541: Nonotexture
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From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 541 for December 9th, 2024. Today's show is brought to you by Delete Me, Uni Pizza Ovens, and Data Citizens Dialogues. My name is Mike Hurley, and I have the pleasure of not only being here, but being joined by Jason Snell. Hello, Jason.

Hello, Mike Hurley. It's great to have you back on the Upgrade program. I'm happy to be back. Between the last episode, which was from our friend Stephen Hackett. Thank you, Stephen. And this episode, you know, I got to see you. Well, I guess it was before that. I guess it was a couple of days before that. But we got to see each other. That was really nice. That was really nice. So welcome back. Thank you. You're back in London, firmly placed in the mega studio. Welcome back.

I have a Snell Talk question for you. It comes from Steven, a different one, Vavi, who wants to know, when one of your favorite movies gets released in 4K, do you buy it again?

I mean, not always, but yeah, it happens. I have a 4K Blu-ray player, so I will buy movies that I absolutely love. I will buy the 4K Blu-ray of them even because if I want to have a real experience, and I don't do this that often, but like a full experience, I will pop in the disc. Extra work required to do that and all, but then it is the super high disc bit rate and stuff, and it's really nice for the ones that are very special to me, but mostly no.

But yeah, like they did a 4K re-release of Real Genius and I bought that. Star Trek 2, I bought that one. The Abyss finally came out in 4K. So I was very happy to get that disc. So for ones that are very much my favorites and special to me or sometimes with animated movies, if they're beautiful and I love them, like the Spider-Verse movies, I bought those. So yeah, sure.

I think for me, it's like, it is a reactionary thing. Like I choose, I want to watch, I choose a movie to watch and I'm like, oh, there is a higher quality version of this. Or I think to myself, is there a high quality version of this? If I have a low quality version, you know what I mean? Like I press play and I'm like, oh, this isn't good. Is there a better version? And sometimes there is. That's why I donated all my DVDs because all my DVDs that were not of things that are not readily available somewhere. Yeah. Um,

Because I realized like, oh, this movie is just available or I might even already have it. But if not, it's streaming somewhere or I can just rent it or buy it in 4K or HD even. And I'm because so here's the story is the library will let you borrow movies. But most of their discs are DVDs. They're not even Blu-rays. They're DVDs.

And that has to do with like the people who are getting movies from the library. They're the most compatible, even though they're not the highest quality. And so they offer them that way. And so we were talking about some movie. And then the next day, Lauren brought it home from the library. And she was like, oh, I got this movie. And I said, I'm never going to watch this on DVD. We will just rent it on HD or 4K. Because standard def, I think one of them she brought home was even cropped. It was like four by three. And I'm like, we're never going to watch this.

Never, ever, ever. And it's like, yeah, am I a snob who is not going to watch anything in SD if I don't have to? Yes. The answer is yes.

I only have a few discs. Like I got rid of all of mine. And like for me, the only ones I have, I think they're special for some reason. Like maybe it's a signed Blu-ray or something like that, you know? Sure, sure. Like I have a signed copy of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I think that was part of an auction, like a charity thing or something like that. So things like that I have, but these are discs I never intend to watch.

Yeah, I have more than that. I have maybe 20, 30 discs and they're, they're mostly either out of print things that are special or they're 4k UHD where I've spent the money on the like super high quality version. And, uh, but, but even then a lot of those 4ks I've all, they're in my Plex. I've already converted them and they're on my Plex in 4k. So I don't actually need to go to the disc, even though again, if I want the highest bit rate, I will go to the disc. Yeah.

I do have a VHS copy of the usual suspects that I have only because it is signed by the Flophouse.

Very good. When Elliot moved from New York to LA, they had a live event and they were giving away a lot of Elliot's old possessions that he didn't want to bring with them. And listener Mehir, friend of the show, thought of me, which is very sweet, and got Elliot's copy of The Usual Suspects and had them sign it. So I've got that. So that's one VHS tape I'll hold on to. Nice.

That's very good. Even though, do I have a, I think I have a VHS VCR somewhere that I could haul out that's for like old home videos or something, but I haven't used it in years. So old media dies slow. If you would like to send in a question for us to open a future episode of the show, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send that in.

So time is running out on getting a 20% off a new annual membership. So it's just now until December 18th. You can go to getupgradeplus.com and use the code 2024HOLIDAY on an annual membership and you will get yourself 20% off of Upgrade Plus. There'll also be a link in the show notes. If you want to do this for yourself, just click it and you go right there and it will be pre-filled.

Or if you want to learn more or give a gift to somebody else, it's very easy over at GiveRelay.com. But if you subscribe to Upgrade Plus, you'll get longer ad-free episodes of the show every week and a ton of other benefits like bonus content, members, Discord access. That's where everybody is hanging out when we're recording live.

But what you want to do is subscribe to Upgrade Plus because you get longer ad-free shows. You help support this show, which we appreciate. This week on Upgrade Plus, we're going to be talking about Jason's new video game hardware, which I'm incredibly excited to talk about. And also some outdoor cooking hardware. Yes. It's a hardware two for this time. I just want to be, I'm going to be a little like friend of the show, Casey Liss here and say, this is the last. So people listen throughout the week, right? We record this on a Monday. Yeah. Release it later on the Monday. Yeah.

But you know, it's a podcast. It's on demand. You listen Tuesday, maybe you listen Wednesday, maybe it's Thursday when you're listening now, but probably sometime during the week since it's a weekly podcast, you listen to Upgrade. I know I'm explaining how podcasts work, but I just think sometimes people aren't clear about this.

What I'm saying is this is the last episode where this offer is going on for the whole week. So whenever you listen, you could go to getupgradeplus.com and get this thing. Next time we'll mention it, but it will only be for like a couple of days after we record. And you might listen to next week's episode and it'll be too late. So don't let that happen to you is what I'm saying. Don't be that person who goes to Casey afterward and says, but I wanted to buy a shirt or whatever.

or whatever and it's too late. And I have a fun visualization trick for people here. Like, you know, maybe right now you're in your car or you're on the train or whatever and you can't go to getupgradeplus.com to sign up by using the code 2024 on an annual membership. I don't know if you knew about that, but that's how you do it at getupgradeplus.com using the code 2024holiday on an annual membership. What you should do is imagine the place you're going to

The place where you will sit down or the place where you will be able to use your phone. Like picture that place in your mind. Like, you know, like you see a thing that sits on your desk or you see a thing at the train stop that you've got to go to. Imagine that place and think about it and tie the thought of getupgradeplus.com with the code 2024holiday. Tie that in your mind with that place. And then when you get there, you'll have a secondary reminder to go and do it and support the show and get Upgrade Plus. Follow up.

Oh, follow up. So on last week's episode, you and Stephen spent a lot of time talking about the merits of laptops and desktops. And you were wrapping yourself up in knots trying to decide if you wanted to be that person. It's a topic that actually I delayed a week. We had a lot of topics the week before you left. And I decided to defer that topic.

to when Steven was here. Okay. Because, you know, he's, he, he last year, remember he was my like, uh, auditor, my Mac auditor. So I thought that would be a very Steven topic and he would enjoy weighing in on that. And he did. Um, and he, and boy, did he, um, and, uh, I, I, uh, bought a MacBook pro after that. Maybe, maybe the two of you enjoyed that conversation a little bit too much because now, now you're a laptop person.

So what'd you go for? I wrote about it. I wrote about it in Macworld. A lot of people were really angry with me because I dared to have an opinion for my own product that I wanted to own. And I think the Macworld editors wrote an inflammatory headline that was like, desktops are done forever or something like that, which is not what the article is. Why I'm finally ditching my desktop Mac for something better. Yeah, yeah. That wasn't the original headline. I had to change it.

It was more successfully inflammatory and it did inflame people and then they wrote me angry. You know, I wrote that whole thing about the Mac as the model. I got way more angry email about me buying a laptop than I did about the Mac as the model. People care about their computer choices, you know? They do. They do. But this was me writing about my computer choice, not about theirs. And I was pointing out some things about how it used to be really bad to be a laptop.

I was a laptop primary user, right? A laptop was my primary computer up until the 5k iMac came out. And then I was working at home at my desk and I got a big retina display, which is my first retina display for a Mac. And it was great. But, um, but before that I used a MacBook air and a MacBook before that and a power book. Like I, there was a long period there where I was docking a laptop at my desk every day and then taking it home every night. So, um,

You know, but it was weird back then is basically how my article went. It was weird back then. And now most Macs in use are laptops. And even the act of docking a laptop and using it lid closed with an external display is, I would say, a common use case. No longer a weird use case, but a very common use case. And because Apple controls...

the platform entirely with Apple Silicon and all the work that I think they've done in the hardware and software side to support laptops better over this last decade plus as more and more people become laptop users, the experience is vastly better. And fundamentally, especially in the winter, I am working in two different places. And I'm at my Mac studio right now recording this, and I haven't used this computer since last Tuesday.

It's been almost a week because I've been working inside where, you know, there's heat that isn't an expensive, you know, electric space heater that I'm using right now that has to run for hours before I get in here to bring this big garage up to even like usable temperature. So I kind of want to be able to go back and forth. And it was that moment of realization of like, I want to be able to go back and forth between these two different workspaces. And it also means that if I travel,

The computer I'm using then is also the computer that I use all the time and all the settings are the same and everything's been updated. And if I make a change, it's a change everywhere I go. Whereas right now, if I make a change in one place, unless it's to a document that syncs via the cloud, it's a change everywhere I go.

I go to the other computer. I just did that this morning where I made a change to how I had to log into my remote server. And then I got to this computer and it didn't do it because I didn't make that change here last week. I made that change on the other computer last week. So, yeah, I got a 14-inch. I know people love specs. People love specs. 14-inch MacBook Pro, space black, no nanotexture option. I don't need it. No nanotexture. I don't care.

No, no texture indeed. 14 CPU, 32 GPU, basically the base model. Like I said to Steven that I was looking at on Amazon, except the one thing that the Amazon deal didn't offer, which is two terabytes of SSD because I'm not going to go back down to one. My Mac Studio is two and I'm using 1.5 of it and I don't want to live like that, especially since with a laptop...

sticking on outboard storage is a lot less convenient. So that's the Pro chip, right? You went with the... It is the M4... Oh, sorry, I didn't mention it. Max. That's why I bought it. Okay, so you've gone with the base level of the M4 Max. M4 Max. Which is 14 CPU, 32 GPU, 36 gigabytes of memory. Rather than... Because this all started because I realized that the M4 Pro was actually...

much faster than my M1 Mac Studio, M1 Max Mac Studio in CPU and GPU, or CPU but not GPU, because this has more cores. And it was only like 4% faster or something. And I thought, I wait a bunch of years and then spend some money on a new computer and it's not really that much faster. It's not a great leap. And so I realized the Pro chip is not going to be where I'm going to go. I'm going to go to the Mac's chip.

because I want that extra GPU speed, the extra GPU cores. I use that for some stuff I do, including like the Whisper transcripts. And the once I realized the core of it is once I realized the Max chip is what I wanted, I thought, well, I could wait around and get a Max Studio with

with a max chip. But then what do I do? I roll down one of my Mac studios to the other room, but they're still out of sync. Plus, I've got a MacBook Air or I could get a computer with a max chip today. Well, I mean, I could order it today and it'll come next week. Now it'll be like it'll be here on Thursday or something. And I thought, well, that actually it makes a lot of sense. Like I'm going to miss traveling with a MacBook Air. But the fact is, I don't travel with a MacBook Air

Very much. Yeah. I try to travel with an iPad. If I need to bring the laptop, it's because I'm doing work and podcasts and other things that are more complex. And the fact is the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while it's bigger than the MacBook Air, like it's not a monster like the big pro laptops used to be. It's pretty...

pretty light light enough that it's already a burden bringing a laptop with me so bringing a little bit heavier of a laptop is not going to be a problem and it'll be my computer with all my stuff on it which is great it's a noticeable difference but I think there is enough benefit for you that it makes sense to have that extra thickness and weight like I think you'll be fine with it because you know you're getting a lot out of it are

Are you planning to use it docked, like screen closed? Yes. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. I've tried. One of my Macworld setups was with the... I actually had a monitor stand that had a laptop stand on it. Wow. So I could have my MacBook Air open, and it was sort of at the same height and all of that. And the fact was...

I don't like multiple monitors. I like multiple monitors. I don't like monitor and laptop monitor. I don't like that. I don't like the size difference that there is between them. And I really don't like having the keyboard and trackpad just out because it becomes too tempting to use it. And that's very bad ergonomically. I never like the level, the height level that you get them at. I've never really liked that.

No, if it works for you, then great. But like, I don't like it. And that's not the goal of this thing. So it will only work lid open when I'm traveling or if there's a very like extreme because somebody was like, oh, well, now you'll be using it all the time on the couch and all that. It's like, no, I use an iPad. I'm not going to change that. I prefer the iPad for

For all of that. I had a MacBook Air. I didn't use that on the couch. I'm not going to use this thing on the couch. However, we were just talking about my mom's going to visit and she's going to be in Jamie's room when she's here. And Jamie's going to also be here. So she's probably going to be sleeping out in the living room on the couch. And I thought, well, you know, am I going to go out in the other room?

Maybe, but it's going to be cold out there most of the time and not heated. And I thought, well, that's a scenario where maybe I bring in my work computer and work in the house. You have different flexibility. But mostly, no. It'll be mostly for travel. And that's fine because then when I travel, I'll have my computer with me, which I know for people who are laptop users doesn't seem like a special thing, but it is actually special because...

The way it's been working, I travel and then it's like, oh, what's on this thing? Did I update this? Is Photoshop active on this or do I have to re-authenticate it? And did I install that software on here? I guess I didn't. And all of those things that even in a world where we sync all our documents in the cloud, all of those Mac maintenance things are still there. So I bought a CalDigit Thunderbolt dock.

Because the goal here is one... Yeah, because the goal is single... Because I got a lot of stuff plugged into my Mac Studio, right? And the goal here is single cable...

in and out on both ends. And I've got it set up in the back. It's a single cable, but out here in the garage, I have a bunch of stuff connected that I need to connect to something else, a hub that then provides me a single cable that I can connect to, to charge and drive the monitor and drive all this peripheral. So we'll see how it goes. There are going to be some quirks. I'm sure I'm going to have some frustrations, but I'm ready. I'm ready. What's happening to the Mac studio?

I don't know. Okay. I honestly don't know. I thought about, I thought about selling it cause it's still pretty powerful. Yeah. Um, I also, sometimes I just hold onto things because then I've got them. Yep. In my little archive of old Macs.

So, I'm considering that, but it's still pretty powerful. So, I haven't decided. If I had done a normal purchase, I probably would have looked at what the trade-in value was for it. But I actually had a friend give me an Apple discount. A benefactor. Which is nice.

And then it's just out of my hands. Like just magic happens and the computer shows up and my credit card is charged and I move on. So I'm not quite sure what's going to happen to it yet. I have my server's an M2 mini, so it's great. I don't need to replace my server, so I don't really know what I'm going to do. Max getting a server. Yeah.

sure why not just like really beefy not that's a good uh retirement option for it but i think i think probably i'll find some where else to put it yeah or maybe this laptop life doesn't work for you like at the moment you don't know like in theory like in theory this is like a great idea but we're unsure of the potential small pain points that you've not found yet all right you're not sure gotta wait and find out i'm excited to see how this goes for you so when is it due to arrive this week

This week. So do you reckon next week you'll be recording from the MacBook Pro? I don't know because it's going to take a lot of setup. Yeah, we'll see. It's possible, but possibly not. We'll see. Well, I look forward to further understanding this transition. Updates on this one, yes. Yes. Just a couple of bits of follow-up before we move on. So this is not really a follow-up to anything specific other than there being a new iPhone.

Being on vacation, I used camera control a lot more than I even normally do, right? Because I'm taking a lot more photos than usual. And I have just some thoughts about camera control, if you have not yet heard enough of them over the last few months. I continue to really like it as being like a quick way to get the camera open, right? Like I can already press the button before I've even gotten to the place. Like it's just easy. It's on the side of the phone. I understand it. I think Apple made a mistake that the...

button press is physical, like an actual physical switch. It's too hard to depress. And especially trying to take a picture with one hand, right? So like you just grab the phone and you just want to press the button, right? That is, I think it can be too tricky to snap the picture. I do actually think that Apple does account for the fact that the button is hard to press and like you actually don't get the blurry frame, like you get the frame before.

Yeah, they are trying to mitigate it because it shakes the phone, right? So they have to. I think they know that. I think the system itself knows that. I expect the iPhone has always tried to account for that. But the thing is, it's not as easy to press as I would want it to be. And I found myself on multiple occasions accidentally switching the camera because I was just swiping the button when I didn't mean to. Look, in 18.2, Apple's adding a bunch of...

settings to the camera control. And there's a lot of stuff in there that's not necessarily what I want. What I want them to add is take a picture with the force sensitive part.

Like, just let me take a picture of it. Don't even need to press the button. So I can take a picture by either just pressing it. Maybe it clicks, maybe it doesn't. Let me take a picture in both ways. That's my new feature request. I think this, I do believe this would have been a better experience if this was just based on how hard you press it, not there being an actual physical switch. But maybe someone at Apple can disagree with me if they tried that out. I don't know. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that this is a...

uh, a challenge with camera. I'm starting to feel like if, if they, if they want to keep doing camera control in future phones that they're going to, uh, need to spend some time sort of reconceptualizing it a little bit. Um, I think it's too complicated. Yeah. And, uh,

and it doesn't need to I think it's a good idea and doesn't need to be as complex as it is and you know you're basically saying I want an easy mode where all it is is a shutter and because I really like having that button there like I like having that button there a lot and I like that even it's got a physical button to open the camera like physical to open right I click it to open just tap it to take the photo that's what I want to do just a light tap and I'll be happy yep

Two pieces of follow-up from people that wrote in about what we're calling the HomePod Touch, which is the... Sure. Yeah. Abelson wrote in and said, regarding the HomePod Touch and projecting interfaces from the iPhone like widgets, I wanted to mention the parallels of CarPlay, a simple screen device in the home that reuses something like the CarPlay protocol for projecting apps, which is a very

would be for at least a single user an ideal method of getting iPhone apps onto a square screen. So yeah, we were talking a lot about many of the things that Apple have done in bringing widgets to the desktop, notification mirroring, all that kind of stuff. CarPlay is an even beefier version of that in a way, right? Like it's pulling all of the UI and everything from the phone that is nearby.

The right way to think of it is the phone is projecting a second screen and it's going on the CarPlay screen and that's how it's working. And that is, yes, I mean, Apple has built this technology or versions of it multiple times because projecting widgets onto the Mac desktop is a different version of the same idea, which is I'm projecting something out of the iPhone onto another device.

The challenge with thinking of CarPlay and thinking of this device is this device has to work fine without a phone projecting its interface onto it. Whereas CarPlay doesn't work unless a phone is projecting its interface. And I think this is just, this is the challenge is what happens when you leave?

If you leave and another family member is there, is it useless or do your widgets just go away? If there are multiple people attached to the family who are near or using that device, what gets connected or projected or whatever? Who wins, right?

Yeah. Two adults are in that house and there's a screen. Who gets the notifications? Is it true during proximity? Is it doing face detection? I mean, this is always going to be a problem with this product, right? Yes. There being multiple people who have their own lives and phones, right? It's going to be an issue no matter what. Yeah.

It will be intriguing to see how they resolve this. Because in essence, the way Apple would like to tell you that the HomePod works, right, is like it has personal requests and should be doing voice detection. Whether that works or not, I don't know. But like that is the story that they tell with the HomePod. But that's not how this one will necessarily work because you don't have to, in theory, ask it to do something. It should always be showing something. It's like whose calendar is it? You know, like it's going to be...

It's going to be interesting to see how they do that. Yeah, that's why I'm a little skeptical of dreaming too much about how personalized this thing is going to be if it doesn't have an app store. Yeah. Because I'm not sure it's going to rely on projected widgets from my phone to do something that looks like standby, right? Because of this issue that there may be widgets on it, but I'm going to guess like the widgets I use in standby, one of them is from an app.

And I don't think this is going to offer that, right? I think that this will offer some view into the data on my phone, but just letting me project an app, because again, what happens when I leave? Does that go away or is it more Apple Watch like where it's like loading code onto it that runs when I'm gone? And if I'm gone, is there a loss of trust there that it shouldn't be showing data? Like it just gets way more complicated when...

when you're projecting things from other people's devices that could appear or disappear on a whim. So it just adds complication to it. And Harvey wrote in to say, to add on to the family of HomePods, so we had the HomePod, the HomePod Mini, the HomePod Touch, what about the HomePod Nano? Could be a small Bluetooth speaker made by Apple. Picture something Google Home Mini size that can recharge and go anywhere. Love it. They should make a battery-powered HomePod.

Yeah, this is a cat. Okay, so I'm just going to lay it out here. This is a category that I think is dumb, but obviously people like it because there are products about it. Because here's the thing. It's just a Bluetooth speaker. There are so many Bluetooth speakers. Why do we have to smarten up Bluetooth speakers? It's just a Bluetooth speaker. If Apple wants to make a Bluetooth speaker and call it a HomePod and make some money, fine, go ahead. You know, it's like a little AirPlay guy. Not just Bluetooth. Yeah. Let's go. Let's go. I guess.

I guess I just, you can get a perfectly nice Bluetooth speaker, waterproof, everything for like nothing. So, you know, why, why does Sonos need one? Why does Apple need one? And I get, I think the answer is money is why, because people want to buy them. So why not sell them one? Even if it's, you know, Bluetooth and doesn't really make sense because it's not a, it should be a wifi device and whatever. If, if, if they want to make money on it, go ahead and do it. But I don't,

I don't know why this category needs complex products in it. There are a bunch of perfectly fine little portable Bluetooth speakers out there. This is your final call for nominations for the Upgradies. The form will close...

on Friday the 13th. Ooh, spooky. Spooky. The formal close. Don't ask me what time. It will be whatever time I do it. So do it before Friday is really what you want to do. Some British time that you might not understand. Yeah. I'm just going to close it when I get to my to-do list that day. So get your answers in before Friday, your nominations.

Upgradeys.vote. Again, don't tell us, oh, I meant to just do it now. Do it right now. Or similarly, remember where you're going and when you get there, Upgradeys.vote. Visualize. And as well, people say, ah, it's too many categories. You don't have to put in all the categories. Just put in the things that you care about. That you care about. Upgradeys.vote and it will come to you at the end of the year.

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So, according to Mark Gurman, Apple and Sony have been discussing a partnership that could see the Vision Pro becoming capable of using the controllers for PlayStation's PSVR2 headset.

How about that? Now, Jason, I'm excited about this because I get to use all of the information that I keep in my brain about video games that I don't really get to talk about very often. So I would like to give a little bit of information and history about the PlayStation VR because I actually think it is important context for this discussion. If you wouldn't mind me taking you down this little history lesson. Sure.

So the original PlayStation VR was released in 2016 for the PlayStation 4. Yep. I had one. Yeah. Lots of people do because it was at the time quite... Well, one, everybody had a PlayStation 4. PlayStation 4 was an incredibly well-selling device, which helped a lot. There was a lot of PlayStation 4s out there and Sony released this hardware and...

They had a bunch of interesting games for it, but it was also pretty fairly priced and was the easiest way at that time for somebody to get into VR. Oculus existed, but it was connected to a PC. It was a much bigger deal at that time. And PlayStation offered an easy way. It could develop a support, by and large, outperformed what Sony expected of it. It's reported that they sold over 5 million units of PlayStation VR over its lifetime.

And it was interesting for Sony because they were actually able to reuse some technology and some devices that they had. So Sony had something called the Move, like the PlayStation Move, and they had these terrible controllers, which were these wands with these balls on the top that these balls lit up and were used for tracking. That's weird.

Weird ice cream cones. Yeah. And they were able to use those controllers for this. So there was these interesting stories that people would get their PlayStation VRs and the batteries were dead in the controllers because they've been sitting in a warehouse because they hadn't sold. So it's like a very interesting way that they did it. But this success of the PlayStation VR ultimately, obviously, led to Sony developing a second version of the hardware. So the PSVR 2 debuted in 2023.

And it was a very capable system. It had new, purpose-made, much better controllers that are essentially like actually really high quality controllers. And, you know, they're not wired, you know, like the wireless, they have lots of buttons on them, triggers, and they have all of the great features that are in the PlayStation 5 controller. And they're in these like form factor for VR. But the headset was also very high spec.

It had very high resolution screens, eye tracking, foveated rendering, all of that stuff, which led to a $549 selling price. And you also needed a PlayStation 5 of similar price. So this is compared to $399 for the original PlayStation VR.

I think more importantly than the price was that developer adoption has not been stellar for PSVR 2. And that has been the big story with it. It kind of seemed like even when Sony announced it and then they were leading up to putting it out there, it kind of felt like they'd already given up.

They only had one first party developed game and it seemed like they weren't able to encourage a lot of new developers to come to the platform. And the issue here, I think, is actually meta is the problem because they have been acquiring studios and signing exclusives for Oculus. Like in the last year or two, there's been a couple of games that have been very well reviewed.

a game called Asgard's Wrath 2 and a Batman Arkham VR game. They have both been great, like critical successes, but they are exclusive to Quest. So this was the thing Sony didn't have to deal with the first time around.

It has been reported that Sony have shipped, not sold, around 1.6 million units of the PSVR 2. And it's also been reported that they have stopped production. They're not making them. You mentioned meta. One of the problems also is just meta existing. So when I got the PSVR, the original, that was my first VR experience, really. And it was great, right? Astro Bot on the PSVR, so good. So good. Immersive platformer, so good.

But meta with the Quest got over the hump in terms of affordability for quality. It's also more convenient. With the PlayStation VR, you've still got the PlayStation involved. You've still got a cable involved. This is what I'm saying.

So it was standalone, but with enough power to make the games good for a reasonable price. And yes, compare to the PSVR where you had to run a cable. You had a weird adapter that you had attached to your PlayStation. You had to have the PlayStation. You had a weird adapter. And then cables came out to your head where the thing was, right? It was so ridiculous. And so that was my first vandalism.

VR experience, but, you know, whatever, a year later, I bought a Quest 2. And even though so much of the Quest is not as good as PlayStation is, the difference was it was affordable, it was standalone, it was easy to take off and put on just...

It just... The time of that kind of tethered product that Sony made the first time kind of ended. And this was their response. And, you know, again, they're tying it to their console and it's hard. So they... I'm not surprised that it didn't do well because it feels like the market really moved on to... The standalone stuff was good enough. Yeah, like in the overall kind of...

consumer media like gaming media like the playstation vr2 is considered a failure like and even sony have made moves that would suggest it like well one there they still have not had another sony developed game uh that i'm aware of even announced and they have added a feature to allow the psvr2 to work of a pc so you can play non-playstation vr games now like that is a move of

weakness, right? Like kind of admitting to the people that spent that money, we don't have enough for you. How about we give you another way to benefit from the hardware that you've already purchased? So...

bringing us back to apple i mean now speaking of weakness indeed we have we have spoken about it many times that apple have not made or supported any vr focus controllers for the vision pro and how we think that this has led to them not being able to support as many games as they could have i wrote a whole piece about this back in june about how i i understood why and and mark german's report talks about this a bit too the

He has made it clear in some of his reports that there is a sort of Johnny Ive-led philosophy with Vision Pro, which we can all see, and we've all speculated about it. We can all see it. To make this product a different kind of product. It's like, let's just use hand tracking. Let's just use eye tracking. This is what we're going to do. And my piece in June basically said, I played games on the Vision Pro. They're not precise enough. I played games on the Quest. The hand controllers are perfectly precise and wonderful. Yeah.

And I don't deny that the hand tracking on Apple's product is superior, and I wouldn't want to have a Vision Pro that had to use hand controllers. Absolutely not. Like, I love what it does. But for certain tasks, the hand controller experience is so superior. And just some of these games that I played on the Vision Pro, like...

They're just bad compared to the equivalent games on the Quest because the Quest has the precision of the hand controllers. And so, you know, my piece basically said Apple doesn't need to make them themselves necessarily, but they need to find a partner or do an open API or something so that developers have some

uh you know have the ability to say this is a game you can play you you need to buy the hand controllers but you could actually make a game that is of the level of the quest which just seems silly because we're talking about a 300 400 product versus a 3500 product but that's where we are where the quest can play games that the vision pro cannot and it's you know i would say mostly because of the precision of the input

So Mark Gurman's report states that Apple's kind of doing two things. He doesn't say this clearly, I think, but I think you can kind of get it from the way that he writes that Apple is working on supporting Apple

VR hand controllers and is working with Sony to make the PSVR 2's controllers not only work, but it seems to be kind of like the flagship device. Like in the way that the iOS devices support Bluetooth controllers, but they always mention Xbox and PlayStation. This is controller support again, except on Vision OS. And then they have to find partners who make

these things. I know there's like a, somebody who did a Kickstarter or whatever that's doing it, but like having Sony's controllers and also knowing that Sony probably has a bunch of controllers in a warehouse somewhere.

as the flagship for this, where they can say, you know, we're going to support Sony's state-of-the-art controllers that are amazing and do all this incredible stuff. But theoretically, it's part of a trajectory that leads to Apple basically saying, if there are hand controllers, third-party hand controllers out there, we will try to build support for them.

Apparently, Mark says that this partnership was actually expected to be announced a few weeks ago, but has been postponed. And that the problem actually may be on Sony's side because they've yet to work out the logistical processes of unbundling the controllers from the headsets because they do not sell them separately. So if they do, as we believe they do, have this like warehouse of PSVR 2s, I guess the question is, are we going to

render these things unsellable, right? Because if you break these things apart, now the headsets can't be sold, right? And so there is an issue here, it seems, on Sony's side of exactly how they want to handle this. Now, they could just make the controllers, but is that going to be worth it? Because again, we come back to that thing we were talking about a couple of weeks ago. Anybody making something for the Vision Pro...

You ain't selling a lot because as Mark Gurman adds in this report, he believes that Apple have not yet sold half a million units of the Vision Pro. It's a tiny market, although you're also placing a bet that maybe if you do this, you will sell some more of them. And then from Sony's side, I mean, what I would say is if Sony has a few million of these sitting in a warehouse, they could probably say, look,

let's pull out $100,000 and see what happens. Because I'm sure that they have a sense of if they really feel like they're going to sell them or not. So it's a logistical challenge. I want to read a couple of quotes from Mark Gurman's report and we can talk about it a little bit more. Beyond gaming, these hand controllers could be used for productivity tasks and media editing.

And Apple doesn't have any imminent plans to launch its own controller, but the company's design team spent a few years prototyping what is essentially a wand for the Vision Pro. This could be more of an Apple Pencil-like tool for precise control rather than in gaming. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that sounds like their compromise, right? Of like, could we do a controller for it? And it was. Remember, there were those rumors that it was going to be like Apple Pencil support on the Vision Pro? Because there are a lot of sensors in there. But a wand, magic wand for Vision Pro. I don't know. I mean, I keep coming back to my excitement about the potential of products like the Vision Pro and my feeling that...

Its initial conception was... Too ambitious. Was kind of misguided by people inside Apple who had some really highfalutin ideals that conflicted with the reality of what was possible. And you end up with a product that turns its back on some of the best things of VR. Like...

I understand Apple saying, look, we're really good at the App Store, at least on iOS, and we've got existing apps. So let's focus on being more of a spatial computing productivity platform. It's like, OK, but up to now, most of the stuff that has been on VR has been games.

And to entirely turn your back on those games that really require that level of precision of a hand controller entirely. Like we're not going to even make one available as an option. It's just not there.

just really misguided. Yeah, or potentially they're misguided in thinking that people would re-architect their games to support the hand tracking, right? Like something's wrong here, but neither of it is what you should do. They did though, like Fruit Ninja, right? They made the Fruit Ninja version. It's like, it's bad. It's real bad.

And there's a Beat Saber-esque game that I bought. And it's also really bad. It's not... Or the Vacation Simulator and Job Simulator, which they actually aren't as good. They don't operate as well. I mean, they're fine and they're fun if you've never played them before. But if you've played them before with a controller, it's not as accurate on the Vision Pro. Right. So the way...

The way this goes, I think, at least potentially, is if Sony can pull this off, it's great because it's two companies that are kind of desperate and are willing to think outside the box. It is a question about the software on the platform. I do think that's a question. But I do also think that there are developers who have VR products who could be persuaded to bring them to Vision Pro.

If they could port them to vision pro without having to worry about their control scheme being broken. Right. I mean that there is some potential there and that meta has snapped up a bunch of these, but like not only are there some of these existing products, but there's also stuff out there that could be ported, but you know, they're not going to do it without hand controllers because they really need that control scheme and they're not going to rebuild it for vision pro hand controlling. Yeah. I think it's,

It's interesting to imagine a scenario where Apple could try and convince them. I mean, they could maybe try and convince PlayStation. Like it's not outside of the realm of possibility. That's my idea is, hey, why don't we make it so that the PS5 can use a Vision Pro as a VR input, VR controller. That would be weird. It would be weird.

yeah it's all weird yeah yeah it's all weird i'm just like if this is a partnership you mean you could make it like oh yeah you're going to be able to do playstation games on your vision pro now too and i assume our deal with sony i mean i assume belkin and logitech are going to be making controls if they're not already you know like one of the two of them is going to be making a controller for apple sure um sure i do here's the thing you already mentioned that you wouldn't like this but i i was wondering so you know like this this this

There's a lot of suggesting in Mark's report that you would be able to use these controllers to do anything in the Vision Pro. That is a thing you could do. Because they have all of the sensors, it could work pretty well. They have a sensor space, they know where they are, you've got lots of buttons, you can select things. And I wondered if that was a good experience for you.

is this another way to get to a cheaper Vision Pro? Like if you removed a lot of the requirements, a lot of the sensors that do the hand tracking on the outside and still did eye tracking, which you could still do, but then also had the controllers for other more precise movements. Like, could that be a way to get to a $600, $700 Vision Pro? Maybe. Although what I would really say is that the Quest 3...

already does a decent job with hand tracking. It's not Apple vision pro level, but they're already doing some of this. So like, yeah, I mean, I guess I am saying that there's a five, $500 headset that does not vision pro level, but okay. Level of that. Yeah. I don't know where all the prices built into the vision pro, right? I don't know how much of that is the processors versus the cameras versus the cloth, uh,

You know, straps and the stainless steel. I like I don't I don't know where all the pieces are, but maybe I think Apple Apple would still want to have that hand gesture interface be there. But you as Meta has demonstrated, there is to a certain degree, you can still do it at a lower price point.

I don't love the idea of having to use hand controllers, but the hand controllers can be perfectly fine for driving an interface because Meta has shown that. Now Meta has tried to go the other way and say, well, you can also just use your hands. And there was something really nice about putting on a headset and not having to find your hand controllers, make sure they're connected, make sure that the batteries are up to speed, all of that, right? And having to dock them and charge them and all of those things, having them not be part of the equation is really nice, right?

But it would be fine. Like, it would be fine. I think the issue is, you know, honestly, I think the issue is precision, that there are some games that just need a precision placement. I think it's less about the eye tracking than it is about the hand tracking, to be honest. I think that Vision Pro's hand tracking is good, but it's just like I did. I used Simple Piano last week for Vision Pro, which came out.

And one of the features for Simple Piano for Vision Pro is a virtual piano. So I have a piano and I was able to do that. But you can also just on my living room or my dining room table,

I put down a piano, a virtual piano, and I started to play it. But the problem is like this finger is a little bit occluded by another finger and it looks at it and it assumes that that other finger is down and plays the note, but that finger is not down. It's still up in the air. And I thought, here are the limits of hand tracking, right? Is that it's all visual.

And you have to make some guesses. And I mean, you can't play a piano with a hand controller. But my point is, with the hand controllers, the hand controller sensors mean that they know exactly where your hands are in space by fractions of a second. Exactly how they're moving. Exactly where they are. And as impressive as camera-based hand tracking is, if...

Something gets in the way of the camera in any way, including another part of your body. You can't do it, right? You can't, you can make an assumption maybe, but, but you're guessing. Whereas those wireless controllers, you know exactly where those hands are and what they're doing at all times. Yep.

And plus they have buttons on them, which for games is really useful because then you've got instantaneous triggers as opposed to trying to, again, making gestures with your hands is something that Vision Pro does a really good job of. But it's got to do a lot of processing. It's got to make some guesses. And that means that it's laggy and it's less accurate. So I don't know. I mean...

I have a hard time imagining Apple making a Vision Pro or a Vision of some sort that didn't support hand tracking. But I think you're right that there's a way forward here that says, well, we have two ways of interacting with this thing. And one of them is precise and one of them is less precise. And that's fine. It's going to be interesting to see if this comes to something.

Yeah, just, I mean, even if this thing happens, right? Because it's supposed to have happened. It hasn't happened. But what I'm going to take away from this, I'm going to choose to be positive about this. Yes, me too. Because I wrote about this in June, like I said. And in June, I said, come on, Apple. Right?

You got to head controllers need to be part of the mix. They don't need to be mandatory. Not everybody's going to need them, but it, but games, there are a lot of games out there that could probably be ported to vision pro and new games written for them, but they can't be done. They just can't be done without controller support. And you don't have to build your own controllers. You can do what you've done with game pads on every other Apple platform, including vision pro, I think, right. Which is just, you pair a game pad and it were a game controller and it works.

It's like, yeah, my PlayStation controller will work on my Vision Pro and it's fine or my Mac. So if this is happening, the most encouraging thing about it is that somebody at Apple agrees with that. And that's good because I think it's the right move. And I think it's a sign of Apple stepping away from one of these assumptions that they made when they built the Vision Pro originally that have proven, like with those Belkin accessories, right, have proven to be

wrong and misguided and that this is a sign that Apple is learning that maybe those assumptions are preventing the vision pro from being successful. So I hope, I hope.

That's true. I mean, I'm happy to see them continue to change and adapt to Vision Pro in public. Like that kind of is what this device should be considering what it is. Like it is essentially like this future platform. We should see it adapting and changing in front of us. Because then you feel like you're benefiting as an early adopter in that way because you adopted it early. That was the point of it. And now you're on the train as it goes down the track.

I don't know what the contractual status of something like the Vader Unleashed or whatever, the game for MetaQuest. But ILM, we talked to them, right? Did the What If immersive experience. They worked on that too, on MetaQuest. And it's like, well, why isn't that on the Vision Pro? And the answer is it can't be because it's a lightsaber duel. And you just... It's just...

You can't do it. I can't explain this to people who haven't experienced it, but if you spend any time with a Quest versus a Vision Pro, like my stupid ping pong game, 11 Table Tennis on the Meta Quest, it's so good. Can't be done. Can't be done on the Vision Pro because you need a level of precision of hand tracking on the controller that a Vision Pro can't do. It doesn't feel right. It breaks the immersion. You should be holding something.

Well, in that case, it's true, but like, but it's also, it couldn't do it. It just can't do it because it can't get that level of precision. Um, so I hope they, I hope they go down this path because it doesn't have to be mandatory, but, um, and I can't believe after all of that time where they were doing weird things about the Apple TV, um,

to avoid having controllers on it. And they finally got the religion about controllers for all of their platforms and have said, yes, all those controllers can be paired with an Apple platform device and work, including the Vision Pro.

But then with the Vision Pro, they made the same problem with hand controllers. The fact that at their unveiling of the Vision Pro, they're like, it's great for games. Look at this game that you play holding a PlayStation controller while looking at a screen. Like, no, what are you doing? So maybe they've gotten over it, or at least some portion of them has been given enough latitude to try this. Great. Bring it on, I say.

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So it is expected that... Oh, the details. Hi, we're in the details now. It is expected that iOS 18.2 will ship this week, right? If I'm following that correctly. I mean, I was on vacation, but I think the release candidate is out. And the expectation was always early December anyway.

So I wanted to run through some of the key features considering we've both been using this beta for as long as it's been available, which has been quite a while now, and kind of just give some thoughts on them and how we're feeling with them now. We'll start off with image playgrounds. How are you feeling about image playgrounds right now? Um,

I don't like how they look. Yeah. Everything that I've generated, I've either been disgusted by or I've sent because I thought it was so bad that it was funny. Yeah, it's memeable. They're very memeable. Not in a good way. I found that some people, and whether this is their faces or my photos of them, some people I can get images that seem like them.

Other people, I can't, no matter how hard I try. They seem like weird caricatures. Especially, I find that with the illustration view. I have a few people for whom the illustration generation makes something that's amazing. I have a picture of John Syracuse wearing a hat with a horse behind him, which is just baffling, subject-wise. I'm going to include...

a link in the show notes to a blog post that Alan Pike wrote. Yeah. Where Alan was basically, every time, any picture of the illustration was not good. And I sent to Alan in that blog post is a picture of me. The rat Mike. Yeah. It seems like there is a problem where for some people, and I think both me and Alan are in this club, that the illustration just makes us look like rat men, no matter what image we feed it. And I don't know why that's happening. Whereas Casey lists,

I think his face works pretty well in the animation style. All my Casey's look like Casey. Are you saying Casey is a cartoon character? Is that what you're saying? I'm saying, yeah, maybe he makes a good Pixar character. Casey does. I would love to see Casey star in a Pixar film. You know, it'd be great. Yeah. That being said, the Casey list story. So anyway, so I don't, I'm unhappy with the output. And then I know that the other image generators, yeah,

Do better jobs than this. So Apple's behind the state of the art. And I just I think it's ugly. And I think that the focus on making pictures of people, you know, is is questionable. I would rather they be more generic pictures of people, a generic person.

And yet every time I try to make a generic person in Apple's AI image tools, they're like, no, you must pick a person. It's like, I don't want to pick a person. I want this to be a picture of a wizard, not a picture of Mike as a wizard. That's not what I'm trying to do here. And it's not interested in that. So I don't like it.

At least with Gemmoji, you can specify the emoji, right? Like you just be emoji character in this rather than person in this. Yes, yes. So this is what I would say about image playgrounds while we're on that subject is I know we've talked about our feelings about AI image generation from a ethical standpoint and all of that. But I'm going to boil it down to my opinion as a user of this feature, which is I don't think it's very good, period.

I absolutely agree. I just think that this feature is not well-baked enough for release, but they're doing it anyway. I'm going to take something Stephen said on last week's episode slightly out of context, so I apologize to him. But I think he said something that I think a lot of people, I can imagine making this kind of...

argument for Apple. Like Stephen referenced something about like you know the cartoon style which is better than deciding to try and make something realistic like because that can be more problematic. Like I think today just people recorded OpenAI I believe their Sora model and like some of this video that's coming out from the Sora model now is horrific in how good it looks like it's terrifying. But

And it's a good point, but I think Apple's actually not capable of doing it. I think... I don't believe that Apple have chosen... have not chosen to do the realistic style purely because they think it's the right thing to do. I think looking at the quality of their imagery now, Apple could not do photorealistic in image playgrounds. They don't have the ability to do that for whatever reason that might be. Because...

The quality of the imagery in image playgrounds is so bad. There are jokes about AI as the long-term can't do hands, right? Image playgrounds can't do eyes. Every eye is like this color tornado. It's bad. It's not good enough.

contrast to Genmoji, which I think is good. A good feature. I've gotten it to make lots of fun, strange, and weird emoji, which is usually what I want. And I use some of them frequently. It works very good with tapbacks. Of course, it gets things wrong and weird in a bunch of ways. But...

You can also get something... More often than not, I get something that is close to what I wanted with Gemmoji. Because I have a framework for what I think they should look like. Because it's Apple's emoji as the starting point. So yeah, I think by and large, this is actually a good feature they should have made. Yeah, I agree. So I commissioned some emoji.

a while ago, some custom emoji from the artist who works on Emojipedia. And I tried to replicate those using Genmoji. And they're not as good, but they're good. Like, they're good. And that's a little disturbing, right? Because I paid an artist to follow my instructions to the letter, and then I just threw a prompt into Genmoji. And kudos to Apple for making the image generation interface a...

A shopping interface, right? That they're like, don't like this one, swipe to the next one. And it keeps generating alternatives. That's so smart because some of them just ain't it, right? Some of them are bad and you're like, nope. And it feels, if you had to go through the generation process time and again until you got one right, you'd be so frustrated. But instead they're like, yeah, throw away the ones you don't like. Keep the ones you do like.

And so I was able to generate, you know, a pretty good cute Skeletor that I, that, you know, from Genmoji. I was able to generate a Tony Sindelar pointing reference acknowledge that looks more like Tony. Not, I mean, his, his emoji is a, looks like a cartoon version of him. That's kind of, you know, again, the artist actually use a photo of Tony to make that one.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, I think you could argue that the artist sort of making a cartoon version of Tony might be better, but like, I can see that in that moment I generated an emoji that looks like my friend making that symbol where I paid an artist to do it. And again, I don't love that I'm paying artists, but most people are not going to pay an artist to do something like that. I did that for, for, for kicks basically. But like I've got, uh, okay. My favorite Jen Moji so far is,

is Tim Kool. Oh, yes. Which is literally Tim Cook on a surfboard. Because of a spelling error instead of Tim Cook. Because somebody typed Tim Kool instead of Tim Cook and they said, I love Tim Kool. I love this idea. Let's go with it, Tim Kool. Tim Cook sunglasses, cool dude surfing was the prompt and he's not wearing sunglasses, but it's recognizably Tim Cook and that's the most important part. Chat GPT in Siri.

Yeah. Yeah. So I connected my ChatGPT account because I pay for ChatGPT to the OS. And what I found is...

And I told it not to ask me. I said, just use GGBT if you want it. If you're ever going to... I'll tell you right now, always just turn that prompt on. You don't want to be dealing with the like, would you like me to... No, it's annoying. To get rid of that. Yeah. Do the thing. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. So what I found actually is funny. I asked...

I ask things of Siri and sometimes it tries to answer it itself. And I say, oh, honey, no. You can't answer this question. You should have gone to ChatGPT. Well, I do. I don't know if you've ever done this. I will just say, because you're in the Siri dog, no, ask ChatGPT that. And then it will go back and do it. Yeah, because that's the problem right now is that Siri is trying to answer some of these questions. It's like, you do a bad job. Just ask ChatGPT to do it now.

And, uh, and those, those answers are better. Although again, I'll point out that although this is some somewhat unpopular in some circles to point out, I asked chat GPT, lots of things and it just gets them wrong, like straight up wrong. I, the other day, one of my tests was, uh, asking about something I don't know the answer to, which is did any of the other players at Florida state who played with Buster Posey when he was at Florida state university, uh,

make the major leagues buster posey future hall of fame giants catcher president of baseball operations of the giants now um played at florida state did any other major leaguers play with him there i was curious i didn't know the answer and and and it came back chet gpt came back and said yes he did there's this guy who was in the minor leagues and never made the majors and there's this guy who is in the minor leagues and never made the majors so i i said to chet gpt i

So the answer was actually no. And this is correct. None of them made the majors. And therefore, the answer to the question was no. But it answered yes. And I asked it another question. And I said, has an American cabinet member ever been assassinated? And it said, yes, this guy got shot, but he survived. And this guy got shot, but he survived. So no. Like, what are you doing? Like, so so.

Here's my problem with all of this is fundamentally everybody raves about AI stuff. And I know that there's, again, I think that there's lots of places where the AI stuff can be very helpful, but oh my God, in the context of what we ask Siri in terms of like world's knowledge, it's still, even the leading models are still so very bad at it. So I don't love that about it, but you know, Mike, when I asked Siri,

Siri, that initial Buster Posey question, you know what it told me? It said, oh, Buster Posey's coach at Florida State was this guy.

had nothing to do with my actual question. It was literally a random fact pulled from the ether by Siri and, and, uh, you know, appreciably worse, even though, because it didn't, it, it, it didn't understand the question. Chat GPT understood the question and got it wrong and then sort of eventually came around to getting it right. But, um, but Siri didn't even get it. So I don't know. I, I'm not happy about it, but I, but I think one of the big problems with it is, um,

that Siri needs... Essentially, if you've got ChatGPT turned on, Siri kind of needs to get out of the way. It needs to be smarter about saying like, oh, I'm bad at this. Let's ask ChatGPT this question instead. Yeah, and the other issue that I have is that it's not... The ChatGPT in Siri is not as good as ChatGPT on its own because it doesn't have any access to the internet. And so it can't give up-to-date information. And so...

you know, I've used it a few times and on its own, Siri has given me some chat GPT answers, which is good. But by and large, if I want to ask a question that I think chat GPT would be better at, I don't ask Siri. I open the chat GPT app because I know I'm more likely to get the response that I want in the way that I want it by just starting the conversation there. Even then I have issues, but at least it's...

It's better than that. So yeah, it's not great. There's some potential. And again, it'll do generation in writing tools, right? That's another place where you can tell it to generate something using ChatGBT and it will do that. Because Apple's models aren't going to do that. Visual intelligence. Now, this is where you can have your camera look at the world and tell you things.

I will say visual intelligence, it's one of these classic features that

I am not sure when to use it because every time I've tested it, I don't get results that I find to be good. So I've only used it a few times. I have no habit for it. I never think about this feature because at the moment, at least, it also feels really half-baked. Like I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with this thing and why it is more beneficial than me just taking a picture of something and then...

uploading it to various apps and services to get answers. It's basically just a shortcut for that. Yeah. Is what it is. And I just haven't found it to be really very reliable or predictable. And so I don't really have much of an opinion on this feature, to be honest. I don't use it very often. And the utility is a question. So I just took a picture of my dog as we were talking.

And it says, a white dog is sitting attentively in front of a washing machine, likely watching or waiting for someone. This behavior is common in dogs, as they often feel comforted by following human routines or curious about household activities. Well, yes, somebody is vacuuming in the other room and the dog is sitting on the...

uh, carpet looking out and the washing machine is in front of her. This is all true. But like, but why? I just did this with my, I just went, looked at my desk and my AirPods there. And it says the image showcases a pair of wireless earbuds in their charging case placed on a colorful mat featuring a cartoon design alongside a table or laptop and

tablet or laptop. Wireless earbuds are compact, portable, and offer the convenience of listening to audio without the hassle of tangled wires. Like, look, this is all impressive stuff, but what is the use? For like an alien coming down from another planet and being like, tell me about what happens on Earth. I'm not sure what the use is of that, right? Because also as well, the...

I mean, I guess you can then ask questions. You know, you could do the thing like in the ad, like what kind of dog is that? Like, you know, that's the thing because you can then ask questions of the image. Like you can kick off a conversation that way. But yeah, I've just yet to find a like compelling, reliable use of this feature.

Yeah. If I tap the ask button or the Google button, basically, when I take a picture of my Ember mug, it says this is an Ember mug. So that's, I mean, that's something. But again, I kind of want another layer here, right? I want a layer where it's trying to intuit right off the bat what it is. And instead, it sort of just takes the picture and says, okay, tap something or ask a question. And I don't know. It's like, I get the idea here, but I want it to be more proactive. Yeah.

I wanted to do a better job of interpreting what I might actually be asking. And I just don't, I, it's, I, yeah, no, I, I have not had success with it.

The writing tools, you mentioned those a little bit. Now, I know that obviously you're very anti the writing tools for very good reasons. You are a writer. Like, I wouldn't use podcasting tools if they made them. Not accurate? They're not for me, but I have been very pro the writing tools because I think there are a lot of people who are not comfortable writing. I'm sorry. I don't mean... If the computer can help them, then good. I don't mean in concept. I mean as in you as a user is what I mean.

me. You're not going to use them. For sure. Never. Anti-use is more what I'm trying to say, but not conceptually against. Where I am a fan of having

like a very competent and kind of complex system that is built in to the device to check my grammar and punctuation and also make suggestions for me. Like I wrote a post the other day that I was writing it in croissant and cross-posting it. And I wanted to just check that my sentence structure was good. And I was able to use writing tools to just proofread that for me. And it was like, yep, this is all good. And then I had the confidence to then post it because it wasn't going to have mistakes in it.

And it has other good tools, right? Summarizing is good. Taking text and turning it into a list is good. I'm not so interested in having it write for me from scratch. Like, I just don't really need that. But the tools are good. Yeah. So some of this is in 18.1. But in 0.2, you can...

actually tell it specifically to do something to the text in a box instead of just tapping on the limited kind of pre-baked questions which gives you more freedom to say you know could this be a little funnier or whatever and it will take a crack at it no I think these are great and again I think my point is didn't work for me but that's because I'm a writer most people aren't

And a lot of people are not comfortable with language or comfortable with sharing their written language publicly, whether they're, you know, at work writing an email or doing a social media post or whatever. And I think that it's great for that. All these LLMs are generally pretty decent at doing things like generating summaries or doing the whole, like, make bullet lists or make this into a table, like all those features that are there. There are a lot of things like that that are good, I think, fundamentally. Yeah.

And for a lot of people around the world, 18.2 is good because it brings Apple intelligence. So it's currently been in U.S. English and you've been able to use it in different parts of the world. We have to make a bunch of changes to your device. So it now is in a bunch more languages and places that speak English and

So you'll also get features like notification and message summaries and stuff like that as part of 18.2. But I wanted to also touch on two 18.2 features that aren't related to Apple Intelligence. One of them is mail categorization, which works so good

It makes me so mad that it's iPhone only. I am so mad about this because it works great. It does a very good job of detecting where a message should live, whether it's like personal or transactions or promotions or whatever.

And also in a very un-Apple move, you can recategorize things if it got it wrong. Usually like Apple's like, ah, don't worry, we got this. And then that's the end of it. But no, you can say like, no, put this here or put this there. I really, really like this feature and I wished it was on my iPad too. So I use a different system that auto categorizes my messages. So this doesn't work for me.

But it seems pretty good, and I do not understand why it isn't on the iPad and the Mac. Yeah, mad. I just don't understand it. Just, I don't, why would you do this? I really can't understand why you would do this. Because it's like, hey, get used to using your email in a certain way, but only on one device. Like, I really, I'm, you know, like if it wasn't on the Mac, fine. But like, also not on iPad? Like, what are you doing?

So here's my theory. My theory is that it's not consistent across devices. And so by limiting it to the iPhone, because most people don't have two iPhones, the mail organization is happening on the device and you can see it and it's the same. Whereas if you've got an iPad 2, maybe those messages are in different places on your different devices and they might have decided that that was confusing. The way in which you get it wrong...

could be so... It's so minimal. It's like this thing goes in like newsletters and not promotions. Like, the point really is about keeping crap out of your inbox. It doesn't really... I don't care where it goes. Just don't put it in the inbox, right? Yeah. I don't understand why it's not on the iPad. I agree. It's the same app. Also, 18.2, the AirPods Pro hearing test is available in more countries, and I did it this morning. So... Oh, okay.

I sat down while me and Adina were having coffee and started it and then realized, oh, no, I actually have to be in absolute silence. You do. So then I had to go upstairs, close the door. Because it's playing these tones in your ears that you have to detect and you tap when you can hear them. And some are so quiet. Yeah.

it. And I think they're doing some spatial audio kind of trickery as well to kind of put it in different places to maybe test how good you hear in certain areas. But this was a fascinating and very weird process and I'm happy to report I have little to no hearing loss. Which, doing the test, I didn't think was going to be the answer because I was going for some stretches where it was like, I can't hear anything. Like, I'm not tapping. Nothing's happening. But I guess...

they're a super quiet um like yeah it's like i think it's like minus one or minus three and like in in one of the ear or the other so it's not like no hearing loss but it is an amount which is like not a concern i guess maybe especially for my age um but yeah i i was sitting down like oh no this is i thought i had good hearing but like i'm sitting there for like 20 seconds and like not hearing

a thing but yeah no it was it was good and this is a again it's like one of these things where i'm just happy to have done that this morning it made me feel good it's like great i have i don't have any hearing loss like good for me and my my apple my airpods told me that have you done this test i have and how were you did you come out okay a little to no hearing loss okay it's funny because i actually had just gotten a hearing test like two weeks before right the results were the same

And the answer is that in one ear, there's a little tiny notch, but it's not that big. And what the hearing professional said is, that's probably like at some point in your life, and it's in one ear. To that side of you, there was a very loud noise. Yeah.

And that's it. Like, like, like that was probably it, but it's very small. And, and in Apple's context, it's little to no hearing loss. So that's great because I'm in my fifties and, you know, so I'm starting out at least from this point with a pretty good hearing and we all, our hearing gets worse when we get older, but it was pretty, it was pretty happy about it. So I was pretty happy about it, but I was going to make a joke about like, now that there's UK, uh,

Hearing tests, you know, do they have like British noises that you have to hear? But I don't even know what those are. Hello, governor. Just in the corner. Yeah. Hello, mate. Hi, mate. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by the Data Citizens Dialogues podcast. As a listener of this show, you know that data is shaping our world today. But if you're ready for a deeper dive into the latest hot topics in data, then you need to listen to the Data Citizens Dialogues podcast brought to you by Colibra, the leader in data intelligence.

In every episode of Data Citizens Dialogues, industry leaders unpack data's impact on the world, from big picture questions like AI governance and data sharing to more nuanced questions like how do we balance offense and defense in data management. You'll hear firsthand insights about the data conversations affecting all kinds of industries, and you can expect guests sharing unique stories from some of the world's largest companies like Adobe, Fidelity Investments, Deloitte, Hewlett Packard, McDonald's, and even the U.S. Coast Guard.

I listened to an episode about how using data effectively and efficiency is improving healthcare memorial care. I really enjoyed how the episode featured the people that are actually implementing the technologies they talk about so they can bring their firsthand experience to focus on some practical examples of the work that they've done, making sure that they keep the focus on privacy, which is obviously very important in healthcare, at the highest level for their patients and how they manage to do that.

The Data Citizens Dialogues podcast is bringing the data conversation to you, so start listening now. Follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our thanks to Data Citizens Dialogues for their support of this show and all of Relay. Let's finish out with some Ask Upgrade questions.

This one comes from Andrew, who says, for years and years, I've backed up my various iOS devices to my Mac every month. This is useful when I move to the next model. However, should I use iCloud backup instead? How do you think about and manage your iOS backups? Wow. I haven't backed up my iOS devices to my Mac in years. I've got to say, Andrew, I respect your determination. I respect your skills. Yeah.

Yeah. Just use iCloud backup. It's great. It's great.

is the answer. And it will do it at night when you're charging. It's great. Yeah. And if you don't have enough storage, I mean, yeah, you can just use your Mac, but I strongly recommend spending enough money on storage to get your devices backed up. And it just makes it very easy. And then I don't think about and manage my iOS backups. That's the truth, is that when it comes time... My mom, a few years ago, left her iPhone somewhere and had to get a new iPhone. It's like,

she's iCloud backed up it didn't matter she just restored yep and it was fine like there was nothing to it it's great so that's what I I recommend and yeah if you don't want to spend the money like okay but you probably should because it's just so easy and convenient to do it that way yeah because like

And it happens automatically. That's the other thing. It happens automatically where you may, like every month, you're going to miss maybe a month worth of data. iCloud, it's just there. I rely on it and it works fine. And you can rest assured that if, you know, you don't have to worry about it not working because Apple will tell you. Like if a device hasn't been backed up for, I think it's like a month maybe, maybe less time, that's,

there's like an alert. It's like, hey, your device has not been backed up. So they even get, they take care of you there too. So I think this is a great system. But if for some reason you can't afford it, then yeah, you're going to have to keep doing what you're doing, which is these periodic backups to another device. But I think by and large, you have some controls about what you can and can't back up. So like if you do want to back up some things, but not others, and that helps you keep up in certain limits and levels, you can do that too.

Bobby asks, just curious, but why is upgrade usually longer than connected? I don't know. You tell me, Mike. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, that is the case. I mean, which is odd because there's two of us and there's three of us on connected. Right. I think this maybe comes down to two things. One is that this show is very like segment focused. So like,

I think we plan out the segments and we do the segments, right? In a way that connect. It's just weird. This is just maybe my brain. Upgraded segment focused and connected as topic focused. And our segments do tend to be a little bit more like we talk about them this week or we don't talk about them at all, right? Like if we don't do room around it this week and we have it prepped out,

There's no point doing that rumor roundup next week because probably most of the stuff is done. So if we've prepped out a topic, by and large, we either do it or it goes away. And because of that comes to the second part where we start the recording of this show earlier in the day.

And I think for me and Federico, if we go too long on the show, we're going very late into our evenings at that point. So I think we're maybe more, we're a bit more like, let's try and cut the whole thing at 90 minutes where this show, this show is usually about an hour 45. And so I think that's the reason. And I expect one of the reasons Bobby has asked this question is because maybe they got their like overcast wrapped or something and could see, you know, I listened to every episode, but there's more upgrade than there is connected. Maybe that's the case.

Yeah, that could be. Jason said, I heard Mike, I don't know if this is you, it probably wasn't. This is not me. I heard Mike talk about using ChatGPT for search. How do you choose when to search there rather than Google? So I've been thinking about this a lot, Jason, because people keep asking me questions like this because I've been talking about using ChatGPT for search. And I think where I'm starting to come down to is

I Google something when I know where I want to end up. Like I am Googling something that I know exists, right? Or like I am confident that I'm going to get to the place that I want to be at because I know how to use Google, right? Googling is...

The Googling effectively is understanding what words to put into Google to get the result that you want, which is actually not too dissimilar from AI prompting, but I'm just more familiar with like getting to a Google search. And for chat GPT searching, it's more for when I do not know anything about my query. Like I have a question or I want some information about a subject area or like a product area that

And I do not know where I would get that information from. So I'll ask ChatGPT and it goes out to the internet, pulls in a bunch of stuff, and then I will maybe go onto the web via the links that they give me and find out some of the stuff that I want. So that's kind of the two types of searches is like, I know this thing exists and I want you to find it for me. And I have no idea about this thing. Tell me more about it. That's kind of how I split them up. All right.

And then Matthew asks, this is a question for you, Jason. So we've got like, you know, one, two for each of us with a sandwich. Okay.

This one comes from Matthew. I've wondered for a while about the discussion of off-the-record topics, particularly when media have access to Apple employees at in-person events. Why would Apple, particularly those in senior enough positions to be trusted as spokespeople, give any level of off-the-record information? Is it just to provide additional color or is there an altogether different motive?

Yeah, it's a little bit, I want to say there's on background and off the record. Those are different. Off the record is you don't talk about this. Yep. Right. Which is a very little use. That's a good distinction because sometimes people say someone told me this off the record. That still does happen. But yes. Obviously a record was made because you're, yes. Off the record is supposed to mean I'm not going to report about this.

Maybe it gives you some background understanding, but on background, the idea there is you're not making any direct quotes. You're just saying, look, I know this, but you can't say Apple PR person XYZ told me, quote, this, right? You don't say that. It's on background. The idea there is we're going to give you this information. You can share it, but you're not supposed to attribute it.

Sometimes they'll even say not for attribution. And then there's, this is where Neelay and The Verge are like, we don't, we're going to attribute information to a person. We're not, we don't want to do it. Like there's a lot of different ways to approach this. I find it,

Some of it is helpful. Some of it is silly. Like I believe that the origination of this is that Apple was frustrated that people who were doing, I don't know whether it was like damage control or product briefings or something were being quoted by name when they thought they were just passing on information to a writer. They ended up getting represented as the person who made a particular claim or

And I think that there was, it was so long ago now, but I think that people were upset because that person's name just kept getting repeated. But this person said this thing. And that Apple decided that they wanted to approach it where in many cases, not even necessarily most cases, in many cases when product information was being handed out.

that directly attributing it to a PR person when there were numerous PR people and all that was not really accurate because they were just the messenger, the conduit for information that was coming from Apple's product marketing group. And so there was this feeling of like, let's make this less personal. Let's not make this personal. Sometimes it is literally, we don't want you quoting us directly because we may say things in the quote that

aren't what we are actually trying to say. And there's two ways to view that. You can view that as control. Oh, he used a phrase that isn't approved. We don't like that. And now that's out there forever. And it's a phrase we didn't want to use. Okay. I understand it. That's a control thing, whatever. So then there's this conspiracy theory part of this, which is every time anybody from Apple says anything,

The conspiracy theory starts and it's like, aha, aha. Did you notice what they said? Do you know what this means? This means that Apple is doing this other thing. And it's, oh, it's all true now. And, and, you know, sometimes it means that, but mostly it doesn't mean that. Mostly it's just somebody said a thing. This is why Apple, one of the reasons why Apple exerts so much control over their message is because Apple

Unlike maybe any other company, I don't know, people are parsing their words online.

And trying to find secrets that are revealed. And one way you avoid that is by not allowing them to parse your words is by having all the words that are out there either be in your press release or approved verbiage. And if you're in an interaction with another human being and you're just talking off the cuff, even if you're a very well-trained PR person who knows all the phrases you're supposed to use, because trust me,

I, I've been in these briefings. You've been in these briefings. We get these briefings sometimes where the, the words that are used by the people in the briefing, the phrases that are used are literally the phrases in the press release. Yeah. Like everybody's been trained. This is like, literally, this is how we refer to this. It's groundbreaking or it's, or it's earth shaking or it's, it's, it's breakthrough or whatever it is. Like they'll use one of those and only the one that's approved. Yeah.

That's just how it goes. So some of it's control and some of it is, is, is knowing that there are people out there who will take any phrase that is not approved and run with it in directions that are maybe true, but probably not true misleading. And they're like, aha, but Anand Laushimpe when talking to Jason in New York said that the, the processing block on the M3 was actually this. And that means, and it's like, that's not what,

So they're like, yeah, Jason, you can talk to Anon, but you can't quote him. And can I say that I talked to him? Well, you know, and it gets weird. So, yeah. Yeah. I've also felt, at least in some of the interactions that I've had, that there are sometimes pieces of information that they don't mind being out there, but they're just too specific or nerdy for Apple to be talking about.

Right. Right. So it's like, we're fine if you say this because it's fine for that to be out there, but we don't have a way to tell people this little piece of information in a way that is worth sparing the time. Yeah. People also don't want to, they don't want people saying, aha, Apple said this again, because it leads down that path of it's got this imprint. And now what does it mean?

And they want that stuff to just kind of get out there or they'll answer my question. But it ends up being a thing where I end up saying, you know, it's my understanding that this thing is happening on the M3 chip.

or the M4 chip. And, you know, sometimes that does literally come from a briefing where Anand is on the briefing and I know that there's a new chip and I'm like, I'm going to ask a chip question because Anand is here and he looks real lonely. Nobody's asking him chip questions. Do they not know who this is? Let's ask Anand a chip question, right? But then a lot of times it ends up being like this. Here's the thing about that I learned about the M4 and not Anand told me this thing, right? And that's just how

those are the ground rules and you just got to deal with them. But I do, do they go too far? Are they, do they happen too often? I would say yes. I think it's become a reflex now. There was also that John Gruber thing where he, he described like the whole process of going to the briefing and where it was and who the people were and the couches they sat on and stuff. And I feel like that was one of those moments where Apple was like, okay, we need to set some ground rules because the story should never be our briefing. The story should be our products.

Right. And that's not about like we don't want to admit that there was a couch that people sat on. It's and that, you know, they're in this place in Tribeca and that we went up to the fourth floor or whatever. It's more like we don't want people talking about our our our place in Tribeca. We want them talking about the new MacBook Pro. That was the surprise announcement of OS 10 Mountain Lion. Right.

ah classic that's a good one the one that dropped out of nowhere right and it becomes yeah that was a that was a great moment i i love that moment too that's that's the one where um where mg siegler and i walked out of infinite loop and we're both like oh my god right like it was a surprise i remember exactly where i was when this news broke like i was i was sitting at my desk in my one of my terrible bank jobs like when i used to work in the branches i was a

branch manager at the time hated it. And I remember being there and that made that day better because it was interesting. And I just read a bunch of OS X reviews out of nowhere instead. People didn't believe us. We dropped at embargo time and people were like, is this a joke? It's like, no, it's not a joke. Because it would seem like it. Because this is back before they came out every year. And there had been no reports that there was going to be an update to Lion and then Mountain Lion just dropped and that was it.

It was great. And you can see why, if you do all that work, the last thing you want is one of your writers to focus on the mechanics of

of the presentation instead of what you're trying to get out there. So I think that's part of what's going on. This is a great question for Matthew. The ways of Apple PR are mysterious, but I think it is this combination of wanting to completely control the message, which you can't do, right? Because there are the press, when you give it to the press, the press is going to do what they're going to do with it. Like that's why you deal with the press is that some people will just take it from the source and

And take the marketing and go to Apple's website and that's all they'll ever do. And like, so be it. But the press gets it to a broader audience, but you do have to take it with the press's impressions and emphasis that is going to be different from your press release. And it's just part of the way the game is played. But even in then, they want to limit what they provide to the press and stay on message. They're very disciplined about that. And that also includes obscuring content.

Some aspects because, you know, and again, it's not like it used to be in the Steve Jobs, Katie Cotton era. The goal was to make Apple a black box like you don't you should never even hear about other people who work at Apple. It should just be Apple.

And Apple speaks in the voice of Steve Jobs, by the way, but it's just Apple. And it's not like that anymore, but some aspects of this remain. And I think part of that is the idea that there are no stars in Apple PR, that the products are the stars and that, that, you know, they should, and it's nothing against the people in Apple PR, but like Apple doesn't want some spokesperson to be famous for saying a thing. That's not what they want. They want, they,

the product to be famous. That's it. If you would like to send in a question of your own for us to answer in a future episode of the show, please go to upgradefeedback.com. You can also send in your feedback and follow up for us there. You can check out Jason at sixcolors.com and you can hear him at theincomparable.com and here on Relay where you can listen to me too. You can also check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can find us both on Mastodon, Threads and Blue Sky because of our sins.

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This show, while it may be drawing to a close, is not if you support us with Upgrade Plus. This week, we're going to be talking about gaming hardware and barbecuing hardware, I think, is the twofer in today's episode. But don't forget, you get 20% off an annual plan if you sign up now. Go to GiveRelay.com to learn more. Thank you to our sponsors. That is Data Citizens Dialogues, Uni, and Upgrade.

delete me. Thank you so much for listening and we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.