Upgrade - 578: The Woven Family of Materials

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 578 for August 25, 2025. This show is brought to you by FitBod, Zbiotics, ExpressVPN, and Hello Fresh. My name is Mike Hurley. I'm joined by Jason Snell, and I think we need to do it because it might be the last time. It is the summer of fun. I do think this might be the last episode in our summer. Could be. If there's an iPhone event in two weeks, we would do the draft.

On Monday. Which would be the official end of summer, hard to believe. I mean, 578 episodes. You and I were talking, it's a bank holiday for you this week. It's a holiday for me next week. But Mondays is just sort of, this is what I do on Mondays. This is how it goes. This is how it works.

is just how it goes yeah this is it this is what we do we chat together i have a snow talk question for you it comes from matt who says inspire a snow talk here which is true my friend matt wrote into us and said stop talking about the weather why don't you do a little question to begin the show uh matt is actually my paper friend it's a foggy you know matt you've met matt uh matt is the person that i work with for the paper products um for yeah paper mat applies that Not a physical paper man Matt who does paper I met Matt

Where Ool Yeah that's where I met him The first time But isn't my wedding Yeah I think so I think so That might have even been that Ool

Where we sat and chatted famously Probably Next to Hans Peter Who was talking to you about pens Do you remember that? That one was before We met Matt When it moved to the Europe hotel

The really beautiful hotel When it moved to the next year then Yeah But I definitely yes Anyway, so thank you. It's foggy. What I like is that Matt didn't want us to have small talk and create Snow Talk. And now we've small talked during his question. Yes.

Which is, how do you become a friend of the show? I feel like this used to be limited to previous guests, but the pool seems to have expanded. First, let's just say it. This is friend of the show, Matt. This is friend of the show, Matt. I actually think this is why Matt asked the question, if I'm being honest. That's my expectation. Yeah, what's to get pumped up here, Matt.

Yeah, his friend of the show, Matt. Yeah, it's a friend of the show. Yep. Well, so, so, first off, because you know there is, episode 252, if robot or not delves into who's the friend of the show. So you can check that out. Do you want to hear John's definition of it? I don't. Do you know what, Jason? I don't.

I absolutely don't want to hear John's definition of that. Actually, I think my memory is that this is a reasonable one, and that he and I agreed mostly on it. So at front of the show is a fun show business kind of way of describing to me people we know actually in some way. It could be applied to people who become sort of a character on the show in some way. They've been a guest or there are frequent letter writer who gets read on the air and they become a character that way. But I think it's also just a good shorthand for, like, people we actually know outside of the context of upgrade because we know them in the real world. I've met Matt, you know Matt. I think this might have come up because of a friend of the show, Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Rang and the kayaks that we talked about.

But we both met Dr. Dr. Dr. Rang. I've been on many podcasts with Dr. Dr. Dr. Rang over the years. I think that's what does it. It's just more like a way to signify. that this is not like random Matt but specific Matt who we who as Steve Jobs would say

who y'all know right like Saul who y'all know to me friend of the show is an absolutely arbitrary monica that I just bestow on people willy-nilly

if I'm being honest I think if you I think if you analyzed who you bestow it on you would find that there is an additional connection that is the thing that pushes it over into being friend of the show

I mean it is helpful if I do know the person, as you mentioned, that is more likely to bump it. That's a good way. But I feel like I'll give it to anyone, you know? And don't forget Dee Griffin Jones, who is the enemy of the show, or at least a neutral frenemy of the show, something like that. We can bestow that title, too. And there is also the official upgrade baby, McKenzie.

Right. Well, I mean, McKenzie is friend of the show, and McKenzie's dad is friend of the show, but also also the Upgrade Baby. The Upgrade Baby. Which I really like. Thank you to friend of the show, Matt, for sending in this question. Oh, oh, did it come in on paper, by the way? No, it came in via the feedback form.

What are you doing? Which I appreciated. I actually appreciated this. If you would 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 your feedback in. I have some follow-up. Dominic wrote in and said, the feature that Jason wanted

and described in episode 577 to talk about being able to delete apps find out what apps I don't use and help me delete them exists since iOS 18. Go to settings general iPhone storage in addition to size

which was available in previous versions the list shows the last used date as a selection for sorting. The list can be ordered by size name or last used date and then you can also swipe on the apps there and offload or delete them. Yeah, this is the part that I didn't know.

I knew that list was there, but if you swipe one direction, it offloads them and the other direction it deletes them, which is really great. I sorted by last use date, and there were a bunch of very suspicious I'm not entirely sure that last used date is accurate.

In fact, it might be that I have some apps that predate the addition of that feature, so the last used date is wrong for them. But this is good. My other note here is that what I really want to be able to do is batch select a bunch of them and instead of having to go swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe I'd rather tap a bunch of them and then then tap delete but but this is better than any other approach I've seen so thank you Dominic

yeah I also found it was odd that you couldn't saw it so you did the the old ones were at the top like you have to scroll all the way down yeah all the way to the bottom and there was like some weird stuff in the bottom that didn't make any sense like a collection of like four apps and like... Oh, well, so one thing that's in there in addition, and this is a bug,

is app bundles. Oh, yeah. So it's data. Data shared by app bundles shows up in that list, even though it's not an app. So if you have like app bundles, well, the idea here,

so the app there is a feature in the app store and in iOS that allows apps from the same developer to share data outside of their own sandbox in a app bundle share box. so uh sandbox sharebox whatever you know what i mean basically like Microsoft this is how if you've got Microsoft apps and you're a 365 subscriber and you launch Word and it says I need to see that

you're a subscriber and you log in and then you launch Excel it just launches how does it know and the answer is there's a shared sandbox for all Microsoft products and it looks there and sees the authentication that Word has written there and it knows it now these should not display in this list. They're not deletable from this list. Oh, they're not deletable because it's like, I wonder what happens if you tried. Like, what happens? No, they seem to be just kind of there as a weird vestigal organ of some sort.

Anyway, that part's weird. I love seeing things like this where it's like the richest company in the world, you know, like, or one of, also has these just weird edge cases based on a decision because it's based on the back of something else. And they can't even get rid of, you know, they can't fix it. It's like, ah, what are we going to do? You know, it's just there. It is, uh, our, uh, uh, Mahel in the discord says it's called app groups.

That is what it's called app groups. It's not, uh, bundles, those are slightly different. Those are things you can buy together on the app store. Sometimes bundles are in app groups, but it's app groups is what it's called. And then, I mean, it's a good feature because if you're a developer and you're like, I need my apps to talk to each other. Apple was like, all right, okay, we'll give you a place that you can put stuff. So, anyway.

Yeah, that's weird, but the rest of it is, it's the best yet I've found. So settings general iPhone storage, it is not just a list. It is also going to give you the ability to rapidly delete or offload old apps. Massimo is suing U.S. Customs over Apple's new workaround for blood oxygen sensor. Sort of saw this coming, didn't we? Yep. I do think there is something interesting in this. So Massimo said they want the new ruling to be overturned.

And they say one of the reasons is because they only found out this was happening when Apple announced it. They did not have the chance to review or challenge it. And I do think that there's like, oh, you know what? Like I don't necessarily disagree with this, right? Like it's to get around what they are doing. And then here's, I'm going to read a paragraph here from Jess Weatherbed at the verge. While no direct accusations were made, Massimo caught out in the file. that Apple has made, quote, a series of substantial investments in the United States

after its appeal to overturn the ITC ban were denied. Massimo noted that U.S. Customs then allowed Apple to reactivate the feature, despite the company continuing to infringe on Massimo's patents, and that whatever proceeding led to this new ruling departed substantially from customs established practice regarding ruling requests. The company's filing says, quote, customs function is to enforce ITC exclusion orders, not to create loopholes that render them in effect. Well, I mean, it's not wrong that it's unusual.

It's not wrong that Apple is investing in the United States. Is that why this happened? I don't think there's any evidence either way, but certainly it's possible. If I were an attorney filing for Massimo, would I mention it whether I had any evidence of it or not? Of course I would. It's great. It's like perfect. It's just sitting right there for you.

Unfortunately, if the state of the United States right now is, okay, so you go in front of a judge and say, but judge, all the judges are against us. The judge will be like, no, they're not. Apple is great. Get out of here. And that could be it. Like, you're asking for, they're basically saying the rule of law is not being followed. Please rule of law, save us. And I'm not sure if it's going to save them because that's not the world we live in.

But we will see how it proceeds. But this is what I would say. These accusations don't prove or deny anything. They're the exact accusations you would make if you were Massimo. Absolutely. Which is like, is this favoritism? Especially since we didn't even, I mean, that's rough. We didn't even hear about this until our opponent put out a press release about it.

Ouch. I mean, I think it's clear at this point that Massimo's kind of whole function at this point. is just to enforce this patent, right? Like, that seems to be, like, their biggest fish to fry. And I get it, right? Like, from, like, they do have the patent. It does belong to them. Uh, they would quite, they would love to get money from Apple for every Apple watch.

That's what they want, clearly, right? And they're, if Apple continue, if Apple does this, they're not going to get it. Um, and I would feel a little aggrieved if, if it is true that the typical processes were not followed, that would be. If you're Massimo. And you believe that you invented this technology properly patented, and one of the biggest companies in the world just decided to ignore your patents, so you took them to court.

I would be aggrieved. And if I won and then behind the scenes they did a thing or you think they might have done a thing and then suddenly they kind of lost, I'd be aggrieved very much so. That said, if I were masturbate, I'd also be aggrieved if a judge gave a or a patent official gave a narrow interpretation of our patent that allowed a workaround here. And that's the thing. I'm not a lawyer

and I don't know all the details of this case, but is it not I mean, okay, I'm not going to double negative this. I think it's possible that the answer is if you look at what Massimo patented, Apple's workaround gets around the details of the patent by not processing.

It's like Apple built a workaround. And there could be a conspiracy here. It's also possible that Apple, and its lawyers looked at the patent and said, is there a way we could build something, not just, because before I think the argument was on or off, turn it on or off, and they turned it off because they had to. Is it possible that in the background they've been looking at it very carefully and saying, let's build a workaround and then just take it to the commission and say, we worked around this issue. This new thing does not infringe on all these details here. In fact, it does this totally different thing. Is it reasonable that they might have done that as a strategy and that the patent people were like, actually, yes, there's no law against it, that kind of thing where it's like, this actually does it. I think it is possible. And I think if I were Massimo, I'd be really mad and I would, I would, I would sue. But it doesn't mean they're in the right here.

We'll see. We had previously spoken about the fact that the government of the United Kingdom wanted to put a back door into Apple's, cloud encryption. The U.S. government has announced that this will no longer be happening. I will also quote from previous writer, friend of the show, Jess Weatherbed at the verge, while it's unclear if the UK would negotiate new terms of Apple that would avoid implicating the data of U.S. citizens, an unnamed U.S. official told the Financial Times that such negotiations would not be faithful to the new agreement.

So essentially, what it seems like is, while the U.S. kind of presenting it. It was like, the UK cannot get data of any US citizen. It kind of means the data cannot compel any US company to do this. I'm happy that this has happened because the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. I think a key tell for me here going into the future is whether advanced data protection returns to the UK. So that had to be removed. So basically the UK government said you can't do this. And also we want the back door if you do do it. So Apple's like, you know what, we're just going to turn off this feature and tell everyone we're going to get rid of it. So I actually removed advanced data protection from my phone before I was forced to do

so. And currently, it's still unavailable for me to sign up for. I'm on the beta. I don't know if that affects anything, but I hope sometime in the future I can turn ADP back on. But it seems like that this whole hubbub, this whole ridiculous hubbub has been taken care of. Yeah, I guess so. It's very interesting. It's hard to follow because they're not, technically you're not allowed to speak, but there was a whistleblower somewhere. I do wonder if there's an understanding here

that's something like Apple's not going to turn it back on for people, but it's not going to turn it off. And it's just sort of one of these like agreement to not compel Apple to do more and it's just going to keep doing what it's doing, which is, because before it was going to be compelled to do this, and it seems like that's not going to happen now. Which is the same because now I can't turn it back on again. And I like that future.

I know. And we don't know what is going on here. But this is interesting because this sounds like it's very much, look, that UK regulation totally overreached, right? It would basically say, hey, we in the UK have decided that we get data everywhere, from anyone in the world. And in this case, the U.S. government, but it really could have been any government, said, no, uh-uh, that's not going to work for us. And, uh, and I mean, that's good because that that shouldn't, I mean, I don't like it for UK citizens either, but I certainly don't like it for literally anyone in the world. One government says, you have to give us all your data anywhere in the world if we ask for it. It's a bit much. I do think Apple would have probably, uh, objected it the exact same way. And if they would have just said it was just, for UK citizens. I'm not sure

if the American part really affected them too much, but it enabled them to be able to get the US government to kind of like bully their way back through the doors and kind of get my government to shut up and sit down, which is essentially what happened. Yeah. For listeners who are excited about photo actions in Tahoe,

Jason has written an article about them already. He's just, you're so excited. He can't stop. It's true. Well, so here's the deal. It's a fun new feature in Tahoe. And what I found is people don't understand how to do it. And that is down to the fact that Apple made it require knowledge of shortcuts, extra knowledge of shortcuts. I mean, the way this works basically is that at a time or when a folder has something added to it or changes in it or a file is updated or whatever, it can run a shortcut.

And so obviously you need to know something about shortcuts because you have to go in and set the shortcut to run. But the problem is, you know, when it's a folder monitoring for changes, what happens is there's no UI. You're basically, your shortcut is given a list of changes. And then that's it. And then Apple walks away, which means, so my article is basically like, how do you deal with this? And the answer is you have to do a repeat loop that repeats for each item in the list. and then acts on it or tests it or whatever and so you need to know how to put in a repeat loop

so I have some screenshots for that and then you can filter because it will the other thing is like if you're like I need this if this particular kind of file is added to my downloads folder I want to act on it. You can't set that in the UI. You have to either add a filter step at the very top filter files that says

you know it has to be and then you set up a set of rules file the extension is markdown or MD or whatever and or you can do an if statement inside the loop that says if this file has attributes of whatever

then perform this action otherwise don't but you know I think there are people who could build a fairly simple shortcut to do what they want but what they have to do is build their own filtering interface. This is something they've used something like Hazel

it comes with a filtering interface for all of this. You build the rules. You set it up and say, then do this thing. And that's why you would, that's a reason to use a third-party utility like Hazel, even though Apple has provided this, because to do it in shortcuts, you need to add all of those extra little bits.

And then the extra wrinkle here that Dan Morin found is, it acts on subfolders by default. So if you pick a folder, any change to anything inside that folder, or a folder inside that folder or a folder inside a folder also kicks off and then trying to find a way to say

no, no, no, not subfolders is actually really hard and we had a couple different ways where we tried to deal with it. I mean, my opinion is some of this stuff should probably just be built by Apple when you set up an automation

but they didn't for whatever reason and so my piece in six colors is sort of some basic guidelines to how to get that up and running because it's a really cool feature right? I mean, the idea that if a file just ends up somewhere on your Mac, your Mac does something to it, and that it's an OS feature. You don't have to install third-party software. That's pretty powerful. Or a little less

complex, but the idea that you can set a shortcut to run at a particular time or whatever, that's also really nice. And that's been available on iOS for a while, but not on the Mac until Tahoe. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at FitBod. If you're looking to change your fitness level, getting started can be high. And that's why I'm very happy to let you know that FitBod is both easy and an affordable way to build a fitness plan that is made for you. Because everybody has their own path to personal fitness. FitBod uses data to make sure they customize things to suit you perfectly.

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Rumor round up time. I got a lot of rumors to round up today, Jason. It's that time of year, I think. Let's do it. Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is currently boosting manufacturing capability in India to prepare for manufacturing the majority of this year's US iPhones in the country. Depending on the reporting that I've read, it dictates how much is being said is being made here.

Some reports say it's all US iPhones and Apple have kind of into towards that, but other reports, including this Bloomberg one, go a little softer on it, which I think might be maybe the more accurate way to look at it. There might not all be made in India. Push comes to shove. But I think, ideally for Apple, they would much prefer to get the majority of the made there. This is significant because it's the first time that all four iPhones will be produced in India at the original time of release.

So Apple have a lot of phones made in India and have for some time, I think, how the even like, you know, the new iPhone comes around, the base one, and it will be made in India to start with and it will be used in different places. But for all of the phones, including the pro phones, to be made in India on day one is a big deal. Bloomberg sources indicate that around half of the iPhones produced in India will be by the Tata group over the next two years. That's kind of the plan. This is another interesting thing because it shifts them away from Foxcon and China. So both things are to diversification, right? So like, we're always talking about diversifying from

China, this is also diversifying manufacturing partner, because even in India, the other half of those phones will be made by Foxcon factories in India. But this is actually them breaking away even from Foxcon. So I find that interesting

too, that they're working with another manufacturer as well as taking themselves out of one country. That's Foxconn, which is a Taiwan-based but very heavy in China manufacturing company, moving to an Indian manufacturing company. Yeah. And this is like tariffs, right? Tariffs might be a part of this, although how exempt

is Apple and what does it matter and what are the sheriffs in China versus the tariffs in India for Apple, which is a different question. There's a lot going on there. But leaving that aside, diversification is exactly, I think, the other part of the story here. And this is, you know, China is well aware of Apple's precarious position in depending on China, right? They're well aware. However, I would say that the Trump administrations focus on American manufacturing and the sort of scattershot tariff thing that just kind of clouds global transactions certainly provides Apple reason, but also cover to diversify its manufacturing outside of China. And so,

Again, I think that this plays to Apple's benefit in the long run, because I think even if Apple doesn't, like if you were to say, oh, yeah, but they spend all this money building things in China or in India to get out of China and it turns out that the tariffs are the same or the tariffs are worse in India or whatever, would Apple regret it? And I think the answer is no. I think Apple got too single sourced from China. And even though China is and will remain a major portion of Apple's production system, because Apple really does have a global production system, I think Apple will be very happy if in 10 years there are, you know, five or six countries where they're making iPhones. And that it's just like we make them all over the world, different parts,

because then if something happens in one of them, and this is why, I mean, this came up and gave them some cover during COVID, right? Because there were some COVID shutdowns where Apple, like, lost the ability to make Macs for a little while. because of a particular area in China that had a COVID outbreak and a factory shut down. And China shut down differently to a lot of the world, like very, very aggressively. Yeah. So for a long time. From a geopolitical standpoint, but also from a logistical standpoint, it's a thing that plays into Apple's hands.

Now, we'll see how it goes. I mean, Apple is a, if that Apple and China book taught us anything, it's that Apple has some pretty exacting standards. And if they are happy with the output coming out of India, that means that they have, this is what happened in China, is Apple's exacting standards created knowledge and capacity in China for building phones. And then, you know, now they also build other phones and other stuff that they've learned from Apple. That's probably what's been going on in India, right? Because, like, I don't think anybody's going to take a phone out of the box that was assembled in India and go, oh, the glass is. sideways and it's the wrong it's two different colors and like apple's standards are so high that what they're doing is instead they're forcing these factories to be because apple's there right

it's not just like they let tata build it and this is the lesson of foxcon is apple's really running that factory and determining what comes out of it and setting the bar where they they feel it needs to be set and that ends up benefiting um the knowledge base in india to do electronics manufacturing like this in the long run. I am interested, though. Like, I agree of what you're saying. It's not like you're going to take the phone out of the box and the camera's going to fall out, right?

But this is clearly an accelerated timeline than what Apple would have done with their making their own decisions. They wouldn't have done this, I don't think. Not this year. To go all India this year, I don't think would have been the plan. No, no, but it's, like I said, it is both geopolitical reality and also providing pretty good cover for Apple to make changes that will benefit it in a long time.

They were always going to do this, right? Because it's like there's a lot of benefit to it. But like, would they have made the iPhone 17 pro in India for the US in 2020? Much less aggressive. Yeah. Much less aggressive. So what I wonder is, while I agree if I don't expect quality to be an issue, I wonder if availability will be an issue. Like, will there be?

Could be. You know, will these, will they be able to produce them at the exact same quality level at the exact same volumes as the foxcon plants in China can. It'll be interesting to see, right? And when Bloomberg hedges here, I think that is one of the things that may happen is they're building as many as they can in India, and the rest of them to fill demand will come from China. Yep. Yep. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, because it's like they are still making the rest of the world's phones in China. In China. And I would expect it is, I'm just going to assume this, like, shockingly easy to be able to scale up in China fast. Like, if they needed to be able

to make two million more phones this week, they could just say, can we have two million more this week? And they'll go, yeah, okay, then. You know, and like it, I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but I also expect that it is simpler than I would have, when you would naturally assume, considering how complex these things are. I want to go back to tariffs. So, There is an interesting thing about tariffs because if you've been paying attention to the news, like at the moment, India is one of the hardest hit tariff countries by the US, right? There's like over 50% or something like that. There are tariff exemptions.

There are a bunch of carve-outs. So it seems that as of right now, iPhones will still have a tariff if they're being made in India, but it's the base tariff, which is lower than China's base tariff. Okay. So there are different sectoral tariffs that go super high. Yeah, but then doesn't Apple also have some sort of like pass because they're... They have a pass to some of it. But they still have to pay some of it.

Like, because that's why they're like, hey, there's going to be like a billion dollars of tariffs or whatever. Like Apple is still paying some stuff for some things. It is incredibly complicated. They're not... It appears from the reporting from what I've been reading. They will pay something. but it's not going to be as high as you would imagine. But as you mentioned, all of this is just like the perfect shield for Apple from a political standpoint.

Because it's one of these things, it is politics, right, in the sense of China knows what Apple's doing. Apple knows China knows what they're doing. But they can say, what are we supposed to do? It's very political, right? It's just like, oh, well, you know my hands. You know my hands are tied. But it's like we all know what each other wants in this scenario. And I feel like what the story isn't is Apple getting out of China, right?

Which is a risk, right? There's no need to do that. There's no need to do that. No, there's no need to do that. China has been an incredible partner to Apple, but they need to have more than one place that can make these phones at the level that they need them. China loses some leverage there, but I think even China has to understand that it's just how it is. I mean, nobody, China dictates terms to businesses in China. I think they understand what it's like if you're an American company to have terms. dictated to you. You're like, yeah, okay, we get that. And they're not saying we're out of China. They're not, Apple's stated thing is like, we're not trying to get out of China. When Tim Cook talks about it, he says, we make stuff in lots of countries and assemble stuff in lots of countries. It's complicated. And what he doesn't say is, yeah, we're trying to get out of China. And that's, I think that that is good, too, for China and Apple. So,

yeah. 9 to 5 Mac is reporting by Lika Majin Bu, that Apple will have a replacement for the fine woven case this year. It said it will be called Techwoven. That's quite a name. It's the first iPhone phone that comes with lasers. Tech woven.

It appears to be a new synthetic fabric, which if the images are, to be believed, is much more textured. It looks kind of rubbery. Fine woven too. The name seems really strange to me, but there have been some images of boxes.

I still don't know if I think it's going to be called tech woven. Maybe it is. I do think that's a terrible name. As well as actual

buttons, it said that the case will feature a holes for lanyards and maybe charms you could put on there. Apparently this is something that's coming to

the silicone cases too, so there'll be a little lanyard hole for a lanyard in your phone case. Yeah, or charms like you put on your crocs.

they're called gibbets Oh they're gibbets That's right We've established this But it's the people Keep saying That there is a lanyard hole Which it is

But I do actually think That it will mostly be used To put charms on your iPhone That's what I expect is going to happen A little dealies Let's be let's I just want to be clear Fine woven

Also a bad name Yeah you know what you're right Actually It's kind of been normalized In my brain But fine It's also a bad name It wasn't fine

It was less than fine It was not fine. It was not fine Corinthian leather by any stretch of the imagination. So tech woven, we will see. I admire their commitment to the bit. Also, I admire everybody out there who still makes leather cases for those who who choose to go that route. So good. And I'll just say again, Lauren had a fine woven case. And she, after about six months, it was so battered and destroyed that we got her a leather case. And it's great. So yeah. Yeah, well, I wish them, I wish them well. We'll see where it is. This is, okay, here's the fine woven recap from what was that. We did this in Memphis, what, two years ago? Yeah. It was very, oh, that air conditioning in the podcast was so, oh, so cold in there.

Anyway, I loved it. The recap is, Apple makes a lot of money from accessories. It's wearables home in accessories. Access are a big part of it. iPhone cases. Why do they exist? Why does Apple make iPhone cases? It's because it's so easy for Apple to upsell you on.

It's online store or in its store saying, would you like a case with that? When I took my fateful trip to the Fresno Apple store with all of Lawrence family, that was one of the moments where it was like, would you like a screen protector? But it's also, would you like an Apple case? And they sell other cases there too, right? But mostly it's Apple cases. So Apple makes a lot of extra money on the sale of every iPhone from accessories. And if you look at the price of that leather case, it was premium.

It was the expensive one. The silicone one is not cheap. None of them are cheap, but the leather one was expensive. And so, like, why did they stop making leather because they had environmental reasons and okay? Why did they start making, or fine woven, which will now be tech woven? And the answer is because they wanted another thing that wasn't silicone that felt more premium so they could sell it at that high price, which is a huge margin. And so that's the reason for fine woven, and that'll be the reason for tech woven,

is they really want another material that they can sell as a premium because they make a huge amount of money and per unit a huge profit on selling these things because they got the Apple logo and it's an upsell when you're in the store and it's just it's just business and I would wager that most well not most many upgrade users a much higher percentage of upgrade listeners than in the general public are savvy and they like they're finding like the cool case that they can get that's a pretty good deal or it's got really good materials. are, right? But I would say most people, it's just like, they go in the Apple store, they buy a phone and they're like, yeah, I want the pink one, and then get the case. And they're done until they buy another iPhone in five years. So it's a place

for Apple to take that $1,000 iPhone purchase and make it an $1,100 iPhone purchase and add another $80 to their profit on that sale. That's why the wovens, the woven family of materials, Mike, the woven

it's not a color way material way exists form way um boo says that there will be an opening for the camera control which would be a strange choice

if it's a hole because the silicone cases they have a little piece of sapphire in them yeah a little button so you don't I wouldn't like that that'd be bad Apple to use it just stick your finger in there

it's fine that'd be bad that'd be bad just stick it in there it remains to be seen how tech woven would hold up but Marjambu says they, quote,

resist glossing and maintain a consistent appearance even after weeks of use. How they would know that? I don't know. Well, they have little, I mean, first off, they probably tested it, but they're also machines that do wearing tests that companies use.

But look, they've had two years, and they know that Fine Woven was not really well received, and they've been trying to make something better. I'm sure one of the things they've been trying to address is all of the issues with Fine Woven. So they're trying. We'll see. We'll see how they do.

Mark German, while we're in Case Corner, Mark German is also reporting that Apple have considered making a bumper case for the iPhone air. So, you know, you could still feel the thinness

of the phone and just be protected in all the ways that matter. Bumper case, S-tier case, best case for the iPhone 4, or 5. Those cases were amazing

because you were still holding the phone, but you had a little bumper around the edge of the edge of the top tip. Best case. I'm sorry about that. Mac rumors reporting via Leake a digital chat station that the design of the iPhone

17E could change when it's expected to be released next year. Yeah, next year. The notch would be replaced of a dynamic island. It would have an A-19 chip and a refresh to the industrial design,

which Mac rumours speculates could maybe mirror the iPhone 15 design which would be in line of how the 16E is modeled on the iPhone 14. Great. That is maybe more interesting when we get to my next rumor, which is this one, which I meant to put before this one. But there we go.

That sometimes, sometimes the rumors get away from you in the round-off. We mentioned that this happened just as we were recording last week and we were going to touch on them more this week. This is when Mike can take his victory lap now. Because Mac rumors is reporting via ET News that the iPhone 18 will not debut in 2026, but in spring 2027. So this would be along with a 17E. So this is the long suggested by me and others, splitting up the iPhone line into two releases throughout the year. So you would get the pro phones and a folding phone in September of 2026. And then the regular 18 and the 17E would be in March of 2027. I would be interested to see where the air goes if it continues

past year one, which I'm sure it will, but you never know. It would be the 18. It'll be the 18 and the 18E, not the 17E. 17 will come this spring, this coming spring. So it's the fall. following year, because they're going to keep that one number parity now. And if you'd like to, if you think to say, why would they do this? It's a great summary from Haley Charlton at 9 to 5 Mac. By 2027, Apple's lineup will expand to six new iPhones per year with the possibility of as many as 10 models available if Apple continues its practice of keeping earlier generations on sale of reduced prices.

Yeah. I mean, if you're doing six new models a year, and this is your point, Samsung does this. Samsung releases so many phones that they do too. And we keep talking here about how in our community, the iPhone event is another Apple event. But in the world, the iPhone event is the biggest Apple event by far that gets covered differently. It's the, and we even see it in our download numbers and in web traffic. The iPhone event is huge in a way that other Apple events are not because it's the iPhone and it's the biggest product by far that they sell. It's not the same as these other products.

So you could do it twice. you could do it twice a year and get that attention global product attention twice a year you could have two totally separate commercial rollouts marketing rollouts on uh at you know on tv and at supporting events and stuff like that it and if you're going to add models every year so you're releasing six phones a year which would be uh the 18 uh 18 air 18 pro 18 pro max 18 E and 18 fold, that's six phones, maybe introduce three of them at the time. Yep. Makes sense.

And then also, because they are still going to be iPhone events, you can slot in other products and have them be seen by more people, right? Sure. Instead of doing a bunch of press releases for some Macs or whatever, or instead of like saying, hey, everyone come watch this iPad event, say, oh, hey, no, we have another Apple event. everyone knows there's going to be iPhones at that event and also there'll be other products too

and that might help them kind of make those a little bit more interesting as well because I will be fascinated to see exactly how in this world Apple sells the iPhone 18 when we know everything about what it will have six months before right like that phone is not a mystery

and it's it's not meant to be right it's not going to be on the cutting edge it's going to be it might be slightly mysterious about what they choose to put in it versus the pro models but the fact is I don't watch as much sports in the spring as I do

in the fall but I can tell you like I've seen Apple market the 16E and I've seen Apple market the 16 in general and the colors when they put like new colors in it so they hey here's the yellow one or whatever

Yeah. Yeah. So it seems weird to us, but Apple is selling the iPhone all year long. And this just, again, we might be like, oh, yeah, but the pros already came up. But, you know, again, you're watching a basketball game and there's an iPhone ad. It's fine. Like that Apple's doing this all year round. I think that's one of those cases, the iPhone, and the reason I keep saying that the iPhone event is the biggest event of the year and all of that is because I think in our community, the iPhone doesn't have the status. that it has in the world. And we just think of it as being sort of like another Apple product. And the truth is it's the Apple product. And so, like, they're marketing it all the time and doing a second rollout makes a lot of sense to me. And also, I mean, let's be honest here, if they're going to do six phones a year, even if the ephone is going to be in the spring, five new phones in September, not only is that

huge and hard for Apple from a manufacturing standpoint, but obviously from a marketing standpoint it's you're flooding the zone even retail you make it's harder for the retail store to handle everything it's like it becomes really it just also just imagine the event itself is just getting longer and longer and longer like it yeah it allows them to be able to let the pro phones and the folding phones to breathe a bit too that they can spend more time talking about and the people who really really really really want to be on the cutting edge the pro and the fold phones will be the ones that they care about. And for people who don't care so much,

it coming out in the spring is fine, right? Because those are more people. And I know there are, these are generalizations and there are people are like, well, I always get a phone every couple of years and I always do it in the fall where when it's the new one,

but I never get the pro phone. It's like, okay. I mean, that will happen. But I think there is a less, it's a less committed. First off, phones get bought all year round. They are not annual person. for almost anybody. I know there are people out there who are on the annual plan and all that,

but like the bulk of people, it's many years, and they're not doing it in the fall, necessarily, and putting them out in the spring, it's just not a big deal. I don't think, we may think, oh, well, it makes them an afterthought in the spring, but I don't think the world thinks that. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Yeah, I think that this is absolutely the right move. I just think they're making it so complicated. And even if they just stuck with kind of like the four main phones, I still think it's worth doing, right, that you have the pros at one point and the like, you know, the regular phone and maybe the air at a different time. Like I still, even without adding the folding phone into the mix, I still think it makes sense to do it this way. And so

I look forward to them doing it. This is, I didn't actually mention the reason that this came up is this was through supply chain briefing. So there were like supply chain briefings that were like oh, don't expect the regular phone in 2026. Right. That would be a pushback.

And I have to imagine that even though Apple is obviously designing phones all the time including for many years out, I have to imagine getting to final production ramp taking a big chunk of that and moving it to a different

time of year. Probably in the long run will make things easier. Yes. Because it's creating less of a bump in one particular time of year. And even at the factories where I presume that, you know, production line shifts are happening and are hard. And it may even be staffing. Like if you're, if you're sort of like every six months turning over a portion of your production line, you might actually be able to keep your staffing levels more static because you don't have a big bump where you need to bring people in. Instead, they're sort of working. and all year round. I don't know enough about that stuff,

but I've got to think three and three is better than four and one. It's like we both know enough people at Apple that like September for them is hellish, even though it happens every year. It's because you've still got to push like everything is going to hit this hard deadline. Right.

So removing some of it and like moving it out and like you have less. assets to create less of this, less of this, it will make it that a little bit easier. Less testing to do. You know, you'll be testing half the models then instead of all of the models to make sure that they're working with the OS that you're putting on them, right? Even if it's simple stuff like that. So I've got to think, I'm sure there are some complications, but like, yeah, it makes a whole lot of sense to do it this way. I think for the bigger picture, as what was it, Jason in the Discord said, and I think that he said this really well, the people buying these phones

aren't connected to the iPhone cycle. My wife's last two phones were bought in the summer with full knowledge new phones were coming in the fall. It didn't matter, didn't care, no regrets. And I think that that is absolutely 100% true. Our audience feels differently, right? But a lot of people just don't care. And when I say the iPhone is sold all year round,

that's what I mean, is like, we're going to get the next set of results are going to, and this last set that we just had, I mean, we are in the desert of iPhone, and they still sell a load of iPhones because most people don't care because they buy it every five years. They're upgrading from a,

phone so old that they don't need to wait three months. They drop their phone, the screen shattered. They're like, you know what? I'm just going to get a new phone now. It's just they don't, they just don't, they're not on a cycle like that. It's still a really new phone for them. Yeah, that that is a very good point, right? Like, if it was the way that we think, the iPhones would only be sold in one and a half quarters of the year, which is not the case. Right, because everybody buys an iPhone for Christmas. They're selling billions of dollars of iPhones every quarter. Yeah, it doesn't work like that. Exactly. Exactly. This episode is brought to you by Zbiotics. Let's face it, after a night with drinks,

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and you'll feel your best tomorrow. I enjoy to have a nice cocktail or two every now and then, but over the years, the types of drinks that I can have and still feel good have, have changed. Like, I've always really enjoyed bourbon and old fashions, but I just wouldn't, it got to a point in my life, kind of in my mid-thirties, where I just, even if I just had one, I just wouldn't feel good the next day. And it's something I've missed, it was my favorite drink. Well, now, after having Zibiotics pre-alcohol, I felt much better and can have the drink that I want to have. The final day is the summer, are here for you to enjoy, whether you're heading to the beach, camping in the woods, or squeezing in one last vacation road trip. Don't

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27 iPhone line, so the one that we're expecting. Yeah, he did a little roundup in his newsletter. A lot of it previously reported, but he has some new details. Yeah, there's some stuff that's, as you say, is new, but also there are some things that I trust more when Mark says them. One of them being, that's true too. But the iPhone followed was going to jump straight to it. Touch ID instead of face ID.

This was another rumor, which I was very disappointed about. Supply chain rumor, right? Yeah. And I would still be incredibly disappointed about this. To me, it's kind of just like, deal with it. You know what? I understand it's hard. I don't care. Deal with it. Right? Like, if the iPhone Air has face ID, to me, there's kind of no excuse. I think I, I, so my guess here, I know you don't care, but I'm just going to say, my guess here is they looked at the size and cost of doing the complete face ID module on the inside and the outside and the outside of this, because it's got to be both directions, and we're like, we cannot do that. Not, I bet they, I bet they want to get there, but like, or we could do a single touch ID button on the side and use it, whether it's open or closed, and save space and save money. And, and that's why it's going to cost $2,000 instead of $3,000. You're welcome.

But I also understand your disappointment, which is, uh, we love face ID. It's great. I mean, it is. So I've been using a Google Pixel fold and it has a, uh, a fingerprint touch, like the fingerprint sensor on the side. I hate doing it. I hate it. Because I'm so used to just picking up my phone and unlocking. I know. To have to put my hand in a certain place is, I find it annoying now.

You get the muscle memory. There was a Google, I want to say a Nexus phone that had a fingerprint reader on the back and I would literally pick it up and I just learned to pick it up with my index finger in that place and it became invisible, right? So you can do it. And having used iPads with touch ID a little bit, with the touch ID button, like, it's okay. But I also agree, I like that you're positioning yourself now as a, you know, the people demand face ID. I like, I agree of what you're saying. It makes sense because you would have to have two assemblies, right, two face ID assemblies. But my feeling on it is, I don't care.

That's your problem, not mine. All I can do is explain why. I think because it's too in a phone that's thin and has limited space and also is going to cost a fortune, I can see why they're like, can we get away with a single, and your argument, I think is a good one, which is this is a super premium expensive phone. Just do it. And I get that too. I'm sure there were some very technical reasons why. You're going to ask me to spend more money on an iPhone than I've ever spent, maybe even twice the price of the other iPhone that I would buy, and then I end up with touch ID, which I don't care what you say. we all know is set to be an inferior experience. Like, that's how we think of it. Like, that's how Apple tells us to think of it. People have their own opinions about touch ID over Face ID.

I get it, but that's not the way it's positioned. Face ID is considered an upgrade over Touch ID. So, but anyway, let's move on from that. This is next year's, next year's Mike review of this product now. I will complain next year. I look forward to next September being able to say, we've been talking about this for more than a year, Mike. Yeah, and I'll say that and I'm still mad about it.

They're currently expecting to offer just black and white models. That is not surprising that this phone will be a little bit more like we're not going to make six more votes. The fewer you sell, the fewer skews you want, I think. Five cameras. Count them. One on the front. One on the inside. Mark said two on the back.

He was obviously meant three on the back. I'm just going to correct Mark German's article there. Oh, yeah, because otherwise there's a mystery camera. There's four. Where is it? You have to find it. I think it's three in the back. I think it means three in the back. Okay. So that makes sense. It would feature the C2 modem, which quote will be the company's first cellular chip with capabilities approaching the latest from Qualcomm. Yeah. I'm not sure if he knows anything here other than the fact that it's the C2 and that he's previously reported that they're on a path to make a... You're not going to believe this, Mike. C2 is going to be better than C1.

I actually don't believe it's possible. And Apple have recently switched to a new screen approach that would diminish. the crease on the inside display. Yeah, it sounds like they were trying to use this technology that was a little less accurate and created a little more of a gap and, uh, diminish the crease on the inside, or it made the crease maybe a little bit more. And the question is not covered in that article is why were they trying to use that sort of cell technology instead? It sounds, my guess is they were trying to save on thickness or save on price or both. I think it's a property price.

I think it's probably price. My, yeah, and they realized that wasn't good enough. And I think that that's a case where Apple probably just said, no, we've got to use the more presumably expensive technology because it solves, it makes the touch more accurate, it brings the screen closer to the surface, and it reduces crease. And if that means that our price has to go up by $100 or $200,

they said, so be it. This is the iPhone fold. And honestly, I think it's the right to say, decision. I think this is the kind of product that some people are going to want at any price. And I think the fewer things that feel like a compromise, the better. I don't know this is the case. I'm just absolutely just shooting from the hip. My expectation is this is a newer thing too, because in the last year, there have been some pretty big leaps in the screen technology that for these phones. Because there's no gaps anymore. They're all getting super thin. I think this is. maybe like a newer way of doing it, which is basically making a folding version of the current screens that we have rather than a folding first screen, which it might have been before. Right, right. And the thing, because I know Samsung has gotten really good reviews for its new fold.

And Samsung is making this screen for Apple. I would just say it may be the Samsung screen we see today. It may also be that Samsung and Apple are both going to use the screen that isn't out yet. That's next year's screen. which is even better. But either way, I know we said this a few months ago, but like this is why it's happening now,

is that the tech has gotten to the point now. And I think this is a great sign in some ways of Apple saying, no, no, no, we're going to do it with the good way. Because Apple is now confident that they can make a product that they can stand behind

and that they're excited about. And that's one of the reasons I'm excited about it is, I think it's going to be really good. I mean, I'm very excited about this product, especially because, Federico Vitici, your compatriot from Connected just did a little Mastodon thread today

where he was talking about he likes to use other products so that he can get a sense of where Apple's ahead and behind and I feel this way too. It's useful to see sort of like even if you're not writing so much about that stuff to just get a sense of the lay of the land it's part of the equation here

and he was talking about tablet stuff because he said look Apple's behind an AI right he's like my judgment like you can look at all the other players you can't say that they're not behind. But he said, on tablets, everyone has given up. And I can just tell, I, you know, I can tell you from my experience using various Android-based e-reader tech in the last couple of years, Apple is so much further ahead. I know Google keeps trying. They keep trying.

Apple is so far ahead on tablets. And that folding phone that unfolds into basically a tablet, it's going to be, it's going to be huge. I know it's going to be expensive It's not going to sell in volume But it's going to be really, really good And one of the reasons why is that We talk about Apple investing 10 years In something like the Vision Pro

And hoping for a product at the end of it Well, Apple's invested 15 years in the iPad And although the iPad's got issues, lots of issues Wow, is it going to pay off with this thing, I think This phone's going to rip Like, it's going to sell so many That it's going to be a big success. I'm not puzzled.

I know people are like, I don't know about this. I'm not puzzled. I know it's going to cost of fortune. Not a lot of people are going to buy that first model, but the idea that you got an iPhone, and then you open it up and you got an iPad, and it's one device, and then you close it up and put it back in your pocket as your phone, man, that's, there is, I can see the use cases for that, right? I can see them. It's not for everybody. I know that people are going to be, some people are going to be so offended by it. It's like, how dare they sell this product? But like, I'm just

telling you that you pay a premium, but what you get is a thing that is both an iPhone and an iPad at the same time. That's pretty awesome. Real-time follow-up, because I was going here, because I know that Mark German had said something in the article about, like, he expects it to be super popular, which we agree with. He updated it to say that it will feature four cameras, one on the front, one on the inside, and two on the back. Okay, so the math, the math is slightly different. So two on the back. So it is down from a pro, which is kind of, I'm not surprised by that, but still two, two cameras on the back. So not completely compromise. down to one.

Great. And then in 2027, iPhone 20. Double X. I'm just going to read Mark's description of this device here. This design will finally break from the squared-off slab we've lived with since 2020. But I found that funny. It's like, it's not, these phones are not bad, and it's not like, it's okay. Like, they're good.

And it says, a move to an approach of curved glass edges all around. It should fit nicely with the new liquid glass interface for iOS, and other operating systems should be released next month. I think he's trying a little too hard with the liquid glass. I think too many people are leaning on this, and I just don't think that there is a connection. I think if there was, we would have gotten this next year, not this year. I think liquid glass is inspired by Apple's by the iPhone and the sheet of glass on it. And I do agree the ideal iPhone is always going to be a thing that's essentially just the glass. I think that that's what the iPhone 10 was intended to be.

I could argue, I know that what Mark's saying here about the squared off slab, it's that Braun style, razor kind of style thing, like the iPhone 5 design and the current iPhones have that design. I really like that design. But I can also see Apple has vacillated, you know, they go back and forth between that and the kind of super curvy smooth design, which is another way to go. It sounds like the iPhone 20. That's what they're going to lean into.

And I think, you know, great. Apple needs to push design forward. That was great about the iPhone 10, is that it pushed the iPhone forward. People who moan about the iPhone being boring, you can't redesign the entire phone every year, especially because the tech doesn't come along fast enough. But Apple is clearly over the next,

and this is Mark's hook in the story, Apple is clearly pushing the iPhone for the next three years in a bunch of ways technically. And the 2020 phone, like, or the iPhone 20, the double X, uh, it's going to be interesting, right, and different and they're going to try a bunch of stuff.

And it's going to probably lead to changes all the way across the product line, but they'll probably like start with the iPhone 20. And it will be kind of a wild idea. I love it. I mean, the idea that it would be more curvy and, and maybe like wrap around glassy and maybe this is when the, the dynamic island.

notch stuff disappears, and it feels like it's just a slab of glass and there's not even a phone there anymore, whatever. Like, I love it because I think that Johnny and I've always thought, and I think Apple still feels this way, that like the ideal, you always want to move toward a design ideal. You never get there, but you're always trying to move toward it. And I think one of the things that Apple has tried to move toward with the iPhone is simplification. You know, it should be all scream. That's like one of the things that they've tried. And they keep getting closer and closer. They can never quite reach it. But I think that that's what they're, what he's talking about here. And like, great, I don't, I can't really envision exactly what this looks like, but I love that

they're trying it because, because they do. They need to, they need to continue to push. And also they benefit because when you make a phone that looks different from your other phones, people buy it. That is a lesson they learned a long time ago. Here's what I wonder. We will have this conversation a lot of times over the next couple of years. Will there be an iPhone 19 that year and the 20 is separate like with the 10 maybe and like it and it's similar to the 10 of like oh this phone is uh maybe a bit sooner than we would want to make this phone you know what like more expensive it's really expensive and you'll have to wait a year or two to get it in the other phones i mean i i was just since i wrote that macro column a couple weeks ago i just keep thinking of

this this lesson that we all need to learn which is you think oh how many iPhones can apple make how many different iPhones can they have in their product line? And my answer is it's the iPhone. They can make as many as they think will sell. If they think that there's a model for, or there's a, there's a room for a 19 and a 19 air

and a 19 fold and a 19 Pro and a 19 Pro Max and a and a 20, they'll do it. Like, I mean, in fact, if you split to three and three, when you're used to doing four phones in the fall, guess what? You could do four phones in the fall and three

in the spring just as easily. And I don't think that they would keep an iPhone 20 for sale, you know, forever. I think that in the next year, it would be like the iPhone 10, right? The next year, it would start to kind of seep into the rest of the product line over time. But, like, if they felt like the thing that made the most sense is to sell a super expensive 20 alongside the 19 line, or put it out in the spring, right? We already did 19 and now we got 20, whatever. Like, if they think they can do it,

they totally can do it because it's the iPhone. The iPhone can withstand a lot because it is so popular. I mean, if why not just have loads of iPhones, like, why don't just have loads of iPhones? If they can cope with it and they think people will buy them, why not just have loads of them? Like, I agree. And I know people will say there's some confusion there,

But I would also say my argument about this is Apple and the iPhone have been out so long and they are so popular that they have reached an enormous audience of people who won an iPhone.

Who's left? Who's left? And the answer there is people who don't want to spend the money and people who, for whatever reason, have just not, you know, what Apple makes is not something they're interested in.

And maybe most of those people are never going to buy an iPhone. But, you know, if you're trying to grow the iPhone, you need to reach those people. And then simultaneously, if you're trying to grow iPhone revenue, you want to convert people who are giving you, you know, who are buying a $1,000 phone,

you want to convert them maybe to buying a $1,500 phone that's premium. And if you get some percentage of those people, because remember, what we think of as the iPhone Pro, that's the iPhone 10 slot. iPhones didn't use to cost $1,000. The iPhone 16, 17, those iPhones are what we used to think of as the iPhone. And then with the 10, they created a higher price point, more profitable product that was on the cutting edge. Could they do that again?

Again, we don't even see unit sales anymore. All we see is revenue. So Apple's goal is, yes, to reach people who haven't bought an iPhone and give them a reason to, get people to buy iPhones more often, and spend more money on the iPhone. These are their goals. So if they could make an Apple of all brands, if they could make a super cool cutting edge phone that doesn't look like anything else out there that's got the Apple seal of quality on. it and it costs an extra $500, there are a lot of people who will buy it. And the rest of them will buy those other iPhones, and that's fine too. Apple wins. If they want to grow iPhone revenue, which they do, they have to explore the scale, which you say, right? Go cheaper and more

expensive. Do all of it. And Apple's more conservative about this than Samsung, right? Samsung doesn't care. Samsung have like a hundred phones. They spray out phones. They have a whole line called the A series, which is just like a phone literally every price point. These are the ones that are not in their events. We say they have two events for their phones every year. It does not include multiple phone models they release every single year. And Apple, there are lots of price points and things that Apple's not going to do. But I'm not saying Apple is going to become Samsung. What I'm saying is Samsung shows you have the ability, if you've got a successful product and the Samsung Galaxy line absolutely is. I mean, I think there's an

argument that the only two companies making huge profits on smartphones right now, maybe outside of China are Apple and Samsung, right? They've got that. But Samsung sells a lot of phones that aren't particularly premium and profitable and they make money off of those phones too. So Apple could be like Samsung, more like Samsung in the sense of exploring other price points. And I think that they're more careful about doing that. But I think that this is a great example where, look, If Apple has a great idea for a phone that is going to cost $1,500 or $2,000, they have two choices. They could not make it because, like, let's just wait for the tech to come down in price so that we can get it down to that $1,000 price point. Or they could make it and charge more for it and just say, here it is if you want it.

It's cost so much because it's on the cutting edge, but it's super awesome. That's the right decision, I think, if it's good. and they can make it and it's up to their standards, then nobody's stopping you from buying the $1,000 phone or the $700 phone, but for some people, that $2,000, $1,500, whatever it is phone, that's super awesome. If it can be made at enough of a scale,

Apple should make it and see. And if they find out nobody wants it, then they've learned a lesson. But I'm telling you, at this point, the size of the iPhone market is so huge. And Apple, I mean, this is the story we started telling with the iPhone 10. Apple continues to experiment.

about how much they can charge people for an iPhone before people won't buy an iPhone. And they have not yet found the top of the scale. That's the bottom line. I just went to Samsung's website and I've gone to their phones section and I've narrowed it by

phones that you can order, right? Because maybe they have some stuff on there that you can just go look at. And their results are 29 phone models. These aren't colors. This is just distinct models of phone that they will sell you on their website right now.

You can go and buy one of 29 phones. So. Apple's probably half that because they sell you some old models. Apple's probably like nine or ten. But there's room in the scale. There's room. And, you know, if we know anything about Tim Cook's Apple, they're going to be

I think, ruthless at exploiting you know, ways to increase their revenue. And this is a great way to do it. Again, again, if you can make a product that's expensive but cutting edge and cool, I think people, and it's an iPhone. I think people will buy it,

and they don't all have to buy it. You can just scoop the top, you know, 10 or 15% off of the pro or pro max and put them up at the super high end. And that will happen with the folding phone, but the iPhone 20 could be a similar kind of scenario. That's fine. They're happy to do that.

Philippe Pespezito at Mac Wilde has discovered it another, yet another interesting tidbit from internal developer code. There's a lot of this coming out over the last, few weeks. A lot of chip stuff. We didn't really cover too much of it, but like a lot of like chips that we know are going to appear in devices, but finding code for that happening. But this time, referencing that touch ID may be coming to the Apple Watch. We are in a touch ID renaissance here, Jason. It's coming back in a big way. This is an exploration for a 2026 Apple Watch is currently in prototyping. It could be either on the side button or under the

screen. This would be Apple's first under the screen touch ID if they do do that. This potentially suggests a bigger redesign for the Apple Watch coming next year, as well as a processor bump, which MacWild has also identified. So the series 9, 10, and 11 watches, they've all had the same processor and they're under the same family. Like Apple kind of groups them together in code. The 26 watch appears to kick off a new family identifier for the Apple Watch, suggesting bigger change. big changes coming for the Apple Watch next year next year 2026 next year I still don't understand why touch ID is on the Apple Watch

no I can't like what because the pin which you don't need to put the pin in if you've got an unlocked phone you know and once it's on your wrist they've got some biometric there so once you unlock it so I guess I mean I guess it would save you if you can just touch the side of it and it auto unlocks but it seems like I don't know it doesn't seem super necessary to me My thought is you could do it if maybe you were going to have new features, right?

That the watch could, if it had a stronger biometric, maybe it could do other things. I don't know what they would be, right? But like, maybe that would work for you. Like imagine, like, I don't know, you could use it instead of optic ID on the Vision Pro or something. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up there. I mean, it's already like, I don't have to authenticate, unlike with my Apple, with my iPhone, I don't have to authenticate with my Apple Watch to use Apple Pay.

Because the fact that I've unlocked and it stayed on my wrist means I'm authenticated biometrically. It's so great, right? Because I don't have to do any work. As long as I've got the watch authenticated on my wrist, it just works. So I don't understand this. But yeah, they must feel like it's solving a problem or enabling something. Oh, they just don't do it. Right?

It's the thing they're trying, but who knows if they actually have. Or, yeah, or they might have found that it's not worth it. But interesting, interesting to see. Mark Goeman is reporting that Apple and Google are talking about using Google Gemini to power the new LLM series. So, according to Mark, Apple approached Google to ask them to build a custom model that could serve as the foundation of the new series set to ship next year, which, quick side note. If we're still expecting this thing ships next year, and we're not a little bit late for this. conversation? Like, doesn't that feel a little bit late? Like, by the way, could you build us the model that the whole system will run on? Like, maybe. Doesn't this have to come first?

Like, I feel like I'm losing the plot a little bit. Not necessarily, right? Because they could be building all the hooks for this. And then, I mean, like, look what they did with Xcode. Like, Xcode literally can use any LLM. Any LLM. And they've got some custom, you know, a custom deal with Anthropics. So it's possible that Apple's got. like whatever their spec is and their standard for app intents and things like that. And it's also possible that Google and Apple are exploring a broader relationship involving AI search and stuff like that, right? We know that that's probably going on because there's this question of what's going to happen to standard Google search. Are there other partnerships?

I'm sure they talk. Yeah. And I think it's not unreasonable that even Google came and said, why don't you let us do this? We will be better than what you've got at this. And Apple. Again, they're doing, so according to Mark, there are two different versions of Next Gen Siri that have cute code names, but it's basically like homegrown or franchised. And the homegrown is Apple models. And then they've got this other one that plugs into external models. And I think maybe as a part of the bakeoff, a part of the comparison between these two versions, I wonder if the people working on the external model were like, we should get another model in here and not you know we've got the anthropic models here but let's let's let's try some other

models um you're right it does feel late on one scale but again if the infrastructure is the same and the question is just what model powers it if google can say you know we could train up a model uh that uses your stuff and runs on private cloud compute uh a version for of gemini uh and we could we can train that up for you and we want to be your partner let them try right like Because I don't think Apple, they're doing the bake-off. I think all of us kind of agree that Apple's probably not going to be able to be the best option. And they need to try to work to be an acceptable default option. But one, they could kick that can down the road a little bit.

And two, they could make it the default and say, but we also have a couple great other options. You could choose to use Gemini. and we work with Google to make a private version of Gemini that runs on private cloud compute. That's another thing you could do. So I don't know. What I like about this is Apple is being really wide open to the idea of what's the best way to approach this. And this shows a very strong lack of the not invented here syndrome where they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to do this ourselves. So as a reminder, Apple had reportedly had similar conversations with both

Open AI and Anthropic. Anthropic seemed to be the preferred partner. According to Mark German, Apple is still several weeks away from making a decision as to whether to continue using internal models or move to a partner. And apparently Anthropic asked for too much money, which led to Apple extending this search again.

So that's why they seem to have gone to Google is that Anthropic were like, I think knowing their place of like, you need us really, maybe more than we need. you in this scenario. Something that I thought was interesting to consider is Google has already made deals with Samsung to do this. So Gemini powers Samsung's AI function.

And I think it really would be in Google's best interest to try and do a deal with Apple for Gemini to power Siri because I think that would allow Google to take a pretty huge leap in Mindshare for AI. Because I think Gemini is forgotten about a lot. I think people think of Google's AI as the Google search preview thing, the AI overview, which is generally quite bad. I was thinking about this recently. My assumption is because that has to load really quickly,

like the model is not very good because for you to want to read that, it has to be basically as fast as a Google search. That was just the thought that I had because that is not a good system. That gets stuff wrong way more than any other AI model that I have used. Any chatbot that I have used has a much better success rate. And it would also suggest why does Google have also an AI mode if AI overview exists? So my expectation is that AI overview is a very small model because it has to operate quickly. So I think for Google to be able to say we power AI,

on Samsung phones and the iPhone is a pretty big move, right? If they got the opportunity to promote that, that feels like a big deal, right? And Apple running it on its servers allows it to say also it's, you know, by default, this is private, which is also really interesting. But the same as the way the open AI thing works would be my expectation. Also, well, I mean, open AI doesn't run on private cloud compute. I mean, that runs on open AI.

My expectation would be that you could opt in with a login to have it just go to Google. Go full Gemini, right? But that is, and I think that's part of the question here, the cost of data centers is interesting too. If they're using Apple's data centers, that reduce a cost for Google, right? Google's not paying per query of the stuff that runs through private cloud compute. And I do wonder if in the long run what Apple's going to do here is instead of it being like Siri as a widget, it's going to be Siri is a feature that can use different data sources like the open AI stuff is now where you could say you know Siri it can be used you can use this with Gemini if you log in with your Google

account it'll use the full power of Google's cloud infrastructure and if you and that would be a way for them to go is to say look if you've got an account if you're paying Anthropic or Open AI or Google this will all just go we've worked with them and this will all go through their servers. But if not, we've got a private version of Gemini, and we've got Apple's model or whatever, and you can run that. I think that what Apple's primary goal here is they want something that they can give away to their users, right? That's good. That does not require you to log in. And that's what they've got with OpenAI already with ChatGPT. But I think it's interesting. I think you're right. I think Gemini sometimes gets lost because it's just Google,

not an exciting AI company, but it's just Google. And that's not really fair, but I think I think that's just sort of how it is. And you know what? The search relationship is currently in danger, I would say. But it's a great example where even though Google is an Apple are competitors when it comes to Android versus iOS, they are also partners in lots of stuff. Yeah. And Google writes them a big check every year. And they work together when it makes sense.

And like, I wonder what regulators and courtsmen. might say about Apple and Google joining forces so that the default AI model used on all phones is Googles. But that's not, that doesn't have to be their concern right now, especially when this is a kind of a desperate time for Apple. I saw a great post on blue sky from Casey Newton, who said, if a judge forces Google to stop paying Apple $20 billion a year for default search placement, but Google then powers next generation search anyway, except this time Apple pays Google, then Sundar will be having a very good year because let's be real

like don't get it twisted in this scenario Apple is paying Google no well unless Apple is funding its AI use through the credits that it's getting for well sure yeah yeah yeah yeah right

like what if it ends up being well Google's not paying Apple money anymore Google's just giving them several billion dollars in AI credit every year well thanks great Yeah. I mean, they can do that. Yes, I get the point. But as in like, Google, Google's not saying we're going to keep giving you more money for this.

Like, this does not replace that if it goes away. And this doesn't get Google what it wants, right? It doesn't actually solve the, we want all that traffic from your web browser to, right? Like, there is a thing that Google wants, Google's not paying Apple for fun. Google's paying Apple for value. And if that, if that relationship has to change, that's not, necessarily great for Google, even if they get this other relationship. But yeah, anyway, they're frenemies. I think there's an argument to be made that, yeah, they're competitors, but they've also carved up the entire smartphone world. So, you know, good to be them.

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Did the lasers get the birds? Oh, they did. That's so sad. That's so sad. The lasers got the birds. No, the birds are flying by. The lasers are there. The birds are not being targeted.

I don't know. It kind of sounded like one of the birds got hit by a laser. Jason, can I tell you a gross story? Can I tell you a gross story? Oh, yes. If you don't want to hear a gross story, I don't know, skip forward 30 seconds or whatever. Okay. There's a park near my studio where there's often a lot of pigeons.

And on maybe five or six occasions now, I've seen a seagull eating a pigeon. Okay. Yeah. Bird world is harsh. Seagulls are like, I just didn't think that happened. I didn't think that birds ate birds. Oh, so at the UC Berkeley, the tall tower in the middle of campus is the Campanile. And they have webcams up there because Peregrine Falcons nest up there, the cow falcons. And what you learn when you start to learn about Paragrin Falcons is what do they eat?

What do they bring back for their babies in the nest? other birds is the answer because they're super fast so they're like flying high and then they dive down and they grab a bird and they tear it apart and take it back up

and feed it to their baby and just two things I find fascinating about this one is it's usually happening and there's other pigeons around and I'm like what is wrong with you leave? Why are you here?

No they've never been safer they've never been safer. The other thing is this is a quite well-trafficked park because it got like a footpath that goes through it and I always love to see how people react when they see this

because some people find it funny some people are horrified it's always fun to see it happens a lot when I was talking through this park a couple of weeks ago I looked up to a building and I saw a seagull sitting

on top of the building I'm like that's where it waits for the pigeons to appear sorry if we spoke about that question this about longer than your 30 seconds skip. Real Rorschach test there rough anyway first question

in Summer Ask Upgrade Summer Fun comes from Ben Burm from Ben who says, if you could make one device waterproof, what would you choose? I'm going to start off with an iPad Mini. I would love to make an iPad

Mini fully waterproof. Yeah. And this would be helpful for the bath, like bath time, as well as pool time. Yeah. Jambo Harve's got a great suggestion of AirPods. That would also be a good one. Sure. that is a good one I mean it is

it's something that you would get splashed or put in the bath or put at the pool yep AirPods is a good one they've made so many of them waterproof now though

AirPods would be really difficult I don't know if you've ever like if you've ever had wet hands and paused your AirPods and accidentally touched the wrong part and then it just all the sound goes really weird yeah yeah

yeah for sure I guess I was I was thinking if you had the Kindle but they did that didn't they yeah they're all they're all pretty much waterproof now. I'm going to say, I'm going to go with a weird choice here,

which is I'm going to say the iPhone. Because while the iPhone has these water resistance ratings, if you put your iPhone in a pool and it gets past the seals and it kills your phone, you have to pay for it. Because it's not covered by Apple. Apple says it's water resistant, but if it breaks,

this is the lesson that Serenity Caldwell learned like a decade ago when she jumped in a swimming pool with her iPhone and it died. She's like, but it says it's water resistant. And Apple's like, well, yeah, but we're not replacing for water damage. So what I would say is, I'd love an iPhone that Apple guarantees is not going to get water damaged. No standby at least, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I want it to be that good. I want it to be that good that I can. Because the difference there is then if I've got, I'm going in the swimming pool and my iPhone's in my pocket, I don't think about it. I just go in the swimming pool. Or if you want to take your iPhone and the shower to listen to a podcast, you don't even need to consider.

You don't need to think about where you put it. You just bring it in. Right. I mean, getting water splashed on it is not the same as submerging it. And I have brought my iPhone into the shower before. When I'm on vacation, I always do it. But you don't have to worry about it. And being completely submerged.

That's what I'd like. I'd like Apple to do that. I don't think they ever will, but that's what I would choose. I listen to so much of the rest of this. in the shower in L.A. I just listen to so much. Yeah. When I'm on vacation, I shower multiple times a day.

It's like a little treat I give myself for some reason. Okay. And especially if it's a nice shower. Yeah, I listened to a lot about the assassination of JFK in a shower in Los Angeles. Yeah. That's great. Good times.

That's great. I try when I've got room to bring a Bluetooth speaker. That's my shower speaker with me now because that's really a nice. But sometimes I forget or there's, no room and then I have to try to find a place to put it where the speakers will like fire off the side of the shower back to me to like magnify it a little bit. Yep. Yep. Yeah, get the bouncing going on. Yeah. Get like a little soap dish or off a window or something like that. That can help. Zoe says in a discord, I can't understand wanting to listen to stuff while in the

shower. That's thought time for me. Zoe, that's why. Yeah. Get the thoughts out. I don't want to be with my thoughts. I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. My podcasters, then my thoughts. I want podcasters. Yes. That's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm looking for. If I, if I need, look, if I am struggling with, like, writing an article or something and I'm taking a shower, I will sometimes shower in silence and allow the thoughts to creep in. Yeah. Like, if I'm, if I'm working on a particular hard problem, I will do that. Like, I will take a shower and, and, and it's like, or take a walk. Swimming is really the best for me. But I can't always do that. It's like not necessarily available all the time.

Right. But this is, but, and I think this is a good point, is that, is that there are times when you want that and times when you don't, I will say as a person who listens to podcasts, who doesn't have a commute, also some of it is I need that time. Like, I need that time to catch up on my podcasts because I've got, you know, doing the dishes, walking the dog and taking showers are like the only times I can listen to podcasts. most of the time. And so I try to get it in there, but yes, it is all, it can be good thinking time. But, you know, sometimes I'm traveling, especially. I'm in a weird hotel. I'm like, I got to get up now. I got a bunch of stuff. I got to see a bunch of people. All of that. It is a real comfort to have the familiar voices of my favorite podcast in the shower instead of it just being me alone with my thoughts on, you know, maybe jet lagged, maybe stressed out about travel. It's a real nice treat to have that, especially that shower speaker with me. Or if you need to be distracted from the horrors of the Seagulls. It's good to have your favorite podcast. Yeah, that's good addition to the list.

Yep. Darren wants to know, what is your best end of summer ritual to close the season outright? Hmm. Well, for me, it's the iPhone draft. Sure. That's the end of summer. It's the iPhone draft. That is, in a way.

So, I mean, the weird thing about being in the Bay Area is that our best weather is in September and October. I'm not kidding. It is our best weather. It is our warm, beautiful, false summer that actually comes at the end of summer. I love it. And so, I guess for me, I try to, you know, we try to make some stuff like the grilled stuff, steak or something like that. I used the pellet grill this weekend on a tri-tip. I smoked a tritip.

It was beautiful. Tasted great. I like to do some of that. And especially if it's a warm evening, because the evening's cool off really fast here, to do that and have dinner outside. So really my goal between now and when my son goes back to college in mid-September is to have a really nice night where we can have a really nice meal, maybe with some corn, you know, maybe just a really nice meal, summary sitting outside at our table that's on the patio because mostly we don't eat out there. I think we've only eaten out there a couple of times this summer. But like if it's a really warm night and the house is. hot like it's nice to go out there and and be uh eaten outside so that that's a ritual i would

say that i that i try to do the worst end of summer ritual is when i take the hammock down uh take the cushions off of the furniture and it's the you know keep everything out of the rain because the summer has come to an end because in california it doesn't rain in the summertime so when the rain gets in the forecast i got to pull all the stuff out because the rain is coming i do have a kind of like a beginning of autumn ritual, which is when I go back to wearing my robe at home. Oh. That's one that I enjoy very much. That's nice. There is, I have, I don't enjoy it as much, but I do have that ritual where I have to plug in the heater out here. Yeah. Yep. And set up the automations and stuff. So that, because it's too cold to come in here and work

in the morning, which will come in November, probably October. Like I said, it's pretty reasonable. And our house has a lot of carryover. So if it's a nice day, the next morning, it'll be pretty nice out here in the garage. But there comes a time when it doesn't get that warm during the day, and then it's cold overnight, and it's really cold out here. So on those days, I'm going to, then I have that moment where I'm like, oh, I got to turn on the heater now. And that's a time, you know, that's up the passing of time. It just happens. Sad. Lee asks, how do you feel about phone cases these days? You just use one in the summer? Do you not use one at all? I'm generally a caseless person.

Yeah. I don't drop my phone that often. I'm willing to take the risks. You know, if I drop it and I get some cracks, then I'll put a case on it for the rest of the time until I get a new phone, probably. And if it shatters, I'll get a new phone. But I generally, that doesn't really happen to me. And so I don't like the, you know, I prefer, I prefer not to. But I mean, I've got a case around if I want to put my phone in it.

it, but I prefer not to. I love having no case on my iPhone. And also, iPhones are so strong now. Like, I drop my iPhone relatively frequently. Like, our downstairs area is essentially just concrete. My phone survives. Like, it really is incredible how strong the glasses now, like, the work that they have done over the last 10 years or whatever to strengthen these things.

I drop my phone often enough in ways that would have absolutely obliterated older iPhones and it's absolutely fine so but I also just much prefer the iPhone without a case on it and so I like it and I do get begrudgingly get AppleCare now because I just figure

I have a higher chance of a phone breaking with a young child around like kick it throwing it out of my hand and like knocking it away which she has done that kind of stuff or whatever if I need to be sending a message or something so I do have it begrudgingly

and Jacob asks Jason, were you in Australia this weekend? I swear I saw you walking into a grocery store. I called out Jason but got no response. If not, when you next visit, what parts of Australia interest you as a holiday maker? This is one of the most unhinged Ask Upgrade questions we've ever received.

I love how it just transitions into just another question. Yeah. And it's from Australia, which means that this is a special summer-ask upgrade from the winter of fun. Yeah, yeah. We've got a couple of questions. because I asked on social media for questions to call that

the summer of fun. Got a few people wanting us to do summer of fun questions. Summer of fun episodes in the winter for the for the Southern Hemisphere. Shout out to Southern Hemisphere who have to endure our summer of fun. So just to be clear, I've never been in Australia. Right. Closest I've been is New Zealand. I have been to New Zealand.

I have not been to Australia. They probably don't like you saying that, right? I know. No, there's a real rivalry between the. two countries. Did you know that the Australian Constitution, when it was formed in like 1902 or whenever, included New Zealand as one of the states of Australia? I didn't know that. How do you think people from New Zealand feel about that, Jason? Well, they voted and they said, no, thank you. And so New Zealand is its own country. But it actually was in the incorporation of Australia as a

country. They were like, yeah, and also New Zealand. And New Zealand's like, nope, nope, no, no, pass. Anyway, I would love to go to Australia. I think the plan is to go in 2028, because there's going to be an eclipse in 2028 that will go across Australia and New Zealand, total eclipse, and that might be a fun opportunity to go to Australia. That's in July, I think, so in the winter in Australia, which might be fine. That might actually be not a bad time to go to Australia, although we went to New Zealand in high summer in New Zealand, which was good because they were having a cold snap and it was actually quite cold, even though it was summertime.

time. But that's New Zealand for you. When I next visit will be the first time, what parts would I be interested in? Well, this is the challenge with Australia is it's a whole continent. It's a big country. And it's like saying, well, you're going to go to the United States for the first time where are you going to go? And it's like, it's such a huge place. How do you even start with that? New York and Los Angeles. I'm going to go. Yeah. We'll get to New York. And then how long is it to drive to Los Angeles? oh buddy surely it's not that long

it's one country yeah so um that makes it intimidating I would imagine we would have to spend I mean we spent

two weeks in New Zealand and New Zealand is relatively tiny so I don't know where we would go I would I Sydney seems obvious um

Adelaide is apparently nice Melbourne is very nice apparently I've heard great things about Perth but it's all the way on the other side of the continent so there's some challenges in getting there

my understanding is Perth is a lot like San Francisco actually in terms of climate and other things and there's a guy I know who lives in Brisbane or just north or as he calls it Brisbane and that's the warm part that's the Gold Coast that's like where the beaches and stuff are and that actually sounds kind of cool too so I don't know I don't know

but I would love to go and 2028 is my target for for Australia I would also love to go to Australia we were maybe going to go a couple of years ago but we just couldn't get it together it was very disappointing But I would like to go It's a long way to go It's a long way to go It's a long way to go

I said this before My friend my friend Simon His wife Julie They live in North London And she's from New Zealand And they go back to see her family It's so far I think there is now a direct

From London to Australia It's like 165 hours But it is the longest route In commercial aviation When Simon and Julie And their daughter go I wouldn't want to do that in once. So what they do, Mike, is they go, they, sometimes they come to America. Whoa.

And then they, and then they go to New Zealand. So they get some days in San Francisco or something. And then they go to New Zealand from there. And sometimes they go to Singapore. Yeah. And then they spend a day in Singapore at a hotel that's got a pool. And they just hang out in the warm Singapore weather and play in the pool with their daughter. And then the next day they fly the rest of the way. And I thought, on one level, level that's costing you time on another level. Oh, that's such a long flight. And maybe it's, and they've really enjoyed the Singapore, the old Singapore stopover. So yeah, real, real far for you to get to Australia. But I hope you make it someday. I guess we should say there was a time when they were flying like podcasters around the world to do things or conferences and all of that. I miss that time. And I feel like that area. Yeah, there are a bunch of people we know who've been to New Zealand because they went to Webstock and they never I think never went outside the hotel basically which is shameful but yeah if there's some amazing people who want us to do upgrade live from Australia I guess

get in touch but probably we'll visit individually uh and the eclipse might be my time for that the Australians come on get us out yeah get us out there I want to um when in Sydney I want to time it if I can for a performance of the dragon friends assuming that that podcast is still performing monthly in Sydney. I would love to see that live. That would be a blast. But regardless, I'm looking forward to going to Australia. It's always been a dream. We knocked New Zealand off first, but your time is going to come, Australia, I promise. This episode is brought to you by Hallow Fresh. You may have heard of Hello Fresh. They send Chef crafted recipes and fresh ingredients to your home. But this summer, they've made their biggest menu upgrade yet. This isn't the

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the cob and more. I love HelloFresh. One of the reasons I love HelloFresh is because they taught me to cook. It's all so simple. Their instructions are so awesome and they give you just what you need. So it takes a lot of guesswork and maybe the uncertainty away from cooking and they make it so you can just learn. I mean, there are so many skills that I picked up from using HelloFresh. I will also speak as a parent of a new child, having to not think about the meal planning so much and having to not think about what items do I need from the grocery store and being able to produce something that tastes good and great and is fresh, it's amazing. The best way to cook just got better, go to hellofresh.com slash upgrade 10 FM now to get 10 free meals

and a free item for life. One per box of an active subscription, free meals applied as a discount on the first box, news subscribers only, varies by plan. That's hallowfresh.com slash upgrade 10 FM to get 10 free meals and a free item for life. There's all the links and information is in the show notes. Our thanks to HelloFresh for their support of this show and relay. Hello. Neil asks, you arrive at the airport for a weekend break

and realize you don't have your AirPods with you. You're facing a flight and two days without your favorite podcasts. Do you, A, buy a new pair of AirPods at the airport, B, buy a cheaper pair of Bluetooth headphones, or C, resolve to read more instead and learn for the next time? Hmm, what do you think? I would buy them at the airport. I think I would buy them at the airport. and resolve to read more instead.

I read, but I read with music playing in my ears and noise cancellation turned on. My rationale is that I've got family members. Jamie washed her AirPods, and I think she's still not bought new ones. And so what I would think is I can use these and then I can hand them down or hand my existing ones down.

So that's probably what I would do. Yeah, that's probably. I've got places, could put them. I would just give them to my wife. This is the thing about Mo, she has just three pairs of AirPods that she uses. Okay. I don't remember how we got to two, but I know that we got to three because I ordered some AirPods Pro, yeah, the original AirPods Pro, and they ended up, I got them with an engraving on them, and they ended up getting lost in the mail, and I then got a replacement pair, and then the original pair arrived. So that made the third pair. So I would just give her so she has a fourth pair. That's what I would do.

But yeah, I... Luxurious. I couldn't live without AirPods now. Like if I want them, you know, like if I'm somewhere where I'm going to use them, I need them. Yes. It is incredibly important to me.

It's like if I forgot my iPhone, right? I would have to buy a new iPhone. I recently, last week, took my mom back. She was visiting us, took my mom back to Phoenix, and she doesn't want to fly by herself, which there's a lot. If you're not a frequent flyer, it's overwhelming, all the stuff you need to know and do. So when I picked her up, I went down there, and she lives very far outside of Phoenix,

and so people drove me down. We have people that can take you, so you don't have to rent a car or anything. And then she and I came back the next day to the airport. But going back, the lady who drives us said, I can just get. at the airport and I said great great suggestion so so I spent last Thursday um flying to and from Phoenix I literally dropped my mom off said goodbye went back through security and then stood at the and went right back home it's amazing what a weird day but I had this like what do I need to bring with me and the answer was I need an e-reader I need a pair I need AirPods and I actually

brought my iPad, figuring I could do a little bit of work, maybe. It turns out I did very little work. I used it briefly. In hindsight, I could have just brought the e-reader and the AirPods, and I would have been fine. But yeah, so AirPods, they are important. Andrew has three vacation questions for us. Great. Let's do it. This is for both of us. What was your favorite summer vacation as a kid? We didn't take a regular summer vacation as a kid. I love, we went a couple of years to Lera the Bear, which is the UC Berkeley family camp that's up in Pinecrest, which is actually not that far from our house. So it wasn't that much of a change of pace. But it's up in the national forest up in the mountains. It's actually near where the ski resort is in the winter. And I enjoyed that. I was really little. And then my parents obviously didn't love it because they didn't go back after we did, I think, two years. And it's too bad because I actually did love it. And it's a great place for kids. We took out, we did that then with our kids for about four. years and it was nice and the kids loved it and I'm a little bit sorry that it just sort of like ended up not working out and we stopped going the big problem was we didn't know any of the people

there I think it would really be different if you could go with a couple other families you knew and we got to know the people there a bit but it's not the same as going with your friends they were like your lair friends um anyway I did enjoy that as a kid and I learned what they taught me how to swim while I was there so I've got a fond memory of that but we didn't do like a traditional Look, we lived in California. It was hot and nice, and we had a swimming pool, and so it was fine. So I don't have any, like, memorable, regular vacations. I did a couple of times go visit my grandmother in Pennsylvania.

Once for myself for a week before my mom flew out. And that was fun. They had tennis courts at our apartment complex. So, like, I learned to play tennis. And to this day, there is a plant that grows in a, other parts of the country that does not grow in California. And I don't know what plant it is, but I will go somewhere and I will smell that plant and I am taken back to my grandmother's apartment in in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,

and Dublin, Pennsylvania, because that's the smell of visiting my grandma at her apartment in Pennsylvania. So that's what I got. What do you have? We also didn't really take, like, traditional vacations or we didn't take one every year. but we used to do when I was when I was much younger

we used to do like somewhat regular maybe every couple of year kind of like British seaside town kind of things we did a lot of like it's weird really

like caravan holidays where you didn't bring the caravan like you went to like a place and everybody stayed in these really large trailer caravan kind of thing but they were all just stationary

and you just hired one and there was just like rows and rows and rows of these things I like those trips because they were just very slow that it wasn't really much happening they would be like

you go play bingo or go to like the we call them the amusements but it was like an arcade right and then there would be like restaurant and a bar and there would be entertainment

every night and they were just very fam they're just like traditional family holiday kind of stuff I want to do those I'm going to do similar things with Sophia

I think that would be lovely we have a thing in the UK called Center Parks which is a bit kind of like outdoorsy and adventurey and I want to do stuff like that with her okay

now there's a question for you which was what was the best place you took your kids on a summer vacation I have two answers here one is we did a bunch of cruises for Macworld

back in the day when my kids were little that's that you know that's the thing of like you're saying about people taking you to, you know, asking us to go to, I don't know, New Zealand or whatever, you used to do the Macworld cruises. So, you know, you got something. And that wasn't time off. That wasn't vacation

time. So I was, I mean, I, no, but I'm saying I was, I was working on the ship, but I didn't, like, I would go for a week and not take the time off. So I still had vacation time to spend on top of it, which is what a scam that was. That was great. But it was real work. Anyway, we, and my cruise was paid for, but my family's cruise was not. So we did pay for that too. Anyway, well, I mean, it was we got the discount rate, but it wasn't

nothing. We went to the Baltic for a cruise, and that was, that's the cruise I recommend to people who have not taken a cruise. It's the only cruise I would do again, really, I think, in the world, is that one. But that was amazing because it was Copenhagen, Helsinki,

Stockholm, St. Petersburg. and then North Coast of Germany and also Gotland out in the middle of the Baltic, the little Swedish island that's out there. And it was spectacular. And it was like a little sample. We'd never been to that part of the world before. So it was a little sampler of all these amazing things around the Baltic Sea. And it's high summer.

We celebrated the 4th of July as the cruise ship left St. Petersburg, Russia. We had little American flags. They had a little 4th of July thing on the ship as we were sailing out of St. Petersburg and to be in Russia. on the 4th of July was amazing. We have a picture of us with the little American flags in Russia on a boat. And the kids,

Julian was just a baby, but Jamie had a fun time and that was awesome. It was truly a beautiful time of year. Oh, and the sun never, the sun went down, but like, it's that super north latitude thing where the sun like,

you're like, oh, the sun's about to set. And then you realize the sun's mostly going sideways. And it takes like hours and the sunset lasts forever. And it really is just big. Under the Horizon at 2 a.m. or whatever, and then it comes just amazing. The weather was perfect. Never got rained on. It was clear. Just never going to be replicated and a great place with us and our kids. And then secondarily, I will say, we used to have a every year camp grandma and grandpa where Lauren's parents would take our children for a week. And we left them there. And we went and had no children for a week, which was a nice vacation for all because although it leads to a very weird thing where we'll be the whole family will be somewhere and I'll say oh I've always wanted to go somewhere and my kids will be like we went there like how did you go there if I haven't been there and the answer is grandma and grandpa took us there and they're like when did you go to legoland when did you go to the wild animal park when did you go to mansinar and they're like oh yeah death valley we did that grandma and grandpa it's like oh grandma and grandpa again so uh They loved that, and I loved that they got that experience with their grandparents that they will always remember spending a lot of quality time with their grandparents in a way that, like I said, I had my, you know, couple childhood visits to my grandmother in her apartment in Pennsylvania, but that was about it.

So it's great that they got to experience that. And Andrew asks me, Mike, where do you hope to someday take your kid for a summer vacation? Disneyland, baby. Yeah, baby. The real one. I mean, we're going to take it to Disneyland Paris, probably quite a few times over our life because it's. It's just a train journey. But I mean, the real deal.

The real deal. Yeah. I don't want to hear. Casey's going to tell you all about Orlando. And I want to go to Disney World one day. But I want to go to Disneyland more because that's what I like. You know, like I don't know if I'm going to like Disney World. I don't know.

I don't know. You have a love of things in L.A., so that helps. I sure do. Stee asks, are there any particular songs, albums, or artists that scream summer to you? Go ahead, Mike, do it. The beach boys, baby. Let's go. That's the number one.

Number one pick. That's the novel one pick. Do you have any? I don't really, no. Fair enough. And Lee asks, Mike, what is your favorite non-smart watch? I'm going to use this as an opportunity to shout out a British brand that I like called FARA, F-A-R-E-R. They have watches kind of across a price spectrum.

It starts high, obviously, because that is what nice watches cost. this is a smaller brand, a British brand. I particularly love, I have two of their watches, a quartz watch, which is like one of the G-N-2 quartz that I don't actually make that model anymore, and I love there. It's a mechanical world timer called the Roche, or Roche, R-O-C-H-E. I love this watch. I wore this watch during the Relay 10 Live Show because I wanted to wear something that was British, and it is a watch that can let me see what the time.

is anywhere in the world. Well, not anywhere, just the places that it's listed. But you get most of the major time zones ticked off. It's got like a little hand. There's got a little wheel that moves on the inside, which is the hour on a 24-hour clock, and then you can work out the rest of the minutes. I just also think it's a beautiful watch,

and it has really great loom, which is like the glow in the dark. They also show that on the website, so you can see what it looks like in the dark. And I wear it with a Milanese band, and it's just such a, a good watch. I love it so much. I also wear

today I'm wearing a Timex, which is a very different price bracket. Watches are awesome, and I'm happy to be wearing in case you haven't been listening to Connected recently. I'm off the Apple Watch for a bit. And I'm back to mechanical watches again. And I'm really enjoying myself.

I love it. If you would like to ask us a question from a future episode of the show, or you'd like to send us any feedback or follow-up, go to Upgradefeedback.com. Thank you to our members to support us for Upgradeplus. Go to Get Upgradeplus.com and you can sign up for longer ad-free versions of the show each and every week.

You can find us on YouTube by searching for the Upgrade podcast. I would like to thank our sponsors. That is Hallow Fresh, ExpressVPN, Zbiotics and FitBod for their support of this episode. We'll be back next week, maybe with a draft. So if Apple announced that there's going to be an event, next week's episode will probably be the draft because we're expecting that the... The Apple event will probably be on September 9th, which means, if that's the case, based on the past, they would send out invites this week. And so if that's the case, if you see it, they know that there will be a draft on Monday for you.

And if that's the case, that means the summer of fun is over. You know, that's all we can do for you. That's what happens. We don't know. Unfortunately, the summer of fun ends unexpectedly sometimes. With the draft, yes, the marching band burst through. and ends the summer of fun. That's how that works.

And you'll know next week. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. Until next time, say goodbye just as though. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.