Upgrade - 514: European Beard

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 514 for may 27th 2024 today's show is brought to you by squarespace vitally and ladder my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike how are you i'm doing fine i'm traveling for the long holiday weekend how's your bank holiday going i was gonna say i wondered if you were gonna say i was thinking about this today are you free from banks if you would say to me happy memorial day and then i would say to you happy early spring bank holiday which is what this one is technically called. We have so many, they have to give them designations like early spring, late spring,

early summer, late summer, you know, or first August bank holiday, second August. Well, congratulations to everybody celebrating the bank holiday, except for the workers in the banks who have to work on the bank holiday. Well, I mean, and podcasters. We do this to ourselves.

This is a funny thing where like like i'm sure we've mentioned this a million times on the show for this exact reason where people you know i'm working on bank holidays here and people like are you working the bank holidays yep because jason doesn't and then i but then i say well similarly there's any uh american like what do you call public holidays that are on mondays jason works them because i'm working this is the one where we technically both could have just said no let's not bother but why would we do that this is the truth the truth is if either of us has a holiday that we want to take off and move the show we'll move the show yeah or we'll pre-record it the problem is then you have to say well can we do it on friday or is it can we move it to tuesday and oh i gotta move a thing

here and i gotta do this there and in the end usually you and i look at each other and are like let's just do it i think it's i think merlin has spoken about this the most of like the knock-on effects of one podcast moving it is um it can be disastrous how many other shows it moves like because everybody's doing shows with everybody else, so all of the shows just stop moving. Exactly. And so it's often easier, unless you're traveling.

I mean, I'm traveling here, and I was able, there's a car trip, I brought lots of stuff with me because I could do that. But unless you're like, if you're traveling for the holiday and you're truly taking a holiday, then we'll move the show, right? We'll move the show. I didn't have to do this today, but I their operating systems and how would that differ from how you would prioritize them? Now, for the sake of the question, I have them listed as follows, not in order, but just listed iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS, watch OS, vision OS, TV OS.

So Jason, what do you think Apple's ranking of priority is for these operating systems? And what would you like it to be? I think it varies. I think it varies based on the lifecycle of a product. And I think they also kind of maybe flip a little bit from time to time. So right now, I would say, I mean, iOS is always number one. Right now, I would say maybe even Vision OS is number two, because it's a product that's still

in process of happening and then i would say then i would probably say ipad os only because it picks up a lot of the work of ios so it's coming along for the ride then i would say mac Mac OS, then watch OS, and then TV OS. I would 100% agree with you. How would you like them to be ranked? Well, me as a user, me as the CEO of Apple. No, you as Jason Snell, you as you. How would you like them to be ranked?

Like in your ideal world, how would you like them to be ranked like in your ideal world how would you do it mac os ipad os tv os wow vision os uh-huh ios that's wild that's a wild ranking that is incredible i love it apple tv is my only tv box so i mean if i'm purely greedy now if i was the ceo of apple ios is first ios has gotten a lot of love it doesn't need more love yeah i know it's yeah i know i i would i would do it very differently but like if i'm I'm greedy, like the iPhone's fine. The other products need more love and I know why they don't get them,

but they need more love. And tvOS, shout out to Joe Rosensteil, who's written many, many, many blog posts about this. But like tvOS has so much potential because even though that box is more expensive than the competition, it's like the hardware is so much better. There's so much that could be improved about it

and it just doesn't get better. And I use it every day. So I would like it to be way better than it is. And the potential's there, but it's just not there. I mean, truth is I'd probably rate Vision OS highly because I think that there's a lot of potential there and I think they just desperately need to improve it. All right, my personal ranking would be, in my ideal world,

iOS, macOS, iPadOS, VisionOS, WatchOS, tvOS. And while I similarly love tvOS, the things I want them to do for tvOS, I don't think they're going to be able to do them because it requires netflix and stuff and well if you make it a priority you make a deal with netflix right then i would okay in that regard i'll flip tv os and watch os watch os i don't really need to do anything like it's fine for me as it is like i'm good with it um because again i actually would if

if i was in charge there would be another another operating system called FitnessOS, and I would put that on a band with no screen. But yeah, that's where I would go. For me, iOS, I think, is the most important still. And I would still put it that way because the work of iOS will inform all the other OSs. And I think it will only ever work that way. Like I can't imagine macOS features really influencing iOS as heavily as iOS can influence macOS.

Like that's how I would waterfall it. All right. Thank you to Ryan for that great question. If you would like to send in one of your own, please go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in a Snell Talk question to help us open an episode of Upgrade. A little bit of follow-up.

First off, I would like to thank all of the listeners and the Upgradians who are the same, one and the same, who wrote in via various means to give us lovely comments about the new show artwork. I'm very happy with it and I'm happy that people love it too. good we did a little fix on the uh on the upgrade plus art for upgrade plus members it was there's a lot there's a funny story here that uh it was using

the tagline from the the taglines are kind of superfluous and you have to look for them but um it was using the tagline from the main show instead of the little cheeky extra word so i i put that word back in in the photoshop file and i also noticed when people were posting them that in our old upgrade plus show art we capitalized all the things in the tagline whereas in the in the regular show art we didn't so it was like up style and on the one and it was inconsistent for years. Stephen made all of the membership show up. He blew it, but I fixed it.

Maybe it was me. It's either me or Stephen. The dereliction of the owners, but it has been corrected. The responsible parties don't even know who they are. It's impossible to know. Very important stuff here here it might be possible to know actually i'll see if i can try and find out the answer to that maybe there's some kind of like provenance to the file somewhere it's nice that people like it it was i like i'm very happy that we refreshed it without changing

it essentially because that was the brief right like you and i both were very happy with our logo we just didn't want it to we just felt like it needed some improvement. Yeah, it needed a refresh. Yeah, it's skeuomorphic now. Carlos wrote in and said, listening to your discussion about the iPhone slim, I am thinking that this kind of market segmentation damages the iPhone brand.

When I had an iPhone 5, if you had the latest iPhone, you had the best iPhone. It democratized the best in the world. But now, the regular iPhone just means you can't afford the quote-unquote good ones. I wonder if it's worth it for Apple to go higher in market segmentation and alienate users. I always love some follow-up from Carlos because he's a little feisty. And I often disagree with him, but I think he makes interesting points.

I feel like the existence of the, well, first off, I question the premise that it just means you can't afford the good ones because I know a lot of people who buy the iPhone 15 and it's not because they can't afford the 15 Pro. It's that they don't think that's a good use of their money. Like for them, the cheaper phone is fine and that the pro is like, what am I really getting out of it? And there are other people for whom it's like, not a question, just like pay the most, want the best. And so that's, I think, good market segmentation.

I think similarly, if you're Apple and you have the opportunity to make a $2,000 phone that feels like the future, but no, you know, and you're like, well, we can't make the iPhone $2,000, right? We can't do it. It will be disastrous. But but what we could do and i'm making up that number but like just it's a proxy for a big number way more than the current phones um well you can't replace the iphone right now but you could make that phone if you're capable and sell it and get people a

taste of the future and some portion of your audience will buy it. I don't buy the premise that the iPhone's success is based on the fact that everybody gets the same one because that hasn't been true for several years and the iPhone is still successful. And in fact, there are people who are perfectly happy to buy the cheaper model because they don't feel like they need to buy all those features.

They're not gonna use all those features or they don't want all those features and they'll save a little bit of money and it makes them feel good about buying the iphone of their choice i don't i don't think there are a lot of iphone 15 and 14 owners going on man i i i don't like this phone i wanted the good phone but i couldn't afford it so i just got this i don't think that's the case i think that's a different market segment but even if there are i don't think apple cares and i think that the results have borne out like well they haven't lost sales over it i don't know right the thing about aspirational goods is in the name like they will make expensive full-featured iphones

because people will the majority of people will want to buy them and either will or they will look to the point when they can and they will just look forward to when they can make that purchase like you're a student now but when you have a job maybe you'll get the pro phone because you're not having a phone bought for you by your parents who are trying to just get you what they can afford right like i don't think that well honestly if it if this was the case this wouldn't have worked, right? For the last 10 years or whatever that they've been doing the segmentation. 10 years.

It's been almost 10 years since the 6 and 6 Plus. And what Apple has proven time and time again is every single time they have a more expensive phone, it always sells the most. In fact, it creates a spike in iphone revenue when they do so i don't i get the idea i understand how if you can't afford it that really sucks but like apple's just going to do what makes it the most money same as pretty much any business that wants to make money that's true and and if it was something that caused the iphone sales to have problems they wouldn't do it, right? That's the counter argument is if they did this and it led to less money, they would stop.

But it doesn't. It leads to more money. Nobody knows which models of iPhone sell most more than Apple, right? And so they know. Yep, they know. While talking about the iPhone slim, I would like to make a quick correction as pointed out to me by our wonderful video editor Chip. I attributed the story of the iPhone Slim

to Jeff Poo. Jeff is an analyst at Haitong International Securities who shared information about the design changes coming to the iPhone 17 lineup as a whole and corroborated the idea of a slim iPhone. But the report of the iPhone Slim from the information was written by Waynene ma and chiano lu so leo so i wanted to just correct myself there because it's

important uh jason you reviewed the kobo libra color which we were talking about a couple of weeks ago like how color is spelled in the product name i think it's canada what oh okay yeah yeah i think they're based in canada yeah so it's great my review is hilarious because when it's in caps it's oh you are and then when i refer to the screen i just say c-o-l-o-r and it's like that's just how it is that's gonna how it's gonna be folks i would like you to say about you know kind of give a little bit of your thoughts but my kind of takeaway from your review is essentially the color isn't as good as you'd want it to be and it makes the screen overall worse yeah i mean the screen is too small to read comics although i did try i read some saga

from a pdf the color is like newsprinty it's not super vibrant or anything because it's an e-ink screen it's impressive that e-ink can do color um it's i mean like there's there's lots of things that are impressive about the technology that e-ink can do color at all is really remarkable but beyond that like it's just it's it's very it's the same as the previous one but it costs 40 $40 more. It adds color, which is not very useful in most cases. Uh, color book covers,

I guess like, and if you do highlighting, you can color code them, which there might be people for whom this is valuable, but I'm somebody who reads books on my e-reader and I don't, I don't understand like $40 more without any other real improvements other than color is not great they seem to have discontinued the black and white model which they didn't do for some of their other models but this one the old libra 2 is gone so unless they're

working on a um a black and white successor um it's really a bummer because now you have to buy spend 40 more so it's that much more expensive um and then there's the big issue which is that color screen is impressive but it's backlight doesn't it doesn't go as bright it's not as bright and the screen itself has a very fine texture i would say almost a pattern on the background that I think is an effect. Some of it might be ghosting. I also have noticed some ghosting where things from the previous page are not refreshed properly. But some of it I think is just fundamental, which is on the black and white Kobo and on Kindles that are black and white. It was originally gray. It was originally sort of like a black on a gray, and that tone has gotten lighter, and the backlight makes it lighter.

Well, this thing, there's a lot of contrast on the black and white model, and the color model with these little dots in a pattern that I think is an effect of the color screen, the color layer, means the contrast is less. So, it gets less bright and there's poorer contrast. And in bright reading environments, I notice this, right? Like, I notice it doesn't get as bright. It's not as easy to read as the old model. So, in the end, I think it's a disappointment. I despair about the current state of e-readers because amazon seems to also have kind of voided their um their high-end button pressing kindles and they just have the lower end kindles now um and the like there are not a lot of the ones that i thought were really good like the kindle

oasis which was expensive but very good that seems to be gone the uh the the kobo libra 2 that is gone and now you have to pay for the color model or you can step up to the sage but that's much more expensive like i just there's no i'm used to there being no excitement in the e-reader space but now i feel like the e-reader space is aggressively getting worse and so the kobo libra color like i wouldn't choose it over a Libre 2, honestly, even though I think it is faster and the pages turn faster. And I think there's some nice things about it. But bottom line is it's not really appreciably better

than the model it replaces. It's more expensive and the screen isn't as good. So what are we even doing here? So I'm feeling a lot of despair about the e-reader market right now. Well, you have the savior of the daylight computer, right? I've heard from like a half a dozen people at least saying, I can't wait to see what Jason says about the daylight computer. The daylight computer is basically an iPad with a screen that they say is like e-ink,

which that's a red flag. Like e-ink which that's a red flag like e-ink what does that mean people say it is a black and white lcd display with an amber backlight not a regular like that's all it is yeah yeah that sounds about right like it's it doesn't it's not it's not e-ink right it's not because they would say if it if it was and what also irks me is that some of the hype people around this product because they've got a really good i'll give them credit a really good process of rolling this out where people are talking about it and coming to me also adjacent their website anchor in paper whatever they say beautiful they have a very

good looking website their videos i think it's a sandwich video is their launch video oh really um yeah but it rolls it makes me roll my eyes because it's all about like oh we're addicted to our screens and this is gonna free you from your screens i'm like come on um but like so this these are the red flags is it's making a lot of claims about oh we're addicted to our screens which people like their screens i i don't i really can't stand the we're addicted to our screens here's another screen oh yeah i know but our screen is a different screen it's like e-ink but not but not but it is so i got a lot of red flags it might be an interesting product it's ipad sized it's black and white e-ink like but not it's got a stylus you can attach a keyboard it runs android but they've customized it you know then again i

reviewed a tcl tablet uh that i got mostly because they put a matte display protector on it with some, and it had some tweaks of Android where you could put it in a black and white mode where it looked remarkably like a Kindle, except it was an Android tablet. So it's still like full on refresh rate. And they say this one's got a whatever, 60 hertz refresh rate and all that. refresh rate and they say this one's got a whatever 60 hertz refresh rate and all that i um it's interesting uh but this is a product in the category of the like remarkable or something or that um word processor that uses like an ink screen so that you can just focus on your writing that that's the market that strikes me and there's a lot of woo woo kind of like we're addicted to our screen stuff in that marketing in that category and this is this strikes me and there's a lot of woo-woo kind of like we're addicted to our screen stuff in that marketing in that category and this is this strikes me as being where it is targeted which doesn't really interest me at all and the truth is that i'm interested in i cover e-readers not

because it's a an important market that i need to cover as part of my business and my brand i cover them because i care and nobody else seems to care or very few other people seem to care, but I care. So I write about it. This product is not in a category that I care about. My only real interest in it is that I have raised an eyebrow at some other marketing and I can't wait for people who are not getting a sneak peek from the company to actually find out what it is and how it really works because i would love to know the choices they've made to allow them to make the claims they're making but for me there's zero interest i would rather use an ipad and as an e-reader I would rather use a Kindle or a Kobo or a Books Palma or whatever, right?

Like any of the above but not... I'm interested. I would love to try the product. Like I would love them to send me one. I actually reached out to them and said I would like to try one. Like I'm not going to spend the $700. Gruber bought one apparently. Well, the other thing is that, yeah, I'm also not going to buy one. I think

there is, in addition to I mean, there is a marking up PDFs market, right? That's one of the things that frustrates me about the e-reader market is they keep getting bigger and they keep adding pens. And I don't care. But also, me and Gray were talking about this on Cortex. They're doing it, but it's still not good enough. They're making the screens bigger they're adding pens but getting pdfs on a lot of these devices is still very complicated and like not as easy as right on ipad right advantage of the kobo is it supports google drive and dropbox now which is kind of nice um and and it's got a pen apparently but i don't want it

and i don't care right anyway so there i i understand what's happening here which is the e-reader market itself is not very big. And so they are trying to find other markets and people marking up documents and now the pen technology is such that you can get, you can integrate that into your product and build something that potentially has another market to it.

Now, I think the truth is for marking up documents with a pen, you probably want a much larger screen than the kind of screen that i want and this product has it and that that's one way where this product might be interesting i mean you and i and it runs android which is great right and it runs android you know we know david sparks like uh david in his attorney job especially like one of the things that like a lot of attorneys and other people do lots of paperwork they use the the iPad to do this. Here's the other thing, though. Again, I will say is, yes, very impressive, long battery life, apparently, black and white screen, doesn't have the big backlight shining in your eyes.

Okay, great. I can see why this might be an interesting use case. Although, again, at that point, I think, or you could just use an iPad and an Apple Pencil. although again at that point i think or you could just use an ipad and an apple pencil but hey uh interesting idea but but um not not anything i would consider as an e-reader it's a totally different category of product that i uh yeah no thank you next week it's the draft the wwc drop we're here how uh it's kind of unbelievable like looking at my next couple of weeks like oh yeah here we go it's ramping up now wwc is just around the corner so next week on the show we're going to be drafting uh could be the biggest draft ever

we're actually going to talk about an upgrade plus so go to getupgradeplus.com if you haven't signed up already get longer ad free episodes of the show thank you to everybody that has we really appreciate you. But we're actually going to talk about the categories because this one's different. Obviously, with the introduction of AI and stuff like that, I think we're going to have to, and VisionOS, we're going to have to talk about how we're going to set our categories.

And so our picks are usually me and Jason do this in a frenzy in Slack, but instead today I thought why not talk about it in Upgrade Plus. frenzy in Slack, but instead today I thought, why not talk about it in Upgrade Plus? This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just

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of this show and all of RelayFM. Room around up time. It's that time again, partner. So, got a bunch of stuff for you. I'm going to start with a report from Mark Gurman with some details about WWDC announcements

in his Power On newsletter. So, got a few things here, focusing on a couple of areas. Starting with AI in Apple's platforms mostly in ios 18 a mac os 18 is where 15 15 yep they should make the numbers the same i think they should i think they should do that uh all the other platforms right it's the same they like tv os tv it will be tv os 18 so why is mac os 15 like let's just let's just make it 18 because really technically mac os is on to like version 50 or something right like yeah it's it's because the year that they went to

to ios 11 and i said spinal tap would appear at wwdc they said no no no no we're just going to keep it at 10 when that was the perfect year to make it mac os 11 and because of that we're now in this ridiculous situation where they waited four years and it's just come on for three years. So yeah. So Apple will have a system on devices that will decide if a task needs to be completed on device or in the cloud,

depending on the complexity of it. A quote from Mark Gurman, most of the on-device features will be supported by chips released in the last year or so. The cloud component will be powered by M2 Ultra chips located in data centers. I had a thought this morning that made me upset.

I don't want to upgrade my MacBook Air, my M.2 MacBook Air. I don't want to do that. I really hope I don't have to do that. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it would... Yeah.

There may be some consternation if the Mac, like I understand if they say only iPhone 15 Pro and later gets this and otherwise it's in the cloud. Like I would understand that. And there's an Apple Watch better performance mention that he has here. And I thought, well, that's going to be for the on-device engine which only runs on the series nine and the ultra 2 right i see it like okay great but yeah if they say oh this can't run locally on m1 or m2 mac you know there may be rioting in the streets yeah i imagine uh stage manager all over again. Yeah, yeah. Siri will be upgraded with, quote, more natural-sounding interactions with better performance on Apple Watch for completing tasks that are focused on the platform as well. We spent some time on this last week.

I think there are two problems with Siri. We talk about the problems with Siri. I think there are two problems with Siri, when people have problems with Siri. One of them is... Are you just trying to get everyone's devices to go off? Why are you saying it so many times? Okay, well, I mean, whatever.

Turn off... Well, Mike, the fact is everybody's turned it off. So, hey. Just real quick, can I just jump in on why you said that? I'm sorry. Adina was watching Loot on Apple TV, and someone said Siri, and it set her phone off. Oh, man.

It's like even the product integrations are ruining people's experiences. Yeah, you cannot have the hey hay and it goes off too well my my dog is named the two vowel sounds of the trigger phrase so i've had that happen a lot anyway um here are the two problems with an with that device that i set off 10 times in the last two minutes. One problem is the conversational problem, right? It's that you have to code your question and word it in the right way. It's really uncomfortable to do sometimes. And if it doesn't understand it or it gets it wrong, it just fires off some sort of ridiculous thing. And then you can't really get it back.

You kind of have to start again. And it's very frustrating. So something like an LLM that would be better at understanding your context and being able to answer follow-up questions and being able to focus and correct things and have a conversation with you that gets to the result of what it needs to give you the result that you want great like that's so that's one part of it and then the other part of it is bad results right which is i think part of the first part but also has to do with the data sources and how and the fact that it punts things to the web too often right and things like or or or can't answer it on a home pod because you've got to have your phone there right so i feel like the the way that this report is phrased i read that as being that they're

trying to make the conversation with the agent better which is great yeah that leaves us with the other part which is first off a question is, if the agent better understands you and what you want, are the data sources in Siri okay? Are they? Are they good enough if the agent is more intelligent? Maybe, but I still think that there are those things where it's like, oh, I need to look on the web for this. And that may be, that's the part two. And is that where partners with other llms come in and is it again there's the mystery of llm integration which you know would would they

would see no you can say i wasn't saying you couldn't say it was just funny to me that you said it like five times in a row yeah well i'm just trying to beat it into submission. Would Siri be able to use some of those LLMs as a data source and say, hey, I am now asking you to give me this thing, but you know who I am, right? And you know what I want, right? And then have it come back with something that it parses and says, I talked to my friend GPT, and it says this, would that be better? So, I mean, we'll see how they, the story of how they choose to implement this, but I still get a little bit of the willies that we're going to get a Siri that we're going to be like, finally they fixed Siri and then we're going to look at what they do and we're going to go, did you fix it? Really?

Mark says Xcode will get AI enhancements. This is what we were all thinking might have happened last year, right? Yeah, this is the copilot thing, which is that programmers have, and I mean, I've done this with Python scripts. You look at code repositories and samples of code and how things do things, and instead of finding a web, you know, okay, let's just say it.

Instead of going to Stack Overflow and finding the three questions that seem to be your question and the answers and trying to parse which one actually works and makes sense for you. And then there's a jerk in the comments who says, no, you did it wrong. And then this one gets upvotes and all of that. What it turns out that an AI parsing all of those and just giving you the answer can be more efficient maybe not more effective but often more effective and so having more of those tools in the development tools totally makes sense because it's it's kind of a proven concept this can be helpful for programmers ai generated emoji so based on conversations that you're having, the system may be able to create new emoji that do not exist that you could use.

Yeah. Now, my expectation is this is not emoji. These are stickers. We've been here before. Yes. Although I did have that moment because you and I both know Jeremy Burge, Emojipedia Emeritus. Yeah. both know jeremy burge uh emoji pedia emeritus yeah and so we know a lot of things about emojis that most people don't know including the fact that many emojis are actually put together these

days with combinations of unicode code points so instead of saying there's a code number for firefighter male and a code number for firefighter female and a code number for firefighter neutral gender um instead there's a code for firefighter and then you follow it with a male symbol or a female symbol or a neutral symbol and or maybe the firefighter is neutral by default and you modify it but regardless that a lot of emoji are built that way so you end up with i think the lime emoji is literally the lemon followed by green square yeah and it turns into that so i did have a moment where i thought would they do that would they just sort of like say what are all the other ways i can combine emojis and build art for them and then just like do it that

way but i think you're right probably it's stickers probably they've got an emoji generator i'm basing this on all of apple's look at this emoji we made started with me emoji then like just stickers in general like exactly they've always added them as stickers and of course now you have the emoji as stickers thing anyway as i as of iowa 17 i can imagine that it will create things that look like emoji but put them in your images yeah right because again they're not going to be able to send them as actual emoji because it wouldn't work actual emoji don't exist yeah and also if you were sending that to a different platform or in a different app like or a previous version of the os yeah so it would just there'll be stickers i reckon uh there will be smart recaps of notifications, messages, webpages

notes and other types of content so you can ask the platform like hey what was that message or catch me up that kind of thing I expect Mark Gurman says that Apple will not have a chatbot of its own it will rely on partnerships this is not stated by Gur german or really anyone yet as how exactly this will work like is it right what you were saying earlier that that siri will go

and ask or is it that the chat gpt app is installed on your phone or is you know like or you just get thrown to a ui who knows this is what i was thinking is i actually even wonder if it might be something you wouldn't necessarily need partnerships but like if it's integrated with a system there could be it's in spotlight or siri will ask i was thinking the other way you could do this is have an api and let because one of the things that some people want is to like trigger this from other places so maybe you could even build an api that's like if you if you offer a chatbot service, you do this API, and then people can choose their default chatbot. And we built some UI around it. But it's a real question. It's an interesting idea of how do they deeply integrate this? Because the chatbots are on iOS now. They're just not super integrated. They're just apps. But how does

Apple choose to integrate them if it chooses to grant them some special privileges? Because they're going up against Android where Gemini is going to be deeply integrated. So that's the challenge that they've got is how do we provide users with whatever it is that they want from these things so that we don't look like we're behind Google in terms of the integration. so that we don't look like we're behind Google in terms of the integration. I mean, as well, since our last show, Microsoft showed up a bunch of stuff of their own, which is very interesting, the new devices and Windows that they're using.

The last thing that is mentioned by Mark Gurman is that these AI features may be labeled as a preview, either up until release or post-release. The more we're finding out, the more we're getting these little reports, and then the more we're seeing from Apple's competitors, the more I'm like, oh boy, I don't think this is going to go very well. I remain hopeful that there's stuff that we haven't seen and the implementations may be really cool,

but Apple's competitors are going very hard on this, and I'm not sure how they're going to stack up. Think about how long it takes to build these things. Longer than a few months.

The Gurman report is that apple was caught flat-footed and had to change direction last year so if apple yeah if we look at the announcements at wwc and are like i mean there's something there but they're still not at the level of what google's doing in android and what microsoft is doing in Windows. I don't think that that's an, oh boy, they blew it now. I think that's more like, we now can see the fact that they were caught flat-footed a year ago because of the catch-up time. So it's like even Apple can't go. Microsoft and Google had such a head start because they took this more seriously. Microsoft were with OpenAI and Google with its own stuff.

And then Apple was like, oh, geez, okay, we need to do this now. And nine months later, I would not be surprised if it's the best they could do in nine months, but they're not going to be able to necessarily match if they were truly caught flat footed, what Microsoft and Google have been doing because Microsoft and Google were not caught flat footed. They have been at a, at a run already. And that means Apple will be, um, it will expose how far behind Apple was last year, right, is what I'm saying. And that is something we don't know for sure, but the reports suggest that they are. And up to now, we've been like, well, is Apple behind?

Because there's nothing really out there. But when you see how Gemini is integrated with Android and you see what Microsoft is doing with Copilot, this summer it may become apparently clear exactly how far behind apple is and then you know i think can they catch up sure i think they can um but that's i think what we're going to learn this summer is how how slow did apple get off the blocks when they realized that they needed to actually integrate this everywhere like their competitors. Mark Gurman also says that some of the home screen improvements that we'll see is the free placements of apps and widgets, which we'd heard before,

and the ability for a user to change the color of app icons. Developers will probably hate this, but this is the aesthetic thing where, I mean, they're already doing this. Like, I saw somebody say, I hate this, and then somebody else said, yeah, but they're already doing it, right? Because we know that people have all sorts of ways of building. You build a shortcut to an app

that uses a custom icon, and then you can have all of your icons be green or all of your icons be pink or have them color-coded. I love the example, the Bloomberg-iest of examples which is finance apps can all be green like money i'm like whoa yes whoa you you're you're letting your monocle and top hat slip a little bit there mr bloomberg let me give you a patented mike hurley guarantee on this one okay this will be an api and only independent developers will opt in that is is what I think is going to happen. Oh, the developers are going to have to opt in to allow customization of their icons. Interesting. Okay, that's interesting.

Well, put that on the draft. I know Google did it with Material You. That's great. That's fine. I don't think that's how... I think it will be different. I think that this is how Apple will do it because I just can't imagine a scenario

because I also don't think that it really makes any sense. Like a brand chooses its colors, right? And then they're just like, oh, forget it. Like, you know, what if in Apple podcast, they were like opt in and people could change the look of your show artworks. No, I don't want people to do that. We have chosen how we want our show artwork to look.

Exactly. So here is my counter prediction you're like i love a counter prediction go um here it is what they're going to do is they're going to have one of the sessions and i love these sessions i watch these videos i love them where they're like you know it's the videos that are changes in emoji and changes in how icons work and and and uh changes in widget design i love those design they're design sessions where it's like technical, but it's also design. I bet that they will have a new approach to app icons that will say,

you know, users can choose. My guess is choose from a palette of colors and that you as a developer can supply alternate icons for each palette or designate a layer of your icon as customizable. And that the system will change that layer based on the palette. You know what? That makes sense, actually. Where it's like, oh, by the way, this isn't a choice. that makes sense actually where it's like oh by the way this isn't a choice but i think you're i think you're right that it's not going to be like would you like us to just run a filter on

the slack icon to turn it into a different color i don't think they will go that far but it'll be more like hey colorful icons everybody's getting in the game here's how you participate and it's either you can meticulously choose every single icon or you can do this thing where you're like i gotta here's this layer you know the letter in our logo can be any color right okay great wonderful okay that's in it i like that i like that so maybe it's time to lawyer up clunk clunk oh i like that i like that it's a law and order kind of thing right yeah that's fun that's fun i like the sound effects that go with every uh chapter i had a friend text me the other day and say oh i was listening to upgrade i haven't listened in a

while and uh there's a lot there's a lot of uh a lot of segments not yet as verticals we've been we've been doing it since the beginning though the verticals we kind of went away from it a little bit now we got more now we got more verticals we're back with the verticals i love structure i love structure in my podcasts makes amazing in the world of technology there are two parties the regulators and apple this is their story bloomberg profiled the developers of the alt store and their journey so far in this article it mentions that alt store pow has already passed a hundred thousand downloads in the eu yeah this is a fun story if you've got access to Bloomberg, I highly recommend it. Mr. Bloomberg with his top hat and his monocle. It is great.

The thing I love about it the most is that Riley Testuit and his business partner, they're in their mid to late 20s. In order to establish their European branch and do their work and develop their app, they've just been living in Europe for a while and going Airbnbs in various places. They're in Amsterdam, they're in Copenhagen, they're in Dublin. And there's literally a quote in the story that's like, I want to go home. But they want to do this. It's just a fun look into all the effort that is required

to try and make this happen. And it's got that really nice moment where they're about ready to launch. And then Apple says, Oh, Delta emulators can just be in the store. And they're like, ah,

which really hits home about how much that was a move to cut them off at the knees from launching their thing by putting it in the regular app store. But they did it. They're like, okay, we'll put it in the regular app store but they did it they're like okay we'll put in the app store and then of course it goes to number one uh yeah it's a good story it's a really good story but i just like the idea that they want to go home but they can't because they gotta keep doing things in europe at shane is the name of riley's shane yeah they need to i think they just need to hire a uh i they probably don have the... They need to hire a part-time European beard, right? I mean, it's possible, right?

Who knows what they may have actually ended up having to do or will end up having to do. But you can't test this stuff outside of Europe is the thing because your phones are then... I mean, I guess... Yeah, right? I don't know. I mean, without shuttling back and forth, you can't actually,

my understanding is that a lot of this stuff is not testable outside of Europe if you're a developer. Because Apple's not going to make it easy. That's the other thing that I really got out of it. And then there's another note you're about to mention, which is it's very clear, too, that this is Apple making it as difficult as possible every step of the way because this is your malicious compliance, right? Which is

they'll do it, but they're not going to be happy and they're not going to make it easy. On Mastodon, Riley Tester has said that the notarization process from Apple is taking multiple weeks, even though Apple had originally said they could expect notarization to happen within a few hours. That's not good.

How about that? This is not good. This is not good. I don't like this. I think Riley suggested that if you don't like this, contact the European Commission, which is like, yeah. No, you should. People should do it.

And I hope that they're making a complaint too, because this isn't right. I was listening to last week's Accidental Tech podcast, and they had a conversation about emulators and not things we've talked about about like not having a just-in-time compiler be allowed and all that stuff and it just struck me again that the real issue here is if i have to like completely simplify it is it's a different thing being a developer if all you can do is do all of your work for a particular platform, put it in front of the platform's council of elders,

and have them say yes or no. And if they say no, you have zero recourse, right? Like if you say no, your thing is dead because it doesn't run anywhere else it's built for that platform and they won't tell you up front whether you can have it and and i mean i guess the story was that riley talked to somebody at apple and probably in developer relations who said no that'll no problem that'll be great and then he submitted delta and they're like no you can't do this why because we say so okay um which is the same with that clip utility which the bloomberg article says um why is this not allowed um because apple says so and then apple's response is something

like oh apple totally allows clipboard managers that protect the privacy of the user by which they mean don't work um and I just, this is the core frustration that goes to all of this, which is all of this would be solved. All of this would be solved if there was a fallback like there is on the Mac where the default is everything's locked up tight. Everything comes through the app store.

That's your only option. But there is a secondary world where you can turn on and get all of the scare dialogues and apps can live there too. Like on the Mac and Apple doesn't want to do that. But like when, when I was thinking about Riley's Delta story, I thought, Oh wow. You know, the fact is today, if you get rejected with your app that you built on iOS,

Apple says no. Well, you can't release that app, except in Europe, where you totally can. And I thought, wow, see, see, there's a little glimmer there of what this is. And I know there are lots of issues. And a lot of people have strong opinions about this but i think fundamentally that's that's what this is about is apple like why invest in developing for this platform if apple can capriciously kick you out at any point um you know and without without recourse right again it's not i have no problem with apple saying no we don't want this kind of app in our store great we don't want it in our default platform because of security reasons it's locked down fine but when there's no alternative and in the eu there is now so that's that's good but i don't i don't like the idea that yes oh well we have this you know this is this is actually was the huge fear about um

the huge fear when they did notarization on the Mac was that Apple would use it as a de facto app approval system. And fortunately, notarization on the Mac has actually been very smooth. But what they said in the EU about notarization for iOS apps that were going outside the App Store was, well, it's going to be more intensive

of our process, which I can see the why, right? It's not fundamentally unreasonable however multiple weeks per app is completely unreasonable yep the set app mobile app marketplace has entered invite only beta as they prepared to launch their subscription model offering this summer the verge got a look at it and wrote a big piece about it. At least at launch, Setapp have said that they will not be charging

for their app marketplace. They're going to be paying the CTF for marketplace installs themselves. So like the 50 cents that you need to install the app marketplace, Setapp will just pay that. They told the Verge that they don't expect app developers to pass the 1 million install

threshold for the ctf like it's just not something they're expecting is going to happen very often if at all and i'm sure that they're using their own data of what setup on the mac and set they have like a version on ios which i'm not 100 sure exactly how that works like i know it does work existing apps and there's coupons or it's weird. It's weird. I don't know how they get through that, but they do. MacPore, who makes Setapp, have confirmed that there will be over 30 apps available when the open beta launches in a little bit in the summer. There's like 17 apps there now. Yeah.

So this is you pay for a subscription to Setapp like you do now. You pay for a subscription to the set app app marketplace and um all the apps in it are free at that point right you you you buy them through your subscription instead yep and we may soon learn if and how all of this work with the dma will scale to other countries nine to five mac is reporting that apple may soon need to offer alternative app marketplaces in Japan. Legislation is currently being debated in Parliament that could result in a similar set of requirements to the DMA. Basically, not default app stores, there should be other payment options, etc.

It is simultaneously DMA providing a roadmap for other regions, other regulators we said this was going to happen, a roadmap for other regions, other regulators to do what they do. It's easy now, right? And more than that, you know what Apple's built, right? So if you build something that more or less follows what's going on in Europe, Apple doesn't really have a leg to stand on in terms of pleading like,

oh no, it will take us time to do this. It's like, well, you already built it, so build it for us now. that that that was always the danger that is the thing about what the eu should be congratulated for is that they were able for whatever reason to be able to put the right amount of pressure on apple to make them do it and google and all the other companies that the dma will or will not affect like that It is quite impressive that they were able to do it. Yeah, and now that Apple has built... Because remember, these rumors...

I mean, this stuff was discussed more than a year ago that they were going to do this and it was going to take until the end of the following year, which is now. But the beauty of it is the EU made them build it, made them spend a big part of the iOS development cycle on these features,

and now they exist. And now other regions can just say, I want that. And that's always been Apple's greatest danger is that once the features have been implemented,

it's a lot easier for everybody else to just say, yeah, give me that. I want that. The marketplace cat is out of the bag yeah uh apple's also been like a new segment marketplace cat no i don't think apple's also been lowering up they're going to challenge the 1.8 billion euro fine that the eu wants it to pay for anti-competitive actions against music streaming services like Spotify.

They're filing a lawsuit at the EU General Court. This one was obvious that they were going to do this because that is a whopping fine. And Apple has also filed a pre-motion letter to ask for dismissal of the US Department of Justice's antitrust case against them. Apple is saying that the market share definition is wrong, that they do not have monopoly power, and they have not harmed consumers. Basically, what are the three things for antitrust?

They are not doing any of them. This is all expected as part of the process that we're going to go through. When we were talking about this is going to take multiple years, this is part of why it's like it was obvious this would happen. There will be many months of back and forth now to see if it will or won't be dismissed. We'll find out later on this year or early next year as to whether a dismissal will work for Apple or not. If it doesn't, the trial stuff

begins. Yeah. And that's why we ordered Art for Lawyer Up. Because this is a multi-year segment in our segmented show. This episode is brought to you by Vitally. Customer success teams are facing a problem. How do they connect customer data back to work?

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I want to do a Vision Pro check-in with you, Jason. How often are you using your Vision Pro? Various, widely. There was a span of about a week and a half where I didn't use it at all. And then I was like, oh yeah, Vision Pro, let's get back on that. And then I got it started back up all. And then I was like, Oh yeah, let's get back on that. And then, you know, and got it started back up again.

Um, but I did actually have, I'd say, yeah, I'd say it's maybe a couple of days a week. Um, I, I had some, there's some work going on in our house and it's, and I work at our house, so it's extremely disruptive, extremely disruptive to my work. And at one point I needed to write, I think it was a Mac world column. And I just like, I had to blot out the world and I, I got the Bluetooth keyboard and I actually sat in the bedroom on the bed with my headphones in, my AirPods, noise canceling, music playing for some of it, and wrote that whole article on the Vision Pro, which I hadn't done in maybe a month. And it was really great.

I was reminded. And then when I was done, I was like, I'm just going to stay in here for a little while and look at some stuff and all of that and be reminded about it. I think the challenge with Vision Pro right now for me is I need more reasons to put it on yes i need more kind of things and this is the challenge with the platform right now is it needs more juice it needs more content it needs more reasons to use it it needs more features and i you know i i it's fine right like i get it it is a uh a new platform that's really just kind of starting but that's about that's sort of where i am with it is if there's new content i will go watch it and if there's a very particular thing where i want to kind of block out the world i will use it but um also it's a little of that is artificial like the ipad pro took up all of my

bandwidth for a couple of weeks where i just use the ipad pro all the time and and anytime i would be like well i could do this on the like i was watching i was gonna watch something on the vision pro and then i thought i gotta watch this on the oled screen on the ipad pro because i need that as another data point i need more video that i'm watching on the ipad pro so some of it's that how are you doing with yours uh i use mine once or twice a week for a few hours at a time usually and and i similarly to you i use it more when there's a thing that gets me there and then i'll use it for a long period of time right yes and so for me i've watched every episode of x-men 97 on division pro so. So every Wednesday, I was sitting down, watching an episode for 30 minutes

and then using it for like another hour, an hour and a half. Because when I'm in the Vision Pro, I just want to spend time in it. Like I love, well, I say it's the perfect noodling computer. I'm like over here checking this message. I'm over here looking at this. Like I really like it.

Imagine how, like for a lot of people, I expect you may be similar to me. If you, when you're on an iPad, you're kind of like spending some time on it. You're like checking what's on this app, what's on that app, what's in my RSS. Like, that's how I love to use the Vision Pro. It's like the ultimate iPad in that way.

With like, and I find it very engaging. Like the operating system looks really great like it's kind of general procrastinating or as i like to call work procrastinating like you're just kind of you're doing little jobs stuff i would be doing anyway but i'm doing it here instead of there and it's fantastic for that i i agree 100 with your perception which is i need a reason to put it on but once i put it on i'm like oh yeah I'm here, I'm going to do this thing and that thing and all that because it's really fun. But you do need, it's enough of a leap where, like,

I don't have it, like, hanging out where I'm like, I'm just going to flip this thing right on. It's more like, am I going to use the Vision Pro? Yeah, I'm going to do that. I'm going to get set somewhere with it, and I'm going to put it on, and I'm going to get it all hooked up, and I'm going to be ready to go. And once I'm over that hump, I'm like, I don't want to leave, honestly, for some period of time. I'm like, yeah, can I stay in here?

If I have to write something longer than an email, I'm putting the Vision Pro on, because I find it to be really helpful for helping me stay focused, just because it's so visually engaging and audio engaging to use. But there is new content. So this is one of the reasons I wanted to talk today is there's three things content-wise, which for the Vision Pro is like, it's like ice water in the desert right now. So the first thing,

I saw Sigmund Judge, who's the host of Magic Rays of Light on Max Stories, on Mastodon said that the experience immersive trailer had been updated. so this is like the sizzle reel and this it's all new there's so much stuff that's in this now so they have um more sports stuff so there is a golf shot there is uh content from the super bowl wow and the nbr all-star nba all- Wow. In this now. There's more soccer. There's more human interest stuff.

There's like hot air balloons and there's people wild swimming and there's more wildlife content. There's so much more stuff. It's like a new sizzle reel. It seems like they're getting ready for a bit of a relaunch, maybe to more people.

Like there's a ton of content yeah that is not available in full form right so like the original immersive trailer i think everything that was in there essentially except some of the sports stuff but that all came out in the episode ones of each of those like different immersive content but there was a ton of stuff in this one that isn't available anywhere else nice like you can't like one of the nba all-star shots you're at courtside which is what people wanted right you're sitting on courtside and you can look around and you're watching them what's really great is this one shot where uh someone misses a pass and the ball hits the camera and like it cuts at that moment but it's like so perfect

just so happen that the ball i haven't seen this this is great this is all new go watch it it's really great they also released um the second episode of the adventure series so the adventure series the first the highline the highline fjords the first one yeah this one is of a parkour group in par. Interesting and terrifying. Because you're up there watching these guys make their jumps and it's really well done. I liked this more than the highlining one. It's really, really good.

It was like my heart was pounding watching it. It was very, very good. But it's not all Apple. There's also, this was announced a couple of weeks ago, the trailer is out now. What if it's a Marvel experience, ILM Interactive and Marvel

work together to produce this? So me and you have both actually experienced this. We both are on the beta. We can only talk about the intro of it right now it's a very very early impressions we'll actually maybe talk more about it next week um i think so so it is some what if is an animated series on disney plus uh which is based on a comic series where

it's basically what if what if you took things that happened in the marvel timeline and did them in another direction so like what if yes peggy carter became captain britain rather than steve rogers becoming captain america exactly one of the big stories in the like the what if show for example um this is a part movie part you're involved in it um you can watch the trailer you put the trailer and some impressions on six colors like this is exactly the kind of thing that we were hoping for like it's fun the fidelity is fantastic you're using hand tracking to like make spells right like you're casting yeah dr strange like spells it's really cool yeah wong wong appears in the intro and and basically says you know here are some hand gestures and there's the the and there's like a

guide but it's an in-universe guide it's like the hand of akimoto is going to show you how to do this gesture to do a teleport and this gesture and uh that's a super clever right way of integrating the hand tracking uh that vision pro can do in order to to make it feel more immersive i i love that they call it an immersive experience because i was trying to explain this to somebody and i said well they don't want to call it a game because it's not very long it's not well it's it's only about an hour long and i think that they've said that too uh but like an hour long is like the longest piece of immersive content that uh that's been on the vision pro yep so there's that right like but it's it's interactive i wouldn't call it a game

because it's not a game i don't i again i don't want to go too far but i i don't think you can die um i think you just play the game or you play the the experience but it for things to happen you have to do things right it's interactive that's the thing that it is also it's a combination of things right some of it is spatial video it's 3d video some of it is uh interaction in your augmented reality space some of it is virtual reality environments all of It's using all of those different pieces. So to call it, I know it feels silly to call it an immersive experience, but I don't know what else you would call it because it is all of those things.

It's a cartoon that you're in. That's essentially what's, it's like a cartoon episode of what if. Sometimes you're watching it through like a portal. Sometimes you're in it. Yeah. Sometimes you're watching it through like a portal. Sometimes you're in it. Yeah.

And some things have to happen because you do them. And the story progresses. And there are twists and turns. And there are choices that need to be made. And so it is interactive. But I don't want to overhype it and say it's totally a what-if game. Because it's not a game. But it is interactive and immersive and uh as a it's a really interesting experiment and again it's like an hour so it's

it's actually it's got a if you think of it as a game you'll think oh it's only it's really short but if you think of it as versus like one of these immersive videos that they've been doing or something like an app like encounter dinosaurs and this is an app too it's uh it's it's the most i think that they've done yeah this really it feels like someone at disney you know or marvel like during the process of of them getting to see it initially was like i have a really cool idea because yeah the doctor strange kind of idea the casting spells of your hands obviously fits so well for this yeah we'll talk about it more next week because we can't really talk about the full experience more than just the

intro part which is what we're talking about right now and it's going to be free so if you've got a vision pro on wednesday you can i think it's wednesday you can get it yeah the 30th get it and i just want to say getting embargo access to anything Marvel property is like dream come true for me. So, loved it. You had a note, too, in our Vision Pro segment today called Selling the Vision Pro. Have you sold your Vision Pro, Jason? What is it? Yeah, no.

No, I have talked to some of my people I know who work in Apple retail. And it sounds like there's been at least semi-officially some recalibration in how they approach selling the Vision Pro in retail. I think it's interesting because, and I think it's good, but it sounds like, okay, remember when this all started, Apple did its most Apple thing, which is like, oh, we're going to bring everybody to Cupertino and we're going to have them all learn this script. And they're going to need to say it word for word. And it's a half hour experience that involves like, you're going to have to get your eyes scanned and then the things are going to be assembled in the back and brought to you. And then you're going to be stepped through by a person, a 30 minute experience and all of that. And I think they've done that now,

right? Like they've literally everybody who wants to see that has seen it. And I think that it's interesting because retail is very sales focused in a way that maybe they weren't in the early days with Ron Johnson, where they were sort of like just the extrusion of Apple as an entity and a brand in your community. And they're like, it's a place for you to go. And they're like, it's not a hard sell place. You can just come and use the computers. And they've transitioned into a much more of a, that, that, you know, everybody is who works in retail is motivated by sales. I would say to some degree or another, but what I'm hearing is that a lot of the feedback that they've gotten is from people who, when they're offered a vision pro experience, say, they say,

it's going to be 30 minutes. And they're like, I don't have that kind of time. And of course they don't. You're just somebody in a mall, you're walking by, you're like, oh yeah, I have heard about the vision probe. Can you show it to me? And they're like, yeah, it'll take about half an hour. And you're like, nope, nope, nope. So my understanding is that there's been a little bit of a recalibration, which is sort of like if if you can get them in it for five minutes or 10 minutes great do it and you maybe we'll keep one here in the drawer that is just like a stock uh no special lenses and if somebody comes in and they don't need an adjustment you just pull it out and put it on right you don't make them wait. And so I was thinking about this and it's like, well, what is the goal of a Vision Pro

in the Apple retail store? And the reason I mentioned the earlier days where it wasn't all about sales is if I were running the zoo, I would do this. I would make it much easier to get that thing on people's faces because first off, as a reviewer, I can say, I don't recommend the vision pro for people. Like I don't, it costs too much and there's not enough there. The people who should use it are people like us,

people like developers and people who really want to be on the cutting edge and don't mind that it costs $3,500. It's fine. They're happy to pay that to get a taste of the future. That's fine. But for everybody else, it's kind of a development platform and a future thing, and it's not ready yet. So if I'm thinking about Apple Retail, I'm like, we're not going to sell a lot of these. And I'm sure that that's what they found, is that they don't sell a lot of them, and that the demo doesn't really even sell a lot of them. So I would say, what is our goal with Vision Pro and Apple Retail? And I would take a page

from the earlier days of Apple Retail. I would say people coming into Apple Retail who are curious about the Vision Pro, let's make it as easy as possible for them to explore it as long as they want up to the full half hour. And if all I have to do, if all I'm able to do is put it on and let them have a single immersive video experience, put it on and have Alicia Keys start singing, or put it on and see the Highline video, whatever it is. And then they take it off and they're like, wow,

that was really cool. And they leave the store. What have I accomplished? And this is my thought, which is they came into the Apple store to buy an iPhone case or to buy an iPad or whatever. They were curious about Vision Pro. So they're in your ecosystem probably. They're curious about Vision Pro. You let them try it. You show off your most impressive thing, which, and this is an, again, I think the kind of like mistake about the early days of the vision pro

where they've gone, you know, they've gone all in on spatial computing as a thing, which, you know, they may believe in. It may also be a combination of what they were able to ship and what they haven't been able to ship.

But the fact that it isn't, it doesn't really play very many games and the games that plays are not like the games that you get on a on a quest and it's like no no but it's a computer right like when somebody's got five minutes to see the vision pro you know what you don't want to do is show them how to launch an app i i mean you don't again that's great and all but what i want to do is if i've got five minutes with somebody is i want to put it on and do the immersive video thing i want to do the demo reel and then i want to say which one would you like to watch you want to watch the highline you want to watch at least your keys you won't watch this don't watch the mls video thing but well you know like what do you want to see i want minimum i just want them to have some time in immersive video that's what

i want because that's that's the platform at its best that's the thing that's going to blow them away more than anything else i don't need to teach them the the window interactions i don't i mean ideally you'd even have it set up to just play the video when you put it on and i know that's not the full demo i know it's not showing off all the capabilities of this thing, but I think maybe the goal in retail right now should not be, let's sell a bunch of $3,500 headsets that most people don't want. It should be, you're already in the Apple store. You're already in our ecosystem. You presumably like Apple as a brand. Here's the new thing that's totally impractical right now, but you can get a taste of it. You can see how amazing it is. And then you can keep in the back of your mind, oh,

but you can get a taste of it. You can see how amazing it is. And then you can keep in the back of your mind. Oh, one. Yeah. Apple is where futuristic stuff happens. They are really on this. This is why I like Apple as a brand is that they're, they're looking at the future. And also, oh, that vision pro I have experienced it. If somebody asked me, I can say, yeah, it was pretty amazing. That's good. And then yeah, maybe in a few years when it's cheaper, it's more affordable, there's more stuff for it. Maybe I will buy one of those because I've experienced it now and I had a positive experience with it. All of that stuff is good. None of it leads directly to a sale in the store. And I think that's okay. So if that's what Apple is doing here in retail, which is kind of admitting that Vision Pro is more there to enhance the brand, point the way way to the future get people to have a great

experience with the product right now because that's the the goal in five minutes or 10 minutes and not 30 minutes they should totally do that and i hope that that is a more broad policy that is coming for apple retail because the if you think about the way that they rolled out the sales where it was 30 minute time slots whole walkthrough how do you move windows around how do you launch apps it's like first off i totally understand if nobody wants to spend 30 minutes getting that whole demo lots of us are really busy and we're just in the mall and i just wanted to get an iphone case but i am curious if you can lower that barrier and get that thing on their face quickly and have them see an immersive video. That's a victory, even if they don't buy it. It

has so many ancillary benefits. So I sort of feel like until they've got something that makes a better case for actually converting to sale, that's what they should do. I mean, have the 30 minute walkthrough available for people who have the time, of course, but go with your best five minutes if you can. And, and, um, so I hope that, I hope that this is not, you know, the people I'm hearing from are sort of like, yeah, you know, we're trying this, but we got indoctrinated on this other way of doing it, but now we're doing it this way. And like, is that good? Is that bad? And like, I think a lot of retail employees are like, it's bad because everything here is about sales now. And I think that's culturally going to be a challenge for Apple retail, but like this product should not

be about sales. This product should be about halo. It should be about making people more impressed with Apple as a brand as they come in to buy some other Apple product. And, and also about the future, about thinking about Vision Pro, being able to have a firsthand experience with it. The more people who experience that immersive video today are more people who will be willing to buy a version of it in three years or five years. Yeah, I think it, I agree with this. I think it is as important right now to like one person at a time change the public perception about the product because right now the general perception is it's too expensive and it is too expensive but wouldn't it be nicer to say like

it's really expensive but it's really cool uh yeah i want one of these i can't afford it but you know maybe in a few years i'll buy one because everybody knows the way that apple works i feel yes you know like if you're at all even tangentially interested in technology you know there's going to be a cheaper one in the future. That's why I think it's such a great thing to get the demo as a brand extension, as a brand to glow up the brand even more. It's like people are already in your store

and they don't have 30 minutes, but you can give them five or 10 and you can give them an experience that reinforces their connection to Apple as an innovator, as a company that makes cool stuff, and that the stuff keeps getting cooler yeah even if this isn't for you today it makes you go oh someday i've seen the future and you presumably will tell people too it's like oh yeah that vision pro like i like you said i know it's it's too expensive and all, but it was amazing.

One of these days, those geniuses at Apple are going to do this thing and it's going to be amazing. When it's $500, I'll buy one. And yeah, the most people possible to have that experience should be the goal. And I would wonder if you said I can give you five minutes, if it's just going to be video, they might not even need to,

they could create a version where you don't even need to do the eye training. Exactly., if it's just going to be video, they might not even need to, they could create a version where you don't even need to do the eye training. Exactly. Well, that's what I was saying is like, you might want to have a few in the drawer that literally just go on your face and start playing video. And there's just like no setup really.

You just put it on and as long as you have good enough vision, it measures your pupils and it just starts playing. Yeah. And obviously if you need correction, then so be it. But like, if you don't need correction, than a vision it measures your pupils yeah and and it just starts playing yeah yeah and obviously if you need correction then so be it but like if you don't need correction just make it happen yeah because then it could be like uh uh because that's also a thing right to get a fuller demo

where someone's like wow that was amazing like do you want to do some more if they say yes like all right we'll just do this quick setup and we'll start showing you some other stuff like there's there's something interesting in that. And you know what? The what-if could be a perfect part of the demo too. You could do that instead of encounter dinosaurs or something like that. I can imagine Apple using that kind of stuff.

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On the Mac, third-party system utilities and extensions are essential to professional and power user use. Apps like Alfred, CleanShot X, Audio Hijack, BetterSnapTool, and more. Even if iPadOS was improved, there would still be issues and wants for third-party apps like these. Do you think Apple will ever allow the ability for apps like these to become system utilities on the iPad? I don't think that there's a clear demarcation between a system utility and a utility. They're all utilities. I think there's a spectrum. I think some of them require

apple to provide access i think some of them require apple to change the way that the operating system works like number one is allow background tasks right that's number one alfred watches the file system in the background like i don't know if apple would need to make any changes beyond that right it's an alfred oh no, Alfred's a launcher. I mean, a launcher runs in the background, waits for a global keyboard shortcut, and launches it, right? I was thinking of Hazel, which also watches the file system for changes.

You could do that, too, I think. Something like CleanShot is using the Screenshot API. They might need to, or a Screenshot system, they might need to, but you can capture video and you can capture screens. So that's already, a lot of this stuff is already there.

And a lot of these things on the Mac, especially in recent years, Apple has been creating more official ways for things to be done. Like Audio Hijack, which now uses Apple's official APIs. Okay, great, see? Because CleanShot used to use the accessibility stuff and now it uses the more newly created screen capture.

Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of this stuff is there's an API or there's a private API that Apple uses. And I think a lot of this stuff gets solved primarily by allowing background apps and allowing global keyboard shortcuts to be assigned, which would also be great for things like shortcuts. which would also be great for things like shortcuts. So, you know, whether they would go to the level of something like better snap tool or better touch tool, or, you know, there are going to be subsystems,

and this is true on the Mac to a certain extent, there's going to be subsystems that are harder to get access to. But I think it's a spectrum. I think it's a continuum. And I think some of those apps would be enabled by Apple, allowing background tasks and allowing apps to, to have access to stuff that Apple's own system frameworks do.

And some of them, they're already, you can do them, but you just can't do them in the, in the background, right? You, you gotta be the foreground app,

which limits their utility. So I hope so. I don't have faith in it honestly i don't i don't oh yeah like the chance that apple would allow this i i think well let me put it this way i think saying ipad os should allow background tasks to run more aggressively than they do on say say, an iPhone, is a better chance than Apple saying, we're going to let you virtualize macOS. I think background tasks is an iPadOS feature that would add a bunch of utility and they can afford to do it because of the hardware. And somebody mentioned on a podcast, I don't even remember what podcast it was like the danger of marco i think it was marco who said on atp said well the danger is then you've got stuff running in the background

and you know it it changes how you handle um using an ipad because people can send things in the background and it can kill the battery life and they're like why did this happen and the answer is you mistakenly sent something to the background or whatever it's like that's true but i would really hate it that the argument is well we should never allow on any ipad ever backgrounding because it might cause some problems to some users it's like i mean well what are we even doing here let's just stop what let's stop selling the ipad pro as well because why um i i believe that there are ways that apple can find ways to do this and communicate to users maybe it only works in stage manager mode right maybe it only works if you turn on a background task maybe it only works if there's a scare

dialogue that says alert alert this app is going to do this and then you know what if it drains your battery a little bit and you have to learn that, so be it. But it adds so much functionality that you can't hide away from functionality. There's already functionality in iPadOS that allows added complexity. And I guess the argument is basically we only should have one and that should be the lowest common denominator of feature set on iPadOS. And I just don't agree. I don't think it's an insolvable problem for Apple. I just don't agree. I think that I don't think it's an insolvable problem for Apple. And I think that it's a convenient excuse to say, oh, well, Apple can't add features to the iPad because that would confuse people on low end iPads, or it would make them not understand. It's like, well,

if Apple does its job that right, that won't happen. So let's not assume that Apple would do the job badly. Let's imagine what if the, what if Apple did a job well, so that iPads that had lots of RAM, and lots, you know, right, and a powerful processor could do background tasks, and maybe the iPads that don't can't. And I'm okay with that. Like, I am super okay with that, that sort of thing. So I hope someday, as one of it really would be a thing that would unlock a lot of possibilities on iPadOS. How pessimistic am I about it? I don't know. I mean, let's see if you'll pick it in the draft next week, right? Yeah, probably not.

Mark says, given recent controversies regarding Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI and Google's new AI summaries feature, do you think Apple should go back to using the term machine learning to avoid comparisons? Apple will use the term AI as long as it's convenient. Yeah. Well, they only started using AI when it was convenient, right? Where they've now rebranded their machine learning things as AI. As AI, because everybody's like, where's Apple on AI? And Apple's like, guys, we've had all this stuff for years. And they're like, no, that's machine learning.

We're asking you where you are on AI. Also, we're behind on what people think AI is, which is a chatbot. I mean, everyone's behind on what AI actually is. It's a machine. Yeah. So we're going to call this AI because it makes us look better. And they will continue to call it AI until the moment that it doesn't make them look better and they're again people in the streets with torches and pitchforks about ai at which point apple will take one step back rebrand everything as machine learning

start to whistle and disappear into a hedge and john says rumors have it that the update to ios at wwdc this year as we've spoken about earlier will be the biggest update ever do you think it will be all ai related upgrades if they are i know i'll be really disappointed i'm sure there's a lot of other stuff in there we talked about the home screen stuff that's not an ai thing i'm sure there will be plenty of other functions out there um also there's always new features that are machine learning based right and that they'll just call them ai things now but like photos the photos app always has new machine learning based stuff and they added the whole thing with uh the autocorrect to being based on an llm uh or on a transformer model sorry on a transformer model last year so like they're going to be three classes of things

they're going to be some features that are just features they're going to be some features that would have been there anyway and they're going to be called ai of things. There are going to be some features that are just features. There are going to be some features that would have been there anyway, and they're going to be called AI because they can be. And then there'll be some AI features that'll be the ones that they'll try to make the most hay over. But we'll have to see. I think maybe there'll be fewer major new features than in past years that are not AI because of the push for AI.

But I don't think it's going to be like that. There aren't features other than AI features. I would also just say, and I'll say this to all up gradients, try and keep an open mind. Like, don't be disappointed before WWDC, right?

That like, try not to make your mind that like, if they talk about AI stuff at all, I'm going to be disappointed. Like we know they're going to see what they have first and see how it makes you feel right like they're they're a different thing like ai is different right like ai uh like machine learning is different to ai generative content you know like apple's not necessarily going to be trying to replace artists here they might just be helping you write a text message quicker. There aren't emoji artists that will go out of business because you can create weird emoji stickers. They're still going to...

Just keep an open mind. I think you'll be happier that way. Just see what they've got before we all decide that it's going to be a disaster. And then judge them. If you would like to send in a question of your own for a future episode, very easy to do so. Go to upgradefeedback.com.

You can also leave us your feedback and follow up there. You can check out Jason at sixcolors.com. You can hear his shows here on RelayFM and at theincomparable.com. Theincomparable.com. I really swallowed a couple of letters there, Jason. Theincomparable.com. I'll give it another go for you.

You can listen to my shows here on RelayFM and check out my work at CortexBrand.com. Jason is at Jsnell on social media. I am at iMike. I am YKE. You can find video clips of the show on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube where we also have full video versions.

We are at UpgradeRelay. Thank you to our members who support us on Upgrade Plus, and thank you to Ladder, Vitally, and Squarespace for their support of this show. We'll be back next week with the draft. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.