Upgrade - 540: Validation for Shower Jason

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 540, recorded December 2nd, 2024. It's brought to you by Delete Me, Smarter World, and ExpressVPN. I am Jason Snell, your usual host, but I'm not doing all the stuff that usually is done by Mike Hurley because Mike Hurley is on assignment. And so sitting in for Mr. Michael Hurley today is our very special guest, Mr. Stephen M. Hackett. Oh, I got the initial. Yeah. I wanted to-

It was fancy. I wanted to introduce you as I, Stephen M. Hackett. But that's a little bit weird. Now I'm inspired with the, sorry, I'm gonna make a little baseball tangent here, I apologize. The Giants radio broadcasters, John Miller, Hall of Famer, and Hall of Fame broadcaster, and David Fleming. Dave Fleming is introduced by John every time

as David B. Fleming, and it's like it's his dad introducing him, and it just makes me laugh, so I thought I'd give you the Stephen M. since since your middle initial is part of your public persona I thought I'd throw it in. Yeah I really tried when I first started on the internet to like make it really real like I included it everywhere but it sort of faded over time but we can't talk about baseball because we have a Snell talk question. Thank you. Bless you. About baseball.

Oh, no. I'm giving Kevin credit for this, but many, many, many people wrote in about this. Kevin said, what will happen to the Snell family jerseys now that Blake Snell is moving on to the hated Dodgers? Okay. Do I have to explain what this means to you? No, I understand. My context of this is listening togers. Okay, do I have to explain what this means to you? No, I understand. My context of this is listening to Upgrade.

Okay, yeah, you know all about it from listening to a computer podcast about baseball. Yes, Blake Snow, who is not related to me in any way, was a giant for a year. He signed a two-year contract that was very clearly only going to be a one-year contract. And he opted out at the end of the year. And during this year, we bought a lot

of Snell branded Giants merchandise. And now he has signed as a free agent with the hated Dodgers. This has had, okay, so a lot of people have asked about this. First off, I don't really care because the whole point here, I'm not really a Blake Snell fan.

He's great, he threw a no-hitter for the Giants. It's awesome. That's right. I know that from listening to the award- winning upgrade program. Indeed, indeed. We're a very popular baseball podcast. Like a very popular podcast

that's also sometimes about baseball, but they're not connected. So- That's a different show. He's fine, he's fine. He's an interesting pitcher. But my prime interest in him is that he has my last name. And if he comes to your team, there's a whole bunch of Snell branded stuff that you get to buy then. So he spent a year on the Giants, it allowed me to buy a jersey, it allowed me to buy a t shirt, it allowed me to buy a t shirt for my daughter, it allowed me to buy a jersey for my wife, we all had a good time because see, our names remain Snell, and we remain Giants fans. So it's fine. It's fine. I'm a little bummed out because he is a good pitcher that he's on the Dodgers now, but at the same time he's also kind of injury prone and can't

throw for very many innings usually, so it's a risk for the Dodgers. They're paying him a lot of money. They're happy to do that. So that's fine. That's fine. It's fine. What's funny now is that my good friend Greg Noss, the Dodger fan, he can buy some Snell branded merchandise and wear that and go, yay, Snell. And he has to do that now because he's a Dodger fan. And that actually kind of delights me. So that's good. Also, I hear from the grapevine that one of his sons works in the baseball industry and it wouldn't be amazing if he ended up working for the Giants. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying that he is, but I mean wouldn't that be great if he did? I just would love that you're a loyal Dodger

fan your whole life and then you get work in the industry, you work where you need to and it's at the Giants. Just make me laugh. Anyway, thank you to everybody who wrote in. And I got it on social media. We didn't even mention the other huge Snell News, by the way, from last week, which was on the TV show Star Trek, Lower Decks. I'm a huge Star Trek fan, lifelong Star Trek fan. They go to a planet that's got all these people on it

with like a little antenna on their head and these little aliens. And they have to hide out for months. They have to live there because they get sort of stranded. And there's always, when you're undercover, there's always that one snoopy character, sneaky character who's always looking around for you. And on the old Bewitched TV show,

it was Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor, who was like, I think there's witchcraft going on. Everybody else thinks she's crazy, but of course there is witchcraft going on and everybody else thinks she's crazy. But of course there is witchcraft going on. It's what the show is about. Anyway, that guy, the sneaky snoop guy in that whole episode who is used as a joke and a punching bag, his name is Snell.

So. Uh. Yeah, it was big Snell week around the old Snell household. The Snelliverse. Wild, wild. Can we talk about the gift of Relay now? I think we should do that. You are a Relay co-founder, so you want to let people know the magic stuff that you and

Mike have hatched up for this holiday season? Yeah, let's do it. So give Relay.com. It's where you want to go. You can use the code 2024 holiday though, if you go through the link in the show notes or on the website. So what's the deal? 20% off all annual memberships from now until December 18th. So for upgrade, that means you get upgrade plus, which is longer ad free episodes each

and every week. I love the upgrade plus Plus segments, they're so good. But you also get access to the Relay Members Discord and tons of bonus content, like two monthly members only shows, a newsletter, some wallpapers, a bunch of cool stuff. And yeah, giverelay.com. So if you already have a membership to like

another Relay show and you wanna add upgrade, you can do that or you can gift it to somebody else so say you've got it maybe a roommate who listens to upgrade y'all do it together and they want to be come a member or Maybe you're like me and I think like Jason like I think a lot of us who are nerdy were kind of hard to shop for Just send that link, you know to your aunt who drew your name for the Christmas Gift giving family extravaganza and they can hook you up. GiveRelay.com through December 18th, 20% off.

And let's do it. And this week on Upgrade Plus, we're gonna talk about Thanksgiving stuff. So that's right. And when there's always something, there's a whole other segment of the show that happens after we say goodbye. It's not like Connected Steven where we do it before,

we do it after, it's like an after. It's fine, Connected, Stephen, where we do it before. We do it after. It's like an after. It's fine. Connected just is very interesting because you talk about video games. Well, I mean, Mike and Federico talk about video games and you cry to yourself, I guess. That's right. Or just show up 15 minutes late. I don't know how that works.

Yeah, we do Connected, we do pro show at the beginning and then we pick titles at the end. Kind of a little bit of both. Yeah, a little bit of both, that's true. There's the title picking at the end. Last week's title was an all-time classic in how nonsensical it is and how much Mike laughed when he saw it as a title suggestion. That was a that was a really good one. And I'll also point out that in your your list of scenarios in which you might give the gift of Relay, I liked how they got increasingly less likely as you went along.

I was waiting for the like, let's say you're in space and okay, what will happen then? Anyway, lots of reasons to give the gift of relay or have someone give it to you. RSS cannot be held back by the bounds of gravity. No, or probability, quite frankly. It's that powerful. RSS is defying gravity. No, or probability, quite frankly, it's that powerful. RSS is defined gravity. Should we do some follow up? That was a wicked reference you were making there. We were defining gravity for a moment.

Follow up. Follow up. You wanna handle follow up? You wanna? This is weird. Like we didn't, yeah, I can do follow up. Okay. I'll drive follow-up. Okay. I'll drive the follow-up.

So, Apple Watch plus emergency call. So y'all were talking about like going for a run and leaving your phone behind, something I know that you do quite often. And a gradient Doug wrote in, isn't it the case with the cellular Apple Watch that you can call emergency services even if you don't pay a monthly fee

to your cellular provider. So in doing some homework for this, I'll tell you it's actually kind of confusing, but Apple says that emergency SOS requires a cellular connection on the Apple Watch or Wi-Fi calling with an internet connection from a nearby iPhone. So I think I know what this is referring to.

So legally, in the US at least, I can't speak for other countries, but in the US legally, if you have a device that has a cellular radio in it, it needs to be able to call 911 essentially. Right. Even if, I mean, basically, even if it's not, doesn't have an active plan on it,

but the real reason that that law is there is so if you're in an area, like my house, honestly, my house is like this, where you have Verizon and you come to my house, guess what? You're not getting a signal at my house. My house has no Verizon or T-Mobile, it only has AT&T. And you have to walk like down the block and then the Verizon shows up.

So if you're in a place or you're just out in the woods somewhere, but there is one cell tower. So it's not, you don't have to go to satellite. You don't have to fall back to satellite. And this is the difference. If you're looking at your phone and it says AT&T, you're like, oh, I'm on AT&T. And then you go out further into the woods

and it says emergency SOS, but it doesn't say satellite. And then you go further out into the woods and it says emergency SOS, but it doesn't say satellite. And then you go further out into the woods and it shows the satellite. That interim step, it can see a cell tower. It just can't see your cell tower. And by law, if you need to call 911, the fact that you're not a T-Mobile subscriber is not gonna get in the way of saving your life.

Right, it will roam to AT&T to make the call. To make the emergency call. Effectively. So what I don't know is, so the Apple Watch absolutely has to do that, I think legally. You have to be able to make an emergency call from a cellular Apple Watch, even if you don't have a plan.

Here's the thing though. I'm not sure whether if you fall and you have the automatic fall detection, do I need to call for help thing if it calls 911 in that case or not, I don't know. Because that's a specific feature of fall detection. I would hope that it would, but I honestly don't know. And the reason I mentioned this in the scenario is,

not everything is a 911 call. I guess, you know, when I fell, I fell and bruised my ribs while running a couple years ago. And like, I didn't call 911, I called my wife. And I said, I fell, I bruised my ribs. I think that's all it is. I can walk. I didn't hit my head.

I wanted to let you know, but I'm just gonna walk home and go to the ER. And that's all it is. I can walk. I didn't hit my head. I wanted to let you know, but I'm just gonna walk home and go to the ER. And that's what I did. So that's a call that you wanna be able to make, which is why I feel like if you're gonna have a cellular Apple watch, you should probably put it on your plan. That's not a 911 call.

But I think it's true that maybe somebody can write in, we'll have future follow-up about this. Nothing like follow-up have future followup about this. Nothing like followup about followup about, that's the best, it's finally aged followup times two. But I don't know whether the fall detection triggers it or not. Yeah, Apple's documentation is a little confusing there. You know, when I experienced the,

you've been in a car accident and your device is called 911, like my phone and watch were with me. And the watch was like going off, right? Cause it's on your person. And if you, the car crash detection, like it tries to get your attention and you basically have to like stop it from calling.

Right. Yeah. Which I had to do when I fell, when I was running, I had to say, no, no, no, please. Well, actually it was a moment of like, well, I didn't hit my head, so I'm gonna say no to this. Cause I'm conscious and I understand what's going on. But yeah, otherwise it triggers. I don't know.

These are all like weirdly overlapping features. And that's even before you get to like the satellite stuff. Right, because that's my other question is, if you take a big fall with your iPhone when you're in satellite land, does it do an emergency satellite transmission then? I don't know if it does. Yeah.

Oh, you'd have to hold it up to the sky so you probably can. It's, yeah, you're right. They all overlap in weird ways, but it's complicated. David Schaub in our chat room is just pasted in an Apple support link with the one word description complicated. It's complicated is the answer here. Yeah just like Avril Lavigne said you know. But it's good to... Come on, you just let that go by? I'm, you know, the people on the YouTube version will see me give you a look.

I'm just gonna let it go by though. Yeah, anyway, so that's the deal here is yes, if you buy a cellular Apple Watch and don't put a plan on it, and you're somewhere and you need help, you will be able to call emergency services, at least in the US and probably in a bunch of other countries that have those rules, but that's it.

Just emergency services. You can't place an emergency phone call to your mom. That is not allowed. That's that you're getting around, you're kind of, can I make a collect call to my mom? No, you can't. You can call 911. That's all you can do. And at least in the US, that's how it works. But it's a good point that Doug mentions. And I think it's worth people knowing that that's what that interim SOS only, emergency only mode means. It's like, just because you don't have cell signal

doesn't mean you can't call for help if you need help. Right. The answer is just don't fall down. Do what you can. That is my advice. My best advice is don't fall down. We're not doctors but it seems good. I wanted to see, Ken, check in with you. You wrote this piece and you all spoke about it. The Mac is the model. How has response

been to that? That piece has been in the world now, like I don't know, a couple weeks, ten days or something. How has that been? I think it's actually been better than I thought. I think anytime you are in the business of writing about and having opinions about Apple, you know this. Criticizing Apple will always get people who will come out of the woodwork to say, but no, Apple is great and everything Apple does is fine. Like there are people who really are,

they only want people to be cheerleaders for Apple, which I've never really been. Like, I feel like I advocate for the users, not for the company. The company has got a lot of money and it doesn't need my help. But more positive than I thought. I mean, there was definitely some pushback from some people.

I think maybe one of the reasons it was muted is that the whole point of how I wrote the article was to say Apple itself has solved this problem and so Apple has its own solution that it built from the Mac. So that I feel like made it harder to make the argument that it's impossible for Apple to do this because Apple literally did it. That was my whole point.

I've definitely heard from people though, and like I understand the pushback that I've gotten that I expected but I think is more nuanced is people saying, but I like Apple being in complete control of the platform, right? Like that's basically the comment that I thought is, I think it's the most interesting is I like it here. I like it in the Waldgarten.

I like Apple having all the payment systems. I like all of that. And I understand that my problem with that is my argument is that you don't have to change unless you want to, but also that you may not even know some of the things you're missing because Apple has complete control over the entire market, right? There are things, there are apps, there are app experiences, there are website links that can't be made. And so you don't even know what the experience would be. I guess I got a version of that was the but Android already does this. So why? And my answer there is, I'm an iOS user, and telling me to leave the platform that I like, because I don't like their policy. Like that's, I mean, okay, but that's not my point. My point is that all computing platforms should have some level of the owner of the product being able to install software on it and not the other way. Not having the, the, uh, the maker of the product dictate what goes on that, that

computer essentially that can run arbitrary third party software. Plus there's the issue of, and we know a lot of these people, people who have invested their knowledge and skill set into developing for Apple platforms. You could say, well, that was their mistake. It's like, okay, but a lot of them came from the Mac, but they're also on iOS. I would argue they are a large portion of

the reason that the iPhone was successful, because they're the ones who developed apps in the app store, and they're captives because you can't take your iOS app and run it on Android. You can't. It's not the same skill set. It's not the same language. It's not the same APIs, and so they're kind of trapped. And yeah, it's easy to say, well, just re-educate and become a Java developer and go write Android apps where there's no market for it anyway, or just suck it up and make your money from Apple. They'll take their 15 or 30% and deal with it. But like my point is those are, those are people

saying, yeah, just take what you can get instead of me trying to be a little idealistic here and say, it's wrong. It's wrong. And that was my point. So not, not as vociferous feedback as I thought I would get, even though that's definitely out there. I think that also speaks to the overall feelings in the community about the App Store, right? Like, Apple's just, they've lost so much goodwill over these issues. And it's their own fault, right?

Yeah, yeah. It could have been, right? Like, they could exert, this is the thing that I think a lot of us feel, is they could have exerted an amount of control and skimmed an amount of money out of the App Store while addressing more of the issues that really set people off and it would have been fine this is the whole argument of like well why don't they want to compete because I think they could compete really strongly

and the answer is because it's better to just not compete And even to be a strong competitor who would take the lion's share of the revenue from the market The lion's share isn't all of it, which is sort of what they want to do But that is the point that I thought the point about like I don't want it to be complicated like I get it But that is sort of my point about the Mac model is, you know, by default you can't run unsigned software on the Mac. You have to go through lots of hoops to get there. And an administrator or a user can set it to only run from the Mac App Store, which I would assume in any circumstance would probably be the default on any future version of iOS. I don't think it would be particularly different. But you know it

frustrates me but I understand it when people sort of say but I don't want it so it shouldn't happen because the point is other people might want it and and I don't love it when people say well I'm okay so it doesn't matter what other people feel. Like that's not a great impulse. Yeah if if they open it up, it's just an option, right? You're not, like with the Mac, right? Again, going back to the Mac is the model. If you wanna live just within the Mac App Store, you can. Now, it's not a perfect analogy

because there's a lot of software on the Mac that's not available in the Mac App Store. But again, you have the option for other, yeah, for lots of reasons actually. But yeah, I just, I love the piece. I really thought about it a lot and just wanted to kind of see how it was. Cause you know, sometimes it feels like

these sorts of topics are potentially spicy. Yeah, yeah, it was, I mean, I had that moment where I was thinking about it and I got frustrated and I was like, I gotta write this sometime. And then when I was writing, I'm like, well, you know, I believe this, I believe that it's sort of fundamentally that if we buy a thousand dollar plus computing devices,

we should be able to put software on them. And that if you're somebody who has a skill set writing software, you shouldn't be at the whims and under the complete control of the platform owner. It just feels wrong. And I know that that's a weird, squishy, emotional, and moral argument, but I do really legitimately believe it, that it just, it feels wrong.

Like not leaving the business model stuff aside, it just feels wrong for that to be the case, that this is, I don't believe that computers and phones and iPads are computers, should be entirely closed platforms that are dictated by the company that makes the OS. I think that that is wrong. And of course, what's gonna happen is Apple's not gonna say, you're right, Jason.

I apologize, we'll change our business model. What's going to happen is what is already starting to happen in the EU, which is regulators will say, no, you can't do it this way. And the good news here, I guess, in a way is that Apple has already built this other model and they have already used it. Now, the bad news is I news is I mentioned notarization in the piece and mentioned that there was one example of Apple using kind of notarization as a weapon in the EU. And the very week I wrote that, there were then some new cases where Apple used notarization

as a weapon in the EU. And I mean, I'm not a European lawyer again, but interesting, feels to me like they are not going to be able to make that work because what they basically said is we've created a new open system called notarization and while it involves us approving everything, we're not going to use it for evil. And then immediately they said, oh, but we don't like this app. So it won't be notarized by us, which is de facto app store outside the app store. I can't see how the European Commission will ever allow that kind of behavior. It seems to be in complete opposition to the whole idea. So we'll see. But what really bothers me is it tarnishes the Mac model, because what it

suggests is that that second ring of software, which is checked by Apple and signed by Apple, is going to be used as the first ring, as an approval system for apps that Apple doesn't like, not to protect users, but because Apple has just decided they don't want it. And the example that I've given a couple of times is, if third-party apps could run outside of the app store, we'd have macOS running on iPad, because all the emulators would appear and you'd be able to run Linux and you'd be able to run Windows, and presumably at would appear and you'd be able to run Linux

and you'd be able to run Windows and presumably at that point you'd be able to run Mac OS. Yeah, Mac OS is just right there. Since it's literally the same hardware, you would be able to do that. And I'm pretty sure that's why you can't is because Apple doesn't want to do that. And Apple wants either the option to do it themselves or to have nobody do it. Like I think that that's the motivator but like I really don't like the idea that even in a system that was open like in the EU where there's theoretically this other pathway if you tried to submit VMware or parallels for iPad to notarize to get into a marketplace in the EU,

I feel like Apple would just refuse to notarize it. And that's not great, right? Like that's completely contrary. So I don't know. I think in the end, that at least a large portion of this is going to come to pass because I just don't think, I don't think regulators in many parts of the world,

at least, will do it. And the only question is, will the regulators, will it be enough of a fragmentation that Apple just says, okay, we give up. Like we don't wanna have two completely different models for what we do worldwide. We're gonna just build this single model.

But I don't know, I'm not gonna get my hopes up. No, me neither. You know what I can get my hopes up about though? Oh, that's a great segue. Is it the Upgradees? It is. It is the 11th annual Upgradees. Tell people how they can nominate.

All right, well, so the way this works is you send in your suggestions and they are votes, but they're also suggestions for things that Mike and I can look at. And then Mike will compile the results using a fancy shortcut that's really just a Python script that I wrapped in a shortcut to make Mike feel better. And because Mike's resistance, you know this,

Mike's resistance to technical things is fascinating, right? Like I pushed him on this and I was like, oh, you could do a shortcut. Oh, there's a Python script. And he's like, no, no. And I finally, I wrapped a Python script inside the shortcut and sent it to him. And then he saw it running and he was like, oh, okay, yes. Now he loves it.

It's the best thing ever. But anyway, so he will compile. But we want your suggestions. It will guide us. We make the final decision. Sometimes we go with what the upgradians want. Sometimes we use that and keep it under advisement. Sometimes it breaks ties and sometimes it makes us go out and do

our own research about these apps that we've never heard of. Why is everybody raving about this app that I've never heard of, and we go check it out and it our own research about these apps that we've never heard of. And why is everybody raving about this app that I've never heard of? And we go check it out and it's awesome. So that's great too. Lots of great reasons to do it. You don't have to fill out every form or every item in the form. If you don't want to, it's fine. But like, we want to hear from you and we want to know what you liked this year

basically, and what you're, what you are liking. So go to Upgradees.com. Uh, sorry, Upgradees.vote will be where you can vote and Upgradees.com will show you all of the previous winners. And you've gotten a few more days. You've got 11 more days. So a little more than a week. But again, don't leave it to the last minute. Upgradees.vote. And the official Upgradees program will be, we're going to record it and release it on December 30th, right at the end of the year. That'll be our big happy new year celebration with our favorite stuff.

Nice to go out on a positive note, I think. It is, yeah. I like it. And you know, Connected has won two favorite podcast awards, one away from Lifetime Achievement, just putting that out there. Yeah, even though one of the hosts is on Upgrade,

somehow that happened. He recuses himself sort of, but I like connected. And upgrade. Upgrade never gets votes by the way. People should vote for upgrade as favorite podcast because you're listening to upgrade right now. Come on, people.

I always like it when upgrade is third on the list of favorite podcasts. It's just like seeing, I've been seeing all of these overcast shares of people's podcast listening and the ones that make me laugh. So many of them are like, ATP and then maybe the talk show and I'm like, is Upgrade in there? And they're like, Upgrade's in there.

It's not up at the top for most of them, but it's like, it's in there. It's in there. And we appreciate that. I don't need to be number one here, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. ATP's got home court advantage.

They really, I mean, really. That is, it's a podcast by the person who makes mean, really. That is, that's when it's podcast by the person who makes the podcast app. That is about as good as you can. Talk about your advantages. Apple would kill for that advantage. Yeah, vertical integration, I think is what they call it. I think that might be it.

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and use promo code upgrade20 at checkout. That's the only way to get 20% off. J-O-I-N-D-E-L-E-T-E-M-E.com slash upgrade 20. I'm not gonna spell upgrade. You can do that for yourself. Enter code upgrade 20 at checkout. Join delete me.com slash upgrade 20 code upgrade 20. Thank you to delete me for supporting upgrade and relay. It's rumor roundup time, Stephen. Yeehaw. Yeah, there we go.

Uh, you're, you're in the spirit. You got a new horse. I do. It's a nice little brown horse. I got a mustache. So that counts for something. That's right. You're basically a cowboy already. That's right.

Yes, that's true. I am titanium. No, well, are you? I'm not. That's the question, Jason. Oh, the iPhone 17. Might it be losing titanium? It could be. So there's been this back and forth in the rumors, which are really my favorite is like

when rumor people are fighting each other. It's like in, uh, uh, anger, man, you know? Sure. And then Mark Gurman comes in with a Trident, kills everybody. Yeah, exactly. There's a, it really went off the rails quickly. So yeah, so the question is the iPhone 17 Pro

and 17 Pro Max, will they feature titanium, just like the 15 and 16 Pro line? And I think it's really interesting. I love the titanium. I think, obviously, weighing less is good. I like that it's not as smudgy like the stainless steel was. But I just wonder, like, do people care about this? I don't think they do. It's a good question. So I got a couple titanium thoughts here. Welcome to our new segment. I like

to call it Titanium Thoughts. Titanium Thoughts. I got a titanium phone. I treated myself to a, or not titanium phone, titanium watch. So the higher, the more expensive watch. Cause I was like, you know what? I, birthdays and anniversaries and stuff. And I buy like presents for Lauren and sometimes it's jewelry and I don't really wear jewelry to speak of. of, at least, you know, not at the level where I'm, you know, by an earring, or by earrings by a ring, by a necklace. I like, it's nice, but I'm not into that. And I thought, well, what is the equivalent?

What could I ask for? And it was, I thought, you know, I'm gonna treat myself to a nicer Apple watch. And I got the black titanium Apple watch. Now I have the series 10 and it's the black aluminum series 10. And Stephen, I could not tell the difference if you asked me between aluminum and titanium.

It's all mental. I mean, it was really nice, but this one is really nice too. And this is the thing about the iPhone. Like I like the idea of a lighter frame. I like the idea of a lighter phone, lighter watch, all this like great. And maybe somebody out there can say, oh yes,

but you don't understand it was like the stainless steel was heavy is the problem. Not that aluminum and titanium are both pretty light. Stainless steel was very heavy. So if they go to aluminum instead of titanium, I don't think it'll make that much of a difference. I do think that Apple brilliantly used titanium for at least two years as a major differentiator

on products that didn't change very much, right? I mean, like I see all those ads, there's like the AT&T ad where the AT&T lady is like, it's the new iPhone with titanium. I think. Who cares, right? But I think it was pretty effective as just it's different and doesn't it sound cool.

And so I mean, fine. But in some ways that were really saying not heavy like stainless. And so, you know, fine, but in some ways, they were really saying, not heavy, like stainless. And so, you know, I don't know. I don't know, what do you think? I think the visual sort of material difference maybe makes more of a difference in other markets than the US, right?

We talk about this a lot. When the phone changes shape or design, they'll have kind of a big year in China and some other markets because that's valued more highly than it is here, which I find really interesting. But I think speaking about the American market, I agree with you. The weight, like moving from stainless steel was the big change and it is remarkable if you pick up a stainless steel phone, like it really does feel heavier. But most people, you know, slapping their phones in cases

so that they never see those rails. They don't really care about the smudginess maybe the way some of us do. And so, you know, I think if they were to go to aluminum on the pro phones, like I don't think it's that, I don't think it's that big of a deal. You know, I think people would, it would be a cycle, right?

And then they would just still sell a bajillion phones. Yeah, I think especially if there are other design changes, they'll use those to sell them. And if it's aluminum and they'll just say it's lighter. And I don't think there are gonna be a lot of people who feel like I'm so betrayed that there's no titanium, right? Like, I mean, there there are gonna be a lot of people who feel like I'm so betrayed that there's no titanium. Right? Like, I mean, there'll probably be like a handful

of super titanium fans who are like, how dare you? I only buy things made of titanium. But otherwise, I think an aluminum frame is fine. I think it's funny, because this is a style issue too, right? It's like Apple felt like aluminum was light, but you know, kind of boring. And that the stainless, it was like, but you know, kind of boring and that the stainless it was like no stainless

It's surgical stainless steel. It's beautiful and heavy and weighty and and and that was like a selling point and then they're like it's too heavy Titanium is better and they put that on there is really yeah, like you said, it's a cycle. It's fashion. It's There's no one right answer so So they keep kind of moving around as they need to or as they feel they need to. And I think that's okay. Yeah, I think people buy the pro phones for the cameras. Right, like that's why people upgrade. Maybe the screen, but I think mostly the cameras.

And as much as I like titanium, and I really like this phone and the phone right before it, like it wouldn't be a big deal to me if they went to aluminum. And it would make the colors our conversation even more awkward, you know, but that's fine. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I feel like they can make colors on anything now,

but certainly on aluminum, we know that they can and they're good at it. And it's affordable and light and it's a great material, right? So they should do whatever they need to do. I think I think it's interesting to say to wonder what do the people who designed the iPhone and the materials used in it think about the style choices, right? Because like if they had their druthers and they didn't care about selling titanium or stainless, would they always use aluminum? And were those directives sort of, let's shake it up? Or were they bottom up where they're like, we want to try titanium, and the execs are like, yeah, let's do it, we can market that. I don't, I don't know. I would like to believe that it's the engineers sort of saying, why don't we try a different material?

But I do wonder if it's actually, you know, them being kind of prodded by people to say, well, why don't we try this other thing? Why don't we try another material? Because, you know, the fact is it's not just a utilitarian block. It is a device that needs to be marketed and it has a fashion element to it. And that's part of the design too. Is it the designers who say, you know, let's do titanium this year?

And the engineers are like, okay, we can do that. I don't know what the push and pull is there. And if the engineers had their druthers, they would just always use aluminum or whatever. I honestly don't know. Yeah, well, and this year notably, they are using aluminum inside the phone for that better heat dissipation.

That was an issue with the 15 Pro. So yeah, it's super interesting. I'm sure there's always that tension between people making the devices and the people selling the devices. It's also interesting that the Apple watch, right? Stainless steel at the beginning was the nice material once they got rid of the gold.

Like we don't talk about that one. And then they moved to titanium and now it's aluminum and titanium. I think the steel is still available on the Hermes watch, but they've moved away from steel there. And I can tell you on the Apple watch, it made a huge weight difference because I wore stainless steel watch for years

and then went to the titanium whenever that was the series. Oh, sure. Six or seven or whatever. Yeah, Lauren had her first Apple Watch was stainless. And again, it was sort of me being nice, but then she went to the aluminum and was like, oh, it's so much lighter. Yeah. It was stainless was nice and all,

but like the aluminum one is, that's the, I think that's Apple's problem, is that the truth is that on the Apple Watch, the aluminum is the best. It's just the best, cause it's so light. I think the only little like niggle I have with that is that the aluminum gets the ion glass and you get sapphire with the nicer metal and the sapphire displays do hold up better.

I agree, but they could, like, there's nothing stopping them from making aluminum on all the Apple Watch models with the nicer glass, right? Or the higher end model of aluminum comes with a nicer glass. They've decided to differentiate based on metal, but I guess what I'm saying is they could just all be aluminum and it probably would be fine,

except the reason I bought a titanium Apple Watch is like I wanted to treat myself and get something nicer. And it was nice, but aluminum is nice, and I'm not sure there's much difference in between them. At least for me, there isn't. So we'll see how my series 10 holds up it's good doing great so far I'm liking it it's nice I went through I went like three years without an Apple Watch update and so for me you know it's it's so much thinner and I actually I can see how much thinner it is just it's not

bulging above my wrist like the old sensor did. It's really nice. And it's yeah. And I got the black aluminum so it's all shiny. And so the shininess matches the shininess of the glass and it's a really good look. So I'm liking it.

I got this watch at in Memphis. You did. You lost it on my couch. I did. I did. Good times. Good times. It was good times. my couch. I did, I did. Good times, good times. It was good times. All right, I wanted to talk,

it was Thanksgiving last week, and what happens, I think, for a lot of our listeners, and for us, is when you visit with family, you also do troubleshooting for family. I have a troubleshooting story that I want to tell and then I'm curious if you've got any too. My father-in-law sent me an email last week that was like, Jason, when you're down here, if you don't mind taking time away from your vacation, I have some technical questions for you. Of course I will help you with your thing. So Friday, I'm thinking,

well, today's the day we're going to do the technical things. I'm literally sitting at the at the kitchen table, we just got there, I'm drinking some tea. And Elliot walks in and says, he's just gotten back. This is what it is. I'm drinking tea. He's just gotten back from a bike ride. He walks in, he's still got his like yellow bike jacket on like visibility jacket. And I'm thinking, oh, he's gonna, you know, take off his stuff and maybe take a shower or do whatever he needs to do and then maybe we'll do the troubleshooting he immediately walks up to me and says

Jason do you have time now to do the troubleshooting I'm like well first off you gotta know my father-in-law this is exactly like him which is like he's got a list in his head and he he waited on Thanksgiving he's like I'm not gonna ask him on Thanksgiving we agreed we talked about it on Friday but literally the first second he sees me on on on Friday he's yeah Jason I'm not gonna ask him on Thanksgiving. We agreed, we talk about it on Friday. But literally the first second he sees me on Friday, he's like, Jason. Let's go. So there are three things,

and I just wanna say them, because I think it's fascinating. It's fascinating to see, you know, we set people up and then we walk away and then we're gone for a long time. And then you come back and you're like, what, it's that community, Jeff, where Troy brings the pizza in and everything's on fire. You're like, what? It's that community, Jeff, where Troy brings the pizza in

and everything's on fire. You're like, I was just here. What is happening? Yeah, what did you do? So one of these, I put them in our show notes. What do you think, the first one, what is my first item? It's your first item. Do you see it?

It's all, I'll tell you what it is. You can guess. Two password. Any idea? Okay. Two password. Does that mean two factor? No.

Oh, if only it did. If only it did. Two password means that my, my father-in-law's complaint was I used to be able to auto fill passwords and click on open site in one password and it would autofill the password and now it doesn't. Can you fix this? And what I discovered when I went to his applications folder is that his applications folder contained one password seven

and one password. They were both open in the doc. So two versions of onePassword were open simultaneously. And there were like five OnePassword.zip like backup files of the app in that folder too. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is too many OnePasswords. So I, and he said something about like, yeah,

but on my, I use the, he's basically, he's using his one password cloud password on his Mac, but he's using his old volt password on his iPhone. And he felt like they, I don't know what the rationale is here. So I, I deleted all the old one passwords, making sure that the whole vault was synced in the, in the cloud and all that for the, for the actual current version of OnePassword.

He handed me his phone, two versions of OnePassword on his phone too, so we deleted OnePassword 7, you opened up OnePassword 8, I made sure Autofill was on and all the places. His behavior is fascinating. I didn't understand this, but this is a thing you can do. He goes to secure sites by opening that site in one password and click open.

Right. And then it opens the browser and auto fills the password, which I find bizarre, but it's supported. It's a thing you can do in one password. So two password, he had too many one passwords. It's so much. And his password, oh, the other thing, his password is incredibly detailed, as you might expect, because you don't want to steal the logins of a retired person. I mean, he's got his financial stuff and all that. I get it. So he's put it under a very difficult password.

And we get to the phone, and I'm like, well, it won't be so bad on the phone. You won't have to pack it in on the software keyboard because you use Face ID. And he doesn't use Face ID. And I said, why don't you use Face ID? And he says, I just don't want to do it. I like having a password. OK. I mean, you're the one closer to the end of your life

who is spending a minute typing in a very complicated password every time you want to open one password on your phone. It's your choice. It's your choice. I'm going to let that one go. Anyway, two passwords. Two password. He also said, I have this thing where when I'm clicking on menu items or things in the interface that it doesn't click. I said, well, what does it do? He says, well, it will bring up usually it will bring up like a, like a menu or something, but it doesn't click.

I'm thinking, well, that's the alt click, that's control click or right click, and he's using an Apple mouse. And I investigated and here's the best I can guess. I don't know this for certain, but here's the best I can guess. And this is this whole computer mystery solver thing that I think a lot of technical people have to do. And some of it is really intuition. It is that we've seen so many things. It's like my story about the guy at the Apple Store who, when I was completely distraught about my Mac studio, who's like, I think I know what this is. And within like 10 minutes, we had solved it, because he'd seen it a million times and he could see the pattern. Whereas I couldn't see the pattern because it had not really happened to me before.

So I showed him the, or the mouse setting where you can actually say, don't use the right side of the mouse as an alt click. But I asked him and he does seem to use a right click from time to time. So in the end, much to my surprise, my solution to his mouse click problem was behavioral. I said, I think what's happening is, as you're using the mouse, slowly, your hand is creeping to the right. Got it.

And the mouse is getting a little tilted. And then when you click, you're clicking with your index finger or whatever that you think is going to be a left click. But you're actually over on the other side and it's a right click or maybe it's right in the middle and it's not registering at all. And so when you have this thing again, look at your hand and maybe reposition and maybe that will solve it. I don't know 100% but I think that's what's going on.

And I told him if this continues to be a problem, turn off the right click in the mouse settings and just use control click when you need to bring up a menu. So we'll see what happens with that. But I was fascinated, I'm like, I think you're just holding it wrong. Like, that's literally what it is, is you're just not paying attention. And I'm not a mouse user, so I really don't know.

But that's my best guess, is that his finger is just kind of going rightward until he's right here Or he's left clicking on the right side. I Don't know. Yeah as Kyle points out in discord like Kudos that he's using a password manager at all. He's already already really ahead of the curve Yeah, he asked me about that at one point and I said you should use one password and and one thing I will give my father-in-law Great credit for is if I basically say, here's a thing

and you have to pay for it, but it solves your problem, he's like, I have already bought it now, right? Like he's instantly bought it. He has no fear of that. It's like, if I say this will solve your problem, he's like, great, where do I buy it? And he's been using it faithfully, like I said, apparently two at a time, but faithfully.

So yeah, also, I should say the dynamic in this house is hilarious because my mother-in-law has a MacBook Air. And my father-in-law has an iMac. It's an Intel iMac. And on a desk, it's a beautiful desk. I think it's an uplift, like bamboo top. It's gorgeous. It's great. Long, and it's got the printer on it. It's got a bunch of papers on it. But it's an iMac. So he's a desktop user.

That's how he wants to use it. And she does not want to use a desktop at all. She wants to use a laptop. I think it's just an interesting split between them. Anyway, the last one is spam in his email. Yeah. That one can be tricky. So this, this one, what, what I found is that he was, he was saying, I get these

emails and I block the sender, but they keep sending me email and I said, okay, there's a few things going on here. I said, first off, if it's truly spam, blocking the sender will do nothing because they will send from another randomized email address. So it will never, blocking sender is not the solution. You block a sender if it's like a person who's bad. So I said, first thing you gotta do

is you gotta send it to junk, send it to your junk mail. And Apple Mail junk filtering was on, but he wasn't training it and he was still getting this stuff. So I said, okay, step one, send it to junk mail. Step two, if it feels like it's a legitimate mailing list that you just don't want to be on, Apple Mail puts a unsubscribe button at the top, just click the unsubscribe button. He says, well, what if it's a spammer? I said, well, the worst thing that happens is that they see that you're alive and they, uh, and they, they send you more spam. But most spammers don't really do the unsubscribe thing. And I'm like, but like, if it's a company that you've had some dealing with in the past, never want to hear from again, just click unsubscribe, but otherwise add them, you know, add them to junk that trains the junk interface and your life will be better for it. So I just thought it was really interesting that he had decided block sender was the right way to deal with spammers. And it's not. And then he said, of course, but I still get them. What do I do when I'm on my iPhone? I'm like, well, here's the thing.

Apple's decided that spam doesn't happen on the iPhone, so there is no junk mail interface at all. Yeah. And he's not using Gmail or iCloud Mail. He's using mail from his internet provider, Cox. So, I was gonna say like, you just can't, sorry. Can't be done. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I use Gmail for everything

and I can just drag it in the junk folder and then it learns and I actually have, well, I don't even use mail, I use Gmail for everything and I can just drag it in the junk folder and then it it learns and I actually have well, I don't even use Miley's Mime Stream, but I don't have any like client side Yeah, I just let it all happen at the server. I have Gmail and I have sandbox Form response. Yeah, and and so I use Mime Stream and they are doing all of that filtering for me, which is great, right? But if you are, you know, and that also means that on my phone, it's also filtered, even though I'm using Apple Mail on my phone, it doesn't matter because the spam filtering

is happening regardless. And I will, most of my training that I do is that I get on all these garbage mailing lists, I think because I'm press and I'm circulating in some press list, and or podcasts, You get this. I'm sure it's the hello podcast. I can make you a more successful podcast.

Please get in touch. And those all go in the same black hole. And I never hear from these people. Goodbye. So yeah. Yeah. So it's a nightmare. So do you have any recent troubleshooting things going?

Oh, I should mention you are the, in addition to being the cohost of Connected, cohost of Mac Power Users, and you have a troubleshooting episode coming up. Is that true? We do. Sunday's episode will be about this. In hindsight, probably should have done it

before Thanksgiving in America, but we missed that. Still got it before the big holidays in December, so that's good, right? There's a lot of holidays in December, so there'll be a lot of family, whether it's Christmas or Hanukkah or anything else. So you're gonna be able to get people before the, the more extended I would say,

Thanksgiving is sometimes so fast. Like I was in Orange County and I didn't get to see your MPU co-host, David Sparks, because I literally had no time that was not the, sort of two days of intense family time and then that was it. Christmas often is, you really do have that time unless your father-in-law is such a go-getter

that he's like, Jason, now let's do it. You may need to relax. So I think it's still good to have, this is a good time to do the troubleshooting episode. Yeah, yeah. So Sunday we're talking about iCloud and iPhone storage space backups, printing, badFi, that sort of thing. What I noticed over Thanksgiving,

and really just kind of in general is like, I have family members who ask me about AI because they either have heard the buzzwords or they've seen the Apple commercials with Apple Intelligence, which as we have all talked about, about not a great ad because that's not really out yet. And that i think is gonna be something that a lot of people like us gradients were gonna face that in the holiday season of you know our. And uncles and whoever asking about these things and some people have some pretty wild ideas about what is possible or what's coming. And it could be difficult to have nuance

in some of those conversations. Like when I sort of realized that this was happening was an extended family member who is kind of a tech bro. Like he works at a start. He has a startup and he wears a vest and drives a Tesla. Typical. Typical. Asking, you know, he was very excited about AI

and wanted to know like what things I thought it would revolutionize. And my answer was like, I think for most people, like some of the writing tools may be interesting. And then my big thing is like, I don't think society is ready for anyone in the world to make AI generated images. And, you know, Apple has sort of had a softball with it because their styles are very cartoony,

you're very hand-drawn, you're not making photorealistic stuff with Apple's tools. I think that that is them trying to avoid these issues while still having the feature. But you can go ask any number of things to make a lifelike image of anybody and they're pretty good at this point. And I don't think we're ready for that.

I don't think people are ready for that. And he was like, ah, yeah, no, but it's gonna like cure diseases or whatever. Like, yeah, he was like, yeah, no, but it's going to like, you know, cure diseases or whatever. Like, yeah, that may also be true, but I'm more worried about my family members on Facebook seeing an image that's not true, not accurate. I've already seen it. Like I've seen it unfold already on social media.

And I think we got to all be prepared to answer those questions. Yeah, I mean, yeah. It's like, how do we talk to your kids about the birds and the bees? how do we talk to your kids about the birds and the bees? How do we talk to your uncle about AI features and that tech bro cousin in your family about AI?

I mean, my stock line about AI all along has been, it's overhyped and also could be huge, right? I think it's both, and I think we don't entirely know exactly what parts are gonna be huge. And I think it's both and I think we don't entirely know exactly what parts are going to be huge. And I think it's interesting to see the stories that suggest that they are running into problems building better models. And the hype train is so hard that it's actually really hard to tell whether that's the backlash speaking. Certainly, if you're in an AI company and you're running into problems, you would deny it, right? You would be like, no, no, no, I need my stock options. I know we're great. We're great. Our company is great. So it's actually kind of hard to

tell, but it is possible that there's going to be a correction where people realize that right now we're in the what doesn't it do phase where it's like AI is the solution to all of life's problems. And you know what? It's not, I think I can give you 100% guarantee that it's not that all of the things that people claim AI can do will not be things AI can do. Some of them may, right? I think some of them will, but not all of them. And that's going to lead to some bumps where some companies that are driven by AI are going to be like, Oh, yeah, we can't do that. And some of them are gonna go out of business,

they're gonna spend a lot of money now, assuming there's gonna be a big payoff, and they're gonna discover that there isn't a big payoff, and there'll be a consolidation. I actually wonder if that will ultimately be a validation to Apple's, like Apple didn't do it on purpose, it wasn't their strategy to get behind on AI,

they were caught flat-footed, but it may be a benefit to them because they may be a benefit to them, because they may be late enough to the party that they can choose useful investments better than some companies have done. I don't know. Yeah, that's interesting.

I hadn't thought about it through that lens. But yeah, that could definitely be how it would be. They may luck out, basically. They're like, oh, well, our small models running on devices that don't cost us a lot in terms of these huge data centers, and we're focusing on summarization and writing tools and some automation, like user automation,

I think, is a potentially huge place where this stuff could be successful. That's why I'm excited about the App Intents and the personal context and being able to, I love user automation, but even at the shortcuts level, it's way too complicated for people. And if people could say, hey, assistant,

I'd like to do this thing and have it know that you could grab from this app and take it here and transform it in this way and then put it into this app and all of that without you actually having to think like a programmer, I think that's awesome. But we'll see. I mean, Apple is behind on this stuff, but maybe they'll dodge a bullet.

I don't know. Related to this, my spider sense went off while listening to Connected last week. I'm in the shower, because I listen to podcasts in the shower and when I'm walking the dog don't be creepy It's just how it is I I have two places that I can really reliably listen to podcasts when I'm not driving back and forth to LA in which case

Wow, we listen to a lot of podcasts, but For this listening connect connected in the shower yesterday and you're talking about your Apple Watch battery issues and You say well, I think it might be the fast charging. I think maybe, which I immediately thought it could be that. So to back up, you and your wife both simultaneously started having battery issues with your Apple Watches, which is deeply suspicious, right?

That it's like, it's gotta be something that's happening on both devices. And all of the things we can isolate are, there was probably a software update at some point that hit both on both devices. And all of the things we can isolate are, there was probably a software update at some point that hit both of your devices. All right, okay. You changed the chargers. And although that doesn't seem like

it would make any difference, and I don't think you're suggesting that maybe fast charging an Apple Watch battery just nukes it, right, and makes it worse. I do wonder if Apple's charging algorithm on the Apple Watch, it's charging firmware, might like handle charging from the fast charger different and might taper it at the top differently

and might even display the battery status differently. And I wonder if it's one of those things where you're using the fast charger, it charges fast, but it doesn't charge as completely. And you end up with a little less battery. You think it's full, but it's not. I had that thought, but the thing that made me literally stick my hand out of the shower, pick up my phone and send you a text from the shower, which I did.

Because I didn't want to forget it. Cause you know, then the conversation is going to go on and I'm going to, I'm going to, because I didn't want to forget it. Cause you know, then the conversation is going to go on and I'm going to, I'm going to miss it and I'm going to forget it was you changed your wifi and you went to two wifi, a ubiquity wifi base stations. And I just, it was again, it's probably not it, but it was doing that pattern recognition thing that happens when you're a technology person and you're trying to troubleshoot, which was, is it possible that even though the Wi-Fi

is perfectly fine for your laptops and your phones, if it's just weak enough in the places where you wear your watch, that it has to ramp up the Wi-Fi power in order to get on your Wi-Fi network, or it doesn't see one of them and it sees the far away one and it's expending enough power

that it's pulling more from your battery and it's invisible to you because you're still on the wifi. A little like how if you're in a bad cell reception area, your phone will get hot because it has to really crank up the power in order to get anything on the receiving end. So that was enough of an idea that you didn't mention

that I, so sorry, I sent you a text from the shower. It happens. Yeah, no, it was good. And some connected listeners had also said like, hey, you know, this happened. When you swapped out your wifi. When you swapped from Eero to Unify. And it was not only that the battery life was bad but

also our watches would drop basically drop off the network so they would be disconnected from our phones yeah and I think that also was like cycling into the battery thing like oh I don't know what to do my phone is gone and I spent some time this weekend doing some looking around, some searching and came across a couple posts, none of them super recent, but people having similar issues with Unifi. And so I made a couple of changes to the network,

just, and honestly, Jason, some of them I don't understand. It's like, oh, change this sort of handoff to this other kind of handoff. It's network voodoo. When I had a ubiquity router for a while, it's the only ubiquity product I've had, but it was one of those things where I'm like, I don't know what any of this stuff means.

I'll just check some boxes. But that's one of the things you can do is like, if I check this box, what happens? If I, you know, it's a one level above, turn it off and back on again. By the way, I should mention my father-in-law he did have another problem later in the day where he's like Jason I clicked open to open this email and it opened with a blank nothing and I tried I did command-q I was like well

let's quit and relaunch mail and I did command-q and nothing happened and I thought let's restart your Mac and then it all was fine after that it's like you got to go through the steps you got to go through tier one troubleshooting which is did you try to turn it off and back on again and then get there? But like for networking, I mean, that's, that's what you, even if you don't know anything, that's what you do is like, maybe DHCP Lisa should be longer. Maybe they should be shorter. Maybe this weird repeater thing should be on if it's off. I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

So I changed a couple of settings and then last night came across a more recent thread that people were having issues with this. If six gigahertz was turned on, because then like the phones on 6e, Wi-Fi 6e, which the Apple watch doesn't support. And so I turned that off and I'm still getting gigabit speed. Like five gigahertz will give you gigabit Wi-Fi speed.

And so I'm not really losing any speed from going down. And then someone else also recommended forget the Wi-Fi network on your phone and like rejoin it. Cause I used the same SSID and password as I had before. Cause I didn't want to run around and like rejoin the new Wi-Fi network to a bunch of devices. And so I've done all of those things and so far it's been okay, but it's only been like 12 hours.

So we'll see. I do think my wife's like small size series eight, like when a small watch gets down to 88% battery or whatever, like you start to feel it more than the Ultra. For sure. And so I think she may end up getting an upgrade anyways, but yeah, I need to continue to chip away at this. I'm pretty convinced that it's something with the wifi-Fi now. Ooh, oh, what a validation for Shower Jason.

Yes, I think Shower Jason was right. And as we're thinking of people, someone even emailed me with some suggestions, which is very kind. Thank you, I've emailed back and forth with somebody now about this for a little bit. So we'll see. We will see how this goes.

And I don't, you know, it's fixable, I'm sure. I think maybe Mary's watch was probably right on the edge, right, where it was still getting it done, but just a little phantom battery drain is enough to make it suddenly, right? Cause you hit the wall where it's like, well, if I can't wear it all day, because I'm sitting at home in the evening

and it's 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. and it's telling me I'm at 10% and I'm gonna die, that's when you notice, right? If it goes from being 30% when you go to bed to 20% when you go to bed, it doesn't matter. But when suddenly you start getting the alerts, and so it's just enough phantom battery drain somewhere in the process to tick her watch over into panic mode, but you could also get her a new watch that'd be nice. Yeah yeah yeah I usually get her every three years anyways so it's it's about time but we'll see you know I'm hopeful that turning off six gigahertz is enough for now and like and if you're listening and you have UniFi stuff and you've had issues like this please reach out because I would like to get this solved

and you've had issues like this, please reach out. Because I would like to get this solved. I believe it's fixable. Like the fact that there's really not a lot online about it suggests that this is not a widespread thing. And I reached out to some friends with UniFi stuff. They're like, no, we haven't seen this. And so I think it's probably something maybe unique to my setup, but we will see.

But you know, this is like some of the fun stuff, right? Like, yeah, it's super annoying that my watch just disappears from my phone and like, my activity rings are empty for the day. Like, that's not great. But part of it, a little part of me, I'm also having fun with it. It's a mystery to be solved.

Because the kids are still being able to stream Netflix, right, it's not like it's broken my network. It's just like, it's really just affecting me and Mary. And like, she didn't even notice until Siri didn't work. She's a big Siri on the watch person. But I feel like it's, there's a fix out there. What series watch does she have again? She is on the series eight, the little one.

So she doesn't have the Siri on the watch, right, at all. Right, but I mean, just like hitting the button and talking to Siri and it's really going through the phone. So having gone from the, I think, seven to the 10, because I think it's the nine and the 10 that have the onboard Siri and the Ultras, she's gonna love that upgrade, right? Because that's the thing that I use,

I use it mostly for like reminders and timers and stuff, but man, having the model running on the device instead of having to go back to the phone. Yeah. It's so great. It's so great. Uh, it's much more responsive. I used to just get so frustrated with Siri on the watch because it would spin and spin and spin and spin and then say, like, I give up.

And now it never does that because the hardware is improved to the point where you can run that stuff on the device. It's great. So she'll love that. I hadn't even thought about that. But yeah, that that that plus the battery may be enough for me to feel good. Maybe I can maybe I can find a Cyber Monday deal. Thanks Unify today.

Thanks Unify. Costing me even bringing families together. Even more money. Yeah, yeah. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Smarter World, if you're in a podcast that delve into how tech shapes our lives, which, I mean, you're here, aren't you? This ad read is for you. I am here, Jason. Steven, let me tell you.

Let's sit down here. I'm going to turn my cap around. Turn this chair around backward. We're gonna wrap a little. Okay, tell me. Let's start with a couple questions. How do you control a robotic arm with your voice? Which technology allows cars to communicate

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And I thought, this is really bad. They need a better system. So this is cool. AppliedEV shared how they're working to bring autonomous driving vehicles to delivery fleets and commercial vehicles. And another episode, Damon Motors explained how they're redefining the riding experience

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and lots and lots of advice from people I know about what kind of computer I should buy. Because I'm feeling the Mac Mini sweats, right? Like the, oh, that Mac Mini Pro chip, so impressive. Do I want that? I have a Mac Studio M1 Max, which is really, really good. I ran benchmark tests against the Pro, and I was like, well, it's way faster at CPU, but actually, because it has so many fewer GPU cores than my M1, it's only like a 7% GPU boost, which is impressive going from a Max to a Pro. But if I'm going to get a new computer after three

years, I want a really impressive jump. And that was enough to get me off of the Mac mini train, I think, even though it's so cute, because I thought it's just, it's not enough of a benefit for me, even though it's sorely tempting. But it's just like, okay, maybe I'll just wait and see. There'll probably be the high end of the Mac mini and the low end of the Mac studio usually crossover and you get the Mac's chip in the Mac Studio, even the base model is going to be way more impressive than the high end Mac Mini, and presumably will blow my existing Mac Studio out of the water. And this was great until some of my friends, and I use that term somewhat

pejoratively here here said, Jason, you have a laptop that you travel with sometimes. You have a desk in your garage and you have a desk in the back of the house that you use a lot in the winter because you don't want to heat your garage and it's a separate space heater. All of this is true. And they say, you should just get a MacBook Pro.

You can get an M4 Max MacBook Pro today. You don't even need to wait for the Mac Studio. And the best part is, you know, Macs are good at syncing data, but they're not great at syncing data. There's a lot of data that doesn't sync. You're like, oh, suddenly this app, I think it was Hazel the other day,

where it was like, oh, Hazel doesn't know what to do on this, and the Python version was different, and this thing wasn't installed. Yeah. When I went from one room to another, and my friends, again, so-called friends, were like, if you have a MacBook Pro, you literally carry your computer from room A to room B,

and everything is the same, because it's literally the same computer, and you know what you can also do then? When you go visit your mom in Phoenix it's also the same because it's the same computer. And like, are you getting it yet? It's not three different computers in three different places. It's one computer.

It's one computer. Between places. And so I come to you. Also with this, I wanted to just share a link. There's an absolutely bananas article on 9to5Mac last week that was how I turned the M4 Mac mini into a travel computer. It's hilarious. I really admire the Moxie of the 9to5Mac writer,

Fernando Silva, because it's like, I've got a backpack, I got a little portable display, I got a Mac mini, I got a keyboard, and I can travel with my computer. And then if any is like, of course you could also buy a laptop. I'm like, mm-hmm, you could do that, you could. You know whose fault this story is? This travel M4 Mac mini,

we're gonna get back to you in a second, but this travel M4 Mac mini situation, it's Federico Vetticci's fault because he cut a MacBook Air in half and stuck an iPad on top of it. And suddenly everybody's like hacking their hardware. It was the original sin of this whole thing was that. It was, you know, Sigmin is like got an Apple TV.

Do you know, we talked about connected I think, he doesn't even have the screen anymore. No, he threw it away. So he just has half a MacBook Air in his drawer. Yeah. What are you doing, we talked about connected I think, he doesn't even have the screen anymore. No, he threw it away. So he just has half a MacBook Air in his drawer. Yeah. What are you doing, man? Back to you though. Thank you.

And I think last time I was on upgrade, I also like had some sort of, I was judging something. Yeah, you bring the Mac therapy. Wisdom, yeah. Thank you. So for years, I had a desktop Mac and a laptop. And so I did this, right? Like I kind of have my desktop be my main computer.

And then I took my notebook with me when I went to go work somewhere else. And I did the data juggling thing. And you're right. Documents, photos, calendar stuff, that's really easy to sync. It's all sort of the other stuff that we as nerds have a lot of extra stuff.

That's where you're really kind of like rebuilding it on both systems. Yeah. It's all the stuff that's in like your library files and that the apps have not, or the system, have just not moved, which they have to engineer themselves like move to a system where that stuff ends up living in a synced place.

And so they all get out of sync. It just, it happens. Yep. It can be, it can actually be kind of frustrating. It's like, oh, you know, why isn't this thing, thing working? Hazel's a great example of this for me. Cause I use Hazel and it's like, oh, why is this PDF

still just sitting on my desktop? Why hasn't it moved? It's like, oh, because I use Hazel and it's like, oh, why is this PDF still just sitting on my desktop? Why hasn't it moved? It's like, oh, because I want a different computer. So, yeah. And Hazel has a sync system, but you have to, you have to turn it on and make sure you turn it on the right place and say, now this, and then go to the other computer and say,

now use that and also do it here. And if you do that, it does work, but you have to do it. Yeah, same with Alfred, which is my launcher of choice. And like, if Alfred's not the same on every computer I use, my brain doesn't work. But you have to like go in and like, you put a folder on a Dropbox and then it syncs it. And we all know how reliable that can be over time.

But, so that was my life for really, for like seven, probably seven or eight years, my first seven or eight years being independent, I did this. And then with the M2 generation, I bought a pretty nice M2 Pro, MacBook Pro and made the decision like I'm gonna have one computer. And when I'm at my desk, it's hooked up to my studio display and my sound equipment and everything else.

I use a Thunderbolt dock for that. But then I can just eject time machine. I can unplug a single cable and my one computer goes with me. Now there are downsides to that, right? The laptop's more expensive. If your car gets broken into and someone snatches your bag

and your one computer was in it, that's a problem, right? Or if you spill iced tea into it and you know, and so I still have like, I have an M1 MacBook Air that's my beta machine in the summer. And that's sort of my escape hatch. Like if something happened to this laptop, I could still record a podcast by getting, you know, some stuff installed on it.

So, you know, there's nothing saying you wouldn't have the redundancy or sort of the safety net of that But I have really come to enjoy Having just the one Mac with everything on it and My setup being the same everywhere and I think it in your case where you are kind of bouncing back and forth between the garage and the bedroom studio B back there I Think there's real benefit to it and I think the garage and the bedroom, Studio B back there, I think there's real benefit to it.

And I think the 14 inch M4 Max would smoke your studio and give you that. And I understand like you're a small laptop person, you know, the 14 inch is a little bulky and I get that. But I think the benefits outweigh that, at least for me. Yeah, I'm coming around, I'm still not there yet, right? Cause I have been a MacBook Air person for so long. But the truth is, my MacBook Air-ness was very much based on the fact that I used to be a commuter

and brought my laptop back and forth. Cause you talk about, you know, having your same computer everywhere, I did that. It was in my backpack, it was a MacBook Air on my back. So I wanted to be as light as possible, but I docked it at work and then used it at home. It was great. And when I started this, I eventually bought that Retina

iMac when it came out, but when I started doing this work from home thing, it was with a docked MacBook Air on a monitor and it was great. So I'm open to it because my laptop, like I don't use the laptop around the house very much at all because I use the iPad. Like on the couch and stuff, it's never the laptop. It's always the iPad for that stuff.

And even in the backyard, most of the time I'm writing, I'm actually writing on the iPad with the keyboard. I'm not writing with the MacBook Air. So my MacBook Air use is really limited to the back of the house as the Studio B driver. And when I go visit my mom or, or do any other kind of like business travel where I need to record podcasts and stuff like that, because I'm not as far gone as Federico, who has completely forsaken the Mac. It's not going to be me. I'm not going to go that far.

For now. He'll be back. He always comes back. Yeah, he'll boomerang around, he bounces around. I love it, he's like, he's just traveling the world and seeing the sights and just like, you can't pin him down, it's great, that's why we love him. So I am seriously considering it, which I kinda can't believe. The other thing is I write these articles,

I write these reviews of these MacBook Pros. And, you know, I always go out of my way to talk about the display, because it is the best display Apple has ever made, period. Yeah, full stop. Hands down, period. It is spectacularly good, bright colors. It's just incredible. And like having one of those when I travel,

well, you know, that would be nice. That would be really nice. And it's very rare that I'm using a laptop in cramped conditions where I am going to say, oh man, I really wish I had the MacBook Air instead of the MacBook Pro. It's not that much. I mean, it's not the 11 inch Air, right?

That's the other thing is Apple is never gonna make, I think, personally, I think, never gonna make a Mac laptop smaller than the 11 inch Air, right? That's the other thing is Apple is never gonna make, I think, personally, I think, never gonna make a Mac laptop smaller than the 13 inch Air. I don't think they're gonna ever make a, I would love it if they made an 11 inch sub Air or whatever, but I don't think they will. And even if they did, I don't think I'd want it because it would probably be so compromised at that point.

So I am coming around to the idea that maybe an M4, a 14 inch M4 Max MacBook Pro might be in my future, replacing all of my other Macs. And as for the fear of having a disaster where you have to send your computer in and you don't have access to a Mac for a while, I have my server. It's an M2 mini. I can do my job on an M2 mini. It's fun. Oh yeah, yeah. If it comes to that, I will repurpose,

I'll move the server and the hard drive and all those things to one of my desks and just use it there and it'll be fine. I have no fear of that. Yeah, don't let Dan Moore near it with an iPhone. We know how that ends. Wow. You know, too soon. I saw a picture. I was building some calendars last week. Interesting. Yeah, right? I've got the last page of the last Stephen Hackett calendar up on my wall right now. Yeah. We've

reached December. That's the James Thompson photo, right? Yeah, of the Icon Garden. It's great, including the hand, which I'm imagining is you waving goodbye to calendars. But we do this every year. We take pictures for the year and then make those the calendar for the next year. And so I was going through all the pictures. And one of the pictures in there is me taking a selfie of my row at WWDC.

And it's like, oh, then there's Casey and there's David. Oh, there's Dan and his laptop just before the bad thing happened. It's like the last known photo of somebody before they disappear. Yeah, yeah. It's like, well, little did Dan know that he would drop his iPhone right on his screen

and destroy it mid keynote, mid keynote. Amazing. That's a real bummer I think the M4 max 14 inch is the way to go I mean that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna do it you know at the end of the year I think and you can spec it up you know where it really can be your one computer like yeah I know you gotta get all your files on there right you gotta get the entirety of relay on that drive so we've got to get the big drive.

I tell you what, once you buy one laptop with eight terabytes, you can't go back. Well, this is the thing with my Mac Studio, is I used to have an iMac with a one terabyte drive, and I got the Mac Studio with two terabytes. And this could be like a little maxim. We could come up with a way to like make this a thing people refer to in the future.

But it's like, basically, once you go to a higher storage tier, you can't go back, right? You just can't. I'm never gonna go back to one terabyte again, because I'm now at two terabytes and everything is expanded to fill the space. I'm never going back. Exactly, it's like the mythical man-month,

but for files. But for SSDs, yep. That sounds right. The subliminal storage doctrine. There is some sort of thing about that, like work will take the allotted time, take up all the allotted time or something. Expand the fill the space, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that does happen with storage. But yeah, I think it's the way to go. And yeah, it's a bit more weight, when you're flying to see your mom or when you're going somewhere, but it's not that big. And I think one thing about the screen that is worth, I mean, I think the MacBook Pro is the way to go for the power. But, you know, for me, I'm sitting in front of a studio display almost all the time, not the laptops open to the left. But again, I'm not getting the benefit of that screen

most of the time. And that's kind of a bummer, but the power is what I'm after and the capacity is what I'm after and the screen is kind of a bonus. And when I do use it just as a laptop, it's incredible. So if you're gonna use it in clamshell mode or something, yeah, you don't get that benefit all the time,

but when you really need it, that's when it'll be there for you. Right, yeah. Right, well, thank you for the sage advice. I appreciate it. Yeah. And I will say, because I think I heard you say this, like clamshell mode works great with Apple Silicon Macs. It's so much better than it used to be.

You know, I used it for a while in the Intel days, and it was just like- It was really bad then. Really bad, and Apple fixed that with Apple silicon. So if you're out there and you're like, oh, I wish I could use clamshell mode, and maybe I'm in a small desk and laptop just in the way, it's really good now.

It is, I use it, like I said, I use it in the back of the house, and as a veteran of somebody who would frequently pull my laptop out of my backpack when I got home to find that it was blazing hot, because although it had been closed and gone to sleep, it decided it wouldn't sleep. That was the Intel Mac laptop experience in a nutshell.

It really was. It's not like that now. It's not like that at all. Yeah, they've, I think someone, when they did Apple silk and they're like, hey, look, this has been a problem. Let's fix it now. Most of our desktop users are using laptops attached

to a monitor, probably, right? Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, what percentage of people who use laptops ever attach it to a monitor? But I wonder if that number is larger than the number of people who are using a desktop Mac attached to a monitor.

Really, maybe. Maybe the same, maybe more, I don't know, but I have a random Mac complaint to share with you. Just before we take our last break, I wanted to share this with you. I had this flash, which was, I use LaunchBar, and I have a ChatGPT account, and I use ChatGPT some, and I was hearing, I was actually hearing you guys talk about, Mike uses ChatGPT account and I use ChatGPT some and I was actually hearing you guys talk about,

Mike uses ChatGPT for search a lot and I thought, how can I, I use it occasionally and I find it interesting. I don't find the results great, but I find it okay. And interesting and sometimes useful. Sometimes really bad, but sometimes useful. And I thought what I really wanna do is use it from inside LaunchBar.

What I really want to do is say, do my LaunchBar shortcut and then do a GPT shortcut and then type a query and then get the response. But what I really, and I could do that on the web. I could build that for the web. But what I really want to do is use the chat GPT Mac app because it's nice that it's a Mac app that is not stuck in a web

browser. And I can open it and I can see my whole history. And it's just it feels better. But the problem is, it's basically a web wrapper. And it doesn't have as far as I can tell any connectivity to other Mac things. And it's frustrating. Like, I want it to be like a URL scheme, right? Something where I can just pass a URL to the chat GPT app that says, do this query and open it. It'll open, I don't even need it to come back to LaunchBar. I just want it to like open in the chat GPT app and have done the query.

Right, just pass it through and then the app open or you tab over to it or something and it's ready for you. And it's ready, right? I just, I want to eliminate a step here because I have LaunchBar in my muscle memory and GPT will bind to a shortcut, but I don't really want that because I don't use it enough for that.

But I would like to sort of like bind it to LaunchBar and have LaunchBar pass it to ChatGPT, but the app is bad. And I actually asked ChatGPT how to do this. And it generated, first off, it told me to go someplace in in launch bar that doesn't exist it's like go to the go to the this tab and then press the the new automation button it's like that doesn't exist okay great and then it wrote an Apple script for me and I know this has happened a few times where I've seen it that chat GPT is actually pretty good at writing Apple script because there's so

much Apple script documentation and examples out there on the internet and I know that they're old but there's so much of it. It's actually a great way to do Apple script is just because nobody needs to learn Apple script today, right? You should never learn it if you don't know it, but there's stuff Apple script can do that nothing else can do on the Mac and Chet GPT will write it for you. So you can do it that way. Be careful,, you know be careful because it could decide to kill all humans and write an Apple script

It's like bad, but but generally it works really well So it's Apple script is super hacky though because it knows that it can't control the chat GPT app So it basically says take the query from launch bar and type it, switch to ChatGPT and type it in. It's like, well, I could use Keyboard Maestro at that point. That is not the point here. And I may end up using Keyboard Maestro to do this. I don't know. But my plea to ChatGPT and everybody over there

is put a URL scheme in your Mac app and document it. Because that's all I really need is I need a way to say chatgpt colon slash slash search and topic equals. That's all I need is document a URL scheme. I don't need an Apple script dictionary or anything like that. Let's not even go there, but just something where I can pass that through because that would be nice.

Yeah, I have the Mac app installed. It's not great. It runs in the menu bar and the dock and it's one of those where you can like hide the dock app, but that doesn't really work the way that I expect it to in a way that I can't quite put my finger on even like it's just kind of kind of weird. I do have it bound to a keyboard shortcut. I'm doing option space and I have it. So the default positions are bottom, left, center, and right. It's like, no, I want it in the top right. Like that's kind of in my brain where it should be.

And I can drag the window up there and set it to open the last position, but it doesn't really remember. Like it's just, it's kind of a weird app. I'm not actually sure, I was trying to dig around as I was talking. If it's native or if it's an electron, but it's got some weirdness to it.

Yeah, I think it's just a web wrapper. And look, I am very glad that there's a Mac app. I love that they said, you know what? ChatGPT is so useful, we wanna integrate it into desktop computers. And they did the Mac version and now they have a Windows version too. Like I like that about it, because if you are a believer in chat GPT and you know,

chat GPT people should be right that it's their product, then you should believe that integrating it with the, the desktop computers is one of the things that you should do. So I'm grateful that it's there because I don't, I mean, like I said, I could open this up in a web browser, but I'd rather not. I just wish that it was a little more integrated. And like the bare minimum to me is accept a URL that's passed from elsewhere in the system, because that will, then you can put it on a stream deck button. You can keyboard maestro it, you can Apple script it,

you can use it in LaunchBar. It opens up the entire platform to just pass things to ChatGPT. If they want to do more, great. If they want to return the result back to some other app, fine. But it's not necessary. I just would like a little bit.

And I realize I could probably build like an API thing that uses the API like how Federico did with one of his shortcuts. Like I could probably do that where I built a whole thing that passes the query to the chat GPT API and gets the results back and displays it. Again, it's kind of too much. I'd rather not.

All I really wanna do is pass the query on to where it should live, which is in the Mac app and it doesn't do that. But I don't know how you're using it. I pay for it because I want to explore it. And I think that it's good. Like I said, sometimes, I mean, other than for computer programming, where honestly it's great,

because it knows way more than I do about it, and it gets me code that is usable or at least fixable. And some of the search is good, some of it is bad. Like it's not perfect, but I don't wanna make perfect the enemy of the good. It is often very good and I like to explore with it. Are you using it? I mean, you're paying for it, so I hope you're using it. Yeah, I'm using it really with search

and to close the loop a second ago, it looks like it's built in Swift actually. And, yeah, but it's just a wrapper. Let's get on it, like something, something a shortcut support would work, URL would work, just let us automate it a little bit. Please. They use revenue cats in here, that's cool.

Yeah, so when search came about, that's like, you know, I'm gonna give this a real bit, please. They use revenue cats in here, that's cool. Yeah, so when search came about, that's like, you know, I'm gonna give this a real shot. Mike's spoken really highly about it. Other people are talking highly about the search. And I've been using it in some show prep and some other stuff, right? Like, and just trying to find things. I'm not, it's not doing my work for me.

And of course you want to always check its sources and that is one nice thing in the search. It puts the sources just right in line. You click on them and see what they're saying and that is really actually pretty compelling. I think the search is good. I think the search is good. I think there are clearly still places where you bump into sort of limitations of their data sets or kind of the, like sometimes you have to think the way that it wants you to think. I'm trying to remember, I'm trying to just go

through my history and I can't find the example now, but there was something that I tried searching for and I had to like tweak it and I can't find the example now, but there was something that I tried searching for and I'd like tweak it and then it kind of ended up going down the road I wanted it to but it is definitely not something that is like baked into my workflows at this point It's it's still very much experimental That's sort of why I want to integrate it with launch bar to see if like if maybe there's a way for me to do That like I built a launch bar thing that actually uses a shortcut, but it's six color search.

So I can do command space six, you know, S-I-X space. And it gives me an end text entry and I can type something and it runs that in the six colors search shortcut that I built, which uses the WordPress search API and searches my WordPress install and passes back results that the shortcut displays and when I click on one, it puts the URL on the clipboard so that I can link to my stuff while I'm writing.

It's like it's not super smooth, but it's smoother than going to the web browser, opening a browser window, typing in a query, site colon six colors.com. It's a little bit better. And I like that. So that was my thought is like, if I can add another feature into LaunchBar that is chat GPT integration, then it will let my impulse to do command space

for everything flow some of that stuff that direction. And I'm with you about search. Like again, none of this is perfect, but I don't know as a content creator on the internet, I don't mind the idea that if somebody asks for a question about Apple stuff, that there's a summary and then there are a bunch of footnotes that say you can read more about this at this place

as you read at the verge and during fireball and at 512 pixels and at six colors, like, I'm okay with that. If we're if the best practice for this is going to be show your work so that you can trust these sources, we're just summarizing these sources, but you need to get more information. Because some percentage of people are never going to go past that. But a lot of people are going to be like, I don't trust this thing. This is not enough. I want to read the details. I'm okay with that. That's okay with me. Hiding that stuff is what bothers me. So I love that the chapter GPT search shows its sources, right? Like that is because it also lets you look at a source and go,

come on, I don't trust that source. And that's good too, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah, and in that way, it's not that different than a Google search, right? Like you search something on Google, it's like, okay, I've come across this website before. Like I don't need to read it or go down that road.

And if anything, it's definitely like, I don't need to read it or go down that road. And if anything, it's definitely, I'm definitely on the side of the argument now of like, oh, Google is in trouble. They need to figure this out. And I think most people now, everybody's getting the AR results at the top of their searches.

And in my sort of like, you know, kind of limited testing, what ChatGBT does with its search is more compelling than what Gemini is doing. And I think more useful and that is pretty interesting. Yeah, bad for Google. Real bad for Google. That's why Google is so spooked by this, right. That's why, is because they can see that this could completely overthrow them if they can't do it right. Somebody else becomes the way you find things on the internet if it's not.

I mean, they're doing a thing like the Apple thing, which is if our bread and butter is going to be replaced, we have to be the one to replace it. And that's why Apple spent lots of money on all sorts of things like the Vision Pro, because they're like, what could be the next thing that replaces the iPhone? And let us be one of the players in that, otherwise our business is gone. And Google, I think the AI stuff is absolutely 100% that,

which is this could be an existential threat to Google. And so if AI is going to replace Google search, we need to be the AI search. And right now they're not, but they're trying real hard, that's why. Well, I'm curious to see how your usage unfolds. And for me, I looked at it a little bit, like, can I pipe this through Alfred?

I was like, you know what, the option space is fine. Like I, you know, and like the app pops up quickly and the one thing I appreciate about it is when you use the keyboard shortcut, it opens and it moves the cursor into the text box, which is not a given, not all apps do that correctly. And so it's one keyboard shortcut and then I'm typing pretty quickly

and that gets me close enough, but I understand wanting to get it a little bit, you know, closer to the metal, if you will. Yeah, sure. Well, we'll see. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Going online without ExpressVPN is a bit like driving without car insurance.

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It's not in New Zealand or if it is, it doesn't have anything on it. I just used ExpressVPN. It was great. Right now you can take advantage of ExpressVPN's Black Friday slash Cyber Monday offer. Oh, it's Cyber Monday as we record this. Cyber Monday. Happy Cyber Monday to all of you who celebrate Cybers. Anyway, you can get the absolute best VPN deal you'll find all year.

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There is. Oh, breaking news, breaking news, yes. Apple worked on the Vision Pro since at least 2008. Okay. What does it mean? So, um, old news. Here's the story. Harry McCracken, who used to be the editor in chief of PC world.

He was my counterpart at PC world. Um, he was posting about finding his old blog that has disappeared from PC world's website in one of the very many kind of, uh, CMS changes that have happened over time there using the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive. And it totally worked and he found it. And I thought, well, let's see if I can find our old blogs from that same period because we, at Macworld, we underwent that same issue.

And I found the Mac user blog, which is where Dan Morin did most of his writing for a period of time when we were doing, like, it was literally a movable type blog. Of course it was. Of course it was. Of course it was. Back in the day. Back in the day. And one of the things, and Dan went poking around in his columns

and he found something and he wrote about it in his Macworld column. So there's a nine to five Mac story that literally is, hey, look at what Dan wrote about on Macworld, which is very strange. But we found this, we have this for podcasts too, where we say things on podcasts and they're like, hey, look at this thing that Mike heard on upgrade and there's a whole story about it.

Look, the content, filling the content void is a real thing. I mean, we do it on like 512 and six colors. It is a little bit weird to see it on nine to five, I think is what you're saying. Well, and we, I feel like we write links where we say, hey, you should check out this article because, but nine to five will often just be like,

well, we're just writing an article about news that broke and it's just our dumb podcast. It just is weird. So this is a post from a Mac user contributor from 2008 that is headlined patent filing suggests Apple quote iPod, E-Y-E-P-O-D, from November 7, 2008. And it's a patent.

And it's linking to somebody's patent website, probably, maybe Patently Apple or something like that. Maybe it's a USPTO site. I don't know what the link is, because this is just a screenshot Dan took. But the drawing of it, it's like the Vision Pro. I mean, it's the Vision Pro. It's wild.

So it's old news and it came a long way. But at some point in 2008, somebody at Apple was like, hey, I have a patent on mounting displays in a thing that you wear on your face. And one of the people credited is Tony Fidel, actually the guy who created the iPod. Yeah. Wow. Look at this thing.

Years in the making. The vision pro. To put 2008 into some context for people, that's the year the MacBook Pro went unibody for the first time. It's the year the MacBook Air was introduced. I mean, it's a long time ago. It's the year the App Store happened.

Yeah. Yeah. Wild. Yeah. Absolutely wild. Yeah, anyway. Yeah. Absolutely wild. Yeah. Anyway, just some fun old news, but I love that, and I love that the chain of events was Harry to me to Dan to Macworld to 9to5Mac.

The internet's a wonderful place. All right, should we do some Ask Upgrade? Let's do it. Oh, double lasers, it's great. That's right. Steven, what's this first Ask Upgrade question? What's going on here? This is from somebody named Casey List.

That name sounds made up. Casey wrote, you've discussed that you don't typically use MagSafe while traveling and often do some sort of arithmetic to figure out if it'll be necessary. I couldn't agree more. I'm in the same boat. Would you trade the MagSafe connector for another USB-C port or slightly different take? Would you be sad if MagSafe went away again? Hmm.

Casey says they don't think they would make the trade, even though Casey seems to use USB-C in that MagSafe? I'm a little confused by Casey's opinion, but what do you think? I would be sad if it went away, because I think having the option of having a dedicated power plug that isn't, I mean, first off, let's just say, I think it's unlikely that Apple would remove MagSafe and replace it with another port I think they would

do what they've done before which is just remove it and tell you to use your other ports for it and the beauty of this is it can't be anything but power and that means that if you're if you're full up you can use it I love having a dedicated power spot and the magnetic thing is big right like there are lots of people who rely on, and when it was gone, we're buying like weird third party things in order to get that breakaway thing where it's not gonna pull your laptop off a table while it's charging

because it'll pop off. And I think it's really good and I want it to continue. And I do, like I said last week, I do travel with it some, right, but it's not required. And if I'm travel with it some right, but but it's not Required and if I'm trying to travel really light, but still bring the laptop I might not use it, but I also sometimes I do travel with it and I'll tell you this The way Lauren uses her MacBook Air and she's using the M1 right now The moment that she gets maybe when I buy that MacBook Pro my hand-me-down M2 MacBook Air the moment that she gets, maybe when I buy that MacBook Pro, my hand-me-down M2 MacBook Air,

she will use that MagSafe cable a lot because I know we've got USB-C chargers around the house and we use them for iPads and stuff too, but her laptop doesn't really have a home. Sometimes it's on the couch, sometimes it's on a table, but like back when she had a MagSafe laptop, it was great because you could just lay it somewhere and know that it would charge,

but also not get yanked and pull the laptop somewhere. And I feel like we'll go back to that when she goes to the M2 and that will be an upgrade. So I love it. I mean, USB-C charging is so great that they could kill it and it would be okay. but I think that the real challenge is trading a port for MagSafe would be like, that would be okay, but I don't think Apple,

I feel like Apple's just never gonna do that. Like the whole point of MagSafe being on the laptop is we wanna maximize your data ports because you actually need to use data ports. And MagSafe on the Mac, there is some nuance here. So like if you wanna fast charge the 16 inch, that requires the 140 watt Apple charger. And USB-C power delivery won't go that fast

on the MacBook Pro. And so there are some cases where MagSafe would be faster. I really like MagSafe, I'm glad that it's back. Now at my desk, I'm using a Thunderbolt dock, so I just have one cable going to my MacBook Pro. But in my bag, I have the MagSafe adapter. I like it a lot and it totally works for me. I would be sad if it went away again.

Something you said there really struck me, which is, here's the thing about USB charging. I don't trust it. I don't trust it. If, like I've got USB-C adapters that have got like the good port and the bad port. And like, but if you're just on the other end, you don't know if it's plugged into the good port or the bad port. Maybe if you're just on the other end, you don't know if it's plugged into the good port

or the bad port. Maybe you could check, but we've got one that's behind our couch, and then the cable snakes over the couch. So I would have to get up and go behind the couch and look and see whether it's plugged into the good port or not. You're not gonna do that, you're just gonna plug it in.

MagSafe, I know it matters what adapter is plugged into the MagSafe, but I would say that in general, I know what I'm getting from MagSafe, I know it matters what adapter is plugged into the MagSafe, but I would say that in general, I know what I'm getting from MagSafe, and USB-C, I don't really know. I mean, some of those adapters are weird, and I know you're plugging into USB-C on the other end, so it could still be an issue,

but I feel more like this is a dedicated power plug that it's gonna do what I trust. I don't know, maybe that's an illusion since they're all coming from USB-C sources anyway, but I feel like having it be dedicated is a good thing. Maybe, and I think magnetic, again, magnetic decoupling is good. Like it's really good that it's safe,

that it lets you pop that thing off whenever there's any tension instead of pulling your laptop onto the floor. It's good. And making the cable release without the cable undergoing tension that makes your cable bad. It's all good. A question from Steven in Memphis. Jason, do you keep the boxes of your Apple products current or past? That's a good question. I think this maybe came up because over the holiday, I was in my in-laws' garage and discovered a G5 iMac box.

That was Andy. Yep, that's exactly what I thought of. And I'm like, what is this even doing here? And it's like, I shook it and I was like, there's a really light, there's no Mac in here now. Cause they got rid of it, but they kept the box, which they probably don't need to have a box for a computer they don't have anymore

and haven't had for many, many, many years. They also, also visible in their stack of boxes high up in the rafters of their garage was their Intel iMac box for the one that I was troubleshooting. So they, they save all these. My answer is mostly no, I don't live in a house with a lot of storage. And so keeping a big box around is not ideal.

I think I do have like at least one of my studio display boxes and it's huge, but I think I might still have that. I keep some of them, like I have the Vision Pro Box, but again, it's a first generation Apple product. I feel like I'm gonna hold onto that box because I'm gonna hold onto that product forever. But in general, no, I have so many products going in and out. I have to hold onto all the boxes of all the Apple owners, right? So that's already taking up a lot of space

because I've got the box they came in, the air bill to ship them back, and the boxes for all of those products. And that takes up a lot of space on my Shelves in my garage already and I just don't have a lot of storage even using the garage as storage like we do I don't have a lot of storage for boxes So so generally no is the answer Other than that I will try to keep it around for a while in case it's a product that's currently in use

And it might go to somebody else because but I don't do a lot of reselling of products either because This is my job. And so I tend to keep old products around whereas I know you sell them and then buy them back 15 years later That's right. You can find that sweet spot where they're not so rare as to be valuable But are also outmoded and you buy them right then. That's the trick. Yeah. Before I talk about my box usage, it's a little two legs.

People have already sent y'all email probably, but in this support document, maybe Jason can put in the show notes. The 2023, so is that the M3 Mac, 16 inch MacBook Pro, apparently can fast charge if you have 140 watt USB-C power adapter and the 240 watt USB-C charge cable, two meter for MacBook Pro 16 inch. Special cable.

And so, you know, yes, I guess there are some specific cases or one case that it can. This is exactly what I mean about MagSafe, which is the two options for that fast charging on the 16-inch MacBook Pro are the 140-watt power adapter with a special USB-C cable or the MagSafe cable. Right, like again, it's like, you might, if you get the wrong cable,

you're not gonna get your full charge, but the MagSafe cable is gonna get you your full charge. And that's a reason to use MagSafe for charging, because you can rely on it. It's like, that's what it's for. That's all it's for, use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think our greater point still stands. All right. And I will say, I do try to keep vintage boxes. So like, I've got the original iPod box around here somewhere. I mean, I've tried to keep some of that stuff, but I can't keep all of it. So a lot of that stuff just goes away.

Yeah. I keep boxes for current stuff up in the attic. I actually have like a big duffel bag that has like current, you know, laptop, iPad, iPhone boxes in it. And that's really about it. I, even though I've got a Mac collection, I really don't collect like the boxes or the packaging. There's some stuff that I wish I had,

like I wish I'd had, you know, an old iPod box or some of the stuff is really interesting, but I have never, it's never really like stuck for me from a collection standpoint. So I really don't have a lot. And once I sell something, you know, the box goes with it. So, or like it, you know it gets passed along to a family member or something, I'm like, here's your new old phone

and here's the box it came in. Yeah, that is ideal is if you've got the box that it came in. But yeah, I save more than I used to. I'll put it that way. I used to not at all, because there was no room. That was back when this garage was a garage. And there was some storage in it. But now we've got like there's a big set of metal shelves that we've got that from like Home Depot, and it's got a bunch of stuff on it. And then I've got a couple other racks of stuff, including old computers and stuff. So we've got a little more storage, but still, it's not Um, so, you know, there's a limit to what you can do. I have friends and you probably know this.

You probably know people who do this. Dan Frakes, my old colleague at Mac world, Dan Frakes is an inveterate, um, seller of his old hardware. So he keeps all the boxes and everything in them pristine because he'll use like a computer for a year and then he'll sell it. Usually he'll like sell it on, I don't even know where, Craigslist eBay, I don't even know what he does.

But this was always his method. And so he would sell it in box with all the stuff, freshly wiped, all of that. And I always admired it, but I also thought like, I ain't doing that, right? Like, there's no way I'm gonna, and I didn't have the room to do that either, but I always did admire that,

that he always kept every box perfectly pristine, and then, which I do with my Apple loaners, but like for a computer I'm gonna use for, especially once I started handing them down to other members of the family, I'm like, I'm not gonna do that. It's not gonna happen, come on. Yeah, I think that's fair.

David asks, I was curious since Jason has both an Oculus and a Vision Pro, how are movies on the two? I'm interested in watching quote big screen movies and a $299 Oculus sounds interesting. I did the trial at the Apple store for the Vision Pro and it was great, but currently too expensive. So I did convert a bunch of 3D DVDs, 3D Blu-rays, to using just really, like I had to use a Windows,

I think it was a Windows or DOS, I don't know, a really bad software. It wasn't DOS, I'm sure it wasn't DOS. But it was like kind of command line-y. Anyway, really bad Windows software in order to do this, but I did manage to do it so I could watch those on the Oculus before I had the Vision Pro because I was like, oh, 3D content. This is cool. And it's okay. There's a good app that puts you in a movie theater

that looks really good. It's got dynamic lighting on the seats and stuff. So when it's a bright scene, the seats light up and when it's dark, they don't. I mean, it's really, really very good. It's called Skybox. It's fine. Like, the Vision Pro is better. The Vision Pro is really nice. But the Vision Pro also costs $3,500. So, I mean, that's kind of my answer, is

if you're curious about watching movies on a big screen in VR, the Oculus will do it. What I would say is, it's not, I don't think it's good enough to watch any, like if you've got a nice TV, you should watch it on the TV. But the 3D stuff was great, and you can't watch that in 3D anywhere else

other than a headset at this point. Now, I don't know, last time I, because of the Vision Pro now, I am not gonna do that, because I have a Vision Pro. But like, I hope they've got a store now somewhere where you can buy or rent 3D stuff in Meta's ecosystem, because they really should.

That was my complaint back before Vision Pro, was that they really should like, let me watch 3d stuff And rent movies and buy movies in 3d and they didn't so if they've got that that that would be great But and also yes the quest 3 Has a better screen than the quest 3s So, you know you go up a little bit you're gonna get a better screen But I also had the quest 2, which has the same screen as

the 3S. And it was fine. Like it was fine. But really, it was fine for 3D content that I couldn't watch anywhere else. Anything else I would rather watch on TV with Vision Pro. Like sometimes there is kind of like, I'm going to watch this on Vision Pro as a treat, because it is of a high enough quality that it's kind of nice to have that big screen when I'm watching a movie by myself, which doesn't happen. I was saying Moana 2 opened this weekend, and I thought I've watched half of Moana, the original,

because I never saw it, and I started watching it in 3D on the Vision Pro, and then I got distracted by something, and I haven't watched the rest of it. But like that was a good example where, again, it's a 3D movie, it's in Disney+, it looks great on the vision pro so my answer is

See if somebody is selling those movies or but or rent letting you rent them on Oculus gotta be right somebody's got to be doing that now and then you know, it's fine But I wouldn't I wouldn't personally choose it over my TV for 2d content But for 3d, it's it's fun. It's it's a lot of fun I wouldn't personally choose it over my TV for 2D content. But for 3D, it's fun. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. I mean, I think the entertainment is a huge use case, right? And that does put the Vision Pro at a slight disadvantage

just due to the price. Yeah, yeah, even it looks good, but it doesn't look 10 times as good, right? That's the problem with it. Right, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And lastly, RM wrote in, "'Has Jason seen this? "'Page turned, buttons are not totally dead.'"

Can you describe this product that RM linked to? Because I've looked at this webpage a lot over the last couple of days, and I'm still just- Just thinking about the Roman Empire? Yeah, I don't know. Just gobsmacked. Okay, so my initial description, let me know how I do here is this looks like

something Federico would buy. Yeah, I think so. It is the sole reader. It is a pair of glasses that contain an e-reader inside them. Yes. They're glasses that are completely covered in the front. So when you put these on, you can't see anything, but a book.

So, so yeah, yeah. It's basically like, what if a Kindle on your face? What? Yeah. What if a Kindle was on your face? Mm-hmm. What, yeah, what if a Kindle was on your face, Jason? Distraction-free reading. So, I mean, like I admire the idea, and I'm sure there's a use case. I'm sure there's somebody who is trying to read in bed and doesn't wanna bother their partner,

and this is great, you just put on the glasses. This is like Federico playing video games, right? You put on the glasses and you can read all you like, and it's not a problem. Although it doesn't look like it's a really great resolution. But anyway, it looks real blocky. So, look, one of the things I love, and this is all when I was reviewing

all the weird Android devices, like those books, e-readers. I love the fact that we live in an era where there is off the shelf mobile operating system stuff and there's off the shelf parts that some manufacturer in China can just sort of put it in a blender and come out with whatever and say, is this a thing? And you know what? Nine times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100,

it's not a thing. But every so often, it's a thing. Or it's a thing for a very narrow audience, like the books, e-readers, that Books Palma is a great example. I know you forgot that you had yours. I did, yeah. It's a great example of a product

that a big mainstream company is never going to make, but that a small company can take the take phone parts and an E ink screen and kind of like put it together and make something that will appeal to a narrow audience that is big enough for them, but would never be big enough for Amazon. right? Or Kobo or whatever. I love that. I love that we live in an era where there are, there can be small companies that can leverage the existence of Android and the existence of apps for Android and can do just, and the existence of parts for these devices that are used by, you know, they're commodities

at this point and build products out of them that will target a very specific nation. Like I said, most of them aren't a thing. And I suspect that maybe the sole reader is not a thing. But if it is, if it can find enough of a following for it to be viable, then great. Like I think the book's Palma is a great example where I reviewed it and then like three months later,

six months later, the Verge wrote about and like, I've seen it in other places and like people are kind of like, it went viral. There's just enough there, just enough there for people to say, like enough people say that that's interesting to me. And, and so I love that we live in this era, but I look at this and I think that ain't it. So if it's for you, I also wanted to mention because I talk about Page turn buttons a lot when you do come see you eaters right because I like them. I think they're good I think they should be on devices You don't have to use them but it's nice that they're there and that Amazon has decided that that they're bad and nobody should have them anymore And I got a bunch of people wrote to me,

including one person who wrote to me and cross-posted it to multiple social media services, which is like, don't do that. Like cross-posting promo is one thing, cross-posting to reach someone, like I literally answered the same question on two different services and then I realized it was the same guy.

It's like, don't do that. Yeah, yeah, agreed. don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that. But I got a lot of people who said, hey, but Jason, here's your solution. And they sent me a link to a thing that is absolutely not my solution. So I'm just going to mention here, speaking of weird reading things, which is there are devices out there that are basically like a remote finger.

You clip them to your Kindle and it hovers. So you clip it to the side and the end of it hovers over the screen, like right on the side of the screen, ideally not blocking your view, although you may have to, and it's awkward because this is like back when we had clip on book lights for the Kindle. It's awkward. It's a thing clipped to the side of your Kindle or Kobo or whatever. And it's got a remote control.

And when you click the remote control, the little finger goes boop and touches the screen and advances the screen to the next page. This is not what I'm talking about. I don't need a remote finger. I have a real finger. My problem is that I don't wanna use the finger. Now, I will say, if e-readers,

and this is the problem with this product. So this product, I have friends who use this product. I have a friend who uses this product because she's got some medical issues. She doesn't want to hold the e-reader. She's got a little stand that she can put the e-reader on, and then she can get under the covers in bed and she's got the little remote, and she can go click on the remote and it advances the page, and she doesn't have to touch the device

or hold it or anything. It's great. But I will say, all of these device manufacturers should just support Bluetooth remotes, right? They should support Bluetooth remotes. There's no reason that a remote finger clip-on thingy should exist. You should just be able to pair a Bluetooth remote

and then click forward or backward or whatever, but none of them do, which is madness. I think that I actually I think the books ones do because they support Android so they can support like a keyboard. So if you made a remote that was just right arrow left arrow Bluetooth profile of a keyboard, I think it would work, but mostly not. So it's not what I want, because what I want is to hold it in my hand and then just sort of squeeze with my finger or my thumb

and have it advance the page, because it feels really natural. But again, it's a weird product, but I'm glad it exists. Like we live in an era where somebody has hacked a way to get a remote control on a Kindle, even though I don't want it, my friends use it, and that's great, but it's not what I want. What I want is a button I can push,

and a clip-on finger is not a button. I can't believe I used that sentence, but there it is. No, and neither are E Ink glasses. Neither are E Ink glasses, which I think come with a button, or they've got a gesture. I don't even know how they work. It looks like it comes with a with a thing you put in your hand Yeah, like a little controller that you yeah. Yeah. Well, that's nice. That's nice Yeah, I don't know. I would be creeped out by not being able to see anything but the book in my face, but

Yeah, I don't know. It's good. Here we go. Handheld remote. It's got a case Yeah, a proprietary charging cable, which is always fun. Oh, great. It's what you want. Yeah. Yeah. Why? They made that decision. I'm a little concerned their website boasts that 500 something books were downloaded in 2024.

Okay. That's not very many. That's not a lot of books. Minutes read 325,000. Pages turned, 377,000. Not a big market. It's very much like this is a real product. Yes, it's real.

It's real. So that's good. It's like when I was doing upgrade and we were talking about the keyboard that is also a track pad, which was that Apple patent, and people wrote in and said, oh, there's a real product that does that. Yeah.

I think you should email these people and get a press unit. Oh man, I know. I do not want it. I do not want it. Okay, well the link will be in the show notes, go check it out. If you work for Soul Reader

and you've heard us talk about this, reach out to Jason, he wants to review this. Please. Steven, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. It's always so much fun to be an upgrade. We, you and I don't get, we say this every time,

you and I don't get to talk tech very much on the shows. And here we are, it's great. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's, I appreciate you filling in for Mike, who got to take his very nice Thanksgiving trip that he likes to take Yes, and but we'll talk about Thanksgiving more in upgrade plus Which you can get by being a member or going to give relay comm and giving yourself or somebody else a gift the gift

the greatest gift of all a podcast Send us your feedback follow up and questions at upgradefeedback.com. Remember Upgradees.vote if you want to send us your votes for the Upgradees that will really help us. I write lots of things at SixColors.com except for last week where I wrote very little, but that's okay. It was a weird week. My podcasts are here at Relay and over at theincomparable.com. And Stephen, tell people where they can find your stuff. Yes, I'm here on Relay. I co-host Connected and Mac Power users, come out on Wednesday and Sunday

respectively. And I write over at 512px.net. We exist in social media. You can find us. Search for Stephen Hackett or with a pH or ISMH. You can find me. J Snell is usually what it is, although in some places I might be something else like Snellzone, it's okay. I mean, find us, we're there. But we're not gonna give you a list of names because it's too many now. It's just too many.

Clips of the show are available on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. We are at Upgrade Reli. The full show also gets posted at YouTube. If you are a YouTube focused person, focused human and prefer podcasts on YouTube to podcast apps of choice, we're there for you. And thank you again to our members

who support us with Upgrade Plus and to our sponsors. Once again, they were, I, Mike's so good at this, I can't, they were Delete Me, Smarter World, and ExpressVPN, that's who they were. And you heard me. If you're not an Upgrade Plus member, you heard me read those sponsor reads, and I hope you enjoyed it.

And if you're an Upgrade Plus member, you're probably not missing anything. Anyway. What is happening? I don't know. Thanks everybody for listening. Thank you, Stephen, for being here. And we will see you next week,

and Mike will be back then. Goodbye. Say goodbye, Stephen Hack Hackett. Bye y'all.