Upgrade - 532: I Am Foreign Exchange Headwinds

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

from relay this is upgrade episode 532 today's show is brought to you by express vpn factor and notion it is october 7th 2024 my name is mike hurley and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. From my garage, it's me. Hi. How are you? I'm good. Happy birthday. I have a Snow Talk question for you. You had a birthday this weekend. Jason, how did you celebrate it? I took it easy, I guess I would say. I mean, we had a nice breakfast. Lauren made me breakfast. It was hot. It was the hottest day of the year yesterday, Mike.

And so it basically got to 100 degrees. And so we stayed inside for the most part, although we did go out to dinner, which was very nice. That was my request is why don't we go out to dinner. And we had a very nice dinner at a restaurant we actually went to for our anniversary. It was really good. So we went our anniversary and it was really good so we went back there and it was uh excellent it was just really great so nice treat because we don't go out to eat that much and um otherwise i just sort of you know sat inside with the air conditioner running because we've got air conditioning now which helps when it's over 90 degrees every day for a week in October,

which is how we roll here. That's how October works in the Bay Area is it gets hot. Anyway, I've turned my birthday into a discussion of weather. Anyway, I was just kind of chilling. We didn't have curling this week. And so I just said, you know what? Literally Saturday, we had nothing on our calendar. I was like, what is, what is it? What does it mean to have nothing on your calendar on a weekend? So I think we really took the week off from our curling calendar in my birthday and just kind of took it easy. And it was nice to, to have that talk to my mom, talk to my kids. Yeah. Nice day. Perfectly nice day. Would have been nice to spend a little more of it outside but at at um most of the day it was hovering about about 8 98 99 degrees and i did not want to do that so it didn't

give it gave the dog a bath decided to hose her down we washed the cars on saturday and then i thought oh it's a hot day and there's a hose so i we we hosed down the dog and i think the dog did not appreciate the cold water. But, you know, so she was sad afterward, but then she was clean. So, yeah, it was just a home weekend. It was good. It was good. Well, I'm pleased that you relaxed.

If you would like to send in a question to help us answer a future episode of the show, just go to upgradefeedback.com and send in your own Snill Talk question. Thank you to me for asking that one. It's time for some follow-up. I would just like to give a final thank you for our St. Jude campaign this year. The final toll tool that the Relay community raised for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

was $1,078,348 for the kids of St. Jude. Amazing. Thank you so much. Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much. How? Amazing. Thank you so much. How? An incredible achievement

that we pulled off together and I'm so, so proud of all of us. To everyone. Thank you. Steve wrote in and said, one thing that you didn't mention in regards to AR glasses is the difficulty Apple would face

in the glasses market with Meta slash Luxottica quote-unquote owning many classic styles, having existing partnerships Apple would face in the glasses market with Meta slash Luxottica, quote unquote, owning many classic styles, having existing partnerships with essentially every glasses and sunglasses retailer. So Meta with their Ray-Bans are working with a company with a very long name that is just essentially known as Luxottica.ottica they have an absolute monopoly on glasses they own so many brands huge i'll put their wikipedia page in the show notes and a lot of the styles of sunglasses that you or glasses that you may know uh luxottica owns that design and it's one

of the reasons that meta has partnered with them because they get to benefit from Luxottica's design prowess and the IP that they own. So it could be complicated for Apple to design what would be considered a quote-unquote classic style or any kind of like, oh, I've seen this style before because Luxottica own it. I think that could be complicated for them. Yeah, could be.

I mean, Apple's got a lot of money, but we also know that Apple can be cheap and doesn't want to pay for oxygen sensor patents and things like that. Also, Luxottica, it's interesting, right? Their agreements with Meta maybe money might not actually be the thing so like meta just signed a deal with them that is exclusive okay i i think that's not what i was saying okay what i'm saying is there are other brands there may not there is a giant number one but there's money and there's other companies out there that are at least scrapping by now i would also say i hope meta is paying luxottica really well because if luxottica truly has an entirely exclusive arrangement with meta when there's another big fish out there that might be interested in spending a lot of money

that exclusive deal if it's exclusive to luxottica and not exclusive to specific brands i hope it gets real expensive for meta because luxottica could realize that there are other tech companies that want to give them lots of money too so there's a there's complexity here i mean we'll see i i think we can so so thank you steve now we've mentioned it and now i will say i don't think it's a barrier to entry like if apple wants to do this they'll they'll they'll do it but they will not be able to swoop in and say oh well i mean like meta meta was like literally hey ray-bans what could be more well-known and iconic and they swooped in and made that essentially an adjunct

to their product that is uh that is smart and it's a coup and it's going to be hard but again apple has a lot of money and a lot of interest. And there's either competitors who are hungry who think that the only way for them to get a leg up against Luxottica is to partner with Apple. That kind of thing could happen. Either Luxottica will rethink the exclusivity of their partnership with Meta if other expensive, you know, deep-pocketed tech companies come calling, or is the exclusivity more limited? And I know that there's some people who are like, Meta wants to buy Luxottica, which is interesting, right? Because most of Meta's business is not eyeglasses but even if that were the case i think if you're luxottica you look at that and say is that the best way for us to run our business if there are if this is going to be a future category and there are going to be other deep pocketed companies i it's something to watch

it's it's definitely something to watch but meta gets the first mover advantage here yeah i think they would love to buy them but just it's too complicated now like i don't i would be surprised if meta is ever allowed to buy another company ever again like i just i think that they would love to buy them, but just it's too complicated now. Like I don't, I would be surprised if Meta is ever allowed to buy another company ever again. Like I just, I think that that time may have, may have ended for Meta. I think they've,

they've bought all the companies they could buy. It is so funny. Like there are all these really weird deals now, right? Where like a company doesn't buy another company. It just hires everyone from said company and gives it to everybody's stock. I think Microsoft just did that recently

with an AI company where they hired everybody, they made their CEO the CEO of Microsoft AI. It was like, yeah, but we're not acquiring them. It's like, okay, whatever you say. Jason, I want to know what happened to your Mac Mini. Oh, yes. Mac Studio, Mac Studio, not Mac studio mac studio not sorry yes it's not a mac mini you're getting ahead of yourself you're very so excited about i can't stop thinking about it every day everything looks like a mac mini to now i got a new mac mini with a in my pocket i got a mac mini hanging on a wall everywhere Mike looks it's just another Mac mini I watch TV on my Mac

mini um Mac studio m1 that I've had since it came out um and really love it and I told the story when we were in Memphis of how I had a cascading series of events failed you could not personalize uh was a software update and and the complication there was that I was having another issue where I had like extensions that it wanted to resign every time, but would never resign or re-approve or whatever. And so I was getting these alerts every time I started up my Mac saying, oh, there are these things you should restart, but the restart never fixed it. And the solution there is to do a software update early, at least that has helped in the past. Software updates failed, all the different versions would not update. Do got some anonymous feedback that this might be a good time

for it if you want to throw it in there. Yep. So the personalization failure Jason experienced was the result of an issue Apple identified for many enterprise customers. There was an odd scenario recently where if an update had been installed between a specific date range, a device signature would not match when you went to install the next update. Apple has addressed this by modifying a check server side, allowing these unexpected signatures. Interesting. So a little tidbit there about what might have been going on. But I was, anyway, I ended up stuck. And so I decided to, when I looked this up, they said, well, here's what you can do. First thing is you can put your, your,

um, you reinstall. So I just went into the recovery and try to do reinstall from there. Failed. Wouldn't do it. Did some more search and it said, well, you could do a revive using, so you put your Mac in DFU mode, which is like iPhone recovery mode for a Mac. It's an Apple Silicon thing. And you have to attach another Mac to it via USB. And then from that other Mac, you say, okay, let's revive this computer. That didn't work. At which point, what was left to me was restore. Now, I clone my drive every day. So it's not a problem. I didn't have any, and I do a lot of stuff in iCloud and Dropbox. So I didn't have data on there that I needed to secure in any way. So I thought, okay, let's do a restore. And I tried to restore from 15 and 15.1 beta and 15.0.1 beta or whatever. I tried many different restores and from back on 14, no restore image would restore. They all failed. This is where I left it.

When I came to Memphis is all the restores failed. What was I going to do? It was in DFU mode where the light on the front of the Mac studio helpfully blinks SOS and Morse code. You know, it's cute. It's cute. But also not great yeah so now experienced mac tech people might have an inkling to what the solution was because i skipped a step here i or i i i did i skipped a step so here's what i did i went to a website called apple.com it's a good website and did text support and said i've tried all these things and they're like immediately fortunately did not try to make me go through many other steps uh they're like oh you tried everything.

How about an appointment in an Apple store with a Mac genius? I said, great. And then literally they said, how about in two hours at your local Apple store? I'm like, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. So I took my Mac studio in a shopping bag to my local Apple store. And they, you know, set me at a table and the guy came over and he said,

what, what seems to be the problem? And he's like, oh, okay. And he, and somebody brought out a monitor and a keyboard and a track pad and a cable.

And, and then he came over and said, what seems to be the problem what have you done all of these things what did you do what did you do to this poor computer and so i told him and his response was something like, oh, okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to put it in recovery. And I said, all right. I'm trying to look up his name because I got his name.

He was great. Whatever his name was. Now I'm not going to. They sent me afterward. They're like, how was your visit with Jim or whatever his name was. Now I'm going to, now I'm not going to, they sent me afterward. They're like, how was your visit with Jim or whatever his name was? And the answer was, it was great. And now I can't find his name anyway. He said, we're going to go into recovery. And I said, well, I tried recovery and it didn't work. He said, well, let's just go in there. And I thought this is the moment where I thought to myself, this guy has seen everything, right? This is like, he's seen it all. He's seen it all. He works at an Apple store doing Mac genius. He's seen every possible failure mode there is. And this is the thing that I kicked myself after he said it, which is, what I did was I went to recovery and tried to reinstall the OS and it failed. So I went to DFU and I tried to refresh.

These are the steps you do when you're trying to save the contents of your hard drive. When refresh failed, I thought, well, everything is ruined now. So the next step in the DFU process is restore, which wipes the contents of your drive. And then you move on with your life. And at least I think that's what it does. But here's the, here's the thing. What I didn't consider is if you're giving up on the contents of your drive, what you should do is what Dave or whatever his name was at the Apple store did brilliant, which is you go back to recovery and you go to disk utility you wipe the drive in recovery and then you reinstall um sonoma in this case not even sequoia just reinstall and i was like i don't know man this seems pretty wild. It's refused everything. He's like, no, no, no, no, no.

It's like, and he says, no, if we erase this, we should be able to install. And I was like, oh, you went back. I thought once you leave recovery and head to DFU mode, you never go back, right? Like you've blown past that barrier. Now you're in the really serious stuff here, the weeds. You've ruined your computer unless you can get it back. And the answer is no. Recovery is still there.

You go back to recovery. So what I did is I leaped over this missing step, which is once I was moving into it can't be salvaged, we need to nuke it from orbit. I didn't think, oh, I should just go back to recovery and wipe the drive and reinstall it from there i i instead was like i gotta do a restore an os restore from a disk image from dfu mode and um i i wasn't even sure if you could get out of dfu mode at that point and have a usable restore um or recovery and you can so in the end we rebooted a recovery and wiped it. And then I stood there as he went off to help other people. And I stood there at the Apple store for 20 minutes while I watched Sonoma install on my Mac studio sitting at a table in the Apple store.

And then it installed and I shut it down and thanked him profusely and walked right out and came back home and when i got back home i updated to sequoia migrated from my clone and was up and running um shortly thereafter with my complete system exactly as it was the day that it died oh that's fantastic what a great story into the story love that thank you to mystery apple. Thank you to, yes, to how was your experience with Jim or whatever it was, which I wish I could find it now. Oh, Jim. It was Jim. How did Jim do? That was the email I got from the Apple store.

How did Jim do from one to five? One being poor, five being excellent. Jim is a five. Jim is a six, but there's no six. So I had to do five. Well, Jim is a five and a call out on the show. That's how you go the one extra. Here's another little tip. I know there are people from my Apple store who listen to this podcast. Somebody at the Corte Madera, California Apple store who listens to this podcast somebody at the corda madera california apple store who listens to this podcast tell jim how awesome he is say many people know no jim not only was i impressed because look i've seen a lot too and he he jumped right over all the stuff i'd seen and he knew exactly what it was

and i was kicking myself afterward but like i just got the sense with jim he's super positive but jim has seen everything i mean he's you know Jim, he's super positive, but Jim has seen everything. I mean, he's, you know, it's, he's one of those people who's like, Oh boy.

I mean, I was going to Mac it professionals and asking them about this. And they're like, I don't know, man. Jim was just like, well, I know what,

I know what step you skipped. Let's just go. And, and it all worked. So thumbs up to Jim. I like to imagine this is how Steven Hackett was when he worked at the Apple store. did Steven fix this for you? He was like, is this is how Stephen Hackett was when he worked at the Apple store. Well, did Stephen fix this for you? He was like, is there a part inside your thing that's broken?

I can sense it from the outside, and I know how to take it. And in the dark, blindfolded, with one hand, I could remove that part, disassemble your entire Mac, reassemble it. Jim is like that. Yeah, well, I mean. Thumbs up to Jim. Stephen's no Jim today, right? Because Stephen didn't fix this. But, I bet he was like it. Back in the day.

You know, he put that old Mac back together again, that MacBook that you painted. He did that. Back when Stephen Hackett was in his prime. Yes. Yes, he did. I was very impressed. He put the Mac that Casey L lisa and i painted black back together and it booted shocking shocking he knows what he's doing he does about with that with stuff from when from back in the day

deadline is reporting that the brad pitt george clo, Walsh, is the quote, most viewed Apple TV Plus movie so far. No idea what that means, but I guess the good thing is this movie has been successful for them when it seemed like Apple have maybe kind of given up on it. A little bit. Yeah, I don't know if they'd given up on it,

but they did. A little bit. Because it was going to be in cinemas, right? And they changed that. Yeah, I think that their strategy changed and they're like no no no no no let's not do that yeah i wonder what that means i wonder if they view it as making the best of a bad situation or if they view that as adding a lot of value it is um it came from somebody inside yeah clearly because it was it was sourced i'm told the film boosted viewership by 30%. 30%, which is the thing that Apple decided to give them.

It also said executives are thrilled or something like that. Yeah, exactly. So this is an Apple leak saying positive things about wolves. So take it for what it is, but they did, you know, it's good enough for them to leak it and do some positivity about it for what it's worth. I believe it. Yeah. Oh, I do too. Big names.

Yeah. Draw attention to your platform. Sure. Sigmund Judge from Mac Stories is reporting that Ted Lasso season four will begin pre-production in January. That he has seen some information. Shooting sometime early next year. Yeah.

It's pretty wild. Sigmund is the one reporting this, which is interesting. There's nobody else reporting this. Nope. And all the reports about it that you find are quoting Sigmund. Yep. So we will see. Sigmund, who does the Magic Rays of Light podcast, which is about Apple TV+.

Sigmund has shared the information with me that he received. And I will concur that the information that he has seen certainly looks like this is the case okay but i don't think he can share his information i think the big thing that we don't know is what form will this take in terms of the story having ended with season three what do they want to build a new season or set of seasons around what story do they want to tell is it actually ted lasso right like is it actually maybe they're calling it that right now but will it be called that who's going to be in it really right and how much like these are the things we don't know right and is jason sudeikis appearing in a in a

really limited way is Is he not appearing? Is Brett Goldstein going to be in it? We don't know any of this. Is Brett Goldstein going to be in it? Boy, here's the thing that I think is funny. When I try to imagine another season of Ted Lasso, I think they could do it without Jason Sudeikis, the title character. Yeah.

I don't think they could do it without Brett Goldstein. I agree with you. Given where the story ends up in season three, unless, again, and I don't think this is the case because I don't think Jason Sudeikis wants to do this, unless Ted Lasso, season four, just follows Ted Lasso, in which case, spoilers for Ted Lasso, I guess, in which case it's a completely different setting

and a completely different set of characters and since the breaking news about this was that they were picking up the options for the British actors who are under the British contract system which is different from the American contract system that suggests strongly that the UK is a major component if not the whole

thing for Ted Lasso season 4 in which case I can't imagine like i mean good it's good to be britt goldstein because i think not only was he one of the writers and and it feels to me like if they're going to do this it's the money truck after the money truck backs up to jason sudeikis's house it goes to britt goldstein's house yeah i agree and also backs up there and he's going to have you know he's a he was writer before. He's probably going to have a more exalted producer credit and a, you know, a maybe higher level co-starring credit because I don't think you can do that show without him. I'd be surprised if he wasn't involved because, like, he's now in the multiple projects at Apple TV family, right?

Like that Apple seemed to be doing. Like if something works well and you have another idea, they'll do it, right? Like he's involved in shrinking. And I think one more project may be in development. So, you know, it kind of feels like they would try. Shrinking is his show. Shrinking is his, and he's not,

he's going to be in it this season, I guess, a little bit. But he and bill lawrence the uh co-showrunner of of uh ted lasso they run shrinking like shrinking is a is a ted uh is it bill lawrence uh no i keep saying ted lasso you keep calling him bill lawrence brett goldstein thing and so yeah's, he's got a strong tie with Apple TV and, you know,

but to say like, you're going to do more in season four, I just, I can't imagine that show without Roy Kent, even more than I can. I literally can't imagine it

without him more than with Ted Lasso, which is just a funny place to be. And this, I guess this is technically follow out. Jason's going to be. And this is technically follow-out. Jason's going to be joining me and Federico on Connected this week. So if you've never listened to Connected and you enjoy this show,

maybe you like that. What I expect is imagine this show, but with more jokes. It's probably what you're going to get. Yeah, maybe so. I would say also you could say imagine this show, but with Federico. But with an Italianian you know yeah imagine just as a bonus on top sprinkling yeah just a little little extra it's the me and mike dynamic plus federico vatici or me and federico dynamic plus jason it depends on how you want it really

i don't know right if we could say i don't know what it would be that like the federico jason dynamic with me i don't know if that if people have that much of a yeah i know what that is but we'll find out it federico's been on upgrade but this is different because now it's it's me on i've been i have actually been on connected many times uh sitting in for one of you guys before it's been a little while. So anyway, I'm looking forward to it. I'm happy to go in there because Stephen's taken October off. And so I'm going to fill in. I'm going to help out,

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for the support of this show and all of Relay. Rumor roundup time, Jason Snell. Yeehaw! Let's do it. Let's ride out there. This is one of the weirder rumor roundup stories that I think we've had in a while.

Russian YouTuber, I'm going to say Willzacom, claims to have obtained a production unit of the base M4 macbook pro and is unboxing on his youtube channel yeah i just want to point out it's bananas that apparently this escaped from the supply chain it's extra bananas that it's a Russian YouTuber, a place where Apple does not do business at present. But I wonder if there is a, you know, from a Chinese distribution center to Russia. It's the only way, right?

Pathway, right? That kind of makes more sense. And then the thing that made me laugh about this is, oh, they got one of the new Macs. This is going to be really exciting. Oh, it's the base model MacBook Pro with the M4 processor. A processor that, although it's only on the iPad, we've seen already, right? So it's not the M4 Pro. It's not the new dynamic Mac Mini.

It's literally the base model MacBook Pro updated to the m4 pro it's not the new dynamic mac mini it's literally the base model macbook pro updated to the m4 so still pretty cool that a product that has not been announced yet is somehow its box and computer are in the hands of a russian youtuber but it's like the most earth-shattering least interesting thing ever so it's like i don't even know what to think about it but great and of course we have no idea of knowing if this is real but it is just interesting no if this person is faking it that is interesting of it on in and of itself like because this is like a very elaborate thing to do so according to this video and and not that interesting that's the other thing is this it's an elaborate fake of something pedestrian yeah which is which is hey maybe that's why it works

uh according to this video the m4 chip that's in this mac is 25 faster due to the 10 core cpu up from eight cores measured with a geekbench test all these and again we knew this faster yeah we knew this yep uh there is a minimum 16 gigabytes of RAM because it's the base model and it starts at 16. It has three Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of up from two. And there is an availability of Space Black.

Right, which the base model did not have in the last generation. The Space Black was reserved for more expensive macbook pros so weird but maybe it's true maybe it's not if it is true this is fascinating because all this all this product is going to be is what's going to be interesting about this product is how is the m4 on the mac like there are some details like thunderbolt ports that we don't know how that chip, that base model chip plays in the concept of a Mac versus a one port iPad. Right. So that's, that's interesting. Um, and yeah, we don't know, like thermal characteristics are different and all of that,

like, but we have an idea of what M4 performance is already. What's more interesting are going to be sort of like the, the computers that change their shape, like the Mac mini and what happens with a, a pro version of the chip. But I would say that this is the, the, you know, there's,

there's some tidbits here maybe, but like also maybe not. So sure, sure. It feels like Mark Gurman reported that like the M4 models were already being able to be made. Cause obviously the M4 chip exists. Whereas the,

the pro models were going to be available a little bit later because they have to put the M4 pro chip into production. And so it's probably true that there are M4 MacBook pros and Mac minis and IMAX sitting in boxes in a warehouse, right? Or on a boat going across the ocean, something like that. And this is Mark Gurman reporting that Apple will be making a product announcement in late October that is focused on this first set of M4 Macs and a new iPad mini. Mark reported that he expects these products to begin shipping on november 1st november 1st so it feels very much like that last week just as it was last year when they did the halloween event

the last the last week of october we're gonna have a lot of news including new max and ipad mini shipping on on november 1st right right after that right after i almost called it thanksgiving halloween all also you know what's really spooky mike what's the scariest thing of all another late money i really don't want to do the evening event again like if they're gonna do this please don't do the evening event the The financial results are coming out on Halloween. The financial results are going to be announced at 5 p.m. Eastern on Halloween. So trick or treat, I'm Apple and I'm a bag of money. That is apparently what's going to happen.

So yes, and then Apple Intelligence, Mark Gurman says, is going to be released. The 18.1 release is going to happen on the 28th. It would seem to me that the 28th or the 29th will be the day that Apple announces this hardware and has it shipping on the 1st. It could be the week before or something. But it feels to me like they'll do a video and there'll be a press event or something like that. And it's all going to happen that last week. because it's literally apple intelligence is happening that week german says the products are shipping that week on halloween as everybody is eating candy and getting into their costumes the results will come out because who doesn't like like what do you have

in that bag well i got snickers uh skittles jolly ranchers and 20 billion dollars in revenue and economic headwinds i've got a cocktail of headwinds in here yeah that is what are you going at as for halloween this year i am foreign exchange headwinds that's who i am that's a real trick they are they're just terrifying um anyway so it's got to be that week right presumably that they'll make an announcement at some point in there which is great so that that's uh you know three weeks away yeah i was wondering if they would do the event the week before but i think for if it's just max then they they don't need to right they could just do it like hey you can buy them today they'll ship at the end of the week i know they've done that in the past yeah i think that's a good call that either the 28th or the 29th

uh for an apple event product shipping on the friday yeah and it'll literally just be a video and they'll they'll give it a week's notice and say spooky yeah whatever and then it'll be that yeah yeah actually the 28th if they're releasing apple intelligence on the 28th i think the 28th actually makes sense for them to do a big thing because they can also kind of like toot their horn about apple intelligence while they also talk about new macs and ipads especially if that ipad mini and those macs all support apple intelligence then that's part of the story right the question is that ipad mini but i would imagine that ip iPad mini will either have an M series chip in it or a a phone chip that's capable uh of running uh running Apple intelligence I I have I have to imagine they will I think it's it's either going to be the A18 or the A17 pro they'll put in the it's

probably the A18 they'll put in the iPad mini I don't think they'll put the M chip in there it could be the M1 but it's like I think i think what we're saying is whatever is cheapest yeah that gets them apple intelligence is what they will do and also again it's like m m series ipads come with a separate set of features including stage manager that's true that would be bad that would be so bad on the ipad mini uh yeah so i i could imagine them then putting whatever is the most capable and available phone chip for them i think that's probably it is the a so the a18 which is in the base model iphone 16 i think is a perfectly reasonable idea that they would just use that again and put it in the ipad mini so because i

i am a believer that they're not going to release any computing devices, right? Mac, iPad, phone that are not Apple intelligence capable now. I think that that ship has sailed. So if they're going to launch Apple intelligence on the 28th, it's a great day to do an event and do all of it and roll it all together and say, here are some new, and that allows them to tell the Apple Intelligence story yet again. Which we've seen that they will do.

Which, you know what? They're going to do it. We know they're going to do that. They got it. The September event proved it. They're going to tell that story because they want to appear to be at the cutting edge. Yes.

Yes. They're going to keep reinforcing, pay no attention, because they feel this is an area of weakness for them. So they're going to keep on you know pay you know pay no attention because they feel this is an area of weakness for them so they're going to keep on asserting it yeah and pointing it out and and uh that's just that's we're in the era where apple's just not going to shut up about intelligence and that's just how it's going to be so so yeah that would be my bet is that is that they'll do a video on the 28th and it'll have all of that stuff in there. Speaking of new products with Apple intelligence,

a couple of stories on the next iPhone SE. Mark Goeman is reporting that it will have an edge-to-edge screen design with no home button and a notch, not a dynamic island. But in the Bloomberg report, he references the iPhone 14 as a good product to look at, that it will support Apple intelligence coming in the spring of 2025. And Felipe Esposito at 9to5Mac is reporting that this iPhone SE will be the first device to feature, you guessed it, Apple's own 5G modem. Here we are again. Another product, another first product to take the modem here we are again uh another product another first product to take the modem uh apparently

though this this product will come with some benefits to the consumer if they can ship it uh as it this modem would reduce battery consumption especially in low power mode nice because it's apple's own silicon that they're that they've done to build this modem i mean we'll see um in this report also say that they're gonna it build this modem. I mean, we'll see. Didn't this report also say that it's going to have a notch instead of a dynamic island? Yeah, notch, not a dynamic island. Yeah, that was a notch report too. I love that it's like, what makes it the SE?

What features is it not good enough to get? And it's like, we're not going to do the little tiny cutouts and dynamic, you're just going to get a notch at the top. Sorry. What is cheapest, right? Everything's what is cheapest. Yeah, exactly what is because that's the the goal here is so you know but face id right so that's face id no no home screen and face id is a big step up button yep interesting you know they could have done i i wonder about the whatever is cheapest philosophy

that they do face id and not a touch ID button. There is nothing to say that having that notch means it's face ID. Well, yeah, I guess not. I guess it could just be a front facing camera and all of that. Although the reason that you have that, my guess is that it is. My guess is that that is the old iPhone 10 level face ID stuff that is cheap enough now that they can put it in the SE. And maybe the answer is either they want it to remain... Well, I mean, the truth is that that Touch ID unlock button is for iPad. And it would have to probably be re-engineered for the iPhone, and they don't want to do that.

Maybe. But in the end, whatever is cheapest and most expedient is going to be what's in the iPhone SE. I think it will be Face ID, but it doesn't mean it has to be just because there's a notch, right? Like it doesn't, if they wanted to do that, they could, but I feel very confident that that would just be a Face ID system. You know, maybe like the first or second gem, one that only worked in portrait or whatever, you know, like it can be, they have the ability to make this thing as cheap. But the thing that, you know, some people will care about, some people won't, like this will be the last time

that a home button is on a product. So you don't, you don't actually need a notch if you're not doing face ID because the width of the notch is because of all the other stuff that's up there, the dot projector and all of that. I would say that if the report was that

this was getting the dynamic island it would be a question about like is is it face id or is it touch id because the dynamic island wouldn't would suggest it was a little teeny tiny cutout but um given that it's the notch i think it's almost certainly face id because they need all that space for the hardware to do it and And remember, that's old tech now. I mean, that's the funny thing is that as expensive and as complex as that tech is, that's iPhone X tech. So it's time to put that in the iPhone SE. So now it'll be there. Yeah.

All of this stuff, while it is still like quote unquote like the the new stuff it's not new anymore it like it really isn't new anymore i mean it feels like the iphone 10 was recent and it's it's not it was a long time ago now a long time ago what year was it let me see it's like six years ago now yeah because it's iphone 16 now right so yeah i just wanted to check the name it launched in november 2017 17 yeah yeah i just wanted to check the name. It launched in November 2017. 17, yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to see it.

Like, I know I could do the math, but I just wanted to know, like, what was the year? Seven years ago. So, seven years ago, the iPhone X hardware was amazing and would blow you away. And seven years later, seven plus years later, it'll get in the iPhone SE. Like, it's not new tech anymore.

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really good it does not taste kind of weird and engineered like some stuff does when it's microwaved or even like even stuff that i cook myself when it comes out of the microwave it can be strange but never with factor not at all um so you know i'm also really loving the rhyming in here we're heating and eating we're shopping so good yeah this came up i think i read this new this is like new air copy from no reddit last week and i spent like 35 seconds praising their marketing team which is not necessary but uh shopping and chopping and heating and eating oh it's so good i love it whether you're managing calories maximizing your intake, or simply trying to eat more balanced, Factor's dietitian-approved meals will help you meet your goals. This fall, you've got a lot going on outside of the kitchen. Keep your plans and

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fully shot for immersive video on vision pro the theme of the movie uh it's a crew it's what you're following the crew of a world war ii submarine following a torpedo attack you're in a submarine yeah that's under attack and is there some water in there yeah there is some water in there. The last thing you want in your submarine is water, but it's in there, so you're going to be immersed. Of course you're going to be immersed in the submarine

and the water. You're going to be submerged. Yeah, anyway. Trailer looks great. The trailer is more of like uh talking about the technology um and this is directed by oscar winner edward berger who uh was previously known for all quiet on the western front oh yeah yeah and so in in it you'll see uh edward and he's

talking about the production and you see him wearing his vision pro you can you kind of see how they have these like two weird circular screens like for cameras which is probably what the they're using i am assuming the i would assume they're using the black magic cameras that they showed off at wwdc that is what i would assume they're using i don't know i i love that in the trailer it shows presumably the director yeah um watching like dailies looking at the monitors looking at the monitors and the monitors are a vision pro yes likely using a vision pro to see what they're capturing it's wild so yeah uh it's a short film i expect i don't know how long it'll

be but i expect it's probably like a 10-15 minute thing but we'll see it's going to be available uh on thursday this week thursday october 10th watch it this week um look forward yeah it'll be interesting to see what storytelling is like on something like this because yeah how yeah exactly how do you how do you do storytelling in this format because remember our criticism of uh some of the sports highlights is that the quick cut format that works so well when you've got a screen in front of you does not work as well when you're in an immersive environment so how does this director uh approach kind of creating that immersive experience and it'll be interesting to see i'll quiet on the western front which was i think a best picture nominee a very good movie really well done

it's really interesting to see i assume apple came to him and said we want you to do this and we'll pay you and your production company a lot of money he might be a big tech nerd right and was like oh this is a thing like i mean, that probably helps. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think you kind of have to be, right? To want to do something like this. I think you've got to at least care about it. Yeah, I'm intrigued. Because you would assume, presumably, it will be following something, someone,

or a group of people. But if they're on the left and something else is on the right like you've got to you've got to consider all of that right that's right how do you attract the viewer's attention whereas if you cut you can you can point the viewer's attention wherever you want yeah if you're in an immersive space where it's more like you're you're there how do you draw people's attention to it and i i don't know right it's a different grammar it is more akin in some ways to an amusement park yes exhibit than it is to a film and so how how does that work and like i'm not sure anybody has the answer for that but i'm sure

a lot of smart filmmakers have thought about it and have looked at the technology and and have thought of things to try and so we will get an another try at it that's not a nature documentary or sports highlights and i'm looking forward to seeing how that goes who is the director of wicked john chu john m chu i know that apple featured him before he he does watch his dailies on the vision pro right and loves it um he was even he was on the town talking about it as well a little while ago i think so yeah interesting i wanted to just follow up on the vision pro a little bit because uh we don't talk about it very much at least i don't really think we talk about what we like about it very much because i mean i think i can speak for both of us that like don't use them as much as i thought i was going to be using it yeah because you know there just isn't enough happening

like stuff like this isn't is exciting because this is something right here's here's something yeah give me reasons to to go there yeah but i i wanted to just like we touched on spatial personas a little bit in the spatial persona calls we have like a facetime call and you're talking to someone yeah um i've done a few more of these like from a business perspective me and gray have you have been using them uh i've been using it to talk and i think that division pro is probably the best co-working telecommuting device that possibly has ever existed it's fantastic so like why is it better than a zoom call because i think i can speak for everyone and say that when you're on a zoom call i mean i anyway i feel like i spend too much time looking at my myself in the corner to like how am i sitting how am i posing all that kind of right make sure am i in frame of those things. And also that if you're having a call with someone,

you want to be at least somewhat presentable. Well, that doesn't matter for these, right? Because it's a fixed in time 3D version of yourself, which the quality that they have been able to get to at these spatial personas cannot be overstated how incredibly lifelike they were and i will say i was incredibly wrong like i remember in the first demos and even in the beginning i was like the the spatial like the personas as they just were then yeah were

gonna be a flop and like they would be the digital touch of this device like i mean i i don't think we were wrong in saying that they were creepy and didn't work right. Yeah. I just didn't think it was going to. I just I thought that that was like just they were going to drop that. What happened is that they got way better. Yeah. And then the spatial aspect where they which I mean, it feels like a very weird hedge, right?

Well, it's in a box. Like, well, why is it in a box? It's because we can't get it out of the box right now okay and then finally they got it out of the box where you've you're just kind of like in a space with people's personas and the personas are also better and it's really good i mean it's like it's really i try to explain it to people and and they kind of don't get it and i you kind of need to experience it but like we we do occasional calls and you've now done some with gray too where it's like you and me and maybe like casey or and maybe james thompson and maybe steven hackley there's a different set of people who will pop into that

that group from time to time and because you got a set of time to do it because people otherwise are just who knows what device they're on but if they're on the vision pro and then all of a sudden like all of the artifice all the window chrome and am i in the shot and you know and and even vanity of like is my hair messed up and all of that just goes away and it's it's much more like you're just in a physical space with people you know and when you're in a physical space with people. And when you're in a physical space with people, you don't take a mirror out and look at yourself. Probably. I hope not. I hope you don't do that.

And so it feels much more natural. It's really very good. And then, yeah, if you want to do in content, you know, everybody kind of like gets put in a, instead of facing each other, like they're around a campfire, they're, they're, they, it moves you so that you're all kind of like aligned, looking at whatever is being shown, but you can still look around and you're still hearing the people coming from where they're coming. It's just, it's very, it is really well done. The pro the problems are all about like, nobody has them. What is the content, all of those other things. But if you can find things to share and people who've got a Vision Pro and that you're

remote from and you want to talk to them, in that use case, it's pretty special. Are you talking about you and Gray using this? Is this going to be a Cortex episode at some point, I assume? I don't know. He was real skeptical about it. And I'm excited to know that you guys actually tried it because are you talking about you and Gray using this? Is this going to be a Cortex episode at some point, I assume, but like, I don't know. He was real skeptical about it. And I'm excited to know that you guys actually tried it because I know that, uh, Meta has had some success and you guys use the horizon workrooms a little bit, but like in our calls with spatial persona,

I kept, when I heard Gray's skepticism about this, I was like, he really needs to try this. Cause yeah, I convinced him and he, okay. He blew his mind.

And so like when, if we do these calls now, that's how we do it. One of the really important things is the spatialness of it. Like Apple uses spatial mostly to talk about sound, but with the spatial persona calls, you're all within relative space to each other. So like, for example,

if I bring a window into the environment i can point at something and you can follow where i'm pointing or like there was a moment um when we were on our call uh last week i had just my mac display and it just for me because i was going through notes and like gray could see that i was reading it and he said something and i pointed at him and said yes right like that's it and like but and he said it worked so much for him because he could see that i was reading it and he said something and i pointed at him and said yes right like that's it and like but and he said it worked so much for him because he could see like it was how i would do things like that's the other thing the technology especially with the facial scanning is so good that you see the facial expressions that you're used to seeing these people make in real life the technology that they have created here is

incredible. And I wanted to mention it again, because I just feel like, understandably, there is a lot of negative about Division Pro. But this is truly the best experience I have had with it is these calls. Now, I will say there's a bunch of people asking, my mouth still doesn't move. But that's not my problem. That's everybody else's problem. It's true. It's true. It's okay.

It's better now. It's not great, but it's better than it was. You were like stone-faced before and now sort of like your face moves and your mouth maybe moves a little bit. It knows that you're moving your mouth, but it can't see through your beard to do that.

That's a thing that they're just going to need to keep working on. No, it's really... Again, it's hard to describe that. That's a thing that they're just going to need to keep working on. But no, it's really, it's really, I just, again, it's hard to describe this. Like the sound plus the hands, plus the face and the facial gestures and the facial expressions. If you roll it all together, it's enough to get it over the edge to being like, it feels like I'm in the room with that person. You put all of that stuff together. It's good enough. than like a zoom does which we've all gotten used to zoom everybody's in a flat little box on your screen this doesn't feel like that this feels like i'm in a room or on a beach or wherever with

the people that i'm talking to and and that it is a completely different kind of feeling there's a lot of uh it's it's can be very impressive yeah it's it sounds so it almost feels like embarrassing to say in a way but like it these these calls it's genuinely as good as spending time with someone like the way it makes me feel like i feel like i've actually spent time with the person yeah our little hour that we try to do every other week and sometimes it comes off and sometimes it doesn't but like i'm hanging out with my friends for an hour yeah and i i don't get to do that a lot because i work in my garage and my friends are all over the world yeah um but that hour feels like just in-person hangout time significantly better than a facetime like

significantly vastly like hugely better like i i feel a lot of times i have long facetimes and i feel tired when i'm done if i have long facetime like long spatial persona calls i feel energized like it's incredible and this is one of the things where like to me it's a shame that it's locked behind such an expensive device and i know that this is something that they're able to bring to different versions in the quality that they've done it in. Because I, genuinely, they have built something incredibly good.

And yeah, it's just, this is like, so frustrating with the Vision Pro, right? That like, this is just such a good part of it. But then there are all these other bits that just have yet to come to much but this is good you linked to uh something on six colors that i thought was was interesting and it was you linked to an article about an article i want to give a little backstory so we can talk about it. So in iOS 18, Apple has created a new privacy prompt

for sharing contacts with an app. So usually, like in the past, I should say, you could, you know, an app could say, would you like to share your contacts? You just say, okay, and it's done. So it used to be incredibly easy.

But now this privacy prompt works similarly to the photos permission, where you get asked if you want to share contacts, and then you get asked for which, and you can either share everything or you can do that thing where you just choose some specific contacts. So basically, Apple has made it much harder for a developer to get that blanket forever permission that they can scan and use all of your contacts for whatever they want so this prompt will also i'm sure make people consider how they're sharing their contacts or they'll just forget about it and not do it therefore it will control how developers get

to scrape contacts for bootstrapping apps usually social apps the new york times i think kevin russ at the new y York Times wrote an article claiming that this process would mean kind of the end of new social apps because there have been many instances over the years of social apps being able to get started by using or abusing the contacts that people had on their phones,

which I think the conceit of that, I actually agree with, but it seemed like that the article was kind of making these claims and trying to back them on information that they were not sharing. You know, if that makes sense. It's like, oh, I spoke to a sausage person and they said this. But I feel like as an opinion piece, this maybe would have been better, but it wasn't really.

It doesn't really seem to have been positioned as such. This article prompted Nick here to write an article of their own basically defending users with this uh rather than the startups trying to invade the privacy of those users which the new york times piece seems to for some reason lean more towards which then made you link to this in six colors talking about the idea of apple being like godzilla which i liked where apple can kind of just in its way stomp on a building and change everything right everything so yeah there's there's all these layers here so i think kevin ruse's piece i don't like it i think that it is way too worried about a growth hacking startup bro who is sad that he can't quickly

build a startup by strip mining everybody's contacts and there's still apps that do this too where where it's like if you want to join our like remember clubhouse clubhouse is like if you want to join clubhouse you have to share all of your contacts with us so that we can spam all your contacts and we can build a social graph. And it's actually kind of amazing that Apple has taken this long to take its approach that it's done elsewhere and do it to this, which is selectively sharing instead of it being like, we empower you to not share anything. It's like, we empower you to share whatever you want to and nothing more, not your entire contacts list. And I'm even leaving out the other thing, which is the consent of the people who gave you their contact information. I'm sure they didn't give you

personally their contact information so that you could share it with everybody else, right? And yet that's what's going on here. I feel like users are not just protecting their own information. They're protecting their contacts information by doing this. So I think Kevin Ruse's piece exacerbated by a really bad headline, but even the piece is bad too, I think, which is, it seems very worried about, you know, who will speak for the startup bros and not about the fact that they are building businesses and getting investments and making profits and selling out and getting rich by selling people's information, right? That they're gleaning from an app permission. So Nick Hears' piece basically says, you got it backward. Apple makes this decision. makes this decision, we should look at it and say, wow, it's kind of crappy that guys like this guy that's quoted in this article extensively have made a living starting up companies based on

asking everybody to empty their address books and give all of their contacts away to this guy. And that it really should be the other way around and so nick here's uh piece is headlined i do not care about impediments to a creepy growth hacking technique which is like i think he's right it they got it all backward and it shows you just how broken i think some writers on technology's minds are about the fact that they seem to be covering startups and not technology that impacts people and that perhaps you should be more user centric and a little less startup centric. I mean, tech crunch, I kind of understand it.

It's kind of their business, but the New York times, maybe not so much. I don't know. Maybe, maybe it is, but the point, and,

and, uh, I was talking to Dan more in last Friday, I guess, on the six colors podcast about this too. I think the thing that's most interesting to walk away from this whole thing is take just the fact that Apple made this decision. Isn't it interesting that Apple at this point is so big and so powerful and the iPhone is so important that any decision Apple makes has the potential to close off whole lines of potential new business. And we talked about this with like the App Store and App Store policy saying,

there'll never be an app that does this because everybody knows it'll just get rejected and how apple has that sort of power but i'm saying like even if apple is literally just thinking oh we did we did uh photos and we did files and now we're going to do contacts with our new system that has an API and the picker is separate from the app. So the app can't see your contacts and then you can choose what to do just like you can with files and photos. This is a new approach Apple's taking that allows apps to ask for stuff without needing to be granted license, right? You pick, you share. The app only sees the stuff you share. It never gets access to your library

and and this year they're like we brought it to contacts and you know they do it at wwdc and you and you think great of course you did like why wasn't it already there yeah exactly but it's and i'm not i really am not making an argument here about this i'm just saying it when apple does something like that, there are enormous ramifications almost every time. And that's the Godzilla metaphor, which is, you know, maybe Godzilla just wants a sandwich, right? Godzilla's like, hey, little famished, gonna walk down to my favorite sandwich shop. But Godzilla's huge and Godzilla's gonna step on your car on the way there. And if Godzilla stepped you, if, if Godzilla stepped on your car,

you're like, Oh my God, I hope I paid my insurance because I need a new car. Now Godzilla stepped on it. That is Apple. Like Apple, Apple sometimes makes tactical decisions to change the world. Right.

Other times though. And I think that they're aware. I think there's awareness there, but I think other times Apple's like, well, no, we just did this because it makes sense technically, or it's a thing that we needed to do because we wanted to protect users against this thing, or we're rolling out our existing privacy framework to another part of the data store on the phone. But like every move they make on the iPhone has potentially enormous ramifications to create markets, to destroy markets, to ruin people's companies, to make new companies. And in that, I think that the original Kevin Ruse piece is interesting because the guy's attitude is basically like, well, I mean, again, a little more sympathetic to this guy than, than I would be, but his thought is like, well, I guess this one's run dry. I'll go on to the next opportunity. Yeah. And that is, that is what Apple can do just at the drop of a hat at that just set in foot on the street. They will, they will

close something off and create something else. And I just think as somebody who covered Apple back when it was irrelevant, it is interesting to think about that and think about what Apple thinks about it. What does, does Apple, every Apple move, presumably they're like, what will this do? What are the ramifications of this? But like everything they do is like this now literally apple cannot make a change without it having a substantial impact on people or businesses or you know or something out there because of their sheer scale one that i always think of with this is app tracking transparency where you know absolutely for whatever reason apple decided that they would

make it much harder for uh developers companies advertisers uh ad marketplaces i think to be able to track users and serve them ads and in doing that i mean for a lot of companies a lot of companies in in like in tech and social media and that kind of stuff there was the pre-att and the post-att yeah like i was hearing i was listening to something recently where they were talking about snapchat and it's like well snapchat they made money they made money in like one quarter and then it all then never again because that truck of transparency came in like they'd finally kind of nailed their advertising system and then gone away again and it's one of these things where it's like i agree with the the idea around trying to give people a choice for their privacy but it's just a peculiar thing

where one company has the ability to change the fortunes of so many other businesses because like you know it's easy to focus on the snapchats and facebooks of the world but there are lots of stories of like companies that were building their businesses selling ads on different platforms and it's become much harder for them now post this the challenge and yeah there's a lot of complexity here but the challenge is apple didn't make it so that you can't track people no and apple didn't make it so you can't share contacts with apps. What Apple did is make them ask or give users more ability to choose what the scope of their sharing is.

And we can argue that, and I actually would argue that I think Apple hasn't nailed that give user scope thing and that it gets in my way more than I would like as a user. You know, and maybe some of this is the way that individual apps handle this. But when I try to share an image in Slack and it's like, oh, currently you're sharing the last five images that you shared in Slack. Do you want to pick from those? It's like, well, of course I don't. I want to pick from my library and it makes me go and add it to the list and then

add it through. And it's like, well, that's not how that should work. And I'm not quite sure who's at fault there. But the bigger point is, it's not like you can't build a business based on your social graph, but you've got to convince the users that it's worth sharing your social graph or part of your social graph with a random company. And you have to make the case. And you have to make the case in the case of ATT, you have to make the case that you want to be tracked and people don't. And I know that that can be self-serving for Apple because Apple considers itself the first party. So it can track you on its devices for its purposes. And that's fine because they're not selling it to anybody else or using it themselves for anything other than their existing things, which is you already agreed to. You're using an Apple phone. Your knowledge is their knowledge, right? It's like a whole thing. And arguably, that's unfair, right? And I know it got brought up like, oh, but what about messages? Messages uses your contacts, and mail uses your contacts. And are they going to ask about that? I guess what I would say is maybe they should, maybe maybe apple the first time and it's going to be annoying but if you want to be fair about it maybe apple when you open messages for the first time it should say hey do you want apple

your all your contacts to be available in messages and here's what will happen is people say yes to that people will say yes to that i i i am of the belief that they should ask because like apple is making assumptions about the trust people have in them right or like like why why does a user who who you know why does somebody who buys an iphone why do they like oh they're inherently like oh i'll just give it to apple and not whatsapp when like whatsapp might be what they trust and use implicitly you know the difference is you are putting that information into your phone which means that it's in your apple kind of system and when you add somebody to messages you're it's not leaving it's not leaving your phone really whereas what these apps are doing is saying we would like to read your contacts and

copy them off your device arguably and again this is one of those cases where you could make a differentiation here which is there's access to the contact information and there's copying your contacts list and putting it on someone's server right and those are those could arguably be different but once the apps got them, anything goes. So I would say there's on-device and there's also off-device and there's implicit trust with Apple. And yeah, I guess my argument would be if people really trust Snap or something, then should they have an address book in their app that's not the contacts and keep it there? address book in their app that's not the contacts and keep it there. And Google has its own contacts that are not Apple contacts.

And they do it that way. It's one of those things where the problem is sometimes I think Apple does this in very self-serving ways because they are damaging competitors while they still have an advantage. But also, this is the complexity of it. And this is why whenever anybody says, oh, Apple just says that they care about user privacy, but they really just want them all to yourself. And I hate those arguments because it is not true. The reverse is also not true, right? This is when we talked about all the issues about Apple

and its security and privacy stance and how the EU says that some of it is bogus. It's like, look, it is part of Apple's corporate belief. It is also a place where Apple has an advantage. And that's what makes it muddy is I don't believe Apple is limiting contacts to destroy tech bro startups so that they can control your social graph for their own nefarious purposes inside Apple. I don't think that's why I think Apple literally is looking at that and saying, it's kind of gross that right now people ask or asked one thing and they get complete access to the contacts. That's too much. And that,

so what you could argue is that the growth hacker guy, his whole business was based on Apple making a naive technical decision a few years ago. Cause remember what it was is they were siphoning all of the contacts out. And so Apple put in a permission to stop it, but it was a yes, no permission. And now Apple saying, let's be a

little more granular about this permission. So it used to be that the way your business model was to get people to say yes. So Clubhouse was like, you can't use Clubhouse unless you give us everybody you know, and then we'll let you in the door, right? So you say yes, and then we got you. Okay, now you can come in the door. And Apple said, well, that's not great. Maybe we need to make it so that if you want to use Clubhouse, you can share five people, or Clubhouse is gone, but that idea. So you could argue that Growth Hacker Bro, he was taking advantage of an inefficiency and a naivety about Apple that has now gone away. And so that's why his attitude, I think, is actually pretty good, which is, okay, they closed that loophole onto the next thing. What will I exploit next in order to make my businesses go? And again, I mean, I'm a little judgmental about that,

but at the same time, that's business. That's just how it goes. I don't think Apple is out to destroy him per se, especially for their own benefit. I think Apple looks at that and says, yeah, that's gross. Users shouldn't be forced to make that decision. We should give users more control of their data and choose where to use it. And I do think that's where they're coming from. But the fact that they benefit from things like app tracking transparency

because they have personalized data in the app store based on what you do and they can use it because they're the first party muddies the waters, right? It makes you question every decision they make based on what you do and they can use it because they're the first party, muddies the waters, right? It makes you question every decision they make because are they doing this to gain an advantage or are they doing this to protect us? And the answer sometimes is yes to both. Yes.

And sometimes it's not. But in this case, it's funny. And this is why I think it's important. It's funny that it's gotten to the point where even if Apple makes what I would say is a fairly straightforward judgment about user control of their data and privacy, people are still going to say, they can still do a lot of damage. And they may know that they're going to do it and not care. They may not know. This episode is brought to you by Notion. There's so much to love about Notion. I love it. I use Notion every single day. I use it for multiple projects, but the majority of the time that I'm spending in Notion is working on my projects with Cortex brand. I keep everything in here, including all the stuff

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does a very good job of that and I think it's really cool to make sure I'm keeping track of everything that we're talking about. The new Notion AI is a single AI tool that does it all. You can search across Notion and other apps, generate documents in your own style, analyze PDFs and images and chat with about anything. Notion is a perfect generate documents in your own style, analyze PDFs and images, and chat with about anything. Notion is a perfect place to organize your tasks, track your habits, write beautiful documents, and collaborate with your team. And the more that you add to Notion, the more Notion AI can personalize its responses for you. Because unlike generic chatbots, Notion AI has the actual context of your work.

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First is from Kevin. If Apple releases an Apple TV sized Mac Mini, would you consider traveling with one plus a Vision Pro as a transportable workstation with a much bigger monitor than a laptop? No.

It's an interesting idea though, right? Like, you'd have this tiny little box in your Vision Pro and then you would have a powerful machine potentially, depending on what you've got inside of the Mac mini

and you can connect it to your Vision Pro. I think that that is an interesting idea. I don't know how you would, it might be difficult to do it without a monitor though, like completely. Right. So no battery. So you've got to have, you a monitor, though, completely. Right.

So no battery. So you've got to have power that's consistent. Sure, sure. Which means you're not going to be able to do it when you're traveling or something. But you could do it in like a hotel room or a conference room. And you're going to need to be able to hook it up to a monitor, presumably, to set it up. Or unless they can do some sort of a quick... There's a lot that would have to go

on for this to be a transportable workstation i feel like at that point you probably should just bring a laptop yeah as zach points out in discord federico could make it work i'm sure federico could build and john they could build a thing that's got a battery and an hdmi thingy on it and it comes with its own wi-fi and it's all just you know you you you pull the chain and start up the generator that gives it power and whatever i i'm sure there's a there's a way there but it seems too fiddly to me it's like it seems beyond what it it would be um useful for but i mean i guess i i guess i what i would say is i could see a very specific scenario where it might be good but probably more likely i would just have a laptop but this is the kind

of thing that is interesting like that that mac mini being small is interesting and you will i believe people are gonna you're gonna see a lot of this kind of thing like people using this tiny mac in like new and interesting ways like i look forward to that time but keep in mind with a vision pro you're still going to need a keyboard and a and probably a trackpad at that point yeah and that's the thing if you bring a laptop you can still do all of this and it is your keyboard it has everything you need a trackpad yeah it has all the things yeah in one piece and battery power. And if you're not wearing your Vision Pro, you can still use it.

Like, there's just too much that, like, get a MacBook Air really is the answer here. Florian writes in and says, Jason recently mentioned that he listens to music while reading. What kind of music? Is it the same music? Similar music? Is it with lyrics, without lyrics? What do you listen to when you read? This is one of those questions, and I knew when I said this that somebody would

probably ask this question. I have a bunch of playlists and stuff that are on my phone that are downloaded to my phone for when I'm on a plane, and it's just music I like. It's mostly music that I know really well. I think that the one thing that is distracting when I'm reading or writing is if it's not music that I kind of know by heart. I have a specific playlist that I use a lot when I'm writing. When I'm reading, the music can be more broad than that. But if it's brand new, I'm not focused on what I'm reading. I'm listening to the music and all of that. So it needs to be something I'm familiar with but that's it i don't and and really nothing in particular it's just the stuff that i like that i've downloaded to my phone so it's on my phone when i'm on a plane it's there's nothing you know really more than that i just when i'm on a plane there's nothing happier for me than airpods pro noise canceling and playing music and while i'm reading a book. That's it. But I think that is the interesting thing, right? I think sometimes people can, they have like specific

needs when doing something like reading or writing. You know, like if I'm if I'm ever writing or reading anything, I can't have lyrics playing. Yeah, I know. A lot of people are like that. And like for me, the more I know music, the harder I find it to concentrate.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, because then I'm trying to sing along. It needs to be stuff that I know by heart, and it needs to be in a very specific range of things that I feel like are good fits. I have a couple of playlists that are my go-to. I don't always write with those playlists going, but if I need, if I'm being distracted and I have a deadline and I need to write something right now, I have a couple of go-to playlists, but there's there it's music with lyrics and I just shuffle through them. But they obviously, I know them so well and they, they give me whatever kind of like focus that I need that

I'll use them. But, um um but generally more generally than like extreme circumstances like that i don't have a problem i know people have a problem with lyrics i don't have a problem with lyrics if it's something that i know by heart because then it's just all part of the background and then it doesn't bother me at all if it's relatively new it's or it's a song that i haven't heard in a while and i really like i will get distracted by it but if it's a, or it's a song that I haven't heard in a while. And I really like, I will get distracted by it. But if it's a song that I play all the time and I know it by heart, like from those playlists, it's not, it's not an issue. And sometimes I'll shop too. Sometimes it'll absolutely be this again for writing, for reading. It doesn't really bother me. Um, sometimes I'll, I'll be like, let's try this playlist and I'll, I'll sit there and I'll try to

write and I'll be like, nope. And I'll move on to another playlist and try that one and see if I can get one that gets me in the mood. Bronwyn has a question for the author of Take Control of Photos, which now is in its fourth edition available at takecontrolbooks.com. This question goes as following. It's me. It's you. Yes, it's you. We're asking the question to you. I'm having issues of iCloud photo library.

I find it deeply slow to download photos. For many, it doesn't even keep the thumbnails on my phone, even though I have plenty of space. When I go to share a photo or insert into an app, it hangs on downloading. I have fast internet. It feels like there shouldn't be an excuse for this. Do you have any suggestions or similar issues with iCloud?

Well, what I will say is I've seen this before. It's not most people's experience. So I would recommend that you restart your phone. Maybe you turn photo syncing off and then let it sit for a few minutes and then turn it back on you might even want to consider logging out and logging back into your iCloud account put the day aside yeah I know like it's the it's the steps right you need to do the steps to to do it because what's happening is it's got something wrong with its photo syncing and so the the you know the implication here is like,

there should be no excuse for this. I mean, the answer is that it's not, it's a bug and it's not working right. But that is not the, the experience that everybody has with it. It would be one thing. It was like, everybody agrees that it's slow to download photos and doesn't keep thumbnails on the phone and it hangs on downloading, but that's not the case. Your library is in a kind of half-broken sync state. The other thing you can do in the new version of Photos is tap on your icon in the upper right corner, and that's where all of the cloud information, the iCloud stuff is now. So you also could look at the sync status and see if there are any issues there. But as usual, Apple doesn't really let you do a lot of troubleshooting so my recommendation is do the things turn it off and

back on you know turn syncing off and on turn iCloud off and on do the things to get it to get you know get back to where it is and also be sure that it's on Wi-Fi at night and sleeping so that it can download a lot of data and do analysis then. Sometimes this stuff just clears up over time. Other times you need to give it a kick, but that's it. It's not the usual behavior. That's all I have. And Sasha asks, do you use any cameras other than your iPhone's camera? asks, do you use any cameras other than your iPhone's camera? I don't really. I have a Sony a6400 that I use for streaming.

And I also use for taking pictures of products, even though I'm not very good at it. But if I ever need to do something like that, like photos or videos of a product, I'll use that just because it is just a much higher quality lens than what my iPhone produces. And I've had my eye on one of those Fuji cameras, the Fujifilm X100V. Because every time I see somebody take photos of one of these, they're just like the most beautiful photos for my taste.

But it's a very expensive camera. And so that's just the end of that really. I also have an a6400. Okay. It's above me right now. It's primarily for video. It's my overhead shot or whatever. When Julian graduated from high school, I took it down and put the battery in it and put a card in it and I shot pictures of his high school graduation with it. I'm not sure if I took it to Oregon for Jamie's college graduation though, because again, battery in it and put a card in it and i shot pictures of his high school graduation with it yeah i'm not sure if i took it to oregon for jamie's college graduation though because again it's a whole other camera but um so i have occasionally done that for special occasions yeah i have to be honest i used to take out my dslr back in the day and shoot product photos

with it for the website and now i just use the iphone 99 of the time for that stuff because it's good enough so yeah there's some stuff i want to get like detail the iphone is just it doesn't have enough flexibility but yeah i agree and i can imagine in a situation like that one that you would describe like in the graduation like if you have a camera with like a big lens you know just like take that but like it's not your everyday thing um but yeah there you go if you would like to send us in a question go to upgradefeedback.com you can also send in your follow-up there as well you can check out jason over at sixcolors.com and hear him here on relay and at the incomparable.com you can listen to my podcast here on relay too

and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can find us online. Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. You can watch clips of this show on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube where we're at Upgrade Relay. Thank you to our members who support us at Upgrade Plus. You can get a longer ad-free version of the show each and every week. Just go to getupgradeplus.com to find out more.

Thank you to Notion, Factor, and ExpressVPN for their support of this show. But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.