548: Hunched Over the Keyboard With My Eyes Closed
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From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 548 for January 27th, 2025. But record it a little bit before. My name is Mike Hurley and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason.

Hi, Mike. Happy Monday. So we'll get to this in a minute, but we're recording early. I have a Snow Talk question for you that comes from Brian who wants to know, in the new Summing Up segment from last week, what was the mountain image used as the wallpaper that was on the phone?

Yes. Thank you, Brian. So basically on last week on Monday morning, I got up and I saw that we had a new segment and that, and also Stephen Hackett sent us a, you know, another Apple intelligence summary to laugh at. And I thought maybe we could make like an Apple intelligence summary, the artwork for summing up. And so I spent half an hour before recording upgrade in Photoshop, making the summing up image and,

And that's literally the lock screen image on my phone because that's literally my phone. It is Milford Sound in New Zealand, South Island. It's a fjord, basically.

And it's a live photo. So when my phone wakes up, not only do you see the beautiful New Zealand mountains and all that, you see some water splashing at the bottom, like splashing on the boat and stuff. That's nice. And it was taken moments before a giant splash completely covered my body with water.

Do you have a live photo of that happening? I have some non-live photos. I don't think I have... Oh, actually, I think I have a video of the water hitting the camera. Oh, that's good times. The iPhone camera. Yeah, it was great. Great trip. So, anyway, that's what that is, Brian. It's literally my phone. That was nice artwork, by the way. You did a good job with that. Thank you. You did a really good job with that. It doesn't withstand close scrutiny. There are some things about it that I had to move around. But, like...

I thought for a quick chapter or thing, it was good enough. We're breaking the tradition today, by the way. I have something about iOS 18 today, but we're not actually going to talk about notification summaries. At least that's not the plan. At least we don't have anything on BBC that's happened in the last couple of days. That's fine. We're all good on that. Okay.

If you would like to send in a Snill Talk question of your own, please go to upgradefeedback.com and you can do that. So as previously mentioned in the opening, we're recording this one a little early. We're recording on the 23rd of November. Nope. It's January, Mike. It's not that early. Man, where am I? Where am I? Take me back, Jason. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there. Take me back. Take me back to the 23rd of November. It's 23rd of January, so it's just a few days, but it's before the weekend.

We don't know what was in Mark Gurman's newsletter on Sunday. It's just, we're out of time here for travel reasons. I have a trip and there was no way to schedule this recording at a better time. So apologies for that. But we've got a lot to talk about. We do, actually. I've been saving up like a month's worth of rumors because we've had too many other topics. We have too many topics about notification summaries to talk about. So we haven't been able to do any rounding up of rumors. So there is like,

There are wild horses everywhere, and the two of us have got to handle that one later on in the episode. But usually when we record in advance, I don't really like to make such a big thing out of it because it's like...

I don't know. It's stuff that the listener doesn't really particularly need to know. Yeah, we call that inside baseball. It's like, you know, when we record and how we do all that sort of doesn't matter because you just get the episode. Other than to explain, like, well, why didn't they talk about Mark Gurman's newsletter? The answer is we recorded early. It feels even more so right now, though. Yeah, so... I mean, we're going to talk about TikTok because that's a follow-up from last time. But I just think that, like...

Oh, man, it's rough. This week has been tough. And I feel like a lot of people in our audience right now feel bad. And I understand it. And a lot of people feel threatened by the new US administration and its policies, whether you live in the US or not, which I like for me is like...

I hate that I am depressed this week about a country that's not my own and how it could affect me. You know what I mean? That is its own thing. And I just want to say, for those people that are

feeling it right now, we're thinking of you. Especially those listeners of ours who are part of the LGBTQ community and the relay LGBTQ community of which I'm proud that we have. Yes. Like, I can see that people are hurting. I can see that people are, like, spiraling right now. And it's tough because I just wish that... Like, I just... Something I don't understand, and I don't know if I'll ever truly understand it, but I just...

I don't understand why people don't feel the same way as me, which is I just wished that people could just allow everybody else to just live as people. Like we're all people and we're all in the world together. And I just think it's, everybody is happier and things are easier when we're kind to one another and accepting of each other. And like from all walks of life, like this is not an, I'm like not trying to like throw bombs at someone and not like, it just, I just wished everyone was,

could just get along and and it's but it seems like it can't yeah right now there feels like there are a lot of people who are um they feel their very existence feels under siege and that's it's it's terrible it's terrible i wanted to throw in as well uh what

What we've been seeing this week post the inauguration. So last week, I guess we're out of time here. A lot of disappointment in Tim Cook right now for attending the inauguration after donating a million dollars for it. And then they, of course, moved it to inside where everybody got to be really close together and in lots of photographs. And, you know, I absolutely understand the disappointment in Tim Cook.

given that he's present around the beginning of this new administration. I also think that disappointment represents some larger and more complicated thoughts about Tim Cook and about Apple and about what it's all about. And it is complicated. And I do think we should talk about it on that kind of a very upgrade kind of approach to that

but... Not yet. This is not... This is not the moment. I'm not really ready to talk about it yet, but I do think that we need to talk about the roots of the disappointment and what Tim Cook is doing and Apple's place in the world and all of that. And I think we will...

We will get there soon. Maybe there's something to say that for all of us as Upgradians, we need to think about what do we like about Apple? And think about that. Because I know this has been a thing that me and you have been feeling for a while anyway, right? With all the lawyer up stuff. What do we like and why? And how do we focus on that where we can? Yeah, I think it's clear that

over the 10 plus years of this podcast, that there are lots of things that Apple and Apple executives do that are at the very least questionable in terms of what the company states as its benevolent, make the world a better place belief system. And we've talked about it in the past. We will talk about it again.

But I definitely see in a lot of people right now this conflict happening where there's the Apple they want to believe in. And this is a moment that shows them that that is not really what the Apple Corporation actually is. And there's a lot of.

understandable upset and cognitive dissonance. And it all makes sense. And I am, you know, I really feel for everybody who's hurting right now. And we will talk about this more, but not today. So let's actually talk about where we are with TikTok follow-up wise. So Donald Trump signed an executive order to suspend the TikTok ban for 75 days, in which a path forward is to be determined by a sale of TikTok's US operations to

a US thing. I'm not really sure what that is yet. And all of this is kind of like, supposedly, like supposedly there's a ban and supposedly there'll be a sale because it is kind of unclear at this stage if the president can do any of this. Like essentially from what I've been able to understand from the good reading that I've been doing, and I'll put links in the show notes, is

Trump is essentially asking the Department of Justice not to enforce a law and not to punish anyone that breaks it during this time period, but actually can't... That isn't the law, right? Like, an executive order cannot...

And Lao for this is the best that I can understand. It's kind of just like, hey, we're all friends here. You know? It's a very interesting situation. And again, it's like also not what he clearly promised TikTok he would do. Right? Because TikTok was like, oh, glorious leader is giving us 90 days, which it wasn't. And he'll save TikTok, which he hasn't. And we're in this interesting, like...

I think everyone doesn't know what to do right now, so it's just going along with it. And it is kind of funny and ridiculous and also deadly serious because what we're dealing with here is somebody who is the President of the United States and has a lot of very specific powers.

But is behaving as if they have all the powers, which, you know, he said, again, listen to what the man says. He said he would be a dictator on day one. He is he is saying the law enforcement agency of the United States shouldn't enforce the law. He's saying that he's granted a 75 day whatever that is not in the law. That is not what it's meant for. There's a 90 day delay that's meant for if an ongoing negotiation is happening, which there there still isn't.

And then he's also throwing out kind of bizarre statements like, we'll do a deal where it's 50-50, the U.S. government will own half of it, and China can own half of it, which is, again, not against the law. The law says it's got to be, what, less than 20% Chinese ownership, but it's got to be a majority ownership deal.

And then is it the U.S. government? At some points he said, well, the U.S. government will own it. And it's basically saying, look, this is a shakedown. Somebody's going to put in a few billion dollars to buy TikTok, but the U.S. government will own half so that when it sells, the government will make money because that's what we do now is we regulate foreign companies in order to shake them down for money. That's all going on here. And then that is not the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part is who's going to stop him? The answer is, I guess,

courts, except so many of the courts, especially the higher level courts, are full of Trump appointees from the last time. Are they going to stop him or are they going to let him do whatever he wants? Is there a rule of law or isn't there? Unknown, completely unknown. And then there's Congress, which like Congress could be the answer here. But again, maybe I don't know enough about American politics. Right. But like if you're a congressperson or you're a Senate senator, there you go. A Senate person. Yeah. Right. Something. Right.

He is undermining your job. They all voted for this. It was a vast majority of the House and Senate voted for this. So he's undermining them on multiple levels. So like you can be part of the party, but if you don't do anything about this, if you change your kind of tact on it, you're essentially saying you are not important.

Right. Right. That's definitely an aspect of it is, you know, can you ignore them or do they get on side? I think maybe they don't because everything is fractious, especially in the House of Representatives where the majority is so thin, you have to get everybody to agree to change the law. So that's a problem. And then I didn't even mention if the U.S. government owned a social media company, it would be subject to the First Amendment, which means that there could literally be no representation

on it because the government can't control speech. Oh, that's great. Oh, man. That's incredible. I had not thought of that. That is an incredible thing. You know what, though, Jason? I don't think... I don't think he means the government, but sometimes it's just so hard to understand what... It's just so hard to understand what he's saying. Yeah, he means Larry Ellison and Elon Musk or something. It's impossible. So, actually, about that...

There is the Wall Street Journal had some reporting that apparently China is now signaling that they'd be willing to look at a deal. I think they have, they did their best and realized they don't have a choice anymore. Right? Like they took it as far as they could and it's all fallen together. It's a negotiation thing, right? You say, absolutely not. And then you get to this point and they're like, well, we might as well do something about this. Uh, and, uh,

Nothing's been put together at the time of recording, but right now it kind of seems like everyone with money is willing to buy this. From MrBeast to Larry Ellison to, of course, Elon Musk. Nobody would sell something as powerful as TikTok unless forced to do so, right? Nobody would do that. You would never sell this. Yeah, you're completely right. There is no...

It's like, would Meta sell off Instagram? Would they just do that? No, they wouldn't do that. That's insane to do. For any price, they wouldn't do it. And what are they buying? That's the other thing here, right? What are you buying if you buy the US TikTok? Are you buying an empty bag that says TikTok on it? Is that what you're buying? Yes, I think so. Because I think part of the original thing is that the algorithm would not be for sale here. So this actually leads me to a couple of questions that I have in this scenario. So let's say, I think it's

The most likely outcome at this point is that an American TikTok is created, right? I think that is the most likely thing and that everybody who has TikTok in the US is migrated to this new TikTok somehow, right? If this happens- And then what?

Is this TikTok USA only or does TikTok USA get to see stuff from around the world or vice versa? It's just people doing dances to Party in the USA. Right. And then. That's it. So then imagine this, right? So I'm assuming TikTok USA is its absolute owned thing. Because what's the point, right? So like it is a container of its own.

Does TikTok USA then become available also in other countries? Well, this is the mystery, right? This is the big mystery. Is TikTok in the USA run by this, but does it interlink so that their videos appear elsewhere and other videos from around the world appear in this, but they're algorithmically ranked differently because they're being ranked like this? And this becomes... And first off, that's a huge engineering challenge, right? To be like, you're of our...

Are TikTok or not? The other question is, again, what does it really mean? They could also say, well, now the U.S. owns it and it's on U.S. soil for its servers. But otherwise, it's completely just part of TikTok around the world. In which case, what are we even doing here? But again, what are we even doing here? There may be answers to these questions in that law, but that law is too much for me to understand, honestly. So I'm kind of just for me. And also, there might be an answer, but what is it?

We'll just have to wait and see. But like I... This is like... The way... However this unfolds is like a fascinating scenario to me. So this is going to be my prediction right now. I'm just going to throw this out there. What's going to happen is...

um, they're going to get a deal. Yeah. Chinese government is going to, has, has already said, you know, we're not going to stop a company from selling things, which was not their policy before. So bite dance is like, all right, in order for us to stay alive in the U S we're going to have to sell, um, the U S interest to somebody and they will line up a deal in the next month. They will line up a deal with maybe there will be bidders,

Um, right. Because it sounds like they're, they're all sorts of different. Well, I mean, I say maybe there will be better is because it's possible that they'll literally just hand it to a favored friend. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But, but I do think that there are a bunch of American companies that will offer money for this and that a deal will be put together and that that deal, my prediction is that deal will not satisfy the law and that,

Trump will then challenge Congress to change the law. He's got a deal. Now they need to pass the changes to approve it to save TikTok. And he basically puts it in their hands to be blamed if it fails. That's my prediction, is that it is that it will end up being the buck will be passed elsewhere for the saving or killing of TikTok in the U.S. I really don't know why we're going through all of this.

I don't know. Why didn't he just let it go? He'd already won the election. Why did he need to be the savior of TikTok? Just let it go. Yeah, especially since he started all of this. I don't know. I mean, dealing with that guy's psychology, it's very hard to say. My feeling is that he...

has an intern or somebody who started posting on TikTok and people said nice things about him on TikTok. And so now he's like, oh, that's a place where people like me. Maybe I could save it. And he likes being seen as the saver of things. But what's bizarre here is, right, he started this because he said the Chinese Communist Party is controlling the minds of our children. That's basically what he said to begin with. And now he's going to come and go, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. I don't know. It makes him, I think really it's just because Biden signed it.

And so he wants to come in and undo everything that Biden did. So even if he was continuing, like there's a whole thing. Okay. This is liftoff, a podcast that is not retired, but only in hiatus on relay FM, uh, liftoff,

We covered the Trump administration the first time about their policies for space. And what's interesting is a lot of those policies were continued by the Biden administration. And what it sounds like is happening now is that the new Trump administration is coming in and saying, oh, those space policies are terrible. They're Biden policies. We're going to get rid of them. And it's like, you started them. This is just politics. It doesn't matter. We're having a lot of that here where the conservatives are like saying to labor, look at this terrible thing that happened. They're like, but you

You were in power then. But it's like, no, you did this. I've been following that story where it's like, who will stand up for this thing that's been happening for years and years and years? It's like, weren't you guys in power for a decade? It's like, well, don't talk about that. So, yeah. It's like, no, the government's the problem and you're the government. It's like, okay, I guess. But that's all this stuff is. It's just blame games. This TikTok story is interesting to me because I just...

I don't know where it's going to go. And it will affect a lot of people. And it's important not just because it's TikTok and silly dances and stuff like that. It's important because it will help define what the new Trump administration's relationship to China is.

and what the new Trump's administration relationship with the tech industry is. It will help define those. Which is clearly different to the first administration. We can see that already. Thus far, yeah. Yeah, thus far. Thus far. We'll see where it goes, but it's starting off with a bang. Let's do some follow-up. iOS 18.3 is in release candidate, and...

in the release candidate, it enables Apple intelligence by default. So currently when you, with 18.1 and 18.2,

During the setup process, you're asked if you want to do this and you can choose to do this. I think maybe at point one, you have to go do it on your own. But point two, it's like, hey, do you want to do this? With 18.3, it doesn't ask you anymore. It just starts the process of onboarding you to Apple Intelligence. You can disable it, but you have to set it up first, then go into settings and disable it.

It is still being labeled as a beta. Yeah. See, look, I don't have a problem with Apple turning features on. Sure. I know some people do. But like, if you don't turn it on, no one will ever turn it on. Yeah. And so if you want people to use your feature, you turn it on and then you let people turn it off. This is a curious one to do it on because this is also the beta where they're turning off some features.

Right. Well, they're turning off a bunch of summary things and all of that. So in general, I'm not talking about 18.3. In general, I think you do need to turn things on because otherwise nobody will find it. Like you do need to say, hey, there's a new feature. And so I understand what they're going for here. Yes, you could argue that what they need to do is say, hey, here's a new feature you need.

would you like to turn it on? But I can understand them saying, no, we're going to turn it on. And then if you don't like it, you can turn it off because this is a major part of the OS experience. Now I get all that. However, coming on the heels of them turning off temporarily, supposedly news summaries and all of that in this, in this beta. But especially on the heels of Apple using as its defense,

for the terrible summaries and notifications that, but we'll remind you in a very condescending way, the statement says, we'll remind you this is a beta. And,

And the idea there is, don't judge us. We told you this was a beta. You know what beta means. It means anything goes and things could be broken. And then at the end of that condescending statement, they say, you know, we're looking forward to your feedback about it. It's very much like, hey, dummy, it's a beta. You can't criticize us. Just send us file a radar, right? Like it's essentially the attitude that I got from that statement. It's very much hiding under the beta, even though it's in shipping software, which the whole argument about

how do you call something a beta feature inside a shipping version of the OS? Like, but certainly if you still call it a beta and you turn it on, like why, what does beta mean at that point? What does it even mean? Because you can't, I think they already can't hide behind the word beta because of all the ads and all the ways that they push this stuff. But if they turn it on by default, like,

What are we even doing here? The beta is meaningless. It means a new feature that doesn't work right, but you have to deal with it anyway. It's ridiculous. So on the last episode in Ask Upgrade, we were talking about retro Macs that we would like to be modernized. And we had a couple of people write in about this. Holly wrote in to say, last week you called out wanting the 12-inch MacBook and the G4 iMac as hardware designs you'd love to see return.

Hmm.

It's a good point because we are so often talking about color and then we didn't do that. I feel very strongly that the MacBook Air should have colors and they probably should just be the iMac colors.

The current iMac colors? Yeah, that would be a good start at least, you know? Yeah, I mean, we know they can anodize aluminum in those colors. That might be a fun thing to do. Now, Holly, the reason that we didn't mention the clamshell iBook G3 is because I don't... Because the question was, what would you like to use upgraded with modern parts? And I do not want to use the big toilet seat iBook. It was a... I don't...

It was a different time. It was huge. It was weird. My mom had one when she, they, my parents sold the house I grew up in and they were full-time motor homers for 11 years. And for the first few years of that, she, that was the computer. She sent email. She would carry it with the little handle. She'd carry it up to the office at the various parks. Cause there was no wifi in most of these motor home parks at that point. And they had, they would have like a line you could plug into to dial in to the internet in order to get your email. I'm like, I have fond, fond,

memories of the clamshell iBook, but I would not want one. However, the colors, yes, the colors on it are really nice. And they had lots of them. There was tangerine and there was a blue and then they had like later there was like a green and they're cute. I would love something like that back in the MacBook Air line. But, you know, it's it's I wouldn't bring it back.

is what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean, it's the colors are fun, the overall shape. It's kind of like for me of why did I say the G4 instead of the G3, right? I really love the iMac G3. I love the colors. I don't need a CRT on my desk anymore. That's exactly it. What would be in it? Would there be like a terrarium in the back where you grow things or an aquarium? The physical shape is the problem. Where like a G3 iBook, I don't think that's going in my bag. Like I don't think I can do that. It's huge. You can't. You can't.

And so that's the G4 is an adaptable thing. And that's why I mentioned the 12-inch MacBook is that I could see that very shape with modern hardware in it. But I do appreciate Holly pivoting in the middle of this question to a better question, which is colors in MacBook Air. And yeah, I just would like some bright colors. I know it's not for everyone. I bought a Midnight. My MacBook Pro now is a space black. This would make you think that I like to pretend that I'm Batman or something. But the truth is, the truth is...

If there was a bright blue or a bright orange, like those iMac colors, I would have gotten that. I got the Midnight because I'm so tired of silver laptops. I'm just tired of them. They're great. They're a classic. It's a classic look, but I'm just like...

It's like every other Apple laptop forever and ever. And I like something different. But if I was given the option of buying an orange or a blue laptop, bright blue, not blue so dark that it looks like black, except in certain light where it looks sort of blue, which is what midnight is, I would do it. But they don't offer those.

Leroy wrote in to say, "Do you think it's possible for someone to make a G4 base with something like a VESA mount so it could hold a modern iMac to create Mike's dream computer?" Now, that would be fun, but what I will say though is I've seen a bunch of these things online, I don't know, over the last six months or so of people taking the G4 and doing stuff with it. I will put a link in the show notes to a video from a YouTube channel called Action Retro. This is one of the ones that I had seen.

where this YouTuber is essentially has been putting new guts in a G4 for a long time. They recently, they did an M2 MacBook Air and now they've done it with the M4 MacBook Air. So they have created an iMac G4 powered by an M4. It's fantastic. It's great. I love it.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know about that video. My big issue with it is the panel because I would want to put a retina panel in there. I was trying to find this, but I had seen on threads a while ago someone who was going through the process and they had done it of replacing the screen with a new screen. Like they had actually – it was bigger.

And it was LCD. And they had done a bunch of stuff to, like, weight it correctly. Like, it was a long process that they were going through. It wasn't even someone I was following because, you know, that's the algorithm. Every time this guy had an update, I would see it. And so, like, people... This is a project that people undergo because of how cool this computer is. And so, like, there are a lot of people that do this. I think it's the best Mac design, the single best Mac design. It's beautiful. The reason that it didn't continue, I'm going to say this again because we said it last week, is screens got bigger.

and they're too heavy, and the only way to counter it is to make the base heavy. And Apple decided that that was... The amount of weight you'd have to put in a base to put even a modern iMac on an arm above it would be...

A lot. I mean, we're talking like... It's like how kids... You got the basketball hoop you can put in the driveway and you gotta have sandbags on it or they fill it with water. I mean, it's like that. You have to have weight at the bottom so that it doesn't tip over. And that's...

Clearly, Apple's designers looked at where screens were going and said, we can't keep this design. As great as it is, we can't keep it going. But I love it. It's essentially a laptop. I mean, that's the beauty of it is it's essentially a laptop. But even our laptop screens, you know, are creeping up to be G4 iMac size at this point. So you could do it. It would basically be like a MacBook Air or Pro inside Mac.

a G4. There's plenty of room inside. That's the funny thing. It's plenty of room inside the half of volleyball down at the bottom. You just got to have the weight down there so that it doesn't tip over.

So, so far in this episode today, we've had some fun. You know, we've had some laughs. We've spoken about colors and computers. We've had some big discussions, right? We've been talking about some big stuff, some little stuff, deep thoughts. If you've enjoyed this conversation so far, let me tell you, there's even more of this show than you may have thought. Every week. Every single week for subscribers of Upgrade Plus. With Upgrade Plus, you get no ads in the show, so you wouldn't hear this. You get longer ad-free episodes every single week.

There's going to be ads later on in the show. You wouldn't hear them if you had Upgrade Plus. You get tons of bonus content. We have two monthly members-only shows for Relay listeners that are behind-the-scenes kind of content and interviews with your favorite Relay hosts. You get access to the Relay members Discord, which is a great community. I wanted to mention something. If you've been thinking, I've heard him talk about this. I don't know if I'd want it.

Our platform provider, Memberful, who we use for all of our membership stuff, they consistently tell us, and Stephen was telling me, just had a call with them, that we have incredibly low churn. And what that means is basically when people sign up to become a member, they stay subscribed. They don't cancel. Memberful is always really surprised at just how incredibly low our churn is because people like what they get when they sign up for one of our memberships. And I can tell you Upgrade Plus is a good time.

Today, I'm very excited to talk about the fact that Jason has canceled Netflix. I saw you post this on Blue Sky. Speaking of churn. Yeah, Jason churned out on Netflix, but he didn't cancel Upgrade Plus. So you can go and go to getupgradeplus.com. That is getupgradeplus.com. You can sign up. You can get a monthly or annual plan. You'll get tons more stuff and you'll be helping support the show, which we greatly appreciate. So that's getupgradeplus.com. Jason, it's time to lawyer up.

Clunk, clunk. Quick one today. It's a quick one. I could not do it. All right. The UK government has announced that the Competitions and Markets Authority, the CMA, don't get it confused with a DMA, has opened an investigation into mobile ecosystems, mobile ecosystems, they would be called here, to determine if Apple and Google exert too much control. Does this sound familiar? I want to read from the government's website.

Two investigations, one into Apple and another into Google, which I do appreciate, by the way, they are separate investigations, right? Like I like that because there's a way that you could just do this broad thing. Separate investigations that will assess in parallel these firms position in their respective mobile ecosystems, which include the operating systems, app stores and browsers that operate on mobile devices.

The investigations will explore the impact on people who use mobile devices and the thousands of businesses developing innovative services or content such as apps for these devices. Essentially, it sounds like the UK version of the DMA. This is what this is beginning. There is a deadline for this investigation to conclude in October.

So we can take a breather on this a bit. Here's what I'll say. I'm interested about this. I'm a little bit surprised in one way, but not in the other. And what I'll say is...

One of the big things that the government here is talking about right now is trying to make the UK a place for investment and growth. Like we're trying to get businesses. So when I initially saw this, I was like, hmm, that's a surprise. Like, you know, to kind of put the hammer down on Apple and Google. But then when I think about it from the other side of like, unless they are using this as an opportunity to try and...

to encourage more varied business development on these platforms. So all these things are just completely unrelated and this is going to happen anyway no matter what the government says.

This is happening. And it's labor, so they're more inclined to regulate than the Tories were. Honestly, it's hard to tell right now. I know. I'm not trying to be like all labor bad. I read Ian Dunn's newsletter. I know what's going on. And also, the other thing is, yesterday, this is the thing that is weird to me, is yesterday, the CMA chief changed.

So it's a weird thing to do this. And now the CMA, the Competition and Markets Authority, the old person is out and the new person coming in worked at Amazon. Previous. Of course. So I don't know if that's obviously unrelated, but it's like, well, does this chief of the CMA have the same hunger for this? I don't know.

DMA, CMA, I love it. This is great. We spent a lot of money on that lawyer up art and I'm glad that we get to keep using it forever and ever and ever. So, yeah, interesting times. The reason we knew, the whole point of this is we have been saying this is going to happen, right? Like we've been saying it was a matter of time until these started happening all over because now the DMA has provided information

A template. But we move from luring up to rounding up. It's time for Rumour Roundup time.

Yee-haw. Yee-haw indeed. That's what they say. So this is the... What's the sound I make for this segment, Mike? I don't know. I don't know. We're going back all the way to the end of December with some of these, Jason. I've been sitting on some rumors around that. Mega rumor roundup. So this was according to Reuters at the end of last year that Apple is in talks with both ByteDance and Tencent to bring their AI models to the iPhone, like how ChatGPT is available elsewhere in the world.

And this is important because in China, the government has to approve any generative AI models for public use. Jack GPT did not pass that and has not passed that. So Apple will have to work with one of these entities. I don't think that

This stuff with ByteDance would preclude them from doing this, but it would make it weird. This is exactly like all the other iOS stuff that is like, I support all of these social media things that are in the rest of the world. And in China, I support these other things that are in China only and the other places aren't available. The iPhone in China is very localized to Chinese services because the Chinese services are available and the rest of world services are not.

And so that's what this is. This is actually not surprising at all. It's more interesting that I wonder if we'll get Chinese AI models connected to iOS faster than we'll get an alternative to chat GPT connected to iOS in the rest of the world. I don't know. Yeah. So, I mean, but this is also another thing of, it is still surprising to me that we haven't seen any other models even hinted at in the US. I know. I know. I think I predicted somewhere that...

That it may be WWDC at this point where they announce some new partners that will be coming in the iOS 19 cycle. Do you think there is any possibility that Apple gave OpenAI like a quiet exclusive? Like we're going to open this up to everyone, but like not too fast. Sure.

Yeah, I think that's possible. There was a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of thing saying, you know, you got it for the first nine months or whatever. Yeah, but it's also not possible to know that in a sense of like maybe Google was just like, no, we want people to install the Gemini app. We don't want to... That's also possible. Although, again, having access to iOS users is really good and you would want that. And, you know, OpenAI is very motivated to be there because, you know, the competitor...

Google has their own mobile operating system, so that's kind of rough. Access there a little bit maybe harder. And so that's true. Then again, Apple may offer terms that OpenAI had to take and Google's like, no. So it's hard to tell from the outside.

Ming-Chi Kuo's supply chain sources indicated to him, he wrote a memo about this, the demand for the iPhone 16 line is not indicating that Apple intelligence has been a reason for a surge in device upgrades. This was a thing leading up to these phones coming out of like, we're going to get a super cycle because people are so excited. And look, I don't know this and we can't really know this from Ming-Chi Kuo's reporting, but I thought it was just an interesting detail from him of like,

it's like gang they're not like making billions of these you know like it's not really done anything we're coming up to an analyst call and a quarterly earnings that'll happen later this week yeah um

And we'll talk about it next week. But in the last one, I think there's been a sense that if Apple Intelligence was going to drive a super cycle, it was going to be over a long time because the features weren't rolling out. They were going to be rolling out slowly. And I think generally an understanding that it was probably going to be a year plus of Apple Intelligence kind of coming. And I think that these...

these reports bear that out to a certain degree. However, I think it's interesting as somebody who watches sports and gets inundated with

cell phone ads that all the carriers are flogging Apple intelligence. Remember how last year everybody wanted titanium? This year everybody wants Apple intelligence. But the thing is, the truth is, it's just a proxy for there's a new iPhone and maybe you want the new iPhone. And they got to give you a one-line reason and the one-liner is with Apple intelligence. And it's like that's... For all we know, they're told what they have to say.

Well, that's true. They're probably given... I mean, what does Apple give them? These are the marketing points for the iPhone is Apple intelligence. That's it, right? Design for Apple intelligence is what they're going for. Just like it was... I still remember there was an AT&T ad last year. It's like, you can get a new iPhone. Mmm, titanium. I thought, well, you're trying. This is all you got is titanium. They're not doing camera control or whatever. They're like, oh, it's Apple intelligence because they think that's going to drive it. And I do think...

It drives it to a certain degree, but the super cycle, the thing is the super cycle is, is a, I probably wouldn't upgrade my iPhone, but I'm going to do it right now because I got to have this new thing as opposed to the usual upgrade cycle, which is just time for a new phone. Yeah. And what we have with Apple intelligence, at least right now, uh,

feels it's very much more, more like a hedge against the competition than it is a gotta have it feature. And so we understand it strategically from Apple's point of view, but in terms of like consumers, consumers,

I don't think it's resonating with them. And maybe as more features come online, it will. I think that that's maybe Apple's hope is that this is going to spur updates over time because there will become a moment where you'll go, oh, I got to have that feature and

And that's why, you know, that's why are there Genmoji ads? In part, it's because you're like, why can't I do that? It's like, you got to get the new iPhone to do that. Oh, okay. And then they get the new iPhone. I really tried to make a good bucatini with some peas to send to you. And I sent you the best one I had, but I couldn't get it to look how it looked in the ad, which was sad about. Yeah. I sent you a horse wearing a suit and tie though. You sure did. You sure did. I think you keep doing that.

Nine to five Mac have found evidence of something called quote Apple invites in the 18.3 beta quote after analyzing the code we believe the app is designed to help users organize meetings and in-person events.

Code suggests that the invites app will integrate with iCloud and will even have a web version on iCloud.com. The new app also integrates with a new iOS 18 daemon called GroupKit, which manages database models for groups of people. So this is essentially there's like remnants of some kind of app, which maybe will come 18 or 19, that is to help people integrate.

And I find this to be a very peculiar task to tackle in an app outside of the calendar app. And it reminds me of these apps that appear every now and again. I saw people talking about Clips recently because CapCut went away. But also there was Music Memos was one. And there's been these apps over time that honestly feel like somebody was told you can make something, go make something, and they made it.

The funny thing to me also is Apple invites means a very specific thing to listeners of this show, which this is not. You know? New Apple invites are out means it's time for an event, but no, it would mean there is an update to this application, which I think is very funny. So, yeah. So first off, I... Is this an app or is it a feature inside Calendar? Is the first question, right? Because I have to ask, like, why...

why would it be a separate app other than just, just to keep it separate? Um, I look, I do this and I'm not a person at a big business, but I have to do this for like podcasts and other things where I use strawpole.com to do this. We used to use doodle doodles got kind of junky straw poles. Nice. Um, and, uh, fantastic. Cal has a feature that does this, right? Um, I wonder with group kit though, um,

It makes me also wonder if this is Apple...

realizing the world that it's in and building features with APIs, right? So like, well, we're going to roll out this feature, but we're also going to roll out an API so the third-party apps can use it because they know it's going to be required in the EU or whatever. And so they build it, they built it with that in, you know, connected so that everybody can connect to the group kit API and understand how it's going. I don't know. It's interesting. There's definitely a use case here because Fantastical built their whole feature about this. And I use a website that does this.

Mostly because, you know, again, one of the challenges here with all of these, and it'll be true with Apple's too, is that everybody's on their own system. And so it's not great. Like you could use Google Calendar or you could use Fantastical, but like then you've got somebody who's not using that calendar. And then what do you do with them? And,

I don't know. It's complicated. Yeah, I always like the idea of these types of services more than I actually like to use these things. I think for me, something that I never want to do is just leave these huge chunks of time just booked up on my calendar and I have to wait until someone agrees to do something. I don't know. But weird. Weird thing to just be hanging out there in iOS 18.3. Yeah.

Mark Gurman reported that Apple was considering adding a smart doorbell to its product line-up.

So this would be alongside the work that they're doing on the HomePod of a screen. And it also was previously reported a potential smart home camera. So this would kind of slot into that product lineup. Apple is considering also offering a smart lock that would work with this doorbell to automatically open your door with a face scan. So it would scan your face and basically face ID-like just open your door.

This is an early stage product. 2026 would be the earliest it could arrive. And no matter what they end up shipping, this is basically, like Mark is saying, the smart home is going to see an aggressive push from Apple. All right. So this is, it's interesting because there are smart locks out there. So they would be adding to an existing category.

A lot of smart lock technology is now moving to use ultra wide band, which allows automatic unlock without requiring. So I used to have a smart lock that used Bluetooth and it was pretty unreliable. And now I use one with NFC. And so I can tap my Apple watch to unlock my door. But the next phase of this, and there were some announcements at CES about this is ultra wide band where you're

As you walk up to your door, it unlocks because it knows it's you and that you're at your front door. And the reason you use ultra wide band for that is that ultra wide band knows where you are in 3D space, which means if you walk up to the

If somebody knocks on your door and you walk up to it from the inside of your house, it doesn't unlock the door because that would be bad because it knows you're inside. Whereas like Bluetooth proximity and stuff doesn't know that. It only knows how close you are to the door. So it's good. This is interesting because what he's saying is, first off, it's going to use Face ID, which...

That's a little bit weird. It does mean that devices that aren't compatible with the lock could use Face ID to authenticate and open the door, I guess. This feels very much like little pieces of strategies that have not been coalesced into products. But I think it's interesting that Apple seems to be rifling through its existing technology and categories in smart home to figure out what it might do, because that's a step up from where they've been before.

And again, it's like, look, Apple is a business that would like to make more money, right? That is essentially their function. And...

And they are struggling to make more money from customers. Wearables, home accessories as a category grew a lot and now is basically flat. Imagine if you could sell every iPhone customer $500 more equipment from cameras. Oh, it's smart. I think a lot of us have been saying they should have done this five years ago, but it's interesting. We wanted them to do it five years ago because the landscape has been rough. It's rough out there trying to get this stuff to work together.

And I am definitely a person who finds HomeKit to be good. Like if I can get products that work with HomeKit, I do find that to be a good system. And trying to, as much as I can, find products that tie into HomeKit, I find it to be more reliable than anything else that I use. Right. So, and again, there's also just the, you know,

they get to stock their own stuff at the Apple store and it's, you know, it's perceived as premium and it works with Apple stuff. And it's, even if there are competitors out there, that's okay. Apple just needs to be perceived as being, well, this is easier and I'll spend a little bit more because this is easier. They need to pick their spots. Right. And that's why like the smart doorbell kind of makes sense because it could integrate with your smart home and integrate with your devices and

and could have like intercom support and it would show the camera. And like, I could see them doing that smart lock. It's like, what do they do to differentiate it from every other lock that's out there? And that's why the considering word is very interesting. Cause like, maybe there's something Apple could add, but like,

I don't know. I'm not sure Apple has a lot to add to locks that it doesn't already offer. I think it's easy to forget the smart doorbell is the most successful smart home product. The market is owned by Ring, essentially. To the point where a Ring doorbell is almost like

a Kleenex, right? Like in that, like that is what people think of. People just want to get ring doorbells because they, they want a doorbell with a camera in it. And so they just buy a ring doorbell and ring offer a comprehensive suite of products. So like I use the ring security system in my studio.

It's very easy to set up and you can just buy a box that has a couple of cameras, an alarm system. The alarm system has a cell connection and also a battery in it in case either power or internet is lost. And I have a bunch of motion sensors that you just buy this thing, you set it all up. It all knows, the pieces all know to talk to each other. The setup is very simple. It's like Ring have this market, which Ring are owned by Amazon.

Apple should want this. I mean, as we say, Apple should have done this years ago. They should have done this years ago. And Amazon has been on it and bought Ring and bought Eero and they've been on it. And they tried to buy iRobot, which I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to do that again now, by the way, with a different administration. Because that makes so much sense for them. I was personally bummed out and that didn't go through. That's the other thing. There are competitors to iRobot now where they could really argue that it's a pretty...

competitive market. Yes, it is. I don't believe there's a ring lock, right? They have partners that they work with, but I don't think there's a ring lock. And that's why I think Mark Gurman's report here is a little bit curious because it's like,

Does it make sense? But he doesn't phrase it as they're doing it. He phrases it as they're considering it. And so what I choose to take away from this report is that Apple is actively looking at its collection of technologies and places they could be applied in smart home categories. And it's trying to figure it out. But I think you're right. A doorbell with a camera is a smart device.

place for them as well as a security camera. I think these are smart places for Apple to go early on in this process because not only are those good categories that sell pretty well, but they're

Imagine, attention, European regulators start listening, stop listening. I don't know. I don't care. You can listen if you want. But listen, imagine the special sauce, the secret sauce that Apple would add, right? Like the idea that Apple would make it the best experience possible if you have an iPhone and somebody rings your doorbell. Like you literally, your iPhone rings and you look at it and the picture and the video is on it, right? Like, and I know that some of that's in HomeKit now, but like,

Even if every doorbell got access to that feature, because here's the other thing. Sometimes that does happen. What you want is not Apple. Let me put it this way. Apple's more motivated to do the work in their software on their devices to support an Apple product that's coming out.

That's what motivates a lot of stuff and prioritizes a lot of stuff. So you end up like even if you use a ring doorbell or something, if Apple makes a doorbell, they're going to do all the stuff that Amazon has been wishing that they would do for the ring system for years and that Apple's refused to do.

but they're finally going to do it. And they're going to do it because now they've got a doorbell. And suddenly it matters to them. Doorbell support on all Apple devices suddenly really matters to them. And so that could be good for the whole market, but certainly for Apple. Lika Sunny Dixon has shared some images of what appears to be the iPhone SE4.

The images show a black and white model. I assume that these could also be midnight and starlight. It depends on the color of the anodization around the aluminum, but yes, there is a single large camera. Uh, maybe it's the 48 megapixel sensor that was previously rumored. Uh,

This kind of like overall design has been corroborated by Evan Blass, who's another leaker who used to own EvLeaks or still does. I don't even remember anymore. But they shared some images that appear to be more of what we'd expect to see on the Apple Store. So they're kind of like rendering images. From these ones, you can also see a dynamic island. Right. I think what I took away from this, and I think I saw some other people commenting on this on social media, is...

They could totally call this the iPhone 16E if they wanted to. Yeah. Right? Because it looks like an iPhone 16. It does. It does. It's a slimmed down, decontented iPhone 16. With that thing they do on the glass where they kind of color the glass in the two-tone way. It's got all of those little touches. It looks like a modern iPhone. It really looks like a modern iPhone. Yeah.

And I know I've heard from people who said, but why would they give it a number? Because they keep this thing around so long. Like, well, they keep a lot of things around so long, but also what if they didn't keep it around so long? What if there was an iPhone every year or every other year in the spring? Why not? Mm hmm.

Hmm. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, I am still of the... I am in the, I don't think calling it a 16E is a good thing to do, unless they do what you're suggesting that they do. Yeah. That's what I'm just saying, is that there's an assumption wrapped in the, they won't do that because... And you have to question that assumption, because it's possible that they've decided, well...

this se thing what if we just made a part of the line and we kept it around for a couple of years but yeah the other way to do it is just call it se it it floats out of time and is what it is but what's great about this is that it's been a long time since the iphone 10 yeah and the se has been back and in the pre-time the before iphone 10 time and it's essentially an iphone 8 and uh and now it won't be anymore and i think that's great something i meant to mention uh

There is a slight discrepancy between these two images, which is where the flash is placed. So in what appears to be the photo, the flash is on the right side and the render one, the flash is underneath. The render one does look more real, but they're coming at it from what appears to be pretty close proximity. Maybe we have two different versions of what this phone could have looked like, but they look similar enough that...

to at least give us an idea. I do think the Evan Blass ones make the most sense to me for what I would imagine this phone to look like, but nevertheless. Also, I think maybe what you're seeing here is the limitations of the leaks information, right? Where it's like, they don't know where the flash is. So...

Or one of them doesn't know where the flash is. Sometimes you just get the basic idea as opposed to... You get the shape. You get the shape. For a case. Because it's coming from... For a case, right? I mean, I can't believe we're back there, but yes, right? Like, for a case, because the case people know. They know. I don't know how they know, but they know. The Switch rumors were all true. You know, like that all came from case stuff. And that was all basically 100% correct. Yeah. These case companies...

They must pay so much money. Oh, the espionage. I genuinely believe these case companies, they pay people kind of amounts of money that these people could afford to get fired. Like, I think that's kind of what's going on here. Yeah. And again, because the economies are so messed up, right? Like how much money a case company could pay compared to what somebody's salary is. Once a year.

somebody wins the lottery, which is they get the money from the case company to leak the dimensions. And then they're fired. Yep. And they take their money and they go to Singapore. Yep. Or Macau. They go to Macau and they put it all down on a roulette wheel. I'm creating a whole thing where they enter a shadowy world of gamblers and outlaws. I think you've just outlined your next novel. Wow. I think you just did it. The Adventure of the iPhone Case Leaker. Yeah, I think you've just started it out.

I have more. I have more. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I just want to go with this for a second. I'm imagining a James Bond movie where he's at like a high stakes table, like a baccarat table or something like that. And at the table with him is of course a Bond villain, right? Like a super villain who's like created like an array of satellites that are going to be used to control space.

lasers that control robots that are going to replace the leaders of the world, let's say, human-like robots. That person's at the table because they love a game of Baccarat. Who doesn't? A completely impenetrable game that doesn't make any sense. But also at the table is some guy from a factory who leaked case specs and has decided to live the high life.

That guy dies. Oh, no. That's a shame. Sorry. So is this one of those stories where we think we're following someone, but now we're following someone else? That's right.

It's like, well, this case leaker seems really interesting. Oh, who's this British agent with a license to kill? It turned out to be a James Bond novel that you were writing. Exactly. Wow. Look at that. Incredible stuff. MacRumors is reporting that leaks coming from a Weibo user by the name of Digital Chat Station, which is great, say that the cameras on the iPhone 17 Pro, all three of them will have 48 megapixel sensors.

So the upgrade here is the five times telephoto lens will go from 12 megapixels to 48 megapixels. Safe to say we could probably get some improved image quality from that. And also the iPhone 17 Pro will have an upgraded selfie camera from 12 megapixels to 24 megapixels. Great. Well, and keep in mind that 48 also means that you can bin at 24 and get higher quality that way, which is really nice. So there's a lot of different options you can do here. Do you think...

That could be over five times zoom then. Could be. Like they could maybe go, I wouldn't say to 10. I could call it more. Yeah, but it's like how the two times zoom is a bin version of the 1X right now. Right. Because they do. So maybe, I don't know, maybe someone could tell me, maybe they could say it's a seven or eight times telephoto because they could bin it. I don't know if that would do it, but maybe that'd be fun.

And Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has shared some leaked images also from Weibo, along with some of his own sourcing that gives us a look at what could be the design of the back of the iPhone 17 Air. These leaks show supposed images of the back case that feature a full-width bar across the top housing the camera that, yes, looks just like the Google Pixel from, like, the last few years. Here's what I don't understand.

All of the rumors, including this reporting, says there's one camera. So why would they need to do this? That's a good question. Because we just saw what could be the iPhone SE, where there's one camera and it's just the one camera. So what is going on here is...

that they would need this entire bar for one camera? Is it just, is it like they're also shoving some other stuff up there to make the phone super thin, right? Like, do some other components housed in that area? Like, I find it peculiar, to be honest.

Yeah, I don't understand what we're seeing here. But again, we may not know what we're seeing here, right? Yes, exactly. There may be who knows what's going on there that we are meant not to understand. I don't know. What I would say, though, is, I mean, honestly, as well, it could just be aesthetic, right? It could be. Because then if you saw someone using that phone, you know they have that new one, right? Because that one looks dramatically different to the other phones. Yeah.

Yeah, could be. And could be establishing a new design language that could be used on folding phones in the future or something like that, which is what we believe this phone could be anyway. Totally could be. And whilst this isn't in rumor roundup, I thought it would at least fit here. Samsung... I'm so glad that you put this in here. Okay. Because I was about to say, meanwhile... Meanwhile...

After all of our discussion of a thin iPhone coming, what might Samsung have introduced? Well, they have spoken about and shown off the Galaxy S25 Edge.

which is expected to be coming to the market maybe this year. They were a bit cagey about it. And at the Unpacked event, where they did have the S25 line, they had this, which is a supposedly, based on rumors, a 6.4 millimeter thin phone. But nobody was allowed to touch it and they didn't give specs. Love it. So basically what it seems is Samsung have been working on this

And they wanted people to see it before Apple gets the 17 Air out. Sure. Sure. Or, I mean, we don't know. It's possible that they've had super thin phones in their lab for a while. Yes. And nothing happened with them. I think the most likely scenario is they're like, they're tinkering with it. And then they hear, oh, Apple's going to do it. And they're like, well, then we're going to do it too. Right? Because we know they can do it. We know they can do it.

Because they've had to make phones this thin for the fold line. Yeah, absolutely. So, but I do think, I'm just going to put it out there. The reason this phone got put into what will probably be production is

is because of the rumors that Apple is doing it. And Samsung is just shameless about that, right? So they're like, yeah, we got a thin phone. Sure. Yep. Got it. Here it is. Don't touch it. Here it is. So bless their hearts. Like I would expect nothing less from Samsung, honestly. Samsung, just keep being you, I guess. They're doing what they're doing. Oh, I just want to say, they also unveiled a headset, right? Yeah.

And I'm seeing everyone online being like, ah, I copied the Vision Pro homework. No, it looks like the MetaQuest Pro. It doesn't look like the Vision Pro. The only way it looks like the Vision Pro is that the colors are the same. If you actually look at the design of that and the Quest Pro, it looks way more like the Quest Pro. I know this because I am the fool who bought one. You have a Quest Pro, yeah. Just if you're interested, you can go look at that.

One of the things that I found that I thought was sore about this, like how come all of these thin phones are maybe going to be happening, right? There's an MKBHD video that I watched a few weeks ago about a OnePlus phone. And one of the things that Marques was talking about was this new battery technology.

that is enabling phones to get thinner and also have really good battery life. So this might be something which is now going to unlock these thin phones. I think it's called like, it's like silicon something or something like that. It's not super important, the technology, but that even though these phones are getting really thin, they...

are still having excellent battery life because of this new battery technology. So I think 2025, I think, is going to be the year of thin phones. And this OnePlus phone kind of started that. That's great. And the truth is, this is something we talk about with computers a lot, which is even the M1 MacBook Air at Walmart is more computer than most people need. Mm-hmm.

It just is. That's just the truth of it. And that changes the dynamic, right? It changes the dynamic of who buys a computer, what they buy, and how long they hold it. Because you've got the technology is just outstripped sort of like what people use this stuff for.

I think that is also true of phones. Obviously, like some people really care about cameras and some people really care about the display and all of that. But creating something that's an outlier in terms of its size to make it thin and look different, it's going to be limited, right? It's going to be limited in

In terms of its functionality, because it's the thin phone, we know that the display is not going to be as great in the camera. There's only going to be one and all that. But we've gotten to the point now where I feel like you can differentiate like this and it's fine because I don't think anyone's going to say, oh, I really would like a thin phone, but I can't do my work on a thin phone. Right. They might say, I want the nicer camera or whatever. Right. Like, I get it. But.

That phone's going to be great. And if that's the phone you want, you will get it and you will be happy with it. And that's a nice kind of enabling technology thing. Now, especially if its battery life isn't terrible, right? If its battery life is also still pretty great and it's that thin, that's amazing too. So that's the advantage of this tech getting better is it's not just that the base tech becomes more powerful. It means that the outliers are still perfectly usable. And that means your outliers get more interesting.

Silicon carbon. That's the battery technology. Love it. Those are elements. Yep. Put them together and what do you get? Long-lasting batteries. Everybody knows that. Skinny phones. Sure. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Vitally. Vitally is bringing in a new era for customer service productivity with their all-in-one platform. Vitally's collaborative workspace combines your customer data with all the capabilities you expect from today's project management and work platforms. We

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Let's finish out with some Ask Upgrade questions. And today's show. Patrick says, with Apple doubling down on health and fitness, particularly with the Apple Watch and maybe new health devices, where do you see Apple Fitness Plus heading in the next few years? Could we see deeper integrations with third-party equipment or more personalized coaching features leveraging AI and health data? What do you think? Oh, um...

I, it's a great place for there to be more. I, I, I fitness plus is still pretty limited in that it's, you know, classes is what they're doing. And, and those classes are good. I've done them. Lauren does them. I keep thinking that there are other ways to motivate and, and,

gamify fitness that Fitness Plus could probably do that it doesn't do. And I don't know. I mean, their gamification is essentially that heart rate bar, the effort bar that shows where you are among people who do it. I don't even know if it's made up. I don't. But I keep thinking like that's one of the secret sauce things about Peloton was...

I mean, not only are there live things, but also like they've gamified it where you can sort of see where you are in the group. I like the idea of doing other fitness stuff where you're comparing it to your friends and challenging your friends. They've got some challenges for activity, but like it would be interesting to see other things where it's like you're doing the same workout as your friends and, you know, you're sharing your

and comparing it to them. And there's like, cause people do react to that. I don't know. More content is always good. I don't know. I think there's opportunities for them to innovate. And we talked about the whole AI coach thing. You'd integrate that too, I think. Yeah. So one of the things that Apple recently did was a partnership with Strava. So they're offering a fitness plus trial to Strava users and

But they're also using what's called Strava athletes in Fitness Plus content. So these are people that are – because Strava is also kind of like a social network. Like you can follow athletes and see what their workouts are. And so now popular Strava athletes – that's hard to say – will be featured in Fitness Plus content. And this is something I imagine them doing. Just peel down the Fitness Plus side.

Finding popular fitness content creators and bringing them in and giving them classes. And then they can offer Fitness Plus trials to their audience, for example. Or working with other companies like this. Because this enables them to kind of... It's the Peloton thing again, as you were mentioning. One of Peloton's other things is that people like certain instructors and follow them on social media and they want to...

do their classes. And that is also part of where Fitness Plus came from. I remember when Fitness Plus started...

seeing people excited that someone they were following on Instagram was an instructor. So like Apple went out and found people that were already content creators in fitness and hired them to be instructors. And I think that that is a very smart way of bringing people to the service because you're finding people already engaging, who already have an audience and bringing them in. And I can imagine doing a lot more of that too.

personalities are huge. I didn't understand it. I know that people talked about like, Oh, the Peloton coaches and all that, but like, it's huge. Um, Lauren does Pilates on fitness plus, and she knows the different instructors and like their styles and what they do. And she was saying to me the other day, she said, that is the hardest Pilates workout I've ever had. And she said, well, you know, the instructor is the guy who always makes it hard. And I thought this is really interesting, right? You're making a connection to this guy because,

because of the way he does Pilates. And I made that connection when I was using it for bike workouts, which I'm not anymore. I can go... I have a dog I have to walk every day. So I'm not using the bike and Fitness Plus anymore. I'm fortunate to live in a place where I almost never can't go outside to exercise. But...

And the bike people, I gravitated towards specific instructors as well. I'm like, oh, yeah, what else does Kim have for me or whatever? And like it was it is powerful. So the more personality based stuff, the more that you can bring in people who people recognize or people are going to have an affinity for. I think that's a huge part of it, too.

Andrew wrote in and said "Recent rumors are saying Apple will finally put a 120Hz refresh rate screen on the non-pro iPhone 7. But I can't shake this feeling that Apple in 2025 won't go that high and will cap non-pro phones at 90Hz.

Mark Gurman's recent report that Apple is looking to raise the refresh rates on iMacs and the iPad Air to 90Hz makes me feel even more certain about this. With Apple keeping ProMotion exclusive to Pro-level devices, what is your guys' take on the future of this? Will 120Hz come to other phones or will 90Hz be the new 60? So,

So I'll start off by saying I think Andrew is actually conflating Mark Gurman's reporting with our reporting. That was a thing that we had from an anonymous source that made its way out onto many parts of the Internet. This is back in November where we had someone who I feel pretty confident in who's given us some stuff in the past right in to say that Apple is working on a higher refresh rate LCD display system.

with a new panel that's fixed at 90 hertz, and it would be used in a next-generation iMac and studio display, and that we also, you know, we could see that maybe being something used for the phones, but some people were saying that there would be higher refresh rate promotion on other phones. My feeling on this is that 90 hertz will be the standard for non-pro devices, and that pro devices will get 120. That's what I think will happen. Yeah.

I think you're probably right. Keep in mind that when you increase the refresh rate, it's not just the display. It's also the graphics processor because they have to generate more frames. And I think it takes a battery hit too. And absolutely it does because it's generating a lot of, it's drawing more and it's generating more frames. So I think 90, that sounds to me like it's the display equivalent of Apple increasing the RAM, the base RAM of a laptop. It's Apple saying, okay,

We want this to be higher than it is. We've left this for a while now. What do we do? Because we want to have our margins on our low end products, but we want it to, it's probably too low and we probably should have done it years ago, but we saved it because of margins. And that's what gets you to 90 is that's the, that's the, it's better. Everybody feels better about it.

But it's not quite the same as the ProMotion. They'll give it another name, some other weird name, Smooth Motion. And yeah, it sounds really realistic to me. It will probably just be part of the specs of this current generation liquid retina display. We increased the refresh rate on the display. And that would just be the end of it. I do think it's time. I mean, honestly, it was time a long time ago. Yeah.

60 hertz is wild to still be doing on a phone that is the price the way the iPhone is. Tom wrote in to say, do you use dictation in your daily workflows? If so, how? And I actually wanted to ask a secondary question to this, which is, have you ever tried dictation as a way to write?

Oh, I have. I struggle with it. I know people who've done this. David Pogue, book author and former New York Times guy from way back. David Pogue has horrible RSI and everything he wrote was dictated with Dragon. That's what David Sparks uses. I don't know if he still uses it because I know he's been pretty happy with what Apple's been doing recently too. But I know that Sparky is a big dictation guy too.

Yeah. So Pogue would literally, when he was writing features for Macworld for me, Pogue would literally have a PC running Dragon because the PC version was the only one available. And for a while it was the only good one. And he would literally use it to dictate while he was using his Mac to, you know, write books about the Mac or write feature articles for Macworld about the Mac. He would dictate it into a PC. Right.

I never really understood it. I've tried it. First off, as everybody is tired of hearing me say, I type real fast. So that's one of my advantages is my brain kind of goes and my fingers go and words come out, which has been really good for me career wise to have that little...

Like, you know, you go from the brain to the fingers to the letters on the screen. It's pretty good. Pretty good. It's funny that this came up, though, because I on David Sparks recommendation, I have been playing around with an app called Super Whisperer.

And super whisper on its surface is yet another whisper interface. Whisper is the text to speech thing, right? Like there's Mac whisper and all that. And you're like, okay, I mean, how many of these, I, I build, I build a version of whisper, uh, from the code, from the source. That's a C plus plus version and put it in a shortcut. I actually do that. And it's really fast. Um,

But Super Whisper is more than that, though, because the developer of Super Whisper has layered multiple things on top of Whisper. So he uses Whisper to do the text-to-speech, and you can choose your speech-to-text. He uses different versions of it that will take your narration, your dictation, and will turn into something. And then he built a context layer on top of it that, based on where you are, it will put your Whisper output through an LLM to clean it up.

And you can choose that LLM. You can have various, I think it's mostly chat GPT with custom prompts if you want to. Plus he's baked in some prompts. So you can like have a prompt, like Sparky was writing about this. Like, you know, you have a prompt that tells it what you want your emails to be like. It always activates when you're in your email program and you use the same hotkey, but it knows you're in your email program. And so the post-processing LLM

It rewrites your email based on that kind of messy whisper transcription in the context of an email. And if you're in a different app, it can rewrite it in a different context. I think this is really smart and it takes it above what a general kind of like whisper port, put a Mac interface around it would do. Because he's trying to make it a productivity utility. It's a really interesting idea and I tried it.

And I would say, so I tried it on the article I wrote this week about moving to the MacBook Pro that I wrote and posted on Six Colors last week. Sorry, last week, last week, last week. And, you know, I ended up sitting at my desk, hunched over the keyboard with my eyes closed, kind of like saying things, but I wanted to try it. It was okay.

It was okay, and the output was pretty good from Super Whisper, although every time I stopped, it appended a sentence at the very end that I didn't say, and that was hilarious and wrong. Every time. What do you mean? Like what?

Well, because the LLMs, Whisper especially, if there's silence, Whisper sometimes just hallucinates things. Oh, wow. And then the hallucination gets passed on to the chat GPT that rewrites it into a sentence. And it will continue the thought, that was my last thought, in a way that's bizarre. That's incredible. It's amazing. And Sparky's talked about how he says, like, don't write a sign-off for the email. Do not write the sign-off for the email. I have a signature file. Don't do it. And he says it still does it.

Like some of the time. It still does. I love you, bye. Because these are LLMs. However, I will say. It's kind of like me, actually. I think I do that a lot. Like just me as a human. Like I just say an extra sentence that maybe I shouldn't have said. I do that a lot. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, the LLMs are getting better all the time. So I did that.

And it was pretty good in that it basically got what I said right. And it was written in a style that was way better than what Mac, what like whisper generally would do. It did a better job. So that's really interesting. Um, the truth is, I mean, could I, if, if I couldn't type anymore, I could use it and probably do my job like David Polk. I could do that. Yeah. But,

I went back through the stuff that I dictated and basically edited it, which is, this is the thing about writing versus talking for dear upgrade listeners. You get to hear us talk and we're just thinking as we go, we don't have a script. We've got some notes, but we don't have a script. We just talk. When I write something that you see on six colors or Mac world or wherever,

It's one layer of processing beyond the talking. And I got to witness that because I just was like, so I get this thing and my daughter's room is heated and my garage isn't. And I kind of like dictated the whole thing. And then I went through it and I was like, oh, no, no, we're going to add like this is going to be, you know, I get to my point here faster and I'm going to make this joke here and I'm going to put a footnote here and all of that. And that's that extra level of.

where I write a sentence and then I think, and I back up and all that. And you don't do that when you're talking. So I found it interesting. I might do it again. It might be a good as a, like a brain change of pace when I've like, this happens a lot where I'm like,

Walking the dog or I'm taking a shower or something and I start thinking of a story I could write and I'm thinking what it is. And I think there's something to be said for just getting that thing that I've thought through out and then turning it into something that I would write. But getting that first kind of monologue out.

and then writing it from there. So I could see using this. I'm not going to use it every day because I do type fast and it gives me precision over what I write that I don't otherwise have. But if I've got...

That thing, like literally I will sometimes sit in the shower and I'll be listening to a podcast. I'll be listening to connected or ATP or something like that. And I'll hear something and it will send me off in a direction of like, oh, that would be an interesting story to write. And I will start writing it in my head and like, well, I'm in the shower. Like, where's that going right now? And I could see the value, not necessarily even doing it in the shower, but when I get out of, of retelling that story that I just told myself, right.

So I could get it down as a starting point and then make the words better. But so I'm interested in this. I feel like this technology is getting a lot better. But what it doesn't do is provide that extra layer that seeing your words and then fixing them. That's another part of writing for me that it can't do. It can't do.

Something that I use dictation for is not too dissimilar to what you were just talking about. So something I have to do relatively frequently is to try and come up with marketing copy for something. So this is especially for my product work where I'm trying to describe what a product is like to use.

And the easiest way for me to do that is to have the product in my hands and talk aloud and just talk about what it is like to use the thing that I'm using. Like, why is it good? What can you do with it? And so I will just like open up Notion, just turn on iOS dictation and just start talking. And I like that. And so you just, I'm just kind of getting my thoughts out and I'm not really editing them at that point. Like it's just getting it all out there and then I can go in and refine it. So I do that.

I also, I have been finding recently that usually if I want to search something on ChatGPT, I just dictate it because ChatGPT's email dictation is incredibly good. Incredibly good.

obviously right like well I mean it's I imagine it's whisper that's doing the back end work there a lot of clean whisper is an open AI thing yeah it's very very good so like it's the fastest way for me to search things with chat GPT because usually is a very colloquial search which is what I'm doing and

And so I will more often than not find myself doing that. And this isn't the like where you're having a conversation with it. This is just like on next to the search box, you can just press a microphone and just speak and then it just dictates it. So I do that too.

If you would like to dictate some feedback, follow-up, or questions for us, go to upgradefeedback.com. You can just dictate into that text box if you would like, but you can also send in your questions. I've got loads of Ask Upgrade questions, and I would still like more. So if you have a question you would like for us to answer in a future episode, just go to upgradefeedback.com, and you can do that. I want to thank our members who support us every week with Upgrade Plus.

Please go to getupgradeplus.com to learn more. As I said, we're going to talk about Jason cancelling Netflix in today's Upgrade Plus segment. If you would like to watch the show on YouTube, you can do so. Just search for The Upgrade Podcast. I would like to thank Vitally for their support of this episode, but most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason. Goodbye, Mike.