Upgrade - 594: Featuring Crimes

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 594. It is December 15th, 2025. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace, Delete Me, Gusto, and Factor. My name is Mike Hurley. I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike. This is our final regular episode of the 2025.

Yeah, it gets weird after this, or it gets special. It gets special. There you go. We've got the holiday special next week. Yeah. The upgrade is the week after that. Yeah. We'll talk about it.

But I want to do some Snell talk with you to start today's show, as we always do. And Addy wrote in and said, Jason, do you have a favorite snack? I don't know. I mean, I don't know if I have an answer to this question. That's my favorite kind of snout talk. What a favorite snack? Yeah, if I said to you, you know, go there to super snack. supermarket, you can buy whatever you want, or you're going on a road trip, you can eat whatever

you like, what are you going to grab? You're going to get some Doritos? You're going to get some skittles? Well, I mean, Doritos are good. That's like a perfectly engineered food. Yep. Not true cheese Doritos. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I like the honey mustard, uh, Snyders of Hanover pretzel pieces. They're like super intense. Yeah, I like those. Like you can taste them all day after you have. them. During the pandemic, Adina and I bought a Philly Cheese Steak box. You know, I remember

all those, all those boxes, like, because restaurants were just trying to do their best to survive. And they included some of those honey mustard, Snyder's pretzel pieces. And like, that is a high we have been chasing ever since. They're not easy to find here. It's dangerous. That's incredible. And that's the, yeah,

favorite snack. Yeah, I guess what what my, what made me pause there is, it's a question of, like, is it all-time favorite or is it the thing that I use as my go-to, like, if I need a snack during the day. And honestly, the answer to that is probably, like, boring, like peanut butter. I've been known to just eat a spoon of peanut butter as a snack. Or almonds, or we have a trail mix that's got almonds and cashews and, like, dried cranberries or something in it, and stuff like that. But, but, yeah, I would,

those pretzels, the nach and cheese Doritos are a good one. What else would we take on a road trip? That's a really good question. I mean, yeah, we try not to, you know, try not to invest a lot in junk food, but for special occasions maybe that. Actually, the funny thing is, and this is a perfect segue into our next segment, which is the funny thing is, our Friday Night Curling League has a tradition of you try to bring in an unusual snack. So you go to the store and you stand at the snack aisle and you try to find the weirdest new promotional flavor of, of Oreo. Amazing.

Yep. Or chips with weird flavors. Some people live near various, like, a Korean grocery or a more generic, like Asian grocery in the East Bay, and they will bring in unusual for Americans chip flavors from elsewhere in the world. So that's been a lot of fun. So we buy a bunch of those weird snacks, and those are also fun. I will say, I think it's actually a lot of fun to try all the different weird Oreos.

some of them are good most of them are not did you try the Coca-Cola ones I don't think I tried those okay that's particularly strange to me a Coca-Cola flavored Oreo but they did that they also did Oreo flavor of Coca-Cola if you can imagine such a thing

oh yeah well that's that's a thing they do yeah that's a thing they do because I had something else that was like that that was the two the two different things where it's like we're here and also we made the opposite of this in the other thing too A few days ago, I was at the train station and I saw an ad of KFC that says featuring gingerbread Pepsi. And I was like, no. No, I don't want that.

I really don't want that. It's a featuring crimes. Who wants gingerbread flavor Pepsi? So the Oreo flavor, the weird Oreo flavor that I had, it's actually pretty good, is Selena Gomez. I'm not kidding. What? There's a Selena Gomez. Flavor Oreo.

It's basically chocolate and cinnamon. It's basically horchata, but it's Selena Gomez flavor Oreo. That is. Look it up. Truly bizarre. It is. It is.

We're like, what does Selena Gomez Oreo taste like? And you bite into it and you have to say, hmm, Selena Gomez. Right? Like, I get it. It's the Selena Gomez Oreo. But also, like, the problem is, and I guess they're probably leaning into it in that way of like that

Oreo do like, lots of different things that, you know, flavored things, right? So it's like, oh, you're essentially saying this is the flavor of Salina Gomez. Yeah, well, if that is true, she, perhaps she leaves a cinnamon chocolate scent in her wake. I could imagine, actually. I could imagine. The packaging is odd because it's a pair of Oreo beats on the packaging, and I'm not sure that I get that. I don't know if Selena is known for music these days. I don't. She's got the, she's got the headphones on in the only murders in the building opener and stuff. Like, that's sort of a character trait of that.

Maybe it goes from that. I don't know. Anyway, that was a surprise. There are, most of them are disappointing, but some of them are good. And, yeah, so I have my, most of my junk snack intake is actually Friday nights after curling. You know, this is one of those classic ones where it starts with, I don't know how to answer that. And we end with Selena Gomez flavor. You know, that's just sometimes how the show begins.

If you would like to send in a Snow Talk. question of your own, please go to Upgradefeedback.com and send one in. We have some follow-up. You referenced curling. Last week, we spoke about curling media, songs, movies, and the like. And a surprise podcast that... Indeed. Yeah, I was quite surprised.

I was quite surprised. We've got two two different curling song recommendations. Yeah. Andrew wrote in with Curl by Jonathan Colton. This is one of the Thing a Day songs that Colton did forever ago. Yeah, I like Colton and I had never heard this song. It's good.

So the story is he wrote it during or right before one of the Winter Olympics in like 2004 or something, 2006, I guess, about like, and it's basically like the skip, it's a skipper wakes up and he's got to do this and stand in the cold. It's cold outside, but it's colder inside. And they're going for gold. And then they have to balance their lives with trying to do this. the ice and and uh it's nice and and the trivia bit is that the skipper of the u.s team at the time was um john schuster who did eventually win the first gold medal uh in u.s curling history at the olympics in like 20 whenever that was 16 right 14 um i never remember the olympic years uh anyway uh so that's a it's a that's a fun song and a very jonathan colton song and this is also

back when like you know the kids don't don't remember this but when john Jonathan Colton was the original, like, I'm going to do, I'm going to make a song every single day person on the internet. I mean, eventually this music went to YouTube, but originally it was just on his website, which was where I first went to find this song, but all the links were dead, but then I found it on YouTube. And then also the curling song by Bowser and Blue. Yeah, it's not really stylistically my choice, but it's certainly very knowledgeable. And I think the point, I think the point made in the lyrics is actually really good. which is, it's Canadian, which makes sense because it's big in Canada.

And it basically says, you, it's highlighting the fact that curling is a recreational sport that people, that regular people can play. So I think the song ends that you can, more people curl in Canada than play hockey because it's harder to play hockey. But, yeah, so I appreciate it. Not, not, you know, really my cup of tea, but I appreciate the lyrics to it. Jeff Williams has joined the board of Disney, which I was surprised to see this. It's not surprising that a big executive at a company would join a board, but I guess this is what Jeff wants to do in his retirement, do a little bit of board, board work, still take a salary, you know, it's a nice, nice work if you can get it. Yeah. Because it's not, you know, he's not going to be in the, in the Disney minds every day.

No. And he'll get compensated to do this. I think this is a strikes me as a fairly common way you find directors. And in this case, it's two companies that are kind of linked together in a lot of ways. And so having a senior executive at Apple retire and then become a board member at Disney does not, it doesn't surprise me at all. And also it feels like as well that like typically when you're at that level, you, you know, you do this for companies you're interested in. Maybe Jeff is a Disney guy and like this is the thing that he wants to do. Right? Because you've got like,

Eddie Q is on the board at Ferrari. Is Tim on the board at Nike? Or is that somebody else? That might be. I don't know. I think he is on the Nike board. I believe he is. But this is the thing that happens a lot.

But I was surprised. I was surprised to see this. Just because of the way that Jeff retired, I kind of got the sense that he was just like done, done. But no, taking a board role. That's a nice retirement. And Tim is on the board at Nike, by the way. Good memory, Mike Harley.

Apple and Google have announced that they are working together on creating a set of features that will make easier to switch devices. These features are shipping in the Android beta for pixels now and will come in a future beta of iOS 26.

So nobody's actually really sure what's in there because you can't test it? It's like, oh, it's in the Android beta but Apple have not shipped it. So, you know, I was doing a bunch of reading today like for sites to say like, oh, what is in there?

Well, nobody knows exactly yet or what the process is like because you can't do what it's meant to be done because only Google have put their part forward yet. It's going to be focused on helping you move your data essentially between these devices. The EU have claimed victory on this, saying it is, quote, an example of how the DMA

brings benefits to users and developers. I will read from the EU press release on this because they go into some detail of what this stuff could include. The operating system portability solution, which is a terrible name, users to easily transfer data from iPhone to Android and vice versa when they set up a new device. It will support many types of data, including contacts, calendar events, messages, photos, documents, Wi-Fi networks, passwords, and even data from third-party apps. It will also work wirelessly.

These are major upgrades compared to the currently limited data transfer solutions. So it seems somewhat like some of the data that would move from iPhone to iPhone, Android phone to Android phone, will now be able to move between the two somehow. I'm fascinated to see how some of this stuff will work. But interestingly, if this is related to the DMA, which I mean, I don't know why else Apple and Google would decide to do this, it's actually a worldwide thing. This is not like a European thing.

This is going to be available to people all over the world. So this is a benefit, I think. Well, both sides have tried to do like move to iPhone apps for Android and move to Android from iPhone and things like that, right? They've tried to do things like that. But that's hostile, right? Those were hostile apps where this is the two companies have actually had to work together on creating some kind of portability

between file structures, right? Yeah. Like moving all your photos is probably essentially been an impossible thing to do until now without uploading them to a cloud service in between in the middle, right? And so, yeah, I think this is fantastic. We'll see, but it's good for the users, good for consumers. Absolutely. And also, I mean, if you're confident, it's good for the companies, right?

Like for Apple, if Apple's confident that it will be able to win over more Android users in time, then this is good for them, right? It makes it easier for people to switch. Yep. But also the reverse is true. Apple have announced that Pluribus is their most watched show ever. Yeah, how about that? I mean, that's more than Ted Lassau, more than severance. More than the studio.

I mean, you know, these are shows that will have been successful for them. I think, you know, there are a few things going on here. One, this show has a lot of interest and intrigue, and people want to watch it because it comes from Fitzgilligan. And also, you know, this is the effect of Apple being better and better over time. They have more subscribers now than they've had before. I think that's probably true. We've seen, there's some numbers that suggest that they've actually had quite a bit of success. I think in Amazon channels.

Yes. I think they're in Amazon channels now. And that allows people who, in some ways it maybe even like takes a little bit of the fear away. I think that some people who are not in the Apple ecosystem look at Apple TV and are like, well, I can't do that. Yes. But if you're in the prime video app,

you can do it that way and you still get all the stuff. And yeah, I think it's a service that's growing. And so obviously there's more of a user base from which to get higher. viewing numbers. So, I mean, good. It's a great show. I love it. No spoilers, all right, but I'm just letting Jason know this. I have started watching it now. We're a couple of episodes in, and I'm enjoying it a lot. It's a fascinating. I feel like where I am at least genre bending show, I think is how I would describe it. Like, there are things you think are happening that aren't happening. It's good. It's very weird and very good and very high concept. There is a second season that, had been greenlit um and that's all there is so far yeah it's they were it was a two season or i i mean i don't know if apple's going to go and announce on the day the of the finale that it's you know season two is coming in a year or a year and a half or something like that but um because they like to the theater of that but it was a two season pickup and i believe they've already written season

two and they're going to shoot it in the spring or they're in the process of writing season two i don't know but like they they it was always intended to be um a two season pickup maybe I mean I assume at this point given the ratings as long as Vince Gilligan wants to do it but certainly there's there'll be a second season and they're shooting it in the spring so we might see that same time next year it feels like one of those shows that like I don't know how long you could do it unless you had a real distinct plan for how you would do it yeah I think there's a plan I do believe that I do believe that. I think it's going somewhere and I think there are plenty of things that could be loaded I mean obviously everybody who's been watching it has been thinking of but what about this what would this be what would this and I can imagine that there are going to be some things that set it off

in some very different directions which would also be really interesting but you know I'm sure Vince Gilligan knows how much story he's got and if he if he you know if he only has two seasons of story he'll do two seasons and be done And if he's got more, then I'm sure he'll do more. Yep. Because Apple's happy.

Yeah, I mean, well, they would be, wouldn't they? Yeah. I think they've had a good run of buzzy shows this year. Yeah. Like, they've had three buzzy shows this year. If you think of the HBO model, the goal with HBO was always to give you something to prevent churn, essentially, because HBO, before the world of streaming, HBO was kind of like a streaming service and that it was an add-on to your cable

system. You had to pay an extra however much money to get HBO and you could drop HBO. And even if you were locked in and trapped in your cable company, HBO was still optional. So they did have churn of subscribers. So the HBO model was always on Sunday night. I mean, movies, they want the headlining movies brought a lot of people in. And then they were also like we can do TV series on Sunday nights and we can have those be buzzy. And that increases the stickiness because you're going to have to stay to watch all of the Sopranos or you know or sex in the city or or these kind of shows that have some buzz and I think the idea was you would have several of them across the year yeah and that is the thing that makes you keeps people in this case opening the app

um finding it valuable finding the service valuable and then maybe exploring the catalog and i feel like apple this year um got pretty close to that kind of platonic ideal of the always something buzzing coming. Yeah, and if you really can, try and back them up against each other, right? I think severance ended and silo started, silo ended and studio started. Because I think, like, if you can really, I don't know if the studio and silo might have overlapped a bit, but I remember it was like severance ended and then season two as silo began immediately. And it's like, if you can kind of really start squeezing those shows together, or silos before severance is though, but that's their strategy. That's their strategy. That's their strategy.

you can see it, that when one big ticket item goes off, they've got another one going on. And that's the idea is there's always something. It may not all be the big zeitgeist, buzzy show that some of them have been, but that is what they're trying to do. I actually wonder, so, you know, there's that, what is it, Jessica Chastain show that got delayed.

Yes. And it still doesn't have an air date. I actually, my theory is that they want to redo the press launch and they want to slot it in at a time. when you know it fits in their release schedule maybe they're just holding it because they're cowards or something but my they may just want to re-rack it and put it in there because they do seem to have very much a content strategy of overlapping content and maybe that will get dropped back in overlapping some other stuff I don't know we'll see it is time to remind you about the

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When you're ready to launch, use the offer code upgrade. You'll get 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 your support for the show. And thanks to Squarespace for the support of this show and all of relay. Rumoraround at time, Jason Snow. Yaha. Mac Rumors is reporting from a leak found on Waybo that the I iPhone 18 Pro may feature underscreen face ID next year. Apparently they will utilize, quote, spliced micro-transparent glass to make this work. So I assume that just means a really thin piece of glass, right?

Like that would be my expectation for what that means. The information, the invitation, different website, the information. You're virtually invited to learn about Apple. The invitation. The information had previously reported that the iPhone 18 Pro would have no dynamic island and feature a, quote, pinhole camera cutout at the upper left side of the display. Mark German has said that there will be a dynamic island as we know it, but it would be slimmed down. So one of the things to remember here is what we're talking about.

What hardware is in the sensor stack that they might be trying to hide under the glass? and I think the way this works Apple doesn't want to talk about it but looking at tear downs and all that I believe the way it works is there's the selfie camera yep right and then separately

there is the face ID system which includes a dot projector of infrared dots and I think an IR flood although I'm not 100% sure if that's still there or not but basically there's a thing that that beams out infrared on your face

when you do face ID and then there's an there's a low resolution actually, infrared camera in there. That is how face ID works, separate from the selfie camera. I figure there are also other sensors in there, right? Like there used to be a, I mean, it still is somewhere in the phone. The sensor for if you, you know, you hold your phone to your face that the screen turns off. Yeah, proximity sensor.

Yeah, I think they're in there, although I think those may be already integrated. Maybe like the sensors that they use for brightness detection are also in that part of the phone. Although they might just use the camera for that? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe. Anyway, so there, if we think about those things, these reports might make more sense that the, if we're talking

about face ID, they may be specifically talking about some aspects of that, like the IR emitter and the IR camera could maybe get buried, but the selfie camera can't. And that's the pinhole that you have. Yeah. I think these can all be kind of accurate that, that you, you could put a bunch of stuff underneath, which allows the one thing that you can't yet put underneath maybe to be much smaller.

Yeah, see, there's a few things going on here as well where there was a rumor that we've spoken about in the past that there was an underscreen camera that might have been in the folding phone. So we'll see. I don't know. I think I wouldn't want to see them get rid of the Dynamic Island. like I quite like the UI that comes from that.

I think they've turned that into quite a clever system. But also from what you're saying, I guess from what Mark Gorman is saying, you could get rid of some of it, make it smaller, right? And maybe it's just a camera and, you know, something else. And there's still a kind of cut out in the screen.

But yeah, over time you would hope that some of the stuff is just not going to need to be completely visible in the way. way that it is. I mean, my gut feeling is that they're not going to get rid of the dynamic island and that it's a feature of iOS now. And that if you think about it, the dynamic island is a live activities feature. So if there's a future phone that doesn't have the cut out at all, I think if you start a live activity, the dynamic island will appear, right, with your live activity running in it. Even if it doesn't need to be there all the time covering up a dot or a hole or a notch or whatever, like, I think that they can keep the dynamic island on the iPhone if they like it. And I find, I think it's nice to have a live activity view floating there and have that option for your interface. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and as you say, like, it could even just like bubble up, right? Like it doesn't, doesn't have to be something black on the screen that it must emit from. Like, it can just pop up and just appear or something. Yeah, just animate. If, I will say, if they do this, if they put the face ID under the screen, I will be even more upset if then the folding phone is touch ID. Like, if they have found a way to put the face ID stuff under the screen completely on the 18 Pro, then I'm going to play like double the price and then you have to use touch ID. I'm going to be so mad because I'm, you know, I'm already angry about the possibility of me paying $2,000 for touch ID. I like knowing one of the talking points of one of our episodes next September is going to be Mike Gets.

angry about touch ID. It's just not as good. So, like, I have touch ID on my iPad Mini, right, that we use in the nursery. And, like, it fails. Like, often. And it's really annoying.

And, like, I, you know, I want Face ID on that phone. And I'm, and it feels like I'm not going to get it. Philea Pespezito at Macworld is reporting on some rumors on a new studio display that were found in a build of iOS 26. This studio display,

would feature a 120 hertz panel HDR so says we could potentially be getting something at least mini LED and an A19 chip so the HDR thing yeah because this has an A13 the current studio display has an A13 in it

this would get an A19 in it it doesn't do anything other than power to display and the stuff that needs to go into that I guess HDR and mini LED would be because the LCD panel that they have cannot do good HDR. Obviously, it cannot do

HDR, it's not the technology for it. So mini LED or OLED is what I guess would be the options on the table. Feels less likely to be OLED just based on price and availability of display. I agree. I think it's almost certainly

not that. But I mean, great, bring it on. I use a studio display. I think having a ProMotion HDR studio display is great. I mean, I'm not sure I'm not sure I sit in front of my Mac thinking, oh, man, I wish I had a Promotion HDR display here. And I do have a Promotion HDR display. It's my laptop screen when I open it. But like, unlike the iPhone where I think I notice it a lot more, on my Mac, I don't, you know, I don't scroll through things and be, I'm not sad that they aren't smoother at scrolling for

whatever reason. So, like, personally, I'm not sure I would rush out as a studio display owner and buy the studio display to. But it's so old that it needs to be brought up to modern specs. And these are modern specs. Yeah. I would be very excited about this because it will be interesting to me to see device compatibility and like what that looks like. Can a MacBook Air drive a 120 hertz display. I would expect so, but like, I just don't know how Apple think about this stuff. Well, you could, I mean, those are in the specs. You should be able to look in the specs and see. I should be able to know now, shouldn't I? Yeah. Right, because it's just external display. Yeah. Specs. But I'm excited about this. I'm very excited about this.

Similarly, similarly, similarly, just mixed. Similarly, I'm off from one today. Not be sleeping great, Jason, you know, for reasons of baby. So I think that's coming out on today's show. Philippine found referenced on the HomePod Mini and Air Tag updates as well. The HomePod Mini will be upgraded from the Apple Watch S5 chip to the current S10. Today it was when I was reminded that the HomePod Mini runs on an Apple Watch processor. I had forgotten that piece of information. And that the new Air Tag will apparently get an improved pairing process.

enhanced precision finding even while the device is in motion so you'll be able to be better at finding it even if it's on the move and more a detailed battery reporting okay so just better I mean sometimes updates are not a lot of times we judge updates

by the Delta right as tech nerds especially we're like well what's new why do they put it what motivated Apple to make a new air tag what motivated Apple to make a new studio display and I think it's fair sometimes to just say

they wanted to stuff using all the old parts that are running out for the old thing. And it's embarrassing that that thing is still for sale. And so why don't we do a new one with modern parts? And so the air tag, it may literally be that, right, which is that whatever, five years ago, they made their first engineering cut at an air tag. They've learned a lot and tech has improved over the years. Why don't we stop making that air tag and start making a better one, even if it isn't,

again, isn't the case that if you've got an air tags, throw them all away and get the new air tags. I don't think that's necessarily what most people will think. It just means that if you go in an Apple store and buy an air tag, it'll be better than it was. That's it. So HomePod Mini is probably similar. Yeah. Yes. I mean, the Hon. Bob Minis is like, we're just updating it.

But I think with the air tag, I think Apple, Apple clearly considered privacy with the air tag, but not to the level that privacy advocate groups wanted. So they made a bunch of changes to the software of the product right, over time. And,

I expect that the second generation air tag will have been developed in a world where they were like, what if we went even stronger? And there were, there were rumors previously of it, of you're not being able to tamper with the speaker, like that they were going to build a tamper-proof speaker. And it's like stuff like that, right? And so that's what I expect to see. And some of this stuff that is given as a, like a customer selling thing. selling thing like you know precision finding or whatever sure i mean you talk about what's improved

about it and that's part can be part of your marketing but i think that i think that sometimes we give that too much weight and it really is that you know they they did this whatever however many years ago they designed the original they've learned a lot since then because they because it's been out in the market yeah and they um and the tech is advanced i mean that's the thing with a lot of stuff is you just got a it's not like a piece of furniture it's a tech product and if in five years, you have completely new processes that may make that product much better or cheaper to make or whatever. And I think also you run, you talk about the processor and the studio display, at some point, they're not making those processors anymore, right? And so it's like you want to get

off of that processor and get to something that you've got in abundance that you're making it scale right now. And then you can commit to that for the next five years. So I think that's a lot of what's going on here. So they'll make claims about the air tag. I just, I just wanted to say, sometimes we get focused on that when I think it's more like it's just a better air tag that they're selling now and you know I maybe there will be reasons to upgrade but it seems to me that it's not entirely about that and it's more about we really should sell it

I mean they're still selling the Mac Pro right like we should really sell a modern one of these and not just keep selling the old one I would like an air tag of a rechargeable battery I think you know when they announced it and it was a watchback I was like, that's great. I don't like that. I have to keep changing these batteries and then I have to deal with the batteries. I would love an air tag that I could put on an Apple Watch charger

and in 45 minutes is back to full again. Like, I think I would like that product. I don't think they're going to do that, but I would like them too. I think that that would make me happy because I don't like having to do all these batteries all the time. I have a lot of air tags in my house. And, you know, I think that would be nice. Tim Hardwick at Mac Rumors has put together a list of,

the MacBook models that we're expecting to see in 2026, and I thought as we're also approaching the end of the year, it would be nice to reflect and look forward as to what we may be expecting to see in 2026. I'll start off with the kind of the boring, especially expecting stuff. M5 update to the MacBook Air

and M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros we're expecting to see. The M5 is a product lineup that now has begun rolling out. We only have it on the, in the laptops, we only have it on the base MacBook Pro. We would expect to see that start rolling out in other places. That would be interesting

to see what the Pro Max chips are like there. But then also we have the low-cost MacBook, which, as a quick refresher, 13-inch display, thin and light, LCD display, A18 Pro Chip, USBC, maybe some colors. That is the kind of amalgamation of the rumors. Right. Performance similar to an M-1 MacBook Air, maybe a little bit better than that, but using more models. parts and, you know, shape to be determined. I'm still thinking it's going to look a lot like the M1 MacBook Air, but we'll see. Yeah, I mean, I think that is the story for me of this product, is how much does it cost and what does it look like? Like, those are the things that I'm really interested in.

The other details, they are interesting, but I feel like I understand them. You know, like the first time I heard MacBook powered by an iPhone processor, I was like, oh, I don't know about that. but the A18 Pro, I know, can handle it, right? Like at this point, so that's not a concern anymore. But, like, you know, when you hear it at first, you're like, that doesn't sound right. But I guess that was how we also felt about Apple Silicon in general, right? Yes, it is. It is.

Very similar feeling. Yeah, it's like, what about Macs powered by iPad chips? But hang on a minute. How are they going to run MacOS? Turns out really good is the answer to that. So, you know, the idea of it going to the iPhone chip, especially at this point, as you say, like, I guess you would know this. The A18 Pro is more powerful than an M1 by quite a margin, right?

Well, I did the research on that, and it's more powerful, what is it? More powerful in single processor because it's, I did charts at six colors about this. It's more powerful at single processor because it's using a modern core. But it's just about the same in multi-processor because you're going from, an m chip with its cores to an a chip with its cores but like perfectly respectable and in graphics i think it was very similar um perfectly respectable uh difference so yeah definitely that's why i keep saying sort of like think of it as an m1 profile um even if the truth is it's so yeah yeah here are the numbers so just using the geek bench numbers as a rule of thumb um 18 pro is in single core is faster than the m3 right because it's using a more modern core than that in multi-core it's about as fast as the macbook air was at in its you know eight-core existence it's it's about the same because although i think it has fewer cores in the in the a18 pro they're also better cores so that makes that that way and then in terms of graphics again it's better than the m1 but not as good as the M2. So I would say it is M1 class for everything

except individual single core performance. But a lot of stuff is just, if you're doing one thing, a lot of stuff is just single core performance and that will make it feel snappy enough. And the M1 Air feels pretty good. So I think it will not be a problem. Yeah.

But we'll see. And then the M6 MacBook Pro is also expected to launch either towards the end of 2026 or early 2027. So this will feature the M6 chip generation. I would expect this will probably be the pro model is what we would see here because of everything else in this computer. I wouldn't expect them to launch the M6 base with this.

The M6 line is a new TSM process, which will be two nanometers, and it incorporates all of the different components more closely together. So we could see some performance boosts there. The big win for this device would be a, or the big feature is a touchscreen OLED display, thinner and lighter, so they're going to redesign it. Apparently Apple are looking to make it thinner and lighter without compromising on battery,

and they will get gains from the display because the OLED display will use less power. They will get battery improvements there. and maybe they'll make some games of the M6, I don't know. We'll be looking at a hole punch camera instead of a notch, kind of like a small dynamic island, is more what they're looking to do. Because of these advancements,

it'll be a little bit more expensive. Yeah, I think so. And German said it might slip into early 2027, although there's definitely precedent for them shipping two MacBook Pros in the same year, because they already did that. They did that a few years ago, so they could do it again if they want to. But the big thing is, this is a new generation of MacBook Pro

So the big step forward where they change the case and they change the display and all of those things and not just kind of the internals. And yes, I imagine it will only be the high-end models. I don't imagine, even if there is an M6 low-end MacBook Pro, I imagine it will look just like the M5 low-end MacBook Pro. I don't think it's going to get all of these improvements because they're going to hold it down on price. And then it'll get these improvements in, you know, M7 or M8. Like I feel like Apple is, likes to withhold this on that low end model because, you know, they're trying to keep the price down on that. Yeah. And that's the point of that product.

And then eventually it will slowly catch up. So this will be, this will be a big step forward. Yeah, this might be kind of like what they did when they did the redesign, the Apple Silicon redesign, right? where we had the what was the touch bar model right still kicking around at the base of the MacBook Pro line

exactly it's exactly that that you know it lags the bottom configuration of MacBook Pro Apple has decided it's important even though it's not always that great right now it is great

right now it's come all the way back up where in fact it exists on a new chip that the higher end models don't even have yet but when we reset the clock when there's a brand new design I don't think it'll get it it'll hang back for a while and with the two in a year

I mean it seems like realistically the M5 Pro and M5 Max have gotten delayed a little bit right like that did not happen in 25 and so we may see early 25 for these and in late 26 for this MacBook Pro which was maybe always expected to be a

236 product early 25 for the M5 and we already are in 25 so it would be early 26 and late 26 I want to get our years right here Thank you so much What year is it? Because we're right at the end of 25

I haven't worked it out I'm still writing 22 on my chest This is what I'm saying is that It's so weird that we're talking about this MacBook Pro and I have to say it may be 27 Right It may be early 27 and not late 26 And I don't know how much of that is the design

And how much of that is the pace of Apple Silicon Like I don't know whether it was always the plan to ship the M5 Pro and Max chips in the spring or whether they wanted them in the fall and they weren't really ready. And so those products have been delayed. I don't know which one of those is true. I suspect that only Johnny Sruji knows for sure. But in any event, yeah. So we might get them both in the same year. That's going to be a big upgrade for a lot of people to drive a lot of MacBook Pro upgrades because it'll have a bunch of new, you know, it looks different. It has

some new hardware features on the outside. It's got OLED, touchscreen. Like, that will be a big leap. And then they'll iterate on that for, you know, whatever, three or four years. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data from the internet at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everybody vulnerable. The bad news is data brokers, can profit from your data, but now you can protect yourself and your privacy with Delete Me. The New York Times wirecutter is named Delete Me, their top pick for data removal services,

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Because this isn't really a beta, but we're going to do it anyway. 26.2 is out. This comes with a bunch of different changes across the, well, it's 26. It's all the point-toes, right? So it's 26.2 on iOS, iPad OS, I guess WatchOS. and macOS as well. Yeah, everybody. I want to start by talking about iPadOS

because iPadOS has had to continue to see more big change. So in 26.1, we got SlideOver. But now Split View is returned. So you can drag apps from the dark and spotlight onto each half of the display. It will fill that half. You can also drag Windows to each side and it will do the same.

And then you have kind of infinite resizing of those two split apps. Also, slide over gets basically, it's dock improvements because in addition to making it easy to drag out two things and make the equivalent of split view, you can drag out of the dock and make a slide over. And then for people who like to switch apps in slide over, you can drag out of the dock onto your slide over and it'll switch to that app. So you can be like running notes and want to put mail in slide over and you just drag the mail. I gone out of the dock and drop it on where the notes app is running and slide over and it switches to mail.

So you're getting a bunch of stuff. If you liked dragging things out of the dock to do multitasking on the iPad, they put that back. And I've seen people say, you know, I wonder if they're reacting to feedback and all of that. And I'm sure there's some aspect of that. But I also kind of wonder if this was just, we can't do that for 0.0. And we'll get to this in point one and we'll get to this in point two that they just couldn't have it all there. But regardless, they put a bunch of that stuff back. And that's great.

So, you know, we've come here to the end. the year, and we have a very complex system, not complicated, but complex system on iPadOS now. Like, yeah, there are a lot of ways to manage your Windows now, which I think is very good. I think that they've added a good level of flexibility into the system. I like having all of the options available to me. I would say that the, this addition has kind of made it easier to manage Windows in general, Like, it kind of felt like you had to, you know, you drag something out of the dock before. You had to like, I would see people do it as you flick it over to one side with a level of aggression that didn't make sense to me.

Sure. But now you, now kind of wherever you're dragging it, it makes a square in the shape, essentially, like a rough shape of what the window's going to look like. And I like that. It'll tell you whether it's going to snap it to half or whether it's just going to put a window on the screen, depending on the feedback you get. So if you're running in a horizontal mode and landscape mode, you'll see it change from a wide rectangle, which is like a window, and then you kind of move over to the left or the right, far enough. And it goes to like a more square because it's going to be that shape. It's subtle, but like it's there. And so if you use it regularly, you'll know, oh, this is where I drop it.

And now it'll go straight into that left half. It'll, it's like a left half tile. So with a couple gestures, you can get two apps split-viewed. Have you been using this yourself other than just for testing? Like, have you been using it much? I use the multi-window features. Honestly, I have, I used old slideover really seldomly. Every now and then, I would be doing something on the iPad, and I'd be like, you know what I should do is put this in slide-over so I can just kind of refer to it.

But mostly, I've just been using the windows as they are. and I was never a big split view user either. I kind of like my Windows where I want them. I mean, that makes, that's the Mac user in me, right? I don't tile on the Mac either. I just generally let the Windows be where I want them to be and whatever layers I want them to be and whatever place on the display I want them.

So I haven't used these features other than for testing purposes, although I will say dragging things out of the dock is a thing I like to do with, iPad multitasking. So I like that aspect of it. Did they mess up your keyboard shortcuts again, by the way? Well, they messed them up but didn't put them back. So this happened during the point two beta cycle. They made some changes to the way that some of the keyboard shortcuts work. Like if you're a stage manager user like me, somebody asked, by the way, that they want to hear about how I use stage manager. At some point next year, I will do a segment on the show where I talk about

how and why I use stage manager on my devices because I think people don't understand it. So I do want to talk about that, but I want to kind of really map it out and talk about it properly and what I like about the system. But like, for example, now, if you press command W and to close a window, it just sends it over to the stage view.

It doesn't actually close it, which I find a very, that just feels like a bug. But the one that I don't like is that, command h used to take you home it now hides your window and globe h takes you home that just feels wrong to me i think hide as a command on ipad o s just doesn't need to be there because command w is fine like it just the apps don't close you're just hiding it like where is it going right otherwise like just command w will do the job i mean they're doing it because that's what it is on the mac and they kind of want these to be the same in both

environments, I think is why. But they don't work the same. You know what I know what you said, but they don't work the same way. And then, like, because my issue is, Globe isn't used for any of the other windowing things in this way. Like, it's not Globe W to close a window or whatever. I'm constantly pressing Command H, which I had internalized, and it's just hiding it where previously it used to take me to the home screen. And has done that for years. I don't know exactly. I'm going to have to look. And I'm not using stage managers. So the behavior may be different. But the way I would expect as a Mac user for it to work on iPad is if I do Command H, the window goes away. But if, but either it's retrievable

somewhere or if I open that app again, the window comes back where it was. And Command W, the app closes essentially. Or that window closes and if there are no other windows open, then it's gone. And then if I bring that back, it's like I'm launching the app. And that window doesn't come back unless, you know, it behaves like an iPad app. It comes back to what other state is the launch state because in window management, the difference on the Mac anyway between Command H and Command W is, Command H is, I don't want to see you right now, but when I bring you back, you come back right where you were. And Command W is you're gone, right? And I don't care. You're, you can exit that state. So if you're in a text editor and you've got a file open

and you do Command W, the file is not open anymore. When you open the app again, you open the app again, it's going to say, let's open a file versus Command H, which is like, stay right there, right? But I don't want to see you, but when I come back, I want you right where I had you. And I don't know if it does that or not. I can say, I don't know about the window

and mode. Stage Manager, it doesn't work like that. They're just the same, I think. They're just the same. With Stage Manager, if you then say select, say Slack, I've said Command H on Slack, it will then just open it in a new stage again because I can see that what they've actually done

is minimize it to the stage view which just is not at all either of the things that you're looking to do in that scenario and they also added command Q which is fascinating to me like there was a quick command you know honestly I

I think that's all about Mac user muscle memory that like if you if command Q is what you do when you're done with your work then maybe it should just say okay I know what you want here I'm going to make this app go away and I would imagine that unless you have

multiple windows open command Q in the same app command Q and command W are identical and command H also may be identical right they may all do the same things or or they may be subtly different I'm not I'm not sure but um I would just like

a command based keyboard shortcut to take me to the screen. Put it on any letter because it's like, it's very strange because all of the other windowing shortcuts are launched, well, not all, but most of these ones, they're in the command, like you're starting with command, not globe. And so like I'm used to doing the window management stuff with command. I don't know. I guess if you're doing, because I don't use the keyboard to do the moving around. I know that some of that is on the globe key about not doing that. That is on the, on the globe key as well. I'm moving them around with my cursor because like that just makes the

most sense to me. I think our discussion here shows you the challenges that Apple is trying to work through. And I think they definitely feel pressure from people who are thinking of the iPad desktop environment essentially as similar to the Mac desktop environment. And so they kind of wanted to behave the same way or at least seem more familiar. And if you're if, especially if you're going back and forth, having the keyboard shortcuts kind of behave the same way is preferable to having them be different like command that's why a command queue would be there at all because that concept is sort of pointless it's and i don't think it's like force quitting the app i think it's just closing it like you would if you switched apps in full screen mode right i think it's just going

away and um and then it will come back but you've got the added complexity of stage manager and the whole concept of like what is this thing what what do we mean when we say we're closing or hiding an app does that mean it goes into the stage manager view does that mean it, you know, like, and conceptually, the problem is conceptually, that's a little different than it is on the Mac. So it's, you know, I think they're still working through it. So I think there's maybe some hope that some of your complaints might lead or might, might be realized in the future just because this seems like it's still in flux. Absolutely. One of the most interesting things to me, for obvious reasons, is the changes in the podcast app in 26.2. So there's

kind of two key areas that they're changing, but both are being enabled by the transcripts that Apple podcasts make. So one is AI generated chapters for podcasts that do not support them. So Apple is encouraging people to add chapters via the many ways in which you can do it, via MP3 metadata, which is what we do for this show, or you can put them in the RSS feed in text or in the description in text, like you put time codes or whatever. Like YouTube. Yeah, like YouTube chapters. They're encouraging that people do this. For those that don't, they are creating their own chapters based on the topics. And what is also interesting, I was kind of poking around, you can tell what Apple thinks is a chapter, even for

shows like ours, because the transcripts that Apple makes, they break up with their own headings? Yeah, they have subheads for the transcript. So, like, for example, last week's Snelltalk discussion in Apple's Apple podcast transcript of the episode says curling media question. And so that, if we did not provide our own transcripts, that is what the chapter would have been. Sorry, our own chapters. Yes, the transcripts would have created that chapter. And that's what the chapter would have looked like. So I have some podcasts that I listen to that don't have chapters in them, which is upsetting to me, because some of them are tech

focus podcasts, like the Vergecast, for example, but in Apple podcasts now they do. And one of the reasons that a lot of podcasts don't is because they use dynamic ad insertion. That is what the Vergecast does, and that is the reason that they do not have chapters. They could add some basic

ones, even if they're just using like text time codes or whatever in the description, but they're not doing that. Probably for some CMS reason, because there are stacks and stacks of issues. that can result in people doing things in interesting ways. But this is like part one of it.

I think this is great. Of course, this is only for shows that are public, right? So if you listen to a show, like a membership show, like a member, like so I, again,

I pay for the Verge. So I get the ad-free version of the Verge. If I listened to that feed in Apple Podcasts, I would be able to get the transcripts, but an overcast, I can't, you know, but they would,

but if there's a membership show, like ours, they won't make the transcripts for them, so you're not going to get those automatic chapters because the transcripts are only available in shows that are publicly available. And my frustration is there is an RSS standard that Apple uses. If you want to supply your own transcript instead of having Apple do it, you can actually put in the RSS feed. Here is the VTT file, which is a subtitles file, that we're going to use as the transcript for this episode, and it's time coded and all of that. You can supply that. in the RSS feed, and frustratingly, even though Apple won't transcribe a private podcast,

a member edition, and we can do a transcript, and we could put it in the RSS feed, Apple Podcasts won't show it, which frustrates me a lot. Pocketcast, I think, does, because I do it for the incomparable special edition for members. I generate a transcript file and embedded in the RSS and I think PocketCast uses it but that's a thing that frustrates me is like

okay you don't have to transcribe my member podcast you could probably figure out that it's identical across all these different subscribers and do that but if you don't want to do it I did it

maybe let my people see it but they don't do that so that's frustrating but then with the transcript so you've got the chapters also with the transcripts They're starting to pick out things that you mention and put links to those things. So the key one is if you mention another podcast in your show, in line with the transcript,

they will highlight the podcast that is mentioned, which I think is awesome. And then you can just press a button to go to the show or press the plus and you can follow the show. So, like, for example, in last week's episode, who mentioned the rest is history. and the show was in the transcript. It's like right there at the moment that we mention it in the chapter where we're talking about them winning the podcast of the year, which the Apple transcript named that one

Apple of the year, which is hilarious. Doing a great job. Apple of the year. Congratulations to Tom and Dominic. You're the Apple of the year. And, you know, AI is doing its thing, I guess. But I think this is great. And then also they're in line,

but also on the episode page, it mentions that there's like a section like things mentioned in this episode and there's other podcasts that are mentioned in the show will get added in there as well. So I think this is a really great discovery thing that they're using, and I think it's incredibly clever, however on earth they're doing this, that I can just say the rest is history and it just puts that link right there. That is very impressive. You did it. And I've done it again. Well, I guess we have to see. So the talk show with John Gruber is also a podcast.

that's available. As is Cortex and connected and Matt Power. I just keep doing this. Be sure to listen to the incomparable mothership available where you get your podcasts. I'm going to have to check now to see what the transcript looks. Who knows what we're just, we're hacking an Apple podcast now.

We're breaking through. We're going to be in a Matrix. It's not going to work anymore. If nobody gets their shows tomorrow now, we know why. Uh-huh. There is also going to be some level of automatic linking via the transcripts that you can

This is fascinating to me because I've yet to see this work yet but apparently if you mention stuff that is on Apple's services so Apple News Apple TV that kind of stuff So when we mentioned pluribus earlier theoretically

It should show up I don't think it's going to show up in line but it should show up at the bottom I checked the TV draft episode because like well if it's going to be in there it's going to be, you know, in there, didn't pick out any of them. And it is possible if you go into the Apple podcast backend, you can manually link these things and you can even put timestamps to them, I think.

So you can go in and add them so things that you've mentioned will show up. But I have yet to see an example of it being in the transcript or seemingly based upon the conversation. It may not be turned on. I do wonder for all of these things if one of the things that's going on here is it's trying to judge if it's a substantial mention, right? Yeah. And so for the podcast, we talked about the rest is history for a while.

Yes. You talked about the subject and mentioned upgrade on Connected, and there's an upgrade link in there. So I wonder if, you know, right, if we spam it like we did a few minutes ago, if it's like, well, yeah, but those are all just in passing and they're not really about this and I'm not going to put the links in or there are too many of them or whatever. There are probably a lot of rules like that that they're trying to use. But we spent a lot of time talking about the Apple TV shows, right? And they're not, they don't link or even reference them in there. It may not be turned on yet for that or wasn't when they transcribed that episode. I don't know.

Who knows? I think this is very interesting. And I think you're showing the potential power that you have available to you once you have a tech complete transcript and an understanding. and an understanding of what is in the transcript to do stuff with it. I think this is very, very clever. So I will say, I've just gone back to the Apple TV draft episode and it has pulled out the podcasts that we mentioned in the episode

downstream, the rest is history and cortex, but none of the TV shows. Yeah, yeah. But I think it's their intent to do that, but they're obviously not doing it or not doing it for all podcasts yet. And that's fine. You're right. This is a consequence of them turning on this feature where they are going and transcribing every popular or semi-popular and ultimately every podcast. They're throwing lots of cloud CPU time at a transcription engine to build these things out and put them in their database. The nice thing is, since they know what the podcast is, they transcribe it once and then everybody gets it, right? Like everybody who subscribes to the rest is history gets the one transcript of that episode. and the same for us. And they do some ad sensing stuff,

which is really amazing for things that have dynamic ads in them. They can kind of map where the content is so that if you get a different ad and then they come back to the host, the transcript picks up where the host speaks, even if it's 30 seconds later on your version than on your neighbor's version. So that's really impressive.

But a while ago, it might have been at WWDC or even longer, I was talking to somebody who was involved with Apple podcasts, and they're not talking about future features, but the implication I got from that conversation about the transcripts was that Apple was viewing the transcripts as a feature that unlocks a lot of other features because now they kind of understand the content of the podcast. And this is a great example of them trying to do that. We spoke about this before, and I've had some conversations to people inside of Apple about some of the, clever stuff that they're doing, like how they're using, like their model is trying to make decisions about the transcript based on information that it can glean. Like, for example, it always puts my name as M-Y-K-E when I say it. Right. And something I find fascinating. I don't

know how they've done this, but so that, you know, I shared some images of you just so you could see what I was looking at. So in last week's episode of Connected, I said the line, I had to immerse myself in all of this news for upgrade this week. It capitalized the U and put the link in. Now, how does that transcript system know what I'm talking about? Now, there are obvious ways that it can know, and they're clearly doing some of that work to link me to these two shows that when I say upgrade, unconnected,

I am probably referencing this show and like I'm sure that they have to do more work because obviously I can say the word upgrade and I'm not talking about this show so I think that that is really quite impressive what they're managing to do. Yeah, there's some sophisticated context being put in here.

I suspect my gut feeling when I first saw that it gets Mike Hurley right almost all the time. Although when I say goodbye to you at the end of the show Jamie pointed out that it almost always transcribes as My Curly. In Apple Podcasts? No, in our editor, in our Riverside editor,

which also does a transcript. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It says, goodbye, my Curley. But, um, and, and Y,ke instead of M.I.K.E. But the thing is, they're probably, when they run the transcript, they're probably passing a load of metadata, including the description of the show, which includes our names in it. Yep.

Um, the RSS feed includes our names as well. They have a thing that they do where they're like people in Apple podcast. where there's like, they're identifying who hosts are, which probably also allows them to cross-reference with other shows and put that in there. And there might even be a bio block where it's like, Mike Hurley is also the host of Connected or whatever or also the host of Upgrade.

And, but whatever they're doing, it's super clever. They are getting that context and then running the transcript and the chapter engine and the extraction of media for links. And that's, they got to be doing all of that because it's, You're right. Otherwise, that context wouldn't make any sense because you can't, you can't use the word upgrade on a random podcast to talk about a software upgrade and have it linked to the upgrade podcast. It doesn't make sense. It would be nice, though. If that happens. It would be great. It would be great. But then there's going to be a lot of podcasts with really common words. So let's not do that. Don't spend the podcast. Don't spend the podcast. So if that is the case, we're really going to benefit. It's great. It's awesome. Well, we'll talk about this more downstream.

I love it. I love it. Love it. This episode is brought to you by Gusto. As a new year is around the corner, a lot of us are trying to get our business operations together. And honestly, having payroll, benefits, and HR handled by Gusto, feels like starting the new year with a clean desk and an organized inbox. So you can focus on actually growing your business. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one, remote-friendly and incredibly easy to use.

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professional way, that is the solution I'm always looking for. So if you are doing any paying, work, hiring, onboarding, all this kind of stuff, team support, gusto, this is what you want. It's going to bring it all together for you, keep it all in one place and make it super easy for you to manage what you need to. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash upgrade and you'll get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at G-U-S-T-O.com slash upgrade. One more time, gusto.com slash upgrade. A thanks to Gusto for their support of this show and all of Relay. We had an Ask Upgrade question that I thought would actually fit quite nicely in this discussion. So Logan wrote in and said, considering the advancements in 26.2 in the

podcast app. It got me thinking, why hasn't Apple focused on video podcasts? YouTube and Spotify are eating their lunch on this. While it technically supports video, no major podcast is releasing through Apple Podcasts. Will Apple address this? I want to know what you think. I think this is a great question, and I think maybe video podcast doesn't fit Apple's strategy. Yeah, the irony is that Apple Podcasts has supported video podcasts since the beginning. But what Spotify is, is done for people who don't know. I mean, we post our podcast to YouTube, right? Everybody's posting their podcast to YouTube. That's fine. We do a video version. It goes to YouTube. Spotify has an interesting thing where they allow you to overlay your video version on your audio

version, but it's weird. And this is why we don't do it because Spotify expects that the audio that goes with your video version is essentially identical. to your audio version. So if we were to upload upgrade in video format to Spotify, you wouldn't get the audio edit that is carefully being done by Jim Metzendorf. You would be getting the audio

from the video edit that Jamie is doing, which is more cheap, you know, it's not on Jamie. It is, hi Jamie. We are more focused on just having it be kind of expediently make sure the cuts happen where the cuts happen. But, like, she's not, and we don't expect her to do, like, dialogue, trimming, take out this little bit of cross-talk.

Like, she might do a little of that. The audio doesn't sound as good either, and that is just a function of the system that we're using. Because it's coming from Riverside, which does a decent job considering, but it's not our local recordings that Jim Metzendorf is using. Which are completely uncompressed audio. So right now, the way it works on Spotify, just so people will understand this, if we uploaded upgrade to Spotify, you wouldn't, even if you're not using video, you wouldn't hear our audio edit. You would hear our video edit, which we are not going to do

to the level of our audio edit because we are primarily an audio podcast. So Spotify basically says if you do video, you're a video podcast and we'll just use the audio of your video, and that's why we don't do it. I think Spotify have made what I consider to be a perfectly fair assumption.

Like, I think if you're producing video, you're probably just pulling the audio out of the edit and you're publishing that audio. The reason they do this is because they have an incredible feature where you can seamlessly switch between the audio and the video

at any time, which I think is very cool. Very cool. Because if you're watching, if you're listening to a show and then someone mentioned something, you can just jump back 10 seconds, turn the video on, see what they said, and then just turn it off again. Which I think is a very cool thing. But yes, it doesn't work for shows that.

that produce in a way that is considered to be odd today. Like, genuinely, I could imagine you could tell, say this to an engineer at Spotify, and they were like, never even considered it. Like, because it's just not how their partners are producing their shows. Because they want that feature. And if we uploaded our video and we didn't have that feature, you couldn't toggle back and forth because the audio wouldn't track because it would be off because the edits are different.

We tried it on an episode. That's how we know this. Like, I recommend it we do it and it was bad. I know some people who edit, Erica, our podcast editor for a bunch of stuff on the incomparable Erica edits in a video editor

in whatever Sony's video editor is called Vegas and she does Total Party Kill which is great because it's got video with it so she does her audio edit

with the video edit but that is what would be required which means that if we really wanted to go down that path with Spotify we would have to get an editor who is comfortable editing

audio and video simultaneously. It would take longer. It would be more expensive. We'd probably need to do a bunch of like download the video files, which would take longer. The show would get out later. And we're not willing to do that. So, okay, so Apple now. What does Apple do? Mike, you are a podcast expert. So I want to hear what you say. My gut feeling is that Logan is right and that Apple has kind of fallen asleep at the switch and that there is this big trend toward having podcasts with video versions and they're just kind of not there. And I get why podcast app is different than YouTube, but Spotify shows that you can also say, actually, podcast and video are now kind of the same for some podcasts,

and maybe we should just let you switch on the video if we want to and that Apple is kind of leaving a trend in podcasting behind by ignoring it. What do you think? So with an asterisk, Apple don't host podcasts. And I think that is the key difference. The asterisk is if you do a membership through Apple Podcasts, they do host the member version. You can upload the files there. Yeah. So let's say this. So if you, we post our podcast on YouTube, YouTube serves it. We You don't have to pay bandwidth charges for every video view on YouTube. It's free. Spotify consumes your content and reserves it. Well, but for video, you have to upload it manually, too.

Yeah, you have to upload that video, and then it's served by Spotify, and they'll do whatever they need to do to compress it and alter it dynamically or whatever it needs to do. Apple doesn't serve anything but those member podcasts, so yes, that would be number one, For me, the reason they are not in this business is because they are not willing to do the hosting. And Apple has always, you know, I think that there is part of this is that they do decide to kind of stay out of it. Part of it is they just, I don't think, could get the internal sign-off to be able to turn themselves into a hosting platform. Because it's going to cost them a lot of money. A lot of money.

Yeah. And it doesn't make sense for their business in the way that it makes sense for YouTube and Spotify's business, because YouTube and Spotify will let you do this and we'll take the cost because they want to put ads on that content. And that's just not Apple's model. So they would essentially be taking on what could be a massive cost for no revenue coming in for them as a business. Like it would just be pure cost. And at the moment, Apple works in a very simple, we sit in the middle scenario. So, like, video is supported in Apple Podcasts. If you subscribe to a video RSS feed, of which there are very few now, but used to be many. And comparable offers one. There you go. We have for total part of kill. We have total video kill for members.

Amazing. Right? But it's for members because, and this is the other part of this, if you host it yourself, it is incredibly expensive to host video. Yes. Especially since you're not scaling at YouTube levels. And so that's why podcasts, even if they're. offered this feature podcasters

I mean probably if they offered this feature there would be a host out there that would have they do offer it you can watch video podcasts and Apple podcasts

but no no I mean if Apple merged podcasts together the swap upgrade can have a video feed but you have to serve the video no one's gonna do that

yeah I mean I imagine they would go out with a partner like Libson or somebody like that and say we've got a video plan for you that you can upload to but it's extra expense

because it's a huge amount of data that's getting transferred at that point. So you're right, but at the same time, it does, it is not strategic for Apple, other than the sense that maybe Apple Podcasts then feels like it's missing

the zeitgeist of podcasts. Yeah, I mean, but yes, I don't know if they care to that degree. I'm not sure, I'm not sure that they do. I think that they are perfectly happy being, you know, the main place that people get audio podcasts. I think they're perfectly happy with that. My other idea was that they do something like you can tell where the YouTube video is

for your podcast and they'll put it in a player in a web kit view or something like that. But no, like, you're right, you're right. It is, what do they want to be? Do they want to be, you know, definitive wherever podcasting goes, including into video? or are they more narrowly focused for a lot of Apple reasons? And I think they, right, the reason makes sense, I would just say, though, that it does, the danger there is that podcasting shoots off in this other direction and Apple never goes there. I mean, I think it already has happened.

I think podcasting has shot off in other direction. YouTube is now the number one place to get podcast content, I think. And now, there are many reasons that people produce video versions of their podcast, which, again, is not, Apple don't care about building an algorithmic suggestion engine to that degree, right? I think that's why people make video versions of that, one of the main reasons that people make video versions of their shows. From my perspective, this will not continue anyway. Like, this kind of like push to video. People think that this is like the new way and the only possible way that podcasting can be successful into the future. And I think that that is going to retreat.

It's just This industry has found So many weird and wonderful ways That it goes to As people are trying to unlock That next $10 million Right And for a while

It was just bundle up a bunch of shows Put some celebrities on them And someone will buy your podcast company Then that stopped And now everyone's like Panic panic The industry's failing We've all got to abandon ship

And then Netflix came into the conversation And now it's like Oh hey! We can license again. And so, like, people just get, the podcasting industry, people just get very excited because everybody wants it to be bigger than it is. And, like, everyone should really just be happy with the size that it is, because it is a business that works really well for a bunch of very specific reasons.

And the more we give away from the RSS underpinning of this industry, the more we will lose, not gain, is my kind of overall thesis. I agree. I'll throw out another idea here, which is, I think that what's one of the things that's happening is that, especially for like celebrities, is that podcast is now a synonym for a talk show you distribute yourself. Yeah. Right. Remember when podcasts were all heavily edited and scripted podcasts about murders? Because it's serious. We've been podcasting through all of it. But there was a time when like every podcast was a very expensive scripted podcast about true crime or whatever. And now, I think the HOD podcast format is conversations like we have, which is awesome, actually, because we are not making the money and do not have the audience that the rest is history has.

But I will tell you, their video strategy is our video strategy. It's identical. It's identical what you see. Now, Conan O'Brien's strategy, you know, he's got multiple cameras in the studio. But, you know, it's cameras around a tape. in a studio. It's a talk show with a talk show host that's distributed on the internet. Stephen Colbert, when it was announced that CBS was going to cancel him at the end of the next year's season in the spring, everybody was immediately saying, well, you know, do a podcast. It's like, I mean, it's do a show on the internet, but now the context for that is do a podcast because that's, so I think that's where it is right now as people think of it. that way. The good thing is, and there is a good thing here, is I believe that so many people love podcasts because they're trapped in their cars or trapped somewhere where they can't watch

TV, but they can listen to the radio. And that aspect of podcasting doesn't transform when everything's on YouTube. I still listen to the rest is history. I don't watch their YouTube videos. I do watch some clips of like Conan's podcasts and stuff like that. And watching that stuff on YouTube is fun. But like it's not just the only way that people consume podcasting. And I think that's good. I think having the video is fine. But so what I like about it is Conan O'Brien has a podcast.

And he may be comfortable with the video. Like this is like when I'm on Twitter, you know, Leo comes from a TV background. And so he, I think, feels that the video version is the definitive. a version, but a whole lot of people never see the video version. And so I like the idea that Conan O'Brien has a podcast. He doesn't have a YouTube video show

even though he does. He also has a podcast you can just listen to. Amy Poller's podcast, you can just listen to it. And it's very popular. So, you know, I don't know what that means for the future of podcasting, but I think what I like about it is it shows that

conversational podcasting in audio form is viable. even if some of the big stars with big budgets also do video at a much higher level than we do. Yeah. So it's an interesting idea, but I think Logan might got to the big issue here is it's not aligned with Apple strategy

and Apple doesn't host video files or podcast files of any kind other than some membership files. So that's why. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Factor. Eating well during the holidays can feel like an impossible task. We're all short on time and surrounded by treats.

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Whoa, I didn't even get to say it's time for some ask upgrade questions so he's already firing off the lasers. Lasers are ready. The lasers are always ready. Sometimes they're too ready. If anything. I would like to mention, you know, we're going to be doing the holiday special next week.

So I think I would love to do some holiday ask upgrade questions. So if you have any specific holiday questions you'd like us to answer on next week's show, go to UpgradeFeedback.com and send us your Ask Upgrade Questions. Roy asks, Jason mentioned during episode 593 that Apple tried to hire him a decade ago. In my three or four years of listening to Upgrade, I don't think I've ever heard this story.

What was the position? Did they approach him out the blue? Did he apply? Why did he turn them down? I would love to hear more about it. This is not the only put, I've heard this from a few people, Jason. It was just a throwaway comment that we have spoken about some point, but a long time ago, I think. Yeah, a long time ago.

and I think maybe I went into more detail on other podcasts about it, but I've been in the funnel, the hiring funnel for Apple a couple of times. One was back when I worked at IDG and they approached me about something and that didn't go very far. I think I decided it wasn't really a great fit

and we didn't do it. And then after I left in that first year that I was out on my own, you know, you go out on your own and I don't know about anybody else, but for me, I just, every time there was a, somebody mentioned a job opening

in that first year, I was like, hey, a job, I don't have one of those. Maybe I should have one of those. And I don't do that anymore, but I did that for a little while. I got approached by a person who works in editorial, which is very funny, thinking about Apple as an editor and a journalist that they have an editorial group. But the editorial group does things like App Store content, App Store features. When they have picks of featured apps, they work with developer relations, but there's a separate group that is doing content for the App Store. And this is as they are about to launch or just had launched the Mac App Store. And so I think the concept there was we want a lead editor for the Mac App Store to do the content for the Mac App Store. And work with other people and all of that. They approached me because you can kind of see why they might do that. I had left Macworld, but I'd been the editor at Macworld for a decade. And they're thinking Apple, you know, Mac content, and he worked at Macworld.

And so maybe he will be the person. And I talked to them. I talked to the guy. I remember at WWDC actually that year, the first WWDC I was there on my own instead of with Macworld. I talked to the guy who was the hiring manager. I'd talked to him on the phone. We met in person and said hello. And I'd definitely seen a lot of my colleagues get hired away by Apple already.

Well, I'm going to be open to this because I don't know how this independent thing is going to go. And we'll just see. And honestly, I was kind of expecting it was useful. I think I talked about this on free agents back in the day that I did with David Sparks. Yeah. Because part of it is measuring your worth. And so what I did was I tried to calculate out what did I, what would it take for me? to go to a corporate job and leave my independent life.

And keep in mind, at this point, it would take almost, at some point in the last 10 years, that number has increased beyond a point that any reasonable company would hire me, right? Because I just want to, which means essentially I'm unhirable. Because like you would, to leave all of this behind for a corporate job would take an enormous sum of money. Because I'm doing fine here. and I don't want to do that. So they would need to blow me away. What I found out with this job, which was early on,

was they, having done it for, having been in this job for six months or a year, what they were going to offer was less than I was already producing. It's not ideal. And they had like options, right? It was like, but there's also stock compensation and all of that. But I was looking at it and thinking, And I don't even know if Lauren had a full-time job at this point.

I think she didn't. She was still looking for a full-time job so that we could get benefits and stuff like that. I had this thought of like, do I want to do this when it's not going to benefit me financially? It's just going to be back in the maw of a corporation. And since it's Apple, it means that I essentially would need to cease all of my other stuff that I do, which I didn't like. And we didn't get that far, but I knew that would be the matter. And then Upgrid listeners may know my opinion about remote work. I had a great staff of people at Macworld, many of whom did not work in our office, and it didn't matter because what we did could be done on the internet just fine.

This was a job that involved sitting at a computer doing content, and they wanted it five days a week in Cooper Tino. And I had kids in school. I was like, that was the deal breaker for me. It was like, you're not blowing me away here. if you know if you i had a brief i was going to i'll drop another thing here i was going to do a job interview at amazon and this is also in those early days and i had somebody i used to work with at idg who worked at amazon and he suggested in a meeting somewhere about creating a new position to do content in the context of of amazon and the home page of amazon like we need

somebody who's got a real editorial mind here. And he suggested me and we lined up an interview or a series of interviews in Seattle for me. I was going to fly into Seattle for a day on Amazon's dime, do a bunch of interviews and then fly home. And literally the day before they called and said, we're canceling, which I think, I think my friend's suggestion got to somebody who's like, I don't want that job to be hired. Let's not do that. And so that all went away. But it again made me think of my worth. And it was like, they are going to need to pay. me so much money for me to leave my career behind and move my family to Seattle. And not that there isn't a price, but like I said, I rapidly came to realize that my price

was so high, again, that nobody should pay it. Right? Like, you could pay me a million dollars a year. And I would probably do it, probably, depending on what it was. But you shouldn't pay me a million dollars a year. You should hire somebody else who you can pay a fraction of that to get the same thing, right? And my skills are very specialized in many ways now in terms of my areas of expertise. So anyway, so that's the story. So we didn't go further than that. But it was definitely that and the earlier one that I had, it was a long drawn out experience. The good news is, I told the hiring person at Apple, I know somebody who'd be perfect for this role

because Dan Frakes got laid off for Mac World and he did Mac Gems, which was all about Mac software and utilities and things like that, highlighting Mac software, literally what the job of the Mac App Store is. I said, Dan would be great. And good news, he lives 10 minutes away from Infinite Loop, which is where their offices are.

So guess who has that job? Yeah, guess who has that job? Dan Frakes still has. has that job. Yeah. So, perfect fit. And so I'm glad, and I don't know if my recommendation led to that or if it happened completely independently, but like, it was very funny. I was like, I can tell you who you should hire to do this job. And they did hire that person. So great, perfect fit. I remember this being a very stressful time for me because I didn't want Jason to leave and go to Apple. And I'm happy to do. Remember when I was, I remember when I was talking about maybe teaching at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley? I do not remember that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that would have been a time commitment where we would have had to, like, change when we do upgrade and a whole thing. And then, and then it's a very similar situation where I was talking to them. And the problem was that they had had an instructor drop out. And the kind of content it was going to cover was not in my area. It was much more of a specific beat, which I could, I could do it. But if I was building the focus of the class, it would have been a little different. But because somebody fell out, they were really trying to replace that. And then they got this person who literally did that job. And I was like, well, you should hire that person to do this. I mean, it's not even higher.

It's like part time. But that was the perfect fit for that. Early days, I mean, that's the truth of it is when you go out on your own in the early days. I don't know if this is for you. It is scary. And I think there is always a calculus, which is I can build this on my own. But if somebody comes with a better opportunity, maybe I'll, do that. And then after a while, it just kind of fades away. And I'm like, that's, those kinds of

opportunities I'm not really interested in. Yeah, I mean, I would, I was starting a podcast every two weeks. It felt like at some point, right? Because it was like just trying things, right? And seeing what stick. Like, that was kind of my version of it. But I was building something's like a different. In your scenario, I probably would have been doing the same kind of thing. Jim writes in and says Right now RAM prices are increasing wildly Do you think Apple will be affected by this in the near future Do you think they could have set themselves up differently

To other companies to mitigate this issue Apple does a lot I mean Apple was asked this question in the quarterly And they said they weren't worried about it Yeah Because I think Apple has long-term contracts With RAM suppliers They still have memory on their chips right

They don't have like a separate memory chip But they still have to have the memory chips. They still have to have those and they build them in. But Apple traditionally has spent a lot of time with long-term contracts where they're basically locking in prices in exchange for guaranteeing volume to the supplier. And they said they weren't really worried about it, about the volatility in it because they had taken care of it. Eventually, it could be, right? Like, at some point, you know, there will be a term limit on those guarantees. It's not going to be forever, right?

And if this situation does not resolve itself, I've put a link in the show notes in case you, if you want to know more about it, but like very, it's just one of those things that reminds me of like COVID stuff where it's like a bunch of things have come together and have resulted in an issue. Right. So if you want to remember, if it turns out that over the course of five years, you know, years the price of ram goes from 10 whatever's to 20 like it's just it's fundamentally this thing used to cost x it costs 2x now apple will have to grapple with that over time yeah that that is true

but fluctuations where like oh suddenly rams are expensive and then what usually happens is if it's so expensive everybody kind of rushes in to fulfill demand to lower the price because that's kind of how the market dynamic works. And if that's the case, then Apple can write it out. If there's a fundamental thing that happens that changes the world, of course they'll have to deal with it. They do have margins. They have different calculations. They can strike a bargain here and there. But yeah. So I think if the question is about fluctuations, I think Apple has said, we'll write it out. We're not worried about it. And then long term will be a fun. I'd say long term will be fundamental for everybody, right? Like in the long term, if

something doubles in price, every single supplier of every single device that has RAM or whatever in it will have to deal with it. And of course, Apple already charges a lot of money for RAM anyway, so I'm sure they're building some level of flexibility. Their margins are pretty good. Yeah, I mean, that is true. That's absolutely true. And James Rottenen says, you've mentioned not wanting to speculate too much about Apple employees' personal lives, their health or careers. Where do you think the line is between gossip or unfounded speculation and reporting on current Apple news and rumors? Is speculation more okay since executives are kind of like public figures? I cannot decide my own position on this. My feeling is what's public and what's private.

And I think we view it from the corporate angle. So we might say Tim Cook, you know, seems like a person who might stick around, but also Tim Cook's in his mid-60s and things like that. But the truth is, I think we approach a lot of this stuff from the angle of what does this mean for Apple going forward? What does this mean for the structure of Apple? How is Apple going to react to people leaving? Who are the new people coming in in positions of power? But it's not it's not like I would say gossipy in the sense of did you hear that so-and-so is doing this thing or going to this place. Like I want to approach it from a what does it mean for Apple because the people come and go, but Apple as a corporation stays

and that's kind of what we're here to talk about. And I think as well, this came up because of the report from Mark Gohmann about tremor right for Tim Cook. And I think we kind of touched on it because it was in the news, but like specifically said, but that we did not want to go into detail on it or speculate

on it ourselves. Like, but it is a thing that was in an important report and feels like something that should be mentioned if it's in that report. And I would argue the health of the CEO of Apple is relevant to a certain point, right? This is, this goes back, there was a scandal about Steve Jobs' health. There was literally a scandal about Steve Jobs' health about if Apple had, had lied or hidden away the details

of his health. And the feeling was that at some level, a public company has to disclose the status of their, especially their CEO, co-founder and CEO. And it's tough because health is a personal private thing, but there is that moment where it's like, but this is relevant in ways to the operation of the company. Especially Steve Jobs, right? Yeah, but if you're, and so, yes, HIPAA, right? Like, it's private, but at the same time, if you are an executive at a publicly traded company, I'm sorry, your whole life is not private.

Parts of it are public because you're an executive at a publicly traded company. and so things you'd otherwise say it's none of your business it is kind of your business things that could impact your ability to be able to do your job need to be disclosed because it could affect

the stock price which could affect people's savings right like there are there are just things that you have to understand and go along with but like we're not going to sit here

on this show and we don't and talk about what we think about Tim Cook's love life right because it's like it's not important in any world. Also, what I think we do, and you can see it from when we report, when we do like Rumor Roundup and all of that, is we discuss things that get reported

about things that might be coming from Apple. But I feel like we do a pretty good job of trying, trying to diagnose that report. Right? Like, where did it come from? from, and we've done this a lot. Consider the sources behind it. Who's giving Mark German information? But we also say Mark German is generally right. Like, I believe him and his sources because his track record is very, very good. If there's a weird report from somewhere,

Ming Chuo, we're like, his sources in the supply chain are good. And so we lay, there's more credence to that than there is for some, like, random rumor posted on a Chinese social media site that got screenshoted and translated and all of that. We will disclose, like, this, some stuff is not worth mentioning, first off. And second, if it is worth mentioning, it is worth mentioning with the details of where it came from. And I think that's important, too, as part of it is, you know, does this stuff hold water, basically? And then you can judge. We will discuss it, but I want to always bring to the table like our level of trust or confidence in it. And I think that's part of the conversation, too. And I think that's something that needs to come

along with it. Yep. But also, just really quickly about personal lives and making it personal, the other thing I would say is I,

the other place that this comes into effect is, you know, it's kind of like mockery about irrelevant things and discussion of irrelevant things.

Just I said something's irrelevant about people who are employees. The things that are not about their role as an Apple person rapidly,

that's when I feel like it's rapidly getting it personal. It's like, Like, first off, you don't know who made the decision. So if you decide to write a thing that says, Phil Schiller made this decision, you better know for a fact that it's Phil Schiller.

Otherwise, you're wrong. And so you shouldn't say that. You should say Apple made this decision and Phil Schiller rolled it out or whatever it is. Somebody at Apple made this decision, we don't know. That's important. And then also it's the getting too personal about, like, Alan Dye's Instagram, right?

Like, Alan Dye's Instagram is full of super fashion stuff. And I get a sense that people are using, Alan Dye's interest in the fashion industry as a way to get at him like, oh, he's not one of us or he's interested in all this stuff and you don't have to be interested in fashion but like I think it's irrelevant

to his job as a designer at Apple and now meta. It got a little too personal in my opinion. So, you know, think about them as people at a public company who have roles and may be visible and that is stuff we could talk about

but I would not go beyond that. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show please go to Upgradefeedback.com especially if it's a holiday question get it in. We talk about it next week. If you would like to support this show as an easy way to do that, go to getupgradeplus.com

and you can sign up and become a member. You can get 20% of your first year for new subscribers by using the code 2025 holidays. If you'd like to actually see the video version of this show that we spoke about earlier on, you can go to YouTube. Don't look at Spotify. Don't look at Spotify. Go to YouTube search fee.

upgrade podcast and you'll find us. I'll put a link in the show notes too. If you would like to watch us there, you can. Thank you to Factor, Gusto, delete me, and Squarespace for their support of this episode. But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Curley.