Upgrade - 556: This Photo Is Not 2000 Years Old

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode number 556, recorded March the 24th, 2025. This week brought to you by Google Gemini, Factor, and ExpressVPN. I am one of your regular hosts, Jason Snell. And of course, Mike Hurley remains on leave. And so the next up in the parade of guest stars on Upgrade is Relay co-founder and co-host of Connected and Mac Power users and probably other things too. It's Stephen Hackett. Welcome back, Stephen Hackett.

Hey Jason, it is always fun to be on Upgrade. It's good to have you back. It is, I am calling in all my favors for this leave. So thank you for joining. And finally somebody not named John. So that's good. That's right, had to break the John streak. There are a lot of Johns out there, but that's over now.

It's over now. It's non-Johns. It's for non-Johns, something like that. All right. Snell talk time. I want to do two Snell talk questions, Stephen. Two, because they're interrelated and they're kind of follow up, but they're kind of Snell talk. So the first one is from listener Casey, who says, sorry, lists and our Casey. Oh,

who says I've always been super cagey about the exact town I live in hashtag don't be creepy. And rather than just say, I live in the nearest city, Richmond, Jason regularly and willfully brings up Mill Valley on his shows. Am I being too paranoid or is Jason being too forthright or is it both? We had a Hill Valley question. Well, okay. So first off, it's not really accurate for me to say I live in San Francisco. I could say the Bay Area. The truth is I feel like I'm not really lot of I'm not really worried about OPSEC about operational security because because I bought my house in 1999 and therefore all public records of my address are on the internet. I mean, please don't be creepy. Please don't come to my house.

But like I can't it's just like how I will always get spam email to certain email addresses because those email addresses have been out there since the 90s like I could hide it but and Mill Valley is a big town and the Bayer you know I just decided to be precise especially for that I think Casey is smart actually he lives in a in a metro area that's got smaller cities as well as Richmond. I think he doesn't need to be any more specific than Richmond. But I don't know. For whatever reason, I just decided saying San Francisco is inaccurate because I don't live in San Francisco and saying Bay Area is accurate but super broad. And sometimes

the context comes up where I talk about my town and I don't have a problem with it and it's too late. The horse is out of the barn as we used to say back up in the on the on the ranch. Yeah, I'm looking at you and find my right now. You're in the garage. Yeah. Yeah, we had a FaceTime conversation with my daughter. She calls us sometimes and just and then just we talked to her while she drives home from work and I brought up, while she was doing that, I brought up a fine mine. We watched her dot drive home. She says, oh, I'm home, but she's still miles away.

She just wants to get off the phone with you. That's a real. Believe me, she is not the one who wants to get off the phone. Now I'm looking at Casey on fine my. Yeah, we know where he lives. Yeah, we could tell people, but I'm not gonna do that. Cause I think he's right to just say Richmond. That's good enough.

He wants me to come do his like fiber and ethernet through his house with him. I heard that cause you're a fiber expert now. Run away. Can I break some news on upgrade? Yep. Breaking news from Steven. I'm gonna visit Casey in October, I think. Whoa. Can I break some news on upgrade? Yep. Breaking news from Stephen.

I'm going to visit Casey in October, I think. Whoa. And we're going to do a long weekend and do his network. By long, you are referring specifically to the runs of fiber in his house, right? That's right. It's going to be a gigabit weekend, 10 gigabit weekend, actually. Stephen and Casey's 10 gigabit fiber weekend. That's right.

Wow. If it were a different time, I'd vlog it. Stephen and Casey's 10 gigabit fiber weekend. That's right. Wow. If it were a different time, I'd vlog it, you know, if it was 2017, but it's not. And I'd have to blur out Casey's entire house as we're talking about. So yeah, we don't want to do that. We don't want to do that. He says he doesn't even do pictures. I guess the only pictures of Casey's house that are public are that one bedroom where

he records. And that's it. That's it. People can drink in that, go back to the YouTube version of when he was on Upgrade and just drink in Casey's guest bedroom slash office slash recording studio. Very, very generic. It may even be a set, like, you know, I mean, who knows?

You know, it could be, he could be somewhere else and that's just all fake. It could be, I set, like, you know, I mean, who knows? You know, it could be, he could be somewhere else and that's just all fake. It could be, I mean, it's not, because it's Casey. It's not. Casey is Casey. For people who are wondering like, what's Casey List like in real life? You know, that's like, that's Casey.

Casey is Casey. He is a completely genuine person who is pretty much exactly the Casey you hear on podcasts. Um, I do have a second Snell talk. Uh, this is from Pat B. Uh, and he writes, uh, Jason, I was shocked when you mentioned Mill Valley and didn't include the most famous resident. I remember, uh, BJ honey cut from mash.

Now mash. Okay. Mash was a TV show. I know. Now, MASH, okay, MASH was a TV show, popular in the 70s and the 80s, about a bunch of doctors at a surgical hospital in Korea, but it was sort of a commentary more on Vietnam, but it was set in Korea. It ran longer than the Korean War by far.

If you plot out the events of the MASH TV series, it couldn't have happened because the series was so popular. It lasted far longer than any American war in Korea lasted. But BJ was a character added a few years in, played by Mike Farrell, and he always would write letters home to his wife Peg in Mill Valley, California, and he would rhapsodize about how wonderful it was

and how he wanted to go back there. And honestly, that's most of what I knew about Mill Valley when I moved here was, oh yeah, BJ Honeycutt is from there. And somebody suggested at one point that just like they've got that statue of like Captain Kirk in Iowa, that somebody should erect a statue of BJ Honeycutt in Mill Valley. And at one point there was literally a public comment period for what they should put in the plaza in downtown Mill Valley. And I said, you know what, I'm going to do it. And I wrote in, we should do a statue of BJ Honeycutt from MASH.

And they came out with a report and they said, one person said, BJ Honeycutt from MASH. And that was the end of that. But I feel validated and thanks, thanks to Pat, I guess, Pat should probably, uh, applaud my, my gesture. But also, also hot tubs were invented here. That's, I'll throw that one in. I'm mountain biking. Those are the Marin County and Mill Valley contributions to society, hot tubs and mountain biking. Nice to get in a hot tub after you've done

a lot of mountain biking, but you like biking. You like biking. I do. Mountain biking was entirely invented on the slopes of Mount Tam behind my house and my town. Yeah. That's awesome. That's really cool.

Obviously we have Elvis in Memphis. Oh man. I mean, that's next level famous. Yeah. And I guess after that, like Justin Timberlake probably, although he really is from a suburb, not really Memphis, but close enough. But if you talk about Memphis contributions

to the world beyond Elvis, it's like the blues, Delta blues, right? And it's a downer, but it's been turned into something better, which is the MLK assassination, obviously, which is now the Civil Rights Museum, which is a spectacular site. And right next to Central Barbecue, which is really a contribution to society too, frankly.

And it's true. Different types of contribution. I don't know if we've talked about this and we'll go into any details, but I am anticipating avidly my next trip to Memphis. I'm looking forward to it. So it's, I get to, it is such a treat to get to go to Memphis a couple of times a year.

So I'll be creeping on you before too long. I know where you live. That's true. You do know where I live. Yeah. So we did, we did, we did a Snell talk. We did two. Let's move on to fatherly advice. This is a where I live. Uh, yeah. So we did, we did, we did a Snell talk. We did too. Let's move on to fatherly advice.

This is a, a segment I invented. I even did the stupid chapter art for it in which I ask if, have people figured out yet that every single person who's been a guest star on this is a parent is a father. And so fatherly advice is anyway, I've given it away now. Steven, do you have any words of wisdom or observations to impart to your professional partner, Mike Hurley, here early in the episode where he's probably still listening? Still listening. I mean, if he made it through the riveting No Valley talk.

He loves that stuff. What are you talking about? BJ Honeycutt, MASH? He go just sit there. That's what he should do while he's like rocking and the baby is sleeping. He should just watch old episodes of MASH. MASH, MASH, he'd go just sit there. That's what he should do while he's like rocking and the baby is sleeping. He should just watch old episodes of MASH. MASH, MASH is great.

It's a great show. I said this on that analog episode, but it's definitely my like go-to advice, really for anybody who's a new parent is like, it's so easy to lose sort of the contact you have with your spouse, especially in those early days. And I think if your spouse is a mom, like it's a very hard season, or can be a very hard season,

very complicated season of life. And so make sure they're doing okay. And it's easy for everything in the household to revolve around the baby, and that's not wrong, but your spouse is gonna be there once your kids are out the door, right? Is something that y'all are experiencing now. That's right.

All the kids do is grow up and leave you, but you're- That's right. And the plan is for your spouse to still be there. So continue to invest in that relationship. Continue to make it the primary relationship and- It'll be good. Parenting is a team sport, is what I would say. I mean, sometimes it isn't, sometimes you're forced to do it alone.

But like, if you are in a relationship and you're the parents and you've got the kids, the thing to remember is you're in this together and your family is now you and your partner and the kid or kids. And it does change the dynamic, but the fact is that, I think it's also an opportunity for bonding and a growth of the relationship because now you're not just connected to each other, but you're connected to this other person

and you're responsible for their life and growth and health and all those things. And that's another point for you to connect as people and like become actually closer together because you're now, you know, the team with this screaming child that has entered your house. So it's a beautiful thing. Well, thank you for the fatherly advice.

I appreciate it. Of course. I didn't know how this was going to go, but it's gone pretty good. Everybody, I've not yet had somebody just say pass, although I'm worried a little bit that Scott McNulty is going to come on here and say, don't do it. It's like, it's too late, Scott.

He did it. They both did it. And they're Mike and Adina are now just, they got a baby. It's like, it's too late, Scott. He did it. They both did it. And they're, Mike and Adina are now just, they got a baby. It's great. Let's do some follow-up. Follow-up.

Thank you. Sorry, wrong show, wrong show. Very wrong show, but that's great. I like it. You're just repeating what I say, follow-up. We talked about, last week about bending phones and, um, bending phones and, uh, John Sarah Cusa and I said, maybe Dr. Drang could tell us the details. It was really, I was tossing it off, but the moment I said his name, I thought, Oh, I've,

I've summoned him. He's going, he's going to appear. And he did Dr. Drang, the internet's favorite,udonymous snowman slash mechanical engineer, structural engineer, structural engineer. I think we got his title wrong too. And nothing makes Dr. Drang more angry than, well, not angry, vexed, than referring to somebody as the wrong kind of engineer.

He is a structural engineer. Yes. Yeah, y'all may have said material engineer. Yeah. Or, you know, he says that he's not. He's a structural engineer. He is the guy, for people who don't know, literally he has a blog post where he was walking somewhere

and a light post had fallen over. And he was like, oh, let me add it. Let me see what happened with his light post. Because that's kind of what his job was. He's retired now. So he has more time to listen to our dumb podcasts and correct us about math. So he wrote a piece called Simple Phone Bending,

where he explained sort of at a simplification of the idea of if you make the phone bigger, how much more bendable is it? And this is what he wrote. So if the beam is lengthened by 10%, which is about how much longer an iPhone Pro Max is compared to an iPhone Pro, the moment will increase by 10%. And if we make the reasonable assumption that the side rails of a max size phone will have the same cross section as side rails of a non max phone, the bending stress will also increase by 10%. Not a lot. He says it's not impossible that they actually looked at the size. Cause remember the iPhone plus is rumored to be bigger than the pro, but not as big as the pro max. They may have looked at that gradient from pro size to pro max size

and looked at the stress on the side rails and said, that's too far, that's out of our zone of comfort. So we'll back it off. Keeping in mind also that when they back it off they're backing off the size of the battery, they're backing off the size of the battery. They're backing off the size of the screen, all of those other decisions that have to go in it. But Mark Erman's report was they looked at a Pro Max size and said, Nope, it's too

bendy. And Dr. Drank is like, you know, maybe, um, but there's a lot going on there, but I just love, he, you know, I took a year of college calculus, Stephen, I look at his site and I am completely baffled by the math. I love, I love Dr. Draying, I love the site. Love him, yeah, you just, you just chat with him. I, he's, he's a, he's a good, a good pal.

And we do, we love him as a, as a human being and also as a man who does lots of math. So we don't have to, thank you, Dr. Drang. Which is impressive for a snowman, their arms are just sticks. I know, right? I mean, how do you, he's doing, he must be using PCALC.

That's the power of the pseudonym, yeah, it's all Siri, oh no. Yeah. I do wanna highlight something you said about, if you back off the size, you're also backing off battery and all the other things. And when we're talking about a slim phone, obviously the first thought is, well, what is it gonna do to the battery life?

And Gurman, I think some others have reported that Apple has some combination of technologies that are gonna mean the battery life in this phone will be comparable to the others, which is really interesting to me. But it really just goes to show like how complicated it must be to design iPhones year after year after year. And then they really over the however many years

it's been 18 years of the iPhone, really very few misses. And I mean, the six plus was bendy and didn't have enough RAM. Like there have been phones that aren't as good as others, few misses. And I mean, the six plus was bendy and didn't have enough RAM. Like there have been phones that aren't as good as others, but it is so impressive to me that they can do this on such a regular cycle. And they're working on all these complicated problems

that quite frankly seem impossible to someone like me to figure out. Yeah, I, we'll talk about this maybe a little bit later because there's a lot of discussion of sort of where Apple is succeeding and failing, let's put it that way, right now. I always say, so like we were talking about this AI stuff and there's more that we're about to talk about.

And what I always wanna say and try to say is, I'm not inside at Apple. It is a black box to me. It is complex and having managed organizations that are a fraction of the size of Apple or even a part of Apple, even from that, I know how complex this stuff is. And so I don't want to understate the complexity of the job they do.

They are one of the world's largest companies. They are a high-tech company that is pushing forward with this technology, and it's only them and a handful of competitors that are even doing that. And the people who work there, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that what they do is an enormous engineering, R&D design, all of that stuff. It's an enormous effort. And just looking at Dr. Drang's math about the iPhone Air is a part of that. Look, they are balancing battery systems engineering and their own chip designs, which is an enormous undertaking and all the other parts that go in there and building their own modem. How does that affect the power? It is always an enormous undertaking and they have to ship enormous

numbers of units. The other thing I always say a somebody gets a bad iPhone on week one and they're like, uh-oh the iPhone is lousy It's like there's no way there aren't bad iPhones because they make so many of them that at point oh one percent failure rate There are a huge number of failures out there and that's why you can just take it back and get a different one But like it is worth Again, the we're gonna criticize What is worth, again, we're going to criticize what is worth criticizing about Apple, but that doesn't mean we don't appreciate and shouldn't appreciate kind of the amazing, uh, run that they do and the incredible difficulty level of all the stuff that they do.

And most of it, they get right. Right. Because there hasn't been a, I mean, the biggest phone disaster in the last 15 years was that, that Samsung phone that caught fire, but like Apple has managed with all of its little gates here and there to be pretty solid at all this stuff while pushing it forward. Yeah. You're not evacuating an airplane.

So you're, you're doing okay. Pretty solid. Pretty solid. Uh, the AI fallout continues as well as a little bit more follow-up. Uh, Mark Gurman reported that Siri has been taken away from John Jan Andrea and given to Mike Rockwell, who is moving into Craig Federighi software group. Mike Rockwell, who is in charge of Vision Pro, is keeping Vision OS, the report says, but will leave vision hardware behind to one of his lieutenants, basically. Rockwell is apparently a long time critic of Siri and I don't know if you remember this report, but I remember this report that originally the Vision Pro was going to be more Siri focused and that Rockwell got so frustrated with the lack of ability to make Siri good enough for Vision Pro

Siri good enough for vision pro and that he tried to basically grab it and influence it and was told that he needed to keep his hands off of it. And that's one of the reasons vision pro is not, as Siri focused is that they wanted it to be. Um, well, that guy is in charge of Siri now. So I think I, I, I do wonder part of me thinks about the dog that caught the car, like, all right, you, you got it. Let's see what you can do with it. You've been complaining about it all this time, but, um, it is. A visible change that I think suggests that Apple is very much aware that the Siri situation is unacceptable.

Also, I don't know what you think about this. My vibe from this too, is that John Gianandrea seems to be much more professorly and researchy and not maybe product shippy. And Rockwell seems to be a product ship guy and you need that to ship products. I think that's right. I think the biggest thing for me in all of this

is that Siri is now under Craig Federighi and It's sort of mind-blowing to me that it that wasn't true before that the guy and for better for worse Who's in charge of basically all Apple software? Siri was outside of his at least direct reporting path and Now that it is folded in, we'll see how it goes. I agree with you. Mike Rockwell caught the car and a bunch of people, a bunch of people have worked on Syria over the years

and it's still the state that it's in. And maybe he's the person or, you know, we'll bring in the people to get it where it needs to be. But that's a really big task. And I hope a couple of things. One, I hope that he's actually given the time to turn it around. I hope that they're not expectations with an Apple that, hey, this is going to be fixed by iOS 20, you know, in a year and a half or whatever. This is going to take some time.

So I hope that just for Mike Rockwell, it seems like a nice guy, like hopefully he's not held accountable for something that's gonna take a while. But two, I hope that through the reporting through Craig Federighi, that Siri can be a bit more streamlined with the rest of the OS. And I mean that in two ways, I think. First of all, from the beginning, Siri has always been a layer on top of iOS or later on Mac OS, and I mean that in two ways, I think. First of all, from the beginning, Siri has always been

a layer on top of iOS, or later on Mac OS, et cetera. You hit the button, it does its own thing, and then you go back to what you were doing. And part of this promise of a Siri that is more integrated with your data through App Intent is gonna be able to do things for you,. That was really never gonna work if Siri was just an overlay. Siri has to go deeper. But two, again, for better or for worse,

Federeggi's over all of this stuff, and they have done a pretty good job shipping stuff on a regular basis. Now, again, just like the iPhone thing we're talking about a second ago, there are examples, right? A recent one is messages in the cloud, the feature that syncs your iMessage stuff

and your history with your iCloud account. That shipped pretty late, but in my experience, it's been really good. And so they took the time, they got it right. And hopefully that is going to be instilled in the Siri team, because clearly clearly someone in that organization has thought, well, this is okay enough. I mean, if Gurman is to be believed,

they were debating shipping the thing that they just delayed until very recently. That means someone in the company was lobbying for it to go out the door. And I think a combination of Rockwell and Federighi, like that's gonna be insulation from that sort of thing happening. And when they ship this, I hope and trust

that it'll be better than it would have been otherwise. But if I were Mike Rockwell, I would have some heartburn right now, I think. Sure. They had a, it's not good enough moment, clearly, where somebody was like, let's ship it. And somebody else, uh, it's not good enough moment, clearly where somebody was like, well, let's ship it. And somebody else said, it's just not good enough. And I don't know. I mean, you could, you could argue that that argument has not won the

day in some previous Apple intelligence features where they've shipped it. It hasn't been good enough. And this one, uh, you know, is even more sensitive if it's using user data, if it's using your apps, if it doesn't work right. That's not great. I wanted to mention, Joe Rosenstiel wrote a piece last week on Six Colors about Siri and Spotlight that I thought was, I mean, he's asking for a very specific thing in some ways, because he uses type to Siri, he said, because otherwise I'm just going to yell at Siri. So I type instead. Um, but he said, we're often trained to do natural language, uh, things for

search engines and he basically said typing into a search engine, you get a, you get a bunch of results ranked and it usually includes the one you want. But if you type to Siri, first off, like regular Siri, your phrasing matters. Like if you're trying to ask how to do something in mail and you don't say how, it tries to do something in mail for you instead, which is not great. But one of the things that I thought was very perceptive about that piece is that part of the underlying rot here is that spotlight is also maybe not up to speed. And, and you want a lot of your personal data is being indexed and searched by spotlight.

But if you, if you try to search in spotlight, it's old, it's old. Spotlight feels very old in the sense that it's not really making any assumptions about your language that you're typing. You really need to think about like old school search engine, get the exact keywords right. And he's absolutely right. Like, and on top of that, it's the disunity of it where you've got

two places that you can instruct your device. And one of them is sort of smart, but kind of dumb. And the other one is super dumb, even though it knows everything, which is spotlight. And I looked at that and I thought, this is a great example of how parts of Apple's product line are not integrated properly because they're, I think, in different groups and in different fiefdoms maybe. And the biggest example of that that I can remember where I got a little peering into

this fact that like different parts of Apple do different things is when workflow got bought by Apple and turned into shortcuts, we initially all thought that the OS team bought workflow. Cause that would seem like the logical place to integrate system-wide is operating system. And it turned out, no, the what I was told was the operating system team didn't want to buy it. So the Siri team bought it. And I thought wild that seems I mean, I get why it fits with Siri in a lot of ways, because it's kind of automation and control stuff. But like, what does it say that you've got parts of Apple that are in charge of your operating system, not being interested in something, and then other parts of Apple

that are also sort of in charge of parts of your operating system, wanting something to integrate, like it's a bad, that was a red flag, that was a bad sign. I think it's good that they bought it, but I didn't like the fact that apparently part of Apple wanted it, and the other part didn't really want anything to do with it. And maybe that's a reason why shortcuts has been kind of

all over the place too. I don't know, it's weird. anything to do with it. And maybe that's a reason why shortcuts has been kind of all over the place too. I don't know. It's weird. I have one more piece of follow-up, which is from anonymous who wrote in and he said, hi Jason, regarding last week's episode with John and Apple potentially using an M series server chip

and a Mac pro, I think this would make a lot of sense. I used to work as an IC designer at Broadcom for RF SoC, system on chip, and I wanted to share it's incredibly disruptive to do any variant of a chip, not only for the additional design time, but all verification and testing down the line. With the tight timelines Apple has, it's probably a lot more efficient to drop in an M server chip. So basically the idea here, and I think we've seen this with Apple, like Apple can only do so much and every new chip variant, look, they're so good at reusing their chips and

different devices and plotting out that piece of information that I gave, I've been talking about for a few weeks now where I was talking to somebody involved in Apple's chip stuff who said, every chip we design, we know what computer it's going in. We know what device it's going in. When we design it, that's all part of the secret sauce of this is that they're aligned and the chips are made for specific Apple products, not for a product line. And this would follow from that, right? Which is if they want a high end chip and they also are building future servers for their private cloud compute,

whether it's the high-end chip or it's just functions on a Pro chip or a Max chip, they're probably trying to build one fewer chip, right? Just like, do we need to build a new chip for our servers or can we, whatever we need to build a new chip for our servers, or can we, whatever we need to do for the servers, can we integrate that in another chip we're building? Because they don't wanna build five or six chips,

because they're not Intel. Everyone has a huge cost, and they are trying to target their specific system. So I think this is a good reminder. I love hearing from people who have knowledge of how chip stuff works. Cause I don't know like all the details of this stuff on the inside. And I like being reminded, it takes a very long time.

The roadmap is long. They're working in advance. And this is a great data point that like every variation is hard. It's not like you can just knock off five M fours and not break a sweat. No, it's actually very hard every single time. Yeah, it's all this work and it's the fabrication of those chips and you end up with bending. It is very, so very complicated.

I do wonder about the thing of like, we know what computer it's going into. That's how you get an M4 and an iPad and a fanless MacBook Air, right? And as they've gone through, it was the iMac and the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, as they've redesigned the systems from Intel to Apple Silicon,

it's like we've built this around Apple Silicon, and you can see that as a, it's just like a way to say it has Apple Silicon inside, but no, we designed these at the same time and we designed it not only, we didn't design the Mavic Air just for the M2, but also the M3, the M4, the M5, the M6, however long this design carries forward. And that is a strength of Apple Silicon

right until you get to the Mac Pro. And then it's like, well, you've designed this stuff to fit in a Mac Studio or in a laptop, and it means you potentially leave a lot on the table when it comes to a full desktop tower machine. And so, yeah, the Mac Pro is such an interesting story when it comes to Apple Silicon, because they don't have anything currently

that really sets it apart. And that makes people like John Sericusa, and me to a degree, a little sad. Yeah, MacStudio is actually a great example, I think, where the cooling in the MacStudio is specifically designed to handle those Macs class chips, and they know that. And for me, that's the question about the future

of the Mac Pro is, are they looking at the cooling envelope of the Mac Pro and saying, there is something we could put in there? And that's the great unanswered question about why the Mac Pro didn't get the M3 Ultra is, the saddest thing, and I know I talked about this with John, the saddest thing is if June comes and they just say, yeah, okay, the M3 Ultra is in the Mac Pro now.

Because that means they didn't even care enough to put it in the same time that they did it with the studio? The good news would be if they're holding it back because there's gonna be a different chip that is outside the range of the Mac Studio that they can't fit it in the Mac Studio cooling. And that's the reason why the Mac Pro hardware actually starts to make sense is that they need that extra

from that hardware and that it's not just a big Mac studio and we'll see I mean I just I don't know I don't know what the story is there but it's um it's not great right now but that would be again it's either gonna be the other shoe drops and it's just sad or the other shoe is gonna drop and it's gonna like ah okay the Mac Pro has a purpose now. This episode of upgrade is brought to you and it's going to like, ah, okay, the MacPro has a purpose now. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Factor. You might be feeling that it's time to optimize your nutrition. If that's you, Factor has chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. They're dietitian approved and ready to heat and eat in two minutes. You can fuel right

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Steven, it's rumor roundup time. Yee-haw! Thank you, thank you, very nice. It is Mark Gurman, of course, the sheriff of the rumor roundup, reporting in his newsletter that Apple is considering plans, considering is the word I highlighted here,

to put cameras on Apple Watch. He's reported about this before. I'm not sure how much of this is new. It's not a decided, but his angle here is that they're actually thinking about it now, not for FaceTime or anything like that, but for visual intelligence. The idea that they are, which is not, it's kind of an underwhelming feature right now, but I think what German says is they're high on it and, and eventually being able to, uh, put their own models in there and analyze what is in the world around you and give you actionable information. And so, uh, he, he says it would be on the side for the ultra. So you'd kind of like hold your ultra out and go boop and it would like look at whatever you were looking at. And on the front for

the series where you have to kind of like flip it over and go boop and it would like look at whatever you were looking at. And on the front for the series where you have to kind of like flip it over and go boop and then the series will do it that way. But, um, this, I don't know what I feel about cameras on the Apple watch, but this makes more sense. It's what I worry about is that it's the people who've been trying to build this camera or like, how about visual intelligence? Will that get our camera put in the Apple watch at last? Because I think FaceTime shooting, you know, up your nose while you're trying

to talk to somebody on your watch is not a great use of a camera. Visual intelligence seems a little better. And he said, this is similar to what they're thinking about with cameras and AirPods is just sort of like allow your devices to understand things about what's around you. Yeah, I don't, I'm not excited about it. And maybe it's because I'm not a visual intelligence user. Like the times that I've tried it,

it's because we're gonna talk about it on a show. And maybe that's just me, but even like Google Lens and other things, I just don't tend to like point a camera or something, but like, what is this? You know, I can, other than translation, this is not a need I have.

Translation is a thing that I do, but I very rarely otherwise dealing with this sort of stuff. Sure. Because it just doesn't, I just don't think it's good enough most of the time. If they can make it good, like I love the idea of your device knows where you are and knows things about you and knows what you're seeing

and can explain it to you. Like I like that idea, but in practice it's just not very interesting. I also wonder about the potential pushback on something like this. Like I know we all walk around with iPhones, like my phone's got three cameras on the back and one on the front. Like it's covered in cameras, iPad, laptops. Like we've all gotten used to that and we have been used to that for a long time, right?

Phones, even before smartphones had cameras. But suddenly when you're talking about AirPods and watches, things that you may wear on your person in times that you would not have your phone, that feels a little bit different. Like if you're at the gym and you have your watch on in the locker room, like your phone's in your bag,

like suddenly like you have a camera in a space that a camera's not expected. And I don't think this would be like full glass hole kind of levels of pushback, but I think there would be some with some people and take off the table like security things. You can get an iPhone without a camera and like Apple or other companies make those

for people who work in like secure locations or people may have to leave their phone in a locker at work and not take the phone in to work because of whatever they're working on. Well, suddenly you're talking about a watch and AirPods that now have those requirements. Like, I just don't know. I just don't know if visual intelligence,

or honestly even FaceTime, or just having a camera on your person at all times, if that's worth that potential downside. I think this is one of the fascinating areas where we have to look, again, I think we're gonna talk about this later, but where Apple's doing well and where Apple's doing poorly. And it ends in a situation,

and I think we're gonna see this more, where Apple becomes culturally across the company aligned in that AI is the future, and that all these features are super important. And so let's take visual intelligence. Apple says visual intelligence is an enormous part of the future and that all these features are super important. And so let's take visual intelligence. Apple says visual intelligence is an enormous part of the future. You all go work on visual intelligence, which right now is just super limited. It's like a Google image search or a open AI.

I mean, it's like there's very little there. It's not that interesting most of the time. The hardware people are like, we're on it. And Apple's hardware people are executing so much better than their software people right now. They're at the top of their game. I think that's one of the weird things about the current state of Apple is that the hardware is not

the problem at all. They seem to be the best at doing what they do. And so you end up in these situations where like, I love the idea that they they're like, yeah, we can put a camera in a watch and we'll make it kind of more scan-y and a little less like it's a FaceTime thing. And so you'll be able to kind of like find a piece of paper and go boop and it will scan a document

and tell you what it is and act on it or put it in your photo library or whatever. Like great, I walk the dog with just an Apple watch and if I see something weird that's worth taking a picture of, I can't, right? So I like, okay, all right. So the hardware people do this. It's like amazing hardware, miniaturization that they've done.

It's incredible. Meanwhile, the, the, the, the software team has shipped an Apple or visual intelligence is like, it doesn't really do anything. And that's, that's the concern is that Apple puts all this amazing hardware in these products. And if they're not supported properly by the software then it's just a waste of everybody's time. So that's that's my concern about it now is that if I think about visual intelligence now I don't see why it's worth doing this. So okay so

they've got great confidence in the future of visual intelligence according to Mark Gurman. Are we confident in their confidence? I don't know. Not after the last few weeks, I'm not. No. Anyway, that's the, look, there's, because this is, here's the thing. I think that this is a direction within Apple, which is put sensors everywhere and put cameras everywhere.

And the reason you do it is because they're foreseeing a future, which I think is not unreasonable, where your location and what's around you has all sorts of benefits. It has accessibility benefits too, where it can say, I see this thing in front of you. If they ever build those, you know, like Meta Ray-Ban style glasses

that have a camera in it, same thing. You're using AI on the phone to process all of that image stuff. And then you've got accessibility issues and you've got other intelligence cues. And there's so many different things it can do. It's more precise on a map because beyond just the GPS, especially if you're in a city,

it can recognize it already can do this. It can recognize the buildings and know where you are. Great, but you could be aligned in that way and build all your hardware toward that direction. But like, if you ship the hardware and it turns out the software is just not there, what are we even doing here? So I, I don't know. I don't know. The other thing I wanted to mention, by the way, since this is the rumor roundup segment is that Mark Gurman is apparently making the media rounds. Now I'll just point out, we had Mark

Gurman on upgrade like five years ago. So I remember. Yeah, we did. Um, but he, the sheriff is, uh, is right in the range. He was on app stories for 28 where he talked about his kind of origin story. And he was also on a Mac rumors show one 39. So he's out there. He's talking. I heard a rumor. Oh, see, I'm going to get, I got a Mark Gurman rumor for you, Steven. Okay.

Who's the sheriff now? My sources are reporting that it's possible that Mark Gurman will be on, Stephen. Okay. Who's the sheriff now? My sources are reporting that it's possible that Mark Gurman will be on MacBreak Weekly tomorrow. I don't know if that's worked out or not, but that was the rumor I heard. I'm just saying, I just want to drop a Mark Gurman themed rumor for fun. Okay.

I like it. But yeah, we did. We had Mark on like five years ago and it was a great conversation. He's the, as Gruber wrote the other week, he is the foremost Apple reporter right now. There is nobody else out there with remotely the sources that he has the information breaks some stuff

from time to time behind their paywall. Wall Street Journal and New York Times haven't really done a lot with it. Occasionally we get leaks out of the supply chain from the people out there, but most of it is by Mark Gurman. And so, you know, tip our hat to him. He's killing it. And I think as Gruber pointed out, the most obvious way that he's killing it is nobody else is remotely close. So good for Mark and good for Bloomberg.

I would like to segue into Lawyer Up, another segment. is nobody else is remotely close. So good for Mark and good for Bloomberg. I would like to segue into Lawyer Up, another segment. Do you enjoy being in all these segments? We don't, you know. It's great. I mean, I feel like I should have brought more outfits, but it's pretty good. The structure helps. The structure helps, especially when Mike is gone. It's nice to have a structure.

Good to have a structure. You don't need Mike, you got the structure. I got the structure. It's, it's basically like Mike. Mike is just a structure in human form. Uh, lawyer up, uh, the EU told Apple to open up access to notifications and a smart watch interoperability. This is, you put this in the document. Why don't you tell me what's going on? What does the EU want Apple to do? They want them to make the Pebble good. No, we're going to get to Pebble in a second. No.

Well, Pebble, Pebble, even back in the day, Pebble was a good example. Like there was no Apple watch. And when Pebble was starting out and I had a Pebble, do you have a Pebble? Yeah. And, and it was passable, but not really super integrated with the phone. And the thought was, well, the Apple watch is going to come out and it'll be super integrated. And it was, but the fact is to this day,

they're trying to bring back the pebble and they still can't integrate with it. In fact, it's kind of worse in some ways than it was before. And that's what this, I feel like that's one of the things this EU ruling is about. Yeah, so there are several points to this that Apple has been told to deal with. The first is that non-Apple smartwatch devices

should have the ability to receive push notifications, including pictures, and reply to those notifications. So this is something that really wasn't around in the first sort of Pebble era, but you know, you get a notification, you can do a tap back, or you can do a quick reply with your voice or with a little keyboard. And that's available to the Apple Watch,

because it's all conjoined with the iPhone, but not on other things. Or if it is, it's very limited. So like, if you have a Garmin smartwatch, you know, if you're a big runner, some of those companies have done things, so like they do like a fast reply, but then has to go through their app,

or their app has to be open. It's a workaround, it's hacky. And this mandate says, no, no, no, you gotta open that access up to notifications. iPhone users going on will also be able to pair their non-Apple connected devices devices such as headphones and smartwatches more Seamlessly and easily with the iPhone so we're all familiar with you get a new Apple watch or any set of air pods You open it that card comes up right and you take a picture of like the weird

QR code in space or do you just hit the button on your air pods and they sync up That system seems like it's gonna need to be you just hit the button on your AirPods and they sync up. That system seems like it's gonna need to be opened up. And if you've, I did this recently, we had to replace, this is a very up-grade topic, we had to replace our shower speaker because whatever waterproof JBL we had for like 10 years finally died,

I replaced it with a newer waterproof JBL. All right, that's loyalty, I love it. And yeah, it's great. The first one was great, lasted a long time. But I hit the button and I sort of waited for the card because I've just paired AirPods and stuff recently. I was like, oh, I gotta go into settings and Bluetooth and add device

and they want that to be more easily done. Faster data connections to and from the iPhone and then one that's sort of outside of, like those all feel related. This one feels a little bit different. Developers should be able to integrate solution, alternative solutions to airdrop and airplay on the iPhone.

So quoting iPhone users, we'll be able to choose from different and innovative services to share files with other users and cast media content from their iPhones to TVs. Right, which you can do now, but it's not sort of the system level to do that. So the fact is, there is no reason today that the Apple Watch should be better than any other smartwatch on the iPhone, because Apple has built features for the Apple Watch and doesn't allow anybody else to use them. Right? I feel like fundamentally that is anti-competitive.

And we could talk about what happens in the early days when Apple is building the platform. I don't think Apple needs to build every product for everybody at launch. I think that there's an argument to be made that for them to innovate, they need to build it for their product, and then they can start rolling it out. And there could be a window of availability for it where it's like, well, you can you can build this stuff for your own stuff, but within five years, it needs to be APIs that are open to people. And again, that would be a huge advantage for the Apple Watch, for example, over other products. But 10 years in, 10 plus years into the Apple Watch, the fact that nobody else can do what the Apple Watch does because Apple won't let them is not great. It's just, it's not great.

Of course, Apple doesn't like this. Apple said, today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don't have to play by the same rules. It's bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users.

And as with everything Apple says, there's truth in it and also not truth in it. So again, I'm sympathetic. But I also think that this is the classic Apple move, which is I'm sympathetic to their argument, but they overstep, they overreach, because they're using a reasonable argument to make, expand it out into an unreasonable argument, which is if we, if we build stuff for our smartwatch, why should we ever give it to anybody else? And nobody else has access to our platform but us. So, uh, it's the EU saying, no, you need to be able to let other people compete with you, which doesn't seem, you know, doesn't seem unreasonable. Again, ability to innovate and giving away new features for free.

Like I get it. And that's what I'm saying. I, I, I don't think everything Apple does should be an open API the moment that it ships. I don't think that, but I do think that ultimately they need to not like withhold all smartwatch features from their platform for 10 years, except for the Apple watch, that seems the Apple Watch. That seems unreasonable to me.

It marks a shift. This is not a fully formed thought, so forgive me, but having something like Bluetooth fast pairing with the card and stuff, is that really a big advantage of AirPods? You see it one time you set it up, or if you restore it, then have to set it up again, right? What makes AirPods good is the sound quality,

the connection, the noise cancellation. It seems like Apple's trying to pick a fight over a feature that's not even that important or that big in that specific case. But at the same time, this is the part that's really not fully formed, doesn't it make the iPhone better and more valuable to an end user

if they can bring other smartwatches to it? Or if a smart ring has better health integration, whatever the example is, Apple has shifted at some point from what makes a single product better for a user to what makes the ecosystem better for a user. And that feels like where a lot of the friction sort of lies. Yeah, I agree.

I think you could throw the whole App Store issue in here too, which is, it's like Apple has decided that the ecosystem is entirely controlled by Apple and Apple's products. And there isn't that broader thought, which is, well, but to make the ecosystem good, we need to have a lot of players in it. And the conflict of interest is, yeah, but we have a smartwatch. Why would we let any competitors in? And I know I've said this on this podcast a lot, but it bears repeating. Why compete if you don't have to? I mean, I understand it as frustrating as it is, I think for us observers, I

understand why Apple has this opinion, because even if we say Apple is going to like the Apple watch is not, if they completely open up or AirPods, every feature of connectivity on the, on the iPhone to those products, it's not going to change Apple being number one. No, it's not. It's not. But why be number one when you could be 100%? Yeah. I think in these conversations, a lot of people will be like, well, think about the iPod and iTunes, right? Like Apple made iTunes, they made the iPod, they were made to work together. And at times there were ways to break that marriage apart,

but I think a couple of things are true. One, that was a long time ago, and Apple was dealing with things like music rights and other complicated things that don't really come into play of like can my Garmin get iMessage notifications, right? So it is a different playing field.

But the truth is also we live in a different time where there are lots of companies making lots of products, lots of good products. And Apple has built walls in a way where, like you said it perfectly, that they don't have to compete and they hide behind privacy or user security. And some of that may be true, some of it's not true. And they are hurting potentially one part of their business in order to try to boost another one, which was your point that I thought was really good. Your point that you're still thinking about, which is that the iPhone is less

good because people who want to make various wearable things like Fitbits and Pebbles and other smartwatches can't make them as good for the iPhone. watches can't make them as good for the iPhone. It means that when you look at Eric Minkowski's, uh, pebble, pebble, Eric, Eric pebble, if you look at his blog post about bringing back the pebble, he says it's going to be way better on Android. Yeah. And I roll my eyes. Cause he's like, well, of course all of us here use Android.

Cause it's open. I'm like, whatever, dude. Okay, fine. Whatever you work to Google. Great. Yeah, you can be obnoxious and right. Yeah, I know. This is what, this is what, uh, uh, epic games taught us that sometimes the worst person in the world is right about something.

Um, it is like the iPhone is, is, is worse. And I cannot understand people who contort to say well actually the fact that the pebble is much worse on the iPhone than on Android is a good thing because you know my column and it's like no it's not it's it means it means that there's a it's a company town with a with one solution and then everything else has been intentionally degraded because they want you to buy the Apple Watch and not everybody wants an Apple Watch. And for Apple, I want an Apple Watch, quite honestly, but not everybody does. And so allowing there to be more, it's not even competition, variety of products available to your users in your ecosystem

is a benefit to your devices. And this is, Stephen, it goes back to the fact that I still get the feeling that Apple, as much as Apple talks about all the money that it's paid out to developers after taking its share, that the truth is Apple ascribes a hundred percent of the iPhone success to itself. When in fact, an enormous portion of the iPhone success

is due to the apps in the app store, which were made by people who are not Apple. But Apple even gives itself credit for apps in the app store because the app store is Apple's. So therefore it's all from Apple's invention and everything else they do. They do these self-serving reports where they talk about how much economic impact they have in various countries. And they

roll every app developer in there like they were an Apple employee. And I mean, it's deeply misguided because, and I think that this is biting them in a bunch of areas now in terms of working with developers, is the iPhone, I mean, you could really argue that what made the iPhone fly was the App Store. So if there's no App Store and there's only Apple apps on the iPhone, what happens? The answer is the iPhone is not what it is today without those developers.

And yet they have this attitude that is pretty pervasive which is it's all about us. And that's the wrong attitude. The attitude is our products are improved by the other products in our ecosystem. And therefore you should let other products in your ecosystem. And they do to a certain extent, but you have these areas where they're just like,

well, no, we can't have book reading be good on the iPhone or the iPad. It can never be good other than in our app, because we have decided to bar Amazon and Kobo and anybody else from selling books and comics directly from the app. They have to do a big workaround, and we don't because we're the owner,

and they're giving themselves an advantage, but it degrades the iPhone experience. And there are so many different examples of this. This is just another one, because again, I don't think the Pebble is going to compete with the Apple Watch at all. But if you want to use a Pebble in the year 2025, you are not a serious Apple Watch potential customer.

You are looking for something very different. And that's OK. That's OK. Because the Apple Watch is still gonna be the best on the platform. And if it's not gonna be the best on the platform, well, Apple should get a kick in the pants and make it better.

Yeah, yeah. It's, what's the word for it? Anti-competitive? No, that can't be the word. That can't be the word. Yeah, options are good. And people should have them. And yeah, hey, it's a,

Pebble coming back in 2025 was not on my, and people should have them. And yeah, hey, it's a, Pebble coming back in 2025 was not on my bingo card, but here we are. I like that Eric Pebble has enough money and enough sway at Google that he can get them to open source their OS so, and that he can fund essentially, cause he's not kick-starting this.

I kick-started the first Pebble. They're just making them. He's just using his own money to make them and then he's gonna sell them. Like in the old days, before we had crowdfunding. And I love it. I think I still have my Pebble around here somewhere. I ordered one.

I've got the core two duo, the black and white one, underscore and I each, he talked me into it, just to see what's going on there. And honestly, like if Apple has to change some of these things, like, I mean, I like the Apple watch a lot, but there may be times where I choose to wear the Pebble for whatever reason.

Or if I were a runner, I want to wear a Garmin, like again, coming down to options for consumers. This ruling also, I think, will have an impact on things like the Meta Ray Bands, right? Where the idea here is interoperability. That the Meta Ray Bands is an example where Apple doesn't have a product in the category, but they can only integrate to a certain degree.

And it's also, so many of these things are like, well, you're gonna run our app, and if our app stops running, everything stops working until you run our app again. And it's just, you know, again, Apple should, I would argue in that case, since it's basically using the same kind of things, that if Apple doesn't wanna play in that area, that's fine.

But if iPhone users want that product, they should be able to use it and have it be decent. And that requires that level of interoperability. So yeah, we'll see. We'll keep watching it. The lawyers, they are they are lowering, lawyering up. Keep watching the clock. No, wait, keep watching the briefcase. Got it. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Google Gemini. I used Gemini for the first time the other day, and the most impressive thing to me was just talking to it. You go live with it, and then it's just like you're having a conversation. You can just talk about your day, or have it explain something to you,

or start brainstorming ideas. I'll give you an example. I pretended I had a job interview coming up, and I asked for it to help me prep for the interview. It immediately started suggesting common questions I might get asked. Then, I started talking through my answers out loud, and it would give me feedback. And it's all happening in real time, like I'm talking to a career coach. That's just what I tried first, but you can talk to it about anything. And that's the magic of it. How you can have this back and forth and it's all seamless.

If you haven't tried it yet, it's definitely worth checking out. You'll see what I mean. I thanks to Google Gemini for the support of this show and all of Relay. All right. So we also need to talk about streaming boxes. Steven, this is back to Mark Gurman actually, because something Mark Gurman wrote in one of his pieces kind of set me off.

Yeah, I think you texted some of us about it. I did, I did. I texted you and Mike about it. Then you turned it into a blog post. Yeah, well, and it came up on upgrade and I ranted about it there. And during, I believe it was during upgrade, I bought a fire TV, a Google TV, and a Roku 4k streamer box because, um, or Kerman wrote this piece about Apple

TV being a laggard and needing a hardware update because it was a laggard with a low market share. And look, I think, as I say in my article that set this whole thing in motion, I think he's just conflating the two things. I think it's basically a writer or editor kind of conflating these two things rather than getting into the details of the complexity of it. But Apple shipping a new Apple TV box with upgraded specs is not gonna change anything about the Apple TV

because it's already fine. It never has. Never. I mean, maybe in, was it 2015 when they launched TVOS and the future television is apps and all that stuff. Sure. Maybe then, but since then, in the 10 years since, it's like, well, do it, you know,

like I upgraded when I bought my first 4K TV. And honestly, I don't even know what Apple TV I have. I know it uses the newest remote, but I think the third and the second gen could, so I don't honestly don't even know. Yep. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. That's the thing. It is so powerful. It doesn't matter. That's the thing. It is so powerful. Well, first off, it's so much more powerful. We got to talk about streamer box, but we also got to talk about embedded streaming because so many people, I think, I haven't looked at these numbers.

I probably should. Interface with connected content on their television sets through the apps on their TV. And those processors are terrible. If you've ever tried to use it, like even on relatively recent TVs, they're so slow. I have a Roku TV, it's so slow. And the Roku box is faster than that.

The standalone box I bought for a hundred dollars is faster than that for sure. But it's for $100 is faster than that, for sure. Yeah. But it's just not an issue. First off, a lot of people are worried about that lowest common denominator. They're like, well, we need to support all of our apps on all devices, and that means these terrible TVs as well.

But if you buy a box, yes, Apple's market share is pretty low. And I do think that they may need to make a more affordable box, because I think that it would be good for them to do so. And so if Mark Gurman's, if I read between the lines, maybe one of the things he's saying is if they update the Apple TV hardware, maybe that will enable them to get the price point down a little bit, which I say great.

But that's literally the only hardware innovation that I want to see on the Apple TV on that side. I know there are people out there who are like playing games on the Apple TV who want more, but it's really such a niche use for the Apple TV that I'm just for the purposes of this, let's just not even talk about it. Because when he says they're a laggard, he means that people aren't buying them, that it's a very low market share. But I was really skeptical about this comment because I thought my experience is that the

Apple TV is actually pretty good and while we're really frustrated about all the things it doesn't do, the hardware especially is not the problem. So I bought these boxes. I bought the Google TV, the Amazon and the Roku and I have spent the last month kind of using them on and off and trying a bunch of things on them. And I can tell you upfront that the hardware, again, the hardware is not the problem.

Apple TV hardware is fine. It's just fine. The software is a problem, although it made me appreciate the things that are good about the Apple TV a lot more too. Do you have any questions for me? Can you debrief me about this ridiculous project that I gave for myself,

that where I spent several hundred dollars for a single blog post? Yeah, which is not gonna work out financially. Let's wring some more content out of it now, Stephen. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, that's right. Put it on the podcast. Also, if anybody would like a Fire TV stick 4K,

call me, I guess. I have one, you can have it. Let me use your payment. You can just look at his address and go get it. Yeah, so you checked out several of these things and I will say, in my household, the Apple TV is our television experience, right? I don't have cable, we use Hulu Live.

My kids, to them, television is tvOS and it's been that way since the second or third Apple TV, like basically the whole time. And so I have not spent a lot of time with these other ones. And I was surprised, I wanna start with Google TV, and you really praised its live tab, where they're pulling in what's on live television through YouTube TV, but also YouTube Premium

and all these other places. Yeah, streaming channels. Yeah, it sounds like they've really kind of got that figured out. Yeah, I mean, one of the big things, and I heard from somebody who was like, well, I don't care about live TV. It's like, well, okay, but a lot of,

the fastest growing segment in streaming right now is live TV, is fast channels, free ad stream, ad supported television, but also all of the services are adding live channels. And one of the reasons for that is sometimes, not to put too fine a point on it, sometimes you wanna sit down and turn off your brain and just watch something, or you're making dinner, or you're folding laundry,

and you just wanna put something on. And these are essentially playlists, unless it's like a news channel or a sports channel, they're essentially playlists, but that's fine. Like, have you looked at cable TV lately? Most cable channels are also just playlists where they show 18 episodes of Law and Order in a row. So with streaming, you can go like to Peacock

and just watch the Law and Order channel. And it's just a channel where Law and Order will play. And you don't have to program it. You don't have to pick an episode. And it's a very popular kind. Not everything is on demand or has to be on demand. And a lot of people are really responding well to what we all know that TV always did well,

which is sometimes you just turn on the TV, flip it to a channel and veg out, and that's all you wanna do. And think about how many places where TVs are that maybe aren't the living room where that's true. So what I just thought about was the tire shop that I go to, I was just there because I had an issue. Their TV in their waiting room,

100% of the time is playing MASH. We spoke about MASH earlier. Oh man. I don't know if the guy's got a DVD player in the back and he just like swaps them in or if it's streaming somewhere, but like any time I've been in there over the course of years, you know, it's MASH.

And it makes sense, right? It's just in the background of your waiting room. Most people are gonna look at their phones or pull a laptop out and get some work done because they're waiting on a tire to get patched or whatever. Or you can watch MASH. Or you can watch MASH. And honestly, I prefer that than having like cable news on.

So. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. These services, right? Like Google TV and the Amazon thing and TVOS, they're designed with the living room in mind, I think, but very clearly there are times where they are used in other contexts, right? So we talked about AirPlay a second ago with the European Union.

A lot of people put Apple TVs in conference rooms and classrooms for AirPlay, and now that AirPlay is on televisions, and I think even some projectors now, like maybe that's gonna break down a little bit. But these products do interact, you know, we interact with these products in different ways. And it seems to me like the live tab in Google TV

kind of understands that, where it's bringing everything together so you don't have to hop around and giving you just like a broad overview of what's available to you in a way that I think tvOS tries to do but as we get to it I think it falls down in a few a few ways. Yeah by the way I it's funny I'm gonna make an admission here because I don't think there's a MASH Fast channel and I don't know what your tire shop is doing, but I'll tell you. So the channels app that Casey always talks about,

I have that, I love it. I use that to record stuff off of my YouTube TV subscription, actually, and then I can watch it later on my local DVR instead of using YouTube's DVR. I started that with Fubo. YouTube's DVR is better. I might just be able to just use YouTube's DVR instead of using YouTube's DVR. I started that with Fubo. YouTube's DVR is better. I might just be able to just use YouTube's DVR. But YouTube's DVR has like a two week cutoff and these will just keep forever as long as I want them,

which is great. So I've got like a little bunch of Jeopardy episodes on there and I watch them when I want to. But one of the features of channels is you can create a virtual channel and it's pointed at my Plex library. So I have a MASH channel that will just play MASH forever. I actually have that,

because I have all the episodes on my Plex of MASH. And I have a MASH channel and you can just turn it on and then you're the tire store at that point, which is great. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, live isn't the only feature, but one of the reasons I focused on live with Google TV Which I because I have YouTube TV like it doesn't integrate with all of them, but it does integrate with a couple of them

I think it does sling and Google TV or YouTube TV but as a result it's like look if you're in the Google ecosystem Google TV is as good as Apple TV basically because it is tied into YouTube TV and YouTube as good as Apple TV, basically, because it is tied into YouTube TV and YouTube. And all the Google, like, if you rented a movie or bought a movie on your Android phone, it's there. All of the ones that I synced for movies anywhere are there. I can watch a movie on it.

It's just, it is Google's answer to Apple TV, and it's pretty good, but the live support puts it over the top because this is the thing. Apple doesn't do that. And that is one of the things that, because I wanted to write about the live stuff is because Apple has completely missed the boat when it comes to live. And this has been a recently emerging phenomenon, but they've had a few years. And if we go another TV OS announcement without them integrating live TV in some way,

it's a really bad sign because it feels like tvOS is holding the product down because they are just on maintenance mode with this thing. And the streaming world is shifting and letting people add their third party apps is not enough. They need to do some work on the OS. And one of the places they need to do work is in, is in a live guide, cause you should have an API,

the way it should work. And Amazon does this really well, actually. I do not, I have a stick cause I didn't want to buy their big cube. The cube is so cool though. Yeah. It's a cube with a little light going around the top. There was a limit.

Well, it's kind of like an echo that's also a stream. And I did not want that in my house. I just didn't want it in my house. I'm sorry. Cubes are best. I know cubes are best, but. Cubagons are the bestagons. Yeah.

So Amazon's is even better. Amazon is doing what Apple should do in terms of, if you have an app on their platform, plus they've got their own library of hundreds of live channels that you get with Prime Video, you can basically either the apps are furnishing those channels to Amazon or Amazon is just doing a backend kind of connection with their service and that is they've negotiated with them. But whatever it is, if you have an app and you say like, I'm adding Peacock, it adds all the Peacock channels. You don't have to

have them there, but it'll put them there. And basically if you pick a Peacock channel, it'll launch Peacock and tune to that channel. But basically you're getting a program guide that you can then mark favorites because you've got hundreds, like 600 channels or whatever. You mark your favorites and you can mark your favorite from traditional TV on something like YouTube TV, a prime Video channel, a Roku channel, a Peacock channel, a Paramount channel, and put them in your favorites, and then they all just show there, you know? So you can have ESPN and CNN and the, you know,

the MASH channel or whatever, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer channel. And it's pretty great. It's like, it's the best at that. But here's the problem, Stephen. Amazon's box is so terrible. It's so good and so terrible because of the ads. It has ads everywhere.

The home screen has ads on it and not like promos for, like Apple has like Apple TV stuff that they're promoting and Google is gonna promote things that are on YouTube or that you can get in their store or whatever. Amazon has all that and lots of it, more than normal. And it has ads. So in the home screen default, the top half of the interface is an ad.

And it's not just an ad for something that you could watch. It's literally an ad. I got a makeup ad, I got a mattress company ad, I got a broadband ad. Which is the hero image in the blog post. Yes, it's the Mancini Sleepworld. That's a commercial. If you arrow up by accident or whatever to the ad unit, it will take over almost the entire screen, and it will autoplay with audio a television commercial for a man seeing the sleep world in this case. Just something you would see on TV, a 30 second long commercial.

Some of them are not like that. Some of them instead just have a button that will take you to commerce. Cause Amazon's gonna Amazon. In the end, even if you spend $100 or $120 on one of these Amazon devices, they don't view it as, thanks for giving us money That's what our product is for they view it as a foothold in your house to sell you stuff and to merchandise and to sell

commercial space and so if you want If you don't mind like it is the best in a lot of ways, but it is so aggressively Just it's like erecting a billboard in your house. It's a little like saying, I'll give you a, and I think some company does this, I'll give you a free 4K flat screen if when you're not watching it, it shows ads on the screen and you can't turn it off.

That's basically what is going on with a Fire TV is that it is so aggressive with the ads that it just look, if I'm being precious, and you don't care, that's fine. But like, web banner ads on my television by default, that I can't turn it off, and they don't go away. It is, in my opinion, a huge step above having Apple show, you know, an Apple TV show in that space. It's just not, or whatever is on the other channels, cause you kind of move around. It's just not the same. So it's really bad.

That was a, Tele was the company you were thinking of that has, you just get a TV, it's dual screen, it shows you ads. Oh, that's right. Yeah, you watch TV and also you see ads. I'm sorry. I'm sorry., that's right. Yeah, you watch TV and also you see ads. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And that's why I said, I mean,

in my piece, I basically said, I'm not gonna ever use this Amazon product. It doesn't matter how good it is. It doesn't matter, because I do not want that level of commerce in my TV interface. That is the equivalent, and I know Microsoft is already doing some of this, right?

But that is the equivalent of when you buy a computer, part of the screen is just a banner ad from the operating system. Wait, you mean like in settings when you could buy AppleCare Plus or turn on Apple intelligence? Again, I don't because that's marketing for the company. And although that's also not great,

if imagine you boot up your Windows PC and there's just a square in the corner that has like web display ads in it, always, always. Mancini Sleep World, and then it's L'Oreal, and then it's Comcast, Xfinity, Business Internet. And they just keep, those are the ones I saw on Amazon. And they just keep reloading. And everywhere you go in your computer,

there's always an ad. Like, no, just say, no, that's unacceptable. That is a bridge too far. I don't like the marketing stuff from, you know, Apple saying, don't you want to buy Apple TV Plus? Don't you want to buy AppleCare? But I understand it and I accept that more than what Amazon's doing, which is literally like,

if you are a mattress, local mattress company, and you want to stick your 30 second TV ad in Fire TV in a particular region, we'll do it. Now my, I suspect that they sold that ad and didn't qualify where it was gonna run. And that if Mancini Sleep World found out that it was running in the home screen of a TV interface, they'd be like, that's not what we bought.

We didn't buy that. We just want this on Prime Video or something. Although, by the way, I do opt out of ads on Prime Video and it doesn't have any effect on the ad load on Fire TV. It's just terrible. That's unfortunate. But Amazon's not alone in it, right? You also talked about Roku.

Yeah. They've done advertising for a long time. There was a story, I think last week, about they were testing an ad spot in the boot up screen. So like, not once you're logged in, but like as the thing is booting. Yeah, you have to watch an ad before you get the menu. Yeah. And, you know, and Roku is also interesting

because they make boxes, but they also sell TVs with it all integrated. A good friend of mine has got a Roku TV. Yeah, I have a TCL TV and it's got Roku OS inside. Yeah, and I think a lot of people like Roku. I don't have a ton of experience with it, like I said, where TV OS through and through. I've had a few.

But they're also doing the live TV thing, right? Another example of something, of someone doing this where Apple isn't. They have 500 live TV channels. I, Roku impressed me the least. And I bought their modern box and all that, but their OS seems really old. It feels very much like you think Apple TV,

future of TV is apps, it's an app launcher. Roku is very much that. It's just a super generic app launcher. And then there are ads and part of their business model is to stick ads and promos in. But they have made this, they've added 500 channels of live streaming stuff, but most of those you can get on other boxes too, because they just want the ads,

the ad revenue from it. but it's super generic and Their live guide is okay. Although it's it's mostly just focused on their stuff not other people's stuff but it's you know, I Found it uninteresting and I would be I actually wouldn't be surprised if Roku is planning a big OS update because they sure need one They it feels not that different than the Roku boxes I was using 10 years ago, honestly. It's really generic and boring in a way that Google and Amazon aren't.

Which brings us back to the Apple TV. Yeah. And I've got a little like prescription. Having made this journey, I've got a little prescription for TV OS, which is one, get on live TV. Every app that's in the app store should be able to provide a little prescription for TV OS, which is one get on live TV. Every app that's in the app store should be able to provide you with a live TV guide either,

you know, buy an API or something else where you can say if you add Paramount Plus, you get these channels or you show the channels anyway and say, would you like to watch these channels get Paramount Plus or Peacock or whatever like that should be integrated. It's great for sports. It's great for live TV. Somebody who's got YouTube TV, having those channels be integrated. It's great for sports, it's great for live TV. Somebody who's got YouTube TV, having those channels be integrated into the interface so it knows that right now I can flip to Discovery Channel

or whatever and see a thing, great, fantastic, do that. And the misguided or at least misfire of an interface decision where the TV app is sort of the main interface of Apple TV, but the home screen is sort of the main app interface of Apple TV. I just think it's wrong and out of date. And the more I looked at Google and Amazon, the more I felt that way.

Google and Amazon integrate the apps on their box into that basically TV interface. And Apple has started to do that. And boy, after using those other devices, I think Apple just needs to rip the bandaid off and make the home screen disappear and put the, the TV app should be the interface. And there should be an app tab or whatever. And an app launcher in that main, and there is sort of an app

launcher already in there, but like this bifurcated interface is a, is a vestige of a strategy that's not there anymore. So they need some work. And the problem is, Steven is it feels like tvOS has worked on by like five people. I think that that might be three people. I think that might be true. Three people? I mean, I might have overshot with five. Because I'm sure the people who focus on TVOS day in day out

know that they're behind in these areas. But it feels like they just don't get the funding to fix this stuff. Because it's very clear, they are moving slowly toward this with the TV app. Like they keep adding those features that will eventually let them kill the home screen. But I think dogmatically they're like,

but we're an Apple device. Everything's about app stores and home screens, right? It's like not the TV. I think you shouldn't do it. I think there needs to be one interface. I think it's really confusing. And then they need to embrace live TV. They just really do.

Well, I mean, I think it's telling that when they brought the TV app to the Mac and iPhone, iPad and stuff, right? They didn't bring the home screen experience. They brought the TV app experience. Of course. I think they know that. I do think TVOS is ahead of anything else. It is, as frustrating as it is, and as behind as some of its competitors, it is

in a few areas, if I had to choose one of them today and I have them all here, I have no regrets about using TVOS. I don't. It is, I think it is the, has the best taste. It has the lowest promotional marketing load. It does most of what I need to do, but I do wish about the live TV and about the unified interface.

But it's pretty close to, I mean, I would say it's the best, although I would say, again, Amazon's shooting itself in the foot, otherwise it's probably the best. And Google, if I was a, if I was an Android user, I'd probably just get a Google TV because it's good. It's good. It's not, it's not. The thing I miss the most is the swiping on the remote, honestly, on the

Google TV, because I use that. It turns out all the time. I had to do a long scroll and I was like, click, click, click, click, click. Can I hold down the button? And it didn't make it scroll faster. I'm like, click, click, click, click, click. Can I hold down the button and it didn't make it scroll faster? I'm like, oh my God. And there's 600 channels. It's like, I just got to sit here and press this button until, and on Apple TV,

I'd be like, swipe, swipe, get it down there. And that's I, uh, that, that one, that one hit me, but, but anyway, I, I don't think it's a laggard in most ways. Um, it is a laggard on the OS side in a few ways. And so if I'm reacting again to that Mark Gurman story about they need, you know, they're gonna do a hardware refresh because they're a laggard is like, thing that makes Apple TV not a laggard is

the, is a software update, not the hardware. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you in part by ExpressVPN. Netflix has more than 18,000 titles globally, but only about 7,000 are available in the US. You might be missing out on literally thousands of great shows unless you use ExpressVPN. When you use ExpressVPN, you can change your online location, which can change where streaming services think you're located.

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And I got to watch, we were watching like John Oliver from New Zealand. And it was great. It's like, that's what I want. It's so much easier to do it that way. So yes, you can watch Max from New Zealand, even though it's in the US, all by opening the app, selecting a location, tapping one button to connect, and refreshing the page to get access. So be smart. Get access to all the stuff that the world brings you and be more secure at the same time. Go to expressvpn.com slash upgrade.

That's expressvpn.com slash upgrade. And you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. Thank you to ExpressVPN for letting me be anywhere in the world, even if I'm only in one location, which I'm usually only in one location and for supporting upgrade. Steven, it's time for ask upgrade. Okay. Those are some, some hack at lasers.

I like it. Thanks for the hack. I should have practiced. I'm sorry. Those are more like truck lasers. They're coming off your truck. They got like a little big heavy thing that's hanging off your truck. So they gotta go boom, boom.

Yeah. My laser's- Get out of my way. I don't know where my lasers are. They're in the cloud. Lasers from clouds, that's how it works. Anonymous wrote in and said, Jason, what do you do about date metadata for the photos you scan in? I want to scan in old photos and have them in chronological

order in my photo library. I actually did this with, I'm thinking of doing this again with some more of them. We scanned in a bunch of slides from Lauren's family and I just sent them to a slide scanning company and it was amazing because they all come back and they're super high quality. company and it was amazing because they all come back and they're super high quality. And in the Photos app, you can adjust dates. You can actually select a big batch and do a date adjust up in the menu and select the whole batch and assign it to September 16th, 1971 or whatever. And it'll just do it. And, and so then what you end up doing, if you're like me, what you end up doing is playing detective a little bit. I did a lot, because this is Lauren's family, especially. So I'm like, all right. When was your dad sent? He looks like he's like, he's in the National Guard and he got sent to somewhere. And she's like, Oh, well, that was, there was a hurricane in the Gulf coast.

And then I'm like on Google going, where was the hurricane in the Gulf coast? And they sent the national guard and I'll get this number and it'll be like, it'll be like, well, that was, that was September of 1969 or something like that. And I'll be like, okay. And I did a lot of that. Like, Oh, how old, like all these pictures of my wife when she was a little kid. And so I started playing the game of how old is she in this photo? And then back basically dating that from her birth and saying, well, we'll say this is

1974. And as a result, they're not perfect, right? They're not perfect. But I was able to group all the events. Oh, everybody had a, it's like a cookout and there's a happy birthday, Lauren, fourth birthday. And I'm like, okay, I know when that is, roughly. And I'll select all those photos and assign it

or adjust it to that date. And after all of that, a little work, some shoe leather included to figure it all out. I can scroll back in photos back to, you know, 1967 or whatever. And it's basically in chronological order. So that's what I recommend is doing it that way. And I highly recommend if you've got lots of like a lot of people have slides. I mean, I, um, I don't remember what service I used.

Maybe I'll try to look that up and put it in the show notes, but I highly recommend this because nobody's looking at your slides. And you know what, what people might look at if you put it in a digital library and you send it to your family and friends. And if you show them off to your family members and like whole portions of my mother-in-law's life returned to life by scanning all those, all those slides that were just in a box in her garage. So I definitely do recommend it. Have you done anything like that, Stephen? I have, yeah. I've not sent anything off to be scanned, but we've, you know, at times taking, okay, we're gonna take the shoot box and scan them. I will say that is a complaint I have

about the Photos user interface. First of all, you can, like you said, you can select multiple images and change their date all at once, but not from the inspector window. You have to go to the menu item and do adjust time date, which is kind of frustrating. But that also is a very fiddly interface.

And like if you accidentally tab out of it, it thinks that your photo, instead of being, you know, 2025, it's the year 25. So it's like, puts it way back at the beginning. It's like, no, this photo is not 2000 years old. Like, it could be a little smarter, but it's doable. Yeah, it does work. And scancafe.com is where I went.

And so all I can say is that I used them and it was very successful. And even they have the option, which I really liked. They're like, okay, would you like us to send your slides back? And I said, no, just put them in the garbage because I've got the digital versions. And I do not want, part of this is,

I do not want boxes and boxes of slides back. But also if you have, so I actually regret this because my parents put a bunch of photos from my childhood in a book. And you used to get from the photo lab, you would get the negatives and the prints. And the negatives seem to have disappeared, which is a bummer because if somebody saved those packages, even if they pulled the good prints out and put them in photo albums or whatever, if they saved those little paper packages that had the film negatives in them, you can take all those negatives and send them off to a scanning service and you will get, and what will happen is they took 30 pictures or 20

pictures and one of them went in a photo album and one of them went in a frame on the wall. Yeah. And the rest of them you've never seen or haven't seen since they came back from the supermarket. Really different compared to today where everything is just together. Yeah, and people didn't take as many photos back then because the film was finite. But the idea that you would take 30 photos carefully,

but in the end two or three might show up as beloved family memories. And this happened to us with some of these slides too where we're like, oh my God, here's this famous photo. This happens with digital photos we've taken of our kids. We're like, there's the one that went on the calendar and there's the one that went on the wall.

And then you look back, Lauren's been doing this because she's got a photo shuffle on her iPhone of our kids on the lock screen. And it's fascinating because you get these photos that are the setting of a very familiar photo that we've marked as one of the best photos of our kids, but it's not that photo. It's from a little bit before or a little bit after, and they're delightful.

And certainly imagine then a photo from 40 or 50 years ago that nobody has seen in 40 or 50 years that is similar to photos maybe you've seen, but maybe not, maybe completely different. And so yes, I highly recommend if you've got slides, if you've got old film to get that, you don't have to do it yourself

because getting a slide scanner, I mean, I had a slide scanner for a while, I scanned in about a hundred photos and I was like, I can't do it. It's so much work. It gets real old real fast. And these services, they are gonna wash your film. They got a whole like conveyor belt

where they're going through. They've got a system where they're making sure that the dust gets off of it. It's, whether you scan cafe or something else, I highly recommend getting that stuff into digital form for your sake and everybody else in your family's sake, those old family photos, I would recommend getting that stuff into digital form for your sake and everybody else in your family's sake, those old family photos,

because there are gonna be some gems in there. It's gonna be amazing. Jose wrote in, and so what do you think is more important or what would be your preference? For Apple to focus first on bringing down the price of the Vision Pro or keeping the price as is, but making the device smaller and weightless to be more comfortable.

What do you think? I think I'm gonna not really answer the question. I think those are the same thing. Like I think a way that you bring the price down is to use materials that could be lighter, get rid of the goofy screen on the front, which would definitely make it cheaper and lighter and simpler.

And I think they've got to do both. If I had to pick, I would probably choose price, but do them both. But it needs to be both. I agree. I agree. It needs to get, if you're building the next generation Vision Pro, I'm less concerned. I mean, put the latest M chip, you can stick in it.

That's fine. But like make it lighter and more comfortable and make it cheaper. And Mike and I talk about this a lot. Like, you don't, it's not gonna, the next Vision Pro isn't gonna cost $800, right? It's just not. But it should not cost 3,500.

Even if it's 2,500 or 2,000, this is a long-term, the only way Vision Pro is going to work is it. It's a product line that is leading somewhere and we'll eventually get there, but it's super cutting edge. And so, yeah, it just, it needs to be cheaper. How much cheaper as cheap, as cheaper as you can make it, knowing that it's not going to be cheap, but as cheaper as you can make it. And if you can make it lighter along the way, changing the materials or whatever,

please do that too. Because those are your two biggest impediments to people buying and using this thing are, they're not comfortable with it and they don't think it's worth the money. I wasn't gonna say they can't afford it because I think the people who are buying this thing can afford it, but even then they're like,

it's not worth it, what do I get out of it? And if there is a groundbreaking killer app, whether it's concerts or sports or whatever that we settle on here where it's like, oh my God, now you can subscribe to this service and it's got all these Broadway shows in immersive or it's got all the sports in immersive. Okay, if the ticket price is whatever that service costs

plus 3,500 or plus 2000, 2000 is going to sell more. It's not going to be a mass market product, but 2000 is going to sell a lot more than 3,500. So as far down as you can get it, the better, I think. Do you think it's going to weigh less now that Mike Rockwell isn't there? I don't think the weight is Mike Rockwell. I think it's Johnny Ive and his design team.

I feel like that first generation Vision Pro has the strong smell of idealized design decisions and philosophies that a hardcore product person would, like that, the stitched a back strap that doesn't really hold on most heads well versus what they should, what Belkin shipped later. Like that's a, I think that's a great example of somebody I can hear Johnny I've saying, Oh, this

3d knitted, uh, fine strap is, is, and it's, it's a beautiful piece of, uh, of art. It is, it is a beautiful accessory, but it's totally impractical and it probably costs a fortune to make when all you really need is an adjustable two-way strap up there. And they didn't ship that, which is kind of baffling. So, well, I mean, they ship the two-way strap and the single strap, but what Belkin shipped is a top strap to go with it.

Like, again, I feel like Johnny Ive and the single strap. But what Belkin shipped is a top strap to go with it. Like again, I feel like Johnny Ive and the design people there were like, okay, we've got a philosophy. We want it to, we're gonna put a screen on the front so you don't feel isolated. And all these things that made the product, I think less practical than it could be.

And I would love to see a more practical, less elegant version of the Vision Pro that's lighter and cheaper, honestly. Yeah. And like the Siri stuff, none of that is fast, but part of me thinks like, well, with new leadership, they may have different priorities and what's important.

Also, that was mostly just a joke about how rocks are heavy, but you answered the question anyways. Like Rockwell, I see. Rockwell, it was not very good. Yeah. I'm sorry. Um, David writes, my kid is going off to college next year after using a Chromebook all through high school. Obvious choice of the M4 MacBook Air, but I'm stuck on whether to upgrade to 24 gigs of Ram and possibly 500 gigs of storage. I have no reason to believe this machine will be used for

intensive 3d modeling or rendering large video files or photogrammetry, et cetera. But I do want it to last for many years. I've set aside the money and can't afford the upgrades, but I don't want to spend money unnecessarily. Okay. It's Mac talk, Steven. What do you think helped David out? Yeah.

I mean, the M4 MacBook Air is great. My, my actual advice is find a refurbished M3 MacBook Air with more RAM and more storage. Because the CPU difference is not that great. And thinking about something that's going to be used long-term, uh, the storage feels important to me. Just like thinking about what a lot of people typically do through college, maybe even after college, right? You're out on your own, you know, family life maybe,

potentially like, it just seems to me like the 256 could be limiting long-term. So if you've got like a top-line budget, I look for a refurbished M3 with more storage and more memory. I think 16 gigs is probably fine for a long time. I think if you're really bent on an M4 and you're choosing between RAM and storage,

I think I would choose storage, but I don't know. I'm actually looking at the refurb store right now. Yeah. Because I agree with you that, I mean, M4 is great. And if I had to answer this question directly, what I would say is I wouldn't worry too much about the RAM, but the storage you should upgrade. Like if you're gonna pay for an upgrade

and you're only gonna upgrade one, you should upgrade the storage. Because 256, look, if they're very cloud oriented, it may not matter, but it's so easy to blast through that. And then you're toting around an external drive on a laptop, which is less good. But yeah, Stephen, I'm looking here, you can get a Midnight M3 as of this recording

for 929 and that comes with 16 unified and 512 SSD. And the refurb, if people haven't done it, you get a full, you get an Apple warranty, it's certified. These are open box for the most part where they just, they get opened um, they get opened and then they get returned and Apple can't sell them as new or they got used for a little bit, but like Apple's going to stand by it, but like a sub $900 MacBook Air with 16 and 512.

Yeah, that's pretty good. And all you're losing is that it's not an M4, but the difference between M3 and M4 is, you know, your kid is probably not gonna run it lid open with two external monitors, right? And the cores are a little bit faster, but again, they're so fast now that that's, so that's a good piece of advice. And then if you wanna stick with the M4

and not go over the refurb route, I would say choose storage over. Yeah. I mean, you can do 24 gigabytes and 512 gigabytes of storage, M3 for 1099. Like, there are machines out there. Yeah. And the refurb store has great filters.

So you can do a RAM filter. You can say, show me MacBook Airs with this much storage and this much RAM. And then you'll see, like, there are a bunch of M2s and M3s there, and they generally have pretty good deals. It's worth looking. And it does change over time. So it may be that if your kid's going to college next year,

it may be, I mean, before long, in a few months, there'll be M4 Airs on the refurb store. And so I would not count that out. And I think the other thing is not in the question, but I will just say this, having talked to a lot of listeners, probably worth the AppleCare on a machine that's going to college just for the damage protection.

I know people feel differently about that, but it's like thinking about college kids, thinking about, you know, maybe worth it. Maybe factor that into. Yeah, well, and you know your kid too. Like my daughter is not hard on her computers. My son is very hard on his computers. So when we got the MacBook Pro for him,

we bought AppleCare for that one. Cause I was like, this is not gonna, this is gonna be, that poor computer. A couple more, these are targeted at Stephen Hackett, so we're gonna get them in now. David says, I've been an Apple user for the majority of my adult life and I have never thrown away any of the boxes

or packages my products have come in. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on what to do with them? We call this the school of John Saracusa. Yeah.? We call this the the school of John Syracusa. Yeah. And I am not in the school of John Syracusa. I am on many things, but not on this. I've got hundreds of computers. Like if you're watching on YouTube, this is a small fraction of my collection behind me. The only boxes I keep are for things that are in current use. So my current iPhone, my current MacBook Pro, my wife's iPad, my

kids MacBook Air. And I do that very often because when we are done with a product, I'll give it to a family member or occasionally I'll sell it. And I want them to have the box and then it's up to them what they do with that. But I don't have the box for my iPhone seven, you 7. I get some people from a collection standpoint want that. I don't, and I don't think it's worth the space if you're just doing it just to do it. I mean, if you're doing it because you like them,

like who am I to judge? But if you're doing it just because you've never gotten rid of them, like you can let them go, it'll be okay. I feel like there's a gradation here for me. So if you don't have the product, you should get rid of the box. If you do have the product and it's old,

storing it in the box is a fun thing to do. And then you've got it. If you don't have that product though, and you have the box, just the box should go away. It should go away. And I'm with you, I try, other than if the box is too big, but I try to keep the boxes of the products that I have, because yes, you could resell it.

I don't resell a lot of stuff witnessed by the iMac Pro behind me. I know, yeah. In part because what happens is you use it and then you hold onto it a little bit because it's still semi-current and I write about this stuff. And it's very convenient to have,

like the other day I had Jamie's hand me down last generation Intel MacBook Air. And I ran tests on it for my M4 MacBook Air review. And really nice to hold on to those things. And then by the time you think, I don't really need to hold onto this anymore, it's so old that it's not even worth it. So it's, our business makes this weirder,

but I know like Dan Frakes, who I used to work with at Macworld, who works at Apple now, he always like keeps his boxes around, uses the computer for a year or two, and then resells it and buys the new one. And the old one goes out with the pristine like contents of the original box. And that is a way to live if you have the storage space.

I have a lot of stuff that doesn't have a box because I used to have even less storage space that I do now. It used to be this garage that I'm in right now was used for parking cars. Yeah. And finally we're like, we can't do it. So we have storage in here

and we have storage sheds outside now. We have more storage so I can store more stuff. I have to store all my Apple owner boxes because those all go back in the boxes. So I guess what I'm saying is don't feel bad. If you don't have room to store it, just recycle it and be done with it. But if you want, I am a fan of the idea

of storing the old stuff in a box. If you have the old stuff and the box, but also if you don't have the predilection or, I mean, the thing is what counts, not the box it came in. Agreed. Last note, and this was definitely with your name on it. Albert says, are you surprised the spinning beach ball on the Mac has never meaningly changed?

Albert? It has changed. It has. Cause it used to be like glossy and aqua-y and now it's flat. Couple of things come to mind. One, like when's the last time you saw the spinning pinwheel, Jason?

Like. I do see it every now and then in very particular circumstances, but it's rare. It's very rare. So you don't see it as much as you did back in the day. Yeah, using weird apps or sometimes if there's like a weird network issue, like I see it sometimes if I take my laptop

that is mostly connected and I open it up not connected and it's not on Wi-Fi Yes, it's got an existing like network connection and it's like whoa what happened and you'll it'll spin then but it's pretty rare And that has been an issue in Mac OS for so long don't understand it Yeah, but I like it because it is a throwback, it's actually from Next Step. So Next Step, if you look at this Wikipedia article, then I'm sure it'll be in the show notes. Spinning Pinwheel, a Wikipedia article, I love it. Yeah, it goes back to Next Step and it came over

and it got aquified and now we have it sort of the flat, colorful thing we have today. Flat version, yeah. And so I like the Easter egg, you know, sort of vibes with it. So no, I think it's fantastic. Yeah, it keeps changing with the times, Albert. Yeah. And I will also say that if you go back to classic Mac OS, different apps had their own custom animated icons there.

Oh yeah. And so you've got in that, and there's a link I'll put in the show notes for this one too, they used to have like the counting hand where a hand would literally like count on its fingers while you were waiting. They had the watch cursor, so it would show a watch and the watch face could move.

They had a spinning globe that you would see in some apps. And hypercart had a beach ball similar to the, the spinning pinwheel. So there are, there have been many weight cursors over the years. And, uh, it's a, it's never reached the point of, uh, of a kind of cult status that some did. In fact, isn't there, wasn't there a dog, an app that had a dog cow that did a backflip? I feel like fetch, or it was a dog, because it was fetch. It was a dog, it was a dog, yeah. Fetch's weight cursor was a dog

that was maybe similar to the dog cow, a dog that did backflips as you waited for your file to download or upload. Or maybe it was running, did it do backflips? I don't remember, I used fetch for years. I remember a dog doing flips. Yeah, we'll go with that. Anyway, so there's a great tradition of weight cursors out there.

Anyway, thank you. Just stick an ad in there, you know? Sure, Amazon will. Amazon will and Microsoft might. We have reached the end. Thank you, Stephen Hackett, for filling in for Mike Hurley today. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. This will blow a hole in my weekly podcast listening because I was on the show, but that's okay. I'm glad to fill in. Well, thank you for listening to Upgrade normally, but you don't have to listen to this episode because you've already heard it. I've heard it. I've heard it before anyone else besides you.

You were a participant in it. So that's pretty good. Thanks to everybody out there for listening. You can send us your feedback, follow up and questions at upgradefeedback.com. Thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus this week. Steve and I are gonna talk a little bit

about whether Apple is peak Apple or beleaguered Apple. And we might also talk about domain, dumb domains we bought. We'll see how that goes. Getupgradeplus.com to get UpgradePlus and you get an ad-free version of the show with extended content every single week. You can find us on YouTube. Just search for Upgrade Podcast. Thank you to our sponsors this week. They were Google Giv and I, Factor, and ExpressVPN. Once again, thank you all for listening.

And with yet another guest, I will see you next week.