552: Table for Six
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From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode number 552 for February the 24th, 2025. Upgrade sponsored this week by Vitally, Google Gemini, and ExpressVPN. I am your host, one of your regular hosts, Jason Snell, but I don't normally do this part. Mike does all the work. Mike Hurley is unavailable because he is on, officially, on paternity leave. So I am joined by my first in a cavalcade of all-star co-hosts. It's Casey Liss. Hi, Casey.

Hello, Jason. I am so thankful to be here. I am so very lucky to be the first one. It's a bold strategy for you going with me first because it's only downhill from here, but I respect that. Let's see if it works out for me. The truth is I was kicking off with Stephen.

And then Mike said, no, no, no, no, no. I'll be there that week. And that was last week. And so you're going to be second track, which I would argue if you're making a mixtape or a, or a C mix CD or a playlist, right. As high fidelity would tell you that, uh, number two, the second track.

it's very important like that's the key I appreciate but that's what I appreciate you end up being number one and that's that's okay too so we're gonna start this episode with a Snell talk question this question comes from me Jason Snell from you to you to to to all of us including you Casey because the question on everybody's mind is did Mike and Adina have the baby yet and I am happy to reveal that they did that

It was a question. Mike was like, I'm not sure if that's going to be public by the time you do upgrade. But about an hour ago, he was like, yeah, okay, you could do it. Yes, please welcome to the world, baby Sophia. My understanding is that everybody in the Hurley family is doing okay. There's an Instagram post. There's a picture of a baby. People can check it out. Sophia was born on Saturday, the 22nd of February. Okay.

And Mike posted on Instagram Feb 22, which made me laugh because that's how not English he is. He didn't do 22 February. He did February 22. But congratulations to the Hurleys. That's so great. It was unexpected and sudden, according to Mike. They were not due until later this week. This was going to be his padding week. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.

See, getting used to it already that nothing goes as planned with children, both in the good and the bad ways. Getting used to it from the start. But no, incredible congratulations from me as well to all three of the Hurleys. This is incredibly good news. I haven't had the chance to ask him all the questions because all I know is, like you said, it was unexpected.

And I don't know, other than the obvious, I don't know what that means. So I'm very excited and curious to hear what the birth story is to the degree that the two of them are willing to share, which may or may not ever be public, to be clear. But I'm excited to hear it. And I'm very, very happy for them. And like you said, to the best that I've been told,

Everyone's doing great. Obviously, everyone is upside down and inside out, but everything is fine and proceeding as you would expect. Yeah, no, it's great. It's great news. I'm really excited about it. I'm so happy for them. I do. I will say I always when I have I talked to a friend who's had a baby and they say that it went really fast.

They're saying it like, oh man, it went really fast. They got the thousand yard stare and they're like, it went so fast I can't even. And it makes me mad because our children did not go fast. They went excruciatingly slow. Same.

I think Lauren was in labor with Jamie for more than a day. I think into a second day. And they were like, you know, this isn't progressing. I mean, it was... And with Julian was very similar. It went on and on and on and on. And so I do have a friend who literally... She took a taxi to the hospital and...

They got her into her room and she went into the bathroom of her room before she'd ever been in the bed. And she just had the baby in the bathroom of the hospital room. Oh my word. And that's like, that's fast. Right. And I'm like, that seems horrible for you, but also kind of good for you because it just happened and then it was over. Right.

Anyway, so yes, congratulations to Hurley's. The paternity clock already had started, but now it starts for real real. Don't know when Mike will be back, but he's going to take a couple months off at least. Like I said, I've lined up. I have one slot, I think, unless he comes back early because the baby was early, but probably not.

I think it's more likely he'll come back later rather than earlier where he'll say, I'm not ready yet. But I've got a long list of people lined up, starting with Casey, to fill in for Mike. So I hope everybody enjoys that. And then, of course, welcomes Mike back when he comes back. I will definitely welcome Mike back. I already can tell you that because this is his way of reminding me all the work he does on Upgrade. Thank you, Mike.

Now I would like to turn to a brand new segment on Upgrade. That's right. Does Mike know about it? No, he doesn't. It is a new segment that we're inaugurating right now, and it's called Fatherly Advice, where I turn to my co-host, who is a father himself. And we provide Mike with up here at the top of the show where Mike might still might actually listen to it.

with a little story or a tidbit about being a parent, advice, whatever you want. And Casey, it's your turn. Do you have some fatherly advice or something similar to talk about where Mike can hear us but not respond?

Even better. That's the best kind. Yeah, so coincidentally, I'm going to plug our show, Mike and my show. We are doing an episode of Analog that Mike had mostly coordinated on his side. That'll be out in the month of March where he's collecting fatherly advice from all of his co-hosts, I presume, including you, Jason. Yes. And so there's going to be a lot in there, but I don't recall exactly what I had told him when we spoke about this and he collected my two cents a week or two back. But what I'm going to go with is

that it's important. So many things are important when being a parent, but it's important among many other things to be incredibly flexible and understand when you need to pick your battles. That's true of pretty much any relationship in life, but especially with parenting. And you definitely need to know which battles to pick and you'll learn over time. And as a silly anecdote for this, which is kind of actually tangentially related, I remember before I was a dad that

that I would look at new parents and this is when I still went to an office and whatnot. I would look at new parents that came in with like baby stuff all over their shirts. I don't want to be any more graphic than that, but typically on the shoulder area, there's baby stuff all over their shirts. Who knows where it came from, Casey, honestly. Nobody knows. That's the thing. They would come in with this stuff all over their shirt and I'd be like, what are you doing? You couldn't spend the time to just

change before he got to work. And I think once I went back after Aaron had Declan and Aaron had very long labor for both Declan and Michaela, uh, I think it was within a week or so of going back to work that I looked down and I saw a stain on one of my shoulders and I realized you're that guy. Yep. I get it now. I get it. The things that I thought mattered.

they don't matter and new things matter now and that's okay. And so you gotta be flexible and you gotta know when to choose your battles somewhat in within yourself. Do I, do I really need to change this shirt or not? But often and usually with your children. And I don't mean that, that sounds negative to say, pick your battles. I don't mean it that way at all, but you have to figure out when to be flexible and when to not. And, you know, I don't have any specific advice with regard to that. You know, obviously each situation is different. Each parenting style is different. Um,

But it's important to realize that, oh, you know what? Even though this is not what I prefer,

It'll be fine. It'll be fine. You know, and, and I don't think that being a helicopter parent and, you know, steering the child every second of every day and telling them exactly what to do when is not personally my, my approach to parenting. And so that implies that you're going to have to let them do something that's maybe a little bit more dangerous than you want, because that's part of learning is screwing up and getting hurt and allowing them to pick themselves up and helping them pick themselves up.

So be flexible and pick your battles is I think what I'm going to go with for today. I mean, you strike me as somebody, knowing you a little bit, a

who likes it the way he likes it. Right? Like, I like it a certain... You have your opinion. You're like, this is the way to do it. This is the way I like it. And boy, does having kids disabuse you of that really rapidly. Very quickly. Because just on the priority list, you realize that you thought that was priority number one, and it's actually priority number 100, and your kids have the top 99 priorities, so you just have to roll with the punches. And that's just the truth of it. I love what you said about letting them fail. I...

and learn, right? Or make a mistake and learn. And there was a point where one of our kids had gotten way behind. I don't even remember which one now, honestly, it's been so long. They'd gotten behind on their homework. And the teacher was like, they've not turned in all this homework and it's not going to count and they need to do it and all these things. And Lauren got really kind of upset about it and said, they're going to get a bad grade and all this stuff. And I said, okay, first off,

it's sixth grade or fifth grade. The grade they get has no impact on their life at all, will not affect their life trajectory in any way. And I said, we can, we, we can give them feedback, but maybe having a whole bunch of the work that they didn't do get marked as, as,

a zero and they get a bad grade in the midterm report card in fifth grade when it doesn't matter is a good learning experience for them. And it was one of those things that like, oh yeah. And I don't think Lauren necessarily agreed with me because I think she's like, no, it's a bad grade. You shouldn't get them. And I was like, I know you shouldn't get them.

I know, but maybe getting them is that little shock that that kid needs to go, oh, oh no, I can't let that slide. And better to do it now when the grades don't matter than for them to do in high school where it's going to kill their, you know, a list of colleges because they messed up when it, you know, when somebody's looking.

No, I couldn't agree with you more. Just a very quick anecdote about my own life. I was a relatively decent student and I like to think of myself as reasonably bright. I was never, you know, a valedictorian or anything like that, but I was a pretty good student. And this was all through elementary school, middle school, high school. I went to a very small high school, um,

And I don't recall where I graduated within our like hundred person graduating class, but ultimately I didn't really have to try that hard growing up. And that sounds like a flex, but it actually ended up being very much to my detriment because then I got to college.

to college. And suddenly not only did I need to try, I needed to try real freaking hard. And so it ended up that I really had wished for failures in the past, as silly as that may sound, because that would have better equipped me. This is exactly what you're saying. That would have better equipped me for when I really needed it, you know, here at 18 years old, just arriving at Virginia tech and realizing, Oh no, I don't know how to study. I thought I did, but I don't. Yeah.

this is going to be a problem. And now you're surrounded with a bunch of people who were also the same student that you were. And you used to be surrounded with people where you like, you could get by because everybody else, oh, those guys all have to work, but I don't. And now guess what? Those guys aren't in your college with you. It's all people with better grades than you who are in your college. Yep. So true. Yep.

Well, that is fatherly advice. Thank you, Casey. And yeah, I'm going to try to do that with many of my... I might be inviting lots of fathers onto the podcast. I'm just saying it may happen that way. Just maybe. And so, yeah, it's a fun time for us to think about Mike and everything Mike thinks he's going to go through and what he's actually going to go through. But let's move on to a more familiar topic.

A chapter marker, right? More familiar with show art. Something, a segment I have art for. It's the rumor roundup.

Yeehaw. Yeehaw. Thank you. A couple items in rumor roundup. By the way, it is actually there's only one item. Mark Gurman's newsletter, which very kindly generates itself on Sunday for us to pick apart on Monday. Didn't really have any rumors in it this week, but there is. But yet Casey List came through and texted me this morning when I was having my tea in the morning saying, well,

Here's a story. We'll link to the article on The Verge reporting about these leaks from a leaker named Majin Buu.

who says this is what the iPhone 17 is going to look like. And I would say if you're following along with upgrade and you're following along with iPhone 17 rumors, you will not be surprised at this. It is what we've been talking about, but this is just saying again, reinforcing the idea that what Apple's doing with the industrial design of three of their phones this fall is they're taking the, I guess, what is John Syracuse to call it on ATP, the camera Mesa and,

Uh, and, and extending it, uh, all the way across. So it's like the, the, the Mesa is now just a full bar at the top, uh,

the iPhone, which is a very different look, even if the camera bump is so large now that you might as well just embrace that it's going all the way across. And of course, Mesa is Spanish for table, and I would say, if I had to describe this to people who haven't seen it, it used to be a table for four up there, but now it's going to be a table for six. That's so true. That's what's going on here. I mean, we tend to get used to everything, but I look at this and I'm like, hmm.

I mean, I know Google Pixel does this. I don't know how I feel about the industrial design of the bar going all the way across. But honestly, I was on a Zoom call with my family last night, with Lauren's mom and dad and siblings. And we do those in the living room on Apple TV. And I use continuity camera. And I was looking at the camera bump on my iPhone 16 and thinking, wow.

Yeah. They're all ugly. Like, it's not like this is going to make it uglier. In fact, this might make it a little more consistent in that it's pretending, right? It's pretending that it's not going all the way across the phone. But at this point, it's going almost all the way across. Why not embrace it? Yeah. Yeah.

I think you're right that a familiarity is what's making me... Familiarity with the current Mesa, the table for four, the four top. Yeah. The familiarity with the four top, if you will, is what makes this very distasteful to me at first glance. And visually, it's not doing a lot for me. And there's a lot of empty space in the span between the triangle O cameras and the

dual, what is it, lens and LiDAR on the other side of the phone. And there's just a lot of emptiness there. I think it's the flash and the LiDAR on the far side. Sorry, yes, yes, yes. That's what I meant to say. My apologies. So the cluster is still clustered, which is interesting. Right, exactly. And I presume that's because they need the two cameras next to each other for spatial video. Yeah, I think that's it. But I'm not entirely sure. I mean, maybe they could have made like a Cyclops-looking thing by putting the other camera dead center. I don't know. Maybe that would have been worse. But that being said...

Even though visually this doesn't do a lot for me, the thought of having a more consistent back, especially with which to set my phone down, that sounds very appealing. And the other important thing about these renders is that for the Pro Max and the Pro, if I understand this right, it looks like there's metal for the camera mesa and the surround lens.

around the edge of the phone. I'm having a hard time painting a word picture here, but the surround around the edge of the phone is metal. And then there's a large glass section that is within the metal that permits presumably not only cellular radio, wifi radio, but also a Qi charging and MagSafe charging. And so the key here is that if I'm understanding this right, that, and if you look at the photo, if you're looking at this show art or what have you, if you look at the photo, it's like this maroony red section, um,

And if that is glass, then that means there's a layer, if you will, of metal around it, which is incredibly important, I presume, for more robust drop survivability. You know, if you drop your phone, I've shattered a couple of back glasses on iPhones and it's infuriating every time because you feel like, why is this all glass? Why is this all glass? Couldn't

we put something around this? And that's what these renders seem to indicate is that they're putting a little sliver of metal around the whole thing in order to presumably help with, you know, how the strength and robustness, for lack of a better word.

I don't know. I don't know. It's, it's right. They, they only know, I think the truth is that a lot of this is coming from case leak where they know, um, they, they, all they can do is intuit what it looks like based on the dimensions of, and the shapes that they've been given. And so there's a real question about, you know, what is in that cutout area? Is that raised? Is it just a different material? Um, and,

And, and then what happens when you drop it? And you would think that that big table would capture many of the drops and the edges at that point because it's raising it up. And honestly, what is it like to use it on a table? Does that stabilize it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Because that would be, I was, I was tapping on my iPhone, uh, on the, on the tabletop the other day and being like, yep.

That's right. Don't tap in the bottom right corner. Everything just wiggles. Maybe this would be better for that. I don't know. But I don't love the look. I guess what I'm saying is I don't love the look, but I don't really love the look. When I look at it and think about it, the existing camera...

thing is not particularly attractive either it's just necessary and what they're doing is they're they're making it so that the phone is thinner except for the part that's not um and this is this is just like kind of embracing that and that that reality of it and hopefully those cameras on it are not themselves sticking out but that's what happens currently so maybe so yeah

Yeah, I was thinking about that, too, that it would bum me out if the Mesa continues to have even more depth. I mean, that's to your point on the peaks in the Mesa. Yeah. And to your point, that is the way it is now. And it's like it's not that big a deal. But I don't know, having it be completely flush would be such an improvement, I think, both aesthetically and, you know, in terms of sitting it down and so on and so forth. So.

I would love it if these were sitting flush. It doesn't give me vibes that they are flush. It said differently. I think you're correct that they do protrude a little bit more, which is too bad, but you know, I'll take what I can get. And even though, again, aesthetically, this is doing very little for me. I think in terms of behavior in real world, you know, toughness, I suspect that this will be a upgrade. Oh, nice. I like what you did there. All right. We're going to move on to yet another segment.

That's right. All before the first ad break, no less. Yet another segment that I have art for. This is the B-Tails. Mm-hmm. Okay. Sorry. I forgot which role I'm playing here. I'm not used to this. I know. It's weird. Just a real quick one. Vision OS. Two years ago.

2.4 developer beta one was released by Apple. This is the thing that basically Mark Gurman reported about a week ago because somebody who got the Apple briefing obviously talked to him. I mean, just as somebody who got the Apple briefing, I can just tell you now somebody who got that briefing talked to him.

I don't know why. 100%. Presumably whoever got it had their own channel that they could have done a story for under embargo and instead just decided to just what the heck, just give it to Mark Gurman and see what he does with it. Anyway, so it's everything that was already reported. But anyway, Apple Intelligence is in there now.

And then there's a bunch of stuff that's not in there now, but will be there at some point that they told us about, which kind of frustrates me because I installed the beta on my iPhone and on my Vision Pro in order to do this. So the Apple intelligence stuff is what you'd expect, right? It's writing tools and image playground and all that stuff is there now. And, you know, we...

One of the things when they mentioned Apple Intelligence and they introduced it back last June is they didn't mention the Vision Pro. And we were told, I don't know if you heard this, Casey, but I heard from sort of behind the scenes, somebody was like, oh, it'll come to the Vision Pro. Don't worry about that. But it wasn't on the record. It wasn't official and there was no time frame. Well, here it is. Right. So here it is. They say it's going to ship in April. It's in beta now. But there are other things that I think are way more interesting than Apple Intelligence. Right.

So first off, Spatial Gallery app. Yes, I am very interested in this. So I also got a briefing. I forget what day it was. Perfect time. But we got a briefing the same, I think it was the same day. I think so. And they spoke about a Spatial Gallery app, which they basically said, this is my interpretation anyway, that there's going to be spatial content and

And I don't believe it's immersive. Is that correct? To the best of your knowledge, it's simply spatial content. It's not immersive, right? That's this is spatial means not immersive. Basically. So 3d, um, stuff, pictures, right. And also panoramas, which aren't,

So panoramas are in here and they're not 3D panoramas, I don't think. I think they're just panoramas that wrap around you. But it's like this is the other stuff that's not immersive video, basically. Right. So, again, and I have a lot of trouble describing this to people that don't have a lot of time with the Vision Pro. But if you think about it, there's you know, you're you're looking at a rectangle in space, but that rectangle is flat.

And that's like watching a regular video. Then you're looking at a rectangle or a square in space and there's depth within that rectangle or square. And that's spatial. That's what we're talking about. And then immersive is when you can actually tilt your head and look around and see different, you know, a different perspective. It's a full 180 degree filling your vision and 3D kind of thing. And that's the, that's like the ultimate, but there's a lot of 3D content that you can do like with your own pictures.

As well as the panorama stuff, which is not 3D, but it's wrapping around you to give you that kind of full thing. These are the other things that Vision Pro does that are interesting. And so they built this app. And it's interesting because it's like...

In my story, I think I said it's like the TV app, sort of, in the sense that it's sort of like, here's some stuff we want to show you. It's like a featured area in the TV app. It's curated by Apple. Apple does the updating. It's not all Apple content, but it's all curated by Apple.

And in the demo, they showed that there's some third-party 3D content that they're highlighting, which is nice. But also there's Apple stuff. And my question is, what is it exactly? They have a...

of Jason Segel that's in 3D with the little clapboard in front of him from shrinking. So like, okay, but what I don't know is, and they say that they got severance content too, although I don't think I saw that. But what I don't know is, is this what that rumor was about Monarch where they said Apple had a 3D camera on set for behind the scenes stuff, but we never saw it? Because why?

What I'm afraid is that this is like a picture of Jason Siegel behind the scenes. And that's all it is that like, here's our extra content in the spatial gallery. It's a photo that's in 3d that somebody took with an iPhone or whatever on the set. And it's like,

That's sort of interesting, but what I'm hoping is that this will actually contain some 3D video content as well. Because we've been frustrated, all of us who are fans of this immersive stuff, that there hasn't been any immersive stuff that's been behind the scenes on an Apple show or something.

Is it maybe there's some 3D video of it instead, and that's where they're doing their VAM, their value-added media stuff for behind the scenes? I don't know. My fear is that it's like, hey, it's like looking through a Viewmaster or something. That's a throwback. Where it's like, hey, here's Jason Segel in 3D. Yep. And then you're like, okay, and then you swipe to the next one. So we'll see what's in the Spatial Gallery, but it could be interesting because that is the idea is they want to also highlight...

third-party apps that have interesting content. So you could imagine the IMAX app might show up in here. And the, the, the, some other there, I have had some other people send me links to like other 3d content apps on vision pro. And this is a way for Apple to sort of like float that stuff up. So if you're a vision pro user, you can see that stuff. And then there are links off to like those apps and stuff, which is it. I don't, so I'm, I

I'm afraid the spatial gallery is not going to really kind of like be earth shattering, but it is the answer to the question, why is Apple not trying to push more of this stuff and show off what the Vision Pro can do? I think this is them trying.

Yeah, agreed. And what I like about the Spatial Gallery is not only is it giving us more unique content, you know, it's not immersive as we discussed, but at least it's stuff that's, depending on how you classify it, you could argue is unique to the Vision Pro or certainly within the Apple ecosystem anyway, is unique to the Vision Pro. And what I love is that the implication here, if not the direct statement from Apple, is that it will be updated regularly.

And I mean, to their credit, they're doing more immersive. It seems like they're picking up a little steam on the immersive stuff, but still not as much as I would like. And I think I speak for you in saying that. And so here, at least it's not immersive, but at least we're getting more unique stuff for the Vision Pro. And the other thing that I really like about this, and they did not say this, to be clear, this is me now wishcasting it, is if you have a mechanism by which

there is a place that people could, or that companies or people that Apple have a relationship with can send their content and then it can be shown to users.

I could imagine them opening this up to anyone and saying, hey, if you just happen to be a very skilled amateur photographer and you take, you know, a really great panorama of something, submit it to Apple and maybe it'll get featured. Again, this was not stated. This is just me guessing. I would go further and say I wouldn't be surprised if there is a shot spatially on iPhone contest or something like that. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that the winners get shown in the spatial gallery.

Yeah, that might be a way that they might structure all that. There is also like there is for the Apple Watch. There is now going to be a Vision Pro app on the on iOS on iPhones and iPads. Vision Pro app not your vision pro stands alone, unlike the watch, which sort of doesn't stand alone and you need it for maintenance. But what they're trying to do here, it actually reminded me a lot of the app that Meta makes for the Quest version.

where you sort of don't need it. Maybe you need it a little occasionally, but what it does let you do is browse what's going on, browse what's in the app store. And my understanding is you can send, you basically can get apps and they will be queued up and downloaded by your vision pro when you're not, I think when you're not using it, as long as it's awake. Um,

and that is, and media as well, that you'd be able to like take media and say, put that on my vision pro and it will be there when you put it on later, which is, again, I've done that on the quest a lot where I have bought, I've heard, I've heard about apps and then I've, I've sent them to the, the meta quest from the meta quest app. So, um,

And it's just another like laying more foundational work. And I think this shows how what a early stage product this is, right? And to be kind about it, like this is something that they could have shipped day one, but there was no way. It was too early for them to do it. But they are now putting in the work to get something like a Vision Pro app on iOS.

Yeah. And I think the key difference, if I understood correctly from the briefing, the key difference here though, is at least the way it used to be when the Apple watch was new, was that the Apple watch app only showed up. If I recall correctly, once you, you made it an Apple watch, I think I have that right. I might be lying to you. Um, where either way, even if I'm wrong, the vision pro app, my understanding is you absolutely can get that as just a regular, you know, iPhone user. We don't know because it's not in developer beta one of iOS, but

The idea is if you have a Vision Pro on your account, the app shows up.

If you don't have a Vision Pro on your account, you can still go to the app store and download it. And it's, you know, there's a lot of marketing stuff in that app too. So there's a lot of, isn't this cool? You can dream on your future Vision Pro from the Vision Pro app if you want to. And then, you know, so I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about the first anniversary of Vision Pro. And I wanted to make the point that

even though we complain about especially like how slow they've been to roll out immersive video stuff, and it's really been a surprise. What's also been a surprise and a good surprise is Apple has not stopped updating and improving the Vision Pro over this first year. You know, so many of those features, spatial personas is a great example of that. Mac virtual display getting improved. These are major things that make the Vision Pro much, much better than,

at what it does. And they have been rolling those out over the course of the last year. Well, here's one that was a complaint that we had from day one about Vision Pro, which is that guest mode was bad, right? Yep. And they've already improved guest mode a little bit because it'll remember your most recent guest settings, which is nice. But this new 2.4 is going to have an improved guest mode where you can, on your iPod,

For iPhone, you can approve what your guest is doing, add apps for your guest to use. And it's got a workflow where you can tap through and get your AirPlay automatically so you can see what they're seeing in the Vision Pro. So this is very clearly from feedback for people being frustrated who want to show this to other people and they can't.

Absolutely. And to back up just a half step, the way it works today is on 2.3 or whatever the current version shipping version is. What I would have to do is I would have to put the vision pro on. Then I would have to go into control center and say, I would like to do guest mode. And then it'll ask me, okay, well, what, what apps do you want to permit? Or do you want to permit all of them? Do you want to turn on airplay, et cetera, et cetera. Then I say, okay, go. And then I take the vision pro off. And then the next person has access.

five minutes to put it on and start the eye-tracking calibration process, which I get. I mean, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but what Jason just said, and it's important to see the difference, is that in this new world, let's say Aaron wanted to try the Vision Pro on or do something in the Vision Pro, she just...

puts it on her head. And then, and then the, my phone will say, Oh, hold on somebody. That's not you just put the vision pro on. It's not even in the app. It's actually like one of these things like continuity camera or something like that, where it, where it like slides up and says, Hey, vision pro is in guest mode. What do you want to do? And then you go through and give it, uh, you know, your authority, which is so much better than having to put the thing on, put the helmet on yourself and then hand the helmet to a friend, right? Like much better, so much better. Now we haven't tried this.

Because again, although I installed betas on my phone days before going on vacation, none of it is there. I actually don't know if the guest mode is there. I haven't tried that one yet. But the other stuff isn't there yet. But it will get there eventually. And then also having it be... I mean, you can get...

into what they're watching, but like to have it be a kind of grease the skids for getting, uh, airplay up and running it so that you can just see what they're seeing on your iPhone is great as well. So, uh,

I think, or iPad. I think most of this stuff is iPhone or iPad. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've done a guest mode like, you know, months ago I did guest mode where I had the vision pro mirroring to a TV in the living room and that, that, that worked. And it's nice to have like a more group experience. This was like in February of last year when everyone was trying it for the first time and everyone else wants to see what the person in the vision pro is doing, et cetera, et cetera. So, um, and that is great. The one, the one, uh,

or crux or issue with this, which the chat room is talking about, is that DRM stuff is hidden, and I have every reason to believe it will remain hidden. Because it's AirPlay. It strips...

anything that's protected content gets pulled out of AirPlay. That's just, and screenshots. Which is annoying to begin with, but I get. But the real crummy thing is if you're trying to like talk a person through a demo, like, hey, I want you to go do the dinosaur experience. And then I want you to go watch a little something in Disney Plus. And then I want you to go do something else. The problem is not only is that blacked out when you're looking at the AirPlay version, it's actually blacked out, if I recall correctly, in the Vision Pro itself, which

which is inferior. I'm pretty sure that's true. That's not great. And so, and so this would be one thing if I just can't follow along watching somebody watch Avengers in 3D. Fine. No, no worries. But it's everything is black. And when it with an immersive experience, I think literally you're just staring into into the void.

because it's just all black. Yeah, I sent you a screenshot because I was actually using Call Sheet in Vision Pro last week. And the moment that I took the screenshot, the movie I was watching with Call Sheet to the side turned black for a second. It took the screenshot and then it turned back into the movie. And I thought, oh no. And I sent you the screenshot. And I was like, look at me watching a black rectangle with Call Sheet there. Yeah.

Which, I mean, again, I get that 100%, particularly from the airplay perspective, but I wish there could be some middle of the road where what's reflected in airplay is black, you know, that that's fair. But whatever scene within the goggles within the vision pro them itself, that was still, you know, this regular full fidelity, you know, exactly what you would always see.

Well, good to see more Vision Pro updates on the way, right? By the time we get to WWDC, Vision Pro will already be up there with the iPhone, the iPad, and the Mac in terms of supporting Apple intelligence. And that's good because that was not a given. No, definitely not. It's nice to see them. They are continuing to move ahead and address some of the big issues.

You know, I have a very quick question for you related to this. Do you happen to know off the top of your head how much RAM is in the Vision Pro? Does it have eight gigs or whatever the magical minimum is for Apple Intelligence? I don't know. It obviously has enough to do Apple Intelligence because it does it. But I don't know if they disclosed that or not. Off the top of my head, I don't know. But it's a... Oh, it looks like, you know... According to Wikipedia, doing 10 seconds of Googling, it's 16 gigs. So that is definitely more than enough. Powerful, powerful system. There you go. Powerful system.

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All right, Jason, would you like to lawyer up for a moment? Let's lawyer up. Clunk, clunk. Thank you. I appreciate that. Apple is turning off advanced data protection in the UK. I would just say, as foretold in a previous episode of Upgrade, we're not saying it's good, but we're saying we saw it coming. This is, of course, due to changes in UK laws that demand access to end-to-end encrypted data.

And so they said, Apple, you got to give us a way to access it. And what Apple did was not do what the UK government seemed to be asking, which is create a system with a backdoor. Instead, they said, we're going to turn off ADP, advanced data protection. We're going to turn it off in the UK. And when they made that announcement, before they made that announcement, they had actually changed the software configuration on Apple devices so you couldn't turn it on if you were in the UK.

And so that's the case now. You can't turn it on if you're in the UK. If you do have it on, Apple says they will have to disable it in the near future. Apple actually can't remote disable it because that would completely invalidate the entire concept of advanced data protection. But

But I've seen lots of speculation about this. It seems like the most logical thing will be that at some point, access to cloud services will probably get cut off if you keep it on, right? In order for Apple to remain within the letter of the law, they'll be like, your iCloud...

will not update anymore they haven't said any of this but that's i think reasonable speculation that that will be the state i thought they did i thought they did say that i i don't know if i'll be able to cite my source quickly while we're recording but i could swear that they did say at some point it will you will lose iCloud access oh that's interesting don't turn it off i mean what

what I've seen is that you will have to disable it and we will provide future guidance, but it's logical that that's what will happen is that the stuff that is covered by ADP will stop working until you turn it off. If you're in the UK.

Right. Again, check my math on that. I can't cite a source off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure... Common sense is the source, regardless of whether Apple said it or not. I think it's clear. Now, I want to be clear about what ADP does, because Apple has a bunch of different products that do sort of similar things here. There's ADP, there's lockdown mode, which is different. ADP, the whole point of it is, there was a selection of Apple services that Apple held a key to, which meant that Apple could...

well, first off, Apple could respond to your help from you where you're like, Oh no, I lost my password. And now I'm locked out of all my stuff. And Apple's like, ah, that's okay. We have a key for that. So we can go through a password reset system, an ID reset, you know, flow, and we can get you back into your account. Um, but also it allows Apple to respond to legal requests from law enforcement to unlock the contents that you've got on their servers and lock

let law enforcement look at them. So what ADP did was take a bunch of those services and create a new version where Apple doesn't hold the key, which means that if you lose...

your access. If you lose your login or one of the other, you know, a device that's got access to a key that will unlock it, which does include, it's not just your devices and it's not just like your Apple ID. It can be a device password. And actually, if you have a, if you have a backup,

I forget. Is it the legacy contact? You can basically give a friend and say, you can unlock in an emergency, you can unlock my Apple ID. They can do that. But Apple doesn't have a key. And those services are...

Freeform, wallet passes, voice memos, Siri shortcuts, Safari bookmarks, reminders that aren't on a CalDev server, reminders to iCloud basically, notes, photos, iCloud Drive, and most importantly, iCloud Backup because iCloud Backup includes device backup and messages backup. So this is the famous San Bernardino example, for example, for instance,

And there are others like this where you're like, oh, it's all encrypted. All their messages are encrypted. Their devices are encrypted. But if you've got Apple's key to iCloud backup, you've got their device backups and their messages backup. And Apple can decrypt the backups, even if the stuff that's on the cloud server is end-to-end encrypted. So it's this specific set that...

that is covered by ADP. And Apple introduced this while it was feeling pressure, right? From governments about like snooping. I feel like they built this feature to basically say, look, now we don't even have the key. You just go away and don't come to us. And what the UK government has done is said, actually, legally now you can't not have the key and therefore they're going to turn ADP off. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. And it's a bummer that this is happening. Like I...

I find it very frustrating that the UK has decided that not only do they get the data of their citizens, which in and of itself is kind of gross, but given Mike's not here to defend himself, given that the UK loves themselves a security camera and loves to watch on their citizens. I'm not entirely surprised that they wanted this. But the thing that really.

grinds my gears about it is that the way the law is written, well, two things. First of all, the way the law is written is that they can get access to any user worldwide, which no, I don't love that. I don't love that at all. And secondly, Apple isn't allowed to say anything about it, which is also really gross. Like I kind of understand where they're coming from on that one, but I find that very, very gross. And so,

Yeah. Country that loves to surveil their citizens wants to be able to surveil their citizens. News at 11. Like in and of itself, this is not that surprising. But the fact that they try to reach into other countries, citizens, I find really a dramatic and gross overstepping of what is really agreeable and acceptable. And that's one part of this story that will have to play out. Right. Because what Apple didn't do is turn off ADP for everyone in the world.

And so there's a scenario here where the UK government basically comes to Apple and says, you need to, I mean, first of all, they could come to Apple and say, this isn't what we asked for, which would, even though it effectively is, it isn't exactly what they asked for. But they could also say, no, I want to get that guy in Singapore. You know, I want to get that person in Saudi Arabia. I want their data.

And they're not in my country and they haven't been in my country, but it doesn't matter. We have reasons to get their data, give us their data. And if they have ADP on and they go to Apple, what happens then? Because Apple would be in violation of this law. And I think that, you know, I don't know enough about international law.

treaties and you know, but it is, and the question is, would they push it that far or is this enough? Cause they're basically, Apple is basically just reverting off of a feature. This is not new. I, there are a lot of, um,

I would say mostly from people who make a living making people upset and frightened. That's just my take on it. I think there are a lot of people out there who really make a living frightening people. That's what they do. Who, who say, Oh, Apple has completely caved into the UK and this is terrible. But the truth is this is actually Apple reverting to the previous system where this stuff is, you know, the key is held and,

And that's not great, but it's not Apple building a whole new system to hand all your data to the UK. It's literally the, if the metaphor is like the back, this is not the back door, it's the front door, which is what I think Tim Sweeney said. It's like the house never had a door. And a couple of years ago when people were sniffing around the front door, Apple built a door. And then one of those people, this metaphor is getting out of hand, said, no, actually, if this house is in the UK, you need to leave that door open. But the door was, there was never a door before.

That's the point here. So it's not great. I want to read part of Apple's statement that they released because I think this is an interesting choice that they made. They said,

that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK, given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will. Now, they don't mention the UK law in particular because legally they're not allowed to. That's not great. I don't love that.

But I do, that last sentence is really interesting, right? Because that's Apple putting a stake in the ground saying, no master keys. We're not going to make a master key for you. And, you know, first off, great. And secondly, if they stop saying that, pay attention, right? Like if they stop saying, oh no, no master keys, that means something very bad has happened.

Yep. It's a heck of a canary for sure. And what's also interesting about this is the implication there, or at least the way I read it, is that

Okay, your move. And if the UK compels them to build a backdoor or master key or what have you, this is Apple pretty much saying we're going to leave the UK, or at least that's how I read it, which I find it hard to imagine they would actually get to that point. But this is one of the only things that I think Apple might actually grow a backbone and put their heels in the sand and say, nope, I'm sorry, we're not going to do it.

I think this is an interesting game that the UK government is playing because obviously, and this is the weird thing about talking about Apple these days, right? One of the weird things about it. I know Mike and I have talked about it a lot. I know you've talked about it on ATP, like Apple's the, Apple's bigger than lots of countries at this point. And, and so the, the balance of power is interesting. Like the UK government is,

obviously has a culture, as you mentioned, it's a culture of surveillance and we're protecting you by watching everywhere and all of that in some ways that some of the laws in the U.S., as long as they're being enforced anyway, are opposed to. But this is one of those cases where I do wonder about the politics of it because it is politics, right? If the U.K.,

If somebody in the UK law enforcement says, you know, we're going to push Apple on this and we're going to demand something and we're going to hold them in violation of this and all of that. At some point, if you're a politician who is in charge of those people, if you're Keir Starmer or one of the people in his cabinet in the UK government, and you consider the risk that what Apple's going to do is say, put out a press release that doesn't explain why, but says Apple to cease operation in the United Kingdom.

Apple to lay off all of the thousands of people. This is similar to the inverse of a story we're going to talk about a little bit later. Apple to remove billions of pounds of investment from the UK, relocate jobs out of the UK, and say, we can't tell you why, but we deeply regret and we'll miss the UK, but we can't be there anymore. That's what Apple has over the UK government. And I got to say, we can't pretend that that wouldn't matter. If you're Keir Starmer,

Do you want that because there's somebody down in your law enforcement or intelligence group somewhere who has gravely overreached with their demands of Apple? And personally, I don't think he can.

Make that choice. I don't think a politician is going to tell the people in this country that one of the major tech companies in the world is going to pull all of its sales and all of its jobs out of your country. Right. Because somebody says, well, it'd be easier for us if we could tell them to unlock this guy's phone in Saudi Arabia. Right. I don't, I don't actually believe that that's a winning and that's bizarre. Right. First, right. It's bizarre that Apple could like overpower Apple.

People inside the UK government, but I think that's where we are. Honestly, I do think that that would be a really bad moment for the UK government if they pushed them that far. I couldn't agree more. And, you know, we're not really in a position to throw stones given that we barely have a government at this particular point in time. But I like to talk about other governments, you know, Casey, right now. I like to talk about them. Exactly.

Anyone but us. Good grief. But no, I think this feels to me like the UK vastly overplaying their hand because I really do believe that for all of Apple's many faults these days, particularly in the last several months...

I really think, like I said a minute ago, that they will stick to their guns on this. I really do believe it. And I think it would be ruinous for both ruinous, maybe a little bit dramatic for an entire government, but go with what I'm the vibe of what I'm trying to say here, that it would be ruinous for the UK to actually compel them to do this. And I think that Apple would actually,

at the very least, you know, start pulling out features or perhaps entire products or stop selling products in the UK. And I think Apple is of the belief that if they really do play this game of chicken and if the UK really doesn't flinch first, and so Apple has to say, okay, we're pulling out, you know, that beautiful thing at Battersea, which I haven't seen, but I've understood to be just phenomenally pretty, that office at Battersea and all of those jobs, as you mentioned, are

I really do think Apple would start to say, OK, we're going to wind all this down unless you guys, you know, find you folks find a solution that's that's more agreeable. And I don't see the UK winning that game of chicken. I really don't. And as a potentially former world leader, as a resident of a potentially former world leader at this point, I think that the UK is playing this hand as though they still own half the planet.

And they don't. And so I don't think this is going to end well for the UK if they decide to stick their heels in. A very reasonable approach to this is the UK says, okay, well, you've done the ADP thing. We'll call it even. That's the real politic here, right? Is declare victory. This is the truth. As I get older, I realize that a lot of this in politics is about the appearance of success more than it is success. So with this-

If they want to, the UK government can declare victory. They made one of the tech giants change their policy because of them.

And move on without pushing it because they know that if they push it much further, it could actually go sour on them. Now, not to say they won't try it. They could try it. But I feel like there's a lot of this. And this is actually, I think, true for a lot of stuff happening in the U.S. right now that we'll get to and stuff we will not get to. But there's a lot of that aspect, which is, you know, sometimes it's not about doing the thing.

It's about saying you're going to do the thing, declaring victory, and then not talking about it ever again and moving on. Because you get to just... And I know that this is kind of cynical, but there is some truth to the fact that if you're a politician and you can say, yep, check that box, moving on, nobody goes back and says, wait...

that I, in fact, I'll get to this a little bit later too. There's a related story about this. Nobody goes back and says, wait, you check that box, but then nothing happened. It's like, I don't know. I checked the box. What do you mean? Now let's move on. Uh, so there's some of that. I have one more lawyer up item. I want to get to really quickly and it's silly, but it's fun, which is, um, remember Casey, you remember when, uh, they did that thing where, uh, the porn app went on alt store pal, the alternative app store in the,

And they said, it's the first porn app approved by Apple. And Apple got very angry, very angry because they wanted to. Apple was so angry. I mean, they were going to scold that porn app regardless. But like Alt Store just amped it up a little bit by saying, Apple approved, Apple approved. Apple's like, we do not approve of this app. And he's like, I didn't say you approved of it. I said you approved it.

Well, good news, everybody, because Riley Tested of AltStore has posted that Apple has changed their form email for approval slash, what is it? Approval slash readiness for apps that have been notarized for use in the EU. It used to say the following app has been approved for your distribution. And it now says the following app is ready for distribution. Yeah.

It's so petty.

I think Riley took a little bit of creative license, like strictly speaking, what, what was said was true that, you know, Apple approved it. Yes. But nevertheless, it is funny to me how quickly a company as big as Apple can move when they have a little bit, a bit of egg on their faces. I liked, I like to think that somebody, it went down a large chain of managers to whoever is in charge of the email templates for developers. Yeah.

Like, who is that person? And they're like, which intern is that? Yeah. Who's got to do the email tables? Anyway, that's OK. Now things are not they're no longer approved. Future porn apps in in alternative app stores will merely be ready. So didn't that solve a problem?

Okay, I've promoted this twice, so I'm going to just jump to it now, which is we're leaving lawyer up sort of, but we're still in kind of a political sphere, which is on Monday, as right before we record this, Apple put out a newsroom post, so basically a press release saying,

saying that it's investing $500 billion in the USA. USA. USA. Oh, God, I can't even say that. I know, I know, I know. Apple today announced its largest ever spend commitment. That is a bad phrase. You should feel bad for writing it. With plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. What an interesting increment of time.

Yep. Apple and partners will open a new advanced manufacturing facility in Houston to build servers for private cloud compute. And Apple will also double its U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund, create an academy in Michigan to train the next generation of U.S. manufacturers and grow its research and development investments in the U.S. to support cutting edge fields like silicon engineering. It's really weird reading stuff like this in front of you, Casey, because you are the one who reads this stuff on ATP. Yeah.

It's strange. And it talks about how... Look, here's the thing about this. This isn't new. And a lot of people, I predict, because it just came out, are going to point to this and say, see? See? See what Apple's doing with the Trump administration? See? See?

Apple's been doing this for a while now, folks. Apple has been talking about how many jobs it creates and listing a bunch of states where Apple has business prominently like, oh, we're in Texas and Oregon and California and Utah and New York and North Carolina and all these things. This is entirely precedented. It at least started in 2018, which, yes, was the first Trump administration and

And they announced the $5 billion advanced manufacturing fund. It came right after they repatriated a bunch of money back from overseas due to tax breaks that they got to bring it back into the U S if you remember back then they announced what is now their Austin campus.

But I will say, this is a political game Apple has been playing since then, including during the Biden administration. Because in 2021, they did this and put out a press release with a whole bunch of stuff, including $430 billion in U.S. investments and another new campus in North Carolina. Now, video editor of the show, Chip Sutterth, has been sending me these links for a while now. That...

Remember the thing about checking the box and then nobody checks what happened to the box after it was checked? That North Carolina hub is...

three years later is basically on hold and apple has not talked about whether they will actually build it or not and they talked about investment in in raleigh durham area schools and all this stuff it's like it's unclear what's going on there but just to be just as a note it's not something that i've really brought up on the show but i just want to point out like sometimes these things get promised and then there's a question about if they ever get delivered but they get promised and i

And so I'm curious how you feel about this, Casey, but I look at this and I say, this is modern Apple doing what it feels is now from, you know, in the last eight or 10 years, necessary relationship maintenance with the U.S. government to point out how much it loves the United States, even though it does things in other countries, it puts a lot of money into the United States. It's got campuses and it's, it's a little bit like how they spread, uh,

Everything in the Apollo program over all 50 states, it's like, look how many states we're in. We impact all of these jobs in all of these states. And it is, in some ways, the inverse of what I described about the UK stuff. It's Apple saying, look how much money we put into the US and how many jobs we put into the US. And doesn't that mean that you, American government, like us?

like us, a great American company. And I could argue that investing in America for a big American company is not bad. In fact, it's good. The fact that they have decided to make it a press release item every few years does suggest that they feel they have to do this in order to please anybody with power in Washington.

You know, for me, I'm just happy that at least this grift is happening in the traditional way rather than in the slimy way of, you know, of the former Trump administration and this Trump administration. No, I kid slightly. But I mean, I think, you know, I'm going to have to read all those letters now, Casey. So thank you for. I know. You're welcome. You're welcome. Yeah. No, you can send them to me. It's fine. OK. But no, I think.

this, this feels particularly gross to me right now because it's not my team. That's that's on the field, if you will. And so I'm more sensitive because, you know, when it, when, when it was that my team, it was like, Oh yeah, you know, there's just go America. Right. Why, why not? But now it's like, Oh, this feels gross for years. That's awfully conspicuous, as you said earlier. Um, but ultimately what I'm trying, what I've been wrestling with a lot lately, and we've talked about this on ATP, you guys have talked about it quite a bit here on upgrade. Um,

I think my view, my mental model of Apple is,

is very different than the reality of Apple. And I think that's always been true, but it's been particularly stark to me anyway, very recently as it seems like Apple in some or Apple as a whole. And sometimes Tim individually is, you know, getting on one knee and kissing the ring and doing a lot of things that I find in, in contrast to what I think Apple stands for. It would be like if Apple said to the UK, Hey,

Oh, yeah, you're right. Let's put that back to orient totally. I would find that super gross. And this it's not apples to apples, but it feels similarly gross. Now, I'm glad that you you went back and looked at how this has been for the last almost 10 years, because that makes me feel a lot better about it. And what I think this is, and I think you said this a moment ago, is.

this is Apple maintaining their relationship with the U S government. And I think it's a little grosser at sometimes than others, both irrespective of what team you're on or whatever the case may be. But it seems that Apple being as big as they are. And you mentioned earlier, you know, as big as bigger than a lot of countries, they have to play politics and Tim has to play politics. And even though I find a lot of their actions, particularly of late to be pretty gross,

ultimately, at the end of the day, is

It is Tim's job and Apple's job to continue it to exist in whatever climate they happen to find themselves in and hopefully push forward and push for what they think is right and what they think is best. For example, you know, going carbon neutral and things in, in products where they can, but ultimately it's, it's their, it's not their job to change governments. It's their job to do whatever they need to, to work within the government of the day. And it's,

intellectually, I get that, but my heart, that kind of hurts at the moment. And I know that that's unfair, but that's just kind of how it feels. Yeah, I think this is the truth. And the reason that I mentioned that it's happened multiple times before is that I do think that this is more about, it's less about who is president and more about the scrutiny and

That tech companies now undergo. Like there was an era where American tech companies standing astride the world and being incredibly powerful was not considered particularly political. In the U.S., it was just considered a win. Hooray, U.S. companies are powerful. And then there was a turn where it was like, oh, now we're going to investigate these tech companies. And while Apple has missed a lot of that drama, it hasn't missed all of it. And I keep saying this on this podcast, but...

It is just like that dynamic with Keir Starmer, you know, not wanting to tell the citizens of the UK that Apple is going to pull all its jobs out and stop selling iPhones and all of that. I think that the same is true here, where it's hard for an American president to say, you know,

The U.S. is the home of the number one tech company in the world, but they're our enemy and we're going to destroy them, right? Like, it's not really what they would really want to do is say, yay, USA number one. That's what they want to do. But there are increasingly...

If not quid pro quos, and sometimes there are, the sense that Apple needs to put out press releases talking about how many jobs it creates, talking about how much money it's committing, even if it was already going to open that factory, even if it was already going to build that campus.

Or, and I think to a certain extent, they lean into doing a little more of that because they know it looks good. And the cost of not doing it is going to be more than the savings that they would get by putting it in a different country. And so they just, let's just do it. Let's build that thing at the Triangle in North Carolina. There's a lot of great college graduates there. It's a great place to have a campus. Let's build one there. Maybe eventually, sometime. And so that's just sort of...

Regardless of American politics right now, I think that that is where tech companies are and where Apple and Tim Cook are trying to do this, which is navigate a way to show their value to not just Donald Trump, but to...

America and all the people in power to say, we are a good American company that does things in America for Americans, even if they were doing most of it already. It changes the narrative a little bit about, oh, all Apple does is outsource everything to China and say, no, no, no, that's not true. We do so much here in America. And I think a lot of that was true before. But in 2018, what Apple felt they needed to do was say it out loud, right? To say, we get all our glass from Corning in Kentucky or wherever. I think it's Kentucky.

Um, like they need to, they feel they need to say that cause they need to say, okay, we're going to show our work about how we are a good American company so that we don't get regulated and we don't get treated badly. And part of that is cause I know, um, people out there who have seen this will know that the president of the United States has already posted a thing in all caps on his social media site, taking full credit while misspelling a word, uh,

Part of the quid pro quo, part of the reason you do this is you are allowing whoever is in power to take credit for what you're doing. And that's part of what this is. And that was true in 2018. It's true in 2021. And it's true today. You don't have to like it, but I think that that's what's going on here. And it's sort of the bigger picture of we live in an era where Apple is so huge.

And it's under enough scrutiny because its category is under such scrutiny that it needs to prove to provide enough cover to people in power that they can say, oh, see, like Donald Trump did today, see, Apple is investing in the USA. Isn't that great? And that's like that is the game they're playing.

Yep. I couldn't agree more. And, you know, a complimentary read of this is, and you implied this or kind of sort of said it a second ago, and you definitely were talking about this a little while ago. A very complimentary read of this is, well, you know what, this is already in the works anyway. And we didn't know that.

And perhaps they wouldn't have made such a stink about it, but it was already in the works anyway. Who cares? Let's just get ourselves a win. Let's cozy up with the people in power and say, look at us and look at all the great things we do for our country. And the complimentary read is that, okay, yeah, I guess they're making a big, you know, a big festoosh about it for arguably no real reason, but all this stuff was maybe already in the works anyway. And

Either way, whether or not that's true or not. Another thing I think that's worth noting is that Apple is under a lot of regulatory scrutiny in a lot of countries around the world, but including America. And granted, the political atmosphere now is a lot different than when this regulatory scrutiny really started to take a monocle to them, if you will. But but no, I think it

to curry favor with the American government broadly is a very good idea for Apple. And so if you take my emotions away from it for a second, and if you take away the fact that I don't, I don't like this from an emotional standpoint, if you look at the brass tacks from a business standpoint, it is very much an Apple's best interest and Tim's best interest for the government to

to like Apple. And so by that metric, Tim and Apple are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, even though I personally find it to be a little bit gross. I will say, I believe this press release would exist even if Kamala Harris was president.

Because it existed when Joe Biden was president. And I think the reason is the atmosphere wouldn't be that different in terms of tech under scrutiny. And if Harris was president and it was a Republican Congress, maybe... I mean, first off...

as we saw with Keir Starmer, who is a member of the Labour Party in the UK, and yet they are still pressing this. The Democrats would also still be saying, oh, big tech danger, et cetera, et cetera. They don't want to get beaten on that, on national security by the Republicans. And then the Republicans in Congress would have their committees where they're looking at big tech and what is Apple doing and all of that. It would be the case regardless. It is not necessarily about the specific...

it's about where we are with big tech and politics and how these big tech companies are reacting to it. But I'm going to say this again, and then we can move on, which is, I think that ultimately, you know,

there is not enough credit given to the idea that some of these dominant countries around the world or companies around the world are American and that as an, and that the U S government is going to give them leeway because you don't really want Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook to be enemies. You want them to be, uh,

examples of American reach in the world. Now that may have consequences for those companies elsewhere in the world. And we've seen that, but I do think that, that it, it just feels unlikely to me that any American government is going to attempt to destroy one of the great American companies. Just like, I think here Starmer is going to have a hard time trying to call Apple's bluff about Apple potentially leaving the UK. I think as,

And that says something about the power of tech companies, I guess. But you never know. You never know what politicians might do. You never know. All right. We are going to take a break right now where a familiar voice is going to send you a message.

This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Google Gemini. I tried Gemini a couple of days ago, the Gemini Live, where you can just talk to it. And it really is wild to have a full-on conversation with this thing. I was messing around and asked it to give me a few ideas for hosting during the holidays. And when it starts giving you results, you can just stop it and say, okay, but what about something low-key for a smaller group? And then it will adjust to that. So you can just keep going until you get an idea that you want.

I think that's what I would use it for the most, brainstorming things. It's so good if you don't know where to start or you hit a wall, you just go to Gemini. It helps you get the ball rolling, but you can use it for all kinds of stuff. If you want to learn something new, you can have it give you advice, ask it to explain Bitcoin in simple terms, or you can have it quiz you on microbiology. Imagine being a student and you've got this personal tutor on hand.

It's hard to explain. You really have to play around a bit. See how it listens to you, responds, adapts to your style of conversation. Just try it out. It's free. Our thanks to Google Gemini for their support of this show and all of Relay. Okay, let's talk about phones now, Casey. How about that? Yes, please. Let's talk about computers and computer phones. The iPhone 16E was announced last week. And I called it that it wasn't the SE. I feel good about that.

In our paternity draft, I got a couple of points. That makes me feel nice. It's a weird phone, right? I mean, it's like both familiar and unfamiliar. I'm fascinated by the choices Apple made.

Likewise.

It's got a ceramic shield on the glass, but they make a point of saying it's not the new ceramic shield that's on the latest models. It's the previous generation ceramic shield. So it's not as shieldy as it was. It's got USB-C instead of lightning. It's got Apple intelligence and an A18 processor. That's all great. What it doesn't have is it doesn't have the new photographic styles. It doesn't have MagSafe. It doesn't have colors. It comes in black and white. It doesn't have millimeter wave. It doesn't have ultra wide band. Curious, right? Like it's just fascinating to see

I'm sure there is a very specific manufacturing reason why all of these choices were made, but I am fascinated about what gets left out and what gets put in a phone like this. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We spoke about this on ATP last week because in a very rare lucky break for us, it was announced on a Wednesday before we recorded. And at the time I didn't have a lot of, I didn't have a lot that I'd read about it. I didn't have a lot of time to think about it. And, and,

Now that I've had a little bit of time to process and hear some input from others, the things that make the most sense to me are, I think, a combination of two things. A lot of people have spoken about and written to ATP and potentially to Upgrade as well to say, look, this isn't, yeah, on the surface, this is a consumer phone, but this isn't real.

really a consumer phone. What this is, is a bulk purchase phone. So as an example, uh, here in Richmond, Virginia, a capital one is one of the largest employers. They're a large credit card company. Um, in fact, they're merging with discover card as we speak, as far as I know. Um,

Really big, really, really big bank effectively. And most of their employees get issued phones. And I think most of them get issued iPhones. And so I bring this up to say, I could imagine a place like Capital One buying hundreds, thousands.

thousands of iPhone 16 E's or 16 E as Connected called it. That was 16 E. Anyways, I could see them buying, you know, hundreds or thousands of these. And if you're buying this as a corporate device, do you really care if there's MagSafe? Do you really, does the color czar need to be, need to approve a corporate device? Do you care if you don't have millimeter wave? Does anyone care other than me if they don't have millimeter wave? I can make an

argument for ultra wide band perhaps, but Jen, the photographic styles, who cares? So like, if you look at it through that lens and I don't know if this is true or not, this is just a guess. If you know, you could even say that it's a 16 enterprise edition. Um, again, that that's not factual, but you could squint and you could see how that could be the case.

And the other thing is you got to remove a bunch of stuff in order to hit a particular price point. And as we record, it was earlier today that Ben Thompson at Stratechery put up a post about the 16E. And what his point was, among other things, was, look, phones...

have effectively gotten cheaper because they've stayed the same price. And I always forget that, that everything in life is so much more expensive now, but except iPhones. Now this one is like, what is it? 130 bucks or 170 bucks more than the 40% more in actual dollars. Like today's dollars from the one that was for sale yesterday, but not right. Cause it's 599 instead of four 29, but it's,

But yes, Ben did the calculations and it's true. Like if you look at the March over time of buying power and inflation and all of that. Right. It's still I mean, this is the thing is I'm sure he went into it thinking it's actually not more expensive. And what he found was, no, it's it's still more expensive. This is that thing, right, Casey, where you want the black and white clarity like the iPhone 16. You want it in black and white.

but it's actually in shades of gray, like an iPhone 16 pro. So sorry, I'm not that I'm bitter about it, but it's, it's complicated, right? Like it's, it is more expensive, but it's not hugely more expensive. And Ben says like, and also like if the idea was that the cheap phone really helped Apple in emerging markets, it's not really like that clear that it has very much, but,

So it is, it's complicated, right? But they did, I mean, you have to say they made a decision. I feel like a lot of this ends up being about margins and about, I mean, they're probably on the iPhone 14 production line. Dan Warren made that point last week on the Sixth College podcast. I think he's right. Like they took the iPhone 14 off sale. The iPhone 16E seems really iPhone 14-y in a lot of ways, 14-y, but it's not. And

And so like, you know, it's, it's Tim Cook's Apple. I'm sure some degree of this is literally, they looked at the, they're going to a much more expensive, uh, product line, right? The, the, those face ID sensors are not as expensive as they used to be when the iPhone 10 came out, but they're still expensive. And the OLED screen is, it's not the new one with the dynamic island, but it's still expensive. And they did the math and they said, well, you know, I,

I took the mag safe and the colors away and it still needs to be $599. And Tim Cook was like, fine, that's fine. And that's, it's not very dramatic to say that somebody with a spreadsheet somewhere looked through the parts bin and looked at the cost, but that's probably what happened. Right.

Yep. No, I think that's exactly it is. It was a combination of what is the ultimate goal? If you take my theory as fact in that this was the 16 enterprise edition, you know, if we keep that lens, if we look at everything through that lens, what are the things that we can drop? Because unquestionably.

You can't have it all at this price point. It's not a cheap phone. I'm not trying to say it's a cheap phone by any stretch, but you can't have it all. So what are you going to drop? And you're going to drop the things that maybe a corporate or, you know, like educational customer won't care about. And I'm not, again, I can't stress enough. This is not factual. I don't know. I have no birdies, but this is the most logical interpretation I can find because otherwise some of these, some of these,

removals or some of these things that have been left behind, if it really is a consumer phone, like, why not have the photographic styles? MagSafe is freaking great. I love MagSafe. I would desperately miss MagSafe. I would probably miss MagSafe more than Ultra Wideband. And so, you know, a lot of these...

these things that are left behind look really weird if you look at it from a consumer's perspective, but looking at it from a corporate perspective, they make at least some modicum of sense. Right. And you end up with people who are just like, I just want an iPhone. I mean, I might buy one of these for my mom because long story short, you know, her phone broke while my sister was visiting her. And so she bought her an SE. And the problem is my mom has really struggled in the desert with kind of wrinkly fingers. She can't get touch ID to work. And my sister bought her another touch ID phone. I'm like, stupid.

like so mad because like, no, she can't do touch ID. We need to get her a face ID phone. So she still has to put in her password every time. It makes me so mad. I might get her one of these. I told this to Mike, by the way, over the weekend. And he said, you're a good son. That was very nice. Thank you, Mike. And there's, there's a marketing product line thing too. I mean, it creates this 599, 699, 799, 899, 999, right? And then 1199 for the big one. But like,

It does that where you can get an Apple intelligence model for $599. The $699 phone is not an Apple intelligence model. And then over time...

I do think that they'll probably update this phone every two or three years, and that's good enough, right? And they'll increment the number to whatever the latest is. You know, it is not, look, it's probably not for anybody who listens to this podcast, although I have been surprised. There are a lot of people who just don't care about their iPhone, and it's all, there is an argument to be made that they're all so good at this point.

that it's fine. Like, it's fine. And you buy it, and then you use it for seven years. And it's fine. And who cares? And I think that other than the people who want a small phone, and unfortunately, the truth is, small phone era is just over Apple. If enough people bought an Apple, it would make one. Not enough people buy it. It's sad. RIP iPhone mini, but that's just how it is. But a lot of people don't really care about all these super powerful features. So,

I consider MagSafe curious, and I wonder if it was just simply an engineering decision where it's like, we can't put that in and do this other thing that we need to do. Because all the accessories, and now you've got this weird outlier that's a 16, but it's not compatible with MagSafe accessories. It's not great. Not great. Nope.

You know, Apple, we've seen it with the Apple Pencil. We've seen it in a bunch of other areas. If it comes down to a little confusion in the product line or money, Apple chooses money. Every time. Every time. It's like, oh, you got four Apple Pencils there. And they're like, sorry, I can't hear you. I'm counting my money right now.

Because I do think that that's the, you know, a lot of us on the outside are like, but oh, but your product line could be much cleaner and nicer. And then there's somebody with a spreadsheet inside of Apple who's like, nope. Right? Like that simple.

Always moving toward perfection, but never, ever, ever reaching it because reasons. And that feels like that's part of the iPhone 16E story. You know, the big story, though, is the C1, right? Yes. We've been talking for six years. We've been talking about Apple building its own cellular chip, right? It bought Intel's motor business. Actually, it's longer than that because I believe there were rumors that Apple was trying to build a cellular chip themselves.

And they were very frustrated. So it's probably more like eight years or 10 years that this has been going on. But nearly six years ago, Apple bought Intel's modem business for a billion dollars and then hired a bunch of people.

And it's taken them this long, but they've got the C1, which is their first beachhead in not having to pay Qualcomm for chips. Still had to pay them for licensing patents probably for a long time, but not chips anymore in some of these products. Right.

I don't know. We don't know enough about it. The product is not like we out yet. We don't have the details I've predicted in, in the draft that there will be some scandal that comes out that Apple probably already knows is true about the specs of this thing, but that they haven't talked about it. And then somebody will find it and go, Oh no, the C one doesn't do this. And, and,

there'll be a, you know, tempest in the teapot and then everybody will forget about it. But like, I feel like this is what this phone is going to be remembered for because this is the first step into a new world where I assume, you know, we are now on the path where eventually every Apple product, please, please, please, including Mac laptops, please, please, please, please, we'll have an Apple cellular chip in them.

Yep. Now, it's obvious that this was coming at some point. I mean, you don't have to be a talking head like the two of us to look at Apple and realize this is a fundamental technology in so many of their products, please, including the MacBooks, please. And so they're going to want to control this. I forget the quote. You know exactly what quote I'm thinking of. But, you know, it's in our best interest to control all the stuff that our products rely on. It was said much more eloquently than that. But you get the point. Mm hmm.

And, um, and so it is clear that they've been working. I mean, obviously we've known it, but even if we didn't know it, it would be clear that they've been working toward this for a long time. And it makes a lot of sense to take a phone that I don't think a lot of, a lot of consumers are going to buy. Some certainly will. I'm not trying to say no, but none of them will, but some, some will, but it's not the core iPhone. It's not, it's not the core. It is the most outlier of new iPhones ever.

Exactly. And so you take this, what presumably may not be in certainly in terms of like, you know, your average consumer is not going to be the most popular phone and you experiment there and it makes perfect sense. And one of the interesting things that this phone does have, which we have not mentioned yet is of all the sixteens, I know it was all the 6.1 inch phones. I forget the, the, the asterisk they put on the statement, but it has better battery life than the,

Most of its contemporaries, if not all. And there's 26 hours of constant video playback. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. And the reason I bring this up in the context of the C1 is that they said during their presentation that.

This is the most power efficient modem on the market. And so you can imagine and you can see how these two are related. And we had at ATP a handful of people that wrote in and said, look, the only thing I care about in my phone is battery life. Everything else is secondary to that. So you know what I'm going to be buying myself? An iPhone 16E.

And, you know, I get that. And as a quick aside, another thing that a handful of people said was that I guess MagSafe can interfere with pacemakers, which means that if you have a phone without MagSafe, that's a great thing if you also have a pacemaker. So that's another example. But anyways, coming back to C1, this is extremely exciting. And I am really...

happy and curious to see how this rollout goes, because I remember years ago, and I'm sure you do too, Jason, there was several years ago now, I don't recall which phone it was, but there was a lot of brouhaha, some of which may have been invented, some of which was probably real. But, oh, if you have a Qualcomm modem

then your phone is faster, better. I forget the details. But if you have one of the Intel modems, then yours is like, you know, hamstrung from the factory. And I forget if it was speed or power. There was some issue. I don't recall what it was. I think it was top data rates. I think it was. And it was not a huge difference, but it was enough for nerds to notice and say, oh, you want the secret Qualcomm version, not the secret Intel version. Exactly.

Exactly. And so I'm very curious to see, as you said a moment ago, what's going to be the drama here. We already know some of the drama is no millimeter wave, but again, I think the only person in the entire planet that cares about that is me because I happen to have a spot where, which is millimeter wave. And I haven't been there in a long time, to be honest with you, even though it's right around the corner from me, but it is incredibly cool. And sorry, I should back up a half step. If you are

if you have service that supports mill and weed or wave, which I think in America might only be Verizon, which I have. No, AT&T, I think AT&T does it too, but I'm not sure. Oh, is that right? Okay. My mistake. Either way, if you happen to be within, I think it's literally eyeshot.com.

of a tower that supports millimeter wave. You can, and I personally, with my own telephone, have gotten two and a half gigabits per second over the freaking air. Like, it's incredible how fast this is. It's got very, very low range and doesn't go through walls very well. So it's kind of like Wi-Fi. But if you were in, so I did this over at the, um,

at the palace of fine arts in San Francisco at their, uh, their little duck pond and all of that. And the first Apple device that supported millimeter way, which I think was an iPad I took over there. And it was the exact same thing, which is like, Oh my goodness, it is incredibly fast, but it's not very popular because yeah, the range is terrible on it. It's, it's fast, but the range is terrible on it. And it's essentially like a hotspot from your wireless carrier, uh,

it really is just like a 5G tech demo, right? Like it doesn't seem like it's very practical, but it's cool, but it's not very practical. And it's like, I totally see why Apple in building the C1 was like, nope.

but there'll be some other quirk. I feel like it's almost certain. Maybe not, maybe not, but it feels like there'll be some other quirk about it. Now, Apple didn't talk about this a lot. And I know some people have said like, aha, they didn't talk about it a lot. That means something. I was like, I don't know. I was unsure if they were going to even mention that it's in there, but they did. Agreed. They, they mentioned it. And there's like a paragraph from Johnny Sruji. And somebody did a like a brief interview with Johnny Sruji about this. The Apple chip chief, chief, chip chief. Uh,

Uh, that guy, you know, uh, Mr. It's Johnny who y'all know, not that one, the other one. Uh, and that's it. So they did a little, I would say part of the reason they did a little is because they

The goal is not for you to notice, right? The goal is to ship it and have it just be fine. What they're not doing, and Mark Gurman has talked about them building the C2 and the C3, of course, that like, we know that this group works many generations ahead of reality, right? Like we know that.

And I think Gurman's report said they expect to match or exceed Qualcomm. You don't know what Qualcomm is going to do in the intervening time with the C3 or something like that. So like, it's not like they can boast, ah, we've beaten Qualcomm. It's really just like, look, we're in the game. Yes, we built this. Let's not make a big deal out of it. I don't think that's because there's a scandal coming or something like that. I think there'll be some dumb manufactured thing that people notice. I do think though that it's just, it's not something to boast about.

And so they're doing the minimum boast, which is like, yeah, we made it. And that's it. No, I couldn't agree more. You know, just to tug on that thread just a little bit, if the C3 is the one that just really sticks it to Qualcomm, could you call it maybe like, I can imagine like C3 performance optimized, and then you would have the Apple C3PO. I can just see it now. Oh, no. See, I thought you were going to say it's really going to happen with the C4, which offers explosive speeds.

even better. This is all going to happen. Everybody get ready for all the Star Trek memes next year or later this year when the M5 comes out because the M5 was the ultimate thinking AI computer in a Star Trek episode. And at least John Maltz and I are going to be flooding the internet with the ultimate computer episode of TOS memes next fall, in the fall. Right.

One other quick thing to mention before we move on is that I saw a video from a YouTuber, Andrew Edwards. And as far as I know, he was the only one that got invited into Apple's lab and was with Johnny Sruji that we were speaking about earlier. And he didn't have any interviews on camera or anything like that, but a little bit into the video. Let me see if I can grab a time. So I'm here after my YouTube ad, I'll vamp while that's going on in the video.

In the YouTube video, at about five minutes and 15 seconds or thereabouts, he kind of casually mentions that the A18 and C1 working in concert supports dynamic traffic management. And the example he used was, you have just sent a photo to somebody. Like, I just sent Jason a picture from, you know, the UVA football game or what have you. And...

It's going in, even though I'm sitting there and also like trying to refresh scores on ESPN or something like that, it knows that my priority is likely to get that photo to Jason as quickly as possible. So that if I understand this and what Andrew was saying correctly, the A18 and C1 can work in concert to say, yes, the user me does want to look at ESPN. But the very first thing you need to do is get that photo to Jason as quickly as possible.

And it can make that kind of quality of service determination behind the scenes. This is not something that I'm doing personally. It's doing on my behalf, but that's really cool. And this is when Apple is at its finest is doing these little tweaks and doing these little things in order to make the whole, the whole experience that much better. And I'm really excited to see where this goes, if this is the case. And certainly if indeed Apple,

These chips are that much power friendly, which I have no reason to believe they aren't. You know, think of any time that your phone is in a spot with crummy service. And there's not a whole ton Apple can do about this, I don't reckon. But what your phone does is it tries even harder to reach the nearest cell phone tower. So it will...

power up those radios even more. But what if those radios are inherently more power sufficient? And I'm talking well out of my comfort zone. I don't know if that's even realistic, but I can see how if this thing, which is arguably one of the most power-hungry things in your phone, it's

especially when the screen is off, if we can make that more power efficient, we could see tremendous battery gains across the entire maybe iPhone 17 lineup. And let me tell you, I am here for battery gains. First, I would like you to be hired as the colors are, but after that, I would be here for power gains. I would love it. I'd like somebody who's not colorblind to be the colors are. I just want there to be one. So the thing about that, that I saw that video and,

And it's very interesting, but it is marketing, right? Like I don't know enough about cellular chips to not to know, like for all I know, Qualcomm has a system that allows their customers who are building phones to prioritize certain kinds of traffic. They, they may have their own, you know, QoS quality of service kind of plan where you're like, this is a priority. Now this is a priority. Right.

So one way you do marketing is you claim, here's a great thing that we built. Your competitor also does that, but you don't mention that. Another thing is, though, and what strikes me about this is I was thinking, like, even if Qualcomm does offer this sort of thing, it may be that they don't offer it in the way that Apple would like them to. Right. And this this takes us back to the bigger point. And it's sort of like if you think back to the Intel Mac era, for example.

is Qualcomm cellular chips, like Intel processors, are made for a market, right? Like, they talk to their customers, they'll do things for special customers, but basically, like...

Intel made a chip and like PC makers could use it and Apple could use it. And maybe Apple talks to them and says, could you please do this? And occasionally that like they did that MacBook Air chip, but then they did turn around and start selling it to everybody else as well. Right. Like, and I'm sure Qualcomm does that too. Again, I don't know enough about the cellular chip market, cellular mode of market to know, but I imagine it's very similar where Qualcomm has got parts that,

And they talk to their partners about what they need. But in the end, they make a part that is productized. It is for anybody to buy on their price list, more or less. And that is not what Apple does with Apple Silicon. And I think that's why it has so much interesting potential. Look, I have over the last few years had a chance at some of these product launches to talk at least briefly with people who are involved in the Apple Silicon process. And what they keep impressing on me

And again, this is also marketing, but I do believe that this is how they think, which is every Apple Silicon chip. They know what products it goes in, right? Like they, they build it for specific products. The M four, they're like, they know it's going in the iPad pro and the Mac book pro and the Mac book air. And like they, they could tick off every product it's designed for. And that gives Apple, uh,

some special powers to do what Apple wants for the products that it's building. And so when I look at the C1, that's what I think is maybe they're talking a good game about this stuff, but Qualcomm does something similar. But what it means is that Apple can now control, especially going forward when this is everywhere, uh,

It can build in stuff that is optimized only for them because they don't make that product for anyone else. It doesn't need to do anything, right? And therefore, it's more efficient because they don't need to do anything that some other customer of Qualcomm's needs that Apple doesn't need. Or a specific thing that Apple would really, really, really like Qualcomm to have done five years ago and Qualcomm just won't do it.

Like they can just do all that stuff now. And that's, that's why the C1 is exciting to me is because it suggests that Apple by taking complete control over it is going to get, is going to get benefits in terms of functionality and in terms of optimization, because they're just making it for themselves.

Yep, I couldn't agree more. It's a very astute point. And again, that's where this gets really interesting is seeing Apple working on both sides of the table, so to speak, in that instead of asking Qualcomm, may we have, now it's just, okay, we need GoBuilding. And it's hard to say no to your coworkers. And so I think this could be very interesting. And I think C1...

that it's interesting in of itself for sure, but at this point we're just trying to get to table stakes. And again, we don't even have millimeter wave. Whether or not you think that matters personally

And factually speaking, it's not table stakes, or it is table stakes, I guess I should say, and we don't have it yet. But maybe the C2 does have millimeter wave, and maybe the C3 is where we start to get really interesting and exciting stuff. And I am very, very excited to see how this goes. And you made a very good point earlier that this is one of those kind of flies under the

We probably won't hear all that much about, but I think this is where a lot of the interesting stuff with iPhones and hopefully Macs, God help us, I hope so, that's where a lot of the interesting stuff is going to be happening in the near future, I think. Yeah. I hope this is the thing that leads to cellular Macs because we're not going to get into it here.

You can listen to a recent episode of ATP where they went through it again about why Marco and Casey want cellular Macs. And I co-signed the entire thing because I agree. Very quickly. You can tether, but it's not great. And we like it better if you don't have to. You can tether.

But it'd be better if you don't have to just very, very quickly. I forget how this came up, but we were talking, I think a friend of mine was over who was also an Apple nerd like me. And we were talking about this briefly and, and he had made a joke that, Oh, I'm going to have to upgrade my laptop recently or soon. And Aaron was like, I'm sorry, what?

And he was like, no, no, no, because he might have cellular MacBooks. And she was like, what are you talking about? And I said, oh, well, you know, we might be able to get an internet connection on my MacBook, blah, blah, blah. And let me tell you, I have not, I have no interest in upgrading my M3 Max MacBook Pro. I genuinely don't. Like, it's great. But if there is a cellular MacBook Pro, I will insta-buy it at any cost. Like, I don't care. It will be immediately purchased at any cost whatsoever. I am that excited for it.

Yeah. And it's fine if you don't get it. But my problem is when people don't get why we want this and therefore say it shouldn't exist. Because you're basically saying, look, I know you like it, but no, you can't have it. And like we can talk until we're blue about why we think cellular in a Mac laptop would be great because I think cellular and iPads is great. And I don't buy non-cellular iPads anymore because it's great. Yep.

But we're not going to get into that now. We're not. Don't at me. Don't at me. This episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. In the real world, if you're looking for privacy, you close the door. But online, we leave doors open wherever we go. Using the internet without ExpressVPN is a little like leaving all those doors open behind you.

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I wanted to watch some stuff on HBO back in America. And, you know, one tap. One tap, and then I was back in America, and I got to get back to my stuff. Also, yeah, if you're out and about, and you're on rando open Wi-Fi at an airport or whatever...

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Oh, I'm excited. It's gadget time. I wanted to having you on. I wanted to do a little home gadget check-in because I am a big believer in home gadgetry, especially I would say ambient information. I know you recently, I don't know if you want to give people a little update. You did. You recently did a project where you basically have this super stealthy thing in your light switch that gives you ambient information that

And with which is like I tell tell people what you did, because if they don't listen to ATP, they don't know this. And we should start there. Sure. So I somehow for some reason, I don't really know why I got it in my brain that I wanted to be able to know a couple of things about the state of my like house and world. And I wanted to be able to know that, as you said, ambiently ambient is the perfect word for it.

And we had in our kitchen a former telephone jack that I took away because we haven't had a home phone in years. And I put just a blank there. And it occurred to me, wait a second, what if I got like programmable LEDs and I could turn on LEDs or turn them off based on the state of certain things? And that did not pass, as I like to joke, the historical commission, which is to say my beloved wife, Erin, said, I don't know if I'm really in love with that idea, but we

we were able to reach a compromise, which is there's a, like this odd manufacturer of smart home stuff, which I'd never heard of previously called HomeSeer, H-O-M-E-S-E-E-R. And they make light switches, which are the standard paddle light switches that you'll see in most homes in America anyway. But what's interesting about them is they're dimmers. And on the side, there's a series of seven LEDs that by default indicate how powered the fixture is. You know, is it very dim or very bright?

But you can tell it not to do that and instead give you full control over how those LEDs are lit, what color they are, which ones are lit, etc. And we're probably going to talk about in a minute or maybe we'll talk about it next. I've become one of those home assistant zealots slash zealots.

uh, you know, people that won't stop talking about home assistance. And now I'm talking to you about it. Rolling my eyes. Yep. Yeah, I know. And it's fair because we are the worst. It's just like CrossFit. You know, as soon as you start CrossFit or as soon as you start home assistant, all you can talk about is CrossFit or home assistant. And so in any case, what I've done is I've set up with home assistants such that there's a, there's,

Again, there's seven lights. I'm only using three of them at the moment. One of them will turn red when the garage door is open and it will turn itself off when the garage door closes. One of them will turn white when the Volvo... Aaron has a plug-in hybrid Volvo and when it's charging, it'll turn white. When it's charged, it'll turn off.

And then John Syracuse, my co-host on ATP, turned me on to these long-range but very low-power smart home gadgets by a company called Yolink, Y-O-L-I-N-K. And so I installed one of these, like a contact sensor that's one of those things where it knows if things are closed or open. And I installed one on my mailbox. So when the mailbox is opened, it's a little more complicated than this. But the short of it is when the mailbox is opened, then a blue light will appear on this light switch. Wow.

that is in the kitchen and they're very physically small leds they're only a millimeter or two across so if you're looking at it you 100 can see them very easily but if you're just kind of passing by you might not even notice and this has been such a delight for me not because any of this is really useful like in particular whether or not the car is charging is that really actionable

No. Am I going to postpone a trip somewhere on account of the car still being charging? No. But it's neat that I know that it's charging. But the ambient thing, it makes you know, like, oh, did I forget to plug in the car? Oh, no, it's charging. And that's it, right? It's like you otherwise would have to go outside and look or go in the garage and look and see whether the car is charging or not. But now you know, oh, yeah, no, I did it already. I don't need to worry about it, which is... Right. You know, that's what's great about this ambient stuff is, you know...

It lets you know at a glance whether something is going on that previously would have required you to either go somewhere or bring up a computer to look right or a phone or whatever. And instead, yeah, exactly. Just like the lights on. And like, imagine, I think this is a real thing. Like the the light in your house lets you know if you left the garage door open. Like, that's great. That is that should be a feature of houses, right? Yeah.

Exactly. And it's just silly things like that. And more than anything else, it was like I nerd sniped myself and I just I wanted to see if I could do this. And I was able to. And I honestly believe that it looks pretty reasonable. This is a manufactured, you know, smart light switch.

it's not me drilling holes into like a blank outlet cover or anything like that, which as hard as I may have tried, it would have looked janky. And so the historical commission was right to veto it. But I think it looks pretty good. But I got to tell you, there's another ambient thing in my life that I'm really enjoying that I know is also entering your world or has actually been in your world for a long time. Yeah, yeah. So Marco talked about this thing called Terminal. Now, full disclosure, they are going to sponsor ATP in the future. Ooh.

I had never heard of this. Marco bought it of his own volition with his own money, et cetera, et cetera. They did send me the one I'm about to hold up for free, but it's this little like a ink thing that you can put all sorts of interesting stuff on. So for me, I have it at the moment split in half and the left-hand side is

shows the agenda, if you will, for the family for the next few days. And then the right-hand side is split in half again. So there's the weather in the upper right as I look at this. And then speaking of ambient computing, on the bottom right, we've been having some problems with both our indoor, our main refrigerator and our garage refrigerator. And we got different Yolink devices. I actually haven't spoken about this on ATP. We got different Yolink devices that'll tell you temperature. And

we were trying to figure out are these fridges really broken or not? And so what I did was I used terminal now to be clear, that's no vowels, T R M L. Um, but I use terminal and their custom plugin system, which we'll talk about more, I'm sure in a second. And I actually have now granted, it doesn't update very frequently, but I have the current temperature of both the indoor fridge, the indoor freezer, the outdoor free fridge and the outdoor freezer on here, just because we were trying to keep an eye on it.

As it turns out, we're getting a new set of fridges on Friday, so that'll go away. But the point is, I can, because I'm a dork and because I can write a little bit of code and because of Home Assistant, I can put something like that, the temperature of a refrigerator inside my house, I can put that on this little e-ink thing that will probably live on our refrigerator at some point, but currently is just sitting on the windowsill in front of the kitchen sink, which is also pretty central to the kitchen. It is...

So delightful. And I love this thing. And the battery life, especially if you get the extended battery, which is not very expensive, and that's what I did. The battery life is preposterous. It's measured in months. It's really, really good stuff. That's the beauty of E Ink. So this is actually shockingly similar to my existing E Ink calendar that I wrote about a few years ago that I still use that's in my kitchen. The big difference, it's basically the same screen. I think mine has a second color, but otherwise it's basically the same.

black and white screen, e-ink. It doesn't use power except when it's drawing. Otherwise there's no power. And my thing is a Raspberry Pi. So it's got power all the time and no battery. This not only has a much better case because mine's a 3D printed case. It's got the battery, which is great. And it's an ESP32.

which is like this other thing I've got, the Ink Plate 6 Color, which I have been experimenting with lately. And its battery life is also bananas. And the reason is these ESP32s are super low power. They've got a sleep mode. You basically tell it to wake up every so often and check a remote server via your Wi-Fi. And then they check...

and then they write to the E-Ink screen, and then they go back down and use essentially no power until they wake up again. And this is why you can have them last forever and ever and ever. Because a phone screen, you've got to power it and backlight it and all those things. You don't do any of that with E-Ink. It doesn't have any backlights or anything. It's just natural light on it like anything else, like a piece of paper. But it's great. I'm exploring the terminal stuff because, again,

I want to, I love the idea that somebody made a product of this and it's a nerdy product, but it is a product. And, and that is in contrast to my thing where I bought a, a screen and a raspberry pie and, and, and took a GitHub project that was written in Python. That was like a German guy who wrote a, it was like a portal themed desk calendar. It was, and I, I, you know, I tore apart most of his code, uh,

and made what I wanted. And I've used it for a few years now. This is like that, but turn into a product. The case is so nice. It's so well done because it's not a 3d printed case. It's a mass produced case. Um, you know, they're using injection molding or something to do it. It's got that battery in it. And, and then they put a,

a web interface on it. So basically you go to their website and there are apps that you can get and there are plugins that you can write yourself. It's basically using HTML technology for the display and the way it works in order to keep it all sort of server side is it uses all that and then it renders it into an image.

And the image is what gets downloaded by your terminal at your house, right? So all the brains are on the server. They are not in the terminal. The terminal knows enough to wake up and ask, it asks, what image do you have for me? And it asks, when should I wake up next? And that's it. Right, exactly. That's all it does. So I love this. I have played with this. I have it in my kitchen right now, right next to my other thing. And what I've ended up with is I've got a couple of boxes that are generated by

As a part of my weather station and as a part of building this other thing, I've got, I've already got some Jason files on my web server. That's my server in my house. And so I can have a, I can have a custom plugin for terminal that just looks at my Jason files on Snell zone. Uh, because that's what it is. It's a real, it's a real nice server in my house. So, um,

and displays those. So I've got, basically I'm caching Apple's weather kit data locally because there's an API cost for it. Right. And as a developer, I've got a developer account, um,

I can load it a lot, but if I had lots of devices loading it a lot, it might be a problem. So I have my server every 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever. I don't even remember what it is. 30 minutes. It goes and pulls WeatherKit data from Apple and just writes it on my server so that all my other scripts just look at my server.

instead of making an API call. It's easier and it's just a JSON file. So I was able to get that up and running where I have a little thing with the high for the next six days or something and a little graphic of what the conditions are going to be, a rain cloud or a sun or whatever.

And then on the left side, what I ended up doing, I was using their calendar plugin, but I found it hard to read. And the thing is, I solved this problem. I have a Python script that outputs an image with my calendar and Lauren's calendar on it already. So I actually just have it loading that image. Yeah.

That's super cool. I love that. I genuinely love that. I'm not trying to be sarcastic. That is really genuine. I mean, because I'm reusing. So here's the truth of it. I suspect that in the end, I'm going to like the, uh, the case and battery of it so much. And, and the web stuff is okay. Although you've got to learn somebody else's web framework in order to get the layout right. And,

And the problem I have with a terminal is that I already solved this problem myself. Yeah. But this is the thing is most people haven't. And, and I love that they are making this. It's still a super nerdy product, right? But it is a level, a level down from having your own Raspberry Pi and your own Python script that you have hacked to connect to various APIs in order to get it to work. Right? Like I already did that. If you gave me a terminal now, I wouldn't do that because. Yeah, exactly. Why? Why?

But I've already done it. So I suspect that in the end, what my terminal is going to end up being is just displaying images generated on my server by my scripts. Because then I have like we have it's like your ambient lights. I have if it's going to if Apple weather says it's going to rain today, it puts an umbrella on the screen.

of my calendar. Nice. And this actually happened last week where Lauren was going to walk out the door and she said, oh, the umbrella is up. I better bring an umbrella or a raincoat because it was, it wasn't raining, but it was going to rain that day according to actual weather. Um, if it's trash night and our trash night alternates between, um, bottles and cans and, uh, paper alternate weeks. So it puts up an icon on Thursday night. That's either an icon of bottles or it's an icon of boxes, right?

Right. And, and it's great because I don't need to look it up. It's just right there. It's like, oh, it's paper tonight. And then I'll take out the right one. A little ambient thing. It's fun to do that in terminal. Like then you're dealing with logic, which it doesn't really want to do.

And like, I was just like, I'm not like, this is why I probably am just going to keep doing this myself because I've gone too far. Like I, some people said he should have stopped before he went too far, but he went too far. But for, for people who listen to shows like this, I think this is a great sort of starter kit for doing ambient devices to, for getting ideas.

what's great about having a low power E-Ink display into your life, because while it's actually not great for stuff like your fridge temperatures, because like I've got current, I've got a Lamentric Time that shows like the current time and temperature, and it's not an E-Ink device. It's a different device.

Like I can show, I can use that feed and show current temperature on the ink thing, but it only updates every half hour or whatever. So it's not actually the current temperature. And so it's not for that. It's not going to, you could have it show whether your garage door is open or not, but it would actually be telling you what your garage door was doing the last time it refreshed.

Exactly right. And coincidentally, I did do that. I very briefly integrated Home Assistant and Terminal and whatnot. And it wasn't that terribly difficult to do, because I didn't realize how infrequently the Terminal updates, which to your point is something like half an hour by default. And they're working on bringing that down. But the corollary to that is it'll kill the battery quicker. It'll kill the battery when it does it. That's the problem. Yeah.

And if you want to put this on magnets on your fridge, you really want it to last three months or whatever, which it probably will. I've got that little ink plate six color, and it's been running for a couple of weeks now, checking my calendar, again, a version of my calendar image every three hours or something.

which is all I need for my calendar, really. And it's two weeks and going strong. I don't know how long it's going to last, but it's like one of those examples of it. Once you've got a device that will go for weeks or months without a charge, you can just put it without a cord on your fridge or

or wherever. Exactly. And you don't need a cord dangling. You don't need anything like that. And then every so often you take it off and plug it in for a couple hours and then it's good for another few months. It's awesome. That's why I do recommend, um, if people are interested in this, that they try the terminal. Um, not a sponsor here. I,

I don't think it's even a future sponsor here, but like what this is, this is, it is a lot of times I write about this stuff and people are like, Oh, but Raspberry Pi and Python. And I have to write a script that is writing images on, onto an image file that then gets put on. And they're like, it's too much. It's just too much.

And most people don't have Dr. Drang like I do, where I can say, hey, Dr. Drang, I need your help with some Python. True story, there's a couple posts on Dr. Drang's site, which I guess I need to link to now, where he helped me out with part of this project. And so most people don't have that. My point is, that's okay. Terminal is an attempt to make something that, again, is not...

It's super nerdy, right? It's just not so super nerdy that you need to be writing your own custom Python script. And I think that's good. I also like the fact that they are open sourcing their firmware and there's a way to get it to not use their servers. And they have a commitment that if they go out of business, you can basically make it run without using their servers at all. You can use their software on your server. There's so many other ways to do it. But

Also, they're trying to put a nice UI on this so that more regular people can say, can I just add the Google Calendar widget and put in my calendar or the iCloud Calendar widget and put in my calendar and then put a weather forecast in with my zip code and get something that is nice and updates every three or six hours and is all the things that are good about using an E-Ink display for this kind of ambient information where like now you've got, imagine a piece of paper that's

except it's your Google calendar or your iCloud calendar. That's awesome. That's kind of awesome. Yeah. And that's what this is. And the genesis of this, part of the reason I was so excited about it was we, we literally at the end of the very last day of the month, I will go into my Apple calendar on my Mac and are into the calendar app. And I will print the family calendar because at this point it's just Aaron and me for all intents and purposes. You know, the kids aren't old enough to have their own real calendars. And, and,

Well, I'll print the Apple calendar and I will put that on magnets on the fridge. And that's great because our lives are not that busy that the calendar changes all the time. But you know what's great than a calendar that never changes is a calendar that will change and will update itself. And so this thing, even if to your point earlier, even if it only updates every three or six or nine hours, it's still better than one that only updates when you go upstairs and print a new copy and then bring that back down.

Like that is a much preferred version of all of this than the piece of paper, you know, that's just stuck on your fridge. So I am really enthusiastic about this. Once we get our new fridges, hopefully Friday, I will be able to repurpose that corner of the terminal and I will probably mount this on the incoming fridge, you know, at that point. And I'm really excited about it. Very, very nice. Well, we're going to talk about...

Home Assistant and Upgrade Plus. Yes, I love this. Hang on for that. But this is going to be the end of the regular episode. You can send us your feedback, follow-up on questions. I have to read it, so be nice. Upgradefeedback.com.

Just please, I beg you. But thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus. We will be talking about some other Casey stuff, Home Assistant. Maybe we'll talk about Call Sheet a little bit. Get UpgradePlus.com if you want to buy a gift for Mike and his baby. Upgrade Plus is a great way to support Mike and his growing family. How about that? That is a thing that Mike wrote, but I am just going to keep on saying it. You can obviously find us on YouTube by searching for Upgrade Plus.

Thanks to our sponsors, Vitally, Google Gemini, and ExpressVPN. But most of all, thank you all for listening. And most, most of all, thank you, Casey Liss, for guesting for Mike, the new dad. You're doing your friend a solid, and you're doing me a solid, too. Thank you so much for being here. No, the pleasure is all mine. It is such a pleasure to be on the show with you. And if you'll permit me to blow a little smoke here, I

Upgrade is such an impossibly good program. And I get more annoyed at Upgrade than I think I do at any other show because you guys make such good points so often in every single episode. There's at least one of you that at least once I say, I wish I thought of that. And so I know I'm preaching to the choir since you're listening to me say this on Upgrade.

But for what it's worth, you can extract this and use it elsewhere. I love this show so much. I love this show so much. And you two are so great together. And even though it's fun to have a little diversion, nevertheless, I am really excited for Mike to come back and to get more of Upgrade in my ears because it's one of my favorite podcasts. Yeah, bad news is you can't listen to this episode of Upgrade because you already heard it. I know, right?

I can, and I can think about it, but that idiot Casey that never got anything right. Yeah. What's wrong with upgradefeedback.com, I guess. You can send your own feedback in about yourself if you really want to. Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. Next week, Mike will be back because we prerecorded an episode because I'm on vacation next week and Mike is on paternity leave. And like...

What happens to the podcast then? And the answer is we pre-recorded something that I think is really super fun. And I hope you will all like, and I hope nothing enormous happens in the news in the next week because we're not going to cover it next week. Instead, we're going to have some fun. So anyway, thank you all again for listening. And thank you, Casey. Mike and I will be back next week. Thank you, Jason.