519: I Got the RGB Going On

From Relay, Welcome to Connected, it's the world's greatest low-key podcast about the Apple devices we take with us. This is episode 519. It's sponsored by NetSweet, FitBod, and Backblaze. My name is Brennan Bigley. I'm no chairman. I'm a usurper king, I guess. I'm joined by the one true John. Hello, Brennan, how are you? Oh, I'm just spectacular. I'm just spectacular. We're also joined, of course, by the man, the myth, the legend. It's Federica for teaching. Hello, I'm what an intro. I love it.

Legendary. Legendary. So I am the only familiar voice, Unconnected this week. I thought we could come up with a funny backstory as to where Steven and Mike are, what they're doing, like, we replace them. And the answer is yes, we have replaced them. This is going to be connected going forward. We thank Mike for their decade of service. It's been a pleasure, but it's even going to be more of a pleasure with John and Brennan. So yeah, these are like- They earned a break, I'd say.

Accentification, you know, somewhere- Double in the pleasure here, I'm John, yeah. Yeah, it's going to be. So we're going to try and somehow respect the traditional structure of the show. And yeah, I'm sure we'll hear from Mike as Steven at some point over the internet, over I message. But yeah, this is going to be connected. So anyway, moving on, follow up. This is a something that Mike, background we used to do connected.

We used to play this game where we wanted to predict where Apple was going to announce. And Mike in one of his risky predictions predicted that Apple was going to publicly state the amount of RAM in the new iPhones. And we also said that Apple was going to do that at the keynote for the iPhone and that they were going to say that it was explicitly for powering Apple Intelligence. Now they did say that they were in- They did mention memory during the keynote.

They did say that it was for Apple Intelligence. They did not specify the amount of RAM. That came a few days ago in an interview with Johnny's Fuji confirming that all iPhone 16 models have 8 gigs of RAM as was expected. So yeah, there you go. So Apple is now openly talking about RAM in iPhones. If you asked, I guess people in this community a few years ago, they would have said that it was unthinkable that Apple was going to do this for the iPhone. Oh yeah, RAM doesn't matter, right?

Wasn't that the line for a while? That was the line. That was the line. Oh, Android cares about RAM because RAM is so bad. Which is funny because now everybody cares about RAM because that's what powers larger language models. So yeah, there you go. Mike was right eventually. Thanks to an interview. We have a tiny topic that it started as fun news and then very quickly became very sad news. John, what's up? So this is about the legendary iOS game, Flappy Bird.

And if people remember, this game has been gone for a very, very long time. It hit the, took the world by storm. It was notoriously difficult to play as you now get a little bird through obstacles. And it's developer ultimately pulled the game from the app store because of online harassment more than anything else. He was not happy with the attention and he just said, you know what, it's not worth it and pulled the game from the store. It's never been heard from since until a couple of days ago.

He not only pulled the game from the store, but he disappeared off of what was then Twitter. And last week or maybe five or six days ago, Flappy Bird burst back on the scene with the trailer. And there was a website and it was called Flappy Bird dot org, which in and of itself is kind of a weird URL to pick for a game.

But it was coming back and it was originally reported that this was a group of enthusiasts who were taking over the game and moving it forward and coming up with new characters and all sorts of things. And what it turned out to be the case is that first of all, people started poking around and they realized, well, the original developer had no, no part in this whatsoever. And in fact, the original developer's trademark rights had been swiped from him.

And I believe a legal proceeding in which these new developers got hold of the trademark rights because they weren't being used. And that's a very common thing with trademark. I mean, if you don't use a trademark, you lose it and someone can challenge it and say, hey, this person's not using this. We want it. And that's effectively what they did. So what they did is probably very legal. It's not necessarily, it doesn't mean it's not a little scummy.

And there also seems to be some notion that this might be adjacent to cryptocurrency because there was an old version of the website where some people did some digging and found references to cryptocurrencies and web three stuff. So oh, no, no. Yeah. This is like the only game where you can play and earn simultaneously. Oh, no. Yeah. And that's because all the other ones that claim they could do that have failed. This is very sad. Brandon, back in the day, flappy bird, yes or no? Oh, huge, yes.

Oh, huge, yes. I was like a flappy bird obsessive. I needed to be the high scores of everyone in my life. I was like really on. I was sending screenshots of flappy bird high scores to all of my friends and like just a really overt attempt to go them into competing against me all the time. I loved it.

The developer, one of the reasons that he claimed, Dong Nguyen is his name, one of the reasons he bailed on the app outside of the harassment he was receiving both online and offline is that he said that the game was too addicting. He didn't want to make a game that was that addicting, which I thought was interesting. I didn't consider the game to be addicting honestly, but I did consider it to be deeply, deeply fun and like maybe one of the most streamlined iOS apps that existed.

I thought it was like as far as games played on a phone go really, really, really simple in a way that was satisfying. Yeah. In your sense, I mean, I guess he developed other games. He had a game studio and another swing counters was the next one. I love that. Right. And none of them really took off quite like flappy bird and I don't believe any of them were being developed any longer.

No, can I also just shout out that the name of the company of a quote unquote enthusiast who are excited about bringing flappy bird back to life is a company called, and this is for real, game tech holdings, which sounds like adjacent to the evil company from like alien, like it sounds like game tech holdings. Yeah. It sounds like a bit in a sci-fi movie about capitalism, game tech holdings. The game tech holdings. Okay. Wow. This is quite so.

I was excited for like five minutes when I saw this and then immediately I saw somebody saying, well, what it looks like the developer is not involved that actually the word legal proceedings against him and that soured the whole story pretty quickly. Which is too bad. It's pretty. Yeah. All right. Moving on. John. It's September. Which means, which means that relay is raising money for St. Jude.

And in just a couple of days as we record this on Friday, Mike, Stephen and the relay crew will be doing their 12 hour podcastathon. That's Friday, September 20th to raise money for childhood cancer awareness month, which is the whole month of September. Now if you listen to Connected, you probably know a little bit about St. Jude by now, I think.

But it does incredible things for kids and their families who have cancer because not only is it a research hospital that is doing all kinds of great research work to try to prevent childhood cancer. But for the kids who do get sick, it's a place where families can go. They have housing. They have food.

They even have teachers there from preschool all the way through 12th grade so that when kids go for treatments, they for up to six weeks, they can get their classwork done and stay up to, you know, stay up to date with school. So then when they go back home, they're not behind all of their friends. So that's a really great thing that they provide.

It's based in Memphis, Tennessee, where Stephen Hackett lives, but it's really a worldwide service because they're doing all kinds of collaborations with hospitals around the world, churches, doctors, and things like that that make this the kind of place that helps kids whether they're in the United States or really anywhere. So during September, Relay has been raising money. You can go to the website and make a donation, which we'd love you to do. The website is stju.org slash relay on Friday.

They'll be doing the 12 hour podcast, which is going to be streamed on YouTube from noon, Eastern, on Friday, all the way till midnight. It's always a lot of fun to watch that, especially towards the end when the guys are really, really tired. And it's a perfect time to make your donation because you can like send them over goals and make them do silly stuff right there live with, you know, because of your donation.

So check it out today, go to stju.org slash relay and make sure you make a donation. This episode of Connected is brought to you by NetSuite. What is the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Some will say rates will rise or fall. Others might say inflation is up or down, but the only way business owners can have for sure is if someone events across the ball. Well, until then, over 38,000 businesses have future-proofed with NetSuite by Oracle.

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NetSuite.com-slaesh-connected. Thanks for the support of the show. All right. So, John, Brandon, and I, we do a podcast together. It's called MPC on Mac stories. It stands for next portable console and we talk about handouts. And we buy a lot of video game handouts of all kinds, you know. We do. The obvious ones like an internal switch and a steam deck, but we are, the three of us were collectively very into emulation handouts.

Android-based, Linux-based, that's what we do, that's what we talk about. But I thought, given that it's Apple release week for operating systems and hardware, I thought that we would talk, you know, take a pause just briefly from gaming. We are going to talk about gaming later in the show. But of course we are. Of course we are. I mean, it's the MPC crew. What are we going to do? But at the very least, you know, let's pretend we can also be professional about other topics.

And I thought we would talk about our purchases in Apple Land this week, if any. And I also want to talk about the new operating systems. So I kind of wanted to go over what we ordered, if we ordered anything and Brandon, I want to hear from you. Did you get anything from Apple this week? Okay. So I know where you're going to be for. I get it. No, I wrote a piece for your website last week. It was called You Shattered Out article. People love the article. Yes. It was very nice. It was very nice.

You shattered out on this show last week as well. It was called Maybe I'm Not a Pro anymore. And the conceit of the piece was while watching that event, it just started to occur to me that because so many of the like new interesting tent pole features of the pro phone were also available on the base iPhone 16, the reasons to actually upgrade to the pro were like pretty slim.

And the more I kind of ruminated what the vibe was between those two, it was like the pro phones are really actually just for pros now. Like they showed somebody filming a music video for the weekend and they were like, yeah, check out also this film set where you can use these different audio modes to isolate people's voices in like a cinematic way, like things like that.

It was like, oh, this is all stuff that I'm not going to use because I am a person who has gotten the pro phone since it first existed. And I think like, you know, you could go back and forth on this, but I feel like the iPhone X is weirdly the first pro phone. I've been in a lot of ways ever since then I've been on the pro track and it's mainly just because I love having the extra lens.

So anyway, I wrote that piece about like, hey, I don't know if there's really a reason to upgrade to the pro phone. And with that drum roll, I sure did upgrade to the pro phone again. I ordered the 16 pro and it's really truly this year just because it comes in gold desert titanium. Sorry. But I mean, it sure does look like gold and I just really missed having a gold iPhone. I find that the years I have a gold iPhone, I usually switch off every year between a black phone or gold if they have it.

I find that whenever I have a gold phone, it just kind of makes me laugh like for the entire year. I love having it. It's like such a kind of silly color for your phone to be. It just brings me a lot of joy. It brings me a lot more joy, I will say, than the natural titanium, which I didn't love. I was kind of surprised, I thought I was going to like it a lot more than I did, but I've been using it for a year. Kind of boring after a while. We started old natural titanium.

I've done it like after a year, I'm looking at this. It's just a piece of metal. It looks like a piece of metal. It's a little beige actually. It's really what it comes down to. Yeah, it could have been, could have been. Yeah, there you go. It's like Steven's old computers. Yeah, it's like an iPhone from the mid 90s or something. Wait a second, though. Yeah, I would love that. Like a beige plastic iPhone. Could you imagine? That looks like a performer from 1992 or something.

I mean, it would be very cool. I am my kingdom for a PlayStation 5 that has the same color scheme as the PS1. Did you see there was a concept image floating around of a PS5 Pro styled like a PlayStation 1 classic, so good. So 16 pro. I got 16 pro. Not a big phone guy. No, I am definitely not a big phone guy. I just find that having a big phone, first of all, I just want the thing to fit into my pocket very easily.

And sometimes the pro max does not do that, at least when I've tried out other people's. But also, I just like, that's what the iPad is for for me at least. I feel like I don't have a lot of circumstances in which having the pro max would be a worth while shift for me over having something that's a little bit more compact. I'd be curious, I know you're a max, but I'm curious why max makes more sense for you than a small one. Like what is the use case for you specifically?

I realized there's going to be a lot of people who are not going to like this. Sometimes. Oh, God. I feel it's good to confess this. Sometimes I watch movies on my phone in bed or TV shows. It's just, you know, it's a silly thing, but it's already in my hand and I can turn it to landscape and it's got a great screen. And I don't have to get out of bed and grab my iPad.

I don't like, I can just hold it with one hand or I can lay to the side, you know, and look at the phone while I'm wearing a preside. It's very comfortably. And I mean, I love my iPad, especially since I moved to the 11 inch, it's so much more comfortable. But sometimes like I watch a lot of YouTube, like generally a lot of YouTube on my phone. And the occasional TV shows quite frequently, especially stuff that Silvia is nodding to. I just watch on my phone.

I just so much like lower friction than even grabbing an iPad sometimes. It's just, it's, my phone is all over. It's always with me anyway. And I do like the tallest iPhone possible for browsing the web or reading articles. Just seeing more text all at once is very comfortable for me. And the final thing I will mention, I also do blog quite a bit from my phone. Like I like, especially like quick posts for Mac stories, just quick things. I love typing them out on the phone.

And I think there's something about the fact that you can only use one app at a time when you do that. Like that selfie post constraint, it really sort of helps creativity because like you just have that text editor open and you got to be concise and you got to put together a quick post, you know, might as well just do it on the phone. And so it's kind of counterintuitive maybe like why would you do that on a phone instead of grabbing your iPad because you have your keyboard and everything.

But in a way, it sort of helps because it's, that's the only thing you can do, right? Right. Yeah. So yeah, I got the biggest phone possible because I also use it for a lot of entertainment. Yeah. The funny thing is that everything you just described is a thing that I also do on my non-max phone, but I understand that, you know, this is, it's literally just a subjective opinion between two people. I understand why you would want the bigger one.

I do also write a lot of blog posts for my phone as well, like sitting on the couch. It is nice. I like doing it. I use IA, right, IA, writer, specifically, which, you know, has the like focus mode for when you're writing, which I am obsessed with. I love that app so much. Shout out. Yeah. I read your team. Very good app. So just the iPhone Pro 16 Pro. I got, yeah, just the iPhone 16 Pro. I also got, I got another SuTi phone back as my hands. Oh, yeah, they're making the new ones.

I got the, they're making the new ones. Yeah. I, for the older one, I think, yeah, I, I think. If you don't know SuTi, they make literally at least until the 16 Pro, they just had these like silicone, silicone phone back so you could get. So it's not a whole case. It's like a mag safe back on your phone. I got a white one for my natural titanium 15 pro, which honestly, I think it's a really great thing to do. So, obviously just made the phone look cooler.

Like, suddenly, it looks kind of more futuristic to me in a lot of ways. And ever since SuTi threw that thing out on the web, I feel like a lot of other companies are starting to do it. I feel like no mad has their own. No mad. They make one. Isn't it called the leather back, or something? I think so. I think so. Yeah. And they started introducing a bunch of new materials. And now SuTi has their own lineup of new materials. So I got a clear one, which I'm excited about.

Maybe it makes sense to have a clear phone back. back. I couldn't choose. So I got both the clear and the nano leather material. Oh nice. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And also the advantage of these cases, you know they're going to work with the iPhone 16 Pro and the camera button because they don't cover the sides. Doesn't cover anything. They don't cover anything at all. They just covered the back. So you're

you're good to go. I'm considering getting one of the silicone Apple cases though. I the like sapphire glass thing that they're doing with the camera control button. I'm curious about it. Yeah. I did get an Apple case, but we'll talk about that later. John, what did you get? So I went with the 16 Pro Max with 512 gigabytes of storage in white. And I think I have only ever

had two white iPhones. And I've always enjoyed it. I've like usually get black. I had natural for the 15 Pro Max, but this time I'm going back to white because I've always enjoyed that particular color. And I guess for me the the bigger one, the reason I get the big one is I somewhat similar to you, Federico. It's I feel like it's my mini iPad mini, you know, it's the most mini of yes, yes, is really kind of what it comes down to because it's really good for reading.

In particular, I do a lot of reading on it, a lot of browsing the web. I don't write articles on it like you guys do, but I do watch a lot of video on my phone too. So that's another good reason for it, I think. But yeah, I don't I don't mind having a big phone. And to me, the biggest screen I always want to get the biggest screen that's not too big, which is very, very subjective. Like

for a long time, I thought the 12.9 inch iPad Pro was the one for me. It turned out it wasn't. It's the 11 inch because that's like right at the margin where it's not comfortable to hold anymore. Yeah. And you know, and and I love the iPad mini. I've been using an iPad mini for a long time, but I think I'm going to kind of settle in with an 11 inch iPad Pro and this big phone. And that's

going to kind of be my my iPhone iPad combo going forward for quite a while. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Federico, I also got one of the new charging pucks because I want to be able to charge at at 25 watts. And so I also got one of those little anchor gand chargers. It's a little tiny one. Like the old iPhone charging bricks, but it can handle 30 watts. So I picked up that as well as the puck to use it my desk. Nice. Brandon, didn't ask you about storage. Oh, yeah. Uh, 256. Same year. Yeah.

Yeah. I am like constantly bumping up against the edge of it just because of the amount of photos that I take. So it's really just I need to be diligent about how many photos I'm deleting. But I used to go with 512 back in the day. And then I just found that I never crossed 256 really, usually. But these days, I think just because of the size of photos and how much I'm doing with like pro res stuff on there, I'm hitting the storage limit a little bit more than I used to,

but still not enough to make me want to upgrade to the 512 personally. Okay. What about you? Would you go with Federico? All right. So it's been a very busy week for me. I got the full slate of things. So I love this. So 16 pro max 256 white. I realized I was only using like a hundred gigs of storage on my phone. I use the iCloud like I count for a library online, not locally saved on the phone. So storage doesn't matter. I was only using those hundred gigs for like

basically cash of apps like Spotify, YouTube cash, Safari cash and a bunch of games. Like I wasn't really using storage. So I got the base model. But yeah, 16 pro max in white. It's been a few years since I got a white phone. So I figured, you know, let's just try it. Like I mentioned, I ordered a couple of the SuTi phonebacks, but I also couldn't resist and got the very bright yellow Apple silicone. I forgot the name of the second super. I thought, you know, I can kind of rock a yellow

case, I think. Yeah. I'll do it. Then AirPods 4 with noise cancellation. I was so looking forward to this. So my realization over the past month and a half has actually been a couple of things. The first one was that I still love and I brand new wrote about this. I linked to it. I still love the wired earbuds. The ear pods. The Apple ear pods. I bought a little stock of some new ear pods for when the time comes that Apple will discontinue them. I have a few backups in storage.

I realized that that shape always worked for my years and that I was a fan of them. So that's what I've been using with all my beta game handouts. This is my biggest question about those new AirPods. I'm curious to see how you feel about them. I'm going to need to trust you with my life on this because I consider getting them as well. I want to use AirPods so badly and they've never fitted my years. So the second realization that I had over the past month and a half was that

I've been using AirPods Pro since they came out a few years ago. I thought I was like the biggest AirPods Pro fan. But lately whenever I was leaving them on for like three or four hours, I was always feeling this discomfort in my years and I realized I thought it was a fan of AirPods Pro but actually wearing them for longer listening sessions or watching a binge in a tv show. Like the discomfort of the year tip was actually bad for me. And I also realized that I was not

taking advantage of any of the AirPods Pro specific features. I don't commute so I don't really need to use noise cancellation. When I'm home, I have two dogs and so I always want to be able to at least hear if something is going on. Dog owners will understand. Like you need to like dog is throwing up. You need to know. Dog owners rise up. You gotta get the pill. And you gotta be fast. Especially if you have one of them that for whatever reason she likes doing it on the on the

sofa because I don't know what list the other one. It happened. It happened. It's hard to bring it happen. List the other one gets down and does it on the floor. But yeah, on the sofa. So you gotta be able to hear, you know, strange noises. And so I realized, well, I'm not using noise cancellation. These tips are not comfortable. I thought, you know, it's been a few years. Why don't I re-evaluate the regular AirPods instead? And there was one of the best decisions I've made this year.

Just getting the plane AirPods 3 a couple of months ago, life changing. Like it made me falling love with the AirPods category all over again. Now, I'm fortunate because the like I said, that shape always worked for my years. Like I guess I'm one of the lucky ones. And so I was anticipating these AirPods 4 with the USB-C instead of lightning. The AirPods 3 still had lightning.

And I thought if they do, if they actually do a version of them with noise cancellation, I will get it because there is the occasional time when like maybe I'm on a plane or maybe, I don't know, I'm waiting somewhere and I want to block out external noise. There is the occasional time when I may want to use it. And they did it. They did two versions of AirPods 4, both of them with USB-C better sound, it seems from the reviews, but also a version that is slightly more expensive

with noise cancellation. And it seems like it's actually pretty decent at that. Not as good as AirPods Pro, but like then again, I don't care. So yeah, I got the AirPods 4 with ANC. And lastly, Apple Watch Series 10, is it the 10? Yes, it is 10. 10. 10. I was, for the past couple of years, I've used the Ultra 1. Never upgraded to the Ultra 2. I like my big watch, but if the big watch can be slimmer and not as

ragged as the Ultra on my wrist, I'll go for it. So this one is 46 millimeters instead of 45. So it's actually slightly bigger than the Ultra. I never, ever used the Action button on the watch. The thing is, I got the Ultra, not because I'm a very active person. I'm not into any of the sports that the Ultra was designed for. I just got it because it was the big watch with a big display. So if there is a base model watch that has a big display, I'll switch to that. I don't need the Ultra.

Yeah. I think to me, Federico, one of the biggest downsides of the 10 that I'll be curious to see, how you think, feel about this, is the battery life. When you're coming from an Ultra, that's one of the things about the Ultra. Yeah, I guess. I think so. Besides being a big screen is having that battery life. I use the Action button myself quite a bit, but that watch, the Ultra is such an expensive model that it's really not,

and I think Apple realizes this. They're not upgrading it on a yearly cycle in the same way they are with the regular Apple watch because I don't think very many people would buy, upgrade it every single year. I've got my battery is down to like 88% capacity, which is noticeable. It's definitely noticeable,

but it started at such a high place that it's still perfectly fine. So I feel like I will probably go Ultra again, but I do think that I can probably go on like a three or four-year schedule at this point. I think my favorite thing about the Apple Watch is a product category for Apple right now, is that they kind of anticipate people aren't upgrading year to year. Although they are upgrading the actual Apple Watch itself year to year, and as you mentioned,

like the Ultra, you know, it's getting upgraded or it just got an upgrade. Finally, it's in black, shout out. I love that I went from the Apple Watch literally Series 0 to Series 5, and then I went from that to the 8. And now I'm just like hanging out on the 8 until I don't know when. I guess when this one's done. I just like, I wear them until they're done. And I love that as a person who generally does upgrade a lot of my Apple stuff very frequently. It's a nice feeling that there's an

entire piece of that ecosystem that I don't need to do every year. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I got into the habit early on when the Apple Watch is relatively new of doing an annual upgrade because there were some pretty big leaps and bounds in terms of what the software could do, what the battery life was like, the sensors that were being added, and we're already at a place where the Apple Watch is fairly mature. And so while these are nice upgrades, they're not like

revolutionary. So I'm totally fine with sticking around with the ultra one for now. Yeah. I'm excited. I'm going to be that person. I'm excited about the fact that you can use the Apple, the new Apple Watch with a speaker to listen to stuff. Not because I'm going to bother people. You're not going to be that guy at the grocery store are you? No, no, no, no, no, no, a podcast while he's buying bread. So here's the rule. Okay. When I'm around other people,

AirPods and usually one AirPods only at a time. I'm that person likes to even just wear. Yeah, one AirPods in my left here usually. I love that. If I'm walking the dogs and so it's during the date, usually in the afternoon, listening to podcasts with my meta Rayban glasses. I'm just I'm walking in other people may pass in my vicinity, but it's just for a second. So if they hear, oh, that guy is listening to stuff in English, whatever, I don't care. When I'm walking the dogs,

I cut up on so many episodes of Into the Aether while walking the dogs with the meta Raybans. It's kind of ridiculous. But when I wake up in the morning and I'm doing stuff around the house, like I'm doing chores around the house or I'm cooking lunch or something like I'm preparing things, I don't put on my meta Raybans immediately. Those are also like sunglasses. So it makes more sense. Like when I wake up in the morning, I grab my regular glasses that I always keep by by nightstand.

And I don't I don't like the idea of wearing AirPods inside the home. I know this probably a stupid thing because literally millions of other people do. So the watch having a speaker is going to be perfect for me for those times when in the morning, I don't have my meta Raybans on. I am not wearing AirPods. I am doing stuff around the house. So I'm moving between rooms and I'm just having the watch with me. I don't have to rely on the phone. I can just listen to podcasts

on my wrist as I'm doing the laundry or brushing the dogs like all those things. I just have it on my wrist. I can totally see that. I can totally see that. I mean, I do that with my phone now. I just walk around with my phone when I'm doing chores around the house. So it would be easier if it was the watch I think. Yeah. Yeah. I'm using AirPods for that these days. That's that AirPods have become

my walking around the house thing. Although now I'm obviously like going back to the early 2000s and getting them caught on like every single right. I need time. I try and do anything smashing them into the washing machine door and stuff. But is it any nice though that you can just plug those in and you don't have to care about anything else? I love it. I love it so much. And also because they're not noise canceling anything. I can still hear everything perfectly. Although I do find as

a person who does commute, they are not conducive at all to my commute. Yeah. I do need I don't know if I need noise cancellation, but I do need like a tighter seal. I think when I'm when I'm commuting, I use the Beats Fit Pro right now. It's kind of my main headphone when I'm walking around. They have the wingtips. So they like stay locked in my ears basically. But I usually don't have noise cancellation turned on. I just kind of I don't even have transparency mode on. I just rock them normal.

Can I go back quickly to both of you having the max phones and ask you the big question based on all the rumors about maybe the next couple of years of Apple stuff. Yes. I for about six months had the pixel fold and was obsessed with it. Where where you guys at on that? Because like that that serves both masters. You're getting the big display and you're getting the pocketable form factor. I loved it to death, but I couldn't use it because it had a bunch of issues right when it

came out where the battery was draining super fast. I was about to go to Japan and there's no world in which I'm going to go to Japan and wake up and find out that the thing didn't charge because of a bug. And I'm just stuck lost wandering around in a place where I don't know the language. But where you guys add on the folding iPhone? There are two products. I want Apple to make glasses like the ones I'm wearing now. The metal ray bands but like made by Apple

and a foldable device. Like the dream for me is a folding iPhone that is a regular phone and then you open it up and it's like a small iPad. That is I am so jealous of the new generation of like the same song foldable. It's probably even like the new pixel. What's it called pixel 9 Pro fold? Pixel Pro 9. That is the phone. That one. That one. It looks so good and the idea

of a hybrid device from Apple. So with the ecosystem of the apps that I like like all the indie apps that I love with that design and the fact that it's like a phone on the outside but then you open it up and you got some basic multitasking going on. That's the dream for me. And as soon as Apple announces that sort of device, if they ever announce that sort of device, even if compared to a Pro Max, it's smaller as a phone on the vertical side. I'm immediately upgrading to that device.

No matter how I mean, sure, if it costs $10,000, no, I'm not going to get it for $10,000. But for like here's my hot take for the price of a Vision Pro. Yeah. Wow. I would do it. I mean, I got a Vision Pro. Yeah, it's like in the closet behind me because I never use it. Yeah, that's unfortunate. I would use a foldable phone. I'm with you on the foldables. I do think that the form factor folded should be smaller than the Pro Max. So I think it should be closer to just the iPhone Pro.

Because when you unfold it, you'll get a really nice size. It's pretty close to an iPad mini. And that's really what I'd like is basically to have an unfolded iPad mini and a folded regular phone. Even if it's a little thicker, that's all right with me too. You have me really wondering how much I would spend on this. There you go. I'm like, I almost don't want to admit it to myself or to the listeners of this podcast, what number floated into my head. But it is, I think it's around

what you're talking about. I think it's like in the Vision Pro. I mean, you know, if they're gonna do it, they're gonna pitch it as like this futuristic nobody's ever gonna done it before spoilers. They have done it before. But it's coming from Apple, right? It's gonna be the nicest looking foldable thing ever. And so like, I'm just gonna ask you. So if assuming that we are staying below Mac Pro pricing territory, would you rather spend $3,500 on a Vision Pro or a super

premium fancy looking foldable phone? I get the foldable phone immediately. Yeah phone, no question. Yeah, that's pretty easy. That's an easy decision. Especially if they're pairing it alongside something related to the iPad. If they're saying like this is both an iPad and an iPhone and that means hypothetically, like an M chip in there or something. Oh my god. Oh my god. That's, I mean, I'll pay Macbook Pro prices for that. It's the most important device I own and the most important

device I will always own. And I want to know. And also they got to make up for the fact that you're not gonna buy your phone and an iPad individually. Yes. Yes. Exactly. You buy it too. So like. That's why it's gonna be at least $2,500 you would think. Yeah, at least because like then it doesn't matter that you're not buying two Apple products. You're buying a really expensive single Apple product. Brandon, did you see the tri-fold Huawei device? The things wild. So now actual hands-on videos.

I've started coming out. And it's it's real. Now durability is a big concern. Thank questions. The folding screen when it's closed, it's gonna be outside. It's on the outside. Yeah, that's I think that that's a really bad decision. It's all kinds of stuff is gonna get underneath that display. And that plastic is gonna be exposed to the outside world. So durability there will be a concern. But just conceptually speaking though, I found that transforms into a 10-inch tablet.

It's you know, it's with like almost a cinema aspect ratio. So you can watch movies the way they were intended to be seen. Not like a phone like if if Martin's Corsese were to look at what I do in bed with my phone watching movies on my pro max. Here would not be happy. Not be happy. But Martin said, sorry, Martin. That's that's what I do. All right, well. So yeah, that's what we're that's what we're getting this week. And we'll see we'll see how we like these things. I'm sure we'll

will come up for a gaming angle for the new iPhones on NPCs. There's always a gaming angle. It's always a sad gaming angle. But do we need to buy new controllers? Do we need to buy new controllers for the phones? I doubt it. They're not that right. Right. Okay. Oh yeah, they're not too much. We go. All right. Cool. The game sir is still gonna work. And that's the one that matters to me. The Galileo. The Galileo. The G8. Yes. That's the one I mean. And the razor ultra. The razor ultra.

John is a pro gamer. I am. Oh my God. The RGB going on. This episode of Connected is brought to you by Fitbot. When you want to change your fitness level, it can be hard to know where to start. That's why we're pleased to let you know that Fitbot is an easy and affordable way to build a fitness plan that's just for you. Everyone's fitness path is different, which is why Fitbot uses data to make sure they customize things exactly to suit you.

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And you can get 25% off your membership by signing up at fitbot.me slash connected. So go there now and get your customized fitness plan at Fitbot F IT BOD Fitbot.me slash connected. Our thanks to Fitbot for their support of the show and of relay. All right, Federica, we have been beating around the bush this entire episode so far, because this of course was a very big week. Apple dropped in kind of an unprecedented way.

All of its OS updates on a single day on a Monday. And I think I will, you know, I'm not going to break my arm, but I'll pat ourselves on the back for kind of sensing that this was going to happen all the way back in June and kind of and being ready for it. But we had a whole series of reviews out this week on Mac stories. The you did iPhone and iPadOS 18. I did MacOS Sequoia.

Devon did Vision OS 2. And Jonathan did watch OS 11. And I wanted to dig in a little bit with you to talk to you about your review this week, because it was a really different, a really different approach than we've had in past years. And you and I talked about this a little bit on

app stories already. But you know, we you the biggest thing. I think the thing people will notice the moment they open the page is they'll say instead of like some sort of motion graphics of realistic looking iPhones with screenshots on them, they see illustrated art. Yeah, yeah. Brandon is actually responsible here. Yes. So yes, you. Well, so yeah, Brandon is the person we need to thank here, because it was

Brandon who introduced us months ago to the incredible artist that is Scout Wilkinson. Scout did we work with Scout for the podcast artwork for comfort zone, which is the other show that we introduced alongside MPC Mac stories back in May. And I loved working with Scout. The process, the the back and forth, the ideas, the brainstorming, everything. The process was

just fantastic. Higher Scout. Yes, higher Scout. And so when the time came when Apple announced iOS and iPad, I was 18 at WDC and I saw Apple Intelligence and the generative features of Apple Intelligence that specifically those like those are the kinds of AI features that I have really strong stance on. And it wasn't sitting right with me. It was something that is pretty much anti-thetical to all the things I believe in in terms of like creating stuff on the web, creating

being creative on the web and sharing your work on the internet with people. I find it very gross being able to generate images and replacing human input with an AI model and I don't like it. And the whole thing was putting a was putting me in a bad mode in June, going into the summer, knowing that I had this massive project ahead of me. I didn't want to do it. I felt like I was stuck because the whole community of Maxori's readers was waiting for me to work on my 10th

annual review and I was dreading the feeling. I didn't want to do it. And so I started thinking, well, I have to do it. We also have a sponsor lined up. I got to do it. But how? And so I realized instead of feeling down about it, I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put a different spin on this thing where Apple may at the time, we still sort of thought that Apple Intelligence was going to launch in September. They delayed the features later, but at the time

was going to launch in September. And I thought, well, what I'm going to do is in the same OS that has the feature that lets you generate images and that has the feature that lets you take a sketch in Apple notes and turn it into a code encode to beautiful artwork using AI. I am going to do something different. I am going to hire an actual artist, a real person. I'm going to ask them to come to create art for the review, to illustrate the review. And that was just like using regular

AirPods again, one of my best decisions this year, like working with Scout. Scout and AirPods. There we go. That's a two. What a combo. She was better than the AirPods. I'll give you that. But like just a whole process of working with her, researching, like coming up with ideas for the chapters. And with that process, with that back and forth, it also led me to this very different place for the conclusion of the story where there is the usual recap and look in ahead at what's

coming next. But it's more of like this conclusion that sets the tone for what I think. We're going to like, what's the role of Mac stories and our approach to creators, right? Developers, designers, artists, you know, what can we do as Mac stories to celebrate those people and to be useful to our readers with content articles that are useful, but also the same time

celebrating creativity. And so I am very happy. I am very happy with that conclusion. Because like, it's the sort of conclusion that was like the result of this three month process of working with an artist and working with, surrounding myself with people that helped me in this process. And it's a sort of, it's a sort of, it's a little blog post, the conclusion base. It's like about a 1,500 words. But it's a sort of thing where it doesn't matter if you disagree with me. Because it's what I

think. And when you believe strongly in what you think, people may disagree with you, people may ignore you, but you're still going to feel good about what you think. It's like, if I say, oh, you know what, I like cheese. And you come to me and you say, you know, you're wrong. Cheese sucks. And I'm like, I don't care. I like it. And so when you have an opinion and you believe strongly in it, it doesn't matter. And so yeah, the fun fact that I wanted to mention, not the brand

that is here, the idea for, for using a first person perspective for the artwork. Scout was coming up with a bunch of different ideas. Initially, the direction was going to be we're going to feature this Apple Steve Jobs like mini mascot, like this little cute little guy with like an Apple head wearing a turtle neck sort of like Steve Jobs. And it was going to be in all the shots. And but then we were also talking about like, how do we convey this idea of like this review usually

helps people discover a bunch of features of iOS. And so we were, we were sort of brainstorming this idea of an instruction manual and scouted. At some point she said, why don't we draw an actual like instructional manual? And that sort of that idea sparked something in my mind. And so I sent her screenshots of fire watch, the video game. And it's all the like, I don't know if you ever

played fire watch. But like, what if you do something like in the game where when you need to open the map, you actually see the animation in first person with your hands reaching into your pocket. And I'm folding the map in front of your eyes. And she loved it. And so that's, that's how she came up with all the other shots in first person, including the one that is my favorite. There's a very meta

shot of in first person of the iPad that scout is drawing on. And if you're looking inside the iPad, there's procreate with the images of my dogs that are featured in other images of the story. So yeah, I love that. I love that so much. That's the backstory working with scout. And I'm so glad I did. You shoot higher scout. She's incredible. I love two things about this. First of all, and the silliest one of the two to get it out of the way is that we can now trace the lineage of

your iOS review all the way back to the success and then failure of far cry too. Because your review is inspired by fire watch, which is made by Campo Santo. Campo Santo made up of the hosts of no longer existent video game podcast idol thumbs who were obsessed with far cry too, which kind of revolutionized this idea of you never break first person. You are always in first person. Great game. It's a great game. Yes. Great game. I love that. I love that we can now go back

and say Clinton Hawking in some way. I had some kind of influence on your iOS review. The other thing I want to mention, and this is more serious, it's a thing you talked about on app stories and things you're touching on here. It's centered around your conclusion specifically. I really appreciate your embracing of subjectivity. I think that that's a huge thing for me personally as well. I think over time what I've learned about the people who I like to read and the opinions

I trust online are embracing the idea of being opinionated. I think there's this real fallacy to the idea that anyone can be objective really about anything. Yes. The making of a person leading up to their decision to have an opinion about something influences that opinion and therefore is subjective. Even if you're trying to remove your own opinion from it, you are in fact imbuing it with a different opinion. I feel like at the end of the day, the embracing of

subjectivity is really important. I think for most people who create, and I'm glad to see you doing it. As your friend and collaborator, I think that's a really exciting future for you to be going down. The people whose work I respect the most these days are the people who are not reviewing video games and just saying graphics 10 out of 10, sound 9 out of 10, fun factor, whatever out of 10. This is my honest opinionated but objective review. None of that is real.

None of that is real. I think we're seeing people start to approach tecturnalism and film and video game criticism and music criticism with this idea of who I am and who I have been makes up how I feel about this thing. I think that's a really powerful sentiment. I think that also bleeds into your decision to work with more creatives across the board.

People scout, which is a really smart decision. I think this idea of let's get as many minds as we can together because the collective influence will make something new is really powerful. So good work. Thank you. I liked it. It was fun to read. Thank you. I'm also part of it like trying to write from... This is something that I still learned how to do. When I started doing this IOS reviews 10 years ago, I like to think that I'm still young

and I feel young. I'm 36 but I still feel very young for my age compared to other people around me. I think I look younger and I feel younger than some of them but I was a younger person at the time obviously and I mean let's face it my role model at the time was what I was telling myself was I want to be the John Syracuser of IOS reviews. That was my goal. And I feel like I fell into this trap of trying to be as detailed and objective and cold maybe as possible. And I don't...

And in looking back I don't like it. I mean obviously these reviews were successful but I feel like they have remained successful because I was able to tone that down and progressively embrace who I am as a person with opinions and you know my stupid jokes, my silly references and I just feel like it makes for a better creative output to fully embrace the person you are and the things

you're into. Even when and especially when other people may think those are weird because like the internet's a pretty big place for there to be other sickos like you and other weirdos like you were going to appreciate the strange things you may say and how you may be able to jump from one topic and like a serious thing to a totally stupid ridiculous you know kind of joke that maybe

a 12 year old would laugh at but like it doesn't matter. And so over the years I have tried and it seems to be working because people tell me this and you know at some point I got to believe what people say. It's that it makes for this better balance of like information but also with character. And that was that is a healthier day. It's a healthier thing for me to do for this sort of project.

I think it connects more with people Federico. I mean I've kind of been along for the ride for a lot of these reviews and I can see you know it's good to be influenced or inspired by other people but it's also easy to fall into a trap where your where that inspiration becomes imitation and I

think maybe that's kind of a little bit of what you're describing and I think there's as you put more of you into these reviews that's where you really I think not only teach people what these O.S.s are about but you also connect with them on a different level because you know there is

a segment of people who really like that high level of detail and technical analytical analysis because after all a lot of people who read Mac stories are like developers people have that kind of technical mindset but I think even they even people coming from that background often will connect more with the material and it's also got more of you and your personnel in it too.

Yeah I look like also from a purely financial and economical perspective. I got so much competition these days not anymore in websites my biggest competition is in YouTube and I have so many competitors doing in fact a much better job than me listing 500 features

I've seen a three hour long video by Brandon Butch I want to say we're going to put a link in the show notes like people people people like them they do such a better job than me at listing and documenting and visually showing you all the new things so instead of competing with

them and there used to be a time when I could say you know all the features in this YouTube videos video are also mentioned in my review but instead I think there's more value in having something that is maybe it maybe doesn't mention 500 features and maybe it doesn't you know it's not as extensive as a documentary like a mini movie about ius18 but it's fine because I think what I hope that I can bring to the table is a lot of historical context because I've been doing this for a long

time and the perspective of someone who leaves some breeds ius and hypatoes and it has for the past 15 years and I still like to have fun with it and especially now you know working with other people and it's sort of that feedback right that feedback loop like I'm working with scout and scout mention so you know I've done this on the iPad using Procreate and actually there's a time lapses for each chapter and then I had an idea of like what can we do with these videos and then I talk to

James Thompson shout out to James the developer of pcalc and diced by pcalc to excellent apps and James was able you know a different type of art form James deals with code but he was able to turn those videos into a screensaver on macOS and so like I think this approach of working with creative

people around me and so ran again it's it's all about surrounding myself with like people like john and devon who edit my reviews scout making the art Sylvia working on the ebooks James working on on on on this screensaver like it's been an incredible process and so

invigorating you know just just it felt good for the for these past three months to work on this and it never felt like a slog is what I'm trying to say and so yeah those youtube videos they're so much better than this review if all you care about are the list of the features

yeah mines a little different with a little more opinion a little more color quite literally I mean go take a look at those illustrations they're beautiful and yeah that's it I um I'm you know ultimately I'm happy like I'm really really happy good yeah well happy happy 10th

anniversary on your thank you thank you thank you thank you all come on all right enough about me next we're gonna talk about this fun idea that I had what if we had infinite power and infinite money at apple and we wanted to fix gaming at apple we're gonna talk about this after the break

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slash connected go there have a play around start protecting yourself from a data disaster don't put it off start today our thanks to backblaze for their support of the show and all of relay all right so as i was saying we wanted to come out given that we are the mpc crew we wanted to

come out with a gaming angle for at least one of the topics are connected and i was thinking about like oh do you want to talk about controllers but no we talked about controllers before you don't want to talk about handhelds because i was doing started with controllers federally

no exactly i can also john as all the controllers like it's gonna become a monologue and we don't want to have a monologue i thought okay we always talk about this in private so what if we had infinite power infinite money to spend at apple it's not our money it's team cooks money

and so one day we wake up and we have been blessed with the power of fixing improving gaming at apple with no questions asked just infinite resources what do we do Brandon your app first yeah i think it's twofold number one is invest some more resources in your proton compatibility layer

like thing with the apple working toolkit yeah that was also that was also mine yeah that's like the obvious slam dunk here i've been using whiskey a lot on my mind oh you have okay yeah um and it's it's weird what games it works for in which ones it doesn't work for like if you

want to play elden ring on your mac you can use whiskey to play it if you want to play uh what fields of uh oh man i just read the name fields of mystery uh yeah yes the new like great magic based farm sim that's like you know echoes of stardew valley does not even boot really that's

weird and it's it's really just very hit or miss so my experience has been like i'm interested in playing this game i'll download it see if it works maybe it works maybe it'll work a little bit maybe it won't work at all and see how that see how that functions um but i feel like they are so close

to just having the steam thing my big question about that is what happens to like the app store like will you need to purchase all of your games through the apple app store and will developers be cool with that verse something like allowing i don't know developers to include something like the

porting toolkit through steam so you could just download all your games through steam as you were able to before uh but this time it's using a compatibility layer to make it run on apple hardware that feels like a little in the weeds um i feel like apples gonna want to make it like as easy

quote unquote as possible and by doing so end up making it like too hard for developers um that's one feeling the other feeling that i have about this really at the end of the day is uh and and i know you're gonna talk about this john uh so sorry it was still your thunder a little bit it's okay

the taste thing yeah it's like it's totally a taste thing and and the thing that's really bouncing around my head thinking about this is the entirety of anaperna interactive all just walked out like literally 25 people yes all just failed uh they were working on spinning off anaperna interactive into its own entity outside of anaperna um talks fell through didn't go very well you have 25 of the best taste makers in the industry right now who made and it should be noted and

published some incredible games for apple arcades lunch and some of the sustainment there who are now free agents looking to form a new entity yep that's not even just uh arcade because stray for instance is anaperna game and strays on them active um yeah i mean this is the taste thing to me

is the big question because part of me wants to say i kind of quarrel with this premise from the get go which is you can't really buy taste you can't you know you can't you can't you can't money's not gonna fix taste but it can hire people who taste yes yes you can you can and here's

the thing that what to me the greatest mystery of all is that apple has spent an extraordinary of money and hired a lot of really talented people to develop movies and tv shows and they can't do something similar with video games for for the life of them and that i don't really get and i

think it comes down to treating game developers like app developers yeah don't think that that's the right approach you need to be treated more like movie creators tv show creators that sort of thing yeah i i feel like almost institutionally there's a this idea and apple the games are not

an art form and i don't want to have the like discussion or video games art i mean i feel like we're past that from my perspective obviously they are um but like i feel like institutionally an apple they think of games as just software and and yes it is software so our movies these days

really when you think about it right right exactly especially with Dolby Atmos and all the fancy audio and video stuff but like elden ring or a i don't know a final fantasy seven are fundamentally different from a calendar app and a task manager like something on the one hand you have entertainment

and an art form and on the other you have a productivity tool a utility it'll be like comparing a hammer to a painting like yes both are objects and i guess this is the problem with right because this is the problem with apple they're thinking of both forms as digital objects right right

it's like you know a hammer a hammer it's an object a painting yes it's an object on the wall both are physical objects like they're fundamentally different i think that is the core of the issue would be first thought like before the money and before the infinite power you need to institutionally

understand that you're dealing with something fundamentally different from from a calendar app or or snapchat or whatever like there's apps and there's games and those are two separate things and dealing with the creators of those two different types of software requires two different

approaches yeah i agree i agree i think one of the traps that apple fell into is they got into gaming by mistake i think that once they had the free downloads within app purchases they stumbled into a business model of kind of the candy crushes of the world and it has made them an extraordinary

amount of money that they don't really understand how it worked how they ended up where they are but they don't want to screw that up in some way and i also feel like it's going too far to say that there's no taste to apple because there are good games on the app store yes the mac app store

i think the balances off i think the problem is is that there's there's one person in the corner advocating for artistic indie games and they lose more often than they don't yeah and i feel like we had high hopes for apple arcade to sort of become the symbol of that balance of like yeah you

can have the you know easy to play family friendly games but also it can be a place for the more niche indie you know artsy games that the press loves to talk about and the sort of games that we knew awards right but the balance as quickly started to feel off in apple arcade to the point where

netflix is actually doing a better job maybe with that balance of like yeah they have the games for you know what's the what's what's the tv show that that also has a game for netflix like the davis stranger things game they have this there they have the video game title a lot of TV and game

type a lot of daily games love i love i when they think and stuff yeah yeah but also they are cutting deals with developers of actually like i don't want to he's serious maybe doesn't quite describe it but like the sort of indie games that you know are more caught are traditionally covered

in mainstream video game press and the sort of games that you see at the game awards and the win awards you know around the world right the people making the decisions over netflix games are i mean they have taste coming out of every every poor like having immortality available on Netflix

that is it was you know it was a big deal video game got nominated for some game awards stuff but by all accounts like not a huge huge huge video game but the choice to have that thing ported to mobile was incredible same thing with like into the breach the fact that netflix is the reason we

have into the breach on mobile i could not thank them more vocally for that because that is one of the best mobile games i think ever made and i remember thinking that when it came out on switch like man i wish this was on my phone and netflix made that happen and i feel like apple should be making

that happen to launch with something like the new rpg by the creator of final fantasy who is looking back on his entire career and deciding to make one last magnum opus and now to be in a place where i'm like you know i'm excited that there's a new retro bowl out but i was having enough fun with

the original retro bowl yeah here's a question for you guys what do you think about the push into the triple a space that apple has seemed to be really pushing at its events because it seems to me that to kind of get this house in order if we're spending apples money think they ought to be starting

with the kind of things that netflix is doing first because we know those kind of games typically can run a lot better on an iphone or a mac or an ipad whereas they're really struggling with some of this triple a stuff whether it's you know assassins creed or death stranding or some of the

other things i know i i just played frost punk two which is out on on steam and i haven't played it a lot yet i did fired up on my mac on a very high end mac book pro and it really struggled to get any you know over twenty twenty five frames per second i mean really not yeah not to get really too

deep in the weeds on things like frames per second but you know the fans spun up immediately got really hot in the battery just started dropping precipitous so i mean that was yeah it was having a hard time and i just don't think that apple silicon is really quite ready yet for triple a type

titles yeah i i mean we've seen some i think rumored not confirmed uh numbers right from capcom's resonable endeavors uh some like pretty small numbers of of attach rate when it comes to those games uh having having sell through um and that's a bummer i think one of the big things here that is

worth noting and this is true i think of like pretty much any endeavor like this is it's all about time like you need to continue doing it just because you know the new assassins creed didn't sell well doesn't mean okay we tried that and now we move on to the next thing you need to make a continued

concerted effort to court these developers and give them enough give them enough uh you know visibility into the fact that this stuff is available on apple devices to continue to push against the now two-decade old narrative that you can't play games on apple hardware like it's been

going for so long at this point that the only thing that you can do to combat the time that it took to build that view in people's heads is reverse the flow of time by continuing to push back against it um and i would like that to be a world in which we live um i would like a world in which

you know the next version of the apple tv or something uh allowed you to play that stuff as well um i i think i think it's all right there this is this is the this is the big frustration point for me at least is i don't know how you two feel about it it feels like it's right there for the taking

like they are so close to having a world in which apple is like a serious other competitor against even xbox and playstation if they want to be and it's just like somebody internally there doesn't want to or doesn't know how to just like reach out and grab it you know yeah yeah i agree

i mean it's to the point now where even though you can do streaming game services on ios and ipad os no one's doing it because i think that those bridges have been kind of burned with with the old the old rules on the app store and i could see a world where yeah you could play g force now on

the apple tv you know maybe you would get xbox streaming on there apple could do its own thing i would love apple to make a controller i think a lot of the technologies that are in things like the air pods would make for an amazing game controller you know instead it's very unappled like

when you think about it they're i mean i give them credit for the deep support for the the dual sense and the xbox controller but but yeah really that's not a very apple like thing to do to be relying on third parties for that important input device for for gaming on the mac or on the apple tv

yeah i feel like so the big thing for me was going to be if i had infinite money and power at apple i would build so and this is something that brands i would build something like proton yeah if there's a company that i would trust to know how to build a translation api

you know i mean look at look at apple and their history and you know what they've done with rosetta we know with the intro transition what they have done what they have done once again with the transition to apple silicon this is a company that has over the years historically built

multiple translation layers to make sure that their platforms could continue working for users and they have shown some signs of that with with the what's it called the game porting toolkit yeah but like and i something like proton which is a very low level sort of this proton for those unaware it's what the steam deck uses for example to let you play all sorts of pc games on a Linux based machine and it's a collaboration between valve and code weavers i want to say to basically take

wine which is this piece of software translates some low level windows apis like direct x and direct 3d to vulcan based apis on Linux and so an apple version of that where you have macOS or you even just like any apple platform becoming capable of translating windows apis because that's

face it developers are gonna build games on windows it's their biggest addressable market an apple needs to start from that recognition right they're not gonna build mac native games but if apple could only build the equivalent of proton for apple devices that would immediately

and work with valve obviously to get that going and you know i wouldn't like i don't i don't think valve would be against it because yes they have the steam deck but at the end of the day they're running a store and the more copies they make the money and the more money they can make off of

the commissions i have a feeling they're gonna be happy which is why they're already teaming up with third party manufacturers to build native steam deck alternatives to just you know yeah you want buy a steam deck but you're still gonna use steam and you're still gonna buy those games on steam

and so imagine you know if i had infinite money cutting a deal with valve and working on an apple version of proton and getting the entire steam library over time running on apple devices that's the dream and you know and at the same time having a cultural change where you have a

service like apple arcade where the mobile first games have a much better balance something more akin to Netflix games for example you know having that too pronged approach of like there's the desktop gaming and there's also a better more balanced take on apple arcade for families and for

people who want to buy ios and ipad us originals in apple arcade that's a dream for me what would you think federico of apple buying a publisher you know bringing an opponent in house basically having having a group like that i thought about that i also thought about like should apple be a

publisher that's what i mean yeah and i don't know given the circumstances right and given the developer relations now and the stories that we have seen from developers dealing with apple arcade seems like a scary prospect but again there needs to be a cultural change right right right

and the thing is why would apple do it right they did it for movies right they're for movies and it's not making that and it's not making them a huge amount of money yes but it supports the hardware sales if you if you have stuff that can push the hardware then you can

you can somewhere hardware i also think in some ways and i know that uh you know at the end of the day it's all about how much money they're bringing in but i do think there is a little bit of long-term thinking when it comes to apple tv specifically where them being able to build themselves up as

a reputable place to see the best television available you know now that uh HVO has become what it has uh i think i think there's a huge value in continuing to pump out great television over time uh because eventually that will again uh push through to hardware sales right

and then you've got a catalog and that's really what it's you know it's where you started talking about which is having a long-term view of this stuff which is building up a catalog and right now it kind of feels like a lot of apple arcade stuff it comes on to great fanfare it sticks around

for a while but then it leaves because an awful lot of games have left and either gone back to the paid app store were available on other platforms now i don't know if this is true about apple but i know that there's been a lot of reporting to kind of confirm this about what it's like working

internally at least at google where there's a lot of as you were saying fanfare when you release a product and getting a product through to release is the thing that gets you promoted in house and then moved on to another product but if you are part of the like sustainment crew that gets left

behind to continue working on a thing after it's launched you kind of get no ribbons for that whatsoever and i'm curious if there's something similar at apple if that's if that's a similar internal vibe it may be it may not be but with the way apple arcade was introduced to great fanfare

and then totally fell off so quickly i i'm concerned that it's more of like an internal culture thing than anything else could be well i think we did it not only did we fix gaming at apple but we also did a successful episode we did but we also did a successful episode of connect with this new line

up well done well done well done well done good job and you know it's we we were successful i'm gonna try i'm gonna try and wrap everything up this was episode 519 i want to thank our sponsors again those were net suit feedbod and back place go check out the links in the show notes for

relays fund raising for st. Jude with the upcoming pacaceton on friday september 20th it's gonna be a 12-hour live stream featuring mike and steven and a selection of other relay hosts some friends doing crazy things and do it for the kids because cancer for kids sucks and so if you can you know donate go check out the links make it donation bigger small it doesn't matter obviously the bigger it is the better you know i mean let's face it you know more money is better but you know

any amount helps and you can go to st. Jude.org slash relay to do so i want to thank random for joining us on this special episode of connected i want to thank you also well yeah you're welcome you can find Brandon you can find Brandon in a bunch of places first off you can find

Brandon a wavelength down online this rejuvenated blog and youtube channel and video series slash podcast that i absolutely love thank you your video on the ps5 pro is really good oh i love the nintendo predictions one too i love the intent of switch predictions video which we're going

to talk about at some point but yeah wavelength is not online you can also find Brandon podcasting into the aether that's into the cast dot online as you can see Brandon is very online in a lot of places it's one of one of our people one of our people into the other excellent video game show very

it's a low key video game podcast and it's it is my favorite personally speaking and you can also find Brandon with the two of us actually at mpc that's on max stories it's just go to max stories dot night slash mpc and that's where we talk about how we spend our money on handels

and portable consoles and portable devices and Brandon is also on threads and master dawn and there's gonna be links in the show notes because i cannot be bothered to repeat the username just click the link and you can find the profile um yeah links are good hyper links are a nice piece of

technology um you can find john in a alternate bachelor places john runs max stories with me app stories we do unwind john is also very much online as a person you can find john and try the master dawn uh you know john you know so i don't think i'm hanging around you don't need to

explain me to me it's always around i don't need to explain john i also don't need to explain me me i'm always me you know i've always been me it's always been so cheesy uh go check out the ius and ipad or ipad or s18 review if you want there's a bunch of bonus features that you can pay for which i love you to check out like i mentioned the illustrations from scout are available as wall papers which look glorious and you can also get them as a screen saver on your mac if you're a mac

person i am not a mac person but i installed them those screensavers and so whenever my mac is connected after a while it just boops and goes into the screensaver with the time lapse it's very nice looking do i need to thank anybody else well i guess we need to thank my const even even though they're not here for uh gifted us connected and um that's it for this week's episode it's the first time in ten years that i've done this show that i have done the outro so uh you know and also if you want

to get a longer ad-free version of this show that has a pro segment before it and the typically people can listen to live also but not in this case uh you can get connected pro at get connected pro.co i believe is the url this week we talked about our superpowers so that's a very good one

listen to oh yes we talked about our superpowers and john as a weird one so of course so that being said say goodbye you're just creepy not nobody's not creepy okay no it's not creepy it's just a adjacent to what soldiers did in world war one there we go that being said say goodbye Brandon goodbye Brandon say goodbye john goodbye i'll be there to you