Upgrade - 460: Mr. QuickTime is Now Mr. Headset

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

With WWDC and our annual draft right around the corner, it's time to survey the final rumors about Apple's AR/VR headset, while also taking stock of some real accessibility developments due this fall. Also: Jason has gazed into the many faces of the Apple TV Quadbox, and Mimestream 1.0 has arrived.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 460 today's show is brought to you by zoc doc and ladder my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by the man from six colors mr jason snell hi jason hi mike i am you made me sound like a secret agent or something yes the man from six colors is here he knows it here's the real license everyone to color jason knows the seventh color as well but he just won't tell you what it is it's ultraviolet i have a sales report question for you comes from zach who wants to know jason when you're eating leftover pizza do you eat it cold or do you reheat the pizza with the pizza we're in a little run here mike these pizza

questions i have some pizza follow-up actually before you get to the snow talk okay federico was happy with the induya he said he'll forgive me for hot honey because he's a fan of induya so you know if you're wondering how the Italians are feeling about our pizza conversations, there's another piece of update for you. Okay. Sounds good. I didn't even know. I thought you made a mistake and were describing Nduja sausage. I know.

Nduja. Yeah, I'll have to have it sometime when I see it on a menu. I think you'd like it. Yeah, I'll have to have it sometime when I see it on a menu. I think you'd like it. The answer to Zach's question is yes. I do sometimes eat it cold. I do sometimes reheat it.

The question becomes sort of like, do I want to go to the trouble of reheating it or not? I am, and this is going to open us up for so much other follow-up, but I am deeply against toaster ovens. Okay. Shots fired. I like slot toasters. Me too. I like ovens. That's what I like. I have a microwave.

Microwaves are not great for reheating pizza. I have a pizza stone because I cook, especially in the winter when I don't have my outdoor pizza oven that I cook on. I, I, I have a pizza stone and it's really easy to just put cold pizza on the pizza stone and put it on or, or on a sheet of tinfoil and put it on three 50.

And that's my tip, by the way, is you put it for Fahrenheit people, 350 degrees, you put the pizza in, you wait until your oven says I've reached 350 degrees. And then you just take the pizza out, eat it. But it does take a little while because unlike, uh, I'm going to admit here, unlike the toaster oven, uh, it takes a little while to heat up the whole oven. So, uh, toaster ovens have got us there. In fact, that's the thing that I, I will acknowledge uh toaster ovens have got us there in fact that's the thing that i i will acknowledge the toaster ovens are superior for i do not reheat pizza enough to buy a toaster

oven and have a big extra appliance sitting on my counters i have limited counter space toaster oven waste of space for me sorry no thanks prefer the slot toaster uh but sometimes i'm i'm impatient or lazy and i don't want to and you know what pizza is great cold too it's just different so sometimes i reheat it and sometimes i don't that's just how it is zach sometimes you feel like it sometimes you don't i agree with you because like so much work when like i have pizza from yesterday and i might just want to just take a munch like i don't want to reheat it it's good cold it's fine like so you just you just do the whole thing you just do it it's easy peasy a little real-time follow-up from um our friend james thompson in the really i have members discord saying microwave old pizza is just fine i think fine is emphasized there so

it's fine and he's right like. Like I've done it. I, I don't prefer it, but, um, is there an interim state between eating a cold and waiting all the time it takes to heat it up? Yeah. And that's the,

in which you might microwave it just out of desperation. Yes, there is, but I don't recommend it because it's all floppy and not that great. But, but again, pizza is good in all its forms. For all I know, you could crunch on some frozen pizza is good in all its forms for all i know you

could crunch on some frozen pizza and it'd be good why wouldn't it be we have entered into like a completely new realm of follow-up like in that i've been getting just so much follow-up about pizza to to the upgrade feedback which is fine we're not going to go over it all but i appreciate the people letting me know a lot of multiple people jason tell me that they've gone to the upgrade feedback, which is fine. We're not going to go over it all, but I appreciate that people are letting me know. I've had multiple people, Jason, tell me that they've gone to the Utah place that you spoke about and had the pizza and liked it. I appreciate it.

If this is where people want to send their pizza information to, they can. And you know what you get with us? You don't get any judgment. There's no judgment here. I was going to joke and say we ought to start getting pizza related sponsors but that already happened

we got one got the best one already so I don't need to do that not today though if you would like to send in a snow talk question of your own just go to upgradefeedback.com tick the box that says snow talk and send one in and you may help us start a future episode

of the show next week is the draft to talk about that in a little bit so if you have any draft related snow talk questions you might want to send one in maybe we'll do one maybe we won't maybe we'll keep you guessing a little little bit of a follow-up for you mike it's not a box you tick it's a it's a pop-up and you have to select the pop-up yeah you know why on the on my, on the back, it is a box that I tick to see those. So yes, you are correct. It is a, what do they call those? Like a something.

A pop-up. Drop down, pop-up. Drop down. It's a little menu. You've got to select Snell Talk from the menu. There you go. Do that. The picker, the chooser, the whatever. Just pick it, but don't look for a box to tick because the only box to tick is the one that says, keep me anonymous't do that unless you need to be anonymous because otherwise

i have to call you a nun do you want to be called a nun or do you want your real name you let me know you'd be a part of mike's secret pizza tip line tip informers yeah we have some follow-up okay sent in to the form uh we havepizza related. We have a few people sending information about passkey sharing. So there was a couple of things here. Adam said, because we were talking about passkey sharing in Upgrade Plus. Last time I was expressing some concern about how would you share passkeys between individuals, like if you have a shared login. Adam wrote in and said, an account only has a single password

but can have multiple pass keys associated to it. So you don't need to share pass keys. Instead you register multiple pass keys on a single account. The problem is signing the other person in remotely so they can add their pass key. Signing in someone remotely is kind of like phishing which is what pass keys are set up to prevent. So currently you would have to be physically together to set it up. So that's fine. Makes sense, I guess. I'm intrigued about what 1Password are going to do when it comes to that.

I think that maybe their implementation might be different. Peter writes in and says, 1Password's passkey support will soon be released and then passkeys could be shared in a multi-person vault or similar in much the same way that existing passwords can be shared and i took a look at one passwords website they have like a bunch of information about passkeys which you would

understand because like they're trying to be very very passkey focused so they still have a business i suppose uh but i actually think that there is a lot of benefits still to having something like one password for me i think when even when it comes to pass keys because one of the things that concerns me about changing from passwords to pass keys is like will i still have this like central place where i can manage them all you know what i mean right like what i like about one password is i have all of my passwords in one password and what i wasn't sure about when it came to passkeys is like, do they just exist in the iOS passwords app? Because I don't want that to be the case for me.

But 1Password have put together all this stuff and it looks very easy to save your passkeys into there. And then it also seems like you can share them from there as well. So that's coming on june 6th like there is is one passwords um support for pass keys but i think right now there just isn't a lot of pass keys that you can create but this would make me feel more comfortable personally to move some of my passwords over if i could also still just have them in 1Password, which is where I like my passwords. Great. You use 1Password, right? Do you feel any particular way about having your Passkeys in there?

Would that make you more likely to swap over to a Passkey login if you could put it in there? Right now, I'm happy to use Apple System because they're all just for me, but I would definitely like to have the ability to share those with Lauren and potentially other members of my family. Um, if, if you picture a world where everything's a passkey, then I need a way to share those passkeys. And, you know, this would be a, uh, our existing workflow to use that. So that would be, that'd be nice. And we, you know, we use one password to share all sorts of other stuff too.

Frequent flyer mile numbers and all sorts of stuff like that. Driver's license numbers. Jason, you have experienced the quad box. The quad box. Quad box. Everyone, the quad box has arrived. Can you, so this was the multi-view multi-view yes for the tv sports stuff on apple tv 4k can you uh tell me what the quad box experience was like

um i think it's really good it's different from my experience with the fubo tv quad box that i use for my um over the top uh yes it's comparative quad box time here absolute gibberish it's a fubo it's comparative quad box one mike welcome to comparative quad box i'm i'm your professor jason jason jason jason oh that's good that's good it's very refined so the way you work the way it works is there's an additional square that's the latest version of tv os so in addition to when you when you bring up the kind of the player ui there's like the picture in picture button and there's a audio streams button and a subtitles button and then there's now a uh a quad box button that's a little four square kind

of thing and if you hit that what happens is is the video stream you're watching pulls back and up from the bottom of the screen comes a list of, and this is all in the TV app only right now. It's a list of other available live content that's playable in the TV app. in the TV app. So if you click on another, so if you're watching MLS, another MLS game or a baseball game on Friday night, or both, if both are going on. And what will happen is that item, those little items are down at the bottom of the screen with little pluses. And then you click one and it adds it to the playing area at the top of the screen. And it plus turns into, I think, a check. And the one you're already watching is also the screen and it plus turns into i think a check and you're the one you're already watching is also down there and it's already checked right so the idea is down below there is sort of like what is in the quad box or you know again two two by two you know it could be two or it could be three could be four um you swipe up and the stuff on the bottom goes

away to bring it back you swipe back down to bring up the multi-view kind of control. You can choose. There's some different layouts. There's kind of like a big and small. There's a four in the square, the classic quad boxes, I would call it. But there's also one where there's one on the left and then three in a stack on the right that are small.

Depends on your preference really to how you want to watch this. And then in terms of how you use it, you can, very much like Fubo, if you swipe around, it'll change where the audio input is coming from. So you can listen to audio from any of them. Unlike Fubo,

so Fubo, when you're in that multi-up view where there's like a big one, a little one, I believe you can click on one and it makes it the big one. Click on a small one and it makes it the big one. Apple doesn't work like that. And it actually, I think is maybe a smarter move. So with Apple, you do exactly what you might expect, which is if there's a little one that you want to make the big one, you tap and hold essentially like so that it wiggles. I don't think it actually wiggles, but it's that same gesture. And then you swipe it over and it just becomes the big one instead of the small one.

And you can rearrange the windows that way. And if any of them are ones that you want to see at full screen, you click and it zooms in full screen. So you can very quickly, once you learn the gestures, have like your four up of four different soccer games and swipe around the audio and then tap and zoom

into one where it's very exciting and then hit back and it goes back. The one thing I also noticed that's different, and I don't know what Fubo is doing in the background, but Apple is not maintaining the streams when you're not viewing them. So when you zoom into one, Apple seems to drop the other streams. It's only streaming the game you're watching, which makes sense, right? But what it means is that when you zoom back out, the other three streams are stills, and then they pick up and they start to play. It's a little less elegant, but if Fubo, if I'm watching two things at once and I'm zoomed into one of them, is it streaming the other one in the background? it probably shouldn't be but i think maybe it is so um anyway yeah you can watch multiple multiple things on it and i think if you've got apple tv channels and so you're subscribing to other services that have sports

within the tv app i think you can use multi-view for that too but what's missing and who knows maybe we'll see it at wwdc we should put it on the draft list is it would be really nice if this feature worked across apps so that you could have multiple views of live sporting events at once across different apps because a lot of sporting events are in different apps maybe we'll get there but it's a very nice implementation for the very limited kind of content live sports content that's in apple's tv app right now that's good this way you described it to me it sounded like you were kind of doing incantations with the tv remote do you think this is complicated like i know you said you got your like once you get to to know it it's fine but is it complicated to learn this stuff i think it's pretty intuitive honestly because there are not that many things you can do with the apple tv remote the one thing that is not entirely intuitive

is the if you want to pick up and move something i'd say that's the least necessary of all the gestures and if you use an apple tv remote, I mean, I didn't know it did that. I just said, well, let's try it. And that's what it did. It was like, okay. Like it, I intuited that that's probably how it worked and it's totally how it works. So I'm going to give that a thumbs up too. But I think in its most basic form, you're, you're watching one thing and you say, put me in the quad box and you go add, add, add. And now you've got four and you're swiping around to change the audio and clicking into whichever one is selected. And it zooms in and you press the back button. It zooms back out pretty.

I think it's pretty straightforward. It's a, I guess, sort of a power user feature. But if Apple is going to get into sports, I mean, this is a this is a sports viewing feature and it's a great sports viewing feature. So I I'm glad they built it. I, I, I feel bad if they built it for NFL Sunday ticket and then they didn't get that contract, but, um, but I think it's great for their sporting ambitions going forward. I also heard, I got some feedback that like in certain other countries like yours, there are not a lot of simultaneous sporting events. Like for example, they only show, you know, they don't really show multiple premier league matches up against each

other. I had to break it to that person and that in the U S they do, we get to see all of them, um, which doesn't happen in the UK apparently, which is sad. Um, we have better English soccer than you apparently. Uh, but it's a great feature for sports fans. And if you don't, if you don't get it you know you're not a sports fan like i okay i get it but trust me i have on um on weekends in the fall especially when like college football is going on or or even on a sunday with pro football i have the quad box going uh on my tv and i love it so So I'm glad Apple has built a, built a better quad box.

Also they all, all the corners are a little round, rounded corners, which is very Apple. It's totally unnecessary. And yet they did it. So that's kind of cute too. It's very Apple.

Mimestream 1.0 has shipped. Mimestream. And you wrote about it. Not the best, you know, not the best name, but you know, it's the best uh you know not the best name but you know it's the name don't understand i i suggest this a long time ago my mail would have been so much better in my opinion i don't know why stream is in the title i like the app a lot and use it on my mac um but i find the naming to be, but they went with what they went with.

It's been two years. So I've been using this. It's been in beta. They've been building it. MimeStream is a Gmail client for Mac OS. So I used to use MailPlane, which was basically a Mac wrapper of the Gmail web interface, which put it in its own app and gave it the right shortcuts. And let me do sorts of drag and drop and other stuff that integration with Mac OS made better than just doing it in a web browser window. But that got discontinued due to security changes with Google and Gmail. But into the breach steps Mindstream, which is written by, it's a team, but the lead guy used to work at Apple on notes and mail. And it feels very familiar, I think, as a Mac interface, but also like mail a little bit. But it's really good. And it is Gmail native because it's Gmail focused. So Gmail does not behave like IMAP, which is the protocol

that people use to check their email mostly these days. It's different. It's a little bit weird. And MimeStream is built to use the metaphor that Google is using for Gmail rather than sort of mapping it to IMAP. And it's got a bunch of stuff like you can create filters right in the app. The search is really fast because it's using the Google Gmail search.

It's not doing what mail does, which is, you know, at least a lot of cases, downloading all the files locally and then indexing them. And it can be really slow or it can be unreliable. Even when it uses the server, I found that it can be pretty unreliable and slow. A lot of great things to say about it.

It's a really good app. It's a subscription app. So there's a discount for year one, at least right now. But, you know, you do have to pay annually for it. That is the way of the world today. But for me, it was an instant buy because this is my email client of choice on the Mac. Their number one priority, according to Neil Mimestream, is iOS. So they're not making any commitments to when, but their next priority is to ship it. People are asking, can you support other mail formats and can you bring it to iOS? And

what he told me is that iOS is their number one priority so that you can use the same app on your Mac and on your iOS devices. And then they obviously are also interested in supporting IMAP. Then they obviously are also interested in supporting IMAP. It's a bigger challenge because of what I said, because IMAP is not Gmail. And so they're going to have to do the reverse of what all those clients that use IMAP on Gmail and have to figure out how to deal with the fact that it's not really IMAP. It's kind of Gmail. MimeStream is going to have to do the reverse but they built a really nice reliable fast client that i vastly prefer to apple mail and you do too i think and so gmail user this is and you have a macintosh this is the app you should be using like i had a great question from a reader who said why

would i use this instead of um instead of uh gmail and web browser and i said because it's an app i mean it's that's the answer is because this is a full-on written in Swift Mac app that gives you Gmail. It is essentially, what if Google cared so much about the Mac that it wrote its own fully native custom Gmail client for the Mac as an app? Which of course, that's not how Google works.

They only have apps on mobile devices for the Mac as an app. Which, of course, that's not how Google works. They only have apps on mobile devices because it was more expedient than telling people to go to their website. They certainly don't care about that on the Mac, but MimeStream does, and it's good. And so now you can buy it and use it, and I do recommend it. You know who you are

if you're somebody who wants a really good Gmail client for the Mac, and eventually for iOS. If you ask the question of why wouldn't I use the website, then this app probably isn't for you and that's totally fine. I feel like you know already, especially if it's a subscription app. You're going to be like, well, really this should be something you know you already want because you're frustrated with your email experience because either apple mail doesn't have all the features you want or you don't want to just have all of your email done in a web browser tab right and i think that's a very good market of people i would be as much as i want them to do it i'd be really surprised if they ever break out of gmail with this app because they have built this app around the way gmail, right? So for the experience to be consistent

they would have to reverse that for IMAP. So the idea of the categorization that it does automatically, they're going to have to work out how to do that. It's possible. Spark does this. But all of that stuff you have to build it yourself and that is

big and complicated. I hope they do do it because that would, to me, suggest that the app has been successful enough that they're willing to put the time in. But we'll see. Right. Although I would actually say that maybe the indication that they have to start working on IMAP is an indication that they need more users. Right. That's the other way to look at it is if they're incredibly successful with Gmail, I would feel like it lessens the pressure a little bit. But you're right.

It'll always be there. There are always people who are like, I have three Gmail accounts and an IMAP account. Please help me. And they can't serve them until they do that. I will also say one of the other really nice things about MimeStream versus like the web interface is how it handles multiple Gmail accounts because it's easy to do. You can merge them together into one inbox. You can keep them separate. And they have this new concept of roles, basically.

So you can have like if you've got like three Gmail accounts for business and one for personal, you don't have to switch necessarily among four. You can create a business set and a personal set. And you can switch between those two. And the business set will accumulate all your business emails can switch between those two and the business set will accumulate all your business emails and they can still be tagged and colored of like which one they're from but it's separate from your personal you can do that if you want it supports focus filters so you can even do it when you're in focus mode it it you you will pop you know and you're like you're in personal mode mindstream will only show your personal mail. I mean, you set it up however you want,

but all of that stuff is in there. And these are all reasons why, I mean, you're going to count on the fact that MimeStream is going to support a lot of core macOS features because the whole purpose of the app is to provide a macOS app experience on Gmail. So they got to, I mean, that's the secret sauce there.

That's the magic is what can we do that a web page can't do that's their entire mission with mindstream but I think it's very good yeah I respect their focus because like there are two very core questions that they have decided not to address for version 1.0 right as we mentioned is anything other than gmail but especially ios we're like nope it's what we're doing. I applaud that focus. And I really hope it works out for them because this is a great application. Yep, I agree. And Apple has started to share some details

about the WWDC schedule for developers. And there were a couple of intriguing placeholders. So, well, the things that they have, that developers know about is they can attend a set of tours inside apple park they have some exhibits and stuff like that which is really cool developers can register for them but there is a special evening activity on monday which feels probably like a bash right like i don't know unless it's like uh apple design awards that's already on there too.

The Design Awards is already on the schedule. So that Monday is like keynote, State of the Union, Design Awards, and then a special evening activity. And then on Tuesday, there are three two-and-a-half-hour sessions at the Developer Center center a morning afternoon evening and you have to register for one of these this is probably gonna be for trying out the headset i reckon they're at the developer center it's not a bad guess right

right not necessarily that but the idea that you have groups especially keeping in mind that the developers are not a very large contingent right no it's not 5 000 developers it's a small number of developers so what if they let you sign up for slots on tuesday where you are in a relatively small group and they bring them in and there's a you know there's a demonstration and then people are there to try on the headsets one at a time or in groups, right? Where it's like four at a time and the rest of them do something else and you kind of move them through. If I were at Apple, that's what I would do, right? You got to have time for your guest developers to see the headset. And how do you

do that? Because it's a one-to-one experience and you've got to come up with a program that lets you kind of like filter them through. And's almost like a disneyland ride where you need like the waiting time and then the experience time so everybody gets 15 minutes experience time and for the rest of it what are they doing is they're doing something else and you gotta kind of funnel them through it'd be interesting to see how they do it and for the press it's the same thing it's like how are they gonna do that with the press it's a it's a tough one i reckon the developer thing will probably follow something akin to the mac pro demonstration thing from what's that 2019 when they have like a bunch of mac like a bunch of people using the mac pro showing you how

like what it could do right like they have that whole kind of like experience thing but obviously with uh i i'm assuming probably a hands-on part or maybe not like maybe it'll just be like here are four apple employees they're all doing something and you can watch them do it and you can see it on a screen or whatever we'll find out but i think that's probably what that's going to be on tuesday is the entire day to allow a set of multiple hundreds of people try out or see something more up close with the with the headset because like it we spoke about this before right like could this be something akin to your original apple watch experience where like they would show you it but you couldn't do it because it was on a loop and that might be the case you can look

around and stuff yeah maybe reach out and touch something and all that but then it just keeps going right a completely guided experience certainly if there's anything it's going to be something like that do you think that that monday night event is a concert yeah the reason that i'm inclined to believe that it is is not just for the developers right right? Think of this from an Apple perspective. If they're launching WWDC, making all their announcements there, including the headset, you could argue that that's like a really good opportunity to throw a party.

Yeah. And so you throw a party for developers and media and VIPs and Apple employees. Yep. And they all come to the, and Apple employees. Yep. And they all come to the inside of the ring? Yep. Maybe? Yep, that's where it's going to be.

The rainbow stage? Yep. Special evening activity, so from MacRumors, Apple says that the special activity is one attendees, quote, won't want to miss, with food and beverages provided. It's a party.

Oh, I mean, come on. Yeah, it's a party. Yeah. Maybe there's a band i mean it's a come on yeah it's a party yeah maybe there's a band definitely there's a party yeah so yeah great awesome probably not spinal tap who knows i always was picking spinal tap could be i like i like federico's i like federico uh wondering about boy genius because they're in california that would be be that would be really awesome I'd be there if I could and maybe I will I'm not saying like I can't I'm saying I will be

I will be there if I'm invited how about that I will be there if I'm invited yep can't wait so

this episode is our final regular episode before WWDC so next week will be the draft, which we are in preparation

on, trying to narrow down our picks and so we'll be making our draft picks. I will be putting my championship on the line for the year. Your right side up pennant and my downward facing sad pennant, yes, on the line.

That'll be on the line. So what obviously something you've known is, as we're recording this, which is the 22nd of May, Final Cut and Logic are due out for the iPad tomorrow, which is May 23rd. We will not be talking about these until at least after WWDC at this point. So just as

a note, we're not going to talk about it on the draft. I doubt we're going to have time to talk about it on the WWDC episode. It's going to be later on. Maybe we'll talk about that in my backyard. Maybe not. Summer of fun!

Talk about the old apps! We're also planning on reprising the outside podcast that we did last year. You can listen to my birds. So that's something we want to do again because we had such a good time with that last time. It was the best part of WWDC for me last year. Low bar. I hope that that won't be the case this year, but who could tell. So we've got that going on, and so

yeah, we won't be talking about anything kind of Final Cut related until then, but hopefully we'll pick it up as part of the summer of fun. This episode is brought to you by our friends at ZocDoc. It sucks when you have to go to a doctor's appointment

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Saddle up, partner. It's time for a rumor roundup. Mike, I feel like the sun is low in the sky and we might be done with some rumor roundups for a little while yes but let's let's ride one last time the wall street journal is reporting come on i like it the apple executives have banned the use of chat gpt and other ai utilities from being used for work at the company. This includes GitHub Copilot for helping developers with their code issues. There is a concern at Apple that these tools

could be a threat to Apple's secrecy guidelines if people are querying them to aid in their work. Yeah. Hey, ChatGPT, here's my top secret Apple code. Can you help me with it like you're sending top secret apple code to chat gpt don't do it or i was thinking like i have got a marketing press release can you just check it over for grammar right like these are things that people are doing more and more right it actually shows you that there is there is going to be a serious

market in the future for ai assistant technologies that run on that you can run on a local private instance yeah right like where where you know keep your secret stuff secret by paying us to to install your thing or whether you know you can do it yourself but like i think there will be companies that will will come to your place with this well Well, funnily enough, OpenAI is one of them. OpenAI is working on this for Morgan Stanley, like a locked-down version of ChatGPT. But yes, I think this is what Microsoft is probably focusing on too, a little bit more, right?

Like a lot of their stuff around Office is like, we are using your information. Because the problem with something like ChatGPT is like you could take, I don't know if GitHub works like this, but the idea is there are certain things that you can do. Certainly Apple does this

where it's end-to-end encrypted, where like you see it because you've got a key, you're logged in, but like it's stored encrypted and that the service can't see it. you've got a key you're logged in but like it's stored encrypted and that the service can't see it the problem with chat gbt is it's got to see it right it's got to see it it has to decrypt it it can't not have it and if it's running on somebody else's servers it could be a leak they people could see what you're you're typing what you're pasting in to those documents so for that reason very

privacy uh and secrecy oriented companies governments government agencies um are gonna need if there if it's truly the case that this ai stuff is gonna have value productivity value um it's either got a run-on device which you know a lot of the stuff will be able to run on device our devices are powerful enough or at the very least it needs to be put in a system where it can be self hosted so that you have some trust that it's not leaving your company

very important on that same kind of topic area TechCrunch have recognized that Apple has been on the hunt for more AI talent there are dozens of job postings available currently on topic area, TechCrunch have recognized that Apple has been on the hunt for more AI talent. There are dozens of job postings available currently on their careers page looking for generative AI experts.

These began posting at the end of April and they're being consistently added to their over 28 AI job roles in that time period. We found the place where Apple's not slowing down hiring. Yep. I was thinking that exact thing right they're not freezing in this area because they need the talent they do they do

uh yeah i mean it's a sign that they feel uh like behind or stressed out or they've lost people whatever it is there's something going on there where Apple definitely needs more. I think Apple, look, Apple clearly is spending a lot of effort on machine learning and AI, maybe not in the way that others are, but it's also possible that the AI stuff has gone in directions that Apple either hasn't anticipated or that Apple doesn't have the capability to do right now and they need to staff up even further. It's not like they're doing nothing. I mean, I was, I was laughing at a conversation about Apple,

like being perceived as being, you know, doing nothing and being behind when they've literally built a machine learning AI special cores into their processors for the last few years. Right. Like they, they, they know,

but they've also got some blind spots and, and have missed some things. Not surprising. Are we surprised that Apple wants to hire more AI? They've been doing a lot of stuff for machine learning, but they've been using machine learning like a scalpel, right? Like very specific things. I think Tim Cook even said it was woven. So I guess like a loom or something. They're like weaving it in.

And that's nice, but it's also, yeah, it's very conservative. What they don't have is this mass consumer facing product. Yeah. So that's kind of what they need to work on. Yeah. And then we take a short left turn to go to Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter where he notes that Apple will soon be selling the Nike-made Ted Lasso merch through the Apple online store.

Yeah, and that there will be QR codes. It must be they're tired of hearing this in the retail stores, so there'll be QR codes or something in the retail store that'll say, if you would like your Ted Lasso merch, scan this code and go to the online store. That's where you buy your Ted Lasso merch. But this would be the first time

clothing has been sold in the Apple store. Right, because you have to go to the Apple stores on Apple campuses in order to get the Apple. Like I've got a Six Colors Apple rainbow t-shirt and all that, but they don't sell those in the regular retail stores, only in the special locations. So this is going to be a change for them. I think

it's great. I think they should do it. I honestly think they should put it in the retail stores too, but they probably have done the profit calculations and realized even though an overpriced branded shirt is not as profitable as literally anything else in the Apple store. Fair enough. Putting it in the online store makes sense. There's no problem with storage,

and they've got the room for it to show it off. I expect them to do more. This is one of those areas. Julia Alexander and I talked about this on downstream the other time, the other week, like three or four weeks ago. The Disney, I don't know if you,

you noticed it. I don't know if we mentioned it here. Disney added a store tab in the Mandalorian where you could buy merch. They're like, put it in the Disney plus app. And, and of course, think about it. Of course, Disney did. This is the company that has you exit through the gift shop. Everything about Disney is about the big picture experience. It's not like, well, they come in, they watch The Mandalorian, and they leave. It's like, no, no, no. They come in,

they watch The Mandalorian, and then they buy a Baby Yoda. That's how it works. And then they go to Disneyland, and they see a Mandalorian walking around around this is disney well apple is not quite disney but apple will leave no stone unturned when it comes to uh revenue or at least uh that seems to be their approach so why would you not merchandise your entertainment product now that you have it so i would be surprised if it stops with Ted Lasso, right? Like, Severance... This is just the easy one. Yeah, this is the easiest one. It's a good one to test. It's also

two years too late, but it's good that it's here. It's literally going to be appearing as the show ends. But, good. Let's get this started. As we assume the show will end. Right. I think I have a view, but I don't know if I've shared it assume the show will end. Right. I think I have a view, but I don't know if I've shared it on the show.

My theory is that season four will become a show called Roy Kent. I think that's the- Ah, interesting. I think it's going to be a Roy Kent spinoff and Roy takes over the team and Ted goes back and maybe does some cameos every now and then. But I think that's how they continue it. I've heard the theory that there are going to be multiple shows. Yeah.

And that Ted Goes Back to America could actually be another show or a continuation of Ted Lasso while the show. Because I think one of the undercurrents of Ted Lasso's production is that Jason Sudeikis got a divorce, has kids that he doesn't see very often because they're in America, and he's in London for long periods of time shooting Ted Lasso. And he doesn't want to keep doing that. And he's in charge. So it's possible that he's essentially going to exit. possible that uh he's going to come back to the states but still get some of that sweet sweet ted lasso money while also allowing his cast and crew who are uk-based to stay and kind of continue the franchise there so we'll we'll have to see but i think we're presumed we're proceeding under the assumption that ted lasso season three is the end of the story and then we'll i i feel very

strongly that since they've not said anything about it since then, I know there's a writer's strike now, but like, it feels to me like the end of season three of Ted Lasso is necessary for the announcements. And so I don't know. I feel like they're sitting on something,

but maybe not. I feel like they're sitting on something there. I will say, Sava in the, in the discord has said, Ted Lasso coaches an MLS team, which is that Disney-like vertical integration. Right?

Right. Because Apple control Major League Soccer now. Right. Actually, you know what? Forget it. Have Jason Sudeikis become the actual coach of an MLS team? Of an MLS team.

Let's go 4D chess on this one. I like it. I don't know. I think it will be interesting to see what Brett Goldstein does, right? Because Roy Kent is a phenomenon and he's also got another Apple TV show, right? With Bill Lawrence, they're doing Shrinking.

And I wonder, especially if Jason Sudeikis either stepped away or went off to do something with Ted Lasso in America, if that would mean that Brett Goldstein and Bill Lawrence would sort of like pick up the reins of a Roy Kent, you know, and look, we say Ted Lasso and Roy Kent, but like these are ensembles.

There are like, what, 15 characters in Ted Lasso? I mean, it's enormous. That's part of the problem of them trying to land this plane is that the episodes are getting like to be an hour long each because they've got five different storylines and they need to service all of these characters um anyway it's it's also it cracked the nielsen streaming top 10 it's it's uh which is a big deal like there that's almost entirely netflix stuff the only disney stuff on there is star wars and marvel and so for ted lasso to be there star trek picard was like the first paramount thing to ever crack it it cracked it the

last couple of months um so and ted lasso is there so like it is by all measurements awards and viewing figures apple's biggest thing so i'm sure as we've said before apple will back up the truck of money or perhaps already has backed up multiple trucks of money to various houses in order to continue with something that's Ted Lasso related. But to pay for that, they're also going to sell Ted Lasso shirts in the Apple store. So we're going to park the roundup.

We're going to park the horses for a bit. We're going to come back to... You don't park horses. Is that what you do? We're going to hitch them. We're going to come back to... You don't park horses. Is that what you do? We're going to tie them up. We're going to hitch them. We're going to tie them up at the hitching post. I wouldn't be surprised if the word parking has some kind of etymology in horses, but we can leave that for another time. You're just opening us up to a world of horse-related follow-up, and as somebody who was

injured in a buggy accident as a child, who better than me to field those questions about horses? I grew up with horses. I don't know if that's a good idea. We're going to talk about accessibility features. So in honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple has once again, as they have for multiple years now, previewed some accessibility-focused

features that will be coming in iOS 17. So they break these out, give them their own time in the sun, which is a really great idea. There are a whole selection of features, but Apple focuses on three main ones. The biggest one is something called Assistive Access, which in a nutshell simplifies and can give you the options to simplify the entire UI of iOS to aid those with cognitive disabilities. It is a fully customizable experience. You can have your entire UI

just be these huge buttons or big text labels or tables that you can access from, like, you know, you got all your apps in just a table, there's no home screen, huge high contrast iconography, and there's a whole set of tools available for a more tailored experience.

Like, so you can put things in grids and rows and stuff. This is like, this feels pretty massive as like a thing to do. It's like, oh, how about we give you the opportunity to rewrite the entire operating system so this seems super cool yeah there's live speech which will allow a user to type what they want to say to somebody and have it spoken out loud from the phone either in person so do it from the phone speaker, or if you're on a FaceTime call, you can type out what you want to say and the person will hear it. You can also create a machine learning version of your own voice using a system called personal voice. So you

record yourself saying, or you speak to the phone saying a bunch of things. And then I think it's like over many hours, the phone will go away and create basically an AI version of your own voice which you can then use for the live speech function this is mainly focused on those who are at risk of losing their voice so this would give them the ability to still be their own person when using these features and also point and speak in the magnifier app so you can hold up your camera and using the camera and lidar you can point your camera at some buttons the system will read and process the buttons and labels so you can point with them with your finger and it will be like that's the start button that's the stop button wild stuff again like they're just

continuing to do some huge things of accessibility here which is just so cool to see shelly brisbane wrote about this at six colors and that was the one that blew me away as she said you know you're standing in front of a vending machine and you point at the buttons and it says like which one is coke and which one is pepsi and which one is and like you don't think about it but if you if you have vision issues um this feature makes every bit of like every interface in the world becomes accessible it's like voiceover but for the world right exactly yeah and and the idea that you know if you can't read the buttons and you're standing in front of a vending machine, what the hell do you do?

And the answer is, it's not a problem. Also, I had that thought, which is, this is also the future of Apple augmented reality. It's stuff like this. And I heard from some people who are like oh well this is interesting because you could put in the apple headset and it's got cameras and it could do that it's like you could and and like in the long run i think these features do go together with augmented reality and the fact that you could wear this around but there's probably and i'm just i'm just spitballing here uh something for down the road for an Apple product. But like, as long as you can get a camera,

which is a challenge, because right now, like AirPods don't have cameras. But as long as you can have a camera, you should be able to do this now, right? Like if your AirPods had cameras, or if you could put on some glasses, or just put a little teeny tiny camera on your glasses. This feature, I know AirPods don't have the processing power right now to do something like this, but I'm just saying if you extrapolate this, you don't need a full-on AR headset to make the entire world accessible.

No, you could put your phone in a lanyard. You could put your phone in a lanyard. You could. I mean, this is what that Humane has, that demo, that startup, where it's got, like, we're not going to talk, it's some weird stuff going on there, but one idea is that you put your, like, phone or this Humane thing in a pocket,

a shirt pocket, and the camera's facing out, and it does it. But, like, there are ways you could do it, but the idea is, as long as you've got that processing power and it's in your ears, like, that alone is an incredible amount of augmentation get those inaccessible things to be accessible, it's awesome. This technology is amazing.

Yeah. So much of it. You mentioned Shelly, who wrote about this on Six Colors. Shelly also has a podcast here on RelayFM called Parallel, where she dives into this in more detail. So if you want more detail from somebody who actually needs and uses these tools, you can go and check that out on relay.fm. Parallel is episode 82.

But I love that they do this stuff, obviously. I like that they give it this focus now, because if this was part of WWDC, the demo would still be really fascinating but it would be part of the news for that day right like that day everyone would have that as one of the many articles written but by doing it this way a couple of days before it gets everyone to actually spend time thinking about it focusing on it you know like how would this be useful why would you need this you know so like and also like for us i see things like

that and i'm like oh who in my life could benefit from this in a way that i might not otherwise think about it because i'm focusing on 2000 different things on wwc keynote day so super cool yeah it's a good thing that they do it now um we we talked about it all this time would we have talked about it all this time if it was amid 800 other announcements well of course not no even if we care about the subject because there are so many other announcements so i like how they do it it does require them to get a little shifty about you know first off they have to they can't they can't pull out anything that gives anything away right so they they it's big because these are new ios features that they're announcing in advance of wwdc they don't say where they're coming you know

they don't put it in that frame but that's what they are and i know i was listening to your uh podcast with uh with well you weren't on it last week, but Connected talked about this. It was my subversive element, John Voorhees, my fellow Jay, who was there with Federico and Steven. And they were talking about this and they both suggested there's that part where it's sort of like, oh, and it'll put this information about where you are in the Notes app. And they all immediately said, that's the journaling app, right? That's not actually the Notes app. And they all immediately said, that's the journaling app, right? That's not actually the Notes app.

That's the journaling app they haven't mentioned yet. And that's why. And there's like a shortcut that they're like, there's this shortcut that does this. So it says, shortcuts, ads, remember this, which helps users with cognitive disabilities create a visual diary in Notes for easy reference and reflection. It's like like you could

do that now why is that and and then you start to unravel and you're like yeah they're probably hiding something there right it's probably more complex it probably involves that that journaling app that we talked about but they aren't announcing that right now okay they're just doing accessibility so this is i appreciate that they do it because this is a not a zero effort kind of thing for them to give this stuff the spotlight while they're also having to do the work to hide the secrets for next month. This episode is brought to you by Ladder. Look, let's be real. If you're like me, you have a tendency to put some things off until the last minute, whether that's going to the DMV,

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of this show and RelayFM. So, mentioned this is the last episode that we'll do before, like, last episode that we'll do before like proper episode that we'll do before WWDC. So it's going to be a roundup next week. And there have been lots of pieces of information about the headset. So I thought we would

because this is the big thing, right? We're going to try and tie as much of a bow around it as possible with some of this stuff as we get ready to head into prime WWDC season. And we will start with an interesting set of reports from Mark Gurman detailing the thoughts and feelings of executives at Apple on the headset project.

Just in general, a fascinating set of things. I actually preferred the version, as I tend to, in the Power On newsletter, which just gave more of a breakdown of basically every executive involved in the project and where their expected stance is, which was intriguing. Again,

this seems like a lot of information to have gotten, and I really wonder where Mark got this information, but it's super fascinating to me. So there is some skepticism about the headset project. Interestingly, Tim Cook is described as having displaying relative non-involvement in the project, which has apparently frustrated staff members

yeah let me decode that though um my guess is that frustrated staff members means there are people who don't like things that happened and wish tim would have intervened and he didn't that's my read on that like i could be wrong like, do we expect Tim Cook to be really involved on in product development? I thought, I thought that one of the great things about Tim Cook is that he knows that he's not the product guy and that he's looking at big picture strategy things and looking at the price and looking at the timing and all of those things, but otherwise not being involved.

So I, I could be wrong again. I I'm just guessing here, but my immediate reaction when I saw that was, I don't know, that feels like sour grapes from people who didn't get their way and were hoping Tim would override the people who made the decisions. And he didn't because he doesn't want to do that. approaches that they were going to take, right? And maybe this is part of the frustration that people didn't get the approach that they wanted. I'll tell you how I read this one, which is not too dissimilar from you. It's just, we know that Tim isn't a product person, right? But maybe there are people in Apple

who were around for the other big product launches, you know, like maybe the iPhone, the iPad, that kind of stuff. And their hope would be that they would have a CEO who is involved in a brand new endeavor. And maybe that frustrates them, and he just isn't.

Because for as much as we know, he kind of never is. Craig Federighi has kept his distance from the project, seeming wary of the effort. John Gruber on Daring Fireball pointed out, this would be quite a task considering he's head of all software. kept his distance from the project seeming wary of the effort uh john gruber and daring fireball pointed out this would be quite a task considering he's head of all software for him to do so i don't know what that means i mean look maybe he and i believe maybe he is skeptical but he can't really

keep a dis like he can't be like oh no forget it right i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna help you build your fork of ios that that it uses a bunch of stuff that we well the way this is phrased too it is probably more like craig federighi never seemed excited and did what he needed to do, but never went the extra mile and was reluctant to part with him, which I also understand, like if this isn't Craig's project and he's really sort of supplying software to someone else's project

and he's concerned about the stuff he's already doing that's very hard with iOS and iPadOS and, you know, and macOS and all the other operating systems out there and here's another platform and he's not down into the day-to-day of it either, he's trying to view this at a higher level, then I could see why he might be reluctant

to dive too far into this. So again, I have this thought, which is like, I mean, maybe he thinks it's a stupid idea, but also, is this not sort of his job? But I do think there's something there, which is sort of like Craig didn't go. Yeah, let's let's I'll give you everything I got. And, you know, maybe people maybe people resented it on the headset side or maybe people on Craig's side were like, oh, I'm so grateful that Craig protected me from the headset people. But I don't know. on Craig's side were like, oh, I'm so grateful that Craig protected me from the headset people.

But I don't know. I mean, it seems like a very simplistic rendering of what was probably a very complicated balance between what you offer as a part of the development of this. And also, remember the days of the iPhone, the stories about that period of time. You've got the people who are in down deep with the hardware and they've got software that they're using, but they are also doing stuff that they like. At some point, the people working on the project really have to just be down in the project. And I view, you know, unless Craig, who knows, but like I view that as being Craig Federighi saying, I'm going to be doing this stuff over here while you guys are doing that over there. And is that, is that spite or is that just how it worked out? I don't know. I mean, I think you're right though right that he's obviously involved but he could just be like

doing what needs to be done but he's not an internal champion of the project which is perfectly fair i think uh johnny suruji is concerned that the focus on silicon for these devices could take away some focus from the iphone and has also likened the whole idea to something akin to a science project this one feels a bit more harsh yeah although we also don't know here's the other thing how long has this project been going on since Since 2015, the report says. Right? So, okay. How did Johnny Shruji feel in 2015? How did he feel in 2019?

How does he feel today? This doesn't say, right? And we know, in this, Mark tries to make some links where he's like, and honestly, the gains in the Apple chips in the last couple of years have been a little bit less. Is that a sign that this is going on? I don't know. I mean, it's really hard to tell. Maybe, maybe not. We don't know.

You wouldn't know unless you were in there. I know that if I'm Johnny Scruci and I'm looking at a Skunk Works project to make a headset and they're telling me I need to do work on this, I would be kind of grumpy because it's like, look, I've got the crown jewels here with the iPhone and we're doing this whole Apple Silicon thing with the Mac now. And you want me to do this thing? Is it even going to ship? There are certainly eras where it's like, you want me to spend money on this science project that you've got going on over here when we're shipping iPhones? That's actually completely reasonable to me. Without a timeframe, we can't really tell what that really means. And so again, we're just left with this little kind of like shreds of, of gossip that we've got here, but I understand it.

And there is a detail, I think in that report, which is that there is a, a wireless processor that they made, um, because there was a version of this headset at some point along the way that was going to be a box. It was going to be a little bit more like a PSVR. It was going to be a computing box somewhere plugged in. And it was where the power was, like the computing power. And then it would be transmitting the content wirelessly back and forth with the headset. And at some point they said, let's not do that. We're going to put all of it on board. And we know that in the VR world that happened, right? There were a lot of tethered

things. And then there was a next generation where it was like, no, we're going to take the tether away. We're going to use smartphone processors. We're going to put them on the headsets. And that way you don't have cables draping all over you. Well, apparently, Apple's chip designers built the silicon for that box, and then it got killed. And would I be

grumpy about that if I were Johnny Cerugy? Absolutely! Like, you know, we took our time to build this thing because you said it was important, and now you're not going to do it, and we wasted our time. So, again, I get it. That was a Johnny Ive decision. Apparently in 2019, the information reported on this that they wanted to do a processing-based station, but Johnny said that they shouldn't do this, that it wasn't the right way to go.

Which, I mean, we haven't used the headset, but I think for what Apple's trying to do, it isn't the right way to go which i mean we haven't used the headset but i think for what apple's trying to do it isn't the right way to go like it's not going to push them towards vr glasses if they're leaning on processing power being off-boarded right because at some point you've got to move that processing power on board unless unless everybody's going to have an iphone or something uh that always has to be with them and is going to be hot and you know plugged into losing its battery and like this this would need to happen at some point the headset has been a product that jeff williams has been a driving force on uh with the actual product team being led by mike rockwell uh cook has leaned on williams to make the product a success which this is akin to the kind of stuff that we've been hearing for a while right like obviously jeff has been running the apple

watch and now kind of oversees the hardware design team as well dan riccio is in the mix he is mike rockwell's boss and has worked exclusively on the headset for the last two years. Riccio was previously the hardware engineering chief. And it is believed inside of Apple that Riccio is probably going to retire after this product comes to market. Interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, this is the

group. It makes sense, right? Jeff Williams is sort of like, please take this across the finish line for me. Rockwell is the kind of product lead. And now Dan Riccio is in there also working on this thing to get it across the finish line. Because there are obviously different phases in these devices, right? And it's such a huge job to bring any new platform out across the finish line to use that, keep using that metaphor. Like you have to change and uh what you do is different because now it's sort of like now we need to produce it in in and mass produce it right like what is involved with that and what are the costs of that and how are we going to set

that up and all of that is incredibly complicated so i'm not surprised that jeff williams has gotten the the the tap here to come in and and uh bring it across to completion like uh happened with the apple watch there's a fun detail in marks uh reporting that dan riccio uh his last two products never saw the light of day there was like a apple tv tv and the car and so like it's for dan riccio i'd be surprised if he retires it's like finally! I've been working on products for 10 years and none of them have come out. But yeah, I feel like these days we see John Ternus, right?

In places where Dan Riccio would have been. Riccio was in so many of the White Room videos for a really, really long time. Yeah. Greg Joswiak is apparently one of the headset's biggest proponents on the executive team. Which is helpful, because he's going to sell the thing. And apparently Frank Casanova is leading marketing,

presumably working for JAWS. And that took me back because Frank Casanova in a previous life was like the quick time guy at Apple in like the late 90s. Still there or back? I think back back there i think he left and came back but he's apparently uh for those who remember the 90s uh mr quick time is now mr headset uh and yeah jazwiak is is into it that's good it's good because jaws is going to be out there being like

it's amazing so uh mark herman says he's a believer you'd hope so uh and phil schiller will be in charge of the launch event at wwc and apparently really pushed for gaming to be a focus uh schiller is noted to have a expensive vr headset racing rig at home. So maybe he wants to replace all of that with his Apple headset. And this fits with what we've, I think, heard before, which is what happened after Phil ascended to the rooftop seems to be that Phil is in charge of events.

And that sort of Phil's Apple. But yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. But like Phil, Phil sort of like not quite retired, but reduced. And it's sort of like very,

some specific things that they have coaxed him to remain doing to keep him attached at Apple. I think that this is one of those cases where Phil doesn't have to be there, but he likes it and they like having him around. And so they've found this new spot for him but yeah my understanding is that events are phil's thing yeah and it's like events are his thing and then it also makes sense from a place of like you need phil like if you need him he's still there

he's there yeah because up on the roof someone with his there isn't anyone, right, with his level of experience at Apple? Like from the level that he's at for the time period that he has done it, right? Right. He's like the longest serving executive. Yeah, he's the institutional memory of Apple at this point. The whole project, as we mentioned earlier began in 2015 the original plan was for this to be on mark on the market in 2020 which obviously didn't happen mark gomer reports that the original intended vision of the project was of course a pair of

eyeglasses that could be worn all day all day we are obviously still very far away from that and apple is currently expecting that we are four years from now away from or like just put the glasses on and go out into the world. It's a pretty long time but to me, we spoke about on this show a million times, feels like the earliest time I could imagine.

Like there's so much between this and that. I can't see it being four years. I agree, it seems like a stretch. I can't see it being four years. Even that, I agree, it seems like a stretch. I think 10 probably, but like,

I don't know what they think they can do in four years. I mean, I'll give you, I'll give you end of the decade, like 2030 maybe, but four years seems a bit much for something like this. Maybe.

9to5Mac is reporting on the cost of the headset. I want to read a quote here. A report from Wilson XR details the bill of materials for Apple's upcoming mixed reality headset. If the report is correct, the components could cost around $1,400 per unit.

When shipping costs are added, it comes to about $1,600. The headset is expected to be equipped with an M.2 chip, 12 gigabytes of RAM, 512 gigabytes of storage, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.3. The most expensive components are the OLED displays, which are expected to be 280 to 320 dollars each, and there will be at least two, maybe three, who can tell, on this device. So yeah yeah it's going to be expensive right and keep in mind this is this is sixteen hundred dollars per unit in parts in parts and as we know from all the times

the bill of materials people do these stories that get hyped that are like oh that thousand dollar iphone it only cost 128 in parts what a rip-off and you're like well no like they have to assemble it and they had to make a bunch of those parts and there's the software and there's like there's so much that goes into this development which are obviously going to take a bath on if they've been working on this since 2015 exactly right like that's not going to be paid back by these headsets yeah so when you put it all together what you get is uh okay 14 or 1600 i think that gives you an idea of the floor of a product like this like even and i don't think it's 1600 right like I don't think that's it. I think that you're looking at a $2,000, $2,500 product

like out the door, really. And that's if they don't, which we've said, like, I don't know where their bar is in terms of like the red zone of like you don't go down here in terms of margin. But even if they go into

the red zone of margin, it's going to be an extremely expensive product. But on the other side, this is what we've been hearing all along. This is an expensive product because it's an expensive product to make. And that's because Apple has really approached this as the spare no expense, state of the art, best in class.

This is what VR and AR can be product. And then the challenge is from here, they're going to need to iterate and they're going to need to improve things while also trying to get the price down. And all the rumors are that there's a second model stream that is going to use the same platform, but be a lot cheaper.

And they have chosen to go out with the expensive one if you want this to work you've got to blow people away and i think that's the strategy if i if we're if we are flies on the wall inside apple and by the way apple do something about these flies why are there flies um it but if if we are flies on the wall the apple that's got to be the argument right that's got to be the argument is this is a huge thing for the future. We're invested in it. We think in the long term, this is going to be on everybody's faces. In the short term, the tech isn't all there yet.

But if we're going to go out with something with the tech not all there yet, we want it to be the best and define this category and show what is possible and blow people away so that this category continues to exist and that we have set the bar in the category. And probably we have set the bar in a way that will make it very difficult for anyone else to meet what we've done right like that that's got to be part of it too is not only are we saying this is going to be the best experience ever but it's like who's gonna match it it's meta right no maybe not because look everyone that has wanted to try vr you know by and large will have gotten an opportunity millions of people around the world have had their first vr experience where it's like wow you know this is amazing i love how good this feels this is i'm so immersed

right now all that kind of stuff but now apple has to come in and leapfrog right they have to come in and be like no this is what you can do we'll blow you away some other way and then they can move forward from there we've made this and i've made this comparison before the original iphone was inconceivably expensive for what smartphones cost at the time right like you got smartphones for free. Your phone was free with your contract or it was like a couple of hundred dollars or whatever. It's like, no, it's an $800 smartphone. It's why there's that clip of Steve Ballmer laughing so much, because it was so expensive compared to the competition. And that's where they've got to

go again. They did it then for a reason, because it blew you away and you wanted one. And they need to be able to get people like me like you like mkbhd to say i've tried this thing and it you cannot believe how good it is right like that's what they need and that's why you've got to go expensive but now they've got to make sure the software meets it like that's the thing uh john gruber was questioning on during fireball how on earth is Apple going to fit everything that they need to into WWDC? If you've got iOS

iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and new Macs as just the basics and you're letting things go at that point, how are you going to fit it in? Friend of the show, Zach Knox who puts together the draft scorecards for us, went through and looked at the run times of the previous six

WWDCs. Pre-COVID, three years in a row, over two hours since 2020 with the video events, all under two hours. This is going to be two and a half hours, right? There's just no way to do it. I don't know. I think two hours is

always the goal for them, and I think that cutting things out is a lot easier and compressing things. I think it's going to be super high compression level. And let's not forget, the keynote is not the end, right? The keynote is the, we want to show this to the masses. And they have this great footnote section, which is the State of the Union. And then they've got the rest of the notes, which are the rest of the week, right? So really, you've got some variability in terms of what you can put in the keynote. You can really cut it down and say, we've got some amazing things and you blast through them and you leave a bunch of stuff on the website because it doesn't matter. And the developers are paying attention to state of the union. They're paying attention to all the sessions you're trying to get. Because if you think of it as a, an event for everyone, an event for a wider audience, there is a limit to how much information you can dump on them. Right? So you do two and a half hours. I could make the argument

that two and a half hours is just too long and it doesn't matter how much stuff if you've got that much stuff you have two choices pull things out like don't announce them which would be like other products or uh move it to the auxiliary keynote which is state of the union or compress but like wants, my argument would be nobody wants to sit through two and a half hours and that among the mainstream. And that if you want them

to form an opinion other than this is really boring, you don't want it to go more than two hours. And on top of that, you undoubtedly have saved the headset for last. And the last thing you want

is to try everyone's patience with a traditional keynote video. And then at the end, when it's almost two hours, give them another half hour of your most important thing. Right? So if I had to guess, and we'll have to do a draft choice about this, right? We'll set the over-under and all that. But I'm just saying for the purposes of not outside of competition, I think they want to hit two hours. It doesn't mean that they will. They may end up brutally at 210 or 220, but I think they're going to try very hard to go to two hours,

and that would be my argument why, is that even if it's full of stuff, after two hours, people are tired. They don't care anymore. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you've got three hours worth of stuff, after two hours, people are tired. They don't care anymore. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you've got three hours worth of stuff. People are only going to pay attention to two hours worth of stuff. So get it under two hours.

I think, personally, they will cut. They will edit. They will make sure they've got all the things that only have to be there, and it will still be over two hours i just i just don't see like a way to to add another like os and hardware like it's that's an hour on its own right like just the headset i feel like but we'll see yeah but i i think the os releases for the other platforms though can be really short i think that's what's gonna happen right i think they're gonna be like hey we've got, we've got new platforms here.

And in fact, the question is, will they even do iPhone, iPad, Mac OS, Apple TV? Or will they say, let's talk about our platforms and talk about features across all the platforms? Because, right, that was the thing that we've been talking about the last few years is at what point do they change the game and talk about iOS and Mac OS and iPad OS sort of like interchangeably instead of doing what they've done the last few years, which is like artificially withhold features from one so they can announce it in the other and say, oh, yes. And also this works on the previous ones that I that I've already mentioned and the ones I haven't mentioned yet. Right. Like they could structure it differently. They could keep it simple. It's supposed to be a fairly light year in terms of all of this. So I wonder if

they could they could get that down uh more than usual i feel like the reporting changed from that that was the original one and then you know the last few months we've had all this other stuff right like here's the journaling app and like i think there is more than was initially expected keep in mind though what's the purpose i would come back to what's the purpose of this event and the purpose of this event is to have a big stage to do big ideas right and yes to launch normally it's to launch the new os cycles but like if the purpose of this event is to launch the headset the new os cycles can can wait right they can wait for state of the union they can wait for press release and they can wait for right? They can wait for State of the Union. They can wait for press release and

they can wait for the fall when they ship, right? Like it's not necessary to detail every new feature of your operating system in June in one time slot. It's really not. It's nice and they do it. But like if you've got the headset there, like you don't, you just don't have to. You've got all summer and then you're going to have to reintroduce it in the fall right where they do the iphone event and they explain that all the features of the new operating system at the iphone event we're all like we know we heard that in june but the rest of the world doesn't care they forgot or they didn't pay attention because it doesn't matter and everybody's going to be paying attention to the headset so i can make an argument that the the other os stuff will be perfunctory because

they can get away with it and then all of us nerds will be like, oh, God, but what's on the pages? And then we'll be looking at the State of the Union and we'll be watching all the videos and we'll be poring through all those pages. And that's fine because that's us nerds. The rest of the world is going to be headset, headset, headset, headset. And that's kind of the most important part. And that's kind of the most important part. MacRumors is reporting that Apple has filed trademarks via a shell company for the expected XROS, but also XR Pro OS. Prus. Zuprus. Zuprus. So look at the URL that's in our show notes.

Like if you click the link in the show notes, you can look at the URL in the title bar. It looks so funny written out. X-R-P-R-O-O-S. Zuprus. Zuprus. in the show notes you can look at the url and the title bar it looks so funny written out like xrp r o o s they're just covering their bases right like the xros is bad enough xr pro os that's just it looks bad written and is horrible to say so at that point why would you do it right yeah i think i think this is one of those like legal covering everything but i love that there's a shell company registering these trademarks this that's apple's thing they go to various countries and register trademarks and because of international trademark law you can just deep dive llc has applied for all of these various things in Jamaica and in Argentina and in New Zealand.

And like, they're just all over the place. And that's their strategy now, right? It's just flood the zone with various names. It works. If you enjoy this show and you want some more of it, why don't you subscribe to Upgrade Plus? You'll hear no ads. You'll get bonus content each and every week. If you enjoy this show and you want some more of it, why don't you subscribe to Upgrade Plus? You'll hear no ads. You'll get bonus content each and every week.

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Thank you if you do. Let's finish out today's episode with some Ask Upgrade questions. Now that Apple is getting ready to release their Pro apps, Final Cut Pro and Logic for the iPad, do you think they will release Xcode this year at WWDC? I don't. I mean, it would be great, but I don't. And the reason I don't is it feels like there is so much complexity in Xcode that is tied to so much that's running on Mac OS that to bring it all to iPad, I'm not sure iPad they've instead been trying to do is create a development environment that's capable of submitting to the App Store but doesn't have all those encumbrances on iPadOS. At some point, Playgrounds can't be called Playgrounds. At some point, Playgrounds has to be Xcode or something like it and be an even richer development environment.

you know an even richer development environment but if they released xcode for the ipad i think it would look more like playgrounds i think it would not be full xcode i think that that's where they're headed with that um i prepare i'm prepared to be surprised but i just feel like there's so much about xcode that is designed with the knowledge of what the Mac is capable of and Mac OS gives them access to as app developers. Because Apple, you know, Apple, it doesn't matter. Apple can make OS changes for its apps. That's what they're apparently doing with Final Cut and Logic. But there are limits, I'd say. There are limits to that.

I feel like maybe it's something that would need like a, we've rethought Xcode, right? And then if they've done that, maybe they could do an iPad version. You're right, it does feel like there's just maybe too much underlying structure that you wouldn't be able to get a convincing version of it on iPadOS, right? Like, you could do it, but it's going to be missing so much stuff that at that point, is it even worth it? Is it even worth calling it Xcode?

I think that's the question. I mean, we'll see what people think about Final Cut, right? Like, Final Cut obviously does not have everything. It's clear from the announcement. It does not have everything that it does on the Mac, but they call it the Final Cut. So there's the question, like, are you just bringing pain on yourself

by saying, well, this is what we call Xcode on the iPad and it's not Xcode and everybody's like snooty about it. It's like, this isn't Xcode. I'd say more likely that Apple is working on a next generation development environment

that will run on the iPad that might run on the Mac too that is, you know, for the next generation of software whether that's based on Playgrounds or it's based on something completely different I think that's more likely than that they would bring what we consider Xcode to the iPad. I feel like it's fair to assume that at some point in Apple's future the development tools will be Swift and SwiftUI like that will be all there is. future, the development tools will be Swift and SwiftUI, like that will be all there is. I feel like you need to get there.

Yeah, I think that's right. Certainly if, well, we've got this legacy version, you know, that's Xcode that still runs on macOS and you can use that. But if you're not using that old stuff, we have this new development environment that you can use, something like that, right? John asks, do you think TapBots will release an Ivory-esque client for Blue Sky? Maybe?

I feel like if it wins. Right? It feels like, yeah, why not? There's already, I don't know, did you see that there's a blue sky uh bridge for for mastodon uh yeah there there is a project i'm gonna have to find it but um there's a bridge that lets you log in in ivory it's sort of designed for ivory to blue sky as a separate account.

And it works. I did it this weekend. It totally works. So I guess the question is, what's the opportunity for third-party clients? I think it makes sense as long as it doesn't break the metaphors that ivory has already had. And the advantage of them doing it natively instead of using a bridge is that they could map things maybe better. When I see the people at the Icon Factory talking about what they're going to do

following Twitterific, this is the kind of thing I think too, which is multiple formats, multiple services in one sort of like social media app that can connect to open formats. But yes, Skybridge is the name of it. Skybridge.fly.dev.

And I have used that over the weekend. And I don't know if it'll keep working. I don't know. I don't know. But it totally works. At least this weekend it worked for me. And that means I have Blue Sky in Ivory just as a separate account. And it's very interesting.

So I think you'll see stuff like that. I mean, that will probably just become a thing you could do anyway, right? Like that just feels like part of the Blue Sky thing. Yeah. In fact, I would actually think it would be more that Ivory would get Blue Sky support than that there would be a separate client for Blue Sky because they seem close enough that maybe

you should just sort of like have an app that does them instead of having to because the amount of overhead to build a separate app for that other social network but who knows but it certainly seems very possible because there's

also like joe's mentioned in the live discord too that there's an instagram project right it's called project barcelona is what they're calling it which is also their attempt to join the text based decentralized universe i feel like it's going to be, I think I saw somebody tweet about this recently, a post about this recently, the idea of like, in 20 years, and why do they call it Ivory? Right? I'm like, why is this app called Ivory? Yep. Well, son, there was this thing called Mastodon. It all started with this thing called Mastodon, which, yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, I don't know. And maybe they do change the name over time to make it something else. Or maybe they just leave it because it's gotten enough cachet and enough loyal users that it doesn't matter. But that's, yeah, I think the beauty of this, whether you're the Icon Factory, which has not released

something but has been talking about it, or whether you're TapBots, which has released something and is obviously thinking about this stuff too, is if you've got a bunch of open protocols for text-based twitter-like things and uh they're similar enough that you could support them all in one app maybe that's the direction that they'll go maybe not maybe they'll be different enough that they're best served but i know that i i prefer having not like three different apps that I have to juggle. And also make a wild prediction, which is at some point, the remnants of Twitter will be owned by somebody who does this. I would not be surprised if at some point Twitter ends up just being another

endpoint for this text-based chat, because I have a hard time believing. No, well, like I said, I think, I think it's the remnants of Twitter when they've, when they've been sold off or gone bankrupt or whatever.

What a result that would be. Somebody will find value. Of the whole thing. Right. Just like, that's just, I mean, it seems realistic,

but like that, it's just like a wild thing to consider that it just ends up it ends up becoming one end point for its replacement i would say as well you mentioned icon factory at this point it seems very prescient in their idea of like we're just not going to jump to mastodon like we're just going to wait out a little bit and see what happens because we have a you know ideas that are maybe bigger than this and that's what kind of what's happening already right of like well it was mastodon but now blue sky's here and now this is here now this is here maybe what we will need eventually is some kind

of app closer to an rss reader in a way which is just like it just pulls in a bunch of sources and can display those to you. And Colin asks, would you like Apple to do a one-time numbering alignment across all of its product lines and software so that iOS 18 is an iPhone 18 and paired with watchOS 18? Or would you go with a different scheme altogether? Don't forget the A18 processor,

which is another teenage number that is out there with Apple stuff in it. It's very confusing. I like what Samsung did when they just went to the calendar year for their products, and I think Apple should do this. I agree. I agree. It would be much easier if in 2023 what we got was iOS 23, iPhone 23, and the A23 processor. Yeah. Super simple.

That would be a lot easier. It could even be, dare I say it, the M23 processor. I know it's big numbers and all of that, but if they're tied to the year or the model year, if you want, whatever. But I hate that they're all different. That's what kills me, is that they're all different. That's what kills me is that they're all on basically annual cycles. Maybe not the M, but the A series, the iOS and iPadOS numbers, and the iPhone numbers. They're all on annual cycles. And so they're incrementing together,

but they're at slightly different places in terms of their numbers i i really would like them to line it all up and and one way to do that would just be to tie it to the year you could also talk contextually too then right you wouldn't necessarily you could just say this year's iphone and you're just like we know what that means which we already say anyway and yeah i would love that i think that would be wonderful i don't think it'll do it, but... No, but it would be nice to dream. If you would like to send in your Ask Upgrade questions or your feedback or your follow-up,

go to UpgradeFeedback.com and you could send them in there. If before next week's episode, you would like to read Jason's work, go to SixColors.com. You can also hear his podcast at theincomparable.com and here on RelayFM. You can listen to my shows here on RelayFM as well and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can find us on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights. You can find me as at imike on mike.social. And you can also find this show as at Upgrade on RelayFM.social.

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Thank you to Ladder and ZocDoc for their support of this week's episode. And most of all thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with the WWDC draft. Until then, say goodbye Jason Snow. Goodbye

Mike Hurley.