Upgrade - 637: My Job Is to Eat the Marshmallow

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 637 for September 14th, 2026. Today's show is brought to you by FitBard, Ship Aton from Revenue Cat, and Notion. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike. Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday to us. Well, it's in a couple.

We're a day or two away from the anniversary of the first episode of Upgrade, which was in 2014. So it's 12 years of upgrade. Wow. Happy birthday upgrade. Yeah, September 16th. Wow. September 16th. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's always around the time the iPhone comes out, right? Like, is the thing and the iPhone comes out on Friday. It's like it's always around this time. It is, it is, because we dropped that episode when I had an embargo drop for the iPhone 6. iPhone 6. iPhone 6. I know. That just doesn't even feel like it could be back.

I mean, that's the iPhone that really kind of strapped a rocket engine to the iPhone and made it huge. and we were right on time. Or you could say it was us. Upgrade. It was us. We upgraded them. You got it. You know?

I take it. I withdraw my previous comments. It was totally us. We did it. You're welcome, Tim Cook. We did it. Wherever you are. Wherever you are.

I have a snow talk question for you. It comes from Darren who says, it's been about five years, Jason, since you were last asked this snow talk question. What screen saver do you use? Your answer in 2021 was the aerial screen saver. But since then, the Macintosh screen saver has

come out, I think, with Sequoia, which shows the imagery from the classic Mac OS. Given the recent launch of designed in California and how it's put Apple and Mac history into the spotlight, wow, look at us. I'm wondering if you've tried this screensaver, if you have any thoughts, if you may have switched to it. Yeah, when the Macintosh screensaver came out, I switched to it immediately. Yeah. It's adorable. Yeah. The truth is in my current setup, I don't, I basically don't have a screensaver. The screen just goes off. I don't. But when, sometimes it's on and sometimes I forget when I turned it off

because I used to come out here and see the little Macintosh things and they're adorable. I love them. I love that screensaver. It's great. It's very good. It's amazing that they did that somebody made the effort at Apple made the effort to replay all of those classic icons and things and system elements

from classic MacOS. So I love that. I fully endorse it, but currently, just full disclosure, currently when I go to screensaver on my Mac it says never. Right. I have it on my the Mac that I'm talking to you from right now my recording Mac. I have the Macintosh one.

Of course I use the Relay for St. Jude's screensaver as well on my other Macs. I see. But what I like on this one is I have because I have the two monitors, right? I don't need my usual wallpaper on two monitors even for me that's too much. And so on my second display I have it where the screensaver turns into the wallpaper,

which I really like that. You know, like it stops, and it's like on a frame. So I have that. And it's the Macintosh one in green. Because I like it, it can vary colors or you can choose a color, and I like it in green. So right now I'm looking at, I don't even know what I'm looking at over there. It's like a zoomed-in dialogue box or something like that. It's very cool.

It's a great screensaver. One of those, like, weird things where, like, Apple does a big kind of song or dance about is history and then, like, nothing. You know, like, for no reason they did it. and then we don't talk about it anymore, but it's a good time. If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question to help us open a future episode of the show, just go to Upgradefeedback.com and you can send yours in. Let's take a moment to talk about St. Jude, because over the weekend, Jason,

we hit a huge milestone in our fundraising campaign. I'm actually happy that we get to be the first show to talk about this, that we have now passed $5 million raised since 2019 for the day. kids of St. Jude. Incredible. Like, we are actually now at 5.1 million.

It's been a very big weekend. Uh, this year, we, we, we're up to $340,000 raised on our $700,000 goal. It's,

you know, like I wrote a little thing on my blog. It's, this kind of stuff is very hard to talk about. Like, because the, the numbers are so astronomical. But it's just,

it's such a privilege to have, you know, This collection of podcasters and podcast listeners who in such a short amount of time could raise such a huge amount of money. And I'm so proud of it. And it's incredible. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it's hard to believe.

Like, it's just, yeah, we're all, we're all so grateful that people out there are doing this with us because, yeah, it's, I mean, what more can you say? But we have to say more because it's only September 14th. Indeed. As we know, September lasts more than a month. It does. It does, even longer than ever. And why do we do this? Because it isn't estimated that 400,000 children around the world had cancer every year.

When St. Jude opened back in 1962, childhood cancer was something that was considered incurable. But since then, St. Jude has helped to push the overall survival rate in America from 20% to more than 80%. They flipped it, which is, I love that statistic. I mean, I will love even more when it's at 100, because that's what every. everyone's working at here, like a 100% survival rate. That is what we want. But it is a tremendous undertaking. And St. Jude needs our help. The generosity of donors like you support cutting edge research that save lives and ensure that families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food because every child deserves a chance to live their best life and celebrate

every moment. And when you support St. Jude, you can help make cures possible for kids with cancer because together we can save more lives. And when I say that to you, when I say those very simple words, how could you not want to get involved? Like kids, no one should have cancer. Kids should not have cancer. And we can work together to make sure this doesn't exist, but also in the meantime, can work together to make sure these kids get the life-saving treatment that they need. You can help support and lead, sorry, the support that you give leads to more cures for thousands of children. And we're inviting you as part of the Relay community to help us reach our fundraising goal this year of $700,000 for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

As always, there are multiple ways to support the campaign. You can make a donation at St. Jude.org slash relay. Your donation can unlock some fun rewards for you. And if you make a donation, why not check whether your employer will match it, to essentially double your donation by clicking the blue search employer button on the donation summary page. You can find more information on employer matching, as well as using a donor-advised fund. at St. Jude.org slash relay because your support is there tomorrow.

Go to St. Jude.org slash relay to donate or start a fundraiser of your own today. So before we... I mean, today is going to be a lot of reflection on last week and also talking about all the new OS releases that are probably rolling out as we're recording, I'm expecting. If that hasn't started already, it will start shortly.

Shortly. But before that, I want to do rumor roundup Because there's a couple of items that I want to talk. Yeah, yeah, then. Yehah, I say. Yeah, thank you very much for you hiring me. I'm being Western themed, Mike. That's actually very important.

Theme. Because I'm jailbreak Jason now. Watch out. Yes, jailbreak Jason. I am bringing my Room Around Up t-shirt for the podcast as on as a secondary item of clothing. I have a whole thing planned. But this is the Room Around Up. A quick reminder.

This is what I wanted to do. A quick reminder of the products that we're still expecting. that could come this year that we did not see last week. Mac Room was put together an article. And I just wanted to give a brief rundown, because there was a possibility of some of these things appearing, but also there's still a possibility of some of these things coming this year. So that is an OLED iPad Mini.

Updates to the iMac or MacBook Pro, maybe to M6 generation. Touchscreen MacBook Pro, who knows what chip is going to happen at this point. HomePod of a screen, HomePod updates, mini, etc., and Apple TV updates. and I wanted to just kind of check in with you now, you know, we had that big event. Do you think we're going to see any of these products this year? Do you think it's possible?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels to me, you know, generally Apple has done another press event. Yep. In late October, early November, sometimes right around Halloween, this feels like that's what they're going to do again. They could do with all sorts of different,

ways and we'll see if they change their ways because they get on a cycle and you think you expect what's going to happen and then they change the cycle. And so you never know. But like in the past, there's been a, you know, press come to New York and see our new thing. And I wonder if they're going to do that, especially if they've got all these home products. We've been talking about this for a while now. If they've got a home strategy to unveil, having an event, having a place where they bring press, having a maybe even a place to show off. their home vision in some way, that is a thing that they absolutely could do and it would benefit from them having a platform to kind of explain what they're doing, even if it's, you know,

a press event and a video, whatever it is. Also, they often do Mac and iPad updates this time a year. So they could do both. They really could just jam it all together if they wanted to and do that in late October early November. So if we go on what they've done in the past, I think that's the most likely scenario is a second announcement that will happen in late October or early November that would have this stuff in there.

I don't know, but the one that I don't know about is the MacBook Pro. Because that story has, from the beginning, that story has been they'd really like to ship it this year, but it might slip to next year. The only reason I think it might not slip is because, remember, according to Mark German,

that new OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro, is not going to have new chips in it. It's going to be a new laptop with the M5 Pro and Max chips in it, which is, again, not unprecedented. Apple has done, you know, laptop updates or computer updates

where the chips aren't new, but the design is new. It's happened. It doesn't happen very often, but you could do it. But my point is, if you're going, if you know that the M7s

are going to come down the pike next, end of next year, maybe with pro and max versions that are going to go in the MacBook Pro, wouldn't you want to start the clock on that MacBook Pro now? Yeah. So that it lasts a year. Yeah. As, as the latest model, wouldn't you want to not go into 2027 and then have to announce an M5 laptop, also knowing that an M7 laptop is coming later in the year? Yeah. So for that reason, I think if, and not knowing anything else about the details of this just to say, I think ideally you'd want that laptop out now,

not in February. And if that's the case, maybe we'll see it. But it just report-wise, it's always been very vague about when they were going to do it. Maybe the vagueness, we don't even know. Maybe the vagueness was actually all about the M6.

And that if they were going to do the M6 Pro and Max, it would be something that would happen early next year. But maybe that's it. But if they just stick to the M5, they don't need to wait around for a new chip. They could do it in the fall. see. But I would be shocked if there aren't announcements at some point between now and middle and November. And that's usually when they do it because they kind of want to clear the decks and

get all that iPhone stuff out. And in this case, all that iPhone stuff goes into October, right? Yeah. With the duo. So you almost want to be, either you do the event and say, this is a very exciting event, the duo is shipping, and here's our new stuff. Or you ship the duo you wait a week or two. Early November, you make your announcement. So I think it's pretty likely just based on history. Yeah, see, I feel like there's a real, like, I think I mentioned, I mentioned this last week too,

but an easy thing to be like, we're going to show the duo again to the media and a bunch of stuff, right? Like that could work as well as you get that out of the way and then do another thing. But if people were going to want to see this again, they may have more third-party apps that they can show.

Like, there could be an interesting story to have, like, a second kind of run at this a month later with some sort of like media. Maybe they put together a video or whatever. Because one of the things that I'm very interested about is the iPhone duo is a meme. Like, it happened. It's broken out. People know about this. I've seen multiple different meme formats about the iPhone duo, right?

Which is like, you know, one is just people, using the image and putting things inside of the image for like kind of no reason like brands kind of like jumping on it in that way but then also the kind of like a version of the like the meme of like I can't believe we got this before we got GTA 6 there's like a version of that like I can't believe this happened and now we have a folding iPhone before it kind of I've seen stuff like that so this product has got some juice and I think that is very good for them because what I'm not seeing a lot of, although I'm sure it's there,

but what I'm not seeing a lot of is I can't believe how expensive this thing is, which I saw a lot for the Vision Pro, right? Where it was like, I think people could not conceive of why that product might cost the money it costs. Because that product doesn't exist in a category most people have any reference for,

but this is a phone and people get what a phone is. Imagine if your phone and your iPad was one thing. And I think people are excited about that. And yeah, it's, so I don't know. I don't know if they, I don't think they need to do it, but I could imagine a scenario where they're like, come and look at the duo again, media, and also here's a bunch of other stuff that we want to show you. I could see that too. So I'm basically a long way around as saying, I agree with you that I think some of this stuff's going to come.

I don't know what. Like, I do not know what. Because like, look at the home part in the Apple TV stuff, feels like we've been saying that is a month away for a year. Right. Like, so I don't really feel like I have a sense of that. But there definitely feels like there is the possibility of some other bit. on a completely different track. A couple of interesting tidbits

from Mark German's Power on Newsletter. Apple is preparing to redesign some of its stores. We have a renewed focus on the Genius Bar, new areas for the classes, which honestly seem like they're kind of shrinking that down a little bit, and a dedicated place to collect online orders. I'm so pleased to hear this. Apparently, this is something that's going to be rolling out

over the next few years. New stores will be built with this in mind, existing stores are going to be refit. They're going to be removing the large video walls that are in most of their stores. The Genius Bar is going to go there where they have those. So that's actually very prime

real estate. And then also they're going to be shrinking down the class areas, having some screens, like some TV stuff. I've seen this in the Comic Garden store. They have it kind of away. They've done this to some stores, but this report is they're going to do this to

all the stores. Yeah. What Mark said is accurate to what I've seen too. They have done elements of this in some of the newer stores, but this is a bigger thing, even in some of the newer ones. And this is an undoing of Angela Arant's decisions, basically. This is an undoing of that. So Ron Johnson's book is coming out this month, I think. And I've been thinking a lot about what happened to Apple Retail after Ron Johnson.

And I think it, I think at the apple of the 2010s, um, kind of, I think they got a little too high-end luxury brained. And that goes for Johnny I've designed stuff and also product decisions. but I think hiring somebody from Burberry and some of the decisions she made, they're very highfalutin. And on one level, I appreciate that because Ron Johnson, his whole idea was model the stores after the concierge desk at a luxury hotel.

Like he wanted hotel service for retail and not what you think of as standard retail service. And this is a retail guy, but that was their, so they were always thinking kind of like that. But Angela Arendt's, I don't know. I just wonder if some of those decisions were a little untethered from reality of what Apple was trying to do and that they're trying to walk it back a little. Like putting the genius bars back at the back of the store instead of the screens is what a message that is of undo it, undo, undo. Let's go back to way it was in 2010. I think essentially they were trying to be a luxury brand with mass market football and you can't do both.

Like, you can make the Apple stores a luxury thing, but then their appointment only. Like, people can't come in and look at stuff anymore. Like, if you want to make it a luxury experience. Or you lean into the fact that Apple stores are always absolutely full of people, needing things, wanting things, trying things. And then you try and build the store around that. And I think they tried to have their cake and eat it, and that's where it fell apart. So, like, you go into an Apple store and, like, you can just go up to anything, buy anything. But also, there's nowhere to check out because they don't.

don't have that, right? Yeah. Yeah. So they're, it's very interesting. I feel like they were stabilizing after Angela Arryn's left for a while. And then now they're like actually executing on an idea of what the store should be. And it does feel like it's going back to basics in some ways, which is really great. By the way, Ron Johnson's book, which is called Shop Different, and you can roll your eyes at that, but that was actually a text from a Wall Street Journal, I think, or New York Times full page ad that Steve Jobs wrote when they launched their retail stories. So like, it's a, it's an approved phrase. It's not just a trying to take off on think different. It's like Steve Jobs wrote shop different. It comes out next week. I liked it. I read it.

It's good. I think it gives you a real perspective into Ron Johnson, who's a very interesting guy, and also like how Ron Johnson and Steve Jobs envisioned the Apple retail at a time, not to get too much into Apple history. There's probably a whole design in California about this. You say there's probably a, they're like, all of them. They're all of them. They're always is. There definitely is. There always is. It was a time when everybody thought that they were crazy for doing this. But it was a sure, sure disaster. And it turned out to actually be one of the smartest things they ever did. Yeah. I would argue. I think that Apple doing retail was a vital part of their comeback because Apple brand in places that people could see it and walk in and

experience it was a huge part of the rehab that that brand had to go through in the 2000s. So anyway, Ron Johnson's book is out next week. But it does feel having read that, I really got some vibes that this is like they're kind of undoing a lot of the Angela Arrant's era stuff and going back to some of the stuff that works and the

return of the genius bar as well as things like a dedicated in-store pickup area where they're going to be able to and the report is like they're going to have a cabinet basically, a wood cabinet because of course it's all made of wood a wood a wood cabinet

full of preloaded with the online orders so that when you come in and say, I've got an online order, they actually can just go over there and open the captain and go, oh, here it is, and hand it to you, which is, that's great. Yep. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at FitBod. If you're looking to make changes to your personal fitness, getting started can feel daunting. That's why I want to tell you about FitBod, because it is an easy and affordable way to build

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Once again, that is FitBOD.com slash upgrade and you'll get 25% off your membership. Thanks to FitBod for the support of this show and Relay. So since last week, this is what I want to talk about now. So kind of thoughts, feelings, information. Things that we'd know now, we didn't know then. I would like to start by just saying, I, a significant percentage of my brain is occupied by the iPhone duo right now. I cannot stop thinking about this phone.

I am so excited to use it. So what you're saying is, if we took Mike, yeah, and then we kind of like opened his head up. You can say cut me open. You can say cut me open. It's fine. No, no, no. Well, we're not going to cut you. We're going to open your head up like a book.

Revealing a larger brain of Mike inside. Yep, yep, yep. It would be iPhone duo all the way down. Yeah, I know. It's a lot. It is one of the most complex, interesting product launches by Apple in a long time, magnified by the fact that it's an iPhone. And the iPhone is the most important product they make.

I keep coming back to the iPhone 10 myself of like the last time. And one of the things that's really been making me feel this way is they made a really great video called introducing the new iPhone duo. It's an ad and the ad is kind of riffing on the original iPhone ads. Like it's the same pacing. It's the same look. Somebody's using the phone. But in this video, in all the video that Apple's been putting out, any kind of like promotional stuff, it looks, it's like, really shiny and looks really expensive. And that's what the iPhone 10 looked like. It looked like

an incredibly premium thing, like a piece of jewelry as an iPhone kind of and like also futuristic. And the duo has all of that in spades, more so even, like, because of just some of the incredible stuff that it's doing. So yeah, I'm, you know, it's like, I don't know, I do not know at this stage if it's the phone I would want to use as my iPhone. There's no way I can know this right now. Yeah. But what I know is I can't stop thinking about it. Yeah.

I mean, look, I am a big proponent in you've got to, you know, go beyond the hype. You've got to spend time with it as a reviewer, right? Like, I'm not going to believe it until I see it, until I experience it. But the potential here. is enormous. I just don't know. And what I keep coming back to is not, this is the thing that blows me away,

and I probably mentioned this last week. What I keep coming back to is that I'm not as interested in the hardware as I thought I would be. I'm interested in the hardware. The hardware is fascinating. The hardware is a game changer for the iPhone. It's just unlike any iPhone ever. How are they doing this?

How does it work? How does it feel? I have no doubt given Apple's critical. when it comes to hardware, that it's going to be a very impressive piece of hardware. We've all sort of agreed that on a hardware basis, Apple's kind of on all cylinders right now. They are just, they're killing it. The part that stops me is the software. Yeah.

Because this gives me those, oh, it's Apple doing their thing vibes more than I felt in a while. Yes. Like, I agree. The sense that they could have done less, but they just didn't. That they could have been like, you know, you open it and it opens, and then the screen is there.

They're like, no, no, we're going to reformat all the apps and we're going to have an opening animation that makes it seem like you're revealing it like a magic trick. And then we're going to build in all this stuff where you can display things on the back while you're running them on the front so the people who are

looking at the back of the phone will see something different than you and you know, you can play a thing for kids there so that the kids are looking at Snoopy and therefore they're looking at the camera and like, and it may not be that great,

but like the fact that they did an under display camera for the first time and that's like number eight on the list of things. That is an unbelievable thing that they have done, right? Because I don't know if we would have expected

they would do that. Most companies have moved away from it, etc, et cetera, et cetera. But yes, they've done that, and we're just like, ah, they also did the displays them. Like, we're not even really focusing on this. It's like, ah, yeah. So the, I keep coming back to that, the software thing.

And I know we feel for, I was just listening to Accidental Tech Podcast and like three developers lamenting the fact that this is going to be an enormous amount of work for app developers. And it is. There's no doubt about it. But as a non-IOS app developer, let's say. Yeah. But I'm so excited about it.

I love that Apple is doing new, new interface stuff to solve interesting hardware problems, and they seem to have made their best effort. And again, jury's still out. It's going to be at least a month and probably a lot more than that before we really get a handle on this. But I love their ambition. They seem to have thought and considered a lot of this stuff.

And it just, that's the part that really gets me. Because again, the magic that, that Apple brings that makes us like Apple products is generally because they do great hardware and they build software to work specifically with the great hardware. And you get that thing where they're working together. And I just really feel it with this product, that this is not, this is not the kind of product where they're like, well, we did the minimum. And Apple should never be the company where the software is like we did the minimum to support the hardware. And yet, at a few points in the last 10 years, 15 years, at a few points, it has felt like that.

Like the hardware is like, oh, let me add them. We're going to do this thing. And then the software's like, well, we can't get to all of your ideas. Like so many times there's been a release where we've all immediately thought, oh, what about this? Could it do this? Could it do this? Could it do this? And the answer is no, not yet. Maybe later. Apple was not going to say maybe later. But it's very clearly like maybe those features will come in a few. your OS update, but you're asking too much. For this version, we just needed to get it to be functional. And I understand that from a practicality standpoint, but I could also make the argument that if when you release a product, everybody immediately says, but what about this, but what about this, but what about this? Could you imagine this? You could do this with it. And all of those things are untouched.

You could then make that argument that that is, those are obvious misses that for whatever reason they chose not to take on because if they're that obvious to us they were clearly obvious to Apple but they didn't or couldn't do it and this product

there are a couple of things that people are what abouting about that Apple has said nothing about which makes me suspicious that there is an answer and they're just not ready to show it to us or it's an answer but it's a point one answer

like left-handedness I have to believe that they have a solution they said at one point you can run it in any orientation. I think that meant the inside. I know, but like I have to believe that they have an approach. I think they don't have something to show now. But not a point of.

Exactly. That the point one version will have this in the same way that they tweaked the always on display stuff. Right. But I think they will. That all said, it's telling that so many of the things that we see that are things that we would have been like, oh, but what about this? Could you do this? Could you do this? Let's explore, because that's our brains exploring the ramifications of the hardware and what it means, like, the sensors are in different places and it opens and it partially opens and things like that.

And I just, I continue to be struck by the fact that most of that stuff is in it, is done, because that's a good sign. That's a good sign that they really, and it also shows how important the iPhone is. Right? Like iPhone, iPhone at Apple, it's like pull out all the stops. It doesn't matter. iPhone at Apple, highest priority. Highest priority. So you mentioned something a minute ago about like the Harvard software thing. I do feel like maybe when we were anticipating this device, we underestimated the software. Like, it was kind of like, oh yeah, it will be like a different shaped iPhone and it will kind of run a split view on the inside. We just kind of like, how wave these things and didn't really, we did not think about this to the level that they have thought about

this, right? I think is very clear, which is why I think we're so excited and kind of surprised. You know, like the idea that all of the app controls moved to the side of the screen is like, I'm really pleased that that has happened from a use case perspective, because as they say, like, it allows for the content to have a lot more space, right? That you can see more because they're making the phone squatter, but if you don't have any buttons on the bottom, you can see more stuff. And it's like, that's really clever.

I don't think I would have thought that you were going to do that based on the models and the rumors, right? And so it's like, I feel like, I will say for me, I underestimated that. And I am so happy that I did and that I feel this way now,

because now it's like, oh, baby, they have, like, they have rethought iOS. Like, iOS is different. It's not iPad OS. it's not the iOS that I'm running on my iPhone Pro. This is a different version of iOS that does different stuff than anywhere else.

And it's like that is a, just as someone who loves to use these devices, that is an incredibly exciting thing to be able to try. And every time I see a video, because it does seem like Apple gave like a lot of content creators a lot of time with this device. It feels like more, there was the hands-on area,

but it seems like quite a lot of people got to go and spend more time with it in content capture environments, right? Right, which is great because that was always the killer in the hands-on area, was that everybody's doing their complete video content capture in the hands-on area, which is bad for all because it takes forever. It's a terrible experience. So, yes, you got to see MKBHD and I saw several people, and they're in, like, quiet space. Yes, it's like there's four or five people in here at a time.

they've got some setups that look like YouTube's set-ups. They had a very MKBHD set up with like the paper rolls, like the color paper. It looked like you just shot it in his studio. But it's like, that's like, that's just like the more content that's come out, the more intriguing it all looks to me. It's like, oh, that's how that looks. It looks like this. It's like, oh, that looks like that. It's fascinating.

Like it really very much is. And also they put out some developer videos. I really recommend one of them. It's called Design for iPhone Duo. this is a very high level video and it just talks through some of the thinking and the concepts and like what good UI

will look like on this device is very approachable for anyone. I recommend watching that video. I'll put a link in the show notes to it. It's like another look at like this is how software works on this. It's like, oh wow. Some other videos they put out a bunch.

I started watching them. They started coding it whatever in my head and that's fine. It's not for me. But just like the pure design stuff was fascinating to look at. They're also doing a really good job communicating it in a way that I am really happy about because John Turnus gave interviews. Yes. He did a few.

There's a two-part interview with Tom's Guide and Tech Radar. They kind of like collabed and split them up. If you will remember, I made a lot of noise last year about a video of the iPhone air where Jaws threw a phone at Lance Yulenov and he dropped it. This is, it's them. It's Lance Juno. Marks, it's Mark and Lance. Yeah. They seem to have this like double act thing that they do. Yeah. Well, they're both, they're both, it's the same company.

Yeah, but they do. It's like a thing where it's like it's two publications. They come together to make these videos. But anyway, they've done one with John Turnus and Jaws. They did two videos. They're great. And it's, I feel like I have been given exactly what I was asking for, which is the CEO of Apple, talking about the products, just talking about the products.

You can tell, and I'm not, I'm not saying that this is, that Tim Cook is bad, and I'm not saying that this is a key part of the job of being a good CEO of a giant company like Apple. It's way more complicated than that. However, to have the CEO of Apple talk in detail about their product philosophy that drove a particular product in a particular direction and the process they went through to build the product

and to understand why the product needed to be the way it was. Like, I know he was the head of hardware when they went through this whole process, so he's obviously closer to it, now he's the CEO. I get it, but I'm just going to say, Tim Cook came in as a VP of operations.

He never had his hands down in products. He had people who told him, oh, we're working on a Tim and here's a thing and all of that. But like, it was not his thing. And you could tell. And he did a good job at the level that he was willing to go. But Ternus in that interview with TechRadar and Tom's guide, like, you can tell he is legitimately able to explain how Apple, not just why, but how Apple made this product. So it's how and why and what it's for and why it's not like the competition and why they approach things differently.

And is it marketing and PR? Of course it is. It doesn't matter. There's a level of detail there that I just, again, as somebody who cares about product, I love to see it. I love to see it. It's confident, comfortable. See, that's the difference. Tim Cook was a confident man in talking about Apple. he was not comfortable talking about the products.

I never felt that he was comfortable talking about products. There's that MKBHD video, right? Which is an absolute PR disaster, right? Where we're talking about the magic mouse? Like, it was just, they must have regretted that so much. It was not his thing. It was not his thing. The great thing about Tim Cook is that he honored the skills of the product people,

and he was not one of them. And he did not pretend to be one of them. But John Turnus is one of them. He is. And letting him, you know, brag a little bit about the iPhone duo and the decisions they made. That's the part that I love. I love the fact that's like, why did you make this product now after years of having folding phones on the market? And what, you know, what do you do that is different and that offers something different here, a different

take on this? And he had detailed answers that I, that also I'll say, you know, I think are true. but they're detailed answers that do a great PR job as well of portraying Apple in the light of being this kind of innovative company

that thinks deeply and is very creative and all the things that they want to portray. And there is a comfortableness in him and also that he's the CEO he's a little bit

he's kind of relaxed in what he can say, I think, because he refers to foldable and foldables and I don't feel like that is what Apple marketing would like him to use that phrase.

But it's like, we're just going to use it because he's the boss. Like, it was funny to me. I said this to you when you sent this video to me. And like, I think it's funny that Jaws is still there. Right. And I understand it. But it's also like, you know, Jaws acts as a handler. Right. We see him a lot with Craig and we used to see him with Ternus. But it's like, Jaws can't tell John what to say. Like it's like it's still like a funny thing. And there's some moments in the interview where Jaws is really deferring. to John in a really interesting way where you can see the relationship has rightly changed, right?

Like, it's as far as interesting as it is to hear them talk about the products, we also find it really interesting to watch just kind of like the cupitinology of it all. It's useful to have a PR person there because John Ternis may not be as up to speed on what the official marketing, whatever is on something. And so you've got your PR person there so you can always turn to them and be like you know, you should take this Jaws because you got this, you got the patter down

because they do absolutely have like, these are the words we're using, these are the phrases we're using, these are our talking points. And you're right, the CEO can just do whatever. But like as the CEO, you don't want to step in it.

So you want, you want to support of PR person there. You don't want to let down the marketing team, right? Like you don't want to make them seem foolish or whatever. You're making a snap decision and they've spent a lot of time thinking about it. at the same time, you do have latitude to talk about it in ways that, you know, that we in the media love where it's a little off script. I agree. Jaws, I mean, I've, I've been working with Jaws on stuff for ages since the 90s.

Like he was the PR guy for, a product manager for marketing manager for Powerbooks back in the 90s, right? like I've known Jaws a long time professionally. It does, the dynamic has changed to the point and also there is just a couple ways that Ternus approached the product stuff that were, that felt new and the way Jaws approached it

felt like old. Like just, just like the way Apple kind of did it. And I do kind of wonder if I had that same thought that you did, which is I'm not sure Jaws should be there. Yeah. But for that kind of an interview.

I get why he's there, but it feels a little bit bit like the old and the new are mixing and that the going forward, I mean, obviously going forward, I don't know how long Greg Jaws is going to stay in this role, but it's not going to be for the length of the tenure of John Ternis's CEO. So it just, I just got that moment of like, oh, this is transitional. That's sort of how I felt about it. It's like, it's nice to have Jaws there. Jaws is supporting John Ternis in doing what he wants to do, but at the same time, it also feels a little transitional like ultimately this is not how the John Turner's era is going to go but this is where we

are today. My favorite exchange which I think exemplifies the thing that me and you are so excited about is Lance Yuleneuf is talking about the variable aperture on the 18 Pro and says like, you know, like oh, you know, the fact that this is actually physical, that's moving parts inside of the iPhone. I've had people reach out already and they're like, oh, is this going to be a problem? Like, you know, how is that going to be reliability-wise? And Turner stops and says, there's always moving parts in the iPhone camera. We have the sensor that moves.

We have the focus that moves. Like, there's always been moving parts. Yeah. But this is what we do. And it was like, oh, my, like, it's like, yes. It's like, he knows how it works. He can answer it. And then give the confidence of like,

you don't have to worry about stuff like that with us. Like, we've got that under control. And then Jaws then kind of jumps in and gives Turner's all this credit for product quality. It's like in the time that John has been here, the product quality has only gotten better. It's like that that was a part with a double act worked well,

but like the thing for me that was just the most impressive was he could immediately answer back with a deep product knowledge. Yes. And just and then also take the confidence into it as well. It was brilliant.

What do you think optical image stabilization is? Yeah. But like it's easy to forget that because you can't see it, but we can see the aperture moving, right? Like you sort of see, So it's more kind of in your mind. Because I had also had that thought of like, oh, that does add some like risk or complexity.

But it's, as you said, they know how to do it. Brilliant. Okay. All right. Really good. Really good. I really recommend people watch these interviews. It's kind of like in two parts.

One's about the products. And then there's another part that's kind of just about like John Turner's being CEO. Like they're both really good. And I'm super pleased because this is exactly what I wanted. And I feel like we're going to get it. Is there anything else that's been. on your mind since the event other than just the iPhone duo and say

John Turnus? Not really. I mean, John Turnus doesn't fill my mind as much as he does yours, I know. I know. I think about him a lot. I can't help it. I know you do. But I just, I've been thinking about the duo and how it's going to launch. And

I guess the thing that I keep coming back to is there's a lot of people who are the very, very smart people. You know, of the, there's that, um, the marshmallow experiment where you like give a, you give a kid or an animal or whatever a marshmallow. And if they don't eat the marshmallow for a certain amount of time, they get another marshmallow. And it's like a, it's, it's, it's a self-control measure, right? Okay. Just like a lot of, a lot of kids will just eat the marshmallow. I just want this marshmallow.

I have a marshmallow. But it's like, but if you don't eat the marshmallow, you'll get a second marshmallow. And they're like, I don't care. I want to eat the marshmallow. Okay. Um, iPhone Duo is a little like that. Where are we going with this? iPhone Duo is the marshmallow. The iPhone Duo is a marshmallow. Okay. Right.

Because it is first generation hardware running first generation software, essentially, with apps that are going to be not updated or updated very briefly for a few weeks in ways that at the moment those developers get their hands on it, they're going to go, oh, no, not this. And it's going to be a rough ride. for a little while. So as a tech enthusiast and reviewer

who loves riding that cutting edge and learning what all the rough spots are, I can't wait to have my hands on this thing. But that's because my job is to eat the marshmallow. I think all those people who are like, maybe next year, I saw a bunch of people where like, this looks really interesting. I might get it, the second one.

I think it's a really healthy attitude because as amazing as this product seems like it's going to be make no mistake that first year is going to be wild it's going to be a wild ride and your apps are going to be all nightmarish

have you seen what non-optimized apps look like like apps built on the 26 SDK have you seen what they're just they're pillowboxed well I mean that's what happened with the iPhone 10 right? Non-iPhone apps You launch them and you'd be like, oh, no.

So there is an element of that. Like, if you don't, I mean, building with the 27 SDK will stop that, but then the apps might look really weird, like non-optimized. But if their apps built with 26, they're just like pillowbox. It's incredible. And so, yes, there is going to be a ton of weird stuff. And I would just say, I am and have always been a marshmallow eater. The reason that I am here is because I have always eaten the marshmallow. And that's what I love to do.

It is, by the way, the Stanford Marshmallow experiment. Does it make a difference? Because like the Stanford prison experiment, really messed up psychological things happen at Stanford. That's all I'm saying. Anyway. I feel like there's some college beef.

Yeah. I'm folding. Is that the red shirt? They got off that red shirt. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. This episode is brought to you by Ship a ton, the global hackathon for builders launching real apps to real stores,

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for their support of this show and relay. It's time for the B-Tales. And this is the special one where it's not really BATES anymore. They are actually shipping, operating systems because today is the day of the 27 releases. I believe

that all of the, I can say correctly that it is iOS 27, Mac OS 27, WatchOS 27, iPad OS 27, and TVOS 27. I don't think I've missed anything. I don't think so. That sounds about right. That will also be, I'm sure, new firmware for AirPods and stuff like that that rolls out today. Of course. I don't know if someone's actually, I say somebody's reviewing that.

I don't know who, but someone out there is definitely reviewing it. Talking about reviews, you have reviewed Mac OS 27 for six colors. It max OS 27 Golden Gate Vision OS I did forget one Thank you Zoe Vision OS 27 It's also out today

How could I forget Vision OS 27 I shouldn't install Vision OS 27 Actually I haven't played with that I didn't put the bait on this time Overall How do you feel about Golden Gate Well it's funny

I mean it's good It is writing wrongs Many of which were perpetrated last year Yep it has some like speaking of writing wrongs one of the wrongs that macOS has had for a while is that they've had two different places

that you could type things in order to do searches and commands and stuff there was spotlight and Siri and they were different and in different places and now there's just one place that is spotlight and Siri. They improve spotlight some more by doing the new indexing that's across all the 27 operating systems

and then they obviously rolled in Siri AI which works pretty well there are places where Siri AI is still a little weird on the Mac and I think that that's just going to be a thing that

it's a little weird everywhere. It's always just for a while it's going to be a little bit. Yeah well I think on the Mac the challenge is that the Mac you really have a wide variety of file types and a lot of

data on your hard drive and sometimes I expect it to do a better job. Like, it feels, and this is, I think, an iOS-centric decision, which I understand because the iPhone is the most important product. But sometimes it feels like Siri AI is better at searching my messages and my emails and my calendar than it is searching files on my Mac hard drive. And when I'm on the Mac, especially, like, I want it, if I ask it a question about

something, I don't just want it to search my mail and my message. I wanted to search my files, right? And I wanted to look inside my PDFs and my text files and whatever else it needs to in order to get an answer to my question. And I don't know, it doesn't seem to be as good at that as it is at that high level stuff that is also the stuff that it's good at on the iPhone. I understand why, but I wish that was a little bit better. But the bottom line is like Siri AI works. Right? That's an overall 27 thing is it works.

If you ask it a question that's like a general knowledge question, it gives you an answer, and it's a good answer. And it's the same kind of thing that you get from Gemini or chat GPT or something like that. Like, I don't think you need to turn to something else. They did exactly what they needed to do, which is get Siri to be functional to do that. So you don't have to turn to a third-party tool. And then, yeah, I had a few great moments. I've mentioned this before, but like asking it to look through my messages archive to give me an answer so that I aren't to scroll back.

over three months to find out when I said, hey, let's do this to a particular messages group and it just finds it and says, this is what you said. That's great. Like when that happens, it's really magical. I just feel like they need to do a little bit more of that. And on the Mac, what I really wanted to see is like, I just wanted to be more capable and intelligent

at using my files that are on my Mac, resident on my Mac as part of it too. Yeah, I have not used Golden Gate yet, so I'm intrigued to see how that kind of feels to me, too. I think your estimation I expect is correct, right? It's like they built it for the iPhone and the Mac benefits, but what that means is files are not a consideration to the same degree, right? The same, yeah. Which, I mean, that is the benefit the Mac has over iOS. I hope that they can push this further, is that on iOS, you have. have to connect with the applications, right?

Like, you, they, Syria AI has to connect with the applications to get the data. But on the Mac, the majority of the data is just living in the file system. So it should, in theory, be easier for them to do some stuff. Right. And it's in spotlight. That's the thing. But I think that the, I think that the AI model is not as focused. This is just a gut feeling.

It seems like, you know, they trained an AI model to do a lot of searches in the very specific Apple apps. Yeah. And then there's like... I think that's how you would start, right? That's how you're going to start. And I get it. The thing is, is like, this is absolutely a 1.0 product.

It is like... It is a beta. It is not... It's a beta. It is completely detached from the series that we had before. Like, it is not the same thing. No. It just shares a name.

They started over. Like, they really started over and you can feel it. You feel it in a bunch of weird ways on different platforms. Like, you can feel it in that... On my Apple Watch, it takes longer to start a timer than it used to. It makes me so mad. Now, I have noticed that it got better during the beta process. I think what it's doing, it knows when you asked, and it takes a while to start the timer,

but it sets it back to the moment that, like, because there was a time in the beta where I wasn't doing this very reliable. Yes, yes. And I've been doing some timing of this, like, we've stopped, we've like stop watches and stuff. Yeah. But it's gotten good at it, but it's slow. And you can feel like, oh, okay, there's some stuff that's different here. But yes, it's like if you imagine this is a 1.0 product to be like, okay, a great 1.5 would be doing a better job at search my file system. You need, yeah, that's it is the next steps are obviously other apps that are contributing data to the spotlight index.

And especially, again, on the Mac, being aware that there's, I mean, there's a file index on your iPad and your iPhone, too. but on the Mac, it's even more important because the Macs tend to be the places where there's an enormous amount of information that's in the file system and having, and because finders at the center of it all, and being more aware of being able to extract information.

Like, I had that happen. I asked it a question about, like, can you find my tax ID for my business? Yeah. And what it ended up doing on the Mac was saying, well, I've got some PDs, I mean, it was not stupid. It said, I've got some PDFs here that say tax information, that probably have it in it. And I thought, well, this is good in that they do. But it's bad in the

sense that this is a PDF. Look inside and find the tax information in the PDF. Text. You should be able, a tax ID, like, it's a form. You should be able to look at the form. It's got a very specific format of text. You should be able to look and say, is this? Like, there are so much more it should be doing. And instead, what it seems to have done is a file name search. And again, it was a smart file name search.

And so I applaud that it found a file that did contain my business tax ID. Great. But it's a PDF. It's not a lockbox. It is a PDF with text in it. that's not password protected or anything. Like, just look. And that's the stuff where I think, oh, I've hit the wall.

And you're right, 1.0 beta, essentially. But also it's, what are they prioritizing? Like, zipping through a lot of files local to a Mac is not their priority. It's very clear. That's fine, but they need to get there. Because as a Mac user, you know, one question is so many of the 27 features are the same across all operating systems. Why am I writing a Mac review?

why is Dan Moran writing an iOS review? And in some ways, it's because using an iPhone or an iPad versus using a Mac, those features all manifest a little differently. And this is a good example where I feel like the Mac, I expect more for my results on the Mac here, and I'm not really getting them. But you're right, it is a beta. They're still working it out. Since you mentioned Syria, I'll mention my most frustrating thing about Syria.

right now is on my Apple Watch. I have a standard procedure, which is I have a list called shopping list and I say put milk on my shopping list and the entire summer that's been broken and it's still broken. I have a list called shopping list. And if I ask on my Apple Watch to add an item to my shopping list, it says, you don't have a list called shopping list. Would you like me to create one? And I have a list called shopping list. And in fact, sometimes if I say yes, please create it, it creates a new list called shopping list. And yesterday, I actually moved all my things to the new shopping list list that it created. And then I did the two, and I suspect this is what's happening.

I did the two things that I do with that list, which is I pinned it to the top. And I shared it with Lauren. And then I said, great, add yogurt to my shopping list. And you know what? You don't appear to have a list named shopping list. Would you like me to create one? I'm sorry. So my review,

my very brief review of watchOS 27 is, and Siri AI on watchOS 27 is they screwed it up and they need to fix it and it's bad. And I would actually say if you rely on Siri commands on your Apple Watch, don't update to 27 because the thing we feared, which is by putting a more complex Siri on the Apple Watch, you're going to ruin the Apple Watch is true. And so I'm not going to pull the punch on that one.

They've blown it with Siri on the Apple Watch. I'm fascinated to see how Siri AI feels on the new ones. And I am worried that it's going to feel good on the new ones. And terrible on the old ones. Because I have an Ultra 2 and it's slow. Like it is slow. Like sometimes it's fine, but sometimes it is not. And like there are things that take way longer than they should take.

Yeah. And so I'm using my. Apple Watch less and less for talking to Siri, which is a shame because I'm trying to talk to Siri more or more. I don't mind using my Apple Watch to talk to Siri AI and having it have to be a delay because it's got to go to the cloud or it's got to go to my phone. I don't mind. I don't love it, but I don't mind it.

The stuff that doesn't require that, the stuff that used to be really good and fast on my Apple Watch, that are some of the primary interactions I have with my Apple Watch. Yeah. If those are all broken and or very slow, it's a flop. Like, that is a regression that cannot be allowed to exist. So whoever's doing that needs to work on it. They need to do better because it's bad. It's just bad.

A fascinating detail of Siri AIA on the watch that people not have thought about, right? So, like, one of the selling features is you can go back to your old conversations, right? So you can open the Syria AIA app and you can read the conversations that you've had on your iPhone. and on your watch. You cannot ask follow-up questions on the watch. You can only do that in the iPhone. So, like, if you go into a previous conversation, you can read it, but you cannot interact a bit further.

And I find that a fascinating decision that I think is saying something, but I'm not sure what it's saying. You know what I'm? It's like, why can't I do this? I can do this on my iPhone. I can ask things on my Apple Watch. But once that conversation's over, it is over.

Like, you can't, if there is, a way to do it. I can't find it. There's no buttons. I've long pressed it. Like, it seems like that's the end. And you can sometimes press show more so you can read more of the conversation. But it's like, all you can do is read it. You can't continue to interact with it. And I think that, and there was a, there was a story that came out that the new Apple Watches have more RAM in them, which is fascinating because the price is the same. But they've, and I'm really intrigued. I have an apple water and order. So next week, yeah, on Monday's episode next week, I will follow up on this. I will try it out and I'll follow up on this to see, like, does it feel much different on the series 12 compared to my Ultra 2?

I believe the Ultra 2 and Ultra 3 probably have like basically the same system on a chip. Like I know that they didn't seem to change them very much or like in not in significant ways. So I'll follow up on that. But Golden Gate got a lot of visual changes that you see. seem to be already placed about. Yeah, they fixed a bunch of stuff.

All the windows feel a little more rectangular. The, the corner radiuses are consistent and tighter.

I guess you texted this to me this morning. My joke is that the like, there's like the circle king was cursing

Tahoe, the tyranny of the circle king where everything was just really weirdly rounded. And the moment you update

to Golden Gate, you notice, oh, my windows are rectangles now with little curved edges, whereas in Tahoe, they're like weirdly curved at the edges in a way that just, I didn't, you know, you use Tahoe for a year and you kind of internalize it and then you go to Golden Gate and you're like, oh, that's very different. And the, you know, the sidebar, there was a lot of liquid glass logic being applied under Tahoe where I was like, well, because this is a layer of glass, the sidebar needs to be another layer of glass on top. And so that they would like put the sidebar. bar on a window and they'd inset it because they had to show that there's another layer of glass. And like, it made sense logically for the metaphor, but it was a complete disaster in terms of how it looked.

And in Golden Gate, it's like, nope, sidebars go to the edge of the window. Like, they're all the way to the edge. They have a different background that you can tell they're a sidebar, but they are no longer like a weird glass panel on, floating on top of a gap. in the window or something like it is. So that's a lot better. And the icons are colored now. So in the sidebar, so they stand out in a way that they didn't before. The toolbars are bars now. In a lot of apps in Tahoe, the toolbars were just buttons. The toolbars were like a conceptual space, if you will, where sort of like, imagine that there could be a bar here, but instead there isn't, but there are still buttons that float there. And in Golden Gate,

there's a bar up there. It may be semi-transparent, but like, you can see it. It's a bar. And then there are buttons that are on it. And that is, uh, thumbs up. It's, uh, it's very good. The icons are nicer. They all look better because they change that way. icons are, are composited. Um, the stoplight buttons are a little glassy now. They're not quite aqua, but they actually, I think they're cute. I think they're nice. They are well defined. Um, and there's that slider. So I've been running all summer with a dead center of, uh, liquid glass or not liquid glass. Um, um, To the right, it gets more opaque.

I may not, now that I've taken all my review screenshots, I may conduct a small ceremony later today, or perhaps even right now, and slide the opacity slider slightly to the right to make it a little more opaque. Not all the way, all the way I think is too much, but I might make, yeah, okay, it is done. There it is, I feel better already.

Oh, he's done it. But they've got that there. Ceremony has happened live on the show. So it's good. Yeah, that was it. This is it. This is, you know, amen. The slider's been slid. So, yeah, it's, it just looks a lot better and it's more consistent. And for some people, some people didn't care.

Some people cared a lot. I am in the interesting position of having liked Tahoe, despite the visual problems because they added so many productivity features. And I complain about like, Siri I rolls out. And it seems to be prioritizing data that's on iPhones and Macs too, But like, there's all this other kind of data on Mac and Siri AI isn't as good at that. I think as a Mac user, you get used to being a second-class citizen a little bit. But, like, you know, there are moments where you want them to aspire to do more.

You want them to try a little harder to make this thing better on them. Yeah, a little bit. Like, it still matters and you're still not doing it quite right. And I just, I want more of that. sometimes. I'm excited to try Golden Gate. I am because I haven't used it at all yet. That's the beauty of it is

Tahoe, this is sort of the point I was making. Tahoe did that in a way that Golden Gate doesn't. Golden Gate feels like it's mostly, you know, things imported from other operating systems. Tahoe had a bunch of great stuff that was Mac stuff. So if you skip Tahoe because you were so sensitive to it, good news. You go to Golden Gate, you get all the productivity boosts.

of Tahoe. You get the whole new spotlight approach that they did. You get built-in clipboard history for the first time. There's a bunch of other improvements to the menu bar and to shortcuts and like, there's a lot of other stuff there that was in Tahoe that was really nice because it was sort of like doing a solid for Mac users. And there's less in Golden Gate. But if you skip Tahoe, you'll get all those two and you'll be even happier. So those people are going to be, you know, John Gruber, John Syracusa, people like that are going to be into it because there's a, like I think for a Mac user,

Tahoe was a great release except the fact that it was incredibly ugly. And I would make the argument that even there, I think Mac users dodged a bullet because they had really worked hard to implement liquid glass. It would have been worse. So maybe they halfway implementation was the best case scenario, but they backed

out a lot of that stuff and it just it looks a lot better too. It does feel like Golden Gate has gotten some of the treatment that you wanted Mac OS get for 26. Right. Like when we were leading up to that,

the idea of there being a redesign, you kept saying, like, you hope that someone actually sits down and, like, thinks about how do you

apply this to the Mac? And it didn't really feel like that was the case. It was just like, we're just going to take this and put it on. We're not really going to think about it. We're just going to do it.

And it feels like this one, they've, they've straightened some stuff out, but they've also added things that are not in, like, the stop like controls, right?

Like, they've got a funness, they've done something with it, which is extra, it's not needed, but it's like, well, if we have this liquid glass, why don't we make this look more fun

and hearken back to OS10, right? Like, they're doing something with it. It's almost kind of aqua-y in its way. And yeah, I think they have had another year, and I think this has been a year where they've been spending time

wondering about all the things that liquid glass did wrong, and any redesign is going to be like that. Like bottom line, this was inevitable. There'll be a lot of people who are like, oh, there was a backlash to liquid glass, and that's why they did it. Friends, there was always going to be a backlash to liquid glass because there's always a backlash to redesign. Yeah. Always.

100% of the time, there's always a backlash to redesigns. And what happens in the next year is you try to deal with all of the issues and fix your redesign to be better than it was a year ago. and that is what the 27OS is due. Part of that process clearly was realizing all of those limitations on the max side that didn't really get the attention that they needed in the moment in Tahoe

and applying a bunch of those now. So some of that stuff's picked up from iOS and some of that stuff is very Mac-specific in nice ways. So yeah, it's good. It's a lot better. I just wanted to touch on this. It was like a funny thing because I kind of mostly forgotten that this was a 27 thing,

which is the photo stuff. It's just the like the Apple intelligence editing features. I don't really feel like there's anything to say that we haven't said before. Is there anything you wanted to touch on with these? You know, like extend and reframe and clean up. They haven't changed a lot in the betas. I would say cleanup is better than it was, right? That's the nice thing.

is better than it was. And it was pretty good, but it's better. I mean, the problem with cleanup is you need to replace whatever you clean up with a better background and the AI model it uses now is better. There's actually two models.

It'll let you use the old model. I forget what they even call the two modes. One of them is like, this will run locally and be okay. And the other one is this. We're going to send a private cloud compute and it's going to be way better. And it is way better.

Extend, it's great, but you should use it judiciously and it makes things up. So like, don't over extend. Also, sometimes you're like, I need to extend this down a little bit. And it's like, no, I won't go down.

I'm like, why? I like, I need a little more of these people's legs right now. And they're like, no, not going to do it today. I'm like, I don't know why it does that. I don't know why sometimes it just refuses that. And then the other thing is it will confabulate. I, you know, I took a bunch of pictures from my son's graduation. And I'm like, they're standing in front of a stadium.

And I make it a little taller. And suddenly the stadium has this like weird roof on it that wasn't there before. That doesn't exist in reality. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You need to watch because it will do weird stuff sometimes. But if you do a little bit, just because you need a little more headroom or whatever, it's good. It does a good job with that. And the repositioning thing, I would say, look, every tick you do to reposition that image, it's got to render more fake stuff.

And the more you move it, the faker your image gets. and it gets really fake and weird after a while. So that feature, I don't love it. If you really need it, cart it out, give it a try. This is true for all the features, but especially that one, give it a try. But you may end up just saying forget it. And that's just the truth of it is it's not that good because it has to make up things it can't see.

What would be really great? Note to Apple and everybody else who works on this kind of stuff, you know what happens when I shoot pictures of my family in front of the stadium after the graduation ceremony, I take 50 pictures. A really nice photo alteration algorithm would be able to look at the whole group,

identify pictures that were from the same location at the same time, and maybe somehow, I'm not a scientist, use the other photos to inform what's in the photos, right? Like, that idea, like, there's another photo

that shows what the roof is like of the stadium. Maybe you could use that knowledge. These algorithms, at least the ones Apple's using, they're not good enough for that right now. But maybe someday they'll be good for that. Anyway, cleanup is way better. That cloud cleanup is really good. And not perfect, but good.

And the extend, again, I think extend is good. I just wish it was, well, it's not even that. It's just be careful. Be careful. Don't overuse it because the more you use it on an image, The further you extend, like, the less reality is attached to the image, the further you get away from the frame. But it can do some amazing work. It really can. One last thing before we move on.

Describe a shortcut and describe an extension are new features. These are Apple dipping its toe into user vibe coding of functionality in MacOS and iOS. And I just want to say they're little. limited, but they totally work. That the idea that you can say every morning at 6 a.m., look at my email or check the weather and tell me what the weather is going to be like today. And it will build you a shortcut that will run on a schedule that will do exactly that. And if it doesn't do it quite right, you can literally put in the box and say,

no, it needs to do this too or whatever. and then it'll rewrite that shortcut and do it again. It doesn't use third party actions. It's very, you know, kind of simple, but it works. And it's a great, like, hint at what you could do to ultimately wire it into Siri AI and say, I don't really even need to go into shortcuts. I can just tell my phone I want to do this. And it knows that that actually is a feature in shortcuts and it will build it for you and all of that.

That is where we're headed. And that's great. Like, you should be able to treat your phone as an agent, I guess, and say, build this, do this thing for me, and it builds it in the background for you. That's great. And then describe extension. I spent all summer with this feature thinking, like, how am I going to use this? And the thing is, if there's a thing that annoys you on a web page, you can describe an extension to make it go away or add something that isn't there. And so I did this for a couple different websites where on the title bot we use for, for relay, to suggest titles in the Discord

for members, there's an archive page. So, if you're looking at what titles were suggested for this show, but it's already scrolled off because there's another show that's on the air. There's a link you can use to get to the archive. And every time I need to get to the archive, I can't remember what the link is. And it's not linked to anywhere on the page.

So I described an extension that said, in the titles, on this page, the titles page, titles.rela.fm, add an item at the top that links to the archive. And here's the link. And it was like, great. here's an extension and now that page for me has that link in it. That's awesome. And then I did that

with a straw poll, which I use for scheduling. They do two different kinds of scheduling for a straw poll. And I only use one for podcasts and I always click on the wrong one because they're like, like schedule meeting or take a poll or whatever. And like the one I want to do to schedule a meeting is take a poll, not schedule a meeting, which is very frustrating to me because what I'm doing is scheduling a meeting. But if I click schedule a meeting, I get the wrong thing. And so I described an extension that said hide that link that I don't I always click on I don't want and anytime any link on this page links to that redirect it to the other one because I want the other one and it took a minute and now my straw poll experience is way better so anyway

people should try those features if you ever if you update here think about it like if you're ever frustrated and you're like, I wish this thing, this webpage behave differently, it doesn't have to be a big grand plan. It could be something as simple as hide this item or show this item or rewrite this item. But that's really great. So it's a, it's a, it's a toe in the water. But I feel like they're both encouraging signs of Apple saying, what if we let and ultimately wire them up to Siri AI, right? And say, what if ultimately you just ask your device, can you fix this? And it'll fix it for you. And it's not wired up right now, but it will be. And it'll get better and it'll extend to other areas. And I'm excited by that. So you mentioned Siri AI again. Yes. And so I'm going

to do what I've been doing, I think, for the whole beta cycle so far, which is to keep telling people things that I'm doing with Siri AI that are surprising to me, because I want to encourage people to try it, because I do think that it can surprise you. And I'm still in this phase where I'm convincing myself to ask questions of it because I think to myself, I would like to know this piece of information. I should ask Siri. Siri's not going to know, but then I ask and Siri knows. And so, like, I want to give you a couple more examples of things that it has given me in the last few days that I think have been really great. So one of the things that I've really tried to start getting into my head is that Siri AI is almost like an enhancement to my memory because

is there is information that I know I have been told, but I don't know what it is and I don't know where to find it. Like this is an experience that I have a lot. And I don't know if other people are like this, but I know it's like, I know I had a conversation, I know I had an email, but it's like I don't know, I don't even know where to begin looking for this information, but I know I have been told this information via my iPhone.

So it's like, wouldn't it be great if my iPhone could do this? So one of these is my brother changes jobs a lot. and has done in the last few years, has been doing different roles in different places. And I was seeing him this weekend, and I couldn't remember the details of his newest job. Now, maybe I'm a bad brother. I don't know.

But I was able to ask Siri A.I. to give me this information, and it did. And what I liked is it found different pieces of information from different family group chats and was able to put that into one view of like, it's this, he does this, and he started at this point. It's like brilliant. That is everything I needed to know.

But I could get more if I wanted because I could have the conversation. Another, a couple of years ago, I bought some new sneakers. And I couldn't remember the name of the model of this sneaker from the brand, the color that I bought or the size. And the reason I say this is because I bought a bunch of different ones at the same time. Size is easy to get. That was in my shoe. But I was wearing my shoe at the time.

So I didn't want to take one. my shoe off to look, but there was other parts of information that I needed. So I asked Siri to go and find, like, what was, and I didn't even give it the brand. I was like, what were the details of the last pair of sneakers that I bought? And it gave me the information that I needed and was also able to tell me, because I bought three pairs in different sizes, and one of them was a different brand. And it could say, you returned this one and you returned this one, but you, you you kept this one. And the reason it knows this is because it can see all the emails, right? So it's like you bought this, this and this. And then I can see you had returns for this and this. So you kept this one.

It's like, that is a complex series of searches. Right. Like for me to do myself, I'm sitting there. I'm searching new balance, right? And I'm looking through like six emails, maybe more because they're going to send me 20 emails for every pair of shoes that I buy. So like I'm having to click through all of this. I do these kinds of search. searches a lot, but it's able to give you that information quickly. And sometimes, yes, you have to give it a second go at a question, right? Because I don't fully understand what you're asking. But like you just treat Siri like a large language model now and you will get to where you need to go. Like you sometimes have to give it a little bit more information that maybe you have, but you didn't give it on the first time and you can kind of help it narrow it down and you're

going to get to where you want to go. So I would say like in general, Siri AI is helping rebuild for me the habit of feeling comfortable kind of talking to my devices because I feel like it is a fruitful endeavor rather than a fruitless endeavor, which is how it'd been for years and years and years, right? They'd be like, hey, we've made Siri better now. It's doing more stuff on device that you're like, great, I'll try it. Nope, just the same. Like, it's just the same. It maybe just answers incorrectly faster. That's how it's been for years and years, but it really is getting better now. Now, today, as we're recording this, third-party apps are rolling out, right? And so this is in the second part. This is like the second

shoe to drop. What can Siri access? Well, it turns out Siri can access information, make changes in different apps, but it seems like, at least from my testing, I haven't had a lot of opportunity to test this yet, it kind of always wants you to include the name of the third-party app in the query, which is not what I want, right? That is not natural. If I want to ask what tasks I have today or what meetings I have today, I don't want to say in To-Doist in Fantastical. My iPhone should be intelligent enough to know what I'm using.

And I'm concerned that the system is not going to be smart enough and that the system is not smart enough or it's not been designed to go out and grab all the information I want. Because I know the retrieval in Apple's apps is really good. And I know it could do the same thing for third-party apps. It's just as if they're going to. And so if it doesn't now, I hope they will get better at this. But I do feel like for the vast majority of stuff that I want to ask my iPhone,

it's able to give me a decent answer. And also the world knowledge stuff is just as good as you would want it to be. I feel like it does a good enough job. I think they could get even better at real time. I think we spoke about that in Room of Roundup, that they seem that they're trying to by doing publisher deals. So yeah, I've been very impressed of it and really encourage people to try it. Like, keep trying it.

Second guess yourself, like when you have something that pops into your head, like actually ask and see if you can get there. So that's my thoughts in Siri, AI. This episode is brought to you by Notion. There are a lot of things that AI is replacing, but teamwork is simply not one of them. Because nobody wants a future where every company is just one person and a fleet of agents. Sounds horrible. Look, it could be efficient, but work is.

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very iPhone duo lots of iPhone duo questions today because we've got that we can't stop thinking about it and neither can the audience no

Matt wants to know will the iPhone duo support a mouse or track pad or pointing device Now, this is one of those questions where me and Jason have no idea of knowing the answer but I can give you a pretty good

guess. Because iOS does very well. Like, it's in the accessibility settings. It's been in there for a long time. It predates the iPad OS cursor. It's how I used to use a mouse on iPad OS before Apple added the kind of magic track pad support. It's very good. And I use it, one of the things that I do at Cross Forward

for Widget Smith is I make the video that go in the help screens, which is this very funny thing of more people hear my voice in those help videos in like a few weeks than I've ever heard a voice on podcasts.

It's obscene. But I make the videos. The way that I do this is I connect a mouse to my iPhone to simulate the clicking. So there's like a pointer that appears on the screen

and I'm clicking around as how I make the video so people can see this is where you tap. This is where you tap. So it will do what you need. It doesn't actually. exactly the same as the iPad OS cursor,

but it's more than good enough. And you actually get some fun customization stuff that you can do. If you want to do that, you can do transparency, you can put a little ring around the cursor. So if you want to use a mouse, if you're an iPhone duo, you will be able to do it.

I feel very confident in that. Yeah, and I do wonder if they will, maybe not at first, but if they will allow that pointing device to be the iPad OS style pointing device over time, because I don't know why they wouldn't, honestly, since they've got that code and it works really well, and it doesn't, you know,

you don't have to have the iPad multitasking in order to have the iPad pointer. So I wonder if they will allow that on the duo at some point, but you're right, there's accessibility regardless. Yeah. Hmm, asks, if there's no face ID on the iPhone duo, why do you think the pinhole camera on the outer screen is also an under-disple?

camera like the one inside? I don't know because they they don't I mean the dynamic island and they got a limited space up there people are used to the dynamic island and because when you don't have a screen in front of your camera you can have a higher quality camera I think that is it

the camera on the under display is not very good like it's a 1080 camera yeah like they don't even give it any specs the one under the screen no it's basically the old MacBook Air camera from a few years ago we were all like, come on, really?

We're still doing this? And it's like, yeah, well, that's what it is. And it's even worse because it's under the display. Like there's a... Yes, right. It makes the picture worse because it's having to look through the pixels. Like, essentially that is a very functional camera. It exists that if you have your phone open and someone calls you on FaceTime, you can answer it, right?

You haven't got to close your phone to pick up a FaceTime call, which would be super weird. But you also enable people to take selfies with the camera, without having to open the to take a selfie. Like, it makes a lot of sense to me that the outside screen, the closed part of the iPhone duo should feel like an iPhone. Like, it should just feel like you're using an iPhone. Right? Like, so that means having a camera on it. And you take selfies to post on Instagram or send to your friends. Like, it should feel like you're using an iPhone, like as close as you can get to it. So, yeah. Yeah. I think it makes sense, even though there is also a camera on the outside if you open it. But that's how you, they even show that off. You get,

higher quality selfies that way, because you can take a selfie. You get the best selfie you can get on an iPhone on the iPhone duo, essentially. Because the good back camera can be facing toward your face that you can also see the screen that is facing toward your face. Yeah. All right. Next question comes from Hunter. With the iPhone duo's outer display having completely new aspect ratio, is there a potential future where we see at least one non-folding iPhone that is more similar to the iPhone duo's outer display in shape than the current iPhones. I don't think so. Unless it is unbelievably popular in some way.

You know what I mean? Right? Like it would have to be, which I don't think is going to be the case, right? That like, if people are like, oh man, the iPhone duo is amazing, but you know what the best part of it is? Using it closed. And like this somehow really catches on with people, which I don't think is going to be the case, right? I don't think that's going to be the case either. By the way, David Smith posted a thing about, like, the market share of within Widget Smith of the iPhone 17 generation.

And it's like the iPhone error is like 2% or whatever. Which is very much like the... It's not 2%. No, it is of the iPhone 17 generation. Okay. You got to take out, not the total user base. David posted percentages that don't add up to 100 because he's got a lot of users who aren't on 17. It was 1.5%.

And I don't find that useful. It was 1.5%. Yeah. Okay. I mean, okay, 2%. Folding phones are 2% of the global folding phone market. So like the question of what percentage of the iPhone duo is even going to be of iPhone sales? It's going to be more than that because people are going to buy this thing because they're interested in it.

But how much more? I mean, it may still be like 4% or 5% of iPhone sales, maybe. So, yes, it seems unlikely that one of the great selling points will be, it kind of looks like an iPhone duo, but you can't open it. but you never I mean you never know but my guess is no uh raphaio asks do you think there's room in the market for an iPhone duo max or will there only ever be a single size for the foldable depends on i mean the problem is the aspect ratio they want it to be wide and that means that it has to be wide when it's folded and if they make it taller it makes the whole thing taller

which changes the aspect ratio i think they will look at user feedback and they'll will consider, but it will need to be a larger, a much larger percentage of Apple's overall iPhone sales for them to do two of them. No time soon. Yeah, it kind of... Ever? I think they could, right? I think it's like, I don't think it's going to be like 10 where the next year there's a 10S max, right? But again, if it catches on, there's a lot of, there's a lot of question about if this catches on. If it catches on and they sell lots of them, why would you not make another one that's in a different size,

right? Like it's the old model, but it's there's no way of knowing at this point. That's the ever, the ever here. Like, I think, okay, I'm going to get a little philosophical for a second. And I appreciate that John Turner's and Jaws in that interview we talked about earlier, talked about this. Because it's

what I've been thinking too, which is let's get down to fundamentals here. Why do folding phones exist? Other than because the technology exists, right? Because that's not an Apple answer. That's not good enough. You've got to make it for a reason. The reason folding phones exist is that two things are true.

One of them is what we learned, you know, 12 years ago, or Samsung learned before that and then Apple put into practice 12 years ago when we started upgrade, which is people like big phone screens. Apple bet a lot on small screens. And Samsung was like, what if we sell just crazy big screen? And people like, yeah, I love it. And I know that there are a lot of people out there who are iPhone, many people, and they're like, no, I don't. But I'm telling you, because I don't, I don't love, I like, I like a small phone too,

and I bought the iPhone mini. But the facts are the facts. The bigger the screen, the more people love it. That's like the bottom line. People love big screen. Our small screened iPhone, 17 Pro, 18 Pro, 10 years ago, would be considered a massive screen, right? like massive and that's the basic model now and there's a bigger one so number one bigger screen is better number two i got to fit my iPhone in my pocket right that's number two i need to take it with me

i need to put it in a pocket or a purse or whatever it is it needs to go somewhere portable and number two constraints number one and the only solution is to fold it or roll it or whatever, but you've got to make a small version in the pocket, even if it becomes larger out of the pocket. That's just, that's what drives the existence of the folding phone. And they talked about it in those videos. So ever, like, sure, I think,

Mark German wrote about this this weekend, and he was like, hot take machine, but I don't agree, I don't disagree with what he said. his hot take was like, this is going to change everything and it's going to be huge. Like, okay. Eventually, yeah, I think that's true because I think these two things are true. People like big screens, but you can't fit an iPad in your pocket. You just can't unless you've got a huge pocket.

And most people don't. So over time, this is the answer, right? Like, this is the answer. If you imagine a folding iPhone that has no drawbacks at all, which is a fantasy, right? right now that is a nice iPhone size in your pocket and then you can open it somehow and it becomes a big screen that is awesome for doing work that requires a big screen. Like, that's a winner. That's a winner of a product in the long run.

So ever for Raphael is doing a lot of work here. In the short run, this product's got a lot of work to do. But in the long run, I think, I think these kinds of. of devices are inevitable just because people want more screen sometimes. That's it. It's not complicated. I want more screen, but the big phones are too big for my pocket. How do we solve this problem?

This is the answer. I think, yeah, last question comes from John. How do you think the dual screen nature and different app layouts for the outer screen, single inner screen, double inner screen, landscape, portrait, temp mode, how will apps convey all of this in the App Store screenshots going forwards.

And I guess also how will developers deal with all the screenshots they need to make? Good luck, everybody. With great difficulty, right? Like, it's already, apparently I get the impression from one of my developer friends, terrible to take all the screenshots you need. It's only going to get worse. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I would hope that as they're building new methods, perhaps they will provide developers with new methods to deal with this. But good luck. Yeah, it's going to be a mess, especially at first. Because that's, again, we're back to it. It's a 1.0 product in the truest sense. It's going to be a wild ride. And I'm looking forward to the wild ride, but it's going to be hard for developers.

It's going to be weird for users. It's just what it's going to be. So I'm not happy that it's going to be hard for all our friends who are software developers. But at the same time as somebody who's excited about new tech and applying clever software and design to deal with very interesting hardware, I could not. be more excited for this. If you would like to ask a question for us to answer on a future episode of the show, please go to Upgradefeedback.com.

You can also send us your follow-up there as well as feedback. Obviously, this episode, we're looking a lot towards the future with the iPhone duo. I want to look towards the past. This week on Design in California, Apple desperately needs a replacement for macOS. We know this. If you've been listening to the series so far, you know this. terrible. And John Louis Gassay has entered the picture

and negotiations began for Apple to acquire B as the foundation for MacOS. But those negotiations are starting to slow down a little bit. Not going well. It's not going well. Does Apple CEO Gilamilio have any

other options? Find out on this week's episode of Design in California. Relay.com slash designed. I would like to thank supporters of this episode, those who subscribe to Upgrade Plus. This week, Jason,

I want to talk to you about a show called Paradise, which you recommended to me. Oh, yes. Because we've watched that, and I want to talk to you about it. Go to GetUpGriplus.com. You get longer ad-free episodes of this show.

If you want to find this show on YouTube, because I have a video version, just search for the Upgrade podcast. I'd like to thank FitBod, Notion, and Revenue Cat, for their support of this episode. But most of all, Thank you for listening.

Until then, until next time. Say goodbye just now. Goodbye, my curly.