Upgrade - 480: Never Do a Deal with the Preference Daemon

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

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Starting point is 00:00:00 from relay fm this is upgrade episode 480 for october 9th 2023 this episode is brought to you by wild grain express vpn and text expander my name is mike Hurley. I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike Hurley. How are you? Good. Happy new start of a week. Happy new month, although we did already record in October, but it didn't feel like October for me, genuinely. Today feels like the first day of October, so I'm very happy. I will just say, again, thank you so much to everybody that donated to St. Jude. We raised an obscene amount of money. Thank you so much for supporting what we do for another year. Until next time. I have a Snow Talk question
Starting point is 00:00:49 for you, Jason Snow, to start out this week's show. It comes from Ramon who asks, Jason, do you like orange juice with pulp or no pulp? No pulp. I don't have a lot to say about this. As a a kid i absolutely hated
Starting point is 00:01:08 orange juice with pulp as an adult i kind of don't care but if i had to choose i'd probably choose without if given given the option but i probably don't care. That is exactly how I feel. Where as a kid, I would not handle this. Like I couldn't handle it. And I still stand by the reasoning that younger Michael said, which is if I want a liquid, I want just the liquid. I don't want solids in the liquid which i still stand by as a reasoning for not wanting pulp or like any kind of pulp in any kind of juice but now uh i actually realized this recently that i just i was i don't even remember where i was i think i was in a hotel
Starting point is 00:02:01 oh i was in a hotel in memphis this is just like a couple of weeks ago and i ordered some orange juice and they gave me the orange juice and i drank the orange juice the orange juice had no pulp in it i didn't even think about it until i was halfway through and i was like oh i've grown up now and i can handle the pulp uh but yeah i i would also have given the option would choose no pulp yeah i i don't know i mean mean, like, yeah, as a kid, it really seemed disgusting to have little bits floating in your drinkenser in the door that crushed ice. My favorite drink for a long time was orange juice with crushed ice. Okay. So you'll take the ice pulp. I'll take the ice.
Starting point is 00:02:59 Well, yeah, it's bigger though. And then you crunch on it. And it's just like, oh, crunchy orange ice. Like large chunks of orange in the orange juice. Would that be acceptable? No. No, but ice has a totally different texture from oranges. Frozen orange.
Starting point is 00:03:16 Frozen pieces of orange. No, because then you just, you end up eating pulp. If I wanted to eat an orange, I'd eat an orange, right? Like I'll eat my one of my favorite my favorite fruit is mineola tangelo so it's a you know tangerine but it's an orange um and like i'll bite into those i'll eat those and you know what is an orange but orange juice and pulp right like they're mixed together if i want that i'll eat an orange if i'm drinking it i don't want your pulp i'll take it but I don't want it what is this
Starting point is 00:03:45 what is this it's a tangerine orange hybrid or tangerine grapefruit hybrid I think it's great it's my favorite
Starting point is 00:03:52 fruit I've never had one of these it's a little like a it's like a tangerine it's like a satsuma it's in the ballpark it's just a different particular kind
Starting point is 00:04:00 and it's available generally in February I love it didn't know that I like mandarins but yeah it's all in the ballparkbruary i love it didn't know that i like mandarins but you know yeah it's all in the ballpark those are good too that's my daughter's favorite fruit is a is a mandarin see the thing is like we have oranges it's kind of funny right so if orange juice it's like the juice of pulp right but when you think about eating an orange
Starting point is 00:04:18 it's like something with juice you know because oranges are so juicy it's interesting it's pulp with juice is what it is but it's a it's a whole thing but that's the choice yeah yeah juice is not a fruit juice is juice i'm glad we cleared like we covered some serious ground here serious ground everybody's walking away with something if you would like to send us in a question to help us open an episode of the show just go to upgradefeedback.com and send in your Snell Talk question. I would like to remind everybody that we have a Peculiar merch sale going on right now
Starting point is 00:04:51 over at upgradeyourwardrobe.com, which includes upgrade hoodies and a selection of summer t-shirts you can get in time for the holidays. If you want to celebrate the summer of fun this Christmas, go to upgradeyourwardrobe.com. Hey, Southern Hemisphere, it's your time now.
Starting point is 00:05:09 Yes. You know what? Actually, you're always complaining, all right, that it's the wrong time of year. Well, now it is. We did it for you. This is the Southern Hemisphere sale. So go buy your merch, upgradeyourwardrobe.com.
Starting point is 00:05:23 Should we do some follow-up? Yeah, we should. We got a lot of it. should definitely do it b wrote in and asked jason is the color of your wacky inflatable children delighting air dancer tube man actually international orange well i haven't gotten a colorimeter out to measure its exact shade maybe that's a to-do item for when I bring out the Tube Man this year. But I can tell you, I can report here for the upgrade program
Starting point is 00:05:53 exclusively that according to the packaging, the color of my orange Tube Man is orange. That's all I got. Well, you see, we've learned that like what is orange you know we actually started out this episode like yes what is it i don't want to talk about it whether they're whether you like pulp in your orange tube men or not by the way the answer is no
Starting point is 00:06:16 i feel like that that orange juice question may have been a tie-in to international orange that i i didn't realize until right now until just now well that's how yeah it's a real twist there i put a link in the show notes to a very good uh instagram real short clip video thing that we did from the show i believe chip edited this we have editor chip who helps us out with video now and it includes lots and lots of photos of jason and the tube man it's it's almost like like some kind of scene from a rom-com or whatever where like jason and the tube man are like forlicking around the world and you should go watch this it's so good yeah chip basically texted me on on monday or tuesday and he said i need pictures of the tube man send me all the two men all right all right it's really good so our upgrade video team is uh yes editor chip and
Starting point is 00:07:12 social media maven jamie and they're working together it's a whole crew now it's a good crew yeah we're built upgrade uh upgrade brand which by the way uh in case you missed it we did publish last week's episode to youtube in full which is a thing that we're experimenting with now so if for some reason you would prefer a video version of this show it is now on youtube we're at upgrade relay on youtube i'll put a link in the show notes we've done it a few times now and we're gonna do it a few times more at least so yeah we're gonna try it no guarantees no times more at least. Yeah, we're going to try it. No guarantees, no promises. If it falls apart one week, you know, I guess we could say we're in beta
Starting point is 00:07:50 with it. We're not committing to it. We're experimenting with it. But it is there. We've heard from people. I mean, it's not just finding new people where it gets surfaced via the algorithm where people make clips or things like that. It's also that, you know, some of our listeners are like, oh yeah, I'd listen to that. That sounds fun. So, and you get to to that. That sounds fun.
Starting point is 00:08:06 And you get to see us. So, yay. Again, like as I said before, we were talking about this a little bit in Upgrade Plus last week. I am one of these people. The majority of podcasts that I consume these days, I feel like is by, well, I was like, yeah, actually,
Starting point is 00:08:21 it's by Kind of Funny. They're mostly video games and pop culture. I do not have them in my podcast app i just subscribed to the youtube channel so you should yeah well so and we want to reach the goal here and we've said this on upgrade plus a lot but we'll say it here too the goal here is uh make existing upgrade listeners happier and find new people who might love upgrade if only they knew that it existed and could have it work in a way that they want to listen to this, listen slash watch this. What we're not doing is changing the show. Exactly. So as a reminder, we do not see each other.
Starting point is 00:08:57 We cannot see each other. This is not a video call. We just have cameras on us recording us. That's been the way since we started doing the clips. And'll be that way going forward and the cameras are off to the side so we're not looking at them unless you know i mean occasionally i'll do like a little wave at the camera when we're literally talking about recording ourselves but that's about it so it's not and you can't see it you don't know the only thing that's changed about the show mike is now i reliably take a shower on monday morning before the show that's it that's good news that's good news i mean hygiene's important
Starting point is 00:09:29 start the week off right so last week we spoke in during our mac os review about the high performance screen sharing mode which you really liked from mac to mac and i wondered if this might be the technology that apple uses for the Vision Pro because- Yeah, there's that moment where I said, you do it to a laptop and the laptop screen goes off and you're like, oh, that's like the Vision Pro. And that maybe that they're building it in there because it's kind of what you would need.
Starting point is 00:09:58 Well, we had an anonymous informant get in contact who said, you're mostly correct about how screen sharing changes in Sonoma are for the Vision Pro. When you use a Vision Pro near a Mac that's signed into the same iCloud account, a little pop-over button appears above the computer that, when picked, initiates screen sharing. The laptop screen goes dark and the virtual screen appears in front of you, which, of course, you can then move around, resize, et cetera. It's glorious. So we nailed that one, it seems.
Starting point is 00:10:30 Not all, I mean, I assume this is somebody who knows and it isn't, I mean, I feel like this comment goes more or less with what's been announced and shown. I don't remember seeing this little popover button. You know what I mean? Like there's some detail here, which who knows, right? It's an anonymous thing, but it makes sense. But yeah, it does feel like this, right? Like I i was thinking of it when you had that moment of realization i i was backtracking it and thinking well sonoma is going to be the version that's out there when the vision pro ships
Starting point is 00:10:54 so whatever this screen sharing mode is it's probably built for vision pro as well as for the mac right because this is the version that's going to be out there. And they'll probably say, I mean, they could use older versions of screen sharing, but it wouldn't surprise me if Vision Pro is like, must be a Mac running Sonoma to run this feature. Would not surprise me. Yeah, we're actually going to get into a little bit of that later on.
Starting point is 00:11:20 There's some interesting stuff around like Macs and Vision Pro. But yes, I would expect if you want to connect a Vision Pro to a mac you will be running sonoma to do it uh i put this in because we spend a lot of time talking about on the show but i also feel this like sense of obligation now just to make sure you know that apple's q4 earnings call is coming on october on november 2nd thank you yes i just added it to my calendar thanks to you oh good i am actually happy that that was helpful because well you've done you've done this early enough now that you've beaten my note that i do right to myself that says check on apple earnings um because there was that one time and maybe like a year ago and you forgot that it was happening
Starting point is 00:12:05 until the day before and so now i worry about that for you and so uh here it is this will be covering the july august and september months i believe um so it's not the big quarter of the year which is the holiday quarter which is tech what apple calls their q1 because that's their financial year but this is the one that will give us the early indication on the success of the new iphones mike you mentioned earlier that we're in october new month it is we are now in the holiday quarter we're in the holiday quarter whether you like it or not we are in that we are in it now let me tell you jason i don I don't like it. I love the holidays, but I get scared about how busy the holiday quarter is for me these days. Mike, isn't it less busy now that September is over?
Starting point is 00:12:55 September is not part of the holiday quarter. That's true. I mean, by a few days, it tends to be. But it's a different kind of busy. It's a different kind of busy. Actually, you know what? It's not busy. It's just high stakes. That's actually you know what it's not busy it's just high stakes that's uh yes you're doing cortex brand stuff and so it's just like i don't have to like you know put in a bunch of extra hours but i just have it
Starting point is 00:13:18 there in my brain you know it's just like oh i get it i get it i'm starting to do all the you know we're doing all the logistics for our holiday travel and all that. I'm starting to realize, oh, when are we going to record this? When are we going to do that? Yeah, that's how it goes. We had a very fun... We won't share it, but we had a very fun conversation about the Upgradies, didn't we?
Starting point is 00:13:38 We have some fun stuff for later on in the year for the Upgradies. The Upgradies and a potential Christmas special special too. You published your iPhone 15 Pro review over the past week. I had fun reading through it. It was very good.
Starting point is 00:13:54 There was a couple of things that I liked specifically that we hadn't really spoken about previously. One was you had a very good experience with the ultra wideband feature to find Lauren when you were at a sporting event, which I thought was kind of cool. We were at a Cal football game a couple of weekends ago and we separated. One of us had to go to the bathroom.
Starting point is 00:14:17 The other one was like looking for food. And then she texted me and said, where are you? And I think she had walked past me and not seen me. And she said that she was further down and I didn't know which way it was. And I had that moment where I realized, oh, we both have iPhone 15s. Let's try this feature. And I tried it and it worked great. It, um, she gets notified. Jason is looking for you, which is hilarious, but good. And then, and I think, And then you can just basically open Find My. And I had Find My open.
Starting point is 00:14:47 And I was sort of like headed in one direction thinking she's probably down there. And then it said, you know, suddenly it was like 10 feet ahead or 15 feet ahead or whatever. And then it was like, yeah, that's cool. It was fun to do that. That's a fun feature. You just have to have two iPhone 15s to enable that. feature you just have to have a knife two iphone 15s to to enable that but the eventually everybody will have absolute you know precise positioning of you know of their friends if they want because eventually this this tech will be everywhere you also uh shared some images that were like i don't
Starting point is 00:15:17 know like 20 times zoom or whatever right when you go to like the five and then just keep going keep going yeah there's some artifacting in them from the processing or whatever but it's kind of weird because it makes them look like ai generated images like there's like a piece of a saxophone going into someone's face it's very strange i think i think that may be what's going on i think apple may be doing some machine learning extrapolation at the super low down level. And I say that because like, and there were some that I didn't put in because there's some of like people in the stands that they look like horror movie monsters,
Starting point is 00:15:58 right? Their faces are all weird, but I did zoom into full pixels for a few of these things where like the the name on the back of the jersey i know what that name is and i can sort of see what it's trying to do there but it's generated multiple things and maybe that's part of its image fusion as well that with the because i'm holding it and it's 20x but whatever it's doing it's generated something that that at a distance looks fine but you're looking close and like the letter forms are weird and wrong the the cal logo that is uh is a straight line is wavy there there's like junk on the bottom of the of the letter c that's weird and then the the band
Starting point is 00:16:39 person has uh i mean they're they're playing the saxophone but like it looks like the grass field is going into their face too and i think this is all just i mean what i i'm not creating a gate here what i'm saying is that if you're apple does a pretty good job of those extreme close-ups looking good yeah but what you need to not do is zoom in on the extreme don't zoom in on the zoom because you will it becomes kind of obvious they're they're doing some cleanup but it's just not it's not meant to be looked at that close and i i do wonder if that part of their process actually is some machine learning based kind of like guesses about what is there in order for it to look not just like purely pixelated and it has these effects so if anything i assume that
Starting point is 00:17:27 it's like trying to you know maybe draw in every other pixel or something like that like we're looking at these two things together and we're trying to make an approximation of them because things are moving or whatever you know some strange stuff is clearly going on absolutely that's what's going on and and again it's fine um but it was a thing i noticed that very clearly they're they're doing some yeah they're doing some some work there that um isn't your average everyday uh you know pixely right like it's not it's not like that this is it's showing if nothing else it's showing the image pipeline going on here yep having now kind of looked at the iphone in full on review mode if you had any different takeaways or any kind of things that you were thinking before like fully reinforced
Starting point is 00:18:18 about this lineup of phones not really um i like them yeah they are new iphones uh i i closed the article with a version of my um here's what you should you know here's what you should should do if you're updating from last year or the year before the year before that you know right right because that's the truth as most people are not we get lost in the increment from year to year, but so many people don't do that. So, um, you know, it, it, incremental progress is the name of the game. That's just what it is. They focus on the camera. I really like the action button. Um, you know, the UWB stuff is very, continues to be interesting, but kind of under used. I do think there's going to be a moment where it kind of boils over and is everywhere i think i i can foresee a time you know five years from now where our cars and doors and and smart home stuff all know exactly where we
Starting point is 00:19:16 are at all times and you can do some very smart automation once the system knows where you are right that your your door lock knows you're walking up to it. And so it unlocks. If you're on the other side, it doesn't go, oh, you're close to the door, I'll unlock because it knows you're on the inside. It can do stuff like that that Bluetooth cannot do because Bluetooth doesn't have positioning.
Starting point is 00:19:37 So then CarLock's the same way. They use Bluetooth now, but with ultra-wideband instead of Bluetooth or NFC. NFC, you've got to be right up against it. Bluetooth, it's making a guess, but it can also be hijacked. Ultra wideband can't be hijacked because it's got a timer in it. So if somebody tries to rebroadcast your Bluetooth from the restaurant out to the car, the time codes won't match with ultra wideband, but with Bluetooth, they don't do that. And so it works because it's all based on amplifying the signal to make it seem like you're close to the car.
Starting point is 00:20:09 There's lots of reasons that that'll be cool, but it's underused right now. But I thought it was worth a piece. Really, having not gotten the phone under embargo and then also being in Memphis for the podcast and all know, sort of like everything, it feels like everything's been said about the iPhone. So I ended up kind of taking the approach of, after a couple of weeks with it, do I have some observations or thoughts about these products or also what Apple's doing in general? I did, Lizard's Upgrade will not be surprised.
Starting point is 00:20:41 I said, titanium, yes. Colors, bad. And that's, I mean, you know, natural is really nice, but make no mistake, it's just gray. I mean, it's a nice gray. It's a really nice gray. But I did a mini rant about the fact that wouldn't it be nice if they gave us choices and that some of those choices were colorful and not dull because as a spread of colors i don't think anyone cannot can can deny that the iphone 15 pro is just boring but yeah it's it was it was good to get it off my back too because it's one of those things that i know i have to do it and i struggle with thinking about what am i going
Starting point is 00:21:19 to say what am i going to do so you know i did my I did my best. I was just saying on the iPhone 15 Pro Max again, like this is my favorite build of any iPhone. I find it such a joy to hold. I just think it feels so great. Like it's that combination we spoke about already, the lightness and the rounded edges. Like I just really, really, really like it. And I do, I know a lot of people don't but i do like the
Starting point is 00:21:46 design like the overall design of the flat edge stuff like i just think it looks really good um so yeah i'm a big fan uh i did drop my iphone this is i never did this is kind of incredible where i had a conversation with anina because i was selling i was giving selling my alpha phone to my brother and was remarking about how it was in good condition, my iPhone 14 Pro Max. I was like, look at that. You know, this is great. I don't put a case on my phone.
Starting point is 00:22:11 And I was like, it's not an issue because I just don't drop my phone. That night I dropped my phone in the bathroom. And it didn't break at all, but I kind of bent the frame a little bit from the the back which is kind of interesting so there's a very there's just a kind of kind of a sharp point i will say at the top corner of my phone near the camera but that's just the the the whole uh experience of it all now did it activate okay oh the what like what do you mean when you came home, were you able to get it activated and everything? I did it as soon as I landed.
Starting point is 00:22:45 It was very simple. Beauty. On the plane? Yeah. Yeah. The issue was just what I thought it was, which was like, I couldn't activate it before I got home
Starting point is 00:22:54 because it couldn't contact my network, you know? You're right. Yeah. Because it needs to phone home to actual home to do the activation. It's very simple. Very, very simple. Nice.
Starting point is 00:23:08 This episode is brought to you by Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first ever Bake From Frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, fresh pastas, and artisanal pastries. Every item bakes from frozen in 25 minutes or less. No thawing required. Jason, I believe you have received a box of wild green goodness. Box of bread and pasta. Yes, I have. What more could you want in your life?
Starting point is 00:23:36 You know what I mean? Just like, here's a box of good bread and pasta. I did not know that I needed this. I was like, I'm packing the box and it's like, there's pasta, frozen pasta here and frozen loaves of bread. Um, and then, you know, what do you do? You pop the bread in the oven and you got basically hot, fresh baked bread. Uh, that's real good. Like really good. And, uh, the pasta you're like, well, why don't just get dry pasta well this is frozen but it's frozen like fresh pasta so it's uh like all soft and very high quality fresh frozen pasta is excellent like that that's the way to live your life it's real good so it's like you know having made pasta in the past like it's very different to have the fresh pasta than the dry stuff. Would you say you made pasta in the pasta? Sorry.
Starting point is 00:24:29 Sure. I wouldn't because I speak with an American accent. Pasta in the pasta. No, not pasta in the pasta. Pasta in the pasta. Well, you see, I'm trying my best anyway because I would say- Mary? Mary.
Starting point is 00:24:43 Before I was speaking to so many Americans, I would say pasta, right? But now I say pasta. Because it's a little- Pasta. Pasta and the beaters. Yeah, so it was really good. Lauren actually did the bread, and they keep it until it's dark brown. And it was like the outside was super crispy, and the bread was really nice.
Starting point is 00:25:04 So it's interesting. They don't send you dough. They send you a loaf outside was super crispy and the bread was really nice. So it's interesting. They don't send you dough. They send you like a loaf of sourdough and a bunch of loaves actually. And so you're thinking, well, wait a second. You're just heating up frozen bread. I don't know how they're doing it. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:25:16 Are they under baking? I don't know, people. All I know is that I popped it in the oven or Lauren in that one, Lauren popped it in the oven and we waited for it to be brown and we brought it out. And it was so like, seriously, instead of having extra helpings of, uh, of the pasta, I had extra helpings of the bread and we saved the pasta for leftovers. Cause the, the, the bread was, then the pasta was great too, but the bread was
Starting point is 00:25:38 so good and you know, nothing beats that fresh out of the oven bread, honestly, like in that moment it's is the best. So yeah, it's really tasty. Yeah. Yeah, I got a little more, right? Because I got a whole box. So I got some more bread to bake up and some more pasta. I'm looking forward to hearing about it.
Starting point is 00:25:53 So good. Future episodes. You can fully customize your wild grape box. This is something new. You can get any combination of bread, pasta and pastries that you like. If you want a box of all bread, all pasta, all pastries, live your best life you want a box of all bread, all pasta,
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Starting point is 00:26:35 upgrade at checkout. Our thanks to Wild Grain for their support of this show and RelayFM. You have some follow-out about Connected. Yeah. Would you like to share?
Starting point is 00:26:49 One of my favorite technology podcasts is the Connected program here on RelayFM. Yeah, what you guys talked about, this is a follow-out and it's also just sort of a mini-topic,
Starting point is 00:27:00 but Google Pixel event. Google announced all sorts of new stuff for the google pixel one of the things they did was they say they're guaranteeing seven years of software updates which is interesting and i've seen a lot of people play it as being like take that apple but it's really weird because it's really take that past Google, right? I was thinking about it. I have bought multiple Google phones over the last 10 years because I want to have something
Starting point is 00:27:33 that runs the latest version of Android. And it's shocking how quickly you have to buy another one because even Google doesn't support its own operating system on its phones after a couple of years. It's ridiculous. Yeah. So I love this. I have some skepticism, right? Like, what does this really mean?
Starting point is 00:27:53 And I think the answer is it probably essentially means security updates for seven years. They said feature updates, too. I guess what they said. All feature updates? No, they said feature drops. Feature drops. Which is what they said all feature updates no they said feature drops so like drops which is what they call them so it won't get everything but it's still gonna get stuff like it's gonna get new versions of android but they might not have everything is what they're saying right i that's my assumption is is it will reduce over time but it will be that you'll get some stuff
Starting point is 00:28:22 um and great like great because i actually had a moment while i was listening to connector where i thought oh i could buy the new pixel and know that i could actually stay up to date on android i said again for a while which is good i mean but but i'm and i'm not an android user but so my use case is very weird but like i like that idea i think you guys made the point quite rightly that pixel buyers are probably not the kind of person who buys a phone and holds onto it for seven years but i do wonder if some of what what uh google is doing here is just shaming the android phone business right i think i feel like that's part of what's going on here is just google saying we should do better and we're gonna put a flag in the ground i think that this is more as you say that they are trying to make this a stronger thing throughout
Starting point is 00:29:13 all of the their partners right that i don't really think that they're gonna sway a bunch of iphone owners now to the pixel because it's going to get them, uh, eight years of feature updates because Apple gets basically close to that. If not hitting that, you know, with certain models and we'll continue to, I think ultimately this will hindsight will say this was a mistake from
Starting point is 00:29:39 Google. I think that this is just going to be one of those things where they'll, they'll regret it later. This was, yeah, they regret it. Or there'll be, well, I gotta be honest. The first time I heard about this is just going to be one of those things where they'll regret it later. This was, yeah, they regret it. Well, I gotta be honest.
Starting point is 00:29:47 The first time I heard about this, I thought it's going to be really interesting in five years where Google announces that this pixel will not be supported going forward. And that everybody who bought it can get a coupon toward a new pixel. Yeah. Which something, which it would not surprise me if something like that happened. I just think that you don't need to promise this up front you can just do it and i don't think it makes that much of a difference this seems like an extreme promise so much seven years i i feel like if they had been five i might have been like oh okay seven
Starting point is 00:30:18 feels extra enough that i look at it and think one yeah they're going to regret it two they're probably going to try to weasel out of it. And three, who's it even for? I do wonder, like, weaseling out of it, it's that same thing, right? Which is, you could do this. What's the minimum amount? On year six, what's the minimum amount we can do
Starting point is 00:30:37 and still be considered kind of like up to the letter of the promise here? Because they're just like there are things that you know maybe people will hate me for saying this i don't know but i'm gonna say anyway like the idea that like this is better for the environment people aren't keeping their phones for seven years people that buy pixels are not keeping that phone for seven years the only way it's better than the better for the environment is if there is a good resale market for Pixels, right? Because that's what happens with Apple phones, right?
Starting point is 00:31:11 Which a seven-year-old phone will not have a good resale. Yeah, I know. But after two years, you could sell it back and somebody else can sell it to a market that is not going to pay full price for it. And Apple does this with iPhones too. There's a lot of reused, refurbed, resold iPhones that hold, you know, they have some value because they're able to be kept current and the Pixel will be like that. I agree. I think that it's just too easily overstated, but at least let's just say, I think an android phone that can't run the latest android is worthless almost but a pixel five years from now while not great will if it's running the latest version of android
Starting point is 00:31:55 and it's secure and all those things be have some value so i'll give it i'll give it you know fractional credit for that i i want to say though apple has been so good at this for so long but i do wonder if apple standards are slipping a little bit here and the example i want to give is i don't understand why the iphone 10 is obsolete i don't understand it iphone 10 should should run ios, and it doesn't. The XS does, but the X doesn't. And that's the first time in a long time where I've looked at a phone that is not allowed on the current OS and thought, that doesn't seem right. That phone is not that old, and it was so much more advanced than what had come before it. And so for them to drop the portcullis right
Starting point is 00:32:47 there, it seems weird to me. It seems a little weird, but generally Apple is very, very good at this. And I don't think Apple is going to be pressed into making promises because Apple doesn't like to talk about the future, but I think Apple's track record is pretty strong. And they have that, of course, they have the OS update thing. and when you fall off the os update train you're still on the security update train for a while um so i think that's good i do wonder if in the long run i had this theory that that that apple silicon max may stay on the os update train for a very long time um i wonder how apple feels about this. But like in the long run, wouldn't it be better to keep everybody using their Apple hardware secure and just move to a model where everybody's on the current OS, but they don't get these features instead of having to leave them behind? I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do there.
Starting point is 00:33:42 I'm looking into this iPhone 10 now. I'm intrigued because the XR is still... Well, XR was the next year. It's that year, the 10 year, the 8 and 10 year is obsolete now or, you know, not supported. Like, so the A11 in the X and it was the A12 in the XR. I guess that's the cutoff point, maybe. Yeah, I guess that's the cutoff. I just, it's,
Starting point is 00:34:09 that one feels a little wrong to me. Yeah. It's like seven years old. That doesn't feel like a very long time ago. Yeah, seven years, right? That's the Google guarantee. Yeah. But the 10, I don't know,
Starting point is 00:34:22 the 10, it seems weird to me because it felt so, such a leap forward and yet it still just gets cut off i don't know but it was the fact is it was a long time ago and i guess that shows how well apple has handled this overall is that cutting off a seven-year-old phone feels premature because that's a long time right but but i guess what strikes me about it is the iphone 10 is the first of its kind of the phones that we still use today right if you think about the body class of the iphone and the fact that like there was the
Starting point is 00:34:55 early iphone era there was the four and the four and five era of design then there was the six to eight era and now we're in the 10 era where the phones look more or less the same it's very funny looking at the ios 17 compatibility list and then seeing the iphone se in there and it's like there's got to be designers at apple that are like please please please do something with this because like from a design like a user interface design perspective like that thing is just still out there doing its thing you know and it's and it is now the only one that doesn't and you should say the 10 still could have too but like just looking at that list it's the only one that that doesn't have that new silhouette, edge-to-edge silhouette.
Starting point is 00:35:45 Yeah. So I do. So six years for the iPhone X, but I don't know. I mean, that's the one that struck me. And I do think generally Apple has done a good job, and nothing has changed my opinion about this or formed my opinion about this
Starting point is 00:35:58 more than buying a couple of Google. I don't think I've ever bought a Google Pixel. I think I bought the Nexus models, the late Nexus models. But you buy one, and like all right I set it up now and every time we would write about something regarding Android and I'm like oh Apple Music's on Android let's check that out and all that and then all of a sudden you turn around and it's like it feels like like two years later and they're like oh yeah this new Android doesn't run on that I'm like that is outrageous that is just outrageous and I know google has done a bunch
Starting point is 00:36:25 of stuff to roll things into like play services where they can update a bunch of things without updating the os yeah i don't know like so so i'm glad that they made this even though i think they will regret it and they overdid it um i feel like apple i am very rarely outraged at apple's rolling uh incompatibility list although i definitely know people and shout out to editor chip here who use older macs with with newer os's and just do the thing where you install the software that lets you install it and it runs fine and it makes me think that apple sometimes apple just doesn't want to go back and qualify their operating systems on older hardware it's not necessarily that they wouldn't even work it's that they just don't want to bother but but they do generally let them live a very long time
Starting point is 00:37:10 and that's good and also i'll point out uh because this comes up sometimes your computer doesn't stop working when it stops doing updates from apple right it still works and as long as there's security updates they're also it still works and it's still secure um and so you can still use them your older computers and phones and stuff and it's fine uh you guys talked about the google ai photo editing thing too we did do you had a version of that same conversation that a bunch of people had i know neil a patel over the verge talked about this a lot it's like what even is a photograph anymore a super good episode of the verge cast which is about that too what even is a photo anymore i think okay so first off google's a very engineering driven company like there's two drives at least in my history of dealing with google um internally there's two
Starting point is 00:37:57 drives at google there are the people who are the engineers and they are driven to do cool stuff and push the cutting edge and then there's the suits whose job is to get you involved in onerous contracts and charge you lots and lots of money and maximize revenue. It's a fascinating company because it's sort of like having been through that process once you're dealing with all the technical people and they're just like, oh man, let's just do this. It's going to be awesome. And you work with them on a project and then everybody's really happy. And then all of a sudden the business people start to talk and everybody is very sad because the business people are playing hardball because it's Google and they want their money. Fascinating dichotomy.
Starting point is 00:38:34 So I look at this and I think Google is just flooring it on what if we just did every AI feature possible in editing your photos? Like you take some photos and if this person isn't smiling on this photo, but you did a burst or you did a bunch, we'll just take their head from another shot and put it here. Now I'll tell you, I have done that in Photoshop when I get three family photos that I took and none of them are quite right. I have done that. And it took a lot of work in Photoshop. There is in in fact a poster in a frame in my living room of our kids on the uh one of the lions at trafalgar square that is absolutely composited
Starting point is 00:39:12 from three different shots yeah so it happens but uh part of the point in connected was um but you're making it real easy too easy in my opinion and there's this question of like what is real and and that at least at least expressions make sense and you know how cameras have like done the thing where they won't quite snap the photo until everybody's eyes are open and all that and that's all good there's a bunch of good stuff there but i do think when it starts to be like oh you can you can kick a kid on the trampoline and erase the trampoline. And you're just like, well, but that's not what the... My point here is that contrast that with Apple. Apple seems to have a real ethos
Starting point is 00:39:52 about honoring photography as a way to collect information about reality and depict it. And although there is a real strong argument to be made about how photography fundamentally is not in context because it is a moment in time. Absolutely true. I do think Apple has a professional photographer's, in many ways, approach to why photography is the way it is, and it's to depict reality. And that those pictures of your family where you erase the trampoline or whatever, like, is that, that's not what happened, right? And so I think it's an interesting contrast.
Starting point is 00:40:32 I think Google knows it. And so Google's like, put the pedal to the metal here. Let's just AI all the things because they know Apple. It's not like Apple can't do it. It's like Apple doesn't want to do it. it's not like apple can't do it it's like apple doesn't want to do it i'd say to a fault because there are places where i think apple's software and uh photo stuff should be better it i just i recently set a bunch of um slides from they're actually my mother-in-law slides from the late 60s and early 70s and have them all scanned in. And they're beautiful. And we recovered a
Starting point is 00:41:06 thousand photos that were basically in a box that nobody had really seen in decades. But they're all a little dusty. And although the photo scanning service did a pretty good job of cleaning them up, there's still little specks here and there. And I realized that to fix that, like Apple Photos can't fix that. On the Mac, it can sort of, but not very well. On iPad and iPhone, it can't. You really need another app. And you could use a machine learning based thing that tries to detect the dust and stuff and remove it. A lot of the traditional dust and scratch removing is literally just a blur. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what I want. I don't want to blur. Or you do the little thing where you take a fix tool and you like click on the blemish or in this case, the dust and it fixes it.
Starting point is 00:41:51 And those are now machine learning like Photomator from Pixelmator does this. And you can use it for all sorts of things, right? You can use it to fix weird blemishes on photos or dust or whatever else. And the one on the Mac in photos isn't very good. And on iOS, they just don't have it. And I don't understand it. I don't. So I feel like Apple is maybe a little bit too far down its own rabbit hole on this one, and that they need to do a better job of thinking about how people are using this stuff but i think google it strikes me as google may be going a little too far in the other direction but i'm fascinated by the contrast between the two companies and how they approach photos it's really interesting yeah i'm worried that google stuff is too far but i feel
Starting point is 00:42:37 like also this the train has left the station yeah i think it's google basically saying look it's inevitable so we're going to make it easy i'm like i don't know i mean as a platform owner yeah you're making really like it's are they going to do a deep fakes next right like why not maybe there's a place where you should draw the line and say you know you could do all sorts of stuff but we don't want to enable people to do this thing easily because then everybody will do it and we're not happy with it. And I think that there's, I don't know. I don't know if Google has necessarily crossed that line, but I'm glad people are asking the question. I also don't know if people want these features. That said, I wrote a thing about after the iPhone event where it struck me that
Starting point is 00:43:19 we may soon enter an era where instead of taking photos at all, you literally like hold out your phone or you even have something that you wear that takes it continuously is taking high resolution images. And it's just picking the best things and putting them together. And after the fact saying, here are photos of what you did today. Like we're not that far off from something like that, which is wild because that's not photography at all, but it sort of is. But it's more like a life memory in stills and short videos and stuff. We were close to that. So there's interesting stuff going on, but I'm,
Starting point is 00:43:54 I'm kind of glad everybody at least got a little bit of a pause from Google's announcement, but it's so different from Apple. It's really striking. I don't think either of them are right. I think they're both maybe a little too extreme in either direction, but I can see it. One last item. I know it's a lot of follow-up. You and Federico are on one side of the Mac widgets. I don't even think it's true. I just want to say this. So Mac widgets, I was critical of them last week and in my review. of them last week um and in my review uh but not saying that they're bad and not saying that they're boring just saying that they're a little less special on the mac because the mac has so many alternatives whereas on ipad and ios like i don't think if only the mac existed people would
Starting point is 00:44:36 be like i got this idea for widgets and it's going to be great i think that the the decision process would have been really different because of what already exists on the Mac. That's sort of, if not duplicative, it's a little bit like that. Like it's a little in the ballpark. Federico said that you said they were boring, and I don't remember you saying they were boring. And that's what I disagree with. I don't think that they're boring. I understand the idea that there's a bunch of different ways to access that stuff,
Starting point is 00:45:01 but I do really like it. And as I mentioned, as a stage manager user, I find myself seeing the desktop and getting to the desktop to be quite a frequent thing. Right, because it's cleaner. Yeah, I'm finding myself hitting my shortcuts buttons
Starting point is 00:45:16 that I've put on little widgets like quite often where I would have, like I'm doing that basically exclusively now rather than using the shortcuts menu bar because it's just just visually simple and easy and most of the time like with some of the shortcuts where that i set them up i can actually just see the shortcut window all the time i can just click it and it doesn't
Starting point is 00:45:35 even go to the desktop it just activates it right and so it's like that's awesome i'm a big fan of that i think it's really good yeah so the thing i wanted to call out and this is i'm not i'm not trying to play gotcha with federico here i love by the way that that he listens to the show right because that's not a given um i love he's like oh on upgrade this week i'm like oh and then uh when uh marco and casey and john do it too it's like oh that's so sweet so hi guys um podcasters listening to podcasts who knew here here's the's the thing that struck me as an interesting kind of like a quirk of how you view the Mac and how you view Windows on the Mac is that Federico said, I don't agree with Jason about his comment about reminders. Because what I said was, you can
Starting point is 00:46:19 have a reminders widget on your desktop. But at that point, you could also just have reminders running with a window open. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want a window with reminders in it open all the time. I just want a little thing on my desktop with reminders in it. And I get what he's saying, but my response to that is they're the same or almost the same, right? Like I, and perhaps this is just different ways of perceiving how you use a Mac, but I often have reminders open to the list that I use all the time. And it's off on the far left side of my display down in the corner, usually covered by something, but not always.
Starting point is 00:47:04 And it just sits there. And then I will sometimes go there. Sometimes I'll hide it. Sometimes I won't, but often it just sits back there. It's basically a widget. Now the counter argument would be, no, I don't need to do that. I could just have a widget down there. And that's true. It's cleaner. But at the same time, I do have that thought, which is is it's still a reminder list sitting back in the corner of your screen like yeah and that was my point is that there is a difference but it's not a revolutionary difference right it's like oh now finally we can have the to-do list visible i feel like you could do that before because you could just leave reminders open it's just a little smaller and
Starting point is 00:47:43 simpler now me and federico are in this camp and I'm not sure why we both are, but no overlapping windows. I don't like my windows to overlap. That's fine. And so there's something about the widget, which is different. It's like this permanent thing. It's just stuck there rather than having this little window just cluttering up the place. Yeah, no, i get it and and that's that's what i mean is that different people use the computer in different ways
Starting point is 00:48:09 and therefore i'm and that's why i didn't say widgets are pointless right i didn't say that i said they're just they solve they're not as revolutionary in some ways because on the mac you can just leave reminders open there and it's like you could even set it up to be super minimal and it would be like a widget and and and what the point i was trying to get at is in a one app per you know one app at a time interface like like by default the ipad and like the iphone you it's revolutionary to be able to peer into multiple apps at once on the Mac. It's not, and that's all, that's all, but it's a good feature. I like it. I think it's a cool idea. I just, I had a couple of funny moments where I thought, oh, I could put reminders down here. And then I literally stopped and thought, but why? And right. Why, why put something that's
Starting point is 00:49:04 a little less flexible? But I get the, that you guys want it clean, although I'll point out that it's not clean if there's a widget there. It's a little less clean, but it's clean enough
Starting point is 00:49:13 for you to have it there. It becomes part of the wallpaper. And that's the solution. You know? It's fine. It's different. It's different.
Starting point is 00:49:18 Do you desaturate it when it's in the background? I do, yeah. Okay. I think that's the way to live, to be honest. That makes, yeah,
Starting point is 00:49:24 I turn that feature off too, so they'll show you where my head is. But, all right, that's the way to live to be honest that makes yeah i turn that feature off too so they'll show you where my head is but all right that's it thank you for indulging me in follow-up pleasure happy to listen to the show you know first time caller and all that nonsense thank you that's right thank you for listening the b-tails are back jason snell didn't we say goodbye to them last week goodbye but they're here i told you not to i told you not to i told you we were gonna be right back in there you're right there's a new vision os beta out and there's a couple of things in it that i just wanted to mention because i thought they were interesting one is that as of this beta you need to run apple silicon for development i saw this from c tron smith so as steve said a line in the sand has been drawn and so now
Starting point is 00:50:14 if you want to develop for vision os you need an apple silicon mac uh obviously this is one of these things that i've seen a lot of people being very upset about because that is just the way that all these things go. What are you come on-ing? I don't know. Like complaining about Intel systems not working on the cutting edge. Like, come on. Again, what I mean by come on is I have absolutely zero feeling about that. Like, of course like oh but they're it's artificial and i should still be able to like the whole every the whole platform is on apple silicon now um get with the
Starting point is 00:50:56 program and i thought like you want to develop for apple's next gen uh operating system, next-gen device, but do it from an Intel Mac, sorry. Like, sorry. I have, sorry. It's over. I have sympathy for you because you're going to need to get a new Mac. I get it, but like, it's not unreasonable to me. So sorry about that. This is, yeah, come on. Move on. Time to move on. Intel is over. On all Apple's platforms, it's over. on. Intel is over. On all Apple's platforms, it's over. So my feeling on this is a little bit similar to you, but I think maybe a little different. Just in that, like, we are not super far away
Starting point is 00:51:38 from macOS being Apple Silicon only. Maybe two years, right? But it's not very far away i don't know when i don't know what will cause it but i don't think we're very far away from that and so i do feel like specifically for vision os why maintain the tools on a different platform yep yeah these These are brand new tools. The fact that it ever worked on non-Apple Silicon Macs is interesting to me. I find it peculiar
Starting point is 00:52:10 that they have done this during the cycle. I feel like it would have been easier and cleaner if it was just always Apple Silicon only. That is like the weird part to me. But for this specific thing,
Starting point is 00:52:24 I feel like i understand it yeah and yeah i don't want to say hey everybody everybody who's using an intel mac sucks right that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is yeah hot take says boo yeah what i am saying is if you are a professional software developer who wants to develop for Apple's next generation operating system and platform, having Apple say you need to develop it on a system that is running the same kind of hardware as the new platform is not unreasonable. That's it. That's what I'm saying.
Starting point is 00:53:00 So if you're like, oh, but I have a MacBook Air that's three years old and it's still running on Intel and I should feel shame about this. It's like, well, no, you shouldn't. But if somebody is going to develop for Vision OS, Apple saying you need Apple Silicon, you need an M1 Mac Mini, and then you're golden. Come on. Again, what I would say is it's not an unreasonable barrier. I understand why they might do it. And the people who are complaining about it are either complaining because they want to complain about Apple.
Starting point is 00:53:33 Or they're complaining about, I don't want to invest anything in developing for Apple's new platforms. In which case, Apple has basically said, okay, then you can't. And I don't think it's unreasonable. So I'm not biting on this one. I'm just not. So in the Discord, people were surprised at me saying the two-year thing, which was something that I heard David and Steven talk about on Mac Power Users on the macOS Sonoma episode. So I just went to the macOS Sonoma page and the compatibility is for machines from 2018. That's where it cuts off.
Starting point is 00:54:11 So we're only two years away from that compatibility potentially being 2020. That's when Apple Silicon started. I do believe we're about two years away from macOS versions being Apple Silicon only on some machines. Yeah, two or three yeah i think
Starting point is 00:54:26 you're right it's it's really not very far away and so vision os being still you know a couple of years from being a a real serious platform if if that at all it just seems like why you know like why why put the effort in to maintaining it but as i said it's just strange to me that it even started that way um also from steve trounce smith steve is very good at sharing stuff from the simulator so he's a good follower on mastodon um he included it so he had a video about a a new um sample project game like sample code game that apple is is has in the new uh beta called swift splash it's like a little mixed reality game where you build a uh water slide from pieces like you can build it from these little components and then run it and see how this little fish goes down the
Starting point is 00:55:19 water slide i think that this is a feels to me like an indication from apple of the types of things i would like to see people build right that like these mixed reality games that yep you can build in a space you can move around them and watch them do a thing like this feels like to me at least an indication of hey we would like to see this kind of stuff it's a also a logical extension think back to all of those mixed reality ar kit demos that we got um in the last five years yeah yeah this is clearly they were a lot like this right where it's like oh it's a game you can play on a table and the answer was well you can play it on a table but but you got to hold your iPad the whole time. Yeah. Right? But this is why they were talking about that, is that Apple thinks that this is an entertainment use case for Vision Pro, is software in a mixed reality mode. And yeah, it's cool.
Starting point is 00:56:20 And the idea is not complex here. It's that we're not trying to immerse you in a magical world. We're trying to put things that look like solid objects in front of you that are generated by software. And on some levels, that is kind of a subtle distinction. Because I'm sure you could play something like Swift Splash on something like a quest, a meta quest. on something like a, uh, a quest, a meta quest, and you would be in a virtual world, but it wouldn't really matter because what really mattered was the object in front of you. Um, and Apple saying, well, no, like so many of these things don't need, you don't need to be in a virtual world. You can be in the real world and have the thing floating in front of you.
Starting point is 00:57:00 Um, it looks fun as somebody who spent way too much time playing pipe dream um i looked at this and i was like oh that's really cool connect all the little things and see where the little fish goes and it's a cool idea so it's very clearly apple sending a signal very clearly and steve moser at mac rumors found code in this beta that indicates that it will be possible to enable screen mirroring via airplay or facetime when using the Vision Pro so you can share with somebody what you're seeing. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Screen sharing, essentially, for Vision Pro. Because there was a question about it because when we did our demos, that was happening,
Starting point is 00:57:39 right? So there was somebody in the room who had an iPad and they could see what we were seeing. Like it was a part of the demo. And I heard some people like questioning it as if that would be a thing or saying the other thing, which is, oh, yes, it will work. I've seen it happen. But I think I wasn't convinced that it would ship that way. Is this just a thing of the units or the software that we are using that enables that
Starting point is 00:58:05 but i'm i'm pleased that they will do it this is a thing that other platforms offer but the ability to like you know be doing a thing or playing a game and sharing the screen with somebody who's with you and like that's part of the gaming experience you know you can see what someone's seeing can be fun and it's especially fun for someone who's trying it out for the first time you know and they're like whoa and they're freaking out you can see what they're seeing it's like being shared to the tv or shared to an ipad like that's a fun thing in the vr experience i'm intrigued to see what the longer term use cases will be for that but i'm happy that they'll have it even if just for like that thing of being able to see what someone's seeing because they're having some kind
Starting point is 00:58:44 of fun experience and you want to share it with them. I think that's cool. So it's good that it's in there. Yeah, sure. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Spooky season is here, everyone. Some people call it Tootman season,
Starting point is 00:59:00 but it's spooky season. Yes, as you can hear, it's very much spooky season. So maybe it's time season. And so maybe, yes, as you can hear, it's very much spooky season. So maybe it's time to make yourself a classic horror movie playlist of all of your favorites. Maybe Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street. The list could go on and on.
Starting point is 00:59:15 Night of the Living Dead. Indeed, all of them. Whatever you like, you know. Maybe you want to watch A Nightmare Before Christmas and kind of cross the holiday streams. To find all of these movies, you can use ExpressVPN because ExpressVPN lets you change your location. So streaming
Starting point is 00:59:30 services will show you movies and TV shows that aren't necessarily available normally where you are. So you can get access to thousands of extra shows just by firing up the ExpressVPN app, changing your location, refreshing Netflix or whatever service you're using, and that's it. This means you don't have to subscribe to a ton of other services to find your favorite movies, or maybe you just can't find them all because they're not available in your location. But maybe if you change the location, they will be. This isn't just for scary movies, and it isn't just for changing where you are, right? So like we spoke about this a bunch, I was just traveling in Memphis. I wanted to catch up on some shows that we're watching on our services in the uk and i could
Starting point is 01:00:08 use expressvpn to change my location and do that but maybe you want to watch friends maybe you find that spooky that's not that's on netflix in the uk or parks and rec as well you can just change location to the uk and you can do that. Maybe you're terrified about your life and you look at the people and friends and be like, what they were doing in their 30s. Could it be any more spooky? Here I am. Maybe it's scary.
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Starting point is 01:01:01 at expressvpn.com slash upgrade. A thanks to expressvpn for the support of this show and relay fm you put a note into our document that says simply jason had to delete his user and rebuild his life i don't know what this is talking about so could you please explain yourself i had a thing happen last Thursday. Okay, I have to back up a little bit. So for maybe a year, certainly for many months, I had this situation where, so I pay for Photoshop. That's my Adobe Tithe is an annual payment for Photoshop because I've used, please don't send me anything about alternatives.
Starting point is 01:01:45 I have all the alternatives to Photoshop. I've used Photoshop for like 30 years. Sometimes you just need Photoshop. Sometimes you're working with someone and they send you a Photoshop file and you've got to open it in Photoshop. It's just life. I even, I mean,
Starting point is 01:01:58 I have been using Photoshop since I was in college. It is, I know where everything is. I know how to think in Photoshop. I can't imagine not having Photoshop. And I use those other tools. And I'm like, it is good. The other tools are good and cheaper and all of those things.
Starting point is 01:02:16 But I've just decided that I would rather pay Adobe $120 a year and not learn something else ever, right? Because it's been with me for so long. They will need to do more work in order to get me to stop using Photoshop. However, last year at some point, because Creative Cloud is great, you just get the new version. And I don't have Creative Cloud startup at launch or anything like that. So I don't know. I checked for an update and it was like, hey, we got a Photoshop 2023 update and I installed it.
Starting point is 01:02:46 And the number one thing I do in Photoshop is save out JPEGs and pings to post on the web or to send to people. Sure. And that's using a command called export as. They used to have a thing called save for web. It's still there.
Starting point is 01:03:00 It was better, but the export as has gotten a lot better. Also good settings in that view, I think. Yeah, it's better but the export as has gotten a lot better lots of good settings in that in that in that view i think yeah it's it's better um it's it's a little weird but it's okay it's i've come to accept it and i i choose export as in the shiny new photoshop and it says photoshop could Photoshop could not complete this command because of a program error. Program error. Oh, well, I mean, it's a program. It had an error.
Starting point is 01:03:31 I guess it's not informative in any way. But yes, a program error, a program error has occurred. And therefore, I can't do my job. The buttons below it are okay, or maybe it's dismiss. That's the default. And then below it, learn how to fix. Okay. Okay. Learn how to fix. I click on that. It's fascinating. This is your first line of Adobe support. And you know that somebody has run the numbers here. It's like, you just got to put a
Starting point is 01:04:00 button in the interface when there's an error saying, learn how to fix. And it'll put in the error information behind the scenes and it's going to pop up a solution. And so it took me to support pages for a support page for the program error. And it's like, try this in Windows. I don't have that. Try this in Windows. I don't have that. And it says, one thing you can try, which is uncheck the graphics acceleration.
Starting point is 01:04:21 So I do that and restart. Okay. Same error. Mm-hmm. The other thing on the support document is literally, or you could search for this
Starting point is 01:04:30 in our forums, which is just... Oh. Can we just say, like... No. There is a line. Like, having support forums is not fundamentally evil.
Starting point is 01:04:42 Viewing your support forums as an important part of the support process yes is is a mistake that's unpaid labor as well you know what i mean just like yeah talk maybe it could be really bad i mean i don't know if you've done this i've definitely done this where i've searched for something for an apple problem and there's been an Apple support forum thing, and you click on it. And first off, they're not very helpful. But I'm just going to anger a lot of people today. I'm going to just say this. The Apple support forums are populated by people whose apparently entire self-worth is their level on Apple support forums.
Starting point is 01:05:23 And I will tell you, they think they're being helpful. They are know-it-alls who don't answer correct questions correctly, and then close the thread before somebody can give a correct answer. They are a bane on the existence of Apple support forums. And those power users of Apple support forums are make the whole thing useless, almost useless. I'll say, I hate hate them i'm sorry i'm sure
Starting point is 01:05:48 you're lovely people in your regular life jc simultaneously oh my god uninvited from every mac user group i'm sorry like who are these people and they're like they're like they think they're apple support but they're not they are unpaid labor i assume who've got like these high rankings because they're like i'm just i'm just going out there every day on the internet and helping people and it's if they were right it would be okay but they give bad advice there's a lot of this on reddit too right like reddit yeah oh it's the internet but like it's different if it's reddit because it's just reddit right okay but it's the apple support forums like apple should not one should not be relying on these people and two should not be giving them any veneer of credibility let alone power to do
Starting point is 01:06:33 things like close discussions because i solved it they did you did not solve it sir you did not solve it anyway uh adobe support forums you will be surprised to discover not helpful i saw a meme recently that i enjoyed and i can't remember exactly but it was it was like a screenshot of like a support forum or a reddit thing and it was like the question was like hey everyone like happy to be i just have a quick question about this piece of software like i'm wondering if you can help me with this and then like top comment and like and then like thread locks it says you have simultaneously broken every single rule of the support forum we have therefore deleted your question you know it's just like that's what it feels like sometimes like there is these rules and you don't know what they
Starting point is 01:07:14 are because you have like one question i'm not part of your community whatever that is it's a community of people who sit on the internet complaining about bugs in software that's your what is the community there it's not a community it's people drifting in across the transom who are are need help they need help and that's i think that's fundamentally i didn't expect this to go in this direction but that's the fundamental problem with your customer support forum is that you are, maybe I'm changing my mind. Maybe they are evil because here's, here's what it is. The problem is it implies a level of lack of care unless you're,
Starting point is 01:07:52 you are actively as the developer participating in the community. And, and if it's a part of a larger community of users of your product who are also sharing tips and stuff like that, great. But some of these things, it feels like all it is, is a place for people to come because they have nowhere else to go and say, help me. And then you get a community in there. And that is the community
Starting point is 01:08:16 of the know-it-alls who say you're doing it wrong and are not helpful. And I've definitely had that where there's a piece of software I use that we've talked about here before. I'm not going to go into it, but it's very kind of old software, but it works for me. And it has a support forum. And the developer kind of comes and goes because I think he's got other priorities too, but he chugs along and there's a new beta every few months and it's fine. But I've had some issues with that software where I've gone to the support forums and it's very clear that there've, I've had some issues with that software where I've gone into the support forums and it's very clear that there are some, I think, self appointed people. And if they're not, they're like, they're not involved in the, maybe the developer has given them moderator
Starting point is 01:08:55 power, but they're like not involved in the production of the software. And they are making all the classic customer service mistakes, which is they blame the user. That's what they do. They're like, you're doing it wrong. And I'll come in there and I'll be like, well, I'm not doing it wrong. But thank you for your feedback, person who does not,
Starting point is 01:09:18 like is not part of the company and does not need to be here, but is poking their nose in when I'm, like, if you can help me, help me. But like, as a, as a person who uses the software, like I do, but what are you doing anyway? They're bad. I've decided it now I've come all the way around customer service, uh, forums are bad. They should be good, but they're not good. Uh, official ones, we should say unofficial ones. Great, great official ones. It's an abrogation of responsibility by the vendor,
Starting point is 01:09:47 unless they're in there actively. Anyway, Adobe's support forums were no help. That's what I'm saying about the program. That's a surprise. There's years of program error complaints about there about this very specific thing. Most of them ended up being reinstall it.
Starting point is 01:10:04 That didn't work. Or they were unchecked the being reinstall it that didn't work or they were unchecked the graphics acceleration box that didn't work oh my god so i bit the bullet i said you know what i pay 120 a year for this um my day is free side note my day would soon not be free wide open i was like what am i gonna do this day i got so much to do what am i gonna do this day was filled his day was completely ruined so i said you know what contact us and they're like would you like to talk to a chat agent and i said yeah i would and they're like ah robot and i was like i got a program error and it said, here's a document. It's the same document as the learn how to fix. I'm like, nope.
Starting point is 01:10:49 They're like, oh, didn't help you. What would you like to do? And it's like, search the FAQs, go to the user forums. And then the last item is talk to an agent. I'm like, talk to an agent. Give me the agent. Give me the agent. Give me the agent.
Starting point is 01:11:02 Agent comes on. Obviously, you know, it's a, a it starts probably starts as pre-formatted but it's not a robot i think yet um i i repaste my issue in um and they suggest a couple of things and i i try to make it clear like i've tried all the things it does not work. Oh, I should say as a side note, reinstalling that old, like you, people may not know this creative cloud. You can go back versions. They've got like a library of like all the way back to, I think I can go back to like Photoshop 2022 or something. They're all version numbers, but like old versions. And if I rolled back far enough, I could get it to work. And so for the last two years I've been using or a year and a half, whatever, I've been using an old version, older version of Photoshop. And every time it's
Starting point is 01:11:48 like, you want to update? I'm like, no, I don't because I can't save. So the person comes on and I say, and I say, I can't do this. I can't do this. And they finally say, all right, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give you a link and it's going to install screen sharing software. And I am going to get to the bottom of this. And I thought, you know what? Let's do it.
Starting point is 01:12:10 Let's do it. So I did it. And Adobe screen sharing software. It's actually pretty impressive. You get it going. It, uh, he's got a little chat window that he can send to me and then I can
Starting point is 01:12:20 see what he's doing. And, uh, and I'm watching it and Mike, it was like a sports fan watching a sporting event. Like it was like a playwright watching a play. I got to watch someone else try to troubleshoot my computer. And I'm pretty sure he couldn't hear me, which is good.
Starting point is 01:12:45 I muted all my microphones. Okay. But it was amazing because it was like, all right, he's going to the graphics processor thing, and he's going to turn that off and relaunch. And then it's like, drum roll, export as, program error. Ha ha, I told you, buddy. I told you that wouldn't work.
Starting point is 01:13:05 And then he's like, okay, I'm going to go. Let's, let's uninstall and reinstall to do program error. Sorry. I tried that one too. Good, good on you. And I get that he's trying it because people are unreliable, but still, I knew it wasn't going to work. So I'm like, this is amazing.
Starting point is 01:13:20 Right. I'm watching all. And then he's like, okay, I'm going to go into preferences. And I'm going to change the permissions on all the Adobe preferences. I'm going to add all the specific users, not just the admin group. I'm going to set all of them and everybody else to read and write permissions for the entire folder. It needs a password. That's the moment where I come in and go put my password. Off we go.
Starting point is 01:13:47 Doesn't work then he's like okay there's this other set of things i can do to set the the the um the permissions doesn't work i i don't know i kind of took glee in it because i'm like see see this is hard there is no good answer here also part of me is thinking is he just reading that tech support document? Because it's not helping. That's not what the issue is here. And I can't decide whether there are certain systems where this thing is broken and they just don't care or whether it really is something involving me. But I can't figure this out. So then he says, he comes back on the chat and he says, okay, here's what we're going to try next.
Starting point is 01:14:25 We're going to to follow me here. Again, I was just all in at this point. If I had to yank the computer out of the power and boot it off the network, if I had to reformat my hard drive, whatever, like I was just going to let him do whatever he needed to do. So he says, we're going to go to network utility and enable the root user. And we're going to log out of your account. We're going to log in again as root. Like, wow.
Starting point is 01:14:48 Okay. Big guns, right? It's not even create an admin account. It's like, we're just going to go to root. And I think this is because he's convinced it's a permissions problem of some sort or some weird interaction involving file permission somewhere,
Starting point is 01:14:59 or something else is broken in my user. And so if you go to root, like it eliminates all of those things, you shouldn't ever in the long run, have root enabled as a user on your Mac because it's dangerous, but we did it just, just, you know, for just for a minute. So we do that. And I'm also thinking to myself, like, how's he going to come back in screen sharing? Like we're going to be in a different user, but theobe screen sharing uh is installed for the whole system and is persistent across users so we log in as root eventually i oh he
Starting point is 01:15:32 tried to give he tried to set the root password and i'm like no no no no i i text him like i i have to do this part he's like yeah okay so i set my root password uh We go over. He comes back, which is kind of magical. It's like Adobe screen sharing. He's back. He just goes to applications, double clicks on Photoshop. I think I have to log into Creative Cloud because it's a new user. I'm not sure. Something like that.
Starting point is 01:15:57 It opens. He opens a new canvas and draws like with the paintbrush tool, just draws a squiggle. Does file, export as, does file export as, and the export as window comes up. At which point he brings in, he goes into text and he basically says, well, it's your user.
Starting point is 01:16:14 No. Okay. To be fair. That is unsatisfactory. Well, okay. There, the fact that it didn't happen on older versions of Photoshop makes me think that it's partially at least their fault.
Starting point is 01:16:31 And if we had, or if I had wanted to, we probably could have done a deep dive investigation on everything in my system, in my user folder, to find out why it wasn't working. And I thought about it and I thought, you know what? I feel like this is a symptom of a larger problem. I feel like I probably, this Mac is probably the legacy of untold migrations for probably more than a decade, maybe even two decades. Untold migrations. I would always find preferences that were from 15 years ago. I'm like, okay. So I thought, this is a sign. I think I just need to bite the bullet here and delete my user and rebuild my
Starting point is 01:17:25 life. So I thanked the guy, uninstalled the software, turned off root, deleted the root user, all those things. And then you have to do the dance where I had to like make a new user, delete my old user,
Starting point is 01:17:40 then make a new user. That's me again. Log in as the new user, at which point this was the rest of my day. The rest of my day was, and I'll point out, this wasn't a complete wipe. The system level was all still there because it all worked fine and Photoshop still worked and Um, so I log in and if anybody hasn't done this in a while, the experience, first off, you get to experience every default that exists. So like docs on the bottom minimizes the genie effect, right? Like literally everything. Click on the desktop to hide all the windows. Like in stage manager, it's Sonoma defaults.
Starting point is 01:18:26 Okay. So I have to start moving things around and, and, uh, you know, things are showing up in my doc that I don't want there because they're like, uh, recommend applications and recent applications in the doc and, uh, applications bounce in the doc when they're launching. And it's like, oh boy, turn all those off. So I spent the rest of the day doing two things which is setting preferences and every time the experience is every time you make a movement on the mac every time i go like okay i'm gonna reach for this now you get permission dialogue permission dialogue permission dialogue every app wants to and i've complained about this before but just say it's terrible right it's like this is my software on my computer and it's like oh now
Starting point is 01:19:11 this app wants to look at the desktop this app wants to look at your documents folder like for pete's sake if it's in desktop and documents you can have it right like everybody should take it take it all i i really want a button that says allow every app to access desktop and documents it's fine i have nothing nothing in these folders you can have it if if i have it in there you can take it i'll just share it for free on the internet you know what i mean it's all my god it's so then there's like, oh, and this needs full disk access. And some apps, they just let the system handle it. Other apps are like, hey, buddy, you're new here.
Starting point is 01:19:53 Here's a proxy icon. And here's a little pretend. You need to, I'm going to click this button and then I'll open, I'll do a thing that makes another button come up and you need to click that. And then it opens in the system settings and then you click on this thing and then drag my little icon in and say yes and then we'll be good
Starting point is 01:20:11 and then they'll do it like five times it's like oh I need microphone preferences too I need to access your microphone oh I need to access your screen recording were you using a Disney app because it sounds like Mickey is in the chat at the moment Mickey's a little higher than that okay jason you got a new computer it's not new mickey i don't care uh so so the so i i hate all the permissions i i hate it i really wish i understand why apple does it
Starting point is 01:20:40 i really wish apple one would let power users say please stop and two i'd really like what i'd really like is don't ask for the next hour or something right like don't ask for the give permission for the next hour for everything i do i understand the security implications of that i understand that it's bad because what if there's bad stuff and all that, but like, oh my God, to have every app you use, ask you a billion questions. And I know it only happens when this sort of thing happens, but it is infuriating. Anytime there's a new install or a, or, or a migration or anything, I have to do this. I also have to look up the serial numbers of every app that I bought outside the app store. And there are lots. Fortunately, one of the first things I do is install my email app, which has the receipts for every app I ever bought. So I can search on there and I, and I do one password very quickly so I can get all the passwords that
Starting point is 01:21:35 I need to re-log into and do all of that. But for the rest of the day, it's literally like I was doing a podcast later in the day. I press a button on my stream deck. First off, the stream deck's not there. Second, the Stream Deck preferences are in a weird place. So you have to find where the Stream Deck preferences are and copy it over. I have a backup. So I have my old user folder in a backup that I can drag things out of. So I do that with some apps, but I don't want to do the whole thing because who knows what's lurking in there.
Starting point is 01:22:00 The thing that breaks Photoshop is in there somewhere. I don't want to do that. I'm trying to be good here. So then I get the Stream Deck up and i press the button and it goes error like what is happening and and it was this is a shortcuts error so i have to go to open shortcuts because it launches a shortcut i'm like okay run the shortcut it says oh shortcuts Shortcuts needs permission to automate things. I'm like, why? Allow running scripts.
Starting point is 01:22:30 Allow running scripts. It's like shortcuts. Shortcuts is nice and all and lets you to automate things. But if you want to use Apple script or a shell script, you need to go in and check the box in advance. All right, fine. Yes, shortcuts. I do want you to run Apple scripts. Thank you.
Starting point is 01:22:44 Then I press the button. Error. What is it now? Audio hijack needs permission to run scripts. All right. Permission granted. Then I press the button
Starting point is 01:22:57 and it works. I'm like, oh, but I'm telling you literally in the first five, six, seven hours that I was running is it really ran into the next day too. You do that thing that you do once a day. You do that thing you do once every three hours and you're like,
Starting point is 01:23:11 Oh, click permission, permission, permission, error, uh, check a box, uh,
Starting point is 01:23:18 go to system preferences and allow this extension. Um, just restart your Mac into, Oh i i did have to do the restart your mac at one point i forget what the software was it was a restart your mac and hold down the button and allow the extension to be loaded uh and then restart it again so it was instructive and i feel like my user folder is in a much better place now because it isn't there aren't mysterious preferences and weird things loading that are not things that i needed to use uh that i need to use right now right i left those all out um but it did involve a lot
Starting point is 01:24:03 of like trying to migrate hazel for example is amazing because to do migrate hazel there are instructions but it's like um you need to open activity monitor and quit all the hazel processes and quit the preference process then copy your files over and immediately restart really immediately well because apparently they're cached and the preference demon that's why you have to quit it because apparently they're cached and the preference daemon, that's why you have to quit it because the preference daemon caches the old preferences and will overwrite your new preferences.
Starting point is 01:24:30 So then you restart and then the preference daemon comes up and sees the things on disk and it's like, oh yeah. And then you're back. You should never do a deal with the preference daemon. You know? No, you shouldn't.
Starting point is 01:24:41 No app should. Never do a deal with the preference daemon. I asked, there's another piece of software, and I asked, where are your preferences? And he's like, oh, I just use the system for that. So you have to export your preferences and then import them later, your defaults. I'm like, well, that doesn't help me.
Starting point is 01:24:55 That old user's gone. It's already gone, chief. I have a backup with files. I was like, well, you can't get to it then. You just can't get to it. What? So what I'm saying is. I thought it was a bulb move that you deleted the user before you set the new one up fully.
Starting point is 01:25:14 That was a bulb. I thought that was a bulb move. Oh, no, I backed it up. Right. So I did Carpacabra Cloner on it first. Yeah, but still, you couldn't get it though, right? If you said that, you can't get to everything. I mean, I know you wouldn't have known that.
Starting point is 01:25:23 Oh, that's true. That's true. I can't log back into the old... So here's the problem. Although macOS has, for its entire life, as macOS 10 and macOS, said you can change your username and your user directory to something different.
Starting point is 01:25:35 Because I want to... Because some of my scripts are literally coded to my username and the name of my hard drive. Ah, okay. I'm not going to get a different username. I want my username. So then I have to change my other user's username to something different and then make a new one.
Starting point is 01:25:51 And guess what? It doesn't let you. Because like, oh no, I'm still doing things over there and I don't know what it's doing. Breaking Photoshop. I don't know what's going on over there. Slowly dismantling Adobe. I had to delete it, delete it, delete it, delete it
Starting point is 01:26:04 to make a new user with that. But I did have it in my Carbon Copy Cloner backup. So I was able to get it from there. Yeah, it's a pain. So what did we learn? I don't know. I think if you can manage the pain every so often, not migrating and doing a clean setup is probably smart because it's very painful. But it's also probably dumb because it's extremely painful.
Starting point is 01:26:29 But at least you get a clean thing out of it. I don't know. Photoshop works. I'm on Photoshop 2024 now. I'm in the future with Photoshop. It's amazing. Big news. You can export files from it now in the future.
Starting point is 01:26:41 It's great. But at what cost? I don't know and and i would just say the only thing that i really learned from this and i learned this from the sonoma install and migrating from one mac to another and all the stuff that i've been doing in the last couple of months is i since i'm making people angry today i'm gonna make people you're really leaning in today i i yeah i am it's hot i'm not i tell you i i'm not to make people really lean in today. I, I, yeah, I am.
Starting point is 01:27:05 It's hot. I'm not, I tell you, I, I'm not a hot take machine. I don't, I don't love doing it, but sometimes I just need to say the truth.
Starting point is 01:27:12 Um, Apple, Apple security people, Apple security people, Mac OS security people in specific. I love you. Thank you for keeping my Mac secure. You're out of control.
Starting point is 01:27:27 You are degrading the Mac experience. The fusillade of preference permission windows must stop. Give me anything to allow to control this so I am not dancing back and forth between multiple windows and the system settings in order to get alerts. Oh, by the way, you've got that thing that pops up that says I'm going to have to relaunch this app for it to work. And you click later or you click quit and relaunch the app. I've got news for you.
Starting point is 01:27:56 The apps don't need to relaunch. They just work already. They don't need to relaunch. You say they have to relaunch but i'm telling you i use them without relaunching them i just click later and it's fine nothing ever seems to change maybe that's how you break photoshop though jason i appreciate i appreciate your dedication to improving mac security it's way better than it's been hooray um my computer belongs to me my software is software that i've chosen. And I need you to get
Starting point is 01:28:28 the hell out of my way when I'm updating or migrating. You are corroding the macOS experience. It's a little like what we talked about back when upgrading your iPhone was terrible. Yeah. When it's supposed to be the happiest moment because you're updating your iPhone and it's actually a disaster. It's not now. Well, macOS is like that. You run an update, you do a migration, whatever, and then it's just all the permissions dialogues come up.
Starting point is 01:28:53 Stop it. Stop it. You are, under the guise of making us safer, you've made the Mac worse. Stop it. Stop it. Time to fix it. I don't know how to fix it. You call me. We'll talk about it together i get what you're trying to do you've gone too far you're out of control
Starting point is 01:29:11 stop it but i'm not a hot take person not usually i'm a very considered lava take person yes that's a good point you don't make hot takes, but when you have a take, you will allow it to burn down with the fire of the sun. Well, that's because I hold back until I can't anymore. True. Maybe you should hot take more often and they wouldn't be so bad.
Starting point is 01:29:36 No, I don't like it. I don't like hot takes. I like considered takes. Molten takes. That are scalding. Those are better. Well, I'm happy that you're able to use Photoshop in the way that you want. Things are great. I do wonder'm happy that you're able to use photoshop in the
Starting point is 01:29:45 way that you think it's a great i do wonder if it's not worth it but no more program errors great i do wonder if it was worth it too but uh it's uh what i want to say here is but yeah mike everything's snappier now it's very snappier it's all snappier now now that i cleaned out the cruft of my user folder so all those preference files, all those P lists bogging me down, holding me back. Not anymore. I'm breaking free now, baby.
Starting point is 01:30:12 You're free of the P list. I'm free. The P list can't stop me now. No more P around for you. The sky is the limit. Yep. This episode is brought to you by TextExpander. When you work in a small team, every moment counts.
Starting point is 01:30:25 You don't want to be wasting your time finding video conferencing details to send to your new clients. You don't want to have to be wasting time tracking down FAQs from the company website to send to somebody in an email. These are the kinds of things you want immediately at your fingertips so you can get your work done faster. That's why you need TextExpander. With TextExpander, you can access whatever you want to be typing with just a few keystrokes, allowing you to work faster and eliminate repetition so you can focus on what matters most to the work that you're doing. TextExpander has powerful shortcuts and abbreviation to streamline your work and the work of your team. All you have to do is type a short abbreviation, TextExpander will do the rest. So you can build and collect
Starting point is 01:31:04 your most commonly used phrases, messages, URLs, and so much more right within TextExpander. You choose the keystrokes that you want to be your abbreviation, and they're going to be with you everywhere. You can even customize the snippets by having them automatically add in dates, fill in the blank fields, timestamps, and more. So you're keeping the personality and the communication that you send, but reducing the amount of repetition. TextExpander is available on any device that you use across any app that you use on the Mac, Windows, Chrome, and iOS. TextExpander is one of the very first apps that I install on a Mac, especially if I have to do what Jason has to do, because I want to be able to have my Mac feel like it's working correctly. TextExpander is part of that. I have internalized
Starting point is 01:31:44 the abbreviations that I use for my most commonly used phrases. And if I type them and it doesn't work, something horrible has happened. I love TextExpander. I use it all the time. If repetitive typing is getting you down, you need TextExpander. Check out TextExpander today at textexpander.com slash upgrade and you can get 20% off your first year. That is textexpander.com slash upgrade to say goodbye to repetitive typing. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM.
Starting point is 01:32:12 Let's finish up and cool down with some Ask Upgrade questions. James asks, I'm based in London and missed the pre-order period for the new iPhone. The phone that I want, the natural Pro Max, won't be available until mid-November for delivery.
Starting point is 01:32:33 Would you recommend visiting the Apple store in person to try and get a phone or just waiting it out until mid-November? This sounds like a Mike question. Well, I mean, I don't think this is london specific it's pro max i mean um yeah yes sure yeah what here's what i would suggest if you're able to do this this is the best scenario but i understand if it might be tricky put in the order so you have a place in the queue, but then be checking every day, kind of like in the morning or late in the evening for the Apple stores in your area to see if you can get a pickup.
Starting point is 01:33:15 I've done this before. So like that exact thing, put the order in. So I've got a place in the queue, but then also be checking every day. And what I also like now, the Apple store app and on the web will show you alternate devices that are available
Starting point is 01:33:30 or alternate locations to the one that you're looking at for where devices might be so like maybe you could travel for an extra hour and get it or maybe you could get a different color or you could bump up to a different storage tier
Starting point is 01:33:41 and you'd be able to get it sooner so I recommend checking often they do get stock in the stores and they seem to prioritize that at points like to making sure the stores have stock in them which i understand so i would recommend if you're able to do it put the order in and try and get the the um the order but if you don't have the ability to do that it might just be best to put your order in and wait because you can drive yourself mad checking the store every day it's just like that hassle or stress in your life that you might not otherwise want and hey november will be here before you know it i know that you've done this jason right like that exact thing putting an order in and checking
Starting point is 01:34:19 the stores that's how to do it yeah you make the order it may ship earlier than you think for one yeah and in the meantime if you can go and try to find it in your in in your nearby stores you may be pleasantly surprised because there is i don't want to say there's always stock but what what doesn't happen is that if you can't get it till november online the stores don't have it until november that doesn't happen there's a certain number of them that are allotted to the stores don't have it until November, that doesn't happen. There's a certain number of them that are allotted to the stores so that people can come off the street and buy the iPhone.
Starting point is 01:34:49 They do try to spread it out and that's your opportunity. Run writes in to say that October 21st will mark the 30th anniversary of System 7.1.1, which included the debut of Apple script jason how will you be celebrating apple scripts birthday i mean cake clearly actually i wasn't planning this and i didn't know this and i've now put an item on my calendar and maybe i will write something about
Starting point is 01:35:17 apple scripts 30th birthday uh yeah sure it's a, that's a good Apple history thing. And it's still with us. It's still with us to this day. Kind of hard to believe. I use more Apple scripts now than I've ever used in my life. Cause they will come from you, but I never used them. And now I use a bunch of them. not obsolete. That's the thing is that it's still out. It's great that Apple added shortcuts to the Mac and it's great that shortcuts can talk in Apple script and in shell script, but the next step should be that you shouldn't need Apple script and that hasn't happened. So Apple strip Apple script continues to exist and, and you know, it's, it's fine. It's there's things about Apple script. I was just doing this the other day where I was, I needed a, I needed to parse a date and I used to use a shell script for that inside an
Starting point is 01:36:15 Apple script. I used a shell script for that and the shell command changed in Sonoma. I don't understand why. And it failed, errored out. So I'm like, okay, I guess I'll need to. And I looked up how to process the dates in Apple script. And I thought, oh, that's why I used a shell script because it's bananas. It's terrible. And it's like Python is easier.
Starting point is 01:36:35 Shell scripts are easier. And it was just one of those reminders that like Apple script is like nothing else. There are things that it does that make scripting so easy. And there are things that it doesn't do that make you want to cry so uh that's the apple script experience in a nutshell don't cry and steven asks what does the home button on your apple tv remote map to do you choose the home screen or up next home screen baby yeah i'm home screen too i don't know if i would have chosen home screen if it if that wasn't the default you know yeah so here i i would and the reason is i so i'm a i'm a cord cutter i use the apple tv exclusively but i don't just use what's in up next. I use Up Next a lot, actually. A lot.
Starting point is 01:37:26 But if I'm watching live TV, like sports and stuff, I'm in an app. I'd rather actually map the home button to Fubo. Because that's the live TV interface. I'd rather do that. But certainly I need apps.
Starting point is 01:37:42 And I use channels to record stuff off of Fubo, actually, and then play it back later. And that's an app that's not in Up Next, right? I have a bunch of apps that I use. I would prefer to just use Up Next, but that's just not the way that Apple TV works. Yeah, exactly. And here's the thing. I know that you've relinquished your post way that Apple TV works. Yeah, exactly. And here's the thing.
Starting point is 01:38:06 I know that you've relinquished your post as the Apple TV guy. Well, it was taken from me, so I've let it go. It was, hmm. Yes, yeah, but you let it go. I gladly let it go. You got bigger fish to fry, you're fine. But I would say this.
Starting point is 01:38:19 There have been rumors about the idea of merging the home screen and the TV app that it comes from a different time and that Apple's priorities have shifted. there ever been rumors about the idea of merging the home screen and the TV app? That it comes from a different time and that Apple's priorities have shifted? I don't know if that's a good idea. That's kind of a lot. And Apple seems to be way too busy using the TV app to advertise things. So there's no room for apps in there. But it would be not bad if I had...
Starting point is 01:38:42 I know that you can put the TV app on the top level and then you're and set it so that you're up next is in the preview stuff at the top. And that's not bad, but like I could see the value in having the TV app and the, and the home screen merge a little bit more so that I could like pin my apps that I use all the time and have them right below up next and all that. I just, at this point I can envision a scenario where that was really nice. I don't think it would be nice if Apple did it because clearly Apple is going to take the top of the interface and make it ads for content and not functional. And I hate it. So my, this is another kind of Apple don't get me started because we know what happens then, but this is another area where I think Apple's lost the plot a little bit because it's literally
Starting point is 01:39:28 at the point where I don't want them to integrate the apps I use into the TV app and merge them together in a way that might be useful because I know they would screw it up and make it deprioritize all the stuff I care about and just use it as a way to get more promo material in front of my face when all I want is to launch Fubo and watch live TV. Of course. I have something I want to say about Apple TV. But I must go back a second to correct something. Before a terrible disaster occurs.
Starting point is 01:39:53 So in the Discord there was a question of. Well is this Apple script thing on Stephen's calendar? So I went and looked at my calendar. And it wasn't there. But then it was pointed out to me. That on Stephen's calendar. So I went and looked at my calendar and it wasn't there. But then it was pointed out to me that on Stephen's calendar, it is listed as October 4th, 1993. AppleScript launched the System 7.1.1, which Apple dubbed System 7 Pro. So, I believe Ron is incorrect. I believe that it was
Starting point is 01:40:24 on October 4th, not on October 21st. So that date has passed. We've missed the 30th anniversary of AppleScript. Yes. So you must cancel your plans now. It was on October 4th, 1993. It was when AppleScript launched the system 7.1.1. Delete.
Starting point is 01:40:42 Delete the event. Delete. Delete the event. That's it. We trust Steven, you know? Delete the event. Delete. The event. That's it. We trust Steven, you know? Sorry, Ron. You got your day wrong. Ron, if you would like to provide
Starting point is 01:40:52 context for October 21st, go to UpgradeFeedback.com and you have the opportunity to redeem yourself. But we cannot cover and celebrate AppleScript's birthday now because it's already passed. That was System 7 Pro, which it was called Pro because they charged for an update.
Starting point is 01:41:08 That was when Apple system updates suddenly became for pay. Up to System 7, they were free. System 7 won. Apple was like, you got to pay us money for this. And then they did that for a long time until then they stopped again. I know I want to go back to the apple tv to say there's a thing that apple changed with uh tvs 17 that i don't understand which is they moved the app grid to a six app grid yeah rather than five why did they do that why did they do that now but
Starting point is 01:41:38 why the future of tv is more apps but you know why now of all times why now like i don't understand it it's maddening and i actually don't want it i want to go back to five because apps but you know why now of all times why now like i don't understand it it's maddening and i actually don't want it i want to go back to five because now they're all smaller i liked it the way it was like i didn't they should let you like pinch and zoom on the siri remote yeah it's just like very strange to me it's like why why now why six right like what's happened is it just because you wanted to put facTime in the thing? I think that was the reason. I genuinely think that's what the reason was. Okay, maybe so.
Starting point is 01:42:09 I think if you've got a lot of apps out there, it's nice to not have them be as far down when you go down. But really, I don't know. No, Jason, I think they made a decision to change the grid from a 5-grid to a 6-grid purely so they could put FaceTime at the top. Okay. That's what I think. Could be.
Starting point is 01:42:24 Which, if that is the case that is that icon really stands out too right it's like yelling at you like yes you've done a facetime yet i know and i find that to be like is it just do it in 20 years the apple tv will be a 600 by 600 grid because they keep adding new apps and they want you to see them yeah but the only way you'll be able to go from the far left to the far right is by swiping repeatedly. Just like if you're trying to watch a late episode of a TV show. Do like the scrubbing around the little iPod click wheel thing.
Starting point is 01:42:56 Yeah, that's right. Oh, I had a funny moment. This is another little Apple TV aside. This episode will never end at this point. We're just very discursive today. FuboTV is a great app and I was complaining about Google's Sunday Ticket stuff the other
Starting point is 01:43:12 week on some podcast or other because Fubo has the Quadbox. It's a little Quadbox follow-up, Mike. Quadbox. And on FuboTV, as with Apple TV, as with ESPN, you pick four things and it shows them all for you on your TV at once, four live events. So it can be NLS games on Apple TV.
Starting point is 01:43:36 It can be anything that's on Fubo. It can be anything that's on ESPN's channels on ESPN+. Google got NFL Sunday ticket and they said, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're doing a quad box. Remember we talked about that. It's like, Oh, that's great because you want to have four games at once. Apparently they couldn't engineer the quad box like ESPN, Fubo and Apple. So what, what Google is doing and they're doing this,
Starting point is 01:44:02 they say it's because of a lowest common denominator thing. They want the experience to be the same on all platforms. Okay, Jan, whatever. But what they're saying is they're generating fake channels. They're like synthetic channels with quad boxes in them. It's a channel. You can switch the audio on it. So that's nice.
Starting point is 01:44:22 You can switch between which one of the four is getting the audio, but you can't pick what the four are. They've pre-picked. Oh, it's the quad box channels. I see. And there's multiple ones. So you can get most combinations, but not all combinations. And you can't just pick like with the Fubo,
Starting point is 01:44:39 you pick one or two or three or four. It seems very inefficient. And it's dynamic. dynamic well it sounds to me like they fundamentally they they couldn't write the software to do this and fubo to be fair only has it on apple tv but it's really good on apple tv and maybe google is like yeah we can't put it everywhere so that we're going to put it nowhere or maybe next year they'll do it so anyway so fubo's got it it's great um and i was watching it um over the weekend because you can put up like i had a baseball playoff game and college football and i had a soccer premier
Starting point is 01:45:10 league soccer match they're all going on at once and they have this new thing called widgets where you can actually put like a little scoreboard down at the bottom and one of the cool things about that is that if you see a game that's close you can click on it and it'll either add it to the, the, the multi-view or it'll say, if you have four up, it'll say, where would you like me to put this? So you can like see it, scroll through the scores and say, oh, that game looks interesting and click and add it. It's pretty cool. It's got a little tab above it that lets you view the scores by sport or league, including like the ones that are on Fubo right now, or you can see all, even if they're not on Fubo, you can still see them in college football or major league
Starting point is 01:45:50 baseball or a premier league or Syria or whatever else you want. Um, and I was, I was swiping up to the bar cause I wanted to focus it on a different sport and I couldn't get the little tab to show up at all. sport and I couldn't get the little tab to show up at all. It would go from the scores and then I swipe up and it would go up to the quad box. And I swipe back down and I was like, how do you do this? And I was doing all the buttons on the Apple TV remote. Nothing, nothing worked. So bizarre. And I finally figured it out that you have to go all the way to the left in the quad box. You have to go all the way to the left in the quad box. You have to go all the way to the left or bottom left.
Starting point is 01:46:29 And then you go down and then it goes to the tabs. I just thought, okay, I give Fubo a lot of credit for their Apple TV app. It's bananas. Why is it only over there? There's no good reason. Just, I should be lucky that I have the quad box i should stop questioning it it was just one of those moments of like apple tv app interactions how do they work and the answer is nobody knows nobody knows i have an additional piece of follow-up because the episode continues forever
Starting point is 01:47:02 james thompson john gruber wrote and it's an amazing apple script is still here article for macworld for the 19th anniversary what sort of editor-in-chief would commission that good question great question uh 2012 yeah 19 years why why well the good news it's now now the 11th anniversary of that article. Of that article, which all the images are broken in, so. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good.
Starting point is 01:47:32 John should actually, I think he has the rights to reprint everything. He should update that. That's a good suggestion. I'm going to text that to John. Great. Thank you, listener James Thompson. If you would like to send in your questions, your follow-up, or your feedback, go to upgradefeedback.com. Great. Thank you, listener James Thompson. work, go to sixcolors.com. You can hear his shows on The Incomparable and here on RelayFM. Yes, where you'll find my podcasts here on RelayFM. You can also check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can find us on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights, and I am
Starting point is 01:48:15 at imike on mike.social. You can also find the show on Mastodon as upgrade at relayfm.social. You'll find video clips of the show there as well as on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube where we are at UpgradeRelay on all of them. We're also on threads. I am at iMike, I am YKE, Jason is at JSnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. Thank you to our members who support
Starting point is 01:48:37 us with Upgrade Plus. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com to find out more. Thank you to Texas Bandit, ExpressVPN and Wild Grain for their support of this episode, but most of all, thank you for listening until next time. Say goodbye. Jason Snell.
Starting point is 01:48:51 Goodbye. Mike early.

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