532: I Am Foreign Exchange Headwinds
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From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 532. Today's show is brought to you by ExpressVPN, Factor, and Notion. It is October 7th, 2024. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. From my garage, it's me. Hi. Hello. How are you? I'm good. Happy birthday. I have a Snow Talk question for you. Thank you. You had a birthday this weekend. Jason, how did you celebrate it? Um...

I took it easy, I guess I would say. I mean, we had a nice breakfast. Lauren made me breakfast. It was hot. It was the hottest day of the year yesterday, Mike. And so it basically got to 100 degrees. And so we stayed inside for the most part, although we did go out to dinner, which was very nice. That was my request is why don't we go out to dinner? And we had a very nice dinner.

at a restaurant we actually went to for our anniversary. It was really good. So we went back there and it was excellent. It was just really great. So nice treat because we don't go out to eat that much.

And otherwise, I just sort of sat inside with the air conditioner running because we've got air conditioning now, which helps when it's over 90 degrees every day for a week in October, which is how we roll here. That's how October works in the Bay Area is it gets hot. Anyway, I've turned my birthday into a discussion of weather. Anyway, I was just kind of chilling. We didn't have curling this week. And so I just said, you know what?

But literally Saturday, we had nothing on our calendar. I was like, what does it mean to have nothing on your calendar on a weekend? So I think we really took the week off from our curling calendar in my birthday and just kind of took it easy. And it was nice to have that. Talked to my mom, talked to my kids.

Yeah. Nice day. Perfectly nice day. Would have been nice to spend a little more of it outside, but at most of the day it was hovering about 98, 99 degrees and I did not want to do that. So I didn't do that. Gave the dog a bath, decided to hose her down. We washed the cars on Saturday and then I thought, oh, it's a hot day and there's a hose. So we hosed down the dog and I think the dog did not appreciate the cold water, but

So she was sad afterward, but then she was clean. So yeah, it was just a home weekend. It was good. It was good. Well, I'm pleased that you relaxed. If you would like to send in a question to help us answer a future episode of the show, just go to upgradefeedback.com and send in your own Snill Talk question. Thank you to me for asking that one.

It's time for some follow-up. I would just like to give a final thank you for our St. Jude campaign this year. The final toll tool that the Relay community raised for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital was $1,078,348 for the kids of St. Jude. Amazing. Thank you so much. Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much. How? An incredible achievement that we pulled off together, and I am so, so proud of all of us. Thank you.

Steve wrote in and said,

Meta with their Ray-Bans are working with a company with a very long name that is just essentially known as Luxottica. Luxottica, they have an absolute monopoly on glasses. They own so many brands, huge. I'll put their Wikipedia page in the show notes. And

A lot of the styles of sunglasses or glasses that you may know, Luxottica owns that design. And it's one of the reasons that Meta has partnered with them because they get to benefit from Luxottica's design prowess and the IP that they own. So it could be complicated for Apple to design what would be considered a quote-unquote perfect

classic style or like any kind of like oh i've seen this style before because luxottica own it i think it could be complicated from them um yeah could be i mean apple's got a lot of money but you know we also know that apple can be cheap and doesn't want to pay for like oxygen sensor patents and things like that i also luxottica well it's interesting right their agreements with meta may be

money, money, money attribute of things. So like, Matt just signed a deal with them that is exclusive. Okay. I think that's not what I was saying. Okay. What I'm saying is

There are other brands. There may not. There is a giant number one, but there's money and there's other companies out there that are at least scrapping by. Now, I would also say I hope Meta is paying Luxottica really well, because if Luxottica truly has an entirely exclusive arrangement with Meta, when there's another big fish out there that might be interested in spending a lot of money, that exclusive deal, if it's exclusive to Luxottica and not exclusive to specific brands...

I hope it gets real expensive for Meta because Luxottica could realize that there are other tech companies that want to give them lots of money, too. So there's complexity here. I mean, we'll see. So thank you, Steve. Now we've mentioned it. And now I will say, I don't think it's a barrier to entry. Like, if Apple wants to do this, they'll do it. They'll find a way. But they will not be able to swoop in and say, oh, well, I mean, like Meta. Meta was like literally, hey, Ray-Bans.

What could be more well-known and iconic? And they swooped in and made that essentially an adjunct to their product. That is smart, and it's a coup, and it's going to be hard. But again...

Apple has a lot of money and a lot of interest and, you know, and there's either competitors who are hungry, who think that the only way for them to get a leg up against Luxottica is to partner with Apple. That kind of thing could happen. And also I don't know the details, but I would say that either Luxottica will rethink their, the exclusivity of their partnership with Medda if other expensive, you know, deep pocketed tech companies come calling or is the exclusivity more limited than

And I know that there's some people who are like, Meta wants to buy Luxottica, which is interesting, right? Because most of Meta's business is not eyeglasses. But even if that were the case, I think if you're Luxottica, you look at that and say,

Is that the best way for us to run our business? If there are, if this is going to be a future category and there are going to be other deep pocketed companies, I, it's something to watch. It's, it's definitely something to watch, but meta gets the first mover advantage here. Yeah. I think that they would love to buy them, but just, it's too complicated now. Like I don't, I would be surprised if meta is ever allowed to buy another company ever again. Like I just, I think that that time may have, may have ended for meta. I think they've, they've bought all the companies they could buy. Yeah.

It's so funny. There are all these really weird deals now where a company doesn't buy another company. It just hires everyone from said company and gives everybody stock. I think Microsoft just did that recently with an AI company where they hired everybody. They made their CEO the CEO of Microsoft AI. It was like, yeah, but we're not acquiring them. It's like, okay, whatever you say. Jason, I want to know what happened to your Mac Mini.

Oh, yes. Mac Studio. Mac Studio. Mac Studio. Not Mac Mini. Sorry. Yes, it's not a Mac Mini. You're getting ahead of yourself. You're so excited about the coming Mac Mini. I can't stop thinking about it. Every day I'm thinking about it. You can't. Everything looks like a Mac Mini to now. I got a new Mac Mini in my pocket. I got a Mac Mini hanging on a wall everywhere Mike looks. It's just another Mac Mini. I watch TV on my Mac Mini. Mac Studio M1 that I've had since it came out.

Um, and really love it. And I told the story when we were in Memphis of how I had a, a cascading series of events failed, you could not personalize, um,

was a software update. And the complication there was that I was having another issue where I had like extensions that it wanted to resign every time, but would never resign or re approve or whatever. And so I was getting these alerts every time I started up my Mac saying, Oh, there are these things you should restart, but the restart never fixed it. And the solution there is to do a software update early, at least that has helped in the past software updates failed, all the different versions would not update.

We got some anonymous feedback. This might be a good time for it if you want to throw it in there. Yep. So the personalization failure Jason experienced was the result of an issue Apple identified for many enterprise customers. There was an odd

Interesting. It's a little tidbit there about what might have been going on. But I was, anyway, I ended up stuck.

And so I decided to, when I looked this up, they said, well, here's what you can do. First thing is you can put your, your, um, you reinstall. So I just went into the recovery and try to do reinstall from there. Failed. Wouldn't do it. Did some more search and it said, well, you could do a revive using, so you put your Mac in DFU mode, which is like iPhone recovery mode for a Mac. It's an Apple Silicon thing and you have to attach another Mac to it by USB. Yeah.

And then from that other Mac, you say, okay, let's revive this computer. That didn't work. At which point what was left to me was restore. Now I, I clone my drive every day, so it's not a problem. I didn't have any, and I do a lot of stuff in iCloud and Dropbox. So I, I, I didn't have data on there that I needed to secure in any way. So I thought, okay, let's do a, let's do a restore.

And I tried to restore from 15 and 15 one beta and 15 Oh one beta or whatever. Like I tried many different restores and from back on 14, no restore image would restore. They all failed. This is where I left it. When I came to Memphis is all the restores failed. What I was, what was I going to do? It was in DFU mode where the blint, the light on the front of the Mac studio helpfully blinks SOS and Morse code.

You know, it's cute. It's cute, but also not great. So now experienced Mac tech people might have an inkling to what the solution was because I skipped a step here. I did. I skipped a step. So here's what I did. I went to a website called apple.com.

It's a good website. And did text support and said, I've tried all these things. And they're like, immediately, fortunately, did not try to make me go through many other steps. They're like, oh, you tried everything. How about an appointment in an Apple store?

with a Mac genius. I said, great. And then literally they said, how about in two hours at your local Mac store or Apple store? I'm like, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. So I took my Mac studio in a shopping bag to my, my local app store or my local Apple store. And they, you know, set me at a table and the guy came over and he said, what, what seems to be the problem? And he's like, oh, okay. And he, and somebody brought out a monitor and a keyboard and a track pad and

And a cable. And then he came over and said, what seems to be the problem? What have you done? All of these things. What did you do? What did you do? What did you do to this poor computer? And so I told him and his response was something like, oh, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put it in recovery. And I said, all right.

I'm trying to look up his name because I got his name. He was great. Whatever his name was. Now I'm going to, now I'm not going to. They sent me afterward. They're like, how was your visit with Jim or whatever his name was? And the answer was, it was great. And now I can't find his name. Anyway, he said, we're going to go into recovery. And I said, well, I tried recovery and it didn't work. He said, well, let's just go in there.

And I thought, this is the moment where I thought to myself, this guy has seen everything, right? This is like, he's seen it all. He's seen it all. He works at an Apple store doing Mac genius. He's seen every possible failure mode there is. And this is the thing that I kicked myself after he said it, which is what I did was I went to recovery and tried to reinstall the OS and it failed. So I went to DFU and I tried to refresh. These are the steps you do

when you're trying to save the contents of your hard drive. When refresh failed, I thought, well, everything is ruined now. So the next step in the DFU process is restore, which wipes the contents of your drive, and then you move on with your life. And at least I think that's what it does. But here's the thing. What I didn't consider is...

If you're giving up on the contents of your drive, what you should do is what Dave or whatever his name was at the Apple store did. Brilliant. Which is you go back to recovery and you go to disutility and you wipe the drive in recovery. And then you reinstall Sonoma in this case, not even Sequoia, just reinstall. And I was like, I don't know, man, this seems pretty wild. It's refused everything. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's like,

And he says, no, if we erase this, we should be able to install. And I was like, oh, you went back. I thought once you leave recovery and head to DFU mode, you never go back, right?

Like you've, you've blown past that barrier. Now you're in a really serious stuff here. The weeds, you've ruined your computer unless, unless you can get it back. And the answer is no recovery is still there. You go back to recovery. So what I did is I leaped over the, this missing step, which is once I, once I was moving into, it can't be salvaged. We need to nuke it from orbit. I didn't think, oh, I should just go back to recovery.

And wipe the drive and reinstall it from there. I instead was like, I got to do a restore an OS restore from a disk image from DFU mode. And I wasn't even sure if you could get out of DFU mode at that point and have a usable restore or recovery. And you can.

So in the end we rebooted into recovery and wiped it. And then I stood there as he went off to help other people. And I stood there at the Apple store for 20 minutes while I watched Sonoma install on my Mac studio, sitting at a table in the Apple store and that it installed. And I shut it down and thanked him profusely and walked right out and came back home. And when I got back home, I updated to Sequoia migrated from my clone and was up and running, um,

shortly thereafter with my complete system exactly as it was the day that it died oh that's fantastic what a great story into the story love that thank you to mystery apple tech thank you to uh yes to to how was your experience with jim or whatever it was uh which i i wish i could find it now oh jim it was jim how did jim do that was the email i got from the apple store

How did Jim do from one to five? One being poor, five being excellent. Jim is a five. You know, Jim is a six, but there's no six. So I had to do five. Well, Jim is a five and a call out on the show. You know, like that's how you go the one extra. Here's another little tip. I know there are people from my Apple store who listen to this podcast. Somebody at the Corda Madera, California Apple store who listens to this podcast is

Tell Jim how awesome he is. Many people know now. Jim, not only was I impressed because look, I've seen a lot too. And he, he jumped right over all the stuff I'd seen and he knew exactly what it was. And I was kicking myself afterward, but like, I just got the sense with Jim, he's super positive, but Jim has seen everything. I mean, he's, you know, it's, he's one of those people who's like, Oh boy. I mean, I was going to Mac it professionals and asking them about this. And they're like, I don't know, man. Jim was just like,

I know what step you skipped. Let's just go. And it all worked. So thumbs up to Jim. I like to imagine this is how Stephen Hackett was when he worked at the Apple store. Well, did Stephen fix this for you? He was like, is there a part inside your thing that's broken? I can sense it from the outside and I know how to take it. And in the dark, blindfolded with one hand, I could remove that part, disassemble your entire Mac, reassemble it.

Jim is like that. Yeah, well, I mean... Thumbs up to Jim. Stephen's no Jim today, right? Because Stephen didn't fix this. But I bet he was like it. Back in the day. You know, he did that old Mac back together again, that MacBook that you painted. He did that. Back when Stephen Hackett was in his prime. Yes. Yes, he did. I was very impressed. He put the Mac that Casey Lissa and I painted black.

Back together and it booted. Shocking. Shocking. He knows what he's doing. He does. With stuff from back in the day. Deadline is reporting that the Brad Pitt, George Clooney movie, Wolse, is the quote, most viewed Apple TV Plus movie so far. No idea what that means, but I guess the good thing is this movie has been successful for them when it seemed like Apple have maybe kind of given up on it.

A little bit. Yeah, I don't know if they'd given up on it, but they did. A little bit. Because it was going to be in cinemas, right? And they changed that. Yeah, I think that their strategy changed and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's not do that. Yeah. I wonder what that means. I wonder if they view it as making the best of a bad situation or if they view that as adding a lot of value. It is...

It came from somebody inside. Yeah. Clearly. It was sourced. I'm told the film boosted viewership by 30%. 30%, which is a thing that Apple decided to get done. It also said executives are thrilled or something like that. Yeah, exactly. So this is an Apple leak saying positive things about wolves. So take it for what it is, but they did, you know, it's good enough for them to leak it and do some positivity about it for what it's worth.

I believe it. Yeah. Oh, I do too. Big names. Yeah. Draw attention to your platform. Sure. Sigmund Judge from Mac Stories is reporting that Ted Lasso season four will begin pre-production in January.

that he has seen some information. Shooting sometime early next year. Yeah. It's pretty wild. I, you know, Sigmund is the one reporting this, which is interesting. There's nobody else reporting this. Nope. And all the reports about it that you find are quoting Sigmund. Yep. So we will see Sigmund who does the Magic Rays of Light podcast, which is about Apple TV Plus. Sigmund has shared the information with me.

Mm-hmm.

what do they want to build a new season or set of seasons around? What story do they want to tell? Is it actually Ted Lasso, right? Like, is it actually, maybe they're calling it that right now, but will it be called that? Who's going to be in it, really? Right. And how much? Like, these are the things we don't know. Right. And is Jason Sudeikis...

appearing in a really limited way? Is he not appearing? Is Brett Goldstein going to be in it? We don't know any of this. Here's the thing that I think is funny. When I try to imagine another season of Ted Lasso, I think they could do it without Jason Sudeikis, the title character. I don't think they could do it without Brett Goldstein. I agree with you. Given where the story ends up in season three,

Unless, again, and I don't think this is the case because I don't think Jason Sudeikis wants to do this, unless Ted Lasso season four just follows Ted Lasso, in which case, spoilers for Ted Lasso, I guess, in which case it's a completely different setting and a completely different set of characters. And since the breaking news about this was that they were picking up the options for the British actors who are under the British contract system, which is different from the American contract system, that suggests...

strongly that the UK is a major component, if not the whole thing, for Ted Lasso season four. In which case, I can't imagine... It's good to be Britt Goldstein because I think not only was he one of the writers and it feels to me like if they're going to do this, the money truck...

After the money truck backs up to Jason Sudeikis' house, it goes to Bray Goldstein's house. Yeah, I agree. And also backs up there. And he's going to have, you know, he was a writer before. He's probably going to have a more exalted producer credit and a, you know, a maybe higher level co-starring credit because I don't think you can do that show without him.

I'd be surprised if he wasn't involved because like he's now in the multiple projects at Apple TV family, right? Like that Apple seemed to be doing. Like if something works well and you have another idea, they'll do it, right? Like he's involved in shrinking. And I think one more project may be in development. So, you know, it kind of feels like they would try shrinking.

shrinking is his show shrinking is his and he's not he's going to be in it this season I guess a little bit but he's he and Bill Lawrence the co-showrunner of Ted Lasso

they run shrinking like shrinking is a is a ted uh is it bill lawrence uh no i keep saying ted lasso you keep calling him ted lasso which is funny bill lawrence brett goldstein thing and so yeah he's he's got a a strong tie uh with apple tv and you know but to say like you're gonna do more in season four i just i can't imagine that show without roy kent even more than i can i'd

I literally can't imagine it without him more than with Ted Lasso, which is just a funny place to be. And this is technically follow out. Jason's going to be joining me and Federico on Connected this week. So if you've never listened to Connected and you enjoy this show, maybe you like that. What I expect is imagine this show, but with more jokes. It's probably what you're going to get. Yeah, maybe so. I would say also you could say imagine this show.

but with Federico. But with an Italian, you know? Yeah. Imagine that. Just as a bonus on top. Sprinkling. Yeah, just a little extra. It's the me and Mike dynamic plus Federico Fatici. Or the me and Federico dynamic plus Jason. It depends on how you want it, really. I don't know if we could say, I don't know what it would be like the Federico-Jason dynamic with me. I don't know if people have that much of a... Yeah, I know what that is, but we'll find out. I don't know.

Federico's been on Upgrade, but this is different because now it's me on. I have actually been on Connected. Many times. Sitting in for one of you guys before. It's been a little while. So anyway, I'm looking forward to it. Me too. I'm happy to go in there because Stephen's taking October off. He is. So I'm going to fill in. I'm going to help out. Pitch in a little bit.

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and all of Relay. Rumor roundup time, Jason Snell. Yeehaw! Let's do it. Let's ride out there. This is one of the weirder rumor roundup stories that I think we've had in a while. Russian YouTuber, I'm going to say Willzacom, claims to have obtained a production unit of the base M4 MacBook Pro and has unboxed it on his YouTube channel. Yeah. I just want to point out it's bananas that apparently...

This escaped from the supply chain. It's extra bananas that it's a Russian YouTuber, a place where Apple does not do business at present, but it's,

Um, I wonder if there is a, you know, from a Chinese distribution center to Russia. It's the only way, right? Like pathway, right? That, that kind of makes more sense. And then the thing that made me laugh about this is, Oh, they got one of the new Macs. This is going to be really exciting. Oh, it's the base model Mac pro with the M four processor, a processor that, although it's only on the iPad, uh,

we've seen already, right? Like, so it's not the, it's not the M4 Pro. It's not the new dynamic Mac mini. It's literally the base model MacBook Pro updated to the M4. So still pretty cool that a product that has not been announced yet is somehow it's box and computer are in the hands of a Russian YouTuber, but it's like the most earth shattering, least interesting thing ever. So it's like,

I don't even know what to think about it, but great. And of course, we have no idea of knowing if this is real, but it is just interesting. No. If this person is faking it, that is interesting in and of itself, because this is a very elaborate thing to do. So according to this video... And not that interesting. That's the other thing. It's an elaborate fake of something pedestrian. Yeah, which is... Hey, maybe that's why it works.

According to this video, the M4 chip that's in this Mac is 25% faster due to the 10-core CPU up from 8 cores measured with a Geekbench test. And again, we knew this. There is a minimum 16 gigabytes of RAM because it's the base model and it starts at 16. It has three Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of up from two. And there is an availability of Space Black.

Right, which the base model did not have.

In the last generation, the space black was reserved for more expensive MacBook Pros. So weird, but maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. If it is true, this is fascinating. Because all this product is going to be is, what's going to be interesting about this product is how is the M4 on the Mac? Like there are some details like Thunderbolt ports that we don't know how that chip, that base model chip plays in the concept of a Mac versus a one port chip.

ipad right so that's that's interesting um and yeah we don't know like thermal characteristics are different and all of that like but we have an idea of what m4 performance is already what's more interesting are going to be sort of like the the computers that change their shape like the mac mini and what happens with a uh a pro version of the chip but i would say that this is the the you know there's there's some tidbits here maybe but like

Also, maybe not. So, um, sure, sure. Feels like Mark Gurman reported that like the M four models were already being able to be made. Cause obviously the M four chip, uh,

exists, whereas the Pro models were going to be available a little bit later because they have to put the M4 Pro chip into production. And so it's probably true that there are M4 MacBook Pros and Mac minis and iMacs sitting in boxes in a warehouse, right? Or on a boat going across the ocean, something like that.

And this is Mark Gurman reporting that Apple will be making a product announcement in late October that is focused on this first set of M4 Macs and a new iPad mini. Mark reported that he expects these products to begin shipping on November 1st. November 1st. So it feels very much like that last week, just as it was last year when they did the Halloween event. The last week of October, we're going to have a lot of news about

including new Macs and iPad mini shipping on November 1st, right after Thanksgiving, Halloween. Also, you know what's really spooky, Mike? What's the scariest thing of all? Money! I really don't want them to do an evening event again. Scary money! Please don't do an evening event. The financial results are coming out on Halloween.

The financial results are going to be announced at 5 p.m. Eastern on Halloween. So trick or treat, I'm Apple and I'm a bag of money. That is apparently what's going to happen. So yes. And then Apple intelligence, Mark Gurman says, is going to be released. The 18.1 release is going to happen on the 28th. It would seem to me that the 28th or the 29th

will be the day that Apple announces this hardware and has it shipping on the first. I mean, it could be the week before or something, but like it feels to me like they'll do a video and there'll be a press event or something like that. And it's all going to happen that last week. Cause it's literally Apple intelligence is happening that week. Gurman says the products are shipping that week on Halloween as everybody is eating candy and getting into their costumes. The results will come out. Cause who doesn't like, like what do you have in that bag? Well, I got Snickers.

Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, and $20 billion in revenue. And economic headwinds. The scariest thing of all. I've got a cocktail of headwinds in here. Yeah, that is. What are you going at for Halloween this year? I am foreign exchange headwinds. That's who I am.

That's a real trick. They're just terrifying. Anyway, so it's got to be that week, right? Presumably they'll make an announcement at some point in there, which is great. So that's three weeks away. Yeah, I was wondering if they would do the event the week before, but I think if it's just Max, then they don't need to, right? They could just do it like, hey...

You can buy them today. They'll ship at the end of the week. I know they've done that in the past. Yeah, I think that's a good call that either the 28th or the 29th for an Apple event product shipping on the Friday. Yeah, and it'll literally just be a video and they'll give it a week's notice and say, spooky, whatever, and then it'll be that. Actually, the 28th, if they're releasing Apple Intelligence on the 28th, I think the 28th actually makes sense for them to do a big thing because they can also kind of like

toot their horn about Apple intelligence while they also talk about new Macs and iPads, especially if that iPad mini and those Macs all support Apple intelligence, then that's part of the story, right? The question is that iPad mini, but I would imagine that iPad mini will either have an M series chip in it or a, a phone chip that's capable of running, running Apple intelligence. I have, I have to imagine they will. I think it's,

It's either going to be the A18 or the A17 Pro. They'll put in the... It's probably the A18. They'll put in the iPad mini. I don't think they'll put the M chip in there. It could be the M1, but it's like... I think what we're saying is whatever is cheapest that gets them Apple intelligence is what they will do. And also, again, it's like...

M series iPads come with a separate set of features including stage manager. That's true. That would be bad. That would be so bad on the iPad mini. So I could imagine them putting whatever is the most capable and available phone chip for them.

I think that's probably it. So the A18, which is in the base model iPhone 16, I think is a perfectly reasonable idea that they would just use that again and put it in the iPad mini. Because I am a believer that they're not going to release any computing devices, right? Mac, iPad, phone.

that are not Apple Intelligence capable now. I think that that ship has sailed. So if they're going to launch Apple Intelligence on the 28th, it's a great day to do an event and do all of it and roll it all together and say, here are some new... And that allows them to tell the Apple Intelligence story yet again. Which we've seen that they will do. Which, you know what? They're going to do it. We know they're going to do that. They got it. The September event proved it. They're going to tell that story again because they want to appear to be...

At the cutting edge. Yes. Yes. They are going to keep reinforcing, you know, pay, you know, pay no attention because they feel this is an area of weakness for them. So they're going to keep on asserting it and pointing it out. And, and that's just, that's, we're in the era where Apple's just not going to shut up about intelligence and that's just how it's going to be. So, so yeah, that would be my bet is that, is that they'll do a video on the 28th and it'll have all of that stuff in there.

Speaking of new products with Apple intelligence, a couple of stories on the next iPhone SE. Mark Gurman is reporting that it will have an edge-to-edge screen design with no home button and a notch, not a dynamic island. But in the Bloomberg report, he references the iPhone 14 as a good product to look at, that it will support Apple intelligence coming in the spring of 2025.

And Felipe Esposito at 9to5Mac is reporting that this iPhone SE will be the first device to feature, you guessed it, Apple's own 5G modem. Here we are again. Another product, another first product to take the modem. Apparently, though, this product...

will come with some benefits to the consumer if they can ship it, as this modem would reduce battery consumption, especially in low power mode. Nice, because it's Apple's own silicon that they've done to build this modem. I mean, we'll see. Didn't this report also say that it's going to have a notch? Yeah.

instead of a dynamic island. Yeah, notch, not a dynamic island. Yeah, that was a notch report too. I love that it's like, what makes it the SE? What features is it not good enough to get? And it's like, we're not going to do the little tiny cutouts and dynamic. You're just going to get a notch at the top. Sorry. What is cheapest, right? Everything's what is cheapest. Yeah, exactly. What is? Because that's the goal here is. So, you know, but Face ID, right? So that's no home screen and Face ID is a big step up. Yep.

Interesting. You know, they could have done. I wonder about the whatever is cheapest philosophy that they do face ID and not a touch ID button. There is nothing to say that having that notch means it's face ID.

Well, yeah, I guess not. I guess it could just be a front-facing camera and all of that, although the reason that you have that... My guess is that it is. My guess is that that is the old iPhone X level Face ID stuff that is cheap enough now that they can put it in the SE, and maybe the answer is either they want it to remain...

Well, I mean, the truth is that that Touch ID unlock button is for iPad, and it would have to probably be re-engineered for the iPhone, and they don't want to do that. Maybe. But in the end, whatever is cheapest and most expedient is going to be what's in the iPhone SE. I think it will be Face ID, but...

It doesn't mean it has to be just because there's a notch, right? Like it doesn't... If they wanted to do that, they could. But I feel very confident that that would just be a Face ID system. You know, maybe like the first or second gem, one that only worked in portrait or whatever, you know, like it can be... They have the ability to make this thing as cheap. But the thing that, you know...

Some people will care about, some people won't. Like this will be the last time that a home button is on a product. You don't actually need a notch if you're not doing face ID because the width of the notch is because of all the other stuff that's up there, the dot projector and all of that. I would say that if the report was that this was getting the dynamic island, it would be a question about like,

Is it Face ID or is it Touch ID? Because the Dynamic Island would suggest it was a little teeny tiny cutout. But given that it's the notch, I think it's almost certainly Face ID because they need all that space for the hardware to do it. And remember, that's old tech now. I mean, that's the funny thing is that as expensive and as complex as that tech is, that's iPhone X tech. So it's time to put that in the iPhone SE. So now it'll be there.

Yeah, all of this stuff, while it is still like quote-unquote like the new stuff, it's not new anymore. Like it really isn't new anymore. I mean, it feels like the iPhone X was recent and it's not. It was a long time ago now. It was a long time ago. What year was it? Let me see. It's like six years ago now? Yeah. Because it's iPhone 16 now, right? So...

Yeah, I just wanted to check the name. It launched in November 2017. 17, yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to see it. Like, I know I could do the math, but I just wanted to know, like, what was the year? Seven years ago. So seven years ago, the iPhone X hardware was amazing and would blow you away. And seven years later, seven plus years later, it'll get in the iPhone SE. Like, it's not new tech anymore. Not at all.

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That's code UPGRADE50 at factormeals.com slash upgrade50 for 50% of your first month and 20% of your next. Our thanks to Factor for their support of this show and all of Relay. So today, Apple debuted a trailer for Submerged, which is the first scripted short film fully shot for immersive video on Vision Pro.

The theme of the movie, it's a crew. You're following the crew of a World War II submarine following a torpedo attack. You're in a submarine that's under attack. And is there some water in there? Yeah, there is some water in there. The last thing you want in your submarine is water, but it's in there. So you're going to be immersed in it.

Of course you're going to be immersed in the submarine in the water. You're going to be submerged. Yeah, anyway. Trailer looks great. The trailer is more of like talking about the technology. And this is directed by Oscar winner Edward Berger, who was previously known for All Quiet on the Western Front.

And so in it, you'll see Edward and he's talking about the production and you see him wearing his vision pro. You can, you kind of see how they have these like two weird circular screens, like for cameras, which is probably what the they're using. I am assuming the, I would assume they're using the black magic cameras that they showed off at WWDC. That is what I would assume they're using. I don't know. I love that in the trailer, it shows presumably the director or,

watching like dailies looking at the monitors looking at the monitors and the monitors are a vision pro yeah it's likely using a vision pro to see what they're capturing it's wild so yeah uh it's a short film i expect i don't know how long it'll be but i expect it's probably like a 10-15 minute thing but we'll see it's going to be available uh on thursday this week thursday october 10th watch it this week um look forward yeah it'll be interesting to see

what storytelling is like on something like this because... Yeah, exactly. How do you do storytelling in this format? Because remember our criticism of

some of the sports highlights is that the quick cut format that works so well when you've got a screen in front of you does not work as well when you're in an immersive environment. So how does this director approach kind of creating that immersive experience? And it'll be interesting to see. I'll quiet on the Western front, which was, I think a best picture nominee, a very good movie, really well done. It's really interesting to see how,

I assume Apple came to him and said, we want you to do this and we'll pay you and your production company a lot of money to do it. He might be a big tech nerd, right? And was like, oh, this is a thing. I mean, that probably helps. Yeah. I think you kind of have to be, right? To want to do something like this. I think you've got to at least care about it. Yeah, I'm intrigued because you would assume, presumably, it will be following...

someone or a group of people. But if they're on the left and something else is on the right, you've got to consider all of that. That's right. How do you attract the viewer's attention? Whereas if you cut, you can point the viewer's attention wherever you want. If you're in an immersive space...

Where it's more like you're there. How do you draw people's attention to it? And I don't know, right? It's a different grammar. It is more akin in some ways to an amusement park exhibit than it is to a film. And so how...

How does that work? And I'm not sure anybody has the answer for that, but I'm sure a lot of smart filmmakers have thought about it and have looked at the technology and have thought of things to try. And so we will get another try at it that's not a nature documentary or sports highlights. And I'm looking forward to seeing how that goes. Who is the director of Wicked? John Chu, John M. Chu. I know that Apple featured him before. He does watch his dailies on the Vision Pro.

and loves it. He was on The Town talking about it as well a little while ago, I think. So yeah, interesting. I wanted to just follow up on the Vision Pro a little bit because we don't talk about it very much. At least I don't really think we talk about

what we like about it very much. Cause I mean, I think I can speak for both of us that like don't use them as much as I thought I was going to be using it. Yeah. Because you know, there just isn't enough happening. Like stuff like this is exciting because this is something right. Here's, here's something. Give me reasons to, to go there. Yeah. But I, I wanted to just like, we touched on spatial personas a little bit in the spatial persona calls. We have like a FaceTime call and you're talking to someone and,

Yeah. I've done a few more of these, like from a business perspective, me and gray have been using them. I've been using it to talk and I've

I think that the Vision Pro is probably the best co-working telecommuting device that possibly has ever existed. It's fantastic. So like, why is it better than a Zoom call? Because I think I can speak for everyone and say that when you're on a Zoom call, I mean, I anyway, I feel like I spend too much time looking at myself in the corner.

To like, how am I sitting? How am I posing? All that kind of stuff. Make sure, am I in frame? All of those things. And also that like, if you're having a call with someone, you want to be at least somewhat presentable. Well, that doesn't matter for these, right? Because it's a fixed in time 3D version of yourself, which the quality that they have been able to get to at these spatial personas cannot be overstated how...

incredibly lifelike they were and I will say I was incredibly wrong like I remember in the first demos and even in the beginning I was like the spatial like the personas as they just were then were gonna be a flop and like they would be the digital touch of this device like I mean

I don't think we were wrong in saying that they were creepy and didn't work right. Yeah. I just didn't think it was going to, I just, I thought that that was like, just, they were going to drop that. What, what happened is that they got way better. Yeah.

And then the spatial aspect where they, which, I mean, it feels like a very weird hedge, right? Where that, well, it's in a box. Like, well, why is it in a box? It's because we can't get it out of the box right now. Okay. And then finally they got it out of the box where you've, you're just kind of like in a space with people's personas and the personas are also better. And,

And it's really good. I mean, it's like, it's really, I try to explain it to people and, and they kind of don't get it. And I, you kind of need to experience it, but like we, we do occasional calls and you've now done some with gray too, where it's like you and me and maybe like Casey or, and maybe James Thompson and maybe Stephen Hackett. Like there's a different set of people who will pop into that, uh, that group from time to time. Um,

And because you got to set a time to do it because people otherwise are just who knows what device they're on. But if they're on the Vision Pro and then all of a sudden, like all of the artifice, all the window chrome and am I in the shot? And, you know, and even vanity of like, is my hair messed up? And all of that just goes away. And it's it's much more like you're just in a physical space with people, right?

And when you're in a physical space with people, you don't take a mirror out and look at yourself, right? You don't do... Probably. I hope not. I hope you don't do that. And so it feels much more natural. It's really very good. And then, yeah, if you want to do... This is where SharePlay comes in too. If you want to bring in content...

you know, everybody kind of like it's put in a, instead of facing each other, like they're around a campfire there, they're all, they, um, it moves you so that you're all kind of like aligned looking at whatever is being shown, but you can still look around and you're still hearing the people coming from where they're coming. It's just, it's very, it is really well done. The pro the problems are all about like, nobody has them. What is the content? All of those other things. But like when, if you can find, um,

to share and people who've got a vision pro and you can, and that you're remote from and you want to talk to them in that use case, it's pretty special. Are

are you talking about you and gray using this? Is this going to be a cortex episode at some point? I assume, but like, I don't know. He was real skeptical about it. And I'm excited to know that you guys actually tried it because I know that, uh, meta has had some success and you guys use the horizon workrooms a little bit, but like in our calls with special persona, I kept,

When I heard Gray's skepticism about this, I was like, he really needs to try this because it is next level. Yeah, I convinced him and he blew his mind. And so if we do these calls now, that's how we do it. One of the really important things is the spatialness of it. Apple uses spatial mostly to talk about sound, but with the spatial persona calls, you're all within relative space to each other. So for example, if I bring a window into the environment,

I can point at something and you can follow where I'm pointing. Or like there was a moment when we were on our call last week, I had just my Mac display and it just for me, cause I was going through notes and like Greg could see that I was reading it and he said something and I pointed at him and said, yes, right? Like that's it. And like, but, and he said it worked so much for him because he could see like, it was how I would do things. Like that's the other thing. The technology, especially with the facial scanning is so good that,

you see the facial expressions that you're used to seeing these people make in real life. The technology that they have created here is incredible. And I wanted to mention it again because I just feel like, understandably, there is a lot of negative about Division Pro. But...

This is truly the best experience I have had with it is these calls. Now, I will say there's a bunch of people asking, my mouth still doesn't move, but that's not my problem. That's everybody else's problem. It's true. It's true. It's okay. It's better now. It's not great, but it's better than it was. You were like stone face before and now sort of like your face moves and your mouth maybe moves a little bit. It knows that you're moving your mouth, but it can't see through your beard to do that. That's a thing that they're just going to need to...

keep working on, but no, it's, it's really, it's really, I just, again, it's hard to describe this. Like the, the sound plus the, the hands plus the face and the facial gestures and the facial expressions. If you roll it all together, it's enough to,

To get it over the edge to being like, it feels like I'm in the room with that person. You put all of that stuff together. It's good enough. It's good enough to cross this line where it feels more real. And it certainly feels more real than like a Zoom does, which we've all gotten used to Zoom. Everybody's in a flat little box on your screen. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like I'm in a room or on a beach or wherever with...

the people that I'm talking to and, and that it is a completely different kind of feeling. There's a lot of, um, it's, it's can be very impressive. Yeah. It's,

It sounds so, it almost feels like embarrassing to say in a way, but like these calls, it's genuinely as good as spending time with someone. Like the way it makes me feel, like I feel like I've actually spent time with the person. Yeah, our little hour that we try to do every other week and sometimes it comes off and sometimes it doesn't, but like,

I'm hanging out with my friends for an hour. Yeah. And I, I don't get to do that a lot because I work in my garage and my friends are all over the world. Yeah. Um, but that hour feels like,

just in-person hangout time. It really does. Significantly better than a FaceTime. Like, significantly better. Vastly superior. Like, hugely better. I feel, a lot of times I have long FaceTimes and I feel tired when I'm done. If I have long FaceTime, like, long spatial persona calls, I feel energized. Like,

It's incredible. This is one of the things where, to me, it's a shame that it's locked behind such an expensive device. And I hope that this is something that they're able to bring to different versions in the quality that they've done it in. Genuinely, they have built something incredibly good and

Yeah, it's just... This is like... So frustrating with the Vision Pro, right? That this is just such a good part of it, but then there are all these other bits that just have yet to come to much. But this is good. You linked to something on Six Colors that I thought was interesting. And it was... You linked to an article about an article. I want to give a bit of a backstory so we can talk about it. So...

In iOS 18, Apple has created a new privacy prompt for sharing contacts with an app. So usually, like in the past, I should say, you could, you know, an app could say, would you like to share your contacts? You just say, okay, and it's done. So it used to be incredibly easy. But now this app

privacy prompt works similarly to the photos permission where you get asked if you want to share contacts and then you get asked for which and you can either share everything or you can do that thing where you just choose some specific contacts. So basically Apple has made it much harder for a developer to get that like blanket forever permission that they can scan and use all of your contacts for whatever they want. So

This prompt will also, I'm sure, make people consider how they're sharing their contacts or they'll just forget about it and not do it. Therefore, it will control how developers get to scrape contacts for bootstrapping apps, usually social apps.

The New York Times, I think Kevin Russo of the New York Times wrote an article claiming that this process would mean kind of the end of new social apps, because there have been many instances over the years of social apps being able to get started by using or abusing the contacts that people had on their phones, which I think the conceit of that I actually agree with. But it seemed like that the article was kind of

And making these claims and trying to back them on information that they were not sharing, you know, if that makes sense. It's like, oh, I spoke to such and such person and they said this. But I feel like as an opinion piece, this maybe would have been better, but it wasn't really. It doesn't really seem to have been positioned as such.

This article prompted Nick here to write an article of their own, basically defending users with this, rather than the startups trying to invade the privacy of those users, which the New York Times piece seems to, for some reason, lean more towards. Which then made you link to this in six colors, talking about the idea of Apple being like Godzilla, which I liked, where Apple can kind of just, in its way, stomp on a building and

and change everything. Right. Everything. So yeah, there's, there's all these layers here. So I think Kevin Roos's piece, I don't like it. I think that it is way too worried about a growth hacking startup bro who is sad that he can't quickly build a startup by strip mining everybody's contacts. And there's still apps that do this too, where, where it's like,

If you want to join our, like remember Clubhouse? Clubhouse was like, if you want to join Clubhouse, you have to share all of your contacts with us so that we can spam all your contacts and we can build a social graph.

And it's actually kind of amazing that Apple has taken this long to take its approach that it's done elsewhere and do it to this, which is selectively sharing instead of it being like, we empower you to not share anything. It's like we empower you to share whatever you want to and nothing more, not your entire context list. And I'm even leaving out the other thing, which is the consent of the people who gave you their contact information. I'm sure they didn't give you personally their contact information so that you could share it with everybody else, right? Mm-hmm.

And yet that's what's going on here. I feel like users are not just protecting their own information. They're protecting their contacts information by doing this. So I think Kevin Ruse's piece exacerbated by a really bad headline, but even the piece is bad too, I think, which is it seems very worried about, you know, who will speak for the startup bros.

And not about the fact that they are building businesses and getting investments and making profits and selling out and getting rich by selling people's information, right? That they're gleaning from this, from an app permission. So Nick here's piece basically says, you got it backward. Apple makes this money.

makes this decision, we should look at it and say, wow, it's kind of crappy that the guys like this guy that's quoted in this article extensively have made a living starting up companies based on asking everybody to empty their address books and give all of their contacts away to this guy.

And that it really should be the other way around. And so Nick here's piece is headlined, I do not care about impediments to a creepy growth hacking technique. Which is like, I think he's right. They got it all backward and it shows you just how broken I think some writers on technology's minds are about the fact that they seem to be covering startups and not tech.

technology that impacts people and that perhaps you should be more user centric and a little less startup centric. I mean, tech crunch, I kind of understand it. It's kind of their business, but the New York times, maybe not so much. I don't know. Maybe, maybe it is, but the point, and, and I was talking to Dan more in last Friday, I guess on the six colors podcast about this too. I think the thing that's most interesting to walk away from this whole thing is the

Take just the fact that Apple made this decision. Isn't it interesting that Apple at this point is so big and so powerful and the iPhone is so important that any decision Apple makes has the potential to

close off whole lines of potential new business. And we talked about this with like the app store and app store policy saying, you know, never be an app that does this because everybody knows it'll just get rejected and how Apple has that sort of power. But I'm saying like, even if Apple is literally just thinking, oh, we did, we did, uh,

photos and we did files. And now we're going to do contacts with our new system that has an API and the picker is separate from the app. So the app can't see your contacts and then you can choose what to do just like you can with files and photos. This is a new approach Apple's taking that allows apps to ask for stuff without needing to be granted license, right? You pick, you share, the app only sees the stuff you share. It never gets access to your library.

And this year they're like, we brought it to contacts and, you know, they do it at WWDC and you think, great, of course you did. Like, why wasn't it already there? Yeah. Exactly. But it's, and I'm not, I really am not making an argument here about this. I'm just saying it. When Apple does something like that, there are enormous ramifications almost every time. And that's the Godzilla metaphor, which is, you know, maybe Godzilla just wants a sandwich, right? Godzilla's like,

Hey, little famished, gonna walk down to my favorite sandwich shop. But Godzilla's huge and Godzilla's gonna step on your car on the way there. And if Godzilla stepped on your car, you're like, oh my God.

I hope I paid my insurance because I need a new car now. Godzilla stepped on it. That is Apple. Like Apple, Apple sometimes makes tactical decisions to change the world, right? Other times though. And I think that they're aware. I think there's awareness there, but I think other times, uh,

Apple's like, well, no, we just did this because it makes sense technically, or it's a thing that we needed to do because we wanted to protect users against this thing, or we're rolling out our existing privacy framework to another part of the data store on the phone. It's not that big a deal, but like every move they make,

on the iPhone has potentially enormous ramifications to create markets, to destroy markets, to ruin people's companies, to make new companies. And that, and in that, I think that the original Kevin Ruse piece is interesting because the guy's attitude is basically like, Welp,

I mean, again, a little more sympathetic to this guy than I would be. But his thought is like, well, I guess this one's run dry. I'll go on to the next opportunity. And that is what Apple can do just at the drop of a hat, just set in foot on the street. They will close something off and create something else. And I just think as somebody who covered Apple back when it was irrelevant, it is interesting to think about that and think about what Apple thinks about it.

Does Apple, every Apple move, presumably they're like, what will this do? What are the ramifications of this? But like everything they do is like this now. Literally, Apple cannot make a change without it having a substantial impact on people or businesses or, you know, or something out there because of their sheer scale. One that I always think of with this is app tracking transparency.

Absolutely. For whatever reason, Apple decided that they would make it much harder for developers, companies, advertisers, ad marketplaces, I think, to be able to track users and serve them ads.

And in doing that, I mean, for a lot of companies, a lot of companies in tech and social media and that kind of stuff, there was the pre-ATT and the post-ATT. I was listening to something recently where they were talking about Snapchat. And it's like, well, Snapchat, they made money.

They made money in like one quarter and then never again because that track of transparency came in. Like they'd finally kind of nailed their advertising system and then gone away again. And it's one of these things where it's like, I agree with the idea around trying to give people a choice for their privacy, but it's just a peculiar thing where one company,

has the ability to change the fortunes of so many other businesses. Because, like, you know, it's easier to focus on the Snapchats and Facebooks of the world, but there are lots of stories of, like, companies that were building their businesses selling ads on different platforms, and it's become much harder for them now post this. The challenge, and yeah, there's a lot of complexity here, but the challenge is...

Apple didn't make it so that you can't track people. No. And Apple didn't make it so you can't share contacts with apps. What Apple did is make them ask or give users more ability to choose what the scope of their sharing is. And we can argue that, and I actually would argue that I think Apple hasn't nailed that give user scope thing and that it gets in my way more than I would like as a user.

Um, you know, and, and maybe some of this is the way that individual apps handle this, but like when I try to share an image in Slack and it's like, oh, currently you're sharing the last five images that you shared in Slack. Do you want to pick from those? It's like, well, of course I don't. I want to pick from my library and it makes me go and add it to the list and then add it through. And it's like, well, that's not how that should work. And I'm not quite sure who's at fault there, but, but the bigger point is, um,

it's not like you can't build a business based on your social graph, but you've got to convince the users that it's worth sharing your social graph or part of your social graph with a random company. And you have to make the case and you have to make the case in the case of ATT, you have to make the case that you want to be tracked and people don't. And I,

I know that that can be self-serving for Apple because Apple considers itself the first party. So it can track you on its devices for its purposes. And that's fine because they're not selling it to anybody else or using it themselves for anything other than their existing things, which is you already agreed to you using an Apple phone. Your, your knowledge is their knowledge and right. It's like a whole thing. Uh, and, and, and arguably that's unfair. Right. But, and,

And I know it got brought up like, oh, but what about messages? Messages uses your contacts and mail uses your contacts. And are they going to ask about that? I guess what I would say is maybe they should, right? Maybe Apple the first time, and it's going to be annoying, but if you want to be fair about it, maybe Apple, when you open messages for the first time, it should say, hey, I

Do you want Apple, all your contacts to be available in messages? And here's what will happen is people will say yes to that. People will say yes to that. See, I am of the belief that they should ask because Apple is making assumptions about...

The trust people have in them. Right. Or like, like why, why does a user who, who, you know, why does somebody who buys an iPhone, why do they like, oh, they're inherently like, oh, I'll just give it to Apple and not WhatsApp when like WhatsApp might be what they trust and use implicitly, you know?

The difference is you are putting that information into your phone, which means that it's in your Apple kind of system. And when you add somebody to messages, it's not leaving your phone, really. Whereas what these apps are doing is saying, we would like to read your contacts and copy them off your device online.

Arguably. And again, this is one of those cases where you could make a differentiation here, which is there's access to the contact information and there's copying your contacts list and putting it on someone's server. Right. And those are, those could arguably be different, but once the apps got them, you know, anything, anything goes. But so I would say like there's on device and there's also off device and there's implicit trust with Apple. And, and yeah, I guess my argument would be if people like really trust Apple,

Snap or something, then should they have an address book in their app that's not the contact's

and keep it there. And Google has its own contacts that are not Apple contacts and they, they do it that way. Yeah. I just, it's one of those things where, where, where the problem is sometimes I think Apple does this very, in very self-serving ways because they are damaging competitors while they still have an advantage. But also this is the complexity of it. And this is why whenever anybody says, Oh, Apple just says that they care about user privacy, but they really just want them all to yourself. And, and, and,

I hate those arguments because it is not true. The reverse is also not true, right? This is when we talked about all the issues about Apple and its security and privacy stance and how the EU says that some of it is bogus. It's like, look, it is part of Apple's corporate belief. It is also a place where Apple has an advantage.

And that's what makes it muddy is I don't believe Apple is limiting contacts to destroy tech bro startups so that they can control your social graph for their own nefarious purposes inside Apple. I don't think that's why I think Apple literally is looking at that and saying,

It's kind of gross that right now people ask or asked one thing and they get complete access to the contacts. That's too much. And that, so what you could argue is that the growth hacker guy, his whole business was based on Apple making a naive technical decision a few years ago. Cause remember what it was is they were siphoning all of the contacts out. And so Apple put in a permission to stop it, but it was a yes, no permission.

And now Apple's saying, let's be a little more granular about this permission. So it used to be that the way your business model was to get people to say yes. So Clubhouse was like, you can't use Clubhouse unless you give us everybody you know, and then we'll let you in the door. Right? So you say yes, and then we got you. Okay. Now you can come in the door. And Apple said, well, that's not great. Maybe we need to make it so that like, if you want to use Clubhouse, you can share like five people and, or, you know, Clubhouse is gone, but that idea.

So you could argue that like growth hacker bro, like,

He was taking advantage of an inefficiency and a sort of a naivety about Apple that has now gone away. And so that's why his attitude, I think, is actually pretty good, which is, OK, they close that loophole onto the next thing. What will I exploit next in order to make my businesses go? And again, I mean, I'm a little judgmental about that. But at the same time, like that's business. Like, that's just how it goes. I don't think Apple is out to destroy him per se, especially for their own benefit. I think Apple looks at that and says, yeah, that's gross.

We shouldn't, users shouldn't be forced to make that decision. We should give users more control of their data and choose where to use it. And I do think that's where they're coming from. But the fact that they benefit from things like app tracking transparency because they have personalized data in the app store based on what you do and they can use it because they're the first party muddies the waters, right? It makes you question every decision they make because are they doing this

To gain an advantage or are they doing this to protect us? And the answer sometimes is yes to both. Yes. And sometimes it's not. But in this case, it's funny. And this is why I think it's important. It's funny that it's gotten to the point where even if Apple makes what I would say is a fairly straightforward judgment about user control of their data and privacy.

People are still going to say, I can't believe Apple is doing this. And that's the Godzilla thing, right? Like through, you know, through no fault of their own necessarily trying to do something positive, they can still do a lot of damage and they may know that they're going to do it and not care. They may not know.

This episode is brought to you by Notion. There's so much to love about Notion. I love it. I use Notion every single day. I use it for multiple projects, but the majority of the time that I'm spending in Notion is working on my projects with Cortex brand. I keep everything in here, including all the stuff for the Cortex podcast too. We plan out all of our shows there, but also all of the products that we have,

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Let's finish out today with some Ask Upgrade questions. First is from Kevin. If Apple releases an Apple TV-sized Mac Mini, would you consider traveling with one plus a Vision Pro as a transportable workstation with a much bigger monitor than a laptop? No. It's an interesting idea, though, right? Like, you'd have this tiny little box and your Vision Pro. Yeah.

And then you would have a powerful machine, potentially, depending on what you've got inside of the Mac Mini, and you could connect it to your Vision Pro. I think that that is an interesting idea. I don't know how you would... It might be difficult to do it without a monitor, though. Completely.

Right. No. So no battery. So you've got to have you got to have power that's consistent. Sure. You're not going to be able to do it when you're traveling or something, but you could do it in like a hotel room or a conference room. And you're going to need to be able to hook it up to a monitor, presumably to set it up or unless they can do some sort of a quick. There's a lot that would have to go on for this to be a transportable workstation. I feel like at that point you probably should just bring a laptop.

yeah as zach points out in discord federico could make it work i'm sure federico could build and john they could build a thing that's got a battery and an hdmi thingy on it and it comes with its own wi-fi and it's all just you know you you you pull the chain and start up the generator that gives it power and whatever i i'm sure there's a there's a way there but it seems too fiddly to me it's like it seems beyond what it it would be um

Useful for, but I mean, I guess, I guess what I would say is I could see a very specific scenario where it might be good, but probably more likely I would just have a laptop.

But this is the kind of thing that is interesting. Like that Mac mini being small is interesting. And you will, I believe people are going to, you're going to see a lot of this kind of thing, like people using this tiny Mac in like new and interesting ways. Like I look forward to that time. But keep in mind with a vision pro, you're still going to need a keyboard and a, and probably a track pad at that point. And that's the thing. If you bring a laptop, uh,

You can still do all of this and it is your keyboard and laptop. It has everything you need. Or a trackpad. Yeah. It has all the things in one piece and battery power. And if you're not wearing your Vision Pro, you can still use it. Like there's just too much that like get a MacBook Air really is the answer here.

Florian writes in and says, Jason recently mentioned that he listens to music while reading. What kind of music? Is it the same music? Similar music? Is it with lyrics, without lyrics? What do you listen to when you read? This is one of those questions, and I knew when I said this that somebody would probably ask this question.

I have a bunch of playlists and stuff that are on my phone that are downloaded to my phone for when I'm on a plane. And it's just music I like. It's mostly music that I know really well. I think that the one thing that is distracting when I'm reading or writing is if it's not music that I kind of know by heart. I have a specific playlist that I use a lot when I'm writing. When I'm reading, the music can be more broad than that. But if it's brand new, I'm not...

focused on what I'm reading. I'm listening to the music and all of that. So it needs to be something I'm familiar with, but that's it. And really nothing in particular. It's just the stuff that I like that I've downloaded to my phone. So it's on my phone when I'm on a plane. There's nothing really more than that. When I'm on a plane, there's nothing happier for me than AirPods Pro, noise canceling, and playing music while I'm reading a book. That's it.

But I think that is the interesting thing, right? I think sometimes people can, they have like specific needs when doing something like reading or writing. You know, like if I'm ever writing or reading anything, I can't have lyrics playing.

Yeah, I know. A lot of people are like that. And for me, the more I know music, the harder I find it to concentrate. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because then I'm trying to sing along. It needs to be stuff that I know by heart and it needs to be in a very specific range of things that I feel like are good fits. I have a couple of playlists that are my go-to. I don't always write with those playlists going, but if I need, if I am being distracted and I have a deadline and I need to write something right now,

I have a couple of go-to playlists, but it's music with lyrics and I just shuffle through them. But they obviously, I know them so well and they give me whatever kind of like focus that I need that I'll use them. But generally, more generally than like extreme circumstances like that,

I don't have a problem. I know people have a problem with lyrics. I don't have a problem with lyrics if it's something that I know by heart, because then it's just all part of the background and then it doesn't bother me at all. If it's relatively new or it's a song that I haven't heard in a while and I really like, I will get distracted by it. But if it's a song that I play all the time and I know it by heart, like from those playlists, it's not

It's not an issue. And sometimes I'll shop too. Sometimes it'll absolutely be this again for writing, for reading. It doesn't really bother me. Sometimes I'll be like, let's try this playlist and I'll sit there and I'll try to write and I'll be like, nope. And I'll move on to another playlist and try that one and see if I can get one that gets me in the mood.

Bronwyn has a question for the author of Take Control of Photos, which now is in its fourth edition available at takecontrolbooks.com. This question goes as following. It's me. It's you. We're asking the question to you. I'm having issues of iCloud Photo Library. I find it deeply slow to download photos for many. It doesn't even keep the thumbnails on my phone, even though I have plenty of space.

When I go to share a photo or insert it into an app, it hangs on downloading. I have fast internet. It feels like there shouldn't be an excuse for this. Do you have any suggestions or similar issues with iCloud? Well, what I will say is I've seen this before. It's not most people's experience. So I would recommend that you restart your phone. Maybe you turn photo syncing off and then let it sit for a few minutes and then turn it back on.

You might even want to consider logging out and logging back into your iCloud account. Put the day aside. Yeah, I know. But it's the steps, right? You need to do the steps to do it because what's happening is it's got something wrong with its photo syncing. And so the implication here is like there should be no excuse for this. I mean, the answer is that it's a bug and it's not working right, but that is not the...

the experience that everybody has with it. It would be one thing. It was like, everybody agrees that it's slow to download photos and doesn't keep thumbnails on the phone and it hangs on downloading, but that's not the case. You are, you're,

Your library is in a kind of half-broken sync state. The other thing you can do in the new version of Photos is tap on your icon in the upper right corner, and that's where all of the cloud information, the iCloud stuff is now. So you also could look at the sync status and see if there are any issues there. But as usual, Apple doesn't really let you do a lot of troubleshooting. So my recommendation is do the things. Turn it off and back on. Turn syncing off and on.

turn iCloud off and on, do the things to get it to get back to where it is. And also be sure that it's on Wi-Fi at night and sleeping so that it can download a lot of data and do analysis then. Sometimes this stuff just clears up over time. Other times you need to give it a kick, but that's it. It's not the usual behavior. That's all I have. And Sasha asks, do you use any cameras other than your iPhone's camera?

I don't really. I have a Sony a6400 that I use for streaming and I also use for taking pictures of products, even though I'm not very good at it. But if I ever need to do something like that, like photos or videos of a product, I'll use that just because it is just a much higher quality lens than what my iPhone produces. And I've had my eye on one of those Fuji cameras, the Fujifilm.

X100V because every time I see somebody take photos of one of these, they're just like the most beautiful photos for my taste. But it's a very expensive camera. And so that's just the end of that, really. I also have an a6400. Okay. It's above me right now. It's primarily for video. It's my overhead shot or whatever. When Julian graduated from high school,

I took it down and put the battery in it and put a card in it. And I shot pictures of his high school graduation with it. I'm not sure if I took it to Oregon for Jamie's college graduation though, because again, it's a whole other camera. But so I have occasionally done that for special occasions. I have to be honest. I used to take out my DSLR back in the day and shoot product photos with it for the website. And now I just use the iPhone 99% of the time for that stuff because it's good enough.

So, yeah, there's some stuff I want to get like detail. The iPhone is just it doesn't have enough flexibility. But yeah, I agree. And I can imagine a situation like that one that you would describe like in the graduation, like if you have a camera with like a big lens, you know, just like take that. But like it's not your everyday thing. But yeah, there you go.

If you would like to send us in a question, go to upgradefeedback.com. You can also send in your follow-up there as well. You can check out Jason over at sixcolors.com and hear him here on Relay and at theincomparable.com. You can listen to my podcast here on Relay too and check out my work at cortexbrand.com.

You can find us online. Jason is at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. You can watch clips of this show on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where we're at Upgrade Relay. Thank you to our members who support us at Upgrade Plus. You can get a longer ad-free version of the show each and every week. Just go to getupgradeplus.com to find out more.

Thank you to Notion, Factor, and ExpressVPN for their support of this show. But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.