Upgrade - 571: Am I a Legacy Node?

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

From Relay, this is Upgrade. This is episode 571 for July 7th, 2025. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, Delete Me, and Oracle. My name is Mike Hurley and I have the pleasure as always of being joined by Jason Snow. Hi Jason. Hi Mike Hurley and I have the pleasure as always of being joined by Jason Snell. Hi Jason. Hi Mike Hurley, how are you? I'm good, you know I'm very happy today. The YouTube viewers will see that I'm wearing a Rumour Roundup t-shirt today. I love this t-shirt. It's a nice orange t-shirt with the Rumour Roundup logo on it.

I like the color. Yeah, it looks good, right? People can buy it themselves. You can go to upgradeyourwardrobe.com. We have a small selection of shirts that are always available there. So people can go buy them. You get lawyer up, you get river round up,

whatever you want. But there's not enough time for all this. We got a snow-torn question. This one comes in from Sam who wants to know, Jason, it's Renaissance Fair season. Have you ever been to one? Have I ever been to a Renaissance Fair? Yes, I have been one time to a Renaissance fair.

Okay. How did that go? I can tell you from my Googling on the subject that it was in the 90s. It was fine. We never went back. One of the reasons we never went back. And one of the reasons we never went back, as you will see, I put two links in our show notes about this, one of which is a link to the Vince Mulroy Wildlife Preserve Wikipedia page, which will explain,

the preserve is partially on the side of the former Renaissance Pleasure Fair, which took place there from 1971 until 1998. When the fair went bankrupt, Vince Mulroy bought the land, donated part of it to become the preserve, and the rest of it became the Stone Tree Golf Club, and they also built a bunch of housing out there.

And in fact, so I'm taking this in just a completely different direction. In fact, over the weekend, Lauren and I went up to Sacramento, went to the art museum, and then went to the baseball game. The Giants were playing the Sacramento's. Lauren and I went up to Sacramento, went to the art museum, and then went to the baseball game. The Giants were playing the Sacramento's, which they don't want to be called by the

city in which they play, which I think is a jerk move. So I'm only going to call them by the name of the city in which they play. The West Sacramento's. This is some of that beef that I don't understand, but you don't need to explain it. It's bad sports owners doing bad things. They do that. I all love to the people of the city of Sacramento and no love to the owner of the Sacramento's. So that the journey to Sacramento takes us right past

Black Point where the Renaissance Fair was. And every time I look at there's off the road there, there's a little kind of like hillside and a little path going up and there's houses and a golf course and I think, oh, there's the Ren Fair because it hasn't been the Ren Fair for 25 years. But that's my story. I went one time and then they shut the place down and turned it into a golf club. Okay. Does that, is there any bearing on how good quality the Renaissance Fair was?

Well, we never know how much I liked it because it's now further away and I went one time. Ah. Why have I never gone back? Is it because I didn't like it or didn't like it enough or is it because they moved it further away? It's a golf course. It's a golf course. It's a golf course.

No one, only future historians can speculate about that. If you'd like to send in a question of your own to help us open a future episode of the show, just go to upgradefeedback.com and send in your own Snill Talk. We have some follow-up. Many people wrote in to recommend hyperjuice charges for traveling charges.

We spoke about this a little bit in Ask Upgrade last week. For a few reasons. One, they have a lot of options, including one that goes to 145 watts, which is bananas. But the main thing that it seems that people like about the HyperJuice Chargers is you can, they have an adapter for like one of those figure eight kind of barrel plug things.

So you can essentially have a long cable that comes off of the socket. So you can plug that in wherever, and then you can move the like the power brick, I guess, wherever you want. So people seem to like that. It's fine. I have one of their products.

The reason I have one of their products is because I bought one of their other products and it was recalled. They all get recalled though to and they got recalled and I got some credit to buy a different product from them and the credit was priced so that I had to spend more money to buy a different product from them or I just ate the money and I did end up buying more product from them so anyway I don't know if I'm going to be able to endorse hyper hyper juice but I really liked that charger that got recalled. It did get really hot.

I mean, it's like, you know, anchor products always getting recalled. Like this is part of, I have so many issues around charging technology and like my fear of it all. And this is part of in this spot of why? I should tell you this. So I bought actually the wire cutter, speaking product recalls. I bought a media air conditioner a few years ago, a window unit. And it's the like the U shaped one. It was the wire cutter pick for ages. It may still be because our houses

here in Wren County traditionally not had air conditioning and we had enough misery in our house that I finally decided to buy one and put it in the window in the summertime in the living room so we'd have at least one room on a hot day that would be fine. It has it has been replaced right we now have redone our roof and put in a heat pump that does heat and air conditioning. And so it's been double replaced, because first off, the house doesn't get as hot

as it used to at all because of the insulation that is the new roof. Amazing difference. Amazing, like it used to get so much warmer in here. And then there's AC if we want it. So I had this thing and I'm like, I'm going to have to sell it or donate it or I'm going to have to do something with it. Great news everybody. It got recalled because it had allowed moisture to collect and grow dangerous mold or something. Nice.

It's my favorite thing in an air conditioner. So the good news is I didn't have to sell it. The bad news is I do have to take it to the dump basically. Oh. But they paid me for it. Oh, they don't want it back. They're just like, here's the money. We don't want it.

They said you could ship it back. And and there's a whole thing, a rigmarole about shipping this heavy thing back. They said, or just cut off the power cord and take a picture of it, which is what I did. So so I got my money back. So they give you a full refund. I would have to look up what it costs. But basically, yeah. I don't understand how when these things happen, these companies don't just go out of business. Well they've got other products and apparently have done pretty well. They will also do a replacement, right?

But I'm not interested in that because I actually don't want the thing anymore. So I hate the waste of it, but at the same time, it's a faulty thing. It must be insurance or something. Yeah, I don't know exactly what happened here, but it got, it got removed. So Madea, uh, friendship ended with Madea. Right. Whole Home Air Conditioning is my new best friend. Is Daikin the makers of My Air Conditioner, which is also they, and nobody's ever heard

of them and they're now the name of the Houston Astros ballpark so everybody will know who the random company the Japanese Heat pump company that makes my heating and air conditioning. I also speaking which Madea Not great home kit support. I think I had to have a plug-in for that And I can also not great home kit support and I have to have a home bridge plug-in for that. And Dykan, also not great, home kid support might have to have a homebridge plugin for that as well, unfortunately. But it works great. So that's the thing. So anyway, let's hear it for product recalls. After the WWDC keynote, we had someone ask us, why didn't we hear anything about Pixelmator

anywhere, now that they're owned by Apple? Well, the app just got its first update in its post-acquisition era to support image playgrounds and writing tools. Very much an Apple app now, if you needed any proof. Very much an Apple app. Nice. Support our APIs, please, Pixelmator team team. I mean this also really feels to me like, you know, we were talking about this like proof that it

maybe is part of the like, iWork organization. Because like pages and numbers and stuff always get at, they always get these kinds of features added. Yeah. Right. This feels like the kind of thing you would do to pages, numbers, keynote, etc. Structurally, I don't know if it's with that group or if it's with the group that does logic and Final Cut. Maybe they're all the same group. A weird separate apps group. I don't know. But it's like they probably have guidelines for those applications about the things that they need to support and pixel may Appears at least because I don't even know where you put writing tools in pixel may or what they all have in common

Is that they're downloadable and not part of system updates, right? Yeah, which is what makes them different from like the photos app, which is in the OS Apple is joined threads. There is now an Apple account on threads. There had previously been a bunch of service based accounts. So music news podcasts and stuff. But now they have a main brand account. They haven't posted anything.

But this is making news. People are wondering if Apple are finally going to be abandoning X or lessening their presence on X. I reckon my take on this is that this is in anticipation of ads on threads and that Apple wants to be an ad buyer on threads. That's that's what I reckon is going on. Makes sense. I don't for whatever reason, they still want to post Solonex and I don't see it changing

because it hasn't after all this time. You still using threads? Yes, I am. I post to it. It's actually the network where I have the largest following of all the Taxplace social networks, I think just because it's attached to my Instagram. Um, I use threads as kind of like, uh, forwarded is, which is purely algorithmic. Like I get a lot of F1 news on threads, for example, cause like they know I like F1 and so I get a lot out there, but, um, blue sky is, is, is my favorite, uh, of

these kind of networks at the moment, because it's given me the main crossover of all of the people that I want to follow from my tech world, gaming world, and general kind of world of celebrity. Yeah, Blue Sky is the one that I'm using the most. I'm not using threads at all at this point. Blue Sky has a serviceable number of sports writers, which is my biggest problem with completely dropping X is that all the you know big media sports writers and

people are posting on there. But a bunch of them are on Blue Sky now so I have a sports list on Blue Sky which is great and then Mastodon is where all my tech people are and that's great too. But I just think it's funny that we have this all these conversations about threads and all that and I'm just and they've added some things And delayed some things in terms of that averse sharing all that it's like I'm kind of I kind of just don't care It seems successful enough, but it's like yeah. Also. I just have you know, it's like oh boy Back in the arms of Facebook, which I've been running away from for all these years. So I'm not not

of Facebook, which I've been running away from for all these years. So I'm not, not, I'm just not interested. Yeah. The tenor and tone on Facebook shifted again. It kind of felt like it was like shifting a little bit, right? Like, are they actually caught? No, no, they're not. You know, like it was like, hey, a bit, hang on a minute. No, they're not. A US federal judge has rejected Apple's attempt to have the Department of Justice's lawsuit dismissed. So that's going to be continuing. So we have that in our future. And unsurprisingly, Apple has appealed the 500 million euro fine that they received from the EU over DMA anti-steering stuff. This is a quote from an Apple spokesperson. Today we filed our appeal because we believe the European Commission's decision and their unprecedented fine

go far beyond what the law requires. As our appeal will show, the EC is mandating how we run our store and forcing business times which are confusing for developers and bad for users. We implemented this to avoid punitive daily fines and will share facts with the court. I wanted to include this because I thought this quote was interesting because it gives

a little bit of context what we were talking about last week, which is those new confusing rules Apple say they're that those confusing because that's what the European Commission wants them to do. And also the only reason they made that change is so they weren't going to continue getting the daily fines. I have two thoughts about this. One is that classic line, I'm just here so I won't get fined. Mm-hmm.

And also I love it when Apple explains why their terms are confusing, which is so they cannot, which is either depending on your view because the EC made it confusing or because Apple wanted to make it confusing so they could complain, look, we're forced to make it confusing. One of those. I still think, I think it's in the middle, which is if you implement the rules to the exact letter of the legal language that they are written in from the European Commission, you can make a set of rules that are very confusing. If you took the spirit of the rule,

you could maybe make something less confusing. That's my read on it anyway. So there we go. And F1 has now grossed 293 million dollars as of last week over the weekend, sorry. So it's doing the job. I'm not going to keep giving updates on this, but like we've had the full kind of like big holiday weekend and like week or whatever up to this point. Yeah. From when it came out to now, it's like a week

or change. Um, and it's doing great. So congratulations. Congratulations. You did it. But it's good though, right? Cause it means that they're not going to implode Apple TV. Like this is now like they found, they have now found that it is possible for them to make a movie and put it in theaters and make money on that movie. Now, is it enough money? No, but they don't also have to spend like 250 to $300 million in every movie. Like they don't actually all need that. This movie did, but you could maybe spend $150 million on a movie, market it really well and make back your money faster, right? Like there is the

proof now that this could be done. Yeah. I mean, I feel like all it really proves is that Apple is not the kiss of death to a movie in theaters, that it can make money. It can generate revenue and be a success. I'm not sure that this is the business they should be in No, actually, do you know what it is showing? I mean, this is unique it's showing that When they actually put a real marketing effort behind a movie They can get people to go see that movie like because they have the movies that they've had they have not put a big Market marketing spend behind them and they've not given them proper runs in theaters or whatever, right? It's like limited run or like hey, here's some ads on a bus.

It's like, no, they went full court press, like everything, everything possible as a normal movie studio would do. Right. That if you think you've got a movie that can make money, you market it to its, to the nth degree. And they did that. And they said, man, Warner Brothers, right. Cause Warner Brothers doing the theatrical distribution, but they, they, they did that and, and working as a partner.

And yeah, it, it, I feel like it doesn't prove that this is the right strategy, but it does prove that, like I said, Apple is not incapable of doing this. I don't know if that's a great lesson to be learned, but it's a lesson we can take away from this. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything

you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings of a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. The ways in which you can get paid for Squarespace is fantastic. It's not just a sit- you say that like, oh, okay. Yeah, I can sell my ceramics on Squarespace or I can sell my paintings on Squarespace. And you can do that. You can set up a store, you can sell physical goods, digital goods. It's super easy to do that.

We've done that with Relay and I know Brad, my co-host and the pen addict, he has a Squarespace website and he has a Squarespace store where he sells some products and collaborations that he does. But you can also offer your services and get paid with Squarespace from consultations to events and experiences. You can showcase your offerings of a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business. Think built-in appointment scheduling, email marketing tools and more.

Plus, keep everything cohesive of on-brand invoices and get paid easily with online payments. You can also get discovered fast with Squarespace's integrated suite of SEO tools, because you don't want to build a beautiful website for nobody to find it. That's why every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions and auto generated sitemap and more, so people will find your site through search engine results. Squarespace is fantastic, I've used them for over 15 years, so many projects, so it's so easy for me to go from idea to website, but don't just take my word for it. Go to squarespace.com slash upgrade and you can sign up for a free trial today.

When you're ready to launch, use the offer code upgrade and you'll save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That is squarespace.com slash upgrade with the offer code upgrade. You'll get 10 percent of your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of this show and all of Relay. So let's talk a little bit more about the A18 Pro MacBook rumor. You wrote a really good piece

on Six Colors where you were kind of expanding on some of the things that we spoke about, but I think the thing that is pertinent for discussion today is you did some benchmarks. Well, I mean, I took existing benchmark numbers and put them together. It was that moment of realization, so we talked about this last week,

this is the Min-Chi Kuo report that's been sort of backed up by some other people spelunking in code, that there is an A18 Pro powered MacBook on the way, a low cost MacBook. And how I felt like this was very much, in fact, the piece I wrote is specifically just parroting the title of the piece I wrote in late 2023, which was called About That Low Cost MacBook Rumor. And now it's about that A18 Pro MacBook rumor, because it's the same story as that Digitimes report

from late 2023, I think, where everybody's like, oh, they're going to make a Chromebook killer. And I thought at the time, this feels more like the M1 Air at Walmart to me. And I still feel that way. And it seems like the M1 Air at Walmart has been around for a while and is still out there at 649 that people are like, oh, that is kind of an interesting model for Apple that gets Apple a

much lower priced computer. But I have lots of questions that I don't have answers for, but like, I wonder about the production line of chips, right? I wonder, can you keep making Can you keep making that M1? Or is that on a, I honestly don't know. I don't know if at some point the volume is so low that the production line is not worth keeping. And if TSMC and Apple are like, I don't know. And then meanwhile, and this was my thought process here, cause I talked about it with you,

I talked about it on MacBreak. I spent a lot of time talking about it and realized I hadn't written a word about it. And I thought, what's an interesting angle here is, is this suitable? That's the big question is like a phone chip in a Mac? I know, Mike, this is us having our Macs discussion again. A phone chip in a Mac? What?

Yeah, that's what I meant. Now, here we are again with a phone chip in a Mac. But no, we mean like this year's last fall's phone chip In a mac the the it's literally the chip that's in my iphone 16 pro Right here that i'm holding in my hand and How does that work? So I went to the numbers. I went to my numbers spreadsheet That uh, I keep with uh, so when I like reviewed the macbook air m4

that I keep with someone I reviewed the MacBook Air M4, and I found the A18 Pro Geekbench numbers, and I plugged them in to a version of that same chart. So you can look at the performance of the MacBook Air M1234, and then the A18 Pro. And I suspected it would be slightly faster than the M1. And that's basically it. it would be slightly faster than the M1. And that's basically it. So the core, the M4-A18 core, CPU core is a lot faster, right?

It's like 50% almost, 40% more fast than the M1 core because over four generations, the base CPU core has gotten faster. Mm-hmm. But obviously M series chips have more cores and more CPU and GPU, but still an A18 Pro is almost exactly the same multi-core performance as in an iPhone, which has no cooling like a MacBook Air, right? Almost exactly the same performance.

And the Geekbench Metal score, which is the GPU score, also almost exactly the same. They're both slightly in sort of general, this set of test numbers, and test numbers can vary a little bit. They're slightly faster, but they're, I would say they're the same. And a single core performance,

which in many cases is the most important because it's a single person activity, especially on a low end computer. Like it's just, I need to do a bunch of work. This core can do it and then report back. It's faster. So certainly it's not a compromise from the M1 to put a phone chip.

And what that says to me is one, they could totally do this and probably get some benefits in terms of shutting down the M1 production line in terms of the volume that they're making the A18 Pro chip for this year's phones and maybe even for future phones down the road. And it also says to me, it makes this product continue to be viable because once they do this, they can probably just keep putting in

other phone chips over time. Yeah, because this was the thing that I was really hung up on last time. It's like, why not just use a Mac chip and a Mac and use the phone chips and the phones? And this is answered my question, which is that for single core use, which as you say, is like realistically for this computer,

the majority of its work will be single core work. It's actually, it's faster than the M3 even. And so- Yeah, for single core. And certainly if you even it out, because the other ones, it's slower than the M2, right? But like if you even it all out and you think about the M1, which they're still selling.

And again, we would all argue is great. This one does the job. And I think what I came back to, and I think I mentioned in the piece, I keep thinking of the fact that I think Apple Silicon is just so good that they built a base model chip. And it's so good. And we said that all in 2000. Five years later, it's still so good. So good in fact, that I think it's very clear that Apple's cheapest Mac, cheapest Mac laptop anyway, is not, it used to be the bare minimum, right? They would ship what they considered the bare minimum. The one time that I think they went below it was with that, the MacBook, the 12 inch MacBook,

which was really slow and it had some serious issues. But I think today that 999 Air is way more than sufficient for regular people. Like it's overpowered, honestly, in some ways. And if that's true, then there's an inefficiency in the market that Apple could probably address. And what is a very Tim Cook thing, I would say, is they've been experimenting by addressing it with an old system sold through a weird channel. But like, that thing's still chugging. And I would not, I mean, I think the 999 M4 Air is a great

deal. It is the one of the best values ever in the Mac. But if somebody said, I can't spend $1,000 on a computer, but I went to Walmart and there was a Mac for $649, I can't spend $1,000 on a computer, but I went to Walmart and there was a Mac for 649, I'd say, yeah, get it, it's fine. For what, I would ask them what they were gonna use it for and all that, but like, it's fine, it's fine. I can break this here exclusively, Mike. Our video version on YouTube,

which is mostly processed in the cloud, but it's edited and all of that by our video expert, Jamie. She does that all on an M1 Air. Yep. It's fine. Very capable computer. Yeah. We've got a couple of pieces of follow-up written into us

about this chip. One was from an anonymous person who says, as I've mentioned before, I used to be a chip designer. So we'll take this person at their word. Yeah, I think I know who I mean, I think I know which anonymous person this is. Regarding the MacBook of an A18 Pro, I believe Jason is spot on. The only detail that I wanted to add is I think the three nanometer A18 Pro has about a 15% smaller die size than the five nanometer M1. It's possible that even though the three nan 15% smaller die size than the five nanometer M1. It's possible that even though the three nanometer process

is more expensive than the five nanometer process, the effective cost of an A18 Pro may be very close to that of the base M1. Very interesting. I think that's efficiencies and scale, right? Yeah, you put in the invisible to us cost of production lines going up and down. And I do believe, I mean, this is Tim Cook's Apple, right?

I believe strongly that Apple and TSMC are constantly having conversations about optimizing the production line, right? Because no one else uses these chips. Apple and TSMC have to work out when they shut a line down, when they stop producing a processor. We were talking about being surprised that the M3 was introduced in some new products. And one of the pieces of speculation I gave at the time was we don't even know if they're still making it or if they just have a bunch and they

know how many of that product they sell. And when they run out, they'll have another product ready to go and they're going to just use the M3 until it's gone. Like we don't know and we don't know about the M1. They may know exactly how many M1 MacBook Airs they're going to just use the M3 until it's gone. Like we don't know and we don't know about the M1. They may know exactly how many M1 MacBook Airs they're going to sell and how many they've got in a box. When that is over, that deal at Walmart has ended. They may also know that's going to happen. So they've been working in the background because they liked how that went,

which I really do think is what's going on here, to take it wide. I don't think that the A18 MacBook, if it exists, will be a Walmart exclusive, right? I think that'll be available. Now, it may or may not be available on Apple's website. My guess is it will be, but it's also possible. It depends on the effort they put in. It's also possible, though, that they will use it as a channel product, right? And they're like, if you're going to come to Apple.com, we want you buying, you know, a 999 MacBook Air, not a $700 MacBook. But you might show up on Amazon and Walmart and you know, being partners and all that target, or maybe it is everywhere. And I think that that whatever like whatever they're going to do there. And so yeah, I'm sure they're looking at the chip, chip costs, it probably uses less battery. Like there's, there's lots of things going on here. But I think it's, I think it's, I love that, that a person who actually knows what they're talking about said I was right. So that's great. Thank you.

And Vibe I wrote in to say, another thing that could add legitimacy to the rumor is Mac OS 27, so that's next year, is slated to drop support for Rosetta 2, which uses hardware accelerators on the M series chips for x86 translation. Removing support for Rosetta 2 means that the AAT MacBook is not decontented compared to the M series MacBooks running the same operating system.

I had a couple of people point out that Rosetta 2 is gonna be a problem. I'm not sure whether it means that Rosetta 2 wouldn't work on this or that it wouldn't work well on this. Yeah. But regardless, if it's a $700 laptop that doesn't support or Intel apps or support them well, if you need that buy the thousand dollar laptop, like I just

don't think it's an issue. I feel I agree with you. I think the transition has been successful. And I feel like the only apps that are left with Intel being the primary, like being the architecture underneath, they're pretty specialist, would be my expectation, right? I would feel like most apps that most people would use have moved over to Apple Silicon.

But it was interesting, right? It's like, yes, this would actually be a decent time to do it because Apple was moving away from Rosetta 2. For Rosetta. This is the long game that Apple plays with chip transitions, which is this is the hammer, but it comes five years later. Which it's hard to say, okay, we'll give you Intel compatibility for a year,

but then everybody has to switch. All the developers are like, but we have these code bases and people rely on, la, la, la, la, la. So they're like, all right, we'll give you five years. But you know, five plus years. But when they come to us now and say, next year, no more Rosetta,

the arguments don't hold water. I feel like they're like, but, but, but it's like you had five years. I think you had five years kind of blows a lot of the stuff out of the water. You've had five years. And that you had five years kind of blows a lot of the stuff out of the water. You've had five years. And that Intel Mac apps now have reached the point where

as of next year, more than a year away from when they ship, like it's reached the point where you're gonna need to stay back on Tahoe if you want to run that. And like, because you're basically choosing, you're like, I have to step off the software cycle because I have old software that I need to run. Well, that's always the way. It's not always this visible. It was visible with the 32 bit apps, it's visible with Intel apps, but like this happens all the time where people stay back because there's a key app that is not updated for the new thing. And that's just, that's life. But I don't think it's that big of a deal,

especially for the lowest cost product. I want to correct something slightly that I said Mac OS 27 is the last year to support it it would be dropped from 27 to 28 won't have it 27 is the last version to support it. Yeah so I mean the hammer is gonna come down at a point where I mean this is the this is the best transition the best best transition is where you get to the point where the transition happens and nobody cares anymore. That's the best one. And that feels like this is going to be, it's going to go so long that by the time we get there, it's not really going to matter. So, after a week of letting the news kind of sink in on this, why don't we look towards the Summer of Fun and build what we think is the perfect MacBook? All right. Great.

Now, I know that ATP- They did a draft. They had a round robin draft where they made what they thought was like a terrible MacBook, I think, realistically, is what they were going for. I'm not sure that was the right format, so let's not do that. Even though we're happy for them to draft things, I'm always happy when other tech podcasts draft things,

because it shows our influence and benevolence, frankly. We're fine podcast format innovators over here at the Upgrade Podcast. That's right. We are amused, in fact. Not amused. We are amused. We are in fact amused. So let's build, yeah, let's build this thing. So I have a few areas that I wanna talk about.

I wanna start with kind of like design and color and materials. So kind of like the way this thing is built and looks. I will start the bidding at essentially the MacBook, the plastic MacBook, but in color. That's where I will start the bidding of kind of design for this thing. So my question is gonna be cost.

Yeah. And my second question is gonna be environmental. I don't think Apple wants to make a plastic computer. I just don't. I see it. I would also argue that at this point, the aluminum laptop is Apple's biggest product thing. Sure, then let's just do aluminum and color then.

So my questions are gonna, and color is easy, right? I mean, despite what we see from Apple. I don't know. Color is actually easy because you anodize that stuff and that's it, right? I mean, iPod mini, we know you can do it. And the iMac, right, the current iMac is like this. So colors on aluminum are not a problem

and they can do aluminum. So my questions are, first off, what we know is, every time you do a new production line and you do a new design, the price goes up, right? The cost to manufacture goes up. And then over years, it comes down. But there's an initial cost and you kind of amortize it and then the components go down over time.

So I don't know enough about this to say, like for example, is there an older design that they've got that's cheaper? Like, you know, an older MacBook Air design even. But what I keep coming back to is just that this project should be, how do we tweak the M1 Air, which is that classic MacBook Air design, how do we tweak the M1 Air entirely, not just the chassis, the whole thing, to be future-proof, right? To be able to go into the future as a modern computer.

Because my guess is if they want this to be cheap, what they wanna do is keep as much of the M1 Air production line as possible. Because if they throw it away, we all wanna see a brand new computer. We all wanna see a plastic MacBook or something like the 12-inch MacBook design. But my gut feeling is that doing a new design

and a new production line adds so much more expense that they're not gonna be able to hit their price point. And if you want, if this is all about hitting a price point, that's, that's like sort of at least like the M1 Air is at Walmart. The answer is to convert your M1 Air production line. And that probably means keeping the case of the M1 Air, more or less. I think. I mean, this is a terrible point to make, it depends. Like, if they're going to put this on Apple.com, which I think they will. I don't know if they will want to use the M1 Air design.

Like, and if we're going by your logic, why not? And you want to make like as efficient as you can from production standpoint, why not use the M2 chassis? Well, okay. So that's a good point. So my question is, is the M2 chassis, um, more or less expensive to build than the M1. And talk about production lines. Is it easier to keep the, to do a decontented M2, three, four MacBook Air and, and that production line than to keep the M1 Air running?

And, and I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know if there are fundamental things about the M2 Air's aluminum that make it more expensive than the M1 is to manufacture. And I'm not worried about Apple saying, oh no, it's on apple.com. I'm not worried about that because it's going to be cheap and probably anodized into some fun, you know, put an asterisk next to fun colors. Great. But I think in the end it comes down to what's the cheapest thing to make. And if it's cheaper to leave to use the M2 3-4 Air production line to make these things, and they're basically a variant in the existing MacBook Air design, they could do that. I actually would be more worried that it looks like a MacBook Air, a current MacBook Air, than I'm Apple,

than that it looks like the old design. Because if it's the old design, you can tell it's not the current MacBook Air, it's a different product. And we don't know anything about the, we'll get to the rest of the computer here, right? But just for the kind of physical design of it, you know, I would probably look, if I were inside of that, well, the answer would be what's

the cheapest way for us to make this product. Right. And that's probably an existing design. It depends. I see where you're coming from with that, but like, it's not what they do with the se, I know the se went up in price, but like, if you are confident that you will make, like if you can project out the money you're going to make on this thing over the next 10 years, maybe you do spend a little bit of money in the tooling to create a new thing.

Maybe. I mean, you risk, you risk having it cost more than you want, which is a question, right? Like maybe they don't want to sell a 649 computer, right? Like maybe there's no way for them to make anything but that M1 at 649, and they're blowing out the last of their parts for that, and then it'll be gone, and that they're okay with 799 instead of 649.

That's a big leap, but Apple is, if any company is capable of making that leap. Also, you mentioned the, I mean, not the SE, but think about the iPhone 16E. The 16E is based on a modern design. It's not based on an old design, it's based on a modern design that's been given a little bit of a twist. It would really surprise me if they released a new computer that looked exactly like the M1 MacBook Air. I would be surprised about that because also they, well I mean and this also actually undoes my point about basing on the M2 as well, like I don't think they want

people to think this product is a MacBook Air, right? That it is a MacBook. I agree. And so then would basing on either of the air chassis make that a problem? If it looks like a MacBook Air. You know? Yeah. So, look, if I had my druthers, I would say, make a new aluminum design that is reminiscent of the M4 Air, 234 Air, but is a little bit different. That would be if I had my druthers. M4 Air, 234 Air, but is a little bit different. That would be if I had my druthers.

If I'm looking at spreadsheets at Apple and the answer is make some minor modifications to the M1 Air design and keep selling it as MacBook because the MacBook Air looks different now, you could get away with that. We haven't even talked about the thing that's hanging over this product, which is, do you just call it a MacBook Air and say the MacBook Air starts at 799?

I wouldn't do that either, because I think then more people will buy it and you don't really want MacBook Air users to buy it. This is a pretty serious bifurcation if that's the situation, right? Yeah. Like this is a quite different computer that it would be spec'd quite differently. Like it's not going to have the same ports, right? They're not going to be the same. Um, whether, you know, I don't know how many they're going to put on it, but they're not going to be Thunderbolt, right? There'll be USB-C. Um, the screen who knows what that will be, the webcam who knows what that will be.

We got to talk about all of that because I think that's interesting. Um, but yes, I agree. I think this should be a separate product. And I think if it's going to be a separate product, it should probably look different. Now, you could have it look kind of like the MacBook Air, but be a little different, or you could have it look like the M1.

Or again, look, if the M1 Air product line could be retest relatively inexpensively to assemble something that was similar, like the old 12-inch MacBook design, because you could use that enclosure. It's small, but it's got the big frame. Can you fit that 13-inch display, whatever it is, in there with a different, you know, the way screens look now, or does it not fit? I don't know. The rumors are that this is a 13. Even screen size is squishy.

Could you do that? But in the end, I feel like Apple's going to make the most price expedient decision going forward. Let's talk about some of the other bits in it because I don't think we can come to a consensus on this. I think we all want color though. Yes, for sure. And much we can agree on.

Webcam, ports, battery screen, the bits that go inside. So color, the rumor is that it's gonna be colorful. If they do polycarbonate, that's easy to do, but I feel like Apple's stock and trade at this point is aluminum and anodizing aluminum. So maybe, you know, in the end, if you want a colorful Mac laptop, Apple's stock and trade at this point is aluminum and anodizing aluminum. So maybe, you know, in the end, if you want a colorful Mac laptop, you're going to have to get one with a phone processor inside of it.

But it's also a differentiator. If the MacBook Air, which I would argue shouldn't have dark colors, but if the MacBook Air has dark colors and the MacBook has bright colors, regardless of what it looks like, it will be a differentiator that this is a very different kind of computer. They'll still call them come in silver, though. Come on. Yeah. But maybe we'll get some IMAX colors in there. Who knows? But on the other bits.

I mean, less battery makes it lighter. And I think I think you could argue that they've all look for those of us who use our computers all the time as heavy users of them on battery like having all this battery life on Apple silicon is great but for a a cheap laptop you could cut battery and still have pretty good battery life and this is a phone chip. So you probably have even better battery life. It's probably more efficient than the M chips. So you could make the battery physically smaller and keep a similar amount of battery life. Keep a decent

amount of quoted battery life, 15 hours or something, 14 hours, and dramatically reduce the actual size of the battery, which also dramatically reduces your weight, which is good. So I think that's a given. Webcam, I think it's a question of margins again. They seem to have gone to this new webcam that's in the new models, it's not, wouldn't be surprising if they kept the old MacBook Air M1 webcam though, it wouldn't surprise me. Or if they went to the kind of lower quality center stage webcam. This is absolutely in my mind a place where they cheap out on

like they would cheap out on the webcam. They've been cheap web camming for ages and only recently have made their webcams better. So why wouldn't they just say, look, the point here is not to have the really nice webcam we put in other things. So I think, yeah, I think that front, that facing camera is just going to be bad. They won't call it bad. They'll call it the one the customers love. Yeah. Customers love their webcams. What about the port situation?

What do you think we're going to end up with, or could end up with on a product like this? I mean, it kind of comes down to what the A18 Pro supports. I would like to say two, if it can do two, we if it can do two. We know it can do one. If it can only do one, then I think it's one plus MagSafe. I think it has to be. But I think that they're not gonna do one and it's your charger.

I do however think that it's gonna, again, everything, not knowing the prices, we can't play the prices right here, right? But that's what I want to know is, is it, how expensive it is to put MagSafe on a computer and put a MagSafe cable in the box, versus some other approach where you just do one USB-C or two USB-C's. And that's an open question for me because whatever is cheaper, I would say, is what they're gonna do. But I do feel like one port, no other way to charge is rough. They could do it. They've done it before. They could do it. But that's rough. Yeah, but that was such a death knell in that computer amongst all the other things, right?

Like, it's not a good experience to have just one port on your computer. It's a very bad experience. And they have an option right there, and it's called MagSafe, right? And I would be really surprised if they were like, hey, you have one USB-C port and that's the whole thing. Again, the question is, what's the cost of that? Is the cost of the fact that defrayed by the fact that they've been shipping it for

a while on the M2 so they can put it in, it's relatively inexpensive for them or not. That to me, that would be the only reason not to put it in. I don't think it's beyond them to release a 649 laptop with one port, but the M1 Air has two. So. Because here's, I see what you're saying about that, right?

But then I think a lot of the questions that I have about the makeup of this computer come back to, well then why do it at all? Right? Like, like if you're gonna make it worse than the M1 Air in some respects, why even do this? You know? I mean, one of the reasons why might be that they can't make the M1 Air anymore. And so they're gonna move, they're gonna move on, but they like being down there. And they may not be at three at 649, but maybe they're down there at 700 or 800. It's gonna be less than the air.

But I agree with you. I think that that would be the argument is, let's try not to make it appreciably worse. And then the question for me becomes, is it two USB-C ports or is it a USB-C port in MagSafe? And I think that comes down to price, but I think it also comes down to what that chip is capable of.

If the chip is not capable of, and I just don't know enough about USB-C and the implementation on that chip, the A18, to know if it's capable of two, if it's capable of two, though, it would be very easy to just do two USB-C, just like the M1 Air, and you charge on one of them and There's no mag safe. I think that so Zoe in the discourse making a good point, which is that

These the battery life now is better than it was with the MacBook to 12 inch MacBook but the thing is I think there's a story around every product right and It will become so easy for the story to be like oh You can't even charge and plug anything in, even if you wouldn't do it. And I think you lose the story of the computer so fast with points like that. And you end up making people question whether this computer would work for them in a way that you don't really want them to be asking that question. And I think if you say to people you can charge it and plug in via us, like plug in peripherals via USB-C, you've kind of removed that point from people's minds.

I don't think that a lot of customers in this area are like, but can I plug two things in? No, you just like you have an option to plug something by USB-C while you're charging your computer. I think that is a just an easy story to tell rather than like the story they tried to tell last time, which didn't work for various reasons, but it also just didn't work on the face of it before people would used it, right?

And it's a complicated story to tell. But I can see a simple answer here where it's two USB-C, charge via USB-C. And this came up on ATP last week, and I think it's a really interesting point. And I think it's not, again, not beyond Apple, which is no charger in the box.

Like an iPhone, charge via the USB-C that you got, no charger in the box. If they go USB-C only, then don't put charger in the box. Well, if they do MagSafe, they still don't have to put charger in the box. They don't. They just put the cable in the box. Yes, the cable, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, no charger in the box. I don't think there's a charger in the box for this product, no matter what they do. Yeah, no, I just think it's fascinating. What an idea, but yeah, that's one way you bring the price down. It's just you don't include stuff like the charger and they already do that on other devices.

You bring the price down in so many ways, like so many imperceptible ways to the consumer. Like, and I know many people know this, but obviously you've not made the thing, right, which is like a whole separate process. You're gonna put them in the box. That's a separate process. You make the box smaller, which is cheaper. Then they are easier and cheaper to ship because they take up less physical space because the boxes are smaller.

And they're lighter because there's less battery and the weight makes them easier to ship as well. Yeah. Well, it depends on how you do it actually. So it's just, if you put it on a plane, that's a problem. Put it on a boat. It doesn't matter. Like boats is not about weight. Boats are purely about physical space. About capacity, volume. Yeah. The other thing, I don't know if I mentioned this here last week, but the other thing that struck me just as a drive-by is I don't know what the TSMC factory in Arizona is going to be able to produce, but it strikes me that it's not gonna be leading edge chips.

Is this the kind of thing that ends up getting some chips that are produced in the US and possibly assembled in the US for non-profit margin reasons, right? For tariff and politics reasons. I don't think, I feel like a laptop is complicated enough that probably not, but who knows about that. So I just wanna throw that out there.

Yeah, they put a Mac Pro together, you know what I mean? It's made with trailing edge stuff, right? This is not gonna be a cutting edge product. I realized that the A18 Pro is actually made with the newest three nanometer process from TSMC, but today's cutting edge process is tomorrow's legacy node. That's just how it works. That's how my granddad taught me

and his granddad taught him. You could put that on a tea towel and hang it over your oven door. That's right. That's right. I mean, it's a memento mori. You could put it anywhere and just say, today's cutting edge is tomorrow's legacy node,

and people will be very confused. And also sad. People will feel sad. I'm like, am I a legacy node? Yes. I don't really feel like we've come to any decisions on this product. We've had a good conversation.

Last point is price. For me, $700 is the ceiling for this product, I think. Yeah, I mean, we say that. We say that, and the 16E was more than we thought it would be. 16E was more than we thought it would be. I am gonna say I would like to see it, you said, so you said 799? So 700, so 699.

Oh, 699, wow. In my gut, that's the right price. Okay. So what you're saying is you'd like it to be $300 cheaper than the MacBook Air. Yeah, which is unrealistic, I know. It will be like 800. I'm gonna say $200 cheaper than the MacBook Air. Yeah. Which is unrealistic, I know. It will be like 800. I'm going to say $200 cheaper than the MacBook Air.

Yeah, so what is that, $799? $799. I'd love to see it at $749 or $699, but then I have to do the Jason thing of saying, that's what you want it, and it won't be that. It'll be more expensive than that. $799 actually is also really good, I think. For Apple and laptops?

If it's a brand new computer from Apple that looks nice, right? Like that's important. Yeah. It's gotta look good. It's gotta have some decent features in it. 799. That is the counter argument

to more severely decontenting it and turning it into an M1 Air, is that I think, could Apple make a 649 or $700 laptop? Yes, they could. But what's the goal here? Is the goal to go all the way down to 649? Or is the goal to just create some space

under the MacBook Air to fulfill a market that you maybe weren't serving and now you can and still make your profit margin. And if that's the goal, putting a laptop at $799 is pretty good for Apple, taking it out of the context of, but people want it to be at $649. I get that. People want it to be $400, but it's $649. It's like, I get that. People want it to be $400, but it's, but it's Apple. So if the, if the whole SE and 16E have taught us anything, it's probably that Apple's willing to go down,

but their willingness to go down in price is not what we think it is. And if they're going to go, honestly, I could even argue if they're going to go to the trouble of making a new product, a new product is not gonna cost what the remainder product at Walmart costs. Of course not, they're not gonna do it. It's gonna be 749 or 799. And I think that's, I think I would say 799 is the most likely price,

or the way I've been phrasing it is 200 less than the MacBook Air, because we don't know if Apple's gonna raise prices, because that's a great mystery as well. And in fact, I think that's one of the reasons why this product might exist, is it allows Apple to keep a laptop sub a thousand if they end up having to, due to tariffs,

raise a lot of their product prices. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Right now, headlines are chock full of data breaches, regulatory rollbacks, all of this stuff can make us feel vulnerable. But you can do something about it. Delete Me is here to make it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online. If you want an easier way to deal with data breaches, get Delete Me. Because that way, when you get an email or letter saying your data has been breached, you know you've got Delete

Me to help you out. And it's not just a one time service. Delete Me is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. So to tie these things together, the reason that this is good is because when data gets out onto the Internet, it's sold. People sell it on and then that information can then be used to target you for mailings, for emails.

Like my email inbox is just a nightmare because over the years, on and then that information can then be used to target you for mailings, for emails. My email inbox is just a nightmare because over the years, well it used to be, over the years my email address has been taken and sold and it's sold to PR lists and stuff like that and I have no say over this. People just do it. Now, I could go to the data brokers and say, please remove me and they would. There's like a legal process to do that, but I have to find them to the data brokers and say, please remove me and they would, there's like a legal process to do that, but I have to find them.

And the data brokers feel almost like a whack-a-mole kind of situation, that like, there's just so many, the reason I notice so many and there's more that keep appearing is because I use delete me. And they send me emails where I get a report and I open my report and it's like,

here are all the data brokers we found your information on, here's the ones that removed, here's the one that are in process. And every time I look at the report, there's new companies that weren't there before, and they just keep, new ones just keep appearing. So Delete Me is going out there,

they're seeing where the information that I've told them I want to be removed exists, and they're getting it removed for me. And so while they can't stop data breaches from happening, they can make sure that my information is removed from the places that are then benefiting from it and trying to sell it. I think it's fantastic.

Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now, a special offer for listeners of this show. You can get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to j-o-i-n-d-e-L-E-T-E-M-E.com slash upgrade 20 and use the promo code upgrade20 at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to J-O-I-N-D-E-L-E-T-E-M-E.com slash upgrade 20

and use the code upgrade20 at checkout. That is joindeleteeme.com slash upgrade20 with the code upgrade20. A thanks to Delete Me for their support of this show and Relay. Rumor round up time. Yee-haw. Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple is talking to both OpenAI and Anthropic about being the backend LLM for a new Siri,

potentially abandoning their own efforts. Include a couple of quotes from Mark's piece. Apple has spoken with both companies about using their LLM models for Siri. Rockwell and Federighi don't see the need for Apple to rely on their own models, which they currently consider inferior, when it can partner with third parties instead. And Apple believes that running the models on its own chips housed in Apple-controlled cloud servers, rather than relying on third- party infrastructure, will better safeguard user privacy. Part of what we've been talking about is leadership coming in

and saying we don't have any sacred cows and we can choose the right decisions for Apple products and the feeling like that the Siri team was not delivering and that that they need to deliver. And if delivering good means going to an outside source, then so be it. A lot of speculation about what this means for the people working on LLMs inside of Apple. And I think like Apple has a challenge because LLM engineers are hot and they have to try and retain their

talent and if they feel like they are trapped they're gonna go somewhere else right but I'm gonna I'm gonna be a little contrary to some opinions on about this one and I'm gonna say there's a way to do this where you can inspire the people who are working for you. And the way to do this is to say, we're talking to OpenAI and Anthropic because right now they produce better results than we do. But we want, we, you have, you internal people have our full support. And once our models are what they can be, which is great, we'll use them instead. But right now we're behind. And what you're doing is you're saying, look, you know how Apple works. We want to own this, but we are behind. And so the product comes first. We got to get the product good. And what

you're doing is catching up. And that's not your fault. It's the fault of prior management, you know, throw them under the bus. But when you know, when you are able to catch up and we believe in you, right? All of that. Yeah. Of course we're gonna use our own models because we wanna use our own models. You could also say they are making a general model and we have proven that what we're great at

is making some specific models for Apple for specific tasks. And that's what we want you to focus on, not the general model, which you could even downplay it and say, it's not the mission critical model. Everybody's got one. We want these very specific models. So there are ways to do this where you pump them up. Now, if they don't believe you, if they don't believe that they're ever going to catch up, that they're good enough, or if they think that they are good enough and they're not,

you don't want those people working for you, honestly. You don't want those people working for you. If they don't think that Apple can have a better model, if they think they should just go somewhere else, you actually don't want them around. Because I don't think this story is necessarily, oh, Apple has a bunch of brilliant people and they got mismanaged. I think it's also possible that Apple doesn't have people who are up to the task. And the way as a manager, I mean, you need to hire and you need to find good people and you need to empower your best people to do their best work, right? That's what you need to do. But part of that has to be, we're not going to let our product suffer because you guys are behind.

Don't sacrifice the user experience because I mean this is mean, but because you're trying to make a bunch of people feel better about themselves. Like that's, you're kind of weighing a billion against a thousand at that point, you know, like it's kind of what you're saying, right? Like if the team isn't producing the work and that's the reason, right? That like they could and they have the facilities, but it's not being done. We don't know that's the case, but it could be the case. Uh, then you can't just be like, Oh, well, we'll just keep waiting for you. Yeah. Yeah. In that time that yeah just I think I mean again

There are ways you think of it and there are ways you phrase it to your employees in order to motivate them but what what I would say is It feels to me like the lesson of the last six months in terms of the changes that they've made at the top of the software and machine learning hierarchies is That yeah Apple's products are and machine learning hierarchies is that, yeah, Apple's products are paramount. Yeah. And hurting the feelings of the people

working on the models or shipping inferior models because we don't wanna hurt their feelings or because they're from Apple. And making our product inferior because of that is not acceptable, right? And that's how it should be. If you're a manager at Apple and you're like, well, we could ship this Siri, which doesn't work and it's going to take us another two years, and maybe it'll work or maybe it won't. Or we could integrate with a third party and ship this series next year and it's gonna be good. You can't make that first decision.

You can't, you can't do it. You can't say, the Tim Cook doctrine that people like to talk about is not, Apple should own its own key technologies even if it makes their products bad. That's not it, that's not how it works. And I know Apple Maps is an example people card out there. There are some very specific reasons why that happened.

But suffice it to say, Apple Maps shipping was not viewed as a victory by Apple because it wasn't good enough. It's the at least pretext that they used to get rid of Scott Forstall. Like it was not viewed as a victory. It was viewed as a mistake moment. This is, and I think somebody on a podcast last week

referred to it as the reverse Apple Maps. Yeah, was that you? That's the way to think of this is the old reverse Apple Maps which is we need a thing for now. So bring it in because it's good. It doesn't have to be a lifelong commitment. Although I will also say, there's another way to spin this,

which is those guys are good at this one thing, we'll work with them on that thing. And then we're gonna focus on the models that make the iPhone and the Mac and the iPad unique and build those. There are other ways to approach this. And I think Rockwell especially, who was put in charge of Siri,

we know the story there, right? We know the story that Rockwell especially, who was put in charge of Siri, we know the story there, right? We know the story that Rockwell was very frustrated because he thought, I think rightly, that voice control would be a great asset for the Vision Pro. That was Federico who said reverse Apple Maps. Oh, was it Federico? Okay, you can take credit. It's fine. I'll take credit for Connected, but it wasn't me that said it. So Rockwell went through this. Rockwell felt like the Vision Pro was a worse product because he got let down by the Siri team. Right?

Bottom line. And now he's in charge of Siri, which is quite a statement, right? But it speaks to the idea that in the end, the quality of the product you ship matters, not where the technology comes from. And your message internally is, of course, we don't want to be using open air. But like, seriously, if there's anybody inside the group who is like, but ours is just as good as theirs, you just got to you got to tell them, no, it's not,

it's not acceptable. And if you don't like that, go away, right? Like literally, it's not acceptable. If there's anybody that diluted, and that's my fear is that there are people in the group that have been told that they're doing good work. And if they're not doing good work, they need to be told that. That's where Apple is on this point.

Or maybe the work's good, but it's not good enough fast enough, right? Like we're making great progress, but we're not ready to replace Siri next year from the progress. Right? That's right. So, so like, again, as soon, well, hard part of the pitches, as soon as we can do this ourselves, let's do it ourselves, but we can't do it ourselves now part of, so you make a management change. One of the things you're going to hear is, but I was told we were going to do it this way. This is what we were just doing. What we were told. And it's like, well, that's fine.

But you're being told something different now. Right. And like, I'm not going to blame you, but you know, you can make excuses, but in the end, it's very clear where we need to go. And, you know, when you get there, we'll be here. We want, and we want, I think one of the great advantages of being a manager in this situation is of course Apple wants to build its own thing, but we've been unable to,

and anybody who thinks that we were able to is wrong, and we need to make that a goal, but in the meantime, we're gonna be pragmatic, and we're gonna use partners. And also to say, you know, the iPhone is a place that everybody wants to be. It's super important. And all of these companies are competing with Google

who owns their own smartphone platform. So Apple's actually in an advantageous point here where these other companies would really like to partner with Apple about this stuff. So it gives Apple an advantage to make their product better now. And the only real fear is that Apple will become beholden to them and will be unable to catch up with them.

And I mean, that's bad in so many ways, but you have to bet on your ability to catch up with them. If you're an Apple manager, you have to bet on that. Digitimes is reporting from its supply chain sources that Apple is moving the folding iPhone to prototyping stage, with a launch looking scheduled for 2026 if this kind of usual flow kind of bears out from where they go from like prototyping to engineering sample etc. At the same time, they have reportedly paused work on a folding iPad. Apparently they're facing manufacturing difficulties and presumably are putting their focus into the iPhone. It

seems to suggest, or at least the Digitimes room estates that the expense and also demand of a product like this could see to it being deprioritized. I wonder if maybe like if you ship a folding iPhone and it's successful, maybe you make a folding iPad more desirable, right? That like the iPad is too expensive, but maybe people would see the benefit. But also if you can ship a folding iPhone in 2026, go full steam ahead on that. You should do that. Also. This is the product that we couldn't understand The right this is the what what this is the giant foldable iPad that can be like a laptop or is it a foldable? MacBook or what with and and we we Didn't understand it and that's always a red flag

I mean because maybe they've got an amazing vision for it, but it's also possible that they're experimenting with technology Yeah, that might be possible and not actually solving a problem of a product that needs to exist. So put that one on hold. The folding iPhone makes sense to me in a way that the folding iPad never did. Yeah, I mean, the folding iPhone is just an easy pitch,

right? You understand what that means. It's like iPhone turns into iPad, iPad mini. Yeah. What, what you just like iPad turns into big, like 11 inch iPad turns into 13 inch iPad. You know what I mean? Like it's like, I don't, you put it on a stand here. Yeah. Like it's a very weird. Yeah. Very weird. I was, I will say iPadOS 26 makes more sense for me now of why you might want to have a bigger screen

than like iPadOS 18 did. You know what I mean? Like we're in a world now where I could see that having a bigger iPad screen is nicer. It's still not enough on the face of it for the reason. Bloomberg is reporting that Foxconn has recalled engineers and technicians from their facilities in India back to China. Apparently this has been going on slowly for the last two months with now 300 people leaving the India site. At this time, it's mostly support staff that remain at Foxconn from the people that were brought in, I think from the people that aren't from India. So I think they said in the article that there are people from Taiwan that are like support staff of Foxconn that remain in India, but it no longer, or there are fewer and fewer

like engineers and technicians. Nobody from Apple or Foxconn is commenting on why this is occurring, but it presumably leaves Apple in a tough spot on their plan for manufacturing the iPhone 17 for America in India, which was the plan. this seems like it might not be possible now hmm it's yeah I don't know what to say other than that the the Chinese government has a lot of say yep and the article goes on says that basically the Chinese government has told the Indian government that they're doing this and it's just happening like it's bringing them home and like notification was

given between these two governments but none of the companies involved talking so why this is happening there are many reasons that it could be happening uh this to me feels like that kind of like feels like that kind of like house of cards style stuff that you just don't see. Like there are conversations happening between behind closed doors between all these countries and so you just don't know. Like you see what's happening on the front of it but why it's happening? Who knows? Who knows? And my Jin Bu has shared some new renders of the iPhone 17 Pro based on information they've gathered from the supply chain. I wanted to get a vibe check from us both on how we feel about what is considered to

be about as state of the art as iPhone 17 renders are. So what we have essentially is a two tone look. So it's an all aluminium phones where the rumors are with a glass portion on the back. This gives a two tone look, but also allows for like charging and antennas and all that kind of stuff to work through the glass and a camera bar, which essentially extends the camera portion, the camera bump all the way across the top of the phone. It keeps the cameras essentially in the same place, but just moves the flash and the lidar

sensor all the way to the right and the microphone. What are your, how do you feel about this? Oh, also the new thing is the Apple logo has been shifted down, so it is now centered in the new glass panel, which occupies about two-thirds of the phone, rather than it being centered in the middle of the iPhone as it currently is. I don't know. I mean, having the bump go all the way across is good in the sense that it means that the phone will be more stable when you lay it down, because it will have sort of like a tall part and a short part. And also might be a nice kind of ledge for holding the phone too, like depending on how well you hold your phone.

Could be. That might feel pretty nice. Could be. Beyond that, I don't know if I have an opinion about this at all. I love the two tone. I just think it looks fresh. It's probably one of the main reasons they're doing it. I'm a little bit perplexed about going to aluminium,

honestly. It's like we made such a big deal out of titanium, now we're moving back to aluminium. And I hope that that doesn't result in a heavier phone because of it. That would be a bit of a bummer to me if the phone became heavier, I wouldn't like that. And I think it might actually.

I don't know actually, we have a glass or aluminum is heavier. Like I just don't know the answer to that. Probably glass actually, so maybe it'll be fine. But I like that this phone's going to look pretty different, especially to somebody who doesn't use a case, which is me, right? I like that this phone, I like that. That this is this phone.

I like that this phone will have some visual flare to it, Jason. That's what I'm excited about. Like make it feel a bit new and fresh and then still intrigued about the, I feel like I'm going to have a real complicated buying process with the, with the iPhone line. Cause I'm really intrigued about the iPhone 17 air, right? Like what that's actually going to be. I think it's going to be quite an intriguing phone, but it's like, because I'm really intrigued about the iPhone 17 Air, right? Like what that's actually going to be. I think it's going to be quite an intriguing phone, but it's like, am I able to deal with whatever trade-offs they're going to give us, which that's going to be the interesting

thing to work out. But I'll say I like the look of this. I think this looks fun. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I'm not opposed to it. I think again, it's going to come, I'm just, my, my response is muted by like, okay, it's two-tone, but it's gonna be two-tone gray versus two-tone, not slightly, not gray. That's my concern about it. There's a little contrast back there could be really interesting, but will it be?

We'll see. Yeah, that's a good point. Again, it's like, if you gave us the kind of contrast we got on the iMac, right, that could be real fun, but I don't know what you're going to give me maybe we'll get a nice blue or something you know maybe we'll get that maybe so I hope so this episode is brought to you by oracle in business they say you can have better cheaper or faster but you only get to pick two what if you could have

all three at the same time that's exactly exactly what Coheer, Thompson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second. How is it cheaper? OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking. And finally, how is it better? Well, in test after test, OCI customers

report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all of your biggest workloads. Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Go to oracle.com slash upgrade. That's oracle.com slash upgrade. A thanks to Oracle for their support of this show and all of Relay. It's time for some Ask Upgrade questions to finish out today's show. Andy wrote in and says,

how do iPhone only apps behave with the new windowing system on iPad? I'm hoping they maintain an iPhone screen ratio similar to iPhone mirroring. That's what they do. They just show up as an iPhone shape. And you can have multiple of them on the screen at the same time. That's right, they're just windows. up as an iPhone shape. And you can have multiple of them on the screen at the same time.

That's right. They're just windows. It's fantastic. You know what this fixes? With the iPad, it fixes all of the social media apps that won't make an iPad version. You can now just use the iPhone version. And it looks good.

And you can use it like an iPad app, essentially. This is just one of the many fantastic features that's in iPad OS 26, is that you can use iPhone apps more realistically. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's good. Good stuff. Matthew says, is there any concern about Liquid Glass's high GPU requirements cutting off

older devices? Apple usually keeps devices supported longer than most companies, and that was a huge draw for many people I know, myself included. I assume that Apple has made the cutoffs specifically thinking about the GPU issues involved. And worst case scenario, they will scale it down where you'll just get less because there's a phone that can't support it. If they they don't like it they'll either optimize it or they'll turn it off for some models and I just don't think it's gonna be a big deal so Stephen has a an iPhone XS running 26 that's the lowest phone like

that's where it cuts off and I was asking him about it and he says he's obviously on the bay that says it runs Fine, but you can tell it's you're at the edge basically, right? Like it runs but it is More noticeable that it's running kind of thing. You know, I'm kind of putting words in his mouth It was what he was what we were talking about And I just think it's worth noting that this phone came out seven years ago Right and like I just don't think that's bad, honestly. I. I think seven years is a really, really long time for a phone upgrade,

and if that is your kind of maximum cycle, I think that's totally fine. And I really don't need everybody to write in and tell me about their like uncle Bob, who's been using a phone for 10 years. Cause he could still use it. You know what I mean? The phones don't get murdered, but like I just think realistically the person that is using a phone that's 10 years old, it's maybe not that fast about like being on the most recent version of iOS

26. Like, you know, and I look, I understand that there are, but like, I just think that you could get yourself into an older phone. Like you don't even need to buy the newest phone and you would get a decent deal on it. And I just think seven years is like a really long time. And I think perfectly fine. I was thinking not to step on a philosophical landmine here, but I was thinking about this the other day that

there's this whole debate about like subscribing to things versus buying things. And there are people who don't want to hear this, but I'm just going to say it. Everything is a subscription. Everything. Everything. Like, ah, I don't subscribe. I don't lease a car. I buy a car. Well, okay. But how long do you have that car divided by what you paid for it? And you can subtract out what you sell it back for is what you paid. You just paid upfront, but you paid for it over years. You know what it is upfront, but you paid for it. And then you have to pay for maintenance. You buy a house. Hey, I bought a house. You still got to pay property taxes on it. Like, well, you probably have a mortgage. Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, this is just what it is. And technology has always been like this. It is

look, it's me. I learned to use a computer back in the old days. Um, it's always been this way because there's always a new thing and there's always a new OS and there's always a new version. And if you're somebody who would say, yeah, but you know, now there's security updates that you only get for two years and all that. It's like, well, that's true. But like, it's always been the case that if you're somebody who decides to pull up stakes and just kind of go off on your own with an old computer and old software and use it forever you can do it but most people don't do that because that's just not how it works because the companies that make the product still need your money and that's just that's just the reality of it so I agree with

you as long as a five or six year old iPhone that's supported doesn't like become unusably slow because of liquid glass, I don't think it's a big deal. And I would, again, I would argue that the most likely scenario in that case and something that Apple has done in the past is certain effects are disabled on older models in order for them to run smoothly. That's it. And I think it's fine. I can think if they target within five years, I think it's fine.

Realistically, I think for the way that the vast majority of people are using their phones. And also we come back to this thing that like over and over again, we all have our anecdotal stuff that Apple knows this more than anybody else. Right. And like they want people using their operating system. And so they know what the cycles are for the vast majority of their customers and they target that. Matthew asks, do you think Apple will go with 26 for their hardware this year? I want them to, but I don't think they will.

I don't think they will, but I agree. I would love it if this fall, we got the brand new iPhone 26 Pro running, iOS 26, using the amazing new A26 processor. So that was Andy, Andy wrote in a section, Apple changed the processor numbers. I'll say at least do the processors

if you don't wanna do the iPhone for whatever reason, you don't wanna do that. I hate having these two digit numbers where it's three different ones and moving to 26 for the OS is doesn't change the fact that you've got an a 18 chip in an iPhone 16, which is too close. It's just don't at least with the harder, the only product that is numbered like this is the iPhone.

Yeah. So I just have to remember one number and the rest of the mechanicality year. But I mean, I think I should get rid of the number from the iPhone anyway. But if you're going to keep the numbering, you should just move them all, move them all to calendar year. It will be bananas to me to have done it on the OS's and not do anything else. So why are we doing it all then? Like, why are we doing it all? If we're not gonna, the point of it is standardizing, but then you did not standardize the rest,

you just left it to be whatever you want it to be. Yeah. And Thomas asks, if Mac OS is working towards touch support, do you think it could show up before the MacBook Pros go to OLED, or do you think they would likely wait and roll them out together? There's no point in doing touch support unless Apple is shipping a brand new design

that's got a touch screen in it, and the existing MacBook Pros aren't going to get a touch screen because they wouldn't add that until they change the display. Yeah, I think I'm agreeing with you by saying I think the next big update to the Mac Pro Which I think has been the next couple of years Will get a touchscreen and it will also be OLED. That's it. Maybe next fall I think is the rumor fall of 26 and So that would be my guess is that they'll actually

My guess is that they will do They'll announce Mac OS they'll actually, my guess is that they will do, they'll announce Mac OS 27. And then when they roll these products out, there'll be some new touch APIs that just get added with 27.1 and that'll be that. And by the way, cause people were already writing it, you don't need to make Mac OS touch friendly, you don't. You don't need to do it.

Cause you could just have it for scrolling and pinching and zooming. Like you don't need to make everyOS touch friendly, you don't. You don't need to do it. Cause you could just have it for scrolling and pinching and zooming. Like you don't need to make every button touchable because the track pad is right there. So like you're just, it's for a combo method because then the user will understand very quickly that the button isn't good to touch, right? Also, I have remote controlled a Mac

with a screen scale down on an iPad with my finger, and it worked fine. And the iPad's got a menu bar now that you can do by touch. And it's fine, too. It's fine. It's not going to be a big deal. But at least with the iPad, there are certain elements that you have to tap to enlarge them, and then you can tap them again.

And I don't want to see them do that to Mac-o-lists. And I don't think they need to. I really don't. I don't think they need to, I really don't. I don't think they need to. And my experience with using a touchscreen Chromebook, absolutely most of what I did was scroll or reach out and tap a thing. And the truth is that even those of us

who use keyboards and trackpads all the time and grew up using those kinds of pointing devices, even our brains have been rewritten where you see something on the time and grew up using those kinds of pointing devices. Even our brains have been rewritten where you see something on the screen and you want to touch it. So I would be happy to have that. And I do that on my iPad all the time. Like I don't when the keyboard and trackpad are connected to my iPad, I still touch the screen. I don't do it as much, but I still do. And it's fine. So I just yeah I think I think it will happen at one go. I think there will be new touch screen MacBook Pros with support for touch in macOS and that'll happen simultaneously.

Which would be great. Yeah sure. If you would like to send in any questions you know for ask upgrade or just any follow-up or feedback, you can go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in your questions to us there. Thank you to our members who support us directly with Upgrade Plus. This week, we're gonna discuss how I influenced Jason about some happy fruit. You can go to getupgradeplus.com

if you wanna know what that means. Become a member, support the show, get longer ad-free versions of the show every week. If you wanna watch this show, just go to YouTube and search for Upgrade Podcast and you'll find us. Thank you to our sponsors, that is Oracle, Delete Me, and Squarespace, for their support of this week's episode. But most of all, thank you for listening. Until then, next time, I should say, goodbye, Jason Snow. Until then, next time, Mike Hurley.

Whenever then, maybe time Mike Hurley. Whenever then maybe. Goodbye. Goodbye.