Upgrade - 588: Dodging the Question Intentionally

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 588. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace, Delete Me, FitPod, and Udacity. My name is Mike Harley, and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. How are you? You know, Jason, I had a week off last week, which I'm... Yeah, thanks to giving me to...

time off. Thanks for Stephen for filling in. And this was like one of those things of like, you know, ask my wife, do you want to go away anywhere, you know, do you want to go? No, I just want to be at home. We'll just get some stuff done. We'll just spend some time together. Two days in, baby got a fever and had a fever for two days

and now I've got a cold. So what I'll say is I was happy. I'm happy I was at home, you know? So like we were both on call with a poorly baby, but I did not get the time off that I was hoping for. But such is life, you know? Yeah. Such is life. I have a Snell talk question for you, Jason.

It comes from Chelsea, who wants to know. Do you change your Mac passwords when reviewing units or upgrading to new models? I just acquired a Mac studio coming from a Mac Mini, and it's so tempting to keep the account password the same. For convenience, I'm keeping both machines for now. So using different passwords is really important. when you're doing things in the cloud where they could leak on your devices that you have with you,

it's not so important. And I absolutely, when I'm using review units or whatever, in fact, I don't want to have to be like, what password did I use for that review unit? So there's a, I have a small set of stock passwords that get rotated around for all of those. So, yeah, I just use the same. And when I get a new Mac, it uses the same password as the old Mac. Absolutely, 100%. I've got to say, Jason, this is maybe something I shouldn't admit, but I'm going to admit it.

my Mac password is hilariously bad it's not good it is not a good password that's not a good password either but I mean I don't really expect that somebody from the internet is going to break into my house

and that's my thinking like I feel like there is more of a risk of my online passwords the stuff that's in one password yeah slightly like a thousand like 10,000 times more risk maybe a million times more risk than a hacker breaking in

to your studio and tip, tip, tip, taping around. Because it would, the password is not, like, the password is not very complicated, but it's also complicated enough that you wouldn't be able to just guess it. Like, it's not like an obvious thing about me. And I figure I would be able to do something about the fact that my Mac has disappeared before they would get it. That's my thinking. Well, who knows?

Yep. Who knows? If you'd like to send in a Snell Talk question for us to open a future episode of the show, please go to UpgradeFeedback.com. And you can send in a Snelltalk question of your own. Jason, is Apple results day today? And we're going to be talking about Apple having all the money. But before them, we would like to have all of the money.

Isn't that right? Yes. And how would we do that, Jason? Well, one way we could do that is by doing a little bit of a... We always are selling upgrade merchandise if you do not know at upgrade. upgrade your wardrobe.com. But we have now opened a limited run as of this episode through November 19th at Cotton Bureau so that you can order some things that are limited run for your end of year choice of attire.

Yes. Putting a bunch of stuff back on sale that has not been on sale before. So upgrade your wardrobe through November 19th. the colors are and upgrade pro shirts are back to explain what these are they have the upgrade logo on them everybody loves it it's a you know a little arrow pointing up in a power button circle thing uh the pro shirt uh which makes it delights me every time comes in a variety of uh not colors a variety of monochromes because it's professional and we all know professional things should probably not come in colors i mean technically we should have

we should have an orange in there this time we should have an orange professional But if you would like a cosmic orange shirt, you should get the Colorsar shirt because the colors are blessed us all with colorful upgrade shirts as well. So take you pick your poison, lots of colors in there. And then the arrow and the upgrade logo becomes whatever is the color of the shirt. This is such a good shirt. Like, you know, we have a purple one. I'm going to order a new one of something. Yeah.

If people who want to go to YouTube can see me, I'm wearing a pink one that I ordered a year or two ago. This is a great idea from you, which is like obviously the. upgrade logo, we have the red arrow. And it's basically whatever color t-shirt you get is the color of the arrow, because it comes through the look. I really love it. It's a great idea. T-shirt with a purple arrow. It's fun. So that's the colors are. And then the pro for the people who don't want to wear a color, but prefer monochrome. It's fine. You're professional. And you get that. The upgrade hoodie is back. This is our longest running, I think maybe piece of merch. It was our first piece of merch. I think so. I think so. It's a very nice hoodie. It has an

embroidered upgrade logo on it. You can still order the classic independent trading company heavy hoodie. That is the one that I actually went to Cotton Bureau and said, this is my favorite hoodie. Please, can you do it in this? And they said, sure. But there are a bunch of other variants now. There's a lighter model. And there's that three-quarter zip that everybody likes. We got those now. Yep. I, we just did this for Cortex brand for the subtle stuff. And I had Cotton Bureau send me one. I wasn't sure about this. This was like a recommendation that they made. And I am absolutely in love with this clothing. So I have one with the cortex logo on it. It's just a very, it's just like a nice piece of clothing. It's nice and cozy and comfortable. But it's also something you can kind of

dress up quite well. And so it looks good in the office as well as it does. I was going to say it's, it's good in like corporate environments and golf courses and places like that where dads can wear it especially. My thing, I think, it feels very dad to me. It's very dad, and that's probably why I like it now. But I think if you are like an IT professional,

you should buy the upgrade version of this, right? Yeah. Like, you're killing it. You're turning things on and off, left, right and center. Like, this is,

this is your whole, this is your whole thing. There's also a, uh, a new shirt that's a variation that we haven't ever done before that I wanted to do of the upgrade logo. Yeah. Which is,

um, which is, we've never actually done a shirt that says upgrade. on it. So there's a version now you can get that's a Colorsar kind of shirt, but it says upgrade below it in the upgrade logo font. Because if you'd like to explain what the logo means, your shirt, all the answers about what this logo is are answered by the

word on my shirt. It's upgrade. Because some people, I mean, I just, I realized we'd never really offered the proper upgrade kind of logo in that concept. So that's an option if you want. If you're a word person, you know, like maybe it is important to you that it says upgrade on it. And if, and if If you are that words person, now we have a t-shirt for you. Yeah, so welcome.

And then, finally, there is a shirt that I demanded we make. I hated it. I demanded it. This is the entire reason we're doing any of this. Yeah, it's not. It's not, but it is an impetus for it. It's true. This is going to be the upgrade version of your connected tiny head shirt, I guess.

So in Upgrade 577, one of my favorite things that, a little dumb joke that we made was, were lamenting and we were lamenting the AirPods Max, never really getting an update and that, you know, it finally got an update and all it was was color and USBC and then they lost the cable and then the cable

came back months later and we were just lamenting all of this and we joked that maybe there should be an AirPods Max believe shirt like how our friends at the accidental tech podcast have a Mac Pro believe shirt. And so that's what we did. There's a picture of AirPods

Max with the word believe below it and thanks to John Syracusa for the inspiration if you're an AirPods Prods Max believer get that shirt because it's got headphones and says believe below it and enjoy and we'll see how many of those we sell but I think it's very funny

we should do that shirt no one will buy it that's the quote I think yeah I think so so prove Mike wrong and buy that shirt we also I should remind you a bunch of shirts that are available at all times, including now there's a rumor roundup, lawyer up, upgrade draft, you could throw those in as well. And Mike has gone through and added a whole lot of colors and

weights and stuff. So we have lots of different options. Hopefully one will be right for you. Yeah, I want to mention this. Over the years, Cotton Bureau has increased the amount of product that they have available to print on. And so like, for example, in the Kalazar T-shirt, you have the premium lightweight, which is, these are the ones that we kind of always had. And there's either a cotton or there's the tri-blend. But there's also premium heavyweight and basic heavyweight and there's a price difference for them a little bit. Now, I absolutely love the premium heavyweight options. It's comfort colors. They're a little bit more oversized and the t-shirt's a little bit thicker and they come in some interesting colors. And then the basic

heavyweight option, there are more colors available and similar. Like they're a bit more of an oversized fit, which I just find to be much to be more comfortable. And so I really love those. so they're there. But also there are long-sleeve t-shirts. There are pullovers in different thicknesses, again, like between midway and heavy weight. We have pull-over hoodies similar and tank tops. And then, as Jason mentioned earlier as well,

in the hoodie, we now have a thick and a thinner, like a lighter weight and a heavier weight of the hoodie, depending on kind of like, do you want it to be for the winter or do you want it to be for fall? And then also the quarters it pull over. as well. So I would recommend, like, go and take a look. Go take a look at the different colors available in the different shirt options. And there's a lot of option now. And I really love it. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. And you got a couple weeks to, but you know, hurry in and do it now.

And if you can combine that with some other Cotton Bureau order you're making all the better, you can save on shipping that way. So that is over upgrade your wardrobe.com. And there will, of course, be links in the show notes for you to click and to see. And also the chapter artwork right now is showing you a little preview of some of these t-shirts as well in case you were a little sneak peek but it's about to change because we're about to leave this topic so yeah so you have to look right now in five four three two all right we're now into follow-up um i had a couple of follow-up items uh one from uh last week and one from the week before so you and stephen were talking about falling asleep of AirPods in like i think it was an ask up great question someone

was asking about that um i sometimes do fall asleep of Possibly, yeah, yeah. I sometimes do fall asleep with AirPods in AirPods Pro, but not purposefully, and I don't really find it very comfortable. But I do use sleep headphones every night. There's a product called Oslo, O-Z-L-O. This company was founded by a group of engineers who used to work at Bose. Bose used to do a sleep headphone product, which they stopped doing. And then that team went and, made this company. And so these are like little Bluetooth headphones. They work in a few different ways. You can use them as Bluetooth headphones and listen to and watch whatever you want on your iPhone, but also you can pre-program it with the app to just like as soon as I like pick these things up, play some kind of background sound.

Like I have an ocean sound that plays like the sound of ocean. You can also set an alarm with them. So it will play an alarm in the morning if they're still in your ears. sometimes they fall out of my ears overnight and they also have like you can set the time you can set the background sound to just run for an amount of time I think for me it's like 45 minutes and it just turns off

these are fantastic like they are made for people who sleep on their side basically so I can put my ear flat to my pillow and I don't feel them they've got like those little wing tips in them to keep them in your ears and most of the time they actually are still in my ears in the morning sometimes one of them's falling out whatever I don't know what know what I'm doing but um yeah I really think it's fantastic I'm I'm a big big fan uh of this product uh and I I I really recommend it to people who would like something like that you know

that's really cool I've been I've been I've had this for nearly a year or over a year and I use them absolutely every night so if that is a thing that you care about uh I recommend trying out the also seat buds um okay on AirPods pro three I've kind of really gotten news to them now. Like, you know, we're having some issues with, like, fit and stuff like that. Yeah, and Memphis, we talked about how they were surprising to put them in. I also am used to them now. And I think, I actually think there's a little breaking in period where I don't know whether it's my ears or the foam or a little bit of both, but after a week or so, they're fine. And they are superior to the twos. My long spotlight nightmare is over, Jason.

So I ran those terminal commands again That we were talking about a few weeks ago And then I did a full reboot of my machine And now Spotlight is working as expected It can find apps, it can find files and contacts And even clipboard history is working again for me now So I'm very happy about that So finally we got there

I'm pleased Finally we did it All right, that's great I've heard from other people who are struggling with this And I think that this is very clearly a bad bug In Tahoe I see it I don't know if I've seen it in

261 but I've seen it in 26 sporadically and then it just comes back or I reboot and it comes back and then it's fine but every now and then it would run out so there's a bug going on I hope they fixed it in point one yeah I guess that's the thing

potentially when this episode comes out the point one releases are out I think I want to talk about that a little bit final candidate yeah because I have a I have not even installed the, like, I've not installed the beta version of 261, and I'm actually quite intrigued about some of the changes that they've made, like trying out some of the liquid

glass changes and stuff like that. So, but yeah, maybe in Tahoe, uh, point one, um, it will fix it for everyone, maybe, I don't know. Maybe. And I just want to share a frustration that I've had, you know, I'm just going to, I'm air in a grievance here with, uh, the Apple Watch. Apple Watch workout detection. I want it to recognize me pushing a stroller. Like, it, it doesn't ever pop up and be like, hey, you work it out, you know? It's because you're not moving your wrist, right? Because you're just holding it on the stroller, yeah. Exactly.

But what I know is, when I'm doing that, my exertion level is way higher than when I'm walking otherwise. So, like, I know that this stuff is complicated, but they have done this kind of stuff for so many things. I just wish they would do this too. That's my, that is the only, I just wanted to air that grievance. I find it frustrating. Because I know I'm working way harder when I'm pushing that stroller than when I'm

when I'm otherwise just walking around. And so I would love the, I would love the, I would love the recognition for it without starting a workout on my own, you know? Like I just, I want the credit. Right. I get it. And now we have some follow-ups at infant listeners.

It's not just all about me. Jason wrote in and said, I found that I can take some of the best naps that I have while wearing the Vision Pro. Oh yeah, we talked about like, can you just lay back and fall asleep? I think that was a joke I made where I said, fall asleep with AirPods, how about fall asleep with the Vision Pro? And guess what?

It happens. Jason says, I lay on a flat carpeted area. I put on the mindfulness app, and I'm out within five minutes. Something about the ambient pulsate noise just sends me right to sleep. I think there's also a study somewhere on, quote, face-hugging devices, helping someone fall asleep faster. Probably you could find more about this in the Apple Vision Pro subreddit, which I thought was funny. I guess it's all popping off over there. Or like the CPAP sleep apnea forums might maybe people get comfort from that too. I mean, there's always somebody. Yes, there's always somebody. I assume you probably get pretty hot eyes by the end of that experience too. Probably, probably.

But if it's a nap, you know. Yes, yeah, I guess it depends on how. Well, Jason doesn't say how long the nap is, you know? Yeah, but I mean, a nap isn't long. I would not be able to, to, I would be tossing and turning. and then I'd have a Vision Pro stuck in my face and it would be bad. But just if you're laying flat,

if you're just laying flat for a little nap, a little cat nap, okay. Like if you're on the ground, right? So Jason's on the ground here. And imagine like turning your head

and like bumping the Vision Pro on the floor. Ooh, that would hurt. Can't do that. Steve writes in and said, this feedback pertains to listener Chris's feedback about the iPhone Air and Paul cellular service at a music festival. it would be interesting to know

how much, to know which carrier Chris was with and if he has premium data. If you have unlimited data but not premium unlimited data, your network speeds could be slowed down because of network congestion. There was a lot of different types of feedback about

this, you know, some people saying maybe it was like millimeter wave, maybe it's data, da da da, da. The only reason I really included this is like it was an interesting thing to talk about. It was like, this was an example of maybe it didn't work but of course with these things there are so many

edge cases. But Chris's story was that all of his friends got data and he didn't so that would suggest that they all have some better plan than Chris has? I doubt that's the case. I doubt that's the case. Well I guess maybe Chris is using one of those MVNO things like a Mint

mobile or something and they always use low priority data. Maybe. Yeah I mean we it's it's just an anecdote about a difference between the Apple modem and and the other modems. And there are other potential explanations for it. I think that that's true, although the idea that everybody else is unaffected and Chris is affected, it seems to point at the Apple modem to me. Well, if anecdotes are what you want, I've got another one. This comes from Nick.

He says, regarding iPhone air sales and enthusiasm, one factor that I haven't seen mentioned is that some carriers are offering greater discount offers on the iPhone pro models that end up making the air a more expensive choice. I just helped my parents order new iPhones at AT&T, and they wanted to trade in their old iPhone 13s and were given $1,100 in trading credit to purchase a 17 Pro or Pro Max, but with the same trade-in, they would have only gotten $700 credit for the iPhone 17 or the iPhone Air. Interesting. That is interesting. Yeah, why are they, why are they driving? Well, I have a theory about the Air, which is that it has smaller margins. Yeah. And so there's a limitation there. of how low they will go,

but if they're also not giving the credit for the 17, they're really driving people to the, to get up to the pro. It's an interesting concept. I wonder, I wonder what's going on there.

Of course, that's going to vary by region and carrier. Yeah, I wonder if there's some kind of incentive maybe that Apple gives the carriers to try and get them to sell the more expensive phones, but would it make a difference

if they're giving higher trading value? It's a big difference at the trading value, right? Like $400 difference? So, I mean, yeah, these are the kinds of things that could add up, right, to make a difference. And maybe looking at total, you know, cost of ownership and the idea that they're going to, if they get somebody on the pro track, then the next time they upgrade to a phone, they're also going to get a pro phone in the end that's going to work for them. I don't know what all the math is that's going on there. It's really interesting. This is actually a little aside here. We did a story on Six Colors last week. Shelly Brisbane wrote this story. It was her idea. And then I asked her.

to expand it, and then I did a bunch of charts. It was about, she asked a bunch of the people, and mostly in her friend group and her newsroom. She's a radio journalist in Texas about their iPhone buying behavior, and then we asked Six Colors members in our Discord about it. So a very committed technical

group and a group of basically regular people. And there were lots of fascinating differences. You can check out Six Colors for that story. I spent a lot of time working on charts. There's a fun chart about people's color preferences that it's it's got the colors I had to figure out what the color was going to be for no preference and I just made it a crazy gradient of every color so it's like you pick whatever but the one I wanted to mention here is Shelley's group a larger percentage of them are on some sort of a plan and what we found is that the six colors members almost nobody was on some kind of a plan from their carrier from Apple yeah and and it's that's really interesting because the because obviously the more technical people were much more likely to buy a new phone every year or two yeah um i i think there's a hole there where people like the people in our audience are for whatever reason reluctant uh to go in on a deal because they want to have like maybe it is like have complete control i mean that i'm not on one either right so i can i can suppose from what i behave that um you're like no no no i'll just buy a

And, but the thing is, if you get, I know you, it means you're locked into a carrier or you're locked in with Apple, depending on how you choose it. But like, I've been on AT&T since before there was an iPhone, buy a lot. I've been on AT&T since I got my first cell phone. I have never left AT&T. It became, it became singular and then went back to being AT&T and I was still on it. So I probably could be okay a lot, being locked in with AT&T for a deal. And I just haven't been. So I think that that is, and I know it's more effort. and maybe you're not doing a pre-order, although Dan Moran does the iPhone upgrade program

and he still gets to do that. So I'll just put that out there as maybe even a public service that I think there are a lot of people who are more technical and take control of their phone purchasing who are probably letting savings go out the window by doing that,

because the carriers and Apple want to make you a deal. Yeah, I do think that in our audience and especially in like private members Discord, would. There is a higher level of affluence than the general public. Sure. Sure. And you're like, I'll just pay. I mean, but I think it's not all, I'll just pay for it, right? No, but I think it's not just

I would like to have the ultimate flexibility over my buying decisions. I'll have complete control and I'll just pay for it and it won't matter to me. But I just want to put it out there that I think that the number difference was so enormous that I think, I suspect that part of it is

that we don't think of it for reasons that if you think about it a little harder, might be less logical. So something interesting. So I'm glad since Nick wrote in about this. Of the people that are not on a plan, do they trade in their iPhones

so that they hand them down? Right, right, because that makes a difference. Dan Morin is on a plan. That means he has to give back his iPhone every year. Yeah. But I trade some in and get some money back, you know, instead of then it kind of lessens the impact each time. Or I sell it to a friend or family member

or whatever and I kind of make my money back that way. Yeah, that's how you make all your money, right? It's just you're jacking up the price on things to your friends and family. Because they don't know, I sell it for more than I bought it for. Yeah, I was going to say, you just sold your cousin an M2 Vision Pro for like $5,000, right? It's like, do you know, this is Mike Hurley's iPhone?

I don't know if you know. I'm kind of a big deal. This is like a thing, you know? You've got like, this is a piece of history right here, you know? Oh, yeah, that's right. Would you like me to sign it? It's like this Vision Pro, this is owned by a guy who experienced the Vision Pro before it came out. Like this is, you know, this is no joke.

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You can build the entire website and then use the offer code upgrade to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That is Squarespace.com slash upgrade with the offer code upgrade for 10% of your first purchase and show for the show. I thanks to Squarespace for the support of this show and all. of RELI. Money, money, money, money, who has all the money?

Money, money, money, money, money who has all the money? Money, money, money, money who has all the money? It's Apple. Welcome back to everybody's favorite quarterly segment. That is Apple results time. Thank you very much to the one and only Lex Freepin for that jingle. You can check out Lex's incredible.

games products over at lex dot games i will have a link in the show notes there thank you to lex for those wonderful those wonderful jingles that we get to use especially this one multiple times a year so i'm going to run through some top line figures of apple's q4 um results and then we can dig into some stuff uh because as always jason you've been doing some great analysis of these results revenue was $102.5 billion for the quarter the quarter

ending at the end of September, right? So, yeah, as is always worth remembering.

Almost the end of September, not quite the end of September. That's weird to me. It's like September 29th or something.

They do it in weeks. They do it, they do the quarters based on weeks, and so they'll sometimes have a longer quarter after a while because they have

like, it's like a leap quarter where they have to add another week to a quarter. order. It's a, I've been doing this so long now that I have learned all of these things that I, I just want to say again, I was a kid who threw the business section away and thought that is boring. Like I care so much about all other forms of journalism and I get to the business page and I'd be like, whoop, no, don't care. And look what I, look the charts I make now. Now you are the business section. I'm the business section now. Look at me. Look at me. Look at my works and despair. Look at my charts and despair. $102.5 billion. That is a Q4 record. Yeah, Dan and I were talking about how one of these days,

Dan Moran, who does six colors with me, one of these non-holiday quarters that we consider the boring quarters was just going to casually, boringly break $100 billion. And this was it. It's like, it's the fourth quarter. It's not one of Apple's big quarters. and it's $100.

It's just $102.5 billion just right there. Yeah, because, yes, the reason I mentioned when the quarter ended is this only includes the very beginning of iPhone sales. It's not the iPhone sales quarter. That is the next quarter, which is Q1, which is the holiday quarter, because it's the way Apple has their year. That's always the biggest that they get. That's interesting. Yeah, I'm looking. Last year's was 124.

point three billion and we'll talk a little bit about their guidance in a bit but this 102.5 was up 8% year over year which is the biggest Q4 ever rounding out Apple's biggest revenue year of all time yeah yeah it's an all-timer next week we can talk about the annuals because I've got my forthcoming annual charts post that will that will break down you know now that the fiscal year is closed and Yeah, it was Apple's best fiscal year by a lot. So, yeah, a lot of money coming in, coming in. I'm going to, I'm going to also do a shout out to our friend, Dr. Drag, who wrote an interesting post where he tried to take Apple's revenue and normalize it for inflation, which I keep waiting for an economist to say that's not how it works.

But it does show you that, you know, one of the things that's happening here is that as as inflation goes up, you know, Apple's prices go up a little, or. Apple's revenue goes up a little bit, and so you could normalize that out and say it's about the same. I think what's interesting is Apple's not raising a lot of prices, and there's obviously foreign currencies involved. So I'm not sure that's a rabbit hole. I want to go down, but I like that he did it because he shows that if you pull a little bit out because of inflation, everything feels a little flatter. But, you know, again, I feel like I'm uncomfortable doing that because I think we just need to be aware that there are lots of macroeconomic factors that go into these numbers, but I'm going to kind of focus on the actual tangible results

here. Because again, headwinds, as they like to say, the foreign exchange head ones, Apple is doing business in so many different countries and they're taking money in local currency. And then they are eventually, eventually repatriating it to U.S. dollars, but not always, right? Sometimes they'll keep it in the country and then spend it on things in the country rather than having to go through an exchange. And they do a bunch of hedging with currency and they do a whole lot of stuff. It's very complicated. So all these numbers that we're reporting that are revenue numbers are really, these are reported

Apple, US dollars. It allows us to have a common frame of reference, even though we might want to be mindful of the larger complexities of this. Yeah, but like, I am definitely on board of you with the idea of like there isn't just one level of inflation, so that doesn't hold water. And then for me,

and other thing is the assumption that Apple will always have the same level of sales, no matter how much inflation goes up or down just doesn't hold for me. It's also true. And they've held their, and the thing is by holding their prices, the products actually are coming down in price, if you think that way, right? Because they've held so many price points even. Like a $9.99 MacBook Air today costs a lot less

in comparative terms than a $999 MacBook Air five years ago. Yeah. So I just, but yeah, it is an interesting exercise. It's complicated. But it is an, put that out there. It's a fun blog post. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Drang, I love it when he writes about my charts. So, thanks, Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. One of the key things for this quarter is that none of the main areas of business that Apple reports on were down year over year, which is not the case, always. I think technically wearables home and accessories was down a teeny, teeny tiny bit, but it rounds to zero. Yeah. Yeah, my chart, thank you numbers for putting minus zero on that chart. I thought that. I had to spend some time trying to to work out what that meant when I was looking versus iPad, which is

a positive zero. I was looking at it. I was like, what is zero and minus zero? Little charting, because the other thing people might notice is sometimes in these charts, there'll be two numbers that are the same, but the bars are slightly different. And the answer is the way numbers charts, and I

don't think I have gone through the trouble of trying to fix this, is numbers is charting the real number. Yeah. So if one of them is 12.1 and one of them is 11.6, They both will be labeled 12, but one will be taller than the other. And the same way with zero, it puts minus zero if it's just under. And there's a little teeny tiny wearables home accessories bar just peeking down slightly.

But basically it's flat. And so like that I think is one of the things that contributes to this being such a bang, a quarter for them. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt. The iPhone is at $49 billion, which is up 6% year of a year. the Mac is at 8.7 which is up 13% year over year.

Yeah, really good for the Mac. Really great. The iPad at 7 billion is flat. The wearables at 9 billion is also flat. And services is 28.8 billion, which is up 15% year over year. Same old story.

So there's a couple of these areas I want to dig into. But I actually want to start with a dramatic reading of a piece, of a piece of prose from your reporting on this. Oh, good. I love this. I said this last week

when I read something Stephen wrote that I enjoy the dramatic readings. Thank you. I just want to say, before you start, these quarterly, I used to write these for Macworld, and I wrote them late in the evening. Yeah, yeah. And this one, the results came out, and the call transcript,

my transcribing of the call, that was done and posted. And Dan and I were going to do a live stream on YouTube at 4.30, where we walk through the charts. And I had like an hour. And I realized, well, if I do this now, I can get this story out. I don't have to work tonight after the live stream. And it will go in the Six Colors newsletter for members,

which goes at 5 p.m. Pacific. And sometimes I make decisions, editorial decisions based on the newsletter, because I've always gotten the back of my mind. I wrote the script that builds the newsletter. I'm like, oh, the newsletter, I should get that out. and so a little punchy at this point right generated a lot of charts edited a big transcript and then had about an hour and I was like well

am I going to get this thing out now and sometimes when you write and you're a little punchy the writing is interesting yeah so I will read this in a second but like my my first thought when I read this was is this to check that people are reading this is this like a like a thing like is anyone reading this I am always reading it And I got this. Look, numbers are... Hold on, I'm going to stop here one more time just to say. Look, look, numbers are boring, and I try to make this calm interesting,

and I try to inject humor into it because it's boring. And I've done the boring part, and this is the part where I try to bring out some things that I think are interesting, but also try to make it a little bit funny because otherwise it's like death. Okay, go ahead. On the day that Apple announces its quarterly fiscal results, as it did on Thursday, there's a little ritual that happens down in Cupertino. financial journalists get a pre-briefing about the results from Tim Cook and they rush to their live shots to breathlessly report the news

on CNBC or Bloomberg Business or Fox Business from atop the Apple Park Visitors Center just as the announcement is posted publicly. Sometimes I imagine that Cook and CFO Kavan Perak say goodbye to them, jump in a car and just joyride all around Apple Park doing donuts and singing out loud until they have to calm it down

and get on the phone of financial analysts about half an hour later. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I've written so many leads about Apple having records that at this point, this is where my mind goes. I loved it. But I didn't know.

This quarter is, because there are a couple slam dunk moments in this quarter. I mentioned later that does Tim Cook dunk on people? Does Kenny dunk? Because there are a couple moments in here where I could hear them being like, oh, by the way, also all this awesome thing that has never happened. before also is happening. Bye, right? Like, okay. They know it.

They know that this was a killer quarter with a killer quarter yet to come. Talking about that. So Tim Cook said, we expect the December quarter's revenue to be the best ever for the company and the best ever for iPhone. Yeah, amazing.

He didn't blow an air horn right then too, right? And then, like, Parak follows it up by saying, we expect our December quarter total company revenue to grow by 10, to 12% year over year, which would be our best quarter ever. We expect iPhone revenue to grow double digits year over year, which would be our best iPhone quarter ever. And you added, just so we're clear, that's about $138 billion in total

revenue and a minimum of $76 billion in iPhone revenue, which is astounding. And my question is why? Here's my answer. They already know, because the results only show the first week and a half of iPhone sales. But they know the next month's iPhone sales. And they said they're supply constrained with iPhone models in a bunch of regions, which means they literally sold more than they could make. And when somebody asked, are you having trouble making them? Tim Cook was like, nope.

It's like that we just can't. Like this isn't, he said this was the dunking moment. He was like, you know, there isn't a ramp up here. It's just demand. And so why this year, why these numbers? Apple is, I would say, after six weeks or whatever of iPhone sales, iPhone 17 cycle sales, supremely confident that they're a hit. That's it. I think more my question is, like, I just, I wonder why this set of iPhones is resulting in this. Now, look, I've said myself, like, I've said it on this show, I've wrote about it too.

I think this is the most compelling range of iPhones that Apple has ever produced, like, just as I agree. Here is our range. But just because I, you know, just because we think these things, it doesn't always result in the rest of the world. It comes out here. it doesn't necessarily go around the world and everybody else goes yes Jason yes that's yeah I I think that's probably part of it

I think um I think that for all Apple's pushing of you know titanium like there were the ads that last year were like ooh titanium uh from all the carriers and stuff uh I think that the orange phone I think the look of the of the molded you know the the unibody back yep on the on the pro model

I think bringing all of those pro features down to the the base model I think the intrigue of the air which I think you know we talked about it in China is is potentially got some markets where that's intriguing and you know maybe it's also that people there's a little bit of a super cycle happening where people have have kind of their have not felt like there was enough there for them to update the last few years and that this one they're like okay this is compelling enough and that they're they're driving those people to update but I just, so, you know, it's probably complex and it's probably a lot of that stuff, but I do think it's really interesting that they very clearly are sending the signal here that iPhone sales are going great, because otherwise they would not make. Apple is actually very conservative with their guidance, and since COVID, they've been even more conservative with their guidance.

So to say this, there was a time when Apple, like, over, like, Apple has always undercooked its guidance a little bit, and its guidance is closer to reality than it used to be. But still, you know, even if they're not sandbagging this, like, that's good. Because if they sandbagged it, it would be if they were underselling it, in other words, this would be even more. Like, these numbers are astounding. Even if they're absolutely what Apple expects, they are kind of astounding. So Apple, Apple has looked at six weeks of sales and says this is a hit. I think that it is, you know, I'm sure for them, interesting that they are having supply. issues.

Like, I think that that shows something, right? Like, Apple is a company very good at making what they need. And maybe they were caught a little bit by surprise. Yeah, well,

and Cook said, this is not the ramp, right? Like, that is, which is, I know it's jargon, but it's that idea of, are you ramping up?

Like, you know, some companies, they introduce a product, and then it's like, oh, we can't make them fast enough. We're still trying to build capacity. Apple, starts building them really early

and they're at capacity. And that's so when Tim says, you know, this is not a, there is not a ramp issue. It's just we have very strong demand and we're working very hard to fulfill all the orders that we have. Like that is unusual for Apple

because they, they ramped it. They do that. But they are, they are fine. Now, some of that could be, some of that could be surprise demand. Yeah.

demand beyond their, not necessarily their capacity, but also that they're conservative in what they order because they want to see what the demand is like. And they got caught flat footed because they under, underestimated. But again, I think the story there would not be that they underestimated it and that Apple's bad at estimating. And I thought it was not going to be as good. I think that is Apple being surprised by the market because there is just more demand. If you want to view it that way, I don't think it's Apple being bad at estimating. I mean, I guess technically it is, but I think it's that Apple, that all the signals here are strong and that they couldn't match it. You absolutely cannot get it right. You can't. It does not matter how good Apple is. You cannot fully estimate consumer interest in your product. Right. And keep in mind what they do not want to do and is like a cardinal sin at Tim Cook's Apple

is build a bunch of stuff that you are not going to be able to sell later. Because they don't want inventory on demand. They ramp because they want to fulfill. at a level that they expect there to be demand to. But remember, Apple at its best, at its favorite, is that once a product is out, and sometimes it takes a week, sometimes it takes a month, sometimes it takes three or six months, depending.

But once a product is out, what they want to do as quickly as possible is to get in supply demand balance, which literally means every time somebody buys an iPhone, an iPhone is made. Like, that is the cycle they want. And I know it's way more complicated than that because you've got to ship them

and they're in different countries and all of that is true. But, like, that's the goal is to never have a warehouse full of iPhones that you're hoping will sell in the next few months. Yeah. And you balance that. And that's why you have to estimate because you've got to start ramping and building these things in July because you know that they're, or June or I don't even know when they start building them. Because you know that when September hits, they're going to be a load of pre-orders and you're going to have to fulfill a pre-order spike. And they get people in for the holiday season. So it's complicated.

But also, this puts a little different spin on the stories about how Apple is increasing some phones. and decreasing some other phones like that the air is not getting, you know, maybe the way to look at this is, is that it's not so much that the air has bad demand, but that the others have surprising demand. Also keeping in mind that China report that the air might be finding demand in other countries than, like China, where it didn't go on sale right away. So there's a lot, there's a lot going on here, but this is, it turns out this is, it happens when they choose to say. send the signal, this is the really interesting thing about these results, is not the numbers they give you. Because with Wall Street, it's always about the future, right? So it's not the numbers that give you about this quarter. It's that they felt confident enough to predict in their forward-looking information that, you know, might or might not happen that assumes a lot

of things. But like, with all of the caveats and footnotes and all of that, they just said, yeah, we're going to set an all-time record in iPhone and overall Apple revenue and we're going to blow it out. And the only way that's true is if, because we can see the numbers that they disclosed, right? But they know how the following four weeks went before they made

this statement. They know how it's going. And they said, we're blowing it out. So there you go. They're going to blow it out. Yeah, I mean, we're going to touch on Apple Intelligence a little bit later on the show. But you've got to imagine it feels good for them at a time when Wall Street is looking at them unfavorably for

Apple Intelligence incident to be like, yeah, but you know what? though, we're selling more product than we've ever sold. So one thing I do, about 30 minutes before the results come out, I turn on a financial news network like CNBC, which is why I put in that thing about the guy is always sort of breathlessly rushing back to the visitor's center to do his little thing, where he says, I talked to Tim Cook and he said these things that he's about to say in the financial call, but I got it slightly before that, you know, that kind of thing. But they are enthusiastic about growth.

This is a thing that they do. They are painting a narrative. This is, this is, but, but when you talk about AI, when you are looking at the business channel narrative, it's not the same narrative as Apple's. And that's fine.

It's, I find it instructive. There are AI, there's so many people who are pumping AI, especially stocks and stuff, right? This is the story of the economy right now, is AI pumping. And so, you know,

I saw some really interesting analysis where some analysts were saying, well, you know, the great thing about Apple is that they have a product that they sell and that that insulates them from their AI lapses don't really affect them as much because they have a product people want. And there's truth in that. There really is truth in that. And the fact is you can run AI stuff on iPhones. Apple doesn't actually have to provide it. In the long run, they probably need to get there. But you can, you know, you can use your iPhone to do stuff. And if you want to do AI stuff, you can do that on your iPhone.

And Apple has a real product to sell. And I feel like some of the analysts were getting to that point of saying, hey, isn't this nice that this isn't just AI that's sort of BS hoping for the future, but it's real. At the same time, some of those analysts then immediately toggle and they say, but they still have to do it by next year. They still have to get on board. Like it's still, and, you know, I don't know if that's true or not.

Everybody is acting as if it's true, and I guess we'll find out if it's true. But I think the truth is right now that Apple has real products that people want to buy and put in their pocket and use. And that is a strength because they're not selling AI futures. This is not a company that is built on promising AI futures. Now, we can talk about, again, and have a lot. Especially not. Well, this is the thing, though, is we can talk about whether they're going to pay for that later. And there are a lot of scenarios where they are, and there are a lot of scenarios where they will skate away. Scott-free from all of that. But the reality is, I feel like it's almost like refreshing and counterintuitive in a world where

Every other company result is about AI this or AI investment or performance or whatever. And then Apple's like, yeah, we sold a lot of hardware and we're going to do it again. And it's an understandable business. And then everybody else is like, yeah, yeah, that's great. But they also need to do the AI thing. Tune in. I'm sure they'll do it next year, right? Like, okay, that's the narrative that they want to put out there.

And we're going to talk about what Apple's trying to do there. Because, you know, Apple, again, I think there are scenarios where a lot of this AI stuff kind of evaporated. and we realize that it's never going to get where they thought it would go and that it's going to end up getting kind of put into chunks and put into features and we may end up building all this capacity in the cloud and then the models will get so good and so focused that we can just run them on our devices. And again, Apple kind of wins in that scenario.

But it is interesting to see the difference between what your average CNBC or Bloomberg business person will say where there's a real cognitive dissonance between, wow, look at this, a company that makes things and sells them at profit versus sort of all that kind of AI talk that is built in large part on spending enormous amounts of money on the hope of an enormous payback down the road. Yeah, if and when the bubble bursts, like, Apple is going to be in a scenario where they will be better off than a lot of their competitors. Oh, man, Apple, I mean, for those who have not followed Apple through other bubbles bursting,

one of the great things about Apple and the way they approach the world. And again, this may be a reason that they have been hurt in the AI. Like Apple's attitude has pros and cons. But one of the great things about Apple being a kind of careful company is that when bubbles burst,

Apple ends up with, as the song says, all the money. And Apple is one of the great companies in the world at investing through a downturn. And nobody, if, there's a if there's an AI bubble you know who's going to be scooping up all the pieces of those AI companies that didn't make it and putting them at for cheap and putting them inside it's going to be Apple that's Apple Apple Apple will absolutely be positioned to accelerate when other

companies are decelerating and that that's been one of their advantages over the years um again that that approach has disadvantages too but you want to you want to mention my my spooky thing about the Mac because they did they did offer a scary spooky day before Halloween warning for Mac revenue. Tough compare. So Mac revenue has been great and it's been great for two straight years,

basically. They've been growing year over year. But they did say this quarter, all we've really got, the way he said it, it was almost like the island of misfit toys

kind of thing where I was like, last year we were updated all the Macs last in the fall quarter. We updated all the Macs. We had so many of them. And this year, well, you know,

we've got the 14-inch MacM5 MacBook Pro. You know. So that's a tough compare. That guy. And he's not wrong. He's not wrong. They literally, I mean, you know, what drives sales is generally as new models.

And they're going, and remember, what drives those bar charts is comparison with the previous year. So what he's saying there is, look, we sold a lot of Macs in the year ago quarter, holiday quarter, because we had a lot of new Macs on sale. And that's not happening this year. So that's going to be bad. So get ready. So when we are clutching our pearls in third. three months about max sales being down, we were warned that it was a tough compare,

and I believe them. And services, you know, we mentioned its results. It was its 13th consecutive quarterly revenue growth and ninth consecutive double-digit growth. This also led to one of your favorite moments on the call. Tim Cook was asked to give more information

about how much of this money, like was Apple's ads and like how, you know, to give more detail on it. Yeah. It's the Google search, right? So it's like the first party ads versus third party ads and really what they're saying there is. How much is the ads that you do and Google?

Yeah. And Tim Cook said, I'm dodging the question intentionally because we don't split it at that level. Yeah. Incredible. It was a, it was, you know, he said the quiet part out loud. We all know that that he's doing it. It was funny too because he actually said, we don't divulge. And like, and the divulge like trailed off.

He's like, devulge. you just stop saying it I'm dodging the question intentionally because we don't split it at that level that's what he said but he's like we don't divulge that to you it's what it means we're not talking about that I mean if we're supposed to believe all the

testimony that it's been given I believe Tim Cook doesn't know the number for an answer that he gave once he's just ah there's no way I could know this no one tells me nothing that was a pretty good question um Wamsie Mohan from Bank of America gets the gold star for the analyst the question this time because what he was basically saying is he was trying he it was a good good try it was a good try because he was asking like three levels down about what the Google revenue was because what he was saying is there's a lot of talk that search standard search is slowing down because of AI search and you have a large revenue component in services in your advertising category that you don't break out but apparently it's in advertising internally that is Google search results.

You know, ad revenue, basically. It's your Google RevShare deal. So is that growing or is it not? And so he's trying to frame it in a way where it's about growth and it's not specifically about Google. And what Cook said is, yes, that the advertising category is growing. And then Wamsie Mohan was like, does, and he says, and it's the third party and the first party.

It set a record during the quarter. And Wamsi Mohan said, so is that, does, do you mean that, do you mean that, internal and external both set records. And Tim's like, mm-hmm, no, I'm not going to answer that one. Yep. So, but nice run. It's funny, though, right?

Because you said, like, you know, there's a lot of talk about search revenue going down. Part of that is Eddie Q's for four. Eddie Q. Eddie Q. It is. It is. Yeah.

I'm sure that somebody there was rolling their eyes and you're like, Eddie. Uh-huh. I don't know, man. I don't think any of those guys are going up on that stand about knowing exactly. what they're going to say. It's hard to imagine that.

It's hard to imagine that. So basically, yes, Apple's not going to go out of business and get ready for a blowout, a holiday quarter. Actually, the biggest takeaway from this entire thing is what we've been saying, which is the confidence Apple has

in how iPhone 17 sales are going is very clear that they are surprised by the level of demand and they're going to blow it out next quarter in iPhone sales. And that's the, And, yes, services also continues to escalate. And then, you know, those are the big stories.

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slash upgrade 20 with the code upgrade 20 are thanks to delete me for their support of this show and relay rumor roundup time yeah I have a couple of rumors that we missed that I wanted to enter into the roundup because you know if we don't talk about them here

they're not real Mark Gohmann is reporting that Apple is preparing to launch its first touchscreen MacBook Pro in late 2026 or early 2027 there had been some previous report on this from Ming Chi Kuo that I really messed up on a previous episode that we fixed later on in a further episode but now this will be the official record going forward.

This machine will feature an M6 chip and will be lighter and thinner than the current models of MacBook Pro that it will replace. The screen itself will be an OLED panel as well as a touchscreen with a hole punch camera instead of a notch. It will apparently work similarly to the Dynamic Island. I wonder and kind of hope that what Mark means... here is that it will be kind of dynamic islandy, like notifications and stuff might appear from that area to screen. I think that would be a fun thing to add to the Mac. This MacBook, oh, we've got

a no face ID though. That is still years away. So it would just be the camera. Apple has been working on a new hinge to minimize the amount of movement of the screen when interacting with the touchscreen. I thought that's an interesting detail, right? Because if you're tapping it, you don't want the screen to just be like pushed further away from you. so you kind of got to think about that as well which I thought was an interesting detail this MacBook Pro will most likely cost more than the current one because the parts would be more expensive

and Mark says that Apple is not currently developing any other touchscreen Macs as they want to see how people react to this model first I have no idea why they think people would react negatively like oh people might not like these touch screens as a newfangled technology yeah it's very rare confusing I don't know. I mean, we've been talking about for so long.

I mean, I don't know. I'm sure that they ran their calculations and that they, here's a thing. Apple's analysis is different, right? Apple's analysis is just different of stuff like this. And all of us are like, oh, touchscreen Macs, you could do stuff with that. And everybody else, all the PCs have touch screens. And why doesn't Apple? And it's a joke. And Apple's so behind the times here. Apple would probably tell you that if you look at how laptop users use touch it's not that important and that it doesn't get used that much and so it's hard for them to justify adding

cost and thickness and whatever complexity in and I think that there's truth in that I think that touch screens on laptops especially laptops you can't convert into tablets is kind of it's not unimportant, but it's not that important.

As somebody, I mean, I've told the story before, we had a Chromebook for Jamie that was a touchscreen, and I used it quite a bit too. And even with my iPad, when I've gotten the keyboard, like, it's just so easy and everybody's used to touching a screen, and I don't use it for mousing. I use it for scrolling or tapping on a button because your brain is like, I can just,

yeah, I can just tap on the screen and do this thing, and it's easy, and it's second nature to me. So I could defend, Apple's decision to be reluctant to go down this path because they didn't they thought it adds a lot of complexity and our users don't actually in the end they won't get a lot from it just because everybody else did it that's not enough of a reason it makes them look bad but I feel like if Apple felt like it was existential they would have done it a long time ago and they felt like they could still sell lots and lots of laptops without that feature and essentially nobody would care

And I think that's true. The question is, why now? And did they do anything to make this correct? Because, like, Apple's move is usually, well, we didn't just do a touchscreen. We added this thing that, whoa, and blows your mind, right? So what is that? Because I have a hard time saying, oh, it's got a touchscreen. Now, look, you can scroll.

Wow, Apple. Oh, my God. Scroll on a screen? What? So what is that thing? I think is a more interesting question. Because I think the truth is that touch screens on laptops is a good idea, and that Apple's saying, oh, zombie arms and you don't want to manipulate it. I think that's true, but it doesn't make it not nice to have a touchscreen, especially since, and I think this is my most important reason you put a touchscreen on a MacBook Pro is every screen that's near your body that you can touch will receive your touch.

touch except for Mac laptops. And I know it's not ideal, and I know it's not going to get a lot of intense use. Most people are not going to spend their time touching a screen instead of using their keyboard and their track pad on their laptop. But it does

happen, and why not just do it? If it's not too much trouble. And if you've got a clever idea to make it even better, all the better. I wonder what that would be. Yeah, my thinking on it is the same as it's always been. It's just and nice to have. It's just an option to have. It's just nice.

And as you say, like, I am used to touching screens all the time. I use a product that is Apple makes that is essentially a laptop, the iPad Pro, and I touch the screen, even when I have the keyboard in it, right? And, like, that's the way I use that product. So why, why can I not do that on my laptop? And I have, I have touched a MacBook screen. Oh, I have done it a few times, right? Where it's like, oh, especially having used the, if you use another device that's got it in a configuration, like a laptop, then, and the iPad qualifies, then I'm like, because I do that all the time on the iPad. Like, again, I've got a keyboard and a trackpad, but maybe my hands aren't on the keyboard and trackpad, and I'm just looking at a screen and a dialogue box comes

up, and I just go tap. Or I'm reading something. My hands are off the screen, off the keyboard, and I can either choose to just reach out and do this to scroll, like flick my finger, or I can put my hands down and orient on the trackpad and put two fingers down and do it That, like, those are the kind of situations where we're all just kind of used to this. It's not, my point is, it's not for most people going to be a remotely transformative productivity, productivity feature. But at some point, you just need to have it there because all of us are used to touching screens and it needs to do something. Yeah, maybe I don't, no, no, I do not understand enough about how screens are made, but there is a part of me that wonders, like at a certain point, does it become more hard to make an OLED screen that is not a touch. screen.

Or, like, is there less availability of screens? Or up to Apple standards. Like, I'm sure that there are some, I mean, I'm sure some of it is just kind of like dogma of like, we don't do that. I'm sure part of it is the way Apple constructs their laptop screens to do this is going to require a rethinking of things that they weren't willing to do. And with this generation, they built the concept in. And is it price or thickness or just the technology?

involved, or did they just have a change of heart in the last five years since they introduced the last MacBook Pro design? Four and a half, five. It'll be, it'll be like almost six years by the time this model comes out, where it's a completely new design. And sometime in that six years, they're like, yeah, let's just put it in there. People are used to it. Also, we have a lot of Mac apps now that are iPad apps. Yeah. Like, they're not as many as you would think, but like those are out there. And all those, understand touch natively and that's a quick win and maybe they're like ah that's a reason enough for us to do it i don't know uh we have some uh breaking news here um okay and that stephen hackett just text me uh apple has created a new sonic logo along with the logo for apple tv it is composed by phineas uh bill atleish oh interesting uh brother and come and like composer uh it It has a very different sound. Maybe we can put that sound into the podcast, Jason. What do you think about that as a possibility of a thing that we can do?

I like that. I don't have it loaded in my soundboard, but I'm sure we could have... We have post-production. I'm sure we could play it now. It's a good sound. It's still got that kind of like... sound, like it still sounds like an Apple kind of like warning sound

kind of thing. Oh yeah. You know, not, you know, not warning like booting sound or whatever. Yeah, it's got a little back back masking going on in it. There's a lot of stuff going on in there. So there you go. I hope people enjoyed that. Exciting audio logo. Yep. The vibrancy continues, Mike.

The vibrancy. It is actually very vibrant. The identity continues to vibrate. Very vibrant. But it's not just the MacBook Pro, that will get an OLED panel, according to Mark German. Apple is developing displays, OLED displays for the MacBook Air, the iPad Air, and the iPad Mini.

The iPad Mini is actually expected to be the first of these to get the upgrade. As early as 2026, Apple is also tested making this waterproof. Yeah. To make this work, Apple has been working on a new speaker system to remove the holes on the device, and they would use some kind of vibration technology

instead for audio. It's basically a reading device, for a lot of people and the Kindle's been most Kindles, many, most Kindles have been waterproof for a long time now. So I think this is a, I think this is an area where they feel that they're lacking and that they could benefit from

given how this device is used to get it to be waterproof. I think that would be really great. Yep. Or is it going to be waterproof or is it going to be like the iPhone where it's like it's water resistant but if it breaks because you put it in water we're not going to. Yes, it will probably be waterproof in

the way that an iPhone is waterproof. Yeah. So you wouldn't want to just toss it in the bathtub, but if you dropped it in the bathtub or splashed it, it would probably survive. My thinking is, like, is Apple trying to build what it's essentially a high-end Kindle, right? Where it's like, you would sit by the pool with this with no problem, you're going to get splashed, it's going to be no problem, like that, that kind of idea.

As long as it's bright enough, as long as the anti-glare is enough, those are the real issues versus the Kindle, is the Kindle is readable and bright sunlight. So if they can do that along with this, then, then yes, I think, because I think that's a use case for the iPad mini, right? It gets used a lot as an ultra-portable reader like that. The iPad Air will get another LCD update before it gets an OLED, and that will probably be in the spring of next year. Sure.

Mac Rumors is reporting that Apple may be getting ready to announce iPad versions of four existing professional Mac apps. They have discovered App Store IDs for PixelMator Pro, which is the image editor, Photoshop, like app that is available for the Mac. There is a PixelMata app on iPad, which is in desperately even update. And so a PixelMator Pro would do that.

I love PixelMetro on my Mac. I hope to get a good version on the iPad. And, I mean, Apple owns them. So, yes, they should do that. And then also Compressor, which is a video and audio compressor app, which is a Final Cut Companion app on the Mac. Motion, which is another final cut companion

for creating visual effects, and Main Stage, which is a companion app for Logic Pro, for producing live performances. Now, my wonder here is, does this signal maybe some bigger updates coming to Final Cut and Logic? And I also wonder how companion apps like these would work on the iPad compared to the Mac, because they're very much hand-in-hand, these applications, compressor motion and main stage. feels to me like Apple is building a pro app bundle

remember because like Final Cut Pro on iPad is a subscription and Logic Pro on iPad is a subscription and those apps on Mac are not currently so this could be a pro bundle on iPad also this could be the moment where Apple unveils its new pro apps bundle

across all its devices and you subscribe and you get it everywhere, which I feel like is coming. I mean, Final Cut and Logic, I mean, maybe they'd still make a version available that you could buy or something, although I don't know.

I mean, I feel like they have been laying the groundwork for those becoming subscription apps. And to the credit of the developers of Final Cut and Logic, they do update them regularly, and then you pay once and then you don't pay again for years. So I can see it. That answers the question, right, of why did they buy a pixel meter?

So they have another app for this bundle. For the bundle. A creative professional. They have a photo. It runs across Mac and iPad with a photo app, a video app, an audio app, and they have begun to construct or have constructed a pro bundle. And you buy it and maybe you buy the individuals or maybe they just sell it as a bundle. I don't know how Adobe they want to be about this. But that's interesting, interesting how they'll approach that.

But that would be my guess is that this will be a pro bundle of creative apps on all of Apple's platforms. and that includes all their creative apps on the Mac as well, including PixelMator. According to a Waibo account Instant Digital, Apple is planning on making changes to how the camera control button works for the iPhone 18. The capacitive layer will be removed, leaving just a pressure sensor instead. Now, I'm sure when people read these headlines, they hear these clips, they're like, oh, they're going to get rid of the swipes from the camera control.

But no, that's not how it works. this doesn't actually mean that they would have to remove the swiping gestures. There are other phones on the market right now that are doing swipe sensing motions on similar buttons from just using the pressure sensor layer. So it could be that Apple has just come to work out the way to make this work. Maybe they're happy with a little less reliability on something that people are not using very much. And having just one sensor, so just having the pressure sensor, as well as the capacity of layer, would make the component,

cheaper overall. Apparently, camera control is not only expensive to make. It's also very expensive to repair. It's actually causing repair price increases for the iPhones. My hope is that they remove the actual physical click motion required to take the images, which is the thing I mentioned before. And so I will now add in here, instant digital, same account, has claimed that the 27 iPhone line, which is probably going to be the iPhone 20, will finally see the removal of all moving buttons, replacing them with solid state, haptic buttons on the iPhone. Instead, this was something that was heavily rumored to be coming to the iPhone 15 in 2022, but instead we got a physically moving action button to our surprise. This is a quote from Mac rumors. According to

the leaker, Apple's solid state button design has been completed as, sorry, it has completed functional verification and includes haptic feedback for the side button, volume buttons, action button, and camera control. I think this could go well. I mean, I think Apple has shown that they are very good at making fake buttons that feel real, like the AirPods Pro or track pads and stuff like that. I would have in theory no problem with this as a system. What do you think? Late generation iPhone Home button too, right? Yes. The iPhone Home button. Very good call. went haptic and nobody really noticed and it was fine and they eliminated a moving part. I'm okay. I mean, it's all in the execution, but I'm okay with the idea and that saves a lot of

of price and water ingress and whatever else is going on. Like it reduces a lot. I also think the camera control, I don't know, one of these days I want to know what the story is there because it sounds to me like maybe that was the action button was supposed to be the camera control button and then they introduced the action button. And then they decided to leave the action button and make another camera control button. And in two years, they added two physical buttons to the iPhone, which seems weird for a company that seems like dedicated on the premise of getting rid of buttons.

Instead, they turned around and added buttons. I think everybody, well, not everybody, many people would agree. I would believe that the camera control button was way over-engineered, too complicated, overshot in all aspects and that a simpler space where you could open the camera button, open the camera app and take a picture is kind of all you need here. And if that is a, if that's Apple's experiment with what if we take a button and make it all just down to kind of being pressure sensitive and not a real button anymore in advance of doing that with all of the buttons down the road, sounds good to me. There are a couple of areas that I don't, as one that I think,

would be frustrating. And one I don't understand about going to all solid state buttons. One is like, because you reminded me with the, with the home button, you know, like, you would not be able to potentially control the volume of your iPhone when it's in your pocket or if you have gloves or whatever because it can't read the sensors. If it's pressure sensitive and not capacitive, you could, right? You would be searching for a specific level of, this is all the, this is all the execution, right? Is like, what are the use cases that you're covering and how are you covering them and how are you right now a button can be pressed accidentally so it's not like you need to make it so the button can't be pressed accidentally by enough force but you do need to

make it that ideally yeah if it's in your pants pocket and you just squeeze the volume button the volume goes down right there would have to have that some pressure because how enough would you turn an iPhone on if the iPhone is off that's the hard reset and turn on is one of those questions like how do you how do you do that and is there one button that actually does depress a little bit or is there, I mean, what, that, these are the questions. These are the questions. This episode is brought to you by FitBod. If you're looking to change your fitness level, it can be hard to know where to start.

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F-I-T-B-O-D-Me slash upgrade for 25% of your membership or thanks to FitBod for their support of this show and Reli. Mark, I want to continue talking about rumors, but about Apple intelligence specifically. Mark Herman is reporting that Apple

continues to struggle with the Syria upgrades coming next year. While reporting on more departures from Apple's AI, I division, from researchers to engineers to executives. Mark says that internally, there is concern over the quality of the new Apple intelligence-powered theory from those that are testing it. And he, not fears, he suggests this may lead to even more departures if it comes out and is a failure. Like I said for a while now, these people leaving, if everybody at Apple looks at

their work and says, this isn't good enough, I would leave. Right? Like, I'm in a hot category. I'm not being appreciated, and I'm not saying they're wrong. They may be right, but this is one reason you see people leaving that team is that the bosses have left and also the team has been condemned for not doing good enough work. And that can be either because of the work not being good enough or that they're not given the environment. Yeah, the constraints pull it on them by Apple for sure, right? That's a potential reason. Mark is also reporting that Apple is quote, paying Google to create a custom Gemini-based model that can run on its private cloud servers and help power Siri. So Google was the winner of an internal bake-off between them

and Anthropic. We spoke about this before, right? One of the past that app was looking to take was to bring in an external model to be the kind of the underpinnings because their models weren't good enough to power something like Siri. However, it was the financials that won the day. It was believed that the Anthropic had the better capability for what they needed, but were too expensive. And so the Apple ended up going to move with Google for Gemini. Mark German doesn't expect that this will be a public-facing relationship. Like it's not going to, Apple and Google are not going to come out on stage and announce this deal together. Yeah, this is a white label for the model running on private cloud compute is the idea here, is that it will actually be a

modified custom Google Gemini based compiled to run on Apple's servers which are on Apple Silicon instead of on wherever Google is running its servers, whatever platforms it's on. And that that will just be, so instead of Apple

Foundation model, it'll be running a version of Gemini, white-labeled, they won't talk about it and that's what you get when you go to the private cloud. And this is one, again, regardless of the partners, so this idea that Anthropic it was more expensive. Like Apple's got an existing relationship with Google,

so you could even argue that it's not going to cost anything. It'll cost in like credits against the search revenue or whatever. But that also it's like this is like white label. You're asking companies that are AI and are building lots of other things to build a custom version of their model for your silicon in your data center. Like Anthropic would be like, yeah, we could do that. But what are we going to charge them? And set a number that Apple was like, oh, no, no.

And Google might be more hungry about like, yeah, we'll take that. And we're going to own the models that smartphones are using, and that'll be good for us. It also allows Apple to swap the models out at any time if they want to. And if they build a model of their own that they like, they can put that in there. And this is one of those advantages that Apple has is Apple doesn't necessarily have to own the AI model to have AI features. I'm sure they would like to, right? but the era we live in right now you've got all these AI companies

investing enormous amounts of money in model development as well as cloud infrastructure and if Apple says well we're investing in our cloud infrastructure but our model development isn't so hot right now but we'll you know we'll pay you to use your model on our stuff

like that kind of gets Apple what it wants in the short term. Yeah I don't know what to make of all of this you know it's hard to to make an assessment on this when we don't have all the information, right? Was Anthropics cost astronomically different to Google,

right? Or was it going to be more complicated or, you know, was the cost way higher than the capability difference, right? But I just feel like I want to hear Apple's going with the best capability partner rather than the best financial

partner for this product. Like, I feel like with hearing things like this, And just that Apple is still like, you know, Apple has to rely on someone else. I'm happy that they're doing that if it means the product's good. But also it's like, shouldn't you be able to do this? Like, you know, like, well, this is, this is a question of Apple's view of AI in general and their priorities here is that you could argue that they got in this place because they are not real deep believers in AI. And that could be a mistake or they could be right.

I think it's still all kind of out there. I think they're behind because they made some assumptions about AI's utility that were proven wrong. But I think there's also an open question about whether everybody's agreement that AI is going to be everything in the future may be overhyped. Let's just put it that way. So do they look at this and say, well, we can spend a lot of money on Anthropic. Is it worth it when we've got this other deal with Google that's pretty much as good? Or maybe their thought is, if we do this deal with Google, we will be on parity with Android. And that's all that is required, right?

We don't need to be better than Android. We just need to be a parody with them. And this gets us there. And then we're fine. And we can kind of go on our way. And maybe we'd come back to Anthropic later. I also could throw in like, you know, maybe they don't want to prop up Anthropic because they got their eye on them. And if Anthropic loses a bunch of deals,

then they're going to be ripe for the pickings. I don't know. But yes, it is not a great look to have a report that says Apple tested a bunch of AI models. And the one that was the best is not the one they went with. Because they went with one that was cheaper. I mean, to be fair, it is Google Gemini. And I think that there are a lot of smart people

who would say that Google seems like the most likely winner of the AI race because they are Google. And they've got a lot of advantages, even though open AI has so much money. I don't follow this, like, nearly as close to say someone like Federico, right? Like, but from my understanding, it just seems like what model is best changes on like a fortnightly basis. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons I think that Apple going with the white label is maybe a good idea in the long run.

Here's the, I read a piece over, it might have even been a Ben Thompson piece, but I was reading some stuff about AI over the weekend. And one of the things about the AI bubble and about people spending lots of money on AI and investing in all this stuff is a bunch of very powerful big companies with lots of money are trying to grab the win, like the winning condition, which is general intelligence. It's like building the ultimate model. And while I appreciate AI as a thing that can make feature. is cool. Not only do I not believe that general intelligence is really a thing that's going to happen and emerge from an LLM, I don't actually believe that. Even if I spot you that it will emerge, I have zero belief that it will emerge at one company and all the other companies won't get it immediately after. And that's, I think one of the problems I have with the AI investment is

I think there is an underlying belief that whoever gets there first is going to own it. And I just don't think that's going to be true. And if you're Apple, you know, this is an advantage because if it doesn't matter because there's always another model out there and you can just partner with whoever has a good model and you're never really behind, even if you're never really ahead, it's just fine. Is that enough for Apple? Like, maybe? I don't know.

I remain very skeptical not my skepticism of AI is tempered I I I'm really skeptical on the idea that there's a wall that's going to be built on AI that's based on like the model that gets built I can see the wall being built in terms of your server capacity and your all the GPUs you got and all of that but I'm telling you in the long run if it's an arms race for hardware capacity to run a model Apple will be there Apple can spend the money Apple builds its own silicon it can do that it can it's already started to do that and I am skeptical of the idea of like how unique these models are because like you said all you have to do is follow people who follow this stuff and there's always another model that's got another novel thing a model at this scale for a device a model at this scale for a small cloud novel at at huge scale it just keeps on changing and it's I mean it's fun and exciting that there's such an arms race but it also tells me that you know if somebody gets to the end there's always a another thing beyond the end. There's never really an end and that somebody else is going to get there too. And so it's going to be very much like a commodity on that level. And I think that Apple benefits if that's the case. So I don't have a problem with like other than the pummeling Apple takes in the public image, I suppose if they, you know, they haven't built their own model. They're using somebody else's. But I would say that most of the people, if Apple has a good useful model and it's white labeled so they don't even know it's coming from Google, nobody's going to care.

Tim Cook said to CNBC as part of the I think the results stuff that Apple are making good progress on their efforts and that they expect to release these features next year at least he isn't still they're not still saying in the coming year which I was saying a little bit we're almost at that year now so the coming year is almost here so yes he did finally just say it's next year like they're going to

do it next year that's that's what they put down and now they really have to have to deliver and maybe that's the source of the confidence is that they've got this AI deal with Google and they're happy about how that's going to go. So I wanted to just very quickly run back through again the features that we have seen, but have not shipped, right? Stuff that show up at WWDC.

This is Siri on screen awareness, so this is your phone, you know, being able to take actions on things that are on the screen, so you could just talk to your phone and be like, archive this email or whatever. Also, actions across apps, so you could say, like, take this email and upload it to slacks or whatever, and your phone should just be able to understand how to do all of that. And then the big one was personal contacts as well, so learning what you do, and you're

able to answer questions about what's on your device. And that was the whole, when is my mom's flight arriving thing. It's able to build an agent, basically, that has access to it. And we've seen this, right? This is like a GPT or something. idea that there's a there when federico uploads all his reviews or whatever or his notion or his obsidian or whatever like it's the idea that there's a personal data trove that you have and then you you're asking the model to query the contents like you know about all this stuff

now do stuff with it and if you can do that on device it's really powerful because and it's hard to do that in in the cloud because you would actually need to upload it to private cloud compute and that's a lot of data. So what you want is some parsing to happen on device. But that's the dream, right, is that your phone knows about your stuff. And then the LLM that's running can make distinctions based on your stuff. And ideally, the model could potentially, and I know this is wild, I don't think they've talked about it, but ideally the model could query your personal context, get a bunch of related data out, and then send that in a query to the private cloud. Yeah. And have it process it, right? You could have a

a kind of cherry-picking your personal data model on device that then kicks it to the more powerful model to process it and intuit things about it. There's lots of ways you could do this. It's a great idea. It was a great idea in 2024 when they showed it, but they got to do it is the challenge there. So I'm just going to make a little prediction. These three things that I've spoken about, we will see iOS 27 before all three of them ship. I think you might be right. It's all part of in the coming year, right? I believe they will have stuff like I believe they will have in the spring

like it has been rumored but I don't think all of these things and I think particularly the personal context thing we may never see that like that feels such a big thing to try and more personal Siri can mean a lot of things

to a lot of people so we'll see how it goes I wanted to just give a couple of notes on the jaw knit band so Apple sent me a jawknit band for review and I tried it out today at my Vision Pro lives at the studio and I have not been here until today

but I spent some time wearing it and using my Vision Pro it is a hefty piece of equipment the joint net band like as soon as you pick it up like on its own you take out the very elaborate packaging that it comes in

it's like this is a unit of a thing the adjustment system that's the winner to me like it is absolutely the most intuitive system for adjustment maybe any headband of any product I've ever used, like across all of the various VR headsets

and everything. I had a hard time picturing it how it works. It just it pops a little bit out to do one dimension and you push it back into the other and it's very nice. They did a good job. It feels almost infinite, right? Like in the amount of adjustment that you have with it, it's very special.

You can dial it in very particularly. It's also a little like firmer. The whole thing is a little denser. Yeah. than it was, and I think that's just that they've got the what tungsten inserts in there. I'm surprised, I would not have guessed that there was metal in this, because it's still flexible.

I don't know what's going on in that strap. I meant to look to see if anyone's done a tear down on it, but like, I was expecting the back of it to kind of feel rigid, but no, it's still flexible, but there's metal in it. Maybe it's very flexible metal, I don't know.

Maybe, some little bits, I don't know. So this is absolutely the best headband. I can see why they have decided to make it the default headband that ships. This is the only one anyone should use, I think, at this point. Yes. Yes, I agree. It took them too long, but they

are shipping the version of this product that is the most comfortable to use now. I now just want to talk about Vision Pro a little bit for just a couple of minutes. Whenever I wear this thing, I always come away from it with thoughts.

Because the thing that I'm always struck by, is how impressed I am at the complexity of it and how easy it is to use when it's working properly. And I say that because I have an issue, it's been a persistent issue for a long time now where my eye tracking seems to kind of get out of whack

and I have to redo the eye tracking. And so like, I think we talked about this before. Yeah, I particularly have problems with compatible apps. Like, yeah sure iPad apps

yeah the iPad apps basically trying to close those apps is almost impossible for me to be able to do like if I look down

to the little X it just never highlights it and even just using these applications a lot of the time I have to look slightly below

the action that I want to perform now the issue with this is because there has been so little developer

adoption of the Vision Pro from a native app perspective across a lot of the apps that I use I am using too many of the compatible apps right and so I'm having an experience which is not as good as it could be because I don't have these problems

with the native apps as frequently sometimes it does but not as frequently. There's something about the targets and the targets are different on the iPad apps and I think it's exacerbating your existing issue which is that there's some sort of eye tracking or alignment thing that you've got wrong.

I don't experience this usually but every now and then I get in a state where I can't look at the closed box in anything and I will either readjust the headset or I will take it off and put it back on and then occasionally I will do the retraining and I think part of it is the alignment of the headset is

just a little bit off in some way where it thinks it's doing proper eye tracking, but it's not. And it really is, eye tracking is a magic trick. It is. It is amazing when it works. And then every now and then, or perhaps more often for you, every now and then I get in a situation

where I realize, oh, it's mistracking me now. It doesn't happen very often for me, but it does happen. And I have my series of steps, right? Which is, is it too high? Is it too low? Is it a little too far away? Do I need to take it off and all that? And then it's the, I'm going to run back through the eye tracking

thing to get it to work. And it is just one of these things where like I just don't have as good an experience of the compatible apps and the lack of native apps is always highlighted by the fact that I have to use more compatible apps than I would like to use to be able to get

what I want to do done on the device. Yeah, I agree. With the widget and window snapping stuff, you know, I've used it before in the betas but using it again today is like, oh, this is just really good. Like, this is really nice. But again, I open that widgets app and there's not a lot of apps in there, right? It's like, really I'm using just Apple's ones

and Timery. For the most part. Yeah. I can use my, I can use my widgets that I made for my iPad using scriptable. Yeah. Because that's not a Vision Pro app, but it is an iPad app and it contributes its widgets. So my weather widget that I built, I can actually stick on a wall, which is pretty fun. Yeah, it's like, I love using the Vision Pro, but like it's just, I, I, I, I, I feel like I need an iPadOS 26 moment with it. Yeah. Which is like make it easier for me to use this device more. Right.

That's what iPadOS 26 did. That's the ultimate Vision Pro review is really, it's an amazing piece of hardware. Maybe the most amazing piece of hardware Apple's ever built. It's incredible to use it. You're inside it and you're like, oh my God, I can't believe this thing. And then you spend the last,

the last, whatever the last five minutes are before you take it off is spent trying to find an excuse to stay in it and then not finding it and then leaving. That's the truth of it. Every time I'm in there, I'm like, great, how can I stay in here? And the answer is, oftentimes it's like, oh, I need to do this thing. I can't do it in here. I give up. Or it's, you know, I've reached the end of, I watched a movie in it the other week, a 3D movie for a podcast. And it was a warm. day. So I, like, sat outside watching in my big giant, you know, movie theater. And it was awesome. But again, I get to the end and I'm like, I guess I need to go inside now and do actual

things because I can't really do it here. Because it's just not, it's just not. And there are specific, I mean, like, the Mac virtual display has gotten a lot better. I think the iPad apps look a lot better than they used to. I think that they, they did something in the rendering. I remember when I first used it, I was trying to write in one writer, which is an iPad app. And I, it, the text rendering was really bad. And I tried it the other day and it's much better. It's not necessarily as good as a Vision Pro Native app, but it's pretty good. Like they've made strides in so many areas.

The personas are so much better. But still, the fact remains, there's not a lot of content for it. They're not a lot of apps for it. And so you're left with a really wizzy, fun experience that you can't, I mean, you just reach the end really fast. It's like, I open the app store today and it's like, it's just nothing in here. Yeah. Like, yeah, and it's a real chicken egg problem that could be solved by Apple buying a lot of eggs, right?

But instead, Apple's sort of like, come on in and reach the several hundred people who might buy your app. And that's just not going to work. So I appreciate that they did, like I went to the Vision Pro, you know, immersive video thing a couple weeks ago. And it was really interesting. And I know they're doing that for app development too. But I feel like at some point, Apple needs to be encouraging somehow, probably involving money, more investment in this platform just to get it to – because, like, it really does kind of live or die by content. And I don't just mean immersive videos or 3D movies in Disney Plus or on the iTunes store. I also mean apps.

And the content in the apps is just – there's just not a lot there. There's stuff, and the stuff is fun. But there's not a lot of it. And the more of it there is. And again, the argument is that this is a platform that they're building for five years from now. Like, I guess they got time. But, like, it's just very frustrating when I go in there that I wish I could do. I always wish I could do more.

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So I actually, Udacity gave me access to try out a course that I wanted, and I just started a course on social media marketing, because they have courses with tons of different options. You know, they want us to talk about the AI stuff for a good reason, but they have lots of things, you know, some, some high level stuff, project management stuff, some that are very technical, some that are more high level. And I started today, I'm looking forward to digging in even more, the course. I really like the way the systems laid out. They have the videos, they have the outlines of what you're going to be covering, course downloads.

It's all very accessible, all very easy to use. I was actually, this is what I was doing in my Vision Pro today. I was watching the videos for the social media marketing course that I'm starting here of Udacity. The tech field is always evolving and you should be too. You can try Udacity risk free for seven days. Head to Udacity.com slash upgrade and use the code upgrade for 40% off your order. That is UD-A-C-I-T-Y dot com slash upgrade for 40% off and make sure you use the code upgrades so they know we sent you. Our thanks to Udacity for their support of this show and all of RELI. It is time for some

Ask Upgrade Questions Brants writes in and says When Apple brings OLED to the iPad Air and the iPad Mini Do you think they'll give them Face ID as well? I think Face ID is coming to other iPads. I don't know when. I do think it will happen because it's so much nicer

and Apple does have this tendency to bring Pro features down over time. I think the catch is just you know, you've got to make space for those things and they're always fighting the battle of they also want to make the bezels thinner and you know, like I think the air feels more likely to me actually

than the mini just because the mini is smaller and so you've got to fit that space in there. I think they will happen. I have no idea when. I think eventually everything will move to face ID but I think that the rumors of the falling phone getting touch ID pushes this possibility out further. Yeah.

Timothy Wright-Sin and says this question is more for Mike. Is there an F-1 podcast that you recommend? My daughter has fallen very deep into F-1 and dragging me in with her, so I'm hoping to have a good podcast for me to enjoy the sport more. I recommend P1 with Matt and Tommy. I watch their content on YouTube,

but they also have kind of more traditional podcast feeds as well. But they do everything. like they kind of remind me of us a little bit Jason. I play games like throughout the year, prediction games and like weekly games and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, we love a good game on the show. But yeah, I really like them. I really like their content.

They're balanced, you know, like a lot of it, any kind of sport reporting, people can get a bit over-excited, I would say, with some of the opinions. And I think that they do a really good job. They're both people. They, you know, they've been reporting on F-1 for years, and years, and they used to work for an existing publication. They went out and started on their own.

I've actually met them both at an F1 event that I went to last year. They were both really, really nice guys, so I recommend it a lot. P1 with Matt and Tommy. Pat asks, do you think Siri should get its own app as part of future upgrades? If Siri's going to keep a history of my conversations, I would want a place to see them myself. Part of me worries Apple would make some weird UI to avoid being seen as, quote, just another chatbot app they could also throw their other tools into this too if they wanted to I mean I like the idea of there being somewhere you can go and see a Siri history I think that that

actually is a huge thing now the question is is that an app or is that something that they put in like a Siri interface where you double tap the bottom of the screen and it brings up a Siri interface that has a thing in it is it a weird basically do they make it weird or do they just say an app Yeah. But I would like to be able to do that. I would like to be able to go in and like say, all right, we're going to continue this conversation now. You know, that kind of stuff. Or just look, what was the answer? And you can't find it because there's no history that like I think I think if they're going to have a more chat body kind of like experience, they need to put that history somewhere. I think an app is actually kind of a great idea. But I'll give you the example of what is it, Shazam where Shazam is in iOS, but there's no. know, I mean, there is a Shazam app, but by default, it's just kind of a present feature. It's in control center. And like, there ought to be, yeah. So I think the question is, really, do they do it as an app or do they do it as a weird thing? And I feel like an app is the answer, not a weird thing. I agree. That you have a place you can go explicitly to ask Siri questions, typing, or

voice, and you can get what your different conversations are and you can separate them. I think that would be a nice thing to do that keeps it simple, so you don't have to remember how to activate the thing that kind of feels like an app, but is actually not. Randall says, do you think that if it hadn't been for the EU's USBC charging requirement, Apple might have made the iPhone Air portless? I imagine that was in the plans at some point. I mean, they've been talking about it. Yeah. What I'll say is, I don't know about if the USBC charge and requirement thing I don't know the full ramifications of it

I don't think it does because I think that wireless charging isn't covered by it right I think I think it's really hard to force everybody to charge wirelessly yes and there are lots of inefficiencies in wireless where you can get a quick charge like Apple is spending so much time talking about quick charge by wire

I think that Apple would need to invent a new wireless charging thing that was faster or that wireless charging techniques to get way better. It's a hard, it's a tough one. Not having a port introduces a lot of complications in terms of resetting and support like the Apple Watch deals with this now.

So I think that there's a lot going on here that makes it really hard to have no port at all. And again, like Apple will do it if it's not that big a deal. They removed the headphone jack and it actually wasn't that big a and even then people made a big deal of it. This would be bigger. And I just think, like, what's, again, what's the benefit to it? If it's just to say, look at what we did, he, he, he, you know, aren't we stinkers?

It feels more agro than any benefit. If you wait a couple of years, right? Like, this is the thing. I think this is actually true. I think Apple has a dream of doing a portless phone. And the time when they would have done it, it would have been way too soon because we weren't there yet. And the better answer is to wait until the technology makes it almost irrelevant, right?

That's what you really want, is you want it to be, we don't need the port anymore because of X. And I don't think we're there yet. I would expect that there was absolutely a version of the iPhone Air that had no charging port when they started the development of this product multiple years ago. But like there was a vote, like, would this be the one? Right? Because you could imagine that product, right? Of like, here is this phone. Look at all the things this phone has.

We didn't have enough space for a charge ball. Like they didn't put a SIM tray on it, right? Like, I could imagine a version of it that probably didn't get very far, but like that they were at least considering the iPhone air to not have a charging port on it. Sure. And that would be, see, making a phone so thin that you can't put USB on it, that's a reason to do it, right?

But just be a regular old, thick iPhone pro. and it doesn't have a port because they closed it up. It's just spiteful. What are you doing? And again, they could invent something else, but then you've got to deal with, now is there a special magnetic connector that I have to bring with me? And that's not standard.

And if Chi charging, which is a standard, but like it's got issues and there's support issues. Like, I don't know. You just got to have a really good reason to do it. And Jack writes in and says, have you ever chatted with Mark German he would be a

fascinating guest on the show well Jack indeed he was episode 296 which was a horrifically long time ago five years

over five years ago now we had Mark on the show which is I haven't listened back to it but I still reckon it's fun listen

I would like to talk to Mark again I would actually I've not asked him so you know but I would like to have Mark on Cortex at some point

to talk to him about his right workflow that would be good but we talk to him about like his contacts and we some of it is about like apple during the pandemic but some of it is about him doing his job and he was he was a great guest and and we really like his uh he's he's the best

one out there in terms of uh all this stuff in terms of getting the you know getting the scoops he is the sheriff he's the sheriff he's the sheriff for a reason that's why he's the sheriff so unconnected they stole room around up last week yeah they did but i saw that but stephen called mark gorman the wizard i'm like i see you don't understand what room around up is why would you call the man a wizard? There's a wizard in the wild west? What are you doing? So what is that segment then? Is it like rumors and rangers or something? It's like a fantasy

put, he's got a... It's like rumor round up, but they're rounding up aliens? I don't know what he's doing. Well, it's a wizard, so like they're rounding of like trolls or something? Trolls? Yeah. I don't know what that was all about. You know? Get the fan art going, I guess, for that. But the wizard I guess that was his way of making it kind of a slightly off

brand. No, I just think that they're imitators, Jason, and they just And then there's the original. You know, they just can't do it. If you would like to send in a question of your own for us to answer in a future episode of the show, just go to Upgradefeedback.com where you can also send us in your follow-up and your

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