Upgrade - 518: Having Lots of Money Doesn't Make You a Bank

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 518 for june 24th 2024 this episode is brought to you by squarespace vitally krcs and ladder my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by my fun summer co-host Jason Snell hanging loose over here Mike happy happy episode 518 get ready to ride the rip curl

of this Snell talk which comes in from Bromwyn and is summer themed thank goodness Jason when you enter a body of water that you suspect may be chilly are you a toe tester or do you are you a jump straight inner oh toe tester for sure yeah toe testing toe tester and in fact then if it if it proves to be um not incredibly warm uh i will i am a gradualer i am a gradual or i prefer to just very slowly psych myself up as i get deeper and deeper

into the water until finally i reach a point of no return and i give up and i completely submerge um that's just how i do it that's quite different to me let me tell you i'm gonna jump straight in no i'm actually something in the middle uh i i confidently move right so like if i'm going to a pool and i get into the steps i just go i just walk through you know so you don't you don't jump in but you you you stride yes at a constant rate i just don't stop right i'm like i'm walking down the steps and then as soon as my feet touch the ground i'm going under stop that's me straight under do a lap and i'm good to go or you know straight under this is harder to do in the in the ocean because yes you can't but like

i will do the same in the ocean to the degree that i can of just like confidently walking through that that to me is like if i focus on the the confident movement i don't get so freaked out by the cold even on the beach in hawaii i will in Hawaii, I will get my feet in and then I will, if I'm going in, I'll just keep going in and get up to the ankles and sort of like, and the waves will come over you and that helps because it acclimatizes you. Yep. And eventually you're like, all right, that's fine. And you go all the way down. And that's a key too. You got to go all the way down.

You got to go all the way down yes you go to even if it's not depth of you of your height you at some point you're like i just have to get in because then once once you get in then your skin isn't going to match the water temperature instead which is better so yeah thank you to bromwin for that question if you would like to send us in a summer themed snow talk it could be a snow talk of any kind but right now we are particularly looking for summer-themed questions, go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send yours in. You know what we do? We start the show and then we stride right in to Snell Talk every time, walking

confidently like Mike Hurley does into a body of water. I was trying to think of a way to to like to bring that in but i couldn't do it and you've you've done it so i appreciate that thank you it's the service i provide it's a good service let's do some follow-up jason snell sounds great friend of the show david smith has a good suggestion i thought that he posted a mastodon for how Apple could have a light mode tinting with the home screen so at the moment if you want to do any of the new color tinting you are doing this with dark icons dark background icons which I don't think should be

the only way to do things and I think that underscore did a really good job of he basically he just inverted a home screen that he made and everything's light and purple rather than like dark and green. And I think it looks really nice. And I think Underscore did a, well, I really liked this post. So he says, he talks about like,

this is what I think. And I think like, you know, I have my own opinions of this. He follows it up by saying, of the top five themes in Widgetsmith, four of them have light backgrounds and two are completely white. And what I like about this post is that, and then David also follows this up with a feedback. He couldn't have done this in a better way, in my opinion, of like, oh, by the way, I have millions of users and they make these these choices so i thought this is a good way of putting his case across yeah it is they do they look good and then he's got the numbers to back

it up it makes me wonder who decides these things at apple and what do they use to decide them right because apple is famously like oh no no no no we're not going to use focus groups we're not going to we which isn't true they do research but like oh no but we're going to just make the right decision because the users don't always know what they want but in this case david's very popular app that really kicked this off and was referred to by executives right of the whole customization thing, the whole making your home screen your own trend that, you know, four years later they're like, oh yeah, people want that, we should do that. He's learned

and his stats are, I would say, pretty solid. That the people who want to make an effort to customize their home screens prefer actually to customize them in a light mode and not a dark mode and i mean everything apple showed is in dark mode and that's what's on the betas which leads me to believe that they think that that's it and the job is done and i i just i wonder what are they basing that on why did they choose that what was there just a designer somewhere or a couple of designers who were like, eh, I kind of like a better dark? And they're

like, okay, we'll ship that. Or did somebody actually do some research? Because based on David's statistics, it would suggest they've made the wrong decision here, or at least they haven't made a complete decision, which is to have two options, a light base and a dark base. So, you know, bless David, he did the mock-up, you know, he shows the different compare and contrasts, he files a feedback and he's, he's really trying to prevent Apple from making a mistake. So, you know, it's up to Apple now to listen to that. But, um, but it troubles me that David's numbers could be so clear and that apple would just do this other thing because it makes me suggest makes me think that they're not

it's not like if the users want it give it to them i don't believe apple has the data that david has right so i think david has that may be true right like because this kind of thing has not existed before like they have no way of basing it. And I expect it was a design decision that they've made so far, where they're like, we think this looks better. And that is fine. These things are all an element of taste. But at a certain point, data is important.

And he has that data. For all we know, underscores taste are dark taste and he was like oh i would like dark mode but then he was surprised with what his users is i mean frankly widget smith in and of itself is a surprise like what this app was originally made to do is not what ended up becoming the thing that people wanted it for right like underscore was thinking how can i make widgets the most have the most utility that they possibly can but it turned out people wanted visual customization and so like these things can be a surprise and so maybe like you know apple they're like oh we think dark mode's the way to go here but actually people would like the choice and i honestly cannot understand why they didn't

do both and i also think for me i can't see a scenario why they couldn't change that before release this doesn't feel like something that is massively complicated for me i feel like if you have built the system to do it in a dark mode, how hard could it be really to also do that in a light mode in the next three months? I mean, to me, that doesn't seem like an insurmountable challenge. I agree. It seems like a fairly understandable, limited kind of concept of there's a light mode and a dark mode option. limited kind of concept of there's a light mode and a dark mode uh option and i also just like david's mock-up better i mean i like it better me too i think it looks nice i think that there's a

reason why people uh tend for a light mode and not dark mode on their devices i i use my phone in dark mode all the time but I want dark mode in app content. I don't want my home screen to be in dark mode. That's not something that I am looking for. Right, you just want the background. I had this the other day. I realized, I had a realization when I was doing MacBreak Weekly,

which is a video show, that every time I do it, every time I open up a browser window to read a story, a giant, you know, I got a 27-inch monitor a few inches away from my face, and you open up a browser window to read a story a giant you know i got a 27 inch monitor a few inches away from my face and you open up a giant web page in uh in light mode on the mac and it's like blasting a new light on my face and my face lights up on the video it's very distracting and i realized oh you know what i need to put my mac in dark mode for mac break weekly because i don't actually like dark mode on the Mac,

but that I absolutely should do that because I don't want that effect. And I feel like that is why that is a key reason why you use dark mode in any scenario is you don't want the big blast of the white background. And, uh, and so I agree with you that, um, there are places where dark mode for content makes sense, but on the home screen, I don't necessarily want it to be that way. You know, I'd forgotten if I was using light mode or dark mode on my Mac, because I'm just looking at it now. And now I'm looking at it again, I can see that I do, but I just changed the system to light mode, and I felt like my eyes were about to explode. So it turns out I am using my Mac on dark mode. And that's fine. I had to install a Safari plugin too

because Google doesn't have a dark mode for Google Docs. No, I wish that they did. Of course they don't. They do on the iPhone. Yeah. So I installed Noir on the Mac and now when I'm in dark mode for MacBreak Weekly, all the show documents and everything else

also are dark mode, and that's better. It's weird that you can't do it on the web version, because they have the technology. I know. I wanted to talk about an apple film for a moment so apple they're making a film about formula one uh which is obviously of interest to me it's starring brad pitt and it's directed by joseph kaczynski who directed top gun maverick and apple have announced

a release date for this movie in theaters starting june 25th 2025 it's being distributed by warner brothers as part of apple's like continued deals that they're doing with companies to do film distribution the budget of this movie uh is said to be currently over 250 million dollars which is a lot of money and i think one of the reasons that this movie is costing what it is costing is the way in which they are shooting it, in that they are driving real Formula 2 cars that are mocked up to look like Formula 1 cars during Formula 1 race weekends. They've done it a couple of times last year, done it a couple of times this year, with the Formula 1 drivers that currently are driving. And actually, Lewis

Hamilton is, I think, a producer on the movie. So I think this is part of why you can imagine the budget is getting higher and higher on this, because they are doing something quite ambitious in that they are filming these cars with high quality cameras while real cars are driving during Formula One race weekends. You can see how costs will balloon if that's what you want to do. So this made me think what I wanted to talk to you about is what is the aim here at this point? A $250 million movie, if it was being released under regular circumstances, you would need to make five,

six, $700 million for this movie to be considered successful in the typical Hollywood environment, right? That's what I have garnered from listening to the town. That's the kind of money you'd need to make in the box office are apple actually going to try and make that money in the box office like do they want to to distribute this movie in such a way that it could make half a billion dollars before they would put it on apple tv plus because they don't want to do that why are they spending all this money on the movies that are making like what is the aim here so i just wanted to know what you thought about that. Yeah, it is. It's a question of our time. I would say Apple wants to be, I mean, just look at that Apple TV Plus

thing that they roll at the top of WWDC, right? Apple wants to be in business and have good relationships with key people in Hollywood, right? They want to be, they want to win awards. They want to release movies and TV shows with big stars. They want to establish that the sort of like Apple's brand is a, an entertainment brand as well. And that look at these, all of these well-known people and they're using their money to do that. I think financially, the goal is to continue to burnish

Apple TV Plus's reputation as well because their biggest challenge is that it's a very small service and people don't feel that it's essential. I think it's the same reason why they do some sports stuff is they're just trying to get people to try it. Because as we know, the more they go here, their catalog has actually gotten pretty good

of just originals. If you're somebody who's never done Apple TV Plus now, you're going to go, oh, well, I always heard good things about Ted Lasso or For All Mankind or The Morning Show or Severance or, right? Like you can watch a lot of stuff on Apple TV Plus. Plus they've got those movies there,

which drive, I'm sure they drive a certain amount of engagement right killers the flower moon probably drove a certain number of people to be like okay i'll get apple tv plus for that and then i'll look at the catalog and so that's one of the things that they're trying to do is just be so some of it is prestige and some of it is just getting people to consider Apple, um, either now or in the future as a service that they want to subscribe to. It's a weird game, right? But that, that seems to be the game they're playing is they're going for prestige and, uh, to make Apple TV plus seem like a more appealing destination for people, um, which they can afford to do, right? They can afford to lose money. I mean, not a lot of money in the long run. They don't want to do that because it is still money, but

I think they still view it sort of like strategically and giving a kind of halo to the whole Apple brand and the Apple entertainment brand. I would say that if Apple was a company that was in difficult straits and there was a lot of pressure on the executives to increase profits and cut things that aren't working. This would get cut almost immediately, but it's not. It's not. It's seen as an empire building play here. I don't think they should be in the movie making business. I think they should be in the TV business.

they should be in the movie making business i think they should be in the tv business i don't i don't think that these movies will drive enough long-term engagement like the reason i say that is like with a streaming service you need to provide people with a value that continues to get them to want to stay as part of the service. And a TV show that you roll out weekly over three months does that. A movie is something you watch one day. One day, yeah. And so you would need lots of movies. But you can't keep making movies that cost $200, $300 million. making movies that cost two three hundred million dollars you know you can't keep doing that if you're not making money in the box office is how i look at this anyway this is the argument

about a lot of streamers making movies right which is is it wise in the long run for streamers to bankroll big budget movies because i I think, I think, personally, it might be better if they bankrolled smaller budget movies, not like super small indies. Oh, definitely, yes. But like mid-budget movies

and had a lot of them. Yeah. But they also want to win Oscars. Well, this is what Netflix does. Well, Netflix has had a bunch of different strategies and they've had, they just recently had a change

and it was in charge of it, right? Sure. And I think they're, I netflix wants to do fewer uh expensive movies you know zach snyder uh moon movies and things like that right i think they i think they want to do more they want to kind of spread it out a little bit more but that what netflix would tell you is you know if they can do a bunch of Hallmark-esque romantic comedy kind of things and have 10 of those or 15 of those or 20 of those that cost 10 million or whatever, it's totally worth it. And then you have some mid-budget sci-fi movies. And like, I feel like that there is a way to do

this where back in the old days, they had the concept of the movie of the week, which was like a TV movie, a TV movie as a concept, a movie that was never made to be anything but shown for two hours on a TV network. And those things had TV budgets. They were not super ambitious, but it was a real thing. And I think that there's room for that. However, I think that Apple is more concerned about getting award nominations and about working with stars and famous directors and things like that than it is about playing the game that netflix is playing and and i think it's fair to say should you really think that way i think that i think that's a fair question i wouldn't be surprised if they uh stop doing big movie deals i think and start doing maybe some indie movie

deals but also also more, you know, just focus on the TV stuff. I will say one of the places that they're experimenting that I think is interesting is licensing movies for a month or two on TV plus. And it appears kind of connecting them either thematically or demographically to the movies that they're releasing. So you get end up in this scenario where I would bet you when Apple's F1 film

comes on TV+, there will be a curated selection of things that probably skewers mail, might be a little more international, and if there's anything about racing, Ford versus Ferrari, or Days of Thunder, that they'll put all of those on there as well.

And the idea there is, you come for the F1 film, but oh look, Apple's got a bunch of these movies that I can stay and watch. thunder or like that they'll put all of those on there as well and the idea there is you know you come for the f1 film but oh look apple's got a bunch of these movies that i can stay and watch even if they're not there forever nothing on streaming is forever but like they're there for a month or two they can create that kind of experience that makes you want to hang on even though they don't have a huge catalog it's like they're just experimenting they're trying stuff but i do think there's an element to it and i've seen some reports from people like matt bellany uh about this where you know there's an element to it of just like apple likes being likes having using its money to have stars around and i think

they're doing a great job of that with the with the tv shows right their tv shows are packed full of a-list movie actors you know doing tv so and i think that they're doing a tv show right harrison ford doing a tv show people in but i think so this movie here this very particular movie which doesn't have a name yet which is interesting uh it has the potential of making a lot of money in the cinema, provided that they commit, right? Because what this movie is going to do is provide people with a Top Gun Maverick-like experience, where Top Gun Maverick, I'm so disappointed I never saw that in cinema. I saw it at home. on an IMAX screen would be absolutely exhilarating because they actually put cameras on fighter jets and this time they're putting cameras on essentially the fastest race cars right and so like if you get really good footage which I'm convinced they are this movie is going to be incredible to watch in a theater but they have to actually commit to that and i'm not sure that they will even though they have if you know what i mean like is this going to be a full premium format

imax screen release like i i don't know but it'll be interesting to see i mean they're i think experimenting with this too but it may be right they may have brought warren brothers on as the distribution partner thinking this movie costs so much money we really need to try to give it a proper theatrical release. And it does make sense. I know I talked about this a lot with Julia on Downstream. streaming rights to is actually helpful because most of your potential audience won't get out to the theaters to see it. And if they do, you make money. But if they don't, what you've done is the launching of a movie in theaters is marketing. It creates awareness that that movie exists so that when it then 45 days later or whatever appears on your platform, everybody knows about that movie and said, yeah i wanted to see that movie so there is a strategy there but when it gets to be a very expensive movie you know you're trying to

cut your costs uh but i agree with you this seems like one of these peculiar like does apple want to be in the business of making 250 million dollar movies does it really or should it be making 50 million dollar movies you could get five you have got a five pack of $50 million movies for the cost of this one. So, but it wouldn't have Brad Pitt in it. I want this movie to be successful, but Apple needs to commit to that strategy. And it'll be interesting to see if they will.

Speaking of committing and strategies, Apple have abandoned their Apple Pay Later service. This is where you could, as part of an Apple Pay checkout, pay in payments. You could take a payment, split it into chunks and pay it over time.

This was announced at WWDC last year, I think, but it's available for around a year. Providing a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said, starting later this year, users across the globe will be able to access installment loans

offered through credit and debit cards, as well as lenders, when checking out of Apple Pay. With the introduction of this new global installment offering, we will no longer offer Apple Pay later in the US. And I feel like this is

them trying to save face a little bit because they're offering these features to third parties, but they are select third parties. Where if they were rolled with how they did it and how they could have rolled it out themselves, you could do this no matter who you banked with. But like, say, for example, they mentioned in the UK, there are two banks that you can do it with.

And if you're not a customer of those banks, you can't use this feature. So interesting. Yeah, I wrote a piece for macworld this week thinking about all the places where you know apple is this colossus that's that uh it's huge company three trillion dollar valuation and it acts like it can do anything at once but it can't it can't and i think it's interesting to see the areas where it thinks that it can and it can't because trying new things is not bad, right? Trying to enter new areas is not bad. Apple did it with the iPhone and the iPod, right? And they were successful with it. But in some of these

areas, Apple sort of said, well, I think there's a little crack here. Like they did Apple Pay and I was like, the Apple Pay worked and they were able to crack the market in a way. And some of it was timing, but some of it was just the way that they built it and the enthusiasm of their user base. They cracked it in the US in a way that contactless had not been done before. And they took advantage of a moment in time and they really made a difference. But since then, they're like, ah, yes, financial is a place where we could go. Let's do some more financial products. And if you take a step back, other than Apple Pay, nothing has worked.

So it's interesting, right? Like the Apple Card has been out there for years now. Goldman Sachs is their partner because they had to have a partner. Goldman Sachs wants out. They're trying to get out of it. Apple apparently wants to get them out of it and is trying to find a partner. But no partner has been announced because Apple Card is maybe problematic.

Also, I'll point out Apple Card, U.S. only. Apple Cash, U.S. only. So even when Apple has tried to be ambitious with financial, they can't even get it out of their home market. So it's an interesting, and you could say, I mean, in my column,

I talk about like they have a car play and they're like, aha, well, maybe we'll build a car and we'll do this next generation car play. And the car makers are like, no, thank you. No.

Where, oh yeah. Uh, maybe automotive is not actually as wide open to you as you thought it was. And then, you know, the big one is obviously regulation and governments and things like that, where they're like, oh, we can totally do this. And it hasn't gotten there. Um, uh, Dan Morin recommended, uh, in that category, the, the whole digital driver's license thing, which is also just sort of like, they thought they could do that. They could do an Apple pay with that. And it kind of hasn't happened in the U S but the, the financial one is like a really great example where like they set up their own bank to do, to do short-term loans.

It's like, that's weird. And they, they had to do it themselves. And Mark Gurman wrote the stories a couple of years ago about their big financial and vision and vision. And they were going to set up a whole division of the company that does financial services and all that. And I, I know that the Apple pay later is a very specific product and it might not necessarily be representative of everything else.

But if you look at everything else that they've done in this area, other than Apple Pay itself, none of them, I would say, have been successful. Because first off, none of them are outside the US, and none of them have really grown or changed over time. It's all very limited. So I think maybe this is just one of those areas where Apple's, what is it, Apple's reach exceeded its grasp. It's trying, but it can't get there with this stuff. And maybe Apple, turns out, maybe having lots of money does not make you a bank. It's not the same. They're not the same. 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 starting out or managing a growing brand, you can stand out with a beautiful website, engage directly with your audience and sell your products, services, or even the content that you create. Squarespace has everything you need, all in one place, all on your terms. Squarespace's Blueprint and SEO tools make it so easy to get started.

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Room around up time, Jason Snell. Yeehaw! So I wanted to give an abridged outline, or basically talk about an outline that Mark Gurman has given for his expected timelines based on information he's received, and I think also a little bit of gut feeling,

about when Apple intelligence features are likely to ship. So from his Power On newsletter, in the initial release, most likely in the fall, we'll see notification prioritizing and recapping, summaries and transcriptions, Genmoji and image playgrounds, some of the writing tools to rewrite your text, the new Siri UI,i type to siri and better understanding of speech these are the things that are expected to be probably in 18 and 18.1 something like that but the expectation is that these features would would make it although they may not make it in the bay as apparently until at least some of these things until very late in the day like some of these things are targeted to be ready in august which is very late uh then later

in 2024 would be the chat gpt integration it's expected that this may not be ready for 18.0 and then in 2025 we would see features like siri being able to find content on your device this was the when is my mom's flight demo that is this like finding content on your device semantic indexing this is the understanding of you based on the data you have on your phone the intense based control of apps and actions so being able to ask your phone to do something and it would understand what that is and function it based on an application and its features and also on-screen awareness and i'll really quote from mark german about what kind of defining this part he says for example if you're texting with a friend about lebron james you'll be able to ask how many points

did he score last night and you'd get an answer. So this is the timeline but look, that 2025 could be who knows when. I'm happy to hear, because I was starting to feel like a lot of this stuff wouldn't ship at all this year, but the features

that he's put in the initial release, I think there's enough there which would be interesting to play with, right? And that people will be excited about. And it will give more time for developers and for Apple to convince more developers, which has been an interesting theme that I've been hearing people talk about over the last week, especially Ben Thompson, to actually try and get them to come on board with Apple intelligence, which could actually end up being a bit of an Achilles heel for them. So interesting timeline. to actually try and get them to come on board with apple intelligence which could actually end up being a bit of an achilles heel for them so interesting timeline obviously they're just doing this as fast as they can and there's going to be the stuff that they feel like is in better

shape or that is more constrained that they can do and then there's going to be the stuff that's messier i also would not be surprised if some of this stuff slips, right? I wouldn't be surprised if they say, yeah, Image Playgrounds turns out we can't ship it, so it'll be later or whatever. But at least there are going to be things, right? And I think we just have to accept that this stuff is going to roll out

over the course of the entire year, the entire release cycle, right? From September through next June june basically that they're going to keep adding things and then i imagine next june they'll make an announcement and those features will take a year to roll out as well and that's just how how it's going to be from now on is that this stuff is going to roll out over time because they don't have i think they know that they can't just sit on it for a year and do nothing right i think that they've got to be ambitious and then keep shipping throughout the

year but at least there will be some stuff there even if it's not in the betas which is you know for those of us who write about this stuff the most frustrating thing is is not having time to spend with major features of the operating system yeah but I think that's just how it's going to have to be this year is, is that it's all going to be coming. Uh, it's going to be a real challenge, right? Because you could review iOS for the fall, but you're not really reviewing, you're reviewing the 0.0 release and there's going to be a whole bunch of stuff that's not in there. And the stuff that's in there, you might've only seen it for a couple of weeks and that's just how it's going to be so yeah uh yeah it's an interesting interesting times yeah i would say like i think as you're you're saying too like as a content creator talking about apple

and technology i love the fact that they will be releasing things slowly over a one year period because we get more more excuses to talk about a new thing like that's great for us and you know it is it is i think a this is one of the things where it's a symptom of the situation that they're in but it is also something that people who have been following apple for a long time have kind of been begging them to do anyway that That like, we don't need, and they've been doing more and more of it over time, but the WWDC should be a roadmap of the next 12 months. And it's not all going to be in three months. You know, it's just funny.

I saw today like fifth, that there are currently six new baits for iOS 17, like 17.6 or something. Like it it plays out today which is funny that like all right we're still doing 17 betas but that's kind of what it should be i guess still fixing stuff or doing compliance for eu or who knows what yeah i agree that a feature that can't ship in september shouldn't have to wait for the next September. Like that's sort of what we're saying is under Apple's old model, either it shipped in September or it didn't or October or whatever in the fall, or it didn't ship until the next cycle. And now what they do is say, here's what we're working on for the next year.

And this stuff will ship over the course of the year. And it's a better model. Like it's a better model. Like it's a better model. You should not, you should not have a feature that just misses by the skin of its teeth because they aren't going to have it ready. And it's sentenced to banishment for a year, right? Like that's dumb. That shouldn't be the way you do it. Um, and it allows Apple to hold features back that it wants to ship, but aren't quite ready. It has the freedom to say it's going to be out of you know x.1 and it's going to slide to x.2 like that's good that's a good thing i think so but with apple intelligence you can also see that they're running as fast as they can right there again

they're that duck and it's paddling furiously beneath the surface you can and you can see it you can see that they're like uh this is just the beginning and we're working on it, but it's not all going to be there. And like, yeah, we, we get it. We get it, but it's,

it's okay. I'm okay with it. But at the same time, we knew this was coming. They'd be working on it for ages. We just so happened to now be shipping these things all at once. Yeah. In pieces.

The information is reporting that Apple is shifting focus away from a vision pro two towards an entry-level quote-unquote Vision product. A cheaper, lighter, pared-down version of their Vision OS headset. They're aiming for a $1,500 price tag, although they are apparently struggling to decide what features would get cut from the Vision Pro to make a cheaper product and they want to have a product on the market by the end of 2025 i'm seeing a lot of people say ha ha it failed uh what is your feeling about this news i um i so i cheated a little because i listened to you on connected yeah talk about this with steven it's rare that news gets to be i get to talk

about connected like news i get to talk about rumor news on connected first that is a rare i know it is weird i um my first thought about this as somebody who has a vision pro and thinks it's a very interesting product is this is absolutely what they should be doing when they were talking about there were reports about like oh apple's not even trying to make a cheaper version of it they're just going to do another vision pro and it's going to be another you know four thousand dollar headset that's using the latest and greatest like i thought that that was delusional yeah and that their their big goal should be they gotta they gotta knowing what they know having shipped a product having learned some

lessons presumably they're going to learn some more as they go into international markets, but they've learned some lessons. They've had time to think about it. They've had the time to think about their initial decisions and whether they were right or wrong. I think, and there's a narrative about Vision Pro sales that I think is wrong because somebody pointed out, initially the reports were like, oh, Apple can only make 400,000 of them them and so that limits how many and now there are stories that are like oh it's really disappointing apple's only going to sell about 400 000 of them it's like wait the number is the same what happened there it is not setting the world on fire but it's also a severely constrained product but like i don't know how you

look at the vision pro and don't think oh this needs to be a lot cheaper. And how much cheaper is a question? On Connected, which is a lovely podcast full of nonsense and also tech analysis that I recommend, the Connected program here at RelayFM. Thank you. Just a little plug, throwing it in there. You said

to summarize you, you're like, they really got to get this down to a Quest price. Yeah. 500. And the rumor's like an expensive iPhone, like 1500-ish for it. I agree on an infinite timescale, a reference to another podcast. I agree with you.

I think Apple needs to have a product that is affordable for people like yeah why not i'll watch it i'll use it for movies and maybe some games and whatever yeah like i do agree they need to go there they probably can't get there with the next one no and so i think they just need to strive to push the price down i think is the and that's where we absolutely agree is whatever they wherever they can get somebody needs to be looking at Vision hardware and saying, what is everything we can do to make this product cheaper? I would even say lighter. Yeah, I mean, lighter would be nice.

Make it cheaper. I think the number one thing with the Vision Pro is not its weight. It's not its size. Those would be nice too, sure. But make it cheaper because I agree with you that at $1,500, you're not going to sell a zillion of these things. But at $1,500, I do think a certain segment of the market that is never ever going to buy it at $3,500. For $1,500, could they find if there is more content, if there are more apps,

better movie and immersive experiences with it, maybe better games experiences with it, at $1,500, you'll get more of them and you'll get a little more momentum. But really, the goal should be, you can be thinking about the high end and what you want to do in the long run, but just get the price down as far as you can, because dollar it drops you will pick up some sales but you can't stop at 1500 you do need to keep driving it down it just may be the product is so early that it's going to take them five years to get down to 500 you know and if so like they should do it as fast as possible but i could see this1,500 is not a great price, but, I mean, it's less than half of the current Vision Pro. If they can make their next version cost less than half of the one that they've got out there now, my point is, it's good. This is exactly what they should be doing, is reducing the price. That's the most, the number one priority is to reduce the price of this thing yeah like the point that i was making on connectors and i and i stand by it but i also agree with you is that i don't think that a 1500

price tag is still is still too high to make a for this product to make a meaningful impact which i think is what apple realistically need they need this product to to make a meaningful impact if they want to continue to invest in it and i think that 1500 is still too high 1500 is a lot better and they will pick up more people but i i don't think that this is going to be a product that is meaningful until it is impulse pricing and 1500 is still too much like the price of an iphone being at 1500 or whatever doesn't matter because an iphone isn't like an essential yes it's in your pocket all the time where this is this is a novelty i i agree i just think um i think if i disagree it's it's that first off i don't think it's realistic that they're going to get it to 500 and second no it's not it's

completely unrealistic but but i think it's the right direction to go and i do think that they can pick up users by going from 3500 to 1500 but i agree with you in the sense that the goal can't be to make a thousand dollar headset like the goal can't it can't be the goal it has to be a 500 700 it's apple right so maybe it's a 700 600 but it needs to be something like that even even at 999 like at least you could make the argument it would be pricey but but like they just need to do everything every single aspect of that product needs to be put under the microscope and said do we need this could it be cheaper how you know does it betray the product or is it just like let's just get rid of it and and i'm sure we all have lists of things that are obvious i'm sure that

the people who build this thing also could look at it and say like something you you guys mentioned that i thought was really interesting is if you can improve your machine learning models you can drop sensors right like that's one thing you could potentially do is if you can have a if you can have a new sensor that maybe covers more ground, but it's a little bit lower resolution, but the machine learning model is more accurate. You can save money by shaving sensors off of it. And there are probably other parts that are like that too. They don't need to ship it with the super 3d knitted headband,

right? Like there are lots of things you could take out of it to get it down. And they need to, they absolutely every leave no stone unturned um but i'm gonna i'm gonna mention something else here because i was thinking about your conversation with steven and thinking about vision pro direction you know like they should we talked about it they ship job simulator for it and right and vacation simulator and there's some other games that are on it now. And it's interesting because those are VR games that are just have been out there for ages and they ported them to the platform.

Right. I'll also throw out a, uh, before I get to my point, I'm going to throw out a shout out for when cards fall by the game band and snowman, which, uh,

has been an iPhone iPad game for a a while now but there's a vision pro version of it it's great it's gorgeous it's like monument valley-esque puzzler um and vision pro version is is spatial so i mean it's 3d basically is what it is but it's gorgeous it's really good uh i really love it this brings me to my point which is while apple is rethinking things it's assumptions about the vision pro hardware like do we need to spend that money on the lenticular external display that shows eyes and every other thing i mean that's the easy shot but like every other thing about the product that was an assumption like well we have to have this and they end up with a 3500 headset they also need to rethink some of their assumptions that are,

I think, mistaken. I was going to insult them more and I'm not going to. That were mistaken and that were probably based on some dogma or being too prideful about the amazing work they've done on their hand tracking. This is a long way of me saying they absolutely 100% need to make hand controllers for the Vision Pro. Oh, okay. Or make a hand controller API and let third parties do it. Because they could pick up one of the problems, especially if you're going to 1500,

one of the problems with the Vision Pro is it doesn't play games. It plays some games, but games you think of as VR games, the ones they've got are not very good for the most part because they have to rely on the hand tracking. And the precision you can have with hand controllers is so much better than what you can do with hand tracking. better than what you can do with hand tracking. Doing Beat Saber or the Darth Vader game, right? Or like there are so many things you can do with precision on an Oculus Quest with their hand controllers. And they don't have to be mandatory. They could be, again, they could be third party even with an API. But if you had the ability to, as Apple, unlock ports of all those VR games that assume that you've got precision hand controllers and that don't work when you try to build them with just hand tracking.

It makes the product better. It makes the product more appealing to have that. If I could do, okay, maybe I can't do Beat Saber, but if I could do something like Beat Saber with the precision of Beat Saber, which Vision Pro does not have. If I could do something, if it's not getting Vader Immortal or whatever it is that I played on Quest, something like it, where you're using the precision to do a lightsaber, there's a lot of lightsaber, it's a good fit, or whatever. All of these other VR games that have been done for other platforms that could potentially be ported to Vision Pro, other vr games that have been done for other platforms that could potentially be ported to vision pro and they just can't be because apple said no no it's like if you see a stylus they

blew it remember that yeah this is that which is i get them saying if you see hand controllers they blew it because there was a period with the quest with the quest 2 when i got it we're like there was no hand tracking and when they they did hand tracking, it was bad. The hand tracking in Quest 3 is okay. It's actually okay. But on the Quest 2, it was really bad. It was an afterthought. Like pass-through was an afterthought.

And Meta has gotten better with that over time. But like, so I get Apple saying, no, we want the Vision Pro to be a device where you don't have to put on your little controllers. You can literally just slip it on and sit there and interact with the world. Great. Philosophically, 100% agree with that. But you know what?

Apple still shipped an Apple Pencil because there are things that are better with a stylus, with a pencil, things that are better. And VR is better with hand controllers because you can play more games with more precision that your beautiful sensors that are very expensive and your amazing ML models just can't do. The complexity of pressing a button on a hand controller instead of having to do a very specific,

like I'm trying to put my fingers together, but I'm playing a game, I'm moving my hand around and it can't see that I'm putting my fingers together or it misreads moving my hand as putting my fingers together and the input's all messed up. Like it's just, there are applications on the Vision Pro

that can't be done because Apple said we're not doing hand controllers. So if I was working on this product, that would be one of the things on my list is in addition to working to make a cheaper model, we've got to add a proper hand controller API to the operating system. And either we make a first party set of hand controllers and they can reinvent the hand controller if they want, whatever. Or if you just find partners or a partner, maybe you'd even design it for them, but whatever it is, just say, we need to have it.

Because I just, I feel obviously, cause I've just ranted about it for five minutes. I feel very strongly like they want this thing to be successful. There's a whole class of fun applications for it that would make you more inclined to use it or buy it that they refuse to have on their platform because they don't deign to have the, you know, these awful hand controllers that you shouldn't need to have to do proper augmented reality or VR. And like,

they need to get over it. This product for this product to be good, they got to get over it. They, they just, they got to get over the, the I'll say it'd be pride or the arrogance of like, well,

we're just going to roll in and we're going to do our awesome thing. And we't need this other stupid thing that Meta is doing. It's like, they're wrong. They're wrong. They can't do it. You've got to have a hand controller if you want to play those games and you've got to have a catalog of apps for Pete's sake. I don't know. Do you agree that it's like a glaring, like, why would you hurt your product by not having it? Oh, I mean, I said it from the beginning, right? The gaming story on Vision Pro will always be hampered by the fact that most successful games rely on controllers, so can't be ported. And there are some that work, like your job simulator or whatever, you're just emulating your hands, right? And so that's fine. Right. And they'll say, oh, we could do a PlayStation controller or something.

I was like, that ain't it, guys. PlayStation controller in VR, that ain't it. That's not. No, that's not it. No. I mean, unless you somehow make a deal with PlayStation to use their PSVR controllers, right? Like that would work.

Yeah, exactly. But like there are, love more hate. There are lots and lots of shooting games in vr and i've played some like one called super hot is fantastic there's another one that i can't remember the name of but like they're exhilarating and really fun and interesting and some of them that they they deal with like the real life element by not making people look like people right like and you know it is know, it is what it is, but it is a very successful and there's a lot of zombie games and stuff like that. There's a very, very well-reviewed game

called Asgard's Wrath 2. I mean, the problem is a lot of these good games now are being bought up by meta. So that poses its own problem, but it would be easier for more gaming experiences if there was a more gaming precise input method, which there isn't. Yeah, it's just, I think about the limited number, I mean, because the joke that I made and that everybody else probably made at WWDC when they put up that image of all of the icons of VisionOS apps I believe I turned to Casey and said that's all of them right I mean this is the problem is there aren't that

many Vision Pro apps and there are some and there aren't like reason to buy a Vision Pro apps and I'm not saying playing a game you could also play on a quest for 500 is a reason to buy a vision pro but if i'm looking at that 1500 product or that or a thousand dollar product from apple the the low cost one low cost in quotes right 1500 and i think well all right they're doing some immersive sports and they're those immersive movies and there's a bunch of 3d movies and like and there's apps it's like it's kind of interesting but i don't know well if you've got a game catalog on top of it it just makes it more appealing it makes it more appealing and i would say for existing vision pro users it would make it more appealing if you used it more if i used it more i would like it more and so anyway yeah

they need to do it they need to get over whatever their opinion is i mean and and this is just i don't know for sure but my guess is there is a dogma inside apple which is if it can't be done with hand controls and our amazing sensors and and and ml models for hand tracking it shouldn't be done on vision pro and it's just wrong. They're wrong. It shouldn't be mandatory and it's not going to be mandatory because I've been in pro does so much so well, but like, it's not like those games could be ported to the vision pro and work with hand tracking. It's that there are classes of games that simply can't be done with hand tracking. You need a controller and they just need to get over it. So I don't know. It's that's my, I just, that, that actually was the thing that I was most shocked by about the vision OS two announcement in some ways was that there was not even a nod toward like a third

party or whatever. Like there's just zero. And, and I don't know it. I hope they're not delusional about it. I hope they know this inside and they're just not. Cause that's the thing with Apple is you can't tell. Do they know, but they're working on it and it's not ready? So they're not going to do it and they're not going to say anything and they're going to do their confident marketing of like, no, no, we're happy with the way it is, even though they know in the background that it's absolutely not okay and they're trying to fix it. Or are they actually delusional and think it's okay? I don't know.

I don't know. I sure hope it's not actual delusion and that they're working on it. This episode is brought to you by Vitally. Vitally is bringing in a new era of customer service productivity with their all-in-one platform. Vitally's collaborative workspace combines your customer data with all of the capabilities you expect from today's project management and work platforms. With Vitally, you can measure the effectiveness of OKRs and operational strategies on customer outcomes at scale thanks to their goals feature. Goals allows you to track the progress of your accounts against target metrics, meaning you can standardize goal

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when you schedule a qualified meeting. A thanks to Vitally for their support of this show and RelayFM. It's time to lawyer up,ason snell uh hear you hear you oh i like the dun dun dun dun you know that was good i like that okay all right and we're still working it out we're recording this show a few days early uh it's actually friday the 21st when we're recording this while we were today, the Discord alerted me to some news. I'm going to read from Mark Gurman here. Now, this is a bit of a longer quote than usual because I haven't had a lot of time to digest this information. Apple has announced

that it is withholding the release of Apple Intelligence, iPhone mirroring, and SharePlay screen sharing from users in the EU this year because the Digital Markets Act allegedly forces it to downgrade the security of its products and services, citing concerns posed by the bloc's regulatory attempts to rein in big tech. Apple said in a statement, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. Now, on first glance of this, one, fascinating, but two, I don't feel like I understand what Apple is saying. Like maybe there's a part here about

what the DMA wants. That means that this, like, honestly, this doesn't even really feel like anything to me other than Apple is deciding to fire shots back at the EU. I will just bring in a point here that prior to this announcement, EU Competition Commissioner Margaret Vestager told CNBC, we have a number of Apple issues i find them very serious i was very surprised we would have such suspicions of apple being non-compliant she's it's very it's a very i'm not mad i'm just disappointed kind of

statement which i really love which is a very funny way to do it i have a theory probably between when we record this and post it there'll be more more details. But I have a theory here, which is if you're Apple and you're tired of getting fined and yelled at about misinterpreting or lightly interpreting intentionally the DMA, one, and they won't pre-clear you, right? They won't pre-clear you theoretically. Although, but sometimes what happens is Apple says, we can't do this because of the DMA. And the EC says, oh no, no, you can do that. That's okay. I wonder if that's what they're doing here. I wonder if they're just saying, look, this is our way as Apple of announcing that we don't think we're allowed to do these things in

the EU. So we're going to withhold these great features from our European customers because, but it's not our fault. It's the DMA. It does give the European commission the opportunity to say, Oh no, no, no,

no, no. You could do that. We didn't mean it that way. I don't know if that's the game being played here, but I wonder, I wonder if in part it's to get uh european customers to be asking the commission like why it doesn't make sense why can't i use iphone mirroring and for them to say

no no no we didn't mean that no no no it's fine apple you can you can ship that feature right what this reminds me of is when months ago we were talking about the um i don't even remember the name of it now though but the bill that was going through the parliament, going through parliament in the UK. Oh, right, about the end-to-end encryption. Yeah. And there's more of that kind of stuff happening in Europe now anyway.

And that Apple kind of started making statements of like, oh man, it'd be a shame if something happened to your iMessage. If iMessage just got turned off in the UK. And other features, right? That they may have to leave the UK market. There has been a lot of talk since the DMA was introduced about if Apple should just leave Europe. I see this as a talking point.

John Gerber brings it up quite a bit. And I don't really think it's a great argument that they should just leave Europe because it just doesn't make sense to me. This is the way you do it, though. You say, oh, we can't give you the nice fancy features because we're just too scared of the DMA, which is also hilarious that Apple, who is by all accounts seeming to not care about the DMA in in a lot of instances like you you linked to this in six colors that they're refusing to notarize emulator apps that would be distributed in alternative hat marketplaces which by basically all reading of the dma is something they are not allowed to do but they're doing it anyway but they're doing it anyway and like what margaret

vestiger is saying that things like seemingly, things like the CTF and stuff like that are also against the DMA. But in this instance, Apple's like, oh, we wouldn't dare break the DMA. It's existing features versus new features. And you can see they've got this like pincer approach now, which is drag your feet on changing your existing features. And then now we get the other part of it, which is withhold new features for fear.

And it's, I mean, it is a, there may, this may have truth in it, but it's also a political calculation. They are saying, look at everything you're not going to get because of the dma and it's going to they're trying to motivate people in europe to say i don't like this dma i want that feature why can't i get it and and that's good because they're the ones who can go to their elected officials uh and say uh stop this this is bad It puts potentially negative press on the commission and potentially makes the commission more likely to say to Apple, okay, it's fine. You can do that and be lighter on them. It's a game of, I was going to say it's a game of cat and mouse.

It's like a game of chicken. Literally, they're just barreling down the road saying, nope, you don't get those features no apple intelligence in europe sorry europe womp womp sad trombone and there's another statement given to the financial times from another apple spokesperson who says due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the digital markets act we do not believe that we'll be able to roll out the three of these new features, iPhone mirroring, SharePlay screen sharing, and Apple intelligence to our EU users this year. Yeah. Right? Very strange.

And maybe the way they phrase that is, we're concerned that we're going to get fined and we're going to just ship it and see what they say. It feels very much like a ball is in your court statement, right? Which is, one, is this okay? Let us know, but we're worried that you're going to knock us for this. Or two, and this might also be what they're trying to say is, we can ship this in the rest of the world now because it's built the way Apple usually builds features. Apple usually builds features. But if the EU is going to require that anytime we do a feature like this, we have to publish an open API and we have to have it be like accessible from third parties and all of that. If that's so those features will need more work and we can't commit to shipping those in this cycle because right. So that's one way if you're like oh well

you can ship a new feature but you need let's say let's say uh the iphone mirroring what if they have read whether it's aggressively read or not a uh a dma you know aspect that says um if you offer this feature you need to also offer it for other devices like Android phones. And Apple's options are, what Apple said all along is, you roll out a feature and then you expand it, but they're rolling it out. They are simultaneously rolling it out to make iPhones better with Macs

and because it's a good feature for Mac users. And both of those things are true. It makes having an Android phone worse and makes having an iPhone better. And so you could argue, if you're in Europe, you could say, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. Although the Mac's not a gatekeeper. It's very weird, right? But it's like, no, no, no, no. You also need to make that available or whatever. But I'm just saying, whether it's that example or not, this is one way that Apple can argue that their shipping features the way they ship features. And if Europe requires them to ship features with a bunch of extra stuff on top of it, they're just not going to ship those features in Europe,

at least not at first. Interesting mean it's yeah it's politics it's strategy yeah my my read on this because this this press release could have come out at any time right that would where they they just realized this like they didn't at any point work this out yeah i believe apple knows because i think you know think there is communication that occurs, they are about to get hit by the EU again. They're going to either get a fine or they're going to – it's been bubbling for the last couple of weeks. saying if you're gonna make us do this like really make us do this the way you want enforce the way you want this is what we'll do to your customers like it's almost like oh you want you want some protection around it like it's but this is this is what happens in these kinds of scenarios right this is posturing from all sides right margaret vestiger is not just like falling into

cnbc and giving a quote right she is doing this similarly she's trying to stoke it up right like before anything is like oh i'm so shocked and surprised at them and then apple's like oh man if only we could give these amazing features to your customers it's a new weapon for apple right because it's been about existing features needing to be retrofit to meet the rules and so apple's like been dragging their feet and all that this is a whole new front in apple's battle with europe which is withholding features and making note of it like and you would think oh yeah but they're hurting themselves in the eyes of people in europe it's's like, well, they are, but what they're really doing is saying, we can't give you these features because of your bureaucrats.

So they're trying to put pressure on bureaucrats because in the end, the bureaucrats don't speak for Apple. We learned that they do theoretically speak for their the residents of those countries and it puts a little bit of pressure on them to say uh oh apple's products are worse in europe because of you not because of them everybody else gets these features but you don't and it's a nice flip side to the positive pr presumably of hey only in europe can you have third-party app stores and all of that. It's like, okay. You're like, hey, they're working for me. We got features nobody else in the world has. And now it's going to be only in Europe can you not have Apple intelligence.

Like, oh, oh, this isn't good for me. And that's a message that Apple wants to send. Yeah. I love that it's heating up again. I do. I love it. I'm sorry. I love it. I just, I find it so fascinating to watch this play out. And I, and I expect that for next week's episode, we're going to have even more. Yeah. Yeah. There's going to be a lot here.

That emulator thing too. Just, I missed it when it happened. It happened like right before WWDC, but Apple's doing that thing where they're like, Oh, well, but there's a security rule and they're like there are a couple rules that uh are happen when you're in

the app store but one of those rules also happens when you're not in the app store and it's the rule against a specific it seems like it's the rule against like having binaries that come in from outside and are executed which is weird because i think delta does that and delta is allowed everywhere also troubling is that it took them months to reject that app which suggests that first off this seems to be measured like apple had debates about it and decided to go ahead and reject these things even though it seems inconsistent um and riley tested has also said um that who does alt store that apple has dragged their feet on notarizing all sorts of apps for Alt Store as well. And Apple could argue very specific points here, and it may be that they have good reasons for rejecting these that aren't inconsistent with other approvals. inconsistent with other approvals. But from Margaret Vestager's perspective,

and from my perspective, honestly, I'm open to hearing Apple's argument here, but I feel like Apple broke the seal with this, where notarization was supposed to, and has on the Mac meant this all along. When they did notarization on the Mac, which you can turn off, but is on by default that it wants to see a notarized Mac app to launch it. Everybody was like, oh, geez, they're going to start approving or disapproving Mac apps. And Apple was like, no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. But with the, with the notarization for the app marketplaces, Apple said, well, we're going to put more into it than we do on the Mac. There's going to be more, you know, standards are higher here because this platform is secure and we need to keep it secure. But this is the moment where you look at it and you say, oh, they have decided to do what they do with the app store, which is set some rules that are arbitrary, enforce them arbitrarily, and use the notarization process as a de facto approval process. And I don't know all of their arguments

that they will have to make about this, but if I'm Margaret Vesager, I look at this and I think this is not what you're allowed to do. Like you are not allowed, the point of having external marketplaces is that they bypass your rules except for very specific cutouts for security and i would say i would approach apple's arguments that these emulators are rejected for security reasons with a great deal of skepticism this is i did not expect this turn maybe i should have maybe i should have but i did not expect it and i as i said earlier like this is clearly a new development for them because they had they had a lot of opportunities over the last couple of weeks to talk about this in their rollout but now all of a sudden here we are yeah this is it's and the danger here here's the other thing because they

i'd like to dash this off as being oh yeah well somebody didn't get the memo but like they took months so clearly they had a whole discussion internally about whether they should notarize this or not which i would argue is also not in the spirit of the dma yeah and then they decided they would they would use the hammer they would say no we're, we're not approving this, but, but for good reasons, which is very, a very much an abstract attitude that they're now going to apply to this. So it's a, it's a, it's a specific act that they're performing here. And as with so much that they've done, I look at it and think, by doing this, you risk making this much worse for yourself. Not just in terms of fines, but in terms of you're calling the EC on how they interpret

what you're allowed to do with notarization. And the result might be something you don't like, Apple. The result might be, you decide to draw a line right here, which is emulators of old PCs. Like, who cares? Who really cares? What is the difference between old PCs and Game Boys? Like, what's the actual difference? So, was this worth it? Because if the EC doesn't think you have a leg to stand on with your security complaints about this, they may make it clear about what they mean by allowing things in for security via notarization. And it may handcuff you so that something else comes along that you actually are

concerned about. And you may not be able to reject it because the rules have narrowed. Your behavior may have made it worse for you in the future. And this is something that a lot of Apple's behavior makes me wonder if it is aware of that concept, right? The idea that you're making it worse for yourself because they're like, no, we're going to fight tooth and nail. And it's like, you know, if you'd gone along, you might've ended up in a better place, but like, no, we're going to fight a tooth and nail. All right. It's your funeral, but we'll see. very specific things with UTM and IDOS that are, that the apps are doing that is beyond what the other emulators have. And that Apple thinks it's a security thing, but even there,

even there, they're allowing the European commission to come in and say, yeah, that's not good enough. Right? Like the EC, if this is about like a just in time compiler, like a JIT,

the EC could just come in and say no jits jits are allowed and then what does apple do i mean apple can't say no or they'll get fined so why are you bringing this on yourself it's so stupid and and it really undermines the whole concept that notarization is supposed to be kind of a fair deal where you're like you're outside the store. So we're really only going to be we're like almost independent and we're not doing this to enforce Apple's policies. We're just trying to keep everybody safe. And instead, it's like all of the safety things that are really there to allow Apple to exert control have gotten imported into notarization. It is a real shame.

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to make your payments on time by the due date. Our thanks to KRCS for their support of this show and RelayFM. So considering what we were talking about earlier on,

home screen tinting and there's obviously more home screen optimization coming to the iPhone. I wanted to get a little like check-in and like a baseline set right now of how our home screens are looking. Can I just say it, Mike?

Yes. Summer of fun! Summer of fun! Although there was more news breaking in this episode than we expected, but nevertheless. Yes, but here we are. Just to be clear, the summer of fun means although there was more news breaking in this episode than we expected but nevertheless yes but here we are at the just to be clear the summer of fun uh means we're gonna do stuff like this just kind of uh you know unusual so it's our home screen it's a home screen it's not a competition

it's not a challenge it's not a roast probably no i mean it might be it depends some are fun stuff we usually you know we need topics who bring these things in how and we actually didn't today there was more news and other stuff we could have spoken about but we just started the summer of fun so i felt like we had to start with a summer of fun like topic so here we are yeah here we are so i'm going to take a look at your home screen first right would you like to take me on a tour or anything? Yeah, just thinking about where we are and where we might go with iOS 18. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

So in terms of apps, and I know we've talked about this before, it hasn't changed a lot. At the bottom, I have Overcast, Safari, Fantastical, and Slack in the dock. Although the dock doesn't really matter other than they're more reachable because i only have one page yeah just one that's interesting just one screen yeah i i'm big uh

big search boy like if it's not there sometimes i have to realize oh that app is on the home screen i don't need to search for it because i just i do a lot of that do you not think though like you could have a whole widget page over there you know you could have a bunch of bunch of widgets on another page showing you some fun info like even in the today view i could have widgets you could you could you could you could have them anywhere you like i i do have a couple widgets in the today view uh i have thought about it in particular like on a vacation or something or on a trip i might add them but i but I tend to not otherwise. I just, I, if, if I was motivated, I would do it. I would do that, but I have not been motivated. I probably just put them in the today view. Right. Because then I don't even need to add another page.

Yeah. Um, cause I just swipe the other way. Cause it doesn't really matter. Right. At that point, if you only have one page swiping left or right right doesn't matter. You're just going to a page with widgets. Anyway, so those are my doc apps. And then I have on my phone, I have the MLB app because I'm a baseball fan. And checking on the scores and bringing up the live activities. Not Apple Sports or anything like that? No. No?

No. What does the MLb app give you that sports doesn't um well i can listen i can put on audio okay that's pretty big and i can put on video but i mostly don't do that on my iphone but i can put on the game like the radio broadcast plus it's got box scores It's got lots more detail than the Apple sports app has. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense.

I have Slack in my dock, but I have discord on my home screen. Didn't use to, but all our membership communities are in discord now. You know, I have three of them, four of them. If you count twit actually,

where I'm only on there though, during the live show, but, but incomparable and six colors and relay so i've i've got discord everywhere now um didn't used to carrot is my is my weather app that's on my home screen um other other weather weather apps are available but carrot is the one that i have i've got a little orange icon. A little aesthetic going there. I chose a custom icon for Carrot.

It's an orange one. Is that for giants? Because they're giants? Mostly because I like orange. Okay. It's a nice color. It could be for the giants, too. Let's go giants.

They're orange. Yeah, sure. I mean, I have the overcast in the in the light color too because i like the orange well you you can actually set you can choose so you can choose dark or light and then also choose the icon which which i've done yes the orange i choose orange the iconic icon it's beautiful i gotta ask about the iRobot app i gotta i gotta ask about irobot just let me get camera okay music yeah notes yeah settings yeah photos messages correct maps yep phone big stock boy mail and irobot yeah we've got a lot of stock apps actually before we get to irobot settings okay

well yeah man what do you mean, well, yeah, man? How often are you in settings? I'm changing settings all the time. I mean, I don't have it in my dock. I'm not a monster. How often are you changing settings, and what are you changing? It's, you know, if I need to get on... Some of this is probably control-centrable,

and I'm just not doing it there. It really is. It really, really is. Yeah. You're like, oh, I didn't turn off the Wi-Fi. I gotta, really is. Yeah. Like, Oh, turn off the wifi. I gotta go to say no, but it's like, I got to find the new wifi and I can swipe down and do that. Or I, you know,

I don't know. I find myself, I find myself going, I find myself going to settings enough and my home screen is not full. Right. I find myself going to settings enough that I don't want to pull down and shoot type S E T and then tap right i can just tap on settings yeah do i use it a lot probably not but enough enough that it makes me

also honestly there's a lot of uh hey jason can you do this thing on the iphone i'm like all right let me see where that is in settings it's this and this and this i might tell somebody you go here and then here and then here and then you do. I have now realized that there is no home screen topic that doesn't become a roast. Like, I feel like that's just- It's true. I was trying to say it might not be a roast

as a suggestion, but- There's no way it doesn't become one. No, it doesn't. There's no way it doesn't become one. Explain yourself. Settings, I don't know. I find it useful. It would not be there.

I've removed a lot of things from my home screen. Yeah. And it's still there, which means that I must hit it enough for it to matter sure okay but i robot i feel like i cut you off of iro are you like often starting the rumor manually you know it's actually more about stopping the Roomba. Okay. But yeah, so the fact is sometimes the Roomba is set to go most days at, I think,

one or two in the afternoon. And sometimes I... Because I work at home, right? Sometimes I'm doing stuff. I'm watching TV. I'm working, whatever. If I'm in the garage, it's okay. It just happened where Juneteenth was Wednesday, so Lauren had it off, and the robot started to go, and I was able to very quickly say, no robot, go home.

Right? So some of it is just, I can't do this right now, and I'll pause it, or I'll send it home. where I'll notice like cat litter on the hallway carpet and I'll just be like, send the robot to do the hallway because there's cat litter that came out of the cat box. Or we'll be leaving for curling and I'll say, and Lauren will say, can you run the robot?

And I'll like give it a full house run as we leave so that while we're gone, the robot is going around and doing its thing. So I have enough robot control. Like, could it be replaced with like a widget or a control center item? Oh, right down. Well, I mean, I would hope so

because there's only really basic. I don't do a lot of, oh, let's look at the map or let's change the schedule. It's not a lot of that. It's a lot of start or stop that I'm doing that I could probably do something else. It might be in home because like one of the home improvements or stop that I'm doing that I could probably do something else. It might be in home because one of the home

improvements was support for robot vacuums, but it does require iRobot doing that. But they could also just add a control center widget from iOS 18 to do it. But for now, that's why iRobot is there. Do I spend a lot of time on my phone going, oh man, I'm going

to go in? And they're trying, like everybody else. iRobot is there. Do I spend a lot of time on my phone going, oh man, I'm going to go in? And they're trying, like everybody else. iRobot is trying to like, oh, let's do the whole iRobot experience in our app. And you can shop for things and learn tips. And I was like, I'm not interested in any of that. I'd love to send a message right now. Jason, you know they have some shortcut sections? I just looked.

You could make a shortcut to pause it. Yeah, I could. Just letting you know. I'm not saying you should. I'm not saying you should. But again, but it's not going to be as compact as just opening the app and then having all the controls there, right? Yeah. This is also one of these things where I'm like trying to save the feedback, you know?

Yeah, sure. Sure. Well, it's controllable by home voice assistants too, right? Yes. And I'm not interested. I configured that up for when I had an Echo that I could use Alexa to do that and I literally never did it. It's just not, I'm just not interested in that.

I'd rather just flip open the phone and go boop, boop and send the robot where I need it to go. But I'm open. I think iOS 18, whether it's home or control center on the phone and go boop boop and send the robot where i need it to go but i'm open i think i ios 18 whether it's home or control center or some combination thereof might solve enough of my use cases that i that right because the idea there is if i'm launching it a couple of times a week i mean i might as well put it on the home screen but if i only have to launch it to you know change a a setting or a schedule or something like that then it doesn't

need to be on my home screen if i can get quick access to telling the robot to stop what it's doing because robots are dumb they're real dumb maybe ai will make them all better but right now they're still pretty dumb even the smart ones are kind of dumb and what is going on with that weather widget all right so at the very top, I have a weather widget. This is inscriptable. It is a widget I wrote, or at least I adapted from. It was like a German hourly weather widget, but I liked how it looked. So I converted it.

It uses weather kit. It's got the high temperatures in my... I have a bunch of different widgets on different platforms that do this. But for the iPhone, this was the most effective way to do it was to use Scriptable. So it's using WeatherKit of the high

and the conditions, which look really boring right now, right? Because it's California in the summertime. So there's a cloud today and then it's just a sun the rest of the time. And then there's some other data from my weather station that's also in here. So it's got the high and low for today so far. The current conditions, partly cloudy. The current temperature, 51 degrees. I took this at 8.38 AM. 10 degrees cooler today. We had some warm days, but that's actually one of my favorite stats in here is that, is it going to be cooler? Is it shaping up to be cooler or warmer than yesterday? And I can see, well, the highest forecast to be 71. And it's, yeah,

it's already 10 degrees cooler than it was at this time yesterday, which I find really useful. I think that's really helpful. And two degrees warmer in the last hour so you can see if the heat is really spiking it's like oh geez i better get out now because it's really it's really heating up out there so this is my like personal home weather dashboard widget yeah i am you mentioning that that carrot got an update recently and one of and it like when you open it now it can show you some things that have changed i actually really like that it's like hey it's two degrees warmer than yesterday it's a great stat that's a good that's just a good thing to know like oh oh okay that's interesting because it puts it in a bit of context which just makes me think like did i feel warm today because i'll feel warmer tomorrow or whatever

you know or yesterday today so there is, this is actually a stack. Okay. This is a new feature. So I also have a Mercury weather widget underneath here. Yes, I'm paying for Carrot and Mercury. Look, you're a weather nerd and everyone just says to get used to it.

I like Carrot. I think I like Carrot better than Mercury in general, but I think Carrot is lacking a feature that mercury has, which is trip forecasts. So when I'm traveling, I flip it over to mercury because mercury will do the thing where it'll say it's going to be a high here on Thursday and then you're traveling and here's the temperature on Friday, Saturday, Sunday when when you're traveling to that city. And then, then you come back home. So when I went to visit my mom, uh, it was like 72, 75, 72, 105, 101, 169, 71. And it's like, Oh, Phoenix weather in there. Um, and I like that. I think that's pretty cool to be able to see how it's shaping up so if i'm about to go on a trip or i'm on a trip to be able to to see that i don't necessarily need the details of my home while i'm traveling so i flip over to the mercury uh widget very cool which is cool all right this is a this is pretty standard should we should we switch over to me

there's a lot going on here yeah yeah it's a lot of stock apps it's just you're a very stock apps boy and you love your settings that's what we know about you and we love i love my settings in the phone i'm surprised you didn't say anything about phone sometimes i gotta call people yeah i don't love it at the point that we have like maps and settings and camera and photos it's's like, you know, you're in it. You know, you're in the original iPhone life. I don't even have reminders on there, which I probably could. I use reminders a lot too.

I should probably put reminders on. I mean, you have three extra spaces, so you might as well go for it. I do. I do. So for iOS, I'll just say, for iOS 18, we talked about some of the things that we might be able to put in control center that would reduce my need to have them elsewhere that is possible and then i think the other thing i anticipate is that i will probably do what i think a lot of people will do which is bring down more apps lower on the screen yeah it would make sense for you to shift it all down one exactly because i

want the ones that i'm using most often above the doc apps to be the next for next most oftenly used right that's the way that should be anyway let's look at you so i'm gonna start from the top down uh and we'll go from there so the very top i have a stack of carrot weather and fantastic owl widgets and they rotate throughout the day so you know i can know my weather i can know what my next tasks are so i like having those there they're pretty helpful for me to have that um then we move on to i have a another stack of widgets which is due and reminders so the reminders are shared like. This is where we put our house tasks and stuff like that. It goes in reminders.

And then do is where I have little things for myself to deal with. And then I have a four block of apps. Notes, Discord, Google Maps, and City Mapper. Then I have camera, Instagram, messages, and Slack. And then I have a stack of a small widget, a Timery widget, and underneath it is a Shortcuts widget with two time tracking widgets that I use. And my dock is Todoist, Notion, Safari, and Overcast. So that's screen one.

Screen two. There's a lot of organization happening there. Screen two. I have a stack of notion widgets so i can get the different things quickly then i have a couple of widget smith widgets with different albums then i have a stack of widgets for the app peak which is just fitness stuff so it shows your rings and your steps you can choose what you want in there. Then I have another stack of photos widgets.

One is the official photos app one. And then one is the Widgetsmith on this day and they rotate. Then I have a stack of two home widgets, one for my home and one for my studio. Ah, right. Then I have a... Yeah, I love widgets. Then I have another page,

which is mostly all widgets. I have one for my home security system, Abode. Then I have another WidgetSmith widget, which shows me the pollen count. All right. Which gets cycled in and out throughout the year. Then I have another stack, like a longer stack. So this has got a bunch of things in it. What you're looking at right now is a WidgetSmith countdown widget.

But this is one of the newer ones that David added last year with the interactive where the actual countdown to the event, I have to tap on the image and it slides up and shows me the actual date, which is nice. So then I don't need to look at

how many days it is until the London live show, which is currently one month, six days as we're recording this. Then I have in this stack a Formula One app called BoxBox, which shows me the calendar of the Formula One races. And then another Widgetsmith widget, which is time zones, for the time zones that I need to be aware of. And then a widget from the app GameTrack, which is a game tracking app, which shows me the games that I'm currently playing in progress.

Then I have Duolingo, 165 day streak, no biggie. And then I have New York Times Games, which is a new one for me. Everyone plays it and I want to play it and I'm enjoying it. I have Delta, the emulator, and then I have MetaView, which

is the app for my sunglasses and then ChatGPT because you the app for my sunglasses and then chat gpt because you know that's where we are okay that's my home screens well i am um shamed by your amazing widget collection i love widgets man i really love it's really good it's really i've been going and we learned this when steven judged me that one time yeah Yeah. We learned that I am a minimalist in a lot of ways. So my tendency is to say, ah, I'm not going to do a second page. And you said, why not do a second page with widgets? I'm like, yeah, am I really going to use it?

Right. It's just a tendency, and I'm not entirely sure that it's right. Am I knowing myself or am I just precluding myself from trying it? But this is sort of aspirational and inspirational for me in some ways where I think being clever about having the stacks and having things that you don't need my phone as much as you do because I'm mostly at home and I use my phone some at home but not as much as my iPad and my Mac but seeing the way you use stacks I really like that. Oh like I have a whole lot of home screens we're not going to get into today where like travel ones and stuff where sure sure I'm traveling and then I have like the flighty one and the tripsy one and I have camera sorry like calendar and then find my like the flighty one and the tripsy one and I have calendar and then find my, like, you know. Oh, yeah. I think that widgets are very good.

Like, I just like that they can surface so much information, which is good information for me to have that otherwise I wouldn't have or I would have to go and get. Like, for example, the peak one, which shows me my activity rings and my steps all in one widget or the duolingo widget the duolingo widget is great if you use duolingo because the image changes so if you haven't done your duolingo today it's a good reminder and and i think duolingo is quite clever that they have the the owl which is their mascot, doing increasingly weird things. Sometimes I've seen its face melting. Sometimes it's like the head has opened up and another owl. They're trying to grab your attention with really weird imagery to indicate to you that you need to do your Duolingo.

And then when you've done it, you get the little celebratory owl that you've done your Duolingo for today. So I like the way that they do that. And that's just like a good piece of information for me, the countdown and also the photo widgets. I think I'm surprised that you don't use those at least, because I know that you care a lot about your photo library and the photo widgets that I use, both the official photos one and then also the Widgetsmith ones, where I get the on this day, is like that is surfacing for me images that I otherwise would not see today. And I think that that is a real pleasure. So I have photo widgets on my iPad. Yeah, that makes sense.

But not on my, because for me, so my iPad is evening, like evening watching less engaging TV and going to bed. And morning when I wake up and I'm reading and all that. And so I've got all good morning. Open your iPad. That would be a great thing for Tim to say as an alarm. Good morning. as an alarm um good morning the uh so so for me that is like a a place where the ipad interface is very comfy and that that's a good place to put things like photos um the iphone i don't know i think maybe my iphone i just treated a a little more as a utilitarian thing than the but this is

offering me inspiration i have some questions okay i will just say on that you're saying about utilitarian for me that means you should be even more widget focused i think all right like so your phone every time you open your phone i think it should be showing you the thing that you're wanting before you even needed to do anything with it you know oh interesting interesting but i'm never gonna open my phone to see a picture yeah that's fine though but like you do use them but use them on your ipad which i think is obviously the better place for you right there there are like for example like a calendar widget or a reminders widget like they are quite utilitarian things they're they're surfacing information for you right and i do have a calendar widget on my ipad yeah right yeah um but that's a that's a it's

a good point it's a good point um so i have an organizational question for you which is you've got these so you've you've staggered your small widgets on your first page. Yeah. Which creates holes for four apps in squares next to them. I don't understand. So I understand why CityMapper and Google Maps are next to each other. Yep. And I understand why Camera and Instagram are next to each other.

I don't understand why Discord and Slack are not next to each other. Because Messages and Slack are next to each other. I don't understand why Discord and Slack are not next to each other. Because messages and Slack are next to each other. Because you view Slack and messages as more similar. It's more that Discord came later. Okay, there's no spot for it. There was no spot for it.

So I removed, I think, one password was next to notes. It's like, well, I want Discord on my home screen. This is the only spot that I can give it. And to me, messages and Slack feel closer to each other than Discord and Slack or Discord and messages. I'm also thinking, I'm looking at my home screen now, and I'm trying to think what can go,

because I think I'm going to have to think about some stuff to go because I want to try some stuff out. And I think I could probably I think Discord and Notes I could remove from the home screen. I use them all the time but I don't think I really need the instant

access to them. They're more purpose driven. So I'm more likely to search for those. But that's only two. So I'm more likely to search for those. But that's only two. So it's going to be complicated. This is why I wanted to do this today, of like take stock right now. Because as I'm looking at my home screen,

especially like my selection, I feel like it's like perfect for me. So I don't really know how I'm going to take advantage of the, oh, you can put your icons wherever you want. It's like, well, they already kind of are where I want them. So. Well, I'll say one thing you could do.

You've got these blocks of four. One thing you're going to be able to do is if you decide you want to kick something out, you don't have to replace it with something, at least not right away. Yeah. So you could throw, for example,

um, what if you wanted to group camera, Instagram, and meta view together? Everything you've got is groups of four. You could do a group of three in iOS 18, right? And then have that other one just sit empty. And that might be okay.

I know there's some people are very much like, oh no, you got to fill all the slots, but you could not. And it would be okay. Whereas right now you can't not fill the slots, right? That's how it has be okay. Whereas right now you can't not fill the slots, right? That's how it has to be. So you could kick Notes off or kick Discord off and keep the other three there and it would still be possible. Yeah. And I also wonder how Control Center might unlock the ability to remove some of the apps and then maybe that will you know like i don't know what that will be yet right there is a possibility that some apps or even some widgets that i have

or even some widgets i won't need them to be where they are like so that might unlock a bit more customization possibility for me right yeah for sure it's interesting yeah another difference between how i do it and how you do it is that you don't have music on here i very i mean honestly i actually seldom listen to music like i i listen to podcasts and i watch videos on youtube like that is the majority of the things that i'm listening to if i listen to music uh i'm listening on devices that aren't my phone and so like i have a weekend focus mode for example which puts the sonos app on my home screen okay when i and i don't i don't i i tried and i decided i didn't like it. The putting in a travel focus while I'm traveling. Yeah.

I will do it while I'm like literally traveling. But when I get to my destination, I don't like having that there. I have a vacation home screen for that reason. So travel is one and then vacation is another because the apps change, but they are different to what I want. Right. When I'm at home so sure so um i mostly have i mean i listen to music in the car sometimes mostly podcasts but not always and on uh dog walks i am just taking my apple watch and I'm listening to podcasts, but on flights, I do a lot of listening to music. So,

and I, and my iPhone is again, because I'm not an iPhone primary person. One of the big things about my iPhone is I'm using it when I'm in transit, when I'm in the car, when I'm on a plane, I actually use the iPhone and rely on it a lot. So I,

I, some of my stuff is kind of skewed toward I'm, you know, waiting at the gate, I'm going down the jetway and we're stopped and I'm looking at discord or whatever, like that stuff. Or like when I went to Portland and I rescheduled who was going to be on upgrade while sitting at the gate and going down the jetway. And that was all in messages and Slack and, and that was all happening on my phone. So it's scenarios like that when I'm out and about that it gets used the most. But iRobot is still there

because sometimes you just got to tell a robot to stop. I'm intrigued to see where we'll be in like a year from now. Like, are we going to embrace these new customization options? Are we going to theme our icons? I have to wait and's interesting i i think i think the places that apple is missing the boat in addition to the light icons that david smith mentioned are i kind of can't believe you can't theme per page or per icon and per icon but certainly per page and the fact that you can't if a if an app they should really have an interface. If an app has a bunch of custom icons

offered to users, there should be a way for it to just happen in the home screen where you should tap and say, pick a custom icon. You shouldn't have to go into the app, into settings and do it, right? And you can't do that either.

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approved. That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com slash upgrade. Ladderlife.com slash upgrade. Go there today. Thanks to Ladder for their support of this show and relay fm it's time for some ask upgrade questions just now first one today comes from upgradian kevin who says in thinking about the new more powerful apple intelligence infused siri i'm curious if you guys think HomePod upgrades will be required to enable that for queries shouted into the air in my home.

Clearly the chips in the current HomePods do not match the requirements laid out for iPhones, iPads, or Macs to take advantage, so it seems to me that we would necessarily be expecting new HomePods soon. I want to give you my initial thought on this one, Jason, and why I wanted to include this in the show today.

Because I've been hearing people say like, oh, why can't they just have the cloud-based Apple intelligence for the older phones, right? And Apple's maybe not going to do that because it's just going to be too many requests, too complicated. I could imagine a scenario where that's how they deal with HomePods. Yeah. What do you think about this?

I think Apple's moving so fast on this that there's details that are either not disclosed or that they're not worrying about it right now, right? Because they've got so much else to do. But I think it's a really good question. HomePod, like, leaving aside the specifics of any given hardware platform, just think about Siri. Like, some devices run Siri on device. Most of them don't. Most of them have to go to the cloud. Are all of Apple's other devices going to just continue contacting this not very good cloud service for everything forever? It's all in the cloud anyway, right?

Like, so I think one question is, will Apple give an intelligence upgrade to cloud Siri in the long run? Now, maybe they can't do it now because of the scale required of Apple Silicon in the cloud for the private cloud compute. Although I'll point out that, you know, the current Siri doesn't use private cloud compute. It just uses its own thing. But it doesn't have any context for you right because you don't what context does the home pod have for you really none and yet there could be some value in having a more intelligent cloud siri anyway so i don't know if they've even thought about it yet other than as a passing sort of like, we can't deal with that now. In the future, I do wonder if they will personal context that's built up by that semantic index.

Because you need a device that you use and that's full of your data. And your watch doesn't have it and your Apple TV doesn't have it. It has some data, right? It knows about your library and stuff. And so I could see it applying there. HomePod, you could argue, you build it and you have it be a basic set of like statuses

and web queries and music library and podcast library or something like that, right? And so I could see it more there for very specific use cases that are not going to be the same kind of broad thing, but that will be better than what is there so like also you could turn on personal requests right at which point i think your home pod talks to your iphone and i think that is a way that they may gate the home pod into this is you turn on personal requests and now the home pod is really asking the iphone and the iphone is giving the response and then the home pod responds and you the iPhone and the iPhone is giving the response. And then the HomePod responds and you could maybe do it that way. In the long run, I think probably

there will be hardware that will be compatible with Apple intelligence, but even so, I think they're going to have to make changes to how they do it. And their focus is going to be primarily on iphone and ipad and mac and then vision pro and watch and then home pod and apple tv right it's it's they're way down on the list and this is a year where their list is full so i think in the long run they'll do it in some form it may require new hardware and it may require a connection to another device for it really to work, or it'll be super specific to, I'm the Apple TV. I know about, you know, I know about your streaming services that you're logged into and your personal context on this device is very different from it is on your, what it is on your iPhone. Or they might say, oh man, we really need that context. So when

any, whenever we have the opportunity, we're going to connect, we're going to have you pair it with your iPhone so that the Apple accessory can talk to your iPhone and get your personal context and use that instead and sort of cheat that way. A lot of good questions. I'm sure a lot of smart people at Apple have been scratching their heads about this, but it will seem a shame, right? if Apple's continuing to offer this kind of poor cloud-based Siri in the long run on all older devices, when it could probably give that thing an update to a more intelligent version, even if it's not as responsive or as good as the Siri that's using Apple intelligence. And it's just an unanswered question whether they will have some story for old siri and are just focused on ample intelligence right now or whether it literally is just a huge gaping dividing line it's like if you want a better siri sorry you just gotta buy new hardware i see a scenario where like the semantic index and the personal context could be shared between devices by creating some kind of local connection

between them and it like updates them at night or something right so like it knows stuff about you i don't know how that will work but i could imagine them doing something like that akin to how they've done some of the health sharing right because you can get your health information on different devices and you can and it shares some of the photos faces between devices right stuff that initially was like, whoa, no way, we can't share that. But then they work out a way to do it. And I imagine in the future they will do that. The thing I can't imagine happening for a significant time

is HomePods and Apple TVs getting M-class chips. So that's why I can imagine home pods maybe just for the time being always just sending the requests out to the cloud as like the default yeah i think that i think that that is the most likely they may need to do hardware updates anyway to have some like maybe even voice processing on device like like you can do that right there there are certain like apple watch series 9 and ultra 2 that do voice processing on device like they're not doing all the thinking on device but there's some basic stuff they can do on device and then they can send it out so i could see them gating it some way but i have a hard time imagining they're going to ship a home pod with an m1 or an m2 and eight gigs of ram right like that knows that's going to download all your mail

from a server and like it's not going to happen right it's not going to happen so that it could be maybe have a model on it for your library or whatever and your podcast but like everything else it's really going to be you got a phone home and is that home i don't think that home is going to be like a semantic index about you that lives on a server right apple has said the semantic index is per device. It's not per user. And I think they're going to keep with that. And there are lots of reasons why that's a good idea or a necessary idea. So instead, I do wonder if their solution is going to be,

we have a way for your device to talk to your phone or maybe some other device that's nearby and it's got a semantic index. And that is based on what they currently do with that uh being able to to link it's like personalized responses or whatever it's called it's linking it to your phone when you're on your home pod that they may just have to do that and the watch the same way which is actually kind of a bummer for me as a person who leaves with a cellular apple watch because that is probably unlikely that they're going to let you make a cellular connection

back to your phone in order to get that data. Probably not. Maybe, but probably not. Yeah. Kind of similar-ish vibe. Sebastian asks, do you think that the next base iPad, so like the standard iPad,

will get an M1 chip so that it could use Apple intelligence? This is almost like a prediction. The next base iPad? I'm going to say no. Interesting. I feel like the base iPad is going to take time to get to that. It's meant to be cheap.

Like, I don't know. I feel like it'll get there, but I'm not sure I would say it'll get there next time because it's meant to be cheap. My prediction is, I don't think Apple will ship any product in the supported product lines for Apple intelligence that can't support it.

So no Mac, no iPhone, no iPhone, no iPad. So everything that is in a line that supports it will have to support it. That's what I think. So there are a couple options. They could put an M1 in it or they could put an A18 in it

in a year or two. Yeah. Right? Presumably the A18 that's coming, because it won't be the 17 Pro because it's on the old process. They could put an A18 in it. But they could. They could put an M1 or an M2 in the base iPad. The question is next.

But you're right. Maybe they just won't do another. They just updated the base. Or no, they've still got the 10th generation. Right? They just dropped it. Yeah. Dropped the 9th.

Yeah. So it's the no home button one. Yeah. Right. generation right they just dropped it yeah drop the ninth yeah so anyway one yeah right so so i could see your point which is if we're not going to update it until it supports apple intelligence we just won't update it but i i don't think it's going to be like i don't know if they can if they can get the price down i. I just think there's like a strategy tax to it all, really. Where I just imagine now it's like, oh, well, we were going to plan to update it in two years. Or let's say like the iPad mini or something. It's like we're now actually going to have to eat a little bit of margin on this because it should have this processor in it so it can do the thing.

And let's be serious. What's really going to happen is that they are going to release a new base iPad, but it's going to cost $100 or $150 more than the current base iPad, which is going to just get discounted. And the old model won't support Apple intelligence, but there will be a new one and it'll probably have an M1 or an M2 in it. And then you'll have to wait two years for that one to come down in price and actually be the base model because that's how they do everything these days but the new one will be well supported it'll just be too expensive for most of the base model purchasers and that's just like you said that's the tax on apple changing to this approach is they're going to have to make that one expensive for a while and mark writes in and says with the vision pro expanding to other countries soon i

wanted to get your opinion on which storage capacity to go for i don't know my exact use case at the moment but i expect it will be largely entertainment and using my max screen in vr well i'm at the base level and it's not a problem and i looked at it the other day and it's not even remotely close to filling yep so unless you're somebody who is going to travel extensively and needs to load up an enormous amount of movies to watch on the plane, I don't think it's going to be an issue. So I completely agree with you. But I have a 512 gigabyte because I didn't know

what it would be used for. None of us did. And I can't imagine right now what you would need it for. And similarly, and I can't imagine right now what you would need it for. I think 256 gigabytes is enough, but I think there is a possibility you might want to future-proof a little bit to go with the 512. But as of everything we know right now

about the Vision Pro, you do not need more than the base storage. But my thinking is, let's imagine this product's still in this current incarnation for the next few years i feel like i have no idea where technology is going in the next few years now and you're already like three and a half thousand dollars in maybe you just go a little bit more future that's why that's why i did and that's why i did it like i don't know what i'm

going to use this for. I don't know why. So let me just go with the middle one. I'm already so far in the hole on this one. I may as well just go a little bit more. But I will also agree with Jason. I'm using basically none of the storage space on my Vision Pro and it's totally fine.

So I think you're good for 256. But if you're the type of person who doesn't mind future-proofing for a little bit extra, then I would just go with a 512. Yeah, I'm a big believer of if you want to be a Vision Pro astronaut, do it, but just don't spend the money. Buy the cheapest one.

I bought the cheapest one. I didn't buy the case. The only thing I splurged on is I did buy one of those 3D printed things that lets me do two of the adjustable straps, the Solo Top strap. I look forward to joining Solo Top land because right now it's just too complicated for me to buy a second solo strap, right? Oh yeah, right. Yeah, when it comes to the UK, you can do it. It's great. But in a few weeks, I'll be able to do that.

I understand why Apple didn't do it because those things, those straps have to cost a fortune to make too. But it's the best actually. As ridiculous as it is to have two of those knitted bands, having the adjustable knitted bands, it just feels a lot better. It's really nice.

If you would like to send us in your feedback, your follow-up, your questions, you can go to upgradefeedback.com. I wanted to thank, we got a lot of great feedback about last week's episode. A lot of people wrote and gave us really nice messages.

I appreciate most of the people that said, I don't agree with you, but I love the way that you spoke about it. So thank you to everybody who sent in their lovely feedback to us about last week's episode. You could check out Jason's work over at sixcolors.com and hear his shows at theincomparable.com and here on RelayFM.

You can listen to me here on RelayFM too and check out my work over at cortexbrand.com. You can find Jason online. He is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. You can watch video clips of the show on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. We are at Upgrade Relay. Thank you to our members and supporters of Upgrade Plus. This week, we're going to be talking about various power-related circumstances occurring in our life.

Electricity, electricity. Yes, it's going to be an electrifying upgrade plus go to oh man so electric feel the electricity building thank you to ladder KRCS vitally and squarespace for their support of this show but most of all thank you

for listening until next time say goodbye Jason Snell goodbye Mike Hurley.