Upgrade - 490: The Cat Has a Team of Lawyers

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 490 upgrade is brought to you this time by wild green and express vpn and i am your host jason snell mike hurley is on assignment he actually kind of is he kind of is on assignment this week, expanding his mind and learning things and doing awesome stuff. And so joining me this time for the upgrade program is returning after about a year since I think he was here the last time in December. As a guest, it is John Syracusa. Hi, John. Like a substitute teacher. A little bit.

Not your normal Mike Hurley. I'm a substitute today, so we'll probably just watch a movie. Class. Yeah, that's right. Take little bit. Not your normal Mike Hurley. I'm a substitute today, so we'll probably just watch a movie. Class. Yeah, that's right. Take your seats. We got to take attendance and then we can do whatever we want. That's right. You know, Mike actually listens to these.

He said last week, he really loves listening to episodes of podcasts that he's not on that he hosts because they're his favorite podcasts, obviously. And, uh, and yet there's one that he's not participating in and it is i remember flying home from new zealand listening to the two episodes well i listened to one on the ferry between the two islands in new zealand and then i listened to the other one on the flight home of the two that i didn't do and it was it was kind of like an out-of-body experience a little bit other than the uh the switcheroo that you guys did with rocket, um, or whatever it was called.

Have all three of you guys been on every episode of ATP? Yep. That was just the one, the one time we, uh, weren't all there. And I was the one who wasn't there. And you've never,

you've never had that thing where like, oh, well this week, I mean, I've listened since the beginning, uh, where it's like, oh, well, Casey's not here this week. Marco's not here this week. No, no. That's remarkable because we did the math about at the podcast-a-thon about how many times the three different connected hosts have missed.

And it's a lot. Like, it's actually surprising. surprising they definitely are living up to the idea that if you have a show with three hosts um oh you know only two hosts need to appear at any given time it's more of a two two of them are over there in europe or europe adjacent areas you know they have the whole thing where they get like you know three weeks vacation in august and just there's more of a relaxed atmosphere you know federico does actually i think think, take, you know. He takes on his thoughts. I don't want to go into any stereotypes, but you know. But he also writes an iOS review during that time.

So is he really taking the summer off at the beach? He's sort of taking the summer off at the beach to write a voluminous review. But it still counts. I think it's very impressive that you guys do that show. I know sometimes you bank an episode here and there in order to get it done. But I usually only offset by about a week. Like that's the way we do it. If one of us can't make it there, we shift it forward or back.

And it's usually not a whole week because that week we have a regularly scheduled show. So we have to have the second one after the regular scheduled show. I think the worst we've ever had it is like a maybe a two day gap between episodes. So we still try to space them out. But yeah, we haven't missed one in 10 years. No, I'm very, I'm very impressed. I tell people that, that consistency is an important part of podcasting because you're creating a subscription relationship. And you know, if you're, if your thing that comes every week doesn't come, people are

unhappy about that. They really kind of bank on the consistency. And with, with you guys here, I am on this weird episode where one of the two people who's usually here is not here but until i went to new zealand i think i had never missed an episode of upgrade i had even like recorded pre-recorded segments for episodes i missed on vacation in order to just be there and mike finally talked me into it he just said look you don't have to be on every episode so okay said, okay. And I'm on this episode, which as people already have known, while I drink lots of tea, I completely lost my voice on Saturday. Well, not completely. Half the words came out.

The other half did not. But it's coming back and I'm here drinking tea, taking names, talking to John so he doesn't have to monologue on someone else's podcast. We usually start with a snell talk question i got two questions in that are sort of i'm going to point the spotlight at me but then maybe point it back at you because you have opinions about things we do in fact a new robot or not episode over the incomparable came out today so if you enjoy me talking to john and john talking to me, we do a silly podcast about stuff on every other Monday. Basically, it comes out on The Incomparable. So maybe you can tell me what you think about this. Brian wrote in to say, Jason, when pouring milk into a bowl of cereal, do you pour all in one spot or move around?

And if you do move around, which do you move, the milk or the bowl? Well, Brian, bless you. I've never thought of this at all, but I will, I will say that when I put milk into a bowl of cereal, I pour it all into one spot. It's generally the center. And, uh, I'm surprised that you're asking about moving the bowl around because I think the big question with cereal is how much milk you put in. Cause I think, um, my goal, my goal. Okay.

We'll get, we'll get to it. But my, my goal with the bowl of cereal is to get enough milk in that. First off, it's not dry. And second, at the end,

there's very little milk left, maybe even no milk left, but the stuff that's still there is still, um, still milky. So that's, that's sort of my take on it is if I, if I really nail it,

I used to have a cat who, who, um, who, who drank the, the cereal milk at the end. And then I'd put a little more milk in cause he, he actually liked that.

Um, but, uh, bad for cats. Some cats, maybe not. I mean, he,

he liked it. Some cats like it. Some cats don't like it. I think they like it. I'm just not liked it some cats like it some cats don't like it i think they like it i'm just not sure it's good for them i don't know he was he was our retiree adoptee as it turns out we didn't realize how old he was so really he was at the point in his life where we should just give him whatever he wants and and he would sometimes he would come up to the milk what am i gonna get to that and he'd be like sniff sniff and he'd be like oh no and he'd walk away and other times he'd be like, sniff, sniff. And he'd be like, oh no. And he'd walk away. And other times he'd be like, yes, please. I want that milk right now. I don't know what his opinion was. So what am I missing here about cereal and milk, John?

Oh, so the big question was cereal. And this is going to sound ridiculous to you, but it's in the category of secret weird things is a milk first or cereal first. You just assumed cereal first. People just assume whatever they do is a hundred percent normal. They didn't even think of it do you realize there are people who are putting milk in their cereal first milk in the bowl first well cereal on top of it so i this is like the tea debate right which is do you put the milk in into the tea first and then the tea or do you put the tea in and then the milk and in england i'm told there's actually some classism involved in that like upper crust people think that the

which is funny because it's hard to find something in the uk where classism is in that like upper crust people think that the which is funny because it's hard to find something in the uk where classism is not yeah i well no this is absolutely true but i think it's funny because we think of tea as english and americans think of tea as being like fancy and english is fancy people but the truth is there's like builders tea that the builders do and then there's fancy tea and so it's all it's all fine uh it spans it spans is what i'm saying but apparently one of those things is like oh you're not doing it right you're putting milk in first you shouldn't you're a real milk in first kind of person and it's all but a cereal floats right like that's like that's like putting so that's that's the question about this you know like it seems it seems so strange that it would done the

other way but the question is hey where do you put the liquid in? So first I'm going to say that Brian may not have been paying enough attention in chemistry class when you went over the properties of liquids and solids. Usually what they teach you in high school, do you remember what they say about liquids? To tell you what a liquid is? No, what do they say? Takes the shape of its container. It's on the test.

You've got to write that off. Just check off the option that says it's a liquid because it takes the shape of its container it's on the test you gotta write that off okay just check off the option that says it's a liquid because it takes the shape of its container okay so no matter where you put the milk in assuming there is cereal already in there but even if there isn't cereal already in there the liquid is going to shake take the shape of the container and the shape of the container obviously if it's empty it's the shape of the bowl that it's in but if there's cereal in there it's going to go in between all the nooks and crannies of the cereal no matter where you put it in but the second question you were getting to is, okay, but what if the cereal floats? Yeah.

Because now as you're putting liquid in there, the cereal is moving because it starts to float. That's why you have to have different amounts, different rules sort of for filling things based on how much you know the cereal floats. Density of the cereal, right. Yeah. And that happens when you put the cereal in. When you put it in the bowl, if it's a floaty cereal, you can't put as much in because as you put the milk in it's going to rise and then the cereal is going to

spill over the edge before the liquid gets to the edge you know it's true yeah i have precise amounts for all different kinds of cereal brands and i know how high i have to put the milk in my bowl and unlike you my goal is not to be done with everything at the same time my goal is to have a little bit of milk left because i like to have the second little helping a cereal to get rid of the milk that's left because one bowl of cereal is just not quite enough with the size of my bowls. Oh, interesting. And no, I don't move the bowl or the pour around. I pour on the edge so I can see better and I don't move the bowl or the pour.

And the thing that my daughter does with cereal, which drives me just up a wall, is the final question you didn't ask which is hey when you're doing this with the milk and the cereal where are you doing it she does it on the kitchen counter she put she puts the milk and the cereal in the bowl on the kitchen counter and then carries a bowl full of milk and cereal sloshing as she goes into the room where she's going to eat it yeah that's not right do it and do it at your place setting where you're going to eat it you do not want to be carrying a bowl of cereal and milk around. All right.

So I got some notes here that you're going to really love. One is, um, the cereal that we have in the house, which I don't, Lauren eats it every day. I don't eat it every day, but I do eat it.

I have it occasionally. I like, I like some cereal with milk. Um, it's floaty. Um, sometimes we'll have raisin bran, but usually it's this Kashi stuff and it's good.

Um, and I have it and it's a treat. Um, it's floaty. Kashi is not that floaty. It's flakes, right? No, no. These are little, these are little hearts and circles. It's the Kashi.

Oh, their puffs kind of like Cheerios. Yeah, exactly. So, um, floaty cereal, what you want to do is put the cereal in and then use the milk because what you want, the cereal is going to float on the milk, right? So you want the milk stream to kind of pass through the cereal. Cause then what I want ideally is cereal that has been touched by milk and has absorbed maybe a little bit of the milk, but is not going to get super soggy, super fast so that I can kind of mix the milk and the cereal together while it's all still a little crunchy and a little milky, which is, I think, ideal because once it gets soggy, it's, I think, no good.

So that's part of the reason I think that I put it in there, although I think there's some spoon technique too, where you've got some milk and you've got some cereal and you have them together. Anyway, but John, here's the thing that's going to blow your mind, which is, it leads into our second half of the Snell Talk question, which is from Anthony, who says, Jason, you drink your morning tea in bed? The answer is, yes, I do. And I eat my breakfast in bed, which means if it's cereal,

I will pour the milk in the kitchen and carry the bowl sloshing around with milk in it, John, all the way back to bed and sit in the bed and eat the cereal in bed. Do you have a little tray thingy that goes in your, or are you just holding it in your hand the whole time? We have trays i do not use it i am holding you must have deep bowls the entire time i can't imagine they're not like stoneware they're not they're not super deep but i will say i'm not filling them to the top right like that would be a bad idea yeah yeah and i do drink my

tea as well in bed um i am my stomach is, sensitive enough now in my old age that I have to eat something before I drink tea, which makes me sad, but I have to, I have to eat something before I drink tea in the morning. Um, I, and, and if you're wondering milk in first or not, the answer is I don't put anything in my tea anymore. I used to put honey in my tea. Um, but I stopped even doing that. So I just have it straight up.

Um, although there's honey in it now because I'm trying to have my voice not disappear during a podcast. So thank you, Brian and Anthony, for your Snell Talk questions. Just a reminder, if you love Upgrade and you would like more of it, don't forget. You can subscribe to Upgrade Plus and get the no-ad version with bonus content every single week, as well as access to the Real AFM members, Discord, and a whole lot more. Special deal finishing this week. If you're an ATP listener, you'll know Casey especially will beseech you, don't put it off. Final, final, underscore final version of this plea is happening right now. This only lasts until December 15th. By the time

the next upgrade comes out, this deal will be over. But if you've not been an Upgrade Plus subscriber, you can get 20% off the annual plan. Just use the code HOLIDAYS2024 at checkout. Go to getupgradeplus.com so you'll get your first year of Upgrade plus for $40. Find out more at give relay.com. We have a little bit of follow-up, which I know you enjoy John, although you weren't on this previous episode, but you were on an episode that did a similar thing. Basically listener Taylor wrote in chuckling. I think the whole time saying, so beeper mini upgrades Monday schedule means you guys got to see the entire lifetime of this product play out between recordings looking forward to hearing your

thoughts yes beeper mini the i message for android that came and went between episodes might come again it's possible i when i like quinn nelson who does such a great job with youtube videos he's one of us he's not kind of like in the in what we i think a lot of people think of as the inner circle of apple commentators or whatever but trust me he he is he's very good at his job uh snazzy labs youtube channel he did a whole video where they actually got him access and they explained to him how it worked and it's great. And the whole time that he's describing how it works and how, how, uh, it, it uses Apple's existing technology in order to do this and why that, that was going to mean that Apple couldn't, uh, couldn't break it because it would not only look bad, but it would,

it would break things that Apple already has in place. And I thought the whole time, I thought, you know, this sounds like a great story, but I'm sure they're really confident in it. And they told it all to Quinn very confidently. But it doesn't mean that the high school kid who figured this all out didn't miss one little thing that allows Apple to pull a pin somewhere and help the whole thing fall apart. Because they're very confident. It's like, no, no, no, it's all using standard stuff. And, um,

I think maybe they believed that, but the danger there is that, you know, what they see on the surface is not everything that's there. Um, I also had in the back of my head, the idea that just because Apple currently uses the system, it's entirely possible that Apple has alternate methods that they could slide in.

You know how when they replace a bridge, they build the bridge to the side, and then one day they shut down the traffic and they slide the old bridge out and slide the new bridge in? They have the ability to do stuff like that, too, where they actually have some stuff ready to go and they can flip a switch and go to an alternate method. But that was part of their confidence. to go and they can flip a switch and go to an alternate method well but that was part of their confidence they were like well but if they change this they'll break older devices because if they have that parallel bridge it would presumably only be in newer versions of the os you know what i mean and so they're like well apple can't apple can't break us because then they'd be breaking all their old devices and they're not going to do that but like the fact that they listed it all apple wouldn't do this because it would look bad shows either they're not being honest or they don't understand apple it's like is apple really like you think it would look bad but let me

tell you the history of apple doing things that other people were angry about but that they did anyway right and then the second thing is like i don't i don't understand what their technical foundation for thinking that they couldn't break this without breaking old devices was because they said an atp the the root problem here is uh how does apple uh figure out whether something that is connecting to one of their services is allowed to right and the of the allowed to rules are pretty clear if you asked apple they would say apple devices are allowed to use iMessage and they sell lots of devices and those things connect but the root problem is okay but how do you tell that this is an Apple device? And Beeper was like, we found a way to make Apple think we're an Apple device. That's great and all,

but you're not an Apple device. And so you're not really using the service the way Apple intended it to. And the way they're getting it to work is say, well, we have some credentials that are from a legitimate Apple device, so we're just going to send them. And even though we are not that device, we're going to pretend to be. That's trivially easy for Apple to stop because they'll just find out whatever credentials you're using and stop you from using it unless you're the device that was using it for the 10 years prior or whatever,

however old the device is or whatever. And that just starts a game of cat and mouse. It's like, okay, well, we'll find different valid credentials. Okay, we'll do this. And that cat and mouse game, I don't think Apple wants to play it for a long time, but they can play it forever.

Apple has more money than Beeper. Don't get in an effort war with Apple, right? This just in, John, the cat and the mouse are continuing to play the game because our chat room just sent a link saying that Beeper Mini now works again, but only if you've got an email-based existing Apple ID, not the phone number registration. So they've taken that part out of the equation and they're like, no, just use your real Apple ID. And so, okay, Cat, I guess, it's back in your corner. The mouse has responded.

The Cat has another thing. The Cat has a team of lawyers. And like I said, it's back in your corner the mouse yeah but the cat the cat has another thing the cat has a team of lawyers and like it's not an atp apple can play the tech cat mouse game forever and they will win it but they also have another game that is much easier and faster to win which is hey you're not legally allowed to connect to our servers and use our service if you're not an apple device uh so especially since beeper's trying to make money off of this it's probably pretty easy to send a bunch of lawyers and say, yeah, uh, you know, cause there's gotta be something in the terms of service that you agree to when you get an Apple idea that says you're only allowed to use Apple services, Apple devices, like that's in the legalese somewhere. I'm sure. So they can just lawyer the way out of this as well.

So there are many avenues to shutting down this business. The idea that the company thinks that they're going to be charging their customers $2 a month and build a burgeoning business and Apple's just going to look the other way just seems highly unlikely. Well, so I have some understanding of the idea of it makes Apple look bad in that Apple is under pressure in a lot of quarters, especially in Europe about iMessage. But you're right. The Apple's track record is, first off, they make a lot of things that they do low-key and they just say, it's a security issue we fixed, because security is a priority for our users. And they just do it super basic. And also, their strategy with a lot of these regulators has been to push it to the limit and say, not compromise, but instead be like, no, of course we had to do this. you know uh not not compromise but instead be like no of course we we had to do this that this is not opening up iMessage on Android this is some company hacking our systems and that that is you know look somebody in the EU is going to use this as an example of Apple being you know

right they're diligent in closing their system it'll be in a document somewhere a politician will mention and all of that but it is consistent with Apple's behavior to basically be like, well, no, this isn't an example of anything except some other company trying to hack into our system. And it's not even hacking. It is straightforward, unauthorized use of network service because the use is not authorized. It's not like hacking, like they're exploiting a security flaw or a buffer overflow or whatever. They are pretending to be an authorized thing but they are not an authorized thing and that i feel like is just so much much more a legal policy thing it's like look you're not asking anybody else who runs like whatsapp or any of

the other things to say oh and by the way you should allow completely unauthorized applications to use your network no no one makes that argument so apple is on very firm footing saying regardless of the antitrust things or whatever you can't make it a requirement that we allow anyone who can figure out how to communicate with our service to use it because that's not how anything else works like there's not a burgeoning market for third-party wechat and line clients that are 100 supported by those companies at least as far as i know but either way like it's a policy decision based on the network do you have a network that's used for instant messaging would you like to allow third-party clients or are you going to look the other way at third-party clients or are you going to be like we know apple's going to be is no if we're not supporting third-party clients for i

message you don't get to use third-party client with i message i know you can get it to work but that's not the terms of service that you agreed to when you sign up for an apple on it or whatever anyway the the adventure continues i guess uh taylor and maybe the entire lifetime of the product is not yet over but i don't know it's entertaining to to watch it but um that's that's it i the fact that they charged for this product that i i don't know i i appreciate this happening i'm i feel sorry for everybody who spent you know money or is uh working at beeper about i mean like this this feels like a doomed thing i don't quite know why they're doing it yeah unless they're hoping like apple would say oh we we finally decided we're going to make i message randor but we don't want to bother making the app so we'll do a deal with you where you charge two lawyers a month and you give us

one dollar and 80 cents of that you know like there you could make legal deals and say okay we're allowing this particular third-party client to use iMessage on android and it's a financial deal we worked out because we don't want to develop it ourselves but that's not an aptly thing to do and they haven't decided to do that so trying to sort of just wing it and be like we're going to get away with it you know what is it like you know better to ask forgiveness than permission well apple is not forgiving in this scenario and they definitely didn't ask for permission no well the challenge with better to ask forgiveness than permission is when you're dealing with somebody who won't ever give won't ever forgive and will never give permission. That's the challenge. And that is absolutely Apple here. One other item, Mike and I do this details thing about betas.

The state of my voice, I don't think I can do it, but it's the details. Oh boy. Wow. That was bad. Okay. I did the hoo-hoo. Anyway, final versions of iOS and iPadOS 17.2 and Sonoma Mac OS Sonoma 14.2, I believe shipping expected ship anyway this week. Um, I just wanted to close the book on that a little bit.

That journal app for the iPhone is going to be out. The spatial video recording that we've already, you know, talked about and written about on the iPhone. you know, talked about and written about on the iPhone. Uh, so you can record 10 80 P 30 videos in stereo based on two sensors and then watch them later on the vision pro, um, is with, and there's a big asterisk and footnotes and things like that, but that, that will be there. Um, the thing that I've complained about for a while now, the sticker reply and messages, my feet, my feedback, uh, ticket got closed, John, as being fixed in the latest beta. And so I'll just point out my feedback was very specific, which was your stickers cover the text of the messages. And a couple of betas ago, they fixed that.

You still can't tap back to get to emoji stickers. You have to tap and hold. Heard from a lot of people who didn't even know that you can double tap on a message to do a tap back which is why it's called that but surprise you can but you can't do this other part of it through there you have to tap and hold and then choose and the sticker picker isn't very good and i don't know like i don't like the implementation of it but i gotta give it to them the sticker doesn't cover the text now it goes just below and the second sticker if there's a second sticker added, it also, it goes on the other side and doesn't cover the text. If some rascal in your instant messages decides to add a third sticker and four sticker, well, then everything's getting covered up and that's just how it is. covered up and that's just how it is but yes they did fix the sticker reply in the beta so that if you do a sticker reply with a any sticker especially an emoji sticker it doesn't actually

cover the message that you're responding to which was really dumb so thank you i i what i said somebody on on mastodon asked me about this and they're like well how do you feel now and i'm like i mean they took something that was an f and they made it like a C or a C minus. Like it is usable now. I'm still really disappointed in how they built it, but I am glad that they at least made it usable and not covering the content of the messages before they shipped it. So that's in there. Hooray. It's so weird.

Like you've said this many times. Everyone has like, it's so weird that they didn't do the obvious thing so long ago which just allow you to use any emojis a tap back like setting aside the sticker thing so that but that like when they're embarking on doing the sticker thing didn't somebody raise their hand and say you know what before we start talking about stickers can we why don't we just make it so you can use any emoji as a yeah yeah but like everybody else like i kind of like there's there's reasons you can come up like why didn't we do this to begin with well you know it's a network thing and i only have to send a small amount of information tell you which tap back was but if it's an emoji i have to send the

emoji character and not every receiving device might have the update on all the emojis i might show up as a weird thing on devices that aren't on the os and like like yeah i know that's why you don't do it in version one but by version whatever the heck we're on now it's time to do emoji tap backs and then once you have them are sticker tap backs or sticker thingies really that important like maybe that can wait until later but instead they did it the other way they did tap backs then they didn't change them forever then they added stickers and did them badly and still don't know emoji tap backs my feeling and this is i've heard second hand that there's some truth in this but i don't actually know directly is that there was a big argument about this inside apple and you know my

impression is that tap backs are very specifically were built a very specific way they've got animations attached to them and all this stuff and and and i think the argument was probably something like but if we're going to make every emoji a tap back, we either have to degrade the quality of our tap back animations and all of that, or we have to build a bunch of animations for everything else. And there was this whole argument of like, no, you don't. You can just use Slack and Discord. Just let me put an emoji there. It's a foolish consistency. Like, allow the tap backs to be what they have always been.

And people will understand the emojis are different difference top backs are monochrome like it's not even a visual confusion thing it's like you've got your standard tap backs that do what they always did and you can pick from any emoji and no one's going to be like oh i can't believe the emoji thumb doesn't animate like the monochrome one it'll be fine i swear right like people will not be confused by it it's a it is a consistency that does not matter. No. And I, I, I think ultimately in this, again, I don't know this for sure, but I have heard some suggestion that it may have some truth at least is, um, it sure seems like there was a tap back crew that didn't want their tap backs kind of like messed up by emoji. And then, and then what got implemented instead was, well, we're not going to let you mess

up our tap backs, but we'll give you this sticker thing almost out of spite or at least out of like we don't want to build we don't want to break our beautiful thing and we've got the sticker thing lying over here that nobody really uses so we'll just we'll just do that we'll make emoji stickers and call it a day and and they're already animated stickers in 17 so there's like a whole like it fits with other stuff but it's the wrong decision which is why it's like a c minus because it doesn't cover the content, but like it's a whiff in terms of what they should have done, which is literally just let you tap and choose any emoji. And I know that the space is very limited, but like add a second line, do most recent, uh, have a tap that brings up the emoji picker outside of the basic. I mean, there are lots of ways that this could have been built to do what literally every other messaging system does, which let you reply with whatever emoji you want. And they didn't do that. But at least it doesn't cover the content.

Bare minimum, before it was like it was punishing you for using the stickers, right? Like, see how you like it. You want to put that shrugging guy in there? Well, fine. Everybody else will be shrugging because they won't be able to read what you're shrugging at. Ha ha. Take that you. And they fixed that part.

So great. But like do better. It's still not very good. It's just, it's just disappointing, but it is not actively bad, I guess. I don't know. And I don't think the, these, the tap backs team made the stickers team cover the text. Like that was their own thing. Like, you know was their own thing. There's no reason for that in this whole drama over should we do emoji Tapax, but there was never any pressure or impetus to cover the text with a sticker. Someone just decided to do that and it talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Collaborative playlists in Apple Music was removed from the last betas. So the idea that you can invite your friends to a playlist, not yet, apparently. So anyway, check that all out. Everybody's going to be getting updates probably this week. You can do some journaling. I've had the journal app since the very beginning. week you can do some journaling i've had the journal app since the very beginning um i like how it's built but it took a while for things to even show up sort of in the journaling app i mean

it's beta i get it it's not it's not an app for me but i do like the idea that apple is building it based on an api so other apps can take advantage of the sort of like what have you been listening to and what have you been doing and like i like that that isn't completely walled off but they're just sort of like building an api and then building an app that uses the api that part's good but it's just you know it's not ultimately going to be for me i'm not a journaler i'm sorry yeah it's it's good to see apple still doing that i talk about that all the time in atp i don't have a good phrase for it but the apps that are uh built on libraries and apis um that's it's it always amazes me that apple has ever done that and continues to do it but they do i mean they can do it badly

we'll see how the journal app goes but think about things like contacts calendars photos it's hard to believe today if you think about today's apple that those things are actually databases with apis that allow us to have third-party clients and apple ships first-party clients for all of those things and it has not destroyed the market for third-party clients and it has not made apple make its first-party clients work it's just been a win win win win but it seems like anytime you talk to apple about this type of stuff they're like that's not their first instinct it's like don't you see how great it's been to have apis and public databases for things like contacts and photos and now journal like it's it's so good for everybody you don't have to make every app on in the world

third parties can make it you can have a a healthy third-party ecosystem even though you make a default good bundled app with the phone right this can all work you should do this all and i know it's harder to do this than to make a proprietary app but they should do this all the time for anything remotely important so i'm excited to see them do it with the journaling app obviously it depends on the quality of the api if the api and everything is such that you really can't make a good third-party app or if the first party app is not good for whatever reason and it's hard to make a third-party good one as well like it can go badly but this should be their first instinct especially on the phone where it's so hard to do anything else because it's just it's too it's too useful to have public access to to those databases through apis yeah and i don't know if

it's all there right like i don't know if spotify uses whatever api is required for like here's the music you were listening to or if that only works with Apple music, but. Oh no, I'm sure Spotify just ignores the Apple music library, but there are third party music clients for. Right. That's true.

And I don't know what I API it's sniffing in terms of what you played and if it's the Apple music API or something else, but the idea is at least there that they're trying to build this stuff and, and, and have it be accessible to third parties so that, you know, another journaling app also gets to have access to this. And that's, that is not, I mean, I sort of assumed that wouldn't be the case,

but I do really like it because what they're doing then is they're saying, here's the thing we think should be on our platform. And we see the people like these apps, but we have the ability as a platform owner to do a little more and collect more information and use that. And we think that would be cool. And you know, the day one people can't do that because they're not the platform owner. And then there's that moment where it's like,

so we've seen a need on our platform and we're gonna write an app that's gonna be a typical Apple, like appeals to 80%, but not 100% that uses that API, but that anybody else can use that API too. That's how it's supposed to work, right? I think ideally it becomes this thing

that is an example, helps them build out the API and understand how it's supposed to work, right? I think ideally it becomes this thing that is an example, helps them build out the API and understand how it's supposed to work, and will be very useful for the, you know, people who are not going to seek out a journaling app, a third-party app necessarily, just like notes or calendar or anything, right? Like it's good enough. And that people who want more will seek out an app that does more. And yeah, I think this is a pretty good example of that. So, but I'm still not going to use it probably because I'm just not journaling. You forgot the most important 14.2 feature.

Oh, yes. They fixed my window dragging bug. Oh, yes. Well, of course. A little fallout from ATP. They fixed, well, fixed. Little tiny asterisk, right? They fixed the bug as reported.

Because I reported that if you log in two users on my system with my set of hardware and software, and you open 25 text-edited windows and you try to drag one of them around, it's super laggy. And it's not super laggy anymore. But as I said in ATP, now that I know, now that I've plumbed the depths of

window-dragging performance on macOS, I do know that as you added the depths of window dragging performance on macOS I do know that as you add more windows things get worse so fixed for 25 but then I went farther is it fixed for 100 is it fixed for 200 and that's really a separate issue and the bottom line is it's so much better than it was that I doubt I will encounter this problem in real world use I was definitely encountering the problem of real world use when it happened to me at 25. So now it's been pushed way out to the edge. Yeah and I think actually it doesn't get worse with multiple users logged in anymore either. So whatever that thing was it doesn't matter if you have more than one user logged in anymore. And it was also related to the

the polling rate of the peripheral and if you're using a USB wired mouse versus a Bluetooth one. It was a very complicated situation, but I gave them so much information. I'm glad they got around to fixing it. Hopefully I will never have to see this again. This episode of upgrade is brought to you by wild grain. The first ever bake from frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, fresh pastas, and artisanal pastries. Every item bakes from frozen in 25 minutes or less, no thawing required. They sent me a wild grain box that had bread in it. It had some, uh, some desserts in it. It, uh, it was, it had some pasta, some fresh pasta that was then frozen, but not dried.

And it worked great. You know, you pop that loaf in, it's not dough, it's a loaf, but it's not all done. I, I don't even know how to explain it. Basically you pop it in the oven and it comes out and it's like fresh baked bread, except you didn't have to make the bread yourself. You didn't have to get out your, you know, dough hook in your mixer or whatever. You could just take their bread, pop it in, and then boom, on your table for dinner, fresh baked bread, pasta. Similarly, drop it in the boiling water. And it's like it came out of a bread maker or bread, not a bread machine, pasta maker, pasta machine kind of thing.

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So get any combination of breads, pastas, and past pastries that you like we got a whole big assortment different kinds you like seeds on the outside do you not you choose uh if you want all bread you want all pasta all pastries you can have it and you can get 30 off for a limited time of your first box plus this is adorable free croissants do you want some free croissants? They're in every box. When you go to wildgrain.com slash upgrade to start your subscription, that's right, free croissants in every box and $30 off your first box. When you go to w-i-l-d-g-r-a-i-n.com slash upgrade, that's wildgrain.com slash upgrade, or just use the promo code upgrade at checkout. Thank you to wild grain for supporting upgrade and relay FM. John, it's rumor roundup time.

Yeehaw. Uh, uh, Mark Gurman in his newsletter. See, we, we have this, uh, advantage advantage by being on Monday of getting to talk about Mark Gurman's Sunday newsletter when we, on Monday morning, when we do upgrade. And, uh, he is talking about the, uh,

the year of the iPad. Cause this year was no iPad. So next year is all iPads apparently. And some of this he's reported before, but he's kind of rounding it all up. There are new iPads coming around March, he said. I don't know what that means. February, April, I guess, or around March, but probably March-ish.

A new iPad Pro that will be slightly larger in 11 and 13-inch configurations. They'll have OLED. They'll have the M3 processor. And they'll have a new accessory a new magic keyboard which german has reported about in the past presumably will be sized to fit just these ipad pros that's going to be one that's got like aluminum more of a laptop feel uh sort of like even more differentiation for the pro line and then then separately, the iPad air will be updated to the existing sizes. So presumably using the existing magic keyboard and things like that,

if you want, and the M two processor. And then later in the year that we'll get the new base iPad and that home button iPad will die. And probably the original pencil will die at that point. And, and then later there will be a Mac mini or an iPad mini bump as well. Um, any thoughts about future iPads?

I am very excited about the OLED iPad pro because my main use of my iPad is to watch TV shows and movies and the black levels on the current crop. Cause I don't have one of the mini led 12.9 inch ones, the black levels on the current crop, because I don't have one of the mini-LED 12.9-inch ones, the black levels in the current crop of, you know, where the backlight is always on behind every single pixel, are not great, especially since I watch them in the dark at night in bed a lot, so you really see that lack of black levels.

I am super excited about that. I hope that it is a good OLED and not one that I'm going to cause massive burn-in on by using it. But we'll see. The phones have had OLEDs forever, and they've been pretty good in this regard. But yeah, I'm getting one of these. I don't care about the M3.

I don't need any of that stuff. I just want that sweet, sweet OLED screen. And again, I skipped the mini LED on the 12.9 because that size is a little bit too big for me to have on my lap as a TV screen with the distance I keep it from my face so i'm excited about that and then as for the setting aside me personally yeah the whole ipad line needs to be uh rationalized they're not really rationalizing it all they're doing is taking a step forward along all the lines like for i think they're getting what is it they have the ninth and the tenth generation ipad that are out now and they're going to stop selling the ninth and they're going to have the tenth and the eleventh it's like you're

just it's just more of the same it just yes they are finally pushing the the home button one off the end of the lineup but they're it's not a change in strategy they continue they're going to continue to sell these weird assortment of things with the weird assortment of devices they're just progressing all of them forward which will be good because hopefully the pro will have the camera on the landscape edge and everything that the other one got so there'll be some rationalization there but really they're just take all the lines and move them all one step forward as opposed to 23 and 3 which was not really moving a lot of lines forward at all but i wouldn't call it like a rethinking and it's not like oh now the ipad line makes sense no they've just taken the existing

lines and move them forward which is good they should do it but i really wish like the ipad line suffers the most from the uh whatever you call that atp the real tim cook doctrine which is uh if you make a product just keep selling it until people stop buying it which uh is probably good for business but it's not good for making sure that all of your product lines make sense right not really inspirational the ipad pro i keep thinking since it's oled and m3 that they'll probably get more expensive, although that doesn't always happen. Having a little more price differentiation between the Pro and the Air is probably okay, I think. Saying, no, no, these are really Pro. And adding OLED.

The OLED is going to be quite a differentiation. The device is basically just a screen. So that alone, setting aside the M33 which i don't think matters that much for ipad people the oled versus non-oled is going to in my opinion widely separate the air from the pro yeah yeah i think so um i have the 12.9 inch micro led um it's good like it's way better looking it is people complain about blooming it's like yeah if you've got a very small point source way better looking it is people complain about blooming it's like yeah if you've got a very small point source you're going to see the fact that the that the micro led doesn't have it's not a one-to-one you're going to get a little blooming around it but it does look really good like it is

a major upgrade but it's not it's not going to be oled like yeah the test i always use for things like that with blooming it's like oh i get a little blooming around a little a black element but it really hurts you when you have like a star field because then basically every single backlight is on because there's always at least one star behind it that's supposed to be bright and when every single backlight region is on then you've just reverted to the non-dynamic backlight again yeah oh and the irony is of course that the show that i watch the most in bed in the dark at night is star trek because yeah uh, that drops at, at, uh,

11 PM Pacific. The new star Trek shows generally drop around then. And if I'm awake, then I will just watch it right then. Uh, I don't do a lot of TV watching on an iPad in bed, but I do with that one. Um,

that's how I end my day, I guess. And then I started with cereal and tea. Uh, I guess, uh, the M three MacBook air is now around March as well. And then I started with cereal and tea. Bad, yeah. I guess. The M3 MacBook Air is now around March as well, according to Mark Gurman, which is, I think, I don't know if that's a new date or not. But the M3 chip is out there, and if it's going to come to the iPad Pro, putting in the MacBook Air is probably a good idea. Yeah, the weird part of the dead things is you're kind of probably a good idea kind of do the weird order that did things

this year kind of took some of the wind out of the sail because one of the benefits of the other rollout uh order which is you put your chips into the lowest end products first you put you get the low-end chips first and you put in the low-end products is that it gives these products their time in the sun so if they had rolled out the plain old m3 first and it was in the air it's like okay well we're not that excited about the air but it's the first one to get an m3 generation chip right and then the pros and the max would come later this year they didn't do that they did m3 m3 pro m3 max all at once and not in the air yeah and so it's kind of overshadowed by its more expensive siblings it's like okay and now the air gets it too it gets it late it gets a chip that's already in other stuff you know then it's just kind of like okay it's good it's a better

MacBook Air but it never gets that moment in the sun of being the the first uh you know product on the M3 generation right at least I mean this is a speed bump right presumably the the specs aren't really going to change beyond the chip at least not not very much. They did the redesign with the M2. So it's a less exciting update anyway. And it is Apple's best-selling laptop. So, I mean, it's great that they're going to be doing this. We had an email, well, it wasn't an email, a feedback from upgradefeedback.com from Tyler, who asked,

when the M3 chip is released and pushed across the MacBook air and MacBook pro product line, what happens to the M one MacBook air? Would they put an M two into it and drop the air from the name? I don't know, but I, I'm really curious about what happens to the MacBook air if they do an M three MacBook air air because i feel like that m i'm not sure the m2 macbook air is going to be discounted at amazon to 7.99 right i feel like the m1 macbook air although it is old and cheap it's also still really good and i'm still great i i'm a little curious about are they going to have three of them are they going to not sell the m2 anymore but continue to sell the m1 what do they do with the ipads they we have how many low-end ipads do you have all the ones that we can continue to sell i guess the limit is two you

will have the ninth and tenth generation right once we pull out the 11th okay the ninth will get pushed off but that's my question this is the third generation would you get rid of the m1 air at that point i think they should get rid of the m2 and sell just the m1 and m3 yeah right because the m3 like it's not that big of a change over the m2 that like eclipses it or anything but once you have the m3 like i don't think like i think you're right they're not going to discount the m2 so like the cost of materials in that computer uh the soc is not like the thing that's driving the cost of that computer right especially since apple is his own chips they don't have to pay margins to Intel or something like that.

So changing from M2 to M3, it's like, well, now we can discount the M2 because why? It's cheaper to build? No, it is not really that much cheaper to build. The M3 is surely more expensive than the M2, but by how many dollars? By not enough that you're going to care. So I would say drop the M2 and keep selling the M1. And you can keep selling that M1 until like it is is a bad computer it is not currently a bad computer the only thing that that um i would say about the m2 air is the m2 air is going to be cheaper because they've been

making it for a year but what but what but what parts are cheaper like the case we assume is going to be the same the screen is the same you know what i mean it's just the just the soc but generally they're all going to be the same. The screen is the same. You know what I mean? It's just the, just the SOC. But generally they're all going to be a little bit cheaper because that's what happens to Apple's products over time is that when you, when you get them on the production line, they cost more than they do after they've been on the line for a year, year and a half there. They, that's how they kind of claw back.

They talk about it in their quarterly calls. Sometimes like a brand new system doesn't have the margins, but they're not looking at the margins of the system on day one. They're margin looking at the margins over years and the margins get better every day is my impression. But the thing is, like the materials and the manufacturing aren't that different. You do have to pay more, especially when you're first assembling it. Like, OK, well, we have to get the kinks out of the line and make sure everyone knows how to put the components in. And the components in the M3 MacBook Air are a little bit different than they are in the

M2. But things like machining out the case and assembling the display and like if that stuff doesn't change, the M3 MacBook Air is also benefiting from the reduced expense because they've been stamping together those like the thick of the lid, the top part of the thing. I'm assuming that's going to be literally identical. So whatever benefits they got of streamlining that manufacturing also apply to the MacBook Air.

So what happens is that you get higher margins on new products. Very little is going to be different. I mean, maybe it'll be different colors. I don't know. But like, yeah, very little is going to be different, which means the M2 and the M3 aren't going to be that differentiated anyway. So why do you keep the M2 around? You can't discount it down to where the M1 is.

I think, yes, if I had to choose one option i would say the m2 is replaced by the m3 and the m1 remains in the lineup which seems bizarre this is also my pet theory about all those rumors about a a low-cost macbook is is that that is that is going to be the macbook maybe even se and it's going to be basically something like the m1 air's replacement because they can't sell the m1 air forever there has to be a moment and if the m2 air design is just not it's going to take years for it to be something that they can sell for that price then they might want to have something else that they tweak that they put down there and it might be essentially the m1 air with a little bit of a processor upgrade and some other changes to make it more

affordable to make i don't know about that but but yeah i do i i if i had to guess i would say the m2 is just going to disappear and be replaced by the m3 they'll have refurbs and you know like you'll still be able to get it but it's not like things ever drop off the face of the earth but like it doesn't seem like it's worthwhile for apple to continue selling that for a hundred bucks less than the m3 it's like who who cares that's just sell through the rest of your inventory sell the m3 and and i really i don't i do wonder the m1 versus the m3 right yeah those are both unibody aluminum cases with screens inside them keyboards keyboards and and batteries and like like in terms of manufacturability it's not like they did something new with the squarish case that is it

seems to me radically more difficult or expensive to to manufacture than the old one they're different looking but if anything you might say the m1 case had it actually been new which of course it wasn't is more fancy and expensive because of the taper and just how much that makes the packaging more difficult. The new one, once it has, you know, hit its stride in manufacturing, is boxy and straightforward. And like, what's less expensive about the M1 other than the fact that that case is ancient and has been around forever and then using the M1 SoC? Maybe the screen is less expensive than the m2 one but i i do wonder if you made a low cost one like wouldn't you want to put it in the boxy case and not in the in the in the the weird tapered one so i don't know i don't i don't know where all the cost goes but i

feel like the way the apple way to make a low cost macbook pro is to make the m4 or macbook air rather is to make the m4 macbook air have a much better screen and now anything without a much better screen is the low cost one yeah whether or not it is less expensive or just where they just raise the price of the macbook air i don't know but yeah what i'm saying is how do you get the cost out of these laptops it's a unibody aluminum laptop with a battery and an soc and a tiny motherboard like how do you remove cost from that right what what is where is their cost that is wasted oh we'll put an m2 instead of an m3 how many dollars do you think that saves you 10 15 like for apple's cost you know what i mean like that's not saving you a lot of money so it is it is a bit of mystery of course you could lower the you could make a low cost one by lowering

margins but apple's not super into that no that's not going to happen. No, absolutely not. Gurman also reports that the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro probably won't get upgraded until the end of 2024 at the earliest, if not 2025, which I think is a little bit of a bummer. I suppose that says something about

how many Macs they can change at a time and also maybe about the status of the ultra variant of the M3, assuming that that exists. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think, cause again, I don't think there's much they have to do to change, uh, either of the, well, for settings on the Mac pro for the studio, it's not like that case is too old and needs to be revised or isn't fitting needs. The studio case is fine. Everything in that the computer is fine. The only question is what do I put in it put in it where's the ultra i mean they could do a max studio now if they just put a max in it but they're not going to do that right so and the ultra the question with the ultra is can they economically make that with their current n3b process that they're making everything with

or do they want to wait for the next more economical process from TSMC and that seems like it would have to be the long pole we're not going to make an ultra until we can make it on n3p or n3e or whatever uh and that's not going to happen in time for you know the end of 2024 at the latest therefore that's when the Mac studio comes out which is probably fine it's a little bit embarrassing that some the m3 max like laptops can outperform the like the m1 ultra and some things but the m3 ultra is still kind of hanging in there so yeah that's that's that's fine and i think this is another sort of weird side effect of going three nanometer in that it has sort of changed how things are rolling out uh once three nanometer is

more mature for the m4 generation hopefully there won't be these weird cadences and big gaps. But, you know, we talked about this in ATP before. If you're trying to look for patterns in Apple's rollout of Apple Silicon for Macs, there's not a great precedent. Every year has been a little bit different for explicable reasons. Like, oh, this is the first year, and this year must be the way they're going to do it. Oh, but actually in the M3 generation we have three nanometers so every year there's been something to explain why things are not expected or normal or like the previous year and uh that may continue maybe m the m4 generation

will be the first generation where apple gets to have the cadence that it wants and then maybe the m5 generation will be the same as the m4 but m3 is not the same as m2 which was not the same as m1 you play with cutting edge chip uh fabricating techniques and you everything gets a little messy that's fine i mean it's fine honestly i feel like apple just is in such a good position with the mac right now that you can just shrug this stuff off right i think there was an era where things were tough and you're like oh why that why is there not a new mac that intel did this thing and all that it's like you know what like you just said which is yeah the laptops are faster than the

m1 ultra and some things but the m2 ultra is still great and like that's how i feel about the whole line is like sure i i'm a Mac studio user. I'd love to see the Mac studio updated sooner rather than later. Although I don't think I'm going to buy one, but, um, but it's fine. Like in the end, it's just, it doesn't feel as pressing to me because okay. M3. Yes. But M2 and M1, like it's all, it's all pretty good.

I just, I don't feel that way. I mean, the Mac pro is the one sore spot because they, that computer still still is they feel like not separating itself enough from the studio uh and that's certainly not gonna happen no like it's in this in this generation when we do get the m3 ultra it seems like it's just going to be like the m2 ultra and you know status quo the the m the m3 mac pro will be just like the m2 mac pro which will be a mac studio in a massively larger case for people who need those card slots uh which is not great as far as I'm concerned, but I haven't seen anything in any of the rumors that makes me think that is not going to be the case. So pin your hopes on M4, M5, M6, M7, pick an M. Yeah, more future Ms. One other little tidbit from Mark that I've heard from a bunch of other

sources too, is that Apple is gearing up for training its retail employees on how to sell vision pro. And the way that they're doing it is they're having basically, it's like, um, it's like model UN, um, sort of, uh, the, my impression is, uh, every store is sending a representative, one of the employees from the store to Cupertino where they're going to do a two day training in January, where they're going to learn how the mothership wants all of retail to sell Vision Pros, how they're going to demo it, how they're going to explain it to users, how they're going to presumably like measure your head, get you the right seal, all of those things. It's a two-day long, according to Mark, training in January.

And then they will all return back to their stores with the details for everybody else. But they want somebody from every store present in Cupertino to learn about this. And on top of that, Gurman says they're still hoping to sell it before March, which is interesting, uh, that they were hoping for by the end of January, but, but it may slip, but before March, so maybe February that comes before March, but, um, but it's still probably a moving target. So the two days of training, I think, I, I mean, obviously they have said, and there've been reports before they really want the uh store experience to be the primary way that people buy vision pro not just

like pressing some buttons because there is there are fit issues and stuff like that so it sounds like they're investing in employees here yeah if you let people buy this site unseen it's going to be a bad experience for everyone involved including apple who's going to have to deal with all the returns and modifications and even in store speaking of this training i'm just thinking of maybe because i'm old now but i'm thinking of how difficult it's going to be even in-store to give customers a good experience of picking out and configuring their vision pro because so many people so many of their potential customers do not have perfect vision which means you're now entering the realm of tell me what your glasses prescription is oh i don't have that on me well try these lenses oh

do you have an astigmatism which eye is different than the other like you know what it's like to get to get glasses it is a it's not a complicated process but it is a process and getting that part of it right has such a profound effect on the customer's satisfaction with their purchase. Because if you get it wrong, they're going to have eye strain, things are going to be blurry, and it's not so straightforward to get right. And so I imagine a lot of the training has to mean, yes, there's the fitting to your face and adjusting the straps. So that I feel like is tractable. It's like fitting in any kind of retail environment. Let's get this garment or this piece of equipment to fit you. But lenses the glasses thing that is something usually when you're selling a product you don't

have to deal with please give me some of your medical information that you probably don't have on you but that is crucial to your enjoyment of yeah yeah and i i wonder like apple wants i would assume apple wants the retail experience to be, maybe they don't, but like the idea of, of, uh, you walk out with the thing and you're happy and you can try it out and you can't wait to begin. I do wonder if this is going to be, is this going to be more of a star Wars action figures coupon in the box kind of thing where you're going to come in and you're going to see a demo and you're going to get measured and you're going to have a website to send your prescription to or whatever. And then you get to wait for it to show up there were rumors

that like how many different prescriptions are they going to have like available right you know what i mean like oh you can leave today kind of like how many configurations of macbook do they have right you can leave today if you want the stock one or the big one like they usually have a couple of configurations um and it's kind of like contact lenses. If you've worn contact lenses, you'll know that contact lenses do not come in all the different prescription strengths that you can get glasses in. Because it's a manufacturing problem. There's just too many

variations, right? So my glasses prescription, if I look at my contact prescription, it's not the same. Why? Because they don't make it that granular. They make, you know, half steps or whatever. They don't make every single little step. Whereas when you get glass you know lenses ground for your glasses you can get any prescription they want because they're going to grind it for you right and so whatever sizes that they whatever lens prescriptions they have if they have any in stock in the store

that they can give you it is not going to be as granular as it could be will apple offer precise prescriptions for the things if you're willing to wait as a sort of bto type of build to order option or will they not and say like contact lenses you're negative three you're negative three and a quarter you're negative three and a half like you can only go by 0.25 increments and if you're somewhere in between there just pick the one that's closest right yeah yeah and there was one report, I think maybe from Mark Gurman, about how one of their challenges was going to be to stock the lenses, right? Because you could do that, right? You could literally have, here are the lenses that we cover in store and we keep them in the back and we, you know, you wait over here and like you said, you, uh, and then get them out of there with it.

It's going to be, it's going to be a challenge. I have full faith that they're going to be able to succeed in this challenge because every time I feel like Apple has tried something ambitious with the store, they have, if not succeeded, they have figured out how to make it work because they're highly motivated and they're very good at doing their retail stuff and the places where in like the apple watch like they they had to adjust that over time and be like well this is not actually how it's how it's going to work so i think i think they're motivated to do it but it's very clear that retail is going to be a centerpiece of this um and and i think for good reason i i you know know, James Thompson in our Discord pointed out, you know, MetaQuest, just you ordered online. I ordered mine online. But then I also had to go to Zinni Optical and put in my prescription and order those inserts separately and have them show up.

And it feels like the Vision Pro, they don't want you to use glasses with it. Whereas you can use glasses with it whereas you can use glasses with the meta quests um you you're i think they really don't want you to use glasses with vision pro that they want them that it's it's not really designed to work that way yeah i don't know if they'll even fit in there and like ordering online by the way like it's easier for people to get their prescription then because there's no like hey i've arrived at the store but i forgot my prescription when you're in your house, maybe you have access. You can go into your filing cabinet and find the prescription or you can call your doctor.

Like that is actually easier if you find it. But of course, you order it sight unseen. All that fitting stuff can happen. And yes, you know, I don't think there's going to be at least as far as I'm aware now that there's going to be any kind of difference in the product that you receive. as far as I'm aware now that there's going to be any kind of difference in the product that you receive but the act of someone who knows what they're doing and has some experience presumably the retail people will eventually fitting it to you showing you how it should fit is the thing that can only happen in person and the great thing about the vision pro when it launches is it's $3,500 not a lot of people are going to buy these it's too damn expensive so it is going

to be necessarily a boutique experience for a small number of early adopters with a lot of disposable income hopefully that will give them time to get the kinks worked out before the affordable one arrives like next year sometime yeah the um i did see a demo this is actually how they did it at apple park for wwdc which is uh they scan your face using the basically the face id dot scanner thing there's an app and and they try to use that to size your the light shield for it now mine was uncomfortable so i i actually don't know if they did it right or not and they said that they didn't have all the sizes that they were going to have but this is this is a great example where i'm sure that if you need to do it sight unseen that there's a way you can do it but it you're buying this expensive

thing right like having somebody who has been trained in Cupertino or has been trained by somebody who was trained in Cupertino who has seen a lot of people come into the store look at your face and look at the thing and say oh you know you actually want this one and like that's valuable right like an actual human being to be like oh i figured this out and so that when you walk out of there you actually walk out of there with something that you don't have to turn around the next day and come back and say i get a giant headache using this i think it's the wrong one right like that is that is part of it as you said, this is a very expensive product. So having that boutique service kind of makes sense, at least upfront. And, and, you know, I always, whenever I talk about vision pro, um, especially

when I'm talking to people who don't know a lot about it, like not in our direct sphere, I keep trying to explain part of what Apple's doing here is trying to learn. Like, they don't know this is the first time they've only been doing this inside they've learned a lot on the inside i'm sure but like that classic line of battle plans not you know they work until they meet the enemy at which part they fall apart right like this is the meet the enemy moment for the vision pro is how does it work in the world with people with stuff we haven't anticipated and that can go for like software developers and it goes for users and it goes for users how they use it and it goes for users like their faces and their heads and the shape of it and have you you know did you make this work or not and and like it's all going to be a learning process in retail how does that work they're going to take their best shot but like they're

going to have to learn on the fly too uh i i every time i talk about vision pro i get excited too. Uh, I, I, every time I talk about vision pro, I get excited. Cause I mean, it's a cool product. It's a very cutting edge product. I enjoyed my 30 minutes with it. I don't know if it's going to succeed or not, but I'm excited that Apple's built something this cutting edge and I'm excited that it's going to be out in the world. And I, I think whatever happens is going to be really interesting. I don't know if it's going to be again, a success, a failure, something that muddles along for a little while, but like it's sure. I mean, next year it's going to be, again, a success, a failure, something that muddles along for a little while. But like, it's sure. I mean, next year is just going to be really interesting.

That part I am sure of is it's going to be fascinating to see what happens there. Unfortunately for the early adopters, part of the learning experience you described involves people getting a thing, getting it fit as best to their ability going home with it and realizing they don't like it and bringing it back and that iteration cycle of which customers that i sent someone had the face shield and it didn't fit right and i gave them the smaller size and all the people i give the smaller size came back and told me they have headaches so i should give people like that learning process like the customers are part of the learning process unfortunately so well they'll all learn together together and hopefully converge on something. So maybe by the time, again, the most expensive one comes out, the learning process that happened involves a lot of people with returns and dissatisfaction and, you know, picking the wrong size.

And I remember when they first did the watch band thing, I was like, oh, if you want an Apple watch, you have to make an appointment so one of our people can fit it to you. And that was on your wrist for crying out loud. I was just going around your wrist. But it's interesting to look at where they are today, where it's like, they don't have that process anymore. You can just go into the store and buy a watch. And yeah, you can still try them on, but it's not like you have to make a fitting appointment. And the other thing that's important, and Apple will hope this will happen, we'll see if it really will, is people know their Apple Watch sizes now. I get this size band in this style. I put the

thing in this hole. I get this size watch. People who have bought lots of Apple watches, they know this about themselves the way they know like their jean size. If this product is successful, the face shield consternation and the prescription stuff will sort itself out. So when people are buying their fourth one of these in seven years from now or whatever, maybe they'll already know, I know I want the G size face shield and I need this strap. And when I get the prescription, I should get them like this. That's if the product is a success. That's the ideal case. But that really has happened with the watch. I know my wife has had an Apple watch since the beginning and she gets a new one very often and she knows all her specs. And when she goes

to buy one, there is no complicated fitting process. It is very straightforward because she knows what she wants. So fingers crossed for that actually happening with this. But those early adopters, they're going to figure it all out. It's tough out there on the cutting edge. This episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. If you're looking for something new to watch during your holiday downtime, this ad is for you. Maybe you've already watched Home Alone too many times this year. Impossible. Maybe you just want to change from the usual. ExpressVPN is an app that lets you change your online location. And if you use Netflix, that means you get a whole new library of content because if you didn't know, Netflix has different shows and movies in every country. For example, let's say Mike is really enjoying

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Thank you, ExpressVPN, for supporting Upgrade. Upgrade. John, last week I wrote an article about default apps and it was prompted by a listener, I guess, or a reader, somebody who's posted on Mastodon and they said, What do you recommend? I'm probably going to get a new MacBook Pro. What do you recommend for apps and i i hadn't really thought of it in that way because i kind of assume that so many people especially who listen to us or read my stuff are going to be migrating from an existing mac and they've been using the mac a long time but this person seemed to be very much like i'm starting from scratch what should i do and i thought that was an interesting exercise into the sort of end of year here are my favorite mac utilities or my apps of the year and all those things that I tend to write

Dan and I tend to write those on six colors every year thereabouts um and then I stopped myself because I went on this little journey where I started to think okay somebody was coming to the Mac who doesn't have a whole history and a bunch of utilities that they rely on and wants to know how to get started and I was kind of taken aback because as I walked through this approach, I kept thinking Apple's default is pretty good. And that maybe you should start with Apple's default. And it used to be back in the, and you remember this back in the early days of OS 10, right? Like I would immediately install some stuff every time i went to a mac that was brand new or

like we had a we had a macworld expo we had like a game show where um you competed at various computing tasks uh against another team which was it was really fun but like the first thing that i did when the clock started was install launch bar right like i like i need my things and i realized that over 20 years 20 plus years apple has actually done a pretty effective systematic job of having like the basics covered like i used to have to install launch bar but spotlight is way more functional than it was back in the early days. And it's a good place to start. And then if you want more,

you could get launch bar or any of the other launches that are out there. Alfred Raycast, Quicksilver. Um, and, and I just was thinking about like, yes, eventually you are going to want to have a different backup solution that includes offsite backup,

but time machine is there. Start with that. You could, you can get, if you, or if your company requires you to have something like Dropbox or, or box or whatever, sure. But you could also use iCloud in the meantime. And, and I, I ended up actually kind of struggling to think of what, what gaps Apple has left kind of untouched. And the best I came up with was clipboard manager,

which I feel like Apple has left clipboard untouched other than the iCloud clipboard sharing, which only works for me a fraction of the time. I, I feel like the clipboard is untouched since 1984. Um, I don't know if you have any thoughts about like, where are the,

where are the places where, um, again, not saying that the utilities aren't great, like if somebody's just starting out like the idea of exploring like you use calendar you may i use fantastical but like you could start with calendar calendar's fine and then you can decide if you want more than that and then there's an there there are other apps you can use this um journaling app on the iphone is like that's not on the eye on the mac yet but it will be eventually um so what do you think about obviously utilities are great we have them you

write them but like the the clipboard manager and actually window management which does fit into something that you build utilities for those seem to be the two places where apple's sort of like yeah i don't know what do you think well there's two strains of this when I first saw this article and first saw that title I thought it might be about uh the this first one that I'm going to describe which is uh within the community of people who are you know tech enthusiasts and especially have been using Macs for a long period of time there is a cycle a boom and bust cycle where uh some of them will sort of fill their computer with uh customizations and system level customizations and things in their menu bar and uh apps that

they use instead of the default apps and they'll do that because that's what you do when you're a tech enthusiast and they'll reach a point where they're like you know what i've gone too far i have too many icons in my menu bar too many of my things are customized. Using a Mac without them feels too alien. And they get into a minimalist phase. Marco's done this a few times. He'd be like, you know what? I'm just going to use the default Mac the way it is. Because that way, I've eliminated the setup process.

Because I get a new computer every eight months. And I hate having to set it up. And so now I'll just get used to the defaults. And it saves a lot of time. But someone who's new to the platform, that's not going to be their experience. They haven't gone through a boom and bust cycle of adding crap to their Mac. They're a clean sheet, right? So that's not what your article was about. It was not like, hey, I've added a bunch of stuff, but I realized I've gone too far and prepared it back. This person's saying, I'm starting from zero. What should I do? And I think that what

you wrote is definitely true. And the of it you know the thing that comes with the suggestion to start with the defaults is the idea the thing that we experience as tech enthusiasts is that either we don't want to or shouldn't be responsible for supporting someone using a new third-party thing so say someone is like, I'm new to the Mac, what should I use? And you say, oh, you should use this, this, this, this, this. You're kind of on the hook now to help them figure out how to use those things. How do I install them? How do I deal with updates? How do I pay for this? How do I deal with the fact that I'm using a non-default thing, but sometimes the default thing will appear and how do they interact with each other? And that's not really

a support burden you want to take on. So I think tech enthusiasts learn, don't suggest all your favorite weird programs to someone who's new on the Mac because it'll be confusing to them. And do you want to be answering

their questions about that? Like, and you know, how does one password interact with keychain? And how do I, you know, why is the keychain not working Chrome? Well, previously, or even just getting the new apple extension to work in chrome how do i deal with that it's like it's like you get to the point where like i don't want to deal with that but

really setting aside your support burden people should add things to their mac as their needs dictate maybe they don't care about the same things that you care about and when their needs dictate like you know what i've been using the calendar app but it doesn't do this thing that i want to do and if you know for a fact that fantastic how does it at that point suggest fantastic how yeah they will adopt fantastic how and they will figure out how to incorporate it with the rest of the calendar stuff and how to deal with it were like at their own pace they will they will have ownership they're like i had a need i was dissatisfied with the default calendar i asked a friend for advice on which calendar i should use

based on the features that i want i went and purchased and downloaded and installed fantastic how i figured all that out i figured out how disk images work whatever the things they're figuring out like they did that for this one app there's one custom app that they made they picked everything else is stock but now they're using Fantastical. When they overcome that hurdle, they feel like they have a sense of ownership about Fantastical. They solved the problem they had for their Mac. And they need to repeat that process over the course of many, many years before they

get to the point where we're all at, where we have 17 different apps that we know that we like and use. There's no shortcut. You can't shortcut them by saying, let me save you some trouble. Get Fantastical, get LaunchBar, get that. You're not skipping them to the end. there's no shortcut you can't shortcut them by saying let me save you some trouble get fantastic launch bar get that like you're not you're not skipping them to the end you're giving them some suggestions they haven't even told you what their needs are and they do not have all the knowledge necessary to wrangle all that so much better for them to sort of demand page uh to use a computer

analogy the things that they need as they need them. And it doesn't mean you serve no role. You're there to say, hey, if you're looking for an alternative web browser or alternative calendar app or a different way to deal with your photos, I have options.

I have advice. I have things to suggest to you, but let them come to you with that suggestion. And the one thing you picked is like clipboard manager, like, oh, that's an essential one. I know why you feel that way.

I feel that way too. I 100% agree. It's ridiculous that they haven't incorporated yet, but I'm not entirely sure that someone new to the Mac realizes that's a gap. And that is the final thing that I'll say on this topic is sometimes they will never come to you and say, boy, I wish I could have clipboard history because it just doesn't occur to them. But it may be that once you show that to them, they're like, oh, I can never go back just like we all are. So there is a place for you to suggest things that people will never ask for,

but in moderation and selectively, right? And maybe pick just one. There's that lack of imagination where I've absolutely had this where I've said to people, where they're like, oh no, this happens a lot in my house where Lauren will be like, ugh. I'll say what? she she yells a lot at those things she's like stupid computer or knitting or whatever she she's vocal about her frustrations i'll be like what happened because she's using the computer i'm like okay maybe i can help and and i end up with uh oh i copied this thing and then i copied something else and i and i and that's that moment where you say we should put a clipboard manager or actually in

that case i was like i already installed launch bar on your computer uh many many years ago and she uses launch bar and i'm like oh did you know launch bar is actually saving your old clipboard you say what or i've had that with people where they're like what what there are utilities that let you keep your clipboard history around so you can and like yes and they're very useful and i i feel like that is also a uh a way to think about this the the thing that unlocked for me in in thinking about this issue and writing about it is this idea of like if you're at apple because over 20 years this has happened while i wasn't kind of paying attention to it as much because i had replaced a lot of the

things that were missing in early versions of os 10 and they filled in the gaps a lot more which was an interesting realization. But I also am fascinated by the idea that if you're Apple, you're thinking, what's a way for us to improve the fundamental Mac experience in a way that is not too complicated for regular users,

but that regular users may not know that they want, but that they'd find valuable. And when I use that approach, that's when clipboard history bubbles to the top for me, because I feel like that's a pretty great win to say, oh, did you lose that thing

that was on your clipboard? Well, you can do this, whatever that is, and see the last 20 things that were on your clipboard and get them out of there yeah clipboard history is the menu bar clock of 2023 like it's just so obvious everybody has it's so lightweight and there's such an easy way to add it to the operating system without messing with anybody you can even have it off by default like multitasking was multitasking off by default i forget on the ipad but anyway you can have it off by default because it is

technically maybe a security concern you You know what I mean? But just, it's there. Everyone wants it. Everyone uses it. And the keyboard has changed. At some point, it'll save your bacon. You'll be like, oh no. Like, aha. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right? And then I started to think about, like, could you use iCloud for it?

Would that be interesting to have it? Certainly, could you? I would love it on the Mac as a default, but I also thinking also ios could have that feature please because i miss it so much on ios people can't add it to ios like yeah that's right only apple can do it yeah well that's i mean only apple can currently do it it's criminal that only apple can do it well that's true although there are i believe there are clipboard history things for ios that uh use some strange technique to get around it like they use the share sheet or something i don't know i believe they do exist but it's just so cumbersome this should be it should be a lesson

this is why ios and ipad os have been held behind because one of the important vectors for evolution of mac os has been third parties extending the system and then apple realizing that extension is essential and adopting it i use the menu bar clock as an example it's a real one they used to not be a clock in the menu bar that was a third-party app for classic Mac OS. And Apple said, you know what? That's a good idea. We should make that part of the operating system. And the rest is 40 years of history.

Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, window management is the other thing that I thought of, which is I know that Apple keeps, I mean, you know, this having spent so much time, you and I have logged a lot of time in the Mac OS 10 development trenches over the last 23 years and every version and i wrote the mac world features and you wrote those rs reviews and all of that uh apple keeps throwing window management systems in there right like oh sure here's a new one uh maybe this one will work and they've done little bits of cleanup behind the

scenes like snap little like real subtle like snapping against edges and things like that that they've done over time as well but when i think about like all the window management utilities that are out there that are are more directly like put this over on the side or or tile these or whatever and and and microsoft has tried a lot of this stuff too that's another thing that it strikes me it's like yes there are window management things that apple hasn't tried yet on the mac and i wonder if they could do something there but honestly that's about all i could come up with where i felt like there's total green space i don't know if there are other things that you think where apple's like could really improve the default life of mac users um with with some new functionality that was the best i could

do on the window management, though, I feel like maybe that's, I would take a different approach to that because as you mentioned, Apple has added so many things to macOS since the dawn of macOS 10 related to window management. They've only ever essentially removed one of them,

which was spaces in two dimensions. Do you remember when spaces used to be up, down instead of just left and right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It was like a grid. That is the only one that they have backtracked that they're all still there and all right yeah they just keep adding them right and for the most part they're complementary uh like they added stage manager did they get rid of mission control no did they get rid of spaces no did they get rid of window snapping no like did they get rid of the

zoom box no there's everything they have ever thought of and i guess single window mode with the purple dot but that was the only in beta right right right so given that and given that i think all the things they've tried there's somebody out there that probably likes them and they're mostly useful i think people who like two-dimensional spaces probably miss it but i'm gonna say the same thing i said when i was on mpu which is we are at the point with window management on the mac where apple the the best thing apple can do is make public apis sufficient such that a third party could have implemented stage manager you know what i mean like stage manager is apple's attempt to do a window thing but we're at the point now where they've added so many different things and still some people are like well i would like to, well, I would like to be like this. I would like to be like that. It's time to make an API, make an API, public API that apps in the

Mac app store sandbox doesn't, you know, like, like real officially supported safe apps using public APIs can do window management things. And that doesn't exist on the Mac. There are third party apps that are outside the Mac app store that try really hard using private APIs to do cool stuff like that. But that's not a great solution. Those apps tend to break and Apple frowns upon them and they, you know, they're not great, right? If you made a third-party API to influence window management at the fundamental level, at the level of moment to moment as a thing is being dragged, have awareness of where all the other windows are, what's in them. And, you know, I understand it's a privacy concern and like they can see the contents of your windows and blah, blah, blah.

Like it's not easy to do, but they've done so much with window management. This is the only viable next step to really solve this problem once and for all, because, because of all the things that they've made, everybody is like, nah, it's good. Maybe I use it. Maybe I won't like third parties, third party opportunity, let a million window management apps bloom right now. It's amazing that people have gotten by with all these window management apps with the tiny sipping straw that they get to use to access stuff. And by the way, most of them don't work through it with sandbox apps anyway. It is such a grim scenario on the Mac.

I mean, it's worse on obviously the iPad and iPhone when there's nothing. But on the Mac, the the things that you have to do, the private APIs that you have to discover from decompiling things or looking at header files to figure out how you can figure out which windows are on which screen and what spaces they belong to and what apps own them, let alone be able to manipulate them, let alone to be able to get the contents. It's just such a nightmare to do that stuff, which totally precludes anybody, any third party implementing something like Stage Manager. But if the APIs existed for implementing stage manager, A, Apple used them to implement stage manager. And B, everyone who has a better idea than stage manager can make their own idea and try it out in the market. And then we might converge on

something that is better than Apple could then fold back into the operating system and the lifecycle continues. Yeah, they a uh a real journaling app thing there right and say oh we're we built these apis that are open now and we use them and you can use them too i don't think that's ever going to happen um are there do you see any other empty spaces where you think like oh that would be a a place on the mac that apple could add some functionality and if you want you could pitch it across all the platforms because that was one of the reasons that I modified my shared clipboard history to include iOS was because I feel like

that's how you sell it inside Apple. It's probably like, oh, every device will share the clipboard. We'll have a clipboard history, not just the Mac, because it's, I think, a lot harder these days to say, I have a Mac-only feature I would like. It's not impossible. It's just harder. Yeah, I mean, window management management you could make the pitch for that because all apple has similar difficulties in the ipad where they keep trying different things and the ipad customer base

seems less satisfied with them so if they made an api and you could say this this these hooks this api for understanding where all the windows are being able to manipulate where they are being able to move them being able to you know get tiny thumbnail images are, being able to manipulate where they are, being able to move them, being able to get tiny thumbnail images of them, be able to control them and switch among them. All those APIs will be on the Mac and the iPad. A, that would be revolutionary for the iPad because only Apple has been allowed to play in that sandbox. And B, it is a way to pitch it.

But thinking outside of window management and like other type of features, I think you're right that they've incorporated most of the low-hhanging fruit here i mean honestly i what i would say is there's lots of stuff that ostensibly exists but doesn't work very well that i would prefer that they just on the mac in particular i prefer they just make all that stuff work better i mean simple things like network shares in the finder fundamental operational finder being able to mount network shares why is it so bad why it's i mean it just please do not try to come up with something that we shouldn't be scratching our head and say here's the thing

you should add do clipboard history make a window management api like do make network shares better like make things that are slow faster make things that have bugs not have bugs like just that's fair that's that's the level i am for most features in mac os these days and it becomes increasingly annoying when you encounter things like that like that you know the fact that to get to you know to mount on my desktop the the folder for my wife's mac over there takes so many steps and is so cumbersome and has so many weird obscure bugs and so much legacy stuff i when they add stage manager i'm like okay so you added stage manager your next take entirely new way to deal with windows but still doing network stuff in the finder sucks that's that's a not a great set of priorities as far as i'm concerned

the uh other question i had for you was are there any apps that apple apps that are like default experience apps that you choose over available third-party apps and i'll say that the i looked at mine and i think music i guess i would say and safari but like i'm not using calendar i'm not using mail um i'm not i'm not using those apps i'm not using spotlight what about you are there are there defaults that you embrace i mean safari is my default web browser but i do run Chrome pretty much 100% of the time despite the error network change. Yes, indeed. As ADP listeners will know about.

Let's see. I use the default terminal. I know there are, I think I have like iTerm2 installed and stuff like that, but whatever advantages the third-party terminal apps have have not been sufficient to dislodge me from. It's good.

I use the screen sharing app now in Sonoma as well because the screen sharing app is so good now um let's see when i look down at my doc here um i mean messages that kind of doesn't count because it's kind of yeah it doesn't have an alternative it's not really like i'm using fantastic cal and i'm using mime stream right i'm not using calendar and mail yeah i'm not i don't use apple mail i don't use apple calendar i do use apple contacts i know their third party client said oh i guess i say the one i should use photos right because i do have third party me too apps i i do have several commercial third-party apps installed that read my photo library but my default photos app like not just like default which one launches but i mean like the one that i'm going to use to go

through my photos is still apple photos absolutely despite all of its annoyances and interface annoyances that i have the the basic editing controls when i edit photos and uh i hate how they work right i hate how cropping works i hate how much stuff out that you are but the little sliders for levels and contrast and brightness or whatever i am used to those particular knobs you can get way more knobs in other apps and you can get way fewer knobs in other apps as well and i have all those installed, but I am most comfortable taking a first pass at photos and adjusting them in the Apple photos app, despite the fact that I want to throttle the people who have designed the UI for that simply because like, which knobs do I have? I think Apple gives you the right set of knobs. The only thing I really, really,

well, the only knob that I really think is it's not the wrong set of knobs that works so poorly, is at this point, Apple's little Band-Aid heel thing is embarrassingly bad compared to all the ML-powered ones that are in all the other apps they use. If they had like a Pixelmator Pro. A Photomator kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. If they had at least that level, it would make things better.

But, you know, again, I'm glad to have the third-party options. Photos on iOS doesn't even have that feature. Yeah on ios is missing so many features it's it's offensive as somebody who gets to live with all of the photo features every summer when i update my book about photos like oh i know john i know um i realized um reminders and notes i i don't have a third party to do anything i i throw a lot of stuff in reminders. And although I don't use pay pages, I do use numbers for some stuff. And I used to use keynote when I gave presentations, but like I am BB edit is where most of my stuff goes.

I do use notes for lots of stuff, especially stuff that sinks. Whenever I'm like watching a movie for a podcast, I just take the notes and notes. It's it. And I know it'll be there on all my other devices. And they're, they're both very good reminders and notes.

They've done a lot of that. Those keep getting advanced every, every year or two, um, as time goes on. And they're very, they're very good apps. That's another case where I use the defaults.

I do use reminders and notes, despite the fact that they both have little things that annoy me. So notes on the Mac annoys me when I, when I updated on my phone and the Mac app has been open the entire time and it's not updated. And the way I fix that is by quitting notes and relaunching it that should never happen but it does sometimes um and the second thing is reminders uh you know it's i i think the reason i didn't mention these i think of them as mostly as phone apps because i'm getting the reminders on my phone most of the time as i'm going through my day but there is a

mac you know copy of that app and i do look at those same reminders on my mac from time to time but when i will like log into uh you know switch to my account on my wife's mac i'll see reminder notifications for things that i did yesterday they'll pop up and it's like i marked that off on my phone yesterday why now mac are you showing this notification now the mac doesn't yet know that i marked it off either way it's like it's not a big deal you know i can either mark it again or just close it and it will go away but that type of thing i feel like shouldn't happen and yet i continue to use it the default reminders app because despite those minor annoyances it's built in it's everywhere and it it you know i don't need anything more than what it offers i just wish it worked a little bit better. Yeah, I had an interesting UI hole that I fell in that I haven't written about. But so it all starts with Google disappointing me.

So, well, no, I guess technically it starts with Amazon disappointing me. Amazon's Echo got so bad in interrupting me to try to advertise things that I replaced it with a Google Nest Home mini. I don't know. A little Google screen in my kitchen. Is it the little hockey puck thing? No, no. It's got the one with the screen. Oh, okay. Yeah. You had the Amazon show. Yeah. The Amazon show ads. Echo show.

Oh, and plus it would say, by the way, here's a thing that you don't care about and i hate it so i got for you to reorder t the google one is better i know the google one is better um but it uh okay so i switched to it in part because i'm using any list as my shopping shared shopping list for my family. Using that for a long time. And again, it's that thing about like, I know there are other solutions, but at the time it was the best choice. And now we're in inertia mode there.

So when I was looking, number one thing we did in the kitchen, other than timers, was adding things to the shopping list. So like, I'm shopping for the Google thing. I'm thinking, can I replace the Echo? And the answer was yes there is any list support in google it was great so i i i get the google home we have for a few months and then i get an email from any list saying google has decided to just stop supporting syncing with its to-do lists and third parties just continues a product that never happens. I know. Impossible, right? So, very frustrating. We start using our iPhones and our Apple Watches to put things on the shopping list because there's a sync with reminders for any list. And then I had that

moment where I thought, you know, you can just share lists in reminders and they now are shopping lists too. You can mark them as shopping lists and they organize them just like any list did and i thought okay yeah like why am i doing this i should just okay so that's great so i made it we now have a shared shopping list that doesn't sync with any list any list is gone i cancel my subscription and now here we are and then i fell into the hole which is apple by default seems to think that every device you own should get a notification whenever somebody who isn't you adds an item to a shared list by default so you know i'm writing a story and it says lauren put tomatoes on the shopping list i'm like okay hey at least at least it doesn't just say like notes does you know has

made changes and doesn't tell you what they are oh yes oh the mysterious changes so then i'm like okay notification center no it's not there and the thing is about reminders you can turn off notifications for reminders i don't advise it because it's yeah reminders turns out what you have to do is you have to go to the list and choose manage shared list the place where you invite people to the list and in there is notify when adding items completing items and you have to uncheck it so you have to go into reminders you have to go into that list there and and you know what that's. But what it's missing is a thing that says on all my devices. I love the option of saying because I've been playing whack-a-mole with every device where I forget that I'm even doing it.

And then suddenly I'm on my iPad and it says Lauren added spaghetti to the shopping list. I'm like, God, I got to do it again. And I just keep doing it over and over again until eventually all the notifications stop. And then Lauren says, oh, look, Jason said, put Coke Zero on the list. And I'm like, you can turn that off. And we play the whack-a-mole game on all of her devices too. I fell in where I'm like, this is great Apple, but it's on by default and I can't turn it off on across all my devices. Like, all right. I mean, I'm not going to turn off notifications for all of reminders because it might need to remind me of something, but anyway, but I love reminders. That remind kind of reminds me of what I was so puzzled when Apple announced this feature.

I'm like, so they added shopping lists but they added it to reminders right and yeah the reason i mean because you can understand why reminders might act this way because it thinks of the items as things that you're supposed to do that you're reminded you know what i mean and it makes sense if there were individual items like pick the kids up oh now i know my wife picked the kids up because i got the notification that reminder was checked off or whatever but for a shopping list i don't need to know itemized every single thing so the thing we use for shopping lists we did use any list for a while whatever we use a notes document with the little check boxes in it uh and you still get notifications and it says you know the note

has something has changed or whatever but like but reminders just seems like i just think of reminders as individual items rather than lists of things whereas if they had integrated you know if you're going to take any list type functionality and add it to an apple app i would have added it to notes first instead of reminders but hey you know and i tried the reminders thing but we went back to our notes thing which is not great either the reminders one is a great example of a 1.0 product that third parties do better uh organizing it by type like produce meat whatever that great, but that's not the way we shop. We organize it by store because we buy these things at Whole Foods. We buy these things at Star Market.

We buy these things at Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's, yeah, exactly. And then within those stores, maybe they're broken down by type or maybe not. Or maybe you want them organized by aisle or in the order that you're going to traverse through the store. So 1.0, it first passes. Yeah, separate the dairy from the meat, from the vegetables or whatever. But, you know, the fancier third party apps that do this type of thing will let you organize by store.

And well, you know, how do you want it sorted when you check them off? Notes will just shuffle the checked off ones below the unchecked ones. But my wife wants to sort the checked off ones alphabetically and notes won't do that for you and makes it difficult to do manually so there's an example of where apple has a good product that's a good 1.0 and there are tons of third-party products that can do this better um i but again with the notes one like any list any list doesn't use the notes database they have their own database that syncs between things making shopping lists out of reminders i think there are third party clients that can access the reminders database am i getting that wrong uh yeah sure

sure yeah but anyway if they did that it's like if there was if there was like list functionality built in you could get a third party client that would have the defaults that you were battling against like have better defaults that were more suited to you or have more features but yeah you i mean i don't know how you do that in in reminders today you'd probably need to create like a whole foods list and uh like i have a i have a hardware store shopping list that is separate from my shopping list right i mean you do like an omni-focus thing or whatever or when you enter the store geolocation it pops up the list and stuff like that you know oh that's nice it's clever anyway that's my story

that i think brings us to the end of this episode of upgrade remember you can send us your feedback follow-up and questions at upgradefeedback.com check my stuff out at sixcolors.com the incomparable.com and here on relay i have to some podcasts when my voice is around. You can check out John Syracuse. Let's see. Reconcilable differences here at RelayFM. I don't want to forget it. ATP is at ATP.FM. Robot or Not is at TheIncomparable.com.

Those are podcasts for John. Where can people find you social media-wise these days? I'm at Syracuse at mastodon.social. Uh, that's where I'm doing all my social networking. I am on threads and, uh, what's the other one? Blue sky, blue sky. I try to spend all my time and energy on mastodon. I do occasionally pop up those other ones looking for mentions, but if you're looking for me, uh, I am on mastodon. All right. And I am, uh, Jay Snell at Zeppelin am on Mastodon. All right. And I am jsnella at zeppelin.flights on Mastodon. I am also

on Threads and Blue Sky, but not that much. And members, thank you for supporting us with Upgrade Plus. Thank you to our sponsors, Wildgrain and Express VPN. Thank you to Mike for

expanding his own horizons this week. We support this. Good job on assignment, doing the work, putting in the work. I thank you all for listening. And most of all, thank you, John Syracuse, for being my guest on a Monday morning. Pleasure as always to spend some time talking about stuff with you. Anytime you need a substitute teacher, I'm here. All right. Now we're just going to put on Home Alone. I think that's what happens for the rest of the class, except for the, I guess, honor students will get a little upgrade plus.

But otherwise, thank you all for listening. This brings us to the end of our podcast. Mike will be back next week, and we'll have very exciting upgrade-ies business to attend to then but until then goodbye