Upgrade - 529: Grind Down That Silicon

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

from relay this is upgrade episode 529 for september 16th 2024 a monumental day that we'll get to shortly this episode is brought to you by fitbod delete, DeleteMe, and Backblaze. My name is Mike Hurley, and I have the absolute joy and pleasure of being joined by my friend, Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. It is delightful to be here with you today, Mike. We're celebrating. We'll talk about this later on in the show. We are. But literally today is the 10-year anniversary to the day of Upgrade Episode 1. Mm-hmm.

Which is cool, man. That's cool. So I have a Snow Talk question to start in possibly the only way that could be acceptable, which comes from TF who wants to know, Jason, what is the weather like today? At least one person cares. is the weather like today at least one person cares currently as we record 59 degrees fahrenheit and cloudy and foggy we had a uh a change in the weather tf over the weekend and our usual best weather of the year september october pattern has been disrupted um and we've gone into a weird kind of a fog cooler foggy mode

which is okay i mean i do enjoy those warm late september days but um it's a cool and foggy we went to the baseball game yesterday you you know this mike you're gonna open the gate you're san francisco giants let's go and um they uh it was the last game we went to, it was sunny and hot. It was still sunny for half the game, and then the high clouds came in. But having it be a little cooler and there being some wind was good because we were not as miserably hot. They built that stadium specifically to block the wind. And so the flags were whipping, and we had almost no wind where we were sitting which is really nice but that does make it hot on a hot sunny day so yeah anyway windy foggy kind of

kind of weird so thank you tf thanks for asking now oh update real-time follow-up okay 60 degrees we broke 60 everybody that's good i'm happy to have gotten that real-time update well let me tell you i'm in memphis tennessee weather is bananas over here jason oh yeah hot and humid so much rain so much rain it is raining like well yesterday it was raining like mad it was very remember that rain was it like the rain when we came back from the baseball game that one time nearly as bad as that i maintain that was biblical that rain time one time we were at baseball meet you and steven is the worst rain i have ever seen ever where it was raining so hard that the rain was bouncing off the ground yeah yeah hitting you from all angles

yeah it was it was up there when i was a kid we took a trip to Washington, D.C., and we were in the Smithsonian, I want to say. We were in the cafeteria. But what I remember is there weren't very many people there. There was a question about whether we should go back to where we were staying because there was a tornado warning. And I also remember that one of the glass panels in the windows of the cafeteria at the smithsonian was broken and water was just pouring in and i thought is this where we die right here is this the end of the world will the tornado come and get us as a california kid i don't know anything about tornadoes anyway uh but that memphis yeah that was probably even worse than that but and it's cold it was like

cold raining really yeah it's it's the i think steven was saying it's like. It was cold yesterday too. Cold, raining. Really? Yeah. I think Stephen was saying it's like the tail end of a hurricane. Like there is a hurricane. Oh, yeah. There was that hurricane. And Memphis is just getting the rain of it all. Well, good news.

For the rest of the week, and I will be joining you in Memphis. The rest of the week, this is now the Memphis local weather segment. Just letting everybody know. Highs to hot mid to upper 80s so it's going to warm up and all that moisture that's down in the ground is going to come out and make everything nice and humid so get ready for that one yummy it's gonna be like like temperature of like 80 feels like of 150 something like that hope your raincoat has a raincoat yeah

if you would like to send in a Snell Talk question for us to open a future episode of the show please go to upgradefeedback.com I'm in Memphis right now because this Friday, September 20th at 12pm

Eastern Time to 12am Eastern Time at YouTube dot com slash at RelayFM will be the 6th annual podcast-a-thon for St. Jude from the St. Jude campus. We're doing it on YouTube this year, which is going to be great because

you can rewind the video if you want to. I love that about YouTube live streaming compared to Twitch. And then it will be on our YouTube channel forever. So there's a link in the show notes, which you can go to, to actually, you can put a reminder on YouTube, but you can also just watch it straight there. Make sure you mark your calendars. Jason's going to be here. Casey, this is going to be here. Kathy Campbell's going to be here. We're going to have an incredible time raising money for the kids of St. Jude, bigger and better than ever, more hosts and hijinks than ever. It is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. So that is why we're going to be broadcasting the sixth annual podcast

for the kids of St. Jude for the relay for saint jude campaign and talking about campus uh we got to i've got to see this happening over the last few years and uh last year in october saint jude welcomed the first patients and families to its newest housing facility the domino's village it's one of four housing facilities that are available to saint jude patients because saint jude has treated patients from across the United States and around the world, which makes housing for patients and their families a critical need. So St. Jude provides free housing to any patient who needs treatment requiring an overnight stay and whose family must travel 35 miles or more to the campus. And now they have one more option when they need housing. The Domino's Village is six

stories tall with more than 307,000 square feet and it features 140 fully furnished apartments. Patients and their families that are staying in the Domino's Village can spend quality time together in places like the Arts and Crafts room, the community kitchen, an outdoor activity space that has a large LED movie screen for movie nights. There's also places like a toddler room, a beach-themed play space designed just for the little ones with a walk-in lighthouse and colorful mural with sea creatures, sailboats, and beach umbrellas. Plus, they have a medical clinic with three exam rooms

where patients can get medicine or preclinical work before a procedure to the hospital. This is another thing in the big stack of things for what makes St. Jude special to me, because they understand that families need to feel like families and kids need to feel like kids, even though they're going through this horrible traumatic thing of having cancer treatment or treatment for other life-threatening diseases. They make sure to put the money that they are given in the donations to good use like this. That yes, it goes to treatment for cancer. Yes, it goes to research for more treatments,

but it also goes to making the lives of these kids affected by one of the worst things that could happen to a human to make their lives that little bit better while they're receiving their treatment. The Relay community has shown so much generosity over the last six years, and we would love, over the last five years and six podcastathons, and we would love support again this year to support the life-saving mission of St. Jude. Please go to stjude.org slash relay where you can make a donation today, and there are some incredible, awesome rewards that you can redeem if you do. Plus, you can also find out about employee matching and how to set up a fundraising campaign of your own where there are

even more fantastic incentives available don't forget the podcast at home will be on friday september 20th from 12 p.m eastern on the relay youtube channel when we rally for a common cause we become more than a community we become beacons of hope for all that's why we're asking you all to join relay and st jude this september for childhood cancer awareness month together we can help cure childhood cancer so go to stjude.org relay to donate or create your campaign today while we make while me and steven may be competing for the title of co-founder champion this month we're all united when it comes to what matters most finding cures and saving children one last time that is stjude.org relay be a beacon people that's what ted lasso would probably say he would say that he would say be a beacon their hope right

that's like this is what this is what they are they're st jude's hope i'm in the dark but there's a beacon over there beacons what they. Very rarely is there a sinister beacon. That sounds like a... Well, like any siren, you know, maybe? That's not a beacon. That's a good point. That is a really good point. Beacons are hope.

Beacons are shining light through the darkness. It's a good metaphor, I think. So be a beacon, people, Ted Lasso might say. And Jason would say. I would say. I mean, if I were more homey like Ted Lasso might say. And Jason would say. I would say. I mean, if I were more homey like Ted Lasso, I would. Would you like to do some follow-up? Of course.

Of course. That's, right? Just going to say it here. One of the things I look forward to the most in doing Upgrade when we started was that I had never done a podcast that i was on every week so that we could have a continuity where there was follow-up because the incomparable is not like that and i was only i was not on every mac world podcast they were all just kind of like mix and match and upgrade i was very excited and clockwise didn't have a format that could have follow-up so uh that was one of the things i was most excited by about doing upgrade was the existence of follow-up and the ability to have an ongoing story and uh back and forth with listeners so

it's great so i'll spoil a little bit of this now but later on we've got some questions from listeners about the show and its history and six colors and you know this 10 years we've shared together but one of the questions was about um like what's changed over the show's history uh-huh this is something that changed because in the beginning of upgrade you were so excited for follow-up we did way too much of it we early on there was interesting much too much follow-up um and i think we kind of scaled that back over time because we were spending a significant portion of the show just talking about the previous episodes which i know it works for some it works for some all right it works for some to say i i i did i did have a moment where i you know okay let's just be real here there are moments where i feel like i'm almost at the end

of an episode of atp and they're still doing ask atp i'm like are there segments in this podcast or is it all q a now uh hashtag ask upgrade by the way uh yep i i you know i i get it i get it that there is uh it is a comfort but also you don't want to do too much of it yep this came in from an anonymous listener via the feedback form in the draft episode you mentioned how annoying it is that the a series chips don't line up with the phone name but it's even worse internally at apple the iphone 15 pro shipped with the a17 whose internal project identifier is h16p h16p reuses ip from h15g which is the m3 in my organization we primarily develop for the g variant which is m series chips and inherit that design for other chips so when figuring out which

chip is in each product we have to consider h15 h16 a8 a17 is h16 yep which is based on an h15 which is the m3 i'll point out it's also running ios 18 um i recommend that people inside apple begin constructing if they haven't already a uh a bingo game okay where you have various letters and numbers on a bingo sheet and see if you can connect them all to various products because that's what this sounds like yes i've got you know h16 and m3 and a17 and i15 yeah, that's a bingo. It's wild. That's wild.

It's, you know what? Internal is internal. I get it. I, I find it weird that Apple hasn't synced this stuff up externally because it is, there's like confusion in communication to customers.

I think when it's, you're getting 18 on your 16, it's like, why, why am I, but it's got a 17 in it. And now what? Huh?

Hmm. Johnny Cerugie confirmed in an interview with YouTuber GigaOne that the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro have 8 gigabytes of RAM. He spoke about it very specifically, very openly, and talking about why they needed to move to 8 gigabytes what it enables for apple intelligence and then all of the other benefits that may come from having this amount of ram in an iphone so they did it they said it they've actually said it yeah this doesn't uh i think what's interesting in uh thinking about our draft, for example, the Rikis on Connected and other games like that is that we have very specifically limited ourselves to the event video.

And that leads to some interesting calculations and calibrations. For example, both of us missed on the announcement of the OS release date, which is today. But they didn't mention it. They just put it out in a press release. And I think that's part of the strategy is like, what does Apple deem worthy of mentioning in the video? And honestly, my opinion is that there are details that Apple used to care about, not just...

I know people are like, oh, well, you know, Apple omitted a bunch of stuff from this video. We noticed that. I think that Apple is recalibrating as well for the fact that they're doing this video and you know what that watch the film watch the event all that stuff like stays on their website for a long time i think they viewed the live event as more of a press download and now they are more and more leaning into the film as being even higher kind of level. And like the day the OS release comes out is not at that level.

They're like, that's in the press release. And I think we're going to see more of this actually, where these details are going to end up leaking out later that they're just going to say, look, obviously there needs to be more, a higher memory environment and more memory bandwidth. And that might be as detailed as they get. And then sure. There'll be an executive interview the same day, the next day, there'll be a press release where they'll actually release stuff that is beyond like way beyond what's in the video. Because I think they're my observation anyway, is that I feel like the videos are getting less specific intentionally because they're they're they're on a path toward being more of a commercial than they've ever than they've ever been and i think that wasn't the case when they were on stage where it was sort of i think mentally they were

still like the press is here and we're dealing with the press and we're going to give them details and oh yes the world is also watching. And I think now they flipped all the way over to, we may invite the press or not, but this video is for the world and we don't need to get to that level of detail. Like there's, I mean,

the obvious example is like, there's the end of the video. They don't say, Hey, if you're watching this in the Steve jobs theater, go back at the end and there'll be products out the back. Like they're of course not, they're not going to craft it like that so i think this is in line with that

where johnny sruji like is happy to say that they have eight gigs of ram but it's not going to be in the video because it's not needed because well because this is like similarly now they have the opportunity to get that information out in different ways right so like apple want the world to know that the phones have eight gigabytes of RAM in them, but didn't deem that worthy of taking time in the big event commercial. But they know they can get that information out to people, so they'll just give it out through interviews like this. Right. I mean, yeah, there's the stuff you dump in a press release. There's the stuff you put on the website.

And there's the stuff that you hold as a tidbit that you know will get reported. And then you drop that in an interview. And that's all part of the strategy. It's just a different strategy maybe, and maybe a more sophisticated one than the old one was. So to continue with some bits and bobs that have happened since the event last week, to comply with EE regulation, the batteries on the iPhone 16 line have apparently been specifically designed

to be easier to replace. This was a thing in a press release. I look forward to the teardowns for this to understand how. But I did see today something that I guess is funny. I think unrelated really, but it's just a funny contrast to this,

that the Pro phones, the battery replacement has become 20 more expensive but i don't i think these are these are separate things in my mind like i don't i don't think that the ease of the battery replacement is what dictates the cost of the battery replacement you know right that may be that may be true interesting yeah teardowns are going to tell us a whole lot right i mean teardowns are also going to reveal the difference in the chips, right? Because there's an initial thought that because the GPUs were one different between the pro chips, the cores from the M4, but they didn't describe the non-pro chip that way. And there's a question if maybe the non-pro

chip is a different chip generation, even though it's on the new process. Right. Maybe. Yeah. Well, M3 was on the old process, and my understanding is you had to re-architect that, but maybe it's using some cores out of that or it's out of some parts of the M2. We just don't know. And that's the thing that somebody's going to grind down that silicon and try to see what's in there.

And that's all cool. That's the next level. It's funny because like Apple knows people are going to do this and Apple could eliminate all doubt by just disclosing all of this in interviews and things. But this is how the game is played. Some of this stuff, they're like,

look, if you want to do it, you can speculate. We're not going to talk about it. And that's just how it goes. So I look forward to it too. The iPhone 16 Pro features a new Qualcomm modem that should see an increase of 5g download speeds of around 25 over the 15 now i think this is interesting to qualcomm what a great partner well this is why it's funny to me like qualcomm just like purposely making it harder for apple to make their own

modems by making them better and better and better. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Sucks. It's like, well, you know, oh, good news, iPhone people, the Qualcomm modems are even better, your 5G is even faster. All it does is raise the bar. I mean, and Qualcomm knows it, right? All it does is raise the bar for Apple

about what Apple has to do if they're going to make their own modems and go away from Qualcomm. Mm-hmm. I think the truth is that Apple doesn't have to go away from Qualcomm. It just wants to. Yeah. And it doesn't have to go away from Qualcomm. It just wants to. And it doesn't have to go away everywhere, right?

Like, it's possible that the rumor that they're going to do this in the iPhone SE and maybe in, like, some iPads. Like, you're trying it out, right? Let's see how it goes. uh and maybe you you know either you're confident that the iphone 17 is going to have uh you know better better uh 5g even though qualcomm's raising the bar or you could always say okay we're gonna we're gonna wait another year or something like that who knows i don't know what all the different benefits are for apple but um meantime qualcomm since this is their you know one of their key things that they do is 5g modems uh good for them that this sounds like it's a faster modem in the pro chip models the pro models of iphone yeah and uh 24 faster is that's pretty impressive. I'm really intrigued to see what that translates to.

But great, right? Like if you could just make it faster just by putting a new modem in it, like fantastic. But I guess as well, you've kind of got to have the speed available to you and your plans or whatever. But nevertheless, still a cool thing to have. The FDA has already approved the AirPods Pro as a hearing aid in the US. So that was fast.

So we can assume that they'll probably be ready to go as soon as iOS 18 drops, provided Apple was expecting that and it's in there. And this just in, Mike. This just in. They also approved the sleep

apnea. Oh, wow. Wow, okay. That's just in. They also approved the sleep apnea. Oh, wow. Wow, okay. That's pretty cool. They did that today. Man, the FDA is like, they're on it. Yeah, and Apple. I don't know whether this means Apple's like, FDI, do what we say.

Or whether it's more like, can you hold off? We don't have a final thing. Okay, now we're ready. Now we're ready to seek approval. But they knew, like Apple last week was so confident about, these will be approved, right? But the timing is interesting that they've gotten it to go just as they're launching it. And the question is, will this require a software update? Or is there some sort of secret switch that can get flipped when you're in a region that's got an authorization which is would be a a cool way of doing it this reminds me of do

you remember like way back in the day when apple had to work with was it the fcc and they ended up creating a new process for submitting things secretly, which wasn't a thing that they had. Right, because that was the story when the original iPhone came out is that one of the reasons they announced it way before they shipped it is that they had to go through a public FCC process to get the radios verified. Yeah. And so the iPhone was going to be leaked by the FCC if they did that. And so the story is that they did it early and then sought FCC approval. And yeah, not great, not ideal, but you're working with a public agency. But at the same time, the public agency knows that industry does not necessarily want all of their stuff to be

disclosed by the public until the disclosure time happens. So I'm sure that there's something going on here, whether some of our listeners who are in government could probably tell this, whether this is a wink, wink, nudge, nudge kind of situation, or if there's literally a process where the company says we're seeking approval, but we don't have, we're not ready to ship the product yet so can we hold off and you can release your final evaluation when we're ready to ship uh is that official or is that more like an understanding between these groups i don't know cool though and i hope that it isn't too long until i get some of these features in the uk but I'm not necessarily holding out hope for it, especially with the, I think it was Sleepapnea that they,

I think one of the two, oh, it was the hearing aids where they didn't even mention the UK, but hopefully it will get done here too. And Apple has shared an image with Wired that was created in Image Playgrounds. Apple is calling this the first public image that has been seen outside of apple's

original demos and it is supposed to represent craig federighi's dog celebrating a birthday i would say like it's the best one of these images i've seen from them but but I still like, but why though? You know? Like, congratulations I guess, but why? It's also very funny that Wired put this big thing across the image that says AI generated image, which is in line with their policies.

It's just funny to see this image going around the web with just that text over the top of it. That's pretty smart from Wired. I mean mean my thoughts immediately were i guess apple's still trying to you know still trying to make this happen where i thought like maybe they would back off yeah on this and instead they're kind of like pushing forward on it and saying see it's fun it's what i said back in june right fun it's fun with your phone it's fun and uh but they're still trying to make it happen which i guess means technically they're still trying to make craig federighi's ai generated dog

fetch happen that's pretty good that's pretty good i don't know you should be happy with that that's the best i look these are the jokes folks anyway uh Anyway, yeah, it's fine. I mean, it looks like AI-generated pictures. Again, my feelings about this are complicated because I don't really like the look. But I also appreciate the fact that there are scenarios in which it could be used for fun. And it's just like low stakes. Nobody's losing their jobs. It's literally like, it's fun versus like if you put it and it's in a text message, right? Like you put in a keynote presentation when you might otherwise have needed, uh, a, uh, an image library subscription that is for a company that is paying photographers or whatever,

like it starts to get weird when you do that. Um, but which is why I kind of like the AI emoji better because it feels much more emojis are constrained and in terms of their language, but also in, in terms of what is an emoji. And so you're kind of creating images that look like emoji design, Apple's own art emoji design. That kind of, I feel better about that. But, you know, this is what Apple, I don't even know if this is what Apple thinks people want.

I think this is what Apple is afraid people want and that will be used against them by their competitors. And so, you know, I watch football over the weekend and Google's got lots of pixel ads. I don't know. Now you're in America, you may see more of these and maybe notice them and find them interesting, but like they are pushing Circle around something to search it on AI, which is clearly Apple's thing with the camera control is going to be an answer to that. And like this is why I think Apple really is going so deep down in this embrace of AI. I think it's not that Apple is convinced that people want it. I think Apple is afraid that people will want it and that it will be used against them by their competitors. And so I think there's a scenario.

I don't know what you think about this, but I think there's a scenario where a year or two on, we realize that 90%, maybe not 100%, but like 90%, 80% of these AI features are a dog. No offense to Craig Federighi's dog. And nobody wants them. And they're pointless. And why? And then there are a few that no offense to Craig Federighi's dog, and nobody wants them, and they're pointless, and why? And then there are a few that are really good, and then they're like, oh, this is what people want. But we're not at that state now. We're at the stage now where it's like, what can we do with AI?

Let's shovel it out there. And if you're Apple, you're like, oh, I really don't want to do that, but we're going to get killed if this stuff is popular because we're so far behind years away. We better do it. And we'll see. We'll see if offering because offering it to make images of a dog at a birthday party or your mom is a superhero to the public is one thing.

But like, is this just Memoji? Is this just Slow Fees? I mean, right. Like you can push it, but it doesn't mean anybody wants it so we'll see genmoji i could see like genmoji genmoji i think it's more interesting yeah and i'm gonna i'm gonna counter something that i think is probably in the heads of some listeners right now which is yeah but so many people are already using ai generated images using ai chatbots and stuff it's like i don't believe that the people who are tinkering around with ai chatbots and stuff. It's like, I don't believe that the people who are tinkering around with AI chatbots are

representative of the entire human population. I don't believe it. They're different people. It doesn't mean that the general human population won't also like generating images like that. They might, but the people who are tinkering around with chatbots are computer nerds. I'm sorry.

Even if they don't know it, they are. Anybody who's like, I will talk to a chat bot now. I just don't think that represents the vast majority of the much more low tech, you know, a smartphone using populace.

So I don't think we know, and maybe they will love it. Maybe they will. I just, but, but you know, these companies have tried other stuff that seemed fun. Apple's when i mentioned

memoji and uh slow fees those were both hey fun with your phone yay kind of features and they went nowhere so we'll see yeah we'll see this episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at fitbud if you're looking to change your fitness level getting started can be pretty complicated or it can be daunting. And that's why I'm pleased to let you know that FitBod is an easy, affordable, and approachable way to build a fitness plan that is made just for you. FitBod understands that everybody has their own path with personal fitness, which is why

they use data to make sure they customize everything to suit you perfectly. FitBod adapts as you improve to make sure that every workout is challenging and interesting while pushing you to make the progress you're looking for. Superior results are achieved when a workout program is tailored to your unique body, experience, environment, and goals. And these are all stored in your FitBod gym profile. FitBod tracks your muscle recovery so you can avoid burnout and keep up your momentum. And it builds your best possible workout by combining AI with exercise science.

They have analyzed billions of data points, and they have all been fine-tuned by certified personal trainers. One of the things that I really love about FitBod is that when I'm presented with a new exercise, I get instructions on how to complete it, but also videos. These are shot from multiple angles, so I can be absolutely sure that this new exercise that I'm learning, I'm going to be doing it correctly. And this is, again, one of the things that makes me confident, and it's built up my confidence of exercise, because I know that FitBod has got my back. Your muscles improve when they work in concert with your entire musculoskeletal system. Overworking some muscles or underworking others can negatively impact your results.

So FitBod will track your muscle fatigue and recovery to design a well-balanced workout routine. This also means you won't be getting bored as the app mixes up your workouts with new exercises, rep schemes, supersets, and circuits. The app is fantastic and easy to use. You can stay informed with FitBod's progress tracking charts, weekly reports, and sharing cards.

And it integrates with your Apple Watch, Wear OS smartwatch and other apps like Strava, Fitbit and Apple Health. Personalized training of this quality can be expensive. FitBod is only $12.99 a month or $79.99 a year, but you can get 25% off your membership by signing up today at fitbod.me slash upgrade. So go now and get your customized fitness plan at fitbod.me upgrade so go now and get your customized fitness plan at fitbod.me upgrade that is fitbod.me upgrade for 25 of your membership our thanks to fitbod for their support of this show and relay so today let's do oh let's do the b-tails it's the b-tails because it is it's new os day around here so it's these less that kind of as we're recording right now i think they're still in beta because they're not available but they'll

be they will be available by the time this episode comes out and and it's okay because the point ones are also still in beta and will remain in beta until they release next month right yes so very good okay there's always more betas. And this is probably a historical day because today, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, WatchOS 11, macOS Sequoia, and VisionOS 2 are released. This is probably the most released from Apple ever, like the most operating systems in a day

because we now have VisionOS in the fray. You have written a... What reviews have you written this year i have a mac os review an ipad os adjunct to dan moran's ios review okay i have a piece that's going up later about my feelings about the new changes to the photos app and then dan's got his ios 18 piece i will i want to write something about the watch changes to the Photos app. And then Dan's got his iOS 18 piece. I want to write something about the watch. I haven't gotten there yet. And it may be in conjunction with the actual new watch as well. And I need to write more about Vision OS,

although I already wrote about when that Vision OS 2 developer beta came out. And it's great. I don't know. There's nobody who is using a Vision Pro who should not be on Vision OS 2, bottom line. Yeah. Bottom line. Just do it. It's absolutely the right version. Just do it. What was it like to write the macOS review this year? I know that I've been talking to John

Voorhees about his and it seems like a bit of a struggle, to be honest. So one of the challenges is Apple intelligence is hanging over everything it's true of all of these reviews it's just hanging out there the the main event is not here this review is or this uh release is like a bunch of the the side stuff but the there's this thing that apple has leaned on as the most impressive thing that they're doing, and it's not there, which is weird. So that's a weird feeling. And I would say also, yes, in the beta process, a lot of features were just sort of like being added as they went and being changed as they went i felt like there was a lot of stuff that was way

more movable this summer than it has been in the past and that can be a that can be a challenge as well like there i so the way the way i for the last few years the way i've written my review is i write a public beta story right when the public beta comes out so that gives me a few weeks after they announce to spend time with it and then write a story about the public beta but the public beta comes out. So that gives me a few weeks after they announce to spend time with it and then write a story about the public beta. But the public beta, you know, I'm not being judgmental about it. It's a public beta. It's early days. They've got the summer to fix things. That's why it's a beta. And so I will make observations about, huh, this thing is missing. This thing doesn't work right. I don't know about this thing yet. And, and then in the fall, I come back to the close to final and I recheck everything and see what progress they've made. And I don't know if there's been an OS version that made more progress over the summer than Sequoia, where a bunch of stuff changed and a bunch of stuff that I complained about in July is just fixed. So I deleted a lot of stuff from parts of it, which is good news, right? But it also shows you that they were shipping things in June that were, I mean, maybe they did some changes based on feedback, but I think a lot of it was also they were making changes because they were putting things in that were not feature complete in order to get them in the beta. And then they added them on as they went. so it's been an interesting process yeah i i haven't really spent any time with sequoia and i don't

never really play around with the mac betas anyway um but i you you were sharing some stuff with me and i thought that you had just like a really good way of talking about there being this just, there's just this like cloud that's hanging over everything, which is the actual version of iOS 18. And more than... And Mac OS 13, right? All of the, yes, I keep thinking of that, but all of the point ones is what I was trying to say, right? Like all of the point ones for the major platforms include the big thing yeah right which is and every year this happens this was happening for a long time that like 0.1 0.2 0.3 have features in them and we know they're coming but it is much rarer for like what feels like the entire point of having the new operating system to not be in the initial shipping version.

And you can kind of feel how you'd like about Apple intelligence. But if you are looking at the company and thinking about the company in the way that we do it is clear that this is actually what they care about but they they don't have anything to show for it today which is this is also that function of the iphone controlling everything it doesn't make sense to ship ios 18 right now like They should ship iOS 18 in October. They ship iOS 18 and it includes a beta for Apple Intelligence. But what are you going to do about the iPhone? So you kind of have to ship it now.

And it's just one of these funny things about, we were always talking about this, how the iPhone just dictates everything. And that's why point O of all of this stuff is coming out today because the iPhone comes out on Friday and they can't ship it with 17 on it. So here we are. Yeah. So here we are. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I could ask, are the intelligence features far behind enough that you had to delay them to October. I think what we're seeing here is Apple hedging. I think in June, when Apple announced this, they were not convinced there wouldn't be

big problems that prevented them from shipping it immediately. And so they said, look, it's not going to be in the first version and we'll get to it when we get to it soon thereafter. Now they've obviously reached the point where they feel like, yeah, October, we can ship it in October. If they had known that they were this close, would they have pushed it a little and gotten it into 0.0? Maybe? I don't know. I still think that, I mean, there, there are some worry about how it's going to work, but there's also some worry about just the strain it's going to put on, you know, their servers that they're building their little private compute cloud thing and all of that. But, um, it is a little curious that they're literally saying like, Oh yeah, in a couple of weeks, it'll be out. So it's like, well, why didn't you push that? I know you're running full speed here, but like the developer betas haven't changed that much. So could you have just shipped 18.1 as 18.0 and been fine? Probably.

But I think they didn't know that when their initial plan, but so we're left, we're left looking at everything else and it is fine. Like there are always a spread of features. Like there's always like the eight, the eight tier features that are there that are the big ones that are like, oh, this is a big change. And then there are a bunch of B tier features that are pretty nice. And then there's like the C tier is just like all of this little tiny detail stuff.

So there's still a bunch of B tier features. still a bunch of B tier features. And depending on the platform, I mean, I would argue that there may be some arguably A tier features, but really Apple intelligence just obscures it all. So really you've just got to say Apple intelligence is the thing that Apple's focused on. That is the number one feature on all these releases and it's not there. So we're left with the rest and it's a little bit weird. And I feel bad for some of the features. Like on the Mac, iPhone mirroring feature is really nice. And I think will make people's lives better. And I think that Apple's pitch for it was actually really smart having used it now. Because they talked a lot about using notification center as the method to get to phone mirroring.

And I've found that that's actually true. The idea that I don't often go, oh, I shall bring up my iPhone now and look at what is going on. But instead, I get a notification on my iPhone, but it comes up on my Mac and I click on it and it opens iPhone mirroring to that app that I don't have on my Mac.

I'm like, oh, okay, all right, right? Like now it's all kind of seamless on this one screen that I'm't have on my Mac. I'm like, oh, okay. All right. Right? Like, now it's all kind of seamless on this one screen that I'm using right now. And they did a good job. It's like, it's smooth. I've got some quibbles, but like in general, it works really well. They fixed a bunch of stuff in the beta.

There was complaints I made about mirroring in specific, you know, about like, you couldn't edit the home screen you couldn't add or remove apps and stuff and they fix that you still can't access control center which i find a little bit weird and you can't force a rotation which there are apps where they work in both formats but sometimes it's better in one than the other and if it supports both sizes it will always stay vertical which i don't love what what if you actually physically turn the device will it do it no really no no it's not

related to the no because your device could be in standby and it's going to run the phone in vertical because most stuff is vertical so it's not no it's just it's a thing that they should add they probably will at some point because it there are there are apps where that's nice to be able to force it into horizontal instead of vertical. They added their little window manager on the Mac, which I don't want to belittle it by saying, oh, they got a little's basic but like that's the point is there are lots of apps out there that do this stuff like moom from my pals over at many tricks is one of them but like there are lots of them and they all do more but this is something and it's an and it's stock and if people want more there are third-party apps to solve it but this is like a very basic i want to put this window to the right I want to put this window to the right. I want to put this window to the left.

And keyboard shortcuts in order to move and dock, sliding things into the corners and having them resize and dock there. It's just nice. that is not going to blow the third-party apps, the third-party utilities that really need this to be like, oh, I need it to be in three, and I need it to move this thing around when I hold down this key. And Apple's not going to do any of that stuff. It is, once again, just trying for a simple addition for the masses. And it is that. And I don't think it needs to be a lot more complicated.

I don't love the fact that you can't change the keyboard shortcuts that it applies and that they use the globe key, which if you're using a third-party keyboard, you kind of don't have. But again, nice Mac feature. have been layering on all the video that you take with your device their own like video uh synthesis right so they had the the effects that came in and the portrait effect and all of that and so this time they have background replacement uh and there are a bunch of images of like apple park that you can put behind you um but you can also use your own. And Apple's background replacement tech is really good. And now every single app just gets it if they're using video because you can set that at the system level. And they just keep kind of like ratcheting there.

It's a nice little feature. Is it enough to upgrade on its own? No, but security updates are probably the reason you update on your own. And I mean, the list goes on, I'll, I'll throw out another one here. Safari. I really like high distracting items and I know it's kind of like a manual ad blocker, but like, here's the, here's the thing. I don't think that, that websites should be prevented from making money on ads, right? I clearly don't believe that, but I do believe there is a point. And that's why I think it's great that Apple calls

this high distracting items. There is a point where you are trying to read an article and right next to the words is a video, possibly even overlaying the words, is a video that is auto playing and it's so or or there's an ad that's blinking and it's so hard to to focus on reading an article when that is in your peripheral vision and so apple's basically said we will let you make it go away and it disappears like thanos has snapped it just into little particles and it goes away and And like, I can't be against that because that's a, in my mind, that is a violation of the contract between the reader and the website.

If they are making it impossible to read your article in order to load it up with distracting ads, I think that's, it's gone too far. And it puts it in the user's hands to say, no, that ad. And what I found is a lot of times the really distracting ad actually has an ad under it because they're trying to work around ad blockers.

And the ad under it is not distracting because it's not animated or video. So there are a lot of positive things about it. But I've really liked that feature because there are sites I read that like literally good sites. And then halfway in the middle of the article, they just start playing a video of a completely different article about a different topic. And I know why I know it's there so that they can run a pre-roll ad and

claim that people were watching that video, but it's muted. And like, it's, it's a ripoff. It's a ripoff to the advertiser. It's a ripoff. It's,

it's bad policy. And now as a user, I can advertiser. It's a ripoff. It's bad policy. And now as a user, I can just say, I don't want to see that. And it goes away. And then I can read my article in peace. Can I give you a quick hit list of the things that I like from the various betas that I've tried? Sure. So this is, I've been using iOS and iPadOS 18. And I've put WatchOS 11 on my watch

a couple of days ago as well. So in general, the emoji tap backs and the text effects and messages are fantastic. Like they are a reason to upgrade to iOS 18. The text effects are so fun. And I think Apple has done an incredibly good job of detecting effects to be added to words. Like, for example, a couple of days ago,

I, for emphasis on a word, repeated a letter a bunch of times at the end of the word. You know, it's like, thank you, that kind of thing. And it picked that up and was like, you should add an effect to the you because you've obviously done something weird to it. So they're doing a good job of that, but also they're just really fun to play around with and emoji type backs you know about time it is past time but they are great i agree uh the control

center i like the third party actions um it's fiddly to set up but you set it up once um i like that you're able to have multiple pages for home kit because i can now have a different page with distinct items one for my home and one for the studio which i love that i can have that and that can set them up the way that i want to um game mode is the thing that's been added when you play games right um and i know that this is doing stuff like it changes some of the thermal properties and gives you more power but something that it does spatial audio for iphone games now this makes a ton of sense to me i actually think spatial audio makes the most sense for video games on your phone

than it does for watching movies and stuff it just fits really well especially if like i play a lot of games that have sounds like not music but sounds and i can hear those sounds while i'm listening to a podcast and this makes a lot of sense because the podcast is up here in my ears and that sounds from the game are happening down there on my phone it it's actually i really like it uh i think it works pretty well um the new photos design uh it takes some setting up again like control center but once you've set it up you're left with something that works better for you like that's kind of my my overall feelings on photos does that jive with you yeah i and like i said i wrote i wrote a piece for my feelings about this. There was a lot of initial backlash to the photos design.

And I just, I think the initial beta was a step too far because it was literally like you could scroll up or down or sideways. I was like, that's a lot of different things happening in one app. And they took out the scroll sideways. And now it's just there. It opens with two things, the library grid above and collections below and again like i heard from people who are like oh i can't believe they did this i just want my library i just want my grid of photos that's that's completely uh chronologically ordered with the most recent ones at the top and

like okay photos has two things about it. One of them is it's where your system camera roll basically is. And like, you need to be able to get to it to get to that last photo you took. I get it. But the whole point of having a photo library is to look at the photos in the library, I think. And that includes on your devices, not just like back home on a Mac or something. It includes on your devices, especially for like, and I think, I think again,

our more computer focused community is maybe over-indexing on, I don't want to see collections. I just want to see a utilitarian grid. And I, I, I just don't agree. I think the problem with Apple's first off, there's this perception. It's like, Oh, it's just Apple's stupid machine learning stuff, trying to recommend a memory for me.

And that is on Apple because that's how Apple pushed this stuff. Primarily was with these memories that could be very weird, weird labels, weird collections and all of that. But like, first off, collections is way more than that. And I think that a lot of them, if you want them to be utilitarian, you can actually make really great utilitarian collections. I would argue that recent days and travel alone, and then people and pets where you can now make groups. So you can say,

I want all the pictures. I want to see all the pictures of these four people together and make a person group as well. Like those are utilitarian. Those are, I don't, I mean, you could scroll back through a grid forever in order to find something. You should probably use search, which by the way, is also incredibly better now than it used to be. You can, you can just search for plain text, essentially like find me all the photos of Jamie on a beach in Hawaii and you just type it and it comes out and it's exactly right. Which is amazing. That's cool. But, um, but the like recent days, like, you know, when you get to that open screen, yeah, you can scroll back. It's like when, when, you know, a few days ago I did this thing. Well, yeah. Or you could look at recent days and

go back three days and go, there it is, and tap and see all the photos from that day. Like, it is utilitarian. If you want to go beyond that, they're also generating favorites or generating memories and featured photos and stuff like that. And you can customize it.

Like you said, you can pin things, you can move the order around to make it be what you want. But like, Apple is trying to serve two two purposes here because apple feels and i think they're right that hiding all of the curation behind a tab and having everybody's main interface be a featureless grid is a mistake and they're right it is a mistake because that's not, it's bad user interface. Featureless grid is not the right way to do it. There are, there are use cases where featureless

grid is the right thing. It's the utilitarian. I need to go and find that thing I just did. There it is. Got it. Right. But like if, if that's all photos is there's something wrong because there's so much else going on. And I firmly believe that a huge percentage of regular users never tap on the tabs and are not aware what Apple is doing behind the scenes to organize their photos. And why do we have hundreds of thousands of photos in our photos library if it is not to look at them? And Apple trying to find ways to get you to look at them again and surface them is part of the reason the app exists. So I'm a big fan. I think this is the right thing to do. And I think if people are grousing about, oh, I only want to see a grid, like how are you using your photos library? And maybe consider looking at the

utilitarian features and collections because their recent days alone is very helpful in just coalescing your photos down into the most recent days or travel that coalesces your trips based on your GPS and time data so that you can just say, where is that trip I took? And instead of scrolling back a year to find that trip you took, you look at trips and you go back four and you're like, oh, that trip and you tap on it. It's just, it's the right thing to do. So I think they nailed it. I also like that the grid of photos at the top you can choose how it's displayed whether you want it to be displayed in date order or added order like when added to the library um i love that uh that you can do that because i would often find myself trying to find an image

you know but it's like is it in recents or is it in like my library but you can just choose and by default my choice is to i want to see things when they as when they were in like my library but you can just choose and by default my choice is to i want to see things when they as when they were added to my library because that makes more logical sense to my mind and to be clear photos has been using machine learning for a decade and none of the features i've mentioned are apple intelligence i think the only apple intelligence features in photos are cleanup which removes things from the background, which works really well. Not perfect, but none of these things are, but it works really well. And there's a freeform text to make it generate a memory movie and stuff for you.

That's an AI feature. But the rest of it. Oh, my God. The UI for that feature is so good. Yeah. With all the things flying in and the lasers and stuff. Yeah. And it shows you the words it's searching to collate what you're looking for. It's very, very good.

Very good UI. Yeah. I wanted to mention the passwords app. Oh, yeah. Okay. I haven't really paid any attention to it. It's good. I have dealt with performance issues when importing.

I have a big one password library. It's like 2000 passwords and uh it bugs down it bugs down yeah well i don't know i've been using a long time right so it really it really bugs down and i think it's a problem and then deleting them is also really slow uh it gets it gets slow i think they've got some work to do there um and then i think passwords as an app is so good that what it does especially if you're coming from one one password is reveal all the ways that i think apple still fails at dealing with this because i've been using it for the last few weeks uh full time and what i found is then i come to a website that wants to

use my credit card and it doesn't autofill from Apple for some reason from the wallet because that's not in passwords it's in the wallet but if I'm not going to use one password then I'm using Apple's wallet stuff and I come to websites where it won't autofill or it won't autofill the date and it won't or it won't autofill the little cpv code yeah and trying to get that out of apple wallet is awful and one password does a very good job of brute forcing those kinds of scenarios i think and if it fails use a keyboard shortcut to call up your your credit card and grab and copy and paste the dates and codes out of it and apple is not it's not good enough there apple wallet feels very much like they're sort of, they've sort of moved on from auto

filling in the browser because they want you to use Apple Pay. But the fact is the reality, not always using Apple Pay on websites. That's just how it is. And they don't do as good a job of that. And there's other, you know, other similar data. I was asked to put in my driver's license. I was like, oh boy. And like, you can keep that in a locked note or something, but there's other personal information that it doesn't do as good a job about.

I also have some import errors that happen to me where I would try to log into a website using passwords and it would say the password is wrong. And I would look in passwords and it was the wrong password. It was like an old password, but in one password from which it had imported the data, is the right password. So I had to do a bunch of cleanup there, too. So I guess what I'm saying is, it's good. Apple's progress is good. But there are still things that, in terms of autofill, that it needs to do a better job of. Because right now, if I was not also having... having my one password app is still on my system

I guess what I'm saying is I I tried to use passwords all the time and Apple's adjunct things that are like what's in one password and I end up having to go back to one password more than I expected and that's not great so So it's, it's a good, good step, but I feel like there's more to do there and, uh, the app needs to get a little bit better. Um,

but yeah, there's, I don't know if there's anything else. Um, I did like math notes is, is nice. Math has come along over the summer. Yeah.

It was kind of bad at the beginning of the summer and it's much better now um so it's it still has some quirks where you want to use variables and it thinks you're doing something different and uh every now and then i i write something and it gets the little squiggle under it and i tap to see like what does math notes think this is and it thinks it's some complex math equation and i'm like oh no that's just a letter why are you doing this but um but i really like and i and this also featured that like makes sense to real real people regular non-computer nerd people it's cute and it works very well and it's a lot of fun yeah Yeah. Lauren's response was something like, oh, yeah,

trying to do math when you have to type it in with a keyboard is impossible because it's really, it's really bad. It's like, this is one of those things

that our keyboards weren't really made for and that we all learned how to do the math with our hands and you're writing the equations and all of that

and like Math Notes just does that. It's actually pretty great. So, yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff in there. It's just that we're also just waiting for the the the main the main event to happen and and that's apple intelligence i have a couple of a little bit so you're talking about like great ways to surface uh your photos allow me to extol the virtues of the Apple Watch Photos face. It rules. Yes. It's so good.

It's so good. So the way it works is you start on your phone and you pick some photos. Or you pick like up to 24. You can also pick just like not images, but like show me photos of this person. You can do that too so uh and and what happens is they are analyzed and they are cropped on the phone based on a machine learning analysis of what the key images are that you want to see because obviously a photo is not the same shape as an apple watch so it tries to keep the subjects of your photo in view. It does a pretty good job. It's not perfect, but it's better than not doing it at all.

Very impressive. And you can also have the time be dynamic. And what that means is it will make the time bigger or smaller based on the content and the spaces around the content in the photos. And again, not perfect, but pretty good. For example, there's a photo that's got me and Lauren and there's some space to the side and it wraps the, it puts the time on the left wrapped. So it's the first two digits are at the top and the bottom two digits are at the bottom because it knows that's the space it's squeezed into. But for another photo, we might be at the bottom and it puts it above and it uses the depth effect to actually like have our heads be a little bit in front of the time. And then another photo might say, I can't do that here. And it tries to put it in the least obtrusive place in front of us. But there's a lot of stuff going on for that photos, the new photos

face on the Apple watch. Yeah. My, my recommendation is if you want to try it out, go in and set it up. It has a few things. It's kind of like the lock screen, right? You can choose pictures of nature, I think pictures of pets, pictures of buildings, like architecture, or cities, I think they call it, and pictures of people. So I set mine up to be like nature, cities, and pictures of my wife. And then every day, it gives you a new set of images

so like and then they scroll through throughout the day and you can also just tap on the watch face and it will cycle through them and it's doing that thing like the lock screen like as jason said like sometimes it's a picture of my wife and the the time part of it is behind her head right yeah you can also have two complications on it too which i think is fantastic so i have uh the date and i have the weather and i think now i'm like 90 sure this is going to be my watch face now because it it brings me happiness when i look at my watch like it's joyful to me because i get to see these photos of things that I care about. I think this is incredible. They've done a fantastic job with this.

It's like they took the lock screen photo shuffle, shrunk it down, and put it on the watch and I think they did a really good job of it. I like more widgets. There are much more widgets in the Apple Watch. I like the suggestions. I like that you can kind of say like, don't suggest this to me or do suggest

this to me i think that's pretty good uh one of the one of the new widgets that i like a lot is the workout one where you can just start your three most recent workout types just from a widget i think that's really good um i like the vitals thing it's just like a cool app to have um and then just because i don't want it to feel left out we mentioned VisionOS 2 a little bit the new gestures for going to the home screen, bringing up control center and stuff, it's so much more natural than the way they were doing it before

and then you know the new environments and stuff like that, like VisionOS 2 is a good leap forward and as Jason mentioned earlier which I agree with, if you have a Vision Pro you should be on VisionOS2 because it just makes everything a little bit better but yeah this is part one of ios 18 we'll be doing this all over again i guess in like a month and then maybe again like two months later as we add in

all these apple intelligence features oh there's some good stuff since this is a since this is a uh a real uh retrospective episode as well because it's our anniversary i'm going to say uh i had a late idea when i was trying to figure out what the opening photo for my mac os review was going to be that i really like and i've mentioned it in passing here before so i'll just mention it here it It's an Easter egg, but I love it, which is, it's Macawess Sequoia, which is named after the national park, as we discovered when we were measuring for the California bear trophy, but it's also the tree. The park is named for the tree. Sequoia is the redwood and there's a bunch of different kinds of redwoods. There's giant

sequoias and there's the California coastal redwoods. There is a redwood tree in my backyard a sequoia in my backyard and uh i have spent the last 20 years writing and editing os reviews in the summertime under that tree that's my favorite place to be to work on stuff in the summertime i sit out there in a camp chair and i work under the tree uh and it's a sequoia. So my art for the macOS review this time is literally a Mac running the new, awesome classic Mac screensaver under the tree. Because it's a Sequoia

and it's macOS Sequoia. And I don't, you know, it made me happy to be like, yeah, I got it. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to show the tree. So there it is. Very nice.

Tree. Me and my tree. So there it is. Very nice. Tree. Me and my tree. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Have you ever wondered how much of your personal data is available on the internet? This is an uncomfortable thing to think about. Your private information could be out there,

especially since there are data brokers who make it their sole business to harvest this data and sell it. But we have the right to be private, to stay private, and protect our privacy. And this is where Delete Me comes in. Delete Me is a subscription service that removes your personal information from the largest people search databases on the web, and in the process helps prevent potential ID theft, doxing, and phishing scams. You can sign up and provide Delete.me with exactly what information you want deleted, and their experts take it from there. Delete.me sends you a regular

personalized privacy report that shows what they found, where they found it, and what they removed. And it isn't just a one-time service. Delete.me is always out there working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the internet. As I have gotten older and as I've been online for longer, I am aware of the huge trail of stuff that is left behind me, you know, like various email addresses, maybe places that I put information I didn't expect that I would go, and it's just like a tumbleweed and like a snowball, just carries on going forever.

What I love is now Delete Me is out there tidying up for me. They're getting rid of the stuff that I don't want to be online anymore and what I really like is I can tell them just remove these things because there are certain things that I do want to remain out there I'm a professional online I don't want to not exist on the internet but there's stuff maybe various email addresses

contact information that I would just prefer to be gone and Delete.me takes care of that for me take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for delete me now at a special discount for listeners of this show today you can get 20 off your delete me plan when you go to join delete me.com upgrade 20 and use the promo code upgrade 20 at checkout the only way to get that 20 off is to go to join delete me.com upgrade 20 and enter the promo code upgrade 20 that is j o i n d e l e t e m e

dot com slash upgrade to zero promo code upgrade to zero thanks to delete me for the support of this show and relay so we mentioned this earlier in the beginning of the show but it is so very special anniversary here has been this has been an

anniversary year and this been an anniversary year. And this is an anniversary year not just for this show, but for Six Colors. So 10 years ago, you left IDG and started Six Colors. We started Upgrade. It's a big day. Congratulations, Jason. Literally, Upgrade and Six Colors launched at the same moment because it was when the embargo dropped on the iphone 6 and 6 plus reviews yeah and so we so i mean i mentioned this in a in

a little bit in my post on six colors today about the 10th anniversary but um i i got the review units from apple which i didn't always get and then had to tell my PR person I wouldn't actually be at Macworld when the embargo dropped. And it was like, well, what are we going to do? And I could have just run away with the phones, but I also felt like that Apple was giving me those phones because I'm me, but also because I had an outlet at Macworld. And I could have pressed it, but I didn't want to. So I made a deal with the powers that be at Macworld that I would give them a review for free if they had a prominent link to my reviewer's notebook at Six Colors and a prominent link in my bio at the bottom to Six Colors. Because it was really like, literally, this is going to be viewed by a lot of people who read Macworld and I want them to know that I started a new site. And so that's what we did. So I wrote the review for them, uh, which disappeared from the internet and is now in six colors as of last week for anyway, for reasons. Uh, and I don't feel, I feel like I, I own it cause I wrote it for free and they

didn't hold, they were no longer holding up their part of the deal, which is they were no longer posting it and linking to my site. So it's like, all right, well, I'm going to take that one back now. And they offered to find it and repost. I'm like, I'm just don't worry about it. I'll post it. So I had that going to them. I wrote a substantial sort of like reporter's notebook, essentially talking about my experience reviewing those phones. Those were milestone phones too, right? Those are the first much larger iPhone 6 Plus, the 6 Plus that was even larger still. And they drove a huge upsurge in iPhone sales.

And like, it was a big moment for Apple and the iPhone. It was, that phone was a great success that turned into a future disaster that they were clearing up for many years because those phones were so successful. It really messed up their earnings for a long time to come right because they were this huge huge bump in sales that's like what's what's wrong with you why can't you do that more and they're like look that was a

one-time really a one-time thing yeah it's funny that like obviously i'm aware of 10 years and like you know i've been thinking about it a lot and thinking back to when we started the show and how long ago that feels but the iphone 6 and 6 plus feel way older than this show in my mind like that they feel so long ago like it almost i can't believe that like when we were planning this show it was like the iphone 5s is the phone we were using yeah yeah it's uh it is it is very strange so um so yeah all that stuff had to drop at the embargo time which was uh like a month like it was an afternoon embargo i don't really know quite what they were doing there they've changed it since then um but that was back again 10 years ago things were different and uh and so we you

as i recall were going to romania is that right no i was in italy oh you're going to italy okay so you had a vacation so what are we going to do with this and so in the end like i went to xoxo festival over that weekend. So it was like before that. So it was like the Thursday or whatever. It was very quick after the aftermath of, of me leaving IDG and all of that, like almost immediately we had to record and talk about the iPhone, um, because that was going to be our first episode and you were going to be gone on vacation.

So we prerecrecorded episode one i posted it i remember distinctly right because we didn't really we didn't really know what we were allowed to do like it was also incredibly new for both of us right especially me i'd never been in that experience before and we kind of tried our best to make it sound like it was happening in the moment it was happening it was really weird because it's like our best to make it sound like it was happening in the moment it was happening it was really weird because it's like you can't make it sound like i knew about this before no it's it's recording you're you're recording something in advance but acting as if it was done at the release time right which is a that's a thing right but uh but that was and we had no

you know it was our first episode so it became this thing of like, well, okay. In the last week I left my job of 20 years, uh, started a new website, which again, we were recording before it was up, uh, started a new website, uh, reviewed these phones and we are starting this podcast, which we need to explain to people. And all of that happened like really in the course of a week. Yeah. All of these things happened. It was a, it was an absolute wild ride. And what I said on my piece on six colors today is I really, really, really wanted to take some time off.

I was burned out and I wanted to take some time off and the exact opposite happened, which is the moment I left IDG, I was working on launching my site and writing those reviews and recording with you and getting it all edited and set up so that we could go live. And that's just because the iPhone event is too big to ignore. If you're launching yourself into a new world of starting a podcast, starting a website and all of that, the iPhone week is the right time to do it. So we did it and I didn't get that little break

that I always envy people with. They're like, I'm going to take some time and then do my next thing. I'm like, okay, must be nice. Must be nice. Yeah, I always find that weird too. It's like, wait, what are you going to do? Just sit on a beach somewhere?

Yeah. Sounds nice. Yeah, it'll be kind of nice to take that break uh but it didn't happen so yeah so upgrade one ended up being this really interesting combination of it being a six color site announcement uh new podcast explanation and iphone embargo review all in one so put out the call for some questions from upgradians and i've got a selection of questions from our listeners who uh wanted to get some of some of the thinking about us some reflection first comes from aaron looking back how have your interests in the tech products and companies that you cover changed and how has this impacted the structure of the show? I honestly, I think we did a lot of hedging at the beginning because we weren't quite sure. Again,

Apple was in a very different place when we conceived of this show. iPhone had not exploded to the degree that it would with a six. It was still sort of the size of Steve Jobs' Apple, and now it's the size of Tim Cook's Apple, right? It has been a huge change in what Apple is and what it does. And I think we were unsure where we would go. And so the initial description of the show was very broad. I think at the time I was thinking I would be interested in Amazon Echoes and what Google was doing and the Nest and the Kindle and all of these things that do interest me. But I was thinking, okay, honestly, you can't predict the future. Let's not limit ourselves. I think that was the idea. Let's not limit ourselves. This could I think that was the idea was just,

let's not limit ourselves. This could be, we'll see where it goes. And over the course of time, I think what happened is I could look at this as a failure, but I don't think it was. I think it was a, a,

I think it was dealing with the, the cards we were dealt, which is Apple exploded and got so big in so many different areas that a lot of that other stuff that I'm still interested in got pushed to the periphery. and in 2024 or even 2018, I feel like is totally different. That Apple just went in so many different directions that it became, Upgrade became more of an Apple-focused podcast than I expected it to be when we started.

I thought we would need to spread a little further and wider. And I think the truth is we could have, but we didn't i mean apple just there was so much that i think we we didn't need to and that the the apple the path apple was on was so interesting that we needed to follow it if that makes sense yeah i think i mean i actually think we could probably take a new crack at our show description anyway i think it's still too broad considering where we are now but i think that's the thing of like over these last 10 years it's like if you cover apple you're

if they're your beat there's more than ever stuff to talk about there's more stuff than there's ever been to talk about so you know i think that we both have a keep a healthy interest in all technology and we bring it to this show but it always comes second to if there is big news with apple to talk about right because that that is the bread and butter of the show yeah and apple has imprinted itself i mean apple cast such a shadow over the tech world it would be different if apple was like off in a niche somewhere and was super weird and and this podcast like, oh, I guess the rest of the world is happening, but we're only really focused on this corner case with Apple. But that's just not the case. Apple is huge.

It is the biggest or one of the biggest companies in the world, and people really care about it. It, it, it affects the rest of the tech industry. It affects the rest of the world. So, so yeah, I think that, that has led us in that, in that direction. Our interests are broader than that, but again, I think that we would show it more if Apple was more esoteric than it is, but it's really central. So it's, it's hard to avoid. And what you said about Apple being your beat, I mean, that's the truth of it. Leaving IDG, the biggest change for me, and this is still the case, is I used to try to think about Apple as our beat and think holistically about how we were going to literally cover everything with a staff.

And as a human being, a single person, and even working with Dan on Six Colors, And even working with Dan on Six Colors, working with you on Upgrade, like Apple is actually too big for even it to be your beat. I mean, that's the thing. You end up having to choose what in Apple is your beat because Apple is too much. There is just too much of it. Jonathan asks, you've both spoken about being so happy that the other person wanted to do a show with each other so we both said that about each other but i'd like to know what was it that made the potential of doing a show together so exciting for you both uh you tell me mike you're jason snell oh ha ha no seriously that's what i was looking for there but that was the reason for me like

you know like even 10 years ago i was in a very different spot to where i am now and there's a question a little bit later on where i might talk about that a little bit more but my kind of position in our in our community was different. And I was someone that was, I was starting to kind of establish myself a little bit, but there were certain people who sat at the top of the Apple-focused tech community that we're a part of, right? That all of our listeners are a part of, you know.

But you've got the content creators that we call now, but writers we called them then that sat at the top of that tree you know it and you were one of these people you always have been right like jason snell was like one of the people that everybody knew jason knew everyone you know like jason's party at wwc was one of the hottest tickets that you could get like i remember getting my first invite to that party and i nearly did a backflip i was so excited like it was huge for me to have one just to know you right and to be friends of you was exciting enough but to have gotten the opportunity then to be in a position where i would be your you're like your equal right that we would host a show together was just so incredible to me and like you i always loved when i got to hear you talk about technology and was always kind of sad about

the fact that i didn't get to hear you talk about it enough right because you were kind of in the corporate structure that you were in and so like yeah i sure was right and and this was like the thing this conversation that this famed conversation in the history of upgrade when me and you sat down for like an hour in ireland at the all conference and kind of spoke about all of this stuff you know like i remember saying then like how just thinking how incredible it would be to hear just a tech podcast like the ones that we do with you on it but for me like just what an honor it would be to be able to do it with you because you are a historic figure in the history of covering Apple.

You are. Whether you like it or not, you were at the iPod event. You have been through the history of this industry. You have been there. That is an absolute honor for me to be able to

have gotten the opportunity to do this show with you. And it continues to be an honor for me today. So there you go. Well, thank you. I didn't mean to call you old. Yeah. Oh, my hip. So that little conversation, that was in the spring, right?

Of 2014, I think. Yeah. And that means it came after I'd already attempted to escape my job once. And I know I've said this before, but it's like, well, you say you tried to quit and they didn't let you. What is that? It's like, well, I tried to quit. I had nowhere else to go. I just couldn't do the job anymore.

I was miserable. And they said, no, no, no, no, no. We just changed our management structure. There's a new person in charge. It's going to be better. Please stay, please stay. And I was like, all right, okay. And I was, you know, cause again, I got up the courage to, to quit and not have anywhere else to go. And I wanted to start things on my own, but it was, you know, you get your waiver, your waiver, And to have the full court press, very charming, very flattering from the people at IDG to stay, we got this new guy, we're putting him in charge. It's going to be better. And like, that was all, that was all fine. And I regret, I regret not

actually just saying, well, no, but in the end it worked out, I guess, in the sense that seriously, eight months later, the new guy who was going to fix everything got laid off, got fired. The new president of the group got cut. So how well did that work? Well, I got severance out of it because I told them I wasn't really interested in going through these shenanigans again. So I got more runway to start my own thing. But I say this because I had spent a great deal of time thinking about what I wanted to do. And when I saw you at UL and we had that conversation, I had already been thinking about that a lot. And in this era, so this is the era where you guys were doing the prompt on 5x5. where Hypercritical had just finished.

And I had been listening. I don't even know what was happening with the talk show, but I had been listening to this model of tech podcasts where there were people talking, you know, it was like somebody who's a writer, a reporter, whatever, talking to somebody else about it and you build a podcast around it. And with Envy, right? I mean't and during

fireball too i was like ah i could do that i'd love to do that uh but i've got my corporate job and that's that's fine so i've been thinking about that a lot and so when we got to the point where you know we had that good conversation i had definitely been thinking about these sorts of things we got to the the fall and i i realized that i was going to be going out on my own. You guys at that point started Relay. And again, I've been listening to the prompt and I was listening to Connected. And that was my identifier. And I think the reason that I approached you and not Steven, who I could have approached, was in part because we had had that conversation at Ool.

was in part because we had had that conversation at Ool, and in part because I felt like we were different enough in a way that Stephen was a little more aligned with me, actually, right? That I thought that it might be a better combination. Because otherwise Stephen and I would just talk about performance all the time. And it would have been canceled after like 10 episodes of the Performa podcast. So instead don't know and i think we had a good i when we

had that conversation we made a good connection anyway so i i definitely part of it was just me thinking i like that you guys were starting relay i wanted to do that two-person podcast with continuity and follow-up i wanted all of that. And it just seemed like the best fit. So you and Stephen ended up being one of the very first people to hear that I was leaving. Because we needed to plan it if we were going to do it. This episode

is brought to you by our friends over at Backblaze. Backblaze are the folks that look after your digital data with their unlimited computer backup for macOS and Windows for just $99 a year. So you can protect all of your data automatically, never having to think about it. It's not just for personal use.

Backblaze is great for businesses. Protect the whole team's data through essentially managed administrative console. It's easy to deploy across multiple workstations with silent and link-based deployment options, and the enterprise control add-on includes granular access permissions, advanced single sign-on options, group management controls, and compliance support. You're in safe hands with Backblaze. They really know their stuff. They have been recommended by the New York Times,

Magazine, Inc. Magazine, I should say, Macworld, PC World, Life, Wire, Wired, all the wires, Tom's Guide, 9to5, Mac, and more. And you can access your backed up data from anywhere in the world using their web app or their iOS or Android apps. It's a super handy feature. Backblaze offers multiple restore options, including rapid recovery for our USB hard drives shipped to you

in the event of data loss or ransomware. Or you can go old school restore by mail for a refundable fee with a hard drive of all of your data shipped directly to your door. I have been a very happy Backblaze customer for an incredibly long time. One of my favorite things about Backblaze is I never think about it. It's just out there, it's protecting all of my data for me it's backing it up to the cloud and I never even think about it Backblaze has my back and I know I can rely on them it's absolutely rock solid whenever I've needed to restore files it's been incredibly easy to do

I love that I have access to them via the iOS app if I need them too it's an absolutely essential thing for me I put it on my family's computers too. I love it. Go to backblaze.com upgrade so they'll know that you came to them from the show and they'll continue to support this show, which we'd appreciate. Backblaze have restored over 55 billion files for their customers. Don't be that person and forget to back up your important files. Receive a fully featured, no risk, free trial at backblaze.com upgrade. Go there, have a play around, start protecting yourself from a data disaster.

Don't put it off, start today. Our thanks to Backblaze for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. I said the FM, it's because I'm thinking old school, you know? Yeah, let's hear it. Switch on. Switch on.

Jerry says, are there any episodes that you have produced that could get me started with how to make a podcast of my own and i knew we had done this and i ended up finding it it was episode 200 so a very long time ago now on in july 2018 because we were celebrating our 200th episode by answering some questions from listeners and also uh talking about how we podcast why we podcast that kind of stuff i have no doubt that that stuff is very relevant today except for every time we say skype replace it with zoom and you'll be good yeah adam asks is there anything you miss about being a smaller company or maybe reframe that of like from when

we started to now are there things that you miss from the earlier days of six colors to now oh i mean six colors is not that different because relay has grown but you know six colors is what it was i mean i i it's it's me and dan and that's nice because uh one person site is harder and it's great that dan is uh there because we also have all these other things that we're doing so i really appreciate that dan moran who you know worked for me for ages at mack roldan and uh you know it is i i i don't know if he was always part of my plan or not, but I, I think my plan was really to give all of my friends who were, who no longer had a place to post things on the internet to give them a place to do this.

Like Dan freaks before he got a job, he posted a couple of things and Philip Michaels posted something. And I mean, like there were people in those early days. Um, but, uh, Dan wanted to make a go of it kind of like on his own. And he was willing

to do his tech stuff at Six Colors. He did a bunch of others blogging in other places. But so, you know, the shape of it is not that different from the start. Like I said earlier, the big change is scope. That my old job was thinking big picture and having a team of people and trying to cover everything. And I think we did a great job. I think we assembled a great team. We had a lot of really amazing writers and editors and Macworld and the Macworld website, especially like we really got to cover Apple kind of in, in great detail and with a lot of different angles, um, being just me or just me and Dan, like the scope completely changed. And so we found our way and all of that, but,

uh, it doesn't, other than the fact that we did a membership and added a community and that has changed, uh, the, the feel of it a little bit because there's now like the six colors readers are no longer theoretical.

They're actual people in a discord. And before that, a slack, slack rip to the slack but we moved it to discord anyway um that's changed but like i would say that the six color side of it is is not that different in the sense that it's just a place for me to post my things that i write and it continues to be that relay i feel like this is a better question so what do you think what are you feeling right now I mean being a smaller company is nice because you have less to do like less in theory being a smaller company means that you have like less things that you

need to manage but what has actually happened is as we got bigger Stephen and I brought in people to do more jobs so like like if Relay was smaller, I'd probably be busier. So I actually, I don't miss being a smaller company than we are now. I mean, the bigger something gets, the more pressure it can bring, which is that, but that just comes with the territory. That's kind of what you pay for success, I suppose, in a way. So I don't miss being a smaller company at all you know there are things I miss from when we started right like there was like a lot of excitement and there was always new things happening which was fun and like a lot of those new things happening with new shows right like

in our first year or two we were launching stuff left right and center and they were really exciting projects with loads of really exciting people and we just decidedly do less of that now because it's just not the mode that relay is in as a business it's not where we are right now we're much more in a way that i've been trying to phrase it is i just we are like listener first and those listeners are the ones that we have like i i'm really focused now and that's the same for this show too it's the same for all of my shows i'm really serving the people that are here and like trying to give those people what they want rather than that's like trying to find new people endlessly and like tailoring and ruining things for that like for example i think a good thing

of that is the video that we do right the logical way to do this is to for me and jason to see each other right and like that is the logical way to make a video show but we don't want to make the show worse for the people that have been listening to it for 10 years by now like instead of me describing to jason what something looks like i show him and that is what naturally would happen if we were looking at each other but that is doing a disservice to our existing listeners i don't think that that is listener first so we we produced a video version of this show in a very different way to produce how other people might or how we would naturally to make sure that we're doing all that stuff so yeah i don't miss being smaller

um there it's less kind of like oh what could happen next but i actually think i'm good with that you know i think i'm fine with that yeah the something you said that you know i wanted to mention the when you're starting out and i know i've talked about this before and i did a whole episode of uh focused uh about this as a guest star but when you're starting out you do everything because who else is going to do it so if you can do it you do it and that means you can do it or you learn to do it and then you do it the thing about and again is sixth college bigger i don't know but like we have revenue i know we a business. I know what the money is in the business. Day one, we had nothing. And so it's, you do everything. Now we've got more of

a business. One of the things that's allowed me to do is realize that there are things that I was doing, not because, and this is important for anybody else who's in similar circumstances. I was doing it because I could, not because it was a thing that I had to do because me doing it was the secret sauce. And I work in a business where there is a certain percentage of what I do, where me doing it is the secret sauce, right? I am a content creator. I am a writer? I am a content creator. I am a writer. I am a podcaster. I am a producer of podcasts. I have ideas for things that we're

going to do on this show or, or on the podcast-a-thon or on the incomparable. I have ideas of that. That's part of the mix. I have strategy of like, where do I want to go? Is there something I want to change? It's business strategy that because it's my business, I need to do. It's a thing that has to be me. But there was this huge chunk of things that I only was doing because I'd been doing them and not because I needed to do them and not because I added the magical element. And so I did spend some time two three years ago finding people to work with who i could pay to do those things and that gave me more time back to have more energy and more time to do the things that i actually need to do that are things that that are for me and not things that anybody could do because again going back to that i'm just one person thing. Like, if you're just one person, and I'm sure that somebody like Marcus Brownlee experiences this on an even greater scale, right?

Because he's got such a successful business. But it's the same idea, which is 100% of his time should be focused on the things that only he can do. And he can do everything that people in his business do. He can do it. But he doesn't need to. And so he hires staff to shoot and edit and all these things. And even somebody like Quinn at Snazzy Labs, it's the same thing, right? A lot of content creators can do everything or almost everything. But at a certain point, there's only so much a single human being can do in a day. You need to focus on the things that you absolutely need to do and let other people be your teammates who can do those other things and work with you.

And that, so that for me is the biggest thing about, um, being a more established, uh, company. a more established company. And I don't miss it, right? Because I was very much chief cook and bottle washer kind of person at the beginning because everybody in a small business is that. And I know Relay, it's the same thing. Like you grow over time

and one of the things that allows you to do is work with other people to do those other tasks. And then you can focus more on the stuff you need to. And that's been a big change. Christian asks, I've only been listening to the show for about four years,

which means I've missed out on over half of upgrade. Well, Christian, it is all out there. If you, I wouldn't recommend it, but like, you know,

you can always go back. What are some of the things that were stuck around since the beginning? Are there any bits or segments that have been dropped over the years? So I had did some thinking about this this so a lot of our special episodes started in year one the drafts upgradies holiday special they all started like within the first year uh we dropped out some segments like upstream because it became its own show yep um and we had the summer of fun that came in at some point that wasn't that was in after the first couple of years because we were realizing how hard it was to come up with things to talk about in the summer uh and i feel like we used to have

more guests on for timeless topics throughout the year rather than what it is now which is guests typically are covering somebody's vacation so i think that kind of changes that we've had right i mean yeah there was there was an early time where i was like let's get scott mcnulty on to talk about the kindle right it was like episode three yeah we don't really do that anymore but we were trying to figure it out um what's funny is for a show that's got segments we we we called them verticals at the beginning right but that which because i was laughing at the idea that everybody in the media business calls things that are focused on a particular topic a vertical and so then we did a lot of sort of jokes about verticals

but um you know but we did you know build up segments and ask upgrade and and follow up and all of those things oh my gosh yeah ask upgrade don't forget we created that all right yeah segment of like sending your questions it's called ask something it came from this show follow up we did not create ask upgrade we create follow up we did not create uh but so i'd say a lot of it was there but but we we definitely um things there's stuff that you think is going to be a thing and then it's not a thing and you just drop it and you move on and and that definitely uh that continues to happen but in the early days yeah there was a lot more experimenting with you know again you're like what's the show are we going to bring guests on to talk about particular topics um and now you know that the answer to that now is essentially no unless it's a special episode or somebody is not around.

We don't do that. I think a lot of that comes from me. This is my own personal taste. I tend, in my podcast listening, to not enjoy guests in the regular show format. Sure. Sure. in the regular show format sure um sure because i think that you get joy and like you you're attached to the hosts of the show you just want to hear them um so that's what i prefer and so i kind of try and bring that to most of my shows to be honest and really we only have guests where you

need to i agree i definitely have that on some of my podcasts where there's a guest episode i'm like a you know i'm not as into it because i'm into the hosts talking to each other. And that's what I like. Also, keep in mind at this point that, you know, early on in our run, I was doing Clockwise. And I heard from somebody the other day who said, I didn't realize Jason used to do Clockwise. I was like, oh, man. Oh, my God. It's been so long. man oh my god it's been so long um i'm the co-creator and original host of uh original co-host of clockwise with dan we did that together we come came up with a format together we stole it basically from idg under their noses they gave us a permission to do it and then executives regretted it later but it's too bad we had already we were out of the out the door don't try to stop us and uh but that that's two uh guests every week and uh and then when steve and i did download we had guests every week and let me tell you nothing makes you not want to schedule guests like scheduling guests regularly so upgrade not having guests is not only good content wise but

also i was at a point early on where i realized very quickly that the last thing i wanted to do was schedule guests and zach has made a point in the discord which i think will clarify a slight addendum that i have to my point was zach says i think the verge cast has done guests on the show while bringing in some other journalists for some segments but it's like similarly i think another relay host dropping into the show is less disruptive for me it's like when somebody comes into the show and they don't really have a rapport with the hosts because they're like a subject area expert or what like that kind of stuff for me is like we're kind of breaking things a little bit so i just prefer in general i get a lot of emails from those people uh and their pr people saying oh we sure do oh

jason i was so excited today i was so excited today because i thought i was getting like an email that i'd be happy with for the rest of all time so i'm gonna i'm gonna basically i'm skimming this email it's like one of these like hi i'm such and such person i do this and this and this and like and i'm skimming it and it says johnny ive and i was like oh my god it's happening but no it wasn't that Johnny Ive was a guest on another podcast and they wanted us to drop it into our feed there were people what but yeah this happens all the time I get these like we don't do a

feed drop with this show it's like no I don't ever want to do that I don't ever want to do that like we have gotten these requests from podcasts that you listen to listeners right and I will never do this because i think it is a terrible idea uh but i i thought that someone was trying to bring johnny ive on the show but

that did not happen uh shame question from david this is to jason mike's been covering apple for 10 or so years now how do these years compare to your first 10? Well, so the difference is my first 10 would have been 93 to 2003. So my experience was weird, dying Apple at Death's

Store. Steve Jobs comes back, brings out the iMac, opens a bunch of retail stores, brings out the iPod on the way up. That is my first 10 years. Because I don't, you said, oh, you go back in history. But it's like, I was just somebody, I got a contact about like somebody doing a podcast about the day that the Mac was launched, the original launch of the Mac. And they said, Oh, you seem to have been covering this. And I said, just to be clear, I was 13 years old, just to be clear. I didn't touch a Mac until like several years later and didn't buy a Mac until the what, until like the nineties, the

early, like 1990. So no, I'm not, I don't go that far back. So my first 10 years was very much, I have made a horrible mistake doing, because I loved Apple stuff, loved the Mac, doing something I love in media about something I love while it's dying. Yeah. Like what? Because it's like the triple whammy. It's like, I made a bad career decision. It's going to lead me to cover things that I don't care about because I like the triple whammy it's like i made a bad career decision it's gonna lead me to cover things that i don't care about because i like the mac my preferred platform is dying the company that

makes it is falling apart like it was grim folks it was real grim and then like a dream i mean seriously if you had told me in the depths of 1997, like, oh, no, no, here's what's going to happen next. Now that they just bought Next from Steve Jobs, right? Like Steve Jobs is around. I'm like, yeah, I know he's around, but he's like, honor him. And then this person from the future would be like, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. Steve Jobs is going to take over and he's going to turn the Mac around and he's going to make it successful. And people are going to like be wowed by those products.

And he's going to open a bunch of retail stores. I'm like, well, that sounds like a bad idea. It's like, no, no, it's a good idea because they're also going to release a music, a portable music player, a digital music player. I'm like, are you high right now? Future person, are you crazy? That will never. And they're like, no, no, no, no. Listen to me. By the time you've been in this business a decade, Apple will be on the upswing. It'll be making lots of money. It'll be a lifestyle brand. It'll have cool music and ads.

It'll have retail stores everywhere. And people will come into the retail store to buy the little music player and they'll see the Mac and they'll fall in love with it. And they'll be like, Oh, I guess I might, maybe I should buy a Mac too. And everything is about to change.

And then I won't even tell you what happens in the next decade but it gets even wilder then i tell you that person i i would not ascribe one percent chance that they were right like it was not good it was bad times it It was very, very bad. So the unlikely thing that they had the comeback story and that it began in 97 and just sort of went from there where at the end of my first decade covering Apple, they were basically on the upswing and headed for, we didn't know it at the time, but they were in iPod heaven and the retail was really growing. And so the Mac was really going and os 10 was out and that changed the game for the mac a lot too and then you know upswing to the iphone eventually you in the last 10 years have we talked about it have experienced the inflationary period of apple where it went from being steve jobs's company to being a colossus striding the world. Where Tim Cook is referred to in journalism circles sometimes as being one of America's ambassadors to China. In the sense that when relations between the two countries are not always that great, Tim Cook has good relationships with people in China and understands them.

Like that's bananas. That fact that Apple's, most of Apple's feuds are not with its competitors, but with countries and regional governments. Like that's what, I think that's what's happened in the last 10 years. So it's really dramatically different. And there's a decade in between there

that set the stage for that. But like, this has been, I think upgrade has really been the chronicle for the last 10 years of what has happened to Tim Cook's Apple, where everything is the stage set by the decisions that Steve Jobs made early on in his return to Apple and in the launch of the iPhone. But like the moment where the iPhone really kind of blew it out and caught fire and was just not literally caught fire. I keep saying the iPhone's exploded. People are going to take me out of context. That's not what I mean. It's metaphor, people. Breaking iPhone 16. So it's a, like that for me, that's the story of the last 10 years. It's just like Apple has gotten so much bigger and so much more

influential and powerful because of this huge growth in primarily the iPhone, but then services on top of that and the Apple watch and the AirPods on top of that. And it's just kind of like, it is just a very different company than it was 10 years ago. What do you think? I mean, I couldn't agree more. Like, you know, it depends on where you cut my 10 years ago what do you think i mean i couldn't agree more like you know it depends on where you cut my 10 years from it's either the 10 years from when i started but i started at the ipad right it was when i first started podcasting it's the ipad had been released or you start it from 10 years from now and it starts with the biggest most successful iphone in contextually the most successful iphone in history right and it's like it is a very very different time but there is interesting parallels

right where like you're looking at Steve Jobs and like his rise through everything that he did and changed the company in the ways that he wanted to change it like over that longer period of time and then you have the same with Tim right like Tim took over the company worked out what

he was doing and then started changing it and molding it the way that he wants very different times but the ideas remain the same i wanted to very quickly if you've listened this far uh i wanted to just mention upgrade plus again so i think this is a good time to talk about it uh we have a membership program. You can go to getupgradeplus.com and you can learn more. We mention it a lot, but in the last five years, Upgrade Plus has become an incredibly important thing to the both of us because of how it represents how we make a living, where membership has become the stable bedrock on which the show can be built from. Ad, advertising goes up and down.

Sometimes we don't have as many advertisers. Sometimes our advertisers don't pay as much as other times of the year, but our membership remains consistent. And we would love for you to consider becoming a member. You get longer ad-free versions of the show every week. You get access to the Relay Discord. You get access to other perks for being a relay listener including additional bonus content but at for for the the purpose of this conversation what i'm saying you right now you support the show it helps the show continue me and jason want to continue doing this show for as many more decades as you'll allow us um and i would really love it if you would consider becoming a member and supporting the show. You can find out more by going to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign

up today and it would mean an awful lot to the two of us, I'm sure. Right, Jason? Yes, absolutely. And it's been a great thing. Like I said, about Six Colors, the same goes for Upgrade. It has been great to have that as part of this journey and has allowed us to continue doing what we do yep all right so that's gonna be it for this week's episode uh if you would like to send us feedback some follow-up or questions you can always go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send those in uh i guess next week's episode we're going to be reviewing the iphone 16 it's a banger we have new iphones in hand hopefully and we'll be together and and we'll be together in person

that's right yeah yeah uh you can check out jason's uh work and dan's work there's a bunch of articles about reviews and stuff uh over on sixcolors.com and you can hear him on the incomparable.com and here on relay you can listen to my podcast here on relay and check out my work at cortexbrand.com jason is at jay snell i'm at imike you can find clips of this show on tiktok instagram and youtube where we are at upgrade relay thank you to our members who support us with upgrade plus thank you to our sponsors this week is to find people over at Backblaze, Delete Me, and FitBud.

They help make this show possible. Please go to stjude.org slash relay and consider donating to our campaign for this year. And don't forget, this Friday, September 20th at 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time, you can catch the sixth annual podcast-a-thon broadcasting live from the campus of St. Jude. Me and Jason will be there.

Stephen will be there. Casey Lewis will be there. Kathy Campbell's going to be there. It's going to be an incredible time. I hope that you'll join us. And I will say, right now, more than ever, thank you for listening to this show whenever you started. We appreciate you. This is why we do this. We do this for you, and we hope that you will

always enjoy it. Until next week, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.