Upgrade - 488: The New Numbers

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 488 recorded monday november the 27th 2023 and the show today is brought to you by memberful ladder and notion I am not Mike Hurley, but I am Jason Snell, one of the voices you're used to hearing. Mike Hurley is on assignment with me as not always, and in fact, quite rarely, is my guest host, James Thompson. Hello, James. I'm a Brit, but probably not the one you were expecting. Reference acknowledge there'll be more Doctor Who references later, we promise. Yes. It's going to be 90% Doctor Who, 10% Mac. Welcome to Upgrade, a Doctor Who podcast.

Yeah, we are the double J. James and Jason are here. I don't know who the third J would be. Yeah, literally only deployed when nothing is happening whatsoever. Yes. Well, I thought I'd make it hard on you by doing an episode of Upgrade where, because of the Thanksgiving holiday last week, essentially nothing has happened. But we're going to find things to talk about. I suspect when I'm on podcasts, generally, we find things to talk about.

But before we do that, I would like to do what usually is our Snell Talk question. Yeah. holiday cyber monday is for the world james how are you feeling on cyber monday well i was at a thanksgiving dinner at the weekend so i mean i'm kind of i've already been eased into it so uh yeah i mean i have spent well actually no money today uh because cyber monday it's like Black Friday month now, it seems to me. And I have had so many emails from Lego, Kobo, many other companies that just keep sending me emails like, maybe you didn't buy anything yesterday, but maybe you'll buy something today. Would you like a 500-pound lego set well yes but no yeah i it sounds up your alley it sounds like that's something you would like i don't know where you would put it you don't you're small enough that's the main problem i think you would

need a room just literally filled with lego and i mean filled about five feet high so that would be well people who are viewing the uh video of will see the, there used to be three frames filled with Lego minifigures behind me. There are now six, two of which are not currently filled, but I'll get that. That's a great promotion for our videos that we do on various channels, as well as sometimes experimenting with the full show on YouTube. By experimenting, I mean, sometimes we post it. When we don't post it, it's because something horrible has failed. But it's not essential. We can't see each other here. Even

though James has just specifically made reference to what's behind him, I don't even know what he's talking about. No, it's a surprise for everyone. It is. That's great. I've been in that room. I've slept in that room where you are now. But anyway's let's cyber monday i i agree with you i um was watching the black friday football game uh on amazon prime because amazon prime convinced two two of this country's great institutions amazon and the nfl came together to put a football game on on black friday for the first time where there were qr codes everywhere for various things you could buy i wonder how it did for them. But I did load one of the QR codes, which just went to a page with Black Friday deals.

And late on Black Friday evening, I switched to that tab or I reopened Safari and it went to that tab and reloaded it. And what was it? It had already flipped over to Cyber Monday deals. They just like next, next up. And then after Cyber Monday, I don't know what's next. Maybe it's literally just holiday buying from that point on. We don't even need to cloak it in a clever phrase. When I was growing up, all the sales came after Christmas. It was like your Boxing Day sales. We've lost the true meaning of Christmas, which is the sales that come after them. It's the Box day sales. It's the war on boxing day sales.

All right. What we want to do here, and I just had this idea last night. I decided to go with it. Cyber Monday. Cyber from a period, a brief period, where cyberspace, I guess, was a thing that people in the general public tried to talk about for buying things on computers, which is what we now just call shopping. But back in the day,

it was novel. And so they lifted a cyberspace, cyberpunk kind of thing, William Gibson-esque. And so I thought we would do a little word association. It's cyber word association. I looked in my dictionary app and saw all the words that start with cyber, and I thought I would get your thoughts about them. Just quick word association. Here we go. Cyber law. My mind immediately went to Robocop. Is he law or is he justice? Is he order?

Is he law and order Robocop edition? I mean, he's kind of Judge Dredd, but more metal. Right. It's the American Judge Dredd, Robocop. I think that's actually pretty fair. And nobody gets satire on either side. Dread, but more metal. Right. It's the American Judge Dread, Rebel Cop. Yeah. I think that's actually pretty fair. And nobody gets satire on either side. Cyber crime.

Well, Chopper, the most chaotic neutral droid. Oh, from Star Wars Rebels, right? Yes, my favorite droid who occasionally does war crimes, but is apparently lovable. I should have said, by the way, that these cyber words were randomized by random.org. So they're coming in any order, no particular order. Cyber surfing, James. Well, I'm as old as you, and my mind immediately went to CyberDog, Apple's web browser of the late 90s. I mean, even calling it a web browser is not quite right

because it was OpenDoc, right? So it was like a web browser window you could put in documents? It was very strange. And I never understood why they called it CyberDog, although I read recently that apparently it was just a reference to that on the internet no one knows you're a dog saying they're like product name i'm trying to remember what it is i was watching last night that had a club called cyber dog in the background of the shot oh man that's why it was in my mind that's but we've forgotten cyber dog cyber dog um it was in some ways the epitome of 90s apple the the bad product name the unclear concept

the we spent a lot of money on r&d trying to develop technologies without actually figuring out how they would be used wow cyber dog uh cyber not well they're not just to me i've thought of micronauts oh my favorite toy from when i was a child also astronauts and cosmonauts james those are more common knots yeah but i are they real i mean uh i i don't i never encountered the Micronaut comics. I only ever encountered the toys, and the toys turned up in the discount toy places. So I would go and I would buy quite a lot of these heavily reduced, transparent little people. Plastic guys, yeah. Fun ships and bases and stuff.

And they are probably all still in my parents' attic somewhere, and I need to go digging. You should. And if you don't want them, I'll take them. But you should want them. Cyber Slacker. Well, what came to my mind for this was Bill and Ted, but the robot versions from the second Bill and Ted movie.

I don't know. I'm going to actually open the dictionary for this one. But there is not a more 90s word than cyber slacker, I think. A person who uses their employer's internet and email facilities for personal activities during working hours. See, we don't even have this word anymore because it's overcutting. I think that's called employees. Employees, yes, exactly. Cyberphobe. And I don't know why, but anymore because it's everybody. I think that's called employees. Employees, yes, exactly. Cyberphobe.

And I don't know why, but my brain said John Syracuse. Because, well, that's just what came to mind. He gives his judgments on various things. But he has no fear. A cyberphobe definition, a person with an extreme or irrational fear of computers. I guess to truly know them them you must fear them i think he just doesn't like them which i guess is different from fearing them but you know phone right you can take that in multiple ways all right i'll let you um cyber cafe um well again i don't know my mind just went to a robot cat cafe, which I think would be good because I don't like

cat cafes. Well, I like cats, right? Cats are great. I don't like cat cafes because all the cats tend to be, shall we say, sedated by a variety of things. And I feel bad for the cats. I'm sure it's just so that they can have a chill life with all the annoying children running around wanting to hug them, but robot cats. What I want to say here, and this is true, is Cyber Cafe is actually a cat cafe, but imagine instead of cats, they had computers.

So you come in and you can sort of like, don't pick up the Mac Classic unless it gets on your lap by itself. No, just sit down and put your hands on it. And I would also say that this is yet another word where cybercafe, a place where you go to maybe drink coffee and also be on the internet, now just a cafe. Cyber squatting. And Ted Lasso domain names, because I had so many Ted Lasso ones that were shown in the show, and Apple never registered them, so I registered them. You were a cyber squatter on Ted Lasso branding domain names, which I believe you let that go so people who are out there who want to get a from a season one episode of ted lasso a domain that appeared in the background if you want to own it you can own it now yeah i i this is my gift to everyone cyber war um again the word that just came into my mind was Twitter, because that's really all it is these days. And it's nothing that I want anything to do with. But yeah, it's just a battlefield. Cyber attack.

When I'm in the kitchen trying to get something and the Roomba bumps into me, it should know where I am, but it's not very smart, our Roomba bumps into me. It should know where I am, but it's not very smart, our Roomba. Do you do the thing where you see the Roomba coming and you just, it's like the Roomba rumba. It's like a dance where you just keep your feet moving just ahead so you can always just sort of like, oh, it's coming back. I'm going to take a step.

And I do that a lot in the kitchen because whatever timing I have, it seems inevitable that when I'm trying to make myself a sandwich the rumba is in the kitchen uh the rumba is a great idea for a product for somebody who doesn't work at home and i work at home like you do and uh it's less good because you have to dodge a robot as it roams around your house it's less good cyberpunk uh keanu reeves the original cyberpunk he's been in so many well okay not the original but in my heart it's your word association i shouldn't be so judgy um oh somebody has just posted a picture of the cyber dog place which now tell me what show i was watching yesterday it's a shop in camden yeah you were

watching doctor who and it's come back to doctor who again because that cyber doctor who is in the background yes it was doctor who yeah it seems very weird because they have cyber men and that's not even in this uh cyberpunk of course i will always think of it's a genre of fiction uh william gibson neuromancer and all of that but i kanu Reeves can be the living embodiment. Yeah, Johnny Mnemonic. He was in Johnny Mnemonic. Yeah, sure. Cyber Store, James, Cyber Store. Sharper image.

It was always the high-tech seller of tat when I was in the store. And now we would just call that an online store. But back in the day, Cyberstore was something special. Cybercast. Well, I immediately think of roboism with Kathy Campbell and Alex. So, you know, that is just some branding. Cybercast actually is listed as a video broadcast of an event transmitted over the internet. Welcome, everyone, to the Upgrade Cybercast. Only on YouTube, though. Here, it's just a podcast instead. We don't have the cyber. We're leaving the cyber for Cybertube, which is probably what they used to think they would call it. Cyber mall.

I wrote an abandoned metaverse version of the former Valko mall in Cupertino, diverse version of the former Valco Mall in Cupertino, which was an interesting mall because I watched it over several decades go from a bustling hive of capitalism to closing one shop after another. Then everybody moved up to one level and they started to close and then it went away. The saddest thing I have ever seen is David Price sitting at a small table in the middle of Valco trying to sign autographs for 10 pounds, and there was nobody there. Well, that's not good. Cybermall, by the way, officially in the dictionary as a commercial website through which a range of goods may be purchased. You don't say. Cyber cybernetics a real word yeah well you know it's it's a t800 or

something like that because i don't know cybernetics just now i just i just think of uh sci-fi things rather than real things i don't know why you humans cry. Cyberchondriac. Well, I wrote down Marvin the Paranoid Android, but I mean, he did have a pain in the diodes down his left side. So I don't think he was a cyberchondriac, really. Apparently a cyberchondriac is somebody who compulsively searches the internet for symptoms. It's the WebMD addict, basically. I get it. you've got everything now now known as human being yes cyber culture um i visualized an exhibition of ai stolen art

you know just just a whole load of things that were nicked from other artists nice nice the the dictionary definition is the social conditions brought about by the widespread use of computer networks for communication entertainment and business in other words you're soaking in it uh cyber pet um also cyber dog okay because well we came all the way back around say a i think a tamagotchi is a cyber pet so that tells you how timely that word is they keep trying to bring uh tamagotchis back like their color now yeah well i mean sure uh the final word is cyber bullying and i said what the discord does to mike every week yeah i was gonna say whenever discord whenever Mike is challenged in any way that's not in person,

and honestly, even when it's in person, he thinks that it's cyberbullying. That's not how that works. All right, well, thank you for participating in our first and last Cyber Word Association game. I do want to tell people that the Upgradees are still open for nominations. This is the 10th, believe it or not, annual Upgradees. You can go to upgradees.vote. Nominations run until December 5th. So you've got a little bit more time. You've got another week. We really rely on your nominations.

Not only is it great to get the voice of the Upgradees in the Upgradees, but also you get to tell us about things that we don't know about and we'll go, oh, what's that? And we'll check it out. And sometimes that leads to us talking about it or writing about it and maybe making it a nominee or a winner. So we could not do the Upgradeys without your help, or at least we could, but it wouldn't be as good. So please help us, Upgradeys.vote. That episode is coming out on December 18th, a little bit earlier than usual, because we've got some other special stuff planned for the rest of this month and into the beginning of next year. So you can see all the previous winners of the award at Upgradees.com, of course. I will not try and influence the vote in any way.

Okay, good. Good. Good job. Upgrade Plus, by the way, if you love Upgrade and want to hear more of it, please subscribe to Upgrade Plus. No ads, bonus content every week, access to the excellent RelayFM members Discord,

and there is a special deal right now. Until December 15th, you can get 20% off a new annual plan. You use the code HOLIDAYS2024 at checkout. Go to getupgradeplus.com. Get your first year of Upgrade Plus for $40. Find out more at giverelay.com. Now, this week on Upgrade Plus, who knows what we're going to talk about, but I'm going to guess it's probably going to be Doctor Who related. Who knows? Who knows, eh? Who knows? Let's do a little bit of follow-up.

OpenAI, Mike and I decided to take the brave step to talk about OpenAI last Monday, thinking it's probably over, right? It's probably over now and there will be no more news about OpenAI. I don't think we actually believe that, but we thought we could maybe slide in some takes on last Monday, and I'm glad we did. But just to wrap that up in a bow in case you were not paying attention, the board realized that the whole company was going to dissolve. And Satya Nadella, as Mike said, he's a stone-cold killer, said, we could just take them all at Microsoft, which seems like it was basically a ploy to get OpenAI to do what they did, which is reshape the board and bring Sam Altman back. So in the end, I don't know what the net result is other than Sam Altman's back. He's not on the board. The board is still sort of semi-independent. Their weird governance is still there. But I feel

like if nothing else, there is now kind of an acceptance that open AI is going to do what it's going to do. And the board is probably not going to suddenly fire everybody. It did seem coincidental, perhaps, that all the implications of that are now gone. Yeah. So, good job. They just got in the way, I guess. Get them out of there. I could say things ironically now that I'm not going to say.

Right? Because it would all be funny, but also kind of unpleasant. So I'm just going to move on and mention another thing that is something that we cover on Upgrade from time to time, which is Apple's little holiday films that they released. They released a new one. It's called Fuzzy Feelings. Put a link in the show notes to that. to that. And over at Six Colors, my pal Andy Anotko wrote a, I think, funny article about his journey while watching this video about empathy that includes, it's about a bad boss, but is he really a bad boss? Because the main character is late for work and the boss says,

you're late for work. And is he being neat about it? But she's making an elaborate stop motion video in which she gets to harm him in various ways. But in the end, she learns that he's a human being which she should have known all along and ends up being nice to him at the end. So it's a weird, I enjoyed it. And I think that it's very impressive that in a few minutes, it takes you on a whole journey, a whole story arc. I thought it was a lot of fun and it

looks really great, but it is weird. I had slightly a different response to watching it. I think that boss deserved everything that he was getting in felt and life um you know why did she suck it up and be nice to him just because he knitted her a sock he eats alone he's a bad because he's a bad boss a bad human you know i i didn't i didn't feel that he had earned the redemption you know because she i mean i i i thoroughly was impressed by the various murder uh scenarios that she had dreamed up for him because it started with him losing his trousers and then you know go on a bit and he was being hit by cars and and all sorts of things and and i thought this is a really interesting apple advert i'm not sure what the message is but i'm really on board and then and

then she she kind of like because i think she was coming in late because she doesn't want to be at work he's terrible he doesn't like he doesn't let uh take any of her feedback you know he closes the door when she's coming up to try and talk to him about things. Don't give up on your felt murder dreams, lady. So you're disappointed that it takes a turn at the end where she learns the spirit of the holiday season and human empathy. Yeah, I think he should have learned something not her. Interesting. All right, well, that's our follow-up. I feel conflicted about it now. Let me take a pause to tell you about our sponsors this week. Our first sponsor is Memberful.

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it look? And then when you're ready to open the doors, that's when you sign up and start paying for Memberful. Just couldn't be easier. Go to memberful.com slash upgrade. It could be the next great move for your business. Memberful.com slash upgrade. Thank you to memberful for supporting upgrade all right it's time for the details james you didn't do the hoohoo okay uh i i can put that in in post i did my own we all know how painful that can be all right i had a rental car this weekend i just i'm telling you a little story it's vaguely beta beta I almost said beta. You're doing it to me. It's beta related, James. I had a rental

car with CarPlay this weekend because I don't have cars with CarPlay. So then I get rental cars with CarPlay. It's very exciting. This was a Jeep Wrangler. Shout out to Casey Liss. I was driving a Jeep in the snow in Colorado. And I had a couple of observations.

One is the shared playlist feature in CarPlay, which we didn't use and none of my family knew about. And I'm not sure, is it in there in the shipping version? Have they added that? Or is it in the 17.2 beta? I'm not sure. You don't drive, so how would you know? I don't drive and I don't have CarPlay.

Not a real road tripper. And I only installed the 17.2 beta this morning. Okay. Well, it is a new feature of 17, at least, whether it's in the shipping version or not. And I think that would be great because my daughter was trying to pick songs for us to listen to when we were on a long part of the drive and driving from the airport because the airport in Denver is very far away from everything. And she's like, pulls the USB-C cable as far as she can away from where it's plugged into the car in order to use it. And I'm sitting there looking at the taut USB-C cable as she was trying to pick music. they're looking at the taut USB-C cable. She was trying to pick music. And I thought, well, this is the perfect example of bringing up that share interface where you can have a shared

playlist of what's coming up next and people can add songs to it, which I can't wait to use that feature, but I still haven't used it despite that. But it got me thinking about the other feature that I really want to try. And that is in the 17.2 beta for sure, which is collaborative playlists. The idea that I can make a playlist. I was thinking about this because I used to have a playlist that is at various points in a failure of iTunes or the music app. I don't know which. I lost this.

It's probably still on an iPod somewhere in my drawer. I could maybe see what songs were on it from that. But it was a favorite humorous playlist of mine called Creepy Stalkers, where it was good songs, and then you listen to the lyrics and realize that it is about very bad behavior by people who really need to just let it go and move on with their lives. But it makes for good songs, but it's also creepy. And I was talking to my daughter about it, and she had a bunch of suggestions of songs that i don't know that were also sort of creepy stalker-esque and i had that moment of thinking um this is what a shared playlist is for so one of these days those collaborative playlists will come out and i will try that usb road trip control the music feature which let me tell you have have there been shouting arguments in my life about who gets to

choose what song plays on the radio? Yeah. Yeah. At least one. So this is a good feature and I'm looking forward to it, but neither of those things have I tried yet. And at least one of them, and maybe both of them is in the beta. So yeah, I thought I would slide it into details. This is all about cars, James. So very little relevance to you, really. Well, I was going to say, whenever we do long car journeys, we end up listening to either podcasts or audiobooks. So it's not something that is like, there's usually debate over, will we listen to my podcasts or will we listen to Saskia's podcasts, which are quite different.

She listens to a lot of things that are sort of worthy in nature whereas i listen to things which are mostly about video games so right yeah that's that is uh that is the issue we in our four family group we will occasionally listen to podcasts together but it's fairly rare usually it's more like let's just get some music on so we're not you know so we're not just sitting there and listening to the road and occasionally saying something. We do talk, but it's nice to kind of have something in the background. But anyway. The last time, I was just thinking we did put on an audiobook for a long drive. And it started, I would say, right in the middle of an extremely explicit scene, which made for a 10-minute kind 10 minute kind of awkward drive you have to turn on

the on the defogger yeah all the windows got fogged up uh while you were listening what is a long drive for you well 30 minutes i mean you're not wrong you're not wrong like driving to edinburgh is a long ish drive because that's like 45 minutes to an hour. Wow. It's a little island. It's a little island. Yeah. All right.

In the spirit of Cyber Monday and the holiday season, which is all about commerce, of course, I thought we would do another quick segment about where we are right now in terms of apple products just a little idea i had because we don't have news to talk about just like go through the list of current apple products and say what would we recommend for people who are looking for something for this season of commerce uh and what will we not do you get it you get the concept here it seems fairly straightforward all right macbook pro start easy i mean that seems to be the the easy one to recommend nice nice new chips um uh full range of things you know you can spend infinite almost infinite amounts of money

if you want to fully spate one of those. And as we discovered, like the high-end Macs ones, they beat my M1 Ultra Mac Studio by significant amounts. And that makes me sad. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is the easiest one on the list, honestly, is if you are looking for a MacBook Pro for you or someone else, now's a good time to buy. The usual caveats apply. I feel like for all of our consternation about that low-end MacBook Pro, I think it's better than what was there before, but I would still say what I said back then is still true now, which is if it's in your budget to go up to the $2,000 model that has the M3 Pro chip in it instead of just the M3, do that because you get a lot more for your money once you break that 1999 barrier. But it's, yeah, now's the perfect

time for that. What do you think about the MacBook Air? Would you recommend anybody buy a MacBook Air now? It is both a great product, but also a little bit long of the tooth. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about that because i'm in the market for something and i don't know what because i i usually i have the split lifestyle of i have my uh mac studio which is where i do all the sort of heavy lifting and then i have something that i say on the sofa and answer emails on and things and that seems like the perfect candidate for macbook air uh but there's just part of me that's thinking yes but if i waited maybe until like march right maybe i would get an m3 macbook air so it's really nice it's fast it's decent

but maybe wait i'm going to come down as saying um tis the season to buy a MacBook Air. The MacBook Air M2 is amazing. The M3 will be incrementally better, but only incrementally. I think it won't change in any substantive ways other than the chip inside. I think it's already great if it's in your price range. When you're looking for a product like this that doesn't have the pro chip and the pro features and all of that, I think it's going to not matter whether you get an M2 or an M3 because it's going to last a long time. I really love that laptop.

I love the design of it. I love everything about it. And there's a 13 and a 15-inch version now, which I know that, although I always like little laptops, it's a stumbling block for some people. And so to have a more affordable large screen laptop, there may be somebody, you or somebody in your life who has either shied away from the MacBook Air because of the screen size or has maybe spent too much money. Maybe they've got an Intel MacBook Pro. And one of the reasons they do is just because they wanted a bigger screen. This would be a perfectly great time to get them a MacBook Air.

And honestly, if you are on a serious budget and you want to get somebody a computer and they don't need a lot of horsepower, I think you can find the M1 MacBook Air for like $799 now. That's a great deal on a really good computer that will serve you for years because the M1 alone, it's not the new design. It's the old style design and all that, but you know what? It's an Apple Silicon Mac and it's going to be great. It will stay in service and be a modern Mac for a long, long time to come. Yeah. I mean, even the lowest of the Apple Silicon chips are significantly better than many, if not most, of the Intel Macs that ever existed.

We have this effect because this is a tech podcast, and we are tech nerds, and we live in tech nerd circles. And sometimes I think we lose sight. This is one of the reasons why everybody got angry with me when I talked about low price macbook pros with not enough ram uh it is some people don't have those our priorities and they don't have our use cases and they don't have our budgets and apple silicon like talking about an m1 air i know that there are probably a lot of people out there like oh but it's so old and outmoded and it's like yeah it's true's also $799. And the person who's thinking of buying it, they probably have some battered MacBook Air from 2016, something like that, right? Like that's 2015. They've got, I know people who are replacing computers that are six, seven years old, right?

Which most tech nerds, except John Syracuse, won't do, but people do. And anybody coming from Intel, especially from like deep Intel, deep history of Intel Macs, an M1 Air is going to, first off, they've been proven that they can hang onto a computer and use it for years and they want to get productivity out of it. And I think once you cross over into Apple Silicon, even if it's just an M1, you are going to get productivity for years. It's going to be a huge boost and you are going to be good for a long time because I think Apple is going to be very good about, not only is it a big boost, but like Apple's going to support Apple Silicon for a while, all the way back to M1, I think.

I think the support will be solid for the chips that it controls. So I think it's a good deal. I think it's if $799 or maybe even cheaper on sale, like that M1, like I would choose the M2 if you've got the budget because it's more modern and it's beautiful. But not everybody can do that. Or they're buying it for a kid or something.'re like i can't i'm not gonna spend a thousand dollars on a like i get it 799 m1 air is pretty great deal yeah mac studio well if you're the kind of person that's buying a mac studio you probably would want the M3 Ultra Mac Studio. I agree completely. I think this is a don't buy it.

Yeah, it is because it is, yes, the M2 is good. The M3 will be significantly better. I mean, as we've seen, like the M3, just the Macs ones are beating the Ultra for a lot of stuff. And keep in mind, Max Studio is Ultra and Max. They don't use the Pro Chip in the Studio. They use the Max and the Ultra. And the Max is the one that is so much faster than the previous generations of Max, where they really souped it up. And then imagine an Ultra on top of that.

But even if you're just in the market for the Max version, the base model Max Studio, I think you're going to want to wait for the m3 because i'm i'm certainly looking at that and thinking that's going to be a very impressive upgrade and those things are so expensive i mean like it is a tiny cube that'll cost you you know whatever five thousand to ten thousand dollars and like yeah And, like, yeah, I'm looking at it because I've got my M1 one. Me too. And I love it. It's great.

It's fast. And now I'm seeing that it is slowly falling off the performance curve. And I am running into things where it's like, it would actually be nice. You know, maybe I should have specced it when I got it originally with more GPU cores. I didn't think that they were useful. Apparently, they are useful now. And just to be clear, the base model Ultra starts at $2,000 for the Max version. The Ultra, the Max is $2,000, the Ultra is $4,000, right?

Yeah, yeah. So you choose your cube of power, something they said to Loki at some point, I think. But I think anybody who's looking at that should probably wait, right? Because performance obviously matters to them or they would get a Mac mini where it matters less. Speaking of which, Mac mini, and I feel like I want to say something similar

to the MacBook Air, which is I'm sure there will be M3 Mac minis next year. Well, I'm not sure. I'm less sure than of some other systems, but I think probably. And I think if you're in the market for a Mac mini, I don't think it matters. I bought a Mac M2 Mac mini a few months ago. Like, I think it's fine because you're using those for utility. If you're using it as a main computer, like, you know what you need. And I think that getting an M2 Pro or an M2 base Mac mini is not going to be like the M3. If it does roll out, I don't think you're going to

say, oh no, I missed all these wonderful features because I really doubt it's going to just be a little bit faster. I don't think it's going to be as big a deal. You could do it. If you need it now, you could buy it now and be okay. Yeah. Get a Mac mini under the tree. Mac Pro, what do you think? I mean, I would argue, was there ever a good time to buy a Mac Pro? Solid. Solid. I was going to say the same thing. I mean, if you want to buy it, we're not going to stop you. We're not the law. We're not Judge Dredd and or whoever we said the American equivalent of Judge Dredd was, RoboCop. We're not RoboCop either, no. You have more than 20 seconds to comply. It is, I just, I mean, if, I don't know what it's for.

I think it's because they said we're going to ship a Mac Pro. And so they've shipped a Mac Pro. But the Mac Studio is fine for, I mean, the Mac Studio is not a low-end computer uh and it's pretty pro enough for i think almost everybody uh i i just don't see the point yeah i i i mean if somebody wants it i think that's great it i have said for a long time that there is a volume that Apple has as a minimum

for shipping anything. Even a Mac, you have to sell a certain number of them. The Mac Pro kind of goes against that. I'm sure that they are, first off, they're doing it because they sort of made that promise and they designed that case and they want to

deliver something in that case. I'm sure that they've heard from certain key customers who have io card needs that the compact systems that are kind of like laptops that apple does everywhere else in the mac line now aren't going to fulfill their needs although i would even argue then you could probably do it with thunderbolt in the breakout box, but maybe there are cases where that's not even true or you wanted something cleaner than a breakout box connected by a cable.

Okay. But like, they've got to know how many Mac Pros they're ever going to sell. And it's, I can't be a large number, but they must think

that it's key sites and they already have the case and they already have the chips. It probably is the reason why they never did the quad chip version because it was hard and they're like, we're not going to sell any of them because it's going to cost a fortune that's what i was going to say is like the one thing that i think would give it some kind of revitalization is if they did actually put in a an even more ultra chip into the thing

but uh yeah for whatever reason that's's not happened. So for most people, there's not much in it. All right. Next year, no new iPads this year. Next year, all new iPads. So I think the default answer here should probably be no. Yeah. I mean, I've had people say, should I buy an iPad? And I've literally told them, well, probably not because they haven't touched them in a year. And there's going to be a whole load of catch-up you will get in the 18 months since the last log. There is one iPad that I am supremely confident will still be on sale this time next year, confident will still be on sale this time next year and that's the low-end 10th generation ipad because even if they come out with an 11th generation ipad they will still sell the 10th

generation ipad at a discounted price and honestly that if you're if you just want a low-end ipad just to replace my dad and frankly i think most people don people who are not very techie don't need anything more than the base model iPad. And that's a really nice, they redesigned it. It feels much more modern. It's got the touch ID button instead of the home button on the front. Feels like a modern iPad while being pretty affordable. I assume next year it'll come down in price, but still, that would be something that I might recommend to people right now. For everything else, I think I'd say wait and see. Unless it's something that you're giving as a Christmas present, then yeah.

Yeah, I mean, even then, I mean, yeah, you can do what you want, but even then you're like, oh, here's this iPad Air that's kind of stale and is going to be replaced with something new next year. Yeah, do it if it makes sense. But it's not the savvy choice. It doesn't mean that if you see it or get a good deal or whatever, you couldn't make it. I put the iPhone down here. I mean, they turn the iPhone over every year in the fall. This is why, right?

Like, if you want an iPhone, get it, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think it only becomes more of an issue when you because we know what the cycle is you know it's unlikely that they're just going to turn around in july and say surprise new iphones um so it's only when you're like past that six months which i i think in my head of you know like and and you're getting closer to the new phones than you are far from the other ones. But yeah, I mean. As designed. The iPhones are great. They are. 15s are good. Never a bad time. And then the older models actually are pretty good

too. And you get deals on those too. So, but this is how they get you. This is how they, it's literally designed so that when people have a conversation like this in the buying season that the iPhones are all there and they're fresh and they're ready to go. Don't buy an iPhone SE now. Yeah.

I think that's about ready to turn over again, but otherwise. And the Apple Watch is a similar story, right? I think that if you want to get a new apple watch well guess what they just made new apple watches for you a new series a new ultra and i think go for it i i mean they did kind of make new ones but also they kind of seem quite similar to the previous generations sure but if you're in the market now i think you don't need to fear like oh but they're about to unveil a brand new amazing.

There's even the rumor of the Apple Watch 10 kind of thing out there, and it's unclear if that will come next year or if it might be further down the line. So in terms of the like, should I buy something now or should I wait because something new is around the corner? Yeah, no, the Apple Watch progress is slow, but the latest ones are refreshed and they're ready for you if you want to buy them. You can do it. I think we didn't mention the iMac. Oh, we didn't. I skipped right over the iMac. We should mention it.

It just came out. I think you should buy it, right? Yeah, I mean, unless you're really wanting a big one, in which case, well, you can't do anything. You're not going to get it. Waiting like six months is not going to have that. I just talked to somebody about this who, I forget, I think it was in a member Discord, maybe the Six Colors Discord. a deal on an LG UltraFine 5K 27-inch monitor, which is much cheaper than the Apple Studio display or the Samsung display, which I didn't like, but which is comparable to the Studio

display, and a Mac mini. And that was in their price range. And the truth is that although buying an external display, even a Studio display, and a computer is going to be more expensive than buying an iMac, the beauty of it is that that display will last you a long time. And in three or four years or five years or whatever, you could buy a new Mac mini and still use that perfectly fine display. That's when you start to save money is because you're just replacing the computer and you're keeping that display. But you do have to buy that. There's the initial investment in the display. And I know that people are – the UltraFine, nobody seems to love the UltraFine, but it is the iMac 27-inch panel.

And it looks good even if it's not Apple level of quality of build. And then you can get a Mac Studio if you want to, but you can get a Mac Mini and you can put that together pretty reasonably if you're a 27-inch iMac user who is frustrated and doesn't like the 24-inch M3 iMac. Although if you haven't seen it, you should go to an Apple store if you can and see it because it's pretty good. It may be enough screen for you, but if it's not, then I think the 27-inch display and like a Mac Mini will give you I mean, base Mac Mini will

give you iMac performance, right? It's not an M3, but it's an M2. It's close enough. And then if you want a little more performance, you can get the Pro version, which no iMac has right now. And again, you scale it up. If you you want Mac Studio use the same display with that the only thing the only sort of possible wildcard in this whole scenario is it is the 40th anniversary of the Mac I know January and there's this part of me because there was the 20th anniversary mac which was you know a ridiculously i mean it was kind of like an iMac ahead of its time it was it was a flat screen um

and to be clear not 20 years ago because it was the 20th anniversary of the founding of apple not the 20th anniversary of the mac yes and came out a year too late but yes but still still you know 40 40th anniversary of the mac maybe they do something fancy something nice it won't be it won't be an iMac though because they uh they said they're not going to do an iMac as much as I'm skeptical that they said we're not going to do a 27 inch iMac which everybody gets readers are ah but what about a 30 inch iMac or a 32 inch iMac all that like I get that. The fact that they went to the trouble of reading that statement out to journalists and reviewers, I got it.

I was sent it. Here is a statement from Apple. It wasn't, oh, a dogged journalist finally got a PR person to confirm this thing. It's like, no, they sent out a crafted statement about not doing a bigger iMac. I think that implies that it's going to be a while before there's a bigger iMac, if there ever is. I think that you don't worry about it. But yes, maybe they'll do something wacky for the 40th anniversary of the Mac. It could happen. I would like to see them do something different and interesting. Maybe, like we've talked a long time about convertible things that you know

could become like it's like an iMac but it's also big tablets or you know like drawing thing or whatever I it would be nice if they did something that we haven't seen before I'm I don't think it's likely but uh it's just that date is because it's the day before my birthday so I always think of it well birthday present for you from Apple I I'm gonna i'll make my i should probably save this for some sort of annual pick uh extravaganza or a year in preview and all that but i'll give a preview here of it which is my wild idea if they do something pretty wacky for the 40th anniversary of the mac it would be announcing new iPad Pros that will run Mac OS in a VM. Or they announce for the 40th anniversary of the Mac that they're getting rid of the Mac. Oh, okay. Well, that's a bummer, but I mean, you do you, Apple.

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James, you are a very kind co-host who gave me a topic today. I have to build this. Mike gives me topics. Mike's up. I'm sleeping. It's Monday. It's Monday in the UK. I am just sleeping away, Sunday night into Monday morning. And I wake up on Monday morning and there's a show doc. And maybe I've left some notes in places for Mike, but he puts it together. I had to put together this. I did it my Sunday afternoon. And then I come in this morning and look, James has given me a topic. Would you like to explain to the people what the topic is? So my topic is, I am calling it subscription burnout. And this is basically, it's one of these things where you take a thing that is happening in your actual life and turn it into a story. I have been, like, over the last weeks, like, everybody has been turning up the screws on their subscription pricing, including Apple, who just put up all their tiers of things.

Because they want to make some, you know, some more revenue, some revenue. It's unclear. And I think a lot of people are reaching the point of it being too much money and are doing the thing of like, well, do I actually need to have this thing? Or do I need like five different versions of this thing? And I'm certainly at that point. I mean, it's not necessarily that I can't afford it. It's just that I don't think they justify the amount that a lot of these things are. And when the leaps are, it's not just, well, this is going up 10% in line with inflation or whatever.

It's like, no, we're going like go up uh 50 75 yeah and because it was all teaser rates back when it was zero percent interest so there's like a teaser rate it's not we'll borrow the money we'll pay it back later teaser rates and then there's inflation and they need to raise the rates anyway and it's like you know when we said six dollars what we meant is fifteen dollars yeah and netflix was i think the early culprit of this. And I think probably started a lot of these runs of subscription rates. And you get the email from Netflix saying, we're putting it up this much. And also, we're going to give you adverts now. And I'm like, no, no, you're not. So, you know, Netflix, we cut Netflix six months ago or something. And yeah, we've had a number of

other services that have all said, yeah, we think that adverts are really what you want. And I'm like, no, it really is not. Yeah. We talk about this on downstream a lot, really is not. Yeah. We talk about this on downstream a lot, but the truth is that there's this economic challenge where there is an amount of revenue you make from each user in the ad-based system, right? Where they know, and this is assuming they sell all the ads and they sell them all at a good rate. When we talk about this, sometimes we start to run away to assume that all ads are sold and they're all sold at the perfect rate, which does not happen. There are, you know, I've worked at a magazine for a lot of years, like there are ads slowdowns, you have to sell below rate. But if everything's humming along, you make X amount from that person on the ad tier. And they're paying, it's the amount of money you're making

from them on ads and the money they're paying you because they're doing both, which my magazine, you had to pay for it and there were ads in it. It's a standard model. It's not unreasonable to have both ads and for you to pay. But then they look at what their ad free tier costs and they look at how much money they make per user on that. And they think, oh no, we make less money on the premium product without ads because we're undercharging for it, essentially. That's the lesson they take. And for all of us who pay for the ad-free tier, and I am an inveterate pay-for-the-ad-free-tier person, I am not interested in your ad tier at all. It is terrifying because Netflix now really doesn't want you to not see ads.

And so in order to get that other premium ad free version to pencil out for them, they have to raise the price kind of a lot because the ads are so successful. And it's great in the sense that I think Netflix and other places will be a little more accessible for people who are willing to watch the ads. But I'm not. And I think you're not. And so you end up in a situation where now you're paying even more because the ad business has been so successful that they're going to charge you even more figuring that if you don't like it, you can just flee to the ad version. Yeah. you don't like it you can just flee to the ad version yeah and and i think it wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't had like whatever the last decade uh you know with i don't know how long netflix has been doing their thing but you know we've we've had this ad free model for so long

it's like i pay you money you give me shows shows. And to then like them to say, you know, oh, but we're going back to pretty much the thing you fled from in the first place. No, I don't want to do that. And the other thing is not, you know, it's also we had all the amazing shows as well, because all of these people were just trying to, you know, as possible. It was a gold rush. They were overspending in order to get people in the door. But it was a gold rush and it was also a golden age. We had so much really good stuff. And now it's like, as Joe pointed out in the chat, production has been down for so long because of all the strikes, because they didn't want to give the, you know, writers and actors money either.

But ended up giving them money after all. But yes, yeah, it's going to be thin on the ground the next few months too. Now would be a great time to cancel. Yeah, there's going to be like six months of whatever, you know, like, oh, yeah, we haven't actually got any shows in the pipeline apart from these, like, two or three that we held back. And that's your lot. So, yeah, this is a great time to save money and cancel all your subscriptions.

And it's also, it's not just, I mean, I'm talking about TV, but it's not just TV. Software. Software. It's not just, I mean, I'm talking about TV, but it's not just TV. Software. Software. I mean, we will come back to my views on developer or app subscriptions. But with things like the Adobe, they've been hiking their prices up.

And I just got an email from them saying, yeah, we would like fast amounts more for Illustrator and Photoshop. And I use both of those things a lot in my work, but I'm not using them to a level they couldn't be replaced by something like the Affinity suite of software, which is indeed what I bought Black Friday deal this weekend, because like I can pay once and I, I can use it until it, you know, stops working. Cyber weekend. Uh, you were cyber cyber dealing. That's what you were doing. Where's my cyber? Those Affinities app for the people who don't know the Affinity apps are so good.

I, I was using an ancient copy of Illustrator that was 32-bit, and that stopped working. I tried to use it, and I realized, what am I doing here? And I bought Affinity Designer, which is their Illustrator equivalent, and it's great. And I only use Illustrator a very small amount, but I did use it to do like t-shirts and stuff and some podcast art. And it was never gonna be worth it to pay a subscription for it. And the Affinity app is just fantastic. And then on the photo, I do pay for Photoshop

and there are so many good photo editing apps out there, but I have 25, 30 years of Photoshop in my brain now. I've got the same. So that one is still reasonably priced enough that I'm not yet willing to give up Photoshop. But everything else, sort of like in that, the Affinity, I just couldn't be more impressed with their stuff.

Yeah, and a lot of the adobe the push is ai generative stuff at least in the last couple of releases um which you know is worse than most of the generative ai stuff i have ever used uh but i don't want to be funding that really uh to be fair be blunt about it. And I've paid for Photoshop. I paid for Photoshop like about 30 minutes before this podcast started recording because our video editor Chip wanted some stuff and I double clicked it.

It launched Photoshop, which then said, oh, we had trouble with your payment so we can't open this file. And in like my crossness i just paid paid for it again for another year but as you say it's reasonably $120 or something and it's like for the app i've been using for for most of my life at this point i'm like okay fine if they if they continue to raise it i would i would have that moment where i'd say there are so many other options here, Pixelmator and.

And I own most of the other options. Like I bought the whole Affinity suite. So I'm going to play with the, with the Photoshop equivalent and see. I have Pixelmator and Acorn, and I'm sure I could use the Affinity photo app too. Like the only reason I'm using Photoshop is like, is inertia, but boy, there's a lot of inertia there. So they would have to, and they know it, they know it, but this is the risk, right? With the subscription inflation is every time you increase, there is a chance of churn, as they call it. You drop off and you may never, like when I give up Photoshop, I think I'm never coming back, right?

So don't push me too hard here. And it was Illustrator was up to, I don't know, it was like £280 or something. And it was like, you know, I can buy the entirety of the Affinity Suite for like £100 this weekend, and that leaves me like £160 extra. And then every year, I get a free extra 280 pounds they're they're not a uh they're not a sponsor but if you if you go to affinity.saraf.com they are having a black friday 40 off sale that's still going on and uh and i can endorse certainly i can endorse designer but they have their goal really is to sort of replicate the classic adobe suite as apps you can just buy, designer, photo, publisher. It's, yeah.

And their iPad apps are pretty much equivalent too, which is very impressive. So yeah. And you don't have any subscriptions in your apps, right? No. And so I understand both sides of this because as a developer, it would be really nice if I had

recurring income because, you know, if you bought Peacock for iOS, that's like 15 years ago. And, you know, you may have tipped or something, but I've not charged for any updates, which is foolish, but there isn't really a good way to do it. And from a developer point of view, I would really like that because the money coming in regularly, and you have an idea of what you're going to get and how much churn as you say and all that, but as a consumer, I hate them. And lots of consumers hate them. And I think there's more of an argument if you've got a thing that is tied to a service. If there's backend servers and maybe you're paying somebody else down the line for weather data or something, I think there's an argument. For something like a calculator,

it's harder. I'm not saying that there is no work done, because there is work done. And even just making the things keep running is a lot of work. But it's harder to sell a consumer on that, I think. And especially now that everybody's feeling this pressure. It's like, if I turned around tomorrow and I said, oh yeah, Peacock's going to be a subscription now, I do not think that would go down particularly well. You would cancel your own subscription to your own app. That's outrageous. Okay. So I get what you're saying. There is an app that I'm not going to mention because I'm not trying to shame them because I actually think it's still a great app and I understand they need

to do what they need to do. There is an app that I have come to rely on and their new version is going to a subscription model. And it is not an app that has a substantial server component. They're really just saying from now on, we want you to pay us. And I get the argument is it's continually developed, but it's a utility that the amount of value I get, I do rely on it, but I think about paying a subscription for it and it just stops me cold because I do that. And we all do this, right? You do the calculation. What's the value here? If the price and the value or the good feeling, a lot of the subscriptions I get are the good feeling of, I love this app. I want it to keep going. And then I look at the price and I think, yeah, for an app I use a lot. And yet this one app, it stopped me short where I thought, really? This is just a utility that does this one thing. And it's like, well, no,

now it's an annual thing that you spend money on to do this one thing. And I don't understand the psychology entirely because sometimes I'm very happy about it, but every now and then I see one and I think this is kind of pushing it. But the flip side of that, and it's something that you did, you, I reboosted you or whatever they call it on Mastodon, you did a Black Friday sale for Peacock. Still running at time of recording. Yes. Okay okay but here's my question for you you don't have a subscription plan you don't charge for upgrades you are putting your product on sale and it's a product that people can only buy once why are you doing that

to capture people who would otherwise never buy it is that the idea basically so what i have found like over the years is whenever you do a big sale like because i don't normally this this was an experiment this the the uh the black friday stuff but i like i did um i think for the 30th anniversary of peak elk i did like a 90% off, which was, you know, that's silly. It was like, it's a dollar. And it made so much money doing that. And it's not something that, you know, it's not like if it was 99 cents, I would always

be making that kind of money. But it's because it was a big deal and it got a lot of press and it didn't affect sales in the slightest because it's not taking anything away from the regular sort of steady sales. The Black Friday thing was an experiment because I've done it for the last couple of years with dice which is my my standard uh experimental product and it did pretty well i mean like you get this big bump of sales and again no downside that i could see the thing is people then start to come to expect it you know and it's like well i won't buy that because I know it

goes on sale, you know, every year on Black Friday or whatever. But I mean, part of it is, you know, Peacock is, it's 15 years old, like, well, that version of Peacock is 15 years old, the iOS one. And the sales have slowed. I mean, it is, you can't have, you can't have an infinite steady growth or whatever. You'll eventually reach everyone who would ever possibly want to buy a calculator and put it on an iOS device. Yeah. And then, well, no more sales for you. It was kind of like, well, let's do a thing. Let's see how this works. And it did very well. It's continuing to do very well. It'll pay for Christmas. But I don't have good solutions to all of these things because it's not like a lot of this stuff is absolutely essential. And if people are starting to see

everything going up in price, they're going to start to see, well, where are we going to make cutbacks? We're not going to buy the thing. We're not going to do this. Or we're going to wait for it to be on a deal, which was what I was counting on. And that kind of seems to have paid off. But yeah, making money is a funny old thing in this world. It is.

So what do you, when you're looking at that app and saying, like, I find it fascinating that it has sold as well as it has over time because it is a single purchase. And if I bought, so if I bought pCalc on the iPhone 15 years ago, I still get it, all of it, right? Yes. All of it. And I know you've got like a tip jar in there, but basically you do not have a model. You are continuing to keep it updated and it is your number one, I would assume, moneymaker for your business. And you do things differently and you don't have a lot of overhead and you work

out of your house and all of those things. But like, have we talked, we're talking about subscriptions here. Remember like this is the, why they do subscriptions. And I agree a subscription for a calculator does seem like a weird thing to do,

but at the same time, this is your job and you do need to make money on what you're doing. I think the thing is we are making the money. You know, like it's never been a, I've never been at the point where, you know, like I'm saying sales are down, but you know, they're down like say, You know, like I'm saying sales are down, but, you know, they're down, like, say, I don't know, 20, 30 percent from the peak of what they were.

So you still there is still an ongoing flow of people who say, oh, I need a calculator. And so you haven't explored or filled that entire gap of people. There are always people realizing they actually need a better calculator than what Apple has to offer. But you can see it slowing. Sure. Which is, you know, that is the, you know, you can see the universe expanding out and- Right. Record number of installed base and all of that, plus new people come in and they, or their needs change and they search for it. So it it's not going to steady state but it's also not like you reach the end and there are no more sales no no so you know if if that was what it was looking for then you know i would be like ah subscriptions they're great let's have those um but uh you know that that's the canary. If I go for subscriptions, things are going bad. But right now, we're making enough money to comfortably live, and you can do the maths on

how long am I going to live from this point? How much money do I need? Right. And you don't have investors who are obsessed with growth. You are doing what I think they call a lifestyle business, which is a little bit silly, but there it is. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It makes us enough money to have a comfortable life, and we don't have shareholders. We don't have anything else.

life and we don't have shareholders, we don't have anything else, we can just kind of like mangrathy our way through this whole thing and see how it goes. But yeah, I could make more money, but to a certain extent, why? Maybe I just have a nice business and people like me. Look, Lauren and I had this conversation this weekend that there are different sort of like choices and different career trajectories. I forget who we were talking about, but it came up the idea that in the line of work that I'm in and really the line of work that you are in, there is this question of like life work balance. And like, if I wanted to maximize the amount of money I make,

I would make some different choices. I would enjoy my work less and work a lot more. Yeah. And I could probably do that, right? I could launch new initiatives and have new stuff and, and, and do stuff beyond what I'm doing now,

drop some of the stuff that doesn't make a lot of money that I do because I enjoy it. Um, and, and focus it all. And I made the decision that I don't want to do that. Like that, that I don't want to,

you know, I, I, I've, I've been going the other way where I realize I'm working so many hours on so many projects and that I need to do less because not only will the stuff that remains be better, but I will also have more energy and that's part of the whole thing. So you do have that balance that you have to seek, but at the same time, you also need to pay your bills and all of that. Yeah, and I think that balance thing is something that certainly I've been thinking, particularly over the last four years or something. Because the last couple of years, I was pushing myself harder than I should have because I wasn't feeling particularly creative, you know, because the sort of global events going on around us.

And, you know, so it's like, well, you've got to be creative. You've got to be on the cycle. You've got to have your stuff out for when Apple has their stuff out and you've got to do all the things. And I kept pushing myself and pushing myself and effectively I burnt out and I was fed up and I didn't want to do any of it. And this year, what I did was I've done less. It's like I've done stuff. I did explore interactive widgets and dice and I've been doing things and i've been playing with vision pro things and stuff but i i don't want to say i did the minimum because i don't think i did the minimum but i did not like push myself where i was working more than was healthy um and i've kind of like i've had you know i'm taking a bit of a break just now you know i got got stuff out i've i've you know i did as i say like messing with vision pro things uh

but i'm i'm you know i think we need time downtime like otherwise and particularly i will say as both of us are in our 50s um you get to the point of like what is actually more important to me you know i i would like to enjoy my life i would like to you know not give myself a wide variety of chronic conditions that will continue until I die because I have pushed myself too hard on stuff. And so I think it's finding the balance of doing enough work. And work is also interesting because it is a creative outlet as well. But you want to enjoy it. And I think that's the thing. It's like, you know, we've talked to a number of people we know, you know,

like mentioning no names, but somebody who runs an awful lot of D&D. And, you know, said person was saying, maybe he's going to take January off from doing stuff. And I'm like, I think that's an excellent idea. Great idea. You know, have a break. Take a break. Relax. We all deserve it.

And that's a thing that you're doing for fun, right? And that's part of it too, is I know you have obligations and other people and all that, but you do need to regulate yourself and watch yourself. That said, I have a, well, I don't want to say it's a million dollar idea, but maybe you can tell me why this has never happened. Because one thing that strikes me is with pCalc being the way it is, you, and you play around with graphics and stuff, what you could do is add new features and ask people to pay for the upgrade to unlock the new features as a revenue source within PCalc. Most, I mean, the numbers don't change, right? Numbers are numbers. They don't really change.

So you can't say, oh, 2023, the new numbers are here. You need to buy the new upgrade for PCalc or you're using the old numbers, right? I get it. But people out there, kids in schools even have to do graphing calculator stuff. And that's not a feature that you've ever put into pCalc. And I've always thought like,

well, that's an obvious, I thought like 20 years ago, well, this is an obvious direction for James to go. And eventually, and you never have, and maybe you never need to, but it did strike me that if you, if you made pcalc also have a graphing function you would probably

be able to charge for it i mean there was the whole thing with the graphing calculator has been shipped on the mac for sure i'm a long time um and i don't want to step on Ron's toes, but I think that we will consider this. This is just between us. Nobody's listening. I'm not actually particularly excited about numbers. About math. Maths. It is a thing that people assume that I am like, wow, I must be really big on math. It's not the case. What I like is designing user interfaces for things. And that is what gets me up in the morning is I want to make a new thing. So for example,

Dice Apps. It's like, this is a completely different sphere of doing things. And it's fun to sort of like, well, how would the interface work for this? What would be the best way to do these kinds of things? And that is what is interesting to me rather than the actual numbers. I mean, you've got to get the numbers right. But James, numbers, graphs aren't numbers. That's the beauty of it is graphs are graphics and you like graphics. But you heard it here first. The Vision Pro PCalc is going to have a virtual full 3D grapher. Well, that is not a product announcement. No, maybe not. No, I'm just trying to guilt you into it. I get it, though.

I get it. You wanted to build an interface and build a product, and you built a calculator. And it has become your career career which is kind of funny yeah i mean it's not like i i'm i am now i am the peak out guy or the dice guy or or whatever like 10 years ago 15 years ago i was the drag thing guy right and uh i don't think anyone remembers drag thing anymore other than john syracuse. Who keeps trying to replicate it with his own apps. Absolutely. He does.

And I am, you know, it is one of those things that the curse is only ever truly lifted once you pass it on to somebody else. Yes. Um, and, uh, I,

I'm very happy for John and I support, uh, all of his, uh, efforts in this field. That's right. Well, yeah, I was going to ask you if you think, if John's continued effort to slowly rebuild Drag Thing one app at a time has only convinced you that you were right to stop. Yeah, I mean, it really has.

I mean, Apple these days is tightening up a lot of stuff. So, you know, back in the day, you could have an app that did anything at all. You know, you could hook into the lowest levels of the system and you could, you know, you want to like control an app in some way, you can do that. No problem. Nowadays, it's like, as you have seen, you get 15 dialogue boxes saying this app really wants to like, you know, look at the contents of your windows or control this or whatever. And it's getting tedious and it's getting locked down. And it's writing sort of system level utilities is like being in a war with apple and you know you just look at like the even the the audio hijack people the the hoops that you need to jump through when you first install that uh you know now now restart your computer hold down this button switch on this scary sounding thing and then you can install it and you know that that's one of the beauties of calculators

is they just exist and they don't have to do any of these things uh even dice apps is the same um i i don't miss that system utility space because it was just becoming hard. And you can ask John if you perhaps have him on a podcast at any point. A couple of weeks, maybe. Yeah, sure. And you can say, does he regret all his choices? Sure. Sure.

It's just every time he talks the the pain that he's going through and building those apps i just imagine i just like you appear uh like hovering overhead smiling happily in your retirement drag thing i feel like every time i still get i still get the emails like you know not often but like i will get an email from somebody who says, I just updated my machine to whatever system after Catalina or later. And drag thing doesn't work. How do I make it work? And I go, I'm afraid to tell you. You don't.

You don't. It's an X utility. Please check out these utilities from John Syracuse. Indeed. This episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by Notion. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects all together in one beautiful space. And navigating that space is easier than ever thanks to Notion's new feature, Q&A, an AI assistant that can answer questions about next quarter's roadmap, find that marketing campaign proposal you're looking for or dig up a long lost link all in seconds.

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Because he doesn't remember. And you're not going to look through multiple books in order to find it out. Let the AI do that. That's what they're for. You can ask those Q&A questions from anywhere in Notion. You can find out exactly what you need. You don't have to leave the doc you're in right now and then go over and then search.

It's not here. It's not there. You can stay focused in your document, ask the question, get an answer. It's't have to leave the doc you're in right now and then go over and then search. It's not here. It's not there. It's not there. You can stay focused in your document, ask the question, get an answer. It's even easier to do your most meaningful work when you can stay focused and all your data is secure. Notion AI is designed to protect your information. No AI models are trained with your information. The data is encrypted and answers will never use information from pages you don't have access to. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash upgrade. That's all lowercase letters, of course, n-o-t-i-o-n.com slash upgrade to try the

powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you will support the show. Notion.com slash upgrade. Thank you to Notion for supporting Mike and upgrade. Thank you to Notion for supporting Mike and Upgrade. Time for a very brief discussion of the Vision Pro before we go. I really wanted to get your thoughts as a developer about where we are. We're probably not a month out. We're probably a few months out from Vision Pro shipping. And I wanted to know, but before we get to the developer part, can we talk a little bit about spatial videos? Because I think you and I have both been experimenting with spatial videos.

We got a letter from Upgrading and Brandon about converting. There was an app that converts your spatial video shot on an iPhone to a format that lets you view it on an Oculus Quest, which I did. I think you did. What did you think of that? So I've seen a lot of fairly high quality video on the Quest. So I had an idea in my head. And I first did this and I just walked through of my apartment and I looked at it and I thought, well, that doesn't look very good at all. You know, it's a 2D video. It didn't really seem to add anything. And I did another test, which was to have my dear wife talking at me and I recorded her. talking at me and I recorded her. And that actually worked quite well because there was somebody close enough to the camera that you could get a sense of 3D separation from what's around

you. And it's fine, but it's fairly obvious. I mean, it should be obvious, but it's that's an interesting thing because you can like make a different choice to whatever the person right looking at so you can like look off in the corner or whatever and this isn't that you know it is basically it is a uh you know a rectangular or square or whatever video, but it has depth. It's like a 3D movie, effectively, like the kind they used to make for the 3D televisions. And I can see that, you know, it adds something to that, you know, to watching a video,

that you get this certain amount of depth to it. But it's not like you're there. I've seen some kind of fairly hyperbolic statements about how magical it is, and I'm just thinking, well, you've clearly never seen any decent 3D video before. Now, it may be that in the context of vision os they're going to do some more processing with it because we're not watching it in vision os and and they're certainly doing things like having the fuzzy frame and all of that uh which i think it's all there to kind of cover the imperfections in here and look they they're doing what they can with this it's

1080 at 30 frames a second and and it's not that high. So it's not that high resolution, and you kind of need to have it as a little fuzzy edge thing. All their demo videos, or at least two of their initial demo videos, including the ones that I saw, are a kid blowing out candles and people at a camp, like at a bonfire or a campfire, both of which are designed to have smoke in the foreground. And there's a reason for that is that you can see this. There's an element hovering in the foreground with a lot of parallax to what's in the background. And it makes you go, Oh, right. Like, Oh, it's a 3d effect. And in those video that I shot is very similarly. If there isn't something very close to the foreground, like I was walking past people or had people sitting in front of me that you could see the depth effect, but otherwise it, you know, you lose most of the depth and you end up with something that's just a, a 10 80

video to the point where I would say somebody asked, I, um, they said, I'm going out, uh, with this, with a beta, this is the sort of like a little backward details happening here. And should I shoot using these spatial videos? Should I shoot 3D video with my iPhone on this trip? And my thought was, you know what? Sure, if it's something where there are lots of people in the foreground or lots of elements in the foreground and nearby, and you're going to get the most out of it. Try some because they may be fun,

but honestly, if these are precious moments, especially if they're not stuff that really benefits from this depth go, you know, collection going on. I mean, you're better shooting it. I'd shoot a 4k.

I'd shoot it. Yeah. Frames like you're going to get, and I would take, I mean, take panoramas cause those look great too. They're still, but they're, they're beautiful and immersive. But like if you're shooting video right now, unless it's something that really is going to benefit from 3d at 10, 80, 10, 80, 30, I would, I would probably choose for to have a 2d 4k HDR, uh HDR and maybe 60 frames a second of that event rather than a 1080p30. And I think one thing that I don't know that there's an answer out there for is whether these things recorded on the Vision Pro are going to be 1080p30. Because, I mean, the Vision Pro literally has the ability to bring in all of reality around you oh those cameras are high resolution and they're identical and the other problem here is that the iphone has to crop the sensor on the one um because it's the wide the ultra wide and so the quality is degraded overall when you put them together i'll mention if you're

a six colors member joe rosensteel wrote a piece. It's subscription fatigue. You may not be. It's fine. But if you are, Joe Rosenstiel wrote a piece about this where he kind of broke it down in detail and said a lot of the same things we're saying here in that it's really interesting. And Apple is trying to get around some of the faults of it, but it really does have its limitations, especially on iPhone. And I think the most important information to walk away with is do not start taking every video you take as a spatial video because the quality isn't going to be very good. You're giving up lots of quality in order to get 3D effect. And you know what? Yeah. If you're at a birthday party for your kid and you want to take some of those videos in 3d, go for it. But I would say also then switch and take

a bunch of videos at 4k, um, and your preferred frame rate, because, um, those are going to look amazing in the vision pro two. They're just not going to have depth. They're going to look amazing on your TV. They're just not going to have depth they're going to look amazing on your tv they're just not going to have depth it's okay not everything needs to be 3d especially when you have to give up so much to get it yeah and i think that as you say like a 4k 60 hdr thing i think is going to look probably better even on a vision pro than the slight depth effect that you get from this. What I would like Apple to do is let you set, say I'm capturing, and I think probably they technically can't do it right now,

is I'm capturing spatial video. And the spatial video will only be at 1080. But since I'm also using the main camera as a part of that, I will also get a main camera video out at full quality in 2D. That's where it should go, right? Is you should have the maximum quality possible that you want, at least out of the good camera and a degraded quality video that's out of both cameras. But I don't think they can do that right now. Or if they can, they can't, like the amount of post-processing required uh it's not

worth it but like that's really what this feature should be is you shouldn't have to make the choice you should be able to shoot it at 4k in the one camera and then generate a 1080 out of it out of both cameras and stereo but the framing change i get that there are lots of issues there but like that's the ideal is you should not have to, users should not have to make this choice, but that's where we are right now is users will have to make this choice. There's people selling, you know, like these little 3D cameras.

I would like to see Apple do something that its entire point of it is to shoot spatial video. It's just a small thing. And, you know, it doesn't have to be. I don't think Apple even needs to make it. I think if Apple finds good partners who they can sell at the Apple store saying, here is a great thing to capture spatial video for Vision Pro.

And it works with Vision Pro, thumbs up, seal, licensing program, all those things that they are good at doing. I think that would be a great way. Even if they don't necessarily even have to make the product, they just need to find a partner who can sell that product. And I agree.

Although, again, your point, you mentioned that I brought a 360 camera to Portland when we did the Incomparable get-together and we played D&D. And there's actually a... I'll see if I can put it in the show notes because it's just public now. There's a 360 video we did on YouTube.

And if you watch that inside an Oculus Quest or whatever, MetaQuest, you're sitting on the table. You're like a very small person standing on the table while we play D&D. And you can just, and there's no director,

there's no camera angle. You just look around and see what people are doing. And that's immersive. It's 2D, but it's immersive in a completely different way, but still it's really immersive and interesting. So like there, there, there's not a single answer here. Like a gorgeous 4k HDR, 60 frames a second video is going to have a lot of feelings of like realism and you are there that a 3d video at 1080 is not going to have and a 360 video is going to have an immersion level that that that other uh video is not going to have so there's like there's no one right or wrong answer here

there's a lot of different stuff you can choose from yeah but i i would i imagine that is one of these things that is going to get better over time and you know this this is what they can do with the current hardware and if it becomes a thing you know like they could turn iphones into you know like very high-end uh stereo capture sure things sure i mean depending on on the technology and the price and all of those things, I'm sure they're discussing whether there's a future iPhone that has a much more capable,

like this is kind of a hack, right? I appreciate that they did it, but it is kind of a hack to get it to do this at all. And it's great that it does it. It is really cool. It's a cool idea because you're out and about,

you're probably not wearing a Vision Pro. Speaking of which, so as a developer talking about the headset itself, what's your experience been? What are your, what are your quick thoughts about sort of like where, where Vision OS is right now? So again, this is my, my standard canary that I do not have a Vision Pro developer kit. I know you were saying on previous weeks that some people are starting to get them it's unclear whether like the shall we say the smaller indie developer types or if

it's just bigger companies yeah yeah because i can imagine you start out with the you know like the disney's and the whatever and then you work your way down but yeah i don't have anything yet and it's i would say if you are building a complicated 3D app and you don't have a developer kit, it is tough. Because the more complex, the more interactions you're doing, the more distant the experience of using the Vision Pro developer kit, or sorry, the simulator is. If you're building a 2D stuff, like taking your existing apps, I think it's entirely doable. You know, there are still things to consider in terms of the interactions

because I've been thinking about this. It's like, you know, it seems like only yesterday, but 15, 16 years ago, when we were building iPhone apps in the simulator and nobody had an iPhone. It's the, well, I know how it might feel and I will build this thing. And then as soon as I got, like with Peacock, I got it onto an actual iPhone in my hand. I'm like, this doesn't work well like this. The kind of interaction model of you holding it in your hand and tapping on it, it's not the same as you clicking with your mouse

and moving a cursor around. And while the Vision Pro, there is a kind of effectively you're moving a cursor around because you're looking. It's not one-to-one. And I think, I mean, had I had the experience of being at an Apple November Kitchen, I think I'm allowed to say that I was actually, you realize that, yeah, you realize that, yeah, oh, this is different. There are things that are important that I'm not doing that just don't, it's not really an issue on an iPad. And I think there's going to be that the first run of apps is, there's going to be a lot of stuff where it's like to make an analogy it's like when the first catalyst app shipped you know you can you can you can take take the box and you can ship an app but is it the best app for the platform that you're going on and i think over time, people will kind of realize more what is important, what's not as important. And I think things will get better on that front. I mean, my apps are running happily. My apps ran day one. There's still things in them that I don't think are the best way of doing things.

Can you just drop bananas? Do they drop bananas out into the world in a random way? Are they in windows? Are you playing with 3D space, rolling dice in 3D spaces, having a floating calculator that looks like a calculator, stuff like that? So all of the above has been tried to some degree or another. I have thrown bananas in augmented reality. It is a dream that has happened. And I will tell you, those bananas look great. There is a certain amount of like, I've spent an unrealistic, not just bananas, the dice, I've spent an unrealistic amount of time making perfect little 3D models of dice. And to see those as a real thing, or as close to a real

thing as you can get, is pretty amazing. Because you move your head just slightly, and all the reflections on them change. And it's like, those look real. And it is a really amazing thing to see these things. It's like 3D printing it and putting it in front of you. But the question, like, so I think like the Vision Pro is probably one of the most impressive pieces of technology that I've used. Yeah, full stop. that i've used you know full stop um it's got so much stuff which is ahead of like other headsets because you know we've both got our our meta quests and things like that and it's way better than that uh i am still not a hundred percent sure what the use case is, which is a different thing. And I'm sure Apple is having

the same kind of thought. And I'm 100% going to do my apps for it, and I'm going to see where this goes. Because I think it is an extremely interesting space. but do I think it's a sure bet? No. But still, the technology is so cool and they've done so much with it. And even not just the technology, the software. The software is really good. The way that they've sort of adapted

the developer APIs into 3D and done things is very interesting. It just comes down to, I'm waiting to see the killer app for this thing. I don't think it's going to be a calculator. I'm not even sure it's going to be a Dice app, although the Dice app might look cool. But what is going to be the thing

and i think things will come but it's just a question of you know what will the interesting apps turn up enough turn up fast enough right for this thing yeah it's going to be an interesting year next year isn't it oh definitely i mean like i was quite glad the rumors are you know that this thing is probably not going to be january you know we're probably more talking march or something it's like that's good because what i'm going to do is i'm going to spend basically january and february and whatever of march working on this stuff because i think that that's my plan for the start of this year is to i mean i've been doing things but i'm really gonna sort of like uh take this make make the the best apps that i can at that point and that will be and then we'll see

where it goes uh and i think it'll be fascinating uh and maybe it's to be this amazing thing and it's going to find a place or maybe it's not. Maybe not. I don't know the answer. Nobody does. That's the beauty of it. Whatever happens, it's going to be a surprise and I think can't be predicted right now really because something will catch on or nothing will or it should be really interesting to watch. Yeah. And I think that's a good space for us to be in because we don't know what the answer is, and that's interesting. Well, James, it has been a pleasure having you on Upgrade

as a participant instead of just a listener and in the chat room, which you frequently are. Thank you for that, too. It is always a pleasure. It is always mildly traumatic to be on one of these flagship podcasts, but I try and it's always fun. We raised the flag today and it just had bananas on it. I don't know what that's about. It's a sign that you're here somewhere. He got to us. He substituted the usual upgrade flag with a banana. You can find James. James, tell people where they can find the things you want to plug right now. You can find James. James, tell people where they could find the things you want to plug right now.

Well, as was stated, if you act now, you can get Peacock and Dice at 50% off. If you go to Peacock.com, just follow the links there. If you follow me on, usually Mastodon is probably the place that people will find me at. And I'm James Thompson on Mastodon.social, Thompson without a P. And I'm also, I'm on everything else as well. And all their social networks are weird. Mastodon seems like the one that has got most of the tech people on it. Right. Doesn't have all the fun people on it.

No. But. Just living in a fractured world now. I'm stress panda on threads. Okay. That's very good. Of course, you can send us your feedback, your follow-up and your questions

at upgradefeedback.com. Didn't do any Ask Upgrade today, but it'll be back next week when Mike is back. You can also check out my writing. I am at sixcolors.com, podcast here at Real AFM, of course, over at theincomparable.com. Doctor Who Flashcast is back. We're doing, Dan Moore and I are doing For All Mankind on the NASA Vending Machine podcast with every episode, lots of that stuff going on.

That's that stuff that I do for fun and not for money, by the way, that I mentioned earlier, because it's fun to talk to my friends about stuff that I'm excited about. You can also find me on Mastodon, jsnell, at zeppelin.flights. Mike always says that I'm on threads. Really not. Not yet. Maybe not ever, but we'll see. And check out our videos.

We have a YouTube channel. We're on TikTok and Instagram. It's Upgrade Relay on all of those things. And we do often post the full show as well as some fun clips. And I know I've heard from a bunch of people who their preferred way to listen to podcasts is to have it playing in YouTube. And occasionally you glance over and see that there are humans saying those words. And we are working on that one. We're going to work on that one. Thank you to our members who support us with UpgradePlus.com. Thanks once again to our sponsors for this week episode, Memberful, Ladder, and Notion. And of course, as always, thank you for spending your time with us today. Until next

week, James Thompson, say goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, everybody.