Upgrade - 486: On the Side of Reality

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 486 for november 13th 2023 this episode is brought to you by express vpn zocdoc factor and oracle my name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hello, Jason. You know, Mike, upgrade 486 is good, but wait until we get to upgrade Pentium. Oh, man, it's going to be fast. Is that a PowerPC joke? No, it's an Intel joke.

All of our Windows users know what I'm talking about. Woo! Windows! Yeah, okay. All of those four users know what I'm talking about, huh? Woo! Windows! Yeah. Okay. All of those four people got the joke. It was a chip. That was the chip for Intel before the Pentium was a 486. I have a Snow Talk question for you.

Comes from Tom, who wants to know, when you put your iPhone into a MagSafe stand for using standby, so you have it on the whole horizontal, which orientation is it? Volume buttons up or volume buttons down? I think it's, so what I do is I take it out of my hand and I rotate it counterclockwise. So I guess the answer there is that side button up, volume buttons down, camera bump up, but it's mostly just a, I mean, it's really, I think ergonomically, I'm walking over to the stand, which is in my kitchen and my hand, I'm holding it. I think, even though I'm usually a left-hander, I think I put it in the stand with my right hand and I rotate it counterclockwise.

So, yeah. So, I guess I never really think about it, honestly. I'm using it more, though. Here's the funny thing, Mike. I'm using the – I have the Studio Neat little wooden, very nice wooden thing that holds a MagSafe puck. It's beautiful. I forget the name of it. Material dock?

Yeah, but it's just a little tiny one. It's just a little circle. They're all material dock, and then they have different names. I see. Here's the problem. The camera bump on the iPhone 15 is so big that in order to get it on the charger, you basically need to put it on the charger and then just slide it until it hits the camera bump. And that's pretty much where the MagSafe charge is. Yeah.

Yeah, it's huge. Because this is the thing with the Apple one, right? The little, um, the fold out travel guy that like it doesn't sit completely flat anymore because the camera bump is so big. Yeah. So that, that I, uh, I have occasionally not set it properly and my phone has not had battery. Um, so I'm using that and that, and also for standby, I'm using the stand a little bit more because standby is cool. And in fact, my standby started doing a thing I hadn't ever noticed it doing before this weekend. Came out on Saturday morning to make the tea. And there was on the phone, instead of what it usually is, which is the time and the weather,

on the phone instead of what it usually is, which is the time and the weather. It was a live activity that had started from the TV app telling me that Arsenal was playing and that it was currently nil-nil with like 30 minutes or 20 minutes in. I haven't seen a live activity on... I've realized that now because I remember that was a thing that they announced.

I have not seen one. I think it's enabled in the beta. I think this must be enabled in the beta, because I'm on the beta on my phone. And I don't think I've ever seen a completely unbitten live activity start for a sports team, and I saw it all weekend. I also saw it at times that I didn't want to see it, and you kind of have to manage that. But where they're like, hey, the Warriors are starting, and I'm like, you know, I like the Warriors, but I also like to see the time. But for the, for Arsenal, it was great. Cause, cause I, as a, uh, American middling,

uh, fan of soccer, um, I never remember when they're playing and when they're playing at six in the morning, I don't really try very hard to get up, but because of our time change and all that, I've been getting up earlier lately. And I was oh i'll turn it on while i you know while i drink my tea in bed in the morning at 6 30 in the morning i'll turn on arsenal so i did anyway so live activity fired off that's kind of fun too so i i enjoy being able to explore this feature um and and so i've been trying to use standby more so it's been fun i love standby uh i'm following you in buttons on the top i have no reason why that's just fun i love standby uh i'm following you in buttons on the top i have no reason why that's just how i put it in every time i have i have no opinion or

reason and everything wants to be like fight me this is what the right way is to do it and i just i don't have any reason and don't care but but that is i'm just reporting the facts here that seems to be how i'm doing it for now if you would like to send in a question to help us open an episode of Upgrade, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in a Snow Talk question of your own. I have a reminder for you, Upgradians. Oh. The Upgradees, the 10th annual Upgradees are coming soon.

Within just a couple of weeks time, the nominations will close on December 5th. Please go to upgradees.vote within just a couple of weeks time the nominations will close on December 5th please go to upgradies.vote and make your nominations for the 10th annual Upgradees Awards

this is your duty as an Upgradian to make these nominations to help Jason and I award our favorites in many categories in early December please go to

upgradies.vote and enter your nominations there's a whole compilation process that happens but i did a little automation i showed you last week that i think is going to help speed things up a little bit which is great because it usually takes a really long time so i'm excited about it does it still does but it'll be it'll be a little bit faster but yeah but get those in now we want hear from you. While we're in this portion of the show, I will also remind you, if you would like longer ad-free version of the show each and every week, along with tons of other benefits of being a RelayFM member, like access to the

RelayFM members Discord, which is a cool place to hang out, and where all the live discussion happens when we record live every week, go to getupgradeplus.com it's just five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year a bargain i would say to get no ads and longer episodes each and every week on this week's upgrade plus segment we're going to be talking about a selection of home kit updates that jason has for me which i'm very excited to hear all about it's true it's true and we have some follow-up so i wanted to know from you, Jason, right? So when we recorded last time, you just published the reviews of the MacBook Pro.

And I feel like... And the iMac. And the iMac, of course. And I feel like over the last couple of years, every time Apple releases a new laptop or a new... Actually, any of the Apple Silicon products, there is the review process. They go out in the world and we talk about it people

make the reviews make their assumptions then it feels like the conversation shifts yes in a way that always makes me feel uncomfortable because it's like we talk about these things we have our opinions or you know we'll talk i'll'll talk to you. You have your opinion. It helps for my opinion. And that's the conversation that we have. But then there tends to be this like, but what about the thermals? Or like there was a question that we had on last week's episode,

which is like, we had no experience or information about the Pro Chip, for example. That was just like a nebulous thing out there. Or like, I think back to the Ultra when it was like, oh oh the ultra is really powerful super cool and then it's like but the mac pro has no graphics cards right and so like then this like conversation kind of like moves and so i just wanted to ask you have you had any further opinions based on how the conversation has gone over the last week it's an interesting effect and i think

it's a combination of things first off it's it's like, you know, we have our opinions and I have, you know, done my due diligence as a reviewer and I have opinions. And then it gets down to the wider world and naturally different people are going to get different systems. They're going to have different needs. They're going to have different perspectives.

I think that's all great. I do also think there's a tendency, though, for the internet to have a discourse that happens that includes people grinding all the axes that they want to grind. And it's, you know, it's not I don't love it, but like it's that's what it is. That's the Internet. It's going to do that. And people are going to do that. And websites are going to write clickbaity articles to try and create new gates and new anger because it is, you know, better than a shrug. Right. And honestly, I feel like my reviews were kind of shrugs

and a lot of the reviews were kind of shrugs. And in that kind of environment where it's just like it's a speed boost and here's the deal and otherwise these things are unchanged. And it basically is a vacuum into which hot takes and gripes and things can fill that void.

And there are a lot of people who want to fill them. And again, I don't love them personally, but it is a natural part of the process, I think. The part of the discourse that I don't particularly love in the last week has been about that base model M3 MacBook Pro. And the reason I don't, I understand it even though I don't love it. What I don't love about it is it's very idealistic and like, you know, idealism, good on you, but I've heard a lot of, but it's called MacBook Pro. And if it's called MacBook Pro with the word pro in it,

it should insert what you think is the Pro-defining, category-defining feature. It should have 16 gigs of RAM. It should have a bigger SSD. It should have more ports. It should support two external displays. There's a whole lot of it shoulds. And the challenge with that is that it doesn't mean anything. Pro doesn't mean anything. There's an iPad Pro, right? There's a Pro chip now for the iPhone, you know, because there's a Pro iPhone. What does it all mean? And the answer is, it means what you want it to mean. It means what Apple wants it to mean. Apple generally has meant it's nicer. You know, there is no definition of what a Pro laptop is.

So it's all in the eye of the beholder. And so if you have a particularly idealistic view, I mean, first off, you're a pretty hardcore computer nerd at that point to have an idealistic view of what a computer spec should be. I'm just saying, you know, it is coming from a very particular perspective, not saying it's right or wrong, just saying it's a particular perspective. What I would say, though, is that what frustrates me about that discourse, because it's very much strongly implied that like Apple is making a huge mistake because they call this system pro, but they don't dare to make it a properly pro system because it doesn't meet my standards. And then there's the reality, right? And the reality, again, and I'm trying to not take this as like I'm taking Apple's side because that's not it, but I am on the side of reality.

I do think it's worth pondering reality and not just living in idealism. And in reality, that base 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M3 chip instead of the M3 Pro and with 8 gigs of RAM exists for the exact same reason that the dumb 13-inch touch bar MacBook Pro that we all complained about because it was so inferior to the actual MacBook Pro models. It's the same reason that that thing existed. And it's an ugly reason, but it's the truth. It's filthy commerce, right? Apple isn't going to compromise on its margins.

Apple knows that there is a market for a sub $2,000 MacBook Pro that they need to hit because there are people who insist on buying something with the label Pro, but won't spend two grand on it. And this isn't somebody who's a legitimate pro who spends $1,800. This is a corporate buyer or somebody who wants something nice and is willing to buy something with terrible specs or with a touch bar. But they're not going to spend $2,000 on that laptop. It's going to be $1,300 or now maybe $1,600. That's it. laptop, it's going to be 1300 or now maybe 1600. That's it. So these products are completely not,

I mean, I don't know how to, how to put it. These products are not what we would ideally call a pro level system. The touch bar MacBook pro certainly wasn't that, and yet it existed for two chip generations. Why is it? Because Apple knows that people want to buy something called MacBook Pro, and Apple is not willing to compromise on its margins. Remember also that the new design for the M1 MacBook Pro, right? Every time you iterate as Apple, an existing product, the margins go up, right? So after two iterations with M3, they were able to get something with that screen and that beautiful 14-inch screen down to still only $1599, not down to $1299 or whatever,

$1599. So it's still a price increase. But clearly, they are fighting margin, and they're not willing to give up their margin. And we could argue like, oh, Apple should, in order to service the word pro, Apple should give up its margins and sell computers at cost because you can't use the word pro. And like, okay, again, I'm not going to say they're wrong. I'm going to say that that's not a realistic view of how the world works. And if you want to believe that, yes, Apple should not call it pro, okay. Or Apple should include more RAM in it at the same price, which is going to hurt their margins. My problem is that I don't know what

the answer is that those people are seeking. Is it Apple gives up their margins? Is it Apple, because that's not realistic, again, is it Apple should not call any laptop under $2,000 pro, Apple should not call any laptop under $2,000 Pro, anything without 16 gigs of RAM or more and a Pro processor? Is that the answer? That feels very let them eat cake to me. As a Pro user, does it make you feel better that there isn't some substandard computer that somebody buys that they can call Pro like your computer is Pro and they've sort of let the rabble in the door?

I mean, it frustrates me when i hear some of these arguments um or should apple eat its margins because there is some group of users who thinks that uh 16 gigs of ram should be the minimum and that nobody should ever be forced i guess to buy a computer with less than that um or should these computers just be priced out of what some group of people can afford? Also keep in mind, Apple will probably lose sales. I think Apple will lose some sales by making the base model $1599 instead of $1299. They will get some new sales and they'll convert some to MacBook Air sales, but they'll also lose some sales from whoever, you know, whatever corporations are like, no, we're not going to,

we're not going to go down that low and we're not going to buy a MacBook Air. Anyway, I hear the idealism. I get it. We all agree. More RAM is better. More storage is better. More external monitors are better, but we also live in the real world. i think understanding why apple does what it does and like i i think i think the attack here is not on that model for being that base model for being underpowered um i think i think it exists because of the people who are buying it and apple knows that apple knows exactly who's buying it and that the truth is Apple always, I would say, prices their products with a base model that is poor because they want to hit a price point, right? They want to hit $999 or $1099 or $1599. And they know that somebody is going to upgrade the ram and we all know that that ram upgrade for 200 is way overpriced for what it should be in our opinions given the rest of the the ram market i i get the raging i guess but it frustrates me because it strikes me as that a lot of it is sort of naively idealistic and it's like like, well, sure, I want an

M3 Max for $1,000. But that's not going to happen. So I understand the frustration here. But it's also, just to wrap it up, it's not new. I'll just say that again. This is the exact same thing as the dumb 13-inch touch bar MacBook Pro. It's the exact same reason. It is a substandard computer for what's on the label because some people buy the label. That's what it is. It's not great. My review, I really don't think that most people who care enough to be concerned about the 8 gigs of RAM should buy it regardless. I think they should buy the base model of the M3 Pro because it's not that much more money. And if you've got a few hundred dollars more, you're going to get more RAM and you're going to get the better chip.

But I know why this product exists. I mean, honestly, this product isn't for nerds who care about specs. It's not. It's for corporate buyers and other people who refuse to buy a MacBook Air because it's a baby computer, even though it's not. And because this is a pro computer because it's called pro, even though, yes, I think we can all agree that in an ideal world, a computer spec like this shouldn't be called MacBook Pro. I get it, but it frustrates me because I don't think those arguments are living in the real world. Very well put. I think the only thing that I would add is kind of like building on what you were saying

about like being realistic and the product naming. I feel like pro for Apple lives on this kind of scale now of mentality to branding. And so I've kind of listed down all of the products that I can think of that Apple's called pro in recent memory from like at the very beginning of this list this is pro by mentality to the end of this list this is pro by branding so you've got mac pro imac pro macbook pro ipad pro iphone pro airpods pro when you get

down to that very end at airpods pro that is not a professional product like these are my professional would not use airpods in their work right like no because there are bluetooth headphones they have latency and or they don't sound as good as other products on the market and you can't plug them into a lossless source and all those mac pros are literally only bought by professionals because you would be out of your mind to do it otherwise right especially now right and then i would question that imac pro remember when the imac pro came out and people said how can this be considered pro it doesn't have slots but it was though over its life we learned processors for professionals and then when you get into the middle the macbook pro and the ipad pro they are products that professionals in the class that

would buy this product would buy, right? So you get like the expensive MacBook Pros, the expensive iPad Pros used by people doing professional work, whether it's like artists for the iPad Pro or it's coders for the MacBook Pro. But both the MacBook Pro and the iPad Pro is where things start to shift, where these products are bought by people who are doing consumer level work on them. That's why there are game demos about the MacBook Pro, right? And you think to yourself, well, you're buying a $7,000 MacBook Pro to play games. And the answer is, no, you're not. You're buying a $1599 MacBook Pro to play games or maybe a $2,000 MacBook Pro to play games.

And people do. And they're allowed to, right? They don't have to show their pro card and say, yes, I realize Pro to play games. And people do. And they're allowed to, right? They don't have to show their pro card and say, yes, I realize that eight gigs of RAM is not enough. They don't have to do that. They can just buy it because they want it because it's nice. Because that is definitely one of our listeners did their whole thesis on this and sent it to me. I actually have a copy of his thesis. I forget his name now.

But it was absolutely, you know, it means that it's nice. It was Taylor. Listener Taylor. Is that the one we were quoted in? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was cool.

Yeah. But it's, so it's a signifier. It doesn't always mean what you, even, and this is the thing about branding, right? All of us get to decide what the brand means to us. All of us do. Right. The mistake is when you believe that that is what it means to or should mean to everyone because it a good chance it doesn't right macbook pro and ipad pro are great

examples mike of uh i know it says pro on it and you may be a pro who uses it for professional reasons but that's not always what it means and also also like the other part of this, like this like scale of branding versus mentality that I'm thinking about, people know where they sit in this and then you make the decisions, right? So like if you want MacBook Pro for the branding, then you'll get the entry level. But if you're a professional,

you know what you're buying, right? If you are a like profession you need professional scale computer you do not buy the entry-level macbook pro like you're not buying it right because you should know what you need to do your work like you're not going to be like oh it says pro on it it's definitely going to be okay for me like you're a professional right that you understand what you need from your tools you're a professional right right? You understand what you need from your tools. You're a professional. Right.

One of the problems that I've had in the last week is hearing and reading professionals who are expert computer users who are probably going to buy, if they buy in this generation the m3 max macbook pro saying essentially you know i know they didn't say it this way but this is how i read it essentially apple shouldn't sell eight gigs of ram as the base model because some people are too dumb to know that that's not enough that's how i read it yeah and it's like you know what they're not too dumb they have that that's not enough. That's how I read it. And it's like, you know what? They're not too dumb. They have a budget or they don't care. And will it mean that their computer runs a little slower

when they've got lots of Chrome tabs? Yes, it will. It's not ideal, but we don't live in that ideal world. We just don't. And the alternative, I don't like the alternative, which is no, no, no, no, no. If you don't have $2,000 to buy a MacBook Pro, you shouldn't buy a MacBook Pro. Shouldn't be labeled that way. It's like, yeah, well, no. Apple's decided no. The market has decided no. It's not going to happen. And like I said, Apple's not going to sell 16 gigs of RAM

for $1599. They're not. Maybe $169999 or $17.99. If they made it the base, it would probably be $16.99. I'm sure they looked at that and they decided, no, that kills too much of our market because there's a market down there that doesn't want to spend a lot of money, but wants Pro as the label. And they're going to get it one way or another. At least the touch bar is gone. This is way too big of a conversation for today, I feel like. And I'm just going to get it one way or another. At least the touch bar is gone. This is way too big of a conversation for today. I feel like, and I'm just going to say this and move on. I feel like too much discourse today online is focused around fake people that people create in their minds and then make arguments for that person that doesn't exist.

Right. Brock wrote in to say, to further add to the confirmation that the plans for the bigger iMac is likely dead, the text for the iMac shown in the banner of Apple's Mac page on their website was updated to say, from iMac 24 to simply iMac. Yeah, the URL changed too.

It's apple.com slash mac slash iMac. And it used to be iMac dash 24. It's not anymore. It's not anymore. It's just the iMac. That's the whole problem. How many ways can we tell you that we are never, ever getting back together? Yeah.

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actually looking at 17.2 because there's a lot in there. I've said for weeks now that we were going to do this and things keep happening that's putting it off. Things keep happening. Those live activities, I think. Indeed. Live activities and standby things keep happening that's putting it off. Things keep happening. Yeah, those live activities, I think, those new live activities in standby,

I think that's got to be a 17.2 thing. I wasn't getting those before. So there's stuff happening. Things are happening, Mike. Still happening. We can keep pushing it because 17.2 isn't out yet.

Right? So like, it's like this is a thing we can get to when there isn't other more important things to talk about. But this week,

Apple not only dropped in the beta the ability this past week to record spatial videos on the iphone so now on the iphone you can scroll to one of the many many many things you can scroll through now in the camera app well it's it's not a scroll it's a it's a button you you you turn on so there's a there's a setting in photos that allows you to do in the photo settings of the settings app uh that lets you do advanced it's like where you set all that kind of advanced uh features of like do you want to capture raw and all those things and one of the switches down there is capture 3d video capture spatial video but then how do you actually make the capture? You're in the video tab and there's a little button that is a picture of a Vision Pro.

And if you tap it, it lights up yellow. And then you are recording only horizontally, only in 1080p30. And that's how you do it. So it's just a mode of video capture. It's not a special spatial video thing you swipe to. That's cool, actually. It's not a special spatial video thing you swipe to. That's cool, actually.

Because my hope is that in the future, this will work like a live photo works in that like once they've gotten better at this, that like you can just record video, but it will also capture the data or like will also capture a second video or something. That's my hope for the future. Well, you could always leave this on. You're just going to only get 1080p 30 yeah and the reason for that is and you can only record horizontally too and you can only record horizontally and the reason for that is you've got to have two cameras next to each other so that you can do the parallax effect and that means it has to be horizontal and then they moved it so that it's

the ultra wide and the wide that are together and that the telephoto is, is elsewhere. And the reason to do that is that they can crop the ultra wide to have it match the wide. And you end up with a usable set pair of images that are offset to generate a 3d video. But once you crop the ultra wide to the same field of view as the wide, guess what?

You can't do the resolution, the beautiful resolution that you would normally get in the wide. And you're down to, you know, essentially they were not happy with anything other than 1080p 30. So that's where we are for now. I would put money on the fact that Apple is working on their camera stack to make it more capable of shooting 3D video. And I would also not be surprised if the long run, not only are they focused on having the higher quality on the cameras so that their 3D video is of a higher resolution,

but that they make it so that their camera stack works at 90 degrees from each other so that they can do uh vertical as well as horizontal i didn't know this until i read uh some of these stories that with the new iphone they they rearranged where the cameras were placed so that this would work yeah yeah that was part of the agenda yeah it feels like this was a nothing's a quick swap but it feels like this was a, nothing's a quick swap, but it feels like this was, this is not a complete rethinking of the iPhone's camera system so far as I can tell, as it is, we're going to need to do 3D capture on the iPhone and they made it work. But what I'm saying is I would probably put money on a future camera stack design that

is more specifically designed to be capable of shooting spatial video. So they introduced spatial video recording on the iPhone. And then in conjunction with that, Apple brought in a selection of journalists to experience some of these spatial videos recorded on iPhones on a Vision Pro. So more people got in to go in, try on Vision Pros again, seemed like quite a select group the response to this overall was once again very positive from everyone about kind of the experience of using the vision pro and i particularly liked this quote from joanna stern because uh joanna kind of sums up my initial feelings of the demo that we had of seeing these

spatial videos uh so stern says ample showed me some other spatial videos. In one, a dad was telling his young kids a story in the back of an RV. It was so lifelike and cozy that it almost creeped me out. Why am I spying on this random family? That's obviously the big appeal here. Spatial videos create intimacy in ways 2D videos and photos don't. It's like the technology is really cool, but if it's not your videos, it makes you feel kind of weird because it's so good so uh i thought that this is interesting as a way of getting like a new renewed focus on the product again and then having these like smaller experiences for people to talk about ahead of kind of i guess a re-reveal of the product next year this is very clever from apple to kind of like keep throwing the breadcrumbs out there for now and they didn didn't get to, you know, they're going to release that capture feature.

They did release that capture feature in beta. And so people are going to talk about it. People are going to reverse engineer the file format. All those things are going to happen. I actually am, I haven't looked, but I'm assuming that at some point I'm going to be able to look the stuff that I've captured already. Look at that in, on my, on my quest, right? Because somebody will reverse engineer it or find a way to play it or something and,

and have it be like a 3D, you know, thing in other video players. I imagine that will happen. It's just a, a, a heath package, right? With two videos in it. And when you play it back, you only see one of them. Anyway, I did capture some this weekend, just thinking this is going to build up a library now for when the Vision Pro comes out.

The 17.2 betas are also showing indication that 3D movies are finding their way to the Apple TV app with a new icon that shows an outline of a vision pro with the word well the the characters 3d overlaid on top mac rumors are reporting that quote 3d titles seen in the apple tv app include jurassic world domination pacific rim uprising shrek trolls warcraft minions the rise of gru mortal engines everest kung fu panda 3 and more what a ragtag selection of movies there they're just loading them in they're loading them in people are they're loaning them in that's it i expect that at launch i think somebody said that they saw

hugo in there and that's a that's a really good 3d movie um but yeah i would imagine since hollywood generally has 3d versions of most of their movies that they will put them in there because this is an opportunity for them to be seen and the 3d tv market didn't really take off so having 3d titles available in vision pro seems like a pretty uh like absolutely makes sense to me this is making it all feel like the vision pro is in fact very close right but like there are now these other bits of the system that need to be put in place yeah so i said something on mastered on this weekend i said that i went to at the cal game this weekend i captured like i captured uh which for me is like even from when i was a kid is like the moment

which is when you come through the tunnel and out into the stands um and this field opens up to you and you're in the canyon and the hills are in the background and all those things and so i captured that in spatial yeah um and then i did some like the band and stuff like that i just did a few and my whole thought process was capture it now while this is happening and in the winter you I, when there are no football games to capture, I will be able to relive this moment and see how it makes me feel and all those things. Right. I just,

I like thinking ahead. Yeah. And somebody on Macedon replied and said, you wish winter. And I said, okay, first off, I don't wish anything.

I don't care. It's not my job to ship the product. And they backed off and said something like, oh, I meant everybody. I'm like, well, that's not what you said. You said you um but uh i am despite that person i am actually

pretty confident that this is a a winter thing i i just i i think it's going to come sooner than people think i don't have anything to back that up other than that apple seems to be continuing to say early next year and my understanding is the hardware has been done a long time and that they're working real hard on the software and i would be i would be surprised if it lingers into like into spring you know into the second quarter i think it'll be earlier than that maybe a lot of surprises me is i have not seen any indication that developer kits have ever been shipped. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. I mean, if there have been, there haven't been leaks and nobody's talking about it. And I just don't believe that there is any way that they could be shipping them to individual developers or small companies. And at least the existence of that fact would not have gotten out there. And I have not seen that or heard that from anyone. And so like, that's the surprising thing to me, just because they made people submit those forms so long ago now, right?

Like within a couple of weeks after it was announced. We know they're bringing retail employees into Cupertino. I think that's early next year. And they're doing more like the developer labs. They're expanding them across different territories, which is good. Like they're doing that, right? But yeah, that has been the surprising thing to me.

I still believe it's on track for early, but I'm kind of wondering why they bothered with the developer kit thing. I mean, maybe they shifted directions and they've focused on expanding those developer kitchen sessions instead. And maybe the developer kits just come out when the product comes out because they're being realistic. Well, that's what I was thinking.

It may just get to the point where they're like, you know what, let's just ship this. Why are we going through this other process? I don't know. And it's possible that it is delayed. I don't get those vibes. I just don't feel like it's going to be, um, you know, Tim Cook is still real, sounds real confident about it. No,

I still think it's coming like in January, February. Like, yeah, I feel very confident. Early, early next year. I don't think May is early next year.

Right. I don't think April is early next year. I think it will be spring. Like I'm on your, I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Anytime. Welcome to be, welcome to the board. You're on the your board. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Anytime. Anytime. Welcome to the board. Uh-huh. You're on the Jason board now. That's great. I'm the chairman, but you can be on it. I'm happy for that.

That's no problem with me. Okay. Thank you. It's a diving board though. Bad news. Sure. Okay. It is rumor roundup time.

Woo! Yeehaw! We have so much rumor roundup. Yeah. That we are going to be breaking rumor roundup time. And we have so much Rumor Roundup that we are going to be breaking Rumor Roundup today into a selection of different products. Okay. That's what we're going to be doing.

Many Rumors Roundup. Many Rumors to be Rounded. I'm going to start today with iPad and Mac. That's where we're going to begin. So the Elec has some details about the OLED displays that will power future iPads and Macs. Apple are going to be working with LG Display

to put together an OLED package, which is custom for them, for Apple, to sit in both the 11 and 13 inch ipad pros on schedule for next year with a macbook for 2027 just another report of what we've heard before yep really yep this is like more confirmation stuff right this is the interesting part to me this is new is it i don't it's not wall breaking but the panels that apple would be using will feature what's called a two stack tandem structure, which features two light emitting layers on the display so that brightness levels are maintained from the like LCD and micro LED. Is it micro LED that's in the iPad Pro now? Or is it mini LED? Mini LED? Yeah. So they will

retain the brightness levels from oled because typically oled is not as bright i found out from this that the iphone uses a single stack oled so it must this must be a harder problem with larger displays to keep the brightness level up i think that's right and a stack i mean the lcd panels um what you've got is you've got a screen and then behind it you've got these individual arrays these arrays of of individual LCDs that are coming on or LEDs that are coming on, not LCDs. LEDs that are behind the LCD panel. And that's how you get the brightness is that they light up more or less. And the more of them, if you had a one-to-one, you'd basically have OLED, right?

And that's what micro LED is sort of supposed to be as a technology. So I don't know what they're doing here, but it sounds like maybe they're doing something like this where there's an OLED layer and then below it there is another light layer, whether it's OLED or whether it's some other LED layer to give it that boost. This is a big deal because maybe, you know, I mean the iPad, it's important that the iPad would be bright, um, taken outside and taken in all sorts of bright environments is really important. Uh, how many times have I said that big, bright, beautiful screen about the MacBook pro since it came out? Um, if they replace that with OLED in 25, 26, 27, whenever it is, they can't regress, right? Like you can't go back to being like, oh, well it's OLED, but it's much dimmer than it was before. I don't think

they can do that. I don't think people would appreciate the benefit of OLED in that case. Yeah. And OLEDs are dark. Generally OLEDs don't get super bright. One of the reasons I don't have an OLED TV in my living room is that my living room has a giant uh set of windows and french doors on one side and oleds modern oleds would probably not be bright enough for me to watch like a football game during the day right so that's a challenge for apple to solve here one of the things i found interesting from this report is like if this is based on facts, right? There's not speculation in this part that it is referencing an 11 and 13 because we had wondered like, is this time to get rid of the 11 on the iPad Pro and maybe go bigger?

Especially with something else I'm going to talk about in a minute. So this is the case, the 11-inch iPad Pro sticking around. I do think an 11-inch OLED iPad Pro would be a very nice product, right, like that. It's why I was so disappointed that they never put the new screen technology, the mini LED, in the 11, right, because that just felt like it would be so good and would give it differentiation to the air. But while talking about that, let me talk about our next thing. We could talk about our next thing we could talk about okay so i i did a quick google and it sounds like the dual stack two stack oleds are really two layers of oled and that okay dramatically increases or doubles the brightness of an oled panel by having two different layers of oleds which is again, light emitting diodes.

They are light emitting dots, basically. Two layers of them, you get more light, which means that it gets to be brighter. It seems hard work to make work. Yeah, and expensive. Mark Gurman, yes. Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo are reporting that it is Apple's plan to overhaul the entire iPad line next year. Makes sense, makes sense. Ming-Chi Kuo gave some scheduled details for the products. So Kuo was expecting the iPad Air in Q1,

and that would update the existing 10.9 model and introduce a 12.9-inch iPad Air. Right. The iPad Pro would come in Q2 and would feature the OLED displays in an 11 and 13 and an M3 chip. The iPad and the iPad Mini in the second half of the year, but no details. And with that, the 9th Gen iPad that features the Lightning port would be removed from sale

so that every iPad is USB-C. Right. So they may be depending on what's in the 11th generation iPad, that might be cheaper and they get rid of the 9th and the 10th. More likely the 10th will then kick down the price list and the 11th will be a little bit better and we'll continue to have an old iPad in the mix. But just the thing that I find interesting

is like 11 and 13 inch iPad Air,, 11 and 13-inch iPad Pro. Okay. You remember those rumors before that the iPad Pro was going to get incredibly expensive? Yeah. I wonder if this is how they mitigate that. It's like, well, we have a big iPad now. Yes. But it's an iPad Air.

You don't have to buy the most expensive iPad in buy the most expensive ipad in order to get a big ipad screen if you if that's what you want yeah yeah and it uses this is something that um when we were talking about ipad a few weeks ago i talked about the uh idea that ipads are made by their accessories right like ipads are devices that have that core and then it's all the accessories that go around it and the reason that you make ipads the same size is not just like it's all the accessories that go around it. And the reason that you make iPads the same size is not just like, it's so confusing. There's two 12.9s. Well, one of the reasons you do it

is that you don't have to make two separate everything for that, right? Oh, this is a new 12.5 inch Air. And like, you can't, like Apple can't, I mean, they can, but they don't want to make that many different accessories. So if you do a 12.9 Air, guess what it's going to use for a Magic Keyboard?

The existing iPad Pro 12.9 Magic Keyboard. So keeping those things in sync is important for accessories. This episode is brought to you by ZocDoc. You know that feeling you get when you finally find that thing you've been searching for for hours on the internet, that exact new piece of furniture you were looking for that all the great reviews told you all about, and it's available for you and you can get it on next day delivery? So why is it that you can find the most random chair or wardrobe from anywhere in the world in just a couple of days. If you want to see a good doctor, it can take forever to get an appointment. Not to mention, how do you even know if they're

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and all of RelayFM. So we're going to continue our rumor roundup, and now we're going to talk about the Apple Watch. Okay. So Mark Gurman had a really big story Continue our rumor roundup. And now we're going to talk about the Apple Watch. Okay. So Mark Gurman had a really big story that was also like history. It's a great story. It's like really detailed, really interesting.

It's good reporting. But as well as looking backwards, it looks forwards. With Drake Bennett, we should say, that was a co-buy line. Thank you very much. I missed that. So I appreciate that. So this is talking about health in Apple's products, but mostly focused on the Apple Watch because it's the product that they focus on most. So I'm going to quote from the article. Apple has an enticing roadmap for 2024, including hypertension and sleep apnea detection for the

watch and hearing aid capabilities for AirPods. There are plans to turn its forthcoming Vision Pro into a health and fitness device, and work continues on a paid health coach service that uses AI. So I want to dig into a couple of these things a little bit more. So hypertension detection is enabled via a blood pressure monitoring system that would be found in the 2024 Apple Watch. I'll go back to another quote from the report. The system is designed to just tell a user if their blood pressure is trending upward and to offer a journal for the user

to jot down what was happening when hypertension occurred. To avoid potentially giving a misdiagnosis, the feature will then direct a user to talk to their doctor or check their blood pressure with a traditional cuff, which can provide exact systolic and diastolic measurements i love this idea that you know

there's the proverbial not to make light of this um but the proverbial like that really raised my blood pressure moment and your watch goes yes it did like yeah okay really raised my blood pressure and i say that as somebody with high blood pressure. I will say that. I am a person who takes medication for high blood pressure. So I get it. I get it. But it's still funny to, I mean, it's a little like the noise thing, right?

Where I'm at a football game and it's fourth down and they're going for it. And we're all yelling because we're, our team's on defense. And I get a little thing on my watch that says it's a little bit loud right now i'm like yeah it it is it's it's okay watch it's okay so now it's like somebody said something that really you off didn't they your blood pressure uh maybe check it yeah so i had the other day my first um high heart rate thing you know where it's like your heart rate's a little high i've never had one before uh i was watching the marvels in the cinema and there was a big tense moment i guess because my heart rate shot up i'd been to the gym before so maybe i was like

you know a little high a little high anyway but yeah i've never had one of those before that's amazing hey your heart rate's too high and i was like oh my god captain marvel no you know a little high a little high anyway but yeah i've never had one of those before that's amazing hey your heart rate's too high and i was like oh my god captain marvel no you know i was obviously very upset fun movie by the way i want to see it tonight i had a great time sit talk about discourse there's a lot of discourse out there about oh marvel people are getting tired of marvel and i guess it didn't open well and there's some negative reviews of it and like every human being i know who I've talked to who has seen it has liked it. So I don't know.

It honestly, to me, felt like a return to form from a movie perspective. I had a really good time watching that movie and I cared about what happened. I will also say on a side note, Loki season two, fantastic. Same story there. I've heard a lot of discourse about it and then i talked to my

friends about it and they're all like i really enjoyed it i haven't watched it yet between these two i feel like they're getting their groove back but this is a little sub-segment we call the marvel moment marvel moment inside of rumor roundup inside of rumor roundup there's a marvel moment this this very marvel too to actually just uh everything's alliterated, you know? Of course. In the future, with the hypertension, they would want to expand it to provide actual exact numbers. Because what this would do is it says it's even you are trending up. But you're not going to be able to take a blood pressure reading with this initial technology. We talked about this with the temping and then it turned out that they use the temperature for cycle tracking.

But it's this idea that you can build sensors that do this stuff on the watch and it's very impressive when they do. But the problem is that they can't be as exact. They can't be as precise as a purpose-built device because the shape, the place on your wrist, all of those things feed into it. So instead, what you, I think you're going to see for a lot of the stuff they add to the Apple Watch over time is it's going to be like trends without details

and saying, you should look at this with a purpose-built device, right? If you have high blood pressure, you should have a high blood pressure cuff and you should check that out. And what we can tell you is you're trending up, which can be really valuable, right? Like if I'm on my medication and I need to go on a different medication because it's not doing its job anymore, if I was told, you know, actually your blood pressure is trending up, you should look into that. That is useful, but it's not a replacement for the the little thing that is going to go on on your arm and squeeze it or not if you're johnny ive or early signs for someone who doesn't yeah yeah who has not had an issue before yeah and then your blood pressure is up that that was a reference by the way that apparently in this story that johnny i've developed like a a squeeze proof um hypertension

a squeeze proof hypertension like cuff. Weird. Okay. But that never came to fruition. Not yet. Yet. That's right. It's just on the shelf. It's on the Johnny shelf in the white room. They're going to be like, oh, you can get the apple blood.

Apple cuff. Apple cuff in case you want it. No, you know what they'll do is they'll be like, yeah, you know, it's Belkin makes a blood pressure cuff. Oh, of course. It's totally designed it's totally designed by apple oh no no you can get it look at this look at this it came out at the same time you know incredible um amazing these things like that idea of being able to give those early warnings and we're going to talk about some stuff like that in a minute too it is kind of incredible how they are building this product to make it that you would feel like you need to wear it every day right because if it's going to be there in the background

monitoring your body for signs of an issue that you would otherwise not know about until it's too late or until it's like too far down the path i mean who doesn't want to wear that product right like if i'm if i'm like oh i have my blood pressure is fine i expect at some point in my life it won't be if i know that sooner based on something that's continually monitoring my body and could then take the path, like the steps to making a better life choices, like why would you not want to put that on your arm every day when it's also a watch? Like it's not just like this extra thing I have to wear. Like I don't need to get a cough and take my blood pressure every day, you know? to wear like i don't need to get a cough and take my blood pressure every day you know i um have seen some this is related i guess to that last thing that i said um some discourse about this

story that said because the story points out quite rightly that apple when they talk about health they face a choice and one of the the choices that they faced is are you focused on well people who may need diagnoses of either they're either they're maintaining their health or their need they're warned that there's a problem or do you focus on taking care of the sick and so the discourse is like well of course apple doesn't want to take care of sick people. That's all a lie. They just want to have healthy people feel better about themselves. However, again, I'm going to say idealism versus reality here. Just pay attention to the history of the Apple Watch, not just from these reports, but from observing it. It's incredibly difficult. One of the huge reasons

that the Apple Watch can't do lots of things is because once you become a medical device, the rules are incredibly specific. And the Apple Watch is meant to be a general use device. When you're sick, you have specific needs and you probably need a specific medical device for it. And they make a lot of medical devices that like connect to the Apple watch and stuff, but I don't think it's unreasonable for any company like Apple making a product like the Apple watch to say, look, our goal here is to monitor you and warn you when there's a problem so that you can enter the medical system and get treatment, which might include other devices, including maybe devices that work with

the Apple Watch. That's fine. I've got a blood pressure cup that does health kit. Great. But it is, I just, I don't think it's like some conspiracy. I think it's like realism that Apple is not, although they put their toe in the water and the story talks about them thinking about doing like healthcare clinics and trying that and realizing how expensive it is, and they can't really do it that way. And they're doing something very similar to what Amazon is trying with their healthcare clinics. I think the truth is Apple is a maker of mass market products, and the Apple Watch is a great example of a product that is on the periphery of medical, but like is never going to go too far down medical for a few reasons. One of which is because I don't think there's enough space in there to make it a detailed medical device for all sorts of different conditions in one place. And two, the amount of regulation that would be required would be enormous. And three, you can see here,

a lot of what they're able to get in that watch shape is not as precise as you'd want for something that is actually actively detailing a medical condition. So I think that explains why the Apple Watch is always going to be, I think, like this, which is they're going to try their best to do things that will be able to read your wrist and give you a sign, but it's probably never going to be as precise as anybody would want it to be. There will always be a better medical device than the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch is like a leading indicator, a warning light. It's able to track you because you wear it all the time or can wear it all the time. That's really valuable, but it's not a replacement for a sleep study or a heart monitor that you tape to your chest and wear for a week or like any other medical device. It's not going to be or a proper multi-lead EKG, right?

It's never going to be those things. or a proper multi-lead EKG, right? It's never going to be those things. It is always going to be like trying to do what it can to give you warnings and information in a limited way on your wrist. So the sleep apnea detection that you mentioned is enabled via, I guess this is just smarts, right? So it's using sleep tracking and breathing patterns.

Like, because there will be things that they will add over time that don't need sensors right it's just like right we're do we're able to use data and like that's how i imagine that even something like the blood pressure system could get better over time of like if you have enough of them out there and you can build a model you build a better machine learning model right that's exactly what it is and the sleep apnea detection i mean what sleep sleep detection is already using a machine learning model right that's exactly what it is and the sleep apnea detection i mean what sleep sleep detection is already using a machine learning model because what does it have it doesn't have like a sleep sensor it's got motion sensors and maybe sound i don't know if it's using sound or not to hear snoring or breathing or whatever but like motion and you do

you know machine learning training on these very minute motions and you are able to pull patterns out of that data and see your breathing patterns and see your sleep patterns at it. But it's limited because all it has is those sensors in the Apple Watch. That's it. What continues on the blood glucose monitoring system? When I was reading about this in this report

like you know we've spoken about it before this feels like the white whale for them they're like if they can get this working and because it also sounds like it will be like this hypertension system initially where it's about trends not readings yeah but even then if they can get that and if they can get up and down working right right, you're trending up or trending down, my word, it's going to be huge if they can get this to work. Well, again, they're trying to do things like, yeah, monitor your blood sugar. And again, it may not be something that's useful for full-on diabetics, but it may be useful for people who are pre-diabetic or might not know that they're pre-diabetic to make changes and understand how their blood sugar is affecting them. Also just for people to understand their diet more.

Yeah, absolutely. Right. Oh, why is my blood sugar up? I just had a bunch of carbs. Yeah. And like everybody reacts differently to different types of foods, right? So like it may help you better plan what you're eating and when you're eating it based on you being able to see when your blood pressure is going up and sorry when your blood glucose is going up and down yeah and but and again this is i just this is one of those cases where i think that there was some initial uh idealism inside apple when the apple watch was being developed that they were going to be like a medical device that just could tell everything and they've had in the last 10 years, a lot of reality about what is capable, even with the amazing things that they're able

to pack in that watch, what they're really capable of doing when all they have is a little tiny window onto a person's wrist. There are incredible limitations to that. And that's just how it's going to be. So in this case, they're like, are we going to be able to be a full-on blood glucose monitor? And it's like, well, maybe not. But there's value in what we can do, I think, is what they're trying to do. There's a lot of that with the Apple Watch now. I can't imagine any computer-based system that could be sticking the little thread inside of your arm, right? Maybe. That would be quite a breakthrough,

but it's always going to be like, you know, you're looking through skin and a blood vessel exterior to make some judgments about what's going on in the blood. And then there's looking at the blood and those are, you know, one of them is harder. But again, I'm not, I think that there will be sensor and machine learning breakthroughs that will be amazing right but they're probably not saying but like there's also a good chance

that there are things that you literally can't measure no matter how intelligent you are yeah from sitting on the back of someone's but i mean even with like the models and that kind of stuff you're still just gonna go and have somebody check your real check the blood right like you'll get to a point but like this doesn't seem right or something's going wrong here you would go to the doctor and you you'd have a blood test done or something right like yeah there's i think there's something there um and also to to round out this to you know because basically i read the quote with touch and all the things the airpods thing would is so airpods would essentially get the functionality to work as a replacement for an over-the-counter hearing aid so they'll build in the functionality to make it like

it should work like a hearing aid as well as being able to use airpods to perform hearing tests so we talked about this a while ago the idea that they've changed the way that hearing aids are licensed in the u.s and it should the at time, it was sort of like this should open the door for companies like Apple to be able to make things like AirPods work as hearing aids instead of having to sort of like not do certain things or not make claims or have to sell them as a medical device. Like they can do this. And this was an interesting report because it suggests that that is happening. I hadn't heard before that it was definitely happening within Apple, just that it opened the door for Apple to go in there. And any of us who've used like AirPods and AirPods Pro

and all the different processing, like it's hard not to think about how it could probably have different modes that would be more like a traditional hearing aid. So here we are. And also I'll point out, there are a lot of people who resist hearing aids and there are people who can't afford them. That's an issue. But there are also people who resist them and don't think they need them.

And even though they don't, they totally need them. They don't think they need them. And even though they don't, they totally need them. They don't think they need them. I've had some relatives like that. This is really interesting. I think for those edge cases where it's somebody who doesn't think they need a hearing boost,

like, oh, I don't need a hearing aid. But then they say, oh, but Apple's got this thing that makes conversations clearer. And you're like, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Don't tell them it's a hearing aid. It's just making conversations clearer. Right that's that's great that's awesome

and on a separate note ming chi kuo is reporting that there are currently no signs that an apple watch ultra 3 is in development quo believes that the likelihood of a new version in 2024 is decreasing and feels this may be because of production issues of the micro led display that apple wants to bring to the product within the next couple of years this is whatever right this report i feel like the reason i wanted to bring it in is because the question i wanted to ask you is i wonder if it's all focus on this Apple Watch X instead. And so they're like, here's one watch next year and it's like the brand new watch. I don't know.

Or this is nothing. Or they're taking a year off and there'll be a minor increment to the Apple Watch in 24. And then the big watch updates will happen simultaneously in 25. I think they're... Look, it's great that the Apple watch ultra two came into being. You've got one, right? And I love it that if you want my long-term review, I adore it. Yeah. I don't feel like the Apple watch ultra needs to be updated every year. It's nice if it is, but I don't feel like it needs to be. And if they skip a year with it,

like ultra two is going to be fine. It's going to be fine gonna be fine and um and i don't think it says anything about the future of the apple watch ultra i'm actually pretty convinced that the apple watch ultra is a winner and it's gonna stick around but yeah it's possible that this is also like they're they're um they're saving up and uh you know 2025 might be the big Apple Watch year. Who knows? This episode is brought to you by Factor. This holiday season, you might be looking for nutritious, convenient meals to keep you energized on jam-packed, busy days.

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So first up, we go back to the sheriff, Mark Gurman, who has been, had a couple of reports over the last couple of weeks about the development of iOS 18 and macOS as well, of course, but obviously most of this stuff is focused around iOS these days

and kind of what Apple's doing and a little bit of what they're focusing on. So last week, in his Power On newsletter, Mark detailed that Craig Federighi ordered a freeze on all new development to focus on bugs and issues in the current internal builds of iOS 18. So they were unhappy at Apple with the quality, I think, of what was being produced. And it was really buggy, which is funny that they're

like, how buggy could it be this early? You know what I mean? Like if it's bad, right? Like you'd expect it to be buggy. It must have been pretty bad for them, right? To do this. And there was that in his newsletter, he mentioned that these, they're usually four milestones. I didn't know any of this, right? We don't get to see much inside the black box at Apple. Nice to know that also in this report, it's very clear, like these are described as being changes that Craig Federighi has made to try to address issues. And I like hearing about- Since 2019. That he's been working, because he's in charge of software, right? He's been working to try to

address some issues that we've all seen on the outside internally. And that's great. So Mark said in his newsletter, like there's these four milestones and that they tend to be sort of like development and then sort of like fixing their regressions and integration and then, and they kind of alternate. And it sounds like this was one of those where it was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we can't move on to the next milestone. It's not good enough. So let's spend another week on this milestone addressing all the issues. And so it's not good enough so let's spend another week on this milestone addressing all the issues and so it's not like a big like press the stop button and and cease and all that it's more the way it came across to me is it's more like he wasn't satisfied with it going to the next stage it didn't feel like they were ready to go there. And like, I am never going

to say, no, no, move on. Don't fix the bugs. Right? Like so many Apple's platforms are so mature right now and they need, and we all rely on them and they need to be stable and they need to work well and they need to not be full of bugs. There was a part in this report that I really liked. It says, in 2019, Federighi adopted a policy that his division calls the PACT. And the PACT is, we will never knowingly allow regressions in the build. And when we find them, we will fix them quickly. Yeah. I like that.

I like it. Just a fun thing. So Mark Herman is saying that iOS 18, this seemed weird to me, iOS 18 is going to be used to sell the iPhone 16 because the iPhone 16 is not going to have a lot of changes. And so they want iOS 18 to be really good. And I kind of, I don't know what I think about that.

Like, what, is it just going to be like a bunch of iOS 18 features that are only in the iPhone 16? Yeah, I mean, maybe. I also don't know how much of this linkage is real and how much of it is Mark Gurman's analysis based on his knowledge of the iPhone 16 not being particularly anything. I'm not sure if somebody said,

oh, they want this to be good because there's nothing in the iPhone 16, or if he sees they want this to be good because there's nothing in the iPhone 16, or if he sees they want this to be good and he looks at the iPhone 16 and doesn't think that there's anything in it and makes a connection. I don't know that, but that does seem weird. And it does, I mean, lends credence to some of our vibes sometimes where it's like, why is this feature only on this model when it could have been on a previous model yeah and you know although i mean it doesn't have to be that right like it could be and i'm sure it is every cycle that there is new hardware in the 16 that they know about that they're building features for and that you

know but but it is an interesting note of like we really got to sell this um because i guess does apple feel like one of the biggest selling points of iPhone hardware is the new OS that you can get on your old hardware I don't know I don't know well apparently iOS 18 is being positioned with a focus on AI and machine learning quote internally Apple senior management has described its upcoming systems as ambitious and compelling with major new features and designs in addition to security and performance updates. So iOS 18 feels like a big one.

There's no real detail on it. But if it's meant to be a focus on AI, is it like the chip is needed, right? Like they need more machine learning cores? I can't imagine that they're going to make an ambitious and compelling update that only has features for the iphone yeah 16 i don't see that so this is why i think that i don't i'm not convinced that these two are linked as such but i like the idea that that this is the um machine learning and ai release because it does give us all hope that that means they're going to do some things of

an intelligent assistant variety, which I think would be great, right? It's got to be Siri, right? It's got to be Siri. It needs to be replaced throughout, right? Yeah. And there was one other quote that I wanted to read because it made me feel bad for Apple engineers for how confusing their life must be. So, last month, the company completed the first internal versions of the updates, including the biggest new features. When Apple gets to that stage known as M1, it usually embarks on work for the next milestone, M2. In this case, the debugging break delayed the start of m2 development by a week so inside of

apple they have things called m1 and m2 and i guess m3 and m4 and that just must make their lives so complicated sometimes now because these are the m1 max max they're in m2 stage m2 m1 max max yeah Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Going back to the ML thing, like last week there was that AI pin event. Oh, the Humane? Yeah. Humane, yeah.

Which is not a good marketing video. I would say everybody should watch that video as a good example of how good Apple is at marketing videos because I think they did a bad job. I think the presentation wasn't very good. It has mistakes in it, but it's more than that. They also like, I think they misprioritized the way they describe the product.

And like one of the first things they talk about is like the colorways of the product. I'm like, nobody cares, dude. That's at the end. Like, why are you saying that first and using those terms in that way and having your cutie names for colors that are just white and black and silver, whatever. But what I, so that's my nutshell of the humane thing is like, I don't think it was, I think the product was let down by the presentation.

I think the product is a weird and probably should be part of a larger ecosystem of products but they got funding to ship a product so it's a standalone product with its own phone number like all right whatever i would say on this this pin like i watched a video and the whole time i was like if apple made this i would buy this yeah well this is the thing is as part of a constellation of devices having a device that is um i mean a lot of it you don't need if you've got an iphone or airpods and all that but like they do also have the thing where it's like an apple watch but they also have a camera looking out which has value and and apple's ecosystem sort of doesn't have something like that can that can see around you but really what i took away from it and the thing that i really wish apple had and that other platforms had as well is they are basically saying, look, our entire interface is basically a GPT AI. Like

that is the whole interface. And we don't even do apps. You just tell it what you want and we get what it is back. I think there's a fundamental mistake that they're making that I understand because again, they had to make a product and this is the product. But like their attitude is that people don't like their smartphones, which is bananas because people love their smartphones. Like, oh, smartphones, who has time for them? Like, well, everybody in the human race seems to have time for smartphones, friends. But oh my goodness, the attitude they have toward machine learning, AI chat, talk information source. That's what I took away and said, I want it right.

Like I want, that's what it's supposed to be like. Alexa isn't like that. Google assistant isn't like that. Siri is certainly not like that. Like that's the dream. And yeah, it hallucinated.

It got a bunch of stuff wrong. It got the eclipse location wrong and they kept it in the video, which is like, what are you doing? But the potential of being able to say, you know, what do I know about this? And it's looked at your, you know, think about it from an Apple perspective. It's got your notes. It's got your contacts. It's got your email. It knows everything about you. It is a personal assistant that you can use to find things that you have in your personal data cloud, but that you don't have in your brain. It doesn't make the connection in your brain and it can make that connection. That is huge. The potential there is enormous to make our devices better. I don't think it makes the smartphone obsolete, which is sort of what Humane's trying to say here. But when we're talking about Apple trying to focus more on machine learning and AI stuff, and I know everybody is trying to do this right now, that's what I want. I want these assistants to be so much better. One of the benefits of Apple

having this enormous ecosystem that they've built is that their machine learning technologies could consume the content in the ecosystem, in your personal ecosystem, and know it. And that would be incredibly valuable if you could act on that. So I don't know how realistic those Humane demos even are, and there were a lot of mistakes in them, but it showed the potential of something like a Siri 2 to do this if it works right. And that's the big question is, is this something that happens this year or in five years before it's good enough? And Apple's limitations and its conservatism about like, well, you know, if Apple's got a thing that tells you the eclipse is in Australia when it's in America, guess what? Not only they're not going to put that in their demo, they're not going to ship it because they don't want to be embarrassed so there's lots of challenges going on here i just can't believe they didn't check the video i can't is this happened in every ai focused product video yeah like it feels like the obvious thing

to do like check it fact checker and also why would you ask questions in a product video that you know it can't give the that you don't know it can give correct answers to i know never ask a question you don't know the answer to in a marketing video that is that is very strange very strange anyway but the potential is enormous i like again um i i don't know if a pin is the right way to go it does make me feel like that, you know, eventually having something you wear, maybe glasses, even if all there is on them are some sensors,

as a part of the kind of broader picture. Like, realistically, any product like this that's going to succeed needs to have a camera on it. And that camera needs to be able to see what you can see. So it's either physical, like a pin, or it's glasses, right? Like the Ray-Bans. Because it seems like if you're able to look at something,

what is that? That's just like, that's cool. Because your phone's in your pocket, so your phone's not looking around. And somebody on Mastodon was like, oh yeah, that's going to be a really good video, right? And it's like, well, that's not the point. be a really good video, right? Like, it's all. And it's like, well, that's not the point.

First off, you are totally underestimating how good stabilization is these days based on machine learning. You take a wide field. And even though it's jumpy, you can stabilize that thing. And it's so valuable for it to see what's around you. It can already hear what's around you with your apple watch or your headphones or whatever um but it's an extra layer and it's a piece of sensory information that the iphone doesn't have if it's in your pocket yeah so that part is cool the rest of it i could take or leave because i have an apple watch and it's got a speaker on it and i some of their demos where it's like oh you can play music to yourself on a thing that's hanging on your pocket sonic speaker i did like the um the fact that it required physical interaction to invoke things sure because that is like there needs to be visuals to the world right that like

you're doing something like i think that's going to be really important but i do that all the time by pressing the digital crown on my watch i don't do a lot of hey activations yeah i do a lot of press the crown and say something because i don't like those mistaken activations i like being able to make a physical thing but i feel like like if you're looking at everything that the humane ai pen is purportedly doing there are most of them are covered by a product in Apple's product constellation but some are not and that that I find that interesting and then there's the whole machine learning thing which is like again if you buy into the premise and I think this is the beauty of of these ML models is like where their secret sauce is first off being able to search the internet and get good

answers to you that are correct is a good one right but like so much of it i was talking to dan moran about this last week on the i think on the six colors podcast like he's written what is it five novels in the same universe now and when he's writing those books he doesn't remember every word that he's written he's got like a wiki that he built that I think he's got in Obsidian now. But he was saying, you know, the dream here, and I think he could do that with GPT now, the dream is to upload the contents of his novels and then say things like, what's the color of this character's eyes? And for it to know they're blue or i don't know it you've never said that or he example he gave is when's the last time this character um fired a gun and dan doesn't know the answer that's right and how do you find that even in a wiki

how do you search for it in manuscripts you you can't find it, but the model may be able to know the answer to that. That's the potential of all this is looking through all of your Apple Notes notes and all your reminders and all your calendar items and all your contacts and all your email and all your documents that are in files and or are in an API that is connected and it knows everything. And you know, it's in your, it's your life, but you may not know the answer, but it knows everything and you know it's in your it's your life but you may not know the answer but it knows the answer that is the that's the promise here right that is amazing if if you could get there it's like on the gpt's thing like i saw on macedon last night matt birchler built one of those gpt's for writing alt text for images just like that's really smart oh

wow so you just in in the in the app you just upload an image and it just describes it in a way in which the language is good for alt text i just thought it was super cool dr wave did a thing where he uploaded all the books about the programming language lisp and made a gpt that he can consult about how to program, about programming problems in Lisp. That's cool. Right? Imagine that, right? You're just like, I just put all the books in there. And then all I do is ask, hey, how do I do this? And it knows because it's read all the books. And yes, I mean, there are limitations. It's not going to be creative. It's going to be derivative. But the idea is you bought all the books you own all the books maybe you've even

read or looked through all the books but like your puny human brain doesn't know and you could look at the indexes and you've got but you've got eight books and are they well indexed and how do you find the problem or if you've got them you could do a search but then you're searching for terms in ps. Like there's just a lot of, of these very specific things. Like again, for Dan, it's literally just read, you've read my novels and made all the connections. You tell me the answer. That's so powerful. That's amazing. I would do that for six colors. Honestly, that might be a thing I do is give it an entire, give a GPT, the six colors archive. Cause then then i'll know like when did i write about this or or six colors stuff that i've written and upgrade

podcast transcripts and stuff and and so then i can say like when did i talk about this and get an answer that's a lot clearer that would be awesome the discord is letting you know maybe you need a gpt of your own leo laporte did that. Oh, that was not Dr. Wave. It was Leo Laporte. You're right. Lisp. If you had a GPT, Jason, you could have said who made that. Yes, it would know that it was Leo and not Dr. Wave.

You're right. It was late. It was Mastodon. I don't know what I was doing. It's super interesting to me, right? Yeah. Like this idea of what I like about some of these models is taking your information and giving it to something. And then models is taking your information and giving it to something and then you

can search your information and so like the idea of me saying here is the rss feed for upgrade go and get all of it like an event eventually here's every episode put it through whisper put the text into the system and then i can say i could just ask you questions about things that we spoken about on the show like that is that's awesome right that is very powerful oh that would that would let us also do like has the snell talk question been used before yes yes i know it's this is this is the thing. And that's, that's the, okay. We're, I know we're belaboring it a little bit, but like, that's the magic here is like, it's not the value is if you, all the information is out there. Right. But our, our tools to search for it now are so limited and because you can't keep it all in your brain, you can't. You can't. So you have the AI do it.

And it's what they're good at, right? I mean, all this talk about AI is taking over the world and things like that. I mean, there are interesting questions about what happens to a lot of human labor and all that. But the brilliant thing about them is they can do things that our brains can't do. And is that not fundamentally what computers are all about? Is doing things that are hard for us to do, but easy for them to do.

That's why we use them. That's why we use computers. Going back to the rumor roundup. All right. Thank you. Sorry. I was really happy we spoke about that. That was like the AI atrium.

Sure. Well, we can work on that one. AI alcove. Well, it's got to be, again, all of our little sidebars have to be alliterative now. Sure. AI Alcove. It's got to be, again, all of our little sidebars have to be alliterative now, so the AI Alcove. No, I know, but... We'll work that out. Mark Gurman is also

reporting that in the first half of 2024, Apple will have a way to comply with EU laws on sideloading of apps. It will be a, quote, highly controlled system, And there will also be changes made to both messages and payments apps as a way to comply with further regulation from the European Union. There's been some code spelunking going on. It looks like what they're

doing is that they are putting, and this is the things that Gurman reported earlier this year about how Apple was building things into iOS that would allow them to comply with those EU laws. It sounds like it's very specific, like in a specific region like the EU, and there will be certain APIs that will feed into the system where certain apps will be granted privileges to do things like install apps. And so we don't know all the details, but it looks like they are building a system that they can turn on in places where they have to turn it on that will allow it's unclear to me whether it's pure side loading or if they will allow very specific apps to be put in the app store that can be their own app stores i'm unclear on that part of it, right? Like it sounds like it might be that

their approach is in the EU, you can apply to Apple to be an app store, and then you need to follow these things, you know, whatever the rules are, and then you can be an app store in the EU only. And then your app has the privilege of installing other apps in the system versus it just being kind of open the doors to sideloading unclear exactly what all is going on here but with this report i i am more confident that you know they're going to open they're going to open apps to come in by a means that is not the app store and it's going to be locked to the eu until other places make this demand in which case they'll have to put it in all those other places i just don't understand why you would go through the work to make things more complicated when you could just open it up everywhere well because apple

i know doesn't want to do it i understand yeah and i'm a real pandora's box believer too that um once this is in the system you know people are gonna subvert it people are gonna figure out a ways around it um and and also it's what we were talking about when we were talking about different encryption regulations too once this works in the eu it will be a model and other locations will pass the same ruling because Apple will no longer be able to say, oh no, we can't do it because they did it. And then on top of that, the real test and this, I don't know what's going to happen, although I think it's going to be fine is my guess. Apple has also said sideloading is dangerous and it will destroy everybody's lives and it's bad and you can't do it. Well, we'll see, right? I mean, we'll see. In the EU, it'll be a grand experiment. And I'm sure Apple, let me tell you, I'm sure Apple will make hay with any bad examples that happen in the EU

of sideloading leading to bad outcomes. But it may be that there aren't that many, and it's pretty lean and they can't really. At which point, their stance on sideloading will be exposed. So it'll be interesting to watch, but it won't be the end of the story. It's just going to, I think, continue from here. Well, it's going to be a mess. But you know what, though? It'll be a great episode when it happens.

Oh, that's going to be real interesting. Should we do an episode from in the EU? I guess we might have to. Go over there? The Amsterdam episode or something? I don't know. Or maybe, is there an EU? I could go to like a Caribbean island that is like part of the Netherlands and I could

probably, that would probably count. I'd probably be in the EU then. I don't know if that counts. I think so. Or I could go to French, like French Guiana is France. So I could totally go to french guiana okay if i could get there the thing that i'm interested in understanding is if they're going to try and do that thing again where they're like we're going to make you submit your account into us so we can get our 30 yeah right if as long as it's not outlawed yeah it's entirely possible and again i brought up the app store

thing because that's an interesting angle, right? Which is like, well, look, they said we need to do this in the law, but it doesn't mean that we can't regulate App Stores, huh? And here are all the rules if you want to run an App Store in the EU in order to submit your app, right? They will not do anything that isn't required by the law. They will make it as unpleasant and just like with those Dutch the law. They will make it as unpleasant. And just like with those Dutch dating apps, they will make it as unpleasant as possible. Jambo Hove in the live chat says,

Mike and Jason go to Oktoberfest. We just missed it, but we could do it next time. Maybe we'll go see Eddie and Tim there. There you go. Two of us. We can do our own tour of a year. I love it. Oh, that would be, wouldn't that be something?

Different app in every different country. We'll do a Kickstarter. Easy. This episode is brought to you by Oracle. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever.

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One last time, oracle.com slash upgrade. A thanks to Oracle for their support of this show and RelayFM. A thanks to Oracle for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's finish out with some Ask Upgrade questions. First one comes from Sasha, who says, I like the style of the charts that Jason makes on Six Colors for the earnings reports. How do you make them? Numbers. Is that like a numbers template though?

No, numbers makes pretty charts. That's why I use numbers. They make the prettiest charts. And so I have a giant numbers spreadsheet with multiple tabs and I've got a charts tab in it. And I built those to use the colors in the Six Colors. And each of them represents a particular category, except for the money. I just made that dark green because money,

money, money, money, charts, charts, charts. So that's it. And I have now built up some automations around there. So I've got a, I've got a, I now have a script that has worked for the last few quarters, which is great. I have a script that actually looks at the PDF that Apple puts up of their results and pulls the right numbers out of it and puts it on the clipboard. And I just paste it into the number spreadsheet. That's awesome. Because I don't have to retype those and risk getting them wrong. That's happened.

I've typed it in wrong and had to go back and change all my charts later. Like it just, it just does it. That part's great. And then I have another script that outputs them. And the way that works is it generates a PDF. And I have this for a shortcut for iOS as well, but mostly I do it at the Mac. It generates a PDF out of numbers and it goes to the page that the charts are on. And the beauty thing about the PDF is that it's resolution independent. And so it looks at that page of the PDF and carves it up

into, or I think it converts it into an image and then carves it up into little individual images for each of the charts. And so they're all the exact right size and they're saved as pings and they're uploaded to the script, uploads them to six colors and takes the HTML of all of them and puts it on my clipboard so that I can put it in my story. It is. So I've, I've saved myself a lot of time there, which is really nice. The one thing that bugs me about it is that images on the web of charts are not accessible. And I don't like that. But the problem is the putting that kind of stuff on the web in an in an embed or something that is a little more dynamic. Those are bad, and they don't work. They just don't work really well. And so I don't love that the charts aren't

accessible. But I have I have not seen any web technology that would make me want to change how I do the charts into something that would be maybe more dynamically generated and accessible. So I'm always keeping my eye out for that. But for now, anyway, I'm just sort of like willing to go with the fact that I've got a bunch of images and they are what they are.

Do you find it to be a lot of work? Like, are you at least happy with the process you've got down? It's a lot less work than it used to be. I mean, it used to be, and I did this back at Macworld too. In fact, when I started at Six Colors, I had to make a new template with new charts because those were the Macworld style charts. And I built new charts for the new site.

And that took a lot of time and it's taken a lot of tweaking and, you know, change the fonts and change the colors and change that. Like I did a lot of things over the course of the last nine years in terms of tweaking them to be more of what I like and get feedback from people about like the right ways to do it. I go to Dr. Drang a lot, and Karen Healy. I've talked to both of them about like the right ways to present data on the internet, right? Because you know people who are good at this, you talk to them about this stuff. It's pretty well, a well-oiled machine now. I actually added a chart after the earnings this time for next time. There was a chart that I wasn't doing that I wanted to add. So I'm going to have to make some tweaks to my export.

But I'm pretty happy with how it is now because it's so automated. Because I don't have to type those numbers in anymore. Because I don't have to. I used to have to take screenshots. I had to get the exact right zoom for the window and then go through and take screenshots of every single chart. That was terrible. I don't have to do any of that stuff anymore. So it's a lot easier now. Mark asks, given the status quo of pre-recorded Apple events, do you think they have dedicated filming studios at Apple Park?

do you think they have dedicated filming studios at apple park i i don't know i don't think so right at least in some of the places are just like the outside right there are a lot of things that are just the outside or steve jobs theater i i think that they i think that it's probably um stuff that they've got the other reason that i think they probably don't have dedicated studios for for shooting is um i mean podcasts are not as important as marketing videos but what we've discovered with our podcast studio and you know we we say we're recording live sometimes from the podcast studio at apple i will i will reveal if you didn't already know dear listener every time i think every time we've done that, it's been a different place. Maybe one of them repeated. They just build them in one place.

All of them were existing things converted into being a podcast studio for the event. So they reuse, I think, some of the equipment and furniture and stuff, but then they just go back into storage. They're not keeping that stuff standing. It gets turned back into whatever it was. So I think no. I think no to that. I think it's a lot less dedicated than you would think. And we think of Apple as monolithic, but I also think that they use a lot of freelance. I don't think they use a lot of like... I don't think they keep a marketing video production team on standby 24-7, right? I don't think that happens a marketing video production team on standby 24-7, right?

Like, I don't think that happens. I think they work with production companies. I think they've got some level of in-house. But when it comes time for the big event, they're hiring somebody to do a lot of that work, I think. I was thinking about this when I saw this question come in. And I just assumed how incredibly disruptive it must be when they're filming yeah because they you never see people in the background so like what do they just say like no one nobody go over the office today or no one can be in this section of the building today or

something like that and also the days preceding it where they need to like prettify the environment i do think it's probably weekends david shahab in the chat suggested that i think that there may be some there may be some cgi involved working at apple seven days a week well yeah but there's fewer of them and then i think it's easier to say stay away and then i think there's vfx i think there's probably vfx to keep people out to make it seem pristine yep and they do often use places that are like the steve jobs theater right that's not being used so that's that's an area where they can use it um that home set that might be a set somewhere but i don't think it's a set at apple park i think it's a set somewhere

that they built and maybe that they keep standing or maybe they folded it and they can bring it back from they literally own sound stages so yeah so there are there are other possibilities there but uh but yeah it's probably very disruptive especially if they're in i don't know where that space is that they call the chip lab but it feels to me like it's an actual working space it might not be the chip lab it might not be the center of the chip lab right but i think it's probably a real workspace i've heard that it's real but i don't know if i believe that like i do but i'm not like convinced well and like i said it may be in the in the area that the chip team uses but it's a a an area that they know is photogenic and they it gets used in these

things and so it's not it's not like where the real work necessarily gets done or the core work gets done but um but i do think that they, then they set up in there for a week and you just have to not be around or be on the sides and not in the main space. I think that they do that. I think it's probably disruptive. If you are somebody who works at Apple Park and has been disrupted or seen the disruptions of shooting these things uh let us know upgradefeedback.com you can submit anonymously there was there it was that was going in the direction that i enjoyed

but it sounded like you were about to give some kind of like legal thing you know like if you have been disrupted at apple park we can make a claim on your behalf call snell and hurley you know and we'll take care of it that's right right. Not attorneys and not law. Last week, Adam, Adam, and says last week, you discussed the trend away from all in ones towards standalone monitors and computers, but it got me thinking, do you think that the inclusion of the a series chips in the studio display and the fact that it is running an operating system will prematurely limit the lifespan of this display versus a typical 5k monitor seems like a situation where the screen panel would be perfectly fine over time but the supporting software or processor might render

the display obsolete i will also just state we got multiple questions about this where adam was the only person who did not use the phrase uh like what is it when like when when you when apple were like apparently are killing products planned obsolescence planned obsolescence or artificial obsolescence people were saying that was that they were doing to the studio displays by doing this so i just wanted to get your opinion on that what do you think uh no uh let me expand the, it's not doing anything. The A-series chip in the studio display is managing stuff that it can manage in 20 years. Not having a software update for the A-series chip is not going to affect that. It's putting something on a screen. There's no UI. It's doing center stage you know it's doing camera processing that's basically all it's doing and that doesn't require it to be up to date with the latest and greatest so no i i just it's not an ios device and the work that it's doing because this is the truth of any

device like if you don't update the software and you keep using it, a computer from the 90s that's still running OS 8 and Microsoft Word 5 is just as fast today as it was then because it's just doing what it was doing then. Physics haven't changed. It's the same. That's the deal with the studio display it's this it's just going to be the same it will stop getting ios updates eventually and all that means is that if there were any tweaks they were going to do to like the camera or whatever they'll stop but i don't like no that's a high confidence no it's not an issue okay yeah that's a good point that you make, that it's been doing it. The device has been doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's not like receiving a video signal is going to change in a meaningful way frequently. If we go to 8K 120, maybe it's going to need something else. But it's a new panel something else but to just continue what

you've yeah like to continue but this yeah the the conversation here i mean because in the chat they're saying like oh but they would still need to make a13s yeah but that's not the conversation the conversation is i buy one of these is it going to be obsolete faster because it's got an a13 in it or whatever and the answer is no because it's got it and it's doing what it's going to do the panel's not going to change panel's not not going to get upgraded. Maybe they'll tweak some of the center stage stuff. Maybe they won't, but like it's irrelevant. And I'll also point out something that came up in the chat, which is all of these things have embedded systems. This one's just a different kind of embedded system. And this goes back, I think a little bit

to all of us who are tech nerds who know about the inner dealings of Apple and its chips and it's what it's embedding in its monitors and all of that. But like all these displays have stuff in them. This is just a little bit weirder and more forward, but like in the end, they're going to last forever because the panel, you know, and if the electronics fail, sure. But the, a lot, I had a TV where the electronics fail sure but the a lot i had a tv where the electronics fail like that does happen but it's not going to change the lifespan at all it's it's a it's a display that's it it's all all it ever will be is what it is now they could stop updating the software now and that would be fine all right next question and i'll ask a great segment today comes from elliot last name we've

held kaylin probably i don't well i don't know because i doubt it because of the way that this is about to go so elliot last name we've held says i've been working my way through the flop house back catalog and tonight i was on episode number 264 the emoji movie live from five years ago live from san francisco maybe i don't know we'll find out at the end of the show the hosts were taking questions from the audience when a person identifies himself as jason last name withheld and starts asking a question about movie sequels i do a double take the voice sounds familiar i rewind to hear the name again could it be is that my podcast buddy jason snell elliot you got me i'm jason last name withheld from the emoji movie live episode of the flop house my favorite podcast of all time recorded live in san francisco and we went and i asked a question that they i don't remember the answer

to i should go back and listen it was basically about sequels and I wanted to know what was a great movie that you loved that never got a sequel, but you felt like it could have had one. I thought that was a clever question. I don't know if they had answers or not. They didn't seem to understand my question. I was very excited to talk to them. Got to meet them afterward and it was great. But yeah, that's me. That's me. Love the Flophouse and I got to go see them live. And I hope when they come back to San Francisco again real soon, guys, right, right,

that I will get to go again. Are they doing tours again? Because I know they were doing like... Yeah, they just did two shows in LA. So they're back on the road. Live podcasts, quite the thing. It's happening. If you would like to send in a question of your own

for Ask Upgrade on a future episode, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send us in your questions there, but also your feedback and your follow-up. If you want to find Jason's work, go to sixcolors.com. You can hear his shows here on RelayFM and at theincomparable.com.

You can hear me on RelayFM too and check out my work at CortexBrand.com. We're on Mastodon. Jason is at Jsnell on Zeppelin.Flights. I am iMike on Mike.Social. You can also find the show as Upgrade at RelayFM.Social. You can watch video clips of the show on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and also full-length video episodes published to YouTube as well. We are at Upgrade Relay and all of those.

We're on threads. I am at iMike. I am YKE. Jason is at JSnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. Thank you to our members who support us of Upgrade Plus. Thank you to our sponsors, the fine people over at Oracle, Factor, ZocDoc, and ExpressVPN for their support of this week's episode.

But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next week. Say goodbye, Jason Snell. Come on, Petium!