Upgrade - 587: My TestFlight Has a TestFlight

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

from relay this is upgrade episode 587 brought to you this time by interconnected fitbot and hello fresh i am your usual voice on this podcast although not right at this point jason snell and that means all you sleuths out there you figured it out i'm not being joined by mike hurley instead i've switched relay co-founders. I switched on, in fact. And Stephen Hackett is here. Hello. Hi, Stephen. Welcome back. Hello. Thanks for filling in for my. Mike is on assignment. His assignment was to take the week off. Yep. Yep. Yeah, he's been working hard. I took last Friday off. That was the thing that I don't do enough where, where, where, but I worked like, I worked the previous week with Apple stuff and then over the weekend with Apple embargo and then into the week with Apple stuff. And then I got to like Tuesday and Wednesday, and I was thinking I'm kind of messed up. And so I just, I spent Friday in my pajamas, basically. It's just nice. It's, it's great. I should be better at it. Yeah. It is, I should be better at

it, too. And Mike is just the king here. I mean, you did do the sabbatical, which is really good, really smart. Yeah. But Mike is, Mike's just taking a week. And I think it's a good thing. But I did take a day. And that was, it gave me a little three-day weekend, because I realized that I had worked, whatever you know what was that 11 straight days not 10 straight days something like that and it's too much too much too much so we're here and we're doing upgrade together we had time for all that but now it's time for Snell talk this question comes from Paul who says does Jason fall asleep with AirPods in first before I answer Stephen do you have what do you do you ever fall asleep listening to audio do you do you do any

of that, or are you just sort of one of the silent, the silent zippers? The silent sickos. I will sometimes fall asleep with white noise, actually technically brown noise, which I like more than white noise. White noise is too harsh. I will sometimes fall asleep with brown noise, particularly if my wife is traveling or, you know, we're not going to bed at the same time. She doesn't like it.

And I can totally go to sleep without it, but never with AirPods in. Never. So that would be like, it's on my phone, you know, with a timer, and my phone is on my nightstand because my phone lives next to my bed at night, unlike yours. And so, I mean, your phone doesn't live next to your bedside. It definitely doesn't live next to my own side. No, it lives near no bedsides anywhere in the world. It's in my kitchen instead.

But yeah, never, never with AirPods. I mean, you know, I'm like everybody. sometimes I'll watch something in bed, like an episode of something, but then the AirPods go away, phone goes away, and I'm set. But what about you? I wanted somebody to roll in and say, well, I just fall asleep with a Vision Pro. Like, what? What? No, I, so I always was, for a long, long time anyway, when I was a teenager and all that. I was a fall asleep to music person. And that didn't work in, college when I had a roommate, but when I didn't have a roommate, I would go back to kind of fall in asleep with music. Lauren is a fall asleep silent person, and therefore, we've been together for, you know, more than 30 years now. So fall asleep silent is my, is, is my thing. When I am traveling, I will sometimes, you know, my mind is racing and I'm not at home and I have those things where I'm like, do I want to, you know, I should go to bed, but I'm going to keep staying up

and all that stuff. I will finally do, I have tried recently to listen to, you know, I should go to bed, to the rest is history with the timer on and overcast and what I find really funny is that the act of turning on a podcast and closing my eyes I set a 15 minute timer

I have to back up almost 15 whole minutes to find a thing that I remember them saying because I think I'm out. I think it takes time to drift but I think I begin to drift and I'm not really remembering

what's going on almost immediately. So it's almost like the act of giving in and putting on the podcast. Does that for me? Now, Paul wrote in because there is a new setting in AirPods that is as simple as pause media when you go to sleep, when you fall asleep. I don't even know how they're doing that.

Sensors? I guess it's sensors, right? It's always sensors. Some sort of sensors that are happening. And they're like this. They've machine learning some sensors. and it has as they do as Apple does and it has led to we pretty much know when you're asleep

I have not turned this feature on in part because I'm concerned that I will be using my AirPods and Apple will judgmentally claim that I'm sleeping when I'm not and I'll be like you jerks it's a little like our kids I don't know if you ever had this

we have when we redid part of our kids bathroom the contractor put in a lightsway that turns itself off. It's with a motion sensor because it was the code.

And our kids would be taken baths. And when they were older and they didn't have to be monitored to drown or anything, they were just taking baths or taking showers or whatever. They would, we would hear Yelps from the bathroom

and it's because they had been too still and the light had turned off. And then they began wildly shaking their hands and stuff like that. It was like not very helpful. Anyway, that's what I worry about with this AirPods feature is that I'm going to be judged

as being, you might as well be, asleep right now. It's like, but I am not asleep. But also, falling asleep with AirPods, my problem is I'm mostly a side sleeper and that, that's just jamming the air pod right into my brain. I don't like that. Same.

Not good for sleeping. No. Or your ears, probably. A brain jam of an air pod is a bad idea. So I'm sure people out there will, uh, will use this feature, uh, but, but, uh, I don't. But anyway, I, yeah, so that was my revelation is that when I'm really wound up at a hotel room or when I'm visiting my mom. or whatever and I really ought to be getting to sleep

and my mind is kind of racing. The answer is put on a podcast. Rest history is nice soothing into English voices and it knocks me right to heck out so I like that. Maybe they can update the iPhone so it pauses media when it hears me snoring.

Could be. It's a listen up Apple. That's your next innovation. And if it detects sleep apnea, then it fires the podcast back up. You know, make sure you're okay. I mean, no, it makes like a horn sound, right? It's like, oh, you're having trouble breathing. Browl, braw, braw, up.

That's not how you cure instant leap apnea. All right. Let's move on to follow up. We have, follow up. Thank you. Reference acknowledged. This is follow up. John Prosser, old front page tech John Prosser, pride of whatever that town is in northern Pennsylvania.

when we last left this story he had been defaulted by the court for not responding to Apple's lawsuit against him for leaking what turned out to be liquid glass to the internet well in advance of its launch his alleged co-conspirator Michael Ramakati had apparently retained a lawyer and been given a little bit of extra time

John Prosser, here's the update. John Prosser said something publicly, which, I mean, mistake one, right? Probably, yeah. Don't do that. And what he said, he said to the verge, all I can tell you is that regardless of what is being reported and regardless of what the court documents say, I have in fact been in active communications with Apple since the beginning stages of this case. The notion that I'm ignoring the case is incorrect. That's all I'm able to say. Well, I got some thoughts about this.

One is, well, he's definitely not ignoring the case. If Apple sues you, you are paying attention, I think. Yeah, definitely. I'd be concerned about him on another level if he was ignoring the case entirely. I don't know about you, Stephen, but I ran a ground on the phrase regardless of what the court documents say. Yep. Because that's the document that matters, right? Nothing else mattered except what the court says.

I'm going to believe my statement to the verge with these lying court documents. Yeah. I mean, about my lawsuit. Yeah. Clearly, this is a complicated situation. And I really liked what you and Mike said about it. As this news broke, like, I would be a disaster emotionally and physically if I were. Didn't you say that if Apple sued you, you'd probably just disappear from the internet forever and ever to be found?

Yeah, just like, he's gone. He's gone. He's gone. He's gone. He's gone. Stephen who? Yeah, clearly it's complicated. Something is going on here.

I hope for his sake that he's taking care of things the way that he needs to. I hope he's getting good advice. That's my concern is that he, my concern is that he thinks he's doing okay. And he thinks he's doing the right things. And that statement to the verge suggests that. And yet the court documents suggest, and Apple statements in the court documents suggest that that's not happening. And that's what really concerns me.

I'm not a big fan of the guy. but like he needs to be getting good advice about how to handle this because the risk here is that there's a default judgment against him and the court basically says okay you you're now legally enjoying to ever ever write about any unreleased Apple things ever again which doesn't destroy his YouTube channel but it definitely destroys the aspect of his YouTube channel that got him all of the attention yeah yeah this feels like uh you you probably have heard of this we both have sort of corporate backgrounds, a career-limiting move. Career-limited, yeah, oh, yeah.

Which stinks, right? The whole thing is bad, no matter what way you look at it. But yeah, I hope he's getting good advice. I hope he's taking that advice. And, yeah, but yeah, I had the same sort of reaction to this. But the court, like, the court document is the, that's the top-level bit here, right? That's the thing that matters. Yeah, regardless of what court documents say really concerns me.

I mean, it just, I'm worried about that. that that's not a good thing to hear anyway that's the latest on the john prosser situation i have some iPhone air follow-up okay i i'm still using my iPhone pro that i bought but i do have the review unit of the iPhone air and i picked it up the other day and i was like oh right right it's great i mean yeah i i even though i didn't end up doing it full full time or even even part-time like some Um, I, uh, I still like it a lot. Um, the, the, um, there's a Mac rumor story says that, um, it's a iPhone air production will be cut due to lower sales. We've heard different versions of this story before. Um, this is from a Japanese investment banking and securities firm via a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a

website called the elect so it's kind of like gone through multiple steps but it it aligns with some other reports that apple may be reducing the the orders now the thing about order changing and they they increase the orders of um the iPhone 17 pro and like but it's about the thing you got to do is it's about expectations right because when they're adjusting the orders they placed their orders based on a guess about how they would do and now they're adjusting months ago months and months ago and it's very easy i mean the iphone air is kind of a weird controversial phone everybody wants to rush in to judgment it's filling a slot that two other products have basically been discontinued so everybody's ready to say that it's uh it's a it's a loser um and maybe

it is who knows maybe it is i think um there was a there's a discourse a little while ago um maybe last week it seems so long ago now where somebody was saying that um the important point is when we talk about the iPhone Air as a stepping stone to a folding iPhone, that Apple doesn't release products as stepping stones. And it's absolutely true. And I wanted to make that point here that Apple did the iPhone Air thinking that that was a good product that people would want. And I think it's a really good product. I don't know if people want it or not, but I think it's really good. I do think it was also a technical challenge that gets them to flex some muscles that lead them where they want to go. But Apple's been doing that with products for a long time. A product gets released because it's a product,

not because it's a test case, even if it is also a test case. I can think of one product that maybe goes against that theory, but, yeah, I mean, they could have built this phone internally and said, you know what, we don't think it's compelling on its own,

but we built it. We now understand how to do something this thin. Let's put this on the shelf as knowledge when we go to the folding phone. Especially for an iPhone, I guess it's a sliding scale from Vision Pro where it doesn't matter all the way up to the eye.

iPhone where it super matters. Yes. But in this case, I think if they did the iPhone error and they couldn't get it thin enough to differentiate it or they couldn't get the battery life good enough or whatever, if there was some aspect of it that was not great, they wouldn't have released it, right? I mean, they just wouldn't have, they were releasing it because they think that it's got appeal and I think it does have appeal. It may not be broadly appealing.

I mean, this takes us to the next part of this follow-up, which is Chance Miller at 9-5 Mac did a report based on something from the South China Morning Post that the iPhone Air sold out within minutes of its launch in China because remember it launched in China late because of getting all of the carriers onto ESIM, the ESM train, and that there was also like availability. You might have to go into your carrier store in order to get the ESIM and a whole, which is antithetical to the concept of ESIMs,

but getting any, I don't know about China, but I will say any wireless carrier that has to support literally anything new, there's going to be trouble. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But regardless, according to this report, the iPhone Air sold out immediately. Now, again, how many did they have?

What were the expectations? What does this mean? Does this mean there's enormous demand for the iPhone Air in China or just that the people who wanted them got them, but that demand is super soft. After that, we are going to have to wait to find out. But I will say that the conventional wisdom, right, is that the market that reacts most to different looking iPhones. is China, that they really like the idea of like, this is a really different physical iPhone and

that that drives sales. And this story, at least, falls into that narrative, which is that maybe the iPhone Air is going to do way better in China than you expect. Yeah, that's a huge thing. I mean, we have seen this over time, right? When their iPhone has a new design, there are reports like this, that it's doing really well in China and other Asian markets. This is important to other markets besides just China, but it does seem to be a really big deal there. And sometimes a color is enough, right? You know, they cycle like the gold in and out of the line over time. But this phone is so fundamentally different looking, even not in a case, it looks different, because it has the plateau and it has the one camera. If you know your iPhones, you know what

this is immediately. And I think that that's really interesting in all. all markets, but especially China. And so I'm not surprised that it's doing well out of the gate. It's just we're going to have to see, like you said, how this goes over time. And there was something interesting. Our friend Dan Moran was on the talk show. And I was listening to their iPhone air chapter this morning. And there was a conversation there about the design of the air and like if it's good or bad, like is the battery life enough? Is the camera enough? And in some for some people, that doesn't matter as much as how it looks or feels. And that's, that's really interesting. But the other thing they mentioned was the price being $9.99 here in the

U.S. That's basically the middle of the iPhone price range. I mean, we all talked about this before it came out. Like, is it going to be above the pro price wise? Well, they slotted it right where the plus phone used to be. And that means because Apple doesn't break out sales numbers, the iPhone airs and get lost in the mix of things like average selling price. So we're not, I don't think it's going to be super easy to tell from Apple's, you know, Q1, Q2 results of how this thing is doing. No. But, so we're going to have to rely on stuff like this, I think, which is a little frustrating, but it's kind of how it is. I think the chance that we will hear on Thursday, which is when Apple's doing its results and its results call, or three months from Thursday when they do it again,

that's our best chance if they want to if they want to say something here where maybe an analyst maybe they offer or maybe an analyst asks how is it how is it going if this isn't true they're going to push back against it potentially right like oh the iPhone air is the as the leading phone in this market or that market or the iPhone air is doing great right and they may be vague if i had to predict in late i'd say that in late january in that uh the holiday quarter release, they will boast either in their statement or as a result of a question, they will say, all the iPhones were among the top six selling phones in urban China and the iPhone Air was actually the number two or number three selling phone in urban China. And that will be the way they kind of like poke back is like actually if it's doing well, that's the way I think that they'll most likely do it because they're so limited on how they disclose this. They just don't want to talk about it, right?

They don't talk about units. They only talk about revenue and they don't break it out by product except when it serves them. And they do sometimes say, boy, we set a record in this region and we set a record in this and the iPhones are the top selling in these regions. And they don't talk about the ones where they're underperforming, but they do talk about the ones. If it's performing well, they will tell us because they will want us to know.

Yep. you have any other any new you know new or different thoughts about the air having you know while we're on the subject i mean like i meant like i said i just really picked it up the other day and um and uh held it for a minute was like oh yeah this is pretty good and then i put it back down and i i gazed at my orange phone and i was like i love you buddy i love you big orange phone but uh what are you thinking about the air with a little bit in the review for you yeah i'm I'm the same way. Like, I adore it.

And I think it's a way better product than some people give it credit for. But for me, mostly because I've got kids doing school stuff, right? Like the range on the camera is what's pushed me into the pro. And, you know, the battery life is not a concern for me because I work at home, just like you do, right? And you can get the battery case or charge it in the car. I guess that was not a big deal because I dailyed it for. almost two weeks and it was the battery life was fine for me it's really the camera range that's the issue but yeah every time i pick it up because i ended up keeping it um uh every time i pick it up

for something it's like man i really like this i know and i like it a lot i think i think i will switch back to it at some point during my loan period just to live with it again some more the reason i the reason i really love that apple gives um reviewers extended loan periods with these things Stuff like this. I mean, I use it for benchmarking. Having an old phone around to benchmark it is always really useful. I try to do that. If there's a new benchmark I want, it's really nice to have a previous wave of phones around so I can run it on those two. All that's true to. But also in certain circumstances, it just allows me to think about and talk about these models with a little more understanding of them. I actually, I think the next thing I'm going to do is go to the 17 for a while because I want to. to write, again, we're so long past the release, but the 17's going to be out there. I want to write an appreciation of what they did to the 17, because I don't think I've fully written that yet about like how many features they brought down. So I kind of want to live with that. And I think after that I may live with the air for a little while for just to, again, get a

little more of that experience before I go back to my Orange Pro. But, and, and I don't know about you, but I have never, I like the small phones. And I've never really. like the pro max or anything like that but there is a a moment where I realized that I really liked the fact that the air had a larger screen I was like oh no they did it to me but I but I really did I really like that it that it was a larger screen and I didn't like how how wide I have to hold it in my hand but the screen I missed when I gave it back and I guess that's uh I even I can succumb to big screen fandom yeah I don't know I I was a pro max or, you know, plus user back in the day for years.

At some point, the pro max tipped over the edge of too big for me. Yeah. Like the 70 pro max is definitely too big for me. But the air size-wise is about perfect, in my opinion. I had no complaints with the air screen size. In fact, when I switched to the pro, I was like, oh, I think we talked about this offline. It's like, oh, this screen feels a little small, which is wild. It's weird.

it's weird to have that that exact same reaction which is like, wait a second, I miss my iPhone air screen it was bigger. It's a great phone. It was kind of nice.

Yeah. Okay, one more bit of follow up before we move on because believe it or not, we're still in follow up. This is just how I, I guess I run the show.

Mike can complain later. Mike enjoys listening to upgrade when he's not on it. I think it's funny. Hope you'll take some time out of his assignment this time. We have a C1X modem update and this comes from a listener

from listener Chris. who said, we just went to a music festival this weekend with my new iPhone air. So I guess this is a perfect segue. And in the highly congested airwaves, the C1X fell apart. I messages failed to send.

SMS went to the void. Calls failed all with full bars. The rest of my group was still SMSing and calling with older iPhones, but I was able to use my camera at midnight since the battery was still full. So positive thing. The cell modem didn't work until the next morning

after two restarts. Now, you and I are sports people who will often go to sporting events. And I have never encountered a more aggressively terrible cellular environment than being at a sold-out football stadium. Yep. It gets real bad, folks. It gets real bad.

And this is the vibe I get from listener Chris here, which is you have a lot of people on the music festival, the cell coverage. And he says, full bars. And this is how they get you. Is full bars means, can you see a signal from the tower? And the answer to that can be yes, but like if you think about it, if the tower is full of data transfer and is at maximum, it doesn't matter if you could see the signal. You've got to get through there.

And so my just troubleshooting vibe here suggests that I don't know if this is true of the C1X in general or not, but in Chris's particular position, it sounds to me like the C1X had either struggled in a high saturation of the C1S. cell tower environment or didn't do as intelligent a job as some of the older iPhones in dropping down to a different band and you know trying to find what if what if i go down to forgy right like what happens what if i go to lTE is there some is that sort of where apple is still struggling a little versus qualcomm not in the clear air as it were but in in really struggling uh tough environments maybe apple stuff shows it's newness. I don't know. This is just one data point, but I thought it was really interesting, because it maybe suggests, despite all the kind of flying colors that the C1X is being

reviewed with, that this is a case where maybe the C1X just fell apart. As Chris didn't say, he used another phrase that I took out, but we'll just say, fell apart. Yeah. The other thing that was interesting about this feedback is that the battery was still full and they could keep using their camera. Because we've all experienced that in those, those low connectivity, situations. The phone gets real hot. Because it's ramping those radios up, but it's trying to reach out. And so maybe the C1X also handles that differently, or maybe that's an iPhone air difference.

Because I'm here to say battery, so I'm not going to do that. I can see how Apple would optimize for that. It's like, look, it's not working. We're going to go into hibernation mode here and not try and not queue up for the limited data. And maybe the Qualcomm modems just blare out and they're like, no, I'll give it to me. right and maybe that makes it different i mean and what's the right thing to do there is is the right to give because i'll tell i'll tell chris i don't well by the way calling is not the same right calling is using a totally different path uh that i believe even on 5g calling is using a different

path in terms of data that they that they they prioritize phone calls differently than data transfers i think they did that did change in 5g at least optionally but anyway my my guess is that the rest of your group was not having a great experience they were having a Well, I sent that SMS and it went through eventually. SMS may also be a different path, right? That's not an I message. But his SMS failed and his calls failed. So I don't know what's going on there.

My guess is that the rest of the group was not having a fantastic time, but that Chris's phone just was like, nope, forget it. You're at a music festival. Maybe it's just out for Chris's best interest. Pay attention to the music. Stop texting people. That could be really bad too, because if you're out at a music festival

and you're trying to find your friends and stuff to not have. Sure. That's happened to me, and it might have happened to you, too. You know, you're trying to text somebody about where you are in the stadium or whatever, and it's like, nope. Yep. Not going to happen.

Not happening. I mean, it's, it is a challenge in so many areas. And, you know, some stadiums have millimeter wave. Mine does not. I don't know if that changes any of the, any of the calculation here. But, yeah, no phone is going to be perfect everywhere. It's an interesting data pool. Right?

But... Because the behavior was different with the C1AX. I think that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you, Chris, for that. And that was, yeah, that was some good follow up there. I think we did some good follow-up.

We were following up. Even though you weren't on the show before, you still followed it. I appreciate that. I'm a listener. So, you know, just... Yeah, you're following along at home. And now you're following on the show. That's how it works.

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and All of Relay. Rumor roundup time, Stephen. Woo! A saddle up, partner. Okay. All right. That was a good... I can channel more Southern Energy. Hang on.

All right this. Saddle up, y'all. All right. Pretty good? Yeah. That was better than what kind of a, ooh, God, you did was. That was good. It's a learned skill.

Do you do it? Do you shout it out loud when you're listening to the podcast at home? I don't. I do often make the laser sounds, though. Oh, okay. Well, we'll get ready. We'll get ready. Okay.

Rumors, first off, there's a story. I feel like this has been out there for a while now. ever since we found out that Apple's got like a vice president in charge of ads it's been coming so Mark Herman reporting that they're going to

investigate finally putting finally putting ads in Apple Maps like they're in Google Maps the idea to let brick and mortar locations pay for promotion in search results I don't I don't love it

because I think that it junks things up because I understand it right I understand paid promotion but the fact is that it takes something that's supposed to be I think ideally um non-judgmental and and objective and makes the user dig either tries to trick them or makes the user dig through lots of things that are unpleasant and on top of that it also makes legitimate um businesses feel the pressure to hand money to a platform owner or their competitors will snipe all of their business from them.

So, which is like App Store ads are like that. So I don't know. I don't, I understand it, but I hate it. That makes any sense. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with how they implement this. Like, you mentioned the app store. Sure, sure.

It could be levels of bad from, you know, it's an ad, whatever, to, yeah um i don't know like why why am i seeing the big one is like why am i seeing a restaurant that's nowhere near here sure and then the all the restaurants that are near here and the answer is the restaurant that's 10 miles away paid to be there yeah i mean if you look at the app store the ads they can be intrusive and there's there's places where i dislike them more than other places but i get it but you do end up doing the thing you mentioned where you are bidding for your name, you're bidding against your competitors

who are also bidding on your name potentially. Yeah. And it's a, the whole thing is a way for Apple to make more services money. But I think in general, from the user experience, not the developer experience, I think it's mostly fine. But then you look something like Apple News, which is just filled with garbage. And it

is unclear to me how much of that is Apple versus the individual publishers. I just don't know that the breakdown there. But I hope that it's much closer to the App Store end of the user experience in terms of how they look and where they show up. But also, like, this is a thing that makes Apple Maps more pleasant for people than Google Maps, right? And that's a distinguishing factor that they're going to get rid of if they do this. But, you know, as someone who pays for

Apple One, pay for a lot of extra ICloud space, like, it would be great if that subscription came with, you know, no ads in these other places. That's a nice idea. Not that I, I don't want to take money out of the pocket of journalistic work, right? If your newspaper is running, has ads in Apple News and you get a cut of that, that's great. But I don't, I don't, it's a different thing than paid placement in something like Maps or the App Store, but I don't know if that ever be a thing they do. There is a real cognitive dissonance about the idea that we spend so much money on Apple products and we're in their environment and then there's this additional monetization that's happening that it feels frustrating like well wait a second on one level it's

I bought I spent all this money and now you're trying to upsell me or they're trying to reduce the quality of your experience when I'm paying for you for your product to have a better quality experience also I think part of it is there's nowhere else to go right there's nowhere to run if Apple in some cases is the last place you can go that doesn't have ever i mean in in the app store it's already gone but like apple maps uh it's got partner content and stuff but it's not the same as as just straight up ads uh apple tv tv not plus is the same way right now although again there's a VP of ads and everybody else has got an ad tier so the more they raise the price of apple tv the more there's room below it

for an ad tier to to come in so i don't i don't know i don't i don't like it i understand it also i think there's a perception like don't you have don't you have enough money and i know that the answer is they never have enough money and they want to keep increasing services revenue but to me services revenue should mean we give you things you know and you pay us for them sure not also we fill the stuff we give you with ads and make extra money on that it feels misaligned with what their product promise is in a way that bugs me. And look, if they do this, I'm still going to use Apple Maps and I'll do what everybody does. I'll do what we all do on Amazon, which is learn to recognize the sponsored mark

and learn to look at the products, at least a savvy shopper, learns to look at the products that are not at the top of your search results on Amazon because those are ads and there might be a better result below it. But even then, it's, you know, Amazon makes it really hard because they intersperse ads among content and it gets really complicated. So I just, I, I get why they would do this, but it feels unnecessary and misaligned with what their brand is supposed to represent in my mind anyway. Yeah, same. Totally agree.

I mean, it's different if it's a, if it's a freebie, you know, a cheap freebie phone or something and, and it's not, like being in the Apple ecosystem is expensive. And I agree with you, like, at the very least, if you're somebody with an active ICloud plus account or an Apple one subscriber. There should be a signifier of like, you're already getting more of my money. Have this be one of the things that I don't

need to see. And let the person I mean, I know this is unfair, but like if there's somebody who buys a relatively cheap iPhone and then keeps it for eight years and doesn't spend any other money on Apple services, if Apple's like, yeah, I kind of want to show them ads, I get it. Right? I get it. I get it.

But maybe there's a different way to do it. I don't, in general, yeah. This is why I don't work at Apple, I guess, or any of these companies is that I look at this and I go, that's gross. And they have a VP of that gross thing. VP of gross. That's, I think it's technically his title. Yeah. Okay. So Mark German also reports. It was a light Mark German week this week, which is fine. There's a lot else going on and he can't, you and I've talked a lot about the relentlessness of like he cannot generate 52 scoops a year people. Like he can't. He's, really good at his job but that newsletter is like feed me with more scoops it's like he doesn't have the scoops so so i feel for him yeah no scoops jerry no scoops his big moment this week was the m6 ipad pill probably have a vapor chamber yeah yeah i saw this it makes so much sense i mean it's really incredible how far apple silicon has gotten without any sort of cooling system beyond just heat dissipation to the chassis, right? And clearly the iPhone 17 Pro reached some sort of breaking

point with that, where me that phone got hot pretty easily. And you know what? The iPhone Pro just doesn't. It really is... Yeah, it doesn't at all. Yeah. So my sort of example case for this was using CarPlay in my truck. The phone is plugged in. It's doing CarPlay. And I don't mount my phone up near an air event, right? I have a little... It goes in a little store. thing kind of down low. I can't see the screen when I'm driving, which is what I want. I don't want it up high in a new event.

Right. But nine times out of 10, especially in the summer, it wouldn't charge. It would give up on charging to keep car play running. And I have not encountered that with the 17 Pro whatsoever.

And so bringing it to something like the iPad, I think obviously makes a ton of sense. Now, the thing that I instantly thought was, boy, the iPad Pro is really thin. And does this mean that, you know, they have a second generation vapor chamber ready to go? Is the one in the iPhone 17 Pro, is able to fit into the iPad Pro as is? I don't know.

But I'm not surprised by this at all. And I don't think it is any sort of damnation of what they're doing with Apple Silicon. I think really, I think the opposite. It's amazing they've made it this far without having to do something like this. Yeah, I mean, vapor chamber is kind of a heat spreader, right? when you think about it, it's just kind of like a very fancy cool heat spreader. You're trying to take the heat and get it to go across a large area and radiate

instead of it being just the single pinpoint kind of area of heat. And so, like on an iPad, I mean, I guess what I would say is if the chips are more efficient, you don't necessarily need as much battery, which gives you a, and if The iPad Pro is all screen and battery almost. It gives you a little bit more space to spread out with a vapor chamber. And you take a little from the battery, but it's okay because the M6 is so much more efficient. And the battery life is so good at this point. And I think they've made these tradeoffs, right, which is how powerful can we make it,

how energy efficient can we make it? And at some point, we can do that, but then it gets too hot. So then we need to manage the heat. And like, we see them doing that. And you're right. But the difference between the 16 and 17 on the iPhone line is absolutely Apple saying, okay, we kind of pushed it too far. We need to manage this heat a little bit better.

And so they put in the vapor chamber. So I guess that's the idea here. Maybe it's just something about the power of the M6 chip. And remember, this is an M chip. This is a Mac chip. And you stick it in the iPad Pro, which is this super, super thin handheld in a lot of cases thing. And like dealing with that heat is an issue. So maybe they look at the M6 and they're like,

it's going to run pretty hot. We need to do a little more on the on the back of the iPad Pro or wherever this thing is. Or maybe it was setting like magic keyboards on fire. And they're like, okay, that's not going to work. And the Mac rumor's reporting of this, you know, mentions the MacBook Air. Like, could this be useful to a product like that? Right. And yeah, of course it could. Right. And the MacBook Air, I'm sure, is thick enough for it kind of as is. It wouldn't surprise me if we see this spread to other devices. Because it's silent, right? I mean, that's the thing.

If you got to run a fan, you got to run a fan. But if you can use this to sort of get that radiation of the heat out into the world as a first step or as the only step, rather than downclocking, then it's an advantage to do that. So I mean, maybe in the MacBook Air, if they want to, if they, it will make a warm spot. But I think that's one of their questions that they actually. think about is like what's worse to have a down clock a little bit or to have a warm spot on the case that's uncomfortable for somebody using it in their lap

and like because this would do that this is going to create a warmer spot but it's going to be spread out a little bit and maybe they're like no it's fine actually it just kind of it just gets slower when it's hot out. Yeah like the original MacBook Air. Indeed.

Hmm. You don't need that second core when the sun comes in your window? Nope. Meat Locker, it's the solution to everything. An account on a Korean social media platform. Oh, boy. You like my, that's my journalistic integrity there of attributing this report to exactly

where it came from. This is an Asia-based source from an account on the Korean platform neighbor saying, here's what the next three iPhone designs will be. And what's funny about this is most of this stuff is also stuff Mark German has reported. And I have a real question about whether this is corroboration of Mark's report, which it might well be, or whether this is like an echo where Mark's report ends up going back and then being translated into Korean and post on social media. And then I don't know. But take it for what it is. It's an interesting idea about where Apple is progressing with the iPhone because we felt, I think, all of us for a while that this year is the beginning of a cycle.

where Apple is going to be kind of like after the last few years of static, relatively static iPhone releases, really kind of trying a bunch of new stuff. So this report says, as Mark German did, foldable in 2026 that folds open. Sort of you get an iPhone that folds open into being like an iPad mini-ish. In 2027, again,

I think this report and Mark German have both said, the goal is to have a kind of hero. iPhone, it's kind of like an iPhone 10 style iPhone 20 maybe, that is quote unquote bezelless with a hidden face ID system. So the idea here is they really want to press it to the edges so that the whole phone feels like scream even more than it does now. That that requires sort of like things to wrap around the edges and stuff and that they're also as a part of this. And there's details in this report about like the coding or the other things in the display. and you're like, well, yeah, because that's where the leak came from, right?

It came to the people who care about the coding on the display, and that that's why they care about it. But the hidden face ID is interesting as a part of that, too, that the idea that they will finally make it so like all those face ID sensors will basically, I think they say something about like they use a coding or something to make it so that it is almost invisible. So I think even on some of those Android phones where it's hidden behind, like if the phone's off and you kind of look at it, you can sort of see that there's something down there. but that when the display is lit up, you can't see that it's there. And I think that sort of feature becomes very quickly like the notch or the dynamic island where your eyes just stop seeing it anyways, right?

Like even if it's there, you just get used to it, right? Like, I mean, we all said this when we reviewed the iPhone 10 100 years ago. It's like, yeah, it's weird the first four days, but then on day five, you just kind of stop thinking about it. And I think that will be the case with anything that ends up under screen or screens going over the edge. Like all of that becomes normal relatively quickly,

which is kind of funny, right? Like Apple does years of work and, you know, probably millions or billions of dollars worth of R&D and troubleshooting and all these things. And like four days in owning your phone, you're like, yeah, it's fine. You know, it's very funny to me sometimes thinking about it that way. This feels very much, and I know I said this about the iPhone 10, But I think that there's an argument that this has been the thing that Johnny Ive even would have said was always the goal for the iPhone, is that eventually what they wanted to be is just a screen that is there.

And that's it, period, right? Like there's no frame, there's no cutouts, there's no touch ID button, there's no speaker thingy, that it's like what you see is when you're using it is the screen and only the screen. it's entirely screened. That's like the platonic ideal. And we can argue about like at what cost, not just the cost of the expensive phone that it might be, but like what are you giving up to do some of that? But I kind of like, I mean, honestly, the reason I keep bringing up Johnny Ives' platonic ideal of an iPhone is I think you've got to have things to shoot for. And I think if you're Apple and you're thinking about your touchscreen phone, you're purely software-defined phone, that is the ultimate result, right? Like I think,

I think the thing you are always striving for is get all of those little bits and bobs just invisible or gone so that all you have is whatever the software defines as the interface, all the content, whatever it is. I see that as a thing to strive for. I also see that like, you know, a lot of people would just say, like you said, well, the bezel basically disappear. It's fine. And that's true. But I do think there's value in saying, you know, everybody benefits in the long run if we figure out how to hide face. ID, how to hide the front facing cameras, how to reduce the bezels, how, like everybody benefits, I think, from these technologies, even if the, you know, most people are not going to run out and spend a very large amount of money on a super amazing bezelist phone. Right. Yeah, the thing that's interesting to me most about this story is that it's three phones in three years and that feels very aggressive. And we'll see if that comes to pass. There's just like little part of my brain is like, These, you know, maybe not all three are actually real, right? Maybe some of them are in the development stages and may never see the light of day.

A March report from Mark Herman who's like, yeah, they kick that back a year. Right, yeah, yeah. This being over five years, right, makes tons of sense. I could see them wanting to do something special for 2027. Right. You know, Apple, we used to say Apple doesn't care about its past, but it does refer to its past more than ever in recent years. Usually in, like, fun ways, right?

Like the video when the Mac had its, I guess, 30th anniversary or... Right. There are things that they do, right, using the six-color stuff. And so I could see them wanting to do something 20th anniversary. You know, if it really falls its history, that phone will be a year late, just like the 20th anniversary Mac was. I was thinking, like the iPhone 10, that means. maybe, because if you do the math, that would be the iPhone 19 year, 2027.

But like, there's a couple things. They could release an iPhone 19 and the iPhone 20, just as they did with the iPhone 10, where there was a previous model that was kind of ignored. You could do that and make the leap and just say it. Also, it depends on sort of like when they release these things. There's that rumor that's out there that they're going to switch to two different, two different announcement times. So that could factor in here.

But, you know, I think you're right. It could be 2028 and it's still, you could still call the iPhone 20. And you don't have to say this is the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. You could just say this is the iPhone 20 and you could get away with it. But I think I like, I get what they're doing here, which is saying, okay, it's going to be the 20th anniversary. And we're going to be coming up to iPhone 20. And what do we want iPhone 20 to be?

Is it something that's a milestone? And so to say, well, it's going to be like the iPhone 10. It's going to push it. It's going to be more expensive. but it's going to be like the very best iteration of classic iPhone that we can possibly muster. And then also there are all the other models. I mean, that's the beauty of it, right, is that there aren't, there isn't one iPhone. There's like, what did I say, there are five new iPhones this year?

Because the 16E also came out this year. Like, it's a whole big product line and you can afford to make an iPhone error. And you could afford to do a super high-end Lux iPhone 20 because not everybody has to buy it. In fact, you know, some people will. and other people will buy a 19 pro or a 19 or whatever, and that's just fine. Like, you mentioned three. I haven't mentioned the third one yet.

This is the one where I'm not sure Mark Herman has actually reported this, but it's interesting, which is in 2028, the account on the Korean social media network says it will, Apple is planning a clamshell foldable. So this is the other way you can fold a phone, which is it starts little like a Star Trek communication. It's like, starts little with a screen that they say, oh, yeah, and they'll have widgets on the outside screen and all of that. Which is like, of course, of course.

Yeah. Anybody could extrapolate what would be on the outside screen, notification center, widgets. It's a lot. It's the lock screen. It's the always on lock screen is what it is. Right. And then you flip it open and there's a whole big iPhone inside. And you don't have to look any further than the Motorola Razor or the Samsung Galaxy flip to see how other companies.

Exactly. Are doing that. And there's a, I think there's a compelling. argument for this for this form factor as well like the the sort of open like a book into an iPad mini the benefits there are obvious right if you when you want a bigger screen to read or do email or watch video you have it but I think the you know the foldable kind of you know opens like the old flip phones is also compelling if you want something really small and you want something where you see like you said widgets or notifications without kind of getting sucked into your

phone. I think both are compelling. And I think Apple's right to explore both. You know, are they two years apart from each other? Who knows? But I think there are people who will gravitate to one, the people who gravitate to others. And because Apple is the only company that makes iPhones, options are good. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think I'm not interested in this phone so much, but I think I've heard from people who, based on our, our rumors, of the other kind of phone are like, oh, I was really hoping. I mean, my feeling is mostly like, I don't see the appeal of something that's this small and thick,

but I've heard from people who are like, but this would fit in my pocket better. And I'm like, okay, like, it's going to be thick, which I don't like in my pocket, but it would be small. And maybe that's, I mean, I love the idea of the little outside screen that tells you what's going on.

It's like the good use of the always on screen widgets and stuff technology to do something like that. that's kind of fun um but uh but we'll see we'll see that's the one that's so far off there that's the one where mark german might be like oh yeah that's not going to happen or it's not going to happen until 2029 or whatever but um it's fun to dream on new iPhones i have one last rumor for you okay uh i don't know how i don't know how rumory this is i mean we'll start with the fact like uh mark german reported this i noticed it on the unit that i got uh the m5 vision Pro is assembled in Vietnam.

A good example of Apple doing more work outside of China in terms of assembly. And the rumor is, and this comes from Mark German as well, that it's forthcoming home line, I think he's reported versions of this before, but this was a new restatement of it. Its forthcoming home line is also going to be assembled in Vietnam. So this is the security camera that slash doorby. Bill. It's unclear what that is, but he says they're working on that. It's that screen that's supposed to be out next year that is like either a home pod with a screen or a thing you can hang on your wall to do home control. And, Stephen, my favorite future Apple Home product that Mark German reports about the tabletop robot. That's right. Yeah. It's going to be made in Vietnam, that robot that is just a thing that sits on your counter and has an arm to pivot the display and is not a robot. yeah well you know we'll let other

podcasts decide if it's a robot if it's a robot if decided already it's not it's just a thing that sits on your like I think a thing like the Chrome Arm IMac G4 sure that sits on your table and that it actually can like move

the arm so the screen is facing you or like when you're cooking or whatever or when you get a call and it pivots to you so you can take your face time call I think that's great. I just don't think it's a robot. That's all. I think it's just a thing with a screen that moves. That's just a device. Probably not a robot. But anyway, assembled in Vietnam, apparently, this is all, that is Apple's home product hub now is factories in Vietnam. And it's, you know,

in the Made in China book and another reporting, assembled in Vietnam, I'm doing air quotes for those not watching, can mean different things. It can mean that the bulk of the core technology is still assembled in China and it's shipped to Vietnam for sort of final work. It could be that the whole thing is built there. And over time, surely it will be more of the latter, where they want to make more things completely outside of China. But that's a process, right? It took it took them decades to get where they were being 100% in China and it will take decades to to unwind that to a point that's more sustainable. But it's obviously it's a good step. And we've seen other things. I think some iPhones are assembled in Vietnam now.

And, you know, it's another step towards that future that they've, they've just got to make. I mean, all of their processors coming from TSM is risky in a lot of ways, geopolitically or whatever. But if you can't address that currently, you can address some of these other things. And I would imagine they're not assembling too many M5 Vision pros. And so, yeah, it seems like an obvious one to move. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by FitBod. When you want to change your fitness level, it can be hard to know where to start. That's why I'm happy to let you know, FitBod is an easy and affordable way to build a

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I love mini topics. It's a mini topic. Mike does these. It's like nobody else knows, but sometimes the topic is a mini topic. I went to Apple last Wednesday for a Vision Pro thing. They did a two-day Vision Pro event that was for, I mean, I guess you'd call them content creators and developers, but really what it was is people who want to make immersive

video for Vision Pro. That's what it was. It was a lot of filmmakers, some of whom are also developers who are building interactive apps like that D-Day Soldier, the camera soldier app that I reviewed on Six Colors a while ago, which is like a really great use of

documentary footage, and they built like virtual environments. They built like an environment where you're standing on the boat about to get into the water and run onto Omaha Beach on day, which was deeply impressive and affecting. And then other people who are just sort of like, they want to make immersive films. And so it was a multi-day thing where Apple was like, here's what we've learned, here's what

the format is, this Apple immersive video format. And it was really interesting. I also got to have hot chocolate inside the ring. Ooh. Got to walk past the rainbow. I've never been inside before. They've never let me in there before. So that was kind of fun.

I've been outside and I've been in the building, but I've never been inside the ring. And it's like, you know, it's just another world in there. Lots of trees. I remember Steve Jobs saying we're just going to plant a lot of trees. Boy, there are a lot of trees in there. So the overall, leaving aside like the technical details of it, I just wanted to say, I got a real vibe when I left there on Wednesday of where the

Vision Pro is now, that it was different than how I've been thinking about the Vision Pro. up to now. Because, you know, a lot of us have been really frustrated with it, like, you get this thing, and it's an amazing piece of technology, but then you put it on and you're like, yeah, but what do I do with it? And we got that first hint when the M5 was announced, right, where they said it renders 10% more pixels in your field of view, you know, in what you're looking at than the M2, which very, to be clear, the M2 wasn't powerful enough to render those pixels on those Sony displays. The Sony displays were not being used to their fullest. I suspect they're still not being used to their fullest. I suspect that 10% more pixels is not 100% of the pixels that could

be rendered for a pixel-by-pixel look on those displays. I think this is one of those cases where we're so used to assuming that the Apple Silicon just can't be the gating factor because it's such an impressive bit of almost futuristic technology. And in the Vision Pro, we got it wrong because it's those Sony displays that are the impressive bit of future technology. And the Apple Silicon, cutting edge Apple Silicon, still can't drive them. Yeah, which really says something as good as Apple Silicon is. Yeah, right? Now, the M2 also, right?

The M2 was, you know, what, four years ago? It was, it was old when the Vision Pro shipped. I think it says a little bit about the lead time on that, on that product. Yeah, it hung out, that hardware hung out for like a year before they actually announced it. Yeah. And the rendering, too, they increased the frame rate. And again, the display is not any different. They increase the frame rate from 100 to 120 megahertz or hertz.

Sorry, not megahertz, 120 frames per second. Imagine, whoa, that's unnecessary. But if you think about those displays in the Apple immersive video format, it's a huge amount of video at 100 or 90 or 100 or 120 frames per second. And so the M5 gets them up to 120 in certain circumstances. Apple's kind of cage you about that. But it's really interesting that this is another area where the M2 struggled and the M5 is better. And we know that that's, M5 is much better chip.

I'm still not entirely convinced that they're, that they're taking full advantage of this stuff. But it does make it clear that over the last couple of years, when we've been, we've been like, where is this stuff that I don't think I understood just how hard they were trying. to make anything happen on this product. Like it was more pushing the limits than I really assumed. And the immersive video stuff brought that home because the immersive video, the file is enormous

because you have to be able to look around. So the file is enormous, even if they only render the part you're looking at, the whole file has to come along. So it's huge bit rate, huge frame rate. And then the other tidbits that I got out of this, first off, and we all kind of assume this, but I think it's just clear.

That Black Magic camera that now enables people to shoot their own immersive video in the Apple video format just came out. And my understanding is like, is it out like it is, but like there's a list

of people who want it. And they are not making enough. I think Black Magic was actually caught by surprise about the demand for this thing. I think that they thought, well, this is just going to be a, you know,

it's going to look good. Apple's going to be really happy and some people are going to buy some, but it's going to be a kind of a, a low volume product, and I think they've been surprised at the demand because people actually think Vision Pro future or not, I think they figure that this is going to be a good format and that in the future people are going to want to watch immersive video and they want to get on board. But just to be clear, that is like we are in really early days of the black magic camera.

So what is everything we're seeing now shot with? And the answer is, just again, to be clear, everything we've seen up to now, these things that we complain that they don't come out often enough and they're too short and all of that it's it's like other cameras bodged together by apple and black magic to shoot the stuff um so you've got hardware like one of the reasons there's not as much stuff is there there how many of those could there have even been right five 10 in in the world and then you take them to shoot and they've got to be super finicky because and you've got a totally hacked together workflow because these you're sticking a couple of cameras together to make an immersive and you've got to calibrate them and then

you got to get the date off and you got to process them. So like I understand a little bit better now of how how much we are in the infancy of even any of this stuff and that those early Apple immersive were tech demos, but like really hard to make tech demos, which I think we all got an inkling as it went on with the Vision Pro that like the pace of release suggested that it was much harder than we expected because otherwise they would release more stuff and they weren't. not releasing more stuff. But then the other piece of it, and I got a couple of views into this where there was a, I was on a test flight of an immersive thing.

And one of the beta notes was something like updated to the new test flight of this other tool that we used to make this. And I was like, oh, my test flight has a test flight. And I realized the other piece of this, and they talked about it in these sessions, is the tools that these creative professionals would use to make these things. are also not not made yet like they're only now a lot of this stuff is only now available for people to get and it's still a beta so like whether it's da Vinci resolve or it's apple's got some plugins for pro tools for spatial audio like i just spending a day in a room with a bunch of

people who are actually really really enthusiastic about the idea of doing immersive video for vision pro that was the sense that i walked away from is this is so early and the tools only now are like usable like you could get a camera

and you can use beta software with a new workflow and so much of the session was really like the people who worked on those Apple demos

for the most part saying here's what we learned like here's what we learned when we shot submerged here's what we learned when we shot that video by the weekend in terms of like doing

how do you add VFX to an immersive video And here are like their best practices of like how you, you know, when do you cut and how do you set it up? Or what do they learn when they built the sets of submerged and how they. And by the way, for those who are interested, the number one lesson is, and this will warm our friend Todd Vizeri's heart. Pre-production is the answer. You need to do the work up front. You can't just half-ass it and be like, oh, yeah, we'll figure it out when we're shooting or we'll fix it in post.

is like it is a recipe for failure. Everything needs to be planned in detail in advance before you shoot an immersive project, which I think is like that it should, it's not a surprise, but I thought that was interesting. They clearly, they didn't give any examples, right? Because it's all meant to be positive,

but clearly they had been burned by decisions they didn't make up front. But anyway, I just thought it was really interesting because even as somebody who's used the Vision Pro and has said from the very beginning, like this is a future thing, nobody should buy this, glimpse at where this technology is going.

I even walked away thinking, oh, like, it's not, like the live thing is another example too, where it's like, why haven't they done live sports? I got the distinct impression reading between the lines that the reason that they're not going to do a live sporting event until next year is because it was impossible, right? Like they just didn't have the camera, didn't have the workflow. So anyway, I walked away understanding a little bit more. that it's great that these people are interested. Somebody at Apple told me one of the reasons they did this two-day thing,

and it's on YouTube, people can watch it on YouTube. One of the reasons they did it is because up to now, if you wanted to do immersive, Apple likes sent people to talk to you and help you, and there are too many people for that now. So instead it's like, okay, we're going to go into the developer center and we're going to give a presentation instead. And then we can refer to people to the presentation and all of that. So there's some sense of growth there.

But anyway, I walked away more than anything else just thinking, oh, I didn't realize how cutting edge this was and just how unavailable, not just the cameras, but all the tools were and how different it is from other formats. Yeah, I mean, that black magic design camera, first of all, it's $33,000, if you can get your hands on one. Yep.

But it's two 8K sensors that are synced at the pixel level. Like, it is a lot of data, a lot of complicated. data. And the workflows will get there. I do worry a little bit. And I'm, you know, again, they wanted to be positive in events like this. But there is, I would guess, some sense of chicken and egg here, right? That, yeah, like, we've all complained that there's not enough content on the Vision Pro. But if I'm a studio and someone comes to me, it's like, hey, I want to do this thing for the Vision Pro and maybe other devices down the road that can play this, is like, why would I spend,

I mean, the camera to a studio is not that expensive, probably, but all of the pre-production, post-production, yeah, all that other stuff to serve a really small. You do it because you want to be cutting edge, or you want to please your director who wants to do. Like, I mean, the thing that kept coming up, and I kept thinking of is Christopher Nolan was like, I'm going to shoot some Batman scenes in IMAX.

And I watched one of the Batman movies he made in IMAX, and you literally are watching a movie on an iMac screen so it's just the movie shape and then suddenly it's an IMAX thing for one scene and then it goes back to being a movie again and that happens a few times and I thought that's going to happen somebody and maybe it'll be Edward Berger

who did submerge who has done all quiet on the Western Front and stuff like that maybe it'll be him maybe it'll be somebody else somebody will have enough clout that they'll be like I want to do an immersive scene and they'll say well but what for and the answer I think Stephen that the answer is and I heard this from

some people when Apple PR wasn't around. Shout out to our pals at Apple PR. Hi, Zach. But you know, they didn't want to they're there at Apple. They didn't want to offend Apple. But they said, you know, this is not just for Vision Pro, right? Like, there will

be other devices where immersive video will be available and there'll be more of them in the future. And it is a bet that immersive video will ever be something that people will want to see. But I think that that's, I think that's a better bet than will the Vision Pro become successful. I think

it's the idea that like for example, the Samsung thing got, if not released, people got demos of it, the new Samsung headset that's like a Vision Pro, but costs $1,600 or something like that. Yeah. And I saw

a bunch of takes that are like, well, this kills the Vision Pro. I'm like, actually, it's the reverse, which is Google and Samsung are saying that they think that this is a category. It's a... It validates the Vision Pro. Totally. I mean, It doesn't validate its price, right? But it validates the space.

And I think that it validates for these filmmakers the idea that it's another, that Google is behind this and Samsung is behind this. And it's another place for them to put those films, right? Because even if it's Apple's immersive video format, there will be a way to play it or there will be a way to convert it. I'm sure this stuff will work on MetaQuest, too, that they will find a format that MetaQuest supports that's not maybe Apple immersive video format and isn't at the same resolution, but where they can put these experiences and put these films.

So I think it is more of an endorsement than anything else. I don't, you know, and also I love, it reminds me of the early days of like multimedia CD-ROMs where it's like, it's really creative people who are saying it's exciting to be discovering a new medium that is using some of the grammar of film, but also other rules that we don't even know yet. I mean, I talked to a couple of filmmakers who said, we don't know we don't know what all the rules are, but we do know that some of the rules of film don't apply. But some of them do.

And they said, if you follow the rules of film, when you make an immersive film, you will fail. But the only way to learn is by trying, and these people all seem really charged up about trying to figure out how do you make a good one of these because it feels very much like the early days of a new medium.

And I just, I love that creative spirit. These are the people who are like, yeah, I don't know what this is going to be. Let's figure it out. And they're trying. So I thought that, but I didn't realize just how, like literally that moment of, well, we use the new beta of that tool in test flight and it helped us do this thing like, oh, man, just think about that.

You're trying to make something and you're relying on a software update to your tool that is also in beta. Yep. Oh, it's a lot. Yeah, that's real hard. Yeah, the file format thing is super interesting. I too thought about like the multimedia days of the personal computer. computer. And back then, right, there were a bunch of different formats. And in many ways, quick time kind of rose to the top for a lot of people. And it was beneficial. It's beneficial to

everyone. People who make content, platform owners, people who watch content, you know, the end user, to not have to not have to worry about that sort of stuff. I mean, do you remember for several years there was a fight between Apple and Google about the way they were doing YouTube videos and it meant that you couldn't watch 4K video on a bunch of Apple devices. Because Apple's like, we're not going to support that format on the Apple TV. So there. Yeah. Yeah. So there. And this market is so small, it behooves all of these companies, right? Apple, Google, Samsung, whoever else enters the mix to come up with a standard that it all, you know, it all is interoperable. And my guess would be if anyone was to win that right now, it would be Apple because they've had a headstone. art and they have those decades of history of working with media codecs and formats that become standards. And they're helping the, they're helping the toolmakers, right? The toolmakers

may give them an advantage. But yeah, in the end, the toolmakers are going to want to be on other platforms and export to other platforms. The filmmakers are going to be on other platforms. I think Apple is okay with that, right? Like Apple, I think what Apple is really enjoying right now is like pushing this forward and defining what these formats are. And I think Apple would love that you know, Apple immersive video might become a standard that Google needs to support, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, politically, definitely. But like I said, I think it's good for everybody if that ends up being the case down the road. Yeah. I get the sense that Apple immersive video is a pretty impressive format, too. Just seeing some of the specs about it. But who knows what Google is cooking up there. Okay. Our other little topic for this segment is your blog post. Boring is what we wanted, which I'm going to read, because Mike likes reading things I wrote to me, so I'm going to read this to you.

Apple Silicon has been nothing but upside for the Mac, and yet some seem bored already. In the day since Apple announced the M5, I've seen and heard this sentiment more than I expected, this is just another boring incremental upgrade. That is the point. Yeah, I got my clap emojis in there. Yeah, I know. Wow. Before we get to this, I want to have like a little writer moment with you. This was one of those blog posts that popped into my head fully written.

Yeah. And the headline that came to mind was so good as like, I ran upstairs and wrote it. I was like, I got to use this headline. Same thing with my iPhone air review, the iPhone air to the throne. I was like, I got to get this joke in before, you know, before someone else does. Sure. But yeah, you know, the M5 has just been this really interesting cycle over the last couple of weeks of, yeah, like, you know, if you have an M4, you don't need it. If you have an M3, you don't need it. And I kind of came to a point that I was like, yeah, that's what we want,

right? That's what we, that's what we want out of these products where just regular, predictable, nice upgrades, you know, roughly annually is where a lot of these things land. It's like a model year. It's like every year they get better. And then every now and then there's a leap. But mostly it's just a new, you know, the new car this year. If you're buying a car this year, you'll get a slightly better car than you got last year because you waited a year and that's fine

because the difference between your car and that car from seven years ago is huge because just because of incrementalism that's all I think part of it is that people in the media

just want, like it's a better story if it's a blockbuster thing that we've never seen before even though that's impossible to happen every year I'm always fascinated by that where it's very clear that writers and YouTubers

are snarky about products because they're like, I'm bored. Give me something interesting to write about. And it's like, their job is not to feed your content engine, right? It's not their job to do that. But like, sometimes I think people lose the plot and they're like, I just want to be entertained. It's like, you being entertained as a journalist is not the point or as a creator of whatever. It's not the point. Yeah. And this has made a little worse when there's a year we're not without a physical change. Or like the M4 Mac Mini got such great coverage because the form factor was different. You know, M3 to M4, not a huge deal, but holy smokes, look at this new Mac Mini, you know.

Yeah, it's super small. So, yeah, I just, I kind of wanted to address that. Like, this is what we were wanting back in the days when we were talking about Arm Max, right? Before we knew the M1 name, before Apple had announced anything, we were hopeful that the, honestly, the success that they had in the A series, you know, A7, 8, 9, 10 throughout the years, that that would translate over to the Mac. And I would say it totally has, right? There's some weirdness around the edges, right?

Sometimes you get an ultra chip. Sometimes you don't. But in general, especially with these mass market baseline products, they've been able to deliver this on a fairly consistent schedule. And you're making 10, 12, 15% gains most of the time. They do add up. And the other part of this that kind of got under my skin a little bit, bit was sometimes people bring up like, yeah, they're punching down to Intel Macs and now

they're punching down to M1 Macs and compare this year over year. But that's just not the world we live in. Most people don't upgrade their computer or even their phone or tablet every year. Most people are on these three, four, five, six, seven, eight year cycles. And so comparing the M5 to an Intel Mac or to an M1 Mac, I think is totally fair game. because for most people, say the people that got an M1, whether they jumped on it immediately or they got that, you know, once the M2 was out or something like that, right? Those machines are beginning to enter that window where most people consider an upgrade. And so it only makes sense to me, and I think to Apple, that you would compare what you have now

to those products. It's not that it looks bad against the M4, it's that hardly anyone shops the M4 versus M1. exactly and for those who do they can go find the numbers because they're the nerds they're the people who are plugged in they're the ones who need every ounce of horsepower they're already going to be tuned into this stuff when you're talking about this on your website as apple you're trying to talk to the masses and the masses just don't upgrade year every year they still have you know m4 to m5 data as well and they know everybody's going to write about it but you're right it's just not the point like people they're doing first off

Nobody knows better than Apple how many Intel Macs are still in circulation and how many M1 Max are still in circulation. Like they know, and they have those discussions like, who's going to buy this thing? And they also know the buying patterns. They know how long people hold on to these things. And I said this with the M4 release, which is Apple is well aware of how many people still use Intel laptops. And that is, they're not punching down.

They are trying to continue to extol the furges of you really will get. whatever. It'll be five times faster. Whatever it is, the number is now, it's ludicrous because it's twice as fast as the M1. And the M1 was so much faster than the Intel stuff. But those people are still out there. I still hear from people who are using Intel laptops. I just updated Jamie to an M1. She's using an M1 now. But she was using an Intel MacBook Air before until like last year, last fall. So, you know, they're out there. And people, people don't have prior. like we do, you know, where it's like, oh, I really held out. I upgraded my M2 to an M4. I was like, whoa, wow. Look at the self-control on that guy. Most people don't do that. Most people are like, yeah, I've got a seven-year-old computer. What of it, right? So I think that's part of it. Also, the other part, and this is what you were saying, it is a deeply a historic argument to make. And the best example, so Gruber dug this up or somebody sent it to him. And it's from Rogue Amoeba's blog. And I'll put it in the show notes. It's a blog post by Quentin Carnicelli in 2018 from Rogamiba. And it's on the sad state of Macintosh hardware. And I want to read a little bit of it because I think this is,

how soon we forget, 2018. This is what Quentin wrote. At the time of this writing, with the exception of the $5,000 IMac Pro, no Mac has been updated at all in the past year. Here are the last updates to the entire line of Macs. IMac Pro 182 days ago. IMac 3754 days ago. MacBook 375 days ago. MacBook Air 3754 days ago.

MacBook Pro 374 days ago. MacPro 436 days ago. Mac Mini 1,337 days ago. And then here's the kicker. Worse, he writes, most of these counts are misleading, with many machines not seeing a true update in quite a bit longer. While the Mac Mini hasn't seen an update of any kind in almost four years, even that 2014 update was lacklester.

Also, the screenshot on this post is incredible because it has a, it has the Mac Rumors Buyers Guide on it with every Mac model labeled Don't Buy except for, and this is so much funnier in hindsight, except for the IMac Pro, which is listed as neutral, friends, the IMac Pro will never be updated. It's a one-off. So don't.

And the only one, other one that doesn't have no buy, on it is is the trash can Mac Pro which just says caution caution I mean I agree with that but like don't buy I'm sending this back to 2018 don't buy it and and even then that update to the Mac Pro they mentioned was just making configs cheaper yeah they didn't actually ever update the trash can with new parts so that's even a little misleading yeah it was it was bad times if you open if you open MacTracker you'll see MacBook Pro 16, 2017, 2018, 2018,

2019. But a lot of those updates were lackluster. A lot of them didn't solve actual issues with the hardware. I mean,

look at every touchbar MacBook Pro that got the butterfly keyboard, right? Like, who cares if it's a little bit faster?

My keys are still falling off, right? It was a really rough time. And, you know, Gruber, then I think you and I also talked

about this offline, you don't have to look any further than the MacBook Air. Right, which was Apple's most important laptop, and it just sat and sat. At one point, there was a press release with like, it's like 100 megahertz faster. Like, what are you doing? Yeah.

And it wasn't until late 18 when it became, you know, the retina machine that we know that, you know, lived on to the M1 design-wise. I did those interviews with Colleen Novelli, who is the IMAQ, she was the IMA product marketing manager, I think. And, you know, I distinctly remember that the first one of those, and I think I went to New York for that one, I think the first one of those was like, yep, the IMac is still around and important and relevant. And there was like a whole argument they needed to make. And they were literally going from like, ah, and we updated the internals. They're major updates here. We're using the I8 Intel processor now, which is a little bit. And then a year passes and it's like, or a year and a half. And it's like, well, the I-9 now. And, like, look, you could make the argument that Apple was busy working on Apple Silicon and their eye was off the ball and they weren't really trying to do much. But, like, the fact is, those Intel improvements were drop-ins. What we, those of us who were there in the mid-2010s, one of the things that was going on in the Mac was that Intel's chips all got delayed. Apple had to pick and choose from Intel's price list about what they wanted.

and Apple chose to not update their computers more often, but I think I would strongly argue that one of the reasons was because what was on offer wasn't interesting. And so they were just kind of drifting, right? Like Intel would come up with another one. And in the early days of the Intel relationship, they would do these updates and you're like, oh my God, the new core duo or whatever is the new I-5

is so much better than the old I-3 or whatever. and by the end like four years would pass and it would feel like nothing was happening and I will admit that somebody could probably make the argument that part of that is that Apple is just focused on Apple Silicon but again part of it was just that like Intel

Intel's priorities let me put it this way Intel's priorities weren't Apple's priorities and the result was that the Mac just kind of drifted and and this is I'm going back to your point which is Apple's now in the Apple Silicon era, guess what?

Apple's priorities are Apple's priorities. Yeah. And it makes a difference. And you're right, it's boring in an incremental way. It's boring like the ticking of a clock for the passage of time. It is,

it is boring like that piece that John Gruber wrote for me at Macworld so many years ago, where it's like Apple rolls, right? Apple incrementally updates. You upgrade your CPUs and your GPUs by 10, 20, 30,

40 percent every year. And what happens is, you look back at the amazing M1 from 2020 five years later and the M5 is twice as fast in a boring way but twice as fast I mean because it is it's just short-sightedness I think

and people forget and yeah I think the Mac is in an incredible place not that they're not you know edge cases but it's um it's so much better than it was not from not that long ago and sometimes I mean remember the the it's the I don't know if is actually an ancient Chinese proverb

or if that was a lie, but the, may you live in interesting times as a curse, not a blessing. Like, there is a lot to be said for boring, right?

And unless you're somebody whose livelihood depends on drama, the fact is, for most people who are buying Apple products, the best thing is, this goes back,

this is the old fig leaf that MacWeak used to report on rumors back in the day, is they would say, oh, well, we don't do it for prurient reasons. We do it because our readers are volume Mac buyers and they need to plan their budgets for the next year. And so knowing what Apple's going to do in advance of Apple announcing, it's very important,

which I always thought was like, it's true, but also it's not true. A lot of people are just reading MacWreck because they want to get the gossip, right? Sure, sure. But there is truth in the fact that if you're somebody, whether you're buying for a big organization or if you're just a regular old person

and it's true in life too nobody likes surprises surprises aren't I mean surprises can be interesting but like surprises can also be really bad and in business and in buying

and in financial planning surprises are not what you want you want reliability, repeatability so Apple doing this thing with Apple Silicon where it's not exactly the same like you said

it's not exactly the same every time but we can pretty much rely on the M6 being better in some areas by 10% and in other areas by 40%. And what those areas are, we don't know yet, but we can pretty much rely on that. And we can pretty much rely on the M7, similarly having characteristics like that, but maybe the balance is a little bit different. And I think we can probably rely on the fact that the M9 will be twice as fast as the M5, right? Like, I think we can rely on that. And certainly the first five years have shown that.

And that's good. Like, people want that. People want that level of reliability, I think, for the most part. They don't want the drama. I want to know that if I'm ready to buy a Mac next year, roughly what I'm going to get and not have it be a mystery of like, I've waited two and a half years and Apple has an update. I don't want to buy the Mac Mini because it's going to get updated eventually, but it's been three years is not what people want. I mean, I remember that being a conversation in 2019.

when the Mac Pro came back, right? That Apple had lost so many pro customers because they hadn't updated the machine and it didn't look like they were going to so people abandoned it. And they haven't really fixed that problem with the Mac Pro, but they are nowhere close to it being an issue

with neither other machines. And that's a good place for the product line to be in. Not every machine gets every chip every year, right? like the iMac skipped over the M2, I think. But for the machines that matter, and really the machines that matter are the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, right? That's what the Mac is.

The desktops are a much smaller business. And so for those machines, you need those updates to be good every time and to be reliable and to have long-lasting support, right? Comparing to the M1, just like talking about Samsung building a Vision Pro clone, it validates the M1, right? And it puts it,

in a place where it's still getting support all these years later. So yeah, I just, it had kind of just been a bug in my mind. And so I was sometimes the only way to get those out as a blog post. Great post. Good, good. I would say almost like the ideal kind of blog post too. You've got a point, you've got a good

headline. Everybody reads it and goes, yeah, you can use some emoji in there. I love it. They don't teach that in journalism school. Tactical use of emoji? No emoji. Maybe they do now, but they didn't back in the day. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Hello Fresh.

You may have heard of them. I talk about them a lot. Number one, Meal Kid in America makes home cooking easier with chef crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door. And of course, it's full. The recipes are changing. Everything's getting a little hardier.

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I can actually say that I use it. They do have great menu selections. The menu selections do change with the seasons. They have gotten better. They have more healthy options. And I really love the fact that it reduces the strain on our shopping trips every week. It reduces the strain on our meal planning. And we're still shopping and we're still meal planning.

But it does, having those for us now, it's three meals a week that are coming in the box really helps with the strategy on from day to day. and from week to week. And I really enjoy that we get to make the meal. It doesn't come like in a prefabricated whatever. Like literally you make the meal. You chop the vegetables. You make the meal from fresh ingredients. It's awesome.

The best way to could just got better. Like I said, go to hellofresh.com slash upgrade 10 FM. FM. I love it. To get 10 free meals. Maybe it stands for free meals. It doesn't stand for the other FM.

And a free breakfast for life. What? Free breakfast for life? One per box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com slash upgrade 10 FM. The FM stands for free meals. You'll get 10 free meals and free breakfast for life. Thank you to HelloFresh for supporting upgrade and all of relay. Stephen, it's time now for Ask Upgrade. Thank you for the lasers. I really appreciate it. Mike D writes, I have a question about your RSS setups. I'm currently using Reader Classic via ICloud for my feeds and read later on my Mac and iPhone.

I'm looking to make a change and was wondering, what are you using for syncing clients and read later? Stephen, what do you think? Yeah, so for syncing, I'm using FeedBin. They have this great feature where you can send email newsletters to them and it goes into like a custom RSS feed. So all my email newsletters end up in my RSS

reader where I want them, not in my inbox where I don't want them. And FeedBin works with basically every app I've ever tried. Currently, I'm using Reader Classic on the Mac, but Reader Classic seems to be slowly breaking down. I had a lot

of problems with it on the iPhone and iPad. So I switched to Net Newswire on the iPhone and iPad. I really don't like Net newswire on the Mac I want more I want more customization options and I can't get the font sizes anywhere close to where I want but I will switch to that if I need to if Reader Classic continues to struggle and then in terms of read it later I send things to Good Links which is a universal app syncs via iCloud and it's fantastic I've used good links for a long

time and really like it did you know that you can also use Speedbin as a read it later Yeah. There's something about those being separate to me because a lot of my read-it-later stuff isn't even from RSS, right? It may be something that someone links to or I see on social media. So I like having multiple ways to get something in there. Yeah. So I am also using FeedBin as my RSS host and I am absolutely using their gateway, which has gotten better. Now you can create custom email addresses so you can create a different custom email address for everyone. one of your things that you get as a newsletter. So you can see where it's coming from. And if you want to deactivate it later, you can just turn that one off and it's gone. And it won't get, it won't come in anymore. So I'm using that for a bunch of my newsletters.

Some of them I forward from Gmail and some of them I just have them sent directly to FeedBin. It works either way. It sort of makes the login a little more complicated if you use FeedBin because if you, if they're doing an email login, you've got to like click through, through to your RSS reader and then click through to be logged in. Anyway, I am using ReadKit as my RSS reader. I like the interface on it a lot. It just got an update for Liquid Glass, which is kind of fun,

but it's really good. My complaint, and I have this complaint, I think, with a lot of apps that use web views inside them, is, you know, ReDKit has a reader view that's really nice where it's loading the web page with adjust the text. and a lot of times that does the job, but there are sites where they really want you to be logged in. And the problem that I have with that app

and lots of apps that use the WebView is there's no way to log in in the WebView. Because if you tap the login button, it takes you to your browser. And there's no way to get back there. And so what I will ask the developer here, I'll ask the developer of ReadKit, but also all other apps that use a similar approach to content, is have a mode where you can browse a website inside the app and get your login credentials turned on.

It doesn't have to be in the actual reading mode. It can be like in some other credential mode or I can tap and hold and do that because what I really want to do is log into all the websites I subscribe to inside ReadKit. And then I can just read in the web view in Readkit, which is my preferred because then I get the fonts and the pictures and stuff.

It's not just in reader mode. And it just doesn't do that. It's, it's infuriating. So I would really love that. But I do like ReadKit. I think it's really good. It's, I don't really read on the Mac. So I really, it's an iPad and occasionally iPhone app for me.

But people should check it out. It works for me in the way that I read RSS. It's got a very customizable interface. You could set like, do you want to see a summary? How many lines? Do you not want to see a summary? How many headlines? Things like that.

So I like it. But otherwise, yeah, feed bin all the way. And I'm using Instapaper for read it later now because it will sink those. So for a really long stories, I will send those to Instapaper because that syncs with my Kobo now. Sure. It used to be Pocket. Now it's Insta Paper. So I'm using that again.

Back in the day, I used it. And now it's back. Nicole writes, I've been wanting to get a HomePod mini and had been hoping to get a new one with the October announcements. But that didn't happen. So would you keep waiting or just get one? one now. I don't use Siri, so approved Siri features aren't worth it for me. I mean, the HomePod Mini is fine. Like, I've got a bunch of them. They sound pretty good for the money. Yep. I do have a general rule with HomePods. Like, don't pay full price. Like, they go,

they go on sale, Best Buy Amazon. Yeah. And, you know, I don't, I don't know what they would do to the HomePod Mini that would make it meaningfully better. So I'd say if you need them, go for Yeah. That's exactly where I was going to land, too, is if you want one, get one. Yeah, get it on sale if you can. But I wouldn't wait around for whatever gets updated. I just don't think it's going to be some incredible, amazing, miraculous HomePod Mini. I think it's just, you know, maybe it'll do more in terms of HomePod Hub or stuff like that. But I just don't think it will. I think it's just, I think the whole point of the HomePod Mini is that they want to keep the price down and let people put these, like Stephen put them, you know, wherever anywhere. I've got one of my bathroom that I don't even use very often because I usually use a Bluetooth speaker a waterproof Bluetooth speaker in the shower to listen to podcast

but occasionally if I want music playing I'll use it and like I have no regrets about it because it's not that expensive and I like having an airplay speaker in the bathroom and it's fine like that's the kind of product is so I would say don't sweat it get one see if you can get one on sale

Sean says year after year it seems that Apple's promotional photos of products like the sky blue M4 MacBook Air and the iPhone Air, options display their colors as more vivid than they actually turn out to be in real life. Are these promo photos in admission by Apple that the more vivid colors

are more attractive to their customers? If so, is it just a technical process that keeps the real ones muted? Sean, photographers like color. Photographers are charged in the case of product photos with showing off the colors of different products and photographers have access to lots of tools

to make sure that the color and the lighting brings out the color of those products. Also, I would say in most cases, I don't know how you feel about this, Stephen, but having spent time with some of these sky blues, I find that there's always an angle where you can see that it's blue, right? Like, it's not like it's not blue. I had that sky blue MacBook Air for a while in March or whenever. And I opened the box, and I had to check the box to see if it was sky blue, which it said it was because it just looks silver to me.

And then I had it sitting like out on a table in my living room and I walked by it and I looked at it and I was like, oh, there it is. There's the sky blue. But like that was literally the only lighting and angle that I experienced where it suddenly I could see the sky blue. So if you're a photographer and if you're Apple, art directing your photographer, of course you want to light it in a way that differentiates the color and shows off that color, even if most people would never, ever, ever see it like that.

reality. Yeah. My wife has one of those sky blue MacBook airs as we talked about unconnected before and it is not very blue. You know, I showed her the colors on the website and she was like, let's go crazy. Let's go blue. And I was like, it's not as blue as you think it is. And then I got it. She was like, I thought you ordered the blue one. It's like, I mean, yes. And it does catch the light in different ways. Yeah. It's a little surprise. You're like, all right, this is blue. It's blue. I don't think it's a technical thing because clearly Apple can anodize aluminum basically any color they want.

Look at the iPhone 17 pros. Yeah, baby. The different iPhone 17s over the years going back to like, you know, like the iPods that were aluminum and anonymized. This is a fashion choice,

not a technical one, it seems. And I, when I wrote, when I did the 20 Max for 2020 installment about the original eye book, I came to the realization that Apple made bright colors on the original eye book

and then has never, ever, ever made bright colors on a laptop again. And that was so long ago now that most of the people involved aren't even there anymore and the people who make these decisions are different. And maybe we will see more daring choices like the iPhone Pro with Cosmic Orange, right? But I will say this. I think Apple learned, and I understand this, that a laptop is a thing you take out in the world with you. And it's big. And it's your computer. And you might go to a job interview or you might have to, you know, you're in a cafe. Your laptop, if it's a a bright color really screams in a public place that you might not be comfortable with. And I actually understand that. I understand that lots and lots of people. And it's not like the same with an iMac where you might buy a colorful iMac that's color matched to your hotel lobby and then park it on a desk in the hotel lobby. That's not the same as going into Starbucks

and opening up your screaming yellow MacBook Air, right? I get it. I get it. So I think Apple learned some lessons from that original iBook and has basically said, we're never going to do that again. And so everything is either black or light silver or dark silver or a blue that's so silver that you would never really notice it and it's super subtle. I want to make

the same argument that I made about the iPhone, which is maybe give people a choice. And some people will choose the bright color and other people won't. And if nobody chooses the bright color, I guess you learn never to do it again, but they have not even experimented with that on the Mac, on a

laptop in ages. And that's why I would like to see it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't have to be cosmic orange. It could be just a brighter blue or green or pink or whatever. And it doesn't have to be six different skews of color like on the IMac. But like, wouldn't it be nice to just try that out and let people, some people would really gravitate, I think, toward a bright laptop. But I think that's why they don't do it is because you're taking it into the world and you're saying I want to stand out in this context and that maybe a lot of people are like, I'm not comfortable with that. Sure. Yeah,

I think that's spot on. So, yeah. Holly wrote, I've just upgraded my iPhone 13 Mini to an iPhone 17 and I love it, but I'm wondering, how do you make use of the always on display? What kind of widgets do you find useful to have at a glance? Now, Stephen, you're employed by a widget maker. We'll just say that here. Yes.

But now tell me how you use you're always on display. yeah so i have all the settings on so i i see the wallpaper i don't blur it you know you can say to hide the wallpaper so it's like a black void the text on it um i like i like seeing it all the time um so for widgets above the time i have uh i use carrot weathers uh lock screen widget up there i love carrot weather and then below i have a next calendar event a time zone for london and then next sunrise and sunset. You know, things that I'm not interacting with, but if I glance at my phone on my desk, I would like to know.

And that's really the way I think about the lock screen. It's different from home screen widgets where you're interacting with them and using them to start or stop media or interact with a photo, right? These are things that, yes, you can tap on them and unlock the phone. It'll open the app. But they're status for me, their dashboard for me. Plansable status. For sure. And I would say, I would say just, you know, on the subject of the lock screen, I think it's

worth playing with some of the new iOS 26 stuff where you can make the time really tall. My lock screen, I'll put a link in the show notes where I wrote about the transparency toggle in 26. Beta 4. But I use like this like really kind of fun lock screen. It's a picture of my wife and it's all blue and the time's big behind her. And I think it's fun. So I think having some fun with the lock screen is is a nice thing to do. It really personalizes your phone. I like those tall numbers. I have a weather forecast and I have the current temperature at my house, which is a scriptable widget that I wrote that it has different. It's much more detailed like on the homes on the home screen, the app screen. I have it there. But when it's on the lock screen, it actually just is a little number in a circle. And it tells me what the temperature is. is outside, which is nice. I'm not using any of the ones that override the

date on the top, but you can do that with text. I'm not doing any of that. I don't have anything so that I desperately want in there. And also I've found, here's a little bug report, I've found that those widgets don't update very often. And so I've had when I tried to put a calendar item in there,

it would be like, you have this thing in two hours and it was in 15 minutes. I'm like, that is not helpful at all. The widget system, overall has some pretty strict memory limitations put on it and it seems like the lock screen may be even more

memory constrained and so it's not surprising and I would say to the to developers like maybe even your employer I would say you got to test that stuff I think that's a Fantastic Al widget so I guess I'm speaking to the developers of Fantastic Al but like

if the system is not going to refresh your widget that's telling me how long until my next event, you can't display that information. Even if customers want it, you can't display it because it's out of date. And I had that moment when I looked at it and I thought, oh, is that call not into not in 15 minutes? And because it's a two hours. And I looked and I was like, oh, it is in 15 minutes and that, that widget just hadn't updated. And that's, you can't, you can't do that. And I'm not, I'm not trying to call them out because it may be a, it may be an OS bug. It may be a

beta bug. But I think in the end, um, you need to have a great deal of confidence that the system is going to not have your data be bad because that's on you. I think there's a timeline for that. So it may really just have been a bug because I thought widget makers could actually say, instead of saying two hours and needing to update it, it would say like when that event was and say then you, the system can say, you know, how long it is from now. But whatever, it wasn't getting updated. And that scares me.

So I have a lot of really, you know, more it's, you know, if it's not the temperature right now, but it's the temperature an hour ago, it doesn't really matter to me. And it's not the forecast that they would make today, but the forecast they made, you know, three hours ago, it doesn't matter to me. So I try to keep that stuff on the lock screen. Yeah, that's a good point. And yeah, you can load things up in a timeline for your widget,

but ultimately the system has the final say. And so, yeah, play with it, you know, see what works for you. And, you know, the nice thing, too, is you can have multiple lock screens set up. I've got several that I kind of bounce in between. And so play with different setups. You may have different things that work for you, get different focus modes or other things.

So it's really pretty flexible. It is funny, though. It is the most reliable way I can make any phone heat up. Even the 17 Pro to a degree, although much lesser degree than other phones. Spitting some time in the lock screen editor just makes the back of the iPhone 17 pro hot. It makes the iPhone air hot.

Like, I don't know what they're doing in there, but it's working hard. funny. It's working really hard. It is. Well, you can send us your feedback as well as follow-up and questions for Ask Upgrade at UpgradeFeedback.com. Thank you to our members who support us every week with Upgrade Plus. This week, Steven and I will be discussing what happens to indie apps at the end of their lives. Do they go to all indie apps go to heaven? We will find out or maybe not in a great app library in the sky. You can go to get Upgradeplus.com for that. Find us on YouTube by searching for Upgrade podcast. And thanks once again to our sponsors Interconnected FitBod and

Hello Fresh for supporting this episode. Most of all, thank you for listening and thank you to Stephen Hackett for filling in for Mike, who will be back next week. Thank you, Stephen Hackett. Hey, thanks for having me, Jason. It's always fun to get to be on upgrade. Yeah, and you can listen to Stephen on Mac Power Users and connected and find him at 512 pixels. Dot. That's me.com. Net.net. Dot net. Oh. One of those, eh? Both work. Okay, good.

The site is at dot net. That's right. You can find me at 6kolo.r.S if you really want to. Thank you to the Republic of Serbia. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Stephen Hackett. Bye, y'all.