Upgrade - 477: Tails O'Clock

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

This week we're wading into follow-up from last week's Apple event. Then we say goodbye to beta season and list our favorite features of the newly shipped iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 477 today's show is brought to you by electric and zoc doc my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley oh say can you see jason uh by the dawn's early light what's the dawn's early light uh it's um that's not what it is dawn's early light is a it's a smart home light the dawn's early light wow they knew about that all the way back then in the morning well i think you know dawn's early oh you know i'm hearing the word that doesn't exist donzily d-o-n-z-e-r-l-y donzily so mike a little little quick we haven't even started the show and we're going off the rails here it is um the lyrics to the star spangled banner are about uh a fierce battle raging overnight. And in the morning,

as the sun starts to come up, seeing that the American flag is still flying over the place that was being attacked. So that's how it starts. It starts in the middle of the story. Can you see by the dawn's early light, the flag, basically. That's what the whole story is about. About the War of 1812, I want to say? I don't know. Something like that. Oh, the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming. It's a funny anthem to me, man. I gotta say.

The Rockets Red Glare. You know, the music is just an English drinking song. Most anthems are. That's true. There's a lot of drinking lot of drinking we did a lot so it's not not surprised and singing after you're drinking why wouldn't you not i have a snow talk question for you jason snell okay comes from trio who asks as someone who is still using the 10s i'm wondering what prompted jason's wife to make the upgrade this year i may also do so but i'm

undecided as my 10s still works reliably more or less and continues to have os support uh i thought this was an interesting question the truth is that we were on a two-year cycle where for i was on a two-year cycle for for a while there what would happen is i would buy a new phone and then when i two years later got a new phone i would give lauren my old phone and she was fine with that. She was, she was quite happy with that. However, I bought an iPhone mini and, um, she was not happy with that. And then last year, um, I pushed back a year because the iPhone mini died and it's for, it's a four-year- old phone. It's time.

So the, my answer is that, yeah, I could have waited a year for it to not run the current OS because the iPhone 10 doesn't. So the 10 S is next. So the kids have theirs. I have mine. Why would she not have hers?

I felt like it was time for that to happen. So now she's got, honestly, for the first time in a long time, she's got a brand new phone. It's a, it's, she deserves it. So, so's got a brand new phone. She deserves it. So she got a 15.

We'll talk about that later. Oh, okay. We'll talk about that later. If you would like to send in a question of your own, please go to upgradefeedback.com where you can do so. You can send in follow-up and Snell Talk questions there as well and many more things. Just go to upgradefeedback.com.

You can send us your stuff. Jason? Yes. It is September. questions there as well and many more things just go to upgradefeedback.com you can send us your stuff jason yes it is september september is childhood cancer awareness month since 2019 at relay fm we have now raised we net we actually have now raised over 2.5 million dollars as a community that was what we wanted to pass this year and we've done it so we've hit our first goal for 2023 we put a new goal in this year's campaign why not go for half a million dollars this year we're at 341 000 raised right now for the kids of saint jude saint jude will not stop their life-saving work until no child dies from cancer with your support we'll be one step closer to that day one cure closer one child closer the main thing i want to let everybody know about today, Jason, is that the fifth annual podcast of Time for St. Jude is coming this Friday,

September 22nd. It is a 12-hour event, which is unbelievable. I'm very excited. I'm going to give you some times here. It starts at 12pm Eastern Time. So that's

9 Pacific. 9 Pacific and uh of course 11 11 central in central memphis time where we will and that is a different time everywhere else i wanted to start saying times and realized that the event that i have in my calendar for the podcastathon is like it's early for for when the actual event starts all right so here we go here we go hold on let me like i can i can do this i can solve this i can make this really really helpful um it is at uh t colon one six nine five three nine eight four five eight colon f you know i thought you were going to help me i don't actually know what that means what you just said did. Did you just say one of those number stations?

I think that's the Unix time. I think that's the Unix time that is what you insert into Discord when you want it to be a universal time that displays everywhere. So here we go. Get on it. Nine Pacific. One, six, nine, five, three, nine, eight, four, five, eight. Central.

Twelve Eastern. That is 5 p.m. UTC. British summertime. That would be 4 p.m. UTC. British Summer Time. That would be 4 p.m. UTC or GMT. And 6 p.m. in Central European Time,

which is what Rome is. That's what I have in my little time zone thing here. So look, we're starting at... Just do the calculation yourself. We're starting at 12 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time. It'll run for 12 hours, which I'm sure no matter where you are,

you could at least catch some of the event. We going to be broadcasting live from saint jude so we're in the studio there we have quite possibly the biggest production no not quite possibly we have the biggest production we've ever had uh we're going to be spending the next like three or four days getting everything set up and we will be joined by the one and only jason snell hello jason hello mike uh great to be here no wait a second what are we doing not yes i'll be there i i've got flights yep uh kathy campbell and i are going to be flying in from the coast to lend uh additional bodies to the 12 hour long production there's gonna well look the entire event is focused around mike versus Steven. We're gonna need adjudicators,

referees and participants for these events. You know, when this was originally pitched to me, I don't know if you know this, it was pitched as, oh, we would like you and Kathy to come to the podcast-a-thon to do, you know, to help with some stuff. I was like, okay, that sounds great.

And it was very much like, we don't really know what you're gonna do. You can like, you'll help with some stuff. In the meetings I've had, okay, that sounds great. And it was very much like, we don't really know what you're going to do. You can like, you'll help with some stuff. In the meetings I've had more recently, it is very clear that Kathy and I are going to be out there. Maybe not as long as you and Mike or you and Steven, but a long time. There are a lot of things that you'll be involved in.

But the difference between- Because we have to adjudicate or commentate about you guys doing your thing, right? You don't need to be there the whole time. Like you don't. Me and Steven are going to be there for like, we're obviously there for the whole time we'll be present in some capacity for all of it but sure i can assure you that the request will not be as heavy you can hang out in the on the set you can hang out backstage you know and then we'll just

shout for you like jason like that when we need you i'm not saying that that we're doing as much as you and steven i'm just saying that i I was enjoying the fact that it was a ramp up from you need to participate in a brief portion of the show to being like, well, we're sort of just assuming that we own you for the day. And that's fine. You do own us for the day. It just was a fun progression. Well, see, you see, Jason, that is the podcast-a-thon planning experience. It always starts out as we're going to do this, and then by the end of it, we've added 50% more runtime. You know, this is the usual thing. So we're going to be live for 12 hours on the 22nd of September, this coming Friday, at twitch.tv slash RelayFM.

We've posted about it on all of our socials, but please come in, join us. We've got so much fun stuff planned. Seriously, this is going to be an incredibly fun time. Me and Steven are going to be competing in a vast variety of digital and physical challenges, like from video games to... I don't even want to spoil

it, but we've just got some incredible stuff planned. We'll be posting some teasers of things, I'm sure, on Mastodon and Threads and Instagram over the next few days, but we're going to have a great time. So go to stjude.org. You can donate there. You can sign up for fundraising yourself and help us meet our goals

for the kids of St. Jude, but don't forget to join us this Friday. That is stjude.org. 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 closer this month and every month let's cure childhood cancer together got some follow-up jason snell some of it kind of spanning back a couple of weeks because we didn't talk about any follow-up over the last couple of weeks um i'll start one of those

actually so the uk government has had to face the facts that the boffins could not solve the encryption problem they wanted to punch holes into an encryption. But they brought in the boffins. They hoped they would be able to bring in the boffins. Oh, but the boffins told them what they didn't want to hear, which is that they couldn't do anything about it because it's math. Yeah.

So effectively, what's happened is the law passed, right? But the government has basically conceded that the technology does not exist, and they won't do anything until the technology exists. So they're not going to enforce their back doors. And so the government's like, hey, no, we still care about this. We're not going to do anything. But we all realistically know that to do what they want to do is effectively impossible. This is kind of amazing because it's actually even an outcome that i don't think i considered which is what if the government

just goes ahead and passes it and then just tells everybody never mind this was actually something not this exact but this is what kind of what i expected to happen like i said on the show that like my expectation was that they would pass the law, but then realize that these tech companies will leave. And so they'll just pretend like it never existed. And essentially what they did that, but they're just like, oh, hey, you know, that technology, it will come. And when it does, oh boy, will we protect those children? There is no such thing as this technology. Which is impossible.

And the same thing, just to do a really short rephrase of this. The truth is the only way that you can make this work is by having another key. And there has been no backdoor key, extra key, skeleton key that has not leaked at some point, right? It's not safe. It doesn't matter where it is. It's not safe. It will get out. The Clipper key got out.

Microsoft had that key that got out that let people spy on people's email. Like the keys get out. They just do. And so there's no way this can work. Like basically the way it will work, if ever, is the way that it works right now. And how like in the U.S., how a lot lot of this stuff happens which is there are bugs that are exploited you know there's stuff that is cracked and security holes are used but an actual systematic creation of a second key or some other kind of backdoor so people are saying in the chat room

like quantum computing it's like yeah the most likely scenario here is that in the end the encryption that's being used will be cracked by a government computer or something that is uh super powerful but like basically this is a this is all just window dressing for them to say they're doing something about protecting the kids when they actually uh can't in this case yeah so i'm happy about this it's not perfect but this will certainly do right that like when i'm not going to lose iMessage and whatsapp and all this kind of stuff so i'll live with that lots of people wrote in with theories and ideas for what apple may do to make the a17 pro a not pro chip next year you know put the a17 in the iphone 16 most people mentioned a variation of apple

somehow binning the graphics chip like so it's just like they've been the chips and the graphics isn't as powerful or they removed the usb3 controller as a way to bring down the capability of that chip to make it work as an a17 and eric also wrote in to say something i thought was interesting that we may see the a17 first in an updated iPad or iPad mini, because that's most likely the next product. Could be. I think the question, I think these are all good, kind of like juicy conspiracy theories. I know Marco mentioned this on ATP last week as well, this idea. But it's funny to me because it's sort of like, Apple in secret has been collecting defective chips and relabeling them as the A17.

Nobody is aware of it. And then they unveil it. It's very conspiratorial, but yet it's plausible. They could have, I mean, when talking about binning, you need a very large bin to collect all the chips you're going to use next year. That's a very large bin. In my mind, there's like a person in one of those bunny suits right and they find the chip and they just throw it over their shoulder and it lands in a big trash can and like that's where the bin chips go they go or it like lands on a big like conveyor belt

that whisks it away to the to the big bin it's like there could be a furnace but it takes a left turn and it goes into a big plastic bin. Yeah. Yeah. It's like where the Ark of the Covenant is in the Indiana Jones movies. There's just a huge warehouse full of binned chips waiting to be born. I am going to start the petition right now that all iPads should have M chips. There should not be A chips in iPads anymore.

Oh. So I think the iPad mini should get an M3 or whatever. See, I was gonna say that I think the like iPad Air will get possibly will get an A17 Pro, not an M3. So going the other way, that it's gonna be the

iPhone chip. Surely they'll keep the Pro chips for the iPad Pros, right? They wouldn't put it in the Air. Well, no, not the, the okay so the current air has an m2 yeah oh you think it's kind of over 17 pro a 17 yeah but then what about stuff like stage manager they're like only m chips boohoo i guess i don't know jason apple's ways are mysterious the the uh if they took away stage manager from the ipad air like i don't know what they're doing like the why did they add it in the first place?

You know what I mean? We had this whole thing already. That's a good question. Why did they add it? So, okay. There are lots of things they could do. Look, I'm just trying to explore the options here. So the other option is,

a lot of people are like, next year then the A17 will come out and it'll just be the A17 Pro, but not quite as good and leftover from last year maybe. Okay. They could also just call it the a18 right they could all just they could also just say next year we'll actually make two variations

on this chip uh 17 and 18 we could do that right so that that's also possible but i love this idea that um maybe they're reserving it and the theory that we might actually see it in an ipad uh also interesting right like what is the bifurcation between the A series and the M series? What does it all mean? There's less of everything in the A series. What is required of an iPad? And then would they make a second chip for the low-end phones? My theory there, by the way, is not that they would just make a second chip for the low-end phones my theory there by the way is not that they would just make a second chip for the low-end phones whether it's a bind a17 pro or not my theory is that they would make a low-end chip that would go on the low-end phones and in all their embedded devices

right that's the tv apple tv chip and it's the home pod chip and it's whatever what other like the the maybe it's the studio display or the next generation display that they're working on. Like that, that's where that goes, right? Is that the super low end where it's like, we don't need to put an A17 Pro in that stuff. Maybe that's their idea. And that's the reason that you build a second lower end chip.

I don't know. I don't know. It's fascinating. See, isn't this great? We could talk about this. We probably won't every every week but we will talk about this a lot we got so much follow-up about it maybe this is going to keep continuing so if you do have thoughts and concerns or theories or whatever about the a17 chips go to upgradefeedback.com fill out the form yeah uh talking about that actually like thoughts and feelings uh we put the last episode

up in full on youtube on our youtube channel it's a full video episode of like obviously we weren't together but it goes from me and you you know backwards and forwards um showing our video that we shoot for our video clips but in full uh this is the first time we've done it this way, right? Like we had the one that Apple shot for us at WWDC. At WWDC, right. But that was more of a like, you know, produced thing. We didn't know if we were going to do this, and we didn't mention it on last week's episode. But what happened is we,

I thought it was a big episode and we would give it a try. And because we do the clips, but we do shoot the whole show so we we gave it a shot um and it's uh i think it turned out pretty well there's a there's a process that we're experimenting with and the idea here is there's actually a uh like some plugins that make it so that you can kind of like auto switch to whoever is talking and the question was like how did it turn out and i think the answer is it turned out really well like i am surprised how good i was waiting i was thinking of all the ways that it could be bad and actually it turned

out pretty well um and i know for a lot of people the video like it's two guys talking it's not that exciting but i do know that a lot of people um what put these videos on when they're working or whatever they're at a computer so they've got a video screen so they had the video on and then when something's going on that's interesting they'll glance over and look at us and the rest of the time they're just listening i think that's how a lot of video podcasts are consumed so so we tried it and yeah we definitely like to hear from people about what it is if we yeah we'll see like it's it's still an experiment phase now but um i was impressed at how fairly easy it was to do in the end in the end this episode is brought to you by electric turning a small business into

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Okay. Got a couple of rumors. There's one that we just had to talk about today because Mark Gurman is reporting that friend of the show, actual friend of the show, Tim Millay has been put in charge of the blood glucose monitoring technology

for an upcoming Apple Watch. So we had Tim on the show a number of times, Tim and Tom, talking about Apple silicon chips. And now this team, which is known as the Exploratory Design Group, is being headed by Tim Millay. It was previously led by Bill Athas, who unfortunately died

at the end of 2022, and the team has kind of been reporting to Johnny Cerugie for a while. Now Tim has taken it over. I'll give a bit of additional context as a reminder that this is from Mark Gurman's report. The group working on the glucose tracker resides within Apple's semiconductor organization because the system relies on an advanced

chip-based system. It uses a range of sensors to shoot lasers into the skin, pew, pew, pew, and determine how much... That's actually in Mark's report. He wrote that down. It's unbelievable. It also uses a range of sensors to shoot those lasers into the skin to determine how much glucose is present in a person's body. Combined with an artificial intelligence algorithm,

the chip can then determine a person's blood sugar. Pretty wild. It is wild. So it's a it's a chip based thing which is why tim malay apparently is the is a good choice here because he's been on the chip team and worked a lot on the apple silicon transition and so which is why we talked to him um and that this is a we've talked about this before this is a, we've talked about this before. This is a huge, potentially huge thing for Apple, right? If Apple can get glucose monitoring via Apple Watch to work, that opens up a lot of possibility in terms of managing diabetes or suggesting that people might have, you know, potential future, you know, pre-diabetes kind of conditions. And like, there's just a lot going on there if they can get it to work. Even more than that, just understanding how different foods affect your blood sugar is,

it can be helpful for everyone when it comes to just like having a different or better diet. to just like having a better different or better diet you're you're speaking like somebody who is working on an apple marketing campaign and has been told that you can't make medical claims no well i said i did this recently so there's a there's a company in the uk called zoe and they provide you this whole kit which includes wearing one of those glucose monitors for a couple of weeks and then they can give you ideas about how different foods affect your body so like we just did this and it's been very interesting so i mean again i don't know how uh i can't speak to the efficacy from a health perspective for something like this but it was interesting to have this information and like i could see that when i'd eat certain food it would make my blood

sugar spike because we it was like connected to an app via bluetooth so like there are benefits that people can have from this even if diabetes isn't necessarily a going concern in their life like you can still learn things about you from monitoring your blood sugar sounds great well tim le get to it i guess that's pretty cool though right this is a big role this is a big job right like it seems like running this team is like well you're about to absolutely unlock the apple watch right like if you if they can do this we spoke about this when this rumor came out the floodgates are opened they will sell a bajillion Apple Watches if they can do this. And Ming-Chi Kuo is reporting that the demand for the 15 Pro Max

is far outpacing the demand for the 14 Pro Max. And due to this, the wait times for this product are pushing pretty far out into the year. This is pretty, within a couple of hours, the Pro Maxes were going out into November after the pre-orders opened.

Kuo is saying demand for the 15 and 15 plus are on par with what they're replacing but the 15 pro is a little weaker year over year the natural titanium and white titanium are the most popular finishes i guess what this is saying is that having that extra zoom was a um a prompt for people to get the Pro Max instead of the Pro, right? There's differentiation between those two models. And where somebody might have previously opted for the Pro, they might have that moment where they're like, yeah, but I really want the, I mean, I guess I'm talking about Casey Liss here, right?

He's a good example. Our friend Casey, who has been a Pro phone user, but bought the Pro Max because he really wants that 5X zoom. So Ming-Chi Kuo's report suggests that there are, I think, unsurprisingly, a lot of people who are like, yeah, give me the better zoom. Why would I not want the better zoom? Where they might've otherwise said, look, everything else being equal, I don't need the bigger screen. I don't want to pay the extra. I know I'll just get the regular pro.

And then this year they're like, no, the max has to be it because I want that fancy camera. I'm also not surprised about the fact that the natural and white titanium is one of the most popular finishes because they actually look like titanium, I guess, right? Like it's,

if you care about the fact that the material has changed the black and the blue one are not really necessary you can tell me but it doesn't seem like they're particularly showing off the metal they know they look a lot like i mean you could argue that like the titanium is a neutral color that it's going to be whatever they they want it to be and so even natural titanium is what you want titanium to look like, not really necessarily what it actually looks like. So I think it's a, I think it's a style thing.

Um, is this, is this where I rant about the colors are again? I mean, I feel like the colors are, has completely lost it. Um, I can say that, I mean,

we're going to talk a little bit more about last week, but I'll save it. I'll save it for a minute, but I'll just stew in the background for a few minutes and we'll get there. But it doesn't surprise me that people like these because it's a new metal and it doesn't surprise me because not everybody

wants the dark phone or the other dark phone so that that's okay let's talk a little bit more about last week though maybe some further reflections but we can start with what colors no okay no well i mean if you want to jump right into it you can feel free no no no no no no no let's let's keep it let's keep it order here, and I'll just let my color thoughts build up. What devices did you order, if any? All right, as predicted earlier on. So I bought iPhone 15 Pro. I woke up, of course, as I do, in the morning Pacific time,

and all my friends who got there right on the dot to order, because Apple's trained us, and they're like, oh, and there was an ordering problem in this and now they're back ordered and all that and i was like oh geez i guess i better go and order it now um did not have a problem got it shipping day uh even hours after it went on sale and that's because i got the 15 pro which is not as popular as the pro max and i got it 256 and i got it in blue titanium one of the least popular finishes i guess and so i had no problem i it was uh it was not an issue i i ordered that and i went with the blue titanium because i love my midnight macbook air and it's sort of in the ballpark of that and i

just decided to even though i am a big fan of the black phone and i also have the black apple watch titanium i decided that um apple's black phone is dark gray have the black Apple watch titanium. I decided that, um, Apple's black phone is dark gray. It really is. And at that point, like, give me the blue, the dark, the dark blue kind of thing works better for me. I like it better. Um, it was a completely like perfectly black, uh, iPhone. I might be interested, but it's not. So I'm and then for lauren as mentioned earlier i got her an iphone 15 128 green with the green fine woven case um she was deeply unimpressed with the colors on offer like deeply and i actually said at one point she said where where are the good colors where are the bright colors and i said you can get an iphone 14 jamie and julian both have an iphone 14 you could just get the iphone 14 it comes in some nicer colors and she's like no no i'll and and

in the end she went with the she went with the green um which is more of a color than some of the other colors. How about you? I ordered a, well, Stephen ordered for me an iPhone 15 Pro Max, 512 gigabyte in natural titanium, because I'm picking it up here. So he got on and quickly got that for me. That's for launch day, which is podcast-a-thon day. So maybe we'll open our iPhones while we're live. I also ordered an apple watch ultra 2 which i'm picking up on saturday uh with the orange ocean band i also got

the orange and beige trail loop and the blue flame nike sport band so i'm refreshing all my bands so they have a bit of orange in them so they can match up with the orange on the watch because on the ultra 2 yeah this is what you have to do. I also, we ordered for Idina an iPhone 15 Pro 256 in blue titanium, because that was what she wanted. Nice. Blue titanium club. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Yeah, she's got my phone.

She and I, Idina and I are getting the same phone. Yeah. I mean, it looks nice, but I'm all into the natural color. Mike, the people who really love you get the iPhone 15 Pro 256.10. Oh, that's so sweet. I love that.

Thank you. I put a big smile on my face. Stephen showed me yesterday. He got the fine woven case came in. Yeah. I don't like it. It feels like paper. It's like a texture paper.

And I think, honestly, I think they made a mistake. I don't think that they should have gotten rid I'm not saying they should have kept leather but I feel like they should have gone with something different kind of like

maybe carbon fiber or some kind of cloth material because the fine woven I don't like it I feel like I need to spend more time with it but as a case it honestly to me like i've i've seen an experience of like and i've handled like cardboard like textured cardboard that's what this feels like not a fan it's interesting because i have felt for a while now that that is what apple's leather has been going toward too huh okay

i've had a couple of apple leather things where i thought uh this feels i forget what was the last one it might have been a band and i thought this actually feels less like leather to me and more like bendable paper right i mean they've probably been reducing the leather like well i think they have their yeah maybe but i think i think that there's also uh this is adjacent to the there there's no the leathers are lost their job last week right the leathers are is gone but i i do think that there's a style issue here too where they have like this is the kind of fine you know material and they're probably consulting with people who are textile experts and right materials experts to do all this stuff and that there's a particular take they have about this

and yeah it may not work for people i i thought that it worked pretty well as a facsimile in the watch bands but i did not see a phone case when i was at the event i only saw the fine woven watch bands and i thought that they were okay but part of that is that they were literally in the context of what the leather bands were. They're the same designs. They look exactly the same. They're just made out of a different material. And maybe that doesn't work for a watch case. I don't know. Or I mean, a phone case. I don't use a case, so I don't know, but I'm looking forward to getting Lauren's probably today, right? Like, like i mean we're in the season where everybody gets their case before they get their phone i'm looking forward to uh

seeing what that is all about obviously i'm not gonna wear i'm not gonna have a case on my phone because i don't like doing that i just use a pop socket they have a great magnetic pop socket now that does yeah that's what i hear that's great you wrote an article kind of with some reactions and stuff like that to the event um now that you've kind of had a little bit more time for things to settle in is there anything that you wanted to touch on i'll talk about from uh from the event last week that maybe we didn't cover too much or in a way that you'd like to adapt now one of the things that is funny is that when you go to the event, and this happened when I got back afterward and talked to you, is we're not in the, you know, discourse, the internet discourse. We're in our own discourse.

It's different. Yeah. Well, so there's a whole like, what did you think about other people's reactions? And it's kind of not my business to have opinions about other people's reactions it's my business to have reactions um so really not concerned but i'm not surprised at the reactions because these are the reactions every time which is people have an unreasonable assumption that every apple event that doesn't do something like radically different and change the world is boring and it's unrealistic because those happen so rarely like the last big change in iphone like really

legitimately big change in iphone was the iphone 10 which was five years ago. Like they don't make enormous changes. And while this was in terms of the sort of like super cycle of design, a pretty minor change, because it's just kind of going to titanium on the pro phones. The truth is that Apple, I feel like a lot of people observe an Apple event and they're basically, they want entertainment out of it. They think the purpose of the event is to keep them entertained. And it's not. I feel like a lot of people observe an Apple event and they're basically, they want entertainment out of it.

They think the purpose of the event is to keep them entertained. And it's not. It's a commercial for products that are being launched. It's for one of the most popular consumer products in the world. One of the most profitable, certainly. And the most important product that Apple makes, it's their opportunity to do a commercial to promote their new version so that people will run out and buy their new version. That's why it exists. And it's not Apple's job to entertain the masses. It's not a TV show, right? It's an ad. And the ultimate goal is to just get their product out there and get people talking about it. So there's a lot of commentary that's like, oh, I found it really boring. And it's like, yeah, but that's kind of not the point, right? Like the point is not how bored were you by the ad?

The point is what was in the ad and how's it going to sell? I think. And so that's what I always pay attention to there. It's like, I'm not... So people were like, oh, that environmental video wasn't that funny. And you said this, right? And it went on too long. And my thought was, I do agree it went on too long.

But I understand why they did it, because it's more palatable for there to be a scripted story that makes the case that Apple is the only one walking the walk when it comes to environmental change in their corporate, in their tech planning and their manufacturing and all of that. And if all it was was Lisa Jackson standing on the roof saying, we're better than everyone else, unlike the competition, we're actually doing things. It's not going to come across as well.

So I thought it was deft in that way, even though it was not as funny as maybe it should have been and also probably way too long. So anyway, that was just a thought that I had. I was not surprised by it at all because it happens literally every time. I think it's funny that people think that every time there's an Apple event,

they're going to change the world when the truth that every time there's an apple event they're going to change the world when the truth is every time there's an apple event people complain that it's boring that's that's the truth people complain that they didn't change the world every year that's what happens every year so it's i thought it was fine i mean it is a i just am surprised that every year people are like wow wow, an incremental update from Apple. It's like, one, you're underselling what did get updated. Like the camera stuff is kind of big. And two, it's an incremental update every time, right?

Every time. With very few exceptions. So I don't know what they're looking for. I mean, I just, I have those moments where I'm like, I don't, you just have to accept that this is how everybody is always going to respond to an Apple event, especially an iPhone event is they have, they have like a little, a little piece of paper with a checklist on it. And the checklist is one box and it's changed the world. And then every year they get up and they tear the paper and they're like, ah, they didn't

do it. And we're like, okay, I mean, yeah, I guess so. Except that if you're buying a phone for the first time in four years, it's a pretty awesome improvement. And that's really what they're trying to do is sell you on a phone upgrade. It is interesting to me specifically when people in our industry make the case of like oh it's only iterative like that is the thing that's so surprising to me it's just like right what were you what do you think apple does or like but like what what would you what does any large tech company do now like if they're not launching a brand new product that didn't exist before

they're iterating each year on the existing thing right like when apple makes a foldable iphone that will be a huge deal but like until then every iphone is just going to get a little bit better than the one before which has been the way it's been maybe for the last 10 years yeah i think some people remember what happened 10 years ago, right? I think some people remember those heady, and they were heady early days of the smartphone era, where we had perhaps the most relevant to people's lives and society and everything, tech product ever, tech category ever happened. And in those first few years, everything is cutting edge. Everything,

they are iterating rapidly and adding features to the software and adding features to the hardware. And it was really exciting because the world was changing. We were changing from a world where no smartphones were in it to a world where the smartphone is everywhere. And it's assumed that if you want to park somewhere, you have to have your phone because you need to use an app to park, right? Like it is, we've gone from point A to point B here. Those early days were really exciting, but like they're over and they've been over for a long time now. And I get like, I get it. I would love, I mean, it would be exhausting because the world would change so much that we would not recognize it anymore, but sure. Change the world every time. Right? Like they just did an event where they, where they put in like the spatial computer VR headset

thing. Right. And yet the very next event, people are like, uh, boring. Like, okay, sure. All right. Fine. You can be bored. It's fine.

I'm just saying, I think your expectations are unrealistic because what Apple does is John Gruber wrote like 15 years ago now is iterate. They roll. That's what they do. They just kind of push it forward. And it's very rare that they give it a big push. It's mostly a bunch of little small pushes. And then you look up four years later and you're like, oh, wow, this phone is like, like Lauren is going to have a very different experience with her iPhone 15 than with her 10 S right. It's going to be dramatically different and better because it's, you know, four years later. When I was coming through customs, I was talking to the customs agent.

He asked me what I did. I explained what I do. And he's like, shall I upgrade to the iPhone 15? And I was like, well, what you got now? He's like, an iPhone 12. I'm like, oh yeah, you have a great time. And he's like, oh,

should I get the pro one though? I'm like, I don't think it matters. Like if you've got the 12 now and you go to the regular 15 you're gonna love it like it's gonna be an upgrade in every way for you yeah just helping out one person at a time jason you know what i mean i i love it you're bringing your your uh your knowledge to america helping out importing it and reporting the knowledge there was nobody in america that could have helped with the answer to that question um no i have been getting quite worked up about the gpus that they put into the a17 pro i'm very intrigued to see realistically what this phone can do and

i'm i'm very keen to see what what the kind of gaming experience will be i mean i think i've been seeing some headlines that like apple have been doing a bit more press about like they think they have the most powerful games console now with the iphone 15 pro i'm not sure i believe that but hey we'll see but just in general i am finding myself very very intrigued about what this technology beefed up enhanced and brought to the mac is actually going to be like i'm i'm really really intrigued by it yeah the uh the the sort of questions and question that i asked in my piece was did apple build cpu cores to make the iPhone better at running console level games? Or does the iPhone run console level games because Apple was set on more a byproduct of apple wanting to up its gpu game across the board yes but especially on the mac that's my sort of gut feeling is like

iphone being a great game playing device and being able to play like essentially console games on your iphone i think is huge right but I wonder if it's part of a bigger picture, I guess, is what I'm really saying that they were, they were, you know, I'm not sure if you're Apple, you say, boy, the iPhone, it's GPU, just sure. It blows away all other devices in its category, but you know, what it could do is blow away consoles let's do that let's make a gpu for that or if it's a broader issue of like this is where we're lagging especially on the on the mac side where the gpu is lagging so we need to put some extra effort into the gpu side of it i don't know i guess we'll find out but um the potential here is huge i'm very intrigued by it like i'm just like this this is the thing i'm

gonna have my uh my eyes on most for the next max like the next pro chips like what is this gonna look like very intrigued um yeah anything else you wanted to touch on you want to talk about the colors are one quick thing about the satellite i just wanted to mention again uh i love that they keep kicking the the can down the road for the satellite stuff. And we just don't know what happens next year. And this idea of, are they going to make people pay? Like, what you don't want to be is in the sense of like, oh, it'd be a shame if you got trapped somewhere with your iPhone and you hadn't paid us, so you better pay us. I can't see them doing that.

But I think there needs to be a long-term plan. They may not know, right? Because the number of people using the satellite services and have access to the satellite services is going to explode now with these two new models, because everybody who gets it, unless they're upgrading from last year, they're all going to be new on the satellite system. And so presumably the volume is just going to go way up again and what is what you know does the satellite network have the capacity to deal with that i don't know so um they may just be waiting and seeing themselves but i do wonder because they're they very specifically said free for the first two years last year and so those phones will run out of two years next fall. What happens then? And we just don't know.

I think that's interesting. Something to watch. And then I'll get to it here, which is just like, has anybody seen the color czar? Has the color czar disappeared? Is the color czar being controlled by some sort of Rasputin-like figure who is opposed to color on either moral or philosophical grounds? I don't know but we here at the upgrade program have been somewhat critical of apple's decisions regarding color in their products over the years but honestly this this event takes the cake like i don't get it i don't

i don't i don't get it i don't get it. I don't get the four... Okay, I almost get the four shades of gray in the Pro phones only because they've worn me down about Pro phones always being boring in all facets and maybe there are limitations of titanium that are part of this.

Okay. But the regular phones, everybody can have their own opinion about color i think they're super boring i think they're all super boring and i don't understand why you don't give people choice because i know whenever we talk about color we hear from people are like i don't want a colorful product right that's what they say in that tone of voice. It's like, we're not saying you don't get to have what you want. We're saying that anybody who wants a colorful product has no choice because Apple refuses. They have made the most muted set of colors for these iPhones in ages.

They're just dull. They're very pastel. They're very Easter egg colored and the kind you don't leave in for very long. So it's just a trace. The camera bump is nice, but even that is a subtle thing that is best appreciated sort of close up. I just, I don't get it. I don't understand how the same company that made those iMacs, the M1 iMacs, made these phones. And I don't understand how the company that made the iPhone XR in coral, how some of the iPhone 11s and 12s

and 13s and 14s made these boring colors. I don't get why there are no choices. Like Lauren's comment was literally, there aren't any good colors. And I don't disagree with that. There are, if you like them, that's fine. But again, my point is, if you want something bright,

don't buy an iPhone 15, essentially, because you're not going to get it. Even the yellow is just the faintest yellow. Like, it's just, give people some choice. They shouldn't all scream. They shouldn't all be muted. And I don't, like, I really don't know what they're doing. And I'm very, very disappointed in the decisions that they made here i don't i just we're going to keep talking about it because it's the thing that frustrates us but

i just feel like i'm losing more and more hope over time like i had the hope with the imax like the imax gave me hope oh oh don't i mean don't get me started like there are all these rumors thanks to mark german that there are new imax in the pipeline fairly soon. I'm now really concerned that they're going to roll it out and it's going to be like, it comes in midnight and starlight. Good luck. And that that's it. And that they've completely, that's my concern is that they, whatever brief moment in the sun that they had for those M1 iMacs that they're like clamping down and they're going to throw it back in the dungeon and say, nope, back to boring. Um, I just, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cause that's where I am. I despair now. I despair for the future of colorful products from Apple.

I feel like whatever moment was happening, they, it feels like they've just decided, no, no, too much. Let's pull it back. This episode is brought to you by ZocDoc. Have you ever been on the hunt for a new doctor? You ask everyone around you for a good recommendation, right? And you want to see what other people do, and it makes sense. You want a doctor who will understand you, who's going to listen to you, make time for you, and make you feel comfortable. Look, you'll search for weeks and weeks and weeks. Then you end up

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that we found that we have in some of them. So I want you to start actually because you published, so I say you published your review on six colors of iPadOS and some of the overall features. Dan published his iOS 17 review and I've also put a link in the show notes

to Federico's review over at Mac Stories. Of course. There's a ton of great coverage and you can go and find them from your favorite outlets. Dig in. Are we going to alternate? Is that what we're going to do? Yeah.

We should do that. I would like you to talk about the one that you have on top because it's the iPad thing. Sure. I'm just interested about this. Yeah. So the iPad got the lock screen lock screen i mean it's very much we're in this we're in this uh situation where we have the um ipad trailing a year behind the

iphone in a lot of cases like a lot of ipad features are like hey this is a thing that it finally got that the iphone didn't and uh so the iphone got last year. So lock screen. It finally came, the customizable lock screen finally came to the iPad. So it's got, you know, you can put widgets on there and you can actually put way more widgets than you could ever possibly put on an iPhone, which is kind of funny. You can do a giant stack of widgets. They've got all the things that the iPhone has where you can have it shuffle through pictures of your family or shuffle through pictures of nature. And they've got this live photo feature that's really nice where they'll suggest live photos to you that they've like algorithmically decided might be good, but they can also take any of your live photos and they like process them to

try and stabilize them and have them be like in the in the form for the lock screen and it's really cool um so you set a live photo as your uh lock screen and when you uh you know lift up your ipad open it up whatever the live photo animates to the end of it in the lock screen and then you swipe up and then it could be your wallpaper and all that and i've had that all summer and i really like it um and and yeah the widgets uh less useful because lock screen widgets are less useful and also there's the fact that you know you're usually not dwelling on your lock screen you're usually just flipping up and going to the the um the regular home screen but i really really like the um the changes that they made to the lock screen. They're just, it's so much more dynamic that you can shuffle between photos, that you can do all

those effects. It's all the stuff that the iPhone had last year and a little bit more. I really like it. So this is interesting to me because we just have a different experience. Like I never think about the lock screen of my iPad. So like I use an ipad mini right like for me the lock screen is always in my way to the thing that i want to do so it's just maybe like do you have your ipad like out and visible a lot like do you see the lock screen i don't i usually have it it's in a it's in a cover but what happens is when i wake it up it animates the little lock screen and then i swipe it away and like the animation is it's just kind of delightful the widgets are less useful although it does mean that i can sort of do it a tap for status like you can on an iphone and um tap for

status and sort of see what's going on but i that's not uh generally what i use at live activities are there now too that's part of this and like again i very rarely am am seeing anything that's not generally what I use it. Live activities are there now, too. That's part of this. And like, again, I very rarely am seeing anything that's on my lock screen, even notification center. I'm mostly just passing through on the're at the home screen, if there are things you want to see, like widgets or notifications, the entire lock screen appears when you swipe down from the top. That's your notification center, but it's also your lock screen. So all the widgets show up and everything when you swipe down. Even when you're unlocked, you can see everything. Yeah. I would say I don't like the widgets on the ipad that much i like where they've done it like i like the little sidebar it's kind

of cool but it's just not incredibly useful i mean i think if it isn't always on display on the ipad would be took would be having a different conversation i think sure um and and i think the magnitude of of how you use the lock screen of your iPad versus your iPhone, it's like, it's just not at the same magnitude as, um, as the iPhone. And so it's nice though, but I'll tell you that little, little effect they Apple, cause the Mac OS stuff, which we'll talk about when Mac OS comes out is similar where Apple has done some real fit and finish to do, to say things like, you know, we have animations of things. Could we integrate those into places that you see them

that can provide some delight in using your device? And the lock screen on the iPad is a place that they've injected a little bit of delight. But we've spent, I will say this, we have spent way more time on this compared to other features than it deserves. Fair enough. So let's do that. And let's go like a ramrod in between the two of us. Yep.

I love the new sticker stuff. I love how you can create stickers from photos. For me, it's very good for memes between friends and loved ones. You get a funny picture of someone, turn it into a sticker, and then you can send it to them. I just think it's hilarious. I really you can send it to them. Like,

I just think it's hilarious. Uh, I really like emoji. My top tip for this, by the way, um, you can, I'd forgotten about this. Maybe everybody knows this,

but I'd forgotten. You can just from the emoji keyboard in messages, you can just drag them out stickers. You don't need to like add a sticker or anything. So it's very easy to do. Uh, I'm still super excited for this to come to tap backs like stickers as tap backs that's coming later we'll talk about some other features that are coming later in a bit um but that's really

great so i'm a big fan of this feature i like the little uh effects and animations you can put on them yeah it's really good let's see i've got i just sent you a sticker by the way i hope you enjoy it let me take a look that's a good sticker it's a sticker of my face thank you it's a sticker reacting to uh to it's a live sticker right because it's that it's that photographic uh whatever i don't know it's good stuff i like it um okay uh stage Hey, remember stage manager that people were just disappointed with last time? Remember that? Yep. They got it right.

I mean, that's the short version is I used to try stage manager, especially on an external display, but even just on the main display with a keyboard and trackpad attached and just say, no, no. Like I couldn't stay in it because I would try to move things around and they wouldn't go. And I'd be like, why am I even doing this? And I would bail out. I used stage manager last year, almost entirely for my work in the sense of experiencing stage manager and not for my work in the sense of doing work. That makes sense. Like I use stage manager so I could say I used stage manager, not for my work in the sense of doing work that makes sense like i

use stage manager so i could say i used stage manager but that was it and they changed all sorts of things the big things are the grid that you have to there's an invisible grid essentially that you can place windows on um it's so it's so small now that basically you can put a window wherever you want. There are occasions where it moves a little bit. They're mostly about alignment. I actually wonder if there's a real grid there or not, or if they're doing what they are with widgets on the desktop on the Mac, which is not worrying about where you put a window unless it's in proximity to another window where it sort of lines it up a little bit for you so like what i found in stage manager is the only time it would move my windows at all is if i had a window behind

and then i was putting this window kind of in front of it partly um but it was the top the window was almost aligned with the window right next to it it would sort of push it up and align it okay but um only just tiny amounts basically you can put it anywhere and my big complaint about stage manager last year was i i put windows in places that the system just i fought the system all the time right the system has made some decisions about how i want to act and it's like no you can't do that it's like i i wanted to put a window in the center and then another window behind it off to the left and they're like like, no, those windows go side by side. When there's two windows, they go side by side. It's like, I don't want that. And it wouldn't do it. And now the

system is like, whatever you want, you put that window over there, put this other window over here. They did a really great job. Their fear, I suspect all along was that they were afraid people were going to lose windows behind other windows, but they built this adorable little system where the window, the behind window sticks out the edge of the window that's covering it. It's like, I'm here. I'm still here. And if you tap, if you tap or click on it, it moves back to where it was. It moves ahead of the window that was covering it and then goes back exactly where it was. It doesn't move.

and then goes back exactly where it was. It doesn't move. It's just peeking out to let you know that it's there, which I think is a really great idea because we know that a lot of less sophisticated users, the problem with a multi-window interface is they lose windows. They're covered by other windows and they don't know they're there.

And that's why we have like expose and all these things is to try to solve this problem. And I actually kind of wonder if we're going to see this on the Mac at some point, this idea of the poke out window that's like, I'm here too, I'm here too. Just enough for you to not lose it. It's a, I think they did a great job with that.

And then they added shift click in so many different places now where if you want to add an item to a space from the dock, from spotlight, like pretty much anywhere, you can shift click on it and it just adds it in your space, which makes managing or a stage, I guess, managing the stages that much easier and that much more natural feeling. Combine that with the ability to minimize, which sends it to the sidebar or to close it or to go full screen. It all starts to fit together in a way that, you know, that my, the short version TLDR stage manager was incredibly frustrating and I didn't want to use it last year. And this year it absolutely works. And I could, I could spend lots of time. I could work on a, on an iPad attached to a 27 inch monitor. Now I could

actually do it. In fact, I did it for a couple of days a few weeks ago uh and i couldn't do that before i would pull my hair out so yeah i really like contact posters so it's the feature of basically making a contact card look like a lock screen you know like where you can make a fun image and you can put the name there and stuff like that um i like that you can do it for yourself i like that you can share it with other people and people can share theirs with you. I also like that you can set contact posters for people as well. Like if you've got a particularly nice photo that you enjoy of a person, like most of my contact images for my friends and family are photos from our wedding, even though people would like to have different images for themselves, right? So like

they'll share with you. I like seeing the pictures of my loved ones at our wedding. And so I most of the time will keep those. But I do like that people can share them. And sometimes I change them over. I do like the contact posters feature. It's bringing something new to contacts who could have imagined. Right. And makes somebody's calling you just a little more delightful, right?

I feel like somebody went through the the the ios and ipad os interfaces and said and then no contact posters on the ipad os by the way that'll be next year right um and said we've got all these photos of people and we've got like can we make these nicer the contact posters are literally like the lock screen taken and applied to contact posters. That's what it is. They use the same technology that's in those custom lock screens. And it's such a good idea because they're like, hey, what if we made this thing nicer instead of it being like, because the contact stuff comes from an era.

I feel like where it was like, oh boy, pictures. Wow. We can't really load those pictures. There's a lot of pictures and they're big and we can't really load them. Can we do like a little square that has a person in it? And can we leave it at that? And like, it was from an earlier era and now we live in an era where it's like, sure, we'll, we'll, we'll have thousands and tens of thousands of photos and they'll have animations in them and we'll be able to detect the outlines of them. And like, yeah, we live in that era now enrich it make it nicer make it more delightful

and they have all over the place let's see what else uh health app on the ipad okay i know you've used some of the new health features on the health app yeah i just really like that the health app is on the ipad so that i can take all my data about my activity and workouts and stuff like that. And I am, I've said before, I am far more likely to be using my iPad than my iPhone. When I think about like, oh yeah, I want to check in about that. And I realized that I can't get to my own health data, even though I'm wearing my Apple watch at the time, right? Because it's just like, no, no, no, that goes on your iPhone. And they built a system where you can now sync, choose to sync.

You have to choose and approve it to sync your health data to other devices as well and uh and so you get these nice big there's like a sidebar now and you get these nice big charts and graphs and stuff in on the ipad which is great i have yet to check out the health app on the ipad i forgot that it existed but i like that you like it. It's new. Yeah. It's new. But you tried some of the other stuff out, right?

Like they have the mood, emotion kind of tracking. Yeah, I spoke about this a bit on Cortex. I think that it is a very good first try for this. I hope that they add a bit more. I think that the UI is really good. The reminders are really good. But I think it's lacking a little bit on allowing you to add simple context to some of the prompts.

So like, you know, you say you might be stressed and you can kind of talk about what's making you stressed and why it's making you feel that way. They have little buttons that you can press to kind of like, oh, I'm upset about this.

But I didn't feel like there were enough options. The one that I spoke about on Cortex is I was stressed about something, we're having some improvement works on the home and it wasn't going very well. And what I wanted to say was that you could say stressed and feeling anxious and it's like, what is making you feel that way?

And there was nothing for home for example like it was they were like very very like i feel like way too specific and you could write something of your own but only after you'd chosen one of the options and so i felt like there were barriers to me being able to adequately talk about what was making me feel a certain way so i would like to see them do more in that department in the future. But I think as a first step, the mood tracking, I think it's really good. I think they've done a good job of it. It's good.

So is it me again now? Yes. I just co-opted one. Standby. Standby is probably my favorite feature of iOS 17. I love that I can put my phone on a charger on my desk and now I can get like information from it. I just think it's so cool.

There are so many apps that are being updated with some really nice standby widgets. And so I can get, you know, my next calendar event. I can see what time is running and I can see photos from, you know, like albums and stuff. Or yeah, like Widgetsmith. I have some Widgetsmith ones in there so I can get some from you know like albums and stuff or yeah like Widgetsmith I have some Widgetsmith ones in there so I can get some like photos running from my albums

I just think it's fantastic like I really really love standby and it's that alone has made me a MagSafe charging person because it's just so awesome so convenient I'm a huge fan of it I love it yeah I think it's really good I keep running I'm withholding judgment a little bit because it's been in the beta period.

And also, you know, the apps that use it keep shifting. And I can't decide whether that's because the apps are in beta as well. And they're getting updated in test flight and things like that. My frustration with it is mostly been I pick widgets and I turn off all the suggestions and everything. And then i come back later and the widget that i had in there is gone and it's been replaced by some random other widget oh that's weird i have not had that problem i hate it i hate it so strange i don't know what's

i don't know what's going on there yeah there was a moment where i had a uh i had a time widget a clock widget and suddenly it was uh it was heads or tails from p calc from dice by p calc and so i walked in instead of the time it said tails like what tails o'clock you never know when you're going to need to flip a coin and i can't so i have to use dice by p calc to do it so uh i that is a bug that has bugged me but i like the idea. I'm also intrigued by the idea of standby since it will do media playback and stuff like that. Standby is a thing you could potentially use in a car if you don't have CarPlay.

If you have it sideways and plugged in, it doesn't actually have to use MagSafe, I don't think. I think it just needs to be plugged in. You could actually have it as a little media dashboard. I believe, if I'm remembering correctly from Federico's review, that he tried to do this and it did not work. Interesting. Because in the movement, it would shut off standby. Oh, the movement shuts it off.

That is fascinating. Well, I think that one of the, on my to-do list for Apple is, I feel like, I know apple wants every car to have car play but not every car does have car play and of course we know the gm is not planning on having car play on any of their future electric cars i wonder like they're they it feels very close to me to them having essentially like a car interface on the iphone for people who don't have uhPlay. Like Maps already does it. Standby kind of, those widgets are kind of in the ballpark as well. I just wonder if there might be a way for them to do something that was either like CarPlay

or actually CarPlay on an iPhone if you're in a car without CarPlay. But anyway, I like Standby. I think it's good. I have the Belkin charger that also has the little AirPods charger on the bottom of it. And it's pretty cool and it's good. I have a, I had the Belkin charger, um, that also has the little AirPods charger on the bottom of it. And it's pretty cool. And it's pretty cute. I haven't decided where it's going to live long-term right now. It's out in the, in the kitchen, um, where,

which is why I've been using it sort of as a clock in there. Um, I don't know about putting it on my desk or not. I might do that, but, um, it's a great feature. It's a really cool use of, this is another example of Apple just using all that widget technology, right? They built this new generation of widgets. They continue to update it. This whole OS generation has the interactive widgets as well. And it's a great example of Apple

just sort of like taking, building this one technology and then exploding it into all these different places on all of its platforms. It's very good. Speaking of which, interactive widgets in general, I love them. I feel like this is something that we're going to see a lot more of over the next couple of weeks. On a note,

we're talking about a lot of things today, but over the next few weeks, there will be more third-party apps that are coming out. iOS, I don't even know if it's out at the time we're recording this, but it is out today um yeah i think it may have started rolling out already but so we'll be covering over the next few weeks some stuff that we like but from an interactive widget perspective the home widget i love just being able to turn lights on and off timery is fantastic joe has just done an incredible job like one of my favorite things that joe has done is the ability to have like scrollable information inside of a widget it's like if you have a bunch

of save timers you can have a backwards and forwards button to page through all of your timers uh widget smith has just got some wild ones underscore has built cover flow as a music widget which is wild but my favorite is you can one of one of the the widgets that i always really like is a countdown timer so you can have like a countdown to a certain event and you could put an image behind that countdown timer well now with the countdown timer widget and a bunch of others you can hide information behind the widget so i have like an image right now of last year's podcastathon on my home screen and when i tap it it slides up and i get the countdown until the podcastathon and i'm going to do that for vacations too so i can have an

image of the place where i'm going on holiday i can tap it the image of the thing slides up and it's underneath underscore as you can imagine has built some truly incredible things in widgetsmith and fantastical as well i've been using their one but I don't know if it's out yet. So I'm gonna talk about it too much. So what strikes me about this, the interactive widget thing is that I feel like we are potentially entering an era

where Apple is sort of saying, there are lots of interactions you can do with apps that you don't need to do in the app. Right? I like this. I like this idea that maybe your home screen is no longer a place where you just launch apps or launch apps and look at information, but it's actually a place where you do things and that the full-on app for some apps not all apps are appropriate for this but like for some apps that the full-on app itself is sort of like the place you go when you really have to get

into it but that you don't have to go there for a whole class of uh particular actions and i just i think that's fascinating because before it was always like, like, look, you launch apps and then you use the apps and then you leave the apps. And now Apple's sort of saying, no, you know, you have little bits of the apps that are just out here and you could, you could put, you know, on a page on your iPhone home screen, you can put three widgets and swipe there and then be like, okay, I'm going to tap this thing and I'm going to tap that thing. And I'm going to, you know and I'm going to tap that thing. And I'm going to, you know, I'm done with a task. So I'm going to tap done on reminders and then tap to a new, you know, tap off or to a new thing on Timery.

And then you move on and like, you never opened those apps, but you checked off your reminder or to do or whatever app you're using. And you also changed your time tracking. Like that's an interesting shift in philosophy to say, opening the apps is not the way you have to interact with them in fact some apps i would imagine you might you know it might be very rare that you need to go in because the stuff you use them for is out on that top level and on a widget somewhere the fantastical one is out and like effectively on one of the

widgets the widget type that i use they now have the ability to go like you can skip month to month right so you one thing that i always want to know what day is this date so i can see that so i can see that like i could just tap forward to october and see that the 27th of october is a friday but it also shows you a preview of the events that you have on those days so it it's like, that is something that I open the app for a lot that I now don't need to open the app for. So yeah, I'm really excited to see more of these roll out over the next couple of weeks. But I expect my home screens are going to change all over again

because of interactive widgets. Let me do a couple real quick. Proximity sharing, I want to mention, because this is the other shoe dropping about Apple turning off the ability to accept an airdrop from anyone. You used to be able to be, and it was dangerous, but you could say, oh, yes, accept an airdrop from anyone. And they changed it, and there was all that talk about how China wanted them to change it and all of that. anyone. And they changed it. And there was all that talk about how China wanted them to change it and all of that. This is the other shoe dropping there, because what this is saying is, if you're in a situation where there's somebody who's not in your contacts, you have not approved them, but they want to share something with you and you're together, what you do is you put one

phone in proximity to the other. They're looking for your approval. This is how you have a consensual airdrop. So you put them together and then there's a little pulsating animation and you say, all right, now I'm going to share this thing with you. And I really think this is smart. This is the idea. You're not in my contacts. I can't airdrop this to you directly, but we agree you're going to send me that picture and we essentially tap phones and then the picture gets sent really smart i like it a lot um i think it's a good way of also taking software chrome even if you're in the context taking software chrome and taking many taps out of the process. You know, if, if I take a picture

and my mom, you know, I'm visiting my mom and she's like, Oh, can I have that picture right now? Um, I can do that. And it just pops up with her. But if she takes a picture and wants to send it to me, it's a whole thing, right? Where she could text it to me, but I really want the airdrop version and all that. Well, well with this you just bring your phones together and then it says yeah okay i'll send that it's just it's really nice it's really well done um there's maybe a little bit of a learning curve but like the idea that you use your interface is how you place your phone in the real world i like that a lot i think that's really good. And then I want to mention your favorite, tvOS. My fave.

I think continuity camera support in tvOS is, it points at potentially future Apple products, but I think it's a game changer. The idea that you can put a camera on a table or on top of your TV, like an iPhone on your table or on your top of your TV, like an iPhone on your table or on your top of your TV, and then just sit in front of the TV and do a family chat with other people using FaceTime or whatever, like it's such a good idea. And the execution is so good. It's using your iPhone back camera to do center stage and zoom in on you. I used this a few times over the summer. It's really, really impressive. And what it makes me want, of course, is a device where there's an integrated camera or there's a little continuity camera you can leave permanently somewhere. But using your iPhone

works okay. I use the same Belkin adapter that I, or little a mount that I can put on top of my studio display goes on top of my TV too. It looks so good. Uh, sounds good. Like it's, it's really good. I, I have been using FaceTime, but I can't wait to use this with something like zoom where we do a family zoom every other week. Yeah. Like to do this and we do it in the living room, but we just have like an iPad or a MacBook sitting on the table and the angle isn't very good and like just put it on the TV. Such a great idea. So I really like how they've executed it. It looks really good. But it also makes me wonder what,

you know, do they have a broader strategy here down the road because they're building the pieces. But even as it is today, you got to have a, you got to have an apple tv 4k and it's got to be one of the two most recent versions i think not the first version so there's some limitations but boy it's really good i'm very impressed i like the new autocorrect i think it's very effective i think it's doing a really good job um i'm also in i'm in i job. I've been trying out some of the AirPods stuff.

The conversational awareness feature is really interesting where you can be listening to audio or something and you start talking and it will either turn the volume down, it will take you off of noise cancellation, and I think it's really cool. The one issue I've had right now is if I'm listening to something on my AirPods while i'm

brushing my teeth sometimes it activates conversational awareness which is not what i'm looking for in that moment and i'm really intrigued about what it is exactly that is making it do that my experience with it is that i i when i'm walking the dog i have to give her feedback and every time i tell something to the dog it just drops me down because it thinks oh you're you're having a conversation it's like i'm not it's it's a it's just my voice and i i'm hoping that maybe a future version of this is a little more aware of sort of like the sounds it's not just me but like that there's another voice happening that there's interaction happening because i heard somebody else said uh when they sing along with the music it dims the

music it's like no no no no no that's not good that's not so i turned it off i i adaptive audio is one of those things like well adapted audio i love that's a new feature i'm not sure about that one i'm not sure about adaptive audio yet. I use that instead of transparency now, adaptive audio, because it is essentially better transparency algorithm. You can hear everything that's around you, and yet it's suppressing stuff that is just kind of like a broadband tone.

It's just sort of like always there. So it's not noise canceling. And on a plane, I'll use noise canceling. But when I'm running, I use adaptive audio and I like it. Conversational awareness, I turned off because I'm talking to the dog when I'm walking the dog. And it worked great on an airplane when I was talking to the flight attendant or talking to my family. It was great. And I could turn it on for that. But mostly I'm walking the dog all the time i'm always walking the dog and i i have to give her commands and it thinks that i'm having a conversation yeah maizey doesn't talk back right like it's not a conversation that's been going on there and i understand that that's hard but i just had to turn it off

but um but the adaptive audio i like the um then there's the adaptive the the volume thing that's the volume volume i like that i hate it i hate it this is super interesting everyone i'm talking to about all this new airpods stuff has very different views so like for me with adaptive audio what i'm finding is when i'm out in the street i have the feeling of noise cancellation. You know, you get like noise cancellation has a feeling, right? Like it has like a pressure to it. I feel like that's happening more than I want.

Like I'm feeling that I'm under noise cancellation, even though I can hear things more, but it's doing like a little mixture of it. So I'm not sold on it, but I'm still under testing for adaptive audio. Like I said, I think what it's doing is it's taking like, so I live by a freeway, right? So there's a little background hiss of the freeway, you know, all the time. It takes that out because that's just an unchanging background sound and unchanging kind of like air sound.

But if a car is coming, I can hear it crystal clear that a car is coming. Yeah. And I like that, right? Because that's why I'm wearing them. And that's why they were in transparency mode before. So all it's doing is it's a little nicer transparency mode. But I'll tell you why I don't like the personalized volume thing is I don't notice it.

Maybe it's working for me in certain scenarios and I'm just not noticing it. And then great, that's great. But where I notice it is that I'm listening to something at a perfectly good volume and then it suddenly just lowers the volume a lot. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like I'm listening.

It happens to me when I'm about to go out the door with the dog and I'm listening to a podcast and I'm getting the leash and I'm getting ready to go. And then my podcast gets real quiet and I roll my eyes and I make the podcast louder so I can hear it. And like, if that's, if, if that's all I'm noticing, I just have to turn it off because it's not working right. It's not doing it right. Anything else you wanted to talk about in iOS? Yeah. Um, if you, speaking of my dog, uh, pets are finally in photos. So it's, it's people in pets now everywhere instead of just pets.

Uh, that made my, that was my big challenge for, uh, updating my book about the photos app is every reference to people is now people in pets, but it works and it works pretty well. It's not perfect, but then the people detection isn't perfect either, but they obviously have some sort of like animal, um, algorithm for dogs and cats that try to identify them and differentiate them. And it does pretty, it does pretty well. My, so I have a tortoiseshell cat who's got the sort of orange and black coloring and a, and a model sort of split face modeling kind of thing going on orange on one side, black on the other.

And there was a cat that we met several times in our neighborhood many years ago, who is the same kind of cat. And that cat showed up in the collection for my cat. And I mean, you just click and you say, this is not that cat. And then they go away. I thought that was interesting. Whereas a very similar cat showed up. However, I had two black cats and they are black cats, right? They're slightly different, right? They're different, but it did a really good job of differentiating between them.

Now, I suspect one of the things that their algorithm is doing is looking at time, right? I suspect that part of what they're doing is saying, well, these cats are not quite the same. And all of this cluster of the cat that looks kind of like this is in this five-year span. And all of the cluster of the cat that looks kind of like this

is in this 10-year span. I think these are different cats, right? I think that it's doing some of that too, but it worked pretty well. Like, I think I look through the photos and I'm like, is that tie or rocket? And it's like,

Oh, that's rocket. But like it, I have to pause. And so the fact that Apple's algorithm has done a serviceable job on taking similarly, similar looking pets and differentiating them uh and it is great to be able to just click on a on a dog and say here are all the pictures of your dog

which before you had to like search for dog and then you get your dog and other people's dogs and all of that which is less good so uh good feature like it so there are a selection of features coming later to ios 17 some small some big i feel like this year there's maybe a bunch more big foot features than there have been before so i mentioned sticker tap backs the airdrop feature where you can walk away from someone from the proximity and have it complete the transfer over the internet is coming later yeah all of the music playlist collaboration features are coming later the pdf form detection is coming later and the journaling app it's a bunch of stuff yeah sticker tap backs is the one that i want desperately me too because i want to

be able to do emoji tap backs yeah of any emoji yeah we'll get there we'll get there we'll get there i wonder what that interface will look like how it'll work and all of that but i mean we may get there pretty soon because sometimes what happens if you're living the beta life and this is why we might be doing details again next week true uh you live you live the beta life they put out a new beta when they ship the old one and then they do the beta the next one and all those features get imported that are not ready yet that that happens sometimes so we'll stay on the beta train this time around which i usually don't but there's a bunch of stuff in there that i want to try as soon as it becomes available so yeah can I give you some quick thoughts on WatchOS 10? I installed the release candidate,

so I've only been using it for a few days. So I think I echo what I've heard a lot of people say. I don't like that the side button, what that used to do for me was show me a bunch of pinned applications that I wanted to be able to use, that has gone away, that feature completely. The side button now brings up control center, which is fine, but there's no way for me to get to a list of applications easily. I have like five apps that I would use a lot and you just can't get to them. There is still a kind of recently used multitasking view when you double tap the crown. I just want to be able to pin apps there like just let me do that but they don't let me do that um i do like you know i like the widgets a lot i like that there's that widget that lets me add some kind of app shortcuts right like like complication style

i don't know why i can't add more than one of those why can't i have two of those widgets that let me have like six little complications like that find that really weird um there are way too many ways to get to widgets like that you can get to widgets for like two or three different actions on this thing and i just think it's too much like it's it's unnecessary to me to have it like widgets access in so many ways i hope that it works out in the long run. I enjoy the UI of the widgets. I like the way that they look. The apps that I care most about widget-wise, I do already have complications for them. So I hope that this functionality gets adopted kind of more widely.

I did get on a beta for a watch app that I would not have a complication for, that does have a widget, and I've been using it over the last few days, and it's awesome. I can't talk about it yet, but I'm very happy that it's there. I think when this app becomes available, people will know what I'm talking about.

I don't understand why on the widget screen, the date and the clock are there. Why are they there? Why are the date and clock there? I just came from a watch face. I don't need another watch face, and they take up too much space. I could have two or three widgets like immediately.

Why do I need this huge date and clock? Like I don't understand that at all. Completely. It feels like you're entering somebody else's watch face. Yes. Why is this there? There's like a little mini watch face and then scrollable widgets.

But it's like, I was just on a watch face that has the time because all the watch faces have the time and the date i think because every time i want to get to my widgets now it's always two swipes it's always two swipes so i swipe up and i have to swipe up again right to be able to get to anything other than the first one yeah and i'm not sure about the the smart of the smart stack right because they're supposed to like move around to what is active like for example right now i have a timer widget running now that should be on the top because that is an active thing that is occurring so i find that weird but it's not there um but i i love i really like the way it looks like i like the widgets i find the widgets helpful and useful

i like the design of widgets and it is a better way of doing that. I used to be a fan of the Siri watch face and I like that. So yeah, I thought it was really good. I never remember to use the widgets on watchOS 10. I never remember. I have used them almost not at all. I need to revisit them and see if I can make them more useful,

but I will agree when I do use it, I just roll my eyes because I get that. I'm immediately given another time of the i've seen the time i was just at the time why are you put it showing me the time again and not my widgets which is why i'm here i don't get it but i need to i need to try that more and also the apps that i use really they need to be updated you know and i hope they are to do watch widgets we'll see i think in general there's a lot more watch apps like i like the overall design of the new watch apps the full

screen stuff that's my favorite thing about it good really good really fresh um both this and just the general watch ui makes me really look forward to getting my ultra like i feel like notifications for example it feels like it wants a bigger watch like the new design of the way a lot of this stuff works um and i like the way that the swipe typing keyboard feels more reliable i don't know if they're using the new autocorrect here with the transformer model if they are it would be interesting because swipe typing on ios does not use the transformer model if you swipe type it doesn't make those suggestions that only if you're like typing out the letters as you go so i would say i like watch os 10 i like the widgets and stuff but

i think there is more refinement needed on that view and i hope that i continue to see more really good updates because there's a bunch there and watch updates that i've seen so far and i hope that that continues because they're really cool yeah all right should we finish out with a couple of ask upgrade questions today yeah let's do it so cory asks for the record when will the ask upgrade lasers which did not fire which is interesting uh when will they be a hundred percent carbon you just asked me a question about let's go back. You asked me the question I said yes Mike let's do ask upgrade. Then it's time for ask upgrade. Corey asks

for the record when will the ask upgrade lasers be 100% carbon neutral? Corey I got bad news for you. These are lasers we picked up at the supervillain factory and they they are they generate vast amounts of carbon dioxide every time they're fired

yep that's the sorry we put coal in and it just generates like 10 times more emissions yeah no it's it's it's very bad for the earth um but you know these are again they're just they're lasers they're bad for the earth they're they're trying they're not good what are we supposed to do we have an episode every week like what are we supposed to do? We have an episode every week. What are we supposed to do? Yeah. I mean, to be fair, we only fire them three times every week for the most part. This week it went well for a bunch. But there, if...

So I guess the answer is maybe someday, but I'm not going to commit to 2030 for the lasers to be carbon neutral. That is very fair. And that is very well we're not and unlike other companies we're not working toward it it might happen sometime but we're not actually working toward it it's just if if the lasers become carbon neutral that was an accident like they just did that we didn't do it right if we buy lasers and then somebody points out that those lasers that you bought they're actually green first off we prefer them in red the lasers are red for strange reasons yeah interestingly i've always imagined the lasers are red that's weird that's a laser color it's the color a laser is

is red right the green laser i don't know that's like a lightsaber or something it's not the same so anyway they're not green they're red and they're they murder people um we fire that we don't kill people with them. They were made to murder people. We fire them into the ground and it's fine. Very few upgrade interns have been harmed by the lasers. So anyway, so maybe someday accidentally they will be carbon neutral. But in the meantime, they are hurting the earth and we're not making any progress toward our goals.

And Eric asks, is the new iPhone 15 Pro having USB 3, could the fastest way to transfer to your new iPhone be from a backup from your Mac? Understand you would need the correct cable, of course. Do you have plans for how you're going to set up your new phones on Friday? Well, I mean, I just the um regular old transfer assistant um i think the there's a good question though um i don't know why it would be faster because you would have to go from you would have to go from your one device to the mac and then the mac to the other device and that you're not going to get any savings there so i think the fastest way to do it is to is to transfer directly either via cable or via via wireless and i'm going to do that device to device transfer thing again i think yeah i i don't remember i think last time i had a bad time

with it but i'm just going to give that a go again i think you're always rolling the dice as to whether the transfer is going to be good or not and next week we'll talk about whether it was good or not you know if i've done it by then because we're actually going to record in person on sunday i'm expecting i probably would have transferred my iphone by then but i'm not sure but we'll see i don't know it's we're living in uncertain times right now we sure are if you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in an Ask Upgrade question there. You can also send in your feedback and your follow-up. Don't forget stjude.org slash relay. Find out more about our work for St. Jude throughout all of

September, which is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. You can donate, you can sign up to fundraise and join us for the podcast-a-thon on Friday, September 22nd. You can check out Jason's work at sixcolors.com. You'll find lots of coverage of the new OSs there. You can hear Jason on his podcast here and on The Incomparable. You can listen to my shows on RelayFM and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. We're on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights. Mike is at imike on mike.social.

You can also find the show on Mastodon as upgrade at relayfm.social. You'll find video clips of the show there and also on our video platforms, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. We are at Upgrade Relay on all. We're also on threads. I am at imike. Jason is at jsnall. Thank you to our members and supporters of Upgrade Plus. You can get longer ad-free versions of the show each and every week. Today, I'm going to tell on Upgrade Plus, Jason,

about my bananas visit trip. Like, sorry, my trip. My trip here was wild and I'm going to tell Jason what happened. You can find that on Upgrade Plus. Thank you to our sponsors of this week's episode,

which was ZocDoc and Electric. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Early.