Upgrade - 481: What If… Octobox?

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 481 for october 16th 2023 today's show is brought to you by electric zocdoc delete me and notion my name is mike hurley and i have the pleasure of being joined by jason snell hello jason hello michael hurley it's a new week to hear you it is a new week new upgrade new week everybody we get it started let's get it started now let's get it started in here it's time to upgrade your week with us it every every week is upgraded by having upgrade be in it i have a snow talk question from mark who says of all of the recent talk about the fine woven iphone cases some people mention that the case comes into contact with their keys and it scratches the case do you keep your keys in the same pocket of two part answer here when I carried keys

back in the before time wow I did not keep them with my phone because it will scratch the screen and you're a monster if you put your keys or any other scratchy thing in the pocket with your phone you can't do it don't do it

phone pocket is just all it is phone pocket phone pocket you could put something soft in there if you really wanted to but you probably shouldn't no it's the same so you put your phone in a bag it goes in its own pocket but nothing else in it yes that's the way so but the truth is i don't carry keys anymore i have i have just as i no longer several years ago switched to the i don't carry keys anymore i have i have just as i no longer several years ago switched to the i don't carry cash which the apple wallet has been great for because now i just have a little magnetic thing with three cards in it on the back of my phone and that's it you have a fine woven one of those don't you uh there is one in my house i am, actually, I had that moment the other day where I was looking down at my brand new iPhone 15 Pro and the leather case on the back.

And I was like, forbidden. You're not supposed to know about this iPhone 15. We used to make things out of leather. But don't tell it. Don't tell it what it is it thinks it's fine woven i'm sure i'm sure it thinks that um anyway so i did that i i i don't carry a wallet i don't carry cash and i've managed to get to the point where i don't need to carry keys because um there are, you know, I've got, if I leave the house and have to drive a car, there is a key hanging on a little hook by the door. And then I will take that and I will,

I will, I suppose it may end up in a pocket at some point, right? I have to put it in a pocket at some point. It will be the non-phone pocket, but it's, that's like my key usage is real low at this point. Like I used to have a key ring with keys on it. Uh, our front door doesn't need a key anymore. Like I just, I don't have keys anymore. Uh, which is great. I love it because it furthers my, I guess what we discovered when I was going through that therapy session with Steven, my apparently minimalist approach to life, which is, you know, I'm reducing clutter in a lot of areas and then focusing all my clutter on podcast t-shirts. Makes sense. Who wouldn't want to do it? That's where I'm not a minimalist to the point where I now have two drawers of my dresser full of t-shirts and I have a drawer out here in the garage of other t-shirts that I rotate

in. Do you mean t-shirts like the wonderful wears available upgradeyourwardrobe.com for like one more day if you're listening to this but then we also have the on-demand t-shirts that are always available? Well what I was going to say is if you'd like to be like me and be a t-shirt maximalist, a podcast t-shirt maximalist, upgrade to your wardrobe.com. Right now for some, always for others. But if you're with a hoodie now, right now. Thank you to Mark for sending in that question. If you would like to help us open a future episode of the show, just go to upgradefeedback.com and send in your own snell talk question we have a variety of follow-up today jason snell there's a bit of a grab bag of follow-up here uh first is that says jason went to a concert last week and used airpods pro as

earplugs i think you along with about 50 of the people I follow on Instagram, went to see Death Cab for Cutie this weekend in one of the various places that they were playing. Yep. I saw them at the Greek Theater in Berkeley on Wednesday. Fantastic. Just fantastic. I've been to, I think, four different shows now where a band has played their album. This is a thing now, right? Yep. Where a band just plays their album. This is a thing now, right? Yep.

Where a band just plays an album front to back. And I have two thoughts about this. One is everybody stop. Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service did it. It's not going to get much better than that. So stop. Oh, interesting. Because otherwise, some of the other concerts I've been to there was one where the realization

part way through was oh i skip a lot of tracks on this album it's a classic album with a lot of great hits but there's also a lot of songs that aren't very good and i wondered if the band thought that too but they said they would play it so they played it all and then i had another one where it was almost like the artist had been held hostage by his bad decision that was suggested by his manager and you could tell he'd be like oh yeah my manager suggested that I play this whole album and then later in the show he's like okay guys we got to get through this and I realized oh no he is he also has decided that this is not a great show playing an album straight through that said I've also been to a good album show before. And then this one, which was great, legitimately just great. It was Transatlanticism and Give Up. And it was wonderful.

And I thought, what am I going to do for earplugs? I have in the past taken literally my in-ear monitors and put them in my ears without just, you know, not plugged in. I thought, you know, AirPods, let's try the AirPods pro. Let's see how those work. Um, and it's funny. Cause then I listened to Marco talk about this on ATP and I was like, ah, Marco, did you wait for the week that I actually got to try this out and then talk about your experience at a fish concert? Although he tried it in an iOS 16 era, so I got to try out adaptive transparency as well. I'm here to report that for my money, transparency mode is the best

mode with the reduced loud sounds turned on. It sounds really good without blowing out your eardrums. Adaptive transparency, it's trying to filter out certain kinds of sounds. It sounds weird. I don't think that would

be good for a concert i i don't think no and noise canceling is worse noise canceling is like it's like the what it's filtering what it's not it's a very distorted strange view of what's going on in the outside world but i i had pretty good luck with transparency mode it sounded pretty good i i did not bring uh standard earplugs like mar did to compare it to, but I was actually pretty happy with that. And the bottom line is if you're somewhere and you don't have earplugs and you do have AirPods Pro and you're worried about hearing protection, you should use able to put those in my ears, and it was quieter. And then I took them out for quieter songs, but for the real loud songs, I popped them back in. Pretty well. Postal Service was loud, but not that loud,

and I, in fact, took them out for Postal Service, because it was fine. I had them out for the Beths and Postal Service, but for death cab i had to put him in for a lot of the songs because they were super loud uh do you not feel socially awkward wearing airpods at a concert no see i think i don't care i don't know any of those people other than lauren and she had hers in too i just don't have a healthier view of the world i don't care and of yourself but i think i would feel strange uh wearing airpods at a concert no i i just don't i don't i don't care i mean ultimately i don't

know any of those people actually somebody did come up to me in between the breaks dan wood of karelia software developer and local area resident spotted me apparently and came over and said hi he he was working the event he had a windbreaker on um he said yeah i get to guard the vip area and see a lot of free shows i'm like actually that's kind of cool so but yeah it doesn't bother me like again i'm not i'm not you can't hear anybody anyway so you're like it's not going to block you out it's really just that there are earphones in your your ears. And like, everybody's already making decisions about if they have headphones in their

ears or not. I just, I just didn't, I didn't care. I just wanted to protect my ears. And so I did. It was fun. I've made a concerted effort to use the adaptive transparency mode.

I love it because I tried it and didn't like it and but that was just one day and i was like no like they've obviously done this for a reason let me try it so i've been using it every day since i was 17 came out and it's not perfect but i think it's i think it's good for my daily usage. Depending on where I am depends on how much I notice it or not. When I'm in louder environments, I notice that it's happening, right? Because it feels like I'm in noise cancellation mode. For me, at least, noise cancellation mode has a certain feeling. And adaptive transparency mode has a little bit of that feeling sometimes.

But I do figure like I am at least in areas there where there is loud stuff happening and I've been putting it through certain tests just myself. Like if I'm walking around and it's filtering out traffic noise, I'm like focusing on what's around me and like, can I hear these other things? I would say it does a surprisingly good job for me of i don't feel like the world is drowned out completely

which is what would worry me so i've i've decided i'm going to keep it in this mode like it's an interesting idea it's one of these things that i think will get better with time too sure but overall like i what i would say is if you if you tried it and then immediately stopped using it i think it might be worth a little bit of a longer try in like different environments like one of the places that i really like is like if i'm you if i'm not listening to a podcast and i'm you know at my studio in the bathrooms they have like like their hand dryers right uh and if i'm drying my hands it like shuts that sound out which i just think is pretty cool it's like not massive of a thing to do for my life but i like that it's doing that

it's it's being pretty smart but the thing i've actually come to value more is conversational awareness i know you don't like it for the reason you don't like it when you're talking to your dogs but i don't have that problem and i would say it is very very good right like i'm listening to something and i want to say something to my wife or i'll go to a coffee shop and i'll make an order i just start talking and i know that my airpods are going to take care of everything else it will first lower things then it will pause it and then it will wait and play again. Like I think it's pretty good. So note to Apple, if there's anybody who works on this team who's listening, I'd love to

be able to assign conversational awareness on off to a gesture on the AirPods, like left AirPods squeeze. So I could do right AirPods squeeze for toggling the sound modes and left conversational awareness because i'm about to go on an airplane conversational awareness is great on an airplane because the you know the the flight attendant comes up to you and says do you want something to drink and i i used it on a plane flight a while ago and was like oh yeah this is really nice and then i got home and i tried to talk to my dog and I was like, oh God, I gotta, and you gotta go into the settings to turn it off. It's not, it's not convenient to do so. So I would like that. Adaptive mode.

I love it. It, what I try to describe it to people is it is adaptive transparency. So it's like a better transparency mode. The idea with transparency is I'm going to pipe everything through to you as if you're not wearing these. And then noise cancellation is I'm going to try to block everything I can so that you're in this vacuum, which leads some people like you to feel like a weird kind of feeling because it's that vacuum feeling, right? And this feature is trying to split the difference. And i think it does a great job like i don't use transparency mode anymore except at a rock concert where i turned it on but normally i toggle between adaptive and noise canceling because adaptive like when i'm out on a

run adaptive works for me it is i can i can hear everything that's going on around me but it's like i i live near a freeway there is broadband freeway noise in the background especially on my run when i run right up to next to the freeway um it filters some of that stuff out making it easier to hear what i'm listening to but i can still hear the world around me i still know when cars are coming and where they're coming from and all of those things, which is really great. In certain public spaces, at an airport, something like that, I might want to be more aware of announcements or something like that. I don't want to go full noise canceling necessarily, but having it dampen it down a little bit is nice. So I'm a big fan of it.

And I'm using it now instead of standard transparency. I think it's a really good feature. Conversational awareness, yeah. I just like to turn it on and off more quickly because there are modes when I want it and modes when I don't. a question from Tim who wants to know what photo slide scanning service did Jason use for his mother-in-law's slide photos in the 1960s as mentioned last week right I specifically didn't mention it only because I always am reluctant to mention something when I literally tried it once everybody's results will vary and I didn't compare it to anybody else's right so all you're getting is a word of mouth like i tried scan cafe it worked

fine i don't know if it's better or worse than any other service that's out there all i can tell you is i tried it and it worked fine so scan cafe is sometimes but i that's all people need you know yeah i know it's just you know again it's not because it makes it sound like an endorsement and the only thing i can endorse is i did it once and they properly scanned the things that were in there and now i have them yeah you don't want to be responsible for someone's like i can't believe you recommended scan cafe because they did a terrible thing to me and i'm like guys you know i i can't believe you recommended scan can't say didn't you know they're owned by vampires? No! Look, I just looked on. It was, they did the mesh.

Anyway, I didn't do that. I just, I looked at a bunch of sites and what their policies were and what their prices were and tried them out. And here's what I will recommend. Just doubling back on this whole topic. If you have stuff locked away or you have relatives with stuff locked away. I mean, Lauren's mom gave us these slides. These are from her first marriage. So, uh, she got them in the divorce basically. And yet they were from an unhappy time in her life and they've mostly sat

completely unused. I mean, they're, they're slide carousels. When was the last time they pulled out a slide carousel at all? Probably never. And she gave them to us because they were cleaning out the garage. And she was basically like, this is when you were a baby. You might want these. And Lauren took them. And they sat in our garage taking up lots of space. I delayed this forever. I could not be happier to have gone through this process.

Whether you use Scan Cafe or something else. Literally the way it worked is they sent you part of your price includes the shipping, which I think is a really nice touch. So like you just get air bills. You just get things to stick on a box and take it to, in our case, the UPS store, which is right around the corner and just hand them in. and they do have a drop-off place in some places um if you're afraid they'll get lost in the mail but for me it was just like no get them out of here i don't want them back i want them gone and then in digital form because then we can actually look at them and there are some amazing pictures in there that were lost

for forever until they got unearthed in this way. So I'm a real proponent of the idea of scanning in old negatives or even prints. It's better if you've got a backup. If those exist, some of them exist as prints because then you're taking a risk. But boy, in the end, we live in an era where if they're not in your photo library, they don't exist. So your digital photo library. So I was very happy to do it. And at one point here, I'm going to round up all of our negatives and send them all into from the film era. Matt wrote in to say Jason's story about

user forums hits home. I just wanted to say that not all of Adobe's forums are the same. It varies by product. I work on the Premiere Pro engineering team and every new forum post goes directly to a Slack channel that we monitor. We can't reply to all of them, but when we spot one where we know we can help, we jump in and do so. I wanted to give Adobe the opportunity

to speak for themselves, you know? I appreciate this, the idea that maybe it varies by product. And I was really, I mean, my biggest user forum complaints were about Apple's forums. I was looking up something else over the weekend. i heard from somebody who said they just do a in google they do minus site colon discussions.apple.com like search apple but not that apple i i don't want those i mean really these days i think realistically what you're looking for is is the subreddits like it seems to be where that is where the majority of useful stuff even though it's also a lot of that nonsense but the upvoting downvoting system

can deal with a lot of that yeah there there are yeah i think you're right but but here's the thing this is why i did that i did that rant about those user forums is they have this veneer of being official and they allow the uh the actual companies to link to them and say, oh, yes, we'll use our forums. And I don't think, like I said last week, I actually think that that's kind of giving up. And you're right. There are better places to discuss this stuff than the official forums. And you end up with these people who have 20,000 points and seem super official, but they're not and they're not always particularly helpful and i did hear from a bunch of people who are like oh boy i know that i know what you're talking about and it's terrible so anyway yes i um yeah yeah we we did some uh we we did i did a

couple of rants last week it's not i got i got i saw somebody complain they're like oh every week they're just ranting about stuff. And I'm like, what? We did it once. Anyway, a lot of positivity about it. I mean, maybe they think every episode's a rant, you know? I'm not going to do a rant every week, and that's fine. But it just worked out that way. I don't know.

I don't know why. I've never liked the word rant. I don't like it. Yeah. I just don't like it. It's not one of my favorites. No. Sonoma video reactions so the

camera little video reaction things that you can do with sonoma they're being frowned upon by online therapy company simple practice who now shows an interstitial warning before calls so we saw this in a slack that we're in um and it was actually from matt howie who is that howie he posted on mastodon too i'm gonna this is in my to write list for six colors because it's such a fascinating idea of a i think maybe misguided or misunderstood uh choice by apple in building this feature where they didn't really think about all of the details when they created a new feature and then turned it on by default without a lot of warnings about it yeah because matt was mentioning it um he posted a mess on it led to the verge uh writing this up where someone was on a call with their therapist and the therapist gave a thumbs up and fireworks started exploding behind them during a very

uh awkward moment and i wanted to just jump in and say, I had the exact same thing happen to me. I was on a call with my therapist and all of a sudden balloons started appearing behind me. Balloons! And he said- Was it the happiest therapy session ever? No, no.

And so I think at the- I don't even know what causes balloons, by the way. Like I couldn't work it out. That is, what is that? Two thumbs up? Or is that fireworks? I think that's fireworks. I think it might be the peace sign, I think, or something like that.

But nevertheless, look, this is a good feature, and it is a fun feature. And I will say, someone in the discourse, like, isn't it relatively easy to disable? That is really not a great like it's just not a helpful thing to say if like you had you were in a therapy session and you weren't and like me yeah person who cares about this stuff i one it's turned on automatically right when you upgrade to sonoma it was i think i've been using sonoma for two days and i do want it on sometimes, but like, so I do want the feature on,

because I think it's funny, but like the idea that like you could, it's just not context aware, like it's a good feature, but it's just like, it's also an awkward feature. Like, I think it would maybe be better to have it as like opt-in, opt-out on certain apps and services, which I don't know if it's possible to do

but i just don't really necessarily like it's this is this is an interesting feature it's a cool thing that it does but it also is a little bit weird yeah i i think there's a reactions pop up that happens when you first connect a camera your first time in Sonoma but we also know that everybody ignores those and clicks through them right they're like let me because you're in the act of doing something get me to my thing right but we also know that if you don't turn on the feature it is unlikely to ever be turned on because people don't go past the defaults very often also saying yes, yes, as you said, saying it can be turned off is one thing,

but like knowing how to turn it off is an entirely other thing. And the moment happened regardless, right? So I think this is interesting. I agree that there should probably be an API that tells Apple, because remember this is happening in the video subsystem. It's not happening in the apps. The apps are just getting camera

and the camera has been processed by the system. So giving app developers an API to control this or turn it off so that, for example, a teletherapy app could say no, right? Just no. Or a Zoom or something like that could have it be in Zoom preferences where you might look for it even though it's actually up in the menu bar. And you could maybe set it per account or something like that. There's probably more controls that could be done here about this. I'm fascinated because I imagine Apple was like, no, this is great. We'll just turn it on. apple was like no this is great we'll just turn it on and it wasn't thinking about people having intense therapy sessions and then random animations are happening in the background

yeah um so yeah yeah it's uh it's fascinating again i don't think this is one of those like oh how dare apple but it's like this is the challenge right because they want people to use the new feature they think it's fun um they turned it on i think for reasons i think there's a warning but the truth is people are still going to be caught unawares and some of those contexts are not great yeah because i do want the feature like i do want right the feature but i'm not necessarily thinking when i'm accepting it as like in my mind during FaceTime that when I'm having my Google Meet calls with my therapist that I could. Because here's the thing, like you don't necessarily think about the fact that you might just hold your hand to your face and then the balloons go off, which I think is what happened to me. Right.

Because I put my hand to my face and then all of a sudden there were balloons or something like that. I thought there were balloons for some, it was a right. It's not now, computer. Not now. Yeah. It's, again, I think having, letting the individual apps kind of make their decisions might be good. You know, I don't know. I'm sure they had the question of like the first time this is going to be triggered.

Do we not trigger it and then put up a dialogue? And you're like, yeah, but you're in the middle of a video meeting right then. So people aren't going to want to pay attention. Do you wait until after it's triggered for the first time? Do you wait in a delay after they're in their first usage of video, but it's done to say, hey, we've got this new feature? a video but it's done to say hey we've got this new feature i it's not an easy answer but it leads to instances like what you experienced or what matt experienced which i just yeah i think it's it's a tough decision making chain yeah and it's it's a good feature it's a fun thing to have it's just like and i don't think this should mean that they do or don't make it but like this is the result of making a decision like that because like you know some uh ramon in the discord is like it should it should just be limited to facetime i wouldn't want it to be the case i actually am happier that they've baked it into the camera system but this is the downside of doing that right and and also talk about having a challenging decision to make. I believe that the settings on it are,

are they global or are they per app? And that's part of the challenge too, is if you think, I think they're per app, which means you think you turned it off and then you're in a different app and it does it again. And you're like, what? The good thing is if it's per app, you can have it on in FaceTime and Zoom and not have it on in Chrome or whatever, right? And that

would work. For the record, if you're using Sonoma, when a webcam is in use, a blue camera icon appears in your menu bar. And if you click on it, you can see all of your camera controls. And there are lots of them. There's some really great stuff in there. It's a new feature. You can like zoom and, and, and not use center stage, but instead have it, have it center you one time, click to center. Uh, and then there's, um, reactions and you can turn it, them off. You can turn them off. And if they're on and you don't want to make the gestures, you can also trigger them without making the gestures from that same menu. There's lots of stuff in there, but you have to know that there's the blue menu with the camera icon

and that there are controls under it. But I do think it's per app, which means that if you turn it off once, you haven't turned it off forever. You've only turned it off forever for that app and you need to keep that in mind too. So if you do all your family stuff on FaceTime and that's great,

and you do all your corporate stuff on Zoom and that that's great and you do all your corporate stuff on Zoom and that's not great, you can, I believe it's per app and you can do that. We're not on video now, so we don't know. This episode is brought to you by Electric. When you are leading a small business, it's not all glitz and glamour.

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I have a room around up Jason S snell there's some spicy stuff in here today oh yeehaw so we're going to start off by talking about uh an article written by jeff poo who is pretty well there is an analyst jeff poo who's predicting that the first apple product to get a micro led display is still going to be the Apple Watch, but it may not be until 2025. The reason I wanted to mention this is because I'm thinking maybe over the next few months or so, or next 12 months,

to be looking out for things that may or may not be in that rumored Apple Watch X that Mark Gurman was talking about. And one of the things that we were wondering is if it was going to get this new display technology and it looks like, no, that it would miss that. And what I wanted to ask you is, do you think that a new display,

some kind of micro LED display, which would be better clarity, better color, and probably a better battery, do you think we would see this come to the apple watch ultra or the regular apple watch first what do you think makes the most sense um i don't know i mean it depends on a lot of things it depends on availability it depends on how much it costs if it's expensive um ultra seems to be a great place to introduce these features because it's more expensive, right? Unless they've got a fancy. The Apple Watch X, X, whatever rumor is interesting because the idea there is there's like a next-gen Apple Watch coming.

And would they do it like the iPhone X where they'd keep the series around, but then they'd have this new watch that was like the future watch and it was expensive? And that's different from the Ultra, I guess. I don't know. I guess. The Apple Watch X, which I'm calling it for now just because it's easier in my brain um that is a terrifying prospect for me honestly because i'm really loving my apple watch ultra right for the battery life especially and i'm wondering if they bring out this apple watch x with these new features will i have to go away from the Ultra to get the best Apple Watch again? I would hope not.

Well, but what about the battery life, right? Like, I feel like that's going to be a thing, which is, because this thing is big, is why it's got the biggest battery life. And so if they made like a new one in the regular line, which is this new next-gen one, I can't imagine it would necessarily

have the biggest battery i mean it reminds me of the iphone 10 where i had to go down in screen size right right exactly it's also possible that they will try some of this stuff out in the ultra and then bring it to a next gen apple watch you know base model either simultaneously or at the, at the next cycle. Yeah. But you're right. It's possible it'll happen a year before. Yeah. Um,

I, I'm not, even Mark Gurman who talked about this Apple watch 10 thing, it seems like everybody's sort of like, yeah, maybe not next year. Right. Like this seems like I read this as being a kind of a corroboration of the idea that next gen Apple watch, whatever they want to call it may not happen until 25 at this point.

Right. Like there's the tech that they want to have in it, that it's their real kind of like redesign of the concept for the first time in since the beginning. Um, I mean the ultra is that too. Right. But like for the for the regular watch to do a different version of it and um i don't know i mean i i think this is a fascinating story because there's the question too of is this a replacement for the apple watch series or is it another model right because we saw that Apple really varied the iPhone models,

that there's lots of different iPhone models now. Would they do that with the Apple Watch or would it be more like a replacement for series, but they'll also keep series around for a little while because they can get that one cheaper and then they've got this sort of a spread going on between the cheaper watch and then the nice watch and then the nice big watch.

I don't know. They've got a lot of decisions to make here. But I look at a rumor like this, and I think maybe this dream of theirs of reinvigorating the base model series is not going to happen next year. All right, so we're recording on Monday. Yeah, October 16th.

Which I think is helpful to note again for this topic because there are lots and lots of conflicting rumors as to whether we will be getting new Apple products this week, namely iPads. So Mark Gurman says no. 9to5Mac says yes. And not only yes, that it will be on Tuesday. So tomorrow, the 17th.

Huh. So Philippe Esposito at 9to5Mac had a report that with the next set of iPad, this rumor came slightly before the date rumor, but this is setting the stage for then what comes next. So Esposito says that a refresh to the iPad mini will happen of an A16 chip. We'll likely see the same thing for the base model iPad. And then at some point over the coming months, we may see a bit of a refresh to the iPad Air, a quote from 9to5Mac.

Details are vague at this point, but it suggests that Apple may be considering introducing a larger version of the iPad Air or a more expensive model with better specs. So this is something apparently Apple is testing, but that's not necessarily expected for this week. If there is going to be an update to the iPad Air, it will be giving the M2 chip to the iPad Air. Then Chance Miller at 9to5Mac reports on a post from weibo that suggests that changes may be made to the upcoming ipad mini to fix the jelly scrolling issue apparently to fix this they will change the screen assembly direction so chance says for those unfamiliar jelly scrolling is when half of the device's display refreshes noticeably slower than the other half this results

in a sort of wobble effect hence the jelly scrolling name so i have this on my ipad mini so sometimes if i'm scrolling a list of things uh the display kind of down the middle looks like it's catching up with itself yeah it's a little jagged kind of thing now i just in general in the ipad mini want a higher quality panel. Now, I'm not talking about micro LED or OLED or anything like that. I just think that the screen on the iPad mini is not as crisp as other iPads. I think it is a lower quality panel,

at least it is to my eyes. So I would like to see them, and hopefully this would improve that. I am aware that for anything more serious i'll be waiting some time apparently oled panels have been rumored for 2026 for anything other than the 2024 ipad pro so that could take a while but there's more but wait there's more according to joe racino at mac rumors mac otakara is reporting that quote, rather than an update to the iPad itself, the Apple Pencil

3 will be launched, which will come with a replaceable magnetic tip. So we've got rumors all over the place, which is rare. Yeah, so it's, Gurman's like, not going to happen next year. Mark Gurman says that Apple does not have enough stuff to bother, like

to warrant doing anything. Right. Right. Which is funny because, I mean, if you've got new iPads and you can sell them in the holiday quarter, I think you'd want to because those are good holiday purchases, I feel like. A new iPad mini or an iPad Air, I could see the argument there, but maybe they're like, no, you know, we're okay. We're going to wait on those and do them next year and we'll we'll build up stock and we're gonna be we're gonna be fine with it but then there's the other report that it is gonna happen tomorrow as we're recording this and then in comes in slides the apple pencil to say not so fast what if it's just me um which is doesn't it strike you as weird the idea that you do an apple pencil announcement

without ipads that doesn't i don't understand that at all honestly i think that that that this might be a translation error or something's going on there because like why you're right why would you just have an apple pencil 3 like that's the and you know ipads that seems what is the pressing issue that you would release an apple pencil 3 now but no ipads right with replaceable magnetic tips right okay yeah no i want to i want to also say um the apple pencil 3 would work. Is somebody saying that the new base model iPad would be updated?

Because that's the one that I don't think makes any sense, right? So 9 to 5 Mac. Okay, so this was slightly before, but they were sticking with, I believe, Chance Miller, who's in the Discord, can tell me wrong if I'm wrong,

that the base model iPad would get an A16 chip in it. Yeah well the question with the base model iPad is is it really going to stay with the old Apple Pencil? Right? Right? And would you announce that

with the new Apple Pencil? My word I forgot about that. The base model iPad remember it's got the adapter. It doesn't have the charging thing on the side does it it's got the adapter the weird adapter that takes the original pencil with lightning and puts it in a little janky adapter so it can attach to the usbc port right so yeah i i feel like i i don't know i i i'm fascinated to watch that because like why is that still a thing why why is that still a thing um maybe they have one thing you could do from an apple pencil 3 might be to engineer something in it that if if the ipad doesn't support charging via the standard charging method.

Maybe there's an alternate charging and pairing method that's built into the Pencil 3 that lets them get rid of the Pencil 1. I don't know what that would be. But something, like a little charge dock or something? Well, I think it would just be better if they just put the magnetic charging thing on the iPad. That's the way to go, right? Just put the magnetic charging thing on the iPad. Like, that's the way to go, right? Just put the magnetic conduction charging. If it's on the iPad Mini, I mean, I know the iPad Mini

is a relatively expensive product, but I think that that's got to happen at some point. And so I would hope that it would happen now. Also, my question is, if they, so it's fascinating that this may or may not happen, but iPad Air and iPad Mini support the Pencil 2

with the magnetic charging on the side um the ipad low low version right had a whole different system where it moved the camera and to the other orientation but uh the speculation is that that prevented it from having the magnetic charging and there's all that so that's one of the things for the ipad we gotta get the ipad back in our brains because this has been a year without ipad announcements at all but there's a question of like where is this whole thing going will if there is a new ipad air and a new ipad mini do the camera positions change if there's a new pencil does the charging situation change? It's not a given that Pencil 3 will charge by the same method as Pencil 2, right? Like they could engineer that thing out and have some other way that you charge it, which would then get rid of the issue on the low-end iPad as well.

So it's all really fascinating, but then you throw in the idea that somebody's out there going, no, nothing. Gurman is saying that. I wonder what the source of all this is. I hope there are new iPads just because it's fun to have new iPads and to talk about them. But I am fascinated by the idea that some people think it's going to happen and some people think it's not going to happen. But that's what everybody should keep in mind if some announcement does happen is like, how does the pencil charge? How does it attach that different is there if there's a new pencil and did they move the the camera right like because that's a thing they did um you know because that that ipad has the the weird thing where it's got like a kickstand back case plus a thing that you attach

that does the keyboard it's a it's a really unusual product. So I guess we'll keep an eye. But I also saw a rumor that said no base level iPad, only the two that actually need, that are the oldest and need the most help, which is the Mini and the Air. So you get an M2 Air and a A16 Mini. What we can say at this point is

everyone's saying everything. Except iPad Pro, which isn't going to happen until next year correct i have another report from mac or takara which is okay about the imac they have said that the next revision of the imac will quote likely be available with m2 and m2 pro chip options thunderbolt 4 points ports wi-fi 6E support, and Bluetooth 5.3 support. As Joe Rossignol at MacRumors notes, this conflicts with Mark Gurman's reporting that the next iMac would feature an M3 chip. No matter what, though, it seems unlikely that these would arrive in October.

No one's suggesting that for the iMac. It's interesting because the iMac this fall has been discussed. It makes sense in one way the M2 rumor is fascinating because they've not done an M2 iMac and I wonder about the status of the M3 I wonder if one of the things that's going on is that the M3 you didn't even mention this but there was also a discussion um i saw a report it might have been in mark german's report that macbook pro with m3 is going to precede macbook air with m3 and is going to come early next year. But the MacBook Air with M3 won't come until summer, which is a wild thought, right? That the Pro chips would ship before the Air with the base chip would ship? That's a wild idea, too.

I don't know what's going on with that. But let's talk about the M3 and the 3 nanometer process and whatever's going on with that because we haven't seen that. One scenario for the M3 getting a delay might be to do an M2 iMac, right? Like that might be one scenario is look, M3 and the iMac, like, oh boy, that's going to take forever. But instead an M2 iMac, which would be would be fine I mean that would be a nice update for the iMac especially if there's a pro option but I don't know it's just something it feels to me like something's going on here and we can't really see it now but I suspect that it's Apple rejiggering what it's going to do with m3 and I don't know whether that has to do with M3. And I don't know

whether that has to do with something going on literally with the making of the M3 chip or availability or volume of the M3 chip. But I wonder, because for a while it sounded like the reports were M3 this fall. And now it seems like, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, no M3 this fall. And now it seems like no M3 this fall. And maybe even potentially higher end M3 chips before the base M3 chips, which is not something that they've done in the past and makes me wonder about, again, chip yields and volumes and how much is going into the iPhone production line and the rest i don't know it's it's a it's a real mystery here and will there be products announced in october at all i think at the low end there's none followed by just the pencil and then the high end you've got multiple ipads plus a mac of some sort maybe an imac but no event per se but they can again they can release these things with videos and press releases and they can do them they don't have to do them in one go. They could do iPads one week and Macs the next week, and that wouldn't be unprecedented at all. We take a left turn now and visit the

sheriff. Mark Gurman has said that Apple's focus for the next version of the Vision Pro, while very early on in the process, of course, is to focus on reducing the weight of the device overall apple is also investigating how a version 2 could have integrated prescription lenses rather than snap in lenses apparently from an operational perspective having the many many many lens options available in numbers for shipping is very complicated so they are investigating what a build to order process could look like so you would submit your prescription available in numbers for shipping is very complicated. So they are investigating what a build-to-order process could look like.

So you would submit your prescription and they would make you a lens and install it and ship it. However, this causes more problems with prescription changes because then how would somebody, would they send their device in to get the lens changed?

And also device sharing becomes basically not possible at that point right it's hard i just uh took uh i i got a quest three oh okay um very exciting maybe we can do a horizon workrooms meeting sometime maybe we can maybe i don't know a bit of a better hardware than me, apparently. Sorry. No eye tracking, though. So, and I pre-ordered it and it arrived and I was like, oh. And I realized I had to go online to Zenni Optical and order my lenses for it because otherwise I have to wear my glasses while I'm wearing it.

And that's not as fun. I learned my lesson with the Quest 2. And I had that thought about Apple, which is, you know, Apple, typical Apple, wants to kind of control the process. So they got like, oh, there's Zeiss lenses. But it sounds like what they want to do is sort of have it be all in the Apple process.

Whereas what Meta has done is basically said, do you want prescription lenses? Use our partner. And it's like, someone else is doing it. Someone else is making those. They've worked with a partner. And this is one of those cases where maybe, I mean, given the volumes,

I mean, who knows, right? Like if they're intending for this to be a high volume product, eventually they're going to have to deal with this. Do they want to control the whole thing? Do they want to use a partner? It's certainly nicer to just, if I could have put in my prescription

and placed my order with Meta right up front and gotten shipped with the lenses that would have been better better even if they were snap-in lenses um i'm not sure i'm not sure why this is better than just allowing you to order the lenses and have them pre-snapped in or included in the box uh rather than having it be like a part that you have to replace that seems complicated but it's an operations issue you know this is it's just going to be it's fascinating right like how does apple has a way of doing things and then a product like this challenges some of those preconceptions i think and to make a future cheaper version, Mark Gurman is saying, in the $1,500 to $2,000 range, this is separate from version two of the Vision Pro,

this is to make the Vision product, Apple would look to try and remove the external display and reduce the overall sensors and cameras on the system as a possibility. A quote from Mark Gurman, Apple is prioritizing the development of a cheaper model even at the expense of other initiatives like the AR glasses project, which I mean, obviously, right. But yeah, he had another line in there about the AR glasses project, which is basically

like the AR glasses project, which doesn't have things that will exist anytime soon, right? Like, it's just not going to happen. And let's, let's, of course you would. Now, the big change here, right, is that we had an earlier report a few months ago where they were talking about, like, what are the fundamentals of Vision Pro that we wouldn't change? And one of them was the external display. They're like, oh, no, no, no. That's part of the whole value of the Vision Pro. We got to be real expensive for something that is not necessary for the user and is more part of your story about how wonderful this product is. And based on this report, it sounds like maybe they caved on that. Whoever was insisting on that

was told, no, we have to ship a cheaper version. If we're ever going to ship this thing in volume, you're going to have to give up your precious external display. And Mike, it makes me wonder if the external display is going to be a one and done for the Vision Pro. I don't know. Here's the thing. My feeling on this is, I'm seeing a lot of people online being like, oh, so it wasn't core to the product.

I think it's too soon for people to like claim that this was a bad part of the device like i feel like a lot of people you know because we were talking about like oh you know it seems like it's core to the product and like from everything apple was saying it feels core to the product right like everything they're showing everything they're saying this seems like an important part of the overall proposition for them. So I just think it's too soon, one way or another, to talk about whether this thing is important or not. Because no one's even seen it. It's true, we don't know.

What this does sound like, though, is that in the battle between philosophically, you've got to have the ability to see somebody using this product and see that see into them. And therefore you need to have a display on the outside, uh, that versus, um, we got to get the price down, right? We got to make a model that doesn't cost $3,500. How, and going to the product manager basically and saying, how are you going to make a $1,500 headset, which for the record is very expensive, still their cheap headset, which is going to make a $1,500 headset, which for the record is very expensive still. Their cheap headset, which is going to be maybe half the price of the Vision Pro, is still very expensive. Okay? And you look at that display on the outside and you're like, well, I mean, I can think of one thing that will drop the price of building this thing by hundreds of dollars.

And it's that display. So, you know, you make the choice. think of one thing that will drop the price of building this thing by hundreds of dollars and it's that display so you know you make the choice and you're right i don't think it means aha i guess it wasn't core to the product because it probably feels like an enormous sacrifice and you know it's apple maybe i'm sure it would be replaced by a less expensive presence awareness indicator, right? Something that indicates that they can see out so that you know that they can see out even if it's not a display. It's a light or I don't know what, something else. But what it does say is that Apple's serious about getting that price down if they're going to do a cheaper product. Because our initial reaction was, in part, how do you make a cheaper product and keep that external display?

It seems like one of the easiest decisions to cut it because it doesn't affect the user experience, right? It affects the experience of the people around the user, but it doesn't affect the user experience. So it does sound like there's a shift here a little bit. We'll see right because you're presumably if you're if you're building a vision one you are looking at every single decision um i was thinking about this actually as i got the as i got the quest 3 out is like okay quest 3 versus quest pro um you know what are the what are the nice features of the Quest Pro that they're like, no, let's make it worse, right? And Apple is bad at that. I mean, Apple struggles with that. That's, I think, one of the reasons Apple is so successful with their use last year's product kind of approach is that Apple's better at giving you last year's cutting edge product than they are

giving you a middling product, right? They don't want to design a middling product. They want to design a really good product, but for vision pro or for vision OS to have a life, it needs to get cheaper. So imagine that conversation of, we chose this really nice woven material for the headband. You're like, guys, it's got to be plastic, right? Like it just has to be. I'm sorry, because it costs so much money and we need to get the cost of this thing down. Again, I've said this before, to be a fly on the wall for those discussions, right? How do we compromise our product in order to make it affordable is a very, I think, very hard thing for Apple to do, but with the cost of vision pro, if they want to ship this in volume,

they really have to do that. So, uh, well, you know, we'll, we'll keep an eye on it. Mike.

We most certainly will, or at least one, but probably two eyes, probably two. Our eyesight. In fact, we'll keep it in focus. Assuming we have the right lenses

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ZocDoc.com slash UpgradeFM. Our thanks to ZocDoc for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. So, some time ago, before the hubbub of the new iPhone, before the iPhone event even, Jason, you wrote a post about your current feelings of trying to use the iPad as your only computer when traveling.

And I've had this in my show notes for ages, and finally we're going to talk about it today. It is you giving up the iPad-only travel dream. I would like to read a quote from your article as a lead-in for this. You say, For many years, I've tried very hard to travel with only an iPad.

Why bring two devices? And I'm not leaving my iPad at home. Since the arrival of Apple Silicon, however, I've gone back to traveling with both an iPad. Why bring two devices? And I'm not leaving my iPad at home. Since the arrival of Apple Silicon, however, I've gone back to traveling with both an iPad and a MacBook Air. So what were you doing when you were bringing the iPad? How did you make that work? Why has it changed again? Well, it's funny because I wrote this the last time I was visiting my mom in Phoenix, and now I'm about to go back there again. And it's the same thing. I'll bring the iPad and the MacBook Air. Well, listeners to this show may remember or may not.

I also wrote about it on Six Colors. I tried to just travel with the iPad Pro. The challenge for me is a lot of it is podcasting related. I do podcasts every week. And the iPadOS functionality just isn't there to do podcasting. So you end up having to work around it. The sound system is not particularly sophisticated. Access

to it by apps is not particularly powerful. And so I ended up doing a bunch of things that were hacks on the podcasting part of my life. So I brought an external recording device, right? And wired it in so that I could be on the iPad talking on Skype, but also recording to an external recording device. I, which works, but then I don't get the other person's recording, which means that there's a backup that's missing. Like I tried in the later days days I tried when we were using zoom to use zoom's recording feature, but zoom's recording feature, if you look at their documentation, there's a little asterisk that says none of this works on the iPad or iPhone, right? Like they just didn't build it, which is too bad because they could build it to work because

they're literally running as the only app. They could record your local audio on your microphone and they don't do it. Um, and so i i had all these different things i drew a little chart of like what gets connected to what in order for it to work and i ended up when i especially when i got the first apple silicon macbook air i had this thought which is like i was taking a trip i don't even remember where. And I thought, am I going to go through all that trouble or am I just going to bring the MacBook Air 2 because it's lighter? And it led to a situation where back in August, when I wrote this post, I had just been on a trip to Colorado with Lauren's family and I had to do one podcast

while I was there. And I brought the MacBook Air. I took it out one time, which was to do that one podcast. And then I put it away again and I thought, well, I mean, I had to carry this thing around. That's true, but I really only brought it for the one podcast. And, uh, but the truth is though, it's not quite that simple because the other part of this is the rest of my job. And while I could do a lot of the rest of my job with the iPad, there in certain circumstances, there was extra effort, right? Like there's, I don't sit in an iPad all day. I sit on a Mac. So I build up work structures based on being on a Mac and then they're gone on the iPad.

Now I can build up new structures. So like on that trip to Colorado, I had to do the charts for the Apple results. I use the MacBook Air for that too. So I opened it twice on that trip actually. And the reason I did use the MacBook Air is not that I couldn't have done it on the iPad because I could have, I built a shortcut that would do it on the iPad, but that it would be a much slower process. And since I had the MacBook Air, I could just use my more streamlined macOS process. So it just, the story was not, and it was, you know, it got on Hacker News and stuff. What the story wasn't is I hate the iPad and I'm not using it anymore. I love the iPad. I use it most of the time, even when I'm traveling. But I did have that moment where I thought,

I am a happier traveler, and it's not that much extra space in my bag, to just bring the MacBook Air 2, and if I've got it, use it for what it was intended, and stop because of the fundamental limitations of iOS, or iPadOS, that Apple is just not addressing. of iOS or iPadOS that Apple is just not addressing, I have given up trying to make the iPad do stuff that its maker doesn't want me to do with it, if that makes sense. That sort of is where I ended up is I'm no longer going to be kind of like a daredevil, like trying to jump a canyon on an iPad and like, ah, it must be done because it

can be done and we must see if it can be done. And I'm over that. I would love for the iPad to progress to the point where I could not bring the MacBook Air with me and be fine, but it's not there. And I'm kind of tired of fighting it because Apple's not, you know, Apple's not enabling this stuff. So why should I beat my head against this brick wall? Why not just bring the MacBook Air, which is perfectly suited for some of these tasks? Yeah, I want to read again from the article because you're kind of getting close to the thing that you were talking about. And I want to talk about it based on what you said. So this is a longer quote. so bear with me a second.

The beauty of the Mac as a platform is that Apple doesn't have to think of every use case and doesn't have to build out every single esoteric detail in order to enable new features. On the iPad, advancement doesn't work like that. Instead, it's decided in various meetings inside Apple where specific features will get prioritized or deprioritized for the next operating system cycle. Once every year or two, we will hear about some legitimately exciting new features that will extend the usability of the platform. And that will basically be it. The waiting begins again. Apple will determine what I can do with my iPad and when that changes. I'm sure they'll let me know. Until then, all any of us can do is wait. I'm sure they'll let me know until then all any of us can do is wait so like of course there are like it doesn't work exactly this way right but which I know you're not saying but like you know

people can make things for the Mac that are outside of the app store and do stuff right and so you can find some truly weird and wonderful things on the Mac because the platform will allow for it. To a wide extent, Apple with the Mac, you can make things for the Mac that Apple has never intended the Mac to do. And that go way beyond what Apple would ever have thought of. And it's fine.

And I feel like on the iPad, Apple has to have meetings where they discuss whether they will allow a thing to be on the iPad. And then that gets added and we go, yay. But like, that's it. Like, it's a limited space of possibility that is incrementally expanded by Apple. Whereas the Mac, while not technically a completely wide open space, is pretty much a wide open space, right?

wide open space is pretty much a wide open space right like you could do almost anything on the mac and apple will you know is not standing in your way it's just it's it's just providing a platform and maybe they'll clamp down on some stuff but it's it's it's starting open and then and then some restrictions are placed on it whereas the ipad is a a closed set that gradually expands and you mean not even just what the platform can do on the ipad even if you can do something weird and wonderful will it get through app review well yeah i mean that's always been one of the arguments about the about the app store only model yeah is it has that chilling effect too which is some wild ideas that might even be approved are never done because you would have to build it and there's no pre-approval process.

You'd have to build it and then is it ever gonna get approved? And then you're left with like a jailbreak and all that. I don't know. I mean, I'm at the point now where I think that it's more likely that at some point Apple will allow you to run a virtualized

version of Mac OS on an iPad than that Apple will allow something like Audio Hijack to run an iPad OS. I actually think that the former is more likely that you've got an M1 or an M2 iPad. It's fully capable of this stuff. If you attach a keyboard, the magic keyboard, and you click on the virtual Mac thing and it just runs macOS Sonoma and you do that for a while and then you leave it and it shuts itself off. Like, why not? First off, why not? You could do that. And second, you know, does that solve your problem? Maybe.

Maybe. But like the actual iPad OS, and it's not like it's bad. It's just that Apple's got its priorities with it and you can't extend beyond it. Not really. And that's just where it is. And we all were pushing, I think psychologically, why people like me and Federico and David Sparks and all sorts of other people were pushing the iPad past its limits in that period. It's two things. One is the Mac was sort of a drag. It was a bad time for the Mac. And the iPad was legitimately exciting and new. And we've talked about this in another context where it feels like there was a period where Apple thought the iPad was the future

and that the Mac was a legacy product that was going to go off and sort of like just exist. And so those of us who felt like that was where it was going, we're embracing this new, exciting thing that was the future because we thought as we pushed forward, we were learning what everyone else would learn in a few years as the platform expanded, right? We were out there on the edge. And this is a thing with tech writers that happens, right? You see things like I saw, I saw an ad the other day about, um, that was making fun of the fact that people have to know that like all caps in a, in a social media post is like you're yelling. And I thought I learned that lesson in 1985, right? Uh, that's an extreme example, but like being on the cutting edge of tech, one of the things you're doing is coming back and

reporting like, this is how it's going to be for you in two or three years. So with the iPad, that's what we all thought we were doing. And I don't know if we misread it or if Apple swerved. I think Apple swerved. But regardless, all of us look up after a while and say, you know what, this platform isn't the future in the way we thought and apple is not moving it forward at the pace that we thought they would and the mac meanwhile has become reinvigorated and apple silicon has really sort of like transformed how awesome the mac is and is moving it forward and the laptops are better and they're more fun to use and all of those things and that's when we all step off to some degree and sort of say okay like. And this piece was me not saying that iPad sucks because it doesn't. Again, it is me saying I am not interested in being a trailblazer and trying to force it to do things it can't do. Because I no longer have faith that it will ever be able to do them. And there's another tool that's better for this.

And it's the Mac. And I can stick my backpack is old and it was built for a much larger universe of laptops than currently exist and as a result the laptop case and my backpack fits a macbook air and an ipad pro just fine i can put them both in there and so that's what i do now for me it was really the thing that David Sparks said. I think it was in like the 2021 or 2022 report card where he was saying that like, I stopped trying to make the iPad be something it isn't. Like it was a very much a crystallizing thing for me because the combination of my Apple

Silicon MacBook Air and my iPad mini just changed my relationship to the ipad because it drew a much stronger line for me between what these products are for when like a mac could be as portable as my ipad pro changed things a lot right because the apple silicon laptops give me the portability along with the battery life and the power. And then the iPad Mini gave me enough of an iPad experience in a truly tiny size, which I found very

good for me at home, but it helped to then make me realize what the iPad for me is best at, which is content. Video, social media, reading, and dealing with very light work like that for me was just the best combination and like what this conversation isn't is like the ipad sucks no the ipad is awesome it's the computer i use most at home but it's not what i get work done

on anymore like i don't i don't open spreadsheets on an iPad anymore like I used to for years, right? I don't do my show prep on an iPad anymore like I used to for years. I don't do all my email on an iPad. I just do that on my Mac now and I leave my iPad for the things that it is best at. Right.

I'm fascinated. So when I was in Memphis, I got to see you and Steven with iPad minis. Yeah. And I think that's really interesting. I have something that we when I was in Memphis, I got to see you and Steven with iPad minis. Yeah. I think that's really interesting. I have something that we're going to talk about in a minute. I have spent the last couple of years sort of dabbling with these weird Android-based e-ink devices. We'll be talking about that after the break. devices we'll be talking about that in books after the break after the break yeah i'm seeing i'm forward promoting here this is how it works tune in to upgrade to hear the host explain what they're doing while they're doing it but um and that's the idea there is giving me ipad like

multitasking where i can choose apps but in a kindle kind of context with e-ink and not like I'm not watching videos and stuff like that. And I really like e-ink as is obvious because I keep writing about it. I really like e-ink as a display technology. I think it gets me in. I think it makes my brain work differently. I think it allows me to focus on the words on the page in a way that I don't if I have notifications on my iPad and all of those things. And like I can always swipe to some app that I know is there. And it's like, no, I'm just using this device. That said, I look at the iPad mini that you guys are using. And I think, you know, and I've tried it every time an iPad mini comes out, I get a review unit, I try it out. The latest iPad mini is really great. And I think about like, could I do this instead? And I could, I prefer not to, but I

could. It's trying to scratch that same edge. And yes, the iPad is really good at that. I think to your larger point, it's really good at that. You were able to sort of take the pro out of the equation because you now are just using the ipad mini for what it's really great at i still use my ipad for more stuff but i but i feel like i am also constantly re-evaluating that part of it which is am i willing to like get an ipad mini instead what does that mean it probably means that i'm going to either try to do some work on the iPad mini, which is probably not great, but it's possible. That's not a great experience to really do work on the iPad mini. on my couch or in bed right like i i don't really i don't i only do that when i absolutely must do it i i and i like that when i'm not traveling um but but i think about it right i i definitely

do think about it i mean it was also for me as a way to try and stop myself from doing like work at home as well right so like well that's yes now i do have to grab my laptop to do something work related that's serious so you build a barrier so i built a barrier i mean all the work apps are on my ipad the same way as they're on my iphone but it's more like checking in on stuff as opposed to like getting active in a thing you know in those devices but i'm right and me, the barrier has been more, yeah, I could open my MacBook Air, but the barrier has often been like, if I'm going to do that,

I might as well just come out into the office and turn on the computer and use it out here. And that's enough of a barrier that sometimes it prevents me from, you know, working when I'm not supposed to be working. And that's a good thing. Yeah. And having a MacBook Air attached to a studio display,

like in my house in another room is a interesting, like it's a lower barrier. So that's kind of interesting of like, do I just pop into the back room where the MacBook air is attached to a keyboard and a monitor and like wake it up and go on a computer and then, and then go back to sleep. I don't know. But yeah, the iPad, to wrap this up, the iPad, I only wrote this article,

and I think it came across, given the hacker news and stuff like that, it was like, oh, trying to get attention. It was like, literally, it was Friday morning. I was at my mom's house. I was flying back that night. And I thought, I'm going to sit down and do some work. What am I going to write about? And I had just been thinking in the shower about the fact that I brought these two computers and was using them. And once I had my MacBook Air, I did my work on the MacBook Air instead of on the iPad Pro because I had it.

I had it. So why not use it to do work that I would normally do on the Mac? And I thought, well, I'll just write that up. And that was literally my point in had it. I had it. So why not use it to do work that I would normally do on the Mac? And I thought, well, I'll just write that up. And that was literally my point in doing it. It's just noticing that a thing about myself that I hadn't really recognized, or I recognized, but I hadn't thought through and written about,

which is that that's where the iPad has shifted for me is I'm no longer willing to be an iPad astronaut, right? And push the boundaries and go out there where no one has gone before and say, like, did you know this thing? Like a daredevil, like I said before, it, it, because it's there, I have to do it. And I feel like lots of us are at that point where it's sort of like, I like the iPad, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna try to make it into what it's not it's not because Apple seems to have an idea of what it's not. And even if I wish it was that thing, Apple says it's not. So it's not.

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m e dot com slash upgrade 20 with the promo code upgrade 20 for 20% off thanks to delete me for their support of this show and relay fm the books books books books b-o-o-x books palma like the palm of your hand with an a on the end yeah what on earth jason is the book i know palma i i want to turn this around and say mike i showed this to you in memphis what was your reaction when

i showed this thing to you because i remember remembered being something like what is that that was my reaction i could not believe this thing that you were showing me which was an e-ink phone yeah yeah so for for a couple years now this company this chinese company uh books has been sending me these uh android-based e-readers because I really, like I said, in the last segment, I really liked the idea that, uh, could I expand like what frustrates me about the Kindle and the Kobo is that I, I, they are dedicated readers. And yet I end up reading all morning on my iPad when I'm waking up and having my tea and, and eating my breakfast, I'm reading on my iPad. And I like my iPad, but I have this whole other device for reading. Why am I not reading on that?

And the answer is because the Kindle and the Kobo, they don't run apps. Kobo has Pocket, so that's something. You can read articles on the Kobo, but they don't run apps. So can I read my RSS feeds on a kindle or a kobo i cannot can i read newspapers that or magazines that have websites uh there is an experimental web browser still experimental but like it's terrible and not e-ink optimized and forget it but they have like there are apps for those and i enjoy using those apps on my ipad so if you built a kindle out of android it would have apps on it and this company has been trying this the problem is that every android app there's two problems big problems one is every android app is made for a phone screen with high

refresh rate and color the ink there is color e-ink now and they they do have a product that is color e-ink and color e-ink is surprisingly better than it it's it's not bad don't you can't watch video on it but it's actually not bad um and the refresh rates are getting better for e-ink but the fact is e-ink doesn't do color 60 frames a second let alone 120 right it just doesn't do it problem number two by the way is all of these are kindle sized so they're all tablet sized in terms of android and and you're not going to believe this you may not have heard this before mike but android tablet apps suck no way they're bad there are some that are okay but like uh they're not very good they're just not very good

uh they do weird things when they're confronted with a larger screen because most android users by far 99 i mean like the percentage of iphone to ipad like it's mostly iphones but like the percentage of android phones to android tablets like it might as well be 100%. Right. Really. So when things get big, things get weird on Android. So I get this company is so eager. They're like, yeah, we'll send you. We got a new one.

They sent me the first one, and I was like, I'll try it, sure. And I wrote it, and I basically was like, you know what? This hardware is pretty good, but the software is mess and it and it doesn't work very well and you know the apps aren't optimized for e-ink so they smudge or they're like all grayscale and weird and the experience is bad and you can't you turn a page and other than the apps that are included that nothing happens and so you end up having to do like a finger scroll on e-ink which is real bad right because it's just slow bit slow refresh rate and smudging as it goes um it's it's it's bad and i wrote about it and i thought well i'm never hearing

from those guys again and i actually said here's the link to the story and let me know you know i'll send back your product and you know there you go and instead they're like, great, thanks. We'll send you more. I'm like, okay. They're like up for it. This is just what we wanted. But the truth is, I mean, they're looking for coverage and it wasn't the most positive coverage, but it gets their name out there. And the truth is they have improved it a lot.

They have done a lot of things to Android to try and make it so that you can like tap and hold on an app and tap on optimize. And it is trying to hack that app to be more contrast and to use volume buttons as page up page down buttons whenever possible and that gets you something that more is more appropriate for an e-ink reader so they've been improving it as they go their their tablet that does color had pretty good software. The color was weird, but okay, but it was heavy and big. And I didn't really like it because of that. And I was thinking,

how am I going to write about this one? And all of a sudden they're like, we'd like to send you this thing. And it's a phone with an e-script. And it's not a phone. It doesn't have cellular capability, but otherwise it's a phone with an e-script. It's not a phone. It doesn't have cellular capability, but otherwise it's a phone with an e-ink screen. It's got a side button on one side and it's got volume up and down. And then another button, a power button on the other side, it's got a camera in the back, which is the most,

they, they have an app called the document scanner, but it's very clear. They're using an Android phone reference platform here. Right. And then putting an e-ink screen on it. So they've collected all the, like,

would they have chosen to put a camera on it? Like maybe, but it's really there chosen to put a camera on it like maybe but it's really there because they inherited a camera from whatever phone platform they're using as the basis of this thing and so they've got document scanner app which is just the camera app uh it does by default it scans it into like a pdf or something like that but you know i took a picture of you it was fun yeah yeah and it shows you as a you know dithered black and white uh maniac honestly uh yeah so so it's a you know it's it's weird because it is a phone like the headline says it's a phone shaped e-reader it's a 6.13 diagonal, uh, E ink screen running Android 11. And I took it with me on my trip to Memphis

because I wanted to be like, and I took my Kobo too. And I was like, well, we'll see how it goes. And I never used my Kobo the entire trip, even sitting in the Salt Lake city airport for 10 hours or whatever. I, I just used the Books Palma. I should also mention that the early Books tablets, their energy settings were all messed up too. So they would lose battery life. They would hemorrhage it. Whereas this thing, I put it in airplane mode, turned off the Wi-Fi, and it would last days. Off, it would last, um, it, it just was much better. And I used it the whole time and I never got frustrated. Some apps are better than others. I found a really good EPUB reading app called moon plus on Android that I use. That was pretty

good. It turns out the Kindle app on Android is pretty good and has all the settings. I couldn't see them all at first, but I, I, because of the way the black and white screen works, like I didn't know that I could scroll down and that there were even more settings in each of the settings windows, but it actually works pretty well. The Kobo app isn't very good on Android. The Libby app for library books is not that great on Android either, but the Kindle app is pretty good. And I found an RSS app that's okay. Um, and I'm sure if i looked harder i would find more and then of course every like new like uh news and company that's got an app um like the

athletic has an app on android and it's fine uh and so i could probably replicate my morning reading experience on the books palma uh pretty well and it would just be using a thing that's shaped like a phone rather than shaped like a kindle well would you or have you like you could but would you i think bottom line is that i don't like i don't like it ergonomically okay um i i have really come to appreciate the kindle and the kobo having a, you know, whatever it is, six or seven inch diagonal screen. And it's really thin and it's got one edge that I can hold onto and it's got page turn buttons on it. And I can just sit there and go click, click, click, click, click. And it's really convenient holding this thing. I end up holding it in my left hand and I have to have my

fingers wrapped around so that they're on the page turn button and every page turn is like I'm squeezing the phone because I got to squeeze that button. Right, right. Or I could tap, but it would be, then it's a two-handed experience, which I don't want. And I don't think that, that ergonomic configuration doesn't work for me.

It might work for other people. The advantage of it, and I've talked to a couple of people who've used it now, advantage of it is it's real small. Like it fits in a pocket in a way that a Kindle or Kobo doesn't and gives you that kind of experience of a really pleasant kind of e-ink experience without, you know, that you can take with you. Also, you had to take your phone because it's not a phone, but you could do it that way. It's come a long way.

And for the most part, right, there's the power button, there's the up and down, which are the page turn buttons. And the button on the other side, I have set to refresh the e-ink screen because every now and then you get an Android app and it's drawing things or it's scrolling or whatever, and everything gets smudgy. And the way that this works on modern e-ink devices is every fifth page turn or whatever it does the full-on sort of like flash refresh of the screen and books the software tries to do that but some apps misbehave and you just press the button on the side and it goes and then it then it looks good again so i i found myself really liking this device mike honestly i found myself liking it. I mean, it is so not for everyone, but I think if you're somebody

who's either comfortable with Android or willing to experiment with Android, like it comes, the first device they sent me didn't even work with Google Play. You had to like do this whole process. It felt like you were essentially violating the terms of Google's licensing agreement in order to enable Google Play.

I think so. Now, Play Store is right on there. Very easy to do. It's all above board. It actually works really well. So it's come a long way. And it's not perfect. I really wish a device like this, and maybe Books is pushing it this way.

and maybe books is pushing it this way i really wish devices like this were popular enough that the that the good android software the best android software for these devices supported it better because if you could get a core set of of apps to support it well and maybe maybe that's on books to try to find partners who have a freemium model where you could put the free version on there and then everyone would use it and say, this is great. And then they would pay an upgrade price or something, or maybe they could bundle. I don't know what theB readers that are very good, you can get this thing to be pretty cool. I think the question that I have left is, if they applied all of this technology to a Kindle-shaped device, would it be good enough? Or would the fact that it's now a tablet kind of make all the software worse?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I really, I like that this product exists. And I think that it's, it's what $280. It's not cheap, but I think that there's a, uh,

an audience for a product like this really, who really loves e-ink and a reader and is going to be comfortable uh enough using android this is a very interesting product in general and it was super funny like i was listening to uh app stories today and john vorhees bought one of the tablet ones yeah yeah oh he and i had a text chain this weekend about that i was like what you got the huge tablet and are using it with a keyboard i'm like wow but just basically the core idea irrespective of the form factor that you go for of android device with e-ink is really cool and i think it's one of the great things in general about Android, right? That like, this is a device that could not exist without Android

because there'd be no point in doing it. Right. Right, especially the phone one. And I know that Remarkable have made a decent business for themselves, but they've been around for a really long time now. But the idea of having the ability to get, you know, like John was having Obsidian, or you would have that athletic app or whatever, right?

You could put any app that you want on it, and they're going to work, and they're going to work. get you know like john was having obsidian or you would have that athletic app or whatever right you could put any app that you want on it and they're gonna work and they're gonna work like i know when i was when you were showing me the device some apps were better than others but also books build in a bunch of really smart features into this into the operating system to try and account for some of that stuff like you can end up with something really interesting that maybe if you you know i have a commute every day and you're holding your phone and reading every day maybe it'd be nicer to pick up this 280 which i think feels like a pretty decent price for something like this um device to just read your art calls on an e-ink screen is i think that's kind of cool i liked it if you like that if you like the e-ink um feel

which is really nice because it's reflective and it is it does have uh it's not a back, it's a side light. That's what they all do now is they have LEDs around the edges that light it up. But the idea is that also the sun hits it and the lights in your room hit it and reflect back. So it feels like paper in a way that our glowing screens are glowing screens. This is not a glowing screen. And it just feels different. It feels more like paper um i i agree this is one of the great things about having something like android out there because not only is an operating system they can use and they can pull reference hardware platforms off obviously like they've

done here with a camera and then there's software there's a software library that exists for it and it's you know not uh it's's, there's a lot of crap on the Android on the play store, but there are also good apps, right. And, and, and you can find them, uh, in most categories, there's somebody like, uh, like moon plus somebody who's making a living building a good app. And they know that they're getting, cause they have a pro version, you know, that they want you to pay for it. Like they're getting a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, but it's still a pretty big audience of people who want to read eBooks on Android and they can make a business out of it, which is great because that app is good.

So I'm happy about it. Like I said, I'm troubled by the fact that the tablet stuff is just not an emphasis on Android. And therefore, I was saying this to John because John's using the big boy right like i said android tablet apps aren't very good and he's like no they're not you can find the you can find good ones but it's harder to do that john's really seeming to to get a good just a good use out of just having a web browser like a full web browser and and there is there is an e-ink browser too but there's like browsers that are are better in e-ink which is nice um that and what does better in e-ink mean it basically means things like reducing the contrast so that you don't have a lot of like a gray background when it's better with a white background and doing paging instead of scrolling like so that you say you you hit the

space bar or you tap the the volume bar and it draws the next page instead of doing an animation that slides it all up because that slide messes up the screen. And it's not meant to work like that to be animated in that way. Um, and so there are browsers that are, that do that. And then he, and he's got obsidian running and that runs fine. And I think that unlocked a lot for him was that he can run Obsidian and he can run a browser and that's sort of all he needs on that device. It's an interesting idea. So, you know, I, I, I continue to say, especially Amazon, which has an Android-based infrastructure for other products, and has an app store. I really am disappointed that after all this time, Amazon hasn't, for example, made a partnership with certain app developers on Android and made those apps available. I don't even know if the Kindle runs Android, but they could do it, right?

They could just build a Kindle that runs Android underneath that you wouldn't see it. And then what I'm saying is Amazon could make the Kindle run a select number of apps and they choose not to. And I can see the advantage of saying, no, Kindle is a select number of apps and they choose not to. And I can see the, I can see the advantage of saying, no, Kindle is for books. Okay.

I can see it, but like, I would love it if I could do RSS and a select number of news sources on my Kindle. I would love that. That would make it a much more valuable device to me because it's a beautiful ink screen. And it presumably the software would be tweaked to actually work right on

Kindle. Wouldn't that be something, but that ain't happening. So instead, this is what we're left with is Android devices and a company that's trying to build sort of like software that adapts existing Android apps to be better on e-ink. And for all I know,

they're also probably talking in the background to some of the apps that people are using on these devices and saying, can you do this thing so it works better on our device? That's probably also going on. But yeah, it's fun to take a spin in this. In the end, I don know in the end if they made something that was the size of a kindle or a kobo that did otherwise software felt exactly like the the books palma i would definitely try it out uh the current readers that are that size are using an older version of the software that doesn't work as well one of the challenges there is also getting a hardware page turn button, which is harder

because lots of tablets don't have physical buttons for that. And I really want physical buttons for that. And the advantage of the Palm is it's a phone. And so, not a phone, but it's shaped like a phone, which means it has volume up and down buttons, which are page turn buttons,

which is really great. I don't know. I loved showing it to you because it's shaped like a phone which means it has volume up and down buttons which are page turn buttons which is really great i don't know it's uh it's i loved showing it to you because it's so weird right like that's that's one of the best things about it is you look at and you're like what is it yeah that's what it is this episode is brought to you by notion there are many ai tools out there that can be fun to play around with but when it comes to something that you actually want to plug into your workflow and use regularly, Notion AI is the one that will really help you save time in your day-to-day work. You can leverage the power of AI right inside of Notion across all of your notes and documents without the need to jump between your work and a separate AI

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you think a multi-stream interface could be like on the Vision Pro. With what seems to be an open canvas, the potential number of visible feeds and the methods to move, bring into focus, and arrange could result in quite the experience. Oh, I agree. I hadn't really thought about it, but it's true. The challenge is bandwidth, right?

Although, you know, depending on what the scale is, I think you downscale, you offer lower quality feeds and all that. And there's this question of multiple apps, although wouldn't that be nice if you could take a video from one app and put it over here and a video from another app and put it over here? I will just say that while tvOS is good at this or capable of this, iOS and iPadOS are not as good at this. So I think that's the question that's the question is will vision OS be good at this, but this would be really great, right. To be able, I'm sure Apple will do it. Will anybody

else do it? I don't know. Right. Like if you have to use the YouTube TV app and it's, you know, it's just going to show you a rectangle with four things in it, that's a quad box. But like what you really want is to be able to put those four things out of the quad box and just have quad boxes in your floating in the world instead. But I love the, I love the idea that you, you can position a bunch of different screens in different places. If you want to get that,

you know, Adrian Veidt at the end of Watchmen kind of feel going on. I got, I got 40 TVs on right now and I'm watching them all at once. It's pretty great, right? I love that. I genuinely love that idea. I think that could be super fun. It is. Quad box is good, but we don't have to stop there, right? Some people look at a quad box and they're satisfied. Others look at the quad box and say, what if Octobox? What about Quintuplebox?

You know, the sky's the limit that's why i even put a number on it in ultibox omnibox infobox anyway dean asks jason you have mentioned that you mount your mac under your desk where under the desk towards the front so that's accessible for plugging things into the front io and pressing the power button or towards the rear to be closer to the permanently collected connected items like monitors and power it is closer to the front partly because i do have to press the power button by reaching all the way around to the back uh which is not ideal and also my mac studio has has ports on the front so it's nice to be able to

plug things into the ports on the front uh and then on the underside of the desk yes i need some longer cables to run all the way back around to the monitor i have a power i power on the underside of the desk i have a usb hub on the underside of the desk so the underside of the desk is doing a lot of work there's a lot going on there so that that's the answer. So it is toward the front. I'm still using a thing that was designed for like a Mac mini and a, uh, and an external hard drive or something before they, now you can get like on Etsy, you can get Mac studio specific shapes. Um, I think Steven has one of those, but, um, I've got the, I've got an older one but it's great and since I have the M1 Mac Studio it also means that I don't hear the fans so that's nice that is nice

Tim asks since the iPhone 15 can take portrait photos without explicitly selecting portrait mode does that mean it's now possible to capture live photos with portrait mode or do you still have to choose one or the other? well Mr. Photos yeah well you have the answer here so just give it live photos with portrait mode or do you still have to choose one or the other well mr photos yeah well you you have the answer here so just give it i do i just i wanted to give you the

opportunity because you were of course the writer of uh does it take control of photos take control of photos yes but i i um would have to think about it and or check it on my phone i want to just give you a cross promo opportunity here but no you have to choose so it's in the same menu so you know like up at the top left or you'd have the options on a live photo to change it to like bounce and loop and stuff like that portrait is now in that menu it's like where you can choose to turn on the portrait so if you turn on the portrait you'll lose the live photo feature right i hope they find a way to do that one day. That would be super cool. Right? I mean, it's basically

cinematic live photos, right? Yeah. That seems like a definite future opportunity for them. And I feel like you just named it, you know?

Mm-hmm. Cinematic live photos. Yep. Let's do it. That's what it is because it's cinematic mode. It already does what portrait mode does.

So you do cinematic live photos because now the the little menu um where it used to just say live now says like f live ah yes so i have just done it to one and what you do you still have a live photo but it isn't portrait mode so you right right so like mode still and a live photo that's not portrait mode it's not portrait live photo so right yeah live photo itself is not portrait which would be fun i think i think they could do that but it's if they want to do it or not but also she's saying cinematic live photos is like a whole feature all of its own for the next

iphone you know? Yeah. And Adrian asks, I'm trying out the no case club. Assuming you put your phone down screen up, I'm worried that the cameras would get scratched if you did that. But screen side down, the screen will get scratched. What do you do? Now, you use a case, right? Or do you not? I don't remember anymore.

All right. So no case. Do you think about this? No. Neither do I. This is the, okay, here's the thing.

If you want to go no case club, you have to not think about things like this. If you think about things like this, you should put a case on your phone. Yeah. I just live on my phone. Like I just live with it. Like I've noticed,

I already have like a slight scratch kind of around the edge of the camera lens, but like that's the part that's supposed to get scratched, not the camera lens, you know, because it's like you're putting it down or whatever camera side down i have never experienced having a scratch on a camera lens and i have been caseless since the iphone 10 i think yeah if if you really if this worry like if that like kind of stuff you think about it it worries you or makes you feel anxious, then I really recommend not doing it. Like if it's not worth it for that, like you've kind of got to go with it.

And as David said in the chat, and it's true, like the camera lenses, they are actually sapphire glass. Like that is the strong stuff. I wished. You're meant to lay your phone down like that. Yeah. By Apple, right?

Because Apple, although they sell cases, the iPhone does not come with a case. That's because it is meant to be used. Like Apple's philosophy here is it's meant to be used without a case, but also there's a case if you want it. And it's meant to be laid down camera side down and it's not meant to be scratched and it is fine so yes you're right mike you gotta kind of like just let go be one being in no case club be one with the phone put it down use it is it going to be affected by the world around it yeah it is but it's okay i think it's going to be okay i think it's going to be okay too in fact i but it's okay. I think it's going to be okay. I think it's going to be okay too. In fact, I know it's okay because I've done it for so many years.

Me too. If you would like to get in touch with us and ask a question of your own, or if you have any feedback or follow-up, just go to upgradefeedback.com. That is where you can submit it. Until next week's episode, if you want to see what Jason's up to,

you can read his writing over at sixcolors.com and hear his shows here on RelayFM and at theincomparable.com. You can listen to me on many podcasts here on RelayFM. You can check out my work at cortexbrand.com as well. We're on the social media places too. You can find us on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights and I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E on mike.social you can also find the show as upgrade at relayfm.social you can watch video clips of the show posted to Mastodon but also

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Jason is at jsnell. Thank you to our members who support us at Upgrade Plus. You can go to getupgradeplus.com and get longer ad-free versions of the show each and every week. Thank you to Notion, Delete Me, ZocDoc, and Electric for their support of this week's episode. But most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.