Upgrade - 512: Pros Are the Little Boats

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

from really fm this is upgrade episode 512 recorded monday may the 13th 2024 i am jason snell mike hurley is off this week he's traveling and having fun while we are down to the difficult, hard-working business of doing things like reviewing a brand new iPad Pro. That's coming later in the show. But first, let me tell you, we're sponsored this week. FitBot, delete me, ExpressVPN. And participating in the show this week, there is no one else who should be here for episode 512 like the proprietor of 512pixels.com the fork bomber himself the mac daddy himself it's steven hackett hi steven i wasn't expecting a fork bomber joke today i was thinking about your website that's all

yeah yeah that is the old name it's a programming joke it's not a nothing else just a programming joke no 512 pixels though from the original mac at 512 that's right yeah a little dpi humor yeah little uh little screen resolution reference from two years before you were born that's true hello hello jason thank you for having me that's it's always fun to talk about computers with you we don't get to do it very often. It's true. It's true. And also it took, I'm going to keep saying this in this episode, took two co-hosts of Connected to replace Mike.

I don't like that. I don't love it either. I guess he's the Archbishop of Rickington or something. I don't know how that works. He's won a lot of things over there. And of course, he's also the Upgrade Draft Champion. He won't let me forget about that. So Federico will be joining me later to talk about the iPad Pro, because the iPad Pro announced last week

and I got one on Wednesday and have been using it ever since pretty much as my only computer. And so I wrote my review on it. I traveled over the weekend, which is actually kind of fitting for an iPad Pro to travel and roam around and also be working on it and reviewing it. And who better, I think, to talk about iPad Pro stuff than Federico, who did not review the iPad Pro, but he did write a big article on Mac Stories. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more too, about his sort of... We got a lot of feedback here, and I know that Federico got it too. We got a lot of

feedback here from people who last week, they found our... I think they found our clips on YouTube. So I guess that is working about complaining about the iPad, but they have no context of all of our past complaints. And so several people swooped in and said, could you list some complaints? And Federico was glad to oblige and wrote an entire article about his complaints about iPad OS and its limitations. So that'll be good. It's a great article. I know you're going to talk to him later in the show i did realize though just now that you having both federico and i on the on the show on the same day at the same you know the same episode

you actually were forbidden to choose between us because you can't flip a coin and so you were stuck with both of us actually you know coin flipping is allowed on upgrade it's just discouraged be Be publicly shamed. All of those things. I heard about all those things. But hey, Stephen, before we get started, I think it's time to do a Snell Talk question. Can you handle this one for me? This could

turn into a Snell Talk question. It is going to. This comes from Upgradian Sam. What is your favorite airline snack, Jason? And why isn't it four-hour-old room temperature sushi? I was sitting right behind you, and I didn't know if you got to experience the glory that was my roommate tucking into some sushi at least four hours into our flight. Boy, that was rough. flight boy that was rough so sam uh told the story uh at the newark airport the day after the apple event sam i i'm sitting there doing i don't even know what and uh somebody waves at me and i look up and he turned and it's a it's sam and who i've never met before and he turns around his iphone to show the ask upgrade chapter art incredible which i immediately tell you and mike about yeah yeah

it was great uh so what i didn't know is that sam sat a row behind me and didn't say anything which is like you could have said something i guess it was a little he's not stalking me because it's like literally we were just assigned those seats anyway um i after so after i got off i i did chat with sam and he said some nice things and I thanked him for listening to the podcast. It was really nice. But I didn't know until later that he had sent in a Snell talk question about the four hour old room temperature sushi. I didn't, I don't think smell the sushi, but there was a smell. I, I kind of thought it was coming from the bathroom because we were only a couple rows ahead

of the bathroom um but uh my favorite let's not talk about unpleasant things anymore my favorite airline snack um i don't have a single go-to like james thompson our friend who i discovered having had many flights with him now he has a very particular type of, uh, cheddar cracker that he gets as a, uh, and I think he gets it even at the airport. Um, and it's a readily available, not a, not a brand available in America, but in the UK and, and that's what he has. And that's his comfort, uh, his comfort food, probably since he was a kid. Um, I like, let's see. I like, like uh i like chocolate on a trip i bring i try to bring some dark chocolate with me in my bag on a trip so i've got some chocolate and then it melts right into your ipad so i was gonna say the highlight or the low light of my chocolate travels is that

we went you and i to johnson space center and spent a whole day on the big long tour while out in the car, my backpack containing a bar of chocolate sat in the blazing hot Houston sun. Houston, Texas. And I got to the airport and a molten wave of chocolate had covered, actually had covered the case for my Sony headphones. They got the worst of it. And Julian used those headphones for a while. And every now and then I would see the case and I would just think, that's Houston chocolate there, baby. Houston chocolate. So, yes, you got to mind where your chocolate is. Ever since then, you you gotta mind where your

chocolate is don't let leave it in the in the hot but uh so that's one i love those ginger i love ginger like cookies and stuff in general so those biscoffs that are on the biscoff cookies that are on like delta and american now does it too which i feel like they're kind of ripping off delta because that's a delta thing right yeah i got my last american flight they they offered me biscoffs i was like okay does delta know you're doing this uh but they're really nice they're little you know little snappy ginger cookies they're great i love them so that's a favorite yeah they're also an iphone app developer you know our friend matt bischoff it's a different thing oh i thought you meant the delta emulator, which does not emulate an airline.

Also a different thing. Do you have a favorite airline snack? I was thinking about this. I think you got to be careful with airline snacks because you don't want something that's going to be like crunchy and make a mess, right? So that rolls out like some granola bars and that sort of thing. Sure. And you want something that obviously doesn't melt right like your houston

experience no good no i think i'm gonna go with like an rx bar kind of thing right like it's pre-packaged it's it's it will get soft but it's not going to melt but also critically not crumbly that's what bothers me with an airplane snack if i feel like i'm sitting in crumbs on my way to california i don't want that all right i get that i get that that is the danger with the bisco that, you know, you take a bite and then you've got ginger crumbs all down your shirt and all that. Yeah. Better than sushi crumbs. I was going to say, what I really like to do is get some sushi a few days before and just tuck it into the bag. Oh.

And then, you know, eventually I'll go through security and I'll get on the plane and in the middle of a five hour flight, I'll take it out. Just bust it out. Yeah, that's no good. Thank you, Sam. No good at all. Thank you, Sam, for the still talk question. I appreciate it. Mm-hmm.

Well, that brings us to some follow-up. Follow-up. I thought, okay, that is just say it out loud. Say it out loud. Follow-up. I wanted to talk about what we, oh, I didn't want to talk about it. How about that? Here's follow up that I don't want to talk about, but I feel like we are obligated.

Yeah. To talk about it. So when I was in New York, I watched that video like everybody else. And we were in a group and kind of no reaction to the crush ad that everybody was talking about afterward and in going back i remember having some negative feelings about it they were mostly about my feelings about the actual objects being used in the commercial being destroyed especially the piano i was like yeah oh man i hope that piano like was really busted because uh they they crushed it in a press and i don't i don't love it but i didn't really

think anything more of it and then it became part of the discourse and uh everybody started talking about how it was representative of how big tech was destroying creativity which is really funny because i'm sure apple didn't intend it that way at all and apple really does legitimately think that it's a partner of an enabler of creative people and that that project that commercial was literally trying to get that across and they they ended up having it really backfire on them. But I think it shows, seems to me that it shows like Apple not understanding how it's viewed. And I don't want to draw too much of a parallel to some of Apple's business decisions in terms of playing hardball with developers and dealing with regulators and all of that. But I do think there a a line running through both of these stories which is

apple still really fancy fancying itself the underdog and the champion of the masses when in fact it is actually a top dog and a big shot and uh and that's i think that's maybe one explanation for how you create an ad that misreads the the vibe in the room because i think that's maybe one explanation for how you create an ad that misreads the vibe in the room. Because I think that's, for me, that's the big offense here is that I think they didn't get the, nobody apparently with any, at least any say-so, raised their hand and said, you know, people are really concerned about big tech initiatives, crushing creative jobs right now. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. So I think they, they really misread the room. What do you think?

Yeah, I think so too. Uh, I agree with you on, on first watching, like just during the stream, it jumped out at me a little bit but then obviously the headlines started coming out and this like made the New York Times the Wall Street Journal this wasn't just like us you know kind of playing on our level it was you know mainstream news for better or for worse and my first thought was well that feels like maybe some misdirected anger I thought about like well you know something like GarageBand has had virtual instruments forever. This is just sort of a riff on that idea. But the more I've thought about, especially over the weekend, the more I've realized that

I think what you said is right, that they did, whoever made the ultimate decision. You know, we don't know the debates that happened. I would like to think some people at Apple saw this coming and maybe were overruled, which is unfortunate. But yeah, clearly they don't understand the vibe. And what makes that potentially way more troublesome is that we are now, as of today, four weeks away from WWDC, where Apple's expected to introduce

a bunch of generative AI features across their OSs. And you said it really well. I just want to highlight it. Apple's best work in a lot of ways is empowering creative people to do their jobs. And those people are worried about this and And they view Apple as the company that kind of gets them, or maybe at least used to get them. And this is going to drive a pretty big

wedge in that. I think in a lot of ways, the world's reaction to this ad could be a warning shot for Apple of what to expect at WWDC. Now, Google goes first, right? Google IO is before WWDC. I think IO is this week. We may see a little bit of that, but I think with Apple, it is going to be different and potentially worse because Apple positions itself as the company that makes cool stuff for creative people. And I just don't know how you circle that square. And if I were Apple, I would be looking at these reactions and really carefully considering how they frame these features that are going to be coming in just a month.

So I have a theory, which is that I think maybe this is a blessing in disguise for Apple. I mean, they came out and apologized. They had their VP of marketing, Tor Maren, basically said, we're sorry. We want to celebrate creatives. We missed the mark. Having it be not an unnamed person, that's good. It was textbook damage control, right? What you want to do is move on.

And so I heard some people were like, I can't believe they apologized for that. And it's like, you know what? This is how you do it. It's like, look, it obviously doesn't matter. What you don't want to do is get in an argument. It's like, no, you don't understand. That's not what we meant. You got it wrong.

Think again. Like, no, you just say, I'm sorry. It obviously, sorry it obviously because it obviously didn't work right it obviously rubbed a bunch of people the wrong way and once you call attention to it then everybody else is going to see it in that lens and then it's over but i think maybe it is a warning to them that they can now take heed of and that maybe having it happen in this sort of footnote to a a footnote an ipad event but a month before wwc might be a wake-up call to say oh those those of us are again because apple is not a monolith apple there are people inside apple who totally get what's going

on here and they were not listened to. So this gives them voice to say, we really need to be careful about this because everybody is wary of big tech ruining jobs with AI and destroying creative processes with AI. I also feel like Apple, Apple's whole thing, and we've talked about it on so many podcasts over the years, Apple's whole thing is that they have been using what they call machine learning, which is what we would now call AI, all along. But they productize it. They put it in features. They say, oh, here's a feature to make your photos look better.

And what they're not doing is saying, here's a thing that means you don't need to have an expert take pictures for you or edit your photos later. It's more like, well, no, you're shooting your own photos and you press a button. Even something like the features that they announced in Logic last week, because they've got that drummer, which is an AI drummer for a while now, and they added a bassist and a keyboard player. I'm surprised that that didn't come in for more scrutiny

and spite from people saying, oh, you're taking jobs and all that. But then again, the way the feature is pitched is it's not so you don't ever need to hire a drummer. It's that you're somebody who is alone in your room making music and you want it to sound better because you're making a demo. And if you become famous, then probably you won't use the Logic drummer anymore. Yeah, you'll hire a drummer. You'll hire a a drummer and i think that's an important distinction right it's like it's not meant to take jobs away from creative people it's actually meant to enable creative people to make their work better uh and i know that's a fine line so i feel like Apple of all companies is probably not banking on AI as a replacement for creativity. They're probably already pitching everything as ways to make creative people work better,

you know, more productive, but not like remove that spark. And that's good. And now they've gotten this warning shot because they do need to tread carefully here but i do i think with this warning i would i would be shocked if they weren't going through everything that they were planning all the all the scripts whatever they've even already shot for wwc and saying how do we let's let's just go over all of it and see what are we stepping in here and are there things we can change? And so on that front,

they're lucky that they've got a month to maybe back off or at least analyze some of what they're going to announce and not through the lens of the people are uneasy about big tech and AI right now. And you are big tech and AI, even if you don't, you're like, Oh no, no, we're different. It's like, they don't, you're like, oh, no, no, we're different. It's like, they don't think you're different.

So keep that in mind the whole time. No, I think that's well said. I think the last thing I would tack onto that is, I suspect if they had any really visual elements of that, that they will be toned down during the keynote. I think one reason this ad hit the way that it did is that you're seeing all these beloved objects be destroyed. And several people did it. It's floating around social media. Running the ad in reverse is actually kind of a better ad in a lot of ways. But I think a large part of the reaction to this is we see it, right? We see these,

in many cases, beautiful things be destroyed and whether they were real or cgi or combination who knows but i suspect if there was anything remotely like that in the keynote that that is getting cut out as we speak and that they're going to i think you said it really they're going to pitch this kind of the way they pitched i mean i went back and actually skimmed the original like GarageBand announcement. It's like, yeah, this lets you do things you couldn't do before. That's the best way to pitch a feature from Apple's perspective. And they just, they missed that in this ad.

And yeah, I think in the long run, I'm sure it's painful right now for them to be dealing with this, but I think you're right. Long-term, this may have been a good thing that it was just the iPad and not the new version of the software that's going to be on a bajillion iPhones in the fall. Yeah. Well, we're not arguing,

I think for the fact that this was a huge, like huge mistake that offended us. Like the ad didn't bother me that much. The point is it, it misfired like and it doesn't again it doesn't matter you could be like well actually it's fine like it doesn't matter it's an ad it's marketing it's meant to engender a certain kind of feeling it engendered the opposite feeling so as a result it fundamentally it failed even if it worked for you or it didn't bother you it and i think performed a service to Apple of saying,

you need to be a lot less complacent about your relationship, your place in the tech pantheon, and your relationship with creative people because everybody's a little uneasy. And I think Apple could learn that lesson more broadly. I think that Apple still behaves very much like an underdog and doesn't understand how it's received, which is as a massive, rich, powerful gatekeeper that has complete control over so many aspects of people's lives. I think they just don't want to think of themselves that way, but they are that. And I think it leads to them doing things that you shouldn't do when you're the top dog. You should only really do when you're the underdog. And it's led them down a difficult path.

But certainly in terms of the AI issue and its relationship with creative professionals, it's a little bit, I would think, of a shock to the system. And I hope that they follow from that. Because I do believe that Apple fundamentally does think of itself as an enabler of creative people. fundamentally does think of itself as an enabler of creative people and that's why this ad uh you know just was a was was a misfire because they misread the they didn't read the room right like ultimately i think that if this had been released two years ago or four years ago it wouldn't have had this kind of uproar but um but we live in a time where we're every everybody's kind of on a

knife's edge about this stuff and apple needs to be super careful about how it calibrates this. All right, Steven, I'm going to bring in Federico and you're going to, you're going to go away for a little bit. Okay. But, but just hang on.

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Hi, Federico. Hello, Jason. How are you? I'm doing okay. It's been a busy weekend. Yes. There's been a lot going on. Thank you for being here and not just being a ghost. Of course. This time in the flesh. Yes. People can see me. It's Federico present, not a ghostly apparition from the future. So this is the iPad Pro review episode. I reviewed the iPad Pro and we're releasing this at embargo time, this whole episode, which is exciting.

I first need to say I'm very happy to talk about iPad things with you. Oh, likewise. I felt like this is, I thought we would both be working away on our own things about the ipad pro but a series of events occurred um yeah and you didn't get an ipad pro to review so no which i'm really sorry about um so you will you did write a different article so we're going to talk about that in a little bit but i wanted to start with the ipad pro because i i can talk about it now i i spent the last four or five days working on an ipad pro 100 of the time which i don't i usually do that when i travel um or i have done that when i travel haven't in a little while but um i just

even at home other than a couple of podcasts where i where i just didn't want to bother my co-hosts i've basically been using the ipad pro as my only device for the last four or five days okay so uh obviously i read your review um so and and i made some notes for questions that I want to ask you before we get started. So which model did you get? Which version? I have, and it matters more than maybe you would think. So it's the 13 inch.

I got to keep saying 13 inch. Not 12.9 anymore. Not 12.9. And space black, which is a little bit darker just like the other space blacks yeah even the even the um accessories that we think of the dark gray of the outside of the keyboard it is darker i mean i'm not quite sure i'd call it black but it's it's it's darker it's another way basically it is yeah it's a darker gray it's the many shades of black approaching black but never quite reaching

it yes how many shades apple is getting up there in the number of shades of gray that it's got it's not the 50 yet but finally that title was not taken um oh man man yeah 50 shades of space gray oh boy but i will anyway yeah sure that's amazing. It's actually not that interesting. It's just a story about Apple's Pro hardware. And it's a one terabyte model, which because Apple is not going to send me one with a disabled CPU and less RAM. They want the full experience. So it's the one and two terabyte models, for those who do not know, are the ones that have the fourth performance core on the M4 processor and have 16 gigs of RAM instead of eight. So it's a pretty sizable spec difference when you go from the bottom two tiers to the top two. It's no longer really a storage tier. It's a storage

and CPU and RAM tier. So we should probably stop thinking of it as a storage tier. Right, right um so how does it feel like that's that's the first question that i want to ask you uh coming from the 12.9 um the the the reduction in terms of thickness and weight like uh after because i've only spent like 20 minutes with it when i was in london right uh using it for five days, how does it feel coming from the previous version? It is, yeah, because I have been using the larger iPad Pro

since there was only the larger iPad Pro, that first model, and I bought it and I have been using it since 2015. And that's been my iPad ever since. You never downgraded to the 11-inch? I never did.

I occasionally pick up Lauren's 11-inch because she's got the 11 inch and i pick it up and go oh wow this is this is really nice and light and then i look at the screen and go it's kind of a small screen uh and then i go back to the 13 so so i've always had the the bigger ipad um yeah you know the i think the big problem this is my theory i think the big problem with the larger ipad is that it's not just the weight it's the fact that the weight is spread across so much more surface area that by the time you get to the far end you know you're actually getting kind of a lever effect where the weight is so far out that it's pulling your hand down it makes it feel and plus it's a little bit

ungainly it's like uh just hard to it's just's more of it. And so it's more to move around and it's a little bit more clumsy in those ways. And obviously this hasn't changed those dimensions at all, but I will say it is lighter. I think lighter is the thing that matters. I think it's really funny that Apple talks about the thinness. I actually asked them in one of my briefings, I said, are you really solving for thinness? Because it seems like lightness is the more important thing when it comes to this product and their response was very typical apple it was we are solving for thinness and lightness i'm like okay right yeah you can do everything okay

fine but um so the thinness i mean it's noticeable and although I would say I usually use this thing in a case, it's either in the Magic Keyboard or it's in the Smart Folio. Which you also got. Which I got in black. Okay. That one's actually just black because they didn't want to give me denim. A very exciting, not exciting blue. My current one is, I got the orange Smart Folio. I'm going to really miss that if I have to give that one up because the orange is so nice.

That was a good color. I had one so nice. That was a good color. I had one of those. It was a good color. Yeah. So I like the thinness fine, but it isn't as apparent. Even, you know, it is thinner than the old one in the folio, but it makes it feel less thin to do that. I have to admit, I did take off the folio sometimes and just use it completely with uncovered completely naked it was naked and um 50 shades of space gray again uh there's a lot

of nudity going on here it is amazing right it's amazing that it's that thin but even then i would argue that the thinness doesn't really matter like Like, I'm never pinching my fingers together and going, oh, I wish my fingers were closer together with the iPad in between. I just, right? I never. So it's the weight. And the weight is, I mean, on that large one, it's more than a quarter of a pound. It's an enormous difference in weight for something that was already fairly light. And that, to me, is where it makes the difference.

Every time I pick it up, it's just a little bit lighter. It's a little bit less difficult to move around and okay and it means that when you put it in the magic keyboard you get something that's basically the weight of a macbook air which is i think what they should have been shooting for all along okay okay so uh would you say that compared to the previous one it's more usable like as a one-handed tablet um compared to the previous gen or still like because it's so large like it's still kind of kind of awkward more use more usable and less awkward but like it's a continuum right i don't think that i would say oh it it solved the awkwardness problem. It's still a very large screen, but the screen is so beautiful.

I mean, really, that's the trade-off, and it's been the trade-off all along, is that that smaller model feels so good to hold, but it's a much smaller screen than the big model. And I really do enjoy having the screen. I think we'll talk about the Magic Keyboard in a little bit, I think. But one of the things that I was reminded of when I was in New York is that I don't like typing on the 11-inch Magic Keyboard. I just think it's a little too cramped. Yeah, I think it's too cramped. So one of the things that would drive me toward the 13 is that I do use the Magic Keyboard. And I love the 13-inch Magic Keyboard size and it feels very much like a MacBook Air. And the 11 just is a little too compact for me. My fingers don't feel

comfortable on it. But I would say, yeah, I mean, anytime you make it lighter and thinner, it's going to be less awkward. And so I would say, you know's better it's better it but it doesn't i can't say it just solves the problem where you don't have to worry about it and you can just use a 13 inch ipad pro and it's and it's fine it's still i mean it's still big but um the lighter it gets it's why i keep coming back to lighter i don't actually care that it's thin i do care a lot that it's light because that really makes a difference right right and it's not like suddenly became an ipad mini that it's so comfortable to hold that it feels like a small tablet because you're still holding a 13 inch display right after all it is i mean

holding it without any any case on it at all it really is amazing because it does you do start to get that feeling that you can almost see apple's vision for it as a um as a just a sheet of glass an intelligent sheet of glass it is starting to really reach that point where when you're holding it and it's thin and it's light and it's this huge screen that you start to think i'm just holding a screen like there's nothing it wears the computer here it's really kind of amazing but you know in real life it's in a case and it's uh yeah and it's better it's less awkward but still a little bit because it's so huge right uh speaking of the display so obviously the the big change here is oled specifically tandem oled um so in reading your review, you pointed out, I mean, obviously the colors,

the brightness, the true blacks, but you also mentioned that OLED is even noticeable in the iPadOS UI itself. So like, can you elaborate on this? Like, where did you notice, like just simply working on your iPad that the screen was better? Yeah, I had the moments, for me it was since i'm a writer um it was in the text in text editing where i had a text editor which was just black text on a white background and it feels sharper and i don't i know that the oled itself should not be sharper than the old one but i think what's happening is that that black text is black. Right. And before... Actually, yeah, you're getting the better contrast between the...

Right, because the mini LED backlighting on the 12-inch, 12.9-inch, sorry, that 12-inch isn't even a thing, 12.9-inch, last generation iPad Pro, last two generations, that backlighting scheme was good. It was better than what was on the 11 inch and it had blooming because it had whatever 2500 local dimming zones but on oled every pixel is its own dimming zone so it's a pretty dramatic difference and and so um so overall like the oled screen impressed me but i was coming from a closer place to it than somebody who's using any other iPad pro where, where you didn't get that, that mid, the mid range step to a

mini led backlight that really did help a lot, even though it wasn't perfect, but I could still tell. Yeah. I just had those moments where I was, I was writing and I was looking at the black text on the screen and thinking, it's different. What is it about that? And that's what it is. It's got to be what it is, is that the black text is truly black. The white background was truly white. And that if you do a reversal and you're using something like Ivory in OLED mode, the black background is completely black.

Although in OLED mode, in Iv ivory the the way the theme works the text is gray which kind of bothers me i i i kind of like the complete i know some people don't like the look but i kind of enjoy the complete contrast of black on white where a lot of people i guess prefer sort of gray on black or or black on gray. I like it. So anyway, that and then, you know, I've got background pictures that have blacks in them and they're just black now. The contrast ratio difference is so dramatic.

And like I said, the dimming zones mean that it was pretty good before on my iPad Pro, on the M1 and M2 generation. But it's just, it surprised me. It came at me in surprising moments where I would look at something and think, what am I seeing there? Oh, right. It's got to be that this is another function of OLED. A sci-fi movie or TV show playing on the screen, I watched a few of those. I watched Star Trek. I watched Doctor Who. And you know, whenever you've got a space scene, like the space is very black and the stars are little white pinpoints or the lights on the spaceship are little white pinpoints

and you don't have that kind of hazy glow around them like you do on the mini LED version. Very nice. Did you get the glossy version or the nanotexture? It's the untextured, the just pure glass glossy version. I just, yeah, I saw the nanotexture in New York and you saw it in London. And what I thought was interesting

is that I got the distinct impression from people I talked to at Apple that they're positioning it as not for everybody. They're like, if you, if you don't know you need it, you don't need it because I think they know that it undercuts what the OLED looks like.

You're, you're putting a haze on front in front of that OLED, but what you get is the ability to use in bright sunlight. So I think their vision is for it to be for like cinematographers and editors and photographers who are out in the field in bright sunlight and just can't work without it. But mine was just regular. And I, you know, I used it in my house and in my backyard and, uh, on a trip. Uh, actually one of the things that was nice was I was traveling this weekend, which was really lousy in the sense that I had a Monday embargo and I had to, I was

visiting, um, we were visiting our kids up in oregon and um it i didn't love the fact that i had a very limited amount of time to write this review and i had to travel at the same time so i warned my family i was like i'm gonna have to do some ipad things and i i uh they went off and did something on saturday afternoon and i worked um at a at a uh an outdoor beer garden, actually. And yeah, it was warm. I was sitting outside and using the magic keyboard and writing. Then later, I also did a podcast and I recorded that in the hotel, basically.

And then I posted it in the car, in the back of the car as we were driving down the freeway to see my son who lives down in Eugene at the university. My daughter lives in Portland. And in both of those instances, I thought about, I actually thought about you and you writing about how you were driven to the iPad specifically because you needed the portability of it. And so this trip to Oregon this weekend actually proved to be a good time. I wouldn't have chosen it for personal reasons, but it was actually a really great time to focus on using the iPad because the thing that the iPad does so well is that mobility

that I was able to travel. I didn't travel with a laptop. I just brought the iPad. I was able to write thousands of words. I was able to work outside at that place and in the back of the car, upload a podcast to the internet using 5G. And it all just was pleasant. It was really nice. And it's a very, like even more than a laptop, it is just a very, very capable device. iPads in general, right? Not this one in particular, but iPads in general. This is one of the great things about them is that it can do all of these different things. very capable device ipads in general right not this one in particular but ipads in general this

is one of the great things about them is that it can do all of these different things we can watch a movie on it and i can hold in one hand but i can also snap it into that case and uh and it's a 5g laptop that i can i can use at a you know outside at a beer garden or in the back of a car to post something to the internet yeah um what about battery life so uh we had the new bright display it's thinner the battery's technically smaller than before but is it the same as before basically i i think it's fine it seems to be the same they seem to have continued to solve for 10 hours as their goal i i used it most of the day on saturday on a single charge and I got back and I was still at like 40%. So it wasn't even close. But I wonder, what do you think about this? They clearly

traded off the energy savings in the M4 to slice battery out of it to make it thinner and lighter rather than being able to claim 15 hours. Do you think they're solving for the right amount of battery power? Or do you think that they need to, you know, maybe embrace a little bit more weight in order to get the battery life up a little? It's tricky because ideally I would say, yeah, I want to have more battery life. I don't care because I'm mostly going to use this in a magic keyboard. And so it doesn't necessarily matter. But then for those times when you do want to use it as a tablet, imagine if it was thicker and heavier. Like I do think that, like you mentioned,

like solving for lightness more than thickness is more important in the long run. And especially if you have these large tablets and maybe down the road, even a larger tablet, if they ever do one, I do think that they need to prioritize making sure that it's comfortable to use when you're not attaching it to a keyboard. So it's difficult, right? Because on the one hand, 10 hours, I mean, you can get laptops that last 15 or more. And so it's not as impressive maybe as it used to be 10 years ago, but actually 14 years ago, I guess at this point. Yeah. But at the same time, an iPad not getting lighter and not getting thinner, like especially a 13-inch one, I don't know.

I don't think their decision is like, of all their decisions with the iPad, the way I see it, maybe this is the least controversial one. While I was writing the article, and you do this too with your reviews, I'm sure, sometimes you life and thinking about the weight and i i think philosophically the product should be i mean john syracuse always talks about the naked robotic core but i think there's something in in there about thinking about what the base product is and realizing that a user has to carry around the base product 100% of the time, whether they use the functionality you've built into it or not, which is a strong argument that you should only build in functionality that really matters to the widest selection of people as long as there's an alternative. So you can't plug in more RAM, you know, right? Like there are lots of things you can't plug in or you wouldn't want to, but with battery life, I do feel like 10 hours is enough. And if it's not enough, you should have, you should be able to plug in or you should have some sort of a power bank that you can use.

But to weigh down every single iPad user with additional battery that most of them probably won't use because most of them are probably not going to drain it to zero in a scenario where they couldn't just plug it in, I think would be a mistake, right? Like I think in the end, you're trying, if you're Apple, you're trying to please the most people and they probably have the stats. They probably know that it almost never happens that somebody drains this thing, goes from full to draining it completely. I mean, I do that at home, but I do that at home when I'm surrounded by plugs. So I know that whenever it gets low, I can just plug it in. It's fine. It's very rare that I am somewhere in the field and can't plug it in and have no battery left. And if it's rare, it's probably on me to bring a charger for it, not on Apple to load every single iPad down with that extra weight.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The M4. M4. yeah yeah yeah um the m4 um did you notice any any benefits compared to the m2 when you were just working with the ipad was a safari snappier oh yeah snappier it is although it's very hard to tell right new new ipad just migrated some files um it seemed extremely fast but it always does i did um i think maybe i didn't get a lot of chance to do like, I got a beta of logic, but I just did not have the time with the turnaround of this to try it out.

Um, and I didn't spend a lot of time in something like final cut, although I, you know, I will at some point I did edit a podcast in ferrite recording studio and do an export from there. And you know, that export went really fast i mean it is even even an m2 is pretty darn fast on ipad os so the m4 um i i feel like beyond your you know final cut and uh logics of the world and maybe procreate i did some some stuff in affinity affinity designer as well which was um which was fine and and that's a very powerful app although although fonts oh ios fonts we'll talk about that later uh i had i had some real font problems that that slowed me down for half an hour but um i saw

i i suspect that uh and i hope that there will be future versions of ipad os that leverage the m4 power more because it's the same old story which is apple comes out with an ipad pro and the chip is so powerful that it's never really going to be tapped by the operating system or if it is it's going to be you know years before software really can take advantage of it. And I had, I, my personal iPad pro is an M one and I, I never even was motivated by the M two. I, it doesn't feel slow in, in any real way. So yeah, it's more powerful. That's great.

I guess, I guess my biggest processor sucking app is probably Marvel snap. And, uh, cause I've got it set to 60 frames a second and high quality graphics and all of that. great i guess i guess my biggest processor sucking app is probably marvel snap and uh because i've got it set to 60 frames a second and high quality graphics and all of that and and it's janky it's a janky app it's got lots of weird flashes and blinks and things it's doing i don't even know what they're doing under the hood there but uh it was it was smooth i mean i'm not gonna advocate anybody spent 1200 on an ipad to play marvel Snap, but boy, that was pretty nice. Well, you are kind of saying that. Yeah, I guess.

Yeah, that's right. It's a video player. Well, I mean, on one level, whenever we review these things, it's not my judgment about how much money you want to spend. I used to argue this back at Macworld. There was a period where the old regime at Macworld would rate products down based on their price. And I said, well, wait a second. We don't know what price people are going to get for this in the future. And we also don't know what their budget is.

Shouldn't we rate it based on like people, human beings are going to adjust whether they buy a product or not based on how much it costs. We don't need to do that for them. We should tell them whether it's good or not. And so I think about that when I say like, I don't, it's more like, i don't know how big the market is for for a just a video viewer that costs a thousand dollars but this is a really nice one right if

all it is like m4 is overkill but like if you really want an oled video player that you can hold in your hands it's really nice um and so i'm not going to judge you if you if if it's worth the money for you to do that then then great yeah i mean maybe there's a professional marvel snap player out there streaming marvel snap on twitch and you know having an ipad with oled that makes marvel snap run the best before maybe it's a maybe it's a good deal for them so um is there anything else you want to mention about the hardware of the tablet itself before we move on to the real hardware of the accessories um i didn't notice much difference i did a facetime call with my mom okay for her birthday using the the new position of the facetime camera and it just feels so much more natural. I always use it in that orientation.

So it was very nice. I had a few moments where I had Face ID fail me and I realized that I tend to hold the iPad with the wrap of the smart folio up and Apple totally wants you to have it down so you can have your pencil up oh okay and that means that the camera's at the bottom and so i had several times why did why did you do that i was trying to unlock it i don't i think honestly i think it's because at some point i had a folio that wasn't i wasn't comfortable with like how strongly it was attaching magnetically.

And so if I held it down, then I was holding the folio against the back case. Whereas if you hold it up, it can like pop off. I don't know. It's a bad habit. I had to break myself of it. But it meant that when I was flipping up to open, I was literally like flipping over the face ID sensor and it yelled at me, or it was like down in my blanket i was waking up i was like no no no pull it back up so i had to i had to flip that around but uh it's really nice to have it there and um and and beyond that i guess i would say you know there was mike speculated about magsafe um i've heard you know john syracuse say there should be more than one port on it i think when i was doing a podcast

and i had a microphone plugged into it and i realized that i was glad i had 10 hours of battery life i thought well this is this can be an issue and we gave the that one port macbook a hard time for it but i think the truth is i have to go back to what we said before which is most people don't need more than one port so i think you probably just need to put it on the people to get a hub, to get a dock of some kind. If you really need to use it with many, many devices, because I don't,

you know, if they could put a second port on there and have it be no problem, but there are probably a lot of compromises that would have to happen to get a second Thunderbolt port on this thing. And it seems, you know, unnecessary for most people. So it doesn't, it doesn't bother me. All right.

So magic keyboard and Apple pencil pro. Let's start with the magic keyboard. So I want to ask you about the function row. This is the, arguably, I think along with the bigger track bigger trackpad, one of the most important changes in this keyboard. One of the things I noticed when I was testing the extra function row in London was that a couple of times I sort of accidentally bumped into the lower edge of the iPad when I was trying to access the function row. Is that something that also happened to you or is it something that happens and then you adjust?

I think there's probably some adjustment. It never happened to me. And I think maybe that has something to do with using it. I mean, I don't know about the difference between the 11 and the 13. There's possibly something there. It also may be the angle that you're pointing it. Maybe the angle that I was using was a little bit more kind of up because if you angle it lower down,

it's going to lower itself down closer. But I never ran into that. And I used it on a table and I used it in my lap and I never really ran into that. What I did notice is on a very soft surface. So at one point when I was doing that podcasting, I was on the bed in the hotel room and I put the iPad down on the bed and the bed was a little, the blanket wasn't perfectly flat. It was just kind of moving around and it was a little bit soft.

And I put the iPad in the keyboard down and it flopped over backward. And I realized this thing is balanced on the head of a pin. Like it is balanced. It isn't going toped over backward. And I realized this thing is balanced on the head of a pin. Like it is balanced. It isn't going to fall over backward in any normal circumstance, but the moment you shift the weight a little bit back, it will fall over backward because it is,

they have engineered that thing very precisely to stay upright. And it will, but, you know, a little bit off and it will it will just kind of go over the whole thing will just tip backward but i didn't have a problem reaching the function row and the function row it's great i i was listening to music and i was like oh i don't i some of it was artificial but you know i'm listening to music i'm like i don't like this track i'm gonna go to the next track it could be a little bit louder and oh let's go it's kind of bright let's make it a little bit different and just being able to do that while I was writing and keeping my hands on the keyboard and not having to,

you know, reach up and find the right control in order to get it to all work. Just really nice. Although I will, I mentioned in the review, um, I can't believe that you can't adjust the keyboard brightness via a keyboard shortcut,

that there isn't a, you know globe brightness or command of those brightness keys because people a lot of people don't even know that it's backlit i'm not going to name names but uh a recent relay podcast mentioned that the magic keyboard is still doesn't have backlighting it's like it's always had backlighting it's always been there but you have to go to settings keyboard hardware keyboard yeah backlighting it's like it's always had backlighting it's always been there but you have to go to settings keyboard hardware keyboard yeah backlighting it's it's so dumb that should be a it should be in control center or it should be a keyboard keyboard shortcut right that's the so anyway but i did use those keys um some more than others i didn't really use the dictation key although it's there quick lock is not a bad idea and i did use there's their expose key basically that brings up the individual app

view like you're doing a swipe up and i i use that a little bit too but i prefer the trackpad gesture for that but boy it's just really nice to adjust the volume and and uh because i have that i've had that on my mac for like 20 years, keyboard shortcut, to adjust my music playback without thinking about it. And then to not have that available at all on the iPad was incredibly frustrating. So I'm very happy. And I didn't really bump into the top of the iPad at all. Nice, nice. The trackpad.

So it's larger than before. It seemed a bit taller than before, basically. And it supports haptic feedback. And I read in your review that Apple also sprinkled some haptic feedback here and there in some of the built-in apps. Like for example, when you're reordering songs in an Apple Music playlist, I believe you mentioned, you can feel a little haptic feedback going on. Can you explain what this feels like? That's a little like a... That's the rollercoaster ride of this feature. If you want the demo of the haptic feedback

in the trackpad on the Magic Keyboard, rearrange items in Up Next in Music because every tick is a bump on the haptic. So you drag a track down and it just goes... as it goes down. But also if you do a long press, it will do a tap as it triggers. Um, if you do a three finger swipe up as you bring it up, it will do a tap as it brings

up that multi, you know, the, the, the app switcher view. Um, so it's not quite, Oh, and there's an API. So in, um, I forget what is it in numbers or maybe it's in, maybe it's the guides and like keynote and pages, but there are some, there are some things like that too,

where there's a snap to guides happening where there's actually a little tap. And I would say it's not quite as obnoxious as the one on the, on the desktop Magic Trackpad. These are just little grace notes. They're little accents. They're not huge boosts to usability, but I think they're trying to go for a little bit of delight

as well as trying to make the user interface a little more tactile. And that's fine. You can't turn it off. So I hope you like it. You can turn it off. Not that I could find. I think that they're on,

that may be a next version OS feature to turn it actually off. Cause you know, obviously they built, that was one of the things they had to put in this version of iPad OS in order to, to ship this thing was some of these specific features for the magic uh keyboard but um but yeah it's so it's subtle but as a as a clicker it works really well like it is just like with the laptops and the desktop magic trackpad where it doesn't move anymore but you wouldn't ever know it feels perfectly normal to click on

it and um and i've definitely heard from people who've said that they, in a, in a quiet space where they're endlessly clicking using the old magic keyboard, everybody, they feel, I think it's more internalized than it is reality, but they feel like they're making these loud clicks in a quiet room with that moving track pad. And while that's gone, it doesn't, it doesn't make that noise. It doesn't move anymore. Now it's just doing a little vibration on your finger but i think they did a good job i think it's executed really well and it's nice having a little more you know a little more um space for using your for your finger to move around on the track pad i think that's nice too

and that's why they've that's why they pushed back uh you know, they used the decreased weight to push the cantilever back a little bit. It sits further back. I guess that arm of it is a little bit shorter so that it sits further back so that they can get that extra room on that plane, that keyboard plane for the trackpad and the function rail. Right. What do you think of the new material material the new aluminum material in the sort of palm rest yeah it's really familiar i mean they're basically making it feel like you're using a laptop like a macbook and i liked it i i have no complaints it went from being a kind of different you know that different kind of rubbery feel around the keys to being just like you're

using a macbook air it really really does i think what's funny is that the other side of it is still the rubberized the rubber yeah and that that which is fine i don't mind it um and i i wonder about the long-term wear on the because like it feels very much like you mentioned you mentioned this in your story that there's an area where the rubber backing sort of attaches to the metal base yeah and you're concerned about the durability of that it feels like that's an interface point that could wear badly and i wonder about like is it is it are they glued on and i we won't know but i wouldn't surprise me if a year or two in, people were looking at that and going, what's going on here?

And Apple had to make some repairs or whatever. The two halves start coming apart. Yeah, that's my concern. And again, it's just when I looked at it, it's a very weird area where it doesn't feel like there's a natural flow from one plane to the other. It really is like one is just stuck on the other one. to the other it really is like one is just stuck on the other one and i hope they've tested that sufficiently and that they're confident that it's going to wear okay because that's the thing that that really bothered me but otherwise you know it's it's uh on the outside it's it's super familiar i didn't have any problem opening it up it's opening it up is a little different um but

i didn't have any problem i know some people um were were a little concerned about that but it seems pretty reasonable to me okay uh so what about the pencil pro have you i mean you're not knowing you you're not much of an artist um very bad uh same um but yeah you did tell me that it's possible to program the apple pencil pro um to run a shortcut when you perform the squeeze gesture yes so maybe that's something you can use yeah so the breaking news here perhaps i'm the only ones who have done this i haven't done this yet but yes you can in settings set the squeeze gesture to you know it can use pencil kit in apps that support that. You can also have it be an eraser. Just say always have it be an eraser.

But one of the functions is run a shortcut. Interesting. It's like a little action button, but for your Apple Pencil. Yeah, that's where the action button on the iPad Pro is. It's on the Apple Pencil. So I don't know. Again, I have not done this i i was so busy writing the review that i thought i cannot i cannot play with this but i do wonder what what is that like why what would be the scenario where

you'd run a shortcut but um maybe you're just you know not even drawing on the screen you just kind of pick up your your pencil and squeeze it or yeah maybe maybe you're just yeah maybe you're just using it as a little squeeze remote shortcut yeah just point the yeah thing at the screen and squeeze it and see what happens yeah so i but i love that it's there right i love that like they didn't need to do that but i think that they for all of the issues with shortcuts on ipad um i do like the idea that they seem to have philosophically decided that they're going to build like these features into a into a feature like it can do a b c or d and then it's like well what else could we do they're like well i don't know put a shortcut in there and then we'll see what we'll see what people do with it we can't wait to see what you

do with it yeah you can it's so much more interesting or and flexible i think if only shortcuts supported any kind of like context like if i squeeze my apple pencil and i'm using safari or if i squeeze my apple pencil and i'm using i don't know omni focus or something like that would be interesting i think to sort of tie that to some sort of uh foreground window context uh i agree but yeah so you just you just set a shortcut and it's system wide so whenever you squeeze you run that squeeze to do not disturb sure you can do that sure why not i mean why not um so anything else about the pencil that you want to mention no i mean i i edited a podcast in ferrite it felt very familiar i think i think the haptics,

speaking of haptics, I think the haptic has done really well. It just feels sort of natural. I know that they said it's up in the top of the barrel, but it doesn't feel like that. The illusion is pretty solid.

I didn't really use barrel roll other than to just draw some things badly and go, oh yeah, look, it turns. But I'm sure that if you're an artist having the ability to use non-circular brushes and and vary them on the fly is good i would imagine that

there'll be some very clever things that are used where you end up using it almost like you're turning a knob where you're rotating the pencil in other apps and it's and it's scrubbing video or i i don't know there are some other things that could probably be done with it. I'm looking forward. Obviously, only a very small handful of apps were able to build custom anything for it. Most of them heard about it first last week and are going to now have to dig into those APIs. But I think that there's some potential there. And I just I love the Apple Pencil. I don't use it very often, but this this one it feels exactly like the old one in that it is essentially a an interface-less object i think i think uh mike and i might have talked about it last week but i think in some you could argue in some ways that this is the ideal of apple

design which is it's just an object it doesn't feel like a tech object at all. It is unrecognizable as a piece of technology other than like a pencil, a non-functional pencil. But it is actually packed with technology and is amazing. Yeah. You close your review with a pretty large section about iPadOS. I do. And the state of iPadOS. I do. So we've been having this conversation over the past few days. And you obviously brought up a bunch of issues that you have run into when you were

trying to use your iPad Pro almost exclusively, I guess, over the past five days, right? Yeah. I guess, over the past five days, right? What's your sort of takeaway? You know, looking at this iPad, this brand new iPad Pro, incredible technology, super thin, lighter than before, OLED,

one month before WWDC, and you're working with this iPad Pro on iPadOS 17. What's sort of your takeaway of this experience? So in a minute, we're going to talk about your piece, which is answering everybody who asked us all last week. You keep saying the iPad has limitations. What are they? Because I realized and you realized that, you know, unless you literally have been reading everything we've written

and listened to every podcast we've done over the last five years you may have missed it and we haven't summed it up so i thank you for writing an article that sums it up and then and then i went and wrote the end of my review and i was like oh i'm sort of summing it up here a little bit but uh so before we get to to your piece i'll just say i was struck by how the ip iPad really has gotten better over the last five years. That I have not been pushing the iPad as hard the last few years since COVID, really, and Apple Silicon. So the MacBook Air came out, I got a MacBook Air, and I thought, well, I'll just travel with this. And so I haven't had to push it in all of those other areas. But, you know, some of the apps have progressed. Some of the OS has progressed.

A lot of the things that bothered me, before we get maybe a little more negative about all the things that iPadOS does wrong, I will just say, I had a moment where I thought I was going to have to pack. I was like, do I need a card reader? How do I get that? And I'm like oh oh no i can literally attach my audio recorder via the same usb cable to the ipad and it will see it as a as an sd card it'll see it as a storage device and i can copy that file over and i can download the zoom now supports a recording with all the individual tracks separate up in the cloud which it didn't used do, which is a great way to do a backup of a podcast. And I can download those files individually. And in the last few years, there's a download manager in Safari and that file goes into the files app.

And you can, and then I was able to very easily import those into Fairlight and edit my project and i thought okay like i remember traveling where i had like the sd card that was also a wi-fi of its own so that i could use a custom app to copy it over to yeah and and oh it was so bad and it's it's not that bad anymore but you know one of the reasons i have to copy that file over is that i can't record my microphone and ipad os so like there's still those walls there but i i was just reminded that with the magic keyboard and with the improvements that they made to files and with i used a lot of stage manager that it's a lot it really has come a long way in five years um i might argue that it's there's huge uh pieces that are still kind of missing or broken. And, and,

and we will do that after, after the next break. But I, I was flashing back to when it was way less capable than it is even today. And I was grateful that, oh yes, it behaves like a computer. If I attach a disc to it,

I can look at the files on the disc. That didn't used to be possible. So better than it was, better than I remember when I was trying to do all of this in 2017. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Delete Me. Privacy is important to lots of us. I know Mike talks about this regularly, that he gets his reports from Delete Me that make sure that information is staying private because there's so many places online that want to sell our information. And, you know, we don't want ours to be a part of it. With Delete.me, we know that someone is working on our side to make sure that our information stays just with us. Do you ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there

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Sign up for Delete.me and you'll get a special discount 20% off your delete me plan when you go to join delete me.com slash upgrade 20 and use the promo code upgrade 20 at checkout. The only way to get 20% off j o i n d e l e t e m e dot com slash upgrade 20 and enter code upgrade 20 at checkout. That's joined delete me.com slash upgrade 20 code upgrade 20 thank you to delete me for supporting this show and relay fm all right federico it's time for us to talk about your story now which is not an ipad pro review it's not an ipad pro review but it's right there in the title it's on max stories right now we'll put a link in the title. It is the title of it. It's on MacStories right now. We'll put a link in the show notes. But because you didn't get it,

which is sad because everybody wants to see a review of the iPad Pro, including people like me who also write reviews of the iPad Pro, I do think you did a good service for all of us who talk about the context of where the iPad is and where it falls down.

Because you and I, I think, both approach this device from a real position of appreciation for all the things that it can do and its potential. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's the only computer I want to use and I just bought one. So like, I'm committed this is the this is my computer but yeah yeah absolutely so so the the the customer or customer service the the um the the service to listeners and readers that you performed is uh going into wwdc which i think is also important like where are we with the current version of ipad os and when we say

that we're frustrated by its limitations why when we say the hardware is great but the software doesn't match a lot of people say what do you mean it seems fine to me right and and we're like where do we start and and so you were able to sort of like go through the details and it it made me smile i mean and also kind of be sad but uh you the the details of what it still doesn't do like individually you could maybe shrug it off but then there is also this just cumulative effect of just a giant like is it doesn't matter there's no calculator well no you can get p calc or other calculators are also available but why and preview and text edit and and journal and you know apple and and sports apple's launched a

bunch of apps that don't even look yeah because of those fonts oh the fonts which i rant about in my review a little bit that i had a i had a big speed bump where i couldn't get the right font to appear on my ipad and the way apple didn't make it, they were like, we support fonts now. And we're like, yay. But the detail is we support a font app section in the app store that doesn't seem to be there. Or an API that allows apps to sideload fonts themselves. So strange. And they could just do something like FontBook and say, do you have a font file?

Well, it's installed now. And they don't um did you how did you feel writing this story was it cathartic for you did you feel like you're just get it all off my chest or was it more like a bad uh flashback it actually felt better than when i did the story on the original version of Stage Manager. Like that story, I sort of, I really hated working on that story. That was a low point. Yeah, that was a low point. Yeah, that was a low point. No, this one, it actually was cathartic and it made me feel like, I feel pretty good about the story because yeah, the approach was basically, so every single time there's always like a

new iPad Pro review and it comes out and there's always that line, that sort of parentheses that says great hardware, but it's the software, you know. And literally everybody says that. And I say that. And I mentioned, you say that, we say, oh, the limitations of iPadOS. And then I get that person of Mastodon who rightfully so is like, hey, the iPad works great for me. What do you mean? And so I thought and and that was literally my process of like where where do we even begin and I realized well let's begin

like let's actually put it all together like at least from my perspective my frustrations in a single story that one can be useful for me because like it's useful reference material to keep around and hopefully can can you know somebody at apple anyone can maybe read the story and and maybe understand like once you lay it all out together as you mentioned like in isolation those are not probably huge issues but when you get that cumulative effect of like oh it's it's this small problem and this small problem and this other small thing, like it starts, you know, it starts piling up and it's not, it doesn't make for a pleasant experience to the point where you have these features that have been semi-broken or, or just done halfway for the past decade of

the iPad. And, and I felt like it was time to, to finally just have it all out in a single story on the site yep for me and i i ran it about this too like you like i i sometimes get the well what do you mean so it doesn't do podcasting who cares that you're such a small niche it's like i think that's fair although i would make the argument and i do in my review that what is pro workflow but a big collection of small niches right like that that's what to be a pro product is to not explicitly support for workflows to be a pro product in my mind means you have to have the power and flexibility to support all of the niche workflows because pros there's no like what do you do i'm a pro i do pro stuff that's not it there's thousands of little tiny what's the american what's the american expression the

rising tide that lifts all boats lifts all boats sure it's it's something like that where you need to the little boats the pros of the little boats exactly exactly the pros of the little boats and apple is the rising tide i guess yeah something like that. Or iPad features the rising tide. I'm not quite sure. But it's that idea that it's not, well, it supports X, therefore it's pro. It's more like it supports a range of things that different pros can use. And I think that's where it falls down. When I wrote my story when I was visiting my mom and not using an iPad, I wrote the story and basically said, the problem fundamentally is that everything on the iPad only happens because Apple says it's okay. And that's not how you can build pro features. So the podcast example, like I can talk about

the fact that it's silly that you can't do something like audio hijack and just say, can I record my microphone, my USB microphone attached to this iPad while I'm also in another app doing a video conference? And the answer is no, because you can't do two things at once on a device with an M4 processor and 16 gigs of RAM that supports multitasking. But the broader issue would be that the audio subsystem of iPadOS is incredibly, I would say, laughably primitive. And the general example, and you and I both used it, is you're playing a video, you're playing some music. This is where it bites me.

I'm playing some music and there's a little video clip in Ivory posted on social media somewhere. And I just want to play the video clip. And on the Mac, if I do that, what happens is my music keeps playing. And on my Mac here in my office, my music keeps playing via AirPlay and then via the Mac speakers, the audio and video from social media play. On the iPad, when you do that, it says, hold on. Stop the music. You don't want to hear two things at once.

Stop the music. That's not. You have to watch this video. And then, and this is true. And then when I'm done with the video, I press play on the magic keyboard. And you know what happens? The video resumes. It doesn't go back to my music because it's like, oh, no, I'm playing social media videos now.

That's what I'm doing. It's so frustrating. And so that's, I feel like that's our, that's, that's our point with a lot of these things is it's not just the detail. It's that the detail is indicative of a larger issue where there's things that have been left, as you said, either unimproved for years or a decade or more. Or they do an update like files. You really have it in for files, which I think is totally fair. really have it in for files which i think is totally fair files i can say files is so much better than it used to be and is it is is okay but everything you list in is like this should be this should have all been fixed over the last five years and instead they sort of ship files

to where it is now and seem to have walked away yeah yeah. Yeah. And honestly, that feeling kind of applies to many other things on iPad, especially multitasking. Like it almost feels like institutionally Apple has a tendency to release iPad features and then walk away for a couple of years and then come back after three years and be like, hey guys, we have a new feature for you on iPadOS. And you're like, well, what about the previous one? the previous one what the previous one no there's no previous feature like it does feel something like that sometimes um and yeah uh like and um i also wanted to mention these other points that i think it's important uh because you and i i think uh and and steve trattansmith and a bunch of other people who have been commenting on iPads for a while, we get this comment from people very often these days.

It's like, oh, these folks, they just want Apple to put macOS on the iPad. And I mean, I am literally the person with the handmade convertible Apple laptop. with the handmade convertible Apple laptop. So it's, I mean, I did this myself, but I did it sort of out of desperation, right? It's not like I want Apple to just put macOS on the iPad. That was a sort of a self-made solution to the problem of the iPad software not getting better. Ideally, I would prefer Apple to keep developing iPadOS for iPad forever and to actually improve it, you know,

going forward. I'm just saying that if that's not something that Apple thinks they can do, maybe it's time to consider macOS on the iPad. Conversely, if macOS on the iPad is absolutely a no-no from Apple, like we're never, ever going to do it, you can't just let the iPad's operating system coast by, you know, without these meaningful updates. Something needs to change. And that was sort of my conclusion of the story. Something needs to change because this situation where macOS is no-go for iPad, but also iPad

OS doesn't really receive substantial updates for Pro users, that's not working either. So something's got to give eventually. Steve said something that I thought was really interesting about how if you were to virtualize macOS on iPad Pro at the high end, you know, with lots of limitations, one theoretical advantage it gives you is it allows Apple to sell all the high-end hardware of the iPad with a sort of a release valve, a pressure release, that gives it infinite time to continue improving iPadOS until iPadOS reaches the point where it can do that. And the counter argument would be, would they? But I agree with you. I am not, I like the iPad. So it took a lot for me to suggest maybe you should just virtualize macOS, but it came from a place of being so worn down and kind of desperate to say, well, okay, I'm bargaining with you, Apple. If you're not going to be responsible enough to make iPadOS better in all of these ways, if it goes against your philosophy, if it's not worth it because the pro user base is such a small fraction of the overall iPad user base that it's not worth the investment,

maybe you should give up and just let people run Mac OS. I don't think it's the best idea. I think iPad OS should be better, but I could see the argument that most people don't care about those features. Although I had the counter argument, and I mentioned in my review, you absolutely went into details about it. One of the other things that really bugs me is background tasks, which is a fundamental from an iPhone that had no RAM and no processor and no battery. And so they designed iOS in the early days to be very aggressively a unitasker. And they've added very careful multitasking over time. And it's a power user feature, but it's not a power user feature because

all sorts of Mac users use background utilities, things that run a backup in the background, things that are an alternative launcher or something like Hazel that watches your files or a clipboard manager or something like the Stream Deck or any other peripherals that need a thing that runs in the background to enable them to function. All of those things, or even global keyboard shortcuts, so you can run a shortcut at any point by hitting a keyboard command. These are, yeah, they're power user-ish features, but they also speak to a broader flexibility of the operating system that other people can use.

Imagine if on an iPad, a regular person could just download a clipboard manager and have it work. But that's one of those things that requires a level of background operation that iOS was never really designed for. And yet, you know, how you sell the ipad pro in 2024 and have it be completely unable to run background software when it's one of the like it's not a nerdy thing it's a very common thing to run a menu bar app or something on mac os and yet on the ipad it's it's just not there so i don't agree that it's just for like super computer nerds, but I think it makes your whole platform richer. And the fact that they can't do it, just, it's so frustrating. So I want them to make iPadOS better. And I know you do too,

because talking about virtualizing macOS is like a Hail Mary. It is a desperation move to say, virtualizing mac os is like a hail mary it is a desperation move to say could could this hardware be quickly made much more flexible and like i still think they could do it but like it's not the ideal outcome the ideal outcome is ipad os gets better yeah that's that's what i hope will happen it's why i wanted to make it clear in the story that that is my ideal goal. That is my hope for the future of the iPad. And yeah, so now I have this article up there on Mac Stories sort of as a, you're welcome, as a sort of as a captioning time of the problems and frustrations that we have experienced. And it's there.

So go read it. I hate to say it, but it comes from a place of love we we those of us who are really enthusiastic about the ipad are in part enthusiastic about it because it has such incredible potential and the things that it does well it does better than any other apple product yeah like i i had that thought this weekend i was like i you know it's a macbook air one i want it to be except for the software issues and then like, you know, it's a MacBook Air when I want it to be, except for the software issues. And then I pop it out and it's just a little tablet.

Like, I can't, and then I get a pencil and I'm doing pencil interactions and editing a podcast with a pencil. I'm like, it's amazing.

And the iPhone doesn't do that. You put a controller, you put a controller around it, you have a giant monitor to play video games. Yeah. Like it can transform into so many different things.

It's incredible. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it does come from a place of love like all the criticism and the frustrations they really do yeah all right well federico thank you so much for being uh on upgrade it took two connected hosts to fill in for mike but i'm and i do love mac stories i should say and we'll say it at the end of the show too and and uh connected and all the other podcasts you do in the mac stories podcast there's so much in the mac stories connected universe but thank you so much for coming on upgrade to talk about thank you been a pleasure thank you this episode of upgrade is brought to you by express vpn you probably wouldn't take a call

in public on speaker for everyone to hear. That's really annoying. Also, privacy, people are listening in that too. Also, you're a jerk and don't do that. Using the internet without ExpressVPN is like taking that call. It's bad. Don't do it. Somebody could eavesdrop if they wanted to. ISPs can see all the websites you visit and that data can be sold to others who might use that data to target you for marketing. Thankfully, you can use ExpressVPN, which reroutes your network data through a secure encrypted tunnel

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One tap, they're not kidding, one tap, and I'm safe and secure no matter where I am, roaming around on the iPad, on random Wi-Fi in a random cafe somewhere in Oregon. Boom, ExpressVPN turned on. Everything is locked and secure. When I went to New Zealand, I was able to turn on ExpressVPN and be back in America, which was really nice for all sorts of location reasons to just sort of be secure and back in my home country where all my stuff was,

digitally speaking. Protect your online privacy too. Go to expressvpn.com slash upgrade today. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash upgrade. And you can get an extra three months for free. That's right. Three months for free. Expressvpn.com slash upgrade. Thank you to ExpressVPN for their support of this show and RelayFM. Steven, welcome back. Hello. Thank you for hibernating during federico see federico lives uh way far away and so we had to record that part before we recorded your part that's a little

behind the scenes action because yeah he's he's central time is a little bit ahead of me but you know central european time wow that's out there. It is a different ball game, setting stuff up with Federico. Wow. Yes. I mean, you do this every week, right?

It's a, it's a thing. So thank you for, for going into podcast hibernation, but you're back. Do you have any iPad, uh, related,

uh, thoughts or questions to ask me now that we've broken the seal on that? Yeah, well, I do, but first I want to say like, I know you, you guys talked through federico's

article i got a chance to read the draft over the weekend yeah there are very few people on the planet who think more thoroughly about this thing these things than federico does yeah for sure and he you know he was talking to several of us after the event leading into this article. And I think if you want a what is up with iPadOS, there's no place better to look. And I hope that people at Apple who work on iPadOS take it to heart because he knows their product better than almost anyone on the outside of the company. So definitely go check that out. But yeah, I i did i really just had you know one question i know you guys talked through a lot of stuff but you've been a big ipad pro user for really as long as i can remember since the ipad pro came out in 2015 20 how how

has it been nine years since the first ipad pro came out i keep thinking it's like right when i went out on my own but it was actually the next year it was a year out on my own iPad Pro came out. I keep thinking it's like right when I went out on my own, but it was actually the next year. It was a year out on my own when it came out and I bought that first iPad Pro. And that was a big, for a brand new company and me out on my own, that was a big investment to buy an iPad Pro with a keyboard, but I totally did it.

Yeah. And like you said, you've continued on that path and it just struck me in, I was rereading some of your old reviews, including your original iPad Pro review from 2015 in preparation for this. I was just struck that as an iPad user, you've kind of been on the front lines of like how they've improved the product the best. Because I think out of all the iPads, the big one has had the most meaningful improvements i mean if people don't remember that original ipad pro it was kind of awkward right because we were still sure in the home button era it was pretty thick it was pretty heavy and then

there was the big keyboard which was a revelation that there was apple made a keyboard for the ipad right because that was the people were arguing like you shouldn't have a keyboard on your ipad and they did it but it was also that it was that first generation one where it like folded over so it was weird half of it was super thick and awkward and i'm like i never carried that thing around in that case i always just kept that case around because it was super awkward but it was a big screen ipad that was you know that they were trying to say hey everybody do work on this thing and they had the i work apps for ipad and like they were really trying to say no no we're trying to establish that the ipad is not just a lean back kind of thing it's a lean forward kind of thing and so yeah

nine years on i've been i've been working the fields on the ipad pro just you know tote that barge lift that bale uh i don't know upload that podcast something like that sure well you can't record a podcast on it that's for sure and and that's really what i was getting at and i think it's sort of the intersection between the y'all's two pieces today where this new ipad pro is so incredible hardware wise but it still has the same problems the original one did nine years ago i mean you have this piece in your original ipad pro were you talking about the hardware and then a single line you have the word but yeah and then the next subhead is talking about software it's like this could be written today i know in many ways federico's piece your piece your 2015 piece they're all kind of the same lineage because apple just hasn't hasn't been able to to move this forward

in the way that a lot of us want it just struck me on reflecting on the nine years of the ipad pro that while the hardware i mean the original one to this one seems like unbelievable progress huge yet the frustrations are kind of the same when you boil it down yeah the pace of the pace of of progress on the hardware side vastly exceeds the pace of progress on the software side. Not that there isn't progress, because like I said to Federico a couple, you know, earlier in the podcast, using it the last five days, I'm reminded of all the things that used to frustrate me back

when I started doing this that are no longer the case. It has progressed. It's just not progressed as fast enough as the hardware. So should we do some ask upgrade that do it, right? Keep it in Jim. Keep my lasers in. Keep the lasers in. Yeah, here we go. Okay. Andrew asks, I'm currently using a ninth gen iPad that I want to replace a fifth gen iPad air that got damaged that I used used to replace. Okay. I want to get cellular in the next one, but mostly I use it for web browsing and streaming video. Should I get a

10th gen since the price has gone down, a new Air or refurbished 11 inch iPad Pro fourth gen since it's on the M series chips and will be supported longer? Wow. So many iPad choices here. I know. So I pulled most of these questions, and that's why I pulled this one. I was like, this really shows the gamut of what's out there. And I think for most people, other than budget, which I think is obviously the biggest factor in this purchase for a lot of people,

I think it's also kind of about the accessories. You know, depending on which iPad you get, you get sort of radically different experiences when it comes, especially to the keyboard and trackpad. I mean, that 10th Gen one has like the kickstands, all sorts of weird stuff going on there. And so I think you look at that. I mean, I think any of them would be an improvement,

but also the ninth gen is still pretty good. Like they're still, they sold it until, you know, eight days ago. And, um, and so I don't know if you've got to completely rush out and replace it just because it's, it's old, uh, now, but I think, look at the accessories, look at the budget. I think between the 10th gen and the, and the air, you would be, you would be fine either way. Yeah. I think between the 10th gen and the Air, you would be fine either way. Yeah, I think the problem with questions that get sent in is that I have follow-up questions. So my answer would be like, do you want to use a keyboard with it? How do you feel about kickstands?

Like, I don't like kickstands. So if I want to use a keyboard with an iPad, I'm not going to get the 10th gen, even though it's got bright colors and it's really nice. The keyboard story just doesn't work for me. It's I would not, I would not go down that path. Um, uh, new air is going to be M series two, just like the 11 inch. So like I, the 11 inch iPad pro fourth new air is an M two. Right. So like, I think the new air is the place that you should maybe start and then see like what price can you get for a refurbed ipad pro and what do you get and and does that make more sense for you it's got face id face id is really nice too i like it um but the new air and the old ipad pros

are very very similar so i'd say price them and see if there are specific features how do you feel about the apple pencilcil? New Air will get you new Apple Pencil. Refurb iPad Pro will mean an older Apple Pencil without the fun new features. So if I had to guess, I'd say Sweet Spot is the new Air, but it really depends on how you use it. That's the beauty of the iPad, but also the complexity of it is that it's sort of defined by its accessories. But to answer the question, you have to weigh the accessories. Apple Pencil doesn't really matter to me because I could use any Apple Pencil to do what I do with an Apple Pencil, but keyboard really matters to me. Yeah. I think too, there's

something else I wanted to highlight in this question about longevity. And really, I think, too, there's something else I wanted to highlight in this question about longevity. And really, I think it's right to praise Apple here. They do a pretty good job supporting devices for a long time. You know, every few years, some iPads and iPhones get cut off. But generally, you know, you have years and years from when something goes off sale. And so the 10th gen versus, you know, a new Air versus a refurbished 11-inch iPad Pro, like, I don't know if, you know, five, six, seven years down the road, how different the cutoffs will be for that software. And so I don't think it would be drastically different.

I think it could be a year or two, but generally what I'm saying is Apple does a good job at keeping these things supported for a long time. And so I don't necessarily rank that super high in my rubric of which one should I get. B wrote in and said, Apple removing the ultra wide camera on the new iPad pro surprised me.

Do you think they did this to avoid needing to add support for spatial video? I don't think, I don't think the spatial video really is affected. Although I would say that, you know, based on the existing cameras that were there, I'm not sure the quality, I think they want the quality of spatial video to be better.

And the iPhones that are coming this fall will up the quality there. But I don't think that was the motivation. It is weird for Apple to remove features from a new generation of a product, right? That doesn't happen that often. And they took the ultra wide out. It's just gone. This was an iPad with two rear cameras and they're like, nope, one rear camera. That's all you get. One 12 megapixel rear camera. But if I had to guess, I guess that they're trying to save money and space and, and that they probably have some access to some very secret internal Apple statistics that showed that nobody used that camera.

That's my guess. That's, that's, that's the best. And I think that they, they like telling the story about the new true tone with the multi, Nobody used that camera. That's my guess. That's the best. And I think that they like telling the story about the new True Tone with the multi-LED True Tone flash and their machine learning on document scanning and stuff like that that they can do. That is a first. I assume the iPhone will pick it up this fall, but it's a first on the iPad. You shouldn't have to buy an iPad to do a document scan. Your phone should be able to do that too.

But like, I, I don't think it's about spatial video. My guess is that it's about saving space and, and weight and power and price because they, even though they raised the price of the iPad pro the OLED adding OLED alone, I'm sure really increased the actual cost of building and the cost of parts. And there's two of them in there. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. Two panels. Tandem panels. So yeah, that's my guess. But it is a weird move, right? Like obviously there was some sort of reason, but I don't think it's spatial recording related is my guess.

Connor wrote in to say, I want to get an ipad mini but i feel like i should wait at this point given the lack of an update to the mini last week is all hope lost do we think the mini will be revised or will it go the way of the iphone mini and should i get one while i still can well connor good news mark german said there is a new mini coming i think we think of apple as this kind of all-powerful enormous entity right but like i don't think Apple has the capability to switch every single iPad production line at once. I think that they're like, no, no, no, no. That's like, cause there's factories.

There's lots of physical implications in doing it. So they did two now and they'll do two later. And Mark Gurman says maybe the end of the year or early next year, there will be a new iPad mini. So I wouldn't buy a new iPad mini if you could avoid it because there is a new one coming and I'm sure it will be a pretty dramatic upgrade because they only get updated every few years. You still use a mini? I do. Yeah, I've got an iPad mini. It's right here on my desk. Nice. Yeah, I mean the iPad mini, other than the first couple where they really iterated pretty quickly, it has slowed down to this sort of irregular, every couple of years, it gets an update. And yeah, I think, you know, spec wise, it will get an update, you know, there, there are these people out there, and I'm could be one of them, honestly, that wants like a pro level iPad mini, you know, it's like, well, what if tandem OLED was in a small tablet? You know, that'd be, that them, honestly. It wants like a pro-level iPad mini. You know, it's like, well, what if Tandem OLED was in a small tablet?

You know, that'd be awesome. But I think the iPad mini kind of lives in the space, kind of like the iPad Air, but you're paying a bit of a premium over the 10th gen for the size. But Gurman says it is coming, and I agree with you. It would be great if they could just roll out,

hey, we've done everything, but they have to prioritize. They have to line up all of these different things and it seems like the mini you know maybe it'll be this fall you know it could be tacked onto the iphone it could be if there's an october event because there's also rumors of a bunch of m4 max coming later this year pre-christmas event seems like if it's ready that would be a great time to launch it yeah and the mini i think does pretty well in the holiday season i would imagine so i think it's coming um i don't think it's going to go

the way of the iphone mini i think that's a very different situation pour one out for the iphone mini oh i know my wife just moved offers this weekend i just saw somebody with one the other day and i was like oh but then again i look at my phone and I'm like, it's fine. I don't need to go back to that. Yeah. I miss it. Mary went from a 13 mini to a 15 this weekend and she picked it up off her nightstand this morning and I just heard, ugh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Sam writes, if Apple were to launch an iPhone Air to sit between the iPhone and the iPhone Pro, which features would you bring to the Air and what would you leave to the Pro? Sam? I love this question. I hate this question so much. I would argue that the current iPhone is the iPhone Air and that the iPhone SE and past models are the iPhone.

That would be my argument is that the iPhone is already positioned in that spot, and the older iPhones and the SE are the low end because there's no iPad SE, right? I think they just approach it differently. But hey, if you want to spitball on what features you take and put in an iPhone Air, I would love to hear. The one that came to mind immediately, and it may come to the iPhone 16, is the always-on display. In setting up my wife's iPhone 15 last night, I kept looking over it and being like,

oh, why isn't the screen not on? Because it's, you know, I know it's not the mini, right? It's sort of now a normal-sized phone. And it's like, the always-on screen is so good. And I have a bunch of widgets on my home screen and a faded-out version of my wallpaper. I love that I can just glance at my phone and see what's going on. And I think everyone should have that. So that would be something I would pull down. I think the other thing I would consider pulling down maybe is a third camera.

That was actually a conversation we had this weekend by my wife on the phone. It was like, we can do whatever you want. If you want the 15 or the 15 Pro, I showed them both to her at the stores. The difference is primarily that you would notice it is the third camera, that telephoto, and it does unlock some interesting creative things. And, you know, maybe there's a world where the Pro is 5x and 10x or something, if they can

continue to improve the, you know, whatever they call it, the Tetra Prism, whatever, inside the Pro Max. Maybe there's room for like a more standard 2X. I don't know. But it is noticeable that that third camera is, you know, kind of there as a distinguishing factor that I think a lot of people would want, but maybe not with all the other stuff and all the expense that it brings. I'll say more colors that are not as bright as uh cheaper models but more of them than on the pro models yeah and um i know this isn't the case but i i'm it makes me laugh so i'm just gonna say it just to replace face id with the the button touch id just to make people angry bring the price down just make people angry and finally jessica asked are you concerned

about the new ipad bending gasp bend gate could we have bend gauge back so our friends at mac rumors and we have lots of friends over there they put this thing on threads three days ago yeah promoting bend gate before the iPad pro comes out like talk about missing the room I don't I don't

love that yeah the replies to it are incredible but just this weekend there was

an interview with Jaws and John Ternus future Apple

CEO talking about a lot of things with the iPad but one

of the things that came out of it was the iPad, but one of the things that came out of it was the construction methods. And I'm sure we'll see more of this the second iFixit has their hands on one, but changing the way that this iPad is actually constructed to make it stronger. And like, there's like a new metal cover that sits on top of the logic board and there's a central rib of metal that like make it stronger, make it more rigid.

I think that's especially important on the 13 where you have more leverage. Yeah. And look, Apple's gotten this wrong before, right? Like look no further than the iPhone 6 Plus. Things can happen, but I suspect they've done their math here and I think under most use cases,

this won't be a problem. If you shut it in a car door or a trunk lid, like our friend John Voorhees did once on vacation. Yeah, sure. Probably going to bend, but so did the old ones. So I think it's not going to keep me up at night.

Yeah. I, uh, there will always be a gate. If it isn't bend gate, they will find some other gate. There will always be a gate because it's what gets the clicks that's it you know maybe it'll be a green gate steven maybe it'll be a hiss gate those are good sometimes screens turn green for no reason should we invent

a gate should we just like uh invent a gate right now for for the new ipads i'm gonna say how about a uh an accessory based gate how about like a um pencil gate yeah i was thinking like function key gate or like charge gate maybe it doesn't charge as well in through the keyboard but i do like pencil gate and it could cover so many different sins. Pencilgate's also fun to say. Pencilgate, right? All right. We don't know what Pencilgate is,

but we're looking at that Apple Pencil Pro and we're suspicious. Something is going on there. Pencilgate. Brace yourselves. Pencilgate. All right.

If you love Upgrade, by the way, you should subscribe to Upgrade Plus where you get no ads and bonus content every week and access to the Real AFM members Discord this week. Steve and I are going to talk about iPod Nanos, and we're going to rank them. And it's going to get wild. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com for more.

But this brings us to the end of this episode. Send us your feedback. Mike will be back next week. Feedback, follow-up questions, UpgradeFeedback.com. you can do snell talk there you can do ask upgrade there check my stuff out my new ipad pro review is up now it's six colors.com listen to my podcast at the incomparable.com and here at relay fm and steven of course 512 pixels.net it's the episode number 512 followed by pixels.net synergy yes and uh i number 512 followed by pixels.net. Synergy.

Yes. And I don't even know what, you're on the socials at various things. I'm having some trouble there. There's a bunch of links in the sidebar at 512pixels. There you go. But I also host

LinkedIn bio. Power users. Yes. Sunday. Here at Relay. Matt, yes. Here at Relay. And then some show

with a couple of Europeans on Wednesdays. Yes, indeed. A very serious technology related podcast uh so i am uh jay snell at zeppelin.flights on mastodon that's the best place to find me on the socials i suppose um mike will be back next time um federico we should say macstories.net you'll see his article there and a whole lot more. And then he's also on a podcast on Relay called Connected and many other podcasts in the Mac Stories family. It's own little podcast collection that's happening over there.

He's busy. He's a busy man. Busy guy. And thank you again to Federico for taking time out to talk about the iPad with me on this episode. Of course, we have our video clips, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Upgrade Relay is the name to search for. And we continue to sell merch at UpgradeYourWardrobe.com. I think our merch drop is basically over at this point for the special stuff, but there's ongoing available merch at UpgradeYourWardrobe.com. Thank you to all the members who support us with Upgrade Plus, and thank you to our sponsors, FitBot, DeleteMe, and ExpressVPN. Is this how

saying goodbye works on Upgrade? Mike will be back next week, and he can do it right. But thank you all for listening, and until next time, Stephen Hackett, say goodbye. Bye, y'all.