Hello and welcome to Connected episode 542. It's a big one. today. I'd like to thank our sponsors for making it possible. Squarespace, FitBot, and ZocDoc. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined by my annual chairman, Mr. Federico Faticci. Hello, Stephen Hackett. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Big, chunky episode today. I know. Chunky. I like it. Okay. I believe we have some follow-up from a listener, Mike Hurley. Yeah, that's how I would pronounce it.
Yeah, right? Yeah. Mike says, Stephen and Mary are so sweet together. Always love hearing their relationship on the show. Oh, thank you, Mike. It's nice. You are sweet together. Mika is right. Yeah, we're pretty good. We've been together a long time, you know? It's good. How many years, Stephen? We started dating 23 years ago. Nice. And we've been married this summer will be 18 years. Thank you, Mika, for the follow up. Thank you, Mika.
A little follow out. I wanted to point people to the most recent episode of App Stories. App Stories is always good. I never skip an episode, but this one was absolutely fantastic called The Missing Middle. Give me the pitch for this episode because I think it's super smart. Yeah, so John has been thinking about this for quite some time, actually. It was basically this idea of what happened to the prosumer market. Like, what happened to these apps built not for individuals...
but not for corporations or large businesses either? Like, what happened there? And why is it that it seems like these days apps are either made for individual users or you must be part of a team? That was the pitch. And so we try to analyze like... What's going on here? What role do subscriptions play here? How are companies now charging for these AI-based extras? Like all of these things. So yeah, that was a...
that was sort of the, the, the angle that, that John wanted to talk about on the show. And I think it came out pretty well. So thank you. Yeah, it did. Y'all were talking about like, why is there an, I work for teams and I texted you that it would be called we work. And then no one replied. No, that was very good. I quietly accepted that joke. I got left on read, as the kids say. Yes.
Oh, man. Hey, there's merch. We have merch. People are buying the merch. Yeah. Which is good to see. And we also have some follow-up. some listener feedback about the merch. We do. Tom from Finland wrote in. Okay. That's cool. Love the merch pitch in the latest episode. Federico made a compelling case that we should buy multiple shirts to keep Mike alive and able to consume... Wow, he really got into some... Wow.
Tom really went for it. Yeah, I'm not even going to read that part, but he makes fun of what British people eat, which is not great. However, you did not actually tell your listeners where we can buy said merch. Sure, there was a link in the show notes. but you don't really expect anybody to read the show notes, do you? Wow, this is good feedback. Tom, I spend a lot of time on the show notes. I wish you would read them, but I did buy a domain.
connectedmerch.co.uk. Go there. It will forward to our Cotton Bureau store where we have six shirts available pre-order. Technology should be colorful. Gumdrops, Take a Test Flight, Return to the Tiny, Tiny Heads Special Edition, and Organic Mega Pickles, which is currently the best seller. Obviously. There are multiple international variations. of this domain, right? I just bought the one. Oh, you just bought... Didn't we have connectedmerch.com? I think it... Let's see. .com.
That one doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe we let that one go. Oh, no, it did. It did redirect. It took a second. Yes. Okay, yeah, because I remember we had, like, so now we have multiple versions of this domain. Cool, great. Obviously, the .co.uk. is the best one given our absentee host from the UK. So, yeah. Steven, how long do people have to buy this merch before it's gone forever? And I do think it's forever because the absentee host won't let us do this again. No, he won't.
March 14th. So just the end of next week. So get on it. Nine days. Nine days. Think of all the things you could possibly do in nine days. Make a plan. One of those days has to be you sitting down, entering your credit card information and buying some of the merch to make sure that Mike can still buy some food from... Have we established the name of the supermarket chain in the UK? Ooh. I said Tesco. Yes, it's not Tesco. I don't know. But I'm thinking... Tesco...
Are we sure it's not Tesco? Look, it is a supermarket. Oh, there we go. Sainsbury's, Asada. Kate is putting a lot of them in. Tesco. I knew it. You told me it was a gas station. I thought it was a gas station. Morrison's, excuse me, petrol station. We can't do this. We can't. The more we do this, the stronger Casey List gets. And we can't do that, okay? Can't do that. But yes, connectedmerch.com or connectedmerch.co.uk or the link in the show notes.
March 14th, buy some shirts. I bought some shirts for my families. My kids wanted some shirts, which made me feel pretty cool. I still got to purchase mine. I think I'm going to go with one of everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can wear one connected shirt each day of the week. And then on Sunday, you know, it's a day of rest. On Sunday, I wear nothing. That's what God intended, you know?
hey you want to come over for dinner sunday no no you don't no uh well i mean unless no no no don't can't can't go there yeah okay organic Mega pickles. Yes. It's really good, right? Yeah, it's very good. This episode of Connected is brought to you by FitBod. When you want to change your fitness level, it can be hard to know where to start. That's why I'm pleased to let you know that FitBot is an easy and affordable way to build a fitness plan that's just for you.
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I really love FitBot. I love that it adapts with me over time. And I love those videos so I can make sure that I'm doing things correctly. Personalized training of this quality can be expensive. But FitBot is just $12.99 a month or $79.99 a year. But you can get 25% off your membership by signing up at FitBot.me slash connected. That's FitBot, F-I-T. B-O-D. Fitbod.me slash connected for 25% off your membership. Our thanks to Fitbod for their support of the show. Steven, we have new iPads.
Yeah, two. One press release, but two iPads. Actually, three of them, when you consider how one of them has two sizes. Hang on, hang on. Does that count as two iPads? Well, different model, I guess. In the physical sense, it does. Yeah. But yeah, it's two new iPads. It's the new base model iPad and the new iPad Air, which... We'll get to the specs. We'll talk about this just as a quick parenthesis. I saw somebody on Mastodon.
like post a picture of a quote-unquote fixed iPad lineup from a branding perspective. And they did something that I think is very fascinating. They renamed the iPad Air to just iPad and the iPad to iPad SE. And I cannot stop thinking about how much better that lineup looks from a pure marketing perspective.
Something worth thinking about. It's like the laptops, which we're going to get to in the next segment, because there's also new Macs. But Air is kind of the default, which doesn't make any sense. Apple stumbled into the air branding being beloved and now they're stuck with it forever. You know what I mean? Like, like they tried to kill them after care and they couldn't. True, true, true. Yeah. So iPad Air, we have the M3 chip, which is a... So first of all, this iPad Air is coming...
How many 220-something days after the latest iPad Air with the M2? So that iPad Air with the M2, I mean, you're the historian, Stephen, has to be one of, one amongst the most short-lived products in Apple history, right? It is the second longest or second shortest lived second, second shortest lived iPad after the ill-fated iPad three or the first one that was not.
not super great i had that i had that i did too it got really hot yeah as it did um i was rereading my review of it and i was like oh this doesn't hold up at all like yeah but uh yeah so the the the m3 Not the last time we're going to talk about the M3 today, but the M3 is a bit of an unusual chip. If the reporting is to be believed, it was built on kind of a dead-end process by TSMC.
reporting says that means it's kind of expensive to make and like i thought i think a lot of people thought that apple was going to move off the m3 basically as quickly as they could And then in the last 24 hours, they've put in a bunch of stuff. So it is updated with the M3. That does give the iPad Pro the only iPad with the M4. Although there's lots of other features, obviously, that separate the iPad Pro from the Air. I think mostly the screen.
Yeah, the M3 in both the 11 and 13 inch, which the prices are the same, right? $599 and $799 starting prices. But yeah, M3. Same colors, right? Blue, purple, starlight, space gray. There's an updated keyboard, which is, it's basically the same keyboard as the iPad Pro, right? Yeah, it's very similar. It's very similar, USB-C charging. All available in white. Function row with 14 keys. Backwards compatible with the other iPad Airs, with the M2. Also compatible with the old iPad Air.
If I'm not mistaken. Yeah. All the way back to the fourth gen iPad Air. There's a side conversation here to be had about names when we get to the base iPad. But this new keyboard goes all the way back to the fourth generation iPad Air, like I said, that was released in October of 2020. And so they've made this thing backwards compatible, which is pretty sweet.
Which is nice, which is nice. Yeah, no, it's good. You have or have had the white iPad keyboard, is that correct? I am looking at it right now. How is that holding up? Because people are like, oh, the white's going to be...
Nah. Well, most people are dirty. That's the problem. If you take care of washing your hands frequently during the day, making sure that you don't leave any skinned oil or grease or any other substance on your keyboard, like... it's gonna be fine um you know just take care of your hands and keep washing your hands even even even if you don't think covid is a concern anymore i think it's fine um
Yeah, I don't know what to say. It's not like even I take particularly good care of my keyboard. I just, you know. I mean, you've cut laptops in half. But still, they were very clean, even in half. I wish we had some sort of indication of how the 11-inch versus the 13-inch. To me, 11 inches, like the classic iPad size, you know, it was 9.7 inches forever. And then we had that one, I think one or two, like 10.5 inch iPads.
But 11 has kind of been the size, I feel like, for a while. And I wonder how the big one sells. Like, with the iPad Pro, I get it. Like, if you are using it as your only computer or your main computer.
You want the biggest screen you can have. But the 13-inch Air has always seemed a little bit sort of out of step with that. I would love to know what the breakdown is between those two. Yeah. I am mostly interested in like... like big picture why this iPad Air after last year's iPad Air like why the need to refresh it after
Less than 12 months, in fact, because that iPad Air was announced in May last year when I flew to London alongside the iPad Pro. So it's, what, nine months or so, right? I guess that... just wanted to move to the m3 even though the m3 according to all the reports was a dead-end process i just i find this update really odd personally well combined with the mac news
It means that the M2, like the base M2 is retired now. You can still get it. So maybe that's why. So maybe that's why. Maybe is that? Yeah. So maybe, maybe that's what's going on because the Mac pro like is only right at the high end. M2 Ultra. Maybe it's just a simplification. I get why they didn't step all the way up to the M4, but it is definitely a little bit.
a little bit confusing. It's not the most confusing chip news we have to talk about today, right? There's more of that coming. But yeah, I think if you have like a, you know, an older ipad air and you like you like that size right the fourth generation the a14 bionic you know this thing is gonna blow that thing out of the water it's even going to be a lot faster than the m1 but i don't think
That's a worthy upgrade. But if you have an older one, this seems like a great time to jump on board. Yeah. The base model iPad updated with the A16 chip. Now, the A16, remind me, are we now on the A18? We are. Okay, so this is from two years ago. So this is from the iPhone 14? Yes. Okay. So the base model iPad running that family of chips from the iPhone 14 from two years ago starts at $349 with 128 gigs of storage. Which is twice as much as before.
which is great as much before which is nice good starting price good storage size yeah however however no apple intelligence yeah which is this is the thing that sticks out to me right now It's super interesting. Even though I feel like a lot of Apple intelligence is a little underwhelming at this point, clearly Apple thinks it's very important.
As I wrote in my piece and a bunch of other people wrote yesterday, these things are bought to be put in the hands of kids at school, even at home, right? It's like the kid's iPad. It's the iPad you get for someone who just wants a basic tablet. And it fulfills that need really well. And so maybe those users, Apple feels like, don't benefit from Apple intelligence yet. You know, and maybe that the A17 Pro, right, which is in the iPad mini. Remember when it got updated last year.
The A17 Pro is hanging around, and that's the bottom of the Apple intelligence ladder for A-series chips. Yeah, I really figured they'd go to an A17 Pro, but... I also think $349 is a really important price for this iPad. I think it's the most important feature of this iPad is the price. And if I had to choose between doubling the storage from 64 to 128.
or having Apple intelligence or not, I would have doubled the storage. And so while it's a little bit weird with sort of the rest of Apple's current marketing push. I think it actually kind of makes sense. And I'm not as turned off by it as maybe my gut reaction was yesterday. I think, and I continue to think that for what you get from iPadOS...
the iPad lineup continues to make way more sense at the low end rather than the high end. And that's the unfortunate reality. Especially when you look like you have your iPad mini, the iPad, and the small iPad Air. I think it all kind of makes sense there from a product narrative, from a pricing standpoint.
Things get murkier. I'm looking now. I'm on Apple.com now and looking at the whole iPad lineup. I think as soon as you hit the 13-inch iPad Air and you move into the 11-inch iPad Pro and then the 13-inch iPad Pro, that's where... you know, you basically enter MacBook Air level territory in terms of, especially with the pros, obviously. Yeah, it gets really expensive pretty quickly. It gets really expensive pretty quickly to the point where like...
This is an old conversation. We've been having this conversation for 10 years. I really don't know what to say except that, you know, it doesn't feel like... hyper os 19 this year is gonna be it's gonna it's gonna have anything meaningful uh this is the year federico you gotta believe yeah no i look uh I don't think... I love the iPad, but also at the same time, I don't think I'm stupid. There's going to be a moment, I think, in my future where after enough...
of no updates, right? And no changes to what you can do with an iPad. There's going to be a moment where I'll be... where either you or Mike or John will sit me down and be like, okay, teacher, look, it's fine that you like the iPad, but you really got to come back to the Mac. If things don't change, it kind of feels like... If we go to iPadOS 19 with no more changes to what you can do with multitasking, to what kinds of apps you can use, to what kinds of computery things you can do on iPadOS.
it sort of becomes a liability almost. You know? And I mean, I love this thing so much, but there's only so much I think you can push me, you know? No, I totally get it. I mean, it is a story as old as time. It's like the hardware just runs circles around the software. Yeah. I mean, look, the M4 iPad Pro is this amazing feat of engineering, but if you just need a tablet...
Right? Like, you don't care about the extra stuff the hardware gets you. Like, go spend $349 or even less at Costco or Amazon or something. Like, you're going to have a really good experience on the base iPad. yeah and if you just want a little more and the ability to add that magic keyboard i do think if only the page will load like the new ipad the new ipad air right so if you get the 11 inch ipad air And it starts at 549? 599, I think. 549 for the 11-inch. Oh, I see 599 in the U.S.
I'm in the US store. Huh. No, it's $599, dude. For the iPad Air? What? Oh, education savings. Oh. Why am I on the education? Why am I on the education? Because you're a student of life, Federico. You always have been. I am. I am a student and a scholar, they would say. You always have been, especially on Sundays. Especially. $5.99 for an 11-inch app at the air. If you want to, like...
Honestly, like, would I recommend the iPad Pro today, right now? Would I recommend the iPad Pro to anyone that is not me or Chris Lolly or... I don't know. somebody exactly and precisely like us? No. Especially with the new keyboard, you know, with the function keys and stuff. You know? You know? Like to the majority of the audience on Connected, I would say just get an iPad Air at this point. And more broadly speaking, if you need to do proper computery things, I would say...
Got the computer we're going to talk about in a minute. The $14,000 Mac Studio. No, wait. Yes, that one. That one. Okay, so that's iPads. They've all... Kind of been updated recently now. And I suspect it'll be quiet on the iPad hardware front. Maybe an M5 iPad Pro towards the end of the year. Maybe. Or it could be a year. Like, this could be it for a while.
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Let's start with the M4 MacBook Air. Yes. I mean, right off the bat, we have a new color. We have sky blue. Looks pretty good. It looks nice. Looks nice. So it's silver, starlight, sky blue, and midnight. So space gray has been sent into orbit, I guess. Yeah, into space, yes. Into space, yeah. Looks pretty good. The starting price is $9.99. So last time around with the M3, it was $10.99 and you can get an M2 for $9.99. And if you went to Walmart, you get an M1 for like...
700 bucks yeah uh but now the good like the best macbook air starts at 999 that's that's incredible yeah that's the biggest news of this product i think like the top macbook air You can still spec it up, right? You can still add quite a bit of thing across to it. 32 gigabytes of memory, 2 terabytes of storage and stuff. This is what I meant two minutes ago. This is the computer that most people should buy. The dollar to computer value that you get.
with this M4 MacBook Air. I mean, sure, we got to wait for the reviews, but we know mostly how an M4 runs and performs. Here, with $1,000, less than $1,000, in fact, $9.99, you got a computer that does all kinds of computer things. And you just cannot say the same for an iPad Pro, unfortunately. So I think the color is great, but being able to go under a thousand, I think that's the real achievement for this new MacBook Air. Yeah, it's fantastic. So yeah, M4.
The slightly more expensive ones have more GPU cores going from 8 to 10 cores. Again, I don't... I don't think any workload on a MacBook Air is like you're really going to notice those two GPU cores being gone. A couple other things I just noted going through the product pages. There's an optional 70-watt USB-C charger for fast charging the MacBook Air. Okay. Pretty sweet. And I wanted to ask you about this. This is still Wi-Fi 6E. No Wi-Fi 7. That's also true on the other M4 models. Yeah.
base M4 models at least. You have Wi-Fi 7 now, as we talked about last week. Do you think Apple needs to get moving on this? Yes, but it doesn't surprise me that...
You know, maybe this is one of the reasons why you want to, you know, if you want to stay below $1,000, you would say, well, what can we cut, you know? And maybe that's something that you can cut, you know? Because for most people... 6c is is fine yeah i think so yeah would it be better with wi-fi 7 yes obviously everything would be better with wi-fi 7 but you know I don't think it's a tragedy or anything. No, I don't either. The MacBook Pro is Wi-Fi 6E. And the...
iPhone 16 is Wi-Fi 7. So I think that's the only Wi-Fi 7 anything that Apple's selling right now. It'll come. I think maybe even in the M5, we'll see that. All the other MacBook Airs, the M2, the M3 are gone, but the M1 deal is still at Walmart, still ongoing, right? I believe so. Okay, so you can either buy an M1 MacBook Air from a few years ago for like $700. Yeah, right now it's $629 at Walmart. Incredible, because that's still a...
I can't say a really good computer. I think it's still a really good computer. But you can also get for $999 an M4. Yeah. Which I think is, like, this has to be the default go-to answer. Like to anybody who just wants to buy an Apple laptop. Has to be the default that you would recommend to most people. Gotta be. Oh, yeah. I think just like the iPad Pro, the MacBook Pro...
makes sense if you have certain needs, but most people don't have those needs. And the MacBook Air is like, it's really good. In fact, I have an M1 that I kind of use as like my personal laptop a little bit, but it's also like my beta.
machine during the summer and that laptop is still excellent but like if i could pick up a refurbished m2 or m3 i probably would now but if you have a intel macbook air or even an m1 macbook air the m4 i think is would really be a substantial update and i think at 999 if those minimum specs meet your needs It's a great value. And it comes in blue. Who doesn't like blue? Sky blue. Sky blue. That's a nice name. Yep. Pre-order today. Ships March 12th. Okay.
Mac Studio. Okay. All right. So what's going on here? So the Mac Studio got updated two years ago or a year and a half ago to the M2 Max and M2 Ultra. And of course, the Mac Pro has the M2 Ultra as well. Well, the Mac Studio got an update today to the M4 Max and the M3 Ultra. which is wild because we have not seen the M3 Ultra to date, right? It's the first time we've seen it. There's a whole press release like saying like, oh, look at this.
chip it's all new and like talking about what it can do and it does seem amazing we'll talk about that in a second but no m4 And right as we jumped on the call, it was reported that Apple had made a statement to a French outlet saying that the M4 Max does not have the... Like the edge connectors, you know, because the Ultra S2 Max is basically like stuck together. Okay. That fabric connection in between them, that the M4 Max doesn't have that. And so...
It seems like the M4 Ultra may not be a thing, at least in terms of how the Ultra has been built before with two Maxes put together. I, when this first happened, this was rumored very late in the day yesterday by Mark Gurman and someone tipped him off, I guess. And my thought was, well, maybe the M4 Ultra.
will be like a Mac Pro exclusive. But now it seems like the M4 Ultra may not exist. Lots of questions. But I think that makes it easy to look at this update and think, well, you know, it's actually not that big of a deal. But if you go and read about the M3 Ultra, this thing is, I mean, it is unbelievable. And it's Thunderbolt 5, like the M4 stuff. So they've upgraded it there. half a terabyte of unified memory, 512 gigs of unified memory, which is just bananas. Wow. And, uh, like.
30 core CPU, huge GPU, you know, Apple always talks about efficiency as well, but, um, You pointed out this bit about large language models and AI about the token generation. Yeah. So they're claiming 16.9x faster token generation using an LM with hundreds of billions of parameters in LM Studio compared to the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra. I saw on Reddit. that they actually tested the 400 billion parameter llama model, which is obviously, like, it's a big, chunky model.
And to have it run, first of all, to have it run locally is incredible. But to have it be almost 17 times faster than a Mac studio with the M1 Ultra, that's... I would love to see the specs of the machine that they tested with that version of Llama running locally. But that is a beast of a computer. So obviously, like, it is strange, right, that you can buy a computer that either comes with M4 Max, but the better version is called M3 Ultra.
So you're going one step beyond and two steps ahead. But it is what it is. Yeah. Up to half a terabyte of unified memory. What? Like, this has to be the computer for people doing really intensive academic things. AI things. This is the kind of machine that not even you... Not anybody. The most you can do is what? Compile an app in Xcode and encode a bunch of 4K or 8K videos? I don't even think you do 8K. No, I don't.
Maybe in a couple of years, you maybe want to do 8K. But still, this is not the computer for that sort of thing. This is the computer for serious researchers and developers of AI products. And it's... Frankly, the numbers are astounding. And to have those numbers in a machine that it's not even that huge, like you put it on a desk, it's basically like a thick Mac Mini still.
I think it's remarkable, honestly. Oh, it really is. And it also really calls into question why the Mac Pro exists. And I love the Mac Pro. I love it. So this is where I wanted to go next. In a world where you can have an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with half a terabyte of unified memory, 16 terabytes of SSD storage, you can run the 400 billion parameter LAMA model locally. And that's all in a small, thick Mac Mini. What's a Mac Pro? Yeah. I'm not putting anybody on blast. I'm just asking loudly.
What is a Mac Pro? No, I agree. I mean, even that last Intel Mac Pro that I had in 2019, it was the most powerful Mac. and the most capable and flexible that you could have. Well, now it's not the most powerful, you know, until today it was tied with the Mac studio. Now the Mac studio, I think quite frankly, is going to really surpass it.
in terms of capability. And it's not expandable because of the decisions made with Apple Silicon, right? I'm not putting GPUs in it. You can put storage in it. You can put network stuff in it. Like there are still some... uses for those slots, but not the way that it was in the Intel days. And I just don't know. I think it's really conspicuously absent from today's updates. Where is the M3 Ultra Mac Pro? They just didn't do it. And I don't know, man. I just don't know.
Are you at any point going to consider buying a version of a Mac Studio? I don't know. I mean, I had one for a little while after I sold the Mac. pro but then i i started my experiment now a couple years ago of like just having a really nice 14 inch macbook pro and i've been really happy with that like i just upgraded at the end of the year to the m4 max and I really like laptop plus display and I don't need the power of that. Definitely don't need the M3 Ultra, right? It's like.
An M4 Mac Studio would be basically the same computer I have now, just less flexible in form factor. I like that I can take my whole computer with me instead of a subset of my computer with me when I had desktop and then laptop. Really, I think I'm basically out of the Mac desktop game for the foreseeable future. Again, I just bought a new 14-inch MacBook Pro at the end of the year. I'm very happy with it. I don't know...
I don't know what would bring me back to the desktop. Do you think Underscore is going to get a Mac Studio? A new Mac Studio? I don't think so. I mean, I think his is a 14-inch as well, but he likes having a MacBook Pro, as far as I know, for the same reasons I do, that he can take all of his work with him. Makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah.
I haven't seen any big Apple Store charges today from him, so I don't think he's gone off and bought one yet. Okay, not yet. You never know. Keep an eye on my email. If you see a $14,000 charge. Yeah. The big difference, I think, that we haven't touched on between the two processors, to back up a second. in addition to like the high end specs being way higher on the ultra is the memory bandwidth is basically doubled 410 gigabytes a second versus 819 gigabytes a second.
I like that it says 819 instead of 820. I feel like Apple tested it and it's like just shy of double. So they're honest with their specs, hopefully. But if you have a workload that really depends on that, my word, the M3 Ultra. is going to absolutely destroy anything. Yeah. I mean, we're not far off from a terabyte a second of memory bandwidth. Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. Like, how it could be so fast.
And so that's where I think the AI training and the LLM work, like that's where that can really shine. But again, for most, I mean, anybody we know, right? The M3 Ultra is just... way overkill and i'm glad apple makes it i'm glad apple is catering to those use cases but i certainly don't need it yeah it is cool though it's it's cooled like these things that
push the boundaries are are are cool because they they break a ceiling you know and and and you can appreciate that even if you don't use that machine i think yeah yeah just like the just like the screen and the ipad pro kind of right to bring that back like it's really cool and if you can appreciate it that's great but a lot of people can't or don't need it or aren't willing to pay for it and that's that's okay too yeah
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So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to ZocDoc.com slash connected to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's ZocDoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C, ZocDoc.com slash connected. Our thanks to ZocDoc for the support of the show and all of Relay. Mike was sad that he is missing. The Jeremys, it's here. It's time. Okay. iOS 18.4 beta 2 includes eight new emoji. If you're unfamiliar with the Jeremys, it's a game that we play where...
Federico has to guess the name, the official name of these emoji. The chapter art right now shows the emoji, so you can follow along. There's also a link to Emojipedia. Our friends over there put a blog post together. showing these. And you've got to name them. And we're going to see how you do. Stephen, I've tried my best to stay away from posts on social media, from images, from...
Things that I knew were showing those emoji. I've tried my best. I know that I don't have a lot to guess this time around. Only eight. Eight.
okay okay i'm i'm finally looking at the image now yeah i just shared it with you oh okay so we're gonna start in the upper left this this this face okay are you first before we begin are you going to be more forgiving than michael oh we'll see you know you know you and i we have our thing yeah for the next few weeks you know you can't give me a point you know we'll see out of the kindness of your heart you know yeah you know
All those Sundays together. Okay. Okay. So first one. All right. So I'm looking. So this is, we know from emoji history that these are called face with something. I've been burned by this face emoji before. So this is not an answer. I'm just thinking out loud. So my gut reaction would be this is a... tired face however i know that apple prefers to call this emoji face something something so i could either go so
The thing is, I got to think about how to call the things around the eyes when you're tired. I know how to call them in Italian. That would be okay. You have... Bags? Eye bags? Bags under the eyes? Bags on the eyes? Bags around the eyes? okay so i'm just i'm throwing it out there okay this is face with uh face with bags under the eyes bingo face with bags under eyes oh i'm so glad that's good it's good face with tired would have been
Face with tired would have been... Face with tired. Yeah, because they do these things, right? It's face with something. Okay. All right, so the next one... Should be pretty easy. I think this is probably the easiest one. No, there's probably another one. There are several easy ones here, actually.
Fingerprint? That's correct. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. So this is the touch ID emoji. Yeah. Out of all of these, that's the one I was most surprised with we didn't have an emoji for. Right? Yeah. The next one is interesting. So we're looking at some purple paint. I don't think Apple is going to call this like purple paint because why would there be an emoji for purple paint? So I think that's paint.
I honestly have no idea. I... What do you call... Like, it's when you spill some paint. Like, that's what it looks like. Hmm. Kate, I had... Did you also have Art Attack when you were little? I thought it was like an Italian thing. So Kate in the Discord is referring to Art Attack. That's a TV show that, oh my God, we had an Italian version. The guy who used to do Art Attack on Channel 2 in Italy is not like, obviously Art Attack was like stopped many, many years ago.
the guy that used to do art attack is now still beloved and still when known for doing art attack and he now does like this like crafty projects on Instagram. He's such a lovable dude. Giovanni? Giovanni Muchaccia. That would be the name. It's a funny name, even in Italian. I had no idea that Art Attack was like an international thing. I thought it was like an Italian local thing. That's awesome. um anyway this is some uh paint the
I'm going to go with paint. What do you call it? Paint splatter? Paint splattered paint. Splattered paint. I'm going to give it to you. But the name is just splatter. No paint. Just splatter? Just splatter. That doesn't make any... Thank you. I'm glad that I worked my way around it, but... Yeah. Just splatter? Like splatter of everything? Okay. Cool. Weird. Why is it purple? Why is it weirdly three-dimensional? Right. Nondescript gooey liquid in the emoji. Interesting.
Okay, so these next two and the final one I think are going to be my issue. I know how to call this vegetable in Italian. I'm pretty sure that would be Ravanello. I have no idea what the English name is. I... I have no idea. Have I seen this before anywhere? This red... Oh! Is it radish? Final answer? Yes. It is not. I mean, that's what it is, but the name of it is root vegetable. Oh my God. Really? Yeah. Root vegetable. Root vegetable.
But it is like... I would call that a radish. In a supermarket, you would call it a radish? Yeah. A root vegetable is like a whole genre. Like carrots are a root vegetable. Right. You know? And there is a carrot emoji. Yeah, I don't know why this one has a generic name. Maybe someone knows, or maybe this is just referred to as root vegetable, like more broadly. Like turnips, also a root vegetable.
Oh, turnip. What's the other word? Yeah, turnip. Yeah, it does kind of look like a turnip. Maybe it looks more like a turnip than a radish, actually. But root vegetable. Yeah, not a very specific name in my mind, at least. All right. So that's the first point I don't get. Okay. So the next one, what is this? This is a tree from a scary tale. Like it's an empty tree with a hollow...
thing. Yeah. There could be like an owl living in there. It doesn't have to be creepy. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at it. No, it's got creepy. It looks creepy. It's got creepy vibes. Obviously, I don't think Apple is going to call it a creepy tree. No, imagine that. Or a horror tree. Yeah. So the question will be, what do you call...
An empty tree. Do you just call it like, is that, is it even the right adjective to say it's an empty tree? I'm sure there is an English way to say it that I don't know because I know how to say it in Italian. Hmm. A tree without leaves. Branches? No, because you can see the trunk. We do have the tree emoji. So there has to be a qualifier to make this tree different. And I keep thinking about that hole in the middle section. I'm going to get this wrong.
i i'm gonna go with uh it's also it's a very sad tree uh i'm gonna go with empty tree You're on the right path, but you're not quite there. It is a leafless tree. Leafless! Oh my god! Oh, come on. Leafless tree. Leafless tree. See, I would have guessed if I wasn't, if I was you, I would have guessed hollow tree because like the hole in it. But yeah, I was going to say leafless.
leafless that is that is even that's actually very sad it's a very sad name it is a leaf a leafless tree it's also hard to say leafless tree that And faced with tired, I'm just saying like big 2025 vibes in this emoji set today. Yeah. Oh, the first one is king. Absolute king. I'm going to use that one a lot. That emoji. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so the next one should be easy. Yeah. This is a musical instrument. It's a harp. That's correct. Okay. And the next one also. Unless Apple has done...
Something weird. I wouldn't have any other idea what to say. It's a shovel. Apple calls it a digging tool. No, I'm just kidding. Shovel it is. Okay, okay. Shovel it is. And now here's my big problem for this game. Let me get closer to the monitor. Zoom in. Computer enhance. I'm looking at a flag.
That almost looks like the... Oh my God, I'm gonna... Like, there has to be a flag similar to this that belongs to Great Britain, right? Like, white with a red cross. It feels... in that vein you know i will say no comment here is a is a political comment about the world right we're just talking about it does look britishy you look you know like it it's got that it's got that feeling
It's got that Britishy feeling. Now, the issue is that in the upper left quadrant of the flag, that portion is filled with a red color. And... two shapes that I'm getting closer to the monitor. I'm trying to understand what I'm looking at. Enhance. Computer, enhance. This looks like a dragon monkey to me. It looks like, so it's got four feet. It's an animal. I think it's an animal because initially I thought I'm looking at like some Asian alphabet, but no, these are two figures, two creatures.
And I think, like, my first reaction would be, like, it's some kind of dragon monkey because it's, like, long, but it's got the cute paws and a little head and a very long tail, it seems. However, I'm pretty sure that a dragon monkey does not exist. Yeah, confirmed. So what country would have... Is this a reptile? Instead of some kind of monkey or some kind of squirrel. And why two of them? Also, I am ignorant when it comes to geography. So I...
I don't mean to offend anybody if, like, I don't know the country this belongs to. I don't know why, on one hand, I get, like, strong British vibes, but on the other, this... I don't know if it's the color or the type of animal. It does look Asian. To my brain. I'm just going to throw it out there because I have a friend who went to this country to play football. Americans would say soccer. To play football for a team in...
Bhutan. Interesting. It's not right. It is not right. Okay. There's a link in the show notes because I was also unfamiliar with this. This is the flag of Cirque, which is an island in the English Channel, you know, between France and England. It was an English thing. Yes. It is a, I'm quoting Wikipedia self-governing British crown dependency. Kind of like the Isle of Man, I think, is in that category. Obviously, I would have never guessed. What's it? Cirque? Cirque. Yeah, S-A-R-K.
I would have never gotten it. It's the first time I'm hearing that name in my life. Yeah. So it was a lion. Kate says, these are helretic lions. Three lions is an English thing. The white red flag without the lions is the English flag, so you're not too far off. So you were in the ballpark. It was British. It was English. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't monkey dragons or whatever you said, but... Look, that's...
Dragon monkey, I think, would be a fascinating animal. It's a Pokemon. Dragon monkey. Dragon monkey. Oh! Obviously, Monkey the Dragon is a character in One Piece. Do you know what One Piece is? I don't. It's a manga and anime. Okay. Well, this is... Why just eight? This is quite underwhelming. Why just eight emoji? Have we run out of emoji? I think so. I think that's what's happened. But hey, you got five right and three wrong. You did really well.
So I got wrong the radish, the tree, and the flag. I honestly thought you would be four and four. I did not think you were going to make it to splatter. Thank you. Good work. Yeah, I've gotten better over the years, I think. I mean, some true greats on this show have happened playing the Jeremys, right? That's where Weird Fish comes from. Take a sip of Grandpa.
Like all that stuff. Yes, yes, yes. And these are, I should say, there's a link in the show notes to the Jeremy's Gazette, which is a running scoreboard of how you have done. Complete with your other guesses. It's a lot of fun to look through those. Oh, there is a website for all the stupid things that I've said. Yeah. You really struggled with palm down hand. You said hand that is about to pick up something or hand that just dropped something.
I see. That was not your best guess. Yeah, that was not. I'm scrolling back. Wow, I really struggled in 2022. We all did. You can tell. I was buying a house. Yeah, you're stressed. I was really struggling. Look at all these guesses that I had for the troll. I said, person who sent you an email saying stay in your lane. Wow. Okay. Wow. Pass me. Good job. All right. Well, hopefully next year there'll be more emoji.
Yeah. It was used to like 50, used to be like 30 or 40 back in the day, you know? The segment used to take a long time. There were only six last year though. There was Shaking Head Horizontally and Vertically, Phoenix, which you said, Flaming Bird. He did not give you a point for Phoenix Bird, for Phoenix. Yeah. That's why I said that Mike used to be like really strict about it. Yeah. Now, maybe now he's a father and, you know, he's gotten softer. Yeah. Maybe.
Potentially. Potentially. Potentially. That's the hope. Yep. And then lime, brown mushroom, and a broken chain rounded out last year. When I guessed people hugging. My first comment was two people get in and on. The biting lip you called the nib nib. Why do people still listen to me after all these horrible things I've said? Pouring liquid when Dracula is upset and drops the blood from the glass. Roller skate. The thing from the Tonya Harding movie. Piñata emoji. BTG guesses. Happy COVID. Oh no.
Tea with holes at the bottom for bubble tea. That was horrible. I remember that. That's a bad emoji. Well, good work. Congratulations. Thank you. I think that's it. I think we did it. We did it. Lots of computers that you can buy this week. You know, especially the $14,000 one. So go nuts. Yeah. If you buy a $14,000 Mac Studio, send us some feedback and tell us why. No, no. If you buy that, you can come on the show as a guest.
It means for sure that you are an interesting person to interview. That's probably true. And maybe a more Mac power users thing. Maybe I'll siphon them off to MPU. Yeah. Okay. I don't mind. We'll see. Uh, this week has been weird for me, Federico, because normally we record NPU on Tuesdays, but for reasons we're doing it tomorrow and it's weird doing connected first. Like I am all out of sorts.
You know what I mean. I know what you mean. You've been there. Yeah. Y'all are doing app stories all over the place. You're doing a lot of podcasts, Federico. I do a lot of them. What helps is that I've tried to condense my recording days down to just two. So most of it basically happens between Wednesday and Thursday. Yeah, that's key. Well, I think that does it for this week. If you want to find show notes with a bunch of links to things we spoke about, go to relay.fm slash connected.
Slash 542. Those links are also, of course, in your podcast player. There's one that says merch like 27 times in all capital letters. That's where you can get some cool t-shirts. So go there. In case you forget. Yeah. You have until March 14th, right? What's the domain, Stephen, so that we don't get the comments? Connectedmerch.co.uk or .com. Straight from the island of Sark.
That's right. That's where the domain register is. I don't know if that's true. Well, it now is in the canon of the show. So yeah, go get a shirt. If you want to find us online, you can find Federico at maxstories.net, where he is the editor-in-chief. Hey, tell people what you're doing with NPC.
Yeah, we launched a paid version of MPC called MPC Excel, which is basically an extra version of MPC. It's on Patreon for $5 a month that gets you access to... to an additional, like an addendum of NPC where we go... in depth on any particular topic on a weekly basis. And that's because the regular free for everybody MPC is also going weekly. So you get everything basically now. MPC every Tuesday.
for free, for everybody, as it used to be, but now more, and MPC Excel, which is even more topics, even more in-depth. We did a first one. on the history of the PSP hardware, sort of the impact on the industry and our memories with the PSP was really good. And we got to do another one tomorrow, in fact, for next week's Tuesday. Yeah, it's fun to branch out. We decided to use Patreon instead of Memberful, primarily because of like...
A lot of gaming podcasts are on Patreon. There's an established audience. You know, you got to reach people where they are, so to speak. And so it just made more sense to use the platform that a whole bunch of people are already using to get. podcasts about video games and gaming in general. And it's fun to try out something new, you know? So yeah, that's what we're doing. And thank you for bringing that up on the show. You bet. There'll be a link in the show notes. People can go learn more.
You can find my writing at 512pixels.net, and I co-host Mac Power Users here on Relay. It comes out each and every Sunday. I'd like to thank our sponsors this week, Squarespace, FitBod, and ZocDoc. And if you'd like to hear an episode of the show without the ads and with extra content, go to getconnectedpro.co.
And you can get Connected Pro, again, longer ad-free versions of the show that we do each and every week, just seven bucks a month. You also get access to our Discord, some members-only podcasts at Relay, and a bunch of other cool stuff. All right, Federico. Until next week, say goodbye. Arrivederci. Bye, y'all.