[beep] [music] From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 510 for April 29th, 2024. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace, Sanebox, and Vitally. My name is Mike Hurley, I'm joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason. Hi Mike, how are you doing? Good, I've got a big show today. There's a lot going on. Big show. Good, a lot going on. There is a lot, there was a lot of movement. A lot of news, I've got a little story, I've got one of those stories. I've got like a little smell story. You did some travel, I did some travel. Yeah, big travel buddies. I had a big weekend, we did not travel together, but we are big travel buddies in another sense. But you visited with a Relay FM host, and I visited with Relay FM host, how about that? Incredible. But different trips, different places. Look at us, you can look at us. If you go to our YouTube channel where this version of the show is posted is a video as well. You love to see it. How about that? That was a little organic marketing. That was really good. That was really good. I have a snow told question for you. It comes from Dylan who wants to know, "Do you read footnotes when you read a nonfiction ebook?" I love this question because of course we know that we are one of the world's foremost ebook podcasts. And my answer to Dylan is, okay, there's a method to reading footnotes when you're reading a nonfiction book. And the method is context. The method is, is the little symbol or number at the end of this statement that just happened? Strongly implying that something is going on in the footnote that you might want to read about. Or is it like obligatory? And so my answer is, when it seems like the footnote is going to expand on a thing in a way I'm interested in, I will tap to bring up the footnote. I'll also say my habits with footnotes in ebooks were formed in an earlier age. And there was a time when to read a footnote, you would tap on the footnote and it would take you to the end of the book where the footnote was. And you couldn't get back automatically. And even worse, in the earliest days of the Kindle, from then on it would think that you had read to the end of the book. Because it measured your, it measured your furthest page read. It was so bad. Congratulations, you finished the book. You finished the book, yay. So I stopped most footnotes. However, software has advanced. Now when you tap on a footnote, it brings it up in a floating thing. You don't even leave the page. You can dismiss it. It doesn't mess up your anything about your where you're reading and all that. It's fine. However, I will say, I still only really do it if I think, "Oh boy, there's going to be something good here." Part of the context, by the way, is that you've had positive interactions with that in the past. If I read a book and a couple of times I tap and it's just a citation to a scholarly journal or something, it's like, "Full me once, shame on me, from me twice, shame on you." I will stop tapping on footnotes. I'm like, "Oh, in this book, the footnotes are boring." But if you got good footnotes, if I'm like, "Oh, this book, every time I see it like 22," I'm like, "Oh, what wacky side story will be under footnote 22?" Then you got me. I will tap on those. Unless it seems, sometimes I'll see them and I'll be like, "Well, I'm not that interested. I don't need to tap on the footnote." But mostly, I will be into it. So it depends on what the book is and how the footnotes are used, and that's my answer. So it's not a yes or no. It's like, if they're good, yes, if they're just citing sources, so that you prove that they're not plagiarists, whatever, boring, then I won't. I do have a little side note about footnotes, though. The way footnotes work, and this is sort of a harkening back to those primitive days early on in e-books where, as I described, tapping a footnote was a whole journey. The one thing that they don't seem to have the capability to do is mark the footnotes and the end material as outside the range of the length of the book. And I say this because I was reading a book the other week. It was a book about, I was called Fifth Son. It's about the Aztecs. Really good book. Highly recommended if you care about that kind of stuff. I'm really going into that middle-aged dad phase where I'm listening to history podcasts and reading books about history. Just lean it in. Lean it in, Mike. Anyway, I read this book about the Aztecs and there's a library loan. What was the name of that book? I want to make sure I get the right one. Fifth Son, S-U-N, Fifth Son, by an American... Fifth Son, a new history of the Aztecs. By Camilla Townsend. Yeah. So I'm reading it, and the library is like, "You're going to get that back to us in two days." I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm only 40% through. I'm never going to get there. I'm never going to get there, and I'm rushing through it." And I get to, like, I swear, Mike, like 55% and it's the end of the book. And the rest of it? Footnotes. Like, "Oh, I think I'm at the end. I got to the last chapter." And it was like, she's like kind of bringing it all together. And I'm like, "Strange to be bringing it all together in the late 50s. What's going on here?" Tap. Boop. Done. Footnotes. I'm like, "Ah." Well, I got to turn in the book. I read the whole book. It was great. But, like, here's my little feature request to cut the cobos and kindles of the world is you probably have, like, a mark. And when you're gauging length of the book, don't include the footnotes. Just don't. Don't do it. I beg you. Anyway, that's my footnotes rant that I didn't know I had. That was a footnote. For the footnote conversation. That's right. You can go back. And by the way, we've talked about ebooks in the past in previous episodes, including last week. That's also a footnote right there. Footnotes from the show notes. Thank you for sending in, Dylan. That question, if you would like to send in a question of your own to start off the show, go to upgradefeedback.com and send in your Snell Talk question. Jason, what season is it? Merch season. It's merch season. Got to upgradeyourwardrobe.com. Because we have brand new merchandise. Jason Snell, purveyor of merchandise. Would you like to give the Upgradians an audio tour of what they will find to upgradeyourwardrobe.com? And normally at upgradeyourwardrobe.com, we've got a few on-demand things. There's a room around up shirt. I think there's an upgrade logo shirt. There usually is an upgrade logo shirt, but not right now to avoid. Not right now, because for a limited time, because it's Cotton Bureau and this is how it goes for the next couple of weeks, you will be able to get some new with a footnote merch. We're doing the upgrade logo t-shirt with a little twist this time, which is that the arrow pointing upward is going to be left blank and it will reflect the color of the shirt you're wearing. So we're basically creating a customize your upgrade logo experience. It comes in two versions. There is Upgrade Pro. Those are monochrome colors because they're very professional. And you should be a professional and use them and they're not boring at all. They're just professionals. Lots of grays. Oh, grays, blacks, whites, whatever. It's shades of gray, professional gray. So that's Upgrade Pro. And then, if you're saying to yourself, but I am not a professional upgrade t-shirt wearer, Jason, I am merely a regular t-shirt wearer. Well, good news, everybody. You have gotten a visit from the upgrade colors are. And we've got non-pro colors. Yes, colorful colors, various new colors so that you can have your upgrade logo in any of the colors that are on offer that are the color of a t-shirt. Mostly pastel colors, which is a new thing for us, which I'm very excited about. Some really lovely options in there. Some very summery. As we're getting into the summer of fun, it seems appropriate to have some nice summery colors in there. Speaking of the summer of fun, Mike, another little segue. We're all about the segues today. Summer of fun, 2024 edition. Now, this is not a new shirt. It is the 2022 beach shirt with the iPhone in the sand. I love that design. It came in a couple of different color options last time. It was like a green and aqua with a yellow print. This time, the geniuses at the Cotton Bureau said, "Here's an idea. What if we did a gradient..." They call it split fountain. A gradient. I don't know what it means. And I also didn't... Well, I know it was actually possible. I'm very impressed by this. I think it's two different shades are put in. Instead of having a cover that's a shirt for one shade, they have two different inks, and then they end up in a gradient. They look really interesting. They're available on dark and light-colored shirts. They look great on both. If you want to relive the summer of fun with this... I love this artwork. It's like a surfboard in the sand, but it's an iPhone, and there's a palm tree. The upgrade logo is the setting sun or rising sun, and there's a pineapple. Which is a phone for the tree? I don't know, man. Because pineapple, because pineapple. That's available. And then we've also brought back the classic dongle town. Our most popular dongle town shirt, the dongle town USB port authority, exactly right, in new colors that we haven't had before. There's some variety. We wanted to bring them back some classics, but with different colors, different options, and that's our spring and summer, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, vibe of merch. Those will be available for the next couple of weeks at upgradeyourwardrobe.com. This is Jason's idea of the customizer logo color one, and I think it's inspired. I love it so much. Some of the color options, it looks so good to see the logo peeking through. You can go traditional and be red, so it matches the show artwork, but why not get pink or blue or purple or yellow, or many other colors that are available to you? Or light gray or a slightly darker gray or even darker, some would say, if you have to get some more black, you can also just get gray. If you're wearing your shirt professionally, you can do that. So we'd appreciate it if you want to check these out at upgradeyourwardrobe.com on sale for just a couple of weeks. Limited time order now. I think I don't want to make some claims here, Mike. I don't want to make some claims here, but I'm just going to say, there are other t-shirts being sold on Cotton Bureau. I think if you ordered them all together, you would get them all together with one shipping cost, but you'll have to wait because of the way they phase their different things. You'd have to wait for them all to go off sale before that happens. So you do you, but there is an option. Some follow up. Scott wrote in to say, I found it strange that Mike was insistent about delta adding in-app purchases or a premium subscription to the app to make more money when the developer already said they have a Patreon. If the developer says their model is already working, why keep suggesting a model that would be worse for lower income consumers like keeping features behind a paywall? I get that a premium add-on or subscription would be optional, but the Patreon is already optional and it's working according to the developer. It's quite simple. I love the app and I want them to make loads of money. And I don't think it's possible. Actually, I know it's impossible for the app store version for the Patreon to provide any bonus features. Like, you can't do that. Now, the old store version, they are doing that. I would just like it because I think it's amazing and I want the delta folks like Riley and team to make more money. So, to add simple things in, like, theming and stuff and put some behind a paywall and have people pay for it. The app also did not even call out the Patreon. I think this is something they've added, but I'm not actually sure this is something Apple will allow, but I think you put it in anyway. I think this is because there it goes. But that's why, because I want the developer to get as much support as possible. I signed up for that Patreon for a year because I'm using the app every single day, but I just want them to be very successful because they deserve it. Yeah. I mean, I would simplify it even further and say, I think having a Patreon forward is perfect, but you basically can't integrate Patreon in that way in the app store outside of the EU, right? You have to in the app store period and the EU, they've got the old store instead. So, doing with it at the still at the top of the charts, it would be nice if they find a way for people to be able to give the developers money. I don't think what we're saying, they should charge for it. They should charge $10 for delta. No, that's not it. It's like you've got this huge user base. Maybe you should add a tip jar or a subscription where you get a little bit of a bonus content. Maybe it's some bonus content that's related to things that are unlocked by the Patreon, but in the rest of the world, they can't do that, so they have to... I would encourage them to do that. Look, if Riley is happy to just let it be free, that's great, but it would be nice if people who liked it could give them more money. I don't think we were saying take things away from people who can't afford it. That's not what we're saying. We're saying Riley deserves support for... And the product's been so successful, there should be ways to clearly give support. And if the Patreon link works out, that's great. But there are other ways that app store apps turn goodwill into some money for the creators, and it would be great if they could do that. Speaking of emulation, I see you wrote an article on six colors a little bit about this, and I just... There was a couple of things. We've been talking about this stuff on and off, and one of the things that I just wanted to read is a quote from your article, which I really agree with. The right decision is for Apple to allow retro emulators of all kinds in the app store, and to allow game emulators to use just in time performance to boost performance. Otherwise, its limited expansion of the rules feels mostly for show and not indicative of a real change in approach to app store rules. Yeah, I mean, the goal here, the file name of this article was emulate all the things. I feel like this is a sign that there is a lot of potential here. When we talk about Apple's rules, one of the things that we talk about is that Apple is actually in some ways hurting itself, because the flip side of the app store, which I firmly believe, the app store and the richness of the app store is what helps make the Apple platforms rich. It's not like the iPhone is great, and then also there are apps. It's like the iPhone has the rich app ecosystem. That's one of the reasons the iPhone is great. So the converse of that, the flip side of that is, if there are things that aren't in the app store because Apple isn't allowing them, Apple is making their platform worse. I think the success of Delta shows that emulation has real potential. I mean, look, emulators have been happening outside of iPhones for a long time now, but like, on the iPhone, it's not been a possibility. And my point with my piece on six colors is that I don't want this Delta thing to be a fake, like I said, mostly for show, where it's sort of like, well, we'll approve emulators, but only in the most limited fashion possible in order to get everybody off of our backs. I think they need to truly embrace this idea. I think that they need to. So what I say in the article is, like, the JIT argument to me is, I get that they're worried, but like the whole no emulator thing was a security worry. Remember, this is all based on a rule back in the day where they're like, nothing can execute code. No apps can execute code. And that was like, you could put Python on it, but you couldn't have any Python. You had to type in your Python scripts because you're like, no, no, no, you can't. It's code that could be interpreted or executed. We can't allow it. And they have gradually backed off on a lot of that. But this saying that they're not going to allow JITs, so they're not going to allow Dolphin in the store, is it strikes me as being one of those cases where they are really hiding behind security as a way to complete continue their control. And so my article is basically saying, Apple, give it up. Give it up. Give it up for JITs. Give it up for console. Give it up for console. Give it up for console. Give it up for console. I've said this before, but like, my favorite games as a kid, we're on the Apple too. Well, that's not a console. It's a computer. And yeah, I could boot it up and do 10 print. Jason is cool. 20 print go to 10, but, or no, 20 go to 10. I do 20 print go to 10. It's just going to say Jason is cool go to 10, which no one cares about. I just I just a plug in a basic program right on a podcast. Anyway, mostly what I want to do is play load runner. Okay. I want to play SSI computer baseball on my iPhone and my iPad. I should be able to do that, even though it's not a console. And it's such an arbitrary rule. All of those things retro. I know you've talked about this. Like, what does retro mean? What does gaming mean? What does console mean? And I think it's stupid. I think these are more arbitrary words that give Apple essentially authority to say yes or no to anything. It's that classic argument about like the point of a law that isn't enforced is that it can be arbitrarily enforced whenever, right? Like, if you make everything illegal, then you can stop anyone you don't like for any reason. And it's it's a portal to ultimate power. It's not law and order anymore. It's just control. And that's where we are with this rule. So I'll go further. And some of this is I've talked about before, but like. Well, Mac emulators, I played a lot of games on the Mac too, but like, regardless of games, like Mac emulators should be allowed. And in fact, I would say Apple might want to start making an effort. In fact, there was just a story over the weekend about how what some version of is it. Is it DOS or Windows, some old PC operating system that was just put out, you know, publicly. Like, I know it's a little bit of effort, at least legally to do it, but like, I would really like to see some tiny portion of Apple acknowledge that their old platforms can be emulated and that have some value. And that they maybe should that Apple should embrace it and not have it be in the on the black market, essentially. And this also goes for the thing that we've lamented for a long time, which is iPhone games. That that an apps in general, and I would go beyond games here too and say, one of the great tragedies of the App Store and app development is that Apple's pace of iOS development is so great that apps break. And Apple even has a policy of like, if you don't touch an app, I have a sticker app that's literally just stickers for the incomparable in the store. And I got a note saying, if you don't change it, we'll take it off the store. Like, they're stickers, man. The stickers are still the stickers. And they're like, no, we're going to just take it off the store, because it hasn't gotten any updates. And, and so they're really aggressive about updating the OS, which is fine, but it breaks old apps and then kicking old apps off the store. And I know that they've done some things with Apple Arcade where they've said, oh, well, we're, we're going to pay somebody to make flight control work again and all that. I'll just put it out there. Today's phones and iPads are so powerful that one thing you could do is offer a virtual machine for your old operating system versions so that old apps can still run. Right. Like, I know that's a wild idea, but like, what's stopping Apple from emulating iOS five and letting all those apps run or iOS seven, like resource wise, it's not that much. I mean, I'm not saying it wouldn't be work to build it, but like the hardware is so powerful that I would really like to see Apple embrace this as a strategy to keep things compatible. And I know that there's this relentless like, well, yeah, but you've got to keep it. We want our developers to move with the times. It's fine. Have the window be 10 years ago. I don't care. But like, I think there's opportunity there. And I've already said that you should also just open emulation like the iPad should be able to run a version of parallels or VMware and should be able to run windows for arm. And it should be able to run Mac OS, because it's an arm processor. It's an M one or M two or who knows M three or M four processor and that I bet we'll get to it. And so I just emulate all the things is what I come back to is like emulation is an amazing thing because computers have been around and phones have been around for a while now. And there's amazing software out there that people love. And yes, some of it is nostalgia, but like, it's amazing software out there that is lost to history otherwise it shouldn't live in the darkness. It shouldn't be limited to just on like a PC or a Linux box or something like that, because other people should have the delight that you might currently have and being able to play Pokemon on your iPhone, like we should that should happen for everyone. And I think it would make the platform better and I wish Apple would get off of this box and just admit that emulation is is good and they should allow it not allow it with a big asterisk that means that only when they feel like it. So moving on, Ross Young has corrected his report on the larger iPad Air having a mini LED screen. He is now saying that the device could be coming later this year that features the screen, but it won't be the air that will probably see what's weak. Huh. Yeah. And that if there is this device that could come later on, it could be in Q four. Okay. Right. I still, I don't think I can even say I have also heard that this is a perfectly logical thing them reusing the mini LED screen because they already built it and that I've heard that like that. That's a reasonable thing for them to do. Young says that he heard from many supply chain sources that this won't be happening that his earlier report was wrong. Not this one. So there may be something going on there but it's not this one. Yeah. So they may be reusing that screen. Yes, but it's not this. Interesting. Interesting. Well, this is bad in the sense that that's a nice feature. It's good in the sense that it probably allows the iPad Air to be a little more clearly down scale from the iPad. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Squarespace, the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just getting started or managing growing brand, you can stand out from the crowd with a beautiful website, engage directly with your audience and sell anything, your products, services and even the content that you create. Squarespace has got everything you need, all in one place, all on your terms. Squarespace's Blueprint AI and SEO tools make it super easy to get started. You get started with a completely personalized website and with their new guided design system Squarespace Blueprint, you choose from a professionally curated layout and you take advantage of styling options to build a unique online presence from the ground up tailored to your brand or business and optimized for every device. And then it's super easy to launch that website and get discovered fast with Squarespace's integrated optimized SEO tools. You'll be showing up more often to more people growing the way that you want. Squarespace also have flexible payment options that you can integrate to your store to make check out seamless for your customers with simple but powerful payment tools. You can accept credit cards, pay power and Apple Pay and ineligible countries offer customers the option to buy now and pay later with after pay and clear pay. You'll be able to stand out in any inbox as well with Squarespace email campaigns. You can make outreach automatic with email marketing tools that engage your community drive sales and simplify audience management. You can introduce your brand or business to unlimited new subscribers of flexible email templates, then create custom segments to send targeted campaigns with building analytics to measure the impact of every send. I have always loved just how easy it is to make a Squarespace website look good because they start from such beautiful start in places, but give you the tools to be able to control it and customize it to fit what you're looking for. And they make it so simple to do so. You can just go right now and check it out for yourself. Go to squarespace.com and sign up for a free trial. You can build your entire website, see how fantastic it's going to look and how easy it is to build it. Then when you're ready to launch to the world, go to squarespace.com/upgrade to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That is squarespace.com/upgrade and when you decide to sign up, get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of this show and all of Relay FM. It is time to lawyer up, Jason Snow. Now, we have amazing artwork being made soon is what I'll say. The artwork is coming soon. It's very good, but it takes time. Because today, the European Union has designated the iPad as a gatekeeper and had given Apple six months to comply with the DMA rules for iPadOS. Previously, the DMA had just applied to iPhoneOS, but now iPadOS. I'm going to quote from the EU's press release. "The Commission opened a market investigation to assess whether Apple's iPadOS, despite not meeting the quantitative thresholds laid down in the EMA, constitutes an important gateway for business users to reach end users and therefore should be designated as a gatekeeper." Basically, they're saying the iPad does exceed the thresholds of users for them and that those users are locked into iPadOS. I think there's going to be a lot of argument in a lot of places about whether or not the EU has just basically extended the rules to include this, but nevertheless, they're saying they want it to comply, so they have six months to comply and put the iPad in the same bucket as the iPhone. And so that means at marketplaces and all that fun stuff for those in Europe. Now, in terms of the sheer technical aspect of this, iPadOS and iOS are the same essentially, so they've done the work, so extending it to iPadOS is not going to be hard for them. I'm just going to predict because they've already done it for iOS. Just to see the justification here, I'm fine with it. I always felt it was very weird that we would talk about this thing, but only in an iPhone context and some of this stuff feels like it's actually better in an iPad context. I say that as somebody who uses his iPad more than he uses his iPhone, right? I can picture it better, a lot of things I'd like to do on the iPad and you can't do them, so this will allow them to do that. So I actually think they've updated this press release because it's much more clear now than it was this morning when I looked at this. So that quote that I just read sounded weird, right? But basically what they were trying to say is end user numbers for consumers, the numbers weren't large enough to be in the threshold. But now they are now saying that Apple's business customer numbers exceed the quantitative threshold for that 11 fold. So that's why. And I believe what they said too is that they expect that they will meet the quantitative threshold for the regular users soon because they say they are very close to it. And so they're just basically getting ahead of it and saying, put it in. Yeah. Now, I'm not going to go into it here, but we'll just say, based on our discussion about the Department of Justice suit that claiming that users are locked in is an extremely debatable issue. That said, justifications being whatever they are, the European Commission has the force of law to demand that Apple changes behavior. So we can, we can debate this, but there's no, there's no debate society here in court like there will be in the US. This is just, they've decided it and therefore they will regulate it. And result, I would argue would be a less fractured experience for users in the EU, because it's got to be weird to have stuff on your phone that is completely unavailable on your iPad. Although, I will say this, if you've got a bunch of stuff you've embraced the DMA lifestyle in the EU on your iPhone and your iPad can't use any of that does making the iPad be compatible with all that stuff. Actually, make the iPad more part of an ecosystem and therefore increase lock in. I'm just saying, right, like, because if the iPad can't do all the stuff your phone can do. And, and then there's stuff on Android that does it. I mean, would you consider getting an Android? I don't know. I'm being a little bit silly, but at the same time, it actually sort of bringing the iPad into alignment with the iPhone makes it actually easier to just be comfortable in Apple's ecosystem because now those two things are connected in a way that they weren't before. But I guess we'll see what happens. I don't anticipate this is going to be a big deal. My guess, if I do guess right now, it will be that Apple will have an update that will follow the new OS version in the fall. There will be a subsequent update that will implement this in the EU. You know, sometime this fall, right? Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it leave. It would be like 18 or 18.1 or whatever, but like, it's going to be around that time. And as you say, this, I mean, I'm sure there's work, but way less because it's there essentially the same, right? And this is going to be end of October. So it could be 18.0, but it could also easily be like an 18.1 update, depending on how they want to do their work. Yeah. I'm actually kind of happy this has happened just to make the bifurcation less complicated. I agree. I agree. It always felt a little bit weird that we were talking about that we're so used to talking about everything in the iPhone and iPad context. And then there's this EU thing where it's just not. So for, you know, for us, it'll be more convenient outside the EU. But I would imagine that there are a lot of people in the EU who have iPhones and iPads who've been frustrated because they really love something. You know, that, whether it's just an emulator or whatever, they're going to, they're going to be things that they like, assuming that anybody adopts all of these changes, right? But assuming you add an alternative app store and all of that, like you get Fortnite, let's say, and you get it on your phone and you're like, yeah, but I'm going to switch to my iPad and play it there. It's like, nope, you can't. You're not allowed. Not allowed on the iPad. So this will change that. Room around up time. Yeah. My girl has been busy. He's had a bunch of reports in the last few days and I want to go over them with you. So first up, reporting that Apple and open AI have renewed discussions about being a part of iOS 18. It's feels late in the game. I'm wondering. So basically, this is, you know, them being one of the options that Apple's going to have multiple partners and like a search engine, you'll be able to choose who you want. Yeah. I think that this is very much. I could imagine we're talking with multiple partners, you know, and they might not even go over it yet. I mean, why wait for September for this, Bob? We're not picking any winners. And well, this goes with, this goes with our speculation a while ago, which is the idea is if Apple handles the front end and has a model on the phone, then a lot of stuff can be in the cloud and you can have different sources for different kinds of material. You could have different different sources in different regions. You could be able to choose a primary source like a search engine. And it doesn't feel quite as late in the game to me because it's a backend cloud service. And I think, like, if you're Apple, you don't want to tie yourself so closely to a single cloud provider on the backend to, you know, because then you're kind of yoked to them. And so I think this is the idea is it's all Apple up front and then back in the cloud, there's stuff and it might be open AI stuff. It might be Google stuff. It might be other things that rise or things that fall get pulled out. And they can just have that all be, you know, it's backing information. It's my LLM is going to talk to your LLM and it's going to give back information, which then it's then my LLM is going to process it and give it to the user, right? It's going to be stuff like that. Here's something that I think could be interesting here, right? Like, I imagine Apple could potentially reference the fact that this would happen, right? There's on device stuff and then there's stuff that happens off device and that's, you know, there's another provider. I, you know, we call those for the web, they're search engines, right? You should default search engine. Yeah. Is Apple going to create a term to call chat GPT Gemini? Like, we call them like LLM's. I don't think Apple's going to do that. I'll be surprised. Like, like AI source or something. Yeah. And so my wonder is if if Apple creates this term, could that become a term like the industry term to describe these things? It's possible. I also had the thought that depending on where they're integrating the stuff. So let's say they're integrating the stuff into a generative AI thing, right, where they're not going to do generative. It sounds like out of the box for their tool, but this is the sort of thing where it's like, look at this paragraph and correct the grammar or write three paragraphs about this topic, right? And first off, that's really great if Apple can like say, nope, it wasn't us who hallucinated that thing. It was the cloud AI provider. But if they do that, one way for them to do that is to integrate it into their text editing APIs, right? This is an interesting idea where there might be new LLM based features that are available through the text editing APIs that are basically so it's at the system level. And then you would choose your source potentially. But you would be able, so if you're following me here, like you could choose chat GPT or you could choose Gemini or you could choose something else. I don't even know. And that would be what would be used when you say, you know, when you select text and say, correct this, or when you are in pages and you say, give me three paragraphs, it would use like, right, which would make sense in a certain way that it would be pervasive in the system at an API level. And then there would be the models that would be, you know, part of that at the system level, right? So instead of it being we wired pages with chat GPT, it would be the system text. And there's this API and they know about each other and your apps also will know about it and get to use this feature. And so app developers, because at WWDC, they'll be talking to app developers. This is how you build this stuff in at a system level, which I think is, I think is smart. I think that's a way to do it, because then instead of you having to do the work of integrating with, you know, an AI provider, you integrate with the system that you're used to integrating with. And it hands that stuff to you. So if they do it that way, so it's like, you can do it in notes, you can do it in pages, you can do it in mail. And you can do it in your third party apps. That starts to sound like an Apple approach to using these LOMs. Also, Mark Gorman is reporting some other features coming to iOS 18. So updates to many built in apps, like mail, fitness notes and photos. And how much those updates, I don't know, I could imagine all of these apps getting some AI stuff. So I expect to be sprinkled all over the place. The iPad is going to get a calculator app, because the calculator apps going to be updated and they're going to put on the iPad. Paul went out for James Thompson. It only took him a million years. Yep. And once again confirming the other reports, free placement of icons on the home screen. Yeah. Yeah, you want to put that app down there in the corner? Go for it. Do it. You know, yeah. Let's get a little life. What a world. Let's get some aesthetics up in there. And also, Mark had a final report ahead of the new iPad unveiling, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. The iPad event coming next week. One, the Apple pencil will have haptic feedback. I don't know what this means. I'm like, is this haptic like an iPhone or haptic like an AirPod? You know, they're both haptic feedback, but, you know, the AirPod, it just feels like you're clicking it. Or like, you know, the magic trackpad or whatever. But the iPhone, I mean, that thing's like buzzing and bipping and blooping all over the place. So what's it going to be? Right. So is it a button that you squeeze and it makes you have a little bit that feels like you squeezed it? Or is it that I'm drawing on the screen and it's going, you know, when you get to the edge or when you snap to a marker or whatever. Do Apple do what so many people try to do and say, it feels like you're drawing on paper because they like give you a little vibration. Let me tell you, having experienced the haptic feedback on the magic trackpad, which I've turned off on Mac OS, right, where they have that thing where like, it hits the, it hits the rule boundary and it locks, it snaps for a moment and it vibrates the trackpad. I hate all that stuff. No, don't do it. But if it's, AirPod like where it's sort of like, squeeze it and I get some feedback. So that's how they're doing their button. That's fine. I'm also worried about, like, if you use it too much, you're going to kill the battery too on top of everything else. Very possible. Yeah. But the weird news, honestly, the argument believes that he doesn't feel sure about this himself, I think, from his report and that he has heard that the iPad Pro could feature an M4 chip and we'd be positioned as an AI powered device. I have two issues with this. One, it's strange. I mean, not impossible, but strange to introduce the M4 here. Like, that is odd. It would be even weirder for them to talk about this as an AI powered device when nothing will change for another six weeks, like minimum. You know, like, yeah, it's only as AI powered. Is there any other current product that Apple sells? Like, it's not OK. Like, they may get the neural engine enhancements to every A&M series chip has had, right? That, like, things that, like in a pixel major on the iPad will happen quicker, but that's not making it any more AI powered than before. Just things happen faster. This would be, I'd be fascinated to see if they're able to pull that off, but it would be surprising to me, honestly. I could not believe this report. No, it doesn't make sense to me for so many reasons. It doesn't make sense in the term in terms of the chip cycle. Like, this is this is doing a chip ahead of the chip cycle ahead of the iPhone chip cycle. It's, you know, what even is an M4 chip if it comes out a few months after the M3 chip. Also, wasn't this product supposed to be released like a month or two ago? Like, it was even closer to the, like, I wonder if there's some enthusiasm for this product that has gotten in the way, because I've heard people assuming it was an M4 to begin with. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not there yet. This is M3, this is late M3 cycle, not M4 cycle. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And the AI stuff, right? Like, the AI stuff is happening in June at WWDC, right? That's what we've all been told. So why is it that a month earlier, there's a product launch that details AI features, but just for the iPad, and also has this chip that should probably not be available for six months? It doesn't, I mean, you're right, Mark Gurman is hedging, but it's also Mark Gurman. Yeah, I think he has the same, I'm going to infer, he has the same skepticism that we do, that on the face of what he has said, it doesn't make sense. Like, but I can understand a scenario where take the AI part of it, that the M4 chip is so good for what they're going to announce, that they're just putting it in here now, because it's the best thing for September, October time. Right, so I've got, so I, let's say, I don't believe this, but I have a scenario where this happens. So here it is. We already, we already did our draft. We'll talk about it. But I have a scenario where this happens. So, so scenario one, the chip. The, what if the AI stuff really did, like, Apple was concerned enough about the rise of AI stuff, that while they couldn't change their roadmap, there was a way to expedite a generation where they're like, this is going to be way better. And expedite the base chip from that generation and pull it forward a little bit. Like, is that impossible? No, it doesn't. It's not something they've done before. But first off, they can call anything an M4. It could literally be an M3 on a different process. And they could call it M4. So there's that, right? Like, how different is it? And is it possible that they felt like they were going to expedite the low end M4 generation chip and get it out now? Although, keep in mind, there's an M3 chip, according to German, that hasn't even shipped yet in a product. Right? That they're planning on shipping. So how would this be an M4? But I'm just saying, just because I'm trying to play this out. Is there a scenario where they kind of did a red alert and they were targeting this generation and saying, can we get this? Or maybe they got it, you know, the fab at TSMC came up that could make this. And they're like, you know what? We could put this in that iPad because it's not going to ship in the kind of quantity where we need to get it up and running. And then, you know, by the time we need this in some iMacs or a MacBook Air, it's going to be six months from now. And we can put it in now and it will give us a little bit of a benefit. And if we're talking ourselves into this, right, this, we've been expecting these iPads for like two months. I know. And so, yeah, although, so if I make one last one, and if, what if some of the features that are AI-focused, they realized we can only have this on new hardware? Okay. So, so this is a good segue into my other point here, which is, remember, they were supposed to come earlier, according to Mark Gurman, and then they weren't. And one of the things that he kept saying was, because of the software update. And again, I'm saying I believe this report because I don't, but he said because of the software update, and we read that as being, well, they got to add in the software for the keyboard and they got to add in the software for the pencil. I think that's how it seemed. But again, just spitball in here. I don't think this is likely, but I'm just going to put it out there. What if there were some features that were plausibly AI-related? If Apple's really feeling the heat about AI, plausibly AI-related that were previously going to be held for another version of the software, for an 18 beta and then an 18 release? That were far enough along that they put them, and again, that they put them, pulled them back and said, let's make this work on a very late 17 release on iPadOS, market as a beta, but let us ship it in May, and say new, because then we're going to be able to say these new iPads are AI monsters and it's going to get some of the heat off of us. Because is that impossible? Is there even, if it's a Siri model, right? We'll just say for the sake of it, we'll call it Siri, right? And it's doing some stuff. Yeah. Is there even an SDK for that anyway? Right. Is there a developer story at all? Does it need to wait for that? And they can also still have like a, hey, we have a new AI kit that you can integrate with. But could they stage it out? Could they be a part of it? That's like it doesn't really need beta testing because it's not necessary. I don't know. I don't know. It could also be literally that they tie pages and notes and stuff into an LLM as a beta, and it's not the Apple thing at all. It's just some other features, and they're like, look, AI, more to come, and then they walk away. So I guess what I'm saying is, I can't entirely discount this rumor because if Apple was desperate enough to show that they're not behind an AI. I mean, they are not as far behind an AI as they're portrayed to be, and to make the stock market make their investors feel good about it. And I'm not saying that is quite the opposite. That is not the way to develop a product. Can I just say on that for a second? Because a lot of people say, there is a possibility that Apple do not want this perception inside of the technology community. It's not like just for investors. It's that like generally in the community, they are considered as behind. And also, do you know what this is before? It's before Google I/O, where it is very expected that Google is about to drop huge Gemini integrations into Android, and that they are going to potentially keep some of it for themselves and their own devices. And maybe they want to get ahead of that too. I don't know. We're in for what is unprecedented times for a while because the playing field has been leveled a bit. Right. So what I would say is, it's not necessarily about the stock market, but it is also about the stock market. It is about general perception, general perception about it. It is about competition, which is great. Also, I can see Apple saying, we have some of this stuff now, right? Like, so I say, this isn't how you design and develop a product. But I can see them saying, you know what, we have some of this stuff now, and we're going to have more in the future, and we've got these new iPads coming out, and then we're not going to update iPads for a year and a half. So if we're going to do this, maybe we should, if we've got it, and we can make some claims now, let's make some claims now, and let's change the narrative going into WWDC with our first, and it doesn't have to run anywhere else yet. But like our first, you know, super AI powered product, and it's the iPad Pro, let's say, and that sets the table. So again, do I think that this is likely? I kind of don't. Do I think that Apple will position the iPad Pro as an AI powered device? Well, probably because everything is AI powered. They position the MacBook Air as an AI powered device, too, to a certain extent. So if they add a feature here or there in that software update, they will certainly, if it's got any machine learning algorithms in it, they will make claims that it is. But if it's got something where they're like, you know what, we pulled pages, AI powered pages forward, or whatever, then they'll do that. If they've got some APIs that they can, that were basically at the ready, that they were, they changed their priority on four months ago to get them in a little bit sooner. Marked as beta, you know, because remember, it is the counter argument is it's only a month till WWDC, which means it's really only like five or six weeks before they would release a beta of the new features. So could you polish them a little more so that they fit in the existing OS and still call them beta? And I know developer beta is scary, but like you give them an extra three or four months. Like, all of this is possible. I think the chip part is the most outlandish one, because it goes against everything they've done. And also, like I've said all along, these apples chips already have AI, ML capabilities. They've between the neural engine and the stuff they've been doing on the GPU, like they have lots of that stuff already built in. It doesn't require, like, to flip the switch to go to an AI chip, like they don't need to do that. So, you know, I'm super skeptical, but I can't just say it's not going to happen, because I think you've got to look at the fact that Apple is fighting this perception in the industry, in the stock market, just in general, that they have lost the plot. And although you might be like, ah, they'll just shrug it off. They always do. Yeah, but Tim Cook is going on, you know, the industry quarterly analyst calls talking about how they're going to do AI. He's talking to doing interviews and saying AI is a big focus for us, and we're going to make some big AI announcements later this year. That is a sign that they are very concerned about perception. And we saw with the MacBook Air release that they've changed how they refer to features. And they are talking about AI power now, which they always soft petaled. They're now hard selling it, because they are concerned about their perception. So we do exist in a world where Apple is deeply concerned about the perception that they are losing it when it comes to AI. So while this is an extreme bizarre assertion that it's going to be an M4 chip with AI features, I don't think we can rule it out, because Apple is feeling that pressure, and that might have led Apple to make some surprising off-pattern judgments a few months ago, which potentially delayed this product. Right, especially I'll bring us back to that original report delayed because of software. I'm still not convinced, but I'm more convinced than I was when I read this report. Like, I feel like we have talked ourselves around on it that I can understand the scenario in which it would happen, but I'm still not sure that it will. Yeah, it's, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure they will position it as an AI power device, right? But like, and it would not be, again, I just want to say it would not be that wild. I know everybody's like, "Oh, they're breaking their pattern. They're not going to do that." But like, it would not be that wild for them to say we have new versions of iWork that have AI features in them. Right? I mean, they could do something like that. That's not everywhere in the OS is a pervasive thing. But you're right, Mike. They could also say, here's a preview, you know, you can turn on this beta preview of Siri 2 or Siri Pro or whatever, Siri AI on the iPad Pro. And people are like, "What do you mean? It's just on the iPad Pro?" And they're like, "Mm, wait and see." They could do that too. So certainly, I would guarantee there will be an AI story at this event about the iPad. There will absolutely be. The question is, is it as kind of radical as it seems here in this report? Or is it more what we expected, which is Apple's going to, like with a MacBook Air, they're going to kind of push it and say, "Yeah, AI, AI, but we're really going to need to wait until the developer conference to see more." This episode is brought to you by Sanebox. Having an empty inbox is a thing of the past. We are inundated and inundated with email, and there is no longer the ability to respond to anything and everything, because it's just about responding to the important things now. The messages that truly matter, the things you actually care about, the things that are important to you. That is where Sanebox comes in. You can think of it as triage for your email. As messages flow in, pile into your inbox, Sanebox does that sorting for you. It sifts out the important emails, puts them in your inbox, and directs all the other distracting stuff into your Sane later folder. So you know what messages to pay attention to now when you open your email and what stuff you can get to later on. Sanebox also has features like Sane Blackhall, where you can drag messages from annoying senders, and you never want to hear from them again. Same reminders, so you can have a reminder, basically, if you haven't heard from somebody by a certain date, and you can use Sanebox with any email client, any device, anywhere you check your email. This is so important. Even if you use different applications on your phone and your Mac or your Android phone or your PC, it does not matter, even if you use it on the web, because Sanebox is going to be available. Sanebox is going to be there and it's going to be filtering your stuff for you. You can even have it take newsletters and put those in a separate folder, so you can get to those maybe on the weekend when you want to catch up your newsletters, rather than them filling your inbox and hiding, something that you want to respond to. I really think Sanebox is an incredible way to triage your email and make sure that you're just getting to the stuff that you really want to deal with. See how Sanebox can magically remove distractions from your inbox of a free two-week trial. Go to samebox.com/upgradefm today to start your free trial and get a $25 credit to. That is S-A-N-E-B-O-X.com/upgradefm. Thanks to Sanebox for the support of this show and really FM. So there is an iPad event. There is an actual video event, which we did not expect, and it is happening on May 7th. Now, leading on from that conversation we just had, I'm like, why would they do that? They have something to say? I'm coming around to this report that I'm not sure about. So we will be recording after the event at some point, so on May 7th, because we'll be talking about the thing that it was. But we have already drafted, so I've spent a few days with my friend and our friend, friend of the show, Undiscore David Smith. I'm going to talk about that in Upgrade Plus today because we got up to some fun stuff. And he referenced to me, he's like, are you going to draft today? And he was like, oh, you already did it. Yes, we already did it on March 25th, over a month ago. We drafted because we were expecting some breast releases to appear, but no. Any moment. Now we have an actual event coming up, which I'm excited about. It's going to be interesting. I thought, though, what might be fun today is to now, in the cruel light of a month later, look at our picks and run through them real quick and see how confident we're feeling about them one way or another ahead of scoring them next week. What do you think? Let's do it. All right. You go through yours and I'll go through mine. Okay. New Apple pencil introduced. Okay. Feel good about it. Yeah. Yeah. That one is good. Yeah, that one's good. Oh, some of these others are not so good, but that one's good. Larger trackpad on the magic keyboard. Okay. I'm just trying to imagine. So the rationale here is I'm trying to imagine. I'm also seeing in the harsh light of day why I've lost so many drafts in a row is because I'm making dumb picks. That's why I want to make and picks that are entertaining and that I want to happen and not picks that are boring. And actually going to happen. So the rationale here is if you're going to do a magic keyboard and one of the big knocks on it is the lack of function rows and the other big knock on the trackpad is tiny. Would you not make the trackpad bigger? That's it. That's all I got. The base model iPad receives an update. Now, I think I've seen some reports that that's not happening. Oh, really? So I thought I saw something that said that that wasn't going to happen. So we'll see. We'll see. An iPad Pro case is offered in a color that isn't essentially gray, white or black. I don't know. I don't know, Mike. Right now they used to do it in colors and then they kind of took the colors away. So I'm concerned about this, but again, I want to manifest things that are good into the world by picking them on the draft. It's not how you should draft. iPad Pro has a new OS feature that takes advantage of a new accessory. I think that's a given, right? There'll be something that takes advantage of a new accessory. Pencil thing that is alternate pencil items or something. There's an expectation of some kind of button or feature, right? So like you've got a tie. It's something. Yeah. Yeah. Magic keyboard comes color match to iPad Pro models. So, right, currently it's like white and gray. So, but there's this metallic, it's supposed to be like aluminum. So I feel like they want to make them match. I actually feel okay about that pick too. You have a lot of magic keyboard picks here. I'm really excited about the magic keyboard. That's the problem. Magic keyboard only works with 2024 iPad Pro models. I still believe that too. Yep. It'll eventually work with others, but I think not out of the gate. No. And new Apple Pencil has an eraser, which we said at the time, if you can flip it over and erase something in a mode, then that's what I'm talking about. It's sort of a second surface to do that sort of thing. I don't know what happens. We'd have to check the tape if you can press a button and turn it into an eraser. But that's sort of not what I was thinking. Okay. Those are my choices. Mine are both iPad Pro models have an OLED display. I'm feeling good about that. The iPad Pro front camera is on the horizontal edge. Feeling good about that. iPad Air comes in current iPad Pro sizes. Also feeling good about that. iPad Pro starts at a higher price. Feeling good about that. New magic keyboard has a function row. I think this is very similar to your larger trackpad. If you're going to do it, actually do it. Do it. Do it if you're going to do it. The iPad Air front camera is on the horizontal edge. I'm going all horizontal edge. I did not remember doing that. It's interesting because it's possible, I mean, it should be, right? But it's possible that this will be one of those frustrations where Apple still doesn't drag the whole product line where it needs to go because it's reusing old hardware designs or something. I don't know. I hope so. The new Apple Pencil charges magnetically and the reason that that is a pick of question is because of the camera, right? What happens to that thing? They came up with that new Apple Pencil that charges via USB-C. There's a question like if they move the camera, do they offer magnetic charging or is it just also a USB-C kind of thing? The iPad Pro gets MagSafe for charging. Yeah. I don't think that one's going to happen. I still do, but I think it's not MagSafe as we think of it. It could be Mac MagSafe or something else. I mean, they already have two MagSafes. One and another one. Why not more MagSafes? Keep doing it. Do they say that the Apple Watch charges via MagSafe? Ah, I do. I think they do. No. Yeah. No, they don't. That would be funny, though. I'm feeling confident about mine. I think that you're being too harsh on yours. I still think there's a lot of stuff in here, which will happen, but I feel better about my picks than you're feeling about yours. Yes, I feel better about your picks than I'm feeling about mine. Maybe that's one of the champions. You know? I think so. Maybe that's a lie. And also not making bad picks. Those two things. To each one of you, you have to make good picks. My advice to people who are playing drafts make better picks. Yeah. It's really good. Make good picks and you win. Make dumb picks and you will not win. It's just how it goes. I have a story for you, Jason Snow. Okay. Something that happened to me over the weekend. It's going to be one of those good stories, right? Really happy story. Like a firming life, firming. I don't think so. It's an interesting story. On Friday, reports started appearing and I've got a link here for nine to five Mac of people having their Apple IDs locked randomly. And that password changes were required to unlock their Apple ID. And as of recording. So this happened on Friday as of recording on Monday. There has been no clarity over why this happened. And it seemed like it was relatively widespread. I have a few friends that I noticed happen to. And there was a lot of reports of it that are in some of these articles. I was away this weekend. It went to Lake District with our friend, I'm Scott David Smith. We did some hiking. It was a wonderful trip. I love the Lake District. I had a notification on my Apple Watch at 6.15 in the morning on Friday to enter my password. So I was going to be waking up at seven. So it was a little early. But I felt a tap. I was like, I guess I was kind of starting to rise. I felt a tap. And it said enter your password for your Apple ID, which I thought was very peculiar. But I was still slightly asleep. And I managed to type it in on my Apple Watch. No problem. You know? Type, type, type, type, type, enter. Your Apple ID has been locked. Now that was odd, I will say. And the reason I did this is because the hotel that I was in. It did not have, I hate when this happens. They did not have plugged the sockets next to the bed. So my phone was charging over on the, like, a little desk. So that was why I didn't grab my phone to type in my password, right? So I get up and go grab my phone, grab my phone, and it says your Apple ID has been locked. Unlock your Apple ID. So I tap whatever button to put in my password. It says, oh, sir, no, no, no. Stolen device protection, because I'm not at home, kicks in. To tell me, you know, for the safety of my device and my Apple ID, I will need to wait an hour now. Now, the key thing here is I think this is happening just to me at this point. I don't know. I didn't see the reports. I was sleeping. I didn't know that this was like a widespread thing that was happening. And so I'm thinking I'm being hacked, right? It's what's happening to me. Someone's trying to get into my Apple ID and I don't know what is going on. And now I'm like, wait an hour. And at the same time, I'm starting to get tons of notifications on my watch of things not working, right? Like, it's just freaking out. Like, I message, like, all this kind of stuff is going on. I grab my laptop, all the same errors, right? Like, my message isn't working. I'm getting errors from my email app, errors from my calendar, all of the stuff that's attached to my Apple ID. And I'm also getting the same, like, you know, your Apple ID has been locked, unlock your Apple ID thing there. And because stolen device protection is not on the Mac, I was able to do this, right? I was able to go in, reset my Apple ID. And I had to change my password, which is not a thing I wanted to do at that point. So I now have a brand new Apple ID password and I didn't have to wait on the device. This then fixed all the device prompts, right, so that it stopped then. And it actually fixed it on my iPhone. I don't know how this was the case, but it did. It stopped it. I guess they're linking together somehow. And I did, by the way, get, like, 45 minutes later, a thing that says, hey, you can change your password now on my iPhone, but I'd already done it, so I didn't need to. This then had a couple of knock-on effects. So some applications, like calendar apps, mail apps, stuff like that, they require app-specific passwords. And so all of my devices, so two Macs, my iPhone, my iPad, whatever they're logged into Fantasticao and Spark via this app-specific password thing, which, by the way, Apple, sort that out. However, you have to do it. I don't care. Just find a way to do, like, none of my other services need this thing. You can just log in via some authentication system or create some kind of version of, like, a system-level thing that they can take that information from or whatever. But, like, I don't know why I need to do this. Well, all of those app-specific passwords have now been deleted because I changed, because I changed my Apple ID password, a thing I didn't want to do. So now, all of my devices are not working with the things that require absolute passwords. So like, a lot of this stuff, there are a couple other things, too, I'll mention in a minute. I hate the kind of errors where there are knock-on effects that you can't see yet. I know that there are things that are broken. I don't know what's broken, but there's stuff that's broken. Like, similarly, I didn't know, sort of because it happened to our friend, James Thompson, he was posting about it on Mastodon, saying that if this happened to you, you have to go in on your devices, manually re-enable our message and FaceTime, because for some reason, this turns them off, and also changes your settings. So if you're like, start new messages from email or phone number, it just reverts that to phone number, I think. But, like, all my devices were, like, signed out of my message, tried to go in and sign them all in. And so, I couldn't see fitness sharing on my Apple Watch until I rebooted my Apple Watch. Like, there's all this weird stuff that's now happening, and I'm very frustrated about it all. But this was just a very weird thing that happened to me because it all, like, kicked off and was made worse by the fact that I happened to be traveling. So some of device protection, I think it's a good idea unless something happens on Apple's Apple ID servers randomly and makes you reset your password. And as I mentioned before, no idea what happened. Was this a security breach? Was there some kind of code deployment issue? Like, unknown, but this is what happened to me at 6.20am on Saturday morning. I think it's interesting that Apple, like, it's not great that Apple has not communicated to people about this. Yeah. As of this recording, like, that's a thing where you should have a communication either via the press or via, you know, a direct email or something to customers who are affected. I don't need them to contact me directly, really. Like, I think it would be best, but like, it's just surprising to me that they haven't responded to media inquiries, it seems like. Right. And the status page doesn't say we had this issue. Now, I have one theory about this, which is this could be a security measure, right? They could have had an ongoing or an alert about some sort of a security problem that caused a, you know, basically led them to do a mass reset, a mass locking of, of like, if you do that, you should disclose that, right? Like, that's the thing that you would proactively disclose. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, I could see the argument of, like, if it's an ongoing issue where they're concerned about something that's still happening and they don't want, you know, but once people are talking about it, it's not like the, you can give away what's going on necessarily by just admitting that there's an issue there, but, but the fact that they aren't talking about it at all, I find that very strange and it makes me uncomfortable, right? Because it actually suggests that maybe this is a larger problem that they don't want to admit to right now or that they don't understand right now, where there were some, you know, some ingress that they don't fully understand and that this was just like a quick response to that. But whatever it is, there should be some disclosure that hasn't happened. It's too bad. So yeah, that's my little story. It was a very strange, very weird. I was very freaked out and I felt much better when I'm in a mastodon and just saw the timeline of people happening and then I told my wife and she was like, Oh, so that's why the Apple TV was freaking out last night. Yeah. That's why the Apple TV is freaking out. Makes sense. Makes sense. She had to do the whole thing that I had to do as well. So I'm glad that you got your hiking time in the Lake District, which is a beautiful place. I've been to a couple of times. It's great. And although did Dave take it easy on you? He did. He did. I'll have more details about it. It's not great plus. He did make sure to be which is good. Let's just be happy that this didn't happen while we were up a mountain. Yeah. With one bar of reception. With one. Yeah. So we'll talk about it in upgrade plus a little bit because I'm going to Scotland and to islands where you've got to hike around, I should probably ask Dave for advice. You should ask him. He'll have recommendations for you. I know that. Awesome. I will do that then. All right. Well, this sucks. Yeah. And on top of that, the fact that Apple hasn't explained anything about it. That's bad. Because, yeah, I mean, these things happen when it's like one person, weird stuff happens to one person. Sure. We have a mutual friend who is locked out of his account all the time. Yeah. Because someone wants it. Yeah. Probably. Or something else. He's being grief or whatever. But like, yeah, these things happen. But I don't think this was that. No. This episode is brought to you by Vitalee. Customer success teams today, they're facing a problem. How do they connect customer data back to their work? Vitalee changes this. It is a new kind of customer success platform, an all-in-one collaborative workspace that combines your customer data with all the capabilities you'd expect from today's project management work platforms. Because Vitalee is designed for today's customer success team, that is why it operates with unparalleled efficiency, improves net revenue retention, delivers best-in-class customer experiences. Vitalee is the solution to helping your customer success team keep a better pulse on your customer's maximizing productivity, visibility, and collaboration. Vitalee, you can boost your bottom line by driving more revenue per customer. And if you take a qualified demo of Vitalee, you can get yourself a free pair of AirPods Pro. So if you're a customer success decision maker, actively seeking CS solutions, working at a B2B, software as a service company with 52,000 employees, and you're willing to explore changing customer success platforms if you have one in place already, schedule your call today by visiting vitalee.io/upgrade and get that free pair of AirPods Pro. That is VITALY.io, vitalee.io/upgrade for a free pair of AirPods Pro when you schedule a qualified meeting. And thanks to Vitalee for their support of this show, and Relay FM. Let's finish out today with some Ask Upgrade Questions. First up today comes from Janis, who asks, "In what area with what tasks would you like AI to help you the most?" Oh, wow, like, okay, a couple of things. One is, I want to have a voice assistant that understands context better, is able to do things, is able to remember what we're talking about, and allows me to, you know, correct it and move it in the right direction. And it's like, I think voice assistants is a very clever category that has never lived up in any voice assistant to its potential. I would like to be able to say something complex to a voice assistant and have it ask me questions that clarify things that doesn't understand about what I said. And that just doesn't happen. So that would be one of them. And then the other thing is something that we've talked about here, which is this idea that, like, I use the example of Dan Moran looking up, like, facts about things that happen in his books, and he's got like four books, four or five books set in the same world. And he doesn't remember the, I mean, when I've written novels, it's the same thing, right? It's like, I don't remember every detail about every character across even one book, let alone five books, and being able to pour that into an AI where it has read your books and knows them all and can hold it in its mind so that if you say, did I ever say what hair color this person was, or when did this last person fire a weapon? And it's something that you can't really search the text for because there's so many different ways of phrasing that, but the AI can do that, like being able to look at my email repository and give me an answer. So I don't have to try to craft search queries, and I'm pretty good at crafting search queries, but I think that I'm an outlier at that, right? Like I'm in the 99th percentile of search query crafting, and even I get frustrated, but like people who are in the 50th percentile or the 20th percentile, like imagine the boon to them of saying, when was it last time I heard from someone so, or, or say, I got a text from a friend this weekend who said it's been 10 years since we went to a Premier League soccer match. I can't believe it's been 10 years since that it was 2014. It was great. It was Fulham and Hull, Hull was in the Premier League back then, they're not now. And I had that moment where, where I thought, you know, this is the sort of thing where you could ask an assistant, like, when did I go to that soccer match? And it would be able to look at like my text messages, my emails, and my photo library and be like, oh, I've got a photo library item that was, that was taken at Craven Cottage, the home of Fulham, it's on this date, and it might even be able to say, oh, yeah, you went with Matt and Simon to that match, and it was, here's the final score, or I could ask at the final score, like, it's all there. But I want to be able to have it do that work researching my own data trove, right? Like, I, I could do it, but why? Like, the computer should do that for me. I'm in complete agreement with you. And to further talk about what I would want, I'm going to go to Eric's question. Eric. I asked for the new AI features coming out of the next WWDC, do you think they'll call it knowledge navigator? I don't, but if you've not, if you don't know what that means, or if you have not watched the Apple knowledge navigator video in a while from 1987, I recommend you do that because while this video is kind of hilarious and incredibly pompous, but I guess it was, it was made in 1987, it's just like, is what it is. By a bunch of white lab coat computer geniuses who got that they, I mean, it's one of those. This was a, the knowledge navigator was a concept idea that Apple was working out during, working out during the John Scully era. And it is essentially like a foldable iPad, which is a little hilarious. But the key thing that's going on is the computer user in his oak office is just talking to the computer, having a conversation with his computer and asking the computer to retrieve things for him in very cool, cool language, simple language, like talking to it as a person and asking for the computer to do things for him. Like, since 1987, people have wanted to do this and we've not gotten there, but I believe that large language models are the biggest, I mean, obviously not loneliness, but watching this, large language models are the biggest thing to have happened that could possibly allow for something like this, like a computer's ability to store an incredible amount of information and make sense of it all in one go and keep contacts and have memory. Like, this is something we've not truly had before. Maybe we're getting closer now, but I would like some version of this that I could have a conversation with my computer in a way that makes sense in my brain to be able to extract information. But like what Jason was saying, mostly I want it from my own information, like anything anywhere on my computer to be able to get that for me, and it doesn't need to be like screen capturing my computer forever and recording all the video, like I don't need that, but like to be able to, at a moment's note, just be able to search every task I've ever completed, every email I've ever sent, every eye message I've ever sent to check my browser history, like all of this stuff that exists on my computer, that is searchable by text by me, but I have to know where to look for it to be able to search all of that stuff and provide that information for me along with web searches, like that's what I want my computer to be able to do. I want a knowledge navigator and I'm hoping that maybe we're going to start getting that in the next couple of years. So I've got a weird related thing, which is just this weekend, I was having a conversation with John Moltz about Star Trek as you do, and John has a t-shirt for sale that I guess I'll plug here. So it's a reference to a Star Trek episode called The Conscience of the King, Original Star Trek. It's a great episode. It turns out it was not like they didn't repeat it on NBC because it's too talky, that's because it's like, yeah, it's serious and weighty and not action-y, but it's a great episode. And one of the things that happens in it, I was just struck by it again. So you said we've been wanting this since the 80s, how about the 60s? So here is, there are multiple of these in this episode and there are another episodes too, but I thought this was a great example where Spock goes to the computer and says, library computer. Kevin Kirk says, history file, subject, former governor, Kodos of Tarsus 4, also known as Kodos the executioner. After that, background on actor Anton Caridean. And the computer says, working, Kodos the executioner, summary, governor of Tarsus 4, 20 Earth years ago in Vogue Marshall, starts to give the summary, literally it's the TLDR. And then it says, case closed, detailed information follows on star date and he goes, stop. Information on Anton Caridean gives the background on him and then says, give comparative identification between actor Caridean and governor Kodos. No identification records available, the computer says, give information on Caridean prior to Kodos's death. No information available prior on the actor prior to 20 years ago. And then Kirk says, photograph of Kodos and then says, photograph of Caridean, he says, start him side by side and it does it. And it's like, they're the same guy, right? And I was sitting there thinking, oh my God, we are still talking about letting computers do this. Star Trek got it exactly right, which is, you know, he could be using, kind of Kirk could have his like, his mouse and his keyboard out and he could be like, we'll click on that and if he needs help, he can get a second person to type with him on the keyboard because that's what makes that, that goes faster according to television. But no, he just talks to the computer and has it refine its searches and it's searching the interstellar Federation database or whatever. But like, so I love that because it's still the dream and it should be doable, right? It's just how do you get there? And I think actually one of the reasons people are super excited about these LLMs is this, which is it actually fulfills a promise, which is, give me a system that is not smarter than me in most ways, but it's smarter than me in the fact that it can hold all of this information in its brain or find it if it needs to and then give me back my answer without me spending five or 10 or 20 or 30 minutes doing all the research. And it's just, it, it, that's what we're looking for here. And it just struck me watching an episode of Star Trek from like 1966 that this is absolutely the dream. And now that's literally they're talking to Siri and Siri is, in this case, good. So that's what I would love. That's what we would love. Give us the things we've wanted forever. Let's navigate on knowledge. You didn't think original Star Trek was going to happen, did you? Um, I mean, there's always a non zero chance of it, right? I never don't think it's, when it happens, I'm not like, whoa, what Star Trek, no, I'm always ready. Yeah, it's not, it's not the Spanish inquisition. I mean, you kind of expect it before it gets here. Yeah. And Nick asks, do you think the new iPad pro will feature a titanium designed like the iPhone 15 pro? No, I hadn't considered it, but I see it as possible. I don't think so, because I think they're going to do aluminum laptop look. And on the, and the keyboard has to match it. Yeah. That's a good point. You wouldn't want to do a titanium keyboard probably, but I mean, I'm just, I hadn't considered this. It's an interesting thought, but you're right. It's maybe going to lean more towards Mac book pro than iPhone pro. If you would like to send in a question for a future episode, very easy to do. So go to upgrade feedback.com. You can check out Jason's work at six colors.com. You can hear him here on relay, a famine at the incomparable.com you'll hear my shows here on relay, a fam as well. You can check out my other work, cortex brand.com Jason is at J.S. Now J S N E double L. I am at I'm Mike. I am Y K E. We mentioned it at the top of the show, but you can always watch video episodes or video clips. We're on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. We're at upgrade relay. Please go and check out our limited edition, limited time merchandise over upgrade your wardrobe.com. Are you a professional? Are you a colors czar? Ryan? Yeah. Just a regular, regular old color t-shirt wear, non-professional, yeah. Go and check it out, upgrade your wardrobe.com. Thank you to our members who support us of upgrade plus, and thank you to our sponsors too. Vitalee, Squarespace and same box. We'll be back next week with our post game analysis of Apple's iPad. Yes, sometime on Tuesday to be determined, but we will get their post game on Tuesday. Is it a game? Maybe. Who knows? You're revealed then. But if for any reason, it's not whenever you might expect it to be, we'll let people know in Discord. Hang on. Hang on. There will be an episode next week you can rest assured. And then rest assured. Unusual time, probably for those in America, my guess is it'll be Tuesday night sometime by the time you get it, which is instead of Monday afternoon, a little late, but you know, what are we going to do? There's an Apple event. You've got to wait, and then you've got to talk about it afterward, and we will. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
We're trying to puzzle through some strange rumors about next week's iPad launch event. Also, the EU brings the iPad into the DMA party, Apple locks the Apple IDs of many people (including Myke!), and we shout out the OG Knowledge Navigator.
