556: This Photo Is Not 2000 Years Old

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode number 556, recorded March the 24th, 2025. This week brought to you by Google Gemini, Factor, and ExpressVPN. I am one of your regular hosts, Jason Snell. And of course, Mike Hurley remains on leave. And so the next up in the parade of guest stars on Upgrade is Relay co-founder...

And co-host of Connected and Mac Power Users and probably other things too. It's Stephen Hackett. Welcome back, Stephen Hackett. Hey, Jason. It is always fun to be on Upgrade. It's good to have you back. It is, I am calling in all my favors for this leave. So thank you for joining. Of course. And finally, somebody not named John. So that's good.

that's right how to break the johns there are a lot of johns out there um but that's over now it's over now it's non-johns it's four non-johns something like that all right uh snell talk time i want to do a two snell talk questions steven too because they're interrelated and they're kind of follow-up but they're kind of snow talk so um the first one is from listener casey uh who says sorry lists and our casey

Oh, God. Who says, I've always been super cagey about the exact town I live in. Hashtag don't be creepy. And rather than just say, I live in the nearest city, Richmond, Jason. regularly and willfully brings up Mill Valley on his shows. Am I being too paranoid or is Jason being too forthright or is it both? We have a Hill Valley question. Well, I...

Okay, so first off, it's not really accurate for me to say I live in San Francisco. I could say the Bay Area. The truth is, I feel like I'm not really worried about OPSEC. uh about operational security because because i bought my house in 1999 and therefore all public records of my address are on the internet i mean please don't be creepy please don't come to my house but uh like i can't it's just like how i will always get spam email to certain email address

because those email addresses have been out there since the 90s. Like I could hide it, but and Mill Valley is a big town and the Bayer, you know, I just decided to be precise, especially for that. I think Casey is smart, actually. He lives in a metro area that's got smaller cities as well as Richmond. I think he doesn't need to be any more specific than Richmond, but I don't know.

For whatever reason, I just decided saying San Francisco is inaccurate because I don't live in San Francisco and saying Bay Area is accurate, but super broad. And sometimes the context comes up where I talk about my town and I don't have a problem. with it and it's too late the horse is out of the barn as we used to say back up in the on the on the ranch yeah i'm looking at you and find my right now you're in in the garage yeah um

Yeah, we had a FaceTime conversation with my daughter. She calls us sometimes and then just we talk to her while she drives home from work. And I brought up, while she was doing that, I brought up Find My and we watched her. She says, oh, I'm home, but she's still miles away. She just wants to get off the phone with you. That's a real... Believe me, she is not the one who wants to get off the phone. Now I'm looking at Casey on Find My.

Yeah, we know where he lives. Yeah, we could tell people, but I'm not going to do that because I think he's right to just say Richmond. That's good enough. You know, he wants me to come do his fiber and Ethernet through his house with him. I heard that because you're a fiber expert now. Run away. Can I break some news on Upgrade? Yep. Breaking news from Steven. I'm going to visit Casey in October, I think. Whoa. And we're going to do a long weekend and do his network. Long by long.

You are referring specifically to the runs of fiber in his house, right? That's right. Yeah. It's going to be a gigabit weekend. 10 gigabit weekend, actually. Stephen and Casey's 10 gigabit fiber weekend. That's right. Wow. If it were a different time, I'd vlog it, you know, if it was 2017, but it's not. And I'd have to blare at Casey's entire house as we're talking about. Yeah. We don't want to do that. There you go.

We don't want to do that. He says he doesn't even do pictures. I guess the only pictures of Casey's house that are public are that one bedroom where he records. And that's it. That's it. People can drink in that. Go back to the YouTube version of when he was on Upgrade and just drink in Casey's guest bedroom slash office slash recording studio. Very, very generic. It may even be a set.

Like, you know, I mean, who knows? You know, it could be, he could be somewhere else and that's just all fake. It could be. I mean, it's not. Because it's Casey. It's not. Casey is Casey. For people who are wondering, what's Casey-less like in real life? You know, that's Casey. Casey is Casey. He is a completely genuine person.

who is pretty much exactly the case that you hear on podcasts. I do have a second Snell Talk. This is from Pat B. And he writes, Jason, I was shocked when you mentioned Mill Valley and didn't include the most famous resident I remember. B.J. Honeycutt from M.A.S.H. Now, M.A.S.H., okay, M.A.S.H. was a TV show, popular in the 70s and the 80s, about a bunch of doctors.

at a surgical hospital in Korea, but it was sort of a commentary more on Vietnam, but it was set in Korea. It ran longer than the Korean War by far. If you plot out the events of the MASH TV series, it couldn't have happened because the series was so popular at last. far longer than any American war in Korea lasted. But... BJ was a character added a few years in, played by Mike Farrell, and he always would write letters home to his wife, Peg, in...

Mill Valley, California, which, and he would rhapsodize about how wonderful it was and how he wanted to go back there. And honestly, that's most of what I knew about Mill Valley when I moved here was, oh yeah, BJ Honeycutt is from there. And somebody suggested at one point. that just like they've got that statue of Captain Kirk in Iowa, that somebody should erect a statue of BJ Honeycutt in Mill Valley. And at one point, there was literally a public...

comment period for what they should put in the plaza in downtown Mill Valley. And I said, you know what, I'm going to do it. And I wrote in, we should do a statue of BJ Honeycutt from MASH.

And they came out with a report and they said one person said BJ Honeycutt from MASH and that was the end of that. But I feel validated and thanks to Pat, I guess. Pat should probably... uh applaud my my gesture but uh yeah also also hot tubs were invented here that's i'll throw that one in i'm mountain biking those are the marin county okay and mill valley contributions to society hot tubs

And mountain biking. Nice to get in a hot tub after you've done a lot of mountain biking. But you like biking. You like biking. I do. Mountain biking was entirely invented on the slopes of Mount Tam behind my house in my town. Yeah. That's awesome. Uh, that's really cool. Obviously we have Elvis in Memphis. Oh man. That's, that's next level famous. Yeah. And, uh, I guess after that, like Justin Timberlake probably, although really he's from a suburb. Not.

really memphis um well yeah but close enough but if you talk about memphis contributions to the world beyond elvis it's like the blues delta blues yeah right and um and it's it's a downer but it you know it's been turned into something better which is the mlk assassination obviously, which is now the Civil Rights Museum, which is a spectacular site. And right next to Central Barbecue, which is really a contribution to society too, frankly. It's true. Different types of...

contribution. I don't know if we've talked about this and we won't go into any details, but I am anticipating avidly my next trip to Memphis. I'm looking forward to it. It is such a treat to get to go to Memphis a couple of times a year. I'll be creeping on you before too long. I know where you live. That's true. You do know where I live.

Yeah, so we did a Snell talk. Yeah, so let's move on to fatherly advice. This is a segment I invented. I even did the stupid chapter art for it, in which I ask, have people figured out yet that every single person who's been a... guests are on this is a parent, is a father. And so fatherly advice is, anyway, I've given it away now. Stephen, do you have any words of wisdom or observations to impart to your professional partner, Mike Hurley?

here early in the episode where he's probably still listening. Still listening. I mean, if he made it through the riveting... No Valley talk. He loves that stuff. What are you talking about? BJ, Honeycutt, MASH. He could just sit there. That's what he should do while he's like rocking and the baby is sleeping. He should just watch old episodes of MASH. MASH. MASH is great. It's a great show.

I said this on that analog episode, but it's definitely my go-to advice really for anybody who's a new parent. It's so easy to lose sort of the contact you have with your spouse, especially in those early days. And I think if you're... spouse is a mom like it's a very it's a very hard season or can be a very hard season very complicated season of life and so make sure they're doing okay and

It's easy for everything in the household to revolve around the baby, and that's not wrong. But your spouse is going to be there once your kids are out the door, right? It's something that... Y'all are experiencing now. That's right. All the kids do is grow up and leave you. That's right. And the plan is for your spouse to still be there. So continue to invest in that relationship. Continue to make it the primary relationship.

it'll be good parenting is a uh team sport is what i would say i mean sometimes it isn't sometimes you're forced to do it alone but like if you are in a relationship And you're the parents and you've got the kids. The thing to remember is you're in this together and your family is now you and your partner and the kid or kids.

And it does change the dynamic, but the fact is that, you know, I think it's also an opportunity for bonding and a growth of the relationship because now you're not just connected to each other, but you're connected to this other person and you're responsible for their... you know life and growth and health and all those things and that's another point for you to connect as people and like become actually closer together because you are now you know the the team

with this screaming child that has entered your house. So it's a beautiful thing. Well, thank you for the fatherly advice. I appreciate it. Of course. I didn't know how this was going to go, but it's gone pretty good. Everybody... I've not yet had somebody just say pass, although I'm worried a little bit that Scott McNulty is going to come on here and say, don't do it. It's like, it's too late, Scott. He did it. They both did it. And Mike and Adina are now...

Just they got a baby. It's great. Let's do some follow-up. Follow-up. Thank you. Sorry, wrong show. Wrong show. Very wrong show, but that's great. I like it. You're just repeating what I say. Follow-up. Um, we talked about last week about, um, bending phones and, uh, John Syracuse and I said, Maybe Dr. Drang could tell us the details. I was tossing it off, but the moment I said his name, I thought, oh, I've summoned him. He's going to appear. And he did. Dr. Drang, the internet's favorite.

a pseudonymous snowman slash mechanical engineer structural engineer structural engineer i think we got his his title wrong too and nothing makes dr drang more angry than uh well not angry vexed than referring to somebody as the wrong kind of engineer he is a structural engineer yes

Yeah. Y'all may have said material engineer. Yeah. He's not. He says that he's not. He's a structural engineer. He is the guy, for people who don't know, literally, he has a blog post where he was walking somewhere and a light post had...

fallen over. And he was like, oh, let me at it. Let me see what happened with this light post, because that's kind of what his job was. He's retired now, so he has more time to listen to our dumb podcasts and correct us about math. So he wrote... a piece called Simple Phone Bending, where he explains sort of a simplification of the idea of if you make the phone bigger, how much more bendable is it?

This is what he wrote. So if the beam is lengthened by 10%, which is about how much longer an iPhone Pro Max is compared to an iPhone Pro, the moment... will increase by 10%. And if we make the reasonable assumption that the side rails of a max size phone will have the same cross section as side rails of a non-max phone, the bending stress will also increase by 10%. Not a lot. He says it's not impossible that they actually looked at the size because remember the...

iPhone Plus is rumored to be bigger than the Pro, but not as big as the Pro Max. They may have looked at that gradient. from pro size to pro max size and looked at the stress on the side rails and said, that's too far, that's out of our zone of comfort, so we'll back it off. Keeping in mind also that when they back it off, they're backing off the size of the battery, they're backing off the size of the screen.

all of those other decisions that have to go in it. But Mark Ehrman's report was they looked at a Promax size and said, nope, it's too bendy. And Dr. Drang is like, you know, maybe. There's a lot going on there. I took a year of college calculus, Stephen. I look at his site and I am completely baffled by the math. I love Dr. Drang. I love him. You just chatted with him. He's a good...

A good pal, and we do. We love him as a human being and also as a man who does lots of math. So we don't have to. Thank you, Dr. Drang. Which is impressive for a snowman. Their arms are just sticks. I know, right? He's doing it. He must be using PCALC. That's the power of the pseudonym. Yeah, it's all Siri.

Oh, no. Yeah. I do want to highlight something you said about, you know, if you back off the size, you're also backing off battery and all the other things. And when we're talking about a slim phone. Obviously, the first thought is, well, what is it going to do to the battery life? And Gurman, I think some others have reported that Apple has some combination of technologies that are going to mean the battery life in this phone will be comparable to the others, which is really interesting to me.

It really just goes to show like how complicated it must be to design iPhones year after year after year. And then they really over the however many years it's been, 18 years of the iPhone. really very few misses. I mean, the 6 Plus was bendy and didn't have enough RAM. Like, there have been phones that aren't as good as others, but it...

It's so impressive to me that they can do this on such a regular cycle. And they're working on all these complicated problems that, quite frankly, seem impossible to someone like me to figure out. Yeah, we'll talk about this maybe a little bit later. Because there's a lot of discussion of sort of where Apple is succeeding and failing, let's put it that way, right now.

always say so like we were talking about this ai stuff and there's more of that that we're about to talk about um and what i always want to say and try to say is I'm not inside at Apple. It is a black box to me. It is complex. And having managed organizations that are a fraction of the size of Apple or even a part of Apple.

I even from that, I know how complex this stuff is. And so I don't want to understate the complexity of the job they do. They are one of the world's largest companies. They are a high tech company that is pushing. uh forward with this technology and it's only them and a handful of competitors that are even doing that and the people who work there it's easy to lose sight of the fact that what they do is an enormous engineering

R&D, design, all of that stuff. It's an enormous effort. And just looking at Dr. Drang's math about the iPhone Air is... A part of that is, look, they are balancing... battery and battery systems engineering and their own ship designs which is an enormous undertaking and all the other parts that go in there and you know building their own modem how does that affect the power like it's It is always an enormous undertaking and they have to ship.

enormous numbers of units. And that's the other thing I always say when somebody gets a bad iPhone on week one and they're like, uh-oh, the iPhone is lousy. It's like, there's no way there aren't bad iPhones. because they make so many of them that at 0.01% failure rate, there are a huge number of failures out there. And that's why you can just take it back and get a different one. But like it is worth, again, we're going to criticize.

what is worth criticizing about apple but that doesn't mean we don't appreciate and shouldn't appreciate kind of the amazing uh run that they do and the incredible difficulty level of all the stuff that they do and most of it they get right right because there hasn't been a

I mean, the biggest phone disaster in the last 15 years was that Samsung phone that caught fire. But like Apple has managed with all of its little gates here and there to be pretty solid at all this stuff while pushing it forward. You're not evacuating an airplane, so you're doing okay. Pretty solid. The AI fallout continues as well. It's a little bit more follow-up. Mark Gurman reported that.

Siri has been taken away from John Gianandrea and given to Mike Rockwell, who is moving into Craig Federighi's software group. Mike Rockwell, who is in charge of Vision Pro, is keeping Vision OS.

the report says, but will leave Vision hardware behind to one of his lieutenants, basically. Rockwell is apparently a longtime critic of Syria. And I don't know if you remember this report, but I remember this report that... originally the vision pro was going to be more siri focused and that rockwell got so frustrated with

uh the the lack of ability to make siri good enough for vision pro and that he tried to basically grab it and influence it and was told that he needed to keep his hands off of it and that's one of the reasons vision pro is not uh, as Siri focused is that they wanted it to be, um, well, that guy is in charge of Siri now. So yeah, I think I, I, I do wonder part of me thinks about the dog that caught the car. Like, all right, you, you got it.

Let's see what you can do with it. You've been complaining about it all this time. But it is a visible change that I think suggests that. Apple is very much aware that the Siri situation is unacceptable. Also, I don't know what you think about this. My vibe from this too is that Gianandrea seems to be much more... professorly and researchy and not maybe product shippy. And Rockwell seems to be a product ship guy and you need that to ship products. I think that's right.

I think the biggest thing for me in all of this is that Siri is now under Craig Federighi. It's sort of mind-blowing to me that that wasn't true before, that the guy, for better or for worse, who's in charge of basically all Apple software, Siri was outside of his at least direct reporting path. And now that it is folded in, like, we'll see how it goes. I agree with you. Mike Rockwell caught the car and a bunch of people.

A bunch of people have worked on Syria over the years, and it's still the state that it's in. And maybe he's the person or, you know, will bring in the people to get it. where it needs to be. But that's a really big task. And I hope a couple of things. One, I hope that he's actually given the time to turn it around. I hope there are not expectations with an Apple that, hey, this is going to be fixed. Bye.

iOS 20, you know, in a year and a half or whatever. This is going to take some time. So I hope that just for Mike Rockwell seems like a nice guy. Like hopefully he's not held accountable for something that's going to take a while. But two, I hope that through the reporting through Craig Federighi, that Siri can be.

a bit more streamlined with the rest of the os and i mean that in two ways i think first of all from the beginning siri has always been a layer on top of ios or later on mac os etc right you hit the button It does its own thing, and then you go back to what you were doing. And part of this promise of a Siri that is more integrated with your data through AppIntense is going to be able to do things for you.

Like, that was really never going to work if Siri was just an overlay. Siri has to go deeper. But two, like, again, for better or for worse, Federighi's over all of this stuff. And they have done... pretty good job shipping stuff on a regular basis. Now, again, just like the iPhone thing we're talking about a second ago, there are examples, right? A recent one is...

messages in the cloud, the feature that syncs your iMessage stuff and your history with your iCloud account. That shipped pretty late, but in my experience, it's been really good. And so they took the time, they got it right. Hopefully that is going to be instilled in the Siri team because clearly someone in that organization has thought, well, this is okay enough. I mean, if Gurman is to be believed.

They were debating shipping the thing that they just delayed until very recently. That means someone in the company was lobbying for it to go out the door. And I think a combination of Rockwell and Federighi.

That's going to be insulation from that sort of thing happening. And when they ship this, I hope and trust that it will be better than it would have been otherwise. But if I were Mike Rockwell, I would have some heartburn right now, I think. Sure. They had a... uh it's not good enough moment clearly where somebody was like let's ship it and somebody else said it's just not good enough and i don't know i mean you could you could argue that

That argument has not won the day in some previous Apple intelligence features where they've shipped it and it hasn't been good enough. And this one is even more sensitive if it's using user data. If it's using your apps, if it doesn't work right, that's not great. I wanted to mention Joe Rosenstiel wrote a piece last week on Six Colors about Siri and Spotlight that I thought was...

I mean, he's asking for a very specific thing in some ways because he uses type to Siri. He said, because otherwise I'm just going to yell at Siri. So I type instead. But he said, we're often trained to do natural language. things for search engines. And he basically said, typing into a search engine, you get a bunch of results ranked, and it usually includes the one you want. But if you type to Siri, first off, like regular Siri, your phrasing matters.

Like if you're trying to ask how to do something in mail and you don't say how, it tries to do something in mail for you instead, which is not great. But one of the things that I thought was very perceptive about that piece is that part of the underlying... um rot here is that spotlight is also maybe not up to speed and and you want a lot of your personal data is being indexed and searched by spotlight

But if you try to search in Spotlight, it's old. Spotlight feels very old in the sense that it's not really making any assumptions about... your language that you're typing you really need to think about like old school search engine get the exact keywords right and he's absolutely right like and and on top of that it's the disunity of it where you've got

two places that you can instruct your device. And one of them is sort of smart, but kind of dumb. And the other one is super dumb, even though it knows everything, which is spotlight. And I looked at that and I thought, this is a great example of... how parts of Apple's product line are not integrated properly because they're, I think, in different groups and different fiefdoms, maybe. And the biggest example of that that I can remember where I got a little peering into this.

fact that like different parts of apple do different things is when workflow got bought by apple and turned into shortcuts we initially all thought that the os team bought workflow because that would seem like the logical place to integrate system wide is operating system. And it turned out, no, the, what I was told was that the operating system team didn't want to buy it. So the Siri team bought it.

And I thought that seems, I mean, I get why it fits with Siri in a lot of ways, because it's kind of automation and control stuff. But like, what does it say that you've got parts of Apple? that are in charge of your operating system, not being interested in something. And then other parts of Apple that are also sort of in charge of parts of your operating system, wanting something to integrate. Like it's a bad, that was a, that was a red flag. That was a bad sign.

I think it's good that they bought it, but I didn't like the fact that apparently part of Apple wanted it and the other part didn't really want anything to do with it. And maybe that's a reason why shortcuts has been kind of all over the place too. I don't know. It's weird. I have one more piece of follow-up, which is from Anonymous, who wrote in and... He said, hi, Jason, regarding last week's episode with John and Apple potentially using an M series server chip in a Mac Pro.

I think this would make a lot of sense. I used to work as an IC designer at Broadcom for RF SOC, system on chip. And I wanted to share, it's incredibly disruptive to do any variant of a chip. Not only for the additional design time, but all verification and testing down the line. With the tight timelines Apple has, it's probably a lot more efficient to drop in an M server chip.

So basically the idea here, and I think we've seen this with Apple, like Apple can only do so much. And every new chip variant, look, they're so good at reusing their chips in different devices and plotting out. That piece of information that I gave, I've been talking about for a few weeks now, where I was talking to somebody involved in Apple's chip stuff, who said, every chip we design, we know what computer it's going in. We know what device it's going in.

when we design it. That's all part of the secret sauce of this is that they're aligned and the chips are made for specific Apple products, not for a product line. And this would follow from that, right? Which is if they want a high-end chip... and they also are building future servers for their private cloud compute, whether it's the high-end chip or it's just functions on a pro chip or a max chip, they're probably...

trying to build one fewer chip, right? Right. Just like, do we need to build a new chip for our servers or can we, whatever we need to do for the servers, can we integrate that in another chip we're building? because they don't want to build five or six chips because they're not Intel. Everyone has a huge cost and they are trying to target their specific system. So I think this is a good reminder. I love hearing from people who have knowledge of how chip stuff works because I don't know.

all the details of this stuff on the inside and i like being reminded it takes a very long time the roadmap is long they're working in advance and this is a great data point that like every variation is hard it's not like you can just knock off 5m fours and sure not break a sweat that no it's actually very hard every single time yeah it's all this work and it's the fabrication of those chips and you end up with bending like it is very so very complicated

I do wonder about the thing of like, we know what computer it's going into. Like, that's how you get an M4 and an iPad and a fanless MacBook Air, right? And when they've, as they've gone through, you know, it was the iMac. and the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, is they've redesigned the systems from Intel to Apple Silicon. It's like, we've built this around Apple Silicon, and you can see that as a, it's just like a way to say it has Apple Silicon inside, but no, like...

We designed these at the same time, and we designed it not only, we didn't design the MacBook Air just for the M2, but also the M3, the M4, the M5, the M6, however long this design. carries forward. And that is a strength of Apple Silicon right until you get to the Mac Pro. And then it's like, well, you've designed this stuff to fit in a Mac studio or in a laptop.

And it means you potentially leave a lot on the table when it comes to a full desktop tower machine. And so, yeah, the Mac Pro is such an interesting story when it comes to Apple Silicon because... They don't have anything currently that really sets it apart. And that, you know, makes people like John Syracuse and me to a degree a little sad.

Yeah, Mac Studio is actually a great example, I think, where the cooling in the Mac Studio is specifically designed to handle those Macs class chips, and they know that. And for me, that's the question about the future of the Mac Pro is... are they looking at the cooling envelope of the Mac Pro and saying there is something we could put in there? And that's the great unanswered question about why the Mac Pro didn't get the M3 Ultra is the saddest thing. And I know I talked about this with John.

The saddest thing is if June comes and they just say, yeah, okay, the M3 Ultra is in the Mac Pro now. Because that means they didn't even care enough to put it in the same time that they did it with the studio. The good news would be if they're holding it back because there's going to be a different chip.

that is outside the range of the Mac Studio, that they can't fit it in the Mac Studio cooling. And that's the reason why the Mac Pro hardware actually starts to make sense is that they need that extra. from that hardware and that it's not just a big Mac studio. And we'll see. I mean, I just, I don't know. I don't know what the story is there, but it's...

It's not great right now, but that would be, again, it's either going to be the other shoe drops and it's just sad, or the other shoe's going to drop and it's going to be like, ah, okay, the Mac Pro has a purpose now. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Factor. You might be feeling that it's time to optimize your nutrition. If that's you, Factor has chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. They're dietician approved and ready to heat.

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And for supporting Upgrade. Steven, it's rumor roundup time. Yeehaw! Thank you. Thank you. Very nice. It is... Mark Gurman, of course, the sheriff of the rumor roundup, reporting in his newsletter that Apple is considering plans, considering is the word I highlighted here, to put cameras... on Apple Watch. He's reported about this before. I'm not sure how much of this is new. It's not decided, but his angle here is that they're actually thinking about it now.

not for FaceTime or anything like that, but for visual intelligence, the idea that they are, which is not, it's kind of an underwhelming feature right now, but I think what Gurman says is they're high on it and eventually being able to... put their own models in there and analyze what is in the world around you and give you actionable information.

He says it would be on the side for the ultra. So you'd kind of like hold your ultra out and go boop. And it would like look at whatever you were looking at. And on the front for the series where you have to kind of like flip it over and go boop. And then the series will do it that way. But this, I don't know what I feel about cameras on the Apple Watch, but this makes more sense. It's what I worry about.

is that it's the people who've been trying to build this camera who are like, how about visual intelligence? Will that get our camera put in the Apple Watch at last? Because I think FaceTime shooting up your nose while you're trying to talk to somebody on your watch is not a great use of a camera. seems a little better. And he said, this is similar to what they're thinking about with cameras and AirPods is just sort of like allow your devices to understand things about what's around you.

Yeah, I don't, I'm not excited about it. And maybe it's because I'm not a visual intelligence user. Like the times that I've tried it, it's because we're going to talk about it on a show. Yeah. Maybe that's just me, but even Google Lens and other things, I just don't tend to point a camera or something, but what is this? I can...

Other than translation. This is not a need I have. Translation is a thing that I do, but I very rarely otherwise dealing with this sort of stuff. Because it just doesn't, I just don't think it's good enough most of the time. If they can make it good, like I love the idea. of your device knows where you are and knows things about you and knows what you're seeing and can explain it to you. I like that idea, but in practice, it's just not very interesting.

I also wonder about the potential pushback on something like this. I know we all walk around with iPhones. My phone's got three cameras on the back and one on the front. It's covered in cameras. iPad laptops like we've all gotten used to that and we have been used to that for a long time right phones even before smartphones had cameras but suddenly when you're talking about airpods and watches things that you may wear

on your person in times that you would not have your phone, that feels a little bit different. Like if you're at the gym and you have your watch on in the locker room, like your phone's in your bag, like suddenly like. You have a camera in a space that a camera is not expected. And I don't think this would be like full glass hole kind of levels of pushback.

But I think there would be some with some people. And take off the table security things. You can get an iPhone without a camera in it. Apple or other companies make those. for people who work in secure locations, or people may have to leave their phone in a locker at work and not take the phone in to work because of whatever they're working on. Well, suddenly you're talking about a watch and AirPods that now have those requirements?

I just don't know. I just don't know if if visual intelligence or honestly, even FaceTime or just having a camera on your person at all times. if that's worth that potential downside. I think this is one of the fascinating areas where we have to look, again, I think we're going to talk about this later, but where Apple's doing well and where Apple's doing poorly.

It ends in a situation, and I think we're going to see this more, where Apple becomes culturally across the company aligned in that AI is the future and that all these features are super important. And so let's take visual intelligence. Apple says visual intelligence is an enormous part of the future. You all go work on visual intelligence, which right now is just super limited. It's like a Google image search or a open AI.

I mean, it's like there's very little there. It's not that interesting most of the time. The hardware people are like, we're on it. And Apple's hardware people are executing so much better than their software people right now. They're at the top of their game. I think that's one of the weird things about the current state of Apple is that the hardware is not the problem at all. They seem to be the best at doing what they do. And so you end up in these situations where like, I love the idea that.

they're like, yeah, we can put a camera in a watch and we'll make it kind of more scanny and a little less like it's a FaceTime thing. And so you'll be able to kind of like... find a piece of paper and go boop. And it'll scan a document and tell you what it is and act on it or put it in your photo library or whatever. Like, great. When I walk the dog with just an Apple watch. And if I see something weird that's worth taking a picture of, I can't. Right. So I like, okay.

All right. So hardware people do this. It's like amazing hardware miniaturization that they've done. It's incredible. Meanwhile.

The software team has shipped an Apple or visual intelligence is like, it doesn't really do anything. And that's the concern is that Apple puts... all this amazing hardware in these products and if they're not supported properly by the software then it's just a waste of everybody's time so that's that's my concern about it now is that if i think about visual intelligence now i don't see why it's worth doing this so okay so they've got great confidence in the

future of visual intelligence according to mark german are we confident in their confidence i don't know not after the last few weeks i'm not no anyway that's that's the look there's Because this is, here's the thing. I think that this is a direction within Apple, which is put sensors everywhere.

and put cameras everywhere. And the reason you do it is because they're foreseeing a future, which I think is not unreasonable, where your location and what's around you has all sorts of benefits. It has accessibility benefits too, where it can say, I see this thing.

of you if they ever build those you know like meta ray band style glasses that have a camera in it same thing you're you're using ai on the on the phone to process all of that image stuff and then you've got accessibility issues and you've got other intelligence cues and

There's so many different things it can do. It's more precise on a map because beyond just the GPS, especially if you're in a city, it can recognize, it already can do this. It can recognize the buildings and know where you are. Great, but... You could be aligned in that way and build all your hardware toward that direction. But if you ship the hardware and it turns out the software is just not there, what are we even doing here?

I don't know. I don't know. The other thing I wanted to mention, by the way, since this is the rumor roundup segment, is that Mark Gurman is apparently making the media rounds. Now, I'll just point out, we had Mark Gurman on Upgrade like five years ago. I remember. We did. Um, but the sheriff is, uh, is riding the range. He was on app stories for 28, where he talked about his origin story. And he was also on a Mac rumors show one 39.

So he's out there. He's talking. I heard a rumor. Oh, see, I'm going to get I got a Mark Gurman rumor for you, Stephen. OK, who's the sheriff now? My sources are reporting that it's possible that Mark Gurman will be on. Mac break weekly tomorrow. I don't know if that's worked out or not, but that was the rumor I heard. I'm just saying, I just want to drop a Mac, a Mark German themed rumor for fun. Okay. I like it. Um, but yeah, we did, we had Mark on, uh,

like five years ago, and it was a great conversation. He's the, as Gruber wrote the other week, he is the foremost...

Apple reporter right now. There is nobody else out there with remotely the sources that he has. The information breaks some stuff from time to time behind their paywall. Wall Street Journal and New York Times haven't really done a lot with it. Occasionally we get leaks out of the... um supply chain from the people out there but um most of it is by mark german and so you know tip tip our hat to him he's uh he's killing it and and i i think as gruber pointed out

The most obvious way that he's killing it is nobody else is remotely close. So good for Mark and good for Bloomberg. I would like to segue into lawyer up another segment. Do you enjoy being in all these segments? We don't. It's great. I mean, I feel like I should have brought more outfits, but... The structure helps. The structure helps, especially when Mike is gone. It's nice to have a structure.

You don't need Mike. You got the structure. I got the structure. It's basically like Mike. Mike is just a structure in human form. Lawyer up. The EU told Apple to open up access to notifications and smartwatch interoperability. This is, you put this in the document. Why don't you tell me what's going on? I did. What does the EU want Apple to do?

They want them to make the Pebble good. No, we're going to get to Pebble in a second. Well, Pebble, even back in the day, Pebble was a good example. Like there was no Apple Watch. And when Pebble was starting out and I had a Pebble. Do you have a couple? Yeah. And it was passable, but not really super integrated with the phone. And the thought was, well, the Apple Watch is going to come out and it'll be super integrated. And it was.

But the fact is to this day, they're trying to bring back the pebble and they still can't integrate with it. In fact, it's kind of worse in some ways than it was before. And that's what this, I feel like that's one of the things this EU ruling is about. Yeah, so there are several points to this that Apple has been told to deal with. The first is that non-Apple smartwatch devices...

should have the ability to receive push notifications, including pictures, and reply to those notifications. So this is something that really wasn't around in the first sort of Pebble era. But, you know, you get a notification and you can do a tap back or you can do a quick reply with your voice or with the little keyboard. And that's available to the Apple Watch because they're all it's all conjoined with the iPhone.

but not on other things. Or if it is, it's very limited. So like if you have a Garmin smartwatch, you know, if you're a big runner. Some of those companies have done things like they do a fast reply, but then it has to go through their app, or their app has to be open. It's a workaround. It's hacky. This mandate says, no, no, no. You got to open that access up to notifications. iPhone users going on.

We'll also be able to pair their non-Apple Connect devices, such as headphones and smartwatches more seamlessly and easily with the iPhone. So we're all familiar with, you get a new Apple Watch or a new set of AirPods. You open it, the card comes up, right? And you take a picture of like the weird QR code in space, or do you just hit the button on your AirPods and they sync up? That system seems like it's going to need to be...

opened up. And if you've, I did this recently, we had to replace, this is a very upgrade topic. We had to replace our shower speaker because whatever waterproof JBL we had for like 10 years finally died. I replaced it with a newer waterproof JBL. All right. That's loyalty. I love it. Yeah, it's great. The first one was great. It lasted a long time.

I like hit the button and like I sort of waited for the card because I've just paired AirPods and stuff recently. I was like, oh, I got to go into like settings and Bluetooth and add device. And they want that to be more easily done. faster data connections to and from the iPhone. And then one that's sort of outside of, like those all feel related. This one feels a little bit different. Developers should be able to integrate.

alternative solutions to AirDrop and AirPlay on the iPhone. So, quoting, iPhone users will be able to choose from different and innovative services to share files. with other users and cast media content from their iPhones to TVs. Right, which you can do now, but it's not sort of the system level to do that. So the fact is... There is no reason today that the Apple Watch should be better than any other smartwatch on the iPhone.

because Apple has built features for the Apple Watch and doesn't allow anybody else to use them, right? I feel like fundamentally that is...

anti-competitive. And we could talk about what happens in the early days when Apple is building the platform. I don't think Apple needs to build every product for everybody at launch. I think that there's an argument to be made that for them to innovate, they need to build it for their product and then they can start rolling it out and there could be a window of

availability for it where it's like well you can you can build this stuff for your own stuff but within five years it needs to be apis that are open to people like and again that would be a huge advantage for the apple watch for example over other products but you know 10 years in 10 plus years into the Apple Watch, the fact that nobody else can do what the Apple Watch does because Apple won't let them is not great. It's just, it's not great. Of course, Apple doesn't like this.

Apple said, today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don't have to play by the same rules. It's bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them. understand our concerns on behalf of our users. And as with everything Apple says, there's truth in it and also not truth in it. So again, I'm sympathetic.

But I also think that this is the classic Apple move, which I'm sympathetic to their argument. but they overstep, they overreach because they're using a reasonable argument to expand it out into an unreasonable argument, which is if we build stuff for... our smartwatch why should we ever give it to anybody else and nobody else has access to our platform but us so

It's the EU saying, no, you need to be able to let other people compete with you, which doesn't seem unreasonable. Again, ability to innovate. and giving away new features for free. Like, I get it. And that's what I'm saying. I don't think everything Apple does should be an open API the moment that it ships. I don't think that. But I do think that ultimately...

They need to not withhold all smartwatch features from their platform for 10 years except for the Apple Watch. That seems unreasonable to me. It marks a shift. This is not a fully formed thought, so forgive me. having something like Bluetooth fast pairing with the card and stuff, like, is that really a big advantage of AirPods? Like you see it one time you set it up or if you restore them, I have to set it up again. Right.

What makes AirPods good is the sound quality, the connection, the noise cancellation. It seems like Apple's trying to pick a fight over a feature that's not even that important or that big in that specific case. But at the same time, this is the part that's really not fully formed. Doesn't it make the iPhone better and more valuable to an end user if they can bring other smartwatches to it? Or if...

A smart ring has better health integration, whatever the example is. Apple has shifted at some point from what makes a single product better for a user to what makes the ecosystem better for a user.

And that feels like where a lot of the friction sort of lies. Yeah, I agree. I think you could throw the whole App Store issue in here too, which is it's like Apple has... decided that the ecosystem is is entirely controlled by apple and apple's products and There isn't that broader thought, which is, well, but to make the ecosystem good.

we need to have a lot of players in it. And the conflict of interest is, yeah, but we have a smartwatch. Why would we let any competitors in? And I know I've said this on this podcast a lot, but it bears repeating. Why compete if you don't have to? I mean, I understand it as frustrating as it is. I think for us observers, I understand why Apple has this opinion, because even if we say Apple, it's going to like the Apple watch is not, if they completely open up or AirPods, every feature.

of connectivity on the iPhone to those products. It's not going to change, Apple being number one. No. It's not. It's not. But why be number one when you could be 100%? Yeah. I think in these conversations, a lot of people will be like, well, think about the iPod and iTunes, right? Like Apple made iTunes and made the iPod. They were made to work together. And at times there were ways to break that.

marriage apart but i think a couple things are true one that was a long time ago and apple was dealing with things like music rights and and other complicated things that don't really come into play of like, can my Garmin get iMessage notifications, right? So it is a different playing field. But the truth is also we live in a different time where...

There are lots of companies making lots of products, lots of good products. Yeah. And Apple has built walls in a way where, like you said it perfectly, that they don't have to compete and they hide behind. privacy or user security. And some of that may be true.

Some of it's not true. And they are hurting potentially one part of their business in order to try to boost another one, which was your point that I thought was really good. Your point that you're still thinking about, which is that the iPhone. is less good because people who want to make various wearable things like Fitbits and Pebbles and other smartwatches can't.

make them as good for the iPhone. It means that when you look at Eric Mikakovsky's Pebble Eric, Eric Pebble, if you look at his blog post about bringing back the Pebble, he says, It's going to be way better on Android. Yeah. And I roll my eyes because he's like, well, of course all of us here use Android because it's open. I'm like, whatever, dude. Okay, fine. Whatever. You worked at Google. Great.

But you can be obnoxious and right. Yeah, I know. This is what Epic Games taught us. Sometimes the worst person in the world is right about something. It is... Like, the iPhone is worse. And I cannot understand people who contort to say, well, actually, the fact that the Pebble... is much worse on the iPhone than on Android is a good thing because, you know, my column. And it's like, no.

It's not. It means that it's a company town with one solution and then everything else has been intentionally degraded because they want you to buy the Apple Watch. And not everybody wants an Apple Watch. And for Apple, I want an Apple Watch, quite honestly. honestly, but not everybody does. And so allowing there to be more, it's not even competition, variety of products available to your users in your ecosystem is a benefit to your devices. And this is...

Stephen, it goes back to the fact that I still get the feeling that Apple, as much as Apple talks about all the money that it's paid out to developers after taking its share, that the truth is Apple ascribes 100%. of the iPhone success to itself, when in fact an enormous portion of the iPhone success is due to the apps in the App Store, which were made by people who are not Apple.

But Apple even gives itself credit for apps in the App Store because the App Store is Apple's. So therefore, it's all from Apple's invention. And everything else they do, they do these self-serving reports where they talk about how much economic... impact they have in various countries and they roll every like app developer in there like they were an apple employee yeah and and i mean it's it's deeply misguided because

And I think that this is biting them in a bunch of areas now in terms of working with developers is the iPhone. I mean, you could really argue that what made the iPhone fly was the app store. So if there's no app store and there's only Apple apps on the iPhone. What happens? The answer is the iPhone is not what it is today without those developers. And yet they have this attitude that is pretty pervasive, which is it's all about us.

And that's the wrong attitude. The attitude is our products are improved by the other products in our ecosystem. And therefore, you should let... other products in your ecosystem. And they do to a certain extent, but you have these areas where they're just like, well, no, we can't have book reading be good on the iPhone or the iPad. It can never be good.

Other than in our app, because we have decided to bar Amazon and Kobo and anybody else from selling books and comics directly from the app. They have to do a big workaround. And we don't because we're the owner and they're giving themselves an advantage.

But it makes, it degrades the iPhone experience. And there are so many different examples of this. This is just another one. Because again, I don't think the Pebble is going to compete with the Apple Watch at all. But there are some, if you want to use a Pebble in the year 2025, you are not.

a serious Apple watch potential customer, right? You are looking for something very different and that's okay. That's okay. Cause Apple's still going to be, the Apple watch is still going to be the best on the platform.

And if it's not going to be the best on the platform, well, Apple should get a kick in the pants and make it better. Yeah. Yeah. What's the word for it? Anti-competitive? No, that can't be the word. That can't be the word. Yeah, options are good. Wrapped and rotated. And people should have them. And yeah, Pebble coming back in 2025 was not on my bingo card, but here we are. I like that Eric Pebble has enough money. And enough sway at Google that he can get them to open source.

their os so and that he can fund essentially because he's not kickstartering this i kickstarted the first pebble they're just making he's just he's just using his own money to make them and then he's going to sell them like like in the old days before we had crowdfunding

Um, and I love it. I, I, I, I think I still have my pebble around here somewhere. I, I ordered one. I've got the core to do the black and white one, uh, underscore. And I each, uh, he, he talked to me into it. Uh, just to see what's going on there and and honestly like if apple has to change some of these things like i mean i i like the apple watch a lot but there may be times where i choose to wear the pebble for whatever reason right or

Or if I were a runner, I'd want to wear a Garmin. Again, coming down to options for consumers. This ruling also, I think, will have an impact on things like the Meta Ray-Bans, right? The idea here is interoperability, that the meta-ray bounds is an example where Apple doesn't have a product in the category, but they can only integrate to a certain degree.

And it's also so many of these things are like, well, you're going to run our app. And if our app stops running, everything stops working until you run our app again. And it's just, you know, again, Apple should. I would argue in that case, since it's basically using the same kind of things, that if Apple doesn't want to play in that area, that's fine. But if iPhone users want that product, they should be able to use it and have it be decent. And that requires that level of interoperability.

Yeah. We'll see. We'll keep watching it. The lawyers, they are lawyering up. Keep watching the clock. No. Wait. Keep watching the briefcase. Got it. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Google Gemini. I used Gemini for the first time the other day, and the most impressive thing to me was just talking to it. You go live with it and then it's just like you're having a conversation. You can just talk about your day or have it explain something to you or start brainstorming ideas.

I'll give you an example. I pretended I had a job interview coming up and I asked for it to help me prep for the interview. It immediately started suggesting common questions I might get asked. Then I started talking through my answers out loud and it would give me feedback. And it's all happening in real time like I'm talking to a career coach.

That's just what I tried first, but you can talk to it about anything. And that's the magic of it. How you can have this back and forth and it's all seamless. If you haven't tried it yet, it's definitely worth checking out. You'll see what I mean. Our thanks to Google Gemini for the support of this show and all of Relay. All right, so we also need to talk about streaming boxes. Stephen, this is back to...

Mark Gurman, actually, because something Mark Gurman wrote in one of his pieces kind of set me off. Yeah, yeah. I think you texted some of us about it. I did. I did. I texted you and Mike about it. Then you turned it into a blog post. Yeah, well, and it came up on Upgrade and I ranted about it there. And during, I believe it was during Upgrade, I bought a Fire TV. a Google TV and a Roku 4k streamer box because, um, Mark Gurman wrote this piece about Apple TV being a laggard.

And needing a hardware update because it was a laggard with a low market share. And look, I think, as I say in my article that set this whole thing in motion. I think he's just conflating the two things. I think it's basically a writer or editor kind of conflating these two things rather than getting into the details of the complexity of it.

Apple shipping a new Apple TV box with upgraded specs is not going to change anything about the Apple TV because it's already fine. It never has. Never. I mean... Maybe in, was it 2015 when they launched tvOS and the future television as apps and all that stuff. Sure. Maybe then. But since then, in the 10 years since, it's like, well, do it.

I upgraded when I bought my first 4K TV. And honestly, I don't even know what Apple TV I have. I know it uses the newest remote, but I think the third and the second gen could. So I honestly don't even know. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's the thing. It is so powerful. Well, first off, it's so much more powerful. We got to talk about streamer boxes, but we also got to talk about embedded streaming.

Because so many people, I think, I haven't looked at these numbers, I probably should, interface with connected content on their television sets through the apps on their TV. Oh, yeah. And those processors are... terrible. If you've ever tried to use it, like even on relatively recent TVs, they are so slow. I have a Roku TV, you know, it's so slow. And the Roku box is faster than that. The standalone box I bought for $100 is faster than that, for sure. But, you know, it's just not an issue.

First off, a lot of people are worried about that lowest common denominator. They're like, well, we need to support all of our apps on all devices, and that means these terrible TVs as well. But if you buy a box, yes, Apple's market share is pretty low. And I do think that they need to make a more affordable box because I think that it would be good for them to do so. And so if Mark Gurman's...

If I read between the lines, maybe one of the things he's saying is if they update the Apple TV hardware, maybe that will enable them to get the price point down a little bit, which I say great. But that's literally the only hardware innovation that I want to see on the Apple TV on that side. I know there are people out there who are like playing games on the Apple TV who want more, but it's really such a niche.

use for the Apple TV that I'm just, for the purposes of this, let's just not even talk about it. Because when he says they're a laggard, he means that people aren't buying them, that it's a very low market share. But I was really skeptical about this comment because I thought... My experience is that the Apple TV is actually pretty good. And while we're really frustrated about all the things it doesn't do, the hardware especially is not the problem. So I bought these boxes. I bought...

Yeah. The Google TV, the Amazon and the Roku. And I have spent the last month kind of using them on and off and trying a bunch of things on them. And I can tell you up front that the hardware, again, the hardware is not the problem. Apple TV hardware is fine. It's just fine. The software is a problem although it made me appreciate the things that are good about the Apple TV.

a lot more too. Do you have any questions for me? Can you debrief me about this ridiculous project that I gave for myself where I spent several hundred dollars for a single blog post? Yeah, which is not going to work out for you financially. Let's wring some more content out of it now, Stephen. This is what I'm saying. That's right. Put it on the podcast. If anybody would like a Fire TV stick 4K, call me, I guess. I have one. Yeah. I have it.

You can just look at his address and go get it. Yeah, so you checked out several of these things. And I will say, in my household, the Apple TV... is our television experience, right? I don't have cable. We use Hulu Live. My kids, to them, television is tvOS, and it's been that way since the second or third Apple TV, basically the whole time.

And so I have not spent a lot of time with these other ones. And I was surprised. I want to start with Google TV. And you really praised its live tab where they're pulling in. what's on live television through YouTube TV, but also YouTube premium and all these other places. Yeah. Streaming channels. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like they've really kind of gotten that figured out.

Yeah. I mean, one of the big things that I heard from somebody was like, well, I don't care about live TV. It's like, well, okay. But a lot of the fastest growing segment in streaming right now is live TV. It's fast channels, free ad stream, ad supported television, but also. all of the services are adding live channels. And one of the reasons for that is sometimes, I mean,

Not to put too fine a point on it. Sometimes you want to sit down and turn off your brain and just watch something or you're making dinner or you're folding laundry and you just want to put something on. And these are essentially playlists unless it's like a news channel or a sports. channel. They're essentially playlists, but that's fine. Have you looked at cable TV lately? Most cable channels are also just playlists where they show 18 episodes of Law & Order in a row.

So with streaming, you can go to Peacock and just watch the Law & Order channel. And it's just a channel where Law & Order will play. And you don't have to program it. You don't have to pick an episode. And it's a very popular kind. Like, not everything is on demand or has to be on demand. And a lot of people are really responding well to what we all...

know that TV always did well, which is sometimes you just turn on the TV, flip it to a channel, and veg out, and that's all you want to do. And think about how many places where TVs are that maybe aren't the living room where that's true. So what I just thought about was... The tire shop that I go to, I was just there because I had an issue. Their TV in their waiting room, 100% of the time is playing MASH. We spoke about MASH earlier. Oh, man. I don't know.

If the guy's got a DVD player in the back and he just like swaps them in or if it's streaming somewhere. But like any time I've been in there over the course of years, you know, it's MASH. It makes sense, right? It's just in the background of your waiting room. Most people are going to look at their phones or pull a laptop out and get some work done because they're waiting on a tire to get patched or whatever. Or you can watch Bash.

Or you can watch MASH. And honestly, I prefer that than having like cable news on. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. These, you know, these services, right? Like Google TV and the Amazon thing and tvOS. They're designed with the living room in mind, I think, but very clearly there are times where they are used in other contexts, right? So we talked about airplay a second ago with the European Union.

A lot of people put Apple TVs in conference rooms and classrooms for AirPlay. And now that AirPlay is on televisions, and I think even some projectors now, like maybe that's going to break down a little bit. But these products do interact. You know, we interact with these products in different ways. And it seems to me like the live tab and Google TV kind of understands that where it's bringing everything together so you don't have to hop around.

And giving you just like a broad overview of what's available to you in a way that I think tvOS tries to do. But as we get to it, I think it falls down in a few ways. Yeah. By the way, I, it's funny. I'm going to make an admission here because I don't think there's a mash fast channel and I don't know what your tire shop is doing, but I'll tell you. So the, the channels app. Casey always talks about. I have that. I love it. I use that to record stuff off of my YouTube TV.

subscription, actually. And then I can watch it later on my local DVR instead of using YouTube's DVR. I started that with Fubo. YouTube's DVR is better. I might just be able to just use YouTube's DVR. But YouTube's DVR has like a two-week cutoff. And these will just keep forever as long as I want them, which is great. So I've got like a bunch of Jeopardy episodes on there and I watch them when I want to. But one of the features of channels is you can create a virtual channel.

It's pointed at my Plex library. So I have a MASH channel that will just play MASH forever. I actually have that because I have all the episodes on my Plex of MASH. and I have a mass channel, and you can just turn it on, and then you're the tire store at that point, which is great. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, live isn't the only feature, but one of the reasons I focused on live with Google TV...

which I, because I have YouTube TV, like it doesn't integrate with all of them, but it does integrate with a couple of them. I think it does sling and. Google TV or YouTube TV. But as a result, it's like, look, if you're in the Google ecosystem, Google TV is as good as Apple TV, basically, because it is tied into YouTube. tv and youtube and all the google like if you rented a movie or bought a movie on your android phone

It's there. All of the ones that I synced from Movies Anywhere are there. I could watch a movie on it. It is Google's answer to Apple TV, and it's pretty good, but the live support puts it over the top because this is the thing. Apple doesn't do that. And that is one of the things that, because I wanted to write about the live stuff, is because Apple has completely missed the boat when it comes to live. And this has been a recently emerging phenomenon, but they've had a few years.

And if we go another tvOS announcement without them integrating live TV in some way... It's a really bad sign because it feels like tvOS is holding the product down because they are just on maintenance mode with this thing. And the streaming world is shifting and letting people add their third-party apps is not enough.

they need to do some work on the os and one of the places they need to do work is in uh is in a live guide because you should have an api the way it should work and amazon does this really well actually um i do not i have a stick because i don't want to buy their big cube

The cube is so cool, though. Yeah. It's a cube with a little light going around the top of it. There was a limit. Well, it's kind of like an echo that's also a stream. And I did not want that in my house. I just didn't want it in my house. I'm sorry. Cubes are best. I know. Cubes are best. Cubagons are the bestagons. Yeah. So Amazon's is even better. Amazon is doing what Apple should do in terms of if you have an app on their platform, plus they've got their own library of...

hundreds of live channels that you get with prime video. Um, you can basically either the apps are furnishing those channels to Amazon or Amazon is just. doing a backend kind of connection with their service. And that is, they've negotiated with them, but whatever it is, if you have an app and you say like, I'm adding Peacock, it adds all the Peacock channels.

You don't have to have them there, but it'll put them there. And basically, if you pick a Peacock channel, it'll launch Peacock and tune to that channel. But basically, you're getting a program guide that you can then mark favorites because you've got hundreds, like 600 channels or whatever. You mark your favorites and you can mark your favorites.

favorite from traditional TV on something like YouTube TV, a Prime Video channel, a Roku channel, a Peacock channel, a Paramount channel, and put them in your favorites, and then they all just show there. So you can have ESPN and CNN and the MASH channel or whatever, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer channel. And it's pretty great. It's the best at that. But here's the problem, Steven.

Amazon's box is so terrible. It's so good and so terrible because of the ads. It has ads everywhere. The home screen has ads on that and not like... promos for like Apple has like Apple TV stuff that they're promoting and Google is going to promote things that are on YouTube or that you can get in their store or whatever. Amazon has all that and lots of it more than normal.

and it has ads. So in the home screen default, the top half of the interface is an ad and it's not just an ad for something that you could watch. It's literally an ad. I got a makeup ad. I got a mattress company ad. I got a broadband ad. Which is the hero image in the blog post. Yes, it's the Mancini Sleep World. That's a commercial. If you arrow up. by accident or whatever to the ad unit, it will take over almost the entire screen and it will autoplay.

With audio, a television commercial for Mancini's Sleep World in this case. Just something you would see. on TV, a 30-second long commercial. Some of them are not like that. Some of them instead just have a button that will take you to commerce because Amazon's going to Amazon. In the end, even if you spend $100 or $120 on one of these Amazon devices,

they don't view it as, you know, thanks for giving us money. That's what our product is for. They view it as a foothold in your house to sell you stuff and to merchandise and to sell commercial space. And so if you want... If you don't mind, like it is the best in a lot of ways, but it is so aggressively just, it's like erecting.

a billboard in your house it's a little like saying i'll give you a and i think some company does this i'll give you a free 4k flat screen if when you're not watching it it shows ads on the screen and you can't turn it off that's basically what is going on with a fire tv is that it is so aggressive with the ads that it just look if i'm being precious and you don't care um that's fine but like

Web banner ads on my television by default that I can't turn it off and they don't go away. It is, in my opinion. a huge step above having Apple show, you know, an Apple TV show in that space. It's just not, or whatever is on the other channels. Cause you know, you kind of move around. It's just not the same.

so it's really bad that was uh telly was the company you're thinking of that has uh you just get a tv it's dual screen it shows you ads oh that's right yeah you watch tv and also you see ads i'm sorry yeah i'm sorry and that's why i said i mean i i in my piece i basically said i'm not gonna ever use this amazon product like it doesn't matter how good it is it doesn't matter because i do not want that level of commerce

in my TV interface. That is the equivalent, and I know Microsoft is already doing some of this, right? But that is the equivalent of when you buy a computer, part of the screen is just a banner ad from the operating system. Wait, you mean like in settings when you could buy AppleCare Plus or turn on Apple Intelligence? Again, I don't because that's marketing for the company. And although that's also not great, if...

Imagine you boot up your Windows PC and there's just a square in the corner that has web display ads in it. Always. Always. Mancini Sleep World. And then it's L'Oreal. And then it's Comcast Xfinity business internet. And they just keep, those are the ones I saw on Amazon. And they just keep reloading. And everywhere you go in your computer, there's always an ad. Like, no, just say no.

It's unacceptable. That is a bridge too far. I don't like the marketing stuff from Apple saying, don't you want to buy Apple TV Plus? Don't you want to buy AppleCare? But I understand it and I accept that more. than what amazon's doing which is literally like if you are a mattress local mattress company and you want to stick your 30 second tv ad in a fire tv in a particular region

We'll do it. Now, I suspect that they sold that ad and didn't qualify where it was going to run. And that if Mancini's Sleepworld found out that it was running in the home screen of a TV interface, they'd be like, that's not what we bought. We didn't buy that. We just want this on your...

Prime Video or something. Although, by the way, I do opt out of ads on Prime Video and it doesn't have any effect on the ad load on the Fire TV. It's just terrible. That's unfortunate. But Amazon's not alone in it, right? You also talked about Roku. Yeah. They've done advertising for a long time. There was a story I think last week about they were testing an ad spot in the boot up screen. So like not once you're logged in, but like as the thing is booting.

Yeah, you have to watch an ad before you get the menu. Yeah. And Roku is also interesting because they make boxes, but they also sell TVs with it all integrated. A good friend of mine's got a Roku TV. Yeah, I have a TCL TV and it's got Roku OS inside. Yeah. And I think a lot of people like Roku. I don't have a ton of experience with it. Like I said, we're tvOS through and through. I've had a few. But they're also doing the live TV thing, right? Another example of someone doing this.

where Apple isn't. They have 500 live TV channels. Roku impressed me the least. and i bought their modern box and all that but their os seems really old it feels very much like you think apple tv future of tv is apps it's an app launcher roku is very much that it's just a super generic app launcher um and then their ads and part of their business model is to stick

ads and promos in, but they have made this, they've added 500 channels of live streaming stuff, but most of those you can get on other boxes too, because they just want the ads, the ad revenue from it. But it's super generic. And their live guide is okay, although it's mostly just focused on their stuff, not other people's stuff. But it's, you know... I found it uninteresting. And I actually wouldn't be surprised if Roku is planning a big OS update because they sure need one. It feels...

Not that different than the Roku boxes I was using 10 years ago, honestly. It's really generic and boring in a way that Google and Amazon aren't. Which brings us back to the Apple TV. Yeah. And I've got a little... like prescription having made this journey i've got a little prescription for tv os which is one get on live tv every app that's in the app store should be able to provide you with a live tv guide either you know by an api or something else where you can say if you add paramount plus

You get these channels or you show the channels anyway and say, would you like to. watch these channels, get Paramount Plus or Peacock or whatever. Like that should be integrated. It's great for sports. It's great for live TV. As somebody who's got YouTube TV, having those channels be integrated into the interface so it knows that right now I can.

flip to discovery channel or whatever and see a thing great fantastic do that um and the misguided or at least misfire of an interface decision where the tv app is sort of the main interface of apple tv but the home screen is sort of the main app interface of Apple TV. I just think it's wrong and out of date. And the more I looked at Google and Amazon, the more I felt that way. Google and Amazon integrate the apps on their box into that

basically TV interface. And Apple has started to do that. And boy, after using those other devices, I think Apple just needs to rip the bandaid off and make the home screen disappear. And put the TV app should be the interface and there should be an app tab. or whatever, and an app launcher in that main, and there is sort of an app launcher already in there. But this bifurcated interface is a vestige of a strategy that's not there anymore.

So they need some work. And the problem is, Stephen, is it feels like tvOS is worked on by like five people. I think that might be true. Three people? I mean, I might have overshot with five. Because I'm sure the people who focus on TVOS day in, day out know that they're behind in these areas. But it feels like they just don't get the funding.

to you know to fix this stuff because they it's very clear they they are moving slowly toward this with the tv app like they keep adding those features that will eventually let them kill the home screen but i think dogmatically they're like but we're an apple device everything

about app stores and home screens, right? It's like, not the TV. I think you shouldn't do it. I think there needs to be one interface. I think it's really confusing. And then they need to embrace live TV. They just really do. Well, I mean, I think it's compelling that when they brought... the the tv app to the mac and iphone ipad and stuff right they didn't bring the home screen experience they brought the tv app experience of course and i think they know that um

I do think tvOS is ahead of anything else. It is. As frustrating as it is, and as behind as some of its competitors it is in a few areas, if I had to choose one of them today, and I have them all here. I have no regrets about using tvOS. I don't. It is, I think it has the best taste. It has the lowest promotional marketing load. It does.

most of what i need to do but i would i do wish about the live tv and about the unified interface but it's it's pretty close uh to i mean i would say it's the best although i would say again Amazon's shooting itself in the foot. Otherwise, it's probably the best. And Google, if I was an Android user, I'd probably just get a Google TV because it's good. It's good. It's not...

The thing I miss the most is the swiping on the remote, honestly, on the Google TV, because I use that. It turns out all the time I had to do a long scroll and I was like, click, click, click, click, click. Can I hold down the button? And it didn't make it scroll faster. I'm like, oh my God. And there's 600 channels. It's like, I just got to sit here and press this button until, and on Apple TV, I'd be like, swipe, swipe, get it down there. And that's, that one hit me, but.

But anyway, I don't think it's a laggard in most ways. It is a laggard on the OS side in a few ways. And so if I'm reacting again to that Mark Herman story about they're going to do a hardware refresh because they're a laggard, it's like... The thing that makes Apple TV not a laggard is a software update, not the hardware. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you in part by ExpressVPN. Netflix has more than 18,000 titles globally, but only about 7,000 are available in the US.

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Only in one location, which I'm usually only in one location. And for supporting, upgrade. Steven, it's time for Ask Upgrade. Okay, those are some... Hacket lasers. I like it. Thanks for the hacket lasers. I should have practiced. I'm sorry. Those are more like truck lasers. They're coming off your truck. They got like a little big heavy... thing that's hanging off your truck so they gotta go okay yeah my lasers get out of my way i don't know where my lasers are they're in the in the cloud

lasers from clouds. That's how it works. Anonymous wrote in and said, Jason, what do you do about date metadata for the photos you scan in? I want to scan in old photos and have them in chronological order in my photo library. I actually did this with, I'm thinking of doing this again with some more of them. We scanned in a bunch of slides.

from Lauren's family. And I just sent them to a slide scanning company and it was amazing because they all come back and they're super high quality. And in the Photos app, you can adjust dates. You can actually select a big batch. And do a date adjust up in the menu and select the whole batch and assign it to September 16th, 1971 or whatever.

And it'll just do it. And so then what you end up doing, if you're like me, what you end up doing is playing detective a little bit. I did a lot because this is a Lawrence family, especially. So I'm like, all right, when was your dad? sent he looks like he's like he's in the national guard and he got sent to somewhere and she's like oh well that was there was a hurricane in the gulf coast

And then I'm like on Google going, where was the hurricane in the Gulf coast? And they sent the national guard and I'll get this number and it'll be like, it'll be like, well, that was, that was September of 1969 or something like that. And I'll be like, okay. And I did a lot of that. I'm like, Oh, how.

like all these pictures of my wife when she was a little kid. And so I started playing the game of how old is she in this photo? And then back basically dating that from her birth and saying, well, we'll say this is 1974. As a result, they're not perfect, right? They're not perfect, but I was able to group all the events. Oh, everybody had a, it's like a cookout and there's a happy birthday, Lauren, fourth birthday. And I'm like, okay, I know when that is.

roughly, and I'll select all those photos and assign it or adjust it to that date. And after all of that, a little work, some shoe leather included to figure it all out. I can scroll back in photos back to, you know, 1967 or whatever. And it's basically in chronological order. So that's what I recommend is doing it that way. And I highly recommend if you've got lots of, like a lot of people have slides. I mean.

I don't remember what service I use. Maybe I'll try to look that up and put it in the show notes. But I highly recommend this because nobody's looking at your slides. And you know what people might look at if you put it in a digital library and you send it to your family and friends, and if you show them off to your family members and like whole portions of my mother-in-law's life returned to life.

by scanning all those slides that were just in a box in her garage. So I definitely do recommend it. Have you done anything like that, Stephen? I have, yeah. I have not sent anything off to be scanned, but we've, you know, at times taken, okay, we're gonna take the shoebox and scan them. I will say that is a complaint I have about the photos user interface. First of all,

You can, like you said, you can select multiple images and change their date all at once, but not from the inspector window. You have to go to the menu item and do adjust time date, which is kind of frustrating. But that... that also is a very fiddly interface and like if you accidentally tab out of it it thinks that your photo instead of being you know

2025 it's the year 25 so it's like puts it way back at the beginning it's like no this photo is not 2 000 years old like yeah imagine it could be a little smarter yeah but oh yeah but it's doable yeah it does work um and Scancafe.com is where I went. And so all I can say is that I used them and it was very successful. And even they have the option, which I really liked. They're like, okay, would you like us to send your slides back? And I said, no, just.

put them in the garbage because I've got the digital versions and I do not want, part of this is I do not want boxes and boxes of slides back. But also if you have, so I actually regret this because my parents put a bunch of photos from my childhood in a book.

And you used to get from the photo lab, you would get the negatives and the prints. And the negatives seem to have disappeared, which is a bummer because if somebody saved... those packages, even if they pulled the good prints out and put them in photo albums or whatever, if they saved those little paper packages that had the film negatives in them, you can take all those negatives and send them off to a scanning service and you will get

And what will happen is they took 30 pictures or 20 pictures and one of them went in a photo album and one of them went in a frame on the wall. Yeah. And the rest of them you've never seen. Or haven't seen since they came back from the supermarket. Really different compared to today, where everything is just together. Yeah, and people didn't take as many photos back then because the film was finite. But the idea that you would take... 30 photos carefully.

But in the end, two or three might show up as beloved family memories. And this happened to us with some of these slides too, where we're like, oh my God, here's this famous photo. This happens with digital photos we've taken of our kids. We're like, there's the one that went on the calendar and there's the one that went on the...

wall and then you look back uh Lauren's been doing this because we she's got a photo shuffle on her iPhone of our kids on a lot on the lock screen and it's fascinating because you get these photos that are The setting of a very familiar photo that we've marked is one of the best photos of our kids. But it's not that photo. It's from a little bit before or a little bit after. And they're delightful. And certainly imagine then a photo from 40 or 50 years ago.

that nobody has seen in 40 or 50 years that is similar to photos maybe you've seen, but maybe not, maybe completely different. And so, yes, I highly recommend if you've got slides, if you've got old film. to get that you don't have to do it yourself because getting a slide scanner i mean i had a slide scanner for a while i scanned in about 100 photos and i was like i can't do it it's so much work

It gets real old real fast. And these services, they are going to wash your film. They got a whole conveyor belt where they're going through. They've got a system where they're making sure that the dust gets off of it. Whether you scan cafe or something else, I highly recommend getting that stuff into digital form for your sake and everybody else in your family's sake, those old family photos, because there are going to be some gems in there. It's going to be amazing.

Jose wrote in, and so what do you think is more important or what would be your preference for Apple to focus first on bringing down the price of the Vision Pro or keeping the price as is, but making the device smaller and weight less to be more comfortable?

What do you think? I think I'm going to not really answer the question. I think those are the same thing. I think a way that you bring the price down is to use materials that could be lighter, get rid of the goofy screen on the front, which are... Definitely make it cheaper and lighter and simpler. And I think they've got to do both. If I had to pick, I would probably choose price. Yes. But do them both. But it needs to be both. I agree.

I agree. It needs to get... If you're building the next generation Vision Pro, I'm less concerned. I mean, put the latest M chip you can stick in it. That's fine. But make it lighter and more comfortable and make it cheaper. And Mike and I talk about this a lot. The next Vision Pro isn't going to cost $800, right? It's just not. But it should not cost $3,500. Even if it's $2,500 or $2,000.

It's this is a long term. The only way Vision Pro is going to work is it's a product line that is leading somewhere and will eventually get there. But it's super cutting edge. And so, yeah, it just it needs to be cheaper. How much cheaper as cheap. As cheaper as you can make it, knowing that it's not going to be cheap, but as cheaper as you can make it. And if you can make it lighter.

along the way changing the materials or whatever please do that too because those are going to be those are your two biggest impediments to people buying and using this thing are they're not comfortable with it and they they don't think it's worth the money. I wasn't going to say they can't afford it because I think the people who are buying this thing can afford it. But even then they're like, it's not worth it. What do I get out of it? And, and, um, and if, if.

There is a groundbreaking killer app, whether it's concerts or sports or whatever, that we settle on here where it's like, oh my God, now you can subscribe to this service and it's got all these Broadway shows in immersive or it's got all the sports in immersive. Okay. If the ticket price is whatever that service costs, plus $3,500 or plus $2,000.

2000 is going to sell more. It's not going to be a mass market product, but 2000 is going to sell a lot more than 3500. So as far down as you can get it, the better, I think. Do you think it's going to weigh less now that Mike Rockwell isn't there? I don't think the weight is Mike Rockwell. I think it's Johnny Ive and his design team. I feel like that first generation Vision Pro has the strong smell of idealized design decisions and philosophies that...

uh, a hard core product person would like that. The, the, the stitched back strap that doesn't really hold. on most heads well versus what Belkin shipped later. Like, I think that's a great example of somebody, I can hear Johnny Ives saying, oh, this 3D knitted fine strap is, and it's a beautiful piece of...

of art. It is a beautiful accessory, but it's totally impractical and it probably cost a fortune to make when all you really need is an adjustable two-way strap up there. And they didn't ship that, which is kind of baffling. So...

Well, I mean, they ship the two way strap and the single strap, but what Belkin shipped is a top strap to go with it. Like, again, I feel like Johnny Ive and the design people there were like, okay, we've got a philosophy. We want it to, we're going to put a screen on the front so you don't feel isolated and all these things.

That made the product, I think, less practical than it could be. And I would love to see a more practical, less elegant version of the Vision Pro that's lighter and cheaper, honestly. And like the Siri stuff, none of that is fast, but... Part of me thinks like, well, with new leadership, they may have different priorities and what's important. Also, that was mostly just a joke about how rocks are heavy, but you answered the question anyways. Mike Rockwell, I see. Rockwell. It was not very good.

Yeah. I'm sorry. David writes, my kid is going off to college next year. After using a Chromebook all through high school, obvious choice is the M4 MacBook Air, but I'm stuck on whether to upgrade to 24 gigs of RAM and possibly 500 gigs of storage. I have no reason to believe this machine will be used for intensive 3D modeling or rendering large video files or photogrammetry, etc. But I do want it to last for many years.

years i've set aside the money and can't afford the upgrades but i don't want to spend money unnecessarily okay it's mac talk steven what do you think help david out yeah i mean the m4 map of gear is great my My actual advice is find a refurbished M3 MacBook Air with more RAM and more storage because the CPU difference is not that great. And thinking about something that's going to be used long term.

the storage feels important to me. Just like thinking about what a lot of people typically do through college, maybe even after college, right? You're out on your own, you know. family life maybe potentially like it just seems to me like that the 256 could be limiting long term so if you've got like a top line budget i look for a refurbished m3

with more storage and more memory. I think 16 gigs is probably fine for a long time. I think if you're really bent on an M4 and you're choosing between RAM and storage, I think I would choose storage, but I don't know. I'm actually looking at the refurb store right now. Yeah. Because I agree with you that the M4 is great. And if I had to answer this question directly, what I would say is I wouldn't worry too much about the RAM, but the storage you should upgrade.

Like if you're going to pay for an upgrade and you're only going to upgrade one, you should upgrade the storage because 256, look, if they're very cloud oriented, it may not matter, but it's so easy to blast through that. And then you're toting around an external drive. on a laptop, which is less good. But yeah, Stephen, I'm looking here. You can get a Midnight M3 as of this recording. for 929 and that comes with 16 unified and 512 SSD. And the refurb, if people haven't done it,

You get a full, you get an Apple warranty. It's certified. These are open box for the most part where they just, they, um, they get opened and then they get returned and Apple can't sell them as new or they got used for a little bit, but like Apple's going to stand by it. But like. a sub $900 MacBook air with 16 and five 12. Yeah, that's pretty good. And all you're losing is that it's not an M four, but the difference between M three and M four is.

You know, your kid is probably not going to run it lid open with two external monitors, right? And the cores are a little bit faster, but again, they're so fast now. So that's a good piece of advice. And then if you want to stick with the M4 and not go over the refurb route, I would say choose storage over. Yeah. I mean, you can do 24 gigabytes and 512 gigabytes of storage. uh m3 for 10.99 like there are machines out there yeah

And the refurb store has great filters, so you can do a RAM filter. You can say, show me MacBook Airs with this much storage and this much RAM, and then you'll see there are a bunch of M2s and M3s there, and they generally have pretty good deals. It's worth looking. And it does change over time. It does. It may be that if your kid's going to college next year, it may be, I mean, before long, in a few months, there'll be M4 errors on the refurb store. And so I would not count that out.

And I think the other thing, it's not in the question, but I will just say this, having talked to a lot of listeners, probably worth the AppleCare on a machine that's going to college just for the damage protection.

I know people feel differently about that, but it's like thinking about college kids, thinking about... Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Maybe worth it. Maybe... factor that into yeah well and you know your kid too like my daughter is not hard on her computers my son is very hard on his computers so when we got the macbook pro for him we bought we bought apple care for for that one because i was like this is not

This is going to be that poor computer. A couple more. These are targeted at Stephen Hackett, so we're going to get him in now. Okay. David says, I've been an Apple user for the majority of my adult life and I have never thrown away any of the boxes or packages my products have come in. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on what to do with them? We call this the school of John Syracuse. Yeah.

And I am not in the school of John Syracuse. Neither am I. I am on many things, but not on this. I've got hundreds of computers. Like if you're watching on YouTube, this is a small fraction of my collection behind me. The only boxes I keep are for things that are in current use. So my current iPhone, my current MacBook Pro, my wife's iPad, my kid's MacBook Air. And I do that.

Very often because when we are done with a product, I'll give it to a family member or occasionally I'll sell it and I want them to have the box and then it's up to them what they do with that. But I don't have the box for my iPhone 7. You know, I get some people from a collection standpoint want that. I don't. And I don't think it's worth the space if you're just doing it just to do it. I mean, if you're doing it because you like them, like, who am I to judge?

But if you're doing it just because you've never gotten rid of them, you can let them go. It'll be okay. I feel like there's a gradation here for me. So if you don't have the product, you should get rid of the box.

If you do have the product and it's old, storing it in the box is a fun thing to do, and then you've got it. If you don't have that product, though, and you have the box... just the box should go away it should go away yeah um and i'm with you i try other than if the box is too big but i try to keep the boxes of the products that i have um because yes you could you could resell it i don't resell a lot of stuff witnessed by the iMac Pro behind me. I know, yeah. In part because...

What happens is you use it and then you hold on to it a little bit because it's still semi-current. And I write about this stuff and it's very convenient to have. Like the other day, I had Jamie's hand-me-down last generation Intel MacBook Air. And I ran tests on it for my M4 MacBook Air review. And really nice to hold on to those things.

And then by the time you think I don't really need to hold onto this anymore, it's so old that it's not even worth it. So it's, it's a, it's a. Our business makes this weirder, but I know like Dan Frakes, who I used to work with at Macworld, who works at Apple now, he always like keeps his boxes around, uses the computer for a year or two and then resells it.

and buys the new one, and the old one goes out with the pristine contents of the original box. And that is a way to live if you have the storage space. I have a lot of stuff that doesn't have a box because I don't... I used to have even less storage space that I do now. It used to be this garage that I'm in right now was used for parking cars.

Yeah. And finally we're like, we can't do it. So we have storage in here and we have storage sheds outside. Now we have more storage so I can store more stuff. I have to store all my Apple owner boxes because those all go back in the boxes. Right. Apple wants their boxes back. Don't feel bad. If you don't have room to store it, just...

just recycle it and be done with it. But if you want, I am a fan of the idea of storing the old stuff in a box. If you have the old stuff and the box, but also if you don't have the predilection or, or, I mean, The thing is what counts, not the box it came in. Agreed. Last note, and this was definitely with your name on it. Albert says, are you surprised the spinning beach ball on the Mac has never meaningly changed? Albert?

It has changed. It has. It has. Because it used to be glossy and aqua-y and now it's flat. A couple of things come to mind. One, when's the last time you saw the spinning pinwheel, Jason? I do see it every now and then in very particular circumstances, but it's rare. It's very rare. So you don't see it as much as you did.

Back in the day. Yeah, using weird apps or sometimes if there's like a weird network issue. Like I see it sometimes if I take my laptop that is mostly connected and I open it up not connected and it's not on Wi-Fi. And it's got an existing network connection. And it's like, whoa, what happened? And it'll spin then. But it's pretty rare. And that has been an issue in macOS for so long. I don't understand it. But...

I like it because it is a throwback. It's actually from Next Step. Yes. So Next Step, if you look at this Wikipedia article, then I'm sure it'll be in the show notes. Spinning Pinwheel, a Wikipedia article. I love it. Yeah. It goes back to Next Step. And it came over and, you know, it got aquified. And now we have it sort of the flat, colorful thing we have today. Yeah.

And so I like the Easter egg, you know, sort of vibes with it. So no, I think it's fantastic. Yeah, it keeps changing with the times, Albert. Yeah. And I will also say that if you go back to classic Mac OS... different apps had their own custom animated icons there. And so you've got in that, and there's a link I'll put in the show notes for this one too. They used to have like the counting hand.

where a hand would literally count on its fingers while you were waiting. They had the watch cursor, so it would show a watch and the watch face could move. They had a spinning globe that you would see in some apps. And HyperCard had a beach ball similar to the spinning pinwheel. So there have been many weight cursors over the years. And it's never reached the point of kind of cult status that some did.

Wasn't there an app that had a dog cow that did a backflip? I feel like Fetch. Or it was a dog, because it was Fetch. It was a dog. Fetch's weight cursor was a dog. that was maybe similar to the dog cow, a dog that did backflips as you waited for your file to download or upload. Or maybe it was running. Did it do backflips? I don't remember. I used to fetch for years. I remember a dog doing flips.

Yeah, we'll go with that. Anyway, so there's a great tradition of weight cursors out there. Anyway, thank you. Just stick an ad in there, you know? Sure. Amazon will. Amazon will, and Microsoft might. We have reached the end. Thank you, Stephen Hackett, for filling in for Mike Hurley today. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. This will blow a hole in my weekly podcast listening because I was on the show, but...

That's okay. I'm glad to fill in. Well, thank you for listening to Upgrade normally, but you don't have to listen to this episode because you've already heard it. I've heard it. I've heard it before anyone else besides you. You were a participant.

in it. So that's pretty good. Thanks to everybody out there for listening. You can send us your feedback, follow-up, and questions at upgradefeedback.com. Thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus. This week, Steve and I are going to talk a little bit about... whether apple is peak apple or beleaguered apple and we might also talk about domain dumb domains we bought we'll see how that goes

getupgradeplus.com to get Upgrade Plus and you get an ad-free version of the show with extended content every single week. You can find us on YouTube. Just search for... upgrade podcast thank you to our sponsors this week they were google gemini factor and express vpn once again thank you all for listening and with yet another guest i will see you next week