn't need to happen at wwc and if it's just a a bigger macbook air and it's not like a mac pro announcement or something then it's not even like the appropriate audience can you imagine like the hands-on area like the saddest little display of all time right which is the the 15-inch macbook air as everybody's trying to get their hands on the headset. On the headset. And this little MacBook Air. And then over there in the corner.

This to me feels like, hey, it's in the keynote now in case of this other thing we're not going to include, right? About time or whatever they might want it to be. And they've already made some videos for it and they did it all at the same time and it's very easy for them to just like, it's out of keynote now we're going to do it in may or something yeah like that or july yeah maybe maybe i i look if you've got it and you think it'll benefit you then announce it but i it seems like it's going to be packed maybe they're maybe maybe not maybe they're like

well there's not that much about the other OSs. We're going to do the reality headset, but there's only so much we can say about that. Having a, some meat and potatoes in there for our developer audience about a Mac laptop. Uh, okay.

All right. But I'm not sure the 15 inch MacBook air is that. So I don't know. Um, the watch OS 10 thing, I still am scratching my head about. But yeah. Look, they had their first cut at it

and then they sort of like took stuff away and they added a few things. It would be, I don't feel like Apple has done the let's do a new, a rethink of watchOS. I think they've done little bits and pieces here and there.

And like an example is like you remember time travel i had to that really threw me off yes i do remember time travel i wasn't sure if you like asking me is this like a general question it's a doctor who question i've got for you time travel was like you could take your watch face and then use the digital crown to move through time. And the idea was you could move forward and see what was next on your schedule. But it also had the effect of if you bumped your digital crown, it changed the time. The actual time on the watch, yes. To the wrong time, which is not what you want. So then they got rid of that feature.

But I think that if done properly, using your digital crown, spinning it while you're on the watch face could do something, right? It could do something. It could adjust something in the complications. It could scroll the watch face off and have a widget view. It could, I don't know, it could could do something but what it does is nothing and the reason it does nothing is because of time travel so again it would be kind of nice if like they repurposed the side button which was originally digital touch and they made that into app switcher and all that like i i would love to see them if this is what this is to for

it to be a real rethink of like okay learning everything we've learned about the watch let's start from some basics instead of just patching this thing that has been you know out there since the first version of the watch so we'll see you know saying about things you've forgotten something i was reminded of uh when i was looking up something a couple of days ago. Do you remember glances on watchOS? Glances. Yes, this was part of, I think, watchOS 1. I don't remember if it went past that.

You would swipe up from the bottom of the watch, and it would show you pieces of information, like here's your heart rate, here's your next appointment, your calendar. And they took that and made a control your next appointment your calendar and they took that and made a control center instead yeah and they also just got rid of glances completely yeah that's the thing like it was it was one of the original failed parts of watch os like when it was like watch kit i think it was part of the watch kit api stuff so like what this reminded me of when i was looking at there was widgets right you, we were talking about like maybe dynamic stuff,

widget stuff, how could you change something in watchOS? That was one of the things that I was thinking about there. Yeah. With it in the chat says, time travel sort of exists in the solar dial watch face. We'll do some adjustments. It has like little bits left, but what I'm saying is sort of like,

that's a big gesture that you could probably do with something in your user interface, right? Of what I'm saying is sort of like, that's a big gesture that you could probably do with something in your user interface, right, of your watch. That instead is sort of like, oh, watch face has something that it does with it. I can just see Apple bringing in the steamroller there and being like, nope, new paradigm now. Because time travel became a thing for a while that was a setting, and then it just went away. Faded away. and then it just went away. Faded away.

Because it was an interesting idea, but just the, it's like a great idea and like a good demo, but in use is, lends to confusion. Yeah, I think, so part of it is the way that it was implemented is if you accidentally spun the dial a little bit, you got the wrong time. That was a problem.

I could see an argument that if you're on a watch face that's got a calendar on it, that you can spin the dial. And it can tell you're actually spinning the dial. It's not an accident. And you're trying to advance or go back. That your calendar complication would roll to the next event. Right. But not changing the time on your watch, which was cute, but really confusing potentially.

So like, I could see, again, there's an argument to be made about like, what if you could advance your data or, and at that point it's like, well, what if you could scroll? If I've got a weather widget with one city on it, what if I could scroll to the next city? Right? Like again, there's other things you can maybe do with it. So, and my larger point is just,

there's stuff like that all over watchOS that is sort of like, you know, they're patching it. They're taping it up that we took this thing out. We put this thing in and I'd like to see them revisit it now from like a top. I know this is going to terrify people but like an iOS 7 kind of thing

sorry calm down everybody calm down I would like I think watchOS deserves that kind of let's think about this moment and you know anytime you do that you're going to make some people mad

but I do think it kind of needs it you want all the watch faces to get thinner yeah i want everything to be flat and thin and unreadable and flat and thin i you know i ios 7 wasn't quite ready and was frustrating in a lot of ways but i'm just gonna say it i don't get ios 6 nostalgia at all i see screenshots where people are like oh look at this big fat skeuomorphic boy with its big wood grain and the bulges here and i hate it yeah i hate it. I don't get this idea. I get the nostalgia, but iOS 7 had lots of issues. It needed a lot of things to be resolved. By shipping it, they got a lot of pushback, and they

made changes. It was not remotely perfect, but it needed to happen, and I'm glad it happened. There, I said it. I'm glad it happened. I wish it had been further along i wish it had not been quite so extreme but the fact is they came out with the extreme version and then they spent uh some time peddling that back into something that's more usable like i

am on board with this okay right like it was a good idea because look what i think i think i think that a lot of people forget is that apps started to look like this. Like the flat design, that was what we called it, flat design. Apps started to adopt this style of design before iOS 7 came along and made the whole thing. Sure.

Right? Like this is what it looks like on the OS. Because skeuomorphic design, this like making things look real, became very heavy. It became very intensive. Everything looked dark. Whenever I look at screenshots of iOS 6 phones,

everything looks really dark. And it was also, it put a lot of hurdles into app development. Because to make a quote unquote good looking app, you needed to be able to understand and design textures, which was really hard. And now you don't need that so much so i think it was a good thing was ios 7 too far in a bunch of ways yes but that was because it seemed like it was rushed right

like it was it was fast they had they didn't have a lot of time which is why like ios 7 beta 1 to the shipping version looked so different and yes it then still took a lot of time and there are still places where like buttons still don't look like buttons and like i know right you know like that is one of the bad parts that we still have but overall that design idea was great and i agree with you watch os 10 should be watch os is like big rethink moment like if you just start it again where would you end up i would like to see what that might be exactly there's one thing about ios 7 that i think is actually the biggest failing of ios 7 which is ios 7 pushed apple has already changed this right now you have this whole thing about like it'll stay on the

previous version and give you software updates and say would you like to update to the new version yeah the number one worst thing that ios 7 did actually was discourage regular users from ever updating their phones yeah because i still see this with my friends and family like it can't ios 7 was such a change it changed their phones out from under them and they're and they were like oh i'm never doing an apple software update again, which isn't true, right? You can't do that. But it means that they cancel and say, no, I'm going to resist that. And I was visiting my mom and she's like, no, should I really do that?

Like, it's going to change my phone. And I'm like, no, it's a security update. Do it. But that totally came because iOS 7 confused so many people when it launched uh because they just updated their phones so their phones just updated and they're like what happened to my phone and that like you gotta you can't do that right you gotta be when you make changes to somebody's phone out from under them you gotta you gotta warn them you gotta explain what you're gonna do you gotta walk them through it and i know you want everybody to to update but

you gotta be gentle with it and that i think is actually the biggest sin of iOS 7. It was a huge change and Apple just dropped it on people because they were in their own little bubble of like, oh yeah, we're just going to push out a software update. It's like, no, you're going to actually completely change the look and behavior of the phone of everybody who's got an iPhone and they're going to hate you for it. And I know you need it to get out there, but you got to find a strategy to mitigate this a little bit. I think that's the biggest sin of iOS 7.

Do you want to talk very quickly about, just touch on Make Something Wonderful, which was the book that came out last week and website, EPUB. I just want to just put out there, everyone that I see that has a physical version of this book just know i'm very jealous of you yeah same but that i really do hope that apple finds a way to make it available but i don't think that they will but if you're a an apple or disney employee

who has no interest in that book get in touch um wouldn't mind it i liked it i i i i'm always okay i think i've talked about it on the show before but like the steve jobs archive is it makes me uneasy and it makes me uneasy because it is steve jobs's friends and family trying to control the narrative about who steve jobs was and that makes me uneasy just because i don't love the idea of anybody kind of like saying, we're just going to, there's this guy who lived and died. And now we're going to tell his story in a way that makes us happy and that makes people remember him in the way we want. Right. At the same time, I also completely acknowledge that if you don't do that, you just let history decide. And it is not a very careful judgment that happens. It's

kind of this thing that just organically emerges. And you end up with a historic figure who has been reduced to a very simple version of themselves that may not focus on the stuff that is what was important about them or what we judge to be important about them. So on that level, I appreciate why it exists while at the same time being kind of uneasy about the idea that they are straight up like myth-making about Steve Jobs. So there it is. I said it. That said, I thought that the book was really well done. It's curated by, essentially, it's a historian who's basically the operator of the Steve Jobs archive and she was a academic historian before that

as well it's very well done it's a collection of things from like transcripts of things he said and things he wrote and especially he sent emails to himself with his notes about what he was thinking about stuff that became a habit for him.

I guess his iCloud syncing wasn't so great. And I mean, it was a habit, right, from way back in the day. And that was a thing you could do is send yourself emails. So he did that. And so that gives us a lot of insight into all sorts of things he was working on or thinking about. And there are other emails in there too. I think the first couple of parts of the book where he talks about his childhood and growing up and then the early days at Apple and going off there too. I think the first couple of parts of the book where he talks about his childhood and his, and growing up and then the early days at Apple and going off to Next, I think is the most interesting stuff in the book.

The third act of it is very much more like, here's what he said on stage at Macworld Expo. And here's a memo he sent out to all Apple employees. And here's a memo he sent out to Pixar employees. And, you know, Steve Jobs' recollections of childhood are really interesting. Memos from the CEO, less so, right? Memos from the CEO are less interesting than that. So that end part is not as good, although it does have his Stanford commencement speech, which is amazing, and has his draft ideas from his email, which is amazing and has the, uh, and has his drafts draft ideas from his email, which is wild. Um, so anyway, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's worth, it's free. It's free. I think it's worth looking at if you are interested in Steve Jobs and Apple at all, because there's stuff in there that I had had seen before, but there's a lot of stuff in there that I had not seen before

or had forgotten about that, um, was interesting to hear essentially in his own words. So, so yeah, I, I definitely recommend it. I was going to give it a pass and then I was like, well, look, I should scroll through it. And then I found that I was really scrolling through it and the website's really beautiful too. And then I read the rest of them in the EPUB and, you know, it's yeah, it's, it's worth, it's worth it. It is not a boring business book about a famous man, nor is it a biography or something. It really is just sort of like, who was this guy in his own words? And then he became a CEO and he sent out memos.

And then he's less interesting, but that's fine. I understand what you're saying for me i like that the people that love him are telling a version of him that they felt to be true you know like um i think that that is as valuable as any other story that can be told of like people that love him wanting to be remembered this way i think i think that that is important as well as like here is the out and out objective history of a human and their life yeah no i i understand the impulse and i i appreciate it um i think maybe part of what takes me aback is that it's not just like hey it's it's Lorene Jobs and Johnny Ive and we're

working on a project about our friend Steve. It's we have created the Steve Jobs archive. Now the Steve Jobs archive has released this and you know, it is it is so structured and calculated and designed to be it's like Apple University

is the internal tool at Apple to like keep the culture what they want it to be. This is like that for the outside. It's like, we're going to manage Steve Jobs's image. And again, it makes me uneasy because you're right. There are things that they're not going to want to talk about. It's not a place for the unvarnished truth. It's not the Steve Jobs presidential library. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. Maybe they'll be like, yeah, we've got bad stuff in here too. Check it out. But I don't think that's why it's there. I think it's there to burnish his reputation. And that's fine. I understand it. Again, history is going to do

what it's going to do. The way you fight that is by doing something like this, where you're like, no, we're going to say what you should remember about Steve Jobs. We're going to be the ones who define that. What gives me pause is that it's not not the whole story it's the story they want you to know about him and they have every right to do that it's just again there's just part of me that's like but it's not the whole story right it is it is what you want but i understand why i would do it if i were them i would absolutely do it yeah yeah because you're like they obviously have access to his email and we've seen emails that came in like subpoenas depositions and depositions right which is a different man but it's still the same man you know and so like it is you know and it's like in the depositions we don't get the good stuff

right yeah and and you mix it all together right you you Unconnected reading Lisa's book. Yeah. Right? Which is a very different view of Steve Jobs. It's very good, but it's a very good book, but it shows a very complicated man. Yeah. So the truth is that the Steve Jobs archive in some ways is trying to be part of the conversation about Steve Jobs. Yeah. of the conversation about Steve Jobs that can get the stuff that they have access to because they have access to his papers and emails

and all those things in order to tell the story the way they want to tell it. Everybody else gets to tell it the way they want to tell it. So why not the people who knew him well and loved him and have access to all of his stuff? Again, I think it's totally reasonable. My reaction to the Steve Jobs archive is, this is

bad. It shouldn't exist. It's not that. What it is, is know what it is. Just everybody know what it is, because it is the friends and family of Steve Jobs trying to myth-make about him. I'm not saying they're lying about him. I'm saying they're trying to give you a very specific image of Steve Jobs, and just know that, because that's their job job is to burnish his reputation for history and impart his wisdom on all of us in the meantime. And just be aware of that, that that's what you're getting. But it's a good book. I liked it. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at TextExpander. When you work in a small team, every moment counts.

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That is textexpander.com slash upgrade to say goodbye to repetitive typing. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's do some Ask Upgrade questions to finish out today's episode

of the Upgrade podcast. First one comes from Peter. Peter says, Jason mentions that he's a runner every now and then. As an Upgrade listener and an amateur runner myself, I'm curious to learn more about Jason's running.

Do you run races? Do you run daily, weekly, sporadically? How do you use your Apple Watch to track your runs? If at all, do you use third-party apps to do this or do you just stick with Apple's tools? Calling me a runner is really pushing it. I have run. I do do run i do it for exercise because it's pretty easy to do i mean the classic thing about running is you can just go run and you don't need equipment

and you just run around my neighborhood in this case um i have done a couple of virtual 5ks i've never even done one of those in person. It was during the pandemic, especially when I was running. When I was running regularly. So the story is I'm not running currently because last summer I tripped over a curb and bruised my ribs. And then I didn't run for a while, partially because my ribs hurt and partially because I did it while I was running and I decided not to run for a while. And then the other reason is, uh, we got a dog and the dog is young and she's 12 months now. And, um, the dog is extremely high energy.

And so my, my, my, my old dog was an old dog who was old dog who was extremely low energy. So I have to take, I mean, honestly, taking the dog out once a day is probably not enough, and I need to take her out twice a day, but that really eats into my time that I would use for other things. So I end up doing a very fast-paced dog walk instead of a run, and that's just how it is. Now, will I get back to it?

Probably, and I mean back to it? Probably. And I mean, we'll see. So in terms of the tech, I did like three days a week. That was my run goal was three days a week. I used Couch to 5K to get up to speed. I actually use an app called Intervals Pro, which lets you program in a Couch to 5K plan. I originally used the Couch to 5K app, but I found Intervals Pro. And Intervals Pro is great because it's an Apple Watch app as well. You can program in your Couch to 5K program. And then when you get up to the 5K, which I would do after, I'm going to have to start it again at the beginning. But when you get up to that point, then instead of those intervals, I was just setting out, like, eventually I get to the point where I can just use the running app, the, the activity, running activity and say, just run open goal or for 30 minutes or

whatever. But Intervals Pro was the thing that I used to get up to that point. So highly recommend that if you're doing a program and you want to use just the Apple Watch because it runs directly on the Apple Watch and it means I don't need to run with a phone. And then I listened to Overcast again on the Apple Watch. So I finally got it to where I was living the dream where I had AirPods in my ears and my Apple Watch on my wrist and that's it. And it was tracking me. It was telling me when to stop and start running. And it was playing my podcast while I was doing that.

And that was great um and yes when i tripped over the curb both my airpods flew out of my ears onto the sidewalk it was a road that was shut down um and i was i was running down it because that's fun and then i got toward the end and i went up on the sidewalk and i missed the, I missed the cutout for the driveway and hit the curb and, uh, tried to take it in my hands and, and, and, uh, and elbows. And, uh, I took a lot of it in that, but, uh, I, I still made contact with my ribs. And, and so you decided to go, Oh, rip the old rib first. Yeah. Well, it was second.

It was second, but I i didn't i hadn't stopped enough of the force yeah uh and you know so basically i walked didn't break anything but basically i walked back home very slowly and got in the car and went to the er and all that kind of stuff anyway i would like to run again um the dog is the question and you know i maybe i could run with the dog i'm not the dog is a handful right now. So, so yeah, I'm spending all my kind of outdoor time on that instead. But, but yeah, I love the whole wireless Apple watch and headphones thing. And I would go, my, my wife would drop me off downtown on her way to work on Wednesdays and I would run back home, which was great.

It was like two and a half miles. And that was usually when connected was on live. And I would actually use broadcasts on the Apple watch to stream it live, just Apple watch because it's cellular model. Love that too. That was really great. And then I would use Siri to send text messages to Mike and Steven, uh, during the show, which was also, I thought was hilarious. So I'll get back to it someday. Now you just do it when you're in the shower. I do. I do. I listen to lots of podcasts in the shower.

I don't have a commute. So it's walking the dog and in the shower is when I listen to all my podcasts and driving to curling. That's about it. Yeah. Was this the other day? I'm just calling you out for the other day when you were sending us live feedback from the shower, I believe.

From the shower. Honestly, I did step out of the shower when I was done, and I toweled off, and then I sent you the feedback. But it was all composed in the shower. Yeah. So I wanted to detail that. So about two minutes later, I said, oh, sent from the shower. I like that idea of like, I'll write it when I'm in the shower,

but I'll do the decency of waiting to press send until I'm out of the shower. Well, I didn't type it in the shower. I composed composed in my mind in the shower but then i stepped out because well using a touchscreen when you're soaking wet is not it's not great i don't recommend that i don't remember what the text of it is exactly but carrie will often recall and i think she has it saved of uh a set of messages that i tried to send her, I think, by email from my Apple Watch while I was swimming. And so, like, I was thinking of a thing, and then I paused at the side of the pool and, like, was dictating and was having to be like, no, like, and it was just, like, dictating,

like, no, I didn't mean to say that. I am doing this while swimming. Like, it's like a whole thing that just went on forever because, yeah, so these things are funny. Sam asks, whenever Apple releases a proper mass consumer headset, whether that's the rumored 2023 one or a future version, how do you think these will be featured in Apple stores?

Do you think they'll have test headsets out for customers to try on in store? Do manage demonstrations? Or leave customers with no ability to try them out before buying? Great question. I think there'll be some video loops in the stores showing what it's like. I think that there will be hardware in the store.

It'll be a little like the Apple Watch try-on thing where you will be able to try it on and they'll have a cloth and they'll wipe it down. Now remind me, jason or someone in the chat the original apple watch did you have to book a try on maybe i think you had to book try-ons at first so i think so that'll be what it is probably is your book you'll book your try-on experience and what it'll be is it's going to be like a, if not a video loop,

like an app that is always running that is an environment for you to be in or maybe a couple different environments that it cycles between, but it'll be like a super controlled, do this, now do that kind of thing. But I do think they will do it because they're going to want to have people experience it.

Discord's saying, yes, you were booked booked they had some walk-in appointments but booking was the preferred thing and yes i expect that's going to be the case right you will you will arrange a try on and you will go probably just to bigger stores maybe and i think that was the thing at first too and you will go and you will try it on and then make your purchasing decision uh later down the line if at all but i think it's going to have to be right like that's going to need to be an important part of this like yeah for sure that's why they've got apple stores everywhere right they want to reach people with a product like this they're really going to people are going to want to see it and they a lot of them, most of them, have never tried a VR anything before, and they're going to want to do it.

And we'll see. We'll see how that goes. But yeah, I'm sure there is a team inside Apple retail who is working with the people working on this product of like, how are we going to sell this thing in stores you know this reminds me a little bit of the conversations that people have had in the past about tvs and cars but more tvs of like how will you equip the apple store to deal with this and what i'm thinking of here is just in general virtual reality requires physical space right it does and so if you are going to want to have multiple try on stations right like you know you're gonna have like four six people at a time using these things you can't have one at a time

like the physical space requirement of that is going to be difficult for them in some Apple Store locations. Now, I can imagine, for me, in London, the Covent Garden Apple Store, for example, which at a time, I don't know if it still is, was the by square footage biggest Apple Store in the world. It's huge, across multiple floors. Very easily could accommodate this. But the Regent Street store, which is just around the corner, I don't think it could. That store is not huge.

It's big. It's very big, but it's not mammoth. But it is always packed full of people. And so I'm intrigued. How will they manage this? They'd be like a little area of the store which is kind of roped off and they're like, you know, like in a way a way right so like you can't just bump into someone who's currently in a vr

experience like i'm really intrigued to see how they will manage this without it dominating the apple stores that they put them in or maybe they want that i don't know i i think you keep it tightly controlled and it's it and it's limited and it's a loop or whatever app that is not uh that you're not going to be walking around or anything you're just going to be turning around and they're going to have like they're going to figure out what the radius is and they're going to put it in a place where it's not in the way and like i i think that they have to think through all of those issues because there's like you know as i say, they can put it in bigger stores, but eventually it needs to be in every store.

If this is going to be a thing that they're going to make as a product for everyone. Yeah, my local mall store, right? They're going to have to put it, like they do with the Apple Watch, they're going to have to put it at a table, and they're going to have to have people there. And like I said, I think it's going to be more like they're going to have them tethered and like i said i think it's going to be more like they're going to have them tethered and so they can't obviously go much past right standing by

the table and the whole thing is going to be really more like you're going to face front and turn around like with your head but you're not going to turn around with your body and you're not going to take any steps and that's not what what it is there are a few people in discord talking about the fact that some of the bigger, newer stores have these rooms that you can have like they do experiences in. I don't think that's going to be the case. Like they want people

to see people using them. Like Apple stores are marketing as much as they are stores, which is why everything is out. Like they will want other customers to see people having a fun, giggly time with the headset on and be like, what is that thing?

Right? Like, they do not want to make the headset like a, please, sir, come over here into the special room and we'll close the door on you and no one will see you. Right? Like, they want this to be a thing which other people are seeing. Right? Which is why, like why that's like the

it's one of the reasons I expect that the Apple Watch Triumph thing looks the way it did, right? We're going to get this thing out and here's all these bands. Choose the band. It is an experience for you, but also for people that aren't you to look at

and be like, what is that? I want to know what that is because that looks interesting. You know, do you agree with me? Yeah. Like it's an inside outside experience, right? For everyone around. You know, people listen to the show for long enough

know that we love thinking about what they do in the stores. And that is a very interesting part of this. Last question today comes from Brantz. Do you think Apple would eventually rename iCloud to something like Apple Cloud or is it one of the iNames that will likely stick around forever

like iMac and iPhone? What a question. I think it'll stay unless they have some real reason to change it. Yeah. I think it is like iMac and iPhone, right? It's just,

it is the name of the product. And I don't think there was ever a case where they were really trying to beat every iProduct out of the, out of the product line or, you know, I think it was more, we should not default to i for products. I think that that's what they were going for.

So like the iPhone and the iPad, I think are not going to become Apple phone and Apple pad ever. And I think iCloud probably won't either, but they're not going to make new products with that, right? It would have been iWatch, but it's Apple Watch.

Apple is the default now, but I don't think they're going to necessarily go back and erase every other product that starts with i. I had dinner with a couple of friends a couple of weeks ago and one of them one of my friends was referencing how he doesn't really know how to use his i watch and neither does he really use his i watch and me and my other friend were like seriously is that what you think it's called like how do you own one but you think it's called the iWatch and that was just like a very wild

thing for me that like in his mind that was iWatch like Apple Watch was iWatch that was what it was called and he would never have thought it to be anything else and I could not get my head around that as like how is this latched on to you but never But yeah, it is funny to me that iCloud is a part of Apple One, right? Like, it's just like, yeah, it's just here. There's nothing we can do about it. It's called iCloud. If you would like to send in your feedback, follow-up, or your questions for Ask Upgrade,

go to upgradefeedback.com, and you can send that in there to us. You can send in feedback with your name on it. You can send in anonymous feedback. You can categorize it. Thank you so much to everybody that sends in their questions every week. We appreciate you. Until next week's episode, you can check out Jason's writing over at SixColors.com

and hear his podcast at TheIncomparable.com and here on RelayFM. You can listen to my shows here on RelayFM. You can listen to my shows here on RelayFM. You can check out my work at cortexbrand.com as well too. We're both on Mastodon. You can find Jason on zeppelin.flights as at jsnell. And you can find me on mike.social as at imike. You can also follow Upgrade on relayfm.social as at upgrade. Thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus.

Thank you to our sponsors, TextExpander, Electric, and Sofa. And also, thank you for listening to this week's episode. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.