Upgrade - 457: Subtle & Vibrant

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

This week we react to rumors of future Apple health services and try to understand the difference between a service and a feature. Also, is Apple right to keep advanced AI out of Siri until it's trustworthy? And we celebrate the suggestion that watchOS might be getting a fresh new Widget-centric interface.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 457 today's show is brought to you by squarespace and fitbud my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley how are you yeah i'm a little under the weather you could probably probably hear it I've got that going on today I've got the low voice We'll see if I still have a voice by the end of the episode 50-50 odds If you lose your voice during this episode I think you will have been proven wrong

about deciding to soldier on and do this episode If I have to get Stephen Hackett to tag in at the midway point Then I made a mistake We'll find out right that is true if i if i have to get steven hackett to tag in at the midway point yeah then i made a mistake then yeah we'll find out happy bank holiday to you and to you i have a snell talk question that comes from john and john says we know that jason uses an ember mug but what is his preferred temperature for tea um oh preferred temperature this this gets us into dangerous um casey list

territory okay because i have to explain my preferred temperature to tea in fahrenheit and then translate it into celsius no you could just say in fahrenheit if people really want to know they can do the calculation no no no i'm I'm full service. I'm full service about this stuff. 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Would you have any guesses about how much that is in C? 2,000. 2,000 degrees Celsius? 2,000 Kelvins.

Yeah, that's exactly it. I like it. I like it to melt the cup. Is that like 80? 70. 70. Okay. 70 C, 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's what I like it. I did not know it's funny okay so john asked this i you know i i am not one of those people who's like oh what is the ideal temperature for my tea i shall find out and then many years ago i was like sip oh it's too hot sip oh it's too hot. Sip. Oh, it's too hot. Sip. Oh, now it's just right. Get the quick read thermometer in there. Whoa, it's 161 degrees Fahrenheit. That's it. Now let's see how long this range goes. Sip.

Still fine. Sip. Still fine. Sip. It's a little cold. Stick it in. Oh, 155. Now we know my range.

I have never done anything that scientific about this. But then the Ember mug has you set your preferred temperature. I had that moment where i realized i need to find out what my ideal temperature is however it is come in useful because there are also times where the uh the teapot the tea robot uh which keeps things warm for about an hour after an hour it doesn't keep it warm anymore and i'll come out there and there'll still be some tea and and what i do, now that I know 160 or 165, somewhere in there is the right amount is I press the hot water button on the, on the teapot. And I just watch as it goes up in

temperature until it hits 160. And then I press the button and, and, and refill my teacup. So now I know, but it's funny because I had literally, I knew there was a temperature that was just right. But I had never even thought about measuring it because what would be the benefit of it? And then I got the Ember mug and I was like, okay, I guess I need to know this. So I believe my Ember mug is set to 160, maybe 165. And that's also the range that I shoot for when I'm heating up tea in the te in the tea, reheating the tea in the teapot that's gotten cold. And now we know. And now you know,

right? So now you can try that. You could try that listeners and all the upgradings out there. They can, they can have their TJson style, which is at 160 degrees and determine, is that too hot? Is that too cool?

What's wrong with me? Or is it just right? If you'd like to send in a snow talk question of your own, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can submit a snow talk question for us to open a future episode of the show thank you to john for writing that in jason i hate that never do that again just drinking some tea over here i guess how would we know you were drinking tea without the sounds but that's right not great i have some follow-up for you so brandon writes in and says you both spent some time on last week's episode talking about the role that fitness will have with apple's upcoming headset we have more of that today actually brandon asked have either of you tried supernatural on your meta quest i was skeptical but immediately got hooked on their vr

fitness programs so two things about this okay well three things supernatural is like a fitness game kind of experience app thing very popular point two uh this is um a company that meta is trying to buy and i don't know if they will be able to. It's getting blocked. Three, for some reason that I do not understand, Supernatural was never available outside of the US and Canada, so I never tried it. Huh.

Weird. I have not tried it. I've heard good things about it from friends. I downloaded it because my wife was interested in it, and she said she might try it, but she has yet to try it. Yep. And I'm kind of happy with my Beat Saber wife was interested in it and she said she might try it but she has yet to try it yeah uh and i'm uh i'm kind of happy with my beat saber for yep um getting the sweat going and otherwise i realized

that um you could argue that my meta quest 2 is essentially a ping pong a product for me like i i play 11 table tennis more than any other, any other app on that thing. And I love it as a kid who grew up with a, a, a ping pong table and then doesn't have room for one. I do love it. But a beat saber is my choice. Uh, but I, I'm curious about it. I would like to try it sometime. I think I got, I realized that, you know, in the end there's probably a trial, but like it's, you got to pay a subscription and all that. And I just kind of didn't, that was enough of a barrier for me to like, I might have idly tried it, but I wasn't going to, I just wasn't going to deal with it. So I haven't tried it, but I've heard very positive things about it.

And those are the things that make me believe that, that and my Beat Saber experience make me believe that fitness is an actual interesting niche for Apple to explore with vr especially since they're already doing fitness content um in a couple of different ways right with fitness plus and with the apple watch yeah i hear a lot of people talk about supernatural as kind of being like the only thing that they do on their meta quest and or it was like the reason that they continue to use it. The thing about this that I'm not sure about yet is I think this works because it's a game. It's not like a fitness class. And I feel like Apple's more likely to do a we have a fitness plus class that you're going to do

inside of VR. I mean, they could gamify it though. I think the most likely scenario is that they will try to do inside of vr i mean they could gamify it though i i think that's the i i think the most likely scenario is that they will try to gamify it a little bit like they do currently and it's not really gamifying it right to put up your rings and say you're you're you're burn bar you're slightly ahead of the pack or whatever like yes i think it's an interesting question about is apple itself going to be able to take advantage of VR in the way that you might need to

to make it a compelling fitness experience or will they work with a partner or will somebody just come onto the platform and do it right and have Apple go yeah use that or buy them or whatever I think the answer is kind of like yes to all of those things, realistically.

I think that, well, I could imagine if Meta pull off this acquisition that they would put this Supernatural on the Apple headset. If people think that's wild what I just said, Meta owns Beat Saber, Beat Saber's on PlayStation. So they're not silly it's the same as microsoft owning minecraft like you own these things to make money from these things maybe you provide a slightly different experience on your own platform in some way maybe it's cheaper on your platform or whatever but realistically you still want to be where the

market is and maybe they put a version of it there because in the same way that if it can run i expect beat saber to find its way to apple's headset as well yeah i think i think there is it's actually a little similar to the um the streaming business where there was a period where everything was sort of like i'm going to just erect a bunch of walls around my stuff and nobody else can come in and then they got to the point where it's like, oh no, actually we can make more money doing, you know, letting other people have our stuff too. Right. Like that there was a calculation there. And I think that maybe there's some of that calculation from meta, which is if we own supernatural and Apple's got a headset and Apple's headset is going to be popular, we make money. Not only does Apple give the entire

VR headset thing legitimacy, which they care about, but they also would make money from it because of their app. And I feel like we're in an era now where there's more scrutiny of that sort of business practice of like, we're not going to forego revenue just out of spite and make people buy our headset. And I think people would also point at Apple's headset and say, really, is that it? You're going to withhold Supernatural? And you think, I mean, the danger is actually that somebody else builds something that's as good as Supernatural or almost as good as Supernatural on Apple's platforms. And that gives them an injection of momentum that leads them to become more powerful than Supernatural. And that's really bad for Meta.

So we'll see. But you're right, that might be the answer, is that Supernatural just goes on Apple's platform. Yeah. More on VR and fitness. Zach wrote in and said, in the most recent episode, you mentioned Apple Fitness Plus workouts with the headset

and expressed interest in having some immersive workouts. I wonder if the time to walk series could be used here as well. It'd be really cool to actually walk along the path that the guest is narrating about and see for yourself instead of just hearing sounds and seeing still images. So here's the problem is VR exercise works with moving your body around in place or you know potentially if you're on a stationary bicycle or something i guess this might work if you're using a treadmill but otherwise it doesn't work i mean i guess okay you could do it in augmented reality mode but now you're walking around your neighborhood

wearing a headset i don't think that's a really good scenario so i i think it's an interesting idea but i just don't you know unless it was a time to walk on the treadmill kind of thing, that could be interesting. Right. And I think that there will be innovation in those areas, bicycles and treadmills and other things, but you got to be able, you know, otherwise in VR, you're basically in a space unless you're, you're flipping it over to augmented reality mode, because otherwise you're, you're going to run into stuff. And I don't think we're at the point culturally where people are going to be walking around with the Apple headset outside. Good point. Also, I wanted to mention David Schaub

in our members' Discord pointed out something that I was also thinking, which is Apple seems to be solving for weight in this product, right, based on all the reports that they're going to put the battery outboard in your pocket or whatever, and they want the headset to be light. I wonder if one of the calculations there is want the headset to be light i wonder if one

of the calculations there is it's got to be light if you're going to really make it a fitness product and the lighter it is the more receptive you're going to be to using it for fitness and i think there's something to that yeah i agree but i would say that a cable to a battery pack is not not ideal conducive to fitness yeah i, I mean, depends, right? Depends on how they do it, but you're right. There's other danger there. On a completely different note, Chris writes in

about titanium and color. So, to kind of try and close this, because we've gone back and forwards on this a bit. So, Chris says, it is possible to achieve a wide range of both subtle and vibrant color when anodizing titanium using either heat or electricity electricity is the way apple would go since it's highly repeatable and uses similar equipment to their current aluminium anodization process

right right and this is something um that has been reported that the Pro phones will be made out of titanium or will have the titanium ring instead of the stainless steel, which is great because it's lighter. And there was a lot of speculation about color ability with it because the stainless, I think, is a little bit harder to get the bright colors in. I love hearing this. It's no guarantee that the Pro phones will have any interesting colors. I love hearing this. It's no guarantee that the pro phones will have any interesting colors, but it means that if they don't, it's,

uh, you know, Apple can't use the titanium as an excuse because the titanium frame can take color. It's just a question of if Apple will provide any. Yeah. The electricity is interesting. This has a name that I've heard before. Um,

that it, I think some of this stuff is done in keyboards. Sometimes the color is called e-white. I think it's basically electrolysis. Yeah, and that's what anodization is. A node, it literally, you're making an electrical connection and it attaches.

It's pretty cool chemistry. So it's good to know that, you know, I agree with Chris, like this is the way that Apple would do it because they wanted to make it. Apple's so familiar with aluminum anodization that it would make perfect sense for them to just replicate that with titanium. And of course, everybody who's been around long enough remembers what happened when Apple made a laptop with a titanium frame. And the answer is they put paint on it and the paint flaked off. That was actually a good lesson that Apple has learned. But I've got a

titanium Apple Watch and it's gorgeous and they've gotten better. Sometimes I think that they experiment with materials like that, right? Like titanium on the Apple Watch gave them some familiarity with titanium that they can now put into practice with titanium on the iPhone, which is a, you know, much, it's an enormous volume. As I'm sure the steel watches probably helped with some of the steel for the iPhones as well, right? with some of the steel for the iPhones as well, right? I think we don't talk about it here a lot, but it's one of my favorite things to think about about Apple is their prowess in material science. And I did, you know, I've said it here a few times before. I have definitely heard from people who say

Apple is about the best in the world when it comes to aluminum. Like they've gotten very, very, very good over the 20 years that they've been doing aluminum primarily for so many of their products. And they're also learning about other materials. Like, that's part of the deal here is they're not going to – I mean, Apple, they could take stuff off the shelf, but I think Apple always feels like they need to play their own game and have their own formulation of stainless steel and have their own process that they're in fact i would almost put money down that they will boast at least briefly about the process that they invented that helped them do the titanium thing on the iphone when they introduced the iphone in september so i learned one of this kind of stuff so especially with the watch is how

i learned one of my favorite words, which is metallurgy. Oh, it's a good word. Yes. A very good word. This episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Squarespace makes it incredibly easy to stand out with beautiful website,

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show and all of Real AFM so we've been talking about health stuff you know we're just talking about it and follow up well Mark Gurman has a report at Bloomberg that Apple is working on an AI powered health coaching service alongside adding the health app itself to iPadOS. So a quote from Bloomberg, the new coaching service is designed to keep users motivated to exercise, improve eating habits, and help them sleep better, according to people with knowledge of the product. The idea is to use AI and data from an Apple Watch to make suggestions and create coaching programs tailored to specific users. The service is planned to launch sometime next year, so it's not necessarily something we're going to hear about on the horizon.

This feels like a beefing up of the trends feature that they added to the health app, and maybe it will now go some way to recommending things. I hope that they do a decent job here because sometimes the trend stuff really annoys me in the health app where it's like, your VO2 stats changed. It's like, is this good? Is this bad? Like, you just tell me there's a change.

That's what I was going to say is that I have gotten one of those alerts that says this stat that is complicated has changed. And I literally don't know if that's good or bad. And it doesn't tell me. You could just say this means that you're in less good shape. Or this means you're in better shape. But instead, it's sort of like, oh, yeah, your VO2 max changed.

Okay, what does that mean? Or your resting heart rate changed. What does that mean? And also, this is pitched here as being a service, right? Which I find interesting because if it's a service, then they're going to, you know, maybe it's adding on to Fitness Plus or maybe it's rolled into a bundle. Health Plus, man. This is Apple Health Plus. I would expect.

Perhaps so. But not only, one, is that annoying because it feels like they're just taking something that would otherwise have been an expanded feature of the software and making it into something you have to pay for, which I don't love. Like, what makes this a service? If it's truly something you have to pay for, which I don't love. Like, what makes this a service? If it's truly something you have to add on, but all it is is like an AI telling you coaching things. Like if they, I mean, presumably they're going to add other stuff, right? For this truly to be a service, they got to have some content. They maybe have, you know, they could talk about like experts

who were involved in building it and that it's like, it's much more than just because if it's if there's nobody there and all it is is some software to tell me uh you could run faster why would i pay for that like i i find that a little bit baffling because that that seems like it's sort of just an elevated feature of the operating system so so what what makes it what makes it a service um i'm just saying i mean i'm not saying they't do it. I'm saying that I'm going to be a little skeptical that Apple has taken something that in years past would have just been a feature edition and said, no, no, no, no, no. This is something, like justify why that's something I need to pay for is what I'm saying. So I'm going to be a little bit skeptical about that. And yes, I share your feelings about already there too which is they're not it's not that good so like i can see them doing better here but if i had read this report and it had said uh apple's got some new features that are going to make the stuff that it tries to tell you better i'd be like well good it needs to be better but instead it's like oh no they're going to launch a service i agree that makes that that's better than the thing that they

don't do very well right now it's like well wait a second did you choose not to make the free thing that just comes with the hardware we're buying better because you decided instead to make a service i just i'm going to be really skeptical about this because what they're doing now isn't isn't that good right like i would love that i use those features i use i'm tracking my workouts and i'm looking at the rings and all of that. But the stuff that they offer is not interesting to me in any way. So, you know, hooray for them trying to do better.

But if it's, you know, it's better but wrapped in a service, I don't know, I'm not happy about that because the baseline is not very good. Because like Fitness Plus, there are incremental costs to that service to keep adding new workouts right it's content you can keep adding it but if this is ai and data from devices i mean what's the ongoing cost imagine if fitness plus what it got you was the workout app so you could say run for five

minutes yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm like oh no this is a big service where we like no fitness plus is a service because they've got trainers and they've got a studio and they generate new content and that that has value and i know you know again, offering a service for AI analysis of your data and then like coaching that's built in is not unreasonable. I guess what I'm saying is it feels like a tough sell if that's all there is, because isn't this what Apple software is already supposed to be doing and not doing it well? And if they make the decision to not make their software better, but instead build a new product that does it better, I think that's a little bit, I mean, I'm an Apple one subscriber, presumably it would just get rolled into my feature set anyway, but I don't love the idea that they made a software improvement and then paywalled it essentially for something they're not doing very well as it is. But like I said, I think it's more likely that there is more content

here, right? Like that it is, they're going to say we consulted with people and they're going to be looking and that, you know, we're going to, I don't know how they're going to pitch it, but if it's all hands off and it's just in software, it's not very inspiring. But I also could imagine it being part of a Fitness Plus subscription. For sure. Because maybe they will be very tightly linked together of like, you know, our data showing this. Have you considered this kind of workout to be added?

This would be a great boost to Fitness Plus. Yeah. For sure. That would be a great value add, as they say, to Fitness Plus. That would totally, yeah. But I agree that that still doesn't answer the question of like, if all it's doing is using data to interpolate and show me in UI

things that my Apple Watch has, me having to pay for that is still complicated. But I'm sure they will do it. I mean, you know, there are features in icloud plus that in theory could have just been software features that apple added yeah yeah i mean some of them have server behind the scenes which which i'm i'm more inclined to understand but i mean that gave me pause then too where i felt like i like the risk is that Apple potentially is creating a platform that's got a bunch of like tariff zones where it's like literally it's like on a road, right? It's like, well, we built a new lane of the highway, but we're not going to let you in unless you pay. And I don't love the idea that segments of Apple's operating systems become places where there are just features that you can't use unless you pay them extra.

become places where there are just features that you can't use unless you pay them extra. And so it's a delicate line to walk, is all I'm saying, is when you're building a services business, what's the rule that says, well, this is just a software feature versus this is a service that you're going to have to pay extra for?

Yeah, because they have a lot of things that run on their servers that you don't pay for. So like, where's the line? And some of the say that what are the things that i call plus there's a private relay is in there right right stuff like that we're saying how much space on the server is that taking up when you're hosting all these photos and videos anyway like do you not have enough space where you could squeeze that on like is it not just incremental at that point like i don't know but i feel like private relay i think they're actually

aren't there aren't there servers for that so they have to they pass through a that's a good server and they're using isps uh in various places or other cdns to be like the exit point and the entrance point so they can't trace you it's double trace like that's my that's my point is like i'm i'm much more inclined to like if apple has to pay for all that traffic it's i'm less inclined when it's sort of like oh this is just a piece of software that we've decided you don't get unless you pay us more that's i i just i i always just want to be vigilant about that because i think that's a path apple could walk down and it would be really dangerous for the user experience hide my email then i think that's a better oh yeah sure because with sign in with apple literally apple's email

server yeah it's like sign in with apple offers this feature right in a way like you can hide your email when you do sign with apple you don't have to pay for that but you do pay for it with hide my email with icloud plus so that doesn't necessarily feel like something that you would need to pay for. Yeah. Or like custom email domains. So, I mean, turning back to this feature for a second, like, I think there are lots of opportunities here. Of course, there's opportunities for people to complain about Sherlocking. But like as somebody who's done like the Couchtock 5K plan, and now it's been a while, as we detailed in a previous Snell talk, I think. It's been a while since I've run. I'm doing a lot of brisk dog walking with my 12 month old dog but um but i

want to get back to running at some point and like having been through that couch to 5k experience a couple of times i would love a program where i say i want to i want to run regularly but you need to get me up to speed that could actually like look instead of it being a prefab program, which is what those couch to 5k things are. And they work pretty well, but like, would it be cool and interesting and maybe useful if it was literally looking at my heart rate and my recovery and adjusting how quickly I need to have my program adjust. And for me to go to the workouts app and literally just say, I'm going to do my run thing and for it to know, okay, great. I know what intervals to put you on to get you to where you want to go. I know how long it's been since you ran the last time.

And so I'm going to adjust for that. There's an opportunity for it. And I think it would be reasonable for that to be built into Apple software on the Apple Watch, especially. I think you absolutely could build that in and it would have a lot of value. So there's plenty of room here for stuff like that. I think maybe, I feel like maybe more stuff like that than nagging you that you haven't run in a little while. Yeah, this is more proactive. Like the Apple Watch and health are very retroactive, right? Like you did this thing, here's the results of that. You've done this thing and now it's changed. But you going into the health app and saying like, I want to be able to run a 5K in six months time or whatever.

And it's like, all right, great. Here is your exercise plan. Like that. And it'll adjust. Yeah. Knowing you. Oh, I only did it two times this week. Because that's what happens with my Catch the 5K plan.

If I only ran two times this week, then do I go to day three of the previous week or do I skip that one and just go ahead and see how I do? And like, it would be really nice if the software was like, I got you covered. Like I've, I've changed everything to, to stretch it around and it'll still work. And that would be, uh, that would be a cool, fun, and it's certainly easier feature to use than me finding an app and editing the, right? Like I don't want to have to do that. So that's all,

there's a lot of great potential for stuff like that. And I would say I would pay for that too, right? Like, because that feels cool. I mean, just like people pay for run training apps and stuff now, like it would be, and it could be, again, tying it into Apple fitness. What if I said, I want to be able to do a 60 minute bike workout, or I want to, or I want to be able to ride my bike 50 miles. me to get there and have it build a program for me um all of that stuff it's basically saying we're going to use software instead of you hiring a personal trainer and i think that's valid because lots of people are not going to hire a personal trainer so this is the next best thing so more

from mark's report the health app for ipad os is likely to be announced at wwdc along with an overall redesign of the health app for iPhone. The app will get new features like the ability to manually input emotional states, basically like a mood tracker, a quote from the article. The initial version of the emotion tracker will let users log their mood, answer questions about their day, and compare their results over time. But in the future, Apple is hoping thehone could use algorithms to determine a user's mood via their speech what words they've typed and other data on their devices that second part i wouldn't do that personally don't don't know if that's a good idea but we'll see well if it's if

it's all on device this is this is like that app that records everything that you do on your mac and indexes it, right? Like there are concerns, although if it's Apple doing it and it's all on your device and it stays on your device. So as I am predicting slides today, let me predict another slide, Mike, for WWDC, which is a slide or for the iPhone event or for both, right? Because they'll roll out the OS at the iPhone event. It's health includes mental health. That's going to be the slide, right? Which is health includes mental health

and mental health awareness is important. And it is. And that they'll say, here are some things that we're going to do in the health app for mental health. And including things as simple as an emotion tracker um but also you know down the road perhaps they find ways to sort of detect your your mood yeah exactly via your speech or what you've typed and your sentiment analysis of every text message that you send i don't know i'm

not sure if that's good i'm not sure if it's good for the iphone to be like hey are you sad i'm not sure if that's good. I'm not sure if it's good for the iPhone to be like, hey, are you sad? I'm not sure if that's scientifically accurate. I just don't know if that's a good idea. I'm not sure that's the relationship people are looking for with their devices. Like for the phone to be like, you seem like having a bad day. You having a bad day?

I don't know. That feels weird to me. I think there's some validity to it though uh kate and the discord points out that mood tracking is apps already apps already exist this is a thing that is a tool it's not going to solve everything for everyone but a tool for people um that has some positive result of tracking your state and then looking back later and seeing sort of like what's going on as a whether it's just sort of life logging or whether there's value in it i think we should at this point we need to

say we are not mental health experts so we can't say but i feel like there could be validity here i believe in this idea like please um what i'm saying is the idea of having this feature is great the idea of the phone trying to guess my mood, that's what I don't like. Oh, sentiment analysis based on the text you send. Yes. Like I said, I'm open to the idea that it could be scientifically accurate,

but I'm really skeptical. Because you've also got to be able to understand how each person talks within each friend group. Yes, exactly right right the context of every conversation is going to be different i don't know that just feels like it's going to produce would produce so many false positives i just i'm not sure about that anyway this yeah when i read this right i was like oh emotional tracking feels like it would fit in with that journaling app mark german says the mood and emotion tracking features are fit in with that journaling app mark german says the mood and

emotion tracking features are separate from a new journaling app that apple is planning for this year that app isn't meant to be a health feature the people said and apple is unlikely to position it as such mark says that this feature the journaling feature more closely aligns with the find my service as a way to add more quote social networking elements to ios i don't understand what any of this off the top of my head my theory is that if you're if if it's got find my data it's gonna let you say things like i was here with these people right because if you've got your friends and you're fine, my, so it knows that you and I are together at WWDC and I create my journal

entry there. Cause you're, cause we share find my information. I always know where Mike is. Um, and I can say, oh, uh,

I was with Mike and Steven. And it's going to say, it's, I'm going to say new journal entry. And it's going to be like, well, you're in Cupertino and you were with Mike and Steven today. That's like, they've got that data, right?

So, okay. I don't know how groundbreaking that is, but they've got that data. They could do that. And I could see with some of their other metadata that they've got from maps and places like that, that if you drove through a national park on a road trip one day, and then at the end of the day, you do a journal entry, and it knows where you woke up. It knows where you are now. It knows where you went. It can pull metadata about the parks. It knows where you stopped.

It's got access to your photos that you took there. There is a bunch of stuff that it could put together. I don't know if I would call that social networking elements uh but i think maybe that's what they're getting at here is that with find my you do know like in an official apple way when you were with friends and that they could you know use some of that in there to pull the again they could also pull the photos of those people who that were taken that day and offer those to include and maybe even offer to share some of that stuff with the people. I don't know. I mean, there's something there. If you and I, Mike, I feel like if you and I sat around a whiteboard for a day

trying to imagine what our Apple journaling app would be, we could probably crack what it is because you can just look at their features and sort of see where they're headed with this. Yeah, I do wonder, though, if this is going to be really heavily focused around find my how well it's going to work like well closely aligns right i don't think it's going to be heavily i feel like find my is one part of the package because that gives that gives them some proximity information for your friends and then location services more broadly lets them know where you were like i'm just not sure how many people share their fine line with a lot of their friends i i don't know i've got i mean we also have it all within the family and that's a default me too you know if you're in the family group the family is there by default at least and so that that's going

to give me my you know you spent the weekend with your kids in oregon kind of stuff and i have a handful of friends in fine my but it's mostly because they're apple people like right and we all tried it out and now we share our locations with our friends yeah it's true yeah i have some people who can see my location but i can't see theirs they they took me away jason but i won't ever let go like they can see my location but i can't see theirs they they took me away jason but i won't ever let go like they can see my location forever i have one person like that where i can't see his location anymore but he knows where i am it's like yeah you do yeah you do yeah exactly um yeah well i mean maybe part of the motivator here is to sort of more closely integrate this stuff to

encourage find my to be a friend you know attachment like do you start to in in group chats do you start to do more encouraging of why don't you just share your location with them all the time also they group chats do let you share a location like temporarily so they could also do a prod there which is like you know do you want to share you seem like you might be getting ready to visit your friends should we all share our locations yeah that that kind of thing too possibly there have been more reports this week uh this one from the information the information is detailing some of apple's ai efforts and how siri is developing at the company i've got some

framing for this kind of, you know, we always like to think about with some of these reports, especially some of these bigger reports, where are they coming from? And this kind of, this for me came from MacRumors writing about the information article. It says, the extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company's AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered Siri and the company's AI technologies. So because of a bunch of things that we're going to talk about, lots of engineers have left, continue to leave Apple as this world heats up. Apple is a cautious company. The AI industry currently right now, not very cautious.

the AI industry currently right now, not very cautious. So I could imagine there are a lot of people who are interested in this kind of technology who are frustrated at Apple and then leaving and then talking about it. And so, you know, I always feel like some of these things, take them with a grain of salt, like especially this particular thing the type of person who maybe really cares about ai right now and wants to do interesting things in ai maybe apple's the wrong company for them like i don't know right um but they're you know talking about their experiences i mean this is a thing that keeps coming up which i think there's truth in which is apple is going to be way less willing. Like, look, look at what happened. Look at what happened with, with Microsoft and then with Google

with this whole rush to put these things out there. And immediately what you get is the embarrassing stuff where the chat bot tells a reporter to leave his wife for the chat bot, chatbot tells a reporter to leave his wife for the chatbot, where there are lies and made-up information and strange behavior and other stuff. Apple doesn't want to do that. Apple does not want to do that. And they can't. Microsoft have been let go, right? People were saying Microsoft have to change this, they have to change this. Microsoft didn't. And now everyone's just kind of like, okay, they're not changing it this is not something that would go away for Apple like I'm reminded of it's you know remember the we brought up a bunch we were super mad about at the time the report that the Guardian had about Siri listening

to people and yeah like you know like that kind of thing like maybe other companies would have been let go like but no we would like, the media holds Apple to a higher standard because of their scale and their size and the way they talk about themselves and the things that they do. Like if a tech columnist used a new Siri, and as you mentioned, like Siri said, leave your wife, I'm in love with you.

It's just not, I just can't imagine that will fly with them. There is a, Apple is, it's not just that just i just can't imagine that will fly with them there is a apple is it's not just that apple has a higher standard it is also that apple is held to a higher standard and you know i can't envision apple rolling out something and saying aha look at it shows how how committed we are to the future of of technology no it's gonna make make things up and lie to you now but but uh aren't we cool like they just they don't do that they don't do that so i think the challenge is oh by the way that the uh the uh employees um one of the things they quote uh in in this report is these these employees uh who are part of a purchase who left for Google.

And I thought it was really funny because I don't actually know anything about this, but this happened earlier this year. And I thought, when was that purchase? And it turns out it was like March or April. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, also their deal to stay at Apple probably expired. Then they left. There are other explanations here, but here's what I understand. And I think this is true of a lot of Apple stuff, which is Apple's way of doing things is not the same way as other tech companies' way of doing things. And there are going to be people who get frustrated. And I think AI is a great example of this because everybody's talking about their field and nobody can see what they're doing because they're doing it inside at Apple. And Apple's not willing to let it out because it's not good

enough yet. And it's like, but they did it and it's good enough for them. And Apple's like, that is not an answer, right? We cannot do it that way. And both of those things are true, right? I get it. I get that you might be frustrated. So on one level, like, am I concerned about Siri? Yeah, right? Like, we should all be concerned about Siri. And this article makes me concerned in the sense that it may be suggesting that apple's ai research is being suppressed at the highest levels but as we always warn on upgrade consider the source it's probably mostly people who have left or it's people on the outside of the siri group at apple because there was some of the reports are like yeah even people at apple are frustrated by siri but like i at the same time it is like apple's higher standard means that apple needs to be

cautious here um but what what i don't know and what none of us probably know is is the you know if if tim cook says no no no, we can't do it that way. Is he suppressing, is he providing support for the idea that Apple has a higher standard or is he suppressing any attempts at actually doing this stuff? And that's, I mean, it's possible that Apple standard is so high that Apple basically can't do this stuff now. i guess my argument would be is what what's it worth to you what's ai worth to you because if if they did an ai powered siri that isn't what does the story say there are 20 writers who pre-write siri answers another senior executives requested changes to siri to prevent embarrassing responses and the company prefers serious responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers

rather than AI-generated. I don't believe that this is the full picture to this story, because that makes it sound like every time you ask Siri for something, there is a response that's written by one of 20 people, and I don't think that's accurate. I feel like that that is for specific things where they've decided they want a specifically pre-written response yeah they they are looking at the most commonly asked things and they have pre-written responses or sets of of styles of

response for those still oh to be on the siri writing team right what do you do i write for siri it's like being on the late night no No, I think it would be terrible, but it'd be interesting. Like a late night talk show host, kind of writer, talk show writer, except it's for Siri. So, like this is the challenge is, is there a release that Apple could do that would be up to its standards that would also use this technology? Or is this technology not really good enough yet and we talk a lot about the vr headset about how you need to get it out there and you need to expose it to the world and i could make that argument that the right thing for them to do is probably at some point to release a you know let people opt into a beta of siri 2 that has the ai stuff in it but is also has a lot of like, it's a beta press this

button. If it says something weird. Um, and even at that point, can Apple get there or is it just, is this technology? Cause again, what are we rushing to is the other thing I would say is like, there are, there are a lot of benefits to this AI stuff. There's a, uh, a report in here about like the putting the kibosh on, uh, conversational Siri. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. That's too weird. We're not going to do that. And it's like, well, no, that's one of the weakest points of Siri is that there, there's

no way to do conversations. But like, this is what I'm struggling with is Apple. Um, is there something here? And I think there probably is. I mean, there's definitely a chance that this AI stuff ends up being way less useful than people think it is now and that Apple will be proven right.

But I think it's more likely that there is a, this is gonna all shake out and it's gonna get good really fast and good and accurate and not weird. Right. Cause that's all part of the challenge here. And like, does Apple lose out by waiting for that moment? Because like, I don't know, we're, we're just about to enter the era. In fact, I just got it today for Google where Google said, congratulations, you can be in the beta to use the AI-powered Google apps. Oh.

And Microsoft is doing the same thing. Like we're getting very close to the point where this stuff is going to be much more aggressively productized. And I think that the clock starts to tick a little bit more for Apple then. But I also, like, again, would I want Siri to be powered

by the stuff that I've seen so far? And the answer is probably not, right? Because you don't want to have those embarrassing mistakes where it confabulates things. And you want something where Siri is hooked up to data sources and knows things that are accurate, but can also actually have a conversation and understand the context. And I don't know, it's, it's a, it's a real predicament they're in. And this story makes me less optimistic about it. And yet at the same time, I don't want to give too much credit to the idea that Apple executives are fuddy duddies who don't want to release a product that will make things up, right? Like

there is, there is, and I could guess if you're an engineer on it you're like no i want to try things in public like the other cool kids like i get it but maybe the adult supervision needs to step in and say no we're not going to release a chatbot that lot that lies about uh facts we can't do it we can't do it in 2019 a team of engineers created a new version of Siri, codenamed Blackbird, that was more lightweight and offered the ability for developers to offer up information to Siri. However, Apple went with another effort called Siri 10, Siri X 10, it was the 10th anniversary,

that aimed to move the processing to on-device for privacy reasons. This removed the modular approach. This is what Apple ended up choosing, the two options. And that's what we have now, right, where Siri is more and more and more on-device. My question for this is, like, why not do both? Like, I don't know why they haven't done both.

Like, I like the idea of developers being able to plug in information into Siri. You have to go off-device at some point, right? And I think the model that I keep being intrigued by is what ChatGPT now has plug-in support. And basically what you're doing is, a lot of these demos

that people have seen is, it's people asking questions of the large language model. The problem is the large language model is a training model that was run at some point, so you can't ask it really about current events or anything like that, because it's sort of putting it based on its document training. But with the ChatGPT plugins, what you end up with is that chatbot large language model that also has access to internet data sources. And that, I think, from the moment I read about it for the first time, I thought,

well, that is the path forward for Siri, certainly, and for any of these intelligent assistants, is you want to use the large language model, not for facts, but for understanding. And I know they don't really understand you, but they sort of do. They can understand from the context what it is, and then they can go get using their plugins using their data sources the right answer and then they can phrase that right answer in a way that is natural and like that is what siri should be right but it needs to be using reliable data sources so that if you ask it a question right like because there's why do we use Siri, right? We use it to do controls. We use it to do basic stuff like, uh, play this song and all that. And I would argue that, yes, that is a place where Siri is frustratingly unreliable and needs to be

better. Like it absolutely does. And when I see the behavior of like the Google assistant that I have in my kitchen now, um's remarkable how good it is. And Siri is not that good. It needs to be better. But like that's some of it is sort of pre-baked in stuff. And then there's the more complicated stuff where you're basically asking Siri for questions about the world.

And that's the stuff where the AI chatbots can shine, but it needs to be real, right? Which is why you need that second layer. And I hope that's the way that Apple is building next gen Siri is there. You can have a conversational AI model that runs on the device even, and then you give it access to the internet or for data from other apps that, right. That seems natural. And it uses those to get the information and then bring it back to you in a form that you expect like that makes sense to me the headset team has wanted to make their own voice control method because they felt siri was not good enough this was overridden

obviously you know can you imagine i think that that's really like and that's funny yeah i totally get it right where it's like oh god siri i don't want to use that can we just keep it simple can we just build our own thing and i can see why that might be i could on the one hand i could see how some project like that they probably were thinking well, we do this and then we take over Siri. Right. We do this and we show that we're better at it than they are and we take it over. And at some point they're like, folks, you got to build a headset. You're not here to build a voice control system.

But it's telling, right? It's got to be. Right. Everybody's got to know, right? Everybody's got to know that it's not good enough. got to know right everybody's got to know that it's not good enough and the yes the most troubling thing in this report is the feeling that everybody at apple knows it's not good enough and yet as far as we can tell they have really struggled to make it better and this contains some details that we've heard before about the idea that the current sir Siri takes months to or weeks to build like modifications

to the model because it's this old tech that has been built up over time but yeah that's the most dispiriting thing to me is there's no smoking gun in here that says ah but they are working on the future of Siri

the report is much more like no it's a mess This episode is brought to you by our friends the future of Siri. The report is much more like, no, it's a mess. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at FitBod. Getting fitter is one of those things that can have knock-on effects in other areas of your life that you might not have expected. You could have more energy, you may sleep better, you may just feel better, but it can be hard to know where to start when you want to improve your fitness. FitBod is an easy and affordable way to build a fitness plan that is just for you. FitBod has an algorithm that they use to learn about you and your goals and your training ability to create a custom dynamic plan based on your experience and any equipment that you have access to. This is all an app that this is all the side of an app

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and RelayFM. We've been talking over the last couple of weeks about what watchOS 10 could look like after Mark Gurman reported that there was going to be some big UI changes to watch os 10 could look like after mark german reported that there was going to be some big ui changes to watch os 10 in his power on newsletter over the weekend mark shared a little bit more about this this version of watch os will focus on widgets and quote fundamental changes to how the device will work so when we were talking about this we were talking about glances we were

talking about widgets you know know, the glances back from the original days of watchOS, you know, these things you'd swipe up and would see these little pieces of information and how we thought, oh, maybe widgets could be kind of like that. And this seems like exactly what they're going to be doing, with widgets becoming a central part of the interface

for watchOS. Quote from Mark's piece, the plan is to let users scroll through a series of different widgets for activity tracking, weather, stock tickers, calendar appointments, or more, rather than having them launch apps. The new interface will be reminiscent of the Siri watch face introduced in watchOS 4,

but it will be available as an overlay for any watch face. It's also similar to widget stacks in iOS and iPadOS that lets users pile many widgets in one and scroll through them. Apple is testing the idea that a press of the digital crown may show these widgets now instead of showing the app's home screen. What do you think of this? I am excited about the idea that Apple is gonna do a real kind of refresh rethink of watch os because it's really been a while and i love this idea i mean i like widgets i think the idea of getting information up on the top level and not being not using apps unless you are doing some very specific kind of interactions is all good um i'm why do they keep mentioning stock tickers i don't know because it's one of the ones

apple's building right like they're always they're always working on stocks they're always stocks they gotta because people at apple have stock options even tim cook once he wants his stocks on his apple Watch, right? I don't love that, but I love this idea that more glanceable information, right? Like, that's great. The complications are great, but they are limited. And so if they find another way to get things out basically on or overlaid on the watch face, I'm all for it. Like I have that too, where like I have occasionally this information that I want to have like in a large widget on modular and,

you know, I don't want to create like 10 different modulars with a different thing in the center, one for weather, one for baseball scores or whatever. Like it would be awfully nice if I had a little more flexibility there. So I'm not knowing a lot of details here i'm actually kind of excited about this because while i do use watch apps and i find value in them the whole goal should be to get as much as you can out onto the watch face because that's where people live. Do you remember there was a rumor that widgets might get some basic interactivity button presses and stuff like that. I wonder if this could maybe be tied into that, that like,

if you were going to mostly replace the user interface of watch apps with these widgets, that being able to press the occasional button might be a helpful thing to have in the overall widget spec, right? If this was going to find its way to the watch. So maybe they would just do it for everything. But yeah, I'm into this idea in general too. I think that for me, all of the watch apps that I use,

like realistically watch apps that I use, All of the watch apps that I use, like realistically watch apps that I use, a widget would suffice by and large for what I want to do. Outside of responding to a message, so using the little keyboard, the majority of stuff that I'm doing, I'm looking at my watch to check a thing as opposed to looking at my watch to be like let's get something done you know like the occasional like press of a complete button or something like that is good but by and large like widgets would be great yeah i use what what watch apps do i use i mean i use it to kick off an activity i use it to pick a podcast or start a podcast and overcast. Like there are a few things where I very specifically do it, but most of what I've got is data on the watch face or it's data, right? Like, you know, it's weather or it's a sports score or it's, you know, I don't know, stuff like that. or it's, you know, I don't know, stuff like that.

Activity rings and things like that, that you could just, you could get it as a glance or get by pushing the digital crown or something like that and seeing this stuff. I think there's more to be done there. And yes, if they could add interactivity, all the better, because that reduces it even further, right? And also, like I mentioned, for developers, I'm going to talk a little bit more about developers in a minute, but this is instead of having to build a watch app,

which I'm sure will still exist, right? There will still be watch apps. Instead of having to build a watch app, you can be on the Apple Watch with your widget. Right? So like, you can still be on that platform and give the information without having to go through the entire thing of building

and maintaining and updating a watch app but you can still be with with the customer on their watch by enabling your widget instead or a version of your widget which might be easier to manage because they're all in swifty y right so the watcher understands swifty y so like i can imagine that being a better experience overall. Our friend underscore, the Widget Smith, pointed out to us in Slack that this could make sense as to why in watchOS 9, Apple migrated complications to the WidgetKit frameworks away from the what was called ClockKit framework for complications, I should say. So they moved complications from ClockKit to to widget kit and was wondering if

oh i wonder if this might have been one of the reasons they did that was to start that migration over before widgets became central to the platform yeah i think this is this is apple playing that big the the longer game right because apple apple hates to use one technology for one thing, right? They're all about reuse these days, right? You can't run all of these different platforms without reuse. So the idea that you could take the work you did on widgets on iPhone and have it be on the Apple Watch, that's great. I love it, right? I love that idea. So bring it on, I say. I think there's some questions about, as somebody who has a cellular Apple Watch, I had that question about, can the widget run on device without talking back to the iPhone? Because I'm not always with my iPhone. I would

like it to be independent. But I also like the idea of them not having to build a whole Apple Watch app in order to get their widget running. I would imagine to do that, you just got to load the SwiftUI code of the widget onto the watch, right? Which the phone could pass off. And they wouldn't need to be necessarily connected to do that. I am not a developer. Never mind, but I'm just saying things yeah it generally I just believe that having as much stuff out on the face

or very because I'm unclear about whether this is sort of like a complication you scroll through or whether it's a widget view that you swipe to display instead or exactly what this interface is for widgets or if you push the side button and the widgets come up,

but it needs to be like at a high level, very easy to get to and see. And I like that, right? Like that feels Apple Watchy to me. And I don't want them to get rid of Apple Watch apps because I do find some of them useful. But yeah, getting more information out there. I'll also throw out there,

it's still an issue where complications don't update properly. Like I still have it where my weather forecast sometimes is just not right. And I have to tap to bring up my app and then the weather is right. And like, and that's, I'm using carrot weather. So, I mean, maybe this is a carrot weather

thing but like a third-party app should be able to be uh the data should actually like be fresh and that was part of the promise of the apple watch and i still feel like a lot of the apps it's not quite fresh data and i know that they want to be aggressive and saving battery and all of that but like you also need to be accurate, right? It's a little like the Siri argument. It's like, I appreciate your commitment to battery health, but if you show me a temperature from yesterday, you're not doing your job right. You've got to be accurate with the information you show on my Apple Watch. So as a part of this, I would hope that the data update story is also consistent. So we spoke about potentially Apple needing to have their iOS 7 moment, right?

This is something you were mentioning on last week's episode. I think it was last week or two weeks ago. And what that could end up meaning for the platform. And one of the things that Mark suggests is that this could be an option at first. And this reminded me of Stage Manager, right? Stage Manager is a thing you need to enable. It's like a choice that you make. And I don't imagine it being exactly like that,

but the idea that you could opt into the watch operating in this different way until maybe a year or two down the line when they make it the way that watch os works and maybe watch os 11 or watch os 12 right i mean once they're on there anything can happen the idea that you might have a watch face that like all watch faces have a widget or everybody knows how this i don't know i feel like people like watch faces on their apple watch but maybe it's even something like your apple watch can be well like it is now with the modular faces your apple watch can look like a watch or it can be a widget gallery right like

and you choose you choose what you want it to be maybe it's just got the time and a bunch of widgets right but this is what he was saying though that like it's not actually replacing the watch faces. Right. It might look like the Siri watch face with that scrolling list of stuff, but you would activate it in some way. Maybe you swipe or you press a button and it shows you your widgets. Because I wouldn't like that now. I've come to like different watch faces.

I think everybody has. I think that would be the smart way to do it. Not be like... I think there like that now, right? Like I've come to like different watch faces. I think everybody has in it. I think that would be the smart way to do it. Not be like, I think there was a while back in watchOS 4 when I was pushing for make the Siri watch face watchOS. Like just make it watchOS, right? Because back then I think that made more sense. But we're now so many years removed from that. There are so many more watch face options.

They are getting better, even though they're still weird in some ways. And people have embedded with the types of watch faces that they like, that I think we've passed the point where they could be like, we don't do watch faces anymore. They're all computers.

You know, I think they've gone into fashion still a little bit, and so it looks and customization. But I think the idea of like you press one button and then all your widgets are there rather than the app honeycomb or the app list that just makes a lot of sense right or like that recent stock or whatever you know there's two buttons either of those buttons could become the button to show your widgets and then what they used to do could be a double tap or a long press away or something like that right and the siri watch face is the is the model here for the other way you can do this which is if you

really really like this you add your widgets watch face and you scroll through all your widgets but if you don't want to do that you just have a regular watch face and then you press a button and the widgets come up yeah they could just be the widget watch face yeah right the the yeah the widget watch face don't say that too many times but that because because be the widget watch face yeah right the the yeah the widget watch face don't say that too many times but because because the siri watch face you know basically it's a it's got it's got the time right it's got it's got like a complication but after that it's basically just a whole stack of little cards that you can scroll through so imagine those being widgets and that you can place them there

based on the apps that you've got. That's really promising, I think. Is the Siri watch face even something you can still add? Oh, yeah. I just added it so that I could look at it. Absolutely.

And there's two complications you can change. And that's it. And the color. Oh, the Dow Jones. That's good. And that's it. And the color. Oh, the Dow Jones. That's good. I got that right. Oh, good.

Stocks. Sunset is in two hours. My resting heart rate is 64 beats per minute. Yeah, that's nice. The temperature. I should take a minute for myself, according to the Breathe app or whatever. That's not asking me to do that. 17 degrees Celsius,

you have to work out what that is in Fahrenheit. I don't know, it's 53 degrees Fahrenheit. You have to work out what that is in Celsius. And I'm recording Upgrade right now. Oh, good to know. That's what I hear. So anyway, yeah, let's do it. Bring it on.

Make the watch more useful. I love my Apple Watch and I use it all the, and I would like to get more data on it. But, you know, yes, let's do it. Let's rethink this. Let's get more stuff up there for people who want it. And as you pointed out also, accessible for people who want it. But, you know, I don't use the computer watch face. I use a more traditional watch face, and I like it. If you enjoy this show, and you would like more of this show each and every week, why don't you subscribe to Upgrade Plus? You'll hear no ads. You'll get bonus content, including our challenges. We just did a big RSS discussion in Upgrade Plus on last week's show.

You get access to the RelayFM members Discord. You get access to other tons of bonus content available for all RelayFM members. This includes some monthly shows, Spotlight, which features Kathy Campbell interviewing a RelayFM host. You get Backstage, which is me and Stephen talking about what's going on at RelayFM.

And also, it is about that time, kind of we're approaching member bonus episode season. Many of your favorite shows we're recording special episodes only for real afm members which will be shared of all members we're getting ready to do ours i think we're recording it this weekend no details yet but you can you might be able to guess what it's going to be for upgrade that will be coming out at an undefined time in the future but will will be available this membership season, we'll call it. You can go to getupgradeplus.com for just $5 a month, $50 a year. You will get all of this stuff

and more, and you'll be helping support the show, which we greatly appreciate. Go to getupgradeplus.com. Let's finish out with some Ask Upgrade questions for this week's episode. Ricardo asks, I'm curious if you know how Apple makes their keynote and WWDC keynote presentations. Are they just very good with the keynote app or are they using something else? I think they're using, well, I think they're using Keynote. I think that maybe it is jazzed up a little bit at times for the official video.

But I mean, it was made to do Keynote. Like it was made for this. Certainly all the WWDC presentations that people use are all in Keynote. But I would imagine that it's either in Keynote or it starts in Keynote and then maybe gets taken out

for video production reasons later on i remember back in the day when there used to be things that would appear on in an apple keynote and then those features would later get added to keynote like some transitions and animations that they would do this isn't a thing that really seems to happen anymore i don't really think that the keynotes that apple makes have these kinds of transitions anymore like i think they're kind of a little bit calmer now right and like actually a lot of what they're doing is the video um or the stage presentation as opposed to like text to fall out of the sky and smoke would go everywhere right like they were cool back in the day but i think

that's maybe not so much now yeah they keep it simple if you look back at some of those steve jobs presentations now you're like whoo like we've gotten so austere with our presentation styles but boy did steve jobs love wacky transitions he loved them yeah and and and they're they're like and that's why keynote is what what it is is that steve jobs was very exacting with what he wanted and they built a great tool i love keynote it's one of my very favorite pieces of apple software i think it's so good as somebody i heard from somebody who said powerpoint's so much better than Keynote. And I'm like, okay, I haven't used PowerPoint in 10 years because I used to have to do PowerPoints at IDG. But I'll tell you, every time I use PowerPoint, I cried because Keynote was so much better. And I have never ever, and I've got Office 365, I could use PowerPoint now if I wanted to.

No, I don't. I don't. I love Keynote. It's so good. But yeah, the world has, I think, moved on for a lot of good reasons. Not like the business world, but like the tech presentation world. Whether you're giving a talk at a tech conference or Apple, certainly. It's much more minimalist right like they use it

for specs or a picture or a simple idea and not you know they don't need the you know the text comes down and smashes into some other text and rattles the screen like we don't need that so much anymore you've got to assume they're still using keynote because it's like these days it's i mean they're probably i don't know if they're necessarily using Keynote because these days it's... I mean, I don't know if they're necessarily using Keynote to build the graphics. I'm probably assuming they're not. But just in like a advancing from slide to slide, they're probably using Keynote for that. I don't know. I mean, I think it comes down to how they produce their videos.

I would imagine that they start in Keynote even if they do get all buffed and made perfect by whoever is in charge of those for the video presentation uh to get them exactly right and you know note perfect and every detail at the right resolution and in the right shade for the you know screen and yeah because i'm thinking of like you know those those the screens that they show all the different features like that visual style like i don't know if keynote can do that like i think that's designed by somebody and then it's put into keynote you know what i mean vincent in the discord says i think it's all final cut pro because there aren't slides that need to change yeah i mean this is again i would think that they all probably start in keynote because they they they need to be somewhere and they need to build them somewhere um whether it's final cut

pro or there's a very or or it's photoshop even right where they're building each slide to exacting detail that that is a video production question right but i i think they probably all still think in keynote in terms of how it's built i went to a workshop recently um at apple and they used keynote to do the presentation and it was like it was like a mini keynote like they're like they're advancing through their slides and doing their thing and it was keynote like i could see it was keynote so they still use it for presentations but for these like wwc videos or whatever that's there's probably nothing on that screen right because why would they commit yeah when these videos are shot way in advance sometimes i'm not convinced that the screen is actually even there but if it is there there's nothing on it that's a good point as well it might not be it's

like well this is a very large thing that's been erected good point as well it might not be it's like well this is a very large thing that's been erected in the steve jobs theater atrium it's like is it really there i'm not sure it is yeah i'm not sure it is right because you could do that now and you can do a camera move and it all looks perfectly legitimate and it's all added later so it's all motion graphics don't believe a thing it's all made up everybody even the presenters that's what it is yeah whereas when they were on stage live it had it had to be i think i think when they were on stage live it was keynote i i do i do believe it was i i could be proven wrong we don't have any facts here but

i'm pretty sure it was keynote but now it's just a movie they're making basically so it could be anything jesse says regarding the headset do you think that it would support multiple users like a Mac or an Apple TV or just one user like an iPhone or an iPad? I read this and I was like, oh, wow, that is an excellent question and something I had not at all thought about. I think it's going to be like an Apple TV.

I think it's going to support multiple users. And I have just made that up off the top of my head, but here's why, which is this thing's going to be real expensive. Um, and it's going to be looking in your eyeballs to do face ID or I ID or whatever you want to call it. I feel like it, it would really make sense if the moment, cause you know, like the Apple TV really wants to be a multi-user device if you let it, but you've got to tell it that it's you or it doesn't work. But otherwise it works pretty well. You've just got to switch users. Well, this thing, you put it on, it knows who it is, right?

It looks in your eyes and says, is this my person or is this not my person? And if it's my person, you're authenticated and you have access to everything. If it's not, what does it do? Does it put you in some weird guest mode? Does it make you do something to put in a password or something? It would be logical that it behaves kind of like Apple TV, where it's got a bunch of preferences that it switches based on who it recognizes. Now, have they had time to do that for release 1.0 of XROS? Who knows? But if I had to guess, this is what I would guess, is that it uses the eye scan to identify who it is and let you in. And if you've got another person added and it recognizes their eyes, it will use their data, not in a kind of Mac way, but in an Apple TV-like way. I really hope that's the case. I actually think that that would be logical, but I just don't know.

I think it makes sense because you do have to think, well, what happens if somebody else puts on the thing and it's scanning your eyes? It's like, okay, well, now do you have to add another Apple ID? Does it say, uh-uh, I can't scan? Do you have to scan a second person's eyes but to add another Apple ID? Does it say, uh, I can't scan? Do you have to scan a second person's eyes, but use it for use the one Apple ID? Do you say, no, it's one, only one person can ever use this again. There are ways they could do it. That would be unsatisfying. And maybe they have had to choose one of those because they're trying to ship this thing.

But if I had to guess, I think it would be like Apple TV. It would be that approach, which is you can add a user, and they can log into their Apple ID, and now it knows who they are, and it changes a certain set of preferences based on that. Kat asks, Jason, as a resident expert for all things Apple Photos, I had a question for you. As a resident expert for all things Apple Photos, I had a question for you. In iOS 16 with iCloud Shared Photo Library, photos I take from my camera can automatically be added to the shared library.

But photos I get from other sources, screenshots I save, photos I save from messaging apps, get added to my personal library. Is there a way to make these photos, which aren't from the camera, also go to the shared library? I can't find anything in the settings.

Nope. You have to do it manually? Yeah. I mean, the best thing to do is just every so often go in and view your personal library and move them over. But there's no direct hook where you can say, add this to the shared library. Maybe that'll be a feature they add. That would be nice, right? But my understanding now is that, you know, they don't want to default to your shared library, right? For, I think, obvious reasons. And there's no sort of like setting or question or automation or anything like that. To my knowledge,

you really have to, I think, again, for obvious reasons, you have to say, yes, I do actually want to put these in the shared pool. Otherwise, who knows what kind of garbage would go in there. I think they err on the side of just leaving stuff out and then you have to add it later. I think that's for the best. And Ash asks,

you've mentioned many times previously that you use a shared Google Doc for your show notes. Have you considered moving to a Pages document with the collaboration features instead? If so, what are the reasons you decided to stick with the Google Doc? So we have a challenge on Upgrade Plus, I think, at some point that we're going to do, which would be to try out Pages again. which would be to try out pages again every time i try pages in the past the reliability of real-time updating has not been there and that has been very important it's been very important for me like as jason is currently trying to distract me by changing the size of the text and putting things into our document so it can be distracting but it's also important because like for example earlier on when we were talking about the watch the uh yeah the the siri section right

i was moving things around within that side of that section yes deleting things as me and jason were jumping ahead of ourselves and talking about them to stop and that stopped us from repeating anything or reading something and going over it again when we didn't need to. Now, if that syncing wasn't being done in real time or was being done in chunks, that would not have been as helpful for the way that we produced this show. And at a certain point,

I've become so used to this as a feature, it is actually really important to me. Google Docs, though, in general, is feature-rich, it's easy to use and we have inertia in it like i'm always willing to try it and every couple of years i try all of the apps see like you know all of the apps that i like that have collaboration features how good are they and i go through them all and i always come back to google docs it's one of those things where it's not making us sad, so we're not

actively looking for other things. It does everything we want it to do. So that's, I mean, that's step one, right? Is you never, you know, I have not heard a thing that's like, oh, but you have to use Pages because not only does it do everything that you do, but it does this thing that you really want to do, right?

Like that's, what are your motivations for leaving anything? One is, it's frustrating to you to you or two is something else comes along that does something that's great. That improves your process. That hasn't happened with Google docs. It just hasn't, the Google docs work great. And I've never gotten something where it's like, oh, but if you use pages, then you get to do this thing and it would change your life. And so it's worth changing all of your habits. So we will use Pages for our show notes for a forthcoming episode as part of a Upgrade Plus challenge that we are doing from time to time. That's going to happen. And it will probably result in us either saying, oh, it's just as good. Good job, Apple. And then staying with Google Docs. Or more likely, I would say, us saying, oh, see, it's really still not there.

And, well, I'm looking forward to finding that out. Because, yes, it is worth checking back in with this stuff over time. It's like, look at our experience with Freeform. Exactly. That was a disaster, right? It was really bad for us. Things were getting deleted so like you know this is this was a challenge we did a few weeks ago a month or two ago when freeform came out and one of the biggest issues we had was jason came to the episode and thought

i deleted a bunch of his notes but i had because they didn't show up they didn't show up on my mac no even though they were still there and were visible on my iPhone. Now, they fixed that feature in a bug fix. That was a brand new app built around collaboration, not an existing app where they added collaboration features to it, which is why I have no pain. And it failed our collaboration test. So we will try it. But I think it's worth thinking a bigger picture about, like, why does anybody leave anything? And I think there are only those two reasons, right? Either it is causing you pain or the grass seems greener on the other side.

And it isn't always, but it seems greener on the other side. And then I guess the additional thing I would say is there's a cost to move in terms of learning something new. And the cost to move has to be paid by the benefit of going. Otherwise, you don't go. And Google Docs, the fact is, Google Docs is really good. And if Google did something really gross and started, or said like Google Docs is now, you know, you got to pay an annual fee for Google Docs. Like, we'd probably pay it.

But it might be worth saying, well, pages we already get. Maybe let's look at pages. There could be something like that. But it's very hard to imagine that actually happening. And I think that's why we'll probably just stick with Google Docs. Or if I use Safari, if Google Docs suddenly got really broken with Safari or something, I'd say, actually, I will throw in one pain point, though, which is Google Docs isn't very good on the iPad. And I still use my iPad a lot. It's okay, but it's not very good. And Google Sheets is terrible on the iPad. And I still use my iPad a lot. It's okay, but it's not very good. And Google Sheets is terrible on the iPad, even now.

It's better than it was, but it's still not great. So like, if we were very, it survived us both being very iPad-oriented. And even now, you know, I'm still sort of iPad-oriented. That would be one of those cases where like, if I was doing a lot of collaboration especially in google sheets i would be more interested in using uh using um numbers for that but again the people i collaborate with for that they don't all have backs so i can't right because

that's the other part of it is you also have to be collaborating with somebody. Mike and I can do it. But like the Apple apps aren't cross-platform either. I know there's a web version and all that. You can have them use it on the web, but people aren't going to want to do that. Because they're just... If you're going to make somebody use the web, then

they're going to want to use Google Docs. So we'll watch it. Also, I don't like Pages. Sorry. That's'll watch it. Also, I don't like pages. All right. That's a good reason. Yeah. We'll try pages and notes probably. Right.

We will probably try both of them. Even though I don't think notes is going to be able to give me, well, no, notes will not give me all the formatting options I'm going to want where pages would. Right. If you would like to send in feedback, follow-up, or questions for this show like ask upgrade go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send those in for us to answer in a future episode if you want to find jason until next time go to sixcolors.com and hear his shows over on

the incomparable.com and here on relay fm you can listen to my podcast here on relay fm as well and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can find us on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnl on zeppelin.flights and you can find me as at imike on mike.social. You can also follow the show as at upgrade on relayfm.social. You can watch video clips of this show on TikTok and Instagram. We are at upgrade relay on both.

If you use TikTok, I recommend, even if you don't, just going to the TikTok page. I'll put a link in the show notes so you can go and see. Jeremy, our official upgrade video consultant,

so we provide him with clips. Jeremy's also been making some TikTok-focused memes of the two of us, which are absurd to me has so we provide him with clips jeremy's also been making some tiktok focused memes of the two of us which are absurd to me and very funny so they might be worth just going to to look at anyway you can you can view these things about needing a tiktok account uh there's some weird stuff in there it's like it's stuff that i feel like i see in other places uh i don't know maybe jason we could bring some of those TikTok memes to the Instagram account as well.

Like, I guess you could down, the videos could be shared back from Jeremy to us. I don't know. But there's funny stuff. There's some funny stuff on there. You can go check it out. Thank you to our members who support us of Upgrade Plus. Thank you to FitBud and Squarespace

for sponsoring this week's show. But most of all, thank you for listening. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike.