Upgrade - 545: The Bee Bonnet Company

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

from relay this is upgrade episode 545 for January 6 2025 today's show is brought to you by Squarespace fit bod and delete me yes I am Mike early and I'm joined by Jason Snell hi Jason hi Mike I didn't know we were doing Weird Voices today. This is my new thing for 2025. This is the year of croak. It's the new yearly thing that people don't know about. Yeah, I've been dealing with some kind of thing for the last few days.

And so this is where I am today. And you said to me, I should have told you I've been off the show, but I refuse. And here I am. I wanna be here. I know. We were ticking down until you're leaving. So every opportunity for us to do a show together,

we ought to take it. It's possible there may be like less than 10 episodes now before I'm gone. So I'm not letting them go. I know, how does that make you feel? A lot of work to do. A lot of work to do. I have a snow talk question for you. It comes from Aaron who wants to know, does smoking the turkey change the tier ranking that you gave to Turkey in the

Christmas special? So we ranked it as B tier. Did you smoke throughed turkey? Did it, did it, did it increase it? No, because turkey, all issues with turkey are dealt with in their rankings. I think this is clear. Like the rankings are, if you go back and listen to that episode, deeply considered, very scientific, all aspects have been considered. And that includes the fact that turkey itself has a range and can be dry and awful or can be made well. And the smoked turkey was also brined and it tasted great,

but the brine turkey that I roasted for Thanksgiving was also great. And the greatness of good turkeys and the badness of bad turkeys all are already factored into the tier list. So it's where it is. See this is like this is what you're saying we're very scientific when it comes to food tier lists like we would never leave something off the table. All tier lists are completely thoroughly considered and if you're thinking I can't believe you didn't mention believe it we didn't mention it. Yeah you can't believe it because we didn't. It's not an accident.

Yeah. Probably. Not an accident. If you have a question you would like for us to open a future episode of the show, go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in a Snow Talk question of your own. I have some follow up for you, Jason Snow. You will know this as I do. Many listeners got in touch to ask,

where is a good place to start with upgrading award-winning podcasts, the rest is history. So I thought we could maybe just give those recommendations now. And what I'll say is, the rest is history is incredible podcast. I love it. But it's one of those podcasts

that doesn't really believe in the web. You know, like- Yeah, their website is just an upsell for their club version. Yes, that's what it's for. Like they don't, they actually don't have a way to like easily link to the show anyway, but this is just how some podcasts are. Um, but you can, you know, like what I do just subscribe to it and then

you can like search in the feed. So here are my recommendations. Uh, I looked at your list and I want to talk about those two, but see my recommendations. Uh, you stole a bunch of mine, so I'll just concur with yours. Because I like all four of these are very good. America in 68, this is where I began. Fantastic starting point.

And that's Dominic's area of expertise. He wrote his master's thesis about some of the political players in the 60s in America. And I'll say as well, just as a general over-thought, as I've listened to this show more and more, I feel so much happier about the world as it is now, because I start to realize that the things that feel like unique problems today have been happening for centuries.

But nevertheless, America in 68, the assassination of JFK, the murder of Franz Ferdinand, and Britain in 68, the assassination of JFK, the murder of Franz Ferdinand and Britain in 1974. They're just incredible series. I love them. Yeah. Um, murder of Franz Ferdinand is really good. If you ever like, Oh yeah, I know that world war one was a thing, but how did that happen? And they go into very detail.

And also the, the it's phrased that way because like it's an assassination plot that happens that and then there's the ramifications of like why did this all kick off that they follow up afterward and they do the the france fernand episodes are in seriavo they went there to do them which is hilarious yeah um and britain 74 is just it's just what a story of a terrible time in british history It was really amazing. So I concur about those. I do think it's interesting that you've got a lot of American things from the perspective of British historians. I think that's funny. I like American history. I explicitly like it when I hear two British people talk about it. Yeah, absolutely. So I love their so I'm going to first I'm going to mention some of their long

series because they do long series. We should also mention there's no continuity really in the rest of history. Sometimes they will make reference to past episodes, but it's more like, well, if you want to hear more about this, go listen to this past episode. Or occasionally they'll joke about how they did a very long series about the Battle of Little Bighorn and some of the characters in that. But it's really like continuity. You can pick and choose and it's fine.

Like all shows that are, in my opinion, good, there are in-jokes between the two of them. And I like that today I started listening to another series because I just can't stop. And I heard a joke that has been referenced multiple times in the show and now I know what it's about. So you get that payoff, you know? Yeah, I mean, that works.

But it's pretty light. You don't have to start from the beginning. You don't have to be a completist. So my recommendations, I love the long series about the fall of the Aztecs. It is a weird clash of civilizations, very rare. It doesn't happen that often. It's long, but it's really great.

And it prompted me to read a book about that too. So, I mean, I really got into that. I thought their American Revolution series was fascinating because as an American, you're taught what the revolution is about. And then you listen to British historians talk about it and say, Nope, it wasn't about that. That's all American propaganda. And just it blew my mind. It's really, really cool. And that's what made me fall in love with the show actually were those episodes. And then there's, there's the very, very long series about Custer versus Crazy Horse, but I think it's good. It's just extremely long, so be warned. But if you care

about that kind of era of history and the clash on the American plains from both perspectives, it's in there and they're very careful about that, which I appreciate. Because it's kind of two series. It is. It is. There's sort of the run-up in the aftermath. They have been doing a French Revolution series that they're sort of in the middle of. They've done a couple of collections of episodes about that. But I read about the French Revolution in college and haven't since then and some of the storytelling of some of the wild things that happen in the run-up to the French Revolution. And then as it kicks off, I thought we're really good. Those are the long series. If you're looking for something shorter to try to test the waters, um, they did a, I think it's a three-part series about Lord Byron where it's Tom Holland who loves, who loves Lord Byron, uh, but just wild, just like what wild playboy

bizarre behavior, so amazing and hilarious and entertaining. Their Titanic series, I thought, was extremely good because they talk about the Titanic and sort of all the social issues and class issues and the story of sort of British Empire kind of fading away and American Empire rising, that's all encapsulated in the story of the Titanic. So even if you know the story of the Titanic.

So even if you know the story of the Titanic, you've never heard it told like this. I thought it was very entertaining. Like they talk about how the real events in the movie overlap and diverse. Yeah, and how the movie gets some things wrong that are like easy kind of social dynamic things of like, oh, of course all the rich people survived

and all the poor people died, which is not entirely true. And also there's some reasons for it that are not, we let them die, but more like the design of the ship. Anyway, they go into a lot of detail about that. And then I'm going to throw out the Martin Luther episodes, which are basically kicking off the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation. And Tom Holland really kind of blew my mind again talking about how the Reformation isn't just the Catholic Church, you know, getting this upstart group of non-Catholic Christian churches. It's not just that, but it's also like our concepts of the secular versus the religious, our concepts of personal spirituality, atheism, all of those things are also fundamentally a thing that stems from the Reformation, which is

just wild. So another mind blowing kind of moment. They're all great, but those are some recommendations for me. Yeah, they're all really, really good ones. I actually would also, I think I would, if you wanted to see if you like it, the Titanic one is maybe a really good start because like it's probably a story you know a bit about. So you'll learn some new stuff and they also do a good, and I think you get a good example of their camaraderie in that series. And if you want a bad boy acting bad, Lord Byron is right there.

That one's wild. I don't know if I'd recommend that as the start because like that one is just Yeah, yeah, that's why I wrote a novel where Lord Byron is a vampire When he was a kid when he was like a young man, he wrote that novel and it was his first book Anyway, I just said like this check it out though. Like it's just so good. Great show And also as rumors suggested we're talking about before the holidays, all iPhones with Lightning ports are no longer available for sale from Apple directly in most EU countries and those that are in the single market.

So that has happened. The expectation is, you know, there's going to be the iPhone SE4. I'm sure that Apple will get that thing out as quickly as they possibly can now, because this is just money left on the table now. Exactly. Exactly. The BBC is back and they're mad. Did they ever go away?

Apple intelligence was once again upset the BBC. So we spoke a few weeks ago about an Apple intelligence notification summary falsely reporting the story, which the BBC complained to Apple. It happened again. They've written another article about this. So it incorrectly stated that Luke Littler had won a Dart semifinal that he had yet to play, and also that tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

These are two things that are quite incredible to say, when these things were just not true. And you can see it. And I actually, in this story, I like what the BBC does here where they show some screenshots that show the individual headlines. So you can kind of get an idea as to how they got smushed together. But the BBC has a bee in their bonnet and I'm here for it. Yeah. Which one of the bees in BBC stands for bee in their bonnet?

Bee, bonnet. Both of them. Bee, bonnet, the bee in your bonnet company. The bee bonnet company. That's what it stands for. It's canon. I have a theory. I have a theory, because Apple has not said much about this at all, if anything.

I have a theory that what Apple is going to do, which we'll see, maybe I guess this is a prediction, is that as a way for Apple to silence this aspect of the story tactically, that Apple will offer app developers the option of opting out of summaries. Either specifically just you can opt out in your app or in your app metadata or in the app store or whatever, but you can just opt out and they will put a patch

in an OS update that will just opt those apps out if they opt out. Or some sort of an entitlement that's related to a topic like sensitive subject area or something like that, or news apps, or something like that, where there are certain classes of apps, because they love to do that. They love to classify apps and say, only you get this feature and the rest of you don't. That would, of course, include news organizations like the BBC. I think one of those things is probably the quick patch on this, just to stop this, which is, look, if you don't want, at BBC, if you're angry about this,

you can opt out of it now. That sounds like the most likely scenario here. We have precedent for this, right? The reactions, like on cameras, you know, like with the video cameras where you can show your thumb and it pops up with a little thumb emoji, that was becoming a problem, right? We were talking about this quite a bit on connected

with teletherapy specifically was an issue. We talked about it here too. You were sending like confetti to your therapist. To my therapist, yeah. Yeah, I've had quite a few times. It was pretty embarrassing. But luckily, I think he's a bit of a techie guy, so he got it.

But, and I expect it would probably work a similar way, which is when you open the app, it would say, this feature has been turned off. Would you like to turn it off? Ah, yes. And I think that's the way to do it. I think this is the only realistic way for Apple to solve this problem in the near to mid future, because what they are not gonna do is make this better. Right, we forgot to tell the summary engine

to not mess up things that are true, right? Like you can't, they already, obviously, they've already done that. Do not lie, do not fabricate, whatever, but they're still misunderstanding these headlines. In the longer term, I think the way forward for this is probably for Apple to build a richer notification protocol, where there's more metadata that goes along with the notification to be summarized.

The longer play here is also in the next iOS release, the BBC app will be able to put the text of their story in the push that gets summarized or something like that, or a summarization of it. I was thinking they could also have a system to kind of say what type of app you are. Well, like, so a messaging app, it makes sense to take individual messages and smush them together, right? But if you are a news app, absolutely under no circumstances should you be taking half of one headline and adding it to another one. Exactly. Because that's what's happening here is the, and that's a thing that Apple could

also do. That's a thing they could do technically right, is say, wait a second, there are certain classes of app where each item is discrete and when you summarize it, you can make those shorter, but you can't mix them. And that might actually, you could even, you could even look at the number of notifications that have come in and then take them and say, okay, I need you to shorten this one and this one and this one and then put them together instead of throwing them all

in the pile and saying, shorten them, which is what they're doing. So there are some technical ways that they could make this better. They could also get more signal because probably they're just using the headline, right? But they could get some more signal as well. They could do a better job here.

But can we, I wanna back up a second though and talk about the larger issue that we're talking about here. I know I posted something on blue sky about this I just I was quoting Someone else talking about this Craig Grinnell about the BBC issue and You know about the fact that BBC says fix this and they and Craig says they can't They're all fancy autocomplete. AI doesn't understand context. I feel like it's 2025 now. 2024 was the year that Apple launched Apple intelligence. I think there was I think all of us

understood that Apple was behind and Apple was trying to catch up and was trying to put AI everywhere in their products and that there was going to be a rough patch, you know, predicting things that Apple would have to apologize for all of those sorts of things. Now that it has become 2025, I'm feeling a little less charitable. And here's my reason. If this was any other Apple feature that wasn't in the context of them struggling to catch up with AI and keep up with their competition, if it was just a feature that Apple did using who knows what technology, and it generated fictional and it generated fictional notifications on your system. Whether it is saying something about a darts match that didn't happen, or saying that the wrong person got assassinated, or if it was something like saying some spam was actually priority email, whatever it is.

Yes, whatever that is. If you take it out of the context of Apple trying to catch up to some technology that is already sort of fundamentally untrustworthy, but on top of that, that Apple is behind. And so they're throwing at it. And they basically, I mean, let's, this is part of my point. Let's be honest here. They've lowered their standards because they need to catch up. let's be honest here, they've lowered their standards because they need to catch up. I think this year, all of us who write about this stuff and talk about this stuff need to cut them less slack about it because the fact is, if this was a regular feature that shipped using the standards we usually hold Apple to, and it's making things up, it's just unacceptable, right? It's unacceptable. It's not, well, you got to understand it's an LLM. It makes mistakes. Apple's trying to play catch up. They're keeping up with the Joneses. They have to do it strategically because what if some of this stuff is really important and then Google's got a huge lead or whatever? Like,

yes, yes, yes, yes. All of that is true. But fundamentally, Apple is foisting broken features on its users and not just that, they're advertising them heavily. And you could say, and again, here's one of the counter arguments, well, it's beta. It's like, okay, it's beta, but it is heavily marketed. The marketing doesn't really talk about it in beta. You can't call it a beta and then put it on the poster.

Like you can't do that. And they really want you to turn it on and use it. And yes, you can turn it off and that's good. But again, contextually, if Apple promotes a feature and ships it and calls it a beta and it's kind of broken in bad ways, counterfactual ways, they should be criticized for it because it's not up to their standards. And I think that, honestly, I think Apple knows that it's not up to their standards, but they're doing it anyway.

This actually kind of corresponds to my thoughts about where they are with the Vision Pro, which is the Apple only has one way to do anything, like a hype filled launch of a product that nobody's going to buy. And that really is kind of a demo and a dev kit for a product they want to make in five years, but they launch the Vision Pro using the same playbook as everything else they do because they only have one way of doing it. I would say they only have one way to launch anything, which is a hundred percent hype full on. And so as a result, like if Apple intelligence ships, they're going to market the hell out

of it, right? They're just going to do that. They're not going to say, let's soft pedal this because it's kind of broken. Let's just slide it out there. They're like, no, it's the defining feature of all of our products now. And I'm not sure that they're just wired. They're not wired to do it any other way. But the problem is, it's not good enough. It's just not good enough. A feature like this, we have to be able to point at it and say, if your summaries are turning news

headlines into lies, your summaries don't work. Like, period, period. If it's only 20% of the time or 10% of the time, it doesn't matter. They're broken. And in fact, to go back to the initial point of this, you should have anticipated this and built controls around it so that the apps could protect themselves, so that the apps could be put in different buckets with different processing, but what happened? You rushed to ship it because you wanted to ship it fast and it's not right, right? Like they could have taken more time but they felt like they couldn't, so they just shipped the bad thing and I feel like we need to be less understanding of Apple lowering all of its standards and shipping the bad thing that's broken. So for this year, for those of you listening

who didn't love how negative we were about some of Apple's AI moves, I would just say brace yourself because if they ship stuff that's substandard, they gotta get called out on it. It's gotta be scandalous. They need to be sent as many messages as possible that lowering their standards to the point

where they're shipping things that lie about BBC headlines is not acceptable. Don't ship it. You can't get away with that. Because right now, I feel like we've let them get away with it and again, I understand everything in the context, but in the end, it's a product. Shipping to customers who are gonna use end, it's a product shipping to customers

who are gonna use it. And it's telling them things that aren't true. And like, we got enough of that in this world. We don't need any more. We don't need our iPhones lying to us. Because like, you know that there are many people maybe going all the way up to the top that knew stuff like this was gonna happen, right?

But they decided to ship it. And so I'm saying, I wanna say these things because it's like, I want people to know that we understand the full context, but that doesn't mean it's good enough. Yeah. Like I know that they thought about this and given, and if they would have had more time, maybe they could have implemented it differently, but they didn't. But that is also their own fault, right? This is it. They could have delayed this and put more controls in it for apps. They could have shipped it for their apps only.

And that would still lead to the breakup by text summarized by, you know, by the system. It could lead to the, the hike almost killed me being, you know, they committed suicide or whatever, like it would still lead to some of that, but it would be a little more controlled and constrained and they could learn from it. They didn't do any of that. There were no limitations here. They just said, yep, summarizing everything on the system. Here we go.

And it's led to these issues. And again, I'm not saying Apple needs to respond to this because of the bad press. Apple does need to respond to it because of the bad press. Apple does need to respond to it because of the bad press. They do need to do that. They're going to need to do damage control. And I think their silence on these issues is really troubling because they're like just whistling past the graveyard here. Apple needs to do this

because of the respect of their users, right? Like they need to, they need to care about the product they ship. And that's one of their brand promises, right? And like, but you understand we have to ship you junk that doesn't work, right? That you can't trust because everybody is doing it in the, in the tech industry. Is not, it's not good enough. It's just not good enough. You need to have some set of standards.

I understand the pressure that Apple is on, although I would argue that some of that is group think and that they're not under as much pressure as they are. But it would be supremely ironic if Apple destroyed its brand in an attempt to rush out new technology so that its brand isn't destroyed. That's all I'm saying. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website

platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just getting started or managing a growing brand, you can stand out from the crowd of a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell your products, services or even the content you create. Squarespace has everything you need all in one place, all on your terms. It's so easy to get a website off the ground with Squarespace because they have two decades of industry-leading design expertise that they have coupled with cutting-edge AI technology to

unlock your strongest creative potential. Design intelligence from Squarespace empowers anyone to build a more beautiful, more personalized website that is tailored to their unique needs to craft a bespoke digital identity to use across an entire online presence. It is so easy to use Squarespace. Like I have a website with them, it's my own site, mikecolle.net, it's like a landing page, kind of bio page for me. And over the weekend I was like, I want to just add in a list of social networks people can find me on.

And I just went in, five minutes in and out and I'd done it. It was so easy to put the content there. It's also so easy to update the design too. I think it's fantastic. And then if I wanted to find out how many people were coming to my website, I could use Squarespace Analytics, where you can measure your end-to-end online performance with powerful website and seller analytics, getting insight and top traffic sources, understanding how your reach is growing, tracking sales metrics, and learning where to focus your

engagement. It's all the data you need to scale your brand or business fully integrated and clearly displayed. With Squarespace, you can sell physical and digital goods because they get paid for the work that you're doing thanks to Squarespace invoicing. This means you can spend more time focusing on growing your business. You can invoice your clients and get paid for your services, you can turn leads into clients to proposals, estimates and contracts, simplifying your workflow and managing your service business

on one platform. So go to squarespace.com and sign up for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash upgrade, you'll be able to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That is squarespace.com slash upgrade when you decide to sign up and you'll get 10% of your first purchase and show you support for the show. Thanks to Squarespace for the support of this show and all of Relay. So talking about this year, considering that it is a new year, I wanted to kind of look

at Apple in 2025. So what are the big things we're expecting Apple will face in 2025. We've kind of touched on already my first one, which was Apple intelligence. But they're going to have to, you know, make better what they've done, that realistically have more features this year. I mean, to be fair, we haven't even seen all the features, have we? I've just realized this. Like we have not got Siri with personal context.

We have not got apps being able to work with each other. That's all still to come this year. That's still to come. That's the, I wrote a piece for Macworld called 2025 will be the year of Apple intelligence again. Because the truth is, and yes, I know everything we just talked about, that's why we're talking about it.

The first half of the year, they have to make good on their promises from June of last year. And then in June, they will make new promises for the next year. And I don't, they seem to be struggling so much to get things in their products. I have a hard time not thinking that next year's cycle

will also just be AI catch up, which we're all going to have to keep a close eye on. But it feels like that's what's going to happen, because they still haven't shipped all the promise from June. We didn't expect they would. We knew some of that stuff was going to slip. It's the hardest stuff. It's also the stuff I was most interested in seeing. So other than Genmoji, we got that. That was pretty good. I imagine that 2025 is all Apple intelligence, not just until they ship those features, but like I think June will all be about Apple intelligence as well, that they're going to announce a whole new slew of features. And then we're going to spend another year watching them ship that. Yeah. I mean, the next point I wanted to ask you about was software improvements

other than in AI, right? And so we can touch on that in a second, but realistically for Apple, they must be really happy about AI existing because they have actual new areas that they have things they can do to the operating system. Where before this, you know, you're kind of, you're iterating on stuff, you're trying to come up with new things. These are like legitimate new areas, like that they can do new, that it doesn't enable them to do new stuff. But that's gotta be encouraging

for some of the people inside of Apple, that maybe in a year or two's time, we might see some like, okay, considering this type of technology that we now have available to us, what are the other things we can do? I mean, we had already seen an example of this, which was transformer based, um, predictive text. Yeah. And that did get better. Well, this is the, this is the irony here is that Apple has been doing machine learning based stuff for a while now.

I do feel like maybe some of it was, I don't know whether it was not good enough or whether people just didn't want to bother prioritizing it or didn't believe in it. But I get the feeling that there was some stuff that people were like, we could really do this. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. And then when the AI thing happened, everything that was machine learning based at all, that was plausibly part of this, it seems like got the green light, the good ones and the bad ones. And there are both. And again, some of it is the rush. Like I'm not even saying after my rant last time about notification summaries, I'm not even saying that notification summaries is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm saying that it got rushed in ways that have led to bad outcomes and that it needs to be fixed. And I would say that that is true for a bunch of the AI stuff as well, that there are, like, look, personal context and app intense control

are both features that, look, when they ship, they're gonna be disappointing because they're gonna be super limited. But I think those are the features with the most potential to completely transform how we use our devices, because you've got a large language model that understands your context in a way that no other model should, because they're running in the cloud

and giving them your personal info is bad. It really should be a device that you hold, that you trust, that has your personal information in it. And then it processes it, right. And if it can do that, that has huge benefits. And then if it can interconnect that with all of the apps via app intents, you've really got something very interesting in terms of using our devices by having an assistive model that knows who we are and knows our apps and knows what they can do and will just do what we ask it. That's the dream there. So great, they got to start somewhere with that, but you're right, that unlocks a direction

for Apple's devices that they otherwise weren't really going because they were kind of tinkering around the edges with a bunch of stuff. And also, you know, there may have been things that I think before now, Apple's machine learning efforts were all, if it can be done on device, we can do it. If it can't, we can't. But now they apply to cloud compute. So there may be new things that they're able to do, which could be legitimately very interesting, but and

now because they're building things outside of your device, this might become more possible again. Are you intrigued, excited or optimistic about software improvements outside of AI this year? Not especially. I think that there's some stuff that they've been working on that they've pushed into. We Mark, Irwin's even report about this stuff that they pushed into the next cycle that I mean, I think there will be some stuff, but I, I'm not. Like, I think the big thing in vision OS three will probably be that they'll add Apple intelligence. I think the big thing in TV OS will probably be that there'll be some connection to Apple intelligence. I think any, if they've got any home products this year, I think that Apple Intelligence will be a selling point.

I think they're going all in on this, right? I'm not sure what else they've got. And to your point, maybe that's it. Maybe they've decided that their products are all kind of in okay, like they should fix bugs and stuff, but is there a feature that you would prioritize that's like, this is a brand new iOS feature or whatever that that should be everywhere and

Isn't AI related, but it's very important. Like I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical about What we will get other than Apple intelligence features going forward. All I want is the male categories on iPadOS and macOS so I. It's all I want. It wouldn't hurt. It wouldn't hurt. Because then I can stop using Spark. Like I don't want to use it anymore.

And so like, if Apple just give me that, I'll get most of what I want and that'll be good for me. Right, which technically is an Apple intelligence, but it's an Apple feature. I mean, I think it counts. And I think that they could do much more with that sort of thing too than they're doing. So that would be, yeah, sure.

You mentioned the Vision Pro. I wrote in the document, will they or won't they? And kind of to begin with, what is your interpretation of that question? If I say Vision Pro, will they or won't they? What do you think I'm talking about? I think it's how in is Apple. Yeah.

And also will they or won't they ship new hardware? Yes, you both, that's what it means. My guess is no new hardware this year for Vision Pro. I do think that they are working on something. I think if I had to guess, and I know we've had conflicting reports about this. If I had to guess, when you're like, will they release a version of that hardware that's cheaper and that has some of the features removed or will they do a new version of it that is using kind of modern more modern processors and stuff like that just giving it kind of a refresh to keep kicking it along as a developer unit.

Why can't it be both? That's my gut. My gut feeling is if, and certainly if I were working at Apple on what the next vision product was, I would want them to go to, let's lower the price as much as we can. Let's also bring the tech forward and put M5 in it and do whatever else we can and make the next vision pro along the line to getting us where we want to go. But I do think that they made a lot of decisions that are bad in that product that increased its price for not very much value.

And obviously that screen in the front is one of them. Some of the other kind of design decisions they made in terms of materials they could probably undo. And probably some of that tech has just improved where you could do a refresh of parts of it to get it to be cheaper or more efficient or both. So that's my guess is that we will end up getting a Vision Pro 2 or you know or maybe they'll call it a Vision but I

don't think they will. I think they'll call it a Vision Pro 2. I don't think it's gonna be this year though. My guess is next year. I do think there'll be a Vision OS 3 and I do think they're gonna add Apple intelligence to it. You do. But that's it. Yeah. Yeah. I think it'd be nothing but a mistake to have new hardware this year. Like there is no world in which that is met with any kind of appreciation. It's not gonna make more people buy them and you're only gonna upset everybody that did. Right? Like I can't see that happening. Will we get the controllers this year or controller support? Probably. That's what I would imagine to be the big feature in

Vision OS 3. Yeah. Along with a bunch of... And I hope Apple... Might even be sooner. Could be sooner. I mean, Mark Gurman's report was that they were gonna announce it, so that means it may be a Vision OS 2 point something update that adds support for that. And I would actually argue that that's great because it gives them some time. Yeah. Like, look, they've got all the time in the world.

I know, again, we think just like Apple, we tend to think of every Apple thing in the lens of what Apple does. And that's pedal to the metal, what's the next one? Ship another one, let's get it out there. But to your point, you can take your time. This is a product category. I know some people are like,

oh God, they better act quick and all that. Like this product category isn't going anywhere. Like literally is not going anywhere. It's the tech, the tech behind the scenes. They need to be working hard to get it, miniaturized to get it in glasses, to address it from a couple of different directions, to push the OS forward to where they're going, where their goal is. But their goal is still so far out there.

Their goal is still so far out there. Their goal is still five years out there, maybe. That in the interim, when they update this, really they should make a more affordable developer kit that does more stuff, because it's entirely exploratory right now, right? Like they are exploring this area. So does there need to be new hardware that isn't based on M2?

Yes. Does it have to be this year? No. Does it have to be cheaper? Well, no, but it sure would be nice if it was a little bit cheaper, right? And that you could use some of the lessons you've learned from this first year with it on sale to make some decisions about what to keep and what to, to drop. So, you know, where the platform is going in the future.

But like, again, I really do think you got time, not in the sense like you don't need to work on it again, because meta certainly is, but I'm saying like, I don't think, and I think this is what you were saying, I don't think any rush to push out Vision Pro hardware in calendar 2025 will do anything for the future of the platform because it's just not going to advance the ball enough. It's still going to be a dev kit because we're just not there yet. And it's going to be interesting to see how they approach Vision over the next year.

Like I'm just intrigued, like how much marketing does it get? Um, like what more or not do they do? Yeah, I think it, I think it's all gotta be strategic, right? I think the Sony thing is actually strategy. And then it's, um, so Julia Alexander, my old pal on, uh, on downstream did a post today on her blog. She's working for Disney, but she's still got comments that are not related to what she's working on for Disney that she can write about. And she wrote about Vision OS today. And it's, you know, it's Julia, it's smart.

It's a lot of things we've talked about, but it's very smart. But like, Apple's issues with the Vision Pro right now, I mean, they do need to be continuing to advance the hardware forward. There does need to be new hardware at some point, but really they gotta be thinking about the big picture. They've got a lot of opportunity in the next year or two

to fix all the other things that are broken, right? So it's why is there not more immersive hardware? Well, they've got a hardware partner who's gonna ship a camera. That's good, that's a good start. Why is there not more immersive content? Are there deals they could do to up this thing as an entertainment device? They need to be working on that. And on the developer side, again, what can they do? Is games a direction? How do they get the hot developers interested in the product? Again, when I talk about Apple,

I mean, basically, I feel like what I'm saying is for a company that is so aggressive internally on developing products, I think policy-wise and corporate culture-wise, the problem is that Apple is just completely calcified, that Apple does it Apple's way. And this has come up in our criticisms of how they've handled being regulated, that there's like, no, we do it by the book and it's our book and we're going to do it this way. But with Vision Pro, I'll say it about their developer story. They approached the Vision Pro like they were God's gift to developers,

because here's another Apple platform you can develop for. When all developers look at it and think, wait a second, you're not going to sell any of these for years, and it's going to cost me how much to develop software for it that nobody will use that with dozens of people or maybe hundreds of people will buy? Why would I do that? And it makes sense when it's iPhone or iPad or Mac because they've got big user bases there. But like, Vision Pro you got to put in the work, you got to act like an upstart, you got to shake hands, you gotta put in the work. You gotta act like an upstart. You gotta shake hands, you gotta influence people.

You gotta make them, make it worth their while. You gotta make them wanna be on your platform, believe they need to be on your platform, or pay them, or give them a special deal, or whatever, to be on your platform. That stuff Apple can do now is change how they approach Vision as a platform so that it's going to have room to grow and

find what it needs to be from not just a hardware side, but a development side and That's the problem right now is they're so calcified in their attitude that they figure they can do what they did on iPhone and iPad Which is just toss it out there and say this is so hot Everybody's gonna just do it. We don't need to do anything. And, and vision OS isn't like that. So what are they going to do? Are they just going to sit there or are they going to change their strategy? Um, that's what I, if, if I were at Apple, I would,

that's what I would be talking about this year for vision is how do we get this thing to be picked up by people who are going to pull the platform forward? Not to sell millions of them even, but to pull the platform forward. And they haven't done that and no hardware update will do that. No. Speaking of hardware, are you intrigued, hopeful, expecting other new hardware this year outside of what we expect, like brand new areas, home products, smart glasses, these kinds of things. I, well, we already said here last week that if, sorry, this is the beginning of the year, I guess I'm doing a lot of, if I were at Apple right now, but like, I would love it if Apple

challenged its internal team to get something like AirPods glasses out this year, like crash program, get it out. Because the other problem I have with a lot of Apple stuff is they make these decisions and they're like, well, that'll take two years. Like, okay, come on, strike while the iron is hot, get something out there. You've got the tech for this, put it together.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, get something out there. Um, and I know like what I said about AI, but what I'm saying here is that sometimes that for hardware, sometimes Apple places the bar too high and that there's a perfectly good product out there and they're like, yeah, but we could do custom chips and all that. I was like, oh, or you could just take your AirPods and put them in glasses. And that would probably be pretty good. But, uh, so that would be a

challenge. I think this is the year of home stuff in large part because I think that so much else of what Apple is doing is in is pretty static, right? Like I look at the Mac and the iPhone and the iPad and other than that thin iPhone, I think the updates are going to be super boring. I think they're going to be super boring because I think that they've made a bunch of exciting updates recently, but what's left right now, unless they do something completely wild with like the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, I don't think they're going to. I think it's gonna be a fairly dull year on the hardware front other than we've got Mark Gurman's report that they're gonna do a home screen thing.

There's some thought that there's probably gonna be an Apple TV update that might again be Apple intelligence related. There might be a HomePod update that again might be Apple intelligence compatibility related. Like I see that as an area that's new and where, and I'm not saying like boring is bad. Like I feel like Apple's gotten a lot of their product lines in good places. They've redesigned every Mac.

They've redesigned all the iPads. They're in a good place. But if you're looking for the new, I feel like the home is the most likely place you're going to get it. Apple clearly wants new areas, right? Like that's their whole thing. They want to make more hardware to make more money.

This is a place to do it and to do it potentially. Wearables is kind of in the doldrums right now. Wearables, home and accessories is in the doldrums. So home is part of that, wearables is part of that, accessories is part of that. And it is a place where you could probably push and they have not bothered to push in the last, as we all know in the last five or 10 years,

like the home has not been a place that Apple has put a lot of focus. Smart home technology, when it works and when people like it, they will buy multiple of the same thing for their house, right? You'll buy four cameras and three speakers. You know, like you have the opportunity to sell through quite a lot of units to the same customer.

It's like if they can make good, compelling products in these areas, this could be a new business, the size of absolutely AirPods or the size of Apple watch, which would be great for them. And get more growth into wearables, home and accessories, which is I think what they, what they want to do. And, and they have, and the truth is the good news about the smart home category is that it's even after Apple kind of like not paying attention to it for a while, it's still not, it's still not great. There's still opportunity for Apple to come in.

I mean, there are a bunch of announcements being made at CES this week. As always. As always, some of them are made up, but some of them are real. And they'll advance the ball a little bit. Sounds like Matter, like there was a report today about how Apple and Google and Amazon

are agreeing to use Matter certification as certification for their standards which sounds boring but it means that if you make a product and you get it certified by matter you've got you picked up works with Apple works with Google works with Alexa that's that's a nice step for matters secondary certification to work and tertiary and right me like it they're like okay matter is like matter is going so slow, but it is happening and I think that it is These other players saying yeah We're putting it all in them in the in the middle of the table with matter and and that's good but there's still opportunity for Apple there and and you're right like

You you can invest in a lot of Tech plus it's an ecosystem thing for Apple, right? Apple's always about the ecosystem. All the products don't have to be Apple, but if Apple's got a home controller that's on your wall or on your kitchen table, that's that screen thing, and it's integrated with your Apple TV, so your cameras come up on there

and you get alerts on there, and obviously it's on your Apple Watch and it's on your phone, and it's everywhere that is in the Apple ecosystem. So you say, I don't want a Google Home, I don't want an Amazon Home, I want an Apple Home. Apple needs to do more work to get there, but Apple could get there

and that's a place Apple would really like to be, is to have all of that stuff be another sticky stay in the Apple ecosystem kind of thing. Yeah. You mentioned the iPhone, like iPhone 17. We're expecting the thin phone. Well, are you expecting the thin phone? That has been rumored.

Sure. Do you think it will be significant to people or it's just gonna be a nice addition? I think it's gonna be better than the plus plus in the mini is what I would say. I think it's going to be better than the plus in the mini. I think it'll be a sub thousand. I think it really will be in that category of, you know, cause it's not going to have the pro features.

It's going to have like one camera it sounds like and it's going to be thin, but like it's going to look great. And we know already from just the colors on the iPhone 16 that there are some people are like, you know what, this is good enough. I'm gonna, I mean, not Federico, he kind of backed out of that. But in general, I think that there's some people who are like, this is enough, this is fine.

And in fact, having the people who don't buy the thousand dollar plus phone have this awesome thing that feels cutting edge, I think it will attract some pro people. It will also attract some people who would normally just buy a base model. They're like, oh, I like this. I don't need all those cameras. Um, even if they do, you know, I like it. It's simple. It looks really cool and different.

And I think it will do better. I don't think it's going to blow the other models out of the water, but I think it's going to do better than the plus or mini. And you know, my theory is still that this is just a test bed, uh, so that they can do folding down the road by making a product that's so thin that ultimately, you know, in a year there'll be a foldable phone, year or two. Yeah. Last thing I wanted to touch on with you, because I think this is still going to be a big theme, political, economic, legal. Yep. What is Apple's 25 in these areas? Yep. What is Apple's 25 in these areas?

Whew. It's so hard to say, right? Apple's been pretty consistent up to now, but at the same time we've seen with a give and take in Europe that Apple sometimes will try stuff and Europe goes, nope. And Apple's like, all right. Like in the end they have to comply. And as much as some commentators kind of say, well, what if they just leave Europe?

It's like, they're not gonna leave Europe. They're not gonna leave Europe. It's not gonna happen. They want that money. They're not gonna abandon a market. They'll do what they need to. And if they're really spiteful about it, they'll do what they need to

in the most limited way possible and limited to that region and that's it. But I think that there will be other parts of the world that will jump on the regulatory bandwagon following the EU's lead. And so that Apple's gonna have to deal with that. I think the real question is what happens in the US because we've got a change in administrations.

We've got, I know everybody's like talking about Tim Cook donating money to the inaugural fund and all of that, but like, let's not even look at that and sending congratulations to Trump. Let's look at the four years Trump was president before. What did Apple do? And the answer is, Apple played ball politically. But I would also say Apple didn't just do what the administration wanted. Apple kind of steered the administration in a lot of ways and did what it needed to. Tim Cook sitting right next to Trump in the White House at that meeting of tech leaders. Tim Cook with Trump at that factory in Texas, right? Like they did those things, but also behind the scenes, they were doing negotiations

about not being not having the tariffs counted, which sounds like that's happened again, where it's like if you do this, Samsung wins and they're not an American company, so don't do this. And it sounds like that's going to kind of win. So the question becomes, what prices does Apple have to pay if any in order to be championed by the government and not attacked by the government? And more broadly, does the nationalist policy of the administration affect Apple's regulation of American companies in other places? Because I don't know what happens when the, if the U S rattles its saber with the European union about the regulation of American companies in Europe and threatens some sort of retribution. Right?

I think it's unlikely that it'll be like stop regulating Apple in Europe and Google and in Facebook or else. Because I'm not quite sure what the or else would be. However, it's very hard for me to not think there won't be a, well, I'm going to take out a bunch of nos there. I suspect there'll be a chilling effect. Let me put it that way. I can't believe there won't be a chilling effect where the EU will be like, Oh man, we're really getting battered by everybody in the US administration about our regulations of American companies. And we're going to still regulate them. But

you know, back behind closed doors, they're like, let's cool this off a little bit. Right? Like, let's cool this off. Because we don't want to get in a shouting match with the president of the United States about this. Like, this is not conducive to what we're doing. Hard to believe that stuff like that won't happen. So I don't know. I mean, that's the real wildcard because that whole administration is a kind of a random policy generator. So who knows? But I think that in the end, if we've seen anything, donations to the inaugural fund aside, we saw in the last Trump administration that Apple worked really hard and Tim Cook worked really hard to make it not make it if not positive to Apple at the very least neutral to Apple. And the same thing will happen again. Apple is not, Apple's advantage and I think all the tech companies advantage as much as conservatives have talked about recently about like oh the big tech companies and

they're so bad I think especially with Elon Musk sitting at Trump's right hand at this point whispering in his ear. For now. The fact, for now, for now, but but right now as they're composing the administration. Here's my theory, which is Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, sure, throw them in there. These are all what we would call great American companies. And I think fundamentally nobody in Trump's orbit wants to be seen as harming great American companies. Right? And so I think at least for their position for these companies around the

world, I think they're gonna keep their hands off. I think they're gonna be as light touch as you might expect. I think there's gonna be a lot of politics and there's gonna be a lot of threatening and there's gonna be a lot of behind the scenes things that happen. But I think it's hard, and we already saw this, I think, with Apple, it's hard for an American administration

of any party to say, we're going to do a policy that kills an American company and makes it Okay for a Korean company to succeed or a Chinese company to succeed so I just I feel like that is that is one of the things that's going to make the big tech stuff not as big a deal as it might have been in the when they were all out of government talking about it. And because now that they're in government, like, and that's why those CEOs gave money to the inaugural fund. And that's why they sent congratulations. And that's why Tim Cook did what he did during the first administration was this is that is that that's

the, that's the way the game is played and you don't have to like it. But that's what's going on. And I expect that will continue. And as a result, I don't think the story is going to be that Apple faces crippling tariffs on stuff they built in China because of Trump trade policies. I think you know, that kind of stuff is going to get smoothed out just like it did four years ago. I think, you know, that kind of stuff is going to get smoothed out just like it did four years ago. Yep. Something I'll be interested to see is if Apple jumps on encourages or sponsors kind of any AI legislation? Like, oh, yeah, yeah. Are they able to get their competitors to be pulled back? Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting question, right? Cause some of the legislation is supported by AI companies cause they want to kind of erect a moat and make it harder for other companies to come in. And if Apple can be like, yeah, we're on that side

with those guys and stuff, like constrain them a little bit but let us be over there and then we're going to catch up to them. I don't know. I, I, I, if I had to predict, I would say that there'll be nothing about AI legislation because I don't think anybody can agree on it. No. I think a lot of people saying, I think Casey Newton, a platformer said this, like something that he expects is during this

next administration that the conservative social media is censoring us, we'll move to AI is censoring us. And you'll ask it for an opinion about a certain group or about a certain politician, and it gives an answer they don't like, and then that's gonna be a new thing. I think that could be an interesting thing to see just in general in technology. What is the free speech of AI like that's gonna be an

interesting thing to look up on but I don't really think it's something Apple's gonna need to worry about. I would say this if I'm a tech giant that's not in the US and I've got competition that's in the US I'm gonna be a little worried yeah I'm gonna be a little worried. Yeah. I'm gonna be a little worried about that because I think you may get punished in the US market for not being American, essentially. I think you'll also, you may get punished,

potentially or threatened as a ploy, if that makes sense. So like, I'll put it this way. If the Trump administration is really unhappy with the European community and the European commission and their regulation of American companies, what do you think is gonna happen? Well, one of the things that's gonna happen is that Spotify is gonna get threatened

and what Epic is to get threatened. And what Epic is going to get threatened. And I'm not saying that that makes any sense, like, legally or something. But like, if Apple goes to the Trump administration, like they're killing us in Europe, one of the things they could do is say, we've decided that all Spotify subscriptions come with a $10 a month tariff. And they don't even have to actually do it. And it doesn't have to be legal and it doesn't have to make sense. But that's the saber rattling that maybe makes people in Europe go, quiet down, calm down. Now is not the time, X-Nay on the regulation Ray.

And we'll see. I mean, we'll, we'll see how it goes, but I, I, something to watch for, because I think there'll be a lot of incidents like that. It's, it's like saying, I want to buy Greenland. Is that, is that something that's practical, plausible, or makes any sense at all? No, but it happened. So, and everybody's like, yeah, and you know, President of the United States. So, we got to at least take it

seriously enough, even though it's ridiculous because you have to. There's gonna be a lot of that for the next four years. This episode is brought to you by FitBard. If you're looking to change your fitness level, it can be hard to know where to get started, which is why I'm pleased to let you know that FitBud is an easy and affordable way to build a fitness plan that is made just for you. Everybody has their own path to personal fitness. This is why FitBud uses the data that they collect from the exercises that you're doing to make sure they're customizing things to suit you perfectly.

FitBud will adapt as you're improving with your workouts to make sure that every single one of them is challenging. This pushes you to make the progress that you want, but also keeps you engaged. FitBod tracks your muscle fatigue and recovery to design a well-balanced workout routine. It's going to mix up the workouts that you're doing, adding in new exercises, new supersets, new circuits. It's one of the things I love about FitBod. I've done exercise apps before I found FitBud where it was like the same 12 exercises. I found them very boring and I didn't like doing it after like two weeks. But what I love about FitBud is they're trying to throw in things in there that are new for me. That is a benefit to me but they also do a really great job of explaining to me how to do this new exercise. They have all these videos in the app to show you how to do the

exercises from different angles. Makes me feel confident with the new exercises that I'm doing. Your muscles improve when they work in concert with your entire muscular system. Overworking some muscles while underworking others can negatively impact your results. That is why FitBod keeps all of this information in your FitBod Gym profile along with the information about your experience, your environment and your goals. They track your muscle recovery to make sure that you avoid burnout and keep up with momentum. The app is great and easy to use. You can stay informed with their progress tracking charts, weekly report cards and sharing cards. It lets you keep track of your achievements and

personal bests and share them with your friends and family. FitBod also integrates with your Apple Watch, Wearer Smartwatch and apps like Strava, Fitbit, and Apple Health. Personalized training of this quality can be expensive. FitBod is just $12.99 a month or $79.99 a year, but you can get 25% of your membership by signing up at fitbod.me slash upgrade. So go now and get your customized fitness plan at fitbod.me slash upgrade. That is fitbod.me slash upgrade for 25% of your membership. Thanks to Fitbod for their support of this show and Relay. So this week marks 25 years since the introduction of Mac OS X

that brought with it Aqua and the Dock. Yeah, I wrote a piece about this at their request for Macworld, which is funny because I wrote a piece about this at their request for Macworld, which is funny, because I wrote a piece about this for Macworld 25 years ago, too. Why not? Why not? But we wrote the same piece, though, would be my assumption.

Not the same piece, but it was funny. There was a period where they were on their old CMS before they switched to WordPress, where I would want to refer to old OS X things that were not on the web anymore. And so I would literally just take the article from Macworld, the text and post it on Macworld backdated, which it's their copyright, right? I don't have the right to post it on the on the internet, but I have access to their CMS still. So I would just post old articles. So that article is still online, even though it's 25 years old. I did that for a bunch of my early OS X articles because I wanted them to be available. And it's like when John Syracuse had access to the Ars Technica CMS, which he doesn't anymore. It's a little like that. Like I could just post old articles. And actually my editor, he would be happy to post old articles as well if I asked him. They have a copyright, it's great. So there are lots of anniversaries for OS X. We should start there. There's Steve

Jobs brought on stage to announce that they bought Next. There's the announcement that they're doing a thing called Mac OS X. There's the Mac OS X server that shipped. There are various developer releases. And then there's the final 1.0 release, which is actually not the 25th anniversary of that is not until next year in the summer. Because although they said they were going to ship this summer 25 years ago, they didn't. They shipped a public data, but not the final. So it's complicated. I would say the, if there is one and there isn't, but if there is one moment that is,

this is when it really kicked off in terms of OS X being announced as more or less it would ship, it's this one. Because this is the event at Macworld Expo, that's why it's in January, it's a January thing because Macworld Expo was always first week in January. This is the one where they unveiled the interface. And the funny thing about it, Mike,

because I watched it back, I linked to the, in the piece I linked to the video, we can put a link in the short show notes to the YouTube video about this. And you can watch it. The amazing thing about it is that Steve Jobs is unveiling Aqua and it's the thing where it's like we said that you should be able to you should want to lick it. All those things are in there, right? He shows off interface

elements. And viewed from today, it's so bizarre because he'll be like, look at this thing, and everybody loses their minds. They're like, ah, and I know it's the Macworld Expo audience which means it's the only Apple events that ever happened where the general public could be there, right? And today's Apple events are completely controlled by Apple and even some of the last of the Macworld Expo events

were like that. But there was a time where you could buy a pass from Macworld Expo and wait in line and see a Steve Jobs keynote. So part of it is that. I mean, this is similar to me for like the one that I always think back to is the iPhone, right? Which is like similar in some way of like,

when there are many anniversaries for the iPhone, it just depends which one you want to celebrate. But like, the rubber band scrolling, people lost their minds. So like, that's my touch point to that idea. The reason I'm making this point is because I think so much of what got announced in this event is still relevant.

And that 25 years later, like literally they're like, oh, this is gonna give us, this is gonna be the next, here's what he said, this is our foundation for the next decade of Macintosh operating systems. Let's take that apart. Okay, first off, not just Macintosh operating systems, literally like five other operating systems, this will be the foundation for it.

And decade, decade, dude, it's been quarter of a century and we're still living in the OS X era, essentially. It was still called OS X past that decade, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They only changed it to Mac OS recently. Yeah. Honestly, before Mac OS X, it was just Mac OS. So it's sort of going back to that,

except with weird punctuation. So this is the part that really gets me, is that he shows, it just struck me how much of this we just take for granted now. Like he shows the Finder and people lose their minds. He shows the fact that you can take a window and move it around on screen and the content stays in the window,

or you resize it and the content stays in the window. On classic Mac OS, when you moved a window, it just showed you the outline of the window as dotted lines until you moved it to where you wanted and then you let go and it redrew it. People don't even remember that now. When you resize, the same thing happened. It did not keep the content in the window.

People lost their minds. The, he was like, oh look, up in the upper left-hand corner, there's red, yellow and green dots. We think that's kind of like a stoplight. And it does these three things, and people lost their minds. And he says, and look, if you move your mouse over them, you can see a little x and a minus and a plus or whatever, because it's maximize, minimize, and close,

and people lost their minds. Like all of these things, it's like, oh, let's look at the finder, and you can double click, and it moves, and there's a back button, and it's got icons, and they're the dock, and you can double click and it moves and there's a back button and it's got icons and they're the dock and you can drag things into it and you can see things and you click on them and and you can uh you can you can uh we built an app they built an app called bomb that like this tries to do everything to crash the system and now we're going to play a quick time video by the way mission impossible 2 trailer how old is tom cruise now

anyway they run the bomb app and the movie still plays. And everybody loses their minds. Because again, on the classic Mac, one app would break the entire system and you'd have to restart. And in Mac OS X, you didn't have to do that. So it's a great, I mean, it's a great Steve Jobs production. It's literally just Steve Jobs sitting at a computer,

clicking on stuff. And people are every 30 seconds losing their minds about this stuff. But this is the thing I can say as somebody who comes to you from the past from 25 years ago, all of that stuff was legitimately mind blowing if you were a Mac user because the classic Mac OS, even though it was only 16 years old at that point, was really dated from another era.

It really dated from the early 80s, late 70s personal computer era. It was missing so many things that they couldn't add to it. They tried. They tried it with Copeland. They tried it with with pink, intelligent. They tried to add, find ways to get a new OS for the Mac or make the old Mac OS work better and they just, they couldn't, they couldn't. That's why they bought Next. And then here it was, this was the moment where it's like, yep, all those things, crash proof, essentially, where other apps won't bring your apps down, dragging

things around on screen, PDFs are in the native format. You just open a PDF, you just drag something in and they lose their minds about it. And what struck me is that that keynote was so successful because all of that stuff is super boring now. It's just using the Mac. It's the way computers work. It's how computers work now. But, but, and we talk a lot about 1984 and the original Mac and all the

great things about it, but like this is the moment where the next quarter of a century of the Mac is just laid out there with Steve Jobs and his mouse. It's just laid out there. It's wild. And yeah, the Aqua interface isn't there anymore. And it doesn't always look like you could lick it, but all the details are still there. The Finder still behaves that way. The three, I would argue that the three stoplight buttons in the upper left-hand corner of a window is as iconic to the Mac as the menu bar is,

and the Apple menu, by the way, there was no Apple menu back then. There was just an Apple logo that didn't do anything that sat in the middle of your menu bar, like an extraneous third nipple or something like that, and by the time it shipped, they put the Apple menu back, they redefined what it was, but they put it back. So it's just, it's just astonishing. So this for me is the moment. This is the moment because we got to see what the Apple's vision was. And if you think about it, and I'm fascinated by this, I would love to do some more reading and research about this at some point. I'm fascinated by those three years, between when Jobs was brought up on stage, and by the time this was shown. And really, you could throw in the fourth year when they shipped it the next year. Because one of the things that had to happen in the background is all those Next engineers came over. They knew the OS top to bottom. those Next engineers came over. They knew the OS top to bottom. That's Avi Tivanian and his gang.

They knew Next top to bottom, but Next was not meant for regular people. And now they were going to be meeting a user base vastly larger than the Next user base. And they had expectations, which was the Mac. And Next, if you ever looked at a next computer? It's bananas. It's sort of Mac-like, Mac OS 10-like, but like, it's not. It's like, it's very weird and alien in a lot of ways. And this was their challenge, is, and I mentioned this in the Mac work column a little bit. Think about it. They have to go through what's on Mac OS, what's on next, what they need to do to ship a new version of Mac OS, and they know they've got deadlines. There's only so many programmers they've got.

Not even to mention the politics of people inside Apple and people from Next arguing about like, we should do it this way, we should do it that way. With presumably Steve Jobs is the ultimate arbiter since he was the father of the Mac and Next. So maybe he's the right decision maker there who's kind of above it all. But they had to decide, all right,

how are we gonna do this? Are we gonna build a new feature that's like the Mac? Are we gonna build a new feature that's not like the Mac or Next? Are we gonna take a feature that is from Next and reuse that code, but maybe make it a little more Mac-like. And they had to do that for everything in the system, the whole operating system. They had to do that. And I think that's fascinating

because they had to make some judgments. James Thompson in our discord saying the next next people versus Mac people was interesting. I am sure it was again. But in the end, this whole team has to come together and ship something called Mac OS 10. And I'll up the stakes a little bit because you could think, well, yeah, but it's really easy for the next people to say, look, we can't rewrite a whole operating system. We're here because you bought our operating system. We have to use it. That's absolutely 100% true. But it's 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000. Microsoft reigns supreme. Apple has with its hardware been able to turn it around a little bit and stem the losses to Windows 95 and successors. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. In this era, if what Apple does is release a new operating system that doesn't connect to the Mac, that means Mac users have a decision to make,

which is do I go to an entirely new operating system I'm unfamiliar with that has questionable prospects because it's just from Apple? Or at that point, do I just go to Windows? Because if there's not enough continuity with a Mac, you might as well just go to Windows because you're going to have to get a new computer anyway. Why don't I just choose the computer that everybody else uses and save some money and it'll be fine. And like literally that was the way it was and save some money and it'll be fine. And like literally that was the way it was in the late 90s. So pushing against the next preference, I think, to keep as much of it like next step as possible,

is the Mac people are coming in and not saying like, oh, we're so great, our OS was so great, because everybody knew that the old Mac OS had to go. But it's like, but you must be fundamentally a Mac. And what they had behind them was Apple's like, user base. And it wasn't a user base that was irrelevant, because we're going to tell them what they want, and they're going to take it. It was a user base that was ready to walk. So you better impress them and make them feel like there was a nice glide path from classic Mac OS to modern Mac OS. And they had to decide features and interface for everything in the entire operating system over that time to get to the point where they could do this presentation and then tweak it for a year afterward and say, we've got some new stuff in here. The doc is sort of like next, but not really it's new. And as James will point out, they threw it out a couple of times and rewrote it and his code only ever shipped once and then they brought somebody else in who rewrote it but like they had some new stuff they had some

Mac familiar stuff they had some next step familiar stuff my favorite is the finder which John Saracusa hates because they changed it into kind of a file browser and instead of what it was which was a little more kind of like every window was its own space. But the one that makes me laugh every time is, we know about Steve Jobs' preferences. So like, he's like, hey, find it, look, icon view. Everybody loves icon view. We've had that since 1984.

List view, everybody loves list view. We've had that since 1984. And now we've got this really awesome multi-column view where you can see your whole hard drive. Well, I mean, that was Steve jobs' favorite view. He probably is one of the reasons it was in next. I hate it. But again, we can, people can differ.

I hate it. I hate that view. I hate the column view. It's terrible. Um, but I hate it. Hey, it's so much, so much. But again, I'm from the past. I like, I like the list view.

I'm a big list view guy, but so anyway, but he see jobs like, oh man This is so great because of course it is it came from next it's probably there to please Steve And of course he likes it. He demos mail. This is also the 25th anniversary of mail.app being shown and No, no plus for that. Okay. Anyway, uh, that's fine. That's fine I'm a little bit excited about it, but I'm not freaking out. But you know who loved mail is Steve Jobs. He loved the Next Step Mail Client.

And so obviously one of the things was, you're gonna put that mail client on Mac, right? Cause I'm gonna use it. So you're gonna put it there. It's not a question. You're gonna put it there. They're like, yep, yep. And so he's like, oh, look at this mail app.

It's great. It's like, yeah, it's the Next Step mail app brought to the Mac. But anyway, so they had to make all those decisions. It's a fascinating time. Um, cause if you think about all the different constraints that they had. And I'll just say, I know that it was shaky version one was really slow. It was really until 10.1, where it was even sort of usable.

It was a many year transitional process. But I would say you can't argue with the results. Because all that stuff, you look at it now and you think, well, that's just computers. And it's 25 years later. That means it worked, right? It worked. That that's the amazing thing about that event. So 25 years on, I think it's I just think it's so impressive that they have used the Darwin stuff that they that they talked about it that keynote, the the kernel and the open source stuff that's underneath it. Like, so much of this is the foundation of not just macOS, but iOS, iPad OS, watch OS, tvOS, Vision OS. Like, right? I mean, it's all just variants on what was Mac OS 10

back in the day. So pretty amazing. Yeah, I was thinking as you was talking, right? Like, will we ever have something like this again? And the answer is probably no, but in a similar way, like, yes, we just had it, right? Like Vision OS was something akin to that, right? Which is like, hey,

we're gonna show you this new operating system. You've never used anything like this before because you use it with your eyes. And like, it's funny, like, as you're talking, I'm like, oh man, I would love that. No, I just had that. Just had that like two years ago. We'll see.

It wouldn't surprise me if in 25 years, people look at the Vision OS announcement and say, oh, wow, yeah. I see how we got to here. Yeah. Not saying how not saying that Vision OS or not predicting anything like that. I'm talking about it like an interface level being like, oh, yeah, yeah, they do the they do this thing and that thing and this thing. We all do that now. Again, I think it's actually not not as likely because even Steve Jobs, who is great at hyping things, was like, 10 years next decade. Maybe he's hoping for more. And it turns out that they overshot by a lot. But but it is one of those

moments where you see things that are new. But when we get to 25 years of iOS, that will be the case, right? Like it will be like, oh, yeah, look, we do that. Oh Oh yeah, yeah, I see where they were going. Oh, it wasn't just like that anymore. It made it better, but like it's like that. I think the iPhone, the iPhone will have a lot of that, right, because the iPhone was also a defining thing. But the funny thing about Mac OS X is it didn't, you know,

I don't think it gets that kind of credit, but if you look at that thing from 25 years ago and look at the Mac now, you're like, oh yeah, like it's all there. And it's funny because the classic Mac OS gets so much credit because it started at all but like 16 I'm not even 16 this it was 16 years old when when this happened 13 years into its run they had bought next because they desperately needed to replace it after having failed to replace it many times Which means like 10 years after Mac OS had come out, they knew it was no good and they had to replace it technically. Not saying it was bad on a user basis, but like it was built for another

era and they needed to do something about it. And they tried a bunch of things before just buying next and doing that. And it took them probably a good 10 years to get from the realization that it wasn't gonna work to shipping a usable version that people just migrated to from the classic Mac OS. It took a very long time. So it's an amazing accomplishment. And this, I feel like is a pretty good moment,

even though fashion changes and pulsating glassy aqua buttons don't exist anymore. But if you look beneath the surface, like all the structure of this is still what we use today. I would like to use this as an opportunity to air a grievance about the dock before we move on. Yes, please. Today. So upgrade plus listeners will know that I'm now using Mac mini, so I've

transitioned over to a Mac mini on this desk and with that I've done the thing that I've promised you and our video editor a chip for a long time, which is to rearrange my desk a bit. So I have two monitors. I have my central monitor and that a monitor on the left and the problem was I'd have to have my camera on the left of that monitor, So the angle was considered to be less than preferable. So I have now moved my monitor from the left to the right to bring my camera in a bit more. So I think I'm now told I match a bit closer to your angle and this apparently looks better. Great. The problem is I like to have my dock on the right, which now means my dock is all the way over there on the external display

Because you cannot choose Where you write your doctor to go at which display it won't put it on a border between monitors It has to all the way to the right or madness to me doesn't make any sense I'll get I know what people are gonna say in a minute and I can argue away that point But like I think it's it's wild that I cannot choose me with your bottom doc takes by the way I don't want to hear about it. No the doc on the side is best I like it on the right But now it means that it's all the way over there

And there's no way to get it to come into the middle of my display and then people I know people will say But how could you drag your cursor through the dock that is madness? Well, I would like to introduce you to stage manager. Stage manager, which I use, exists on multiple displays. And I drag my cursor over the stage manager view to move between displays. So like the idea of there being a app choosing element that you can move your cursor over and switch display is a thing that Apple does.

Also universal control means that I can put an iPad to my right and go right over the dock into the iPad. Now look, using the boundary as a way to move your pointer to the dock, like when I've got a universal control on, I am frequently trying to go to the dock and I overshoot and I'm on the iPad yeah I get it but like that doesn't mean you couldn't allow it or or allow the dock to run maybe a setting to just put the dock on all monitors that would actually be my preference a dock dock on

both monitors I don't know why they can't do that so many bars I am using switch glass by friend of the show. John's your accuser to create like a fake doc. It's doing a decent job, but there are just things that John can't do. Right. Which I'm assuming, right? Like it's not as easy for me to have every possible app I could ever want in there for a bunch of reasons.

Or maybe I haven't set it up right. But there are things like notifications. You can't show me notification badges on here is my assumption. So there's just like a lot of things now. Switch class is getting me most of the way that I need to be because if I need to go from app to app, I know I have that little list and look aside and I can just like click through them and that's great. And I'm happy that switch class exists and I now see one of the reasons why it exists. Um, but what I want is Apple to just have the dock on all displays or just

let me choose. Like I don't know why. Why do I have the dock on all displays or just let me choose. Like I don't know why, why do I have to have it all the way over there? I don't want it over there, I want it there. Yeah, I know. That's how I feel. I hear you. James's dock only went on the bottom. Well, James's wrong.

I'm sorry, sorry. If you watch that, if you're a veteran at Mac user and you watch that dock demo, you will find it curious because it does things like it has files on the desktop and Steve drags them to the doc and they disappear from the desktop. And you're like, where did it go? The answer is, apparently there's a doc folder

inside the user folder and it went in there. And then when you drag it out to the desktop, it comes back onto the desktop and disappears from the doc. That is a behavior that they got rid of, right? Because what we have now, the dock is more like a weird other zone where things can be referenced, but it's not the things themselves.

But in that early demo, the dock was actually a place files could be. And it also means you could put files into the dock folder and they would appear in the dock. What that is, Jason, is a quick way to lose a bunch of files. That's what that is. It's like, where do they go? You never find them. You never find them again.

Grandma lost her taxes. She doesn't know where they are. It's Doctown. Forget it. They're gone forever. Well, happy birthday, Mac OS 10. Sure. Let's say it. Quarter of a century. Pretty good run, right? Pretty good.

And still kicking. Yeah, still kicking This episode is brought to you by delete me You've heard me talk on this show about how much of your personal data could be out there on the internet for people to see And how uncomfortable that can make you feel I mean, it's uncomfortable to me I don't like the idea that my data could be out there and I've become a more privacy conscious data conscious person over time That is because of my wife Edina. She put these that my data could be out there and I've become a more privacy conscious data conscious person over time. That is because of my wife, Adina. She put all of this into me of like making sure

that just the information that I want to be out there is out there and keeping what I don't want away. And so I was very happy recently when Delete Me were like, hey, would you like to gift delete me to someone? And I was like, yes, my wife would love it. And she did, she set it all up just like I did, put in the to gift delete me to someone? And I was like, yes, my wife would love it. And she did. She set it all up just like I did, put in the information that she wanted to be removed,

and is now getting those regular privacy reports that say, this is what we found based on the information that you gave. This is the data brokers that have it, and this is how long it's going to take for it to be removed. Because the sad fact is data brokers can make a profit from your data. Your data is a commodity, and people on the web want to buy that information which can lead to

identity theft, phishing attempts, harassment and unwanted spam calls. The good news is you can protect your data with DeleteMe. You can sign up and provide DeleteMe with the exact information you want deleted and their experts take it from there. DeleteMe sends you a regular privacy report that shows what information they found, where they found it, and what has been removed. But this isn't just a one-time service. Delete Me is always working for you,

constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the internet. To put it simply, they do all the hard work of wiping personal information from data broker websites. I love that Delete Me really is out there in my corner, and it's getting rid of this stuff proactively for me. I don't need to think about where am I going to go, who am I going to find, let me try and get this removed. They are the experts and they look after me. Take control of your data and keep your private life private

by signing up for DeleteMe. Now, a special discount for listeners and their loved ones. Today, you can get 20% off your DeleteMe plan and you go to joindeleteme.com slash upgrade 20 and use the promo code upgrade20 at checkout. The only way to get that 20% off is to go to j-o-i-n-d-e-l-e-t-e-m-e dot com slash upgrade 20 and enter the code upgrade20 at checkout. One last time that is joindeleteme.com slash upgrade 20 with the code upgrade 20. Our thanks to delete me for their support of this show and relay. Let's finish out with some ask upgrade questions. Well, they're big lasers. You've been you've been look, I guess we haven't charged for a while,

so they're ready to charge. Yep. Twenty twenty five laser time. Jim says new lasers. If everything I'm doing on my MacBook Air on my iPhone is saved to my iCloud account How critical is it to back up my computer to time machine? I don't have a usual spot to work on my Mac with on my Mac. So I rarely save to time machine. I mean if Everything you're doing is in the cloud It's not critical other than what but what I'll say is,

is it everything? All your preferences? Yeah, see this is a problem is like all your preferences. If you want to get back up and running and have all your preferences saved and all of that, that's the advantage of using Time Machine or Clone Drive. So I mean, critical, I think you should have a backup. I think cloud is not a backup.

So whether it's Time Machine or a cloud-based backup, like Backblaze, or like a USB drive that you could use. Like, I'll give you an example, a usual spot. I don't know what that means, but like, if you have a place you go sometimes that's like a desk that has a dock or something, you could attach a USB drive to it. And in fact, I just set this up here at my desk, which is I used to have a USB drive permanently plugged into my Mac Studio, but I'm using a MacBook Pro now. And so what I have is that drive is plugged into the hub.

And when I connect connect that drive doesn't mount I've set it not to mount and then my clone operation happens during the day and what it does is the carbon copy cloner or no that musings yeah I'm using carbon copy for this it mounts the drive clones the drive and dismounts the drive so that when I unplug I don't get yelled at for unplugging a mounted disk you could do something like that at a place that you are fairly commonly and it and dismounts the drive so that when I unplug, I don't get yelled at for unplugging a mounted disk. You could do something like that at a place that you are fairly commonly,

and it would be that, or you could just, you know, plug in a drive at that place and choose Time Machine and back up to that drive while you're there. If you've got a Mac on your network, you could also just do it to a Mac on your network and use Network Time Machine, and that can also be a way. But I think you should do something. And if not, if none of those options work, you should get something like

backblaze to do an actual backup via the internet, because even if you don't have a usual spot, you have an internet. Yeah. I think on a Mac specifically, uh, it can be easy for things to be outside of what is being backed up to iCloud, because you can do the documents and desktop. Yeah, your apps and your preferences especially, like if you want to come back up and running, you might have all your cloud files, but you know, you're going to reinstall your apps and do the preferences again, and all you'll lose, like losing all your preferences and

stuff is rough, like you don't want to do that. Why does Apple not have time machine on the web? Like what, at this point, like that is a service you can offer. Like why, why have they not done that? What a way to sell cloud. What a way to sell iCloud storage. Yeah. We're to say you can now do iCloud backup of Time Machine. I don't know. Matthew asks, following up with

your recent hypothetical discussion where you would like what jobs you would have to take to work at Apple, which was a conversation we got a lot of really good feedback about people seem to be like that conversation. Matthew follows it up with, are there dream opportunities that you would take on alongside your current jobs because you would regret passing them up otherwise?

For example, Jason has offered a generous advance from a publisher he admires to publish a novel, or Mike gets an opportunity at a respected design studio to create and market a product of his choice. This might be an answer for both of us, but we have many jobs already. Yeah. And part of what we do is manage our various opportunities and decide what to do and what not to do, knowing that if you take something new on, you probably got to drop something because that's just, there's only so much time in

the day. There's only so much energy and creativity that you can have so I can tell you from my years doing NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month when I was working at Macworld that I could have a full-time job and write a novel in a month and how did I do that it's like I made the time when I came home I stopped like watching as much TV and reading as much and I would have dinner with my family and then I would go lock myself in a room and I would write for a few hours and I was able to do that. So I would say, if there was a dream opportunity that came up, and it was truly a dream opportunity, I would find a way to make it work. But that said, I'll point you back to that previous

conversation. It would need to be a dream opportunity that made some sense in terms of what I would have to stop doing, whether it was part of my professional or personal life, what would be the cost? What would be the opportunity cost? And I would have to decide that. But you know, are there? Sure, like I have been very what would be the cost? What would be the opportunity cost? And I would have to decide that. But are there, sure. Like I have been very slowly.

I need to get back to doing it faster, rewriting a novel I wrote 10 years ago in the hopes that it actually gets in a place where people would want to read it. So I am doing some of that. It is hard to make time for that. That's something I'm trying to do better at. So of course, there are lots of opportunities out there, but I would have to process them. And I, Mike, I assume it would be similar, similar story for you.

Yeah, I mean, essentially, we are, you know, we're, we're, we're masters of our own destiny, right? Like we are freelancers in a way where like, we have things that we do. I mean, I think you more than me. You said that like, I think you more than me, right? Because I don't work for any family. You said that like we were pirates though. That was really, you said that like we were masters of our own, we fly our own flags. I was before this listening to a Columbus series.

A vast. A vast, you mateys, a vast you scurvy dogs. The storm clouds of projects. We be masters of our own destiny. In the skies. So like we have the ability to choose one. And if a project with some description came up, like for example, the rest is technology.

Like if such a podcast wanted to exist. Oh yeah. You know, we would think. It came to us, Goalhanger came to us and said, Mike and Jason, you're perfect for the rest is technology. You should do that. But it's gonna be a huge thing. You know, so there are scenarios.

Yes, of course, there are scenarios like that. It's all just about like, do I think it is of benefit to me? And then also, I mean, and this is especially a thing for me now in my year of fatherhood, this is actually a thing of like, I can't take on anything new unless I'm willing to give up something that would have been of equal time commitment. Because I, I, for me now, anytime that I would have free, I want

to be being a dad. So right. Has anybody broken it to you that it's a lifetime of fatherhood? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody has broken it through Jason. It's more that just like, I know my life is going to change forever, but this is going to be the biggest change, right? Is this the first? Yes, I would say it's the year of adapting to fatherhood more than anything else, but adapting to parenthood is definitely a thing. I was gonna say that,

that one of your challenges is you have a huge thing happening to your time. And so, you know, if that opportunity presented itself now, you'd probably be like, I can't do it because I'm having a baby in a couple of months, right? Like, so that's just, that's part of it too. So I don't know if we've dreamed enough for Matthew here, but like, certainly, I think if something

that is not possibly gonna happen, but something magical like that came along, I think what I said about that, that Amazon thing that that I went through 10 years ago, and there have been a few others like that, mostly 10, eight, nine years ago, is, I'll talk about all of them. But in the end, I have to weigh them and decide whether it's worth it. And Nathan asks, Can you navigate system settings in iOS anymore?

Try searching messages in settings to look for the messages app. There are hundreds of results. So I had this exact same thing happen to me. So like, I was setting up my Mac, right? The new Mac mini and I'm like, oh, I want to turn on message forwarding. So I searched the word messages because messages is now one of the app, one of the apps that has been put into the apps part of system settings. So I searched the word messages and I put a screenshot in our show notes for

just me and you, but I'm going to read. So I searched the word messages. This is what it gives me. Announce notification in Apple Intelligence, blocked in mail, blocked contacts in messages, blocked contacts in FaceTime, blocked contacts in phone, blocked sender options in mail, and Braille alert messages. None of these are messages, right? Like, which is the actual word that I have searched

to get to go to the messages app. Like, I support the idea of tidying up systems, actual word that I have searched to get to go to the messages app. Like I support the idea of tidying up system settings, right? By like putting the app settings in, in like a separate thing, but they've not, the search is too bad. Yeah. It, I'm a, well, look, I've ran it about this a lot. Uh, I think Apple needs to do a better job of re-running settings on iOS and Mac. I think putting apps in apps is a good thing, but the challenge is, first off,

I think you should be able to navigate to what you're trying to find without searching. And second, the search needs to work. And right now, I have had this exact same issue where I'm like, where is this thing? And I'll search and I'll be like, that's a lot of choices. That's a lot of choices. I don't know. It's not great.

It's not great. Something's going on. I don't know what's going on in settings land at Apple, but it doesn't seem right. You can send us your feedback, follow-up and questions, including your own Ask Upgrade questions, by going to upgradefeedback.com. I would like to thank our members who support us every week of Upgrade.

Plus you can get longer ad-free versions of the show each and every week. One of the things I want to discuss on today's show, Jason, is the fact that I'm shortening the intro, the outro I should say. This very outro is being shortened and I want to talk to intro the outro I'll get it this very outro is being shortened And I want to talk to you about why I've decided to do that every time we talk about it here It makes it longer and longer though Yeah Get upgrade plus comm is where you can go to sign up and become a member support the show

You can check out our YouTube channel by searching for upgrade podcast if you want to find the video of the show Thanks to our sponsors this week that is delete me fit bod and Squarespace, but most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.