Our Self-Imposed Tech Deadlines
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Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. This week's episode of App Stories is brought to you by Memberful. I'm John Voorhees, and with me is a student of life.

Mr. Federico Vittici. Hello, teacher? Hello, yes, I'm a student. That's a nice description. Thank you, John. How are you? Oh, that's what Stephen Acker called you. I'm connected this way. A student of life. This is a little bit like follow-out continuity thing. I'll tell you what, I keep studying life and life keeps surprising me. And life keeps studying you back, I bet. Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. What are we talking about today, John?

Oh, we are talking about a topic that you brought up, which I thought is a fantastic one. It has a bit of a negative spin on it, but I'm excited to talk about it. And I think we can do it in a positive light because we're going to talk about

about our tech deadlines, which you described to me as if X doesn't happen by a certain point, what are we going to do about it? And in our kind of tech lives, our workflows, the apps we use, the hardware we use, all that stuff. And so I think that could be a lot of fun. I think we've got some good ones for everybody today.

Yeah, yeah, this was my idea. And it's not like we are threatening anything, you know. It may sound like that, oh, if this doesn't happen, I'm going to do this. But it's more about being realistic and more about being mindful of our job and sort of reassessing the computers we use, the tools that we use, the things that we do, and sort of being realistic about like, okay, if this doesn't happen, what am I going to do?

And right, right. We shouldn't because I mean, the bottom line is we shouldn't punish ourselves by being set in our ways and continuing with something that just doesn't work anymore. I mean, there's there's patience. But then at some point, it's just foolishness. Yeah, yeah, that's that's very much true, which is I am gonna I'm gonna just come come right out swinging with this one. He's coming in hot with this one.

I think there's a real scenario in which by the end of 2025, I will be a Mac user again.

well now it hasn't been that long since you decapitated one are you going to take the head off another mac no no i'm gonna i'm gonna treat it real good um but no this is a and this is a complicated argument yeah uh in that uh it both pains me and excites me at the same time obviously okay so there's gonna be a lot of context here um

So obviously I've been an iPad user, iPad first user for a decade at this point. I think it's a, I think I actually published my first like years. I'm, I'm using the iPad as my main computer, but the iPad air one or iPad air two is,

exactly 10 years ago. I forget if it was 2014 or 2015. Obviously in 2015, the first iPad Pro came out. And so for real, I've been using the iPad Pro specifically as my main computer for exactly 10 years. Oh, wow. And I've lived through all the multiple waves of iPad criticism and excitement and trying to make the iPad work for me, which is

You know, it took me 10 years. It took me about 10 years to finally be able to say, OK, I can use the iPad for everything I do. And I published a story last December, literally called iPad Pro for Everything, in which I described this long journey. It's been a really long journey to figure out a way to be able to write, edit, record audio podcasts and also now record videos.

using just an iPad. And I've used all the iPad Pros. I think a lot of people know me for my iPad coverage. And the thing is, I love the iPad. And I love the iPad because of what it represents and because of what it is. It's a modular computer. It's a laptop. I use it with a magic keyboard. But you can just, you know, right now I'm looking at it, I could tear off the display and use it as a tablet. And Apple doesn't make anything like it. It's

Arguably, I would say this thing, which is one of the points that I raise in my story. No other tech company makes a product like the iPad Pro. There are other tablets.

but no other tablet has the same design, power, performance, app ecosystem of an iPad Pro. Right. Many companies have tried to make a tablet. Even Google tried to make a Pixel tablet, and then they just basically discontinued it and canceled their plans for a Pixel tablet too. It's just the iPad Pro. But I think I have reached a point where...

my excitement and my optimism for the iPad is decreasing on an annual basis. And this has been going on for a while. I think you can just look at Mac stories, look at the story that I published, for example, last May, the story, not an iPad Pro review, why iPadOS still doesn't get basics right, to sort of get my frustration with the iPadOS platform. And the reality is that

The last big thing that we got

with iPadOS was three years ago. In iPadOS 16 with State Manager. And even then, as we know, it didn't exactly work exceptionally well when it launched. And it was barely touched ever since. And I think it's, you know, as much as I love the iPad, I think objectively speaking, it is true that over the past few years, Apple's focus has largely been on the iPhone, obviously.

on the Mac with Apple Silicon and on new products like the Vision Pro and like the AirPods. And the reality is that there are multiple factors that are playing into the fact that due to how the tech industry has changed, I have also changed as a person and as a content creator and as a writer and as a person who runs Mac Stories. I, you know, compared to a few years ago,

When I used to work, you know, I started using the iPad and it was just me, just me doing everything. I didn't have a team at the time. I didn't have, I didn't really have other people working for me. I didn't really care about administrative things. Mac stories didn't have a membership program. We didn't have podcasts. I was a really different person and it was a really different company. And now, you know, now we are a company with a team, with employees, with people working for us, collaborators, you

multiple podcasts, a video channel, two video channels, in fact, now with MPC. Lots more things happening. And as a result, I've changed as a person who uses a computer. I use a lot more collaborative tools, most of them being web services. And

I'm actually working on a story that maybe will be published at some point this week about how most of the apps that I use for my work on the iPad now are either cross-platform or are web apps. And so as I was thinking about this, this has been sort of slowly percolating over the past couple of months.

And it felt in December when I published that iPad story that it was almost like this goal that I achieved. And then when I crossed that finish line, I looked around and I asked myself, and now what? And I think that story too, though...

had a couple of big asterisks attached to it that leads you to where you are today. It kind of showed the path that you're on now, which is the way you solve the problem wasn't with the iPad itself. It was with external hardware. It was with hardware that's not made by Apple and files that were saved on SD cards to external devices, whether it's a camera or your audio interface, which is a good solution,

I think it's a great solution, but it's not an iPad solution per se, right? Yeah. And in fact, right now, the bottleneck in our production workflow is that this happens with you and it happens with Steven when we do connected. When we are done recording, everybody's already done uploading their audio files or their video files. And everybody's just waiting for me.

because I got to grab an SD card and I got to copy the file and then I got to connect my iPad and upload it from the iPad. And those iPad apps, whether it's Dropbox or Google Drive, are not as full featured as just having the Finder sync your file to the cloud. But yeah, so, you know, in December, three months ago, it really felt like more than crossing a finish line, I think a better metaphor would be that it took me years to climb this mountain, which was

being able to be productive on the iPad. And there were many obstacles in this climbing, in this hiking up the iPad mountain. But then when I reached the top, I looked around and it was just me and Chris Lawley sort of standing at the top of the mountain, looking at each other and me like,

cool, we did it, but at what cost? And also, not just at what cost, because I mean, I really love this computer as an object and also how it feels, the modularity, I love everything about it. But I have to be realistic. And I feel like it's just me and Chris Lawley and a couple of other people, at least that I know of online, that have always had this hope

that iPadOS would get better. And let's face it, has it over the past few years? And I go back once again to a story that I published 10 months ago. All the things that I wrote about iPadOS in May, that is 10 months ago, basically, are still true today. And this is why I'm looking at the future. It doesn't look, based on current rumors, that iPadOS 19 will have

any meaningful changes with Apple still catching up on AI and all the Apple intelligence features. And especially when I look ahead at 2025 and beyond, in 2026, I think if the rumor is true that Apple is going to have an iPhone that can unfold into a small tablet...

And maybe that's going to be my future. Maybe that's going to be my... I think my desire for a modular device will be satisfied by... Not by a tablet that can also be a laptop, but by a phone that can also be a tablet. Yeah, I can see that. I had that thought this week myself when those rumors were circulated again. And I was thinking...

if I had a phone that folded out into something the size of an iPad mini or roughly that size, would I be using an iPad anymore? And I think it's a really, that's a hard question to answer without actually seeing what the hardware looks like. But boy, I sure can see a world where that replaced my iPad. Yeah. And so the final thing that I will say is that I'm honestly, I'm tired of

And I'm jealous because I want to go back to the days of Mac stories when I had an iPhone and I had a Mac and I was constantly writing about iPhone apps like I've always done, but also Mac apps. And I think all things being equal that, you know, you do see more web apps on iPad, on the Mac and on PC these days that you see native apps.

But all things being equal, that we're all using more web services and web apps than before, but you do see more indie apps, more utilities, whether it's menu bar apps or launchers like Raycast or AI apps, you see a lot more movement on the native app front on the Mac than you do on iPadOS. And so my deadline to sum up would be

If things don't change meaningfully with iPadOS this year, and it doesn't look like they will, I think my deadline is that by this year, I probably have to become a Mac user again. And I know that a lot of Mac Stories readers will be annoyed, but I think a lot of them will also be excited because I'm

I'm thinking about this deadline with both sadness, but also with trepidation, you know, because I need that spark back.

Yeah. You know, and I don't think that it's the kind of choice that has to be all or nothing either, though. True, true. I mean, I love my iPad, too. I use a Mac most of the time, but I also love taking my iPad, throwing it in the keyboard and walking down to a coffee shop and doing a little email or writing a little bit there, doing that kind of stuff. I mean, that's the thing is that I think

Part of what you're describing is that your work has outgrown the iPad. The iPad hasn't kept up with you. And in the same way it hasn't kept up with you, it maybe never was the right choice for a lot of people who are on a different trajectory than your career has been. But the one nice thing about writing is that it's just text. And so we have the luxury of an awful big part of our job can just be done on an iPad. But it does...

start posing problems with some of the collaboration stuff and the big files we're dealing with, with video and audio and moving those around so that you can get them to me or Steven or whoever it happens to be. All that stuff slows you down. And I know one of the things you and I have both been thinking about a lot in the beginning of the year is how can we get a lot of that admin stuff out of our lives? You know, we have to do it.

But how can we minimize it so that it doesn't crowd out the important stuff? And, you know, I think you're just feeling the friction there a little bit. Plus, I don't like being siloed into one role on the internet for too long. Yeah, you shouldn't be. I don't think it's a good thing. I think in the end of the day, it's one of those double-edged swords of the internet, right? It's like...

It's really nice to be known as the something guy because then everybody reads what you have to say and wants to know what you have to say. But if you go too far down that rabbit hole, you're stuck in it and you can never break free and then you become irrelevant very quickly. Yeah, and also what's the expression when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Right, exactly. I don't want to be... Yeah, you don't want to be the guy who's like, oh, of course I can do everything on the iPad if there's really truly something that you can't. Yeah. But...

So that's my first deadline. We'll see. We'll see.

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Again, that URL is memberful.com/appstories. Our thanks to Memberful for their support of App Stories. All right, well, for my first one, it's also iPad related.

This well, I guess I'm gonna back up because I've had a couple of these type of things come up recently And so I actually want to rewind the clock a little bit before I get to my first one which is I Sort of gave myself a deadline with a task manager called Godspeed, which I think is really good. It's uh, it's on the Mac. It's on iOS It's on iPad OS but it's first and foremost a Mac and web-based product and

They've been working really hard. It's a small team, you know, so I'm not really knocking them, but their focus has been on the Mac. It hasn't been on iOS or iPadOS as much. And for the most part, that's okay because I do most of my task management while I'm sitting at my desk during the day in front of my Mac, and that was okay for a while. But the reality is that sometimes at the end of the day or on the weekend or something, I want to go through my task manager on my iPad once

or on my phone, on the couch, sitting on the couch, not sitting at my desk, because I want to break free from my desk. And the iPad and the phone let me do that. I mean, of course, I have a laptop, but it's just nice to have something a little less heavy duty than the Mac sitting on the couch and relaxing, and maybe getting organized for what my upcoming week is going to be. And so I gave myself a bit of a deadline with that. And so the iOS and iPadOS apps haven't really progressed

in any meaningful way since I started using it late last year. So I decided to switch to Todoist, which is a lot more solid on the iPhone and the iPad. And it's been a good choice, not just because of that, but also because of like the Kanban view, some of the filtering, some of the API stuff. There are a lot of things there. It's a very, you know, it's an app that's been around a long time. It's established, it's not going anywhere.

And I've enjoyed using it. The other one that kind of saddened me to leave behind was MimeStream. And the reason I left MimeStream behind was because there was talk that there would be a beta of an iOS version over this past summer. As far as I know, there's not a beta of MimeStream going on right now. And I just got to the point towards the end of last year where

where I felt like my email had become completely out of control and I couldn't deal with it anymore because I was using not just my stream. I was using that in the Mac because it's Mac only, but it's also Gmail only still.

And so I was still using Apple Mail for my iCloud account. And I was using Spark for collaboration and for dealing with some of the iOS and iPadOS stuff. And three email apps is not a good recipe for efficient email management. And so you and I are both using Shortwave now. And that has been a

a breath of fresh air. It really does legitimately surprise me every week, the things I can do with it. I was just showing you earlier today how I found a list of summertime concerts in my town. And, you know, entering those into a calendar, and this isn't even an email, but it's calendaring, entering those into like Apple's calendar app with all the clicking you have to do would have taken a lot of time. And

It's not like a big appointment that I need to put in my calendar. I probably won't go to most of these, but it is kind of handy to know that on this Saturday, this thing has happened at this place and it's this kind of music. So I took the list. I pasted it into shortwave and I said, make me some events with these concerts. And it did it.

And it just let me go through them one by one and make sure that it didn't hallucinate and get the dates or the information wrong. And now it's all in my calendar. Now I can look at that over the summer when I want to, if we're trying to figure out what to do for the weekend. So it's like little things like that that's allowed me to do more with the tool as well as, you know, be more efficient in email. And, but for my first like forward looking pick, it is iPad related. And I think,

that there is a good chance that if iPadOS doesn't make any significant changes, as you said in your pick, this fall, I might...

Switch over to an Android tablet for a while and see what life is like there. Because you and I have talked on NPC about your Legion Go Ultra. Is that what it's called? Legion Tab. Legion Tab Gen 3, which is gaming oriented, which I would like. There's a lot of things you can do on Android that you can't on iPadOS for gaming in terms of things like JIT.

And I think that I would really like that tablet. Plus, now that I'm using a lot more Google services, I'd have all that available to me to the extent I wanted to use it for work. And the iPad really is probably 50% an entertainment device for me anyway. So having that, having the Apple services like Apple TV and Apple Music available there, I think it might be where I would go for now and see how it goes. So we'll see.

Um, I forgot to mention before, uh, with my, with my Mac deadline that the other thing that, that switching to a Mac would allow me to do would be to finally, because I miss it properly, enjoy the vision pro.

Because obviously with the Mac, I will be able to use Mac virtual display and do the fancy widescreen stuff and have universal control between the Mac and the Vision Pro. So that's something that I miss doing and with the iPad, I cannot do it. And it feels like a shame that I cannot do it. That said, my second deadline is that unless they offer...

at some point soon meaningful integration with apps and with third-party services i think i'm just gonna stop paying for chagi pt like i i currently i'm a chagi plus subscriber and i think between google gemini which i get as part of my uh what's it called google one plan one ai premium

Whatever, that I get access to Gemini Advanced. And I think in between, I mostly use Gemini and Cloud these days. That's what I do. And in between those, like Gemini for the more like web-oriented search stuff, you know, they have the integration with Search and with Google Keep and with YouTube. And Gemini and Cloud with, you know, for editing and like more sort of like work-related stuff.

I think I'm pretty satisfied in terms of LLMs, in terms of functionality. And I don't... Obviously, everybody's using ChugGBT, so I felt like I needed to keep up with ChugGBT. But increasingly, the advantage for me and what I want is integration between an LLM and the work that I do and the apps that I use. Yeah. And unless there's actual changes on that front, I think I'm just going to stop paying for it. Yeah. No, I get it. I mean, one of the things right now, I think...

There's going to be AI subscription fatigue with a lot of people because they all cost 20 bucks. It's like streaming services at this point. Yeah. I mean, who wants to pay like 60, 80, $100 a month for these things when, you know, I mean, it does make sense to kind of decide which horse to ride and go with it. The thing that makes that hard, I think, though, is that everything's changing so rapidly. Yes. That as soon as...

I mean, I kind of guarantee you that as soon as you cancel your chat GPT, you'll be signing back up again a couple of months later because they'll come out with something that beats Gemini or Claude in some particular way that you like. But, you know, it could be like streaming services. You're right. Just dip in and out depending on what the...

what the current flavor is, what the current feature is. I think it's actually going to end up, at least for the foreseeable future, looking a lot like that, where you dip in and out of an AI service for like a couple of months because you need to do something for your work and then you cancel your subscription and then they make you an offer, like sign up for 20% off and you're like, okay, cool, I'll do it again. And then you cancel exactly like streaming services. Chris, I keep mentioning Chris Lolli a lot today. Chris made a joke on

on comfort zone, um, a couple of episodes ago that like, they were talking about streaming services and he was mentioning like, oh, there are like 20 different streaming services now. And he was like, look, we just, we just made cable again. Like, and it's pretty much that actually, even with AI services. Yeah.

All right, I'm gonna skip down to an iPhone pick. I've been thinking about this in the context of the iPhone 16E because I bought one of those and I'll be writing about that more soon on Mac Stories. But one of the things I was thinking about with the 16E is that it's got Apple's first cellular modem in it.

that is reportedly more efficient than Qualcomm's. It uses less energy, and the fact that that phone has just one camera in it, one camera lens, allowed Apple to put it in a bigger battery, and therefore it's got a couple of hours of more battery life than the 16, I believe it is. It's like 26 hours of battery, which is really good for a phone that size. And one of the things that I love about the Pro Max is

is the battery life. I really don't have to worry about the battery on my phone. Yeah. I mean, unless I'm like, unless I'm on a trip, for instance, and I'm taking a lot of video or photos and making phone calls or whatever, uh,

I don't really ever feel like I'm running down my phone in any meaningful way during the course of a day. And so I got to thinking the thing too about the 16 pro max is that it really is the chunkiest big phone that Apple has ever done. And, and without a case, uh,

I think that it's tolerable with a case. It really is pushing it. And I've been using that bang case, which I like a lot, but it adds. Well, that's chunky. Yeah. Yeah. It adds even more bulk to the phone.

And where I'm going with this is that if Apple brings those cellular modems to the 17 line, including the pro models, and are able to fit in maybe more battery or just get more efficiency gains out of the radios in the 17, I could see dropping down from a max down to a pro size. Because if I can get a pro size phone and it gets 24 hours plus of battery life,

It's not – that's not – that's no longer an issue for me. That's no longer a reason to get the Max phone. The reason to get the Max phone would still be the larger screen. But I think where I am with my phone usage these days, I am thinking a smaller phone would be something I'd do if I could get similar battery life. Interesting. Interesting.

I think I'm going to be set on the 17 Pro Max. I know that I'm going to be jealous of the 17 Air. I'm just going to go to the Apple store, hold it for- You know, the rumor is that it's going to be, the Max is going to be even thicker. Yeah, but I've been over, I've been burned before. I need the 5X telephoto camera. So because of the pictures of my dogs. So I'll go to the Apple store. I'll hold the Air for five minutes.

satisfy my need to hold a really thin iPhone and then will worry about it again in 2026 with a foldable phone. Did you see some of those super thin phones that came out of Mobile World Congress from China? They were incredible. They were thinner than a pencil. They were like half of a pencil or something. It's this new high-density battery technology that's sort of coming up now, which is really interesting. My final deadline is gaming-related.

And I think if by the summer we don't hear about any new interesting exclusives for my PlayStation 5, I think in the second half of the year, I'm just going to sell the thing. I just, right now, for the past few months, this console has been an Astro Bot machine. Yeah.

Everything else I can play on my Legion Go, I can play on my Steam Deck, or I can stream from the cloud, from Xbox or from NVIDIA GeForce Now. Do I need a PS5 for one game? Probably not.

So this redundancy, unless there's like Sony comes out this summer at Summer Games Fest and they're like, here's three games that are coming in 2025 or early 2026 to PS5 only. Cool. Otherwise,

I'm afraid this console generation has been very much multi-platform, very much all about PC gaming. And I think that's only going to continue. We've been talking about this on MPC. You know, go check out MPC. We are also on Patreon now with MPC Excel. I do personally think that more and more...

It'll continue to be about PC gaming for a variety of reasons, but we'll see. But I'm giving Sony another four to six months and see what they announce. Yeah, I could see myself not getting a console at all in the next generation. I really feel like

Most of my gaming is handheld now between the Switch, the Legion Go, the Steam Deck, the Android handhelds that we've been talking about on NPC. And like you said, I mean, all those big games you can do over the cloud anyway, stream them to your phone or whatever, to your device anyway. So yeah, I'm not surprised. I could see something like that for me as well. I think the one that I'm going to close out on sort of undercuts my iPad game.

uh, ultimatum. But if Apple were to support third party plugins in final cut pro for iPad, I think I would switch most of my video editing, editing to the iPad pro. That's never going to happen. Well, you know, they said they were going to, when they introduced the app two years ago, they have not done it. And, uh,

There's quite a market for third-party plugins on the web for the Mac version. I only use one for any of our podcasts right now, but I'd really like that to be an option on the iPad, and it's not, so I do it on the Mac. I do other simpler videos on the iPad, but if they did have third-party support,

I think I would rethink my idea about the Android tablet. I'd stick with the iPad Pro. I don't know that I'm going to upgrade from the M4 anytime soon, but it is a pretty capable machine when it comes to video editing. Well, those are our deadlines. Tech companies, you've been warned. You have.

We're going to vote with our dollars. Yes. And our euros. And our euros. And our euros, yes. Yeah, especially if I got to buy a Mac. That's going to be expensive. Yeah, I know. You should just get that $14,000 one. You can get the Macs. Yes, yes. I'm the first customer in line. Yes.

All right, Federico. Well, that's a great conversation. We will be back next week with another episode of App Stories. I want to thank our sponsor again. That is memorable. We will be back. And you can find us on MacStories.net and on Club Mac Stories, as well as go check out NBC. It's got its own

YouTube channel now. And we have NPC XL, which Federico mentioned a few minutes ago, which is the bonus version of the show that is part of Patreon for just $5 a month. You get a weekly podcast that's a deep dive into some of the topics that we do on NPC every week.

All right, Federico. Are we going to do the post show? We're going to talk about our 2025 shopping list in the App Stories Plus post show. So if you are a member of App Stories Plus, you want to stick around because we're going to talk about the things we think we are going to buy beyond the deadlines in 2025. I know. I sort of gave away one of mine, which is potentially getting an Android tablet. But yes, we have many more planned purchases. So

Check out the post show appstories.plus. And you will find us on social media where Federico is at Fatici. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-E-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.