Upgrade - 474: I'm Not a Doctor, I'm an Auditor

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

With a busy fall looming, Mac analyst Stephen Hackett joins the show to give Jason's computing setup a check-up. And some iPhone rumors suggest the Color Czar may be leaving a lump of Space Black coal in Myke's stocking this year.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 474 for august 28th 2023 my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike hur. And we have a special guest today, Stephen Hackett. Hi, Stephen Hackett. Hello, boys. That explains the energy. This episode is brought to you by FitBod and Ladder. We'll talk about those a little later on in the show. I have a Snell and Hackett talk question to begin this week's episode. And it came from me because I didn't ask anyone to give a specific question for the two of you.

And so my question is to both of you what is your favorite planet that isn't earth and why snell and hackett sounds like a like a company that would make like hammers yep i know what jason's is i think i don't know if you do all right well that might be more fun actually why don't we do it that way steven what's jason's favorite planet i'm gonna i'm gonna say i think venus is probably high on jason's list okay why because he wants to take a blimp there i would have sent a balloon to venus well that that that is true i am i'm gonna um i'm gonna say saturn though i'm going saturn instead that's good. Is your favorite, Jason? Yeah, that's my favorite. Why? What I think Steven's favorite is is Mars.

Okay. I think Mars is in my top two or three. Yeah. Oh, okay. For sure. Okay. Well, that was fun. Good work.

Great work, everybody. Was it? It was fine. What was your favorite planet, Steven? Steven, did you say what your favorite planet is? What is my favorite planet? You know, Saturn came to mind. I think it's beautiful and obviously unlike anything we have in our solar system.

And it's got some good moons. Good moons. And a lot of moons that just keep popping up out there. When choosing a favorite planet, choose also based on the neighborhood, right? It's location, location, location when it comes to planets. Absolutely. If you would like to send in a regular Snell Talk question for a future episode, go to

upgradefeedback.com and you can do that. Now Stephen's here for a very special reason today, which we're going to get to in a little bit, but there's a maybe even more special reason why it's good to have Stephen on this week's episode. It's because we're starting

the St. Jude campaign, RelayFM for St. Jude, because September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Once again, for the fifth year in a row, the RelayFM community is coming together to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. St. Jude won't stop their life-saving work until no child dies from cancer. And with your support, we'll be one step closer to that day, one cure closer, one child closer. Now, let me tell you a little bit about what St. Jude is all about. Around the world, an estimated 400,000 children are diagnosed with cancer each and every year. And even more tragically, in many low and middle to income countries, four out of five children

will not survive, largely due to the lack of access to quality care. And St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and all of us at RelayFM want to change that. Curing childhood cancer is a tremendous undertaking, and St. Jude needs our support. The generosity of donors around the world, including you, support cutting-edge research, saves lives, and ensures families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital won't stop until no child dies from cancer no matter where they live, but they can't do that without your help. Stephen, can you talk a little bit about why St. Jude is important to you?

Yeah, absolutely. In 2009, my wife and I's oldest son was diagnosed with brain cancer. He was just six months old. He went to a well-baby checkup and they had some concerns. And within 72 hours, we were having surgery and being introduced into the world of St. Jude. And my wife tells this story, so I'll give her credit for it. But when we were, we were at our local children's hospital and we were going to be admitted to St. Jude and we were like running around trying to figure out, you know, what to do and what they needed. And we got a call from St. Jude and they said like, don't worry about us. Like we have all the information we need about you. You know, we're talking with your healthcare team now. We're going to get you moved over to St. Jude. And from that very first phone call until today, all these years later, they do everything

in their power to take care of these families. Of course, they are doing it with the best treatment and the best research on the planet. But because of fundraisers like the amazing RelayFM community, and really the broader Apple community now at this point, being involved in this fundraiser each year, it means that food and housing and all those things were also taken care of for us. Now, we're a local Memphis family. St. Jude has been in my backyard my whole life. I honestly didn't know how special it was until we needed it.

And that's one reason we do this campaign, is so other people can know how special it is and get on board with this life-saving mission, because it's work that is so important. I mean, those numbers you rattled off, Mike, like the thought that came through my mind is like, those numbers are unacceptable to me. It's unacceptable that so many children

not only receive a cancer diagnosis, but so many kids don't survive it. We're really fortunate through the work of St. Jude that our son is still with us. And I am thankful for that every single day, but that should be true for every kid and every family. And that's only possible by furthering their work. So over the course of our campaigns, we've raised $2.2 million for St. Jude Children's

Research Hospital. And we want your help again this year because we want to surpass $2.5 million and we want you to help us get there. We can do this together. We're so incredibly grateful for the generosity of everyone in the community over the last five years. And we want to ask for your support again.

And we're going to give some thanks to you if you do. So if you donate an individual gift of $60 or more, you'll receive a digital bundle of RelayFM wallpapers and screensavers. Last year, our screensaver sent shockwaves through the community. It was really amazing. Made by the wonderful James Thompson. James has done it again. He's back at it again.

He's back at it like a bad habit, and he's made a new one. So don't miss out. If you donate an individual gift of $100 or more, you'll also receive a 2023 sticker pack featuring all new designs which are in the Mike vs. Stephen design palette which we'll talk about a little bit later I think as to why that is the thing this year

when you donate when you make your donation we have a new thing this year to help with employee matching so if you click the blue button this is search employer when you are on the donation summary page, you can check to see if your employer

offers a matching gift program. If they do, you'll get an email after you make a donation with details on how to have their match credited to our campaign total. If you work for a big company or a medium company or any company at all, please check this out when you donate

because you could double your donation. If you want to get more hands-on, you can start your own fundraising campaign to help us reach our goals while earning exclusive merchandise. So you can sign up over at stjude.org. There's a bunch of information there too, and you can create your own fundraiser. You can share this with your friends, your family, people in your community. Maybe you're a content creator of your own. Fundraisers who raise at least $1 will receive a 2023 face-off edition of the RelayFM for St. Jude challenge coin.

Fundraisers who raise $250 or more will receive this year's incredible desk mat design. And new for this year, the top 50 fundraisers at the end of the campaign will receive a limited edition RelayFM for St. Jude tote bag, which is super fancy and an all-weather material with a laptop sleeve. May have a surprise or two inside. will receive a limited edition Relay FM for St. Jude tote bag, which is super fancy,

and an all-weather material with a laptop sleeve. May have a surprise or two inside. Please go right now to stjude.org slash relay to donate and to find out more about fundraising. That is stjude.org slash relay to learn more and donate today. St. Jude won't stop until no child dies from cancer. With your support, we'll be one step closer to that day. One cure closer, one child closer. This month and every month, let's cure childhood cancer together.

Closer. Closer. Together. Podcastathon's coming back too. Stephen, when's the podcastathon? Podcastathon is Friday, September 22nd. Bam, bam, bam. Sorryember 22nd that was exciting we had to do some air horns there that's good it's going to be 12 noon eastern and run all the way through midnight 12 hours and we have a couple of very special guest hosts

who'll be joining us yep one of them is on this show. Yes, it's true. I'm coming to Memphis, boys. You can't keep me away. Because this year we need adjudicators because the theme of the podcast-a-thon this year is Mike versus Steven. Throughout the month, there's going to be points.

There's going to be points flying all over the place to crown one true winning co-founder at the end of the campaign there's going to be games and shenanigans the whole way through jason i haven't spoken to you about this yet but i'm wondering if the draft this year could fill into the point scoring you may be able to to fight on behalf of steven so the points from the draft might become points for the campaign this year. Jason could be my champion, you know? He could be. He could be your tribute. Jason could be your tribute. So there's going to be loads of

games throughout the month. We'll be talking more about that. But if you see the artwork and you're like, why are Stephen and Mike fighting? Well, it's because this year, Stephen and Mike are fighting. That's it. Why do daddies fight? For charity. For the children. For the children. For the kids, yep. StJuke. Why do daddies fight? For charity. For the children.

For the children. For the kids, yep. StJuke.org slash Relay to donate now, find out more. We're going to be talking about this throughout the month.

Thank you so much if you take part. Thank you. So there's another reason why Stephen's here today. A couple of weeks ago on Connected, I asked Stephen

to audit my Macintosh, both hardware, software, and the way that i use it jason you wanted to be audited too correct yeah i did i thought that was a really good idea and we were talking about there were some scheduling issues and it was possible that you weren't going to be on this episode and i thought well we could get steven on and then i thought oh you know steven could do that thing where he was he puts on his, you know, we, Mike, we know Steven as the genial connected co-host

or maybe a friendly co-host of many departed podcasts here at Real AFM, but he has another hat that he wears and it's the Mac Power Users hat. Yes. And I could hear the shifting of gears on that connected episode where Steven, you know, took off the Japes hat and put on the Sirius Mac power users hat and analyzed your Mac usage. And I said, you know what? I kind of want to see that Stephen.

And so the idea that on August 28th, we could have Stephen on, I thought that would be a good use of the brainpower of Stephen Hackett on Upgrade. So audit me, man. Let's do it. Audit me. Audit him, daddy. I didn't say that. I very specifically steered away from that, Mike. I like the kids.

It's all for the kids, I guess. All for the kids. So in the show notes, there's a picture of your setup. There's a picture of your dock and your menu bar. We will get to all of that. Yeah. So, Jason, I know listeners of Upgrade will be familiar with your setup, but I believe you're using a Mac Studio mounted under the desk.

Under the desk. That's right. The right place for a Mac Studio. Especially the M1 because it means you can't hear the fans. That's right. The right place for a Mac Studio. Especially the M1, because it means you can't hear the fans. Yeah. I still want to know what happened with that computer. Like, why is it so loud? You got a studio display floating on an arm.

I know you got a MacBook Air floating around there. Tell me a little bit about why the mac studio and what and particularly like why you're such a fan of the floating display lifestyle because your iMac hung in the air too didn't it yes let's say on the same arm um the floating display i i was just get frustrated by the uh by that foot on the desk i feel like i you can't put stuff behind it because the computer's in the way. And I like the idea that, I don't know, I bought the whole desktop, so I want to use it. I paid for this whole desk. Why would I only use some of it? And so I just like having it suspended. I can push it out of the way. If I'm doing video i can push it back further i can make it go up higher i can actually uh if i'm cleaning the desk or i'm doing something that

doesn't involve the computer i can push it all the way back and kind of like off to the edge of the desk uh adjust it up and down um and and put stuff underneath it i mean honestly that's like the number one reason is that i can i can have access to whatever is sitting underneath it. And I mean, I would do fine, I guess with a, okay. The other thing is the iMac wasn't adjustable in terms of height. Right. And I've got a, I've got a sit stand adjustable desk and I did, I did not want to be one of those people. Sorry to those people who have like their iMac sitting on a dictionary or something. Oh yeah. I was that person for years. Yeah.

Right. I just, I don't like it. So I wanted to be adjustable. It is true. I could have probably bought this studio display with the adjustable stand and done that. But the fact is I already have a VESA arm and it was several hundred dollars

cheaper to just buy the VESA mount version of the, of the display and put it on that same arm. So that's what I did. So, you know, it's one of those things that I think it came out of partially just wanting access to my whole desk and having the flexibility to move it around. And then partially that back in the day

when I was just using an iMac, the iMacs were only tilt adjustable and not height adjustable, which is crappy, especially if you're in a sit-stand desk, because the angles are different when you're standing than when you're sitting. Sure. I feel like you're setting me up for something here, but I know you're not. You're here to help, right? You do no harm, right? Well, I'm not a doctor. I'm an auditor. Different vows we take. All right. Different vows.

Audit no harm, right? One thing you said, you like having the space of your desk. You bought all the desk. You want to be able to use all the desk. That's a very boomery

thing to say. But you got a lot of stuff on your desk. Not a boomer. I'm sorry. No one remembers Gen X anyways. It's fine. You got a lot of stuff on your desk not a boomer but yeah no i'm sorry no one remembers gen x anyways it's fine you got a lot of boxes true of stuff here you know there's no boxes what are the boxes a little you got a baseball i got little wood trays with stuff in them it's true i got a

brain ball i got a baseball i got some field notes i got a pen holder with pens in it i got a weird android e-reader that i'm supposed to write an article about at some point, but I need to use it more. It's dead in this photo I'm looking at, by the way. It is dead. It is. It needs to be charged. It absolutely needs to be charged.

Yeah, there's stuff on that. See? See, that's me using the desk. Using all the desk. Because, Stephen, I don't see the point in having the desk be completely empty and never have stuff on it. Then I might as well just have a foot of an iMac or a monitor on my desk because there's nothing on it. But I do put stuff on my desk.

I don't leave big stuff piled all over my desk. I try not to do that. But there's stuff around. I think you have more input devices than any one person I've ever seen. Other than David Sparks, who has 15 Stream Decks. It's not even close to David Sparks. Yeah, I've got, so you can see I've got my microphone. That's an input device, sort of, right?

I've got a keyboard. It's the keyboard Mike made for me, the Keychron Q1. I've got the Magic Trackpad. I've got one of the regular-sized Stream Decks, and then I've got the disassembled Touch ID button from an Apple keyboard in a 3D printed case. That's my standalone Touch ID that I made by destroying a keyboard. I broke my one of those.

I don't know how I did it, but I broke it. So I can't seem to get it to work again. So I might have to look at doing that again sometime in the future, but it's all broken. It's tragic. And you have a wrist rest there, Jason? I do.

Okay. A little gushy, like, what is it? It's like a gel wrist pad thing. And the whole thing is on a keyboard tray. It is. I'm a big keyboard tray guy. And you'd say to yourself, well, why do you even need a keyboard tray? Because you got the VESA arm.

And it's true. I can do it that way. I think it's, I find it more comfortable. And also, again, keep stuff off the desk, right? I can slide this right under and it's like there's no keyboard there at all.

There's something funny to me that you've put the monitor on an arm, but then pulled the monitor away further forward because the keyboard's on a keyboard tray. So you're further away put the monitor on an arm but then pulled the monitor way further forward because the keyboard's on a keyboard tray so you're further away from the monitor so the monitor like hovers over way more of the desk than it would otherwise if you didn't have it on a keyboard tray.

It's true. Oh, it is really close, isn't it? I've tried it the other way and I don't think the ergonomics of it work as well for me because I have absolutely tried that where I've pulled everything off the keyboard and pulled the, pulled the keyboard tray out entirely, put the stuff on the desk.

Um, when I do my studio B, uh, in, in, uh, which I don't know how much Steven knows about that, but you know,

we're doing some work in the winter, especially in the house. Um, the idea there, I, I, that desk doesn't have a keyboard tray, so I may actually have a completely different setup there. But when I tried it here, I, I found, I went back to the keyboard tray cause I found it a little more ergonomically pleasant, but, um, I'm not sure why I don't even remember. Maybe I'll try it again sometime. But, uh, the advantage of the keyboard tray is that, yeah, there's times like, you know,

sometimes I eat lunch at my desk while I'm watching a video or something it's kind of nice to slide the keyboard in a place where the crumbs won't get on it so i don't know crumb tray how many sandwiches are you eating at your desk uh i don't know one a day and now we're auditing your your lunch. You need a real lunch break, man. You gotta... Don't eat it. Sometimes. Sometimes I don't, and sometimes I do. Yeah, no. I do too.

The keyboard trade definitely is... I feel like it's a throwback to computer rooms and like computer hutches. They've been talking about this on the Vergecast. I've enjoyed it, right? You had a piece of furniture you bought and... To hide your computer. Yeah. Tower went one place. The CRT went another place. cast some but i've i've enjoyed it right you you had a piece of furniture you bought and to hide your computer yeah tower went one place the crt went other place if it was new enough you had a bunch of plastic trays that you could put optical discs in you know so you could have all those

those stored there and the keyboard tray just feels like a hangover from that era a little bit i mean honestly the the thing about the keyboard tray is it's adjustable, right? And so the reason, number one reason, all kidding aside, to quote Casey Liss, that the reason that it's there is because it's ergonomic and it's adjustable. So it can tilt forward and back and raise up and down. And that's the reason. Ultimately, the reason that I have it is that I can get it in a position where it is comfortable for me to use it. And the desk just stays flat, right? But this thing actually can have a negative tilt. So it can kind of tilt back a little bit so that my wrists aren't bent up as much, which is better ergonomically.

So some of it is just creating a surface that's not quite flat, not quite level, but in fact has a little bit of an incline to it. Some people I know take the keyboard tray and actually pop it right up. So it's all the way up at the top of the, like a desk height. I don't really understand that. It feels like you're wearing your pants all the way, like pulled way up. It's like, no, no, don't do that. It goes under so you can tuck it under. But regardless, that's part of it is just the ergonomics of it, having some more control over

how the keyboard and the pointing device are positioned so that my wrists and my arms don't hurt. The Mac Studio has a bunch of ports on it. Honestly, it's one of the best things about that machine. do you have any thunderbolt dock or like usb hub floating around somewhere that you're trying to hide from me so yes absolutely i have a uh i have a usb a hub underneath velcro underneath the computer for so so mac studio's got a lot of ports on the back but not enough so i have a ups uh ups uh actually does send signals to the mac uh so the mac can uh know how much battery is left in the ups and all of that um i got a battery right so that's got to go somewhere

um i've got i actually use my uh trackpad plugged in because then it never runs out of power i because my i have a wired keyboard wait so it doesn't really matter yes you got a bluetooth trackpad yes it's plugged in you can see it right there see no i see the cable the the and this is auditing apple that cable should be color matched but that's not your fault yeah there is a black one that i might have but it's this is a gray trackpad and then of course my touch id button uh i when i destroyed the keyboard the battery went with it so it needs to be connected all the time so at that point i've got a stream deck i've got all all these little peripherals here all these input devices they got to get plugged in somewhere and there's not enough ports on the back of the mac studio so i have the little usb a uh hub for some of these miscellaneous items i don't know if this has always been the

case but these days if you buy a space go track player track pad they do give you a black cable yeah and i do have i think i have a black lightning cable i i'm using you can see i have a black lightning cable it's plugged into the the black uh touch id thing so i'm color matched over there but the other the white one is not color that's good i apologize to everyone we'll get you a cable so usb a uh little little tiny usb a hub cheap like i think amazon usb a hub and basically i just forget that it's even there because it's really just there to supply you know it supplies data because the trackpad when it's plugged in, will go into a USB mode.

But really, it's not a lot of data, right? It's just a little cheap hub that saves me some ports so that I can fill the ports on the back of the Mac Studio with more important stuff like the... I think the stream deck connects directly, the microphone connects directly, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think having input devices like downstream of that makes sense I guess that that is one thing that if you weren't living this floating screen lifestyle you know you could potentially run some of that off the back of the studio display are those ports in use at all i see a camera up there but what's going on at the back of the

display um well i just i just touched it and it and it went out so that was great okay so we have no display everyone jason jason's flying blind bye everyone actually that's the only cable i think that's back there is that one well it was there not anymore was there down now you know it's it's interesting i use a studio display and i've never had it fall apart just by touching it probably because it sits and what what holds my step together is gravity it's gravity it's interesting well i i just uh you know apparently yanked on the uh entire display and it pulled right out so uh actually there is a webcam i have an opal um webcam And so it's plugged in there. But, yeah, I don't have – I would have to route – in order to keep my desktop clean, I would have to route all the cables all the way back to the back of the desk and then up the arm and all the way to the back of the display.

And so those are there for, like, right now, recording upgrade for our social media video purposes, right? That is via a lightning connector to my iPhone using Camo, and that is plugged in. So right now it's plugged in. So I'll use that for like task-driven stuff, but otherwise I don't have anything else. Actually, when I'm off the beta, I'll have somewhere tucked somewhere, I will have a backup drive i don't actually have that right now during the beta um but i have a little usb drive somewhere i knew he wasn't gonna come back to that i knew he wasn't gonna like that but i think it goes underneath i think i actually had that like hiding right nestled right up against the mac studio down below i used to have it it used to live when i had an iMac i had it my backup drive

lived in the little back of the VESA mount structure it just sort of like sat in there but now now it uh it sits right above the Mac studio so uh and the ports on the front of the Mac studio similarly they they aren't permanently attached to anything i like to keep that clean and then if i want to attach something to the front ports to do something, I'll do it, but I don't do it permanently. Okay. I mean, look at all this and I see the, you know, the setup of someone who is, is very clearly very in tune with what he wants in terms of accessories and, and I guess ergonomics as well, that seems to be pretty high on your priority list. And I can get behind that. You know, as we spend a lot of time at our computers

and as we, you know, I'll get a little bit older, it's important that we don't hurt ourselves. I was wondering if I was going to cut. It felt like he was angling around it, but then stopped and then came back to it again. I don't have like stuffed animals on, just a brain ball. Just a brain ball.

I like it the way I like it. And the MacBook Air is sitting there in this picture. Literally, I just took this picture because I realized I owed you a picture last night. So you are getting it in the raw. There's a can of Coke Zero on the desk too in this picture. I see that four inches from the edge of the desk

right above the keyboard that Mike built you with his own blood, sweat, and tears. Well, Jason sits so far away from the desk, he's going to put it on the edge. You know what I mean? That's true. He can't reach it. It's too far away.

I want to point out that in this photo on the left, there's a little white plastic box. You see that little white plastic box off to the left of the- Don't you dare. Oh, yeah. Don't do it. Yeah, what's it-

No, don't do it. It contains a noise that mike dislikes oh but i keep it at the ready just in case yeah i think you should give us a little taste uh let's see how i can do this in a way that might protect mike slightly yeah just there's just a little taste just the just the just the tease yeah can you talk about the the backup thing are you gonna talk about that now uh yeah i saw it in the menu bar that you had an exclamation point on your time machine icon uh is your data not important when you're running the beta? The story there is actually that's the local backup that failed because I copied these enormous files that I did the 360 video of. And then I also had an enormous project with a bunch of upgrade video in it.

And then I hadn't offloaded that to my external server. So it was trying to back up a local, this is one of these things about Time Machine that I get why it tries to do it, but I don't really love it, which is like, oh, you seem to have a package full of two terabytes of data. Let me back that up to myself. It's like, well, you can't, you don't have two terabytes free. You can't do that and so i actually just yesterday moved the giant uh final cut projects out it took a while because they're huge to my server so it should be able to do a local backup now going forward because a local backup is like if you're not it allows you to retrieve files from your local drive that are you know know, a few hours old instead, which is very clever,

but, um, that part is, has died. My backup to my server is fine. It is, it is, it is barely backup, but, um, but my, my local backup is okay. Okay. So, so you do, I'm confused. So you do or don't have like a time machine drive plugged into your computer right now? Right now I don't. I'm backing up to my server over the network using time machine. Usually I don't have a time machine backup locally.

I have a carbon copy cloner, bootable-ish, you know, for Apple Silicon versions of bootable version. That runs every day, but it's not running at the moment again because i'm on the beta and i'm actually holding i'm essentially holding my last clone before i went to the beta just in case something terrible happens but normally it will be running uh just during the day an incremental clone. So it happens really fast, right?

Because it's only doing the files that have changed since the last time. And Carbon Copy Cloner actually can use snapshots to do things like let you, it will use extra space on the backup drive to store more versions of your clone, which is the old way. It was always just the latest.

So if something bad happened and then it ran a clone, the bad thing got cloned. And now with the new file system stuff, it can actually have multiple snapshots up until the point where the drive can't fit them anymore. So if your latest clone is actually capturing the bad thing that happened, you can actually go back to a previous version of the clone that doesn't, and then pull the files off. So I use carbon copy cloner for a local, like literally local right next to the computer backup of the entire drive. Plus I am backing up to my server, which is in the back of the house in the bedroom.

So that's not as scary as it first looked. I was like, what, what are you doing? Sorry to disturb you about my backup strategy, but it's in okay shape right now. And then that server also backs itself up to Backblaze. So there's like many layers to this strategy.

Good. Yeah, I approve all that. That's basically mine. It's Time Machine. It's Carbon Copy Cloner to, again, a drive that sits on my desk and then Backblaze gets it off site yeah it was just having that two terabytes of like video files that blew up the backup strategy

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off your membership. Our thanks to Fitbod for their support of this show and RelayFM. So now let's move on to Jason's dock situation. You know, I gotta be honest. I wasn't even thinking about the hardware and I was worried much more about the software. Great. And this is scary. And I bring back nice Steven, but I guess not yet.

Okay. Right off the bat, I'm gonna give you points that your dock is on the right side of your display. Now, like on Connected, it's always about how to stick together. You got to put it over there like an old person, right, Stephen? You and me? Yeah, that's right.

I also have mine there, too. Mine's on the right. I'm an old man, too. It's just three old men talking here. But like Connected, you don't have to submit feedback to Upgrade about why that's incorrect or correct. Because it's correct and everybody knows it. You don't have to tell them otherwise. That's right.

It's your choice to be right or wrong. You get to choose. Free will. I'm just going to rattle off the things you have in your doc. Because I find it fascinating. Rattle away. Really how small, like how minimal it is. Fascinating.

Rattled away. Really how small, how small, like how minimal it is. Hmm. So you got Finder, Messages, Safari,

BBEdit, MimeStream, Fantastical, Music, Slack, and Discord. Yep. That's all the apps.

That's it. And then, and you got a couple folders. Dropbox and Downloads and the Trash. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Very minimal.

I really, you're not using it as a launcher is kind of what i gather well i'm using so i use launch bar so my launcher is launch bar i do use the dock i more for occasionally dragging and dropping like a document onto the app but a lot of it is just seeing the running processes and being able to bring them to the front. I do that a lot using the dock. So usually it's not this spare, right? Because I've got other apps running.

At the moment, I also have Zoom and Audio Hijack running. And I have Photoshop because I just redacted that picture that you were looking at and put it in the chat room. And I have other stuff in there. And it's the running apps. But I don't have a huge collection of permanent uh apps in the dock because yeah if i want to run audio hijack i can either do that from launch bar or i can um press a button on the stream deck that does automation that

automatically launches it so i i don't um i don't use the dock uh very much to launch apps these are the apps that basically have to be open and if they're not open i can you know i that's why i put discord in there didn't used to be but i have a bunch of member discords that i'm in now so discord has joined the party of things that basically need to be open all the time and if they're not open i want quick access to get them open okay what is a dock for right i mean that that is a question Like, do I need anything in the dock? Do I even need to see the dock? I like knowing what's running and it lets me, you know, quit things and open things and, you know, force quit something that's bad. And I mean, there's stuff you can do from the dock, but like the dock, I have ended up only really using it to bring apps to the front, like app windows to the front.

That's mostly what it is. using it to bring apps to the front like app windows to the front that's mostly what it is do you think uh to put you on the you know the put on my psychologist hat for a second taking the audit mac you said you weren't a doctor well uh friendly therapist do you think that your need for a small doc is based on your years of using an 11-inch MacBook Air? It's possible. It's possible that that's part of it. Boy, I'm really on the couch now, aren't I? It goes back, doctor, it goes back to my childhood when the Apple II, it was very small and had no dock at all. there was a vacation we went on to a lake and the

dock was small and i remember good times with my family good times with the small duck so here uh i think i think mostly i don't like having the dock have so many things in it that they all like get it fills up the whole side and they all start to get small and all of that i don't like that so much um and like i said with having used launch bar for a long time now, like I don't know what, 15, 20 years? A long time I've been using LaunchBar. I don't need every app that I might possibly open sitting in my dock. I just don't. I mean, there's an argument to be made that I don't need any apps permanently placed in the dock.

Because if I need to launch an app, I'll just use LaunchBar. It becomes more of just a list of currently running apps. Okay. What is your philosophy on badging on the dock? I noticed that none of these apps, like Messages and MimeStream in particular, might have a badge, but they don't. Do you have them off? Are you just really on top of your inboxes? Off. No badges. We don't need no your inboxes? Off. No badges. We don't need no stinking badges. Sorry.

No badges. That's an old reference. Yeah, I don't like badges. I don't like badges anywhere. I don't have them on my iPhone or my iPad. I don't have them in my Mac. I'm not interested in badges. They give me anxiety. I've been getting rid of them.

I don't like it. Most of my discords and slacks are muted. No little dots, except for the ones where I have most of my discords and slacks are muted, like no, no little dots, except for the ones where I have to patrol them. Um, I don't like the little dots. They make me uncomfortable and I don't want to see them in my dock where the app isn't even visible and it's yelling at me. So actually I will say messages has a badge and that's mostly because I have some group chats that are muted that don't give me alerts every time. Because basically, you're in a group chat and then suddenly somebody sends something and there's 18 messages. If you have those set to push out notifications into Notification

Center or whatever, it is like death. So those are muted. Got to mute the group. But the badge, the badge is there. So I can look and invariably somebody in Lauren's family will Got to meet the group. what just happened? And I'll go over there and I'll check. So messages is an exception to that. But that's mostly because I want to know if somebody's trying to reach me via iMessage, and I'm not necessarily paying attention to little floating notifications that are coming in when I'm working on my Mac. So that's a badge I use. I don't think any of the others have a badge. Okay. And not to reopen an old conversation on Upgrade, but you also don't think any of the others have a badge. Okay. And not to reopen an old conversation on Upgrade, but you also don't have any sort of task manager in your dock.

I don't. Yeah, because you're a weirdo that puts everything on their calendar. Please don't tell me you've gone back to that. No. Okay, good. No. Okay. However, I did see, Stephen, you posted on five, 12 pixels.

Oh, get ready. When the tables are turned, I see that you've got a reminders item, uh, here. Cause you're like, uh, I want to change something about reminders. You live your life apparently with things like I have a to do to go to whole foods at four o'clock today. Yeah. Yeah. There's a very specific... So I got an email about this.

There's a very specific reason that Whole Foods is 4 p.m. on Friday. It's after school pickup, and our local Whole Foods, Friday is like the good day in the butcher shop. So if you want the freshest stuff, it's on Fridays. I'm with Jason on this.

That is a calendar item item why is it in your reminders what is wrong with you why would you put this as a reminder why would you do that that is a calendar item within a lot i'm the guest here doesn't matter you're not getting no guest of mine what are you doing here what is this that's madness okay steven i use uh i have a lot of items in my calendar i do um it it including like my mac world column i try to set aside time to write it i make that a calendar item because i'm not because it's a to-do that I need to check off, but because I want to have a place that says set aside time here to do this particular work. And I will do that for individual events, but also sometimes as a recurring thing. Like I like to write my Macworld column on Tuesday afternoon at 2, and I'm going to block off that time.

I'm not going to schedule something else. off that time. I'm not going to schedule something else. I also use reminders, but I'm mostly using reminders as a place to write down all of my ideas for, it's mostly stories I need to write. Occasionally there will be an actual proper to-do in there that I want to catch my attention because I know that if I put it in a separate list, I won't see it. So I keep it in the list. But generally, it's for story ideas. It's for pieces to write for the website. But I do not have a task manager.

And I have never reliably used a task manager to do anything. Yeah, let me have it. What a statement. I have never relied on a task manager to do anything what am i doing here who are these people right i'm like the anti uh every other podcaster i guess i don't know i don't know what to tell you what happened to your todoist usage oh i can't remember the last time I opened Todoist. Oh, Jason.

Yeah, that's gone. This isn't what I wanted. All right. Okay. That's reminders. This is the Mike Borda on his call. And a calendar. Okay.

Oh, okay. Okay, fine. We've got to move on. I love your choices of third-party apps here. BBEdit all time. MimeStream. Newcomer to the the mac but absolutely fantastic please give it to me on ios yes please and uh fantastical another another all-time great yeah

it's better right like i'm not going to reopen the wound but like i'm happy to pay for software that is good and uh fantastical mime stream i are superior to um the defaults and so i'm happy to pay for them because they work for me and i'm a gmail email user so mime stream is perfect for me it's made for me literally so uh i am going to take advantage of it and yes i would also love it on ios the gmail app on ios is like boys i don't know the last time you used it. It's so bad. You know when I use it? I use it when I'm on my iPhone and I need to log into my Google account and it says, I know you made a two-factor

and I know you stored it in one password. But you know, what I really want to do is open Gmail and tell you a number or something. I'm like, no, I don't want to open your Gmail. Oh, there we go. Here's my most frustrating thing about that, right? I have three Gmail accounts signed into the Gmail app, right? That I use infrequently, but they're there. And I sign them all in so I can have them all in one inbox, right? One inbox, three email accounts. Great.

I get that notification when I'm signing in to YouTube or whatever. And it's like, oh, we've got to confirm you in the app. When I do that, it unchecked the email accounts. Randomly, not even consistently. Randomly, it will uncheck them and just check one of them. So then I every single time I do this, I have to go in to the accounts page and make sure the ones that I want that are checked. Sometimes they say fine. Sometimes one of them gets unchecked sometimes two of them you'll find out

later on right like it's just like it is what it is and i have to check it every single time uh maddening really frustrating yeah let's switch gears and talk about the menu bar this is i think the the place where people get into the most trouble. People can see the image. Can you walk us through what these icons are and if any are hidden by default with something like Bartender? Sure. This is actually, yeah, this is with it expanded. So I use Bartender and I love it. What you've got here is left to right stream deck which uh i like i like stream deck

it puts a thing in the it's like a it's running in the background so that if you want to configure it you kind of got to go to the menu bar item i don't love that but it works fine and i hide it so i don't have to see it then it is oh what's this is the downlink. It's Anthony Colangelo's app that uses satellite images for your backdrop, for your wallpaper. And so I've got a, my backdrop is Pacific Coast and Pacific Ocean satellite view. And it gets updated every 10 minutes or something. It's basically like an almost live view of of the planet i like it um next is home control which i don't usually use the ui for but it has a bunch of automations so it allows me to do things like press a button on my stream deck

and turn on a light or lower my blinds or whatever. And so it lives in the menu bar. Nice little utility. Next one is a UPS battery, actually. Yep. I got that going. Literally UPS battery. It's fine. Time machine with an exclamation point.

Yeah. Freaking out in there. We talked about that already. Currently, it is backing up so uh i'm looking at it now and everything's okay steven uh spotlight i don't use spotlight uh it's there it's present you can uh you can remove it now at some point they added the ability to totally ditch that icon well i should ditch it then because i don't i don't want it yeah that's my professional advice uh wi-fi is hidden i guess i'm on wi-fi here i don't actually need to be because uh i'm on ethernet so why

wi-fi i think some handoff stuff requires you to be on have wi-fi at least on have it on but not connected to the local network which is my preference shortcuts i don't actually usually use those but it does show you when a shortcut is running in the background, which is valuable. It sort of fills in the little shortcut rectangles when it's running. And if I'm running a long shortcut, it may, it gives me a little reassurance that that shortcut is still going, but I don't usually actually run shortcuts from the menu bar and Dropbox. And that's the end of the hidden items for, uh, for my menu bar. Those are hidden. They're all stashed away. Yeah. Bartender hides

those. And I don't, I don't see those. So I go like, if I want to see, has somebody uploaded a file to Dropbox or something, I will mouse up to the menu bar, Dropbox icon will appear and I'll click on it and look, but I, i don't need to those those are not items that i need to see at a glance i i just don't and i believe the shortcuts icon appears in the visible section when it's active i think there's some of those menu bar items that do weird stuff where they kind of hop around depending on status so you can hide them but then they pop back in like on laptops you can hide the the battery icon and have it just pop in when you're not plugged in and and do it that way if

you want to so that's that part of the menu bar it's the not there i don't have to see that stuff that next it's the it's the widget that I wrote in Swift Bar. That's my local temperature. In this case, it caught me where the air quality was not good. It's got the extra AQI number next to it with the little symbol. That's because we've had some wildfire smoke the last couple of days. It's not there in my current menu bar. The air is clear right now.

It only appears when the AQI is bad to tell you, you know, in addition to it being 75 degrees, there's some air quality issues. Which is the only time you really care about it, right? If the air quality is good, don't ever think about it. Yeah, right. So I don't have it always showing. I only have it showing when it's bad. What's the temperature difference? You have like the up arrow and the four degrees. Is that change over yesterday or that's change over yesterday? Cause I find that

valuable sometimes, especially in the morning. Uh, cause we, we have weird Bay area weather here, but I find that valuable if it's in the morning and it's like 10 degrees warmer than it was yesterday. I'm like, okay, it's going to be a hot day today. It may not be hot yet, but I know that it's so much warmer than it was at this time yesterday that it's going to be a hot day today. It may not be hot yet, but I know that it's so much warmer than it was at this time yesterday that it's going to be a hot day. Or similarly, that it's not going to be as hot as yesterday because it's five degrees down or 10 degrees down or whatever. Occasionally, we have those days that are the super hot days here and then the fog rolls in, and that leads to some hilarity where the other week I had a day like that and it was like down 21 degrees from this time yesterday. I'm like, yeah it's it's summer is over right so uh that's what that is is not a little little widget

not right it'll be back we've got like a couple maybe a week more who knows mike no one cares about the weather yeah no one cares about the weather besides which i have i i probably have like six or eight weeks of of actual proper summer coming because that's how the Bay Area does it. Next to that, there's not a lot. It's Fantastical and Control Center and The Clock. So pretty minimal. It is. Although, yeah, I mean, right now I've got more stuff up there because I'm recording

an audio hijack and I'm on Zoom and those insert themselves in the menu bar when they're running and I'm recording on Camo. So that's inserted itself. So there's a little more up there now. normally when i'm just uh working at my desk uh this is what you got okay all in all i i like where you're at i i know that weather is important to you and the thing in the bay area has micro climates or whatever so i'm and i'm a weather nerd so i'm hip to that taking up a bunch of space. I do wonder, you know, I think you could probably get rid of Spotlight and Wi-Fi. Because, like, Wi-Fi is in Control Center.

I gave Mike that same advice. Yeah, I don't know why the Wi-Fi is there, honestly. I'm a little baffled by that, too, because I don't want to see it. You know, I wonder, I don't remember, maybe someone knows, but maybe when they added control center, like Wi-Fi was still graduated outside of it. And so it's just like hung out there forever. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I don't look at it. Yeah. The only one I would maybe suggest graduating out of bartender is the time machine icon. And not just because, you know, you had that recent issue, but I at least want to know what the state of that disk is doing.

Am I backed up? Has it been quietly failing in the background? I guess maybe that's a little less important because you're using a desktop, and now I'm a laptop as a desktop person, so it feels a little more important to me. But I'm just thinking you've got 27 inches of space there. Maybe Time Machine deserves to be out of the bartender prison all right i i'm gonna break it out okay just for you good i appreciate that um

i i'm very surprised when i saw these images for the first time last night and then talking to them today uh i'm very like happily surprised how minimal your setup is i've got a bajillion more menu bar items than you do i also i don't expect like jason would have a bunch but it's just way smaller than anybody else that i've seen including me so it was just a surprise to see so few dock items and so few menu bar items yeah 100 but i don't know i think i'm trying to keep it simple i'm just trying to keep it simple jason i don't want noise in my face if I can avoid it. Yeah. You're living that minimal Mac lifestyle like so many people want.

I'm just really zen. You know what's really minimal is my task manager. It's super minimal. Well, how would you know? There could be loads of stuff in there. You just don't open it. It's full of stuff. It's the opposite of minimal.

Todoist is very angry with you. Yeah, if you open it, it starts screaming. You just don't open it. It's full of stuff. It's the opposite. Todoist is very angry with you. Yeah, if you open it, it starts screaming. But you don't know because you keep it closed. Yeah. And I know it's out of the scope for today. But generally, just before I go, I would like to know sort of your relationship between the Mac Studio and the MacBook Air.

Do you try to keep them where the dock is the same on both of them and the menu bar is the same on both of them and the menu bar is the same on both of them? Do you let them lead their separate lives? How do you approach that? I wouldn't say I... Let's say I don't open up

the MacBook Air and like try to compare it and make it match, but they are both having the same philosophy applied to them, so they generally do more or less match.

Okay. You know, wifi is certainly visible on the MacBook air, right. And battery, like things that matter on a laptop. And I'm using it in a little bit of a different context, but mostly it's the same stuff.

And that's just, well, you know, this living the two computer life. When you do that, there's just nothing more frustrating than going on the second computer and realizing that all this stuff that you rely on on the first computer isn't there isn't working doesn't do that so i try to make it so that it um is more or less in sync um and if i'm if i end up having studio b and i have literally two different places that

i'm working back and forth it's going to become even more important that that computer, which will presumably be the MacBook Air back there, will be more or less doing the same thing as the Mac Studio is so that I don't, you know, I don't want it to be jarring, right? I want to be able to reach for a tool and know that it's there, whether or not it's on computer, you desktop computer or laptop computer if i can avoid it yeah that's really been one thing i've enjoyed about going to just a macbook pro because i've been a two mac person my entire independent career and even before that and it is nice like okay i made this change and i just know it's always at my computer because i only have one like there is something uh nice about that.

I do want to talk as you move closer to the Studio B lifestyle, how that works out for you. So maybe we can follow up at a later time. Right. If upgradians are hearing this and they're like, what is all this talk about Studio B? You should get Upgrade Plus.

Go to getupgradeplus.com and you'll get the info over the last two episodes about what Studio B is short version is i'm i'm thinking of setting up a second desk in the house which has heating uh for when i'm very cold in the winter because there's no heat or insulation out here so that's the short version so i'm thinking about doing that and i've been detailing it in upgrade plus yes ste Hackett, thank you very much for joining us. Where can people find you on the internet? The most important URL for me right now is stjew.org slash Relay.

I love that. That's where you can find a picture of Stephen, like he is there. Yeah, you've had a picture of me there. I write over at 5FillPixels and I host a couple of shows here on Relay each week. Probably the most pertinent one to that, to discussion we've had today, would be

Mac Power users. Although this did originate on Connected, so, you know, go wild. Yeah, I'm a whole person, Mike. You can't slice me up into my individual podcasts. I can sure as hell try. No one can stop me. Thank you for joining us, Stephen Hackett.

Bye, y'all this episode is brought to you by Ladder look if you like anything like me you're going to have a tendency to put some things off until the very last minute whether that's going to the DMV arranging a dental checkup I have an email from my dentist that I haven't responded to in a few weeks

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slash upgrade. One last time, ladderlife.com slash upgrade. A thanks to Ladder for the support of this show and RelayFM. Good to have Stephen here. It was great. Before we move on to a very late follow-up. Okay. I wanted to just have little notes for us. Now that Stephen has, Mac Power user Stephen has come and gone.

Yep. Going to have to have a talk about task managers again at some point. little notes for us now that steven has mac power user steven has come and gone yep um gonna have to have a talk about task managers again at some point that's gonna need to happen i think so because you dropped that one on me today you asked me about todoist and i literally was like did i use todoist at some point it's been so long that if you had made me well and i have a theory here about part partly about that is that there's Todoist integration in Fantastical, so it just allowed me to have things in my calendar again. Why did you do that? That doesn't mean you should have done that. Why did you do that?

Okay. So we'll talk about that some more. And I also want to talk to you about time tracking at some point similarly because I'm intrigued by the growth and change in time tracking tools. And that might be a thing that I might want to try. But you know my philosophy on this. A lot of the reason that I don't do this sort of thing, it's that minimal thing again. I guess I'm a minimalist and don't realize it.

No, you're not. I've seen your desk. No, I'm a minimalist. Okay. Well, I mean, but under is very little. Also, this is when I was coming home from a trip and all that. Anyway, because my idea is I don't want to spend time using a to-do manager or a, or a time tracker because it's just time I'm spending.

It's meta time, right? Instead of it being doing the job, it's, it's time spent tracking the things that are about the job, which is not doing the job. And I'm very focused on just doing, I'd rather just do the work instead of do the thing, do work on tracking the work. I'd rather just do the work. And I know that there's, you know, there's benefits, but I sometimes fail to see them. So I think that would be a good subject for now that there's not anything on our agenda for the next, oh, wait a second, the iPhone's coming out. Do you reckon we're going to find out the event date this week?

Yeah. Yeah, probably, right? Because if they're going to bring Meteor in, two weeks of notice. I suspect our next episode will be the draft. Yeah, I think you're right. If it's not, then maybe we'll talk about it next time. Otherwise, we'll just have to file that away for later in the fall when things are quiet to do a little sort of Mike and Jason Tech, uh, organization audit, something like that.

I, I just, I think that's interesting by the way, he's been around, uh, David Sparks way too long. Cause he didn't even comment on the stream deck. He's like,

he's got bigger fish to fry with stream decks. He just knows it's two XL stream decks, two XL stream decks. I know he's like going to be able to play the piano on the Streamdeck pretty soon. Jason, I actually think he has a third one. I think he has the one with the knobs too. Yeah, I think you're right. I think he does have the one with the knobs. He also has the pedal, I think.

I did. I haven't told you this. So I was in Arizona last week. I bought that second Streamdeck. I brought it with me. Oh, good. And it was pretty awesome. I was able to do downstream last week, and it was really nice to just have the same little buttons that i normally do when i'm recording and press the same keys and have it all just be the same it was really nice to be able to do that that is really nice so that was a that was a good thing anyway there's there's some post post steven notes

yeah i like that it's like a little post show yeah for everyone for steven for steven but he's not here so that's good don't let him don't let him hear it should we do some follow-up i have one piece of follow-up for you and i have a rumor i have a rumor roundup too we're not we're not going to show all of the the the convention around here uh the information is reporting that amazon and disney are in early talks about a partnership over espn this is a quote from the information the tech giant could offer the service through one of its streaming offerings helping to Disney are in early talks about a partnership over ESPN. This is a quote from the information. The tech giant could offer the service through one of its streaming offerings, helping to expand its distribution while possibly also taking a minority stake in ESPN.

I don't understand this. It's a good partner. I think we said all along, Disney is looking for deep-pocketed partners, whether they're tech giants or leagues. Amazon, they have an NFL deal, right? Like, they're interested in sports stuff. What I don't understand is the nature of this deal. And I only have read the summaries because I do not pay for the information. But it is, like, Disney doesn't need help streaming so is it that that they would maybe amazon would pay to incorporate espn into uh you know is it just a channel a prime channel yeah that should just

be something espn wants to do like it doesn't make any sense another thought i had is what if there's a prime video tier for sports that includes a bunch of stuff and that they would integrate that in. So it's basically like giving them some more reach, giving ESPN some more reach, having Amazon commit to something like that. Or do they roll it into Prime and it's also available separately, but they will write a check to Disney for it being in Prime just in Prime uh is that right you know because then Disney's going to lose if you do that you're losing charging them presumably more making more money on the outside versus having it be inside on Prime but again the key thing with tech tech companies working with entertainment companies is that the tech companies priorities are different and their value how they value things is different so it's possible that

it's more valuable to amazon uh to pay espn and disney than it is for espn and disney out there on its own and that this is a way that that helps make that transition work i don't i don't know it's it's they Look, Disney wants cash, right? They need cash. They need cash because they want to show investors that they're doing better. And they also are going to have a big bill if they buy out NBC Universal's portion of Hulu. So there's reasons for Bob Iger to be searching for those strategic partners. And maybe that's what this is, but I would be interested to see what the details of a, of a deal like this would be and why they would benefit Disney. Um, I don't think they're reporting that like, they're going to take ESPN

over the top, but it's just on Amazon or something. I don't think that's what this is saying, but that Amazon would definitely be a strategic partner that would market and support this product maybe separately if that's the case though like i assume apple would do that too apple would want to do like a channels thing yeah and do you need to invest in do you need to become a minority investor in espn in order to be a channels partner for espn i don't i don't know maybe that's what they're saying though maybe which Maybe. Which would be weird, but like, it's ESPN and it's Disney, so maybe they just get to set the terms. And this is the terms.

Which would be strange, but if you want it, I don't know. Weird. I don't know. Room of Roundup time, Jason Snell. Alright, let's do it. Settling up. A little late. Yeah, it's a little late in the show, but we're all over the place today. It's fun.

The summer of fun. You know what I mean? Summer of fun. That's it. 9to5Mac is reporting via their own sources that there could be a delay on the Pro Max slash Ultra, whatever they call it, phone this year of at least three to four weeks from all the other models

due to an issue providing the new camera sensors in the volume that's needed from Sony. That would not be unprecedented to have them do that thing where they're like, oh, and the iPhone 15 is available in two weeks, and the iPhone 15 Pro will be available next month, or later this fall, or something like that. They've done that before, but I guess don't get your hopes up. And also, I read this and i think oh man just being totally self-centered for a moment it's like oh man it

means i gotta do two separate iphone reviews now this is the thing like even though it adds frustration and complication for for everybody including apple and but like at the same time i bet it's kind of like when there's two embargoes. It's rolling thunder. I absolutely agree. I think that there is. I mean, I'm sure they'd want it out sooner just to sell it sooner. But there is absolutely benefit in you got an announcement, then you got a wave of reviews of part A, and then later you got a wave of reviews of part B.

It's like, oh, that phone was announced a month ago. Well, here's a reminder. Now here is the version of shipping, right? Like there are, you can make lemonade out of those lemons, I guess is what I'm saying. And Jason, the colors are giveth, the colors are taketh away. So images have been swirling online

of colorful braided USB-C to lightning cables that could be color matched and included with the iphone 15 so there are a bunch of colors here um that have been they're being shared from people who have had access to them i'm intrigued about these but i'm also kind of wondering like are these just the imac colors from like the trackpads and stuff but i'm not entirely sure people are saying that they're longer and relating to uh the iphone this is going along with every rumor website that i'm subscribed to is like reporting like three stories a day on colors right now um which is great for the colors are i suppose uh there are rumors swirling about the iphone 15 lineup of colors so they'll be black and white and there may also be some combination of yellow, blue, green,

and potentially the return of coral. I've also seen purple noted. So there are lots of options. Nobody really knows what they are. The big story for me, though, I think, is an absolute heartbreak rumor that suggests that the Pro phones will come in silver, space black, dark blue and titan gray

getting rid of gold jason what are they doing over there i need to have a meeting with the colors are colors are you can see me in my office in the morning terrible what are they doing think of what they're gonna have silver which will be gray and then they're adding gray i don't know man i don't know about this i feel for you but also doesn't it sound absolutely modern apple that they would do an iphone pro in four colors three of which are essentially not a color no i mean 100 like they can have four colors one of them is a color let me let me tell you what our colors are uh colors are uh well we have a silver which is white and then right right yeah okay and

then and then right below that there'll be a gray which is sort of a darker silver and then there's a black which is sort of a darker gray and then we but don't worry don't worry we have another color for you it's it's a dark navy blue it's blue. So dark that it looks like the black one. But if you put it in a very bright light and tilt it at an angle, you can sort of tell that it's blue. And those are our new colors. Get excited. I'm frustrated about it. But what I'll get to do, though, which is what I did now and I like to do it, is if I go Ultra and they have Titan Gray, which will probably be similar to the Ultra,

I can maybe still have a matching watch and phone and they'll just be titanium color, which is less exciting. What I'm excited about is the prospect that they might bring back Coral because that was my favorite XR phone color. It's such a good color. It's really great.

It's like a bright orangey. Pinky orange. Pinky orange. It's great. I love that Coral X 10r so that would be a cool phone to have and the sheriff of roomerville mark german is reporting on apple's plan to overhaul the ipad pro next year so mark is saying this is planned to be the first major change of the ipad since the 2018 model was introduced is when they did that

new design and they've iterated on it since and this would be the big overhaul and it will feature an M3 chip an OLED display and there will be 11 and 13 inch models so maybe finally they're just going to call it the 13 inch iPad rather than 12.9 inch iPad and a revamped magic keyboard quote the new accessory makes the iPadad pro look even more like a laptop than the current setup and adds a larger trackpad are they gonna they're gonna get rid of the cantilever right how i don't know how that's that's the question right so the beauty of apple's accessories is that they make the iPad, right? This is the, this is, I think don't, people don't talk about this enough, but like all

other accessory makers must adapt to whatever the iPad hardware is. Apple, if it has an idea for an accessory, it can make the iPad so that it works with that accessory, right? It's part of the design up front is this is what we want over here. So we're going to make this little thing over here so that they work together. But my question about getting rid of or redesigning the keyboard to be more like a laptop is weight, right? The reason that it's a cantilever is because they need to push the weight of the ipad forward so the whole thing doesn't tip over backward how do you make something look like a laptop

but have it not have the cantilever right like how do you because that's that's what looks like a laptop is but like what what is that my fear is that the answer is a kickstand. And kickstands are terrible. Well, here's what I'll say. So that's my fear. That's my fear. Bridge made it work. Bridge made it work. And what they did was they had a weighted keyboard and then they had like clips that

clipped around the iPad. So that would be how you have to do it. And clearly, Apple does not mind about weight because part of the way the Magic Keyboard Folio thing, what Magic Keyboard works, is that it's heavier, right? Yeah, yeah. So you could do it like Bridge, where you have something essentially like the Bridge thing where it's got enough weight in the front of the keyboard

that it's going to keep it from tipping over backward. And you would create a more elegant connector than the clips that bridge put on its keyboard so that you could just kind of shove an iPad into the clips and it would work. But you're right. In terms of physics, it absolutely did work and you could use it as a laptop that way. You just had to have a heavy case. And I, I, Apple is, you're right. Not afraid of having a heavy case and i apple is you're right not afraid of having a heavy case like that's not the point the point is that the ipad is going to be on the light side and then the the case it can be as heavy as it needs to be i would be disappointed

personally if they got rid of the cantilever for a kickstand for realistically just to make the trackpad bigger like that would be disappointing to me terrible trade-off so i don't think they're gonna do it what i'll say is nobody expected the cantilever design so i'm still gonna leave the ball in their court for like there's a thing i haven't even imagined that's where that is realistically where i am sitting on this rumor of like they're gonna do something that makes it like that you actually have more space on the keyboard section right so like less of it is unused and it's some kind of design that i've i've not seen before it could be as simple as that it's a still a magnetic attach but it's further back it's basically not cantilevered

and what they've done is they've just made the the other part of the keyboard case thicker and heavier right that that could be it which it would be instead of using clips or anything like that it's still using a magnet to hold it and it's still got the connection between them if you did that there's some interesting options you could do too right you could make that keyboard have a battery in it so that you could actually say when your ipad is in this uh keyboard case it has 24 hour battery life or something like that right they could do that if they wanted to yeah um maybe they're gonna put a vaser home on it you know just so you almost i mean just yeah just go wherever you want and then uh just then just screw it onto whatever surface is nearby and it's floating right in front of you.

Easy peasy. I have a magnetic arm with a base amount. No, it's not a base amount. I have a magnetic arm for an iPad with a little thing that you screw into a clamp into a surface so that it can float above anything. It's awesome, actually. Lovely. Yeah, and then you can put whatever you want above anything. It's awesome, actually. Lovely.

Yeah, and then you can put whatever you want below it. It doesn't matter. All right, let's finish out today's episode with some Ask Upgrade questions. Sriram asks, Sriram asks, why are so many developers no longer submitting the latest updates to their macOS apps

via the Mac App Store and going directly instead? One example being 1Password. Their version 8 was distributed directly and only from their website. Because they can, and then they have complete control over the whole thing, and they don't have to go through Apple's approvals, and they don't have to follow Apple's rules. And it's amazing that there are apps in the Mac App Store, quite frankly. And if you've got a big brand

and you don't need to be relying on the presence, the reason you go in the Mac App Store is because there's some people theoretically who use the Mac App Store to search for software because they're so trained from iOS to use the App Store to search for software. And if you can find them there, so that's like number one i think also it's like if you don't want to deal with and there are

many developers like this you do not want to deal with the payment stuff you do not want to deal with that's number two yeah that's number two john syracusa could set up his own payment system for his little apps right and he's like i'm just going to put them in the mac app store right they get approved apple handles the transactions. So those are reasons to do it. But if you're an established brand, like it's just pain to be in the Mac App Store

and you're probably not getting much benefit out of it. So that's why. That's the answer. And Apple has at times tried to make it easier to be in the Mac App Store. For developers, I think that it will always be this way unless Apple went to the point of like, didn't Microsoft at some point essentially turn their App Store into optionally just being a catalog where you could be in the store?

And you could be in the store and I think you could buy things through the store. And you could be in the store, and I think you could buy things through the store. But for some stuff, you could literally just, you find the app, and then you click and go to the website where you'd buy the app. And they just said, it's a catalog now, essentially. I don't think Apple will ever do that. So we're going to end up with it being kind of bifurcated like it is. I mean, we can talk to this a little bit but when it comes to like Apple podcast subscriptions right but like we don't do that for this show and you don't do it for the incomparable no and part of it is because one we had an existing business of subscriptions that lasted

before so that was one two right like the Apple podcast is not our largest audience base it's large but not largest. It's not dominant. A lot of mainstream shows would maybe be dominant. I don't know. Maybe it's changing with Spotify these days. In some cases, it's becoming closer. They don't allow for us to have all of the features we would want.

Yeah. It's a podcast-only subscription. Yeah. So we can't offer Discord or whatever like you can't do it you just get the podcast so there's lots of reasons that we made it better and better it doesn't make sense like there used to be more things like it used to be that you'd have to go to their system and update and they now change that uh they also recently added in a bunch of new services to do that what i think is called like direct delivery,

delegated delivery is the term that they use. Like a lot of it is getting better. And they're also like, I just saw this thing recently where they have this new like statistics interface, which was really nice. But the biggest thing for me, which I think is for a lot of other people,

which is realistically our audience, we have built it and it's our audience. And if we're going to ask people to pay us i would like 100 of that money not 70 of that money because we've done the work yeah exactly and that we and those that's our audience and not apples right we're not the goal of being like well yeah you're paying but you're really paying apple and then apple's paying us and then you're one of the billion subscriptions that apple can report on its quarterly results but that like and i know that developers feel that way to bring it back to the mac app store i know that developers

feel that way too that they they actually prefer to be in direct contact with their customers and not have apple as an intermediary which is what happens in the app store but this is like one of these things where like uh indie developers are maybe different to more mainstream developers in the same way that indie podcasters, if you call this like small to medium-sized podcasters, are different to large podcasts. Yeah. Right?

So I think it's a similar kind of overlap that there are certain types of apps where like they've got their audience their own way and they want to keep it that way. And they're also willing to do the work. we're willing to do the work it's work but we're willing to do it and great you know arjan asks how do i correctly pronounce the name of the new mac os sonoma okay is that like the way you're saying like phonetically it's like s-a-n-o-m-a uh i mean that's how i say it's sonoma not sonoma it's softer it's uh so no it's not sonoma

sonoma sonoma like panama sonoma yeah nailed it so no ma sonoma sonoma Sonoma I mean I guess you could say Sonoma if you over pronounce it but we don't over pronounce it here in California we say Sonoma it's like if something's like Sonoma it's like it's Sonoma think about like if it was in Klingon

it would be S apostrophe N-O-M-A. That doesn't help me. Maybe it helps Arjan. I don't know. Kapla. Robert asks, as Apple works to eliminate the iPhone and iPad bezels, at what point will this impact or prevent case makers from making cases that snap on?

Is it a riddle? I don't know. I mean, I think that Apple is aware that people want cases and Apple makes cases. Correct. But Apple, at some point, if it eliminates a class of cases, like,

uh, like things that snap on that are actually like gripping on the, on the, uh, around to the front. And if that obscures the front, they will have to just adapt to whatever um whatever apple apple will have a solution right because they design the hardware and

i know what it's going to be magnets magnets how do they work the case will just be connected with magnets and it won't cover the front of the screen anymore it would just like you'll put your phone in and it would just go around the sides and it won't actually go around the edge of the screen. And case makers that don't want to make their cases that way, well, I'm sorry, there'll be no more cases for you. Yeah, because Apple decides. Yeah. And the case industry will just follow what Apple does the same way as they do every single time, right? Like Apple introduces MagSafe, now all the cases have magnets in them right because like that's what you need to do by the way i've said this before i'll say it again that seems like the

worst industry to be in phone cases yeah like the absolute like you know me and gray we like making our products right and we're wondering what other things could we make in the future we have like a an agreement between each other. We will never get into phone cases because it just seems like the worst business to be in. Yeah, and you have to churn it every year too on top of everything else, right? And it's dog eat dog out there.

And or be ready to. Like you don't even know if you need to churn it every year, right? Like it's, I don't understand how case companies make money because it just seems like such an impossibly difficult business to manage yeah they make it with it's with great difficulty yeah yeah because the answer it is not a great business to be in nightmare like all of these people tim cook would probably appreciate them you know what i mean right like i feel like i feel

like tim cook would have some kind of empathy for companies making phone cases because they also have to be logistically nimble. Yeah. If you would like to send in a question of your own for us to answer

in a future episode, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in your own Ask Upgrade question. Before I wrap up today, I want to remind you again, go to stjude.org.

We are raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital throughout all of September. You're going to be hearing about it a lot on all of our shows. Please go and donate at stjude.org. It will mean a lot to us, and it will mean a lot to fighting childhood cancer. If you would like to send us your feedback, follow-up, and questions for future episodes, go to upgradefeedback.com.

As Jason mentioned, we might be drafting next week. So if Apple invites go out this week, you see that on your social networks, on your RSS feeds, then you can rest assured that next Monday's episode will be the September event draft. And that will be the final episode of the Summer of Fun this year. Yeah, I think it almost certainly has to be. Whether the invites go out or not, I think we're going to have to assume that the draft is next week, right? Because it seems unlikely that an Apple event would be later than two weeks from now. Who could know?

We'll find out. Who could know? We'll find out. You can check out Jason's work over at sixcolors.com and you can hear his shows over at the incomparable.com and here on RelayFM.

You can listen to my podcast here on RelayFM and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. We're both on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E on mike.social. The show is on Mastodon as well.

We are upgrade at relayfm.social. You can watch video clips of the show there and also on TikTok and Instagram where we are at upgrade relay. We're also on threads. I'm imike, Jason is jsnell. Thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus. Thank you to our sponsors for supporting us

this week. That is Ladder and FitBud. Thank you to Stephen Hackett for lending his time on this week's episode. And most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you.