Upgrade - 479: The Three Oranges

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

As a very busy September turns over into October, we've got an episode packed with follow-up: Tim Cook takes another European vacation, the Vision Pro product roadmap recedes, Apple considers its search-engine strategy, and we review macOS Sonoma.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 479 it is october 2nd 2023 this episode is brought to you by squarespace and uni pizza ovens my name is mike hurley i'm'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. It is me. I just like that pause. It makes me wonder, like, what is this upgrade? Is this something else? We don't know. It's drama. Sometimes the introductions, they're just, you know, they come into me on the fly. Like, I don't really know what is going to happen next, you know, and that was it. I took a pause. you know, and that was it. I took a pause. We're into October already. I think that was what actually made me pause. I kind of can't believe that we're in the fourth quarter of this year.

It is surprising. And also September has like 60 days in it, right? Is that how that works? September's not over around these parts. We'll talk about that in a minute. September begins at the end of August and ends at the beginning of October. That's September.

I have a Snow Talk question for you. It comes from Mark. Mark asks, Jason, do you decorate your home for Halloween? If you do, when do you put up and take down these decorations? I don't.

Okay. Halloween, not my favorite, honestly my favorite i do have though there's one decoration that i do have i have the um i have a tube man you know one of those air dancer tube men and he's orange the wacky inflatable um flailing yeah he tells you to you know look over here. And I'm sure I've talked about this before. I think I bought it from a company called lookatme.com. It's literally look over here, something like that.

And he is my Halloween decoration. So on Halloween or whenever the trick-or-treaters are out, because we live in it. I grew up out in the middle of nowhere. We didn't have trick-or-treaters. We didn't do trick-or-treating. It was just not a thing. And now I live in the prime neighborhood where everybody in my town comes for trick-or-treating and we have to buy huge bags of it. And I hate it. I hate it. Sorry, people who love Halloween. I hate it. I don't want the people to come to the door. I really would like to be one of those people who like turns off all the lights

and hides, but you just can't. So instead we do it. And I'm also married to somebody who doesn't want to do that. So, um, but, but my, what I do is, uh, I put out my tube man. I put them out, um, sometimes on the roof, sometimes on the front lawn or the front it's not a lawn anymore the front uh uh native plants uh garden and uh you know what the tube man delights the children delights the children of course it does they love the tube man and so that's my contribution to halloween uh as well as paying for bags of crappy cheap candy that we give away to kids uh my my contribution is the tube man he brings happiness to all and i also have a santa tube man uh and and uh because you get a little blower and then you can get little these little sort of silk uh tube men separately

they're like uh it's a whole ecosystem of tube men and uh yes it is it is what a service that is too we salute you tube man uh thank you for your service so um santa anyway santa goes up around christmas and i do tube santa for a little bit but the primary objective of tube man actually the primary objective of having a tube man is that my daughter and i always talked about wanting a tube man. And I finally bought one. But after that, it was, won't he be great for Halloween? And it turns out he is great for Halloween. And all the seasons, apparently. You can get an Easter bunny.

Honestly, Mike, there is like an Uncle Sam tube man that I'm thinking of buying for the 4th of July. You've got to. Right? You've got to. That would got to that would be hilarious right so man wants you yeah to celebrate the 4th of july with fireworks or whatever but not around me because you might burn me down uh so yeah i love uh i love my tube man that's what i'm saying who wouldn't and i love snail talk questions because of that if you would like to send in a question of your own for us to open a future episode of upgrade go to upgradefeedback.com so we mentioned that september continues so this is the final call for relay fm for saint jude go to saint jude.org slash Relay. Our campaign

is ending officially on Friday, October 6th. So that's the final day of the campaign. We have currently raised as of recording right now $742,000 which is truly incredible.

We have obliterated our previous goal, which is $706,000, like our previous top amount raised, like a record is the word I'm looking for. That was set last year, the $706,000. We have smashed through that. I cannot believe

what our community has done this year. It is truly incredible. We are like staring down 3 million lifetime at this point. It's like $50,000 away. So difficult, but not impossible by the end of the week. So what I would say right now is if you have yet to donate, now is an incredible time to do so. Go to stjude.org slash relay

and you can help support the life-saving work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. One of the most important parts of being a patient at St. Jude is having the space to not just be a patient, but to be a kid. This year, St. Jude opened the Family Commons, a 45,000 square foot space just for families.

It is a treatment and clinical staff free floor of the hospital, a place for families to rest and reconnect between their appointments. This space came about after feedback from parents of St. Jude who were looking for a space on campus where families could get downtime together between their clinical appointments to have a sense of normalcy. This is like the whole thing at St. Jude. It's more than a hospital. It's more than a research center. It's all of those things and more than all of that. And that is why I believe we can help get them to their life-saving work, their goal, which is to make sure that no child dies from cancer. That is St. Jude's goal. And with the donations from listeners like you, we get one step closer to that day, one cure closer, one child closer. The longer we do

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childhood cancer together and now it's october yeah i guess for us it is october now i guess that's how that works turn the page uh we have like a funny thing that's happened um due to a shipping error from a shipping company a selection of international parcels of our summer of fun merchandise went missing including mine if i could quote if i could quote uh i'll erase some of the details but if i could quote from our contact in the cotton bureau after invest investigating carriers, a carrier eventually advised us that they have officially lost 15 packages,

including one that was supposed to go to Mike. They have no idea where they are. If we ever get them back, it won't be soon. This is exceptionally rare. And they told us they identified the issue and fixed it. Now, when this came up in one of our,

one of our discords, i think somebody suggested like okay who's dry you know what the driver that like drove their truck off a ledge or off a cliff or something like that has been has been uh relieved of their duties or left the truck somewhere and came back to find it overturned empty and on fire has Has been let go. I like what Zach has proposed in Discord, that it is a summer of fun heist. That somebody just really wanted all this merchandise. I like it. The big, big heist.

Anyway, Carrier says, you're not getting it. Or if you are getting it, it will be a very long time from now. What I'm happy about, though, is that the Car did realize it was their problem and they fixed the problem. Like, that makes me happy, right? At least. We fixed it. This particular problem will never happen again. Again, that's because Jerry has been let go.

So I guess if you live overseas and from this point on ever receive a parcel from Cotton Bureau with your merchandise in it, you can thank the Upgradians for having solved this for you. I guess. So to make sure that everyone, including me, gets the Summer of Fun shirts that they ordered, we've reopened the campaigns of some of this stuff. Amazing. So this allows us to, just with the way that things work at Cotton Bureau,

it's an easy way to put it through. But it also means if you missed out on a wonderful summer t-shirt, you have another chance. And we've also used this as an opportunity to bring back the ever excellent upgrade hoodie, which has a wonderful embroidered patch and a secret upgradian seal screen print on the inside.

So these are all on sale for the next two weeks. UpgradeYourWardrobe.com. These are also joining our ever-present excellent selection of on-demand t-shirts that you can go and check out at any time over at upgradeyourwardrobe.com. Yeah, and the hoodie, I beseech you, the hoodie doesn't go on sale that

often. It is here in the Northern Hemisphere getting toward the cooler months. The hoodie is back, and it does have the special secret screen print on the inside on top of everything else i'm wearing my thunderbolt doc shirt right now mike which you don't have i don't have one of those i'm wearing my room around up t-shirt ah that's nice which people can buy at any time i look forward to joining you in time for christmas that's nice i did wear this on the

podcast so you got to see it and that was that moment where, because we knew about this already, where you said, oh, so that's what that t-shirt looks like. Because I had been paying attention. I'd been like, I sent an email to Compre. I was like, did this? What happened to this? And I think that was one of the things. They heard from a couple of people.

They started their investigations, and now it has opened up one more opportunity for you to buy this merchandise if you would like yeah yeah this happened on the incomparable too by the way so the uh we we had a bunch of incomparable shirts that also never reached their destination so yeah it's great i have quite a lot of follow-up today that i would like to talk to you about it feels like we always have this episode right where um after all of the things that have been going on we suddenly end up with just a huge amount of footnotes and

follow-up so here we are first i actually would just like to ask you a question have you made a decision about your personal iphone i haven't made a final decision yet it's in it's still in the box that it was shipped in but i haven't done a transfer because i've got i still haven't by the way i still haven't has jason made an iphone review question mark the answer no i haven't i'm still thinking about it i think this week i'm still thinking about it well i mean what do i say now it's been all this time right because i get it after i got it during the podcast-a-thon everybody got their iphones so i i have to think about it's going to be more like you know an essay about an iphone 15 is what it'll be so i haven't done that so i'm still using all the review units i went to the uh cal football

game this weekend took a bunch of shots with the 5x camera oh well that 5x camera on the promax it's real nice right yeah um right now i'm leaning toward actually keeping the phone I ordered, a 15 Pro in Midnight Blue, because I do like the Midnight Blue. I also like the Natural. In holding the Pro Max, as much as I love that 5X, I don't want a phone that big. I just don't. I could use it. And in fact, I've tried to... So we talked about this when we were in Memphis.

and in fact i i've tried to so we talked about this when we were in memphis um i've tried to um narrow into why i i said it's not that bad and of course then you devil on my shoulder were like it's in fact it's good jason it's good i think the fact that i run and walk the dog and all those things with the Apple Watch has made my concerns about iPhone size a lot less relevant to me, right? Because one of my reasons for getting a mini and wanting the smaller phone is that I hate going out and having the iPhone in my pocket and it's, you know, swishing around in there. Or it's like, it's, it's just, I don't like having that iPhone weight in my pocket when I'm just walking around in the neighborhood and that's gone. Right. And the only time I bring the iPhone with me now is when I'm like, I put on the big boy pants and I like go somewhere. Right. I don't, if I'm just walking the dog, I don't bother and that means size is less of a

concern because uh in those places where i really need to not be burdened i am totally unburdened now because i just use the apple watch so i think that's the reason behind it but having carried it around for the review and taking the shots the beautiful beautiful shots of that 5X camera, I don't think it's for me. I think it's just too big. I think my hands don't fit on it very well. And I think it's a bridge too far. But I will admit to being tempted by it. And I will admit that that 5X camera is spectacular. So I think what's really happening is if I'm any indication, a lot of people are going to be more tempted. And that's probably my guess is the percentage is going to shift a little bit toward the Pro Max this year. And I hope that next year, the smaller phone gets that higher zoom because that would be amazing. But that's sort of where I am right now. But I've got a little time to decide. I'm going to wait until my iPhone review is over

before making a final decision. Last week on the show, you mentioned that the international orange on my Apple Watch could be held up to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is also painted international orange. Friend of the show, Ian, wrote in to say, fun fact, international orange is not just one color

but rather three so we should start calling it international oranges that yes clearly there is aerospace golden gate bridge and engineering golden gate bridge the three genders orange aerospace golden gate bridge and engineering they're not even they're not even match that's so weird that's like that's like uh we're i'm gonna provide you with three options there's running fish and john what makes it worse what so the link is in the show notes to the wikipedia page yeah is that they are all just called international orange and then in brackets either aerospace golden gate bridge or engineering to me this reads without doing any research about this to me this reads as like they wanted to paint the golden gate bridge international orange and messed

up and then just then created like the wrong color. Well, without knowing anything about it, I'm going to invent a narrative here, which is I wonder if the Golden Gate Bridge was painted international orange. And then they said, we need some other international oranges that aren't that color. And so they expanded it. But the Golden Gate Bridge is so synonymous with international orange that they said, OK, that's that one. one yes that is international orange but we need an engineering one and an aerospace one so we've added those two we need to lighten it up a little bit for airplanes or

whatever well you say that but i've got to continue and it's going to unfortunately prove that wrong i think so golden gate bridge is slightly more red this carries on from ian more red than what people often picture when they think of international orange. Engineering is the most red. It was specified in 1956. Right, so after the Golden Gate Bridge. During World War II, to precisely describe a high visibility color to the growing list of military equipment contractors,

most often seen on today's radio masts. Wait, when was the Golden Gate Bridge built? 1939? Well, who knows? The history of International Orange will remain a mystery, but there were three colors. Okay. Now, which one? Here's the kicker, Mike.

Which one is the button on the side of the Apple Watch Ultra? I think it's more close to International Orange Aerospace aerospace but i'll have to wait until i go and uh go and look at it okay i'm looking at i'm looking at wikipedia look at the wikipedia entry and looking at the button on the watch you know what maybe it is a fourth international orange and it's apple watch you know why not why not okay well we'll just look mike the important thing here is that there'll be more follow-up on this most definitely i mean it's already starting about people being upset about me not knowing the exact dates of world war two you know yeah also it's confusing because it was specified in 56 but they started using in world war ii so that's another example where they picked a color and then later they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's international orange. It's red. But sure, we'll call that international orange too after the fact. So that's, yeah, exactly.

So we spoke for a long, many episodes quite a while ago about you trying to get a smart lock for your home that had HomeKey support. And you settled on the Schlag. Schlage. Schlage. Schlage. Lock. Let's say Schlage. And I saw something on MacRumors that Yale has debuted two new smart locks.

Yeah. And I saw some people in the Six Colors member Discord talked about this too, who got them. So I've got the Schlage lock, and that's how they pronounce it, even though as a German student, I really want to call it Schlage, but it's not a Schlage because it's Americans. Yale is what I had before. What I like about the Yale locks is that they're almost featureless. They're like these little dark kind of portals and they're flat and they sit on the door. And then you can either touch them and put in a number pad code. The number pad lights up or you can hold your watch or phone up to the lock in this case now, and they auto unlock that based on the NFC chip. And that's how home key works.

Great. The Schlage lock that I've got, I don't like it quite as much. It's kind of got like a frame around it. And then the keypad is sort of indented. It's got a, and then depending on your feelings, it's got a keyholehole it's got like a lock um and you can use a physical lock or physical key with it to turn the lock um which lauren was telling me she likes that because there's this sort of like backup of like you could just use the key if you want to and she likes that um i i it's fine i mean my thought is it also means that it's easier to pick the lock yeah but i mean really at that point somebody's gonna bring into your house this year one there is a key option

like so you can you can have it key yeah key free yeah and the key free i think they have like a little contacts for like a uh a battery battery yeah so you can wake it up and you can jump start your lock if you need to essentially it's So anyway, it's, it's nice. And in fact, I might prefer this design. And if I didn't already have one, I might buy this one. However, and Yale's not going to like me saying this, but it's just, I have to call it like it is. My door doesn't fit exactly right. It's not immaculate.

It's a little bit off. And that means that sometimes, depending on how the door has set, when it's closed by a person, the bolt comes out and it strikes the strike plate a little bit. And it has to kind of like push and essentially move the door a very small amount in order to get it all the way through. So there's a little, sometimes a little extra force that's required. So there's a little X, sometimes a little extra force that's required. And in my experience, the Yale, the last generation Yale smart lock did was the motor was not very strong and it would often fail and it was not great. And I did a lot of rejiggering to my door to try to get it to work better. But the fact was that there were certain times when it would fail and that, and then beep loudly. And it was not great. I have not had a failure like that with the Schlage lock. It has a much stronger motor.

It did have a physical failure in part of the bolt housing. And I called them and they said, oh, sorry, that does happen sometimes with our locks. And we are sending one to you free right now and i replaced it and it has worked great but what i will say so good customer service there it was a failure but good customer service so that's my only other takeaway is like ultimately leaving aside the design and the implementation and i really like home key locks i think they're really nice i have gotten used to touching my apple watch up to up to the door, I think it's great. But my experience has been that the Schlage locks have a stronger motor,

and that matters to me because it means that they're more likely to succeed, whereas the Yale lock was just weak enough that sometimes it would try to close the lock and fail and be like, I can't do it. Beep, beep. And that's not a great feature in a lot. It's not so good. No. Not so great. That's not so helpful. Tim Cook has been talking about the Vision Pro a bunch over the last couple of weeks. He's been doing lots of media because of the iPhone and other reasons that I'll get to

in a minute. But he's been talking a lot about the Vision Pro. It seems like wherever he can. And there's a couple of things that I thought were interesting or just funny to me. So Tim Hardwick at Mac Rumors was reporting on a CBS interview. So Tim Cook told CBS Sunday Morning that he watched the entire third season

of Ted Lasso on his Vision Pro. Which just seems like a funny thing. Like that's just very funny to me it's like an unnecessary flex like the entire season well there's like one episode you didn't watch on an ipad tim you know and also i just love the double promo in in one sentence yeah yeah you know like he didn't watch just a show he only watched the third season of apple's favorite ted lasso yes i'm surprised he didn't also watch the debut premiere of the morning show you know on it as well uh and tim also said to cbs

sunday morning that it's still on track for launching quote early next year whatever that means and uh also talking to david phelan at the independent tim cooks this is a quote tim cooks says vision pro has become part of his nightly routine, helping him understand how it could become an industry-defining product. Tim says there are huge differences in how people look at it, depending on if they read about it or if they've actually tried it, he says. I believe even more about how profound spatial computing is. When you've tried it, it's an aha moment,

and you only have a few of those in a lifetime. Now, I agree with that second part. I think we both do. The thing that annoys me about this quote is, why did he not ask him about the nightly routine? What does that mean? What does that mean? I saw somebody, a commentator,

I think maybe it was Nick here, who said, well, while it's interesting to say if you've tried it, you know, it is also worth pointing out that the only people who've tried it are people Apple allowed to try it. That is funny. Okay, it is true.

That is just keep in mind that it's a very specific group. But I do think, and you and I both had this experience, it certainly makes more of an impact to actually experience it. And it's very hard to convey that if you're just trying to imagine that based on what other people have said. That said, we were also in an incredibly constrained demo of it.

And that's not quite the same as going through a nightly routine. What I take away from this is, look, I think Tim Cook dogfoods a bunch of stuff, right? I really do. Of course he does. I think he uses new iPads. I think he wants to be, even at the CEO level, he wants to be familiar with and understand the products that Apple's making so that he can talk about it, but also that he stays connected to the products. It's a product company, and services, and software, but it matters. And so I like that he seems to be really engaged with this product because he should be.

It's and he isn't always as engaged with products, right? He we that's the sense we get is he's an operations guy. He's the CEO. He's got other people to do this. He's not Steve Jobs. But in this product, I suspect like the Apple Watch, it is more important to him and he's spending more time with it. And I like that, right? Because he doesn't necessarily have to do this, but I think it's a good thing.

And I would imagine that Tim Cook using Vision Pro every day probably has helped the progress of that product development, right? That Tim Cook is using it and seeing where it works and seeing where it doesn't and if he's in a meeting he can be like i don't know i tried that and this happened and like that's a much more informed perspective from the ceo i think it's good but yes i do wonder is it like is he brushing his teeth and augmented reality while ted lasso plays in the corner or like i i don't know is he getting like many questions his nightly cream all over the lens by accident? What's happening over there?

Is this where he drinks his smoothie while he's hanging back in an armchair watching an Auburn football game projected on the wall? I don't know. Tell us more, Tim. Tell us more about Tim Cook after dark with the vision pro well jason someone might have gotten this out of him because old boys our friend been busy so you may remember last year around this time tim took a tour of europe and he's been on it again oh so we're back on the up gary podcast with your annual recap of the tour of tim cook as it is to this date so where in the world is tim cook well

i'm gonna let you know i'm working on it all right okay he started by attending a photo gallery show of images taken on iphones in new york he then went across the atlantic to attend a real madrid training session and later a match obviously in spain he had a dinner with a chef who quote uses the iphone 15 pro max in their creative process and another who is champions championing sustainability was still in spain by the way he then attended a musical performance at an apple store in madrid he visited a school that uses iphones for photography in their classes he then visited the procreate developers nice as part of his tour i didn't know they were in spain i'm not sure where they are actually i didn't write that part down this is still part of the spanish legs

so i'm assuming that they're in spain because i'm about to tell you something else that i know he did in spain so i'm assuming that they're still in Spain. So he then spent time with a Spanish Paralympic swimmer who was wearing an Apple watch and they made a video about it. Tim then leaves Spain to meet with chip company NXP, who supplies parts to Apple. He used this as an opportunity to highlight the sustainability work on decarbonizing. tim says nxp's chips are in many of our products including our new carbon neutral apple watch lineup so i will pause here for a moment because now it feels like genuinely there's just a pattern for this because last time when he did this he was in japan i think with sony and said similarly yes we have used

sony's chips forever and it's like apple never talk about this but now they've done it two times in two years on a tim tour that he goes to somewhere and calls them out specifically as like a great partner and it's like they never ever ever talk about this stuff otherwise so i just find that very interesting this just in procreate is uh apparently in tasmania which is as bad as far away from spain as you can get well i think it's literally like the other side of the globe from that but then maybe there were some they may have been in procreate team procreate so huge but like here's the thing this if i followed as chronologically as I assume that is it, right? He was still in the Spain leg when he was meeting Procreate. Okay.

All right. Okay. He didn't, unless he burrowed using new Apple technology we don't know about, burrowed straight through the core of the earth and emerged in Tasmania. Who knows? Maybe he had a digital persona. I don't know. I recall from my trip to new zealand

that spain is actually on the exact opposite the antipode of new zealand so it's in the ballpark of tasmania it's not that far off i'm just saying ask the mole people the truth about apple's lava burrowing anyway i don't think i want to do that. They were probably in Spain. Probably in Spain. Spain. Yeah. Yeah. Tim then met with developers in the Netherlands who make various, like a game studio and a cycling app. Obviously, it's in the Netherlands. He also spent time with a Dutch YouTuber. Great.

Love it. Tim then went over to listen to some spatial audio music at a studio in Copenhagen. Of course he did. went over to listen to some spatial audio music at a studio in copenhagen of course he did he then and this is another thing that happened uh last time another random apple executive appears and tim visited a solar farm in denmark with lisa jackson ah i love this i tell me my mind is like so tim's off all over the place and then like someone else has to go you know because we had eddie q ed Eddie Q last time. Yeah.

At Oktoberfest, are we sure? I was about to say, are we sure that there isn't a thing we've missed here where Tim and Eddie had like tapas?

Not yet. Not yet. I don't know that the tour's over. Okay. Because we cap it off now with Tim coming to the great country

of the United Kingdom because eddie loves those small places just loves the small you just get a whole bunch of little small plates and it's like the tapas and it's great so i'm sure he was like tim tim i'm gonna order for you it's gonna be great that's in my mind that's my imagination they went to the uk you say yep here in the uk he spent some time with some british developers uh he spent some time with some school children which i thought was adorable and then met with the prince and princess of wales to talk about the environment and in the images it's something that like i realized i've not seen a lot of which is tim cook in a suit ah i feel like we don't see him in a suit very much and i will say i appreciated

that you wore a suit to visit the uh the prince of wales yeah so that that's how far we've gotten so far he's not wearing a tie but to be fair william also not wearing a tie yeah it's like you know they're like it's like dressing up but like we're not gonna you know we're cool you know that's that's the note that i get there yeah did he go to battersea i assume he did well as a part of i move on now to my final piece of follow-up for you today as part part of Tim's press tour, The Evening Standard has published some interior photos of Apple's Battersea campus, which I believe is the first time this has happened. And so Mike Hurley gets to tell you, yes, this is what I saw, and it's stunning in there. Unbelievable.

It is beautiful. It looks kind of like Apple Park in a way too right where there's the like an atrium and then they're the various levels and it's all kind of open air it's all soft and round right but it's brick rather than uh i think it's like i don't know what stone it is it looks like limestone to me but it's magical italian stone quarry from a very particular place in in italy only known by johnny ive but and so you have to get to say that if you look if you like go down the page you've got the image which is like the the large image which shows like the archways like and they have these huge brick archways which is

like the the atrium area this is when i i went there and i was with one of the architects and i pointed up at the corners and said, that's incredible. How do you do that? And he said to me, it's not real. And I don't really know what that means, but it was a beautiful detail. And I guess you can take from that what you want, because I've never seen brick curve like that. And I guess it turns out it isn't. But I don't really know what that means.

I don't really know what that means. It's a piece well i was we had this conversation a long ago about like the ballpark in san francisco has the brick and why there isn't brick in san francisco because it crumbles and it's very bad in earthquakes and so you end up having the the ballpark in san francisco has a brick front because it wants to feel old-timey but it's literally there's a picture that when they were building it in the san francisco chronicle of the the little brick wall uh yeah veneer being placed on it right it's not it's not real it's not a brick building it's a concrete building reinforced

concrete with a brick kind of overlay and it wouldn't surprise me if that's what they did here is there's the real brick of the battersea power station and then there's the architectural brick molding that goes in certain places. I reckon it's brick up to a point and then it's not real brick. And then it seamlessly goes back to brick again. They want to mix it in because it has to fit in with the rest of the building.

Yeah, that's what I suspect too. It is truly breathtaking in there. And I'm just happy that they've released some images now because like, wow, it's quite a thing. Facade. David Schaub reminds me, the right word is not veneer. It is facade or cladding. Emma says, sure.

Anyway, sometimes it's brick all the way through. Sometimes it's not. That's okay. Or maybe it's not brick at all, Mike. Okay. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to let you build your brand and grow your business online.

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to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. It is time for a rumor roundup, Jason Snell. Yeehaw! So I've got quite a few things from Ming-Chi Kuo today. He's been publishing some reports.

The first is about Kuo's expectations for the Vision Pro based on his understanding of the supply chain. So we've got three items here. Item one, Ming-Chi Kuo is predicting a production capacity of between 400,000 and 600,000 units in year one. This echoes numbers we've heard before, but the more we hear these numbers, the more likely this is.

There were conversations previously about a million, but then there was a question of like is that a million units or is that a misunderstanding of a million displays being available which would be half a million units and so i feel like we are coalescing now on this like around half a million in year one we have no idea right now what that actually will mean in the sense of like the desire of people you know like my assumption is half a million is not going to be enough i don't know what you think i know i think i i suspect i mean you never know but it feels to me like the price is there in part to gate demand and because they know they can't make that they can't make so many

so you want to price it so that it comes in the ballpark i imagine these are going to be back ordered yeah like yeah it feels like i mean it is it is possible that nobody wants first generation super expensive hardware but i have a hard time i just have a hard time believing that given apple's footprint apple selling half half a million units of its newest platform in its first year. It's a low bar, even for the price, even for what it is. I think, honestly, that idea of nobody wants that, I feel like nobody is in the realm of half a million units for Apple. You know what I mean? Yeah, for Apple. Yeah, that's absolutely true. To say nobody, for them, half a million units of a product, which they put so much effort into, it is almost nobody, which is a wild thing to say nobody like for them half a million units of a product which they put so much effort into

it is almost nobody which is a wild thing to say this is a little sidebar here but i'm curious how the existence of the vision pro is going to affect the sale so meta um introduced the quest three yeah right yeah so i have a quest two you have the quest pro unfortunately for me unfortunately yeah uh so this is i mean it looks looks really good and i like my quest two and i So I have a Quest 2. You have the Quest Pro. Unfortunately for me. Unfortunately. Yeah. So this is, I mean, it looks really good. And I like my Quest 2. And I thought about buying a Quest 3 because it's got, they upgraded the camera. So more like the Vision Pro, it's got like better augmented reality support by having better cameras.

Whereas it was all sort of hacked into the Quest 2. And it wasn't very good. It's black and white and grainy and bad. But they did sort of hack it in there after the fact. And I say this just because the thing that's keeping me from potentially buying a Quest 3 literally is the Vision Pro is just hanging out there. Right? And I know I'm not a perfect example because i covered this for a living and i mean i'm gonna buy a vision pro regardless because i need to for my work but it is also like like that's coming do i really want to invest in any other platform and i wonder

uh how it'll go for meta uh and whether whether the vision pro is a thing that is so far out there and in terms of time and in terms of price that it doesn't matter for the people who might buy something like a Quest 3. Or if it is a... Because I also think there's an argument to be made that the Quest 3 is designed for stuff that Vision Pro isn't designed for and that they're very different. But I do wonder if Vision Pro being out there is going to suppress sales of other products in the category in the meantime at least maybe it's complicated to say right because the price difference is so large because what is the quest three like five hundred dollars yeah oh yeah no it's it's it's not even close right yeah and yet like but there's this question like yeah but am i gonna buy a headset now and then buy

a headset again next year do you put it off i don don't know. I don't know. Or does the detail, I'll take the other side. Does the detail of the Vision Pro costing what it costs make it easier to write it off and say, oh, well, I was worried about Apple's new headset, but now I'm not because I'm not going to buy that. So I'll buy this Quest 3. quest 3 also i do wonder a side note um if the price of the quest pro is so much larger that when you see the quest 3 you're like oh what a relief that one is cheaper i'll buy that one i mean i feel like a fool for buying the quest pro because like they said the best the best feature about the quest pro was the pass-through and they're saying that the quest 3 is even better so why on earth did i need to pay three times the price then

right i don't really understand that um for that one great cortex episode that's why yeah and i will say like for me personally it did make sense because we did a good episode of cortex and i think that it helped me with talking about the vision pro as well so like it was actually a very good investment uh but if we take that part out of it and just think about maybe other people that bought them, it is a bit... Especially when they're talking about... Meta is saying, like, oh yeah, it's way

better than the Quest Pro. So why on earth did you make this product? It's very strange. Very strange. Weird outlier product. What would have happened to the Quest 3 if the Quest Pro sold better? Would they have not released the Quest 3? Like,

if the Quest Pro was a big success, what would have happened? I don't know. I think that it may be that the Quest Pro was, that the Quest 3 is a recalibration because of the Quest Pro not doing very well, but I don't know. Interesting. Actually, this does tell right back into Miningqi quo's second point

quo believes apple have changed course on a cheaper version of the vision pro and believes that apple will struggle to reduce the cost of a potential product enough to make it viable for plan 2025 release so the question that we've been asked a million times which is hard to answer what will they cut out well maybe Apple's struggling with that exact question themselves and they can't cut out enough. Part of it is the challenge they're in now is they're trying to plan the future of this product and it hasn't reached regular people yet. And so they have to use their best judgment, but their best judgment is never going to meet reality. It's never going to match what you can get from having it ship, shipping a product and seeing what happens. And so it's very hard to build a roadmap when you don't know. Because if you're trying to pull out features from this product in order to make a cheaper version,

right, certainly there are going to be arguments about what defines this, what defines the Vision Pro and the Vision OS experience that cannot be omitted from any version. And these are the same arguments that they presumably have been having all along. And so, presumably, the people who would win those arguments are the people who won those arguments before. And so, without reality to buttress the arguments of the people who might have a disagreement, you're going to end up with a difficult... It's going to be difficult to compromise on your low-end product if you really have this idea in your head about what the Vision OS experience is. So that makes it really hard. And we've heard various things like, oh, no, no, that outward facing display is a must for all Vision OS hardware. It's like, really?

Like that would seem like that would be the first thing that could go, but they're like, no, but philosophically, it's very important. I'm like, okay, but how are you going to make this cheaper? So it's possible if a closed report is accurate that, that they've basically said either we don't know or we can't do it or there's no point because the it's also a supply issue, right? Like they're having such supply issues with the vision pro itself. And even if they downgrade the displays and they might argue about that, like, are they going to have the ability to get those other kinds of displays? And is it going to be of good enough quality? And is it even worth selling a cheaper version if you can't

yet suffice demand for the expensive one? Exactly. So my guess is this is kicking the can down the road, letting the Vision Pro ship, working on what the next generation Vision Pro is, and then either doing the Tim Cook thing and taking the first generation Vision Pro and discounting it when the second one comes out. Or using what you learned with that first generation and building the second generation to then work on that Vision 1 or whatever down the road. But it always seemed very ambitious that they were going to do a cheaper version in the short term. And I think this is Apple saying, yeah, we know this is going to take a lot longer.

And we aren't, because I believe that they, that the Vision Pro is not that far off from what they think is like the baseline acceptable experience. And how do you, how do you make those decisions and then say, yeah, but we're going to, we're going to ship something to that'll be more appealing to the masses a year later that is below the bar we've

set. That's a, that is a tough thing to do. So I'm not too surprised that they might just kick this thing down the road. And, and it means the problem is it means for developers that the number of people who are going to be using this platform is going to be small for a lot longer than maybe they anticipated quote also expects that a vision pro 2 is unlikely to be available until at least 2027 yikes i mean i guess it's closer to, I mean, maybe even further these days, but we think of it more on the refresh rate of a Mac. Well, if you think about this as almost being a product that's shipping in year minus one, they are struggling with capacity already. with capacity right already and that and so for 24 half a million units and there's a challenge for what is it in 25 and what is it in 26 like it may be several years before they can even ship the original in any decent quantity and and if that's true i mean mean, I'm sure, imagine what sites they've set for Vision Pro 2, right? Like that's probably an even more impossible product to make today, right?

And will it even be there? Will the parts even be there when they expect? So it's a funny thing because I don't think it's Apple's will here. I think it's also's will here i think it's also um what's available and clear clearly with the vision pro like they chose technology that is very expensive and very hard to make and can't be made in high volume at least not yet continuing information from ming chi kuo on a different tact he has said that the 2024 macbooks and ipads will of of course, feature M3 chips, but also states that his expectation is that the device demand may fall below expectations due to a, quote, lack of growth

drivers. Joe Rossignol at MacRumors suggests that this is probably relating to work-from-home device sales, like this had been a big thing for these products over the last few years and that has changed. I'm just hoping that he is not suggesting that the new ipad pro does not see a significant refresh because oh boy is it time yeah it's it's hard to tell um this is worth since we're talking about ming chi kuo here it's worth talking about that he had a report that john gruber uh wrote about on daring fireball he had a report about the overheating reports for the iPhone 15. Oh, yeah. That was very clearly a TSMC plant that was, oh, it's not us. It's not our chip. Whatever's going on in this thing that's turned out to not be much of a story, big surprise.

New iPhones come out. They run hot for a while. There's maybe a bug in there, too. It's just not a big surprise. New iPhones come out. They run hot for a while. There's maybe a bug in there too. It's just not a big deal. But he did this story about it and it was like, oh no, this isn't that problem. And it's clearly coming from TSMC. And it's worth doing the thing that we do on Upgrade a lot, which is say, consider the source. How do they know the information they know? What are they good at? What are they maybe not as good at? Ming-Chi Kuo is a very well-respected, good source of information about the supply chain in Asia. Very good at that. When Ming-Chi Kuo starts getting

into, you know, punditry analysis, stuff that is not in his wheelhouse, you should be more skeptical. wheelhouse you should be more skeptical so uh this is this is an example where i would say i will take his report about m3 chips in macbooks and ipads i mean this report from him though it's not wrong i'm just saying you gotta back you gotta back it off a little bit because there's the stuff that's in his wheelhouse and there's the stuff that's not like no source because we talk about mark german a lot here too no source is even a solid source is solid about everything so it's worth scoring them based on like what are they good at and then what does it feel like it's a little bit on the outside i want to read what quo said this is what john gruber linked to he says of course as my survey indicates that the iphone 15 pro series overheating issues are unrelated to

tsmc's advanced renaming and node the primary cause is more likely the compromises made in the thermal system designed to achieve a lighter weight such as the reduced heat dissipation area and the use of a titanium frame, which negatively impacts thermal efficiency. It's expected Apple will address this through software updates, but improvements may be limited unless Apple lowers processor performance. If Apple does not properly address this issue, it could negatively impact shipments over the product lifecycle of the iPhone 15 Pro series. This doesn't sound wrong to me. So, okay, there's a couple of things.

Apple says that the... There's a couple things apple says that the there's a software bug apple says there's a bug but apple says that the heat dissipation that he suggests the titanium frame and the reduced heat dissipation area apple says that's not true well that's not true more likely right like is what he said he didn't say for sure but it is a software thing that apple's going to address which he also says but he's also doing some work for tsmc to get it off of their back here right and saying oh it might be it might be this problem with the titanium it might be the titanium and apple's

like it's not the titanium okay and also that last sentence if apple doesn't address this issue it could hurt the sales of the iphone and the and the stock went down and it's like, well, duh. If Apple doesn't properly address the issue of the most important product, then it might be a problem. But is it an issue? And will Apple address it? Those are the questions there.

And, and that's, I guess that's what I'm saying is he's not wrong. And when he's in his bailiwick, he's really good, but he's straying a little bit here because again, you have to ask like, where did this come from? And it feels very strongly to me and a grouper that he's doing some work for TSMC, right? TSMC is like, it's not us. It's not us. Don't blame this on us. It's not us. And so he's like, all right, I'm going to put out a thing

that says, Hey, here's a bunch of other things it could be but you know what it's not it's not tsmc's processors that's what it's not yeah but it's like this these these apps that are overheating iphones are they just overheating the new iphones yeah i don't know i mean because if they are why right and there might be an os bug that's related to the hardware. But also remember that when these devices ship out, they are indexing every photo and they're doing spotlight indexing and they're syncing a bunch of stuff. And like a newly installed iPhone runs hot for a while anyway. Yeah. But also there's the question of like, you know, Instagram maybe using api wrong they named specifically which i found to be very weird like yeah right right it's kind of like third parties why can they even companies you don't like do that companies you don't like are at fault here not apple uh anyway i anyway i i wanted this

is me actually defending ming chi kuo because sometimes I feel like you get that other lack of nuance, which is like Ming-Chi Kuo, you know, he said this thing and he's in TSMC's pocket. It's like, no, Ming-Chi Kuo is great at what he does, which is the supply chain stuff.

Like I believe him. The lack of growth drivers explanation. Sometimes his explanations are where I have to apply a little more skepticism because he's trying to take the facts he know and then build the narrative around it in order to make his facts feel complete or relevant or whatever. And he's not necessarily wrong, right?

Like it could mean that the iPad Pro is not going to get a bigger refresh. It could just mean, as Joe Russignol, friend of the show, says at Mac Rumors, that this is all part of the same story, which is the pandemic sold a lot of iPads and laptops. And those people are on a new cycle. They came a little bit ahead. They bought that new iPad and laptop then, and they're not going to buy another one two years later. They're

not. So the sales are going to be lower and that's just how it's going to be regardless. Like, because there's also this thing that happens, especially in business journalism, a lot where there's this, uh, like Bloomberg does a lot, where it's like A happened and then B happened and therefore they're connected, right? It's this correlation causation problem that happens. And I see this with device sales sometimes too, which is, oh, they're going to put M3 chips in there, uh but demand may uh not follow it's like you know updating a computer doesn't necessarily mean that sales surge right that's not it's not that simple because you got to take into account a whole bunch of other things so you don't necessarily have to make those connections and you don't necessarily have to make those narratives and build them but people

do so that's that's why we're here, Mike. Yep. Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac is reporting on information shared by Business F1 magazine that Apple is looking at trying to secure worldwide rights for Formula One. They are reportedly looking at a deal that will be ultimately worth $2 billion a year, which is double the current rights fee, like if looked at what F1 rights are worth worldwide. The issue with this, and the interesting part

of this, is the way in which the rights are structured. So if Apple were to strike this deal, they would not actually be able to secure the global rights at the same time. They would have to get them on a rolling schedule until all of the contracts expire in the different territories that are all over the next five years. So US rights are in 2025, so that would probably be first, then other territories later on. Apple

is expected to make a seven-year deal for this reason and then also double the rights fees right it would be very interesting to see how they would handle this um f1 tv for example is like something that people really enjoy um if you're outside of some markets like i can't get f1 tv because sky has that very locked down here um but f1 tv is like a pretty technologically rich platform like you can watch like dozens and dozens of camera feeds you get live data and all that kind of stuff would apple want to do that i don't know maybe but there is a lot of interesting stuff that could be done with f1 i think it is a really good set of rights to try and acquire if possible um because it's a growing sport and it's a it's a sport i think with a like quite a high index in advertising for like you know the market

that's watching it um it's an interesting one to go for but a complicated one because it is so chopped up and sky who you who have the rights here, are very closely linked to F1. So outside of the UK, the Sky feed is the main feed. So if you watch it on ESPN, sometimes you get told about features for Sky customers on ESPN,

which you obviously can't get, but it's baked into the commentary. The broadcast, right. Super interesting. I would be intrigued to see if or if anything happens there. which you obviously can't get but it's baked into the commentary the broadcast right super interesting i would i would be interested intrigued to see if or if anything happens here so yeah so demographics are good and it's international and this is one of the things that i think apple ideally wants there was a story last week uh talking to eddie q i guess about a little bit about or a story story about Eddie Q and about sports rights and all of that, that I thought was really interesting. International is better for Apple, right? Apple

views itself as a global company. It's a lot easier if it's something that you can buy and you can put everywhere. And there's a couple ways to do that. You know, the easy way is something like MLS that didn't really have international partners and you just to speak of anyway, and you just buy it all and say, we're going to put this everywhere in the world. And that allows Messi to be watched on Apple TV Plus in, or on the MLS League Pass in Argentina and, you know, in Europe and wherever else, right? That's great. Okay, great. But a lot of, what sports are truly international like that? There are not that many. And F1 is one of them. So that's interesting. It is interesting from a technological standpoint. The challenge ends up being rights again. And I'm intrigued by

the idea that how does Apple solve that? One of the ways Apple maybe solves that is swooping in and saying, we're going to make a deal that's long-term and we will assume the rights in all territories as they expire. That sounds really interesting, right? We will pay you, and then as we pick up new territories, we will pay an increased fee. We'll start with the ones that are expiring in 25, rolling until all the way till 2030, and we'll actually go to 2032 with a deal let's say and we're going to pay you um an average of two billion dollars a year over the course of the contract but it'll be based on as the rights phase in to us all sounds really interesting and possible and something that apple might want to do and if you throw in that like with with drives to survive and stuff like that like apple would get

on the documentary uh train as well they already are with as they well yeah and and stuff like that like apple would get on the documentary uh train as well they already are with as they well yeah and and we've seen like two messy documentaries like they that would become a priority as well so you build content around it yeah but i mean just as a point they're making a documentary about lewis hamilton and they have the movie the brad pitt movie so and then they also have um the possibility of doing some stuff with linear partners. It's an interesting idea of what they could do. I will put out one caveat that I know from other sports, which is sometimes the way these sports rights are written, you can't, as an entity, negotiate a future version of the contract until a certain point. You're not technically allowed, legally allowed to renegotiate. And in some cases, there's a whole like for the year before it expires or for a year period, two years before it expires, you have exclusive renegotiation rights as the rights holder. So that's my question is, I'm not sure if F1 was like, yeah, we're going to take $2 billion from

Apple. It's going to run from 25 to 32. It's a done deal. We're going to take it up. It'll start rolling out in 25 with the US and then roll across the rest of the world as those rights expire. I don't know if they can make that deal is my only question, right? Like, because does Sky say, well, no, you can't negotiate with anyone for the rights until 29 when our rights are, or 28 until right before our rights expire.

And we have, we can match any offer, et cetera, et cetera, right? They could, so there's a lot of questions here, but everything about this report makes sense to me in terms of how apple and eddie q are viewing their approach to sports yep and mark german is reporting that apple is developing more search engine technology so obviously apple have their own search tools in the App Store and in Maps. They built their own stuff for that. As well as Spotlight.

Mark highlights some of this stuff. It's in Gianandrea's team. Gianandrea is the head of AI and machine learning at Apple and apparently has a very large team, Mark Gurman calls it, dedicated to creating search technologies.

Mark Gurman is reporting that this team creating search technologies. Mark Gurman is reporting that this team is, quote, now looking to more deeply integrate Apple search features into iOS and macOS and potentially bolster the technology of its new generative AI tools, a system known internally as Pegasus. Apple are apparently hesitant to have their own web search become a thing due to its lucrative agreement with Google, unless they're able to create a system that could generate their own ad revenue. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah, also that Microsoft wanted Apple to buy Bing at one point.

Yes, that was a thing that was spoken about this week. And they couldn't come to an agreement about it. yes and and they couldn't couldn't have uh they couldn't come to an agreement about it i think this is fascinating right because it's this idea that apple is building search tech but the um the google deal is so lucrative that they aren't gonna you know they aren't gonna bother because google pays them so well mark does suggest that potentially they they use it as like a negotiating chip as well like also right well it's it's an apple maps-esque kind of thing where it's like you you you don't have us over a barrel we could build this or we could partner with somebody else. And we know that they have so many huge ad ambitions that this could be a part of. So it doesn't, I don't know. I think it's interesting. As a podcaster, I think about Apple building, you know, how Apple's podcast crawler works where it's, you know, it's gotten better, but it's like, sometimes it misses things. You

got to kick it a little bit and all that. And I try to imagine a whole web crawler, but I guess they already do it. They've got a web crawler and they use it and they service it in some places and they service Bing data in some places. But primarily, if you're in Safari, by default, you get Google and there's a huge deal for that. I do wonder if with the legal case going on, if that there's also a hedge going on here where Apple might realize like if they can't make the – if they're not allowed to have that same kind of deal with Google anymore, maybe that's when they put Plan B into place. And Plan B is not Bing or some kind of deal with Google anymore. Maybe that's when they put Plan B into place. And Plan B is not Bing or some kind of an auction. It's literally, no, we're going to just use Apple Search from now on. And we're going to monetize it ourselves. We're going to make ads. We're going to put ads all over search pages. And that's how we're going to do it. I don't know.

Do you think that the Google... So the deal is that Google pays Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the iPhone when you search for something? Do you think that this arrangement is in contrast to Apple's stance on privacy? I think it's complicated. But yes. That's for yes for sure okay the simple version is yes like the simple version is if all if there was no money on the line let's do it think of it this way if there was no money on the line and it was purely a customer experience thing that apple was caring about. And that like the default search engine didn't make Apple any money at all. Regardless.

I think they would either have built their own search or they would use some, or they would have bought or would use duck, duck go or some other, you know, there's some others out there, but that kind of thing, I think they would have gravitated a long time ago toward a more privacy-focused search engine. But it's an enormous amount of money that they make from Google.

And then they are, by default, turning their users to what is, I will say, probably the best search experience still. Although search is getting worse by the day, but it's probably the best search experience still although search is getting worse by the day but it's probably the best one but at the price of being in google's data funnel and you know i i so i think that you could argue that google is i mean i use google search because i've tried the others i'm like nope back to google search right and that that is a customer product quality kind of concern that you heard of kagi i have heard of kagi it's getting a bit of buzz at the moment which old school mac users will remember used to be a completely different company and they went bankrupt they heard a lot of software developers and then somebody bought the domain and is making a new product and it's a four-page search engine the the was that like a payment system yeah it was it was kagi was how you bought

your shareware back in the day yeah i know this because of james thompson yes yeah exactly and they and they went out of business and basically was like oh yeah we owe you developers a lot of money you're not ever gonna see you're not gonna get it yeah uh yeah search for it i suppose yeah if you want to i guess now you can do that search for it good luck just go to kaki and say where's my money you know yeah so uh yeah it's a paid it's like a paid you have to subscribe to be in their search anyway my and this is my point is is like yes apple's choosing a good product but they're but I don't think they're choosing it for those reasons. I think they're choosing it because of money. And if all they cared about was privacy and not money, they would have a different default search experience or they would have a, you know, little thing that came up and said, oh, choose your search engine.

But they do not. You have to go dig in the settings if you want to change your search engine. Yeah, I feel like that would probably be the way it would work, that they would ask you, right? I feel like that's what would happen if Google didn't pay them money. Because I think it would be good to ask. You're using Bing now. Everybody's using Bing now.

And users would be like, what did you do? And so instead they would ask. Also, I'm curious about the apple google deal because there's i mean the exclusivity is obviously part of it but surely you could and maybe this will be the end result of all of this um litigation that's going on the idea that maybe it's just all based on affiliate revenue essentially that like ads served that come from these from apple's safari apple gets a percentage of it and that's what apple gets paid i just think it's best if there's no money that changes hands and they well the problem is is

that they're feeding google's business. So money is changing hands. But you could do it where it's like, look, Apple makes money regardless because everybody who owns a search engine pays us if you set it as the default. Yeah, you're right. I think it would be best if money did not change hands. But if that's the case, then I think Apple would just go to their own search engine and make money off of ad placements on their search engine because there's money to be made in search. If we were saying that any certain like then it's like, well, couldn't any website have to pay Apple that you know what I mean? Like just because you're using Safari, like it gets weird. Well, I mean, I would prefer default. But yeah, I would prefer if Apple and Google did not have this deal.

I just think it muddies things in a way that annoys me right that like we have app tracking transparency on one end and then we also have like google is the default web tracking obscurity on the other end and it's all just like yeah i don't know where this deal sits in that flow it's just like a very strange thing to me i'm sure that you are making an argument that's been made inside Apple, which is this is what we should do. And I think what it is, is this is what we should do. We should do our own search engine and we can monetize it as we like. But as we know from Apple, philosophically, Apple thinks, well, but when we do it, it isn't evil, right? Because we're Apple and you trust us and we're not going to do hinky things with the data. We're going to serve you ads like we do on the app store, but we're not going to do all the stuff that Google does with your data. We're not going to build a profile that we share with

other people. We're not going to do any of that. We're just going to be Apple and you trust us, right? And that's the thing. We can argue about what they're saying there and how self-serving it is and do they really mean it? And are they truly not tracking you? Which of course they are, but they're tracking you inside Apple, which is a first party and therefore they don't consider it uh hinky they they think it's fine because it's apple but uh that would be their argument right is ultimately and i'm sure those people get shouted down by the people who are like nine billion dollars a year they're like okay well you win this one but we'll just sit here i think this conversation may happen a lot and then it gets to the point where they're like oh but this comes out of services revenue and then they go well oh no our stock price and then they don't do it because if one year all of a sudden billions of dollars has disappeared from the

part that's meant to be saving the company into the future and in wall street like they just they just say oh no we can't do this and then we move on yeah no that's it it's literally there's a meeting where it's like okay here are all the reasons i got i got a keynote here here are all the reasons uh we're gonna we should use our own search it's like it's better for users we make money on on ads you know da da da and then and then literally the person at the other end of the table says oh no our stock our stock price. The end. End of conversation. And that's why it will take like a legal ruling, I think. And that's why I think that this is going on in the background is like, we need to have

the ability to switch gears if the spigot dries up. Because Google could also be like, eh, you know, you can do what you want with us. We're not going to make this deal anymore. Or Google might say, we can't, guys, we can't make this deal anymore. They're want with us. We're not going to make this deal anymore. Or Google might say, we can't, guys, we can't make this deal anymore. They're looking at us. So I don't know. I don't know. But I do think ultimately it would be better for users' privacy. The question is, would an Apple search engine be any good? Good question. I don't know. This episode is brought to you by Uni. Uni is the world's number one pizza oven company. They I don't know. ovens are super easy to use and incredibly portable. They'll fit into any outside space.

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Ooni Pizza Ovens are the best way to bring restaurant quality pizza to your own backyard. Our thanks to Ooni Pizza Ovens for their support of this show and RelayFM. This might be the last time now truly that we go to the details jason to talk about mac os sonoma yeah details will be back details will return the details will return it's the end of i mean well there'll be it's going to be with new features in it the The details may be surprisingly resilient,

but yeah, Mac OS Sonoma shipped. Hooray. Hooray. Hooray. I did a bunch of, I have a bunch of computers that I had, like this computer runs Sonoma and this computer is not running Sonoma.

So I can do, and all of that is over now. There are the, I, I've switched back to various computers that were previously sort of like replaced with beta versions and all that anyway. So yeah, Sonoma everywhere now. Yeah, I was just planning on putting Sonoma on my MacBook Air.

I was not planning on putting it on my MacBook Pro, which is my recording machine. Because I always like to just wait it out a little bit just in case. Yeah. But then I went to Safari and I'd enabled profiles and then couldn't access any of my tab groups. So now both of my machines are on Sonoma because I need to be able to use my web browser

in the way that I'm used to using it. That's how they get you. That's how they get you. You called it in your review small, like the updates are small'm used to using it. That's how they get you. That's how they get you. You called it in your review, small, like the updates are small, but in all the best ways. I suspect that most macOS users just want incremental improvements

about disruptive changes. Slow and steady wins the race. I think there's something to that, that the idea that sometimes these updates get judged on like how many things got poured into them, how many new features, how many extra things. And it feels like, I mean, iOS, you could say this too, but certainly on the Mac that's been around for so long now,

that I don't think most Mac users want their OS updates to completely change how they use their Mac. They don't. They want some incremental improvements and they want the platform improvements that are across all of Apple's platforms, but I don't think they want to be disrupted. I think they just want it to get better every year. And that's the good thing about Sonoma is that it is not disruptive really,

but it does add a bunch of new features and some of them are very nice. I was very impressed with some of the detail work that Apple did. I want to talk about a few areas, I think the key areas I've, I can see five of them. And I also,

these came from your review. So I think that these are kind of like the key parts. Widgets is probably the big, the biggest feature I reckon for most people, whether you want it or not, like it's a big change. So we have widgets on the desktop. They're interactive as well.

You don't seem to be a big fan of widgets on the mac no it's not like i just had a realization that i don't dislike them i think they make less of an impact than they do on ios and ipad os okay that's that's the thing that's the point that i wanted to make there is that they are, because so much of iOS and iPadOS is one app at a time, home screen's really important. You put things on the home screen, you get your apps there. It's a more powerful thing. And also interactive widgets, right? The idea that when you're out on the home screen, you don't need to launch an app. You can just very quickly interact with a widget. I had this moment of realization where I was writing about, oh, like, oh, interactive widgets are now interactive. So for example, and I thought about it and I was like, for example, you could put a to-do,

like a reminders widget on your desktop and check the boxes off. And I thought, on your desktop and check the boxes off. And I thought, or you could just keep reminders open and check the boxes. Does that make sense? Like the idea that on a Mac, having a bunch of apps open and a bunch of windows in various places, and like, that's just how the Mac works. And so I don't see the need to have my reminders widget open on my desktop. I could just have reminders open and put it over in wherever it is. And it's the whole app. And when I click on it, I have the whole app there. And so that's part of it. It's just, it's less, again, not that interactive widgets are bad, but they have less appeal

on the Mac and the widgets on the desktop. Like it's good, but the average mac user not all of us a lot of us have big screens but like the mac most people use is a laptop which means there's not a lot of screen real estate which means you probably got a lot of windows open which means you probably don't see a lot of your desktop and that's where they're hiding so they're not ambient you have to go looking for them which was the problem in notification center it's not as bad as notification center they set the default that if you literally click on the wallpaper on the desktop, everything hides. Plus there's a keyboard shortcut. Plus there's a trackpad gesture. There's lots of ways

to get there. But by sticking them on the desktop, they are behind your content. And on a 27-inch monitor, there's room. I can see spaces of my desktop. On my MacBook Air, there's room i can see spaces of my desktop on my macbook air there's not so much room and they're less useful there yeah and also the scale is weird on the mac like they're they're kind of too big everything's kind of a little bit i think too big uh and i think that's just a scale thing between mac os and ios that the scale is different but they they feel unnecessarily large which means they take up even more space than you maybe need them to. All of this said, I don't think they're bad. I like widgets. I think widgets are fun. I think the fact that you can run iPhone widgets from your iPhone and put them on your Mac

is great because there's certain apps that don't run on the Mac, even though they should because they're iPhone only or because they've unchecked that box and they're like, no, this app cannot be available on the Mac. I don't understand it. It's very frustrating. Now you can get those widgets to run. That's really great too. Like there's a lot, the way you place them on the screen is really nice where it sort of lets you free freely place them. But if they're near another widget, it'll give you like some alignment guides so you can make them like look all nice. It's really well done. And if you've got a lot of files on your desktop, they all move out of the way magically as you drag the widget around to place it and then they stay away from it.

So there's a lot of good detail here. I just had that moment where I thought to myself, I'm less excited about widgets on the Mac and interactive widgets on the Mac than I am on Apple's other platforms because they feel very much like they're a, they're like an a plus or okay, maybe not. They're a grade a, let's say idea on an iPhone or an iPad on the Mac. You know,

it's like a B or a B minus. It's, it's just not, it's just not as amazing because the Mac is the Mac. And, and if that makes any sense so i really like them um one of the things that helps me use the widgets more is i'm a stage manager user where you cannot turn off the clicking on the desktop shows you the desktop it's just not available for you to turn off

yes so i see them more because and also just being a stage manager user you are just you just see your desktop all the time because that's just how it is so it actually works pretty well for my use case um and i like having them there i like as you mentioned that like you know i only have a couple windows at a time and i'm able to position some widgets in ways that like i'm going to see them when i need them like i can see uh some shortcuts widgets that i might want to use while i'm recording i can see my um a timer thing while i'm recording so i can see my time trackers that are going on right um i really like it but i have a request for apple that i'm gonna make on this show i would like apple to take a look at ipad os

and learn from it so on ipOS, in portrait and landscape orientation, you can set your home screens independently. And when you move from, maybe people don't know this, but whatever layout you do in portrait, you can put your iPad into landscape. You can set a different layout and it remembers both layouts.

And the widgets can go anywhere. Anywhere. Even it's free placement basically so you can even put them like way down where there aren't icons and it will work it's true with the laptop and external display situation it is a nightmare because if i open my laptop screen they they're in a completely different order to what I left them in on my desktop. And then when I, like with my screen,

and then when I plug it back into my screen, they weren't where I left them last time. They've now all moved again. So if you're a laptop user, every time you dare to open your laptop, your widgets all move, and they never go back to the way that you accept them to. That is wild to me that they shipped it this way i can't i just can't i cannot understand how that happened but that happened uh i would like

the locations to be remembered i even had one today where i uh i was testing this out before the show where i had set all my widgets up and I unplugged it and I opened my MacBook Air and I had two widgets overlapping each other, which was fun. So I had a big widget and a small widget in the middle of the big widget for a different app. They just, one had just gone on top of the other. And this is in Sonoma

as it is shipping to the world today. But big fan of widgets. I hope that they maybe tighten that up a little bit. But I think that it's a cool feature that I'm happy to have. I think it would be better if it were, yeah, there's some detail work that could be done. I'd like the scaling to change, honestly.

I would like it to be either, I'd like to be able to bring them to the top instead of having to hide all your windows because I think that there's a scenario where you might want to widget on top but see the content that's in your windows in order to, or just either pin it on top

or temporarily bring it to the top. But yeah, I would like some more placement because they're like, right now they're like stickers stuck on the wallpaper, right? They don't ever leave that bottom layer. And I can see scenarios where I'd actually like to have them either floating, like a picture-in-picture window, or temporarily above my content so I could do, for example, look at the Google Doc in front of me while I put something in an interactive widget.

And they don't do that. The only way to do that is to move your windows around so that the widget is visible and your window is visible and all that. I didn't even mention the other reason that I'm less excited about them is Mac has the dock and it has the menu bar. So it's got lots of other places where you can put stuff. And so the widgets, although they're nice, again, they feel less essential because the Mac has already solved a bunch of these problems. And so, yeah, that's part of the story. Video screensavers. You said, I'm incredibly impressed at the fit and finish

Apple has put into the transition from screensaver to desktop. So this is like the Apple TV-like movies, and then they fade into the desktop. You really seem to like this feature. Yeah, it's just this is another one of those examples of them doing detail work that's not necessary. I think I mentioned this when it went into beta, but like they've got OK, they've got all the aerial screensavers and they've got from Apple TV. And you can make them not only your screensaver, but your desktop. And everybody expects that., you know, they're from the same image from the same movie, but they're not, obviously they're not the same. Or if you give them a little more credit, you'd say there that it, you know, do you do that? And it immediately stops.

And the frame that you're on is, is now your wallpaper. And that's not what happens instead when you go from the screensaver to logging in or you know or unlocking or whatever you do what happens is the screensaver video keeps playing in the background on your wallpaper and slowly coasts to a halt and then that's your wallpaper and like that is completely unnecessary but it is the right way to do it and it is beautiful to see and every time i see it i'm delighted by it but um and that that is i love those moments where i think yeah that's an apple feature that is apple going the extra mile to make something nice uh that we as computer users get beaten down and we're like yeah remember when when with um Silicon, they did the thing where in the display control panel, when you change resolutions, it just changed them. And it used to be on Intel. And prior to that, like your screen would black out and then come back.

Wake up from a stupor. This is a little like that, which is like, we're so beaten down that we're like, well, of course, when the screensaver ends, there's going to be a blink or a black screen or something's going to be a discontinuity is going to happen. And then I'll log in and then maybe, or, you know, I'll, I'll touch ID or whatever. And maybe it'll go to my thing and it'll be fine. Like, and, and somebody at Apple was like, no, no, no, that's don't do that. Like there's gotta be a better way. We should not accept that discontinuity. That's just being lazy. We could do better. And I love it when Apple does that. Cause that to me is like, that is the Apple thing that is Apple actually caring about the detail work of, of, of having the screensaver delightfully transition into a background and kind of coasting down to a stop. It's just, is it a world-changing feature? No. That's actually kind of why it impresses me, is they put the work into something that is just a kind of pleasant feature

when you're using your Mac. Just a little pleasant thing. And the fact that they did that, I just, I'm very impressed. I'm impressed that they went to the trouble. They added a bunch of video controls and effects yeah yeah this is actually another place where they did extra right so they're basically hijacking the video source of a camera and processing it and they're using all of the machine learning technology they built for the iphone camera um to do stuff like uh subject detection and background. And that's how you get portrait mode. And that's how you get studio light, right?

So the portrait mode blurs the background studio light. They're detecting the user in the foreground, the person, the subjects, and they're lightening them and darkening the background or maybe they're not touching the background. They're just lightening the foreground. But the idea there is those are features that are happening because Apple's got this whole pipeline

where they're taking the input from the camera and then they're detecting on the fly the background and the subject, and then they can do things with that. But once you've got that in the pipeline, so the apps don't need it. The Apple's apps don't need to like say, Hey, give me portrait mode or whatever. It's a system level thing. The apps just get a camera. That's actually the processed output from Apple's, from the video subsystem. That's very impressive. But what happened clearly is that everybody at Apple's like, okay, we got this now. What can we do with it? Like we've got all our video segmented with foreground and background. What can we do? And so they built all of those silly video effects,

like the confetti and the fireworks and stuff and like the confetti falls behind you and in front of you like because they can do that because they know where you are and they know where your background is and so they can put layered animations in and then pass that through and then obviously since they're since they're processing they can do gesture detection so if you do two thumbs up, you'll get confetti. And if you do the devil horns, you'll get the laser show, right? Like these are all things that, that they can do because they're processing every frame of video and running it through the neural engine. And they're doing all this fancy stuff. Um, and, and it's very cool, but they also, they added controls,

which is nice, uh, so that you can actually choose where you want to zoom and pan on something like the studio display or a continuity camera they added for people who are tired of the the um of uh center stage moving around um there's a there's like a center button that you can click that centers the image on you and then stops which which is really nice. A lot of details where we heard when I complained about this, I know that we heard from people who are like, Apple will never do webcam settings. It's too, you know, it's too complicated. And I'm like, well, they did them. They did them and they're pretty good. But the one that really gets me is the keynote stuff, or really it's any, any, it's not keynote, it's VOIP presentations. So it can be any app,

any window. And with some app, I think apps have to be updated to support it. Any, you know, any video conferencing app, you click on the little green button on any window and you can choose share this window into that app. And now you're, and you don't have to use the apps like window sharing UI. You can literally just click on a window and say, share this window. And then within there, they've got these two different ways of putting your video in the window. One of them is the window appears behind you, like it's floating. And if you think about it, okay, they know the foreground, they know the background. So they can layer in your screen share between you and the background, like it's floating

and they do all the little things like center stage knows that there's a window over there. So it doesn't center you. It puts you to the side so that you're not blocking the window. Really smart. And then their other one is the one that made me laugh it's so hilariously unnecessary and yet they did it which is there's a small version where you're in the window instead of it showing you in your background it just shows the window and then there's a little circle and your face is in it you're like a little cartoon character yeah except again we all can imagine that feature right they crop they center crop and they use center stage and their face detection or whatever. And they center crop around your face and you appear in a little circle.

That's not what they did. They detect your foreground. They detect you, right? And they detect the background. They remove the background and just put a blank background back there. They keep your head and then they've got the circle. So it's like your shoulders and the circle and the background but that's not it either you're not in the circle the top of your head kind of like pops out of the circle yeah yeah like popping out of a little hole

right it's totally and this is what i'm saying is like is this necessary no it's totally unnecessary but it's really nice it's leveraging the technology they built in their video pipeline to do something that's just a little nice detail. And again, to me, that is the Apple touch that we don't always see, but you know it when you see it. And that, again, completely unnecessary, but delightful. And with this really impressive technical backing. And I love that. I mean, they clearly were like, okay, if we're going to do this, what can we do with this technology of intercepting the video stream, knowing the background, knowing the foreground, you know, having the center stage access and studio light and all these things, what can we do? and this is one of the things they

came up with and it's really nice um so yeah it's you may not ever use this feature but uh i just i appreciate they went to the trouble because this is i just i love that that thing that's like this is not necessary but apple decided to do it and it's delightful i think maybe you could probably issue similar praise to screen sharing high performance mode where in your review you said this feature alone will get me to upgrade my server to mac os sonoma yeah they basically screen sharing used to be this kind of like hidden app that would launch when you were in like the sharing in the finder and you were like clicked on a computer on your network and chose share screen was sort of how you got it. And now

it's got a complete UI, you know, it lists all your recent servers and all that, but they added this high performance mode. If you're connecting, you're on an Apple Silicon Mac connecting to an Apple Silicon Mac, and they're both running Sonoma, it enters this high performance mode, which, you know, is obviously going down at a deep level. If you connect to a laptop that's open sitting next to you, the laptop screen like goes off. Like it's, you are taking it over. Wow. But the result is again, I've gotten used to screen sharing with my server in my house and think, oh, it looks pretty good. And then I opened this mode and it, no, it doesn't look pretty good and then i open this mode and it no it doesn't look pretty good it looks acceptable for what it is which is screen sharing this new mode it feels like i'm using that computer it really does feel like i've just i am now i've teleported and i'm using that computer

it is it is crystal clear this maybe is how the vision pro works it's possible it's the same setup especially since the laptop screen goes off when you do. It's possible. It's the same setup, especially since the laptop screen goes off when you do it. It's possible. You saying the laptop screen goes off made me think that this might be what they're using for the Vision Pro

to make that work. Yeah. And this is, my understanding is this is, Zach's asking about like screens on the iPad. This is an Apple thing and there's no Apple screen sharing app on the iPad. So I

think not, I think this is a, uh, an, a Mac only feature for now, although they really should add it to the iPad. That would be great. Um, but it's, it's very good. And, um, I'm, I'm anybody who's using screen sharing. And again, that's a tiny percentage of people, but I love that they gave this app some love and, um, and it will get me to upgrade my server to sonoma because i want to connect using that uh because it looks it just looks way better also it'll do like audio and stuff and apple claims that you could like edit video using this mode and i'm my audio was a little distorted when i was using it but just like even if that is possible that's kind it is kind of amazing yeah, so serious upgrade to screen sharing.

So Safari added a feature called Profiles, which I was very excited about because it would let me have... And I have set up three profiles. I have a personal profile for just stuff for me. I have a RelayFM profile for my podcasting work. And I have a Cortex brand profile for my Cortex brand work.

Part of the reason I wanted this feature is that each of these things sometimes require me to sign in to back ends of services. Yes. For each of these things. So it becomes really complicated. Amen.

And so I was really happy to have this feature. It takes a bit to set up because it doesn't even seem to remember some of the... It doesn't share your search history it seems like between them so you've got to do that. You've got to re-enable some extensions. It takes a little bit of time to set up.

The implementation on Sonoma I actually think is worse than the implementation on Sonoma, I actually think is worse than the implementation on iOS. Because on iOS and iPadOS, I can toggle the same app between each profile. But on macOS, you switch to a new window each time. It's not like a save state. So I now, on my Mac, have three Safari windows open all the time. And then I just switch between them,

which that is definitely a downside. But the upside of this feature is much higher for me. But what I would like to be able to do is just to be able to toggle between them. But what it makes you do is open a new window each time you want to toggle between them. But what it makes you do is open a new window each time you want to toggle between them, which is a strange way of doing it, but that's the way that I decided to do it on the Mac,

which is odd. I don't really know why it is that way. I like this feature too. I'm using it for YouTube, believe it or not. That's one of mine. I have my whole world in one particular Google account. And then everything I do on YouTube

is in a different account. And I end up having to be logged into both. And it has really negative effects because as you know, because this happens with our Google Docs for this show, I don't know why Google does this. I don't know why. It's so frustrating. Sometimes it just decides, oh, you're logged into two accounts. I'm going to use this other account for this Google Doc.

It's like, no, I never want to use that account with this Google Doc, but you can't really set a default. The only real way to get it to work, um, uh, every time is to log out of the other account, but that's the account I need for YouTube. So frustrating. So now I have a YouTube profile that is logged into that account. And I have a personal profile that is literally everything else just so that I can keep the YouTube login completely separate. So it doesn't keep hijacking all my other Google stuff. Um, but it works great. My only problem there is,

um, the UI, once you switch and you have a YouTube window open, it wants every other window to be a YouTube window. And I don't want that. I actually, I want it to be window and i don't want that i actually i want it to be and i don't think there's a you can set a default but that's not the same thing i would like to be able to say all new windows open in this profile yeah this is part of the tab group problem too tab groups works like this exactly 99 of the time i want it to be in not a tab group problem too. Tab groups works like this. Exactly. 99% of the time I want it to

be in not a tab group and personal profile. Um, but it does this thing where like, if I'm in YouTube profile, it thinks everything I click on and everything I want to do is in YouTube profile. And it's like, no, I make a new window. It's in YouTube profile. I have to turn it back to personal. I don't like that. I want it to just be only go into the other profile when i tell you to otherwise have a default profile and there is a default but it doesn't stick yeah across based on the state of the current window it doesn't stick and i it drives me nuts so yeah like and it's also the thing that i want where you could switch between them you can do that if you open a blank new window.

You can switch that window between the other profiles. But as soon as you navigate to a web page, it doesn't let you do that anymore. And it will now only ever open a new window with a different profile in it. It turns out that it remaps the keyboard shortcuts too in the file menu. So when I'm in a YouTube window, out that it remaps the keyboard shortcuts too in the file menu so when i'm in a youtube window there is a new personal window keyboard shortcut that is option

shift command zero okay all right i mean that's cool to know but what i would like i would like is to say no no no Command N always means personal window. And then give me another shortcut for my others. It's the default. I don't know what it would be, but like command N or option shift command one. It's like, they're not, that's hard for me to remember.

You know what I mean? Like they're quite different, those window shortcuts. But like for me, while I find this frustrating, it is not surprising because I've been a tab groups user and some of the way that tab groups defaults work has been weird. I am at least getting what I want out of this, which is I'm able to move things away. And I will say as well, especially on iOS, the fact that if I want to go from one profile to another, it's multiple tabs. I actually like that because it's adding a hurdle for me to then go to one of my work profiles

while I'm on my iPhone. So it's like, I like those things sometimes, like make it just a little bit harder for me to get to the work that I maybe shouldn't be doing at that time. Yeah, I agree. I also want to add in one thing that I know you won't use, but I am happy about,

which is the predictive text stuff from iOS and macOS is also from iOS is also on macOS. So I can press the spacebar to finish words and sometimes sentences, which I'm really happy about because I love that feature. And it's great here too. I maybe didn't know this or miss this, that they were bringing the transformer model to the Mac. I assume this is probably an Apple Silicon only feature, but I started typing. I was like, oh, it's there. And I could press the space bar and have to type less.

And I love it. We are running long today. So I'm going to bring in an Ask Upgrade question now into this segment. Oh. Instead of doing Ask Upgrade today. So one and a half lasers. We haven't actually left the details. So we're like a stack in now jb asks have you tried running electron apps like slack or discord as a

sonoma safari web app i'm looking forward to doing so in order to reduce memory usage and improve battery life on my machine but i'm curious if it works well in practice i don't understand how this would be better um you know web apps are web apps i think i think that there's some misconceptions here from jb about exactly how this thing works and the resource load yeah i think it would be kind of similar the other problem is that you're also losing features so like slack doesn't let you as far as i could tell switch between instances so you just have to have multiple windows open for each of your Slack instances. I also don't understand why you wouldn't just download.

I mean, I know the Electron, just download Slack. The only thing that I have found as a problem with Electron apps per se is some that I use is every update is like 250 megabytes, right? Because you're basically re-downloading the entire thing every time.

Like that could be annoying, but yeah. Give it a shot. I have tried it. And what I found is that I hate it. And so I have not used it for an extended amount of time in order to, like it just doesn't work

the way I use Slack or Discord. It just doesn't work that way. And you end up in a situation where I've got a substandard Slack or Discord. It just doesn't work that way. And you end up in a situation where I've got a substandard Slack or Discord experience and running those apps don't bother me. Running them in Safari or standalone Safari, they bother me. So I'm not going to do it. So I can't report back and say, oh yes, but memory usage and battery life improved. I can't answer that question for you. If it works for you, give it a try. But I don't have an answer there. I think that they're inferior experiences and that the the apps actually are better. I did I was impressed with the Gmail web app. You know,

I used MailPlan for a long time to put up sort of like an app wrapper around Gmail. And it did a bunch of things that the Gmail web app obviously doesn doesn't do but i was impressed that they are using all of the sort of like app detection stuff so that apple uh has built in so like when you open gmail in the new safari you get a little thing at the top about a banner this is would you like to open this in its own app wrapper basically and it'll save it they all save to user your user folder slash applications which is funny so it's not it's not in your regular applications folder um but yeah oh yeah because this is i was actually going to ask you a question because like yeah the the the way you do this is you invoke a menu command said add to dock right add to dock and i don't want them in my dock necessarily yeah well it's very much like

shortcuts where you add it to the dock and what it does is it actually puts it in your user folder slash applications and then you can take it out of the doc. Okay, so I've had a weird thing happening where I created a couple of these apps just to try them out, right? And removed them from the doc and then I thought they disappeared. And now when I go to Google Docs, it's like, hey, do you want to open the web app? And I'm like, what are you talking about? Because I thought I deleted it. Well,'s like, hey, do you want to open the web app? And I'm like, what are you talking about? Because I thought I deleted it. Well, obviously I haven't, but it's not in the applications folder,

but why would I assume that it would be somewhere else? Along with shortcuts and Steam apps. That's where they all go. Why have they done it that way? Why don't they put it in the applications folder? I don't know. I think you can put it there, but it's not there. Anyway, the Gmail one, it's pretty nice it's not as it's not as nice as um mail plane

because mail plane did lots of like mac keyboard shortcuts and and things that when you're fully integrated with the mac system you could do but you know what if mail plane had died and mime stream hadn't come um i would have this would have been like a moment of if mail plane then died i would be like ah i can use MailPlay and then died, I would be like, ah, I can use Gmail and it's close enough, but I I'm all in on my stream now. So it doesn't, it doesn't matter. But like, I think it's cool. I'm a big fan of this idea of the single site browser.

I've been for a while. I'm glad that Apple has finally embraced it because I, one of the things I hate, the thing I hate the most about like, oh, rely on this website. Like it's an app is it's just another window or it's just another tab in Safari. And like, I'm using Safari all day. It's so easy to close a tab, close a window. And you're like, ah, but my thing just disappeared. And I kind of would prefer app style management, right? Where it's like, Oh no, Gmail is in its own little, you know, quote unquote app. It lives over there. I can hide it or show it as I choose.

I can command tab to it. And it's not one of my many open Safari windows. And you know, I I'm a minimalist. I don't like many open Safari windows, but the idea that like that web app just lives in its own little space. I really like that. I've always liked that. And so for Apple to embrace it is really good. Um, but yes, really good. But yes, look in your user folders, applications folder to discover. Surprise, there might be things in there. That's where they are. I had no idea.

And that's when you add shortcuts to the dock. It's the same thing. You can just take them right out of the dock, but now you've got a clickable application in Finder. I want to finish this conversation by quoting from your conclusion. You say, I sort of miss the days when every macOS version would bring massive changes to the entire concept of the operating system, but I also kind of don't.

Two decades in, stability should be a hallmark of the modern macOS, but Apple should never stop striving to make the experience better. That's what macOS Sonoma manages to accomplish. Yeah, I mean, if every update was like this one, I think I'd be pretty happy. They're importing all of the platform features from across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. They added some nice detail work to Mac features. They made sure that some of the iOS features work better or differently on the Mac. You know, could it be more?

Yes. But on one level, as I just as I said in that thing that you read, I don't need it to be more like I don't need it. I don't need more. I need it to be stable and I need it to be nicer over time. And and Sonoma for me, that's what Sonoma is. It's nicer. And there are a lot of surprisingly nice little details that

give me actually hope for Apple how Apple views the Mac like that they took the extra effort to build these features I I love that I would also just like to say that I'm very thankful that it came out in September like I know it must be really hard to get all this stuff to match up, but I'm just happy that I'm able to take advantage of all of the cross-platform features within seven days of each other rather than a month. I'm sure when macOS has to go out into October, there's a good reason for it,

but I just want to note that when they are able to do them close to each other, I just think it's really nice and I'm very happy for it. Because if that would have happened, you know, like I maybe would have turned on profiles on my iPhone and then it's like, well, now I can't use my browser on my Mac either. So I'm actually really happy I didn't turn that feature on,

which you can turn on on your iPhone. It's the first place, but it's like buried in settings. You can send us your feedback, follow-up and questions. We will do more Ask Upgrade next week over at upgradefeedback.com. You can check out Jason's reviews and all of his work over at sixcolors.com and hear his podcast at theincomparable.com and here on RelayFM, where you'll hear my shows as well. You can check out my work at cortexbrand.com also. We're on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights. I am at imike,

I-M-Y-K-E on mike.social. You can find Upgrade as upgrade at relayfm.social. That's where you can see video clips of the show, but also probably best served on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where we are at Upgrade Relay. We're also on Th. I'm iMike, Jason is Jason L. Thank you to our members who support us at Upgrade Plus. You can get longer ad-free versions of this show each and every week by going to getupgradeplus.com. I think today we're going to talk about the fact that we're trying full video episodes of the show, which you can find on YouTube.

Thank you to our sponsors, Uni and Squarespace. But most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then to our sponsors, Ooni and Squarespace. But most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye just as now. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.