799: The State of Apple, with Jason Snell
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Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks, and as always, joined by my friend and yours, Stephen Hackett. Hello, Mr. Hackett. Hello, David Sparks. How are you? I was just looking at the top of this document, episode 799. We're not messing around here. We are not. Mac Power Users, yes. And we are going to mark the occasion with one of our very favorite guests. Welcome to the show, Jason Stell.

Hey there, I love to appear right before precipitous episodes of MPU. I haven't been here since Katie's next to last episode. Oh really? Has it been that long? It has been that long. And so now here I am right on the precipice of 800. So like I'm clearing the way, I'm preparing the way as they say.

We're not doing anything special for 800. I was thinking we should do something special for a thousand. Yeah. Yeah. But that's out there. So I don't know. You get jaded after you do hundreds and hundreds of episodes. We used to, for the incomparable, we used to do all these like, oh, it's episode 200 or it's episode 250. And like, we're on 767 now. And I'm like, yeah, whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think 1000 will be fun though. If anybody has good ideas, let me know what we should do for episode 1000. We've got three or four years to prep for it. So the sky's the limit.

Either way, Jason, welcome to the show. It's the leading up to WWDC and you're one of our very favorite people to talk to during this period because you're so plugged into what's going on. And really, I really appreciate and respect your opinions. You've got so many interesting takes on what's going on with Apple right now. That felt like the perfect time to have you on. Thank you.

Before we get started, however, just a little bit of housekeeping. Last summer, I did that Summer Academy. It was the productivity field guide for kids. We did it with high school and college students. There were about 20 that went through it. It went really well. A couple of them, it really stuck for, and I'm keeping up with them as they go conquer the world. So I decided I'm going to do it again this year. I've got a link in the notes. This is for high school and college age, gang. So don't write me if you're retired.

But if you know somebody that is in that age group, you might want to forward it to them. Or if you are in that age group, just check out the blog post. It explains how to sign up for it or apply for it. June 11th is the deadline, and I'd love to see some interesting young folk that want to go down the productivity field guide with me over the summer.

Today on More Power Users, which is the ad-free longer version of the show. I'm going to talk more about that in a second. We're going to be talking about WBDC. We're about a week away from Apple's announcements. WBDC, of course, normally is a software-focused event, but sometimes there's Mac hardware, sometimes there's iPad hardware. So we're going to talk about that with Jason for members. So More Power Users, longer version.

ad-free episodes, and you also get a bunch of perks from Relay. So we get a members newsletter, a couple of members-only podcasts, access to our members-only Discord, and our annual specials, which we're putting out right now. And David, you and I just published our annual special. This is a special episode just for members. What did we talk about? We talked about what's in our trucks. That's right. It was so fun. It was so fun. It was great. Yeah.

Yeah. You're a truck person now. Yeah. Well, the funny thing is we've done a lot of these over the years. So it's always like, well, what do we talk about? And I said, how about what's in our trucks? And I have never seen Stephen Hackett jump on anything so quickly. I mean, I would say you're a man who considers things before you agree to them, but not in this case, you were right in there. I was ready to go, man. Um,

Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I think people are enjoying that. So you can go check it out. And the annual specials, the way they work, all members of any relay show get all the annual specials that come out. So like I'm going to do one with the Connected guys in June and Mac Power Users members also get that and they get the focused one, all this stuff. It's really cool. There's a link in the show notes. Go check it out. It's a great way to support us directly.

All right. Let's talk, Jason. It's been too long since you've been on the show. It's just a while. It's okay. Yeah. I don't mind. I mean, Steven didn't want me on, but that's okay. Wow. What's 337 episodes between friends? It's fine. I mean, it really did take a lot, honestly. But you're here now, right?

Right, Steven? You're okay now? Everyone's here. So we're all good. Well, anyway, I think most people know you, Jason, but for those who don't, you are the proprietor of Six Colors, which is an excellent Apple website where you talk about technology, reviews, opinions, everything kind of around the Apple ecosystem. You're also very deep into the Relay network. You do upgrade with Mike Hurley. What other shows are you on in Relay, Jason?

Well, that's the big one is Upgrade. And then I do a podcast called Downstream every other week, which is about streaming media and the streaming media business primarily. And those are my big ones. Yeah. And you and I used to do the Free Agents years ago before we shut that down. We did. And Stephen and I killed several podcasts on the Reel Network together, including Liftoff, which is in a weird –

it might come back someday, but probably not. And, uh, and several others that we're not going to even like download and subnet. Yeah. Like just there are many, the streets are littered with the bodies of podcasts. We've killed it relay. But you know, in addition to all this, this is the thing I was just, cause you and I saw each other over the weekend. I was telling Daisy, I can't get over that. In addition to all of this, you run the incomparable network, which is a completely kind of different endeavor, uh,

And it feels to me like that's a full-time job too. For folks who don't know, explain what incomparable is. Well, it's a, it's just network of podcasts that, uh, about popular culture for the most part. I do some of them and then there are a whole bunch of other people who've just, they want to do things. It's, it's, we have a membership program. It's, you know, it's not generating a lot of, uh, of money for, for anybody. I like to say it's kind of like beer money, but, um, it is, uh,

it's fun and we've been doing the main incomparable mothership podcast uh since 2010 and uh yeah it it is a lot of work um but doesn't pay like a full-time job so it is it's basically it's a little more than a hobby project it does actually generate a little bit of revenue for me but but um but i couldn't you know not not a lot so it is it is more or less a labor of love and um

And, uh, yeah, the big, the big issue with pop culture stuff is the homework, right? Like for the incomparable, you know, you got to read a book or watch a movie or, you know, whatever. There's always like, I, you know, I tell Lauren a lot, like, well, I got to watch a, you know, two hours today I have to do for my work essentially. And like, it's fun, but also it's a big time commitment, especially if you're reading, um, you know, reading a book takes a long time before you can talk about it. So yeah. Totally. Totally.

Well, it's impressive everything you do, Jason. Thank you. And you also were a big mugwump at the Macworld magazine for many years. Back in the day. Back in the day, yeah. I worked at Macworld for...

How long? I mean, 17 years, something like that. Yeah. And before that at Mac users. So I worked in the magazine slash website business for a while before going out on my own. Yeah. And I think frankly, that's what makes you so valuable to our community because you've seen it all. And it's really great getting your, your thoughts on things as they happen. Jason, we, it's been a while since you've been on. So what Apple gear are you driving these days?

Well, this has been detailed on some of my podcasts and on Six Colors a little bit, but I live in Northern California. The weather is nice here, right? I mean, it's not too extreme. It's not as nice as where you live, David, but it's nice. But in the winter...

My workspace, which is a garage, it's still just a garage with a leaky garage door and it gets cold in here. And I decided this last year that instead of getting up from my podcast and like shivering and needing to stand under the shower for 20 minutes, that I would work outside.

in another room in my house because my kids are out of the house now. And so I set up an alternate kind of workstation in the back of the house. And I got frustrated by the fact that I was using two Macs. I had a Mac studio out in the garage and then I was using my MacBook Air attached to a studio display in the back of the house. And when they started announcing all the M4 Macs, I started to think, what am I going to do? Because I'd been thinking this is the time I was going to get an M4 Mac studio and replace my M1 Mac studio.

And I, after years of resisting, because I used to be a laptop only person until I bought my 5K iMac, the first 5K iMac. Sure. I resisted. I used to take that laptop back and forth to work every day. I went through a whole bunch of different laptops. I mean, back in the day, using a Mac laptop was...

lid closed attached to an external monitor was a lot more buggy than it is today. It's so much better now. So anyway, I decided to embrace the single computer lifestyle again, which for me was a big step. I've talked to a bunch of people who are like, yeah, you're just using a laptop. That's what that's called is using a laptop. Most people do that. I'm like, I know, I know. But for me, it was a big step. So I have an M4 Max MacBook Pro 14-inch.

that mostly stays lid closed, honestly. And I can use it where I am now in the garage, or I can take it to the other docking station, essentially in the back of the house. And I actually said, I literally have, I have a stream deck in both places. I have a touch ID keyboard in both places. I have a key cron mechanical keyboard in both places. I have a studio display in both places. I have an Insta360 webcam in both places. I've done a lot of like duplication because I,

I find that that is the best thing is if I can go from point A to point B and everything else is basically the same and my computer is the same, that that works really great in terms of moving around. And yeah, when I travel, I can take the laptop and my whole computer life is with me instead of it being the weird like.

No software updates. Apps are out of sync. Experience that I have when I would use my MacBook Air. So yeah, that's what I'm doing now is M4 Max MacBook Pro, which is so powerful. It's so much faster than my M1 Max Mac Studio was, which is kind of hilarious. But it's been great. I really love it. And even if I were to...

you know, put in a heater out here, a proper heater out here in the garage and do some more insulation and weather stripping, which I'm thinking about doing, I'm still pretty happy to have gone to the laptop. It just, it's so much more flexible without any, I just don't see any downsides. That's the thing is that the laptop

Laptop life is a lot easier now than it was in 2010 when, like, I can't tell you how many times I would get home from work and the inside of my backpack would be hot because even though I disconnected and put my laptop to sleep, it decided to just keep running, lid closed, in a bag. So, boy, it's all better now. It's so much better now. That's a decade and a half of Apple recognizing that almost every computer that they ship is a laptop. Yeah.

That helped a lot. You know, it's funny because this topic comes up on the show a lot, but we always get email from listeners saying, well, I'm thinking about like going to desktop plus laptop, or I'm thinking about going to just laptop. And I feel like my response is always the same.

They're both easier now. It doesn't matter which one you want to pick one and do it. But the fact is the old days of like syncing data is a lot easier than it used to be. And the old days of pulling a heater out of your backpack is not here anymore either. So these days, the big issues in having two computers instead of one is mostly. Yeah, you're right. A lot of the data is just it's auto synced. It's super easy.

It's stuff like, like I mentioned, software updates. It's like your OS versions aren't the same. And you have, especially if you haven't used the alternate computer for a little while, your app versions need to be updated. I do a lot of like user scripting stuff like,

the Python version isn't the same, or I used homebrew here, but self-installed it here. And my scripts that sync don't work the same on like, and it was stuff like that where it's just like, I,

I started to feel the burden of maintenance that just to get the little pieces to all line up. And it's not as bad as when I didn't have files in iCloud drive and Dropbox. It's not, it's not at all, but like still it was a layer of, uh,

of kind of mental burden that made me not want. And this is, I think a key thing, David, you and I talked about this a lot, the back on, on, on free agents, but it's the it's a, it's a little bit of a speed bump, but it's enough to make you not have that behavior. So it's like, if I know if I, I want to switch to the MacBook air and go in the other room or whatever. And then I think, Oh,

but I'm going to have to update the software. I'm going to have to do all these things. And I just go, no, I won't. I just won't go. I'll freeze out here instead. Right. And so it's like, you know, it's still, it's better than it was for, there are certainly scenarios where that makes the most sense. And I lived that for a while, but I'm really loving being back to a single computer. And I'm genuinely surprised even now that,

I just went on this trip to Southern Californians. I saw you and I had to bring my laptop because I did a couple of podcasts and I was genuinely surprised to open it up and realize that all my stuff was there in exactly the configuration it was when I sat at my desk at home because it's the same computer. And I know that's so obvious. And yet I just didn't live that way for 15 years. Yeah.

you know i feel like there's a lot of people doing it like that i don't know if you did it first or steven but the impression i get is both of you are very happy with this transition yeah absolutely it's been it's it is really nice to just have all your stuff with you all the time yeah

Well, my thing was I bought a Mac Studio with a lot of storage. So I am married to this thing for a long time. So I'm not going anywhere. That's good. That works. You did mention the Insta360 camera. I know people are always looking for better webcams.

And it was interesting. You bought two of them, so you must be a believer. I did. Alex Lindsay on MacBreak Weekly recommended they still sell the original Insta360 Link. There's a new model. And as Alex pointed out, the new model is more expensive and not as nice, and they still sell the old one.

And it's often on sale. And so I bought one on Alex's recommendation. And the thing that I like about it is it's a 4k webcam. I use a studio display in both places and that webcam is not so great. And I do a bunch of video. Um, so I, I bought one, but it's, it's one of those that it's its own gimbal. So it's a, it's a PTZ camera pan tilt zoom. It, um, it moves, it does. It's not taking like a widescreen and then kind of cropping and D distorting it. Like you do a center stage, uh,

It is actually moving and there's a little app that you run and you can drag around the shot until you get the shot framing and you can save your shot framings. And another thing I love about it is it's got the little flap so you can stick it on top of your monitor, but the flap has on it a tripod mount. So you can also take it off.

and of your monitor and screw it to a tripod and use it that way. And so for upgrade where we do video, I have it on a tripod to the right of my desk.

And for Mac break weekly, I have it on my monitor so I can actually sort of, it's, it's really adaptable in that way, which is actually pretty fun. I realized if I want to shoot videos above my desk, this is one of the reasons that I bought the second one. If I want to shoot videos where I've got a second camera above my desk or to the side or whatever, I,

It's actually way easier to mount this little thing than it would be to mount like an SLR that can shoot 4K video. And I can control its pan, tilt and zoom from down here instead of going back up and down and trying to get the right angle with my shot. So it's super flexible in that way too. So yeah, I'm a big fan.

I'm a big fan of it. So I did. I bought a second one. Plus, again, I'm just sort of buying everything in duplicates now between not everything. My Thunderbolt dock, I only bought one. I cheaped out in the back of the house. I don't have two CalDigit Thunderbolt ducts. That's a little pricey. Yeah. But the 360 was a good enough buy. So I did that.

Yeah. Interesting. And then you've got four keyboards between two desks. So where are you drawing those lines? Three and a half. I have, well, you know, Touch ID on the Mac is great. So out here I have a deconstructed Touch ID keyboard. I just have the Touch ID sensor in a little 3D printed box, which is a thing you can do. You can...

deconstruct a keyboard and just take the touch ID sensor out. On the back, I didn't bother. I bought an orange iMac. It's a lightning touch ID keyboard on eBay. If you ever have dreamed of having a colored keyboard from one of those iMacs and they're not sold in stores, eBay is your friend. Pick the color you want. You will find one on eBay. And now the lightning ones are actually, I think, going cheaper now.

because now there are USB models out there too. So I bought an orange lightning Touch ID keyboard because I like orange and I thought it would be fun. And I use that with external devices. I use that with Vision Pro from time to time. Mostly where it lives is beneath my monitor in the back of the house in that back bedroom. And I almost never type on it. I just use it for Touch ID. And then I use the Keychron keyboard to actually type. So...

Yeah. I mean, that's the downside, I guess, of using a laptop closed, right? Mine, my setup is similar to your studio display, 14-inch.

MacBook Pro, but I leave it open. And so even though I use a Touch ID keyboard, if I didn't, I could just reach over and do it. But you like it closed, which I get, right? It makes the setup a little bit neater. And if you don't need the extra screen real estate, it also means you can cram on a narrower desk because the laptop's like closed. Yeah.

Yeah, I used to have a stand back at Macworld where I had a monitor and then the one stand was, it was a VESA mount for a monitor and then next to it, it was a laptop stand. And so the idea there was I put my MacBook Air right next to my laptop.

external display. Um, but you know, the keyboards, you know, this, even you're doing it right now, the keyboard sticks out, which means that you're either having your keyboard coming towards you or the display is further back. And I, I just, what I discovered is I never used that monitor. So I just close it. And I know that MacBook pro display is so beautiful and I almost never see it and I feel bad about it, but that's, I just, I know this about myself that

honestly, a 27 inch monitor is about my limit. Anything more than that, I start to like just ignore everything that's on the periphery. So I'm pretty happy with my studio display.

I really noticed the difference when it's in screensaver with like a black background and like the MacBook Pro because it's, was it micro LED, mini LED, whatever it is, the blacks levels are incredible. And the studio display, I mean, this display looks fine, but it's the 5K iMac, right? It's like LED backlit. The black level's not good on the studio display when compared to the laptop. That's a good tip. Don't do that.

This is another great reason for me to run lid closed is it doesn't make me sad about my studio displays. So there you go. Yeah, I get it. I get it.

But you run it closed all the time. I'm curious. A lot of folks, when they get into this kind of higher-end MacBook Pro, there's a good argument the 16. It's got better cooling, more screen when you do want to open it up. What made you decide 14? I am a MacBook Air user since the very beginning of the MacBook Air. I had the first one.

that would shut down one of its two cores when it got too hot, which for me was literally when the sun came into my office in the afternoon through the window. And I was like, why isn't it working? And that was a bad computer. Anyway, so David, honestly, having used a MacBook Air all that time and being a fan before that of the 12-inch PowerBook, I've always been a smaller laptop person.

In part because I used to take it home every night and carry it in my backpack and I wanted to be as small and light as possible. And so I couldn't even, and I get, Apple sends me, I think they're trolling me. Apple, when they send me MacBook Pro review units, they're 16 inch models. I'm like, guys.

don't do it. Big laptops. And so I've seen the 16 inch and it's just too big for me. I just, I don't like big laptops like that. And I mean, if you do, it makes a lot of sense to get that screen real estate. But one, I,

I'm not using that screen. And two, I'd like more portability. So for me, it was kind of a no-brainer. And then, yeah, most of the time, it's just in a stand with a single plug. And that's another thing that I'm a big fan of, I have to say, about using it like this. It's not just the one Mac lifestyle, it's the one plug lifestyle. So I have a single Thunderbolt port or cable that plugs in and everything lights up. And I've got

you know i've got everything i've got ethernet and i've got my thunderbolt display and i've got all my peripherals and it's all it all just works and uh i love it one other thing i've got to ask you guys and then we can move on uh just recently cal digit released the elements 5 hub now if you have an m4 mac that's going to be tempting right

I mean, the thing that jumps out at me is the faster Ethernet that does 10 gig on the nice one. But my switch in my office only supports 2.5 gig, which I have now. So I'm not particularly looking at updating. But, you know, if this thing were to die, I would obviously replace it with the TS5+, which is the big boy. Yeah, I...

I was not willing to commit. This was new to me, right? I'm like, okay, I think I'm going to buy a Thunderbolt Hub. So I cheaped out. If you could say cheaped out about a product that expensive, but it's true. I was like, you know what? I'm going to get the basic, been out there for a few years, CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 Hub, and I'm going to use that.

Because that's got all the ports I need, and that's all I really need right now. And yeah, I think I'm in the same boat as Steven in the sense that if it were to die, or if I were to be even more aggressive about having everything be in sync between my two setups, because I've got like a USB hub that extends a bunch of the stuff in the back of the house, so I don't need the Thunderbolt dock back there. I would consider it, I mean, it would be...

I'm not going to use that speed. I might use the ethernet. It's true. But that's about it. I just, I don't know if it's really necessary, but, but I do think something like that is a wonderful luxury in terms of just the one cable thing. Again, trying to eliminate speed bumps, eliminate reasons for me not to go switch places or whatever. The one cable thing that's enabled by that hub is,

uh, or doc or whatever you want to call it. Uh, that is the best, right? Like that makes my whole setup feel better. And if I had to plug in five things every time I came out here to do my job, I would hate it. So I'm very happy to have it. Yeah. Well, I, it sounds like you guys are both pretty happy with yourself. I'll tell you though, the other thing that do you ever worry about? Like when you go on the road and stuff, it's like, that's your, that's your big machine. That's all your data. That would bother me a little bit. I think.

Yeah, a little bit. I do have an older MacBook Air that I can take with me, but I haven't touched it in months. Like it will get the macOS beta on it in a few weeks and then it'll just be sort of my beta machine for the summer. I do think about it though, right? It's like, well, if I'm not, I'm definitely not like leaving it, you know, in the car or anything like it's going to go with me. But for me, the trade-off is okay because I really like having just the one laptop.

Yeah. You know, I've got a file vault. I have a clone that runs every day plus time machine on top of that. Yep.

So I'm not worried about my data and a lot of my data is in the cloud anyway. I'm not worried about that at all. If something got stolen or whatever, I would need to replace it. I don't know if you guys know this about me, but I have a lot of computers in my house. Same. I could probably get by until I got a replacement. So I'm not that worried about it. And the benefits are so good that I think it's worth it.

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Okay, so Jason, our thought was WBDC is around the corner. Let's just kind of touch base on a bunch of topics kind of floating around WBDC.

the Apple universe. And I want to start with the App Store. Apple has really for over a year now kind of been in a give and take with regulators in the EU, more recently with a judge in the US about needing to open up the App Store payment models, accepting outside payments, but in a way that isn't

ridiculous as they found out a few weeks ago. And just the last couple of days as we record this, Apple has done their normal thing they do in May is, hey, we've prevented all this fraud. Hey, we generate all this value for developers, $400 billion in the US app store for developers. That means the app store in the US is taking in somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars in the US alone. It's a big business for them.

Kind of what is your feeling and take on where Apple is with the App Store right now? And, you know, do you think it's where we are is going to stay or do you think there's more change coming? I think there's got to be change coming because once I think the dynamic of looking at countries that are and regions that are doing regulation and saying you need to open up and allow competition to

All that does is make other countries and regions say, oh, I want that. Let's do that. It gives them a model to emulate, which is, you know, let's do what Europe did. Because we already know Apple's engineered the solution. So they can't even tell us that it's hard because they already did it. So let's just do that. I think that it's going to be hard to stop that from happening. And I do think, you know, Apple can choose to fight it.

and which is what they've done so far um it will become more and more fractured over time and i think the last thing apple wants is it's a little bit like how in the united states you'll get different regulations in different states and then finally the industry that's being regulated goes to washington and says please pass federal regulation because we would rather follow one standard everywhere instead of 50 different standards and i think i think that might happen with uh

Apple worldwide with App Store stuff is at some point, can they make a policy and say, look, look, okay, we're going to do this thing. Are you all happy now? And they may not be, and there's nothing they can do about that. But that would be one way to try and blunt this is by doing, you know, coming up with their own solution. It's funny when you think about it, like the App Store was designed to

as a way to make it easy, right? As a way to make it easy for developers, as a way to make it easy for users to buy software. That was the whole goal of it, is just make it easy. And they did, and it worked, and it was wildly successful. But I think that that was really the goal, just like, how do we make it so that

on these, on iPhones, that I can get a piece of software from a third-party developer without having to do what I do on the Mac. And so they set up a store. So we'll handle your credit card transactions. We'll take a cut. You take the rest. And when they introduced all of that, it seemed pretty reasonable. What's happened over time is the App Store no longer exists to make it easy. It does still make it easy, but it no longer exists to make it easy. It exists for Apple to exert control over its platforms, to limit what gets on the platforms, to limit what developers can do.

to limit how financial transactions happen on their platform. It has become way more than just a convenient option because if that was all it was, Apple wouldn't be afraid of competition because they're

Apple would say, well, yeah, you could do it some other way, but look how convenient our option is. But they've gotten so far away from it now where it is more about exerting control and taking a cut from every digital transaction that happens on their platform. And that's the problem. One of the things that really just gets me about Apple's ongoing response to these regulations is like they've just picked a hill to die on that seems impossible to hold. Yeah.

And...

in doing so have squandered so much goodwill with developers. I don't know about end users, right? But at least with developers, it's made that relationship even more complicated. Yeah, and right, because in defending what they're doing, they tend to devalue developers. And I think developers always understood that Apple, parts of Apple anyway, didn't really care about what developers cared about. And they understood that to a certain point. And then beyond that, they felt they were being exploited. Right.

But I think the truth is that Apple has always kind of culturally viewed developers as making money on the greatness of Apple's works and not... Like, if you asked a bunch of people at Apple, and I think they did in court in a few places, like, what is the value of the App Store and what is the value of the iPhone? They would say, we're really... They say this at WWDC, too. We really love developers because they make...

things for our platform and we, you know, and they make a lot of money. But what they don't ever really say is if we didn't have third party apps on our platforms, they wouldn't succeed, right? Apple is not ever willing to admit that

that one of the great reasons, like even think about how Apple approaches the app store itself. They say, oh, the app store revolutionized everything. They take credit for the success of the app store and the app store is the place where they place a lot of the value of the success of the iPhone. Right.

In both cases, they're not giving credit to the fact that there was a powerful third-party software development community that made the apps that fueled the iPhone. And the iPhone could not have been successful if the only apps you could get on it were apps from Apple. So it's hard, I think, culturally for them to see developers as partners who are a part of the reason that their platforms are successful and that they tend—and I think this goes all the way back to Steve—

They tend to think of it as we created this great thing and you're kind of like taking advantage of our greatness, but we'll let you take some of the money, but we also want some of the money and we'll tell you what to do and almost treat them like employees, which they're not. And I think it's unfortunate. And you're right. I don't think consumers notice that.

but you don't notice that app that doesn't exist because apple didn't allow it. Right. That's the thing is you don't, you don't notice stuff like that. It's harder to notice it as a consumer, but those of us who watch this can see it. You know, my parents grew up during the depression and their whole life, their approach towards money was really weird. And like always my dad, you know, money, you know, money in the mattress literally. And, um,

And Apple having gone through the 80s, I've always felt like culturally,

They're like depression era survivors. And I don't even think that some of this stuff you're saying is malicious, but they're just like, no, we have to have all the money. We can never go back to a point where there are magazine articles about how we're going to fail next week. It is 100% cultural. I think that it's one of the things that is in the culture that Steve Jobs instilled in Apple when he came back is we almost died. We're going to take, you know, we're going to not trust any partner. We're going to take every dollar off the table we possibly can. And that

that is a model that is, and David saying a child of the depression, because like I said, my dad was too, it sticks with you and it, and it becomes part of your worldview as a person. And I think, you know, it was part of Steve Jobs's cultural worldview of Apple when he came back. The problem is if you have that worldview, uh,

And when you are somebody who is just getting out of being in a situation where you don't have any money and you're right on the edge and you're really concerned and people are taking advantage of you and you've got to change the way you behave so you can feed your family and all of that, that's one thing. But when you're the richest person in town and you live in the mansion at the top of the hill and you still...

you know, are a bad tipper and swindle people in and take advantage of them in business deals. The way you're perceived has changed because what's the same behavior now seems like a bully punching down instead of somebody who's sort of understandably trying to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. And that Apple has over the course of the last 20 years gone from the I was just in the poor house to the mansion on the hill.

Yeah, and I would also say that all of this stuff feels like a distraction to me. It's like I want to hear Apple news about products and software. I know.

I hate talking about policy. I really do. We talk about it a lot on upgrade because we have to. And I, every now and then we get feedback, Steven, I'm sure you hear this for connected, especially too, right? You get the feedback. That's like, Oh, I thought this was going to be about, I, you know, this is what I signed up for when I got interested in computers and technology is now it's all about courts. And it's like, I,

Yeah, I agree. It's a bummer. It's a real bummer. You and I used to do a podcast about general tech news and every week it was a terrible thing Facebook did. And you and I were like, we can't do the podcast anymore because it's so depressing. And I felt like that at times with Apple stuff for the last few years. Yeah, I mean, and just to finish the thought, I mean, it's like, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be covering it, but it's just like,

come on, Apple, just get back on message here. Yeah, they are culturally... I think...

And we should never refer to Apple as a unit because Apple is made up of lots of people. I think there's a culture there that makes them behave this way. I think there are a lot of people inside Apple who know that this is counterproductive, but the culture is there. And, you know, it's very clear that the people in the CFO's office have been saying for a while, like, uh-uh, we're going to maximize revenue. And there's nobody there, like...

Tim Cook could step in and say, no, you've gone too far. This is hurting us long term. It's hurting our... And clearly that hasn't been happening, that he's been siding with the CFO in his office. And the shame of it is, and you guys put a link to this in our document, so I'm going to mention it now. The shame of it is,

Apple built the other model for their platforms, right? They built it because when I remember being at WWDC in San Jose, like I don't even know how many years ago that was now. Seven years ago is a long time ago now.

And they came out with the updated version of Mac app security where they said, we're going to start notarizing. You know, we're going to pass Mac apps through and we're going to scan them and we're going to cryptographically sign them and we'll be able to kill them if we need to. And everybody kind of freaked out and said, oh, this means that they're going to clamp down like iOS. But what they did is they built a model that was open. The Mac has an app store. It

It has a security pass-through verification thing so that Macs, by default, will launch apps from the App Store or apps that have been notarized by Apple, which is not an approval process, right? It's just a malware scan and a signing. And then if you really, really, really want to, you can run unsigned stuff. But it's, like, very hard. And now there are, like,

80 dialog boxes before you can actually run that app, but you can if you really want to. And they built that for the Mac, but like, that's a pretty good model.

And you could, Apple could turn that on for iPad and iPhone. Yeah. And they would, you know, the argument is, oh no, you know, disaster would follow. But I'm not sure that's true because we can see on the Mac that disaster did not follow. The fact is, I think most people are going to use the App Store, even if there are alternatives, even if you could sideload apps. Yeah. I think people would still use the App Store most of the time. But it's...

If Apple is really concerned about user security and privacy, having a proper notarization step like they did on the Mac and having a security setting to allow notarized apps to run would... I mean, that's the shame of this to me, is there is an alternative model and it's not me cooking something up out of a fever dream. It's literally the model Apple itself built after the App Store model already existed. Right.

They came and said, well, what would it be like if it was a little more open? And that's what they did for the Mac. So that to me is the real tragedy of this is they've got an approach already built and they've used some of it in the EU when they've had to. The Mac, as I said in that article, the Mac is the model. They already built their answer to what to do in this situation. It works really well. And I think it's a real shame that culturally they just refuse to just embrace the idea that they can compete and still win.

Back when I was a trial lawyer, I had some litigation occasionally that was pretty high stakes. And when you've got a lot of zeros on the line, the judge will always order you out to a settlement conference before you pick a jury. And I had a speech I would give my client and say, look, we're going to go to the settlement conference. I just want you to understand this is the last time you get to control how this finishes.

Because once we turn it over to 12 licensed drivers or a guy in a black robe, they will decide what happens. And you have no say over that. So just understand. I mean, I wasn't trying to force them to settle, but I wanted them to understand that this is the last point that they had any agency. And I kind of feel like Apple's at that spot right now. It's like, guys, you could step in right now.

And, you know, do what is the right thing for Apple and developers and everybody. And you could probably stop this freight train. I'm not sure if you actually could at this point, but maybe you could. But, you know, I just feel like they're at that weird spot right now. And they're about to lose agency over all this. And it makes me a little sad. You know, I think that they think this was avoidable.

Yeah, I think so. And you've seen in those latest judges rulings that that the downside is always exactly what you said, which is now you don't like she said, you need to come back to me with a way to foster competition.

in payments and make a proposal. And a lot of people complain about, oh, well, you know, judges and regulators are telling Apple what to do. And it's like, she didn't tell Apple what to do. She said, you need to fulfill my desire, which is for a competitive system, but you build it, you design it, you go ahead and do it. Like, I'm not going to tell you how to build your system. You do it. And they could have done that. And instead they chose to

create a thing that didn't create any competition at all and claim that it was the best they could do. And the result was she said, okay, now it's nothing. You've lost all of your ability to do anything now. And it's that moment of like, oh, maybe somebody should have said something in that moment of like, no. And Phil Schiller did. Phil Schiller was like, no, I don't know, everybody. I think we got to do what she says. And they're like, nah, we won't. And this is what you get. It's out of your control now. It's out of your hands.

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Jason, the other very uncontroversial topic around Apple these days is Apple intelligence. I've really enjoyed your coverage of it. I think you've got a really smart take on it. You recently wrote an article at Six Colors about how Apple will rethink AI features for WWDC. What are you thinking they're going to do? Well, the idea is...

They've obviously made changes. They put some different people in charge of Siri. They obviously had a bunch of problems last year where they announced stuff that they couldn't ship. Clearly, they were just panicked that they were perceived as being behind, which they were, and they wanted to send a message that they were on it, which they did, but then they couldn't deliver in a lot of ways.

And so what I what I tried to imagine and Stephen will appreciate the Apollo 13 reference that I made is you walk in the door as somebody who's now in charge of all this stuff. And you're like, oh, boy, like that moment in Apollo 13 is when Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris, is like, all right, what do we have that's good? Yeah.

Because everybody's like, this thing is not working on the spacecraft and this thing isn't working and this thing isn't working. And he's like, all right, let's back up. I think it's a really underrated moment of management brilliance by Gene Kranz in that moment, which is, let's think of this from a perspective, he says, of status. What do we have on the spacecraft that's good? And I feel like that's clearly what Apple has been doing the last three months, which is, all right, we promised stuff we couldn't deliver. So what are we doing now?

What that made us think we could deliver. And let's change that because we obviously don't know what we're talking about there. So we need to change the rules of what we deliver and what we promise at WWDC because we were wrong and we got caught out and it's bad. What do we have that's good? Like what's in flight for the next versions of our OSs that we're confident we can ship and that we are happy with what they are?

What stuff isn't going to make it? And then you got to make a decision. It sounds like based on some of Mark Gurman's reports that they may just not announce some things that might actually happen in this annual cycle, but they're too far out to promise. So they're just not going to mention it, which I think was a healthy thing. They can always announce it later and people will pay attention. It's okay to not do that.

And then, you know, what policy changes beyond like how you choose to promise features for the future? What other policy changes were taboo last year that are not taboo now? And the answers there would be, do you let app developers have access to your models? How are your models, by the way? Are your Apple generated models good enough? What are they good enough for? And then do you let them have access to your models?

do you allow deeper integration with third-party AI tools? Because that's the truth of this is, you know, Apple could build the iPhone and sell a lot of iPhones and say, we also welcome everybody else's AI models if people want to use them. And it kind of eliminates a lot of these issues because then you're the best darn Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini phone around and everybody can just pick. Like,

But they have to make some decisions, and I'm sure they have because we're only a couple weeks out now. But I think that will be fascinating because you've had all of this go on. You've had people come in who were not in charge of some of this stuff before. Clearly, the whole company has been embarrassed by what's gone on. And so what were those decisions? Because they had to survey the field. They had to triage. That's the other way of looking at this. Triage what they've got.

be open to changing some other policies. And, you know, I don't know. To this day, I am not sure whether we're going to get

a restatement of Apple intelligence, a bunch of new features that they are still going to promise for next year. I don't know if they're going to give an apology or if they're just going to do a nod and said, oh, we didn't ship this, but we are going to ship it in the fall or whatever. I don't know how far down there they're going to go. And I guess it depends on how desperate they feel and maybe how embarrassed they feel about how they failed to deliver. But it's a wild...

situation where, you know, Apple is so proud and they don't want to admit error and they don't want to admit fallibility and like,

I don't know. I don't know if they're going to be able to say, well, we kind of messed that up or not. Or if they're going to just pretend it never happened and talk about redesigns instead and mention, oh, and also Apple Intelligence continues and then move on. I really don't know what approach they're going to take, but I hope we'll get some hints about how they've changed their approach from last year.

I want to talk about the overall strategy. So last year, my takeaway was Apple saying, we're not at the front end of AI. We don't have a frontier model, but we want to be in the conversation. And our big selling point is we're going to incorporate AI in a way that allows you to privately invest.

use AI with your data on our device. And that's why we've been the privacy company all these years. And we're the one company you can trust for this. I felt like that was kind of the argument, like it's not going to be the best AI, but it's going to be the most private. Do you still think that is a good strategy? Well, I think after a year, the concern about third party, um, AI stuff is going to be a lot less. So like, if you think about the non Apple stuff, um,

There was a lot of, well, chat GPT is there, but you got to turn it on and you get warned and then you've got to say yes. And then we're going to put a warning label on it. And I feel like they're going to be kind of over that, that they're going to have controls there still. But I think it's going to be a little less of the, oh no, third party AI stuff is scary. I feel like that, that they, they like most of the industry has just kind of gotten over that rightly or wrongly. I think that that is the case.

I think there's still an advantage for Apple. I think...

having a private cloud compute is a great advantage for them because they can say, our customers who want a private set of API models that only run in this documented way on our servers where we don't even know what's going on there, but it's got the power of cloud servers. That's what you get with us. You can trust us. And it becomes a, you can trust us, or if you trust a third party or don't care, you can use a third party. And similarly, I think,

Having their own models is important, but really I feel like having their own on-device models is the most important because, again, you create this kind of gradient of functionality where you can start with runs on your device. That's the best thing about our AI stuff is that nobody's talking to the cloud. Nobody's looking at your data.

We don't even see it. It's just on your device. And then up from there is private cloud computers. Like you trust us. That's all you need to trust. Because here's the documentation. The boffins have looked at it. Nobody can see anything. It's great. And then above that, it's like, if you're happy with Gemini, if you're happy with ChatGPT, if you're happy with Claude, go for it. We support all of those in various ways. And then it lets the user decide. But as a platform owner, I feel like those are the bottom two things

are the place where they can say, look, if you really are worried about this,

we've got you covered because it's on your device or it's in our data center using our secure servers. And then even if you're worried about the environmental costs, you will know that at least Apple's data centers are supposedly powered by green energy and it's all renewables and whatever. So they get to make that claim down at that bottom level. I think they should continue to pursue that strategy, but I think they need to also just sort of say,

And at the, in the end, if you've got a favorite that's out there, go for it. We'll let you use that too. And, and, you know, I think they need to do that too. Yeah. And they just need to show base competence in it. Like, I feel like we didn't get that. And yeah, I mean, the Siri thing to me is just like,

it's just so nothing from Apple has got me so like frustrated is how many podcasts have the three of us made making fun of Siri for the last, what, 10 years? In my family, they make fun of Siri. They don't pay attention to this stuff, but they make fun of Siri and like, yeah, suddenly they want to fix Siri. But,

Why did they wait? I feel like Siri is the ultimate what do we have on the spacecraft that's good moment. Because it's like... Because that's the truth of it, right? Is that Mike Rockwell, who has complained about Siri...

For years, apparently, while he was working on Vision Pro and he was like, I want to use Siri. And the Siri team was like, well, no, and it doesn't do it. And he's like, fine, forget it. I won't use it. Right. But it was very clearly one of the biggest critics inside of Apple. I think that Gurman even reported that of Siri. Like, great. Well, you break it, you bought it. He's in charge of it now. What?

What does he do? And again, I would love to see moves in the direction of understanding how broken Siri is, even if you know that ultimately you do need to fix Siri and make it good.

But, like, do they say, we're going to make it easier for chatbots to use the Siri interface or for you to not use Siri and just use them? Like, there are things they could do in the meantime that would be culturally quite different from them that they could do as a recognition that Siri is not cutting it. And I just...

I don't know in three months, you know, he doesn't have time to fix Siri in three months, but, but they need to fix it. It's kind of on fire. And what do they do in the meantime? Do they make a promise about Siri? Do they, do they stand out on stage or in the video that they play on stage, whatever. And,

And say, we are working on a new Siri. I mean, they could say that. They could make some commitments there. Or they could just keep it quiet. But I agree, it's just a huge problem. And now there's somebody new in charge. Maybe that'll make a difference, but they're going to need to show it. I had a situation the other day. I was trying to think of the exact question. I can't remember it, so forgive me. But I was in the car and I said, hey, you know,

Siri asked chat GPT and then whatever my question was, because it was something that I didn't think Siri would be able to answer. And Siri misheard it. And so like, didn't ask the right thing. And I tried it. I tried a couple of times and just gave up because like Apple couldn't even get the handoff right to chat GPT. It's like,

I agree with you. They should. I think they will be more willing to hand off to other partners. I think there's a very real chance that we see the Gemini logo on the WWDC screen at some point this year. But if you're going to do that, then you also have to get out of your own way and maybe not have Siri as the intermediate layer. I just...

I just don't know. What's the role of Siri? What is Siri even? Like it's, it's very clear. There are a couple of things going on in Siri and this has been reported structurally. There's some basic device control stuff. That's basically voice control from the old days, which is set a timer and, and change the volume. And there's like basic sets of commands that you've got. And then there's actually works. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's the knowledge part. Well, like,

I mean, why does that have to be, that knowledge part have to be from Apple? Why can't it be something that's modular? And you take your pick, and if you do it right, and this is a problem because right now it doesn't do it right. I have ChatGPT set up with my iPhone, and when I ask Siri things,

That it doesn't know it tries to answer and fails. And I think your, your model needs to be much smarter about just accepting that Siri can't help me.

and kicking me to chat GPT. But like in the end, we want a voice assistant. Like we, this is a solved problem essentially, which is, it's over there. It's all of these LLMs. And I know there are issues with LLMs and, and all of that. But again, I feel like the horse is out of the barn at this point. So if you could do a fundamental set of controls on device that are voice control, and then the rest of it, you have the ability to say, you know,

I would like you to use an AI service to give me an answer to this question or to have a conversation with me. They could solve this problem. From your lips to Tim's ears. That's right. That's right. I mean, Rockwell, we're, we're, we're, we're listening. Mike Rockwell, save us, please. You're our only hope. Please save us. Do we need to address this thing that's in our outline all of a sudden? Did I make you buy a laptop, David?

Um, maybe. Can I back up? We, we, so David mentioned, um, Lauren and I had had breakfast with David and Daisy on Sunday. And by the end, it was a very expensive, nice little breakfast because by the end I was convinced that I needed to install a mini split, uh,

heater air conditioner in my office so i could work out here all year long and i also convinced david that what did i convince you of something you want solar uh power oh yeah i'm off that train yeah yeah yeah i did the research it's not gonna work and i'm worried that i've just cost david even more money now with this uh macbook pro order i'm just saying guys m4s are now in the refurb store

and you can do pretty good you can do pretty good refurb i love it that's a great and i'm going on vacation but i have there's been changes behind the scenes where i'm doing all the admin and everything now and i'm thinking maybe it is time to turn in this mac studio for one of these nice little macbook pros so i have i have ordered one but knowing my personality i

There's a 50% chance tomorrow morning that will be canceled. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I have to sleep on it, but in the moment I ordered a space black M4 MacBook Pro. That can be a episode 800 followup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For real. It could. I mean, I don't know. It's anything is possible. Anything is possible.

But I am in the Snell Hackett zone of influence right now, and I know that I need to step away from it. But I didn't just put it in my cart. I put it in the button. This thing has a delivery date, so I got to make a decision. That's wild. So, Jason, overall, we've got the App Store app

We have AI. We have leadership concerns, right? Like John Syracuse wrote a pair of really good blog posts about this that I'll put in the show notes. You've covered Apple for a long time. A long time. Since it was doomed. Yeah, since it was doomed the first time. And-

You've seen a lot. You've seen more than almost anyone else in this industry. And that means you have wisdom and knowledge about Apple deeper than most people. I was trying to pull it out of saying that you're old. Like, just give me some grace here. Look, I started very young. It was my first job out of college. Yeah. I'm still very youthful. So you've seen this huge swath of feelings and thoughts towards Apple, right?

How do you reconcile where we are now with all of that history? Like where, and where are you with Apple sort of personally? I know that's also been a conversation on upgrade. Like, yeah, we cover this company. We like their products. We don't have any, you know, financial relationship with this company nor would we want one, but we talk with their PR people. Like we cover them as a topic, but we're also very interested in what they make. So how do you sort all that out?

Yeah, I feel fortunate that because I, you know, got a job at Mac user magazine right out of school, actually, while I was still in school, I was an intern there. And then they hired me while I still have a semester left, that I was viewing Apple through journalistic eyes from the beginning. And I loved I, you know, I had an Apple two, and then I had a Mac se fell in love with a Mac in college at my college newspaper. So I

I love the products, but when you're covering it, the whole idea is that you're independent. You're not covering... We're not the PR marketing arm of Apple. And I was...

Definitely, it was the culture of Mac user back in the day, and I assume Mac world just as much, that we work for the readers, right? We work for the audience, we would say now. And that my job, when I would explain it to people, they're like, oh, you work for Apple. I'm like, no. My job is to be honest about what's going on with Apple because the people who read my stuff are

are people who care about Apple, spend a lot of money on Apple products, want to know what's good and what's bad and what's wrong, want to understand it. I think that these days, you know, there are Apple investors who use stuff that I do. I don't invest. I don't have Apple stock. I don't think about it in that framework, but I know people glean it. But the point is, is

I work for the people who read my stuff and listen to my stuff, and I owe them honesty. And if Apple does something good, I want to be able to say it's good. And if they do something bad, I want to be able to say it's bad because Apple will never say that they're doing something bad, right? They will. It's always good. It's because it's not their job. They're marketing and PR. I once talked to a PR person at Apple who told me point blank that her job was sales. She said, my job is sales. That point blank.

And it is, right? That's it. So my job is not sales. And my job is not to promote whatever Apple wants to promote. If I like it, if I write about it, it can have that effect.

but it's not, you know, they are always at some level or removed from me. Also, I will tell you as a working journalist who had to deal with Apple PR, especially in the early days of Steve, in the early Katie Cotton era of Apple PR and marketing, they were hard to deal with. They were really like, it was sometimes like,

fraught and raised voices and hurt feelings on both sides. There was a lot going on there. And so as a result, when people have watched Apple's behavior in the last couple of years and felt really this emotional...

I think I've got too much invested in this company and it's just a corporation and that I need to not be emotionally invested in this corporation. It's not my friend. I have to remind myself like, oh, right. Most people didn't go through what I went through where I've spent 30 years thinking of Apple as a subject that I need to cover independently. Right.

And that I, my love of Apple products is my love of the Mac or my iPhone and my iPad, not of Apple Incorporated. And it's a difference. And you can, you can love Apple.

the product the company does and dislike what the company or aspects of the company. And that's okay. But I think in the last few years, a lot of people have had to learn that hard lesson that I got, you know, I got up front because I mean, seriously, I had an Apple II. I fell in love with the Mac in college, went to grad school, and then immediately started covering Apple. And all of that romance dropped away because not only, you know, was I needing to be independent, but then I'm

you know, struggling with why won't they return my phone calls? And why did they call my boss? Because they're angry that I wrote something or, you know, all of these things that are going on. So it's been interesting to see other people deal with that. And I'm trying very hard to realize that what I need is to have empathy because it's something that happened to me so long ago that I just don't even think of it in that way. And I have to understand like,

you could be a smart, critical thinking person and still have that part of your heart that was like,

you talk about things left over from when Apple was doomed or fighting for its life, that little part in your heart, that's like, I've, I, I cherish this little company because they make products I love and they almost died and they fought for life and now they're doing better. But like, I still feel that love and it hurts when you realize that that love may not be as rational as it should have been. And, you know, I didn't have to go through that. Or if I did, I went through it 30 years ago. So, you know,

What we talked about before, I think still goes, which is Apple's a company that changed what it did because it was about to die. It then came back, had some incredible success, made a huge amount of money, owns one of the most popular categories in history, which is the smartphone. They are one of two vendors that basically own the smartphone platforms. That's amazing. Yeah.

But what we said, which is they're now reaching the point where they're so big and their behavior that got them here, they don't want to change it. But they can't recognize or are not willing to recognize that if they don't change that behavior, their behavior is inappropriate for the power that they currently have. And I think that it goes back to Steve being very concerned that Apple was going, ironically, that Apple was going to lose its corporate culture.

And so he created Apple University. He really considered...

I would argue, Apple, his final product. Not Apple Park, although that's arguably his final product. Apple's culture as his final product. And he built a lot of institutions inside Apple to make it, don't lose what makes Apple special. But the downside of that is some of those traits are the things that they don't want to lose that are causing them to get in so much trouble now. So the question at this moment is, is this a lesson, a classic lesson

lesson of hubris and they're going to, the thing that made them successful is going to destroy them? Or is somebody going to be able, probably somebody newer than Tim Cook, to come to a position of leadership and say, some of Steve's teachings don't apply to us anymore?

And that's scary, but I feel like those are the only two paths for them. Yeah, it's like Disney after Walt. It's like you've got to learn that you can't do everything the way Walt did it. When we were talking about people butting up against reality with the company, I don't really think that's as big of an issue for probably our listeners and power users because honestly, if Apple really blows it, they're just going to go to the next platform that gives them what they need.

But the people who my heart goes out to are the developers. I do feel like developers in particular have really had a rough couple years with Apple. And if I was, you know, I always like to ask people, what were your Tim? I would, I would make serious efforts to restore developer relations because they're, they're hugely important to the company. Look at the vision pro. I mean, why is nobody buying a vision pro? Cause there's no apps. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's not fun. It used to be that people, some of it was about money, but some of it was also just about the enthusiasm of using new technology and sort of trusting Apple to figure it out. But when you lose goodwill, you lose all of that. And that, that, that has, that has definitely happened. All right. On that happy note.

We usually like to end up episodes talking to folks about some of their favorite apps and services that don't get called out as often. Jason, you got anything up your sleeve? Yeah, I made a list as I was assigned by Stephen to make a list. Thank you. Some tools that I use that are worth mentioning. Dan Morin got me into make.com, which used to be called IntegraMAT, but that's a terrible name. So now it's just make.com.

It's kind of like If This Then That or Zapier. It's a web automation system. We use that. That is how so much of Six Colors and the Incomparables integration with like social media and Discord are generated where I'm passing, you know, a web hook to make and it's

It's posting, you know, posting a Mastodon post from me about a new post that I wrote and posting about all posts to Six Colors on Mastodon and Blue Sky and for me on Blue Sky too. And making a new thread in our member discord on Six Colors about the new article or the new podcast episode for The Incomparable. Like a lot of that stuff, like could we do it?

ourselves, yeah. The difference is that Make offers these templates where you can basically say, add Discord, choose this channel, fill in this blank. And it's got logic and workflows. And it's a whole, like you can make whole like complex workflows where it's doing five different things and it's all based on conditionals. And like, it's really powerful if you want it to be. But the little connections are really convenient because like I looked at

what's the discord API to make a thing? I'm like, Oh boy, am I going to have to learn this discord API and write a Python script? And it's like, no, I can just connect it to make.com and say, add to discord, make a thread, you know, and, and it's a little block that runs and it works and blue sky. They just added blue sky integration. I got to put that in there. It's not for everybody, but like I, what I like about it is that it, you know, I was using if this and that and realizing like,

It's so dumb. It was just so much like, if this, then that, and I'm like, no, I need more than that. I need a lot more complexity than that. And it'll, it'll be as complex or as simple as you want. Um, the only thing I learned is that they charge by the action, which means it's actually very expensive to do things like have a little thing that hits a, hits a server every five minutes to see if something happened that gets really expensive. So I ended up with a bunch of little, uh,

that run on my Linode server, which was going to be the next thing I mentioned. We have a server to do a bunch of stuff, including serve the incomparable at Linode, which is now owned by Akamai. I have a bunch of little scripts that run and they're the ones that are running every minute or every five minutes and checking. And then when they find that something's changed, they use a web hook to

to basically start the job at make.com and then make takes it from there. And that's been an easy way to do that. Yeah. And I would like just to pile on with make that like, while it is more complex, it's not difficult to set up. And we hear from folks all the time who are trying to like figure out how to use web automation and,

And I feel like make is like in the Goldilocks seat right now in terms of having nice power, but not too difficult. And just go to the website and look at the connected services and see if you have any of those. And then you'll be surprised what you can put together. Yeah. But I hadn't thought of the idea of putting it up through your own Akamai server. That's pretty clever. Well, we started to get these, like you used all of your calls from make. And I was like, okay, I've got this Linode at Akamai, uh,

And it runs a bunch of stuff. But one of the things it does is it just I have a bunch of cron jobs with little Python scripts that are doing things like literally one of the scripts is it's looking at an RSS feed. And it has a little text file database of all the all the GUIDs it's seen before in that RSS feed.

And it just checks every five minutes, says, is there something new? Is there something new? And the moment there's something new, it takes the data that's new and passes it to make and says, okay, here it is. Go for it. And like, that's essentially free on the Linode and I make it cost money. So I don't love that I had to split it up like that, but I understand why they're charging the way they are. But, you know, the nice thing about having a server in the cloud is that you can, you know, you can write your own little scripts and that's how I do a lot of stuff. I use, I have a Python script,

That runs on my Linode that generates the Six Colors newsletter every week. And it does it by parsing the RSS server or RSS feed of the site. And it generates actually an RSS feed that's a one-off RSS feed that MailerLite, my email service, provides.

reads and turns into a newsletter. And it's kind of ridiculous, but what it means is that newsletter just comes out every Friday afternoon and I don't have to do it. And I love that. I love not, I had to put in a lot of work to get it working, but boy, that's the great thing about automation when you get to the point where you're like, oh yeah, the newsletter came out and I just, I don't touch it. I never touch it. It just runs and does its job. And that's the nice thing about having a little server in the cloud that's always running that you can do stuff like that with.

Then you've got another app here from a small little developer called Numbers. Numbers? Yeah, Numbers. Look, I do lots of charts on Sex Colors, and I just wanted to put a word in for Numbers. I realized a few years ago that although I've been using Microsoft Excel for years and years and years, the last time I opened Excel, I felt like a visitor to a foreign country. I had so internalized Google Sheets and Numbers that I realized that Excel was now my third choice spreadsheet. Yeah.

And I canceled my Office 365 subscription, honestly. I was like, oh, okay. Well, let's just not do that. And then Lauren found out and she's like, what? And I had to be like, okay, here's how we can get these things in Numbers and Google Sheets and it'll be fine. But, you know, Numbers is weird, but the charts it makes are beautiful. And I did a... We should put a link in the show notes. I did an interview...

with Allison Sheridan on her podcast where she asked me about how I make my charts for my financial results and for the Apple report card.

And it was a fun conversation because it's super nerdy about charting and spreadsheets. But out of that came a suggestion from a listener about how to make it so that I used to have to go every single one of my financial charts for Apple results and click each chart and then edit the data set and then slide it over one every time they added a new quarter.

And somebody wrote in and said, there's actually a way to look up the field based on like the last 20 fields in that column or in that row. And then you never have to change it again. It's like,

Could it be? And I did it and it totally works and it's amazing. So like I just, Numbers has got, they just added like Dan Morin wrote about how they just added like 250 new features or I forget what it is, 50 new formulas to Numbers. Numbers is still actively being developed and the charts are the best. They just, charts and graphs styles are beautiful. And so I still, I use it for all of that. And I just, yeah,

I wanted to put in a plug for it. Like I don't use keynote much anymore. I used to use it all the time and I've never really used pages, but numbers, I'm, I'm constantly surprised about how, how much I use numbers and how much I like it. I, you know, and I would just like, we've been beating up on Apple this episode. I have bumped into the I work team members several times over the years and

they are like the best nerds. You know, I mean, those guys are amazing. You know, just they keep plugging away at making all those great features in all those iWork applications. And, you know, fortunately, I think last time I was in on it, Apple's given this team, you know, free reign to go make it better. And that's what they just keep doing. Yeah. Yeah. What else? I'm a big fan of pushover.

uh, pushover.io, which is a, um, if you don't know about it, like the best way to describe it is what if you would like to arbitrarily send yourself push notifications from somewhere else? So I think it's, I think you buy it per device. So I bought it for my iPhone. It's only on my iPhone, I think. And there are so they have an API. You can, you can have a, uh, it hit a URL, uh,

It will give you an email address you can have things sent to. And then you basically say, I want this to be this notification on my phone. And so how do I use this? Well, when we are done with upgrade, we send the files to our friend Jim Metzendorf. And a couple hours later, he sends the finals back to us and he puts them in a Dropbox folder.

And so what happens is Dropbox, like I thought about, oh, I could do like a Hazel action that sees them and there are issues with like, has Dropbox downloaded them or not and all these things. And I realized, oh, Dropbox sends me an email that says, oh, this file got added.

So I've got, I guess I'm kind of conflating two things here. For Jim's, I do have a Hazel script that sees that those files are there and hits the web URL. And I get a push notification on my phone wherever I am in the house or whatever that says Jim's files are ready because that's a pretty high priority for me to get those out and get upgrade out.

For the people uploading to Dropbox, Dropbox generates... For Dropbox file requests, Dropbox generates an email telling you that somebody uploaded a file. And I use that for the incomparable. So...

I use Gmail. I have a Gmail rule that forwards those specific emails to my pushover email address. So when somebody's uploaded their file for me to get to the right destination for the incomparable, I get a push notification. It's just really nice to be like, so-and-so uploaded their file. And

And that is really helpful. And then I've actually been tinkering with their API a little bit. Um, since I have a solar panel set up on my house now, as David knows, um, I, uh, I have a script that pulls down some of the data from that. And I actually have like, if I'm, if I'm exporting power from my house for a long period of time, uh, in the middle of the day where, uh,

The way California solar works is you don't get much compensation for power you put into the grid in the middle of the day. It's just because there's lots of it. The sun is out. It's shining. They want you to put in a battery instead. When my batteries fill up, I'm just kind of pushing this stuff into the grid and it's a very little value to me. So I have a little script that is running on my Mac mini in a closet.

in my house that's looking at the status of my solar system and it fires off a notification when I've been exporting power for a while by a pushover, which is, you might be like, well, why do I need that? It's like, that's the, that's the tip for me to plug in an electric car or do some laundry because the, the clothes dryer is very,

very powerful. It uses a lot of electricity. Great time to use the dryer is when we're exporting power. So I do a lot of laundry during the week in the early afternoon because I've gotten a push notification that says exporting. And I'm like, oh, geez, let's do some laundry just to use that power. Because basically, if you throw it away, you get pennies for it. Better to use it.

And so, yeah, pushover. It's great. It's just it's such a it's got so many different ways of approaching the issue. Like I said, email or a web URL or whatever. But like, I love the power of getting a push notification that I chose. Right. It's not coming from an app. It's not coming through messages or anything like that. It's like an event happens out in the world somewhere and I get a push notification about it because I care about it. It's very cool.

That is cool. Pushovers are one of those things that like, I want, I just need to spend some time thinking about where it could be useful. And you've rattled off some examples that would be extremely useful to me.

Yeah. I mean, it's really like if you get an email notification and you don't have your email set up to like jump out at you, which is, I don't advise it, right? Like email, I have all my email notifications off. Like I don't want to know, but that one, bang, I got to push notification for it because it's the one that matters to me. So it's stuff like that. And it's just dead simple. Pushover is not hard to set up. No, it's not.

It's really easy. There's no, it's not like, well, you need to make a well-formed JSON package and say, no, it's like hit this URL or send an email here. And it just does, does it. It's great.

You're also a scriptable fan. Yeah. I wanted to mention scriptable. Simon who writes scriptable. It's very clever because it lets you write iOS widgets in JavaScript. And so I have a bunch of, which I have a solar widget. I have a weather widget and it's great because it's like, it's my, I have a weather station and it's also got my forecast from Apple weather. And it's in a widget that I didn't even, I can't even say I wrote it. It's a widget I hacked together with,

from somebody else's sort of similar, but not that similar widget. It's changed so much since then. But I love Scriptable because again, it's the whole idea of like,

I'm not going to write an app. Just like I'm not going to write an app with push notifications on my iPhone, I'm not going to write an app to build my own weather app or something. But I don't have to. I can write a JavaScript script or modify someone else's JavaScript script and put it in Scriptable. And since Scriptable supports widgets, I now have widgets. And it's not just like I've got a large widget on my iPad home screen and on my iPhone home screen, but I also have like a lock screen widget that shows the current temp at my house.

on my iPhone. It's awesome because I mean, where I live, the weather apps don't know what the temperature is here. Because if you go, if you drive 10 minutes South, it'll be 10 degrees colder. And if you drive 10 minutes North, it'll be 10 degrees warmer. I'm not kidding. This is what, how weird the Bay area is. So, uh, yeah, so I love it. Um, I love it.

You know, I'm, I'm covering this one in the Mac Sparky labs because something that occurs to me, you know, the barrier was always the JavaScript part. Like a lot of people are like, Oh, I don't know JavaScript. This is not useful to me, but we live in a world with LLMs where you can put together a workable JavaScript without any JavaScript knowledge. So suddenly this app gives almost anybody the power to make their own widgets. And, uh,

And Simon, you know, he, he just keeps making great stuff. He's actually a future guest on the show. We're going to have him on, I think next month or the month following. Great. Yeah. He makes, he makes great stuff. And I, I just, I love that so much. The last one I'll give you is Swift bar.

Which you probably talked about it. I talk about it a lot, but I just want to throw it out there because it feels like it's the ultimate MPU app. Just as a, just as pushover can let you put a push notification of whatever you want on your device from anywhere. Swift bar is a, an app that lets you put whatever you want in your Mac menu bar.

And I use it for so many different things. So I have a weather station in my backyard. And so I have a Swift bar plugin that is written in Python, but it can be written in Apple script or shortcuts or a shell script or JavaScript or what? I mean, literally whatever. And what it does is, you know, that one shows me the current temperature and

And like how much the temperature has changed in the last hour, because that's what I'm curious. And if I click on it, it's got a forecast from Apple weather. And it's just doing the script runs every 10 minutes or something and does all of that. I've got another one for my solar data where it tells me again, is my battery charged? How much solar are we getting? Are we exporting to the grid? You know, how much power am I using?

Is it that useful? That one, maybe not as much, but it can be useful. And one that you might appreciate, Stephen, I have one that tells me how many people are listening to the Relay live stream when we're doing Upgrade. That's great. It's great. And all of it is, you just do it yourself. It's got full support for SF Symbols.

So you don't have to build your own graphics. You look up the name of the SF symbol and you put it in surrounded by colons and then it just shows the SF symbol. And again, all it's doing is running a script and looking at the output. So that script can be anything. Again, it could be Apple script, shell script, Python script, shortcut, you name it.

And you can put that data in your menu bar. And I'm a big fan of ambient information. I love the idea that I've got smart devices in my house. I can write a script that says, oh, the weather station says it's this temperature. And why not put that in my menu bar? Because I know that the actual temperature thing that comes with the system is

is going to be wrong. So why not use the one that is in my backyard? That one works better for me. So I just love SwiftBar could be, you could use it for, I mean, literally anything, as long as you can get output from some sort of a script on your system. It's pretty great. I love it.

Well, Jason, as always, you come with a lot of great ideas. I'm sure some listeners will be checking those apps out. We have more on the list, which means we cannot wait four years before you come back. Yeah, I mean, you know, whenever Stephen wants me to come back, I'll come back, I guess. Yeah, okay. Okay, well, we'll work it out. Okay.

Jason, where should people go if they want to keep up with you? Oh, just visit sixcolors.com and all my stuff is posted there, including the podcast that I do here at RealAin over at The Incomparable. Or you can go to sixcolors.com slash Jason and it lists all the stuff that I do. Yeah. And I highly recommend, gang, you go sign up for Jason's RSS or haunt six colors in a few weeks. Your WWDC coverage is always excellent.

We are the MacPowerUsers. You can find us at relay.fm. Thank you to our sponsors today, Squarespace and Indeed. Now, if you're a more power user member of the ad-free extended version of the show, stick around. We're going to be talking about our WWDC preview thoughts. See you next time.