[Music] From Relay, this is Upgrade Episode 540, recorded December 2nd, 2024. It's brought to you by Delete Me, Smarter World, and ExpressVPN. I am Jason Snell, your usual host, but I'm not doing all the stuff that usually is done by Mike Hurley, because Mike Hurley is on assignment, and so sitting in for Mr. Michael Hurley today is our very special guest. Mr. Stephen M. Hackett, oh, I got the initial, I want to introduce you as I, Stephen M. Hackett, but that's a little bit weird, now I'm inspired the, sorry, I'm going to make a little baseball tangent here, I apologize. The Giants radio broadcasters, John Miller, Hall of Famer, and Hall of Fame broadcaster, and David Fleming. Dave Fleming is introduced by John every time, as David B. Fleming, and it's like it's his dad introducing him, and it just makes me laugh, so I thought I'd give you the Stephen M. Since your middle initial is part of your public persona, I thought I'd throw it in there. Yeah, I've really tried when I first started on the internet to make it really real, like I included it everywhere, but it sort of faded over time, but we can't talk about baseball, because we have a Snell Talk question about baseball. Oh, no, I'm giving Kevin credit for this, but many, many, many people wrote in about this. Kevin said, what will happen to the Snell family jerseys, now that Blake Snell is moving on to the hated Dodgers. Okay, I don't have to explain what this means to you. No, I understand. My context of this is listening to upgrade. Okay, so yeah, you know about it. You know all about it from listening to a computer podcast about baseball. Yes, Blake Snell, who is not related to me in any way, was a giant for a year. He signed a two year contract that was very clearly only going to be a one year contract, and he opted out at the end of the year. And during this year, we bought a lot of Snell branded Giants merchandise, and now he has signed as a free agent with the hated Dodgers. This is head. Okay, so a lot of people have asked about this. First off, I don't really care, because the whole point here, I'm not really a Blake Snell fan. He's great. He threw a no hitter for the Giants, it's awesome. That's right. Well, I know that from listening to the award winning upgrade program. Indeed, indeed, we're very a very popular baseball podcast. And the separate like a very popular podcast that's also sometimes about baseball, but they're not connected. So it's a different show. He's fine. He's fine. He's an interesting pitcher. But my prime interest in him is that he has my last name. And if they if he comes to your team, there's a whole bunch of Snell branded stuff that you get to buy then. So he spent a year on the Giants. It allowed me to buy a Jersey. It allowed me to buy by a t-shirt. It allowed me to buy a t-shirt for my daughter. It allowed me to buy a Jersey for my wife. We all had a good time because see, our names remain Snell and we remain Giants fans. So it's fine. It's fine. I'm a little bummed out because he is a good pitcher that he's on the Dodgers now. But at the same time, he's also kind of injury prone and can't throw for very many innings usually. So it's a risk for the Dodgers to pay him a lot of money. They're happy to do that. So that's fine. That's fine. It's fine. What's funny now is that my good friend Greg Noss, the Dodger fan, he can buy some Snell branded merchandise and wear that and go yay Snell. And he has to do that now because he's a Dodger fan. And that actually kind of delights me. So that's good. Also, I hear from the grapevine that his one of his sons works in the baseball industry. And it wouldn't be amazing if he ended up working for the Giants. That's all I'm saying. Not saying that he is, but I mean, wouldn't that be great if he did? I just would love that you're a loyal Dodger fan your whole life. And then you get work you get work in the industry you work where you need to. And it's at the Giants that just make me laugh. Anyway, thank you to everybody who wrote in. And I got it on social media. Not we didn't even mention the other huge Snell news, by the way, from last week, which was on the TV show Star Trek Lower Deck. So I'm a huge Star Trek fan, lifelong Star Trek fan. They go to a planet that's got all these people on it with like little antenna on their head and these little aliens. And they have to hide out for months. They have to live there because they get sort of stranded. And there's always in when you're undercover, there's always that one snoopy character, sneaky character who's always like looking around for you. And on the old B which TV show it was Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor who was like, I think there's witchcraft going on. And everybody else thinks she's crazy. But of course there is witchcraft going on. It's what the show is about. Anyway, that guy, the sneaky snoop guy in that whole episode who is used as a joke and a punching bag, his name is Snell. So yeah, it was a big Snell week around the old Snell household. Snell averse it wild, wild. Can we talk about the gift of relay? No, I think we should do that. You are a relay co-founder. So you know, you want to let people know the magic stuff that you and Mike have hatched up for this holiday season? Yeah, let's do it. So give relay.com is where you want to go. You can use the code 2020 24 holiday though, if you go through the link in the show notes or on the website. So what's the deal? 20% off all annual memberships from now until December 18th. So for upgrade, that means you get upgrade plus, which is longer, ad free episodes each and every week. I love the upgrade plus segments are so good. But you also get access to the relay members discord and tons of bonus content. Like two monthly members only shows, a newsletter, some wallpapers, a bunch of cool stuff. And yeah, give relay.com. So if you already have a membership to like another relay show and you want to add upgrade, you can do that. Or you can gift it to somebody else. So say you've got maybe a roommate who listens to upgrade, y'all do it together and they want to become a member or maybe you're like me. And I think like Jason, like I think a lot of us who are nerdy were kind of hard to shop for just send that link, you know, to your aunt who drew your name for the Christmas gift giving family extravaganza and they can hook you up. Give relay.com through December 18th, 20% off and do it. And this week on upgrade plus, we're going to talk about Thanksgiving stuff. So that's right. And when there's always something, there's a whole other segment of the show that happens after we say goodbye. It's not like connected Steven where we do it before. We do it after. It's like an after. Yeah. It's fine. Connected just is very interesting because you talk about like video games and well, I mean, Mike and Federico talk about video games and you cry to yourself, I guess. That's right. Or just show up 15 minutes late. I don't know how that works. Yeah, we do connected. We do pro show at the beginning and then we pick titles at the end. Kind of a little bit of both. Yeah, a little bit. But that's true. There's the title picking at the end. Last week's title wasn't all time classic. It was in how nonsensical it is and how much Mike laughed when he saw it as a title suggestion. That was a that was a really good one. And I'll also point out that in your your list of scenarios in which you might give the gift of relay, I liked how they got increasingly less likely as you went along. I was waiting for the like, let's say you're in space and well, okay, well, we'll happen then. Anyway, lots of reasons to give the gift of relay or have someone to you. RSS cannot be held back by the bounds of gravity. No, or probability, quite frankly, it's not powerful. RSS is defined gravity. Should we do some follow up? That was a that was a wicked that was a wicked reference you were making there. We'll find gravity for a moment. Follow up. Follow up. You want you want to handle follow up? You want to you want to? This is weird. Like we did you. Yeah, I can do follow up. Okay, I'll I'll dive to follow up. So all right, Apple Watch plus emergency calls. So y'all were talking about like going for a run and leaving your phone behind something I know that you do quite often. And a gradient Doug wrote in isn't it the case with the cellular Apple Watch that you can call emergency services, even if you don't pay a monthly fee to your cellular cellular provider. So in doing some homework for this, I'll tell you, it's actually kind of confusing. But Apple says that emergency SOS requires a cellular connection on the Apple Watch or Wi-Fi calling with an internet connection right from a nearby iPhone. So I think I know what this is is referring to. So legally in the US, at least, I can't speak for other countries, but in the US legally, if you have a device that has a cellular radio in it, it needs to be able to call 911 essentially. Right. Even if I mean, basically, even if it's not doesn't have an active plan on it. But the real reason that that law is there is so if you're in an area, like my house, honestly, my house is like this, where you have Verizon and you come to my house. Guess what? You're not getting a signal at my house. My house has no Verizon or T mobile. It only has AT&T. And you have to walk like down the block and then the Verizon shows up. So if you're in a place or you're just out in the woods somewhere, but there is one cell tower. So it's not you don't have to go to satellite, you don't have to fall back to satellite. And this is the difference. If you're looking at your phone and it says AT&T, you're like, Oh, I'm on AT&T. And then you go out further into the woods, and it says emergency SOS, but it doesn't say satellite. And then you go further out into the woods and it shows the satellite that interim step, it can see a cell tower. It just can't see your cell tower. And by law, if you need to call 911, the fact that you're not a T mobile subscriber is not going to get in the way of saving your life, right? It will it will roam to AT&T to make the call to make the emergency effectively. So what I don't know is so the Apple Watch absolutely has to do that. I think legally you have to be able to make an emergency call from a cellular Apple Watch, even if you don't have a plan. Here's the thing though, I'm not sure whether if you fall and you have the automatic fall detection, do I need to call for help thing? If it calls 911 in that case or not, I don't know, because that's a specific feature of fall detection. I would hope that it would, but I honestly don't know. And the reason I mentioned this in the scenario is not everything is a 911 call. I guess that, you know, when I fell, I fell and bruised my ribs while running a couple years ago. And like, I didn't call 911, I called my wife and I said, I fell, I bruised my ribs. I think that's all it is. I can walk, I didn't hit my head, I wanted to let you know, but I'm just going to walk home and go to the ER. And that's what I did. So that's a, that's a call that you want to be able to make, which is why I feel like if you're going to have a cellular Apple Watch, you should probably put it on your plan. That's not a 911 call, but I think it's true that maybe somebody can write in, we'll have future follow-up about this. Nothing like follow-up about follow-up about about, that's the best. It's finally aged follow-up times two, but I don't know whether the fall detection triggers it or not. Yeah, Apple's documentation is a little confusing there. You know, when I experienced the, you've been in a car accident and your device is calling 911, like my phone and watch were with me. And the watch was like going off, right? Because it's on your person. And if you, the car crash detection, like it tries to get your attention and you basically have to like stop it from calling. Right. Yeah, which I had to do when I fell when I was running, I had to say, no, no, no, please. Well, actually it was a moment of like, well, I didn't hit my head, so I'm going to say no to this. Because I'm conscious and I understand what's going on. But yeah, otherwise it triggers. I don't know. These are all like weirdly overlapping features. And that's even before you get to like the satellite stuff. Right. Because that's my other question is, if you take a big fall with your iPhone when you're in satellite land, does it do an emergency satellite transmission then? I don't know if it does. Yeah. Oh, you would have to hold it up to the sky so you probably can. Yeah. They all overlap in weird ways. But it's complicated. David Schob in our chat room is just pasted in an Apple support link with the one word description complicated. It's complicated is the answer here. Yeah. Just like Avril Lavigne said, you know, but it's good to come on. He's let that go by. You know, the people on the YouTube version will see me give you a look. I'm just going to let it go by though. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the that's the deal here is, yes, if you buy a cellular Apple watch and don't put a plan on it and you're somewhere and you need help, you will be able to call emergency services, at least in the US and probably in a bunch of other countries that have those rules. But that's it. Just emergency services. You can't place an emergency phone call to your mom. That is not allowed. That's that you're getting around. You're going to make a collect call to my mom? No, you can't call 911. That's all you can do. And at least in the US, that's how it works. But but it's a good point that Doug mentions. And I think it's worth people knowing that that's what that interim SOS only emergency only mode means. It's like just because you don't have cell signal doesn't mean you can't call for help if you need help, right? The answer is just don't fall down. Do what you can. That is my advice. My best advice is don't fall down. We're not doctors, but it seems good. I wanted to see Ken check in with you. You wrote this piece and you all spoke about it. The Mac is the model. How has response been to that that piece has been in the world now? Like, I don't know, a couple weeks, 10 days or something. How has that been? I think it's actually been better than I thought. I think anytime you are in the business of writing about and having opinions about Apple, you know this criticizing Apple will always get people who will come out of the woodwork to say, but no, Apple is great and everything Apple does is fine. There are people who really are, they only want people to be cheerleaders for Apple, which I've never really been. I feel like I advocate for the users, not for the company. The company has got a lot of money and it doesn't mean my help. But it's more positive than I thought. There was definitely some pushback from some people. I think maybe one of the reasons it was muted is that the whole point of how I wrote the article was to say Apple itself has solved this problem. It's Apple has its own solution that it built from the Mac. I feel like made it harder to make the argument that it's impossible for Apple to do this because Apple literally did it. That was my whole point. I've definitely heard from people though. I understand the pushback that I've gotten that I expected but I think is more nuanced is people saying but I like Apple being in complete control of the platform. That's basically the comment that I thought is, I think the most interesting is I like it here. I like it in the Walt's Garden. I like Apple having all the payment systems. I like all of that. I understand that. My problem with that is my argument is that you don't have to change unless you want to, but also that you may not even know some of the things you're missing because Apple has complete control over the entire market. There are apps, there are app experiences, there are website links that can't be made. You don't even know what the experience would be. I guess I got a version of that was the but Android already does this so why. My answer there is I'm an iOS user and telling me to leave the platform that I like because I don't like their policy. That's okay but that's not my point. My point is that all computing platforms should have some level of the owner of the product being able to install software on it and not the other way. Not having the maker of the product dictate what goes on. That computer essentially that can run arbitrary third-party software plus there's the issue of and we know a lot of these people. People who have invested their knowledge and skill set into developing for Apple platforms and you could say well that was their mistake. It's like okay but a lot of them came from the Mac but they're also on iOS and I would argue they are a large portion of the reason that the iPhone was successful because they're the ones who developed apps in the App Store and they're captives because you can't take your iOS app and run it on Android. It's not the same skill set, it's not the same language, it's not the same APIs and so they're kind of trapped and yeah it's easy to say well just re-educate and become a Java developer and go write Android apps where there's no market for it anyway or just suck it up and make your money from Apple. They'll take their 15 or 30% and deal with it but like my point is those are those are people saying yeah just take what you can get instead of me trying to be a little idealistic here and say it's wrong. It's wrong and that was my point. So not not as vociferous feedback as I thought I would get even though it's definitely out there. I think that also speaks to the overall feelings in the community about the App Store right like Apple's just they've lost so much goodwill over these issues and it's their own fault right yeah yeah it could have been it right like they could exert this is the thing that I think a lot of us feel is they could have exerted an amount of control and skimmed an amount of money out of the App Store while addressing more of the issues that really set people off and it would have been fine this is the whole argument of like well why don't they want to compete because I think they could compete really strongly and the answer is because it's better to just not compete than to even to be a strong competitor who would take the lion's share of the revenue from the market the lion's share isn't all of it which is sort of what they want to do but that that is the point that I thought the point about like I don't want it to be complicated like I get it but that is sort of my point about the Mac model is you know by default you can't run unsigned software on the Mac you have to go through lots of hoops to get there and an administrator or a user can set it to only run from the Mac App Store which I would assume in any circumstance would probably be the default on any future version of iOS I don't think it would be particularly different but you know it frustrates me but I understand it when people sort of say but I don't want it so it shouldn't happen because the point is other people might want it and and I don't love it when people say well I'm okay so it doesn't matter what other people feel like that's not a great impulse yeah if they open it up it's just an option right you're not yeah like like with the Mac right again going back to the the Mac is the model if you want to live just within the Mac App Store you can now it's not a perfect analogy because there's a lot of software on the Mac that's not available in the Mac App Store right but again you have the option for other yeah for lots of reasons actually but yeah I just I love the piece I really thought about it a lot and just wanted to kind of kind of see how it was because you know sometimes it feels like these sorts of topics are potentially spicy yeah yeah it was it was I mean I had that moment where I was thinking about it and I got frustrated I was like I got to write this sometime and then when I was writing I'm like well you know I believe this I believe that it's sort of fundamentally that if we buy a thousand dollar plus computing devices we should be able to put software on them and that if you're somebody who has a skill set writing software you shouldn't be at the whims and under the complete control of the platform owner I just feels wrong and I know that that's a weird squishy emotional and moral argument but I do really legitimately believe it that that it just it feels wrong like not leaving the business model stuff aside it just feels wrong for for that to be the case that that this is I don't believe the computers and phones and iPads our computers should be entirely closed platforms in that are dictated by the company that makes the OS I just I think that that is wrong and of course what's going to happen is Apple's not going to say you're right Jason I apologize we'll change our business model what's going to happen is what is already starting to happen in the EU which is regulators will say no you can't do it this way and the the good news here I guess in a way is that Apple has already built this other model and they have already used it now the bad news is I mentioned I mentioned notarization in the piece and mentioned that there was one example of Apple using kind of notarization as a weapon in the EU yeah and and the very week I wrote that there were then some new cases where Apple used notarization as a weapon in the EU yeah and I mean I'm not a European lawyer again but interesting feels to me like they are not going to be able to make that work because what they basically said is we've created a new open system called notarization and while it involves us approving everything we're not going to use it for evil and then immediately they said oh but we don't like this app so it it won't be notarized by us which is de facto app store outside the app store I can't see how the the European Commission will ever allow that kind of behavior it seems to be in complete opposition to the whole idea so we'll see but what really bothers me is it tarnishes the Mac model because what it suggests is that that second ring of software which is checked by Apple and signed by Apple is going to be used as the first ring as a as an approval system for apps that Apple doesn't like not to protect users but because Apple has just decided they don't want it and the example that I've given a couple of times is if if Apple if third-party apps could run outside of the app store we'd have Mac OS running on iPad because all the emulators would appear and you'd be able to run Linux and you'd be able to run Windows and presumably at that point you'd be able to run Mac OS yeah right there since the since it's literally the same hardware you would be able to do that and I'm pretty sure that's why you can't is because Apple doesn't want to do that and Apple wants the either the option to do it themselves or to have nobody do it like I think that that's the motivator but like I really don't like the idea that even in a system that was open like in the EU where there's theoretically this other pathway if you tried to submit VMware or parallels for iPad to to notarize to get into a marketplace in the EU I feel like Apple would just refuse to notarize it and that's not great right like that's completely contrary so I don't know I think in the end they that at least a large portion of this is going to come to pass because I just don't think I don't think regulators in many parts of the world at least will do it and the only question is will the regulators will it be enough of a fragmentation that Apple just says okay we give up like we don't want to have two completely different models for what we do worldwide we're going to just build this single model but I don't know I'm not going to get my hopes up no me neither you know what I can get my hopes up about though oh that's a great segue is it the upgradeies it is it is the 11th annual upgradeies tell people how they can nominate all right well so the way this works is you send in your suggestions and they are votes but they're also suggestions for things that Mike and I can look at and then Mike will compile the results using a fancy shortcut that's really just a Python script that I wrapped in a shortcut to make Mike feel better and because Mike's resistance you know this Mike's resistance to technical things is fascinating right like yeah I pushed him on this and I was like oh you could do a shortcut oh there's a Python script he's like no no and I finally I wrapped a Python script inside the shortcut and sent it to him and then he saw it running and he's like oh okay yes and now he loves it it's the best thing ever but anyway so he will compile but we want your suggestions it will guide us we make the final decision sometimes we go with what the upgradeings want sometimes we use that and keep it under advisement sometimes it breaks ties and sometimes it makes us go out and do our own research about these apps that we've never heard of and why is everybody raving about this app that I've never heard of and we go check it out and it's awesome so that's great too lots of great reasons to do it you don't have to fill out every form or every item in the form if you don't want to it's fine but like we want to hear from you and we want to know what you liked this year basically and what you're what you are liking so go to upgradeees.com uh sorry upgradeees.vote will be where you can vote and upgradeees.com will show you all of the previous winners and you've gotten uh a few more days you've got 11 more days so a little more than a week but again don't leave it to the last minute upgradeees.vote and the uh official upgradeees program will be uh we're gonna record it and release it on December 30th right at the end of the year that'll be our big happy new year celebration it's our favorite stuff nice to go out on a positive note I think it is yeah I like it and you know connected has won two favorite podcast awards one away from uh lifetime achievement just putting that out there yeah even though one of the hosts is on upgrade somehow that happened he recuses himself sort of but I I like a I like uh connected uh and upgrade upgrade never gets both by the way people should vote for upgrade as favorite podcast because you're listening to upgrade right now come on people I always like it when upgrade is third on the list of favorite podcasts it's just it's just like seeing I've been seeing all of these uh overcast shares of people's podcast listening and the ones that make me laugh or it's so many of them are like ATP and then maybe the talk show and I'm like is upgrade in there like upgrades in there it's not up at the top for most of them but it's like it's in there it's in there we appreciate that I don't need to be number one here it's fine it's fine ATP's got you know home court advantage they really I mean really that is that's when it's podcast by the person who makes the podcast app that is about as good as you can talk about your advantages apple would kill for that advantage yeah vertical integration I think is what they call I think that might be it this episode of upgrade is brought to you by delete me we've talked before about how much of your personal data could be out there on the internet for people to see like Steven's middle initial and how uncomfortable that can make you feel now Mike tells me this is Mike Hurley remember him he loves delete me it gives him an extra layer of comfort for his online privacy he knows that delete me is in his corner they're making sure to take care of removing his data from the places he doesn't want it to be he even set up a gift subscription of delete me for his wife recently oh now that give the gift of delete me I love it she is also equally excited to see how her reports turn out to give her more control of her data that's right it is a second hand and third hand endorsement of delete me by Mike and adena what more could you ask look data brokers can make a profit off your data your data is a commodity this is how huge portions of the economy are run it's really gross but it's true people on the web can buy private details which can lead to identity theft fishing attempts harassment unwanted spam calls but you can protect your data by using delete me sign up and provide delete me with exactly what information you want deleted and their experts will take it from there because you don't know how to do this stuff but they do this is all they do they will send you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found where they found it and what they want removed this isn't just a one-time service they are always working for you checking around on the internet and in databases here and there for you and your information and removing it from all the places you don't want it to be they do the hard work of wiping all that personal information from the places that the data brokers can get it and the bad people can get it take control of your data keep your private life private sign up for delete me and there is a special discount you knew there would be for our listeners and their loved ones like mike's wife adena get 20 percent off your delete me plan when you go to join delete me dot com slash upgrade 20 and use promo code upgrade 20 and check out that's the only way to get 20 percent off j-o-i-n-d-e-l-e-t-e-m-e dot com slash upgrade 20 i'm not going to spell upgrade you can do that for yourself enter code upgrade 20 and check out join delete me dot com slash upgrade 20 code upgrade 20 thank you to delete me for supporting upgrade and relay it's room around uptime Steven yeah yeah there we go uh you're in the spirit you got a you got a new horse i do it's a nice nice little brown horse i got a mustache so that counts for something that's right you're basically a cowboy already that's right yes that's true uh i am titanium no well are you that's the question Jason oh the iphone 17 it might it be losing titanium it could be so there's been this back and forth in the rumors which are really my favorite is like when rumor people are fighting each other it's like an uh uh anchor man you know sure and then mark german comes in with a trident kills everybody yeah exactly there's uh it really went off the rails quickly uh so yeah so the question is the iphone 17 pro and 17 pro max will they feature titanium just like the 15 and 16 pro line and i think it's really interesting i love the titanium i think it obviously weighing less is good i like that it's not as smudgy like the stainless steel was but i just wonder like do people care about this i don't i don't i don't think i don't think they do it's a good quest so i i um got a couple titanium thoughts here welcome to our new segment i like to call it titanium thoughts titanium thoughts i got a titanium phone i treated myself to a not titanium phone titanium watch so the higher the more expensive watch because i was like you know what i birthdays and and anniversaries and stuff and i buy like presents for laurin and sometimes it's jewelry and i don't really wear jewelry to speak of um at least you know not at the level where i'm you know by an earring you're by earrings by a by a ring by a necklace i'd like it's it's nice but i'm not into that and i thought well what is the equivalent what could i ask for and it was i thought you know i'm gonna treat myself to a nicer apple watch and i got the black titanium apple watch now i have the series 10 and it's the black aluminum series 10 and steven i could not tell the difference if you asked me between aluminum and titanium it's all mental i mean it was really nice but this one is really nice too and yeah and and this is the thing about the the iphone like i like the idea of a lighter frame i like the idea of a lighter lighter phone lighter watch all this like great and maybe somebody out there can say oh yes but but you don't understand it it was like the stainless steel was heavy is the problem not that not the test yeah aluminum and titanium are both pretty light stainless steel was very heavy so if they go to aluminum instead of titanium i don't think it'll make that much of a difference i do think that apple brilliantly used titanium for at least two years as a major differentiator on products that didn't change very much right i mean like i see all those ads there's like the atnt ad where where the the atnt lady is like it's the new iphone with titanium i think who cares right like but i think it was pretty effective as a as just it's different and doesn't it sound cool and so yeah i mean fine but in some ways that were really saying not heavy like stainless and so you know i don't know i don't know what do you think i think the visual sort of material difference maybe makes more of a difference in other markets than the u.s right we're talking about this a lot when the phone changes shape or design they'll have kind of a big year in china and some other markets because that's valued more highly than it is here which i find really interesting but i think speaking about the american market i agree with you the way like moving from stainless steel was the big change and it is remarkable if you pick up a stainless steel phone like it really does feel heavier but most people you know slapping the phones in cases so that they never see those rails they don't really care about the smudginess maybe the way some of us do and so you know i think if they were to go to aluminum on the pro phones like i don't think it's that i don't think it's that big of a deal you know i i think people would it would be a cycle right and then they would just still sell bajillion phones yeah i i think especially if there are other design changes they'll use those to sell them and if it's aluminum and they'll just say it's lighter and i don't think there are going to be a lot of people who feel like i'm so betrayed that there's no titanium right like right i mean they'll probably be like a handful of super titanium fans who are like how dare you i only buy things made of titanium but otherwise i think an aluminum frame is fine i think it's funny because this is a style issue too right it's like apple felt like aluminum was light but you know kind of boring and that the stainless it was like no stainless it's surgical stainless steel it's beautiful and heavy and weighty and and and that was like a selling point and then they're like it's too heavy titanium is better and they put that on there is really yeah like you said it's a cycle it's fashion it's um there's no one right answer so they they keep kind of moving around as they as they need to or as they feel they need to and i think that's okay yeah i think people buy the pro phones for the cameras right like that's that's why people upgrade maybe the screen but i think mostly the cameras and as much as i like titanium and i really like this phone and the phone right before it like it wouldn't be a big deal to me if they went to aluminum and it's it would make the colors are a conversation even more awkward you know but that's fine yeah i mean i don't know i feel like they can make colors on anything now but certainly on aluminum we know that they can and they're good at it and it's it's you know it's affordable and light and it's a great material right so they should do whatever they need to do i think i think it's interesting to say to wonder what do the people who design the iPhone and the materials used in it think about the style choices right because like if they had their druthers and they didn't care about selling titanium or stainless would they always use aluminum and were those directives sort of let's let's shake it up or were they bottom up where they're like we want to try titanium and then the execs are like yeah let's do it we can market that i don't i don't know i would like to believe that it's the engineers sort of saying why don't we try a different material but i do wonder if it's actually you know them being kind of prodded by people to say well why don't we try this other thing why don't we try another material because you know the fact is it's not just a utilitarian block it's it is a device that needs to be marketed and it has a fashion element to it and that's part of the design too is it the designers who say you know let's do titanium this year and the engineers are like okay we can do that i don't i don't know what the push and pull is there and if the engineers had their druthers they would just always use aluminum or whatever i honestly don't know yeah well and this year notably they are using aluminum inside the phone yeah for that better heat dissipation that was an issue with the the 15 pro so yeah it's it's super interesting i'm sure there's always that tension between people making the devices and the people selling the devices it's also interesting that the apple watch right stainless steel the beginning was the nice material once they got rid of the gold like we don't talk about that one um and then they moved to titanium and now it's aluminum and titanium i think the steel is still available on the ermez watch but uh you know they've they've moved away from steel there and i can tell you on the apple watch it made a huge way difference because i wore stainless steel watch for years and then went to the titanium whenever that was the series oh six or seven or seven yeah lauren had a her first apple watch was stainless and again it was sort of me being nice but then she went to the aluminum it's like oh it's so much lighter i like yeah it was stainless was nice and all but like the aluminum one is that's the i think that's apple's problem is that the truth is that the on the apple watch the aluminum is the best it's just the best because it's so light i think the only little like niggle i have with that is that the aluminum gets the eye on glass and you get sapphire with the nicer metal and the sapphire displays do hold up better i i agree but they could like there's nothing stopping them from making aluminum on all the apple watch models with the nicer glass right and or the higher end model of aluminum comes with the nicer glass they've decided to differentiate based on metal but i guess what i'm saying is they could just all be aluminum and it probably would be fine except the reason i bought a titanium apple watch is like i wanted to treat myself and get something nicer and it was nice but aluminum is nice and i'm not sure there's much difference in between them at least for me there isn't so we'll see how my series 10 holds up it's good doing great so far i'm liking it it's nice i went through i went like three years without an apple watch update and so for me you know it's it's so much thinner and i actually i can see how much thinner it is just it's not bulging above my wrist like the old sensor did it's really nice and it's yeah and i got the black aluminum so it's all shiny and so the shininess matches the shininess of the glass and it's a really good look so i'm liking it i got this watch it uh in Memphis you did because i lost it all my couch i did i did good times good times it was it was good times all right i wanted to talk it was thanksgiving last week and um what happens i think for a lot of our listeners and for us is when you visit with family you also do troubleshooting for family i have a troubleshooting story that i want to tell and and and then i'm curious if you've got any too my um here's my father-in-law sent me an email last week it was like Jason when you're down here if you don't mind taking time away from your vacation i have some technical questions for you like of course i will help you with your thing so friday i'm thinking well today's the day we're going to do the techno things i'm literally sitting at the at the kitchen table we just got there i'm drinking some tea and Elliot walks in and says uh he's just gotten back this is what it is i'm drinking tea he's just gotten back from a bike ride he walks in he's still got his like yellow bike jacket on like visibility jacket and i'm thinking oh he's gonna you know take off his stuff and and maybe take a shower or do whatever whatever he needs to do and then maybe we'll do the troubleshooting he immediately walks up to me and says Jason do you have time now to do the troubleshooting i'm like well first off you got to know my father-in-law this is exactly like him which is like he's got a list in his head and he he waited on Thanksgiving he's like i'm not gonna ask him on Thanksgiving we agreed we talked about it on friday but literally the first second he sees me on on on friday he's yeah Jason let's go yeah so there there the three of three things and i just want to say them because i think it's fascinating just it's fascinating to see you know we set people up and then we walk away and then we're gone for a long time and then you come back and you're like what it's that it's that community Jeff where pry brings the pizza in and everything's on fire you're like exactly i was just here what is happening yeah what did you do so one of these i i i put them in our show notes what do you think the first one what is my first what is my first item hmm it's your first item do you see it it's all i'll tell you what it is you can guess two password any okay two password does that mean two factor no oh if only it did if only it did two password means that um my my father-in-law's complaint was i used to be able to auto fill passwords and click on open site in one password and it would auto fill the password and now it doesn't can you fix this and what i discovered when i went to his applications folder is uh that his applications folder contained one password seven and one password they were both open in the dock so two versions of one password were open simultaneously okay and there were like five one password dot zip like backup files of the app in that folder too and i'm like whoa whoa whoa this is too many one passwords um so i and he said something about like yeah but on my i use the the the he's basically he's using his one password cloud password on his mac but he's using his old volt password on his iPhone and he felt like they i don't know what the rationale is here so i i deleted all the old one passwords uh making sure that the whole vault was synced in the in the cloud and all that for the for the actual current version of one password um he enemy his phone hit two versions of one password on his phone too so we deleted one password seven you opened up one password i made sure auto fill was on in all the places his behavior is fascinating i didn't understand this but this is a thing you can do he goes to secure sites by opening that site in one password and clicking yeah open right and then it opens the browser and auto fills the password which i find bizarre but it's supported it's a thing you can do in one password so two password he had too many one passwords it's so much and his and his password oh the other thing his password is incredibly detailed as you might expect because you don't want to steal the logins of a repot retired person i mean he's got his actual stuff and all that i get it so he's put it under a very difficult password and we get to the phone and i'm like well it won't be so bad on the phone you won't have to peck it in on the software keyboard because you use face id and he doesn't use face id and he says why don't you use face id and he says i just i don't want to do it i like i like having a password okay i mean you're the one you're the one closer to the end of your life who's spending a minute typing in a very complicated password every time you want to open one password on your phone it's your choice it's your choice i'm going to let that one go anyway two passwords two password he also said i have this thing where when i'm clicking on menu items or things in the interface that it doesn't click i said well what does it do he says well it it will bring up it usually it will bring up like a like a menu or something but it doesn't click i'm thinking well that's the alt click that's control click or right click and he's using an apple mouse and i investigated and here's the best i can guess i don't know this for certain but here's the best i can guess and this is this this is this whole computer mystery solver thing that i think a lot of technical people have to do and and some of it is really intuition it is that we've seen so many things it's like my story about the guy at the apple store who when i was completely distraught about my max studio he was like i think i know what this is and within like 10 minutes we we had solved it because he'd seen it a million times and he he could see the pattern whereas i couldn't see the pattern because it had not really happened any before so i showed him the accept or the mouse setting where you can actually say don't use the right side of the mouse as an alt click but i asked him and he does seem to use a right click from time to time so in the end much to my surprise my solution to his mouse click problem was behavioral i said i think what's happening is as you're using the mouse slowly your hand is creeping to the right and the mouse is getting a little tilted and then when you click you're clicking with your index finger or whatever that you think is going to be a left click but you're actually over on the other side and it's a right click or maybe it's right in the middle and it's not registering at all and so when you have this thing again look at your hand and maybe reposition and maybe that will solve it i don't know a hundred percent but i think that's what's going on and i told him if this continues to be a problem turn off the right click in the mouse settings and just use control click when you need to bring up a menu so we'll see what happens with that but i was fascinated i'm like i think you're just holding it wrong right like that's literally what it is is you're just you're just not paying attention and i'm not a mouse user so i really don't know but that's my best guess is that his finger is just kind of going rightward until he's left clicking on the right side i don't know yeah as Kyle points out in discord like kudos that he's using a password manager at all he's already already really ahead of the curve yeah he asked me about that at one point and i said you should use one password and one thing i will give my father-in-law great credit for is if i if i basically say here's a thing and you have to pay for it but it solves your problem he's like i have i've already bought it now right like he's instantly bought it he is he has no fear of that like if i if i say this will solve your problem he's like great where do i buy it and and he's been using it faithfully like i said apparently two at a time but faithfully so um yeah also i should say the dynamic in this house is hilarious because my mother-in-law has a macbook air and my father-in-law has a uh an iMac it's a intel iMac and uh on a desk on a it's a beautiful desk i think it's an uplift uh like bamboo top it's gorgeous it's great um long and and it's got the printer on it's got a bunch of papers on but like it's an iMac so he's a desktop user that's how he wants to use it and then and she does not want to use a desktop at all she wants to use a laptop i think it's just an interesting uh split between them anyway the um the the last one is spam in his email yeah that one can be tricky so this this one what what i found is that he was he was saying i get these emails and i block the sender but they keep sending me email and i said okay there's a few things going on here i said first off if it's truly spam blocking the sender will do nothing because they will send from another randomized email address so we'll never right blocking sender is not the solution you block a sender if it's like a person who's bad so i said first thing you got to do is you got to send it to junk send it to your junk mail and and apple mail junk filtering was on um but he he wasn't training it and and he was still getting the stuff so i said okay step one send it to junk mail step two if it feels like it's a legitimate mailing list that you just don't want to be on apple mail puts a unsubscribe button at the top just click the unsubscribe button he says well what if it's a a spammer i said well the worst thing that happens is that they see that you're alive and they uh and they they send you more spam but most spammers don't really do the unsubscribe thing and i'm like but like if it's a company that you've had some dealing with in the past never want to hear from again just click unsubscribe but otherwise add them you know add them to junk that trains the junk interface and your life will be uh better for it so i just thought it was really interesting that he had decided block sender was the right way to deal with spammers um and it's not and then he said of course but i still get him what do i do when i'm on my iphone i'm like well here's the thing apple's decided that spam doesn't happen on the iphone so there's no junk mail interface at all yeah and he's not using gmail or iCloud mail he's using mail from his internet provider cox so okay that's what i was gonna ask i was gonna say like you just can't sorry can't can't be done yeah yeah because i mean i use gmail for everything and i can just drag it in the junk folder and then it it learns and i actually have well i don't even use mail he's a mime stream but i don't have any like client side filtering i just let it all happen at the server level i have gmail and i have sandbox uh form response and and so i use mime stream and they are doing all of that filtering for me which is great right um but if you are you know and and that also means that on my phone it's also filtered even though i'm using apple mail on my phone it doesn't matter because the the spam filtering is happening regardless and i will you know most of my training that i do is that i get all i get on all these garbage mailing lists i think because i'm press and i'm circulating them in some press list and or podcast you get this i'm sure it's the hello podcast i can make you a more successful podcast please get in touch and those all go in the same black hole and i never hear from these people yeah goodbye so yeah yeah so it's a nightmare so do you have you have any recent uh troubleshooting things going oh i should i should mention you are the in addition to being the cohost connected cohost of mac power users and um and you have a you have a troubleshooting episode coming up is that true we do uh sundays episode will be about this uh in hindsight probably should have done it before thanksgiving in america but we missed that still got it still got up before the big holidays in december so that's good right there's a lot of holidays in december so there'll be a lot of family whether it's christmas or hanaka or anything else yeah um so you're going to be able to get people before the the more extended i would say thanksgiving is sometimes so fast like i was in orange county and i didn't get to see your MPU cohost david sparks because i literally had no time that was not the sort of two days of intense family time and then that was it christmas often is you know you you really do have that time unless you're unless your father-in-law is such a go-getter that he's like jason now let's do it uh you may uh need to need to relax so it's still i think it's still good to have this is a good time to do the troubleshooting episode yeah yeah so sunday we're talking about i cloud and iphone storage space backups printing bad wifi that sort of thing yeah um what i noticed over thanksgiving uh and really just kind of in general is like i have family members who want to who asked me about ai because they either have heard the buzzwords or they've seen the apple commercials with apple intelligence which as we have all talked about not a great ad because that stuff's not really out yet and uh that i think is is going to be something that a lot of you know people like us upgradians we're going to face that in the holiday season of you know our aunt and uncles and whoever asking us about these things and some people have some pretty wild ideas about what is possible or what's coming and it could be difficult to have nuance in some of those conversations like when i sort of realized that this was happening was a extended family member uh who is kind of a tech bro like he works at a start he like he has a startup and he wears a vest and you know drives a tesla um typical typical uh asking like you know very he very he was very excited about ai i wanted to know like what things i thought it would revolutionize and my answer was like i think for most people like some of the writing tools may be interesting and then my big thing is like i don't think society is ready for anyone in the world to make ai generated images and you know apple has sort of had a softball with it because their stylers their styles are very cartoony or very hand-drawn you're not making photorealistic stuff with apples tools i think that that is them trying to avoid these issues while still having the feature but you can go ask any number of things to make of a lifelike image of anybody and they're pretty good at this point and i don't think we're ready for that i don't think people are ready for that and you know he was like ah yeah no but it's gonna like you know cure diseases or whatever like yeah that may also be true but i'm more worried about my family members on facebook seeing an image is just not true not accurate and i've already seen it like i've seen it unfold already on social media and uh i think we gotta all be prepared to answer this questions yeah i mean how yeah it's like uh how do we talk to your kids about the birds and the bees how do we talk to your uncle about ai features and and that tech tech bro cousin in your family about about ai i i mean my stock line about ai all along has been it's over hyped and also could be huge right like it's i think it's both and i think we don't entirely know exactly what's what parts are going to be huge and i think it's interesting to see the stories that suggest that they are running into problems building better models and the hype train is so hard that it's actually really hard to tell whether that's the backlash speaking um certainly if you're in an ai company and you're running into problems you would deny it right you would be like no no no i need my stock options i know we're great we're great our company is great so it's actually kind of hard to tell but it is possible that there's going to be a correction where people realize that right now we're in the um what doesn't it do phase where it's like ai is the solution to all of life's problems and you know what it's not i think i can give you a hundred percent guarantee that it's not that all of the things that people claim ai can do will not be things ai can do some of them may right i think some of them will but not all of them and that's going to lead to some bumps where some companies that are driven by ai are going to be like oh yeah we can't do that and they're going to some of them are going to go out of business they're going to spend a lot of money now assuming there's going to be a big payoff and they're going to discover that there isn't a big payoff and there'll be a consolidation i actually wonder if that will ultimately be a validation to apples like apple didn't do it on purpose it wasn't their strategy to get behind on a ai they were caught flat-footed but it may be a benefit to them because they may be late enough to the party that they can choose useful investments better than some companies have done i don't know yeah that's interesting i hadn't thought about it through that lens but yeah that could definitely be how they may look out basically that they're like oh well our our model you know our small models running on devices that don't cost us a lot in terms of these huge data centers and we're focusing on you know summarization and writing tools and some automation like user automation i think is a potentially huge place where this stuff could be successful that's why i'm excited about the app intents and the personal contacts and being able to you know i love you to user automation but even at the shortcuts level it's way too complicated for people and if people could say hey assistant i'd like to do this thing yeah and have it know that you could grab from this app and take it here and transform it in this way and then put it into this app and all of that without you actually having to think like a programmer i think that's i think that's awesome but i will we'll see i mean apple is behind on this stuff but maybe they'll maybe they'll dodge a bullet i don't know um related to this i my spider sense went off while listening to connected last week mm-hmm i'm in the shower because i listen to podcast in the shower and when i'm walking the dog don't be creepy it's just how it is i i have two places that i can really reliably listen to podcast when i'm not driving back and forth to l.a. in which case wow we listen to a lot of podcasts but um for this i'm listening connected in the shower yesterday and you're talking about your apple watch battery issues and you say well i think it might be the fast charging i think maybe which i i immediately thought it could be that so you're to back up you and your wife both simultaneously started having battery issues with your apple watches which is deeply suspicious right that it's like it's got to be something that's happening on both devices and all of the things we can isolate are there was probably a software update at some point that hit both of your devices all right okay um you changed the the chargers and although that doesn't seem like it would make any difference and i don't think you're you're suggesting that maybe fast charging an apple watch battery just nukes it right it makes it worse right yeah i do wonder if apple's charging algorithm on the apple watch it's charging firmware might like handle charging from the fast charger different and might taper it at the at the top differently and might even display the battery status differently and i i wonder if it's one of those things where you're using the fast charger it charges fast but it doesn't charge us completely and you end up with a little less battery you think it's full but it's not i had that thought but the thing that made me literally stick my hand out of the shower pick up my phone and send you a text from the shower which i did because i didn't want to forget it because you know then the conversation's gonna go on and i'm gonna i'm gonna miss it and i'm gonna forget it was you changed your Wi-Fi and you went to two Wi-Fi ubiquity Wi-Fi base stations and i just it was again it's probably not it but it was doing that pattern recognition thing that happens when you're a technology person and you're trying to troubleshoot which was is it possible that even though the Wi-Fi is perfectly fine for your laptops and your phones if it's just weak enough in the places where you wear your watch that it has to ramp up the the Wi-Fi power in order to get on your Wi-Fi network and or it doesn't see one of them and it sees the far away one and it's expending enough power that it's pulling more from your battery and it's invisible to you because you're still on the Wi-Fi a little like how if you're in a bad cell reception area your phone will get hot because it has to really crank up the power in order to get anything on the on the receiving end so that was enough of an idea that you didn't mention that i so sorry i sent you a text from the shower it happens yeah no it was good and some connected listeners had also said like hey you know this happened when you swap out your Wi-Fi when you swap from from era to to unify and it was not only that the battery life was bad but also our watches would drop basically drop off the network so they would be disconnected from our phones yeah and i think that also was like cycling into the battery thing like oh i don't know what to do my phone is gone and uh i spent some time this weekend doing some some looking around some searching and came across a couple posts none of them super recent but people having similar issues with unify and so i made a couple of changes to the network just and honestly Jason some of them i don't understand it's like oh change this sort of hand off to this other kind of hand off you know it's network voodoo when i had a ubiquity router for a while it's the only ubiquity product i've had but it was one of those things where i'm like i don't know what any of this stuff means i'll just check some boxes but but that's one of the things you can do is like if i check this box what happens if i you know it's it's it's a one level above turn it off and back on again by the way i should mention my father-in-law he did have another problem later in the day where he's like Jason i clicked open to open this email and it opened with a blank nothing and i tried i did command queue i was like well it's quit and relaunch mail and i did command queue and nothing happened and i thought let's restart your mac and then it all was fine after that it's like you got to go through the steps you got to go through tier one troubleshooting which is did you try to turn it off and back on again and then get there but like for networking i mean that's that's what you even if you don't know anything that's what you do is like maybe DHCP leases should be longer maybe they should be shorter maybe this weird repeater thing should be on if it's off i don't know yeah yeah so i changed a couple of settings and then last night came across a more recent thread that people were having issues with this uh if six gigahertz was turned on because then like the phones on six e wi-fi six e which the apple watch doesn't support oh interesting i turned that off and i'm still getting gigabit speed like five gigahertz will give you gigabit wi-fi speed and so i'm not really losing any speed from going down um and then someone else also recommended uh forget the wi-fi network on your phone and like rejoin it because i i used the same SSID and password as i had before because i don't want to run around and like rejoin the new wi-fi network to a bunch of devices uh and so i've done all of those things and so far it's been okay but it's only been like 12 hours um so we'll see uh i do i do think my wife's like uh small size series eight like you know when a small watch gets down to 88 battery or whatever like you start to feel it more than the ultra for sure and so i think she may end up getting an upgrade anyways but yeah i need to uh i need to continue to to chip away at this i'm pretty convinced that it's something with the wi-fi now oh what a validation for shower Jason yes i think i think shower Jason was right and as we're thinking people and someone even emailed me with some suggestions which is very kind thank you i've emailed back and forth with somebody now uh about this for a little bit um so we'll see uh we will see how this goes and i don't i you know it's fixable i'm sure i think maybe mary's um watch was probably right on the edge right where we're still getting it done but just a little phantom battery drain is enough to make it suddenly right because you hit the wall where it's like well if i can't wear it all day because i'm sitting at home in the evening and it's 8 p.m or 9 p.m and it's telling me i'm at 10 percent and i'm gonna die that's when you notice right if you if it's if it goes from being 30 percent when you go to bed to 20 percent when you go to bed it doesn't matter but when suddenly you start getting the alerts and so it's just enough phantom battery drain somewhere in the process to tick her watch over into panic mode but you can also get her a new watch yeah yes yeah i usually i would get her every three years anyways so it's it's about time um but we'll see you know i i'm hopeful that turning off six gigahertz is enough for now and like and if you're listening and you have unify stuff and you've had issues like this please reach out um because i would like to get this solved i believe it's fixable like the fact that there's really not a lot online about it suggests that this is not a widespread thing and i reached out to some friends with unify stuff like no we haven't seen this and so i think it's probably something um maybe unique to to my setup but we will uh we'll see but you know this is like some of the fun stuff right like yeah it's a super annoying that my watch just disappears from my phone and like yeah my activity rings are empty for the day like that's not great but part of it a little part of me i'm also having fun with it it's a mystery baby solve because the kids are still being able to stream Netflix right it's not like it's broken my network it's just like it's really just affecting me and mary and like she didn't even notice until siri didn't at work um right she's a big siri on the watch person but uh i feel like it's what's that there's a fix out there what series watch does she have again uh she is on the series eight the little one so she doesn't have the siri on the watch right at all right but i mean just like hitting the button and talking to siri and it's really going to the sound so having gone from the i think seven to the ten because i think it's the nine and the ten that have the on board siri and the ultras um she's going to love that upgrade right because like that that's the thing that i use i use it mostly for like reminders and timers and stuff but man having the model running on the device instead of having to go back to the phone yeah it's so great it's so great uh it's much more responsive i used to just get so frustrated with siri on the watch because it would spin and spin and spin and spin and then say like i give up and now it never does that because the the hardware is improved to the point where you can run that stuff on the device it's great so she'll love that i hadn't even thought about that but yeah that that that that plus the battery may be enough for me to you know feels good maybe i can maybe i can find a cyber monday deal thanks unify today thanks unify up costing me even bringing families together more money yeah yeah this episode of upgrade is brought to you by smarter world if you're in a podcast that delve into how tech shapes our lives which i mean you're here aren't you this ad read is for you i am here jason let me tell you let's sit down here i'm going to turn my cap around turn this chair around backward we're going to grapple okay tell me let's start with a couple questions how do you control a robotic arm with your voice how it's me which technology allows cars to communicate in real time as they drive what's inside the smart plug that reduces home fires and save lives if you're curious about the answers you want to listen to the smarter world podcast they speak to some of the world's biggest brands and most exciting startups about how they're using technology to change the world around us host kyle fox recently spoke to honeywell about how smart energy is changing the buildings we work in my old building used it like leave the lights on all the time and leave the ac on half the time and i thought this is really bad right like they need a better system so this is cool applied ev shared how they're working to bring autonomous driving vehicles to delivery fleets and commercial vehicles and another episode damon motors explained how they're redefining the writing experience with their electric motorbike oh i have a friend who's into electric motorcycles that's cool uh the podcast features guests discussing technology topics from drones to software-defined vehicles to smart home innovations they explore the stories behind the tech we use every day you can listen to these conversations by searching for smarter world wherever you listen to podcasts that's the smarter world podcast search for it now thank you to smarter world for this support of upgrade and all of steven's podcast network steven i wrote a thing that i say for you for this podcast which is indecision at the intersection of the max studio and the mac mini which is my article where i get lots and lots and lots and lots of um advice from people i know about what kind of computer i should buy because i feel i'm feeling the mac mini sweats right like the oh that mac mini pro chip so impressive do i want that i have a mac studio m1 max which is really really good i ran benchmark tests against the pro and i was like well it's way faster at cpu but actually because it has so many fewer gpu cores than my m1 it's it's only like a 7 gpu boost which is impressive going from a max to a pro but like if i'm gonna get a new computer after three years i want like a really impressive jump and it that was enough to get me off of the mac mini train i think even though it's so cute because i thought it's just it's not enough of a benefit for me even though it's sorely tempting but it's just like okay maybe i'll just wait and see the probably be the high end of the mac mini and the low end of the mac studio usually crossover and you get the max chip in the mac studio even the base model is going to be way more impressive than the the the high end mac mini and presumably will blow my existing mac studio out of the water and this was great until some of my friends and i use that term somewhat pejoratively here said Jason you have a laptop that you travel with sometimes you have a desk in your garage and you have a desk in the back of the house that you use a lot in the winter because it you know you don't want to heat your garage and it's a separate space heater all of this is true and they say you should just get a macbook pro you can get an m4 max macbook pro today you don't even need to wait for the mac studio and the best part is you know max are good at sinking data but they're not great at sinking data there's a lot of data that doesn't sink that you're you're like oh suddenly this app i think was hazel the other day or is like oh hazel doesn't know what to do on this and the python version was different and this thing wasn't installed yeah when i went from one room to another and my friends again so-called friends were like if you have a macbook pro you literally carry your computer from room a to room b and everything is the same because it's literally the same computer and you know what you can also do then when you go visit your mom in phoenix it's also the same because it's the same computer and it like you are you getting it yet it's not three different computers in three different places it's one computer it's a one computer between places uh and so i come to you also with this i wanted to just share a link there's an absolutely a bananas article on uh on nine to five mac last week that was how i turned the m4 mac mini into a travel computer it's hilarious it's i i really admire the moxie of uh of the uh nine to five mac writer uh fernando silva because it's like i've got a backpack i got a little portable display i got a mac mini i got i got a keyboard and i can travel with my computer and then if in these like of course you could also buy a laptop and i'm like you could do that you could you know whose fault this story is this this travel m4 mac mini we're gonna get back to you in a second but this travel m4 mac mini situation it's federico vaticchi's fault because he cut a macbook air in half and stuck an iPad on top of it and suddenly everybody's like hacking their hardware like was the original sin of this whole thing was that it was you know sigmund is like got an apple tv do you know we talked about connected i think he he doesn't even have the screen anymore no he threw it it says half a macbook air in his drawer yeah what he what he doing man uh back to you though thank you uh and i think last time i was on upgrade i also like had some sort of i was judging something yeah it's you you bring the the mac uh therapy wisdom yeah thank you uh so for years i had a desktop mac and a laptop and so i did this right like i kind of have my desktop be my main computer and then i took my notebook with me when i went to go work somewhere else and i did the data juggling thing and you're right documents photos calendar stuff that's really easy to sync it's all sort of the other stuff that we as nerds have a lot of extra stuff that's where you really kind of like rebuilding it on both systems yeah it's all the stuff that's in like light your library files and that yeah that the apps have not or the system have just not moved which they have to engineer themselves like move to a a system where that stuff ends up living in a synced place and and so they all get out of sync it just it happens yeah it can be it can actually be kind of frustrating it's like oh you know why isn't this thing thing working hazel is a great example of this for me because i use hazel it's like oh why is this pdf still just sitting on my desktop why hasn't it moved it's like oh because i want a different computer so yeah and hazel has a sync system but you have to you have to turn it on and make sure you turn it on the right place and say now this and then go to the other computer and say now use that and also do it here and if you do that it it does work but you have to do it yeah same with alpha it which is my launcher of choice and like if alpha is not the same whenever your computer i use my brain does it work but you have to like go in and like you put a folder on a drop box and then it syncs it and we all know how uh reliable that can be over time but um so that was my life for really for like seven probably seven or eight years my first seven or eight years being independent i did this and then with the M2 generation i bought a pretty nice M2 Pro MacBook Pro and made the decision like i'm gonna have one computer and when i'm at my desk it's hooked up to my studio display and my sound equipment everything else i use a thunderbolt dock for that but then i can just eject time machine i can unplug a single cable and my one computer goes with me now there are downsides to that right the laptop is more expensive if your car gets broken into and someone snatches your bag and your well computer was in it that's a problem right or if you spill yeah iced tea into it and you know and so i still have like i have an M1 MacBook Air that's my beta machine in the summer and that's sort of my escape hatch like if something happened to this laptop i could still record a podcast by getting you know some stuff installed on it so and you know there's nothing saying you you wouldn't have the redundancy or sort of the safety net of that but i have really come to enjoy having just the one Mac with everything on it and my setup being the same everywhere and i think in your case where you are kind of bouncing back and forth between the garage and the bedroom studio b back there i think there's real benefit to it and i think the 14 inch inform max would would smoke your studio oh yeah and and give you that and i understand like you're a small laptop person you know the 14 inches a little bulky and i get that but i think the benefits outweigh that at least for me yeah i i'm coming around i'm still not there yet right because i have been a macbook air person for so long but the truth is yeah my macbook airness was very much based on the fact that i used to be a commuter and brought my laptop back and forth because you talk about you know having your same computer everywhere i did that it was in my backpack it was a macbook air on my back so i want to be as light as possible but i docked it at work and then used it at home it was great and when i started this i started with a mac i eventually bought that retina i'm at when i came out but when i started doing this work from home thing it was with a docked macbook air on a monitor and it was great so i'm open to it because my laptop like i don't use the laptop around the house very much at all because i use the ipad my i around like at the on the couch and stuff it's never the laptop it's always the ipad for that stuff and even in the backyard most of the time i'm writing i'm actually writing on the ipad with the keyboard i'm not writing with the macbook air so my macbook air use is really limited to the back of the house as the studio b driver and when i go visit my mom or or do any other kind of like business travel where i need to record podcasts and stuff like that because i'm not as far gone as Federico who was completely forsaken the mac it's not going to be me i'm not going to go that far for now he'll be back he always comes back he he he'll boomerang around he bounces around i love it he's like uh he's just is uh he's just uh traveling the world and seeing the sights and just like you can't you can't pin him down it's great that's why we love him so um so i am seriously considering it which i can't i kind of can't believe the other thing is i write these articles i write these reviews of these macbook pros and you know i always go out of my way to talk about the display because it is the best display apple has ever made period yeah full sounds down period it is spectacularly good bright colors it's just incredible and like having one of those when i travel well you know that would be nice that would be really nice and it's very rare that i'm using a laptop in cramped conditions where i am going to say oh man i really wish i had the macbook air instead of the macbook pro it's not that much i mean it's not the 11 inch air right that's the other thing is apple is never gonna make i think personally i think never gonna make a mac uh laptop smaller than the 13 inch air i don't think they're gonna ever make a i would love it if they made an 11 inch sub air or whatever but i don't think they will and even if they did i don't think i'd want it because it would probably be so compromised at that point um so i am coming around to the idea that maybe an m4 a 14 inch m4 max macbook pro might be in my future replacing all of my other max and as for the the fear of like being uh having a disaster where you you you have to send your computer in and you don't have access to a mac for a while i have my server it's an m2 mini like i can do my job on an m2 mini it's oh yeah yeah right if it comes to that i will repurpose i'll move the server and the hard drive and all those things to one of my desks and just use it there and it'll be fine right i i have no fear of that yeah don't let don't let Dan more near it with an iphone we know how that ends wow you know too soon i saw a picture i was building some calendars last week interesting the uh yeah right i've got i've got the last page of the last Stephen Hackett calendar up on uh on my wall right now yeah we've reached is December it's uh that's the James Thompson photo right yeah of the icon garden it's great including the hand which i'm imagining is use is waving goodbye to calendars um but i uh we do this every year we take pictures for the year and then make those the calendar for the next year and so i was going through all the all the pictures and one of the pictures in there is me taking a selfie of my row at WWDC and it's like oh then there's Casey and there's David and oh there's Dan and his laptop just before the bad thing happened it's like the uh it's like the last known photo of somebody before they disappear yeah yeah it's like wait a little did Dan know that he would drop his iphone right on his uh screen and destroy it mid keynote mid keynote amazing that's a real bummer i i think the m4 max 14 inches the way to go i mean that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna do it you know at the end of the year i think and you can spec it up you know where it really can be your one computer like yeah i know you got to get all your files on there right you got to get the entirety of relay on that drive so you got to get the big drive i'll tell you what once you buy one laptop with eight terabytes you can't go back so this is the thing with my max studio is i used to have an iMac with a one terabyte drive and i got the max studio with two terabytes and uh this could be like a little maxim we could come up with a way to like make this a thing people refer to in the future but it's like basically once you go to a higher storage tier you can't go back right you just can't i i'm never gonna go back to one terabyte again because i i'm now at two terabytes and everything is expanded to fill the space i'm never going back exactly it's like the mythical man month but for files for ssd's yep that sounds right um the subliminal storage there there is uh there is some sort of thing about that like work will take the a lot of time you know take a ball the a lot of time or something to fill the space yeah yeah yeah uh that that does happen with storage but yeah i think it's the way to go and yeah it's a it's a bit more weight you know when you're fine to see your mom or when you're you're going somewhere but it's not that big and i think i think one thing about the screen that is worth i mean i think the macro prose the way to go for for the power but you know for me i'm sitting in front of a studio to display almost all the time not the laptops open to the left um but again i'm not getting the benefit of that screen most of the time and that that's kind of a bummer but the power is what i'm after and the capacities what i'm after and the screen is kind of a bonus and when i do use it just as a laptop it's incredible you know um so if you're going to use it in clamshell mode or something yeah you don't get that benefit all the time but when you really need it that's when it'll be there for you right yeah right well thank you for the uh the sage at best i appreciate it yeah and i will say because i think i heard you say this like clamshell mode works great and without silicon max it's so much better than it used to be you know i i used it for a while in the intel days and it was just like it's really bad then really bad and like apple fixed that with apple silicon so if you're out there and you're like oh i wish i could use clamshell mode and you know maybe i'm in a small desk and laptops are just in the way like it's really good now it is i use it like i said i use it in the back of the house and i mean and as a veteran of somebody who would frequently pull my laptop out of my backpack when i got home to find that it was blazing hot because although it had been closed and gone to sleep it decided it wouldn't sleep that was the intel mac laptop experience in a nutshell it really was it's not like that now it's not like that at all yeah they've they've uh i think someone when they did apple silicon they're like hey look this has been a problem can't let's fix it now most of our desktop users are using laptops attached to a monitor probably yeah right yeah so i don't know i mean what percentage of people who use laptops ever attached to a monitor but i wonder if that number is larger than the number of people who are using a desktop mac attached to a monitor i really maybe maybe the same maybe more i don't know but i i haven't ran a mac complaint to share with you okay just before we take our our last break i wanted to share this with you um i had this flash uh which was i used launch bar and i have a chat gpt account and i used chat gpt some and i was hearing i was actually hearing you guys talk about mike uses chat gpt for search a lot and i thought how can i i use it occasionally and i find it interesting i don't find the results great but i find it okay and interesting and sometimes useful sometimes really bad but sometimes useful and i thought what i really want to do is use it from inside launch bar right what i really want to do is say uh you know do my launch bar shortcut and then do a gpt shortcut and then type a query and then get the response but what i really and i can do that on the web i i could build that for the web but what i really want to do is use the chat gpt mac app because it's nice that it's a mac app that is not stuck in a web browser and i can open it and i can see my whole history and it's just it feels better but the problem is it's basically a web wrapper and it doesn't have as far as i can tell any connectivity to other mac things and it's frustrating like i want it to be like a URL scheme uh right something where i could just pass a URL to the chat gpt app that says do this query and open it it'll open i don't even need it to come back to launch bar i just want to like open in the chat gpt app and have done the query right just pass it through and then then the app open or you tab over to or something and it's ready for you and it's ready right i just i want to eliminate a step here because i have launch bar in my muscle memory and gpt will bind to a shortcut but i don't really want that because i don't use it enough for that but i would like to sort of like bind it to launch bar and have launch bar pass it to chat gpt but the app is bad and i i actually asked chat gpt how to do this and it generated first of it told me to go someplace in in launch bar that doesn't exist it's like go to the go to the this tab and then press the the new uh automation button it's like that doesn't exist okay great um and then uh it wrote an apple script for me and i know this this has happened a few times where i've seen it that um chat gpt is actually pretty good at writing apple script because there's so much apple script documentation and examples out there on the internet and i know that they're old but there's so much of it it's actually a great way to do apple script is just because nobody needs to learn apple script today right you should never learn it if you don't know it but there's stuff apple script can do that nothing else can do on the mac and chat gpt will write it for you so you can do it that way be careful you know be careful because it could decide to kill all humans and write an apple script that's like bad but uh but generally it works really well so it's apple script is super hacky though because it knows that it can't control the chat gpt app so it basically says take the query from launch bar and type it switch to jet gpt and type it in it's like well i could use keyboard maestro at that point right like that is that is not the point here and i may end up using keyboard maestro to do this i don't know but um my plea to chat gpt and and uh everybody over there is put a URL scheme in your mac app and document it because that's all i really need is i need to wait to say chat gpt colon slash slash uh you know search uh and topic equals right like that's all i need is document a uh a URL scheme i don't need an apple script dictionary or anything like that that's but let's not even go there but just something where i can pass that through because that would be nice yeah i i have the mac app installed it's not great um it it runs in the menu bar and the dock and it's one of those where you can like hide the dock app but that doesn't really work the way that i expect it to in a way that i can't quite put my finger on even like it's just kind of kind of weird um i do have it bound to a keyboard shortcut i'm doing option space and i have it so the default positions are bottom left center and right it's like no i want it in the top right like that's kind of in my brain where it should be and i can drag the window up there and set it to open the last position but it doesn't really remember like it's just it's kind of a weird app yeah i'm not actually sure i was trying to dig around as i was talking um if it's native or it's or if it's electron but it's got some weirdness to it i think it's just a web wrapper and look i am very glad that there's a mac app i love that they said you know what chat gpt is so useful we want to integrate it into into desktop computers and they did the mac version and now they have a windows version too like i like that about it because if you are a believer in chat gpt and you know chat gpt people should be right that it's their product then you should believe that integrating it with the the desktop computers is one of the things that you should do so i'm grateful that it's there because i don't i mean like i said i could open this up in a web browser but i'd rather not i just wish that it was a little more integrated and like the bare minimum to me is accept a URL that's passed from elsewhere in the system because that will then you can put it on a stream deck button you can keyboard maestro it you can apple script it you can use in launch bar like it opens up the entire platform to just pass things to chat gpt if they want to do more you know great if they want to return you know uh the result back to some other app fine but like it's not necessary i just would like a little bit and i realized i could probably build like an api thing that uses the api like how Federico did with one of his shortcuts like i could probably do that where i built a whole thing that passes the query to the chat gpt api and gets the results back and displays it again it's kind of too much i'd rather not all i really want to do is pass the query on to where it should live which is in the mac app and it and it doesn't do that but i like i don't know how you're using it i i pay for it because i want to explore it and i think that it's good like i said sometimes i mean other than for computer programming where honestly it's great because it knows way more than i do about it and it gets me code that is usable or at least fixable and some of the search is good some of it is bad like it's not perfect but i don't want to make perfect the enemy of the good it is often very good and i like to explore with it you know are you using it i mean you're paying for it so i hope you're using it yeah it's um i'm using it really with search and and to close a loop a second ago it does it looks like it's built in swift actually and well then but it's just a wrapper let's get let's get on it like something yeah something a shortcut support would work you are something would work just let us automate it a little bit please they use uh revenue cats in here that's cool um yeah it uh yeah so when search came about that's like you know i'm gonna give this a real shot mike's spoken really highly about it other people so we can highly about the search and i've been using it in some soap prep and some other stuff right like and just trying to find things i'm not it's not doing my work for me and of course you want to always check its its sources and that is one nice thing in the search it like puts the uh it puts the sources just right in line you can click on them and see uh see what they're saying and yeah that is is really actually pretty compelling i think the search is is good i think there are clearly still places where you bump into sort of limitations of their data sets or kind of the like sometimes you have to think the way that it wants you to think um i'm trying to remember i should not just go through my history and i can't find the example now but there was something that i tried searching for and i'd like tweak it and then it kind of ended up going down the road i wanted it to but it is definitely not something that is like baked into my workflows at this point it's it's still very much experimental that's sort of why i want to integrate it with launch bar to see if like if maybe there's a way for me to do that like i built a launch bar thing that actually uses a shortcut but it's six color search so i can do command space six you know s i x space and it gives me an ant text entry and i can type something and it runs that in the six colors search shortcut that i built which uses the WordPress search api and searches my WordPress install and passes back results that the shortcut displays and when i click on one it puts the uh url on the clipboard so that i can link to my stuff while i'm writing and it's like it's not super smooth but it's smoother than going through the web browser opening a browser window typing in a query site colon six colors dot com like it's a little bit better um and i like that so i that was my thought is like if i can add another feature into launch bar that is chedgpt integration then it will let my impulse to do command space for everything flow some of that stuff that direction and i i'm with you about search like again none of this is perfect but i don't know as a as a content creator on the internet i don't mind the idea that if somebody asks for a question about apple stuff that there is a summary and then there is a bunch there are a bunch of footnotes that say you can read more about this at this place as you know read at the verge and a daring fireball and a 512 pixels into six colors like i'm okay with that i if we're if the best practice for this is going to be show your work so that you can trust these sources we're just summarizing these sources but you need to get more information because some percentage of people are never going to go past that but a lot of people are going to be like i don't trust this thing this is not enough i want to read the details i'm okay with that that that's okay with me um hiding that stuff is what bothers me so i love that the type gpt search shows its sources right like that is because it also lets you look at a source and go come on i don't trust that source and that's good too that's fine yeah yeah and in that way it's not that different than a google search right like you search something on google's like okay i've come across this website before like i don't i don't need to uh i don't need to read it or go down that road and if anything it's definitely like i'm definitely on the side of the argument argument now of like oh google is in trouble like they need to figure this out and you know i think most people now are everybody is getting like the AR results of the top of their searches and in my sort of like you know kind of limited testing uh what chat gbt does with its search is more compelling than what jim and i is doing and i think i think more useful and that is pretty interesting back for google real back for google that's why google was so spooked by this right that that's why is because they can see that this could completely overthrow them uh if they can't do it right somebody else becomes the way you find things on the internet if it's not i mean they're doing a thing like like the apple thing which is if our our bread and butter is going to be replaced we have to be the one to replace it and that's why the apple spent lots of money on all sorts of things like the vision pro because they're like what could be the next thing that replaces the iphone and and let us be one of the players in that otherwise our business is gone and google i think the ai stuff is absolutely hundred percent that which is this could be an existential threat to google and uh so like if we're gonna if ai is gonna replace google search we need to be the ai search and right now they're not but they're trying real hard that's why well i'm curious to see how your usage unfolds and you know for me like i i looked at a little bit like can i pipe this through alpha and i was like you know what the option space is fine i got yeah you know i like the app pops up quickly and it the one thing i appreciate about it is when he when you use the keyboard shortcut it opens and it moves the cursor uh into the text box which is not a given not all apps do that correctly and so it's one keyboard shortcut and then i'm typing pretty quickly and that that gets me close enough but i understand wanting to get it a little bit you know closer to the metal if you will yeah sure well we'll see this episode of upgrade is brought to you by express vpn going online without express vpn is a bit like driving without car insurance why would you do it when you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes hotels airports and the rest your online data isn't secure someone on the same network could gain access to your personal data including passwords bank logins credit card details and other things you wouldn't want in someone else's hands express vpn works by stopping hackers from stealing your data through using a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so anybody who's on that network it's just encrypted garbage they don't see anything but lots of reasons to choose express vpn over other vpn's it's super secure it would take a hacker with the super computer over a billion years to get past express vpn's encryption and hackers aren't that patient it's easy to use to just fire up the app and click one button to get protected and it works on all your devices phones laptops tablets and more so you can stay secure on the go and it's been rated number one by top tech reviewers like cnet and the verge now mike hurley is dropping in from his uh assignment he wants me to tell you that he will be using express vpn on his assignment which is a vacation right now to catch up on the shows he was streaming at home and to watch his live sports seamlessly with no buffering that's right he's in a different country but he's going to get access to all of the stuff back home in the uk through express vpn i did this when i went to new zealand same thing it's like i wanted to watch max it's not in new zealand or if it is it doesn't have anything on it i just used express vpn it was great right now you can take advantage of express vpn's black friday slash cyber monday offer oh cyber it's cyber monday as we record this cyber monday happy cyber monday to all of you who celebrate cybers uh anyway you can get the absolute best vpn deal you'll find all year use the special link express vpn.com/upgrade to get four extra months with the 12 month plan or six extra months with the 24 month plan totally free big extension just to have it right on boom it's done express vpn.com/upgrade an extra four or six months of the express vpn for free so you can be wherever you want and watch whatever you want and be secure and safe thank you to express vpn for supporting upgrade and relay is there breaking news there is oh breaking news breaking news yes uh apple worked on the vision pro since at least 2008 okay what does it mean so um old news uh here's here's the story harry mccracken who used to be the editor in chief of pc world he was my counterpart at pc world um he was posting about finding his old blog that has disappeared from pc world's website in one of the very many kind of uh cms changes that have happened over time there uh using the wayback machine from the internet archive and it totally worked and he found it and i thought well let's see if i can find our old blogs from that same period because we at mac world we underwent that same issue and i found the mac user blog which is where dan moron did most of his writing for a period of time when we were doing like it was literally a movable type blog of course it was of course it was back in the day back in the day and one of the things that then and dan went poking around in his columns and he found something and he wrote about it in his mac world column so there's a there's a nine to five mac story that literally is hey look at what dan wrote about on mac world which is very strange but we found this we have this for podcast too where we say things on podcast and they're like hey look at this thing that mike heard on upgrade and there's a whole story about it look the content filling the content void is is a real uh real thing i mean we do it on like five twelve and six colors it is a little bit weird to see it on nine to five i think is what you're saying well and well and we i feel like we write links where we say hey you should check out this article because but nine to five yeah will often just be like well we're just writing an article about news that broke and it's just our dumb podcast it's just as weird um so this is a post uh from a mac user contributor from 2008 that is headlined patent filing suggests apple quote ipod e-y-e-p-o-d from november 7 2008 and it's a patent and it's linking to somebody's patent website probably maybe patently apple or something like that maybe it's a uspto site i don't know what the link is because it's just a screenshot Dan took but it the the drawing of it it's like the vision pro i mean it's a vision pro it's wild so it's old news and you know it came along way but at some point in in 2008 somebody at apple was like hey i have a patent on mounting displays in a thing that you wear on your face and one of the people credited is tony fidel actually the guy who created the ipod yeah wow look at this thing years in the making the figures in the making yeah to put 2008 in this in context for people that's the year the macbook pro went unibody for the first time the year the macbook air was introduced uh it's a long time ago it's the it's the year the app store happened yeah yeah wild yeah absolutely wild yeah anyway just some fun old news but i love i love that and i love that the chain of events was hairy to me to dan to mac world to nine to five mac the internet's a wonderful place all right should we do some ask upgrade let's do it oh double lasers it's great uh Steven what's this first ask upgrade question what's going on here this is from somebody named casey list that name sounds made up uh casey wrote you've discussed that you don't typically use mac safe while traveling and often do some sort of arithmetic to figure out if it'll be necessary i couldn't agree more i'm in the same boat would you trade the mac safe connector for another usb c port or slightly different take would you be sad if mac safe went away again hmm casey says they don't think they would make the trade even though they casey seems to use usb c and not mac safe i'm a little confused by casey's opinion but what do you think um i would be sad if it went away because i think having the option of having a dedicated power plug that isn't go i mean first off let's just say i think it's unlikely that apple would remove mag safe and replace it with another port i think they would do what they've done before which is just remove it and tell you to use your other boards for it and the beauty of this is it can't be anything but power and that means that if you're if you're full up you can use it i love having a dedicated power spot and the magnetic thing is big right like there are lots of people who rely on and when it was gone we're buying like weird third party things in order to get that breakaway thing where it's not going to pull your laptop off a table while it's charging because it'll pop off and i think it's really good and i wanted to continue and i do like i said last week i do travel with it some right but but it's not required and if i'm trying to travel really light but still bring the laptop i might not use it but i also sometimes i do travel with it and i'll tell you this uh the way lauren uses her macbook air and she's using the m1 right now the moment that she gets maybe when i buy that macbook pro my hand me down to m2 macbook air um she will use that mac that magsafe cable a lot because i know we've got usb c chargers around the house and we use them for ipads and stuff too but her her laptop doesn't really have a home sometimes it's on the couch sometimes it's on a table but like back when she had a magsafe laptop it was great because you could just lay it somewhere and know that it would charge but also not get yanked and pull the laptop somewhere and i feel like we'll go back to that when she goes to the m2 and that will be an upgrade so i love it i mean usb c charging is so great that they could kill it and it would be okay but i think that the real challenge is trading a port for macsafe would be like that would be okay but i don't think apple i feel like apple is just never going to do that like the whole point of magsafe being on the on the laptop is we want to maximize your data ports because you actually need to use data ports and and macsafe on the mac there is some nuance here so like if you want to fast charge the 16 inch that requires uh the 140 watt apple charger yeah and usb c power delivery uh won't go that fast right on the macbook pro and so there are some cases where macsafe would be faster um i really like macsafe i'm glad that is back now at my desk i'm using a thunderbolt doc so i just have one cable going to my macbook pro but in my bag i have the macsafe adapter uh i i like it a lot and it totally works for me i would be sad if it went away again something you said there really struck me which is here's the thing about usb charging i don't trust it i don't trust it if like i've got usb c adapters that have got like the the good port and the bad port and like but if you're just on the other end you don't know if it's plugged into the good port of the bad port maybe you could check but like we've got one that's on behind our couch and then the cable snakes over the couch so like i would have to get up and and go behind the couch and look and see whether it's plugged into the good port or not you're not going to do that you're just going to plug it in magsafe i know it it matters what adapter is plugged into the magsafe but i would say that in general i know what i'm getting from magsafe and usb c i don't really know i mean some of those adapters are weird and i know it's i know you're plugging into usb c on the other end right but so so it could still be an issue but i i feel i feel more like this is a dedicated power plug that it's going to do what i trust i don't know maybe that is maybe that's an illusion since they're all coming from usb c sources anyway but i feel like having it be dedicated is a good thing maybe you know and i think magnetic again magnetic decoupling is good like it's really good that it's safe that it lets you pop that thing off whenever there's any tension instead of pulling your laptop onto the floor it's it's good it's and making the cable you know release without it the cable undergoing tension that makes your cable bad yeah all good a question from steven in mimphes interesting jason do you keep the boxes of your apple products current or past um that's a good question i think this maybe came up because uh over the holiday i was in my in-laws garage and discovered a g5 iMac box that was exactly what i thought of and and i'm like what is this even doing here and it's like i i i like shook it and i was like there's a really light there's no mac in here now um because they got rid of it but they kept the box which they probably don't need to have a box for a computer they don't have anymore and haven't had for many many many years they also also visible in their stack of boxes high up in the rafters of their garage was their intel iMac box for the one that i was troubleshooting so they they save all these my answer is mostly no i don't live in a house with a lot of storage and so keeping a big box around is not ideal i think i do have like at least one of my studio display boxes and it's huge but i think i i think i might still have that i keep some of them like i have the vision pro box but again it's a first-generation apple product i feel like i'm gonna hold on to that box because i'm gonna hold on to that product forever but in general no i have so many products going in and out i have to hold on to all the boxes of all the apple owners right so that's already taking up a lot of space because i got the box they came in the air bill to ship them back and the boxes for all of those products and that takes up a lot of space on my shelves in my garage already and i just don't have a lot of storage even using the garage as storage like we do i don't have a lot of storage for boxes yeah so so generally no is the answer other than that i will try to keep it around for a while in case it's a product that's currently in use and it might go to somebody else because but i don't do a lot of reselling of products either because this is my job and so i tend to keep old products around whereas i know you sell them and then buy them back 15 years later that's right you can find that sweet spot where they're not so rare as to be valuable but are also outmoded and you buy them right then that's the that's the trick yeah before i talk about my box usage it's a little two legs people have already sent you all email probably but in this support document maybe jason could put in the show notes uh the 2023 so was that the m3 max 16 inch macbook pro apparently can fast charge if you have 140 watt USB-C power adapter and the 240 watt USB-C charge cable two meter for macbook bro special cable and so it you know yes i guess there are some uh specific cases or one case but this is what i can this is exactly what i mean about magsafe which is the two options for that fast charging on the 16 inch macbook pro are the 140 watt power adapter with a special USB-C cable or the magsafe cable right like again it's like you might if you get the wrong cable you're not going to get your full charge but the magsafe cable is going to get you your full charge and that's a reason to use magsafe for charging because you can rely on it it's like that's what it's for it's all it's for use it yeah yeah yeah so i think i regret a point still stands all right and i will say i do i do try to keep vintage boxes so like i've got the ipod original ipod box around here somewhere i mean i've tried to keep some of that stuff but i can't keep all of it so a lot of that stuff just goes away yeah i i keep boxes for current stuff uh up in the attic i actually have like a big duffel bag that has like current you know laptop ipad iphone boxes in it um and that's really about it i even though i've got a matte collection i really don't collect like the boxes or the packaging there's some stuff that i wish i had like i wish i'd had you know an old ipod box or like some of this is really interesting but i have never it's never really like stuck for me from a collection standpoint so i really don't have a lot and once i sell something you know the box goes with it so um or like it you know gets passed along to a family member or something i'm like here's your new old phone and here's the box it came in yeah that that is ideal is if you've got the box uh that it came in um but yeah i i i'm i saved more than i used to i'll put it that way i used to not at all because there was no room that was back when this garage was a garage and there was some storage in it but now we've got like there's a big set of metal shelves that we've got uh that from like Home Depot and it's got a bunch of stuff on it and then i've got a couple other racks of stuff including old computers and stuff so we've got a little more storage but still it's not enough um so you know there's a limit to what you can do i i have friends and you probably know this you probably know people who do this damn freaks my old colleague at macworld damn freaks is an inveterate um seller of his old hardware so he keeps all the boxes and and everything in them pristine because he'll use like a computer for a year and then he'll sell it usually he'll like sell it on i don't even know where craigslist ebay i don't even know what he does but that this was always his method and so he would sell it in box with all the stuff freshly wiped all of that and i always admired it but i also thought like i i i ain't doing that right like just there's no way i'm gonna and i didn't have the room to to do that either but i always did admire that that he always kept every box perfectly pristine and then which i do with my apple loners but like for a computer i'm gonna use for especially once i started handing them down to other members of the family i'm like i'm not gonna do that it's not gonna yeah come on yeah i think that's fair David asks i was curious since jason has both an oculus and a vision pro how are movies on the two i'm interested in watching quote big screen movies and a two hundred ninety nine dollar oculus sounds interesting i did the trout the apples door for the vision pro and it was great but currently too expensive so i did convert a bunch of 3d dvd's 3d blue rays to okay uh using just really like i had to use a windows i think was it windows or DOS i don't know a really bad software it wasn't DOS i'm sure it was running us wait but it was like kind of command liney anyway really bad uh windows software in order to do this but i did manage to do it so i could watch those on the oculus before i had the vision pro because it was like oh 3d content this is cool um and it's okay there's a good app that puts you in a movie theater that looks really good it's got dynamic lighting on the seats and stuff so when it's a bright scene the seats light up and when it's dark they don't and then it's really really very good it's called skybox um it's fine like the vision pro is better the vision pro is really nice but the vision pro also costs 3,500 bucks so yeah i mean that's kind of my answer is if you're curious about watching movies on a big screen in uh in vr the oculus will do it what i would say is it's not i don't think it's good enough to watch any like if you've got a nice tv you should watch it on the tv but the 3d stuff was great and you can't watch that on in 3d anywhere else other than a headset at this point now i don't know last time i because of the vision pro now i don't i i am not gonna do that because i have a vision pro but like i hope they've got a store now somewhere where you can buy a rent 3d stuff in uh meta's ecosystem because they really should that was my complaint back before vision pro was that they really should like let me watch 3d stuff uh and rent movies and buy movies in 3d and they they didn't so if they've got that that that would be great but um and also yes the quest 3 uh has a better screen than the quest 3s so you know you you go up a little bit you're gonna get a better screen but i also had the quest 2 which has the same screen as the 3s and it was fine like it was fine but really it was fine for 3d content that i couldn't watch anywhere else anything else i would rather watch on tv with vision pro like sometimes there is kind of like i'm gonna watch this on vision pro as a treat because it is of a high enough quality that it's kind of nice to have that big screen um when i'm watching a movie by myself which doesn't happen i was saying moana 2 opened this weekend and i thought i've i've watched half of moana the original because i never saw it and i started watching it in 3d on the on the vision pro and then i get distracted by something and i haven't watched the rest of it but like that was a good example where again it's a 3d movie it's in disney plus it looks great on the vision pro so my answer is uh see if somebody is selling those movies or or letting you rent them on oculus gotta be right somebody's got to be doing that now and then you know it's fine but i wouldn't i wouldn't personally choose it over my tv for 2d content but uh for 3d it's it's fun it's it's a lot of fun yeah i mean i think the entertainment is a huge use case right and that does put the vision pro at a slight disadvantage just due to the price yeah yeah even it looks good but it doesn't look 10 times as good right that's the right yeah exactly exactly uh and lastly rm wrote in has jason seen this page turn buttons are not totally dead uh can you describe this product that rm linked to because i've looked at this webpage a lot over the last couple of days and i'm still just thinking about the roman empire yeah just just go smacked okay so i my initial description let me know how i do here is this looks like something fedorica would buy yeah i think so it is the sole reader it is a pair of glasses that contain an e-reader inside them yes uh they're they're glasses that are completely covered in the front so you when you put these on you can't see anything but a book so so yes yeah yeah it's basically like what if a kindle on your face mhm what yeah what if a kindle was on your satisfaction free reading so i mean it like i admire the idea and i'm sure there's a use case i'm sure there's somebody who is trying to read in bed and doesn't want to bother their partner and this is great you just put on the glasses this is like fedorico playing video games right so you can put on the glasses and you can read all you like and it's not a problem although it doesn't look like it's really great resolution but anyway no it doesn't it looks real real blocky um so you know look one of the things i love and this is all when i was reviewing all the weird android devices like those books uh e-readers like i love the fact that we live in an era where there is off-the-shelf mobile operating system stuff and there's off-the-shelf parts that some manufacturer in china can just sort of like put it in a blender and come out with whatever and say is this a thing and you know what nine times out of ten maybe ninety nine times out of a hundred it's not a thing but every so often it's a thing or it's a thing for a for a very narrow audience like the books e-readers that books pama is a great example i know you forgot that you had yours i did yeah it's a it's a great example of a product that a big mainstream company is never going to make but that a small company can take the take phone parts and an e-ink screen and kind of like put it together and make something that will appeal to a a narrow audience that is big enough for them but would never be big enough for amazon right or kobo or whatever i love that i love that we live in an era where there are there can be small companies that can leverage the existence of android and the existence of apps for android and can do just and the existence of parts for these devices that that are used by you know their commodities at this point and build products out of them that will that will target a very specific nation like i said most of them aren't a thing and i suspect that maybe the soul reader is not a thing but if it is if it can find enough of a following for it to be viable then great like i think the books pama is a great example where i reviewed it and then like three months later six months later the verge wrote about it and like i've seen it in other places and like people were kind of like it would viral there's just enough there just enough there for people to say like enough people say that that's interesting to me and and so i love that we live in this era but i look at this and i think that ain't it so if it's for you i also wanted to mention because i talk about page turn buttons a lot when you do comes to e-readers right because i like them i think they're good i think they should be on devices you don't have to use them but it's nice that they're there and that amazon has decided that that they're bad and nobody should have them anymore and i got a bunch of people wrote to me including one person who wrote to me and cross posted it to multiple social media services which is like don't do that like cross posting promo is one thing cross post posting to reach someone like like i literally answered the same question on two different services and then i realized it was the same guy it's like don't do that yeah yeah don't agree um but i got a lot of people who said hey but jason here's your solution and they sent me a link to a thing that is absolutely not my solution so i'm just going to mention here speaking of weird reading things which is there are devices out there that are basically like a remote finger you clip them to your kindle and and it and it hovers so you clip it to the side and and the end of it hovers over the screen like right on the side of the screen ideally not blocking your view although you may have to and it's awkward because this is like back when we had clip on book lights for the kindle it's awkward it's a thing clip to the side of your kindle or kobo or whatever and it's got a remote control and when you click the remote control the little finger goes boop and touches the screen and advances the screen to the next page this is not what i'm talking about i don't need a remote finger i have a real finger my problem is that i don't want to use the finger now now i will say if e-readers and this is this is the problem with this product so this product i have friends who use this product i have a friend who uses this product because she doesn't want to she she's got some medical issues she doesn't want to hold the e-reader she's got a little stand that she can put the e-reader on and then she can get under the covers in bed and she's got the little remote and she can go click on the remote and it advances the page and she doesn't have to touch the device or hold it or anything it's great it's but i will say all of these device manufacturers should just support bluetooth remotes right they should support bluetooth remotes there's no reason that a remote finger clip-on thingy should exist you should just be able to pair a bluetooth remote and then click forward or backward or whatever but none of them do which is madness i think i actually i think the books ones do because they support android so they can support like a keyboard so if you made a remote that was just right arrow left arrow bluetooth profile of a keyboard i think it would work but mostly not so it's not what i want because what i want is to hold it in my hand and then just sort of squeeze with my finger or my thumb and have it advance the page because it feels really natural but again it's a weird product but i'm glad it exists like we live in an arrow where somebody has hacked a way to get a remote control on a Kindle even though i don't want it my friends use it and that's great but it's not what i want what i want is a button i can push and a clip-on finger is not a button i can't believe i use that sentence but there it is no and neither are a ink glasses neither a ink glasses which i think come with a button or they've got a gesture i don't even know how they work it looks like it comes with a with a thing you put in your hand yeah like a little controller that you use yeah well that's nice that's nice if you want to i don't know i would be creeped out by not being able to see anything but the book in my face but yeah i don't know it's good here we go handheld remote it's got a case yeah a proprietary charging cable which is always fun oh great that's what you want yeah yeah why they made that decision i'm a little concerned their website boasts that uh 500 something books were downloaded in 2024 okay that's that's not very many that's not a lot of books minutes read 325 000 pages turned 377 000 not a big market it's very much like this is a real product yes it's real it's real so that's that's good it's like when when when i was doing upgrade and we were talking about the the keyboard that is also a trackpad which was that apple patent and people wrote it and said oh there's a real product that does that yeah oh i think i think you should email these people and get a get a pressing now oh man i know i do not want it i do not want it okay okay well the link will be in the show and let's go check it out if you don't work if you work for sole reader and you've heard us talk about this reach out to Jason he wants to review this okay please please Stephen thank you for being here thanks for having me it's always so much fun to upgrade we you not don't get we say this every time you not don't get duct tech very much on the shows uh and uh here we are it's great thank you for having me yeah it's uh i appreciate you filling in for mike who got to take his very nice thanksgiving trip that he likes to take yes and uh but we'll talk about thanksgiving more in upgrade plus which you can get by being a member or going to give relay.com and giving yourself or somebody else a gift the gift the greatest gift of all a podcast uh send us your feedback follow up in questions at upgrade feedback.com remember upgradeys.vote if you want to send us your votes for the upgradeys that will really help us i write lots of things at six colors.com except for last week where i wrote very little but that's okay it was a weird week my podcasts are here at relay and over at the incomparable.com and uh steven tell people where they can find your stuff yes i'm here on relay a co-host connected and mac power users come out on wednesday and sunday respectively and i write over at 512 pixels dot net we exist in social media you can find us search for steven hackett or with a ph or ismh you can find me j snell is usually what it is although in some places i might be something else like snell zone it's okay i mean find us we're there um but we're not going to give you a list of names because there's too many now it's just too many clips of the show are available on tiktok instagram and youtube we are at upgrade relay the full show also gets posted at youtube if you are a youtube focused person focused human and prefer podcasts on youtube to uh podcast apps of choice we're there for you and thank you again to our members who support us with upgrade plus and to our sponsors once again they were i might so good at this i can they have delete me smarter world and express vpn that's who they were and you heard me if you're not an upgrade plus member you heard me read those sponsor reads and i hope you enjoyed it and if you're an upgrade plus member you're probably not missing anything anyway what is happening i don't know thanks everybody for listening thank you steven for being here and we will see you next week and mike will be back then goodbye say goodbye steven hackett bye y'all
Stephen Hackett joins Jason to discuss emergency calls, reaction to Jason's "The Mac is the Model" piece, iPhone metals, our innate troubleshooting powers, Jason's laptop dilemma, the ChatGPT Mac app, and some very old Vision Pro news.
