Upgrade - 102: Cautionary Tale of Laptops

Episode Date: August 16, 2016

This week's episode was recorded with Jason and Myke in the same room! Before they high five, they discuss iPad keyboards, MacBook Pro upgrades, Castro 2 and podcast innovation, and Tim Cook getting chatty with the press.

from relay fm and live in memphis tennessee this is upgrade episode 102 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile and squarespace my name is mike hurley and i am joined across the table by mr jason snell hi mike hurley we're here in the uh in the home of uh well we're not in the home right now the home city of mr stephen hackett co-founder of relay it's relay birthday week this is the second anniversary of relay and we're coming up on the second anniversary of upgrade yep and uh and so that's a little celebration you guys uh spend the week here in memphis and uh i i crashed the party for a couple of days which is we've got uh some blue sky thinking to do this week about the company you know we're really kind of i think we're gonna

whiteboard it we're gonna work it out we're gonna we're gonna do some we're gonna do some trust falls we're gonna do some other uh kind of corporate uh yep uh brainstorming exercises we're gonna build a tower out of popsicle sticks and then we're going to destroy it. We've both done stuff like that over the years. I know, seriously. Corporate team building. Absolutely. So Stephen Hackett is our engineer today, and not present because he's totally lost his voice.

So it's just us. So yeah, it's Real AFM's birthday this week. On the 18th, we turn two years old, which is actually probably good for our first piece of follow-up. We've mentioned before the RelayFM membership. The RelayFM members feed is now available. If you are a member, you will have gotten an email about this. And if you sign up in the welcome email, you'll get a link to an RSS feed,

which will include a selection of members-only content over the next couple of weeks um so there's some stuff out there is uh as we speak today connected and bonanza we have two episodes there and later on this week we have an absolute barnstormer of a special yeah where we combined upgrade and cortex to do a text adventure actually at the end of the show today we put a trailer together oh great um i'll play i'll play out the episode of a trailer so you can kind of see what you're going to get um if you are a member you'll get this feed and when this show comes out i think we're going to post that one on thursday um but if you sign up before or after you'll still get the feed and you'll be able to get all of them and trust me you really really want the cortex upgrade special yes i get to be uh that's me acting as sort of your referee almost

yep frustrating you and gray in your attempts to navigate the old west yep jason is the computer and me and gray have to work together on the adventure it's it's really really fun so that will be available i'll put a trailer in the show so you can kind of get a feel for what that's like uh you were on the talk show last week a little follow-out and it was a really great episode as always i always love it when you're on that you had a long flight so you had enough time to listen to it but as you cross the atlantic it was another grouper said to me oh it's not going to be one of those two and a half hour deals and it wasn't it was like 220 so you know slightly shorter short show short show yeah i i uh i enjoy especially that

show when i'm on long trips because it it fits quite nicely but yeah you and john are always good together it was fun yeah it's always always a blast to talk to him and we do i i think we do all seriousness uh intend to not talk for two and a half hours but i i so infrequently see him i see him at apple events and we don't we're all so busy we don't get a chance to talk for very long and then we get on on skype and it just yeah it just goes because it's a it's fun to talk to him and um and it it was a good we had a good time i tried very hard to not steer the uh conversation toward baseball as often happens because i know a lot lot of tech people don't want to hear about sports stuff. So I decided to talk about my clicky keyboard because I know that he likes clicky keyboards.

So we talked about that for a while. And then, of course, as soon as we were done with that, John brought up baseball. So if you don't like keyboards and baseball, I suggest it's really less than a two-hour podcast. You can just skip over the first half hour, and you'll still get us talking about apple and other tech stuff and not the keyboards in the baseball hey jason why don't we talk about keyboards and baseball okay let's do that we went to a baseball game we did we did so steven hackett famously doesn't like baseball on his program the the relay slack to uh react to the word baseball or the baseball emoji with America's boring pastime, took us to a baseball game, which is an interesting...

My first. It was a... Yeah, it's minor league. It's AAA, Pacific Coast League. It's the Memphis Redbirds, which are the affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. And we went to their ballpark, and it was pouring rain at various points. But we were inside. We were actually sort of at the bar that is overlooking home home plate right behind home plate and i got to explain some baseball things

to you and i got a ball and you got a ball so as soon as we arrived uh a ball flew into the stands where we were entering um and i was able to grab it and so now i have a baseball from my first ever baseball game you were concerned that you were not allowed to pick it up or that you would have to throw it back? Yeah. And I was scared that if I threw it, like I was scary, and it would just land. Stop that, English man.

Like three kind of seats in front of me and I'd look like a fool and everyone would laugh. But no, you get to keep it. And now I have one. And it has dirt on it and everything. It's a great souvenir of your first baseball game to have a baseball, a minor league baseball. So we did that.

I also was admiring your, so you have, and I hadn't seen it before, you have the Logitech 9.7 inch create keyboard for your 9.7 inch iPad pro. I do. And I have written a couple articles. I've been focusing on the 12.9. I have both models, but I use the 12.9. That's sort of my ipad and so i've been focusing on keyboards for that and a lot of the keyboards of the of the of the 12.9 ipad the problem is the surface area of the ipad screen is enormous which is great it's not a problem i love that screen but it means that any accessory that is going to act as a cover and cover that screen is huge. And every added little bit of thickness makes it bulkier.

And so as a result, most of the keyboards that are made for the 12.9-inch Pro are kind of too much. And what I found with the smart keyboard on the 9.7 is that it was much less bulky. It was a much more attractive product. And then I saw your Logitech keyboard, and I don't like the Logitech Create. I think it's kind of too much for the 12.9. But yours is really kind of adorable. It's really great. So when I first got it, and I was talking about it on Connected last week,

I was really unsure about it because it adds a lot of thickness and a lot of weight to what is a very portable device. But I have fallen madly in love with it. The keyboard on this thing is a joy to use. The smart keyboards are very practical. Yeah, they're functional. It's a keyboard that is always attached and it works.

But this is an actual keyboard that I'm used to typing on. It's more akin to a MacBook keyboard. Yeah, but it's not aping the MacBook keyboard design like the 12.9-inch Create keyboard, which I kind of appreciate, I think. And it's very typable, even though it's a much smaller area that all those keys have to be jammed into. I think they did a good job. Not only are they real keys, but I thought it was pretty enjoyable to type on it they're

backlit which is really nice is one of the main reasons that i'm going to be sticking with this because i'm able to use it at night and that is a big thing for me and we were saying yesterday you know so often we say things for the podcast but you know we're actually in each other's presence so we have conversations that are not recorded it's strange podcasters it tends to be the same stuff that we talk about on the show anyway. Yeah, it is. That's your real bonus episode is to just stand near us while we're having a conversation. That's next year's Memo's Park.

You get to hang around Jason and Mike. We just give you the address of a street corner. We'll be talking there. If you'd like to come by, you can listen in on that conversation. But we were talking about the percentage of time that you use your iPad in a keyboard configuration. And this struck me as being one of the reasons why maybe our takes on this are a little bit divergent, is that you said, what, 90% of the time your iPad is in a keyboard? Yeah.

Whenever I'm using my iPad, it is pretty much always in landscape mode with a keyboard attached to it. I don't know why that is. It just is. Even when I'm reading stuff like Twitter and stuff, that's how I have it. I have it in landscape, with a keyboard attached to it. I don't know why that is. It just is. Even when I'm reading stuff like Twitter and stuff, that's how I have it. I have it in landscape, usually in split view, even on the 9.7, because split view works when you have a keyboard attached.

Split view doesn't work on the 9.7 when using the software keyboard because you get 25% of the apps, right? You get just the top corners, but it really works with the keyboard, so I tend to have it in that configuration. And it's just because that's how it stands like this thing it's really stable with the keyboard attached to it more so than the smart keyboard yeah and plus it's got the pencil loop in it as well but yeah i i tend to have my ipads in their keyboards and for me although i am a

landscape ipad user for sure um most of the time unless i'm reading a comic or something like that or maybe a long article i'll i'll have it in landscape in portrait yeah well when i'm reading a comic yeah or or an article i'll be in portrait otherwise i'm in landscape i'm always in landscape but i have the keyboard attached less than 10 of the time maybe five percent of the time really unless i'm writing an article, I don't use a keyboard, which is why having an external Bluetooth keyboard and a stand really works well for me is because it's a special occasion to break out the keyboard. And so I think that is the source anyway of our maybe our different take on this is everybody's different. Everybody's going to have that percentage of time where they want to use the iPad with a keyboard. And if it's a high percentage, then you're willing to make more

trade-offs. Now that the Logitech Create 9.7, it is fairly easy to pop it out of there. I think easier than on the 12.9. I think they learned a lot. They learned a lot of lessons after they made that 12.9. This 9.7 is not just a knockoff small small version of the 12.9 i think it is everybody who designed that product learning from the criticism of it and making it better because it's better in all those ways so you you pop it out and then you've got the the naked ipad but it's uh yeah yeah it's i i'm impressed by it i'm not sure whether yeah i i don't have a 970 i have a loaner from apple that i expect that they're going to want back at some point soon but i've held on to it because i i'm running ios 10 on it and not on my

the one that i bought the 12.9 that i bought okay um but yeah yeah it's uh my i i if i had a 9.7 i i think I would probably get it. I'm, I'm impressed by it. A little bit of followup friend of the show. Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia has started a podcast called the Emoji Rap. There's just like a trailer episode right now, but I'm suggesting people subscribe to this show because we talk about emoji a lot. Emoji is very interesting and Jeremy is very connected to the emoji world. He's on the Unicode committee. Yeah. He's on the emoji subcommittee so from talking to him i know he's got some interesting people lined up so if you are interested in emoji at all i recommend uh subscribing to the emoji

wrap and of course you will find a link to that uh in our show notes and i'm very excited about it and the artwork is amazing it is a microphone in a burrito wrap, which is brilliant. With a smiley face on the microphone. Naturally. So go give it a shot. Jeremy's a great guy. Yeah, yeah.

I'm looking forward to that. And last piece of all up today. Do you remember many weeks ago, we were talking about the Rainbow Apple Watch Nylon Band? Yeah, the Pride. The Pride Bands. Yeah, there was someone sent me this, an article on 9to5Mac. It looks like it was a sponsored thing on 9to5Mac,

but it's still interesting to mention. There's a company called Clockwork Synergy, which is making these, the nylon bands that are in the rainbow colors. And I wondered, Jason, if you would think about buying something like this. I'm still very hesitant of buying any bands that don't use the lugs from apple and from what i could see on their website it doesn't look like that they have the official lugs i have a couple of bands that use uh knock off yep uh watch band lugs and which is why i wondered if you would be interested in this because i know you have them i'm just nervous of it like of it slipping

out or something which is also another point where are the third-party bands made by the made for iphone program there aren't any like apple has all the specs out i haven't seen one well you got to wonder if the issue there is concern about compatibility with a future apple watch model or don't say that i have so many bands i know, and I hope that's not the case. But you also have to wonder if it's just the terms of that. You're buying the lugs from Apple. You're paying a licensing fee. It might just be not worth it. They might be thinking, well, we're competing with third-party bands

that cost half of what we're going to be able to charge for this, and so let's not even bother. That could be it. That could be it. And you'd think maybe, I don't know, like, their mares' ones might be from that program apple i mean the high the high end i i feel like apple's licensing program is more likely for some kind of high-end brand that wants to do its own apple watch band and doesn't have a deal directly with apple yeah i think i think there is one company i can't remember the name but i know i've seen uh there is a fashion brand which is

is teasing some and they look to be the official ones i can't remember the name off my head but i'm pretty sure that there is someone doing it but it's as you say a big brand that can charge larger prices that's the value you get is is in doing that otherwise you're a third party you know what's the what what's a third party band otherwise you're trying to go for undercutting apple on price i would think and. Otherwise, you're a third party. What's a third party band otherwise? You're trying to go for undercutting Apple on price, I would think. And I doubt if you're licensing, you're going to be able to do that.

So then how do you differentiate from all the Apple stuff? Because by all accounts, all the Apple bands are incredibly high quality. So you're not going to outdo them on quality, probably, unless you're some sort of brand that offers a luxury brand experience of some kind. So I think that's the story, is that it's cheaper and easier for these companies to get knockoff lugs and sell them on eBay for $20 a shot or $15 a shot.

And I've got a couple, and they're fine. They're not great. They're not as good quality as Apple, but they're fine. And there are lots of people that have them, and they say that they're fine. But I have so many bands and a good choice of them, I'm fine with it. But I'm just a little bit nervous if one day my watch is slipping off my wrist or whatever.

That's what kind of freaks me out. But it's there if you want it. Maybe you should get it and you can say what you think of it. It's a fun idea. The six color band. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by PDF Pen from Smile. I'm very excited about this sponsorship today.

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just like a few quid. Like it's absolutely fantastic. PDF pen for iPad and iPhone is universal. Just one purchase for both devices and that support for the apple pencil absolutely fantastic love it pdf pen 8 for mac os adds audio notes and file attachment supports and it's running fantastically on the mac os sierra beta go to smilesoftware.com upgrade right now to find out more about the pdf pen family couldn't recommend this product enough thank you so much to smile for supporting this show and relay fm i honestly i use it every single day because if i'm not using it for the house stuff i'm using it for contracts and stuff for relay fm it we had to do this me away we had to do this my wife uh needed to fax fax something and it was involving my daughter and her high school athletics

activity and so it was a report from a doctor and I said we can do this digitally we can take a picture of the document and bring it in and annotate it and then send it back out and it's like a fax

but it's actually from the 21st century and it's like a fax, but it's actually from the 21st century. And it would be clear. You can actually read it. Imagine that. We have another Gurman report. Guys on fire. Gurman report from the Gurman desk. This is all about the MacBook Pro line refresh.

So we're going to talk about that. But before, I have a question I'd like to pose for you. We're coming up on September. We're coming up on the that. But before, I have a question I'd like to pose for you. So we're coming up on September. We're coming up on the event. We've had iPhone rumors coming out from Goeman. We now have MacBook stuff. Not only is there nothing from him, but I can't think of, I can't recall,

any credible sources, any credible reports about the Apple Watch 2. Nothing. What's happening here? Do you think that maybe the product is so small production-wise, it's not fully in the chain yet? I think it's possible. I think that they may...

If there is an Apple Watch 2, so there are a couple of possibilities. One rumor is that there is an Apple Watch 2 design as well as an update to the Apple Watch original that there might be sort of, they'll keep the original around as the sport model with slightly upgraded internals, which is something I've expected all along.

I think I might have even talked about this when it was announced a couple of years ago, the idea that they might leave the external design the same. Why? Of course they will. They're going to have the one that we have right now for sale for cheaper because that's the apple way every product line has this right so they'll make it a little bit faster maybe maybe it has a little bit more memory but it's basically the same apple watch i don't think they're gonna do that it'll look exactly the same yeah i think it's possible that they that they'd upgrade the

internals a little bit but nothing nothing substantial and maybe not even talk about it but it might be slightly better slightly slight variation but if you think that watch os3 is fast now they don't need to do it that's true i don't think they're going to do that so they keep that around as the sport model and they cut the price and then they start producing one that's got fancier features at higher price points i hope that if they do that though they don't just have aluminium versions of the watch too like that they let's not just stainless steel i mean and they also have the aluminium versions because i personally don't like the stainless steel design for me so we'll see what they do there we'll see so so my my theories are one it is so small or

constrained or they are they are making an effort based on where they're making it to uh keep the leaks out of the supply chain or it may not even be put in production yet that they're that they're leaving that to later and it's something that's not going to ship until october or november even right i think they really just want to get it out there for the holiday season which means they could even not ship it until early november and it would be just fine i think and so that's one theory and my other theory is a product that they need to worry about announcing early right it's the osborne effect right that's yeah where product that they need to worry about announcing early. Right. It's the Osborne effect, right? Yeah, where they kill...

Yeah, Apple Watch 1 sales are trailing off right now anyway in anticipation of it. Speaking of which, I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a Planet Money episode about the Osborne effect. I don't listen to Planet Money, but Adina does, and it was on in the house the other day. And it was absolutely fascinating to hear about osborne computers and how they kind of just exploded it was really really interesting so i'm gonna put that in there i'll find it i'm sure it's around here but uh yeah if you don't know what the osborne effect is go listen to that it's it's very smart i enjoyed it so they um my other theory is that they're the apple watch 2 looks so much like the apple watch 1 that nobody can tell that it is that it is

literally an internals upgrade and that it may not look anything different on the outside or or so close in terms of maybe the the uh metal enclosure even if it does have gps even if it does have a camera that that may be part of the screen housing and not the metal enclosure so that the places where most of these leaks come from in terms of like the enclosures wouldn't see it or wouldn't notice it it wouldn't shock me because again i feel like this brand new product, you got a bunch of early adopters. Maybe Apple doesn't want its next iteration of the Apple Watch to be that different from the one that's out there now.

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, sure, ultimately they want it to be a thinner product. I'm not sure that this is the era yet of the Apple Watch where they can really make it thinner when they've got so much that they're trying to pack into that technology.

I think it's small enough it's not a thin watch by any stretch of the imagination but it's small enough that maybe they want to kind of let it ride and just do a smaller upgrade to to make it more more capable and and sell more of them because honestly i don't know i'm not seeing a huge leap that they could that they could necessarily take with it. I think the software, what we saw with watchOS 3, I think watchOS 3 is the biggest leap for the Apple Watch, honestly. But we'll see. So that's one theory is that it's so subtle that we may not notice.

And the other theory is that it's, yeah, that they're hiding it away and it's not far enough along that we had any leaks. We'll see. I mean, I don't know. I feel like they're going to do something. I really want to see it just get a little bit thinner. That's mainly what I want. I mean, a lot of the rumors early on, well, a little while ago,

was about putting a camera in the thing. I still don't understand the value of putting a camera in it. I don't think it would work, but we'll see. Anyway, so the government report about the MacBook Pro refresh, slightly thinner not tapered smaller footprint slightly thinner not i wanted lots thinner yeah i wanted like towards macbook thinner so i talked about this with gruber and uh on the talk show last week and um i think the challenge here i think we all wanted that right we all wanted we wanted the

macbook and the macbook air to lead the way for the MacBook Pro. That they are more than those, more substantial than those computers, but still thinner, lighter. Always, it's the Apple law, thinner and lighter. And I think the problem is that if you look at the MacBook, it's extreme. But what you're seeing there is cooling problems power problems it's under it's so underpowered compared to like state-of-the-art why and it's because of the quest to have it be thin and light this is the macbook pro they it has to supply a minimum amount of performance it just it has to otherwise use the macbook like if you want

thin and light use the macbook but the macbook pro has to have a base level of performance they can't they can't not have a laptop in their line that's capable of top of the line uh laptop performance and i think that's what's behind this is just you know we can't make it this much smaller because we can't pull the stuff inside then we can't put an you know an i7 in it we can't make it this much smaller because we can't put an i7 in it. We can't use the full-on Intel processors. We can't do the discrete graphics card that we need to in order to drive an external HD display, let's say, down the road. There's so many things that kind of fall off the feature list if this happens, if they take it below a certain point so i feel like there is still a constraining factor and they're they're trying to get it as light and thin as

they can while still having it be a flagship laptop just but it is disappointing right because we all imagine a macbook pro that feels more like the macbook and it just may not be possible for them because the macbook is so i mean it it it's the cautionary tale of laptops right don't be like me um unless you want it i mean if you want it thin and light be like that but a pro laptop can't afford to do make that decision just quickly it wasn't planet money it was uh gimlet's ebay podcast open for business oh that was what it was on so i'll put that in the show notes in case you're looking for it it's worth listening to okay um the reason i want it super thin and super light is my own selfish needs like what i'm looking for out of an apple laptop now is the best possible

laptop for traveling right because the only time i ever use a laptop now is when it's in my bag and i'm on a trip like this because i might need to use logic on the go so i'm looking for the smallest thinnest powerful computer that that's that's my desire so that's why i want it to be super light and super thin i will take slightly thinner but what i really want is a lot lighter that's that's what i'm looking for well and just to be the uh devil's advocate here i suppose a little bit you could argue that there is not a lot that you do that a macbook can't do like the macbook and you can build that with that i with that i7 even i think this is what i thought so my i was i was actually very close to buying a macbook at wwdc because gray was using one like and it was working for him he was editing we were looking at it together peer pressure is powerful and i was i was holding

a macbook adorable in my hands and i was gonna get it but i thought to myself we're so close from the mac Pro refresh, I need to see what that is, because if it is super light and super thin, or light enough and thin enough, it will still have all the power that I need. So I'm just, for me personally, I'm just going to see what they do here and then think about my next upgrade.

I might not rush into it and just keep the MacBook Pro that I have for a while, but there are some things in this which are interesting to me. And the touchscreen strip for the function keys, I think that could be kind of cool. So this is one of the things why I'm like umming and ahhing about what to do here. So from German's report, the touchscreen strip will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application i'm not the first person to think this but it threw me right back to the original iphone introduction you know no physical buttons just a touch screen because then you can add the buttons you can change the buttons you can make the buttons whatever you need them to be right so it

made me think of that like i imagine having logic open and being able to program in some shortcuts right of the tools that I want to switch to, which would then make it even more interesting and more cool to use than my iMac for that function. So this is why I think this could be interesting. But I know that people like yourself who have been used to using these keyboards for a long time are a little bit more hesitant of keys being removed

in the in the interest of adding this touchscreen strip i'm skeptical about the touchscreen um oh i should say as my follow-up yes you can build to order an m7 which is the lightweight version of that so you can power up that macbook and i would it's possible um the the touchscreen thing again gruber and i touched on this too um and he he made the point of do you do you not look at your function keys uh because i i complained that if you have to do it not on feel but you have to look at the screen you have to look down um i do touch type some of the the power you know the volume and the brightness i do i do that but uh my my concern is is it really going to be app

specific stuff or is it mostly going to be system stuff and maybe there will be an option for some app specific stuff on there but i i feel like it's much more likely that it's mostly system shortcuts and maybe apps will be able to put the labels on the equivalent of function keys. So they'll say you can have access to F1 through F8 as you do now. So you reckon that the volume and the brightness will always be there, right? My expectation is it will take more taps. So there'll be like on the right-hand side, you'll get like a little sun and a little volume thing, and you'll tap that and it'll expand,

and then you could change the volume or brightness. I don't know if this is going to be multi-touch or not but my my i don't know if this is a prediction if if i were at apple um i would at least ask the people involved why why do we need discrete uh key taps for volume and brightness could that not be if you put your finger anywhere on that strip and slide it up and down it's brightness and if you put two fingers down and slide it it's volume that'd be cool right and then you wouldn't be tapping that completely changes your requirement for having it from a touch typing perspective. Right. Because you're doing it.

You're doing gestures. You're doing gestures for the most common controls for a laptop. If they don't put gestures in that bar, it may as well have been another company that made it. Because gestures are Apple's thing. Right. So a multi-touch bar where you don't have to... Because what I've been saying all along it's really smart about about volume and brightness is they're not fundamentally

discrete key tap interfaces we we've repurposed keys to do them because we have keys on a keyboard right but they're not that they're they're all a continuum right they they all are sliders essentially and and so in the in the interface you have them as sliders but on your keyboard you have keys so you tap the keys but if they do this they don't need to be keys anymore they really can be you know imagine as a laptop user you're sitting in front of your laptop and you want it to be a little brighter or darker just being able to reach up to that strip and stick your finger down and then just slide until you're comfortable and then let go it's like that makes so much sense to me like that so i that's what i hope they do is that and then you don't need uh brightness and volume controllers on that strip at all because

you have a better method of doing it right like that's not like oh we've replaced it that's better like that's just a better way of doing or alternately you say if you slide on if it's not multi-touch you you slide the finger on the right side and it's volume and on the left side it's brightness or something like that but something that's gestural and not like tap tap tap tap on this touch screen oh i'd like that and then my other theory is that you know how do you make this thing not a feature that only affects MacBook Pro 2016 models? Maybe the easy way is to just say, look, app developers, put your shortcuts on F1 through F8. And then here's an API to do custom labels.

And on this model, the custom labels will show. And you get to name what F3 is. And put a little icon there. And put a little icon and put a little icon and all of that stuff and on all the other systems it's f3 it's just right there thing is though the macbook pro if you're a mac developer that's got to be where the majority of your audience is anyway yeah but it'll take years for yeah i agree but like a new api like and a new framework to work just with that bar that only works on the MacBook Pro,

I don't think that's a bad decision if you're a developer because there have got to be so many. Do you have the basic level, which is what you just said, like you map the keys and you put little icons in, but then there's also a press and hold and drag and there's another level you can move to if you want to. Because it would upset me if they put this bar in and all it did was just replace the keys.

Yeah, I agree. I want it to, like, with this idea of the brightness and volume, I want that sort of stuff in logic, right? That it can control some kind of volume or some kind of slider. And that would sell you potentially on buying a MacBook Pro, which is one of the ideas here. And if it took off, maybe they would put that in all their other products, too. I hope that this would come, and it would be crazy if it didn't, to a keyboard, a new

Magic Keyboard, to have one of these in them. And it would be mega expensive, like $250 or something they would charge for it. But it would be really cool. I would go so far as to say I feel like this thing will be a failure if it doesn't extend to the rest of the Mac product line. Like Force Touch or the Force Touch trackpad. Yeah, you've got to put it everywhere. You've got to make it available everywhere.

If the Force Touch trackpad didn't come to the trackpad, like the Magic trackpad, Force Touch would have been a failure because if you don't bring it to that external product, it means it didn't work well enough in the laptop. Right. So, I mean, I would argue that it didn't doesn't work anywhere like it's an extension but like the the technology is good right that you can create this thing where

it clicks and but that's effectively all it does for me okay and i don't know anyone that's using it differently all it is is like congratulations you removed the need for a spring yeah that's effectively all they did because i don't know anyone, I'm sure people will contact me, please do if you do it, that uses the Force Touch trackpad gestures for anything. Like you've got all the stuff like to seek in a video, but it's not used. But it's cool technology, and if what they did was it helped them make the laptops thinner, then great, you succeeded.

But as a new gesture interface the force touch stuff i don't think has really taken off in any way um but the product like the idea of it the technology works that's what i'm saying like even if people don't really super adopt it if it comes to the keyboard you know the technology works and even from a base level everyone's happy with it. But we'll see. Should we move on to some other things that this MacBook Pro is rumored to have? Sure. More powerful graphics chips.

There's a line that I cannot get my head around in Gurman's article. For expert users, such as video gamers. I can't get my head around what this means. Like, for one thing, the sentence just doesn't make any sense to me. Like, expert users such as video gamers, I don't think that those two terms are interchangeable. Gamers are not expert users of computers, and expert users aren't necessarily gamers.

But why are they pointing out the graphics chips work for games? This is not a thing on the Mac. Mac gaming, there are lots and lots of hurdles. The biggest hurdle being that Apple have kind of terrible chips for games. Yeah. I don't know why they would be promoting this as a thing, right?

Like, why they're talking about this to government, because they will talk about it on stage, I expect. And I can't understand why they're doing this in the macbook pro line like it's just this is just a thing that's very confusing to me and i really want to see more about what that means and what the chips actually are that they're going to be using it's very it's a very weird statement yeah it sounds to me like this is a fact about they're using more powerful graphics in here and then attempting to... And we've seen this, I think, in a couple of his reports

where there's then an attempt to explain how it might be used that's kind of a reach. Yeah, like there are so many hurdles about bringing this stuff, like games to the Mac. It just seems like such a weird statement to make, but we'll see about that. Yeah. USB-C to be included.

I was thinking about this. I really want USB-C power for my laptop because I have one of those huge Anker batteries that I bought on Prime Day. I've had like little Mophies, but I got like that huge Anker thing, which is basically like an Anker. It's massive. And that could power my laptop right i want that yeah i mean usbc power the disadvantage is it doesn't have the you know magnet release stuff that magsafe has but one of the advantages is that it is no longer a connector that's licensed only by apple and that you now have any you know

any usb power source will work with it um i think one of the interesting questions about usbc on the macbook pros is what what is the port configuration in general is it only um is it only usbc is it usbc and uh usb 3 is there thunderbolt or and is it usbc or is it thunderbolt 3 usbc there are a lot of questions about this because we're in a port transition now and i think the question is is this one of those macbook pro releases whenever it comes that is a rip the band-aid off release where all the legacy ports just go away and you need adapters or is it more which i think would probably be the wisest path is more of a transitional form where they've got some traditional usb on there and they've got the new usb if they go usbc only on the macbook pro that would be crazy yeah well there would be howls of protest which is probably probably why

they're not because pros have lots of usb things that they need to connect this should be half the way through right so instead of having two regular usb things you have one usb one usbc right so you're like slowly moving towards the usbc standard and there's plenty of room for ports on the side of that thing so you know yeah i mean you could have i mean even if they gave me like one usb to usbc like you know like don't take it away help move me along this line but removing all of the existing io for this would that would yeah that that would be although if you want usbc power you're going to need more than one usbc port yes which is like two two on the side like two usb on c on one side one usb on the other sd card headphone jack well and who knows and uh when there's a question about video right because

right now video comes out as mini display port which is also thunderbolt um if you did that's have one thunderbolt on as well probably i i would imagine so because you could also do thunderbolt three through usbc but then you're gonna i mean apple will sell a bunch more adapters if they do that right because you'll have to replace all your old thunderbolt video adapters mini display port with usbc thunderbolt 3 video adapters instead which i mean that's not beyond apple to do that but i yeah if i had to make a guess it would be that they'd introduce this new connection type while leaving the old type there for for one model year basically and then the next one would clear that stuff away yeah we'll see um the io is going to be a real hot topic on this machine um i'm interested to see what they do with it. The headphone jack will be very interesting.

I think if they remove it from the iPhone, they would probably take it off the MacBook just for the sake of it, but I don't know. I hope that they don't because of what I do. I don't want there to not be a headphone port on this because audio is my life, right? I think MacBook Pro, also you've got the argument that they've got space

for a headphone jack yeah and pros need latency free yep not re-encoded audio out if they're a video or audio editor so on a pro i feel like these are the last devices that apple would make that would that would lose their headphone jack i you're right. There's too many reasons why pros need wired audio. This is my realization. I use headphones every day, but I don't use wired headphones on my iPhone every day. In fact, I very rarely do these days. But I use wired headphones every day on my Mac.

So I'm very attached to wired headphones, but not on my iPhone so much as on my Mac. My Mac is where it's important. Touch ID? Excellent. Please. Sure. There aren't a lot of reasons why you'd need it on a Mac as much as an iPhone.

But just for me, onePassword on my Mac. I hate typing the password in now. Yeah, I feel like it's unlocking your Mac and doing Apple Pay and doing 1Password and things like that and having the ability to do that without. I think this stuff is starting to migrate to Apple Watches and to iPhones

connected to your Mac. But that's also a hack because your Mac is incapable of doing it itself. So this would be a start down that path. Yeah, I think that all of that stuff in Sierra is the fallback for when they implement Touch ID. So they implement Touch ID, and that is in Sierra. We just don't see it yet. And then everybody that doesn't have the new MacBook Pro,

which is the only model with a Touch ID in, they can do all of this new stuff by using the old devices. I think this is a really smart way of Apple doing this, like announcing the base level security stuff first, get people working to these new APIs, so then as soon as the Touch ID is there, it works immediately for everyone. It's an interesting way of staging up to that,

when they usually do the reverse. They announce the feature, and then everyone can work backwards from there but instead they're doing it in the other way which i quite like aren't likely to be debuted at the september event is what german says german sources are very good but i just flat out disagree with this i just think that he's got that he's got this wrong and he's got and the way it's phrased it's possible that he's talking to somebody who's like yeah i don't think they's phrased, it's possible that he's talking to somebody who's like, yeah, I don't think they're going to fit it in.

And that's like, okay, well, that's one person's opinion at Apple. But yeah, I think it makes no sense. When they took the time to talk about the iPad Pro, the last one, they will take the time to talk about the MacBooks of this one.

Also, let's remember last year's event was packed. Last year's event, there was no October event. There was no follow-on event. They could one they could do a mac event um i felt like we were done with town hall but um i don't think it's gonna happen and that and that's why because i don't think they're going to do a mac event at a special venue um and i i don't think they're going back to town hall they could and i don't think they want to unveil the mac

a whole bunch of new mac models with just briefings and press releases although they could do that not this macbook pro but but that's that's exactly it so so i think what i would say is if you've got new macbook pros if it is tied into those features in sierra you have to take some time at the september event to talk about sierra that is also the time that you talk about your new macs that are going to support all these great features in sierra and you do that all in once all at once and that is 20 or 30 minutes of your of your keynote and that's fine you've got two hours it's a long time this touch screen there's no there's no new ipads this time like you said no no tv no yeah exactly

no new apple tv no new ipads it's a it's new iphone how much time do you need to take on new iphone and ios 10 well especially when there really isn't going to be that much like an apple watch and a new apple watch but this iphone is going to be more like the amount of time they probably give to an s because for everything that we've seen suggests that it's going to be like an s release and it's three and to go back to wwdc i feel like they're going to structure this as four platforms so they're going to do an apple s release and it's three and to go back to wwdc i feel like they're going to structure this as four platforms so they're going to do an apple tv update and say apple tv is great look at all the apps olympics yay okay let's talk about watch os oh look oh new watch let's talk about uh

let's talk about mac os oh hey new max and let's talk about i ios oh look new iphone goodbye everybody right structure it like that. Move through the product line and drop your... I mean, imagine if they just said, like, we have new Macs coming. Phil Schiller comes on stage and says, new MacBook Pros, new Mac Pros, new iMac update. These are shipping in October. These are shipping in November. Goodbye, everybody. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to do it that way.'s really fun to me because you and group were kind of referencing the new mac releases and you just did it then and both times you didn't mention the mac mini yeah mini yeah what chances that mac mini is going to get a stage call out seems like

almost non-existent but it might happen it will probably get a refresh like the imac will like what's inside of it it's not going to get anybody well it's been two years oh certainlyent but it might happen it will probably get a refresh like the iMac will like what's inside of it it's not going to get a new body well it's been two years oh certainly not but it's been two years but I feel like yeah every two or three years they will come in and just refresh the internals on the Mac mini because the new processes look if it didn't sell they wouldn't keep making them it does sell it serves a purpose in the product line not every not every product is your star you not every product needs to be your star we we had this discussion with the the iphone se it's the same thing it's like the iphone se is doing pretty well for apple but it's never going to be more than probably 15 of the of the iphone 15 20 of the iphone sales that's fine mac mini holds down an important part or you know

holds down a part it may not be an important part of the Mac product line, it's good that it exists, and every two or three years, they put in just enough effort to keep it on the price list. iPad Mini. Why are you mentioning Mini? Waiting until next year as well? I mean, I assume so. They're not going to rev that product on its own,

but that's getting pretty long in the tooth now. No, the iPad Mini got updated last year to match the ipad air 2 last september yeah so it's been a year okay um and i i feel like all the ipad stuff is moving to the moving to the spring and so if that's the case then i feel like the same thing i feel like the ipad mini is still going to kick around it It's got uses. I know people who love the Mini because they are, like I used to be, somebody who, before I went to the other extreme of the iPad line, the iPad Mini, I loved because it was small. It was super pocketable. I still know people who feel that way. It's a great iPad for kids. Great. My son is an iPad mini user and he loves it. It is perfect for him. He does not need a bigger iPad. So I think like the Mac mini, it'll just kick around. It's going to get updated every couple of years. It's now, it allows them to sell a brand new iPad for,

for on the cheap side. And I think, I think it'll just keep going around, but it's never going to be, uh, you know, There was that moment when it was released where there was iPad mini hysteria, like this is going to be a huge... This might be the biggest iPad, and I think that's not. I think it's just an edge case iPad. All right, so that's that.

I'm looking to see. I think we're going to see it in September. I hope we do. I hope so. So we're a few weeks away at least. It doesn't have to ship in September. In fact, it almost certainly wouldn't. Later, but we to see it in September. I hope we do. I hope so. So we're a few weeks away at least. It doesn't have to ship in September. In fact, it almost certainly wouldn't. Later, but we should see it.

Last week we spoke about Pocket Casts. There's another new podcast application for iOS come out this week, Castro 2. You may remember Castro. It was a great little app. It came out with iOS 7. Really beautiful design from SuperTop. And they have gone and they've updated Castro. Well, it's a brand new app, Castro 2.

They've been working on it for a couple of years. I'm really happy to see it out. SuperTop are a great company. And I want to spend some time talking about it because it is very different and very interesting. I'll also put a link in the show notes to the Supertop podcast. They've created a podcast of their own talking about the development of this product. And it was very interesting in the first episode to hear them talking about their kind of feelings coming up to launch and hearing the kind of the doubt and stuffing them.

It was a very interesting episode, like on the eve of a launch of your application, how you feel. So I'll put some links in the show for their podcast. So let's talk about Castro. So the thing that makes Castro 2 different is the way the app is built to manage your podcast queue. And it does it in a way that no other application does it.

And it has different methods of thinking about managing shows. And so the main thing is that you have a list of all of the shows that you're subscribed to, all of the new episodes for those shows. You then triage them. So you tap on the show, you either archive it so you're not going to listen to it, or you add it to the top or bottom of your playing queue. That's how it works. So you effectively see all of your shows, you triage them, don't want to listen to this one, want to listen to this one next, I'll listen to this one later, and you just go through them all and decide what you want to do with every new show. And what this does is it's really good for people that have lots of shows that they subscribe to, and it's also really good for people that have lots of shows that they subscribe to and it's also

really good for if you have a show that sometimes you might be interested in depending on the topic so you can subscribe to it it doesn't fill up your playing queue but now you can choose if you want to listen to that episode or not this is exactly how i am managing my podcasts right now in overcast i subscribe to fundamentally massively more shows than I could ever listen to. But I pick and choose depending on topic for some shows. There are some shows I listen to every week. In Overcast, I have them bump up to the top of my list with the playlist preferences. And then the rest of them, I'll pick and choose depending on what I want to listen to.

But this is an application that is built around that. And as someone who looks at podcasts in the way that i do castro has been built for me and i have to say this is easily the very best way that i have seen for managing a large podcast queue and it's now like my favorite paradigm for how you deal with this stuff and i've got to say like just fundamentally no matter what else we say huge hats off to super top for coming up with something new podcast apps have been the same for 10 years and they have worked out a new way to manage that queue which and it was the thing that i didn't know i needed or wanted this until they showed it to me and that's

when design is great well and i'm i'm somebody who uses overcast with a single playlist same that's how i do it and that's my cue and you know marco arment who does overcast did a set of nice had a nice tweet this week where it was like applauding this app because it does something new and that that he you know he really appreciates somebody who obviously sweats the details of podcast apps and has thought about this a lot uh this was you know i i like that he was applauding a competitor but he's absolutely right to do it because they are coming from uh like you said it's it's good design they're coming at it from a very opinionated point of view they they they have a point of view this is an app with a point of view which is

it's not a podcast app it's a podcast app for you for managing your listening cue and so it is best when you're somebody who wants to take control of what you listen to next, probably listens to a lot of podcasts, probably has opinions about which podcasts are higher priority and lower priority, and doesn't always listen to all the episodes of all the podcasts that you subscribe to. I think if any of that rings true to you, you need to look at Castro 2

because that's the beauty of it is, you subscribe to podcasts and all it does is pour them into your inbox. And then sit in your inbox and go want to listen to that next i want to listen to that eventually i don't want to listen to that i don't want to listen to that and you triage that inbox and you clear out the inbox and at that point your queue is filled up and it's filled up the way that you set it to be filled which is the high priority ones are going to play next the lower priority ones are at the bottom of the list and the ones you archive they never go in your list which is one of the things about overcast that does bother me is that sometimes i do i end up doing pruning

in the playlist uh because it adds every episode of of a podcast and i'm like i don't want to listen to that one i don't want because i there are there is nothing wrong i say this about the incomparable all the time there is nothing wrong with not listening to every episode of a podcast um people do it some people are will listen to every episode from the beginning and will then re-listen and those people we love those people but but some podcasts you don't feel that way about you're like you want to pick and choose and caster's really good at letting you pick and choose there are different types of shows like if someone listens to upgrade it's weird it would be weird for me if they pick and choose what episodes i listen to right because it is one kind of singular topic we talk about which tends to be apple focused technology so it

runs through but with the incomparable if you don't like a movie or that have no interest i've never seen it then you pick and choose from you know in fact that's by just i mean comparable by design almost is a pick and choose podcast because i don't i don't i didn't want to do one podcast about one topic i wanted it to jump all over the place as a result when people are apologetic when they say i don't oh i don't listen to every episode of the it's like no i unless you're me i'm not surprised right i pick what i'm interested in i expect everybody else to pick and choose and be like yeah this is about comics i don't care about that i'm not going to listen to that one oh this one's about star wars i want to listen to that difference of topic focus shows and use focus shows yeah but anyway we're digging in the weeds again or well there are

interview shows that i that i'll listen to the interviews with people that i'm interested so when i was doing inquisitive that was so true people would just if you weren't had no interest in a person you just didn't listen to their episode like i used to get that all the time and it's one of the problems of doing a show like that it's difficult because you don't actually know who's listening you see the numbers but the numbers aren't accurate anyway so we're digging in so some of my issues with castro it doesn't support chapters which which people people do like it doesn't have a now playing screen per se with like show art and controls the show art is like kind of sequestered to the bottom right in the little now playing bar yeah there's a little bar

it just gives you playback stuff yeah and it's got an animation of a waveform that's not a real waveform and it doesn't it doesn't make sense because the waves keep traveling from the right which is the end of the podcast to the left and i get what they're trying to do there but it's like an infinite fake waveform the idea is it's like it's easy to seek so you can you can tap and drag to seek through the show i mean that's why they do it that way i get i get that but the animation is showing something that's not real it's showing it because it's it's it's the not to again we're down in the weeds here but like the left side is the start of the podcast and the right side is the end of the podcast but the waves keep streaming off the right edge of the of the podcast like they're coming from i don't even

know where from beyond the end of the podcast which just as a metaphor it doesn't work for me i think that's a mistake and the fact that they're fake waves and the fact that there's a beautiful show art that you can't see. And instead the sleep timer and the, you know, 1X, 2X. They're given too much prominence in the app. Like there's no need to see those sliders so much. Yeah. You're saying it has a point of view,

which I really agree with. Cashew 2 has a point of view. This is one of the points of view that I don't agree i just disagree with it which is fine i mean that's that they make other that's why they make more than one flavor of ice cream right it's that you can it kind of has two big points of view which is how you manage your shows and then the idea of the now playing screen and which is essentially that it's not it's too difficult to get the show notes for my for my liking right you can get to them you you have to tap like twice. And I get their argument that on the lock screen

you see the show art and the controls and they just use the lock screen. You don't need, I don't think people need to see this. If the show art's not changing, which they don't seem to support because they don't support chapters.

I don't know, I like it. You don't need to see the show art every single week. It makes me happy to see the show art and know which show I'm listening to. And it's a reminder. And sometimes they change the art and I enjoy it.

But I get enough of that in the bottom right. Like just seeing the tiny little icon, I recognize it. But my feeling is that the description and all the show notes take too many taps to get to. Yeah, that's true. And then the other thing that I'll just say is their increased speed algorithm. I don't know whether they put any work into it or if they're just using core audio, but it sounds like they're just using core audio,

which means even at every speed that's not 1x, there are artifacts. It sounds weird. So they have no silence trimming like Overcast. And like Pocket Cast, no strip silence, not strip silence, smart speed nor speed yeah nor are they making as far as i can tell an effort to really smooth out the sound when you're playing it higher than 1x and no volume boosting and i was listening to the actually listening to the super top podcast

in castro and it wasn't loud enough like the The levels were too quiet on the show and I'm used to now Overcast and Pocket Casts, they have audio boosting, which that's actually really good because audio leveling is difficult to do. Lots of people get it right, lots of people get it wrong and it's nice when an application

can kind of just give it a kick up and help you, especially because really the iPhone doesn't go that loud. Like the maximum volume of the iPhone is sometimes not loud enough, and applications that help boost the audio is good. So there's a couple of things. So for me, the inability to have it sound good at a higher than 1x speed isn't the deal breaker that makes me not want to use this app. That's not my deal breaker, funnily enough. And I think that't the deal breaker that makes me not want to use this app. That's not my deal breaker funnily enough

and I think that is the deal breaker for so many people is that it doesn't have any smart speed stuff I could let that go so looking at Pocket Cast and Overcast for me they're similar enough that it wasn't like in my mind

why would I have switched like Pocket Cast is very nice and i like it a lot and it's great for cross-platform but there wasn't a one feature that it has the overcast doesn't have and vice versa so for me it was just like wherever you fall in that is fine and if it's like what is your preferred design effectively yeah castro has the feature it has the feature that makes me want to move which is the way that you do this stuff right so it makes me want to switch because i love their main thinking about how you manage your podcast queue but it doesn't have an iPad app. That is my deal breaker. There is no iPad application, and I am an outlier here

in that these days, I'm mostly streaming shows, and I'm mostly listening on my iPads because I'm at home when I'm listening to my podcasts the most, and the iPads have such fantastic speakers. I prefer to listen on those than on my iPhone. Way louder sounds incredible.

All podcasts sound fantastic on the iPads with the four speakers. It has no iPad app. And because they have no apps on any other platform, they have no sync system. So I can't even use the iPhone app on my iPad because I can't keep them in sync. Right.

And I get why they don't have a sync system. Why do they need it if it's just an iPhone app? But I really want to see an iPad application to this because I absolutely love their thinking. And also the design is great. It looks great. Have you tried the dark and light mode switching gesture? Yeah. It's incredible like you just pull down from the two

fingers but it follows you and the design the the the art you can change the interface design like the color of the interface like oh like as as you're moving your fingers up and down with the two two fingers it's incredible that's a nice touch i twitterific has that gesture but it doesn't it just it crossfades it just does like you do it once and it just switches on and off but this is it follows your fingers up and down it's fantastic it looks great i love it um yeah there are a lot of great things about it one's kind of selfishy thing as a podcast producer i think they really haven't done a good job with the directory at all yeah and i've spoken to o'sheen about this

and they were like i hope he doesn't mind me saying this this was one thing that they just wanted to get out and they're going to work on it later but the directory all it's doing is pulling from the itunes top charts which i hate that i hate that yeah i mean i i didn't want to go into that in the little article i wrote about it yesterday because i'm a podcaster it can come across as sour grapes but i will say as a podcast listener their charts are the most boring charts it is literally just i mean it's actually great if you're somebody who's never listened to a podcast and want to know about what are the most popular podcasts it's every podcast you've ever heard of that you could name it if you're a podcast listener you could write down 50 names and you would and they would be the 50 that are in there because it's it's just the most

obvious ones overcast does a really good job like with the social recommendations and stuff like that pocket cast do a incredible job with their like curated they have someone who picks the stuff i know right puts it in there and highlights i think that they do a bit in my opinion pocket cast does a better job than apple does i feel like i feel like there's something and i think apple won't do this because apple would feel like they're making or breaking you know that one of the reasons apple takes a light touch with a lot of things we do we were talking about this last night that um on not a podcast in in life not available on itunes only for members that why like apple is so with apple music apple is making these great decisions about like what music to highlight

and building playlists and things like that and they do so so such a good job at that and yet on the app store they're afraid to play favorites and have a point of view and as a result app store features and recommendations are kind of boring um and i actually kind of wish they had more of a point of view like apple music does and uh with podcasts i feel like it's the same way it's like they feel they're so powerful that they don't want to play favorites too much they have features and stuff like that i i feel like there's an opportunity for someone somehow to do something with podcasts probably needs to be in association with an app because i've thought about doing this and i don't have the time to do it but

i wonder if there's somebody who could do a really good pick list and a and a custom playlist of podcast episodes and some people have tried it on blogs and stuff like that but i just i wonder if there's something there because curated podcasting and curated podcast episodes is something that is going to happen and kind of needs to happen and but it's just not there work for castro because they do a better job than any app that i've seen of adding one episode of one show right so like you can search in the list and when you go in on the directories, see, they have all the underpinnings of a great directory, just the face of it is not good. Because if you click into a show, you can view every episode.

They show the first one and the last one. You can expand them, look at them all, and then add that one individual show to your queue list at the top of the button. But you don't then subscribe to the show. You just get that one episode. Marco does this with Overcast, but you end up with that to the show you just get that one episode like marco does this with overcast but you end up with that show always living yeah it's a it's like a little phantom show that you're not subscribed to but i don't like that i agree with you um so one of the

reasons i knew this is happening is when i did my export to to castro i was subscribed to a bunch just like what is this it's because i added that one episode yeah but so imagine a something that's kind of like the castro inbox that is somebody's opinionated and have multiple ones of these available somebody's opinionated list of podcast episodes that they think are worth listening to because as well one and then you graze through that and go yes yes yes work with all the stuff that cash was is doing. Because when you start an episode, you have a hall of fame, basically. In the application, there is a, here are all the episodes you've starred. So like Marker does the recommend. I would love to see all of the shows I've ever recommended.

And another thing I like in Cash Show is they have a history. So you can click the history and see every show you ever listened to. Again, it's like all this stuff is like like they have built the underpinnings of a what i think if they continue going down this road they're able to go cross-platform eventually i know this stuff is hard to do it's hard it's they could be on i think sitting on the best app but they've got to get there they have a lot of work ahead of them and all of these these apps have made their choices, right? So none of them is perfect. All of them have, like Castro has made these choices about what they want to be good at.

But then they're not on the iPad and they don't sync. And they aren't cross-platform. Overcast, Marco has focused on audio stuff. And he was miles ahead of everybody else by focusing on volume boost smart speed and his deconstructing his audio player so that when it plays at high speed it sounds listenable i never listened to podcasts at faster than 1x before overcast because it sounded terrible to me just the the artifacts not the not the speed of it the artifacts made it sound terrible and they're listening to crackling and then and then pocketcast basically built the the the great feature set everywhere everywhere thing that they have an incredible application on all platforms including the web right that is their

thing and they no one i don't think there will ever be another company that can touch them so push push all of that stuff together and you've got the perfect podcast client maybe. But instead, and that's why innovation, to take this all the way back around and wrap it up, that's why innovation is important. I saw Marco Arment comment about this today. We likened it to the Twitter UI playground thing that Gruber said way back when. And it's definitely true that you're seeing it in podcasts. And what Marco said was, this is what happens when you have open standards.

When you have open standards like RSS for podcasts, you get different takes on the interface for it instead of a single take from a single platform vendor. And that's the beauty of the way that this is working is you can have Castro with a completely different take on podcasting than Overcast and Pocket Cast. And I hope it continues. I mean, they experimented with a patronage model for Castro 1.5. This one is no in-app purchase.

It's $5 to get it. Just go buy it and play with it. If you love podcasts, you should probably buy it and play with it because even if you decide not to keep using it, you will have supported the development of innovative podcast apps and i think that that's good for all podcasts because i'll tell you pocketcast and overcast you will see and this is not i'm not saying anything negative about them this is how it works this is why podcast pocketcast has features that that were inspired by overcast pocketcast and overcast

will have features inspired by castro at some point because you can't not look at that and go, oh, wow, that's a really good. And even if it's not the same, even if it just spurs Russell and Marco and anybody else who's developing podcast apps, just spurs them to think, how would I do that? What problem are they solving and how would I solve that? That's good for all the podcast apps and the the more diversity of innovation and uh and uh applications and points of view onto something like like podcast apps or any other thing it makes the whole um the whole ecosystem stronger this week's episode is also brought to you by squarespace the simplest way for anyone to create a beautiful landing page, website, or online store. Start building your website today at squarespace.com. Use the offer code UPGRADE at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

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was right or anything like that just upgrade upgrade the way to go so last week we spoke about um some interviews that apple were doing with the press and this there's more this week tim cook did a much larger interview with washington post yeah why are they doing these right now so i have i have three potential reasons theories and i want to see what your thoughts on them are uh it's tim's five years as ceo yeah um it is the five year anniversary of steve jobs passing yep and they're trying to steer the narrative post to bad earnings calls yeah do calls. I think it's a combination of all three of those things.

I think that's exactly it. I think it's a slow news month so they have a receptive audience in journalists and nothing to give them. And nothing to give them. Prepping for... I think they're laying the groundwork for September

because they want to get out their their own narrative which is that apple's just fine which i mean honestly apple is fine this is it's interesting because they're trying to combat some of the kind of bearishness on apple based on those results i think that's part of it i think the five years of ceo is part of it and and uh and so it's yes i think it's all those things i think i think i don't think apple is super actively combating this apple is doomed narrative because the apple is doomed narrative has always been there and it's kind of dumb um and it's always been dumb since night, since jobs came back, it was doomed, almost doomed in 97.

But I mean, it's been dumb, very dumb for a very long time. The, so I think it's all of those things. I think this is also Steve Dowling, the new head of PR at Apple trying new stuff, like trying different stuff.

This is, this is something that if you're viewing this from a Katie Cotton perspective, not to get all insidery on you but katie cotton was the head of all pr and marketing uh or you know all pr and communications working for working directly for steve i think not even working for phil um and if she was working for phil she was still working directly for steve let's be honest um that's my understanding is that Katie really worked closely with Steve. So Steve Dowling is now in charge and who was ahead of corporate PR, which was more like handling Steve Jobs and other executives and not the product PR. And he and Natalie Karras, who was the head of product PR, both vied to get this job.

And Steve Dowling got it. Natalie Karras left went to twitter she's now left twitter she's in now on a vacation in italy which is good good career move there to honestly like take take some time um go to italy that's beautiful uh so so steve dowling is now in charge and um i don't know you're in charge of something like Apple PR, and you've watched how it worked under Katie and with Steve Jobs. And now you've got Tim and an opening feeling of, let's try different things. Let's be different. We can grow and change. And you want to make your own mark. And we've seen it in how Apple does events. I mean, in so many different ways, Apple has thrown

away their old rulebook for dealing with the public and the press so why not this stuff right so i i think if you were to bring it back around if you were looking at this under the katie cotton playbook you would be like oh geez what are they all of this is super tactical they are very specifically addressing certain things maybe they're trying to exact revenge on certain news organizations that they're not going to give this to. I mean, you could come up with a whole list of things that Apple used to do. I don't know if any of those are really accurate. I think this is a, you know, let's keep ourselves in the public eye. We've got a quiet month to make some noise about how great we are. We do want to offset some of the feelings about Apple that are negative.

Although again, I think that was much more true after the previous quarterly earnings and not this most recent one because the stock actually did okay. I think the narrative isn't as brutal for Apple as it was three months ago, where people did that one report and the stock result and freaked out. So I don't know't know yeah i think it's a combination of all those things i'm much actually i'm much less interested in the kremlin ology of this than just in the fact that we got in the washington post story we got some interesting bits from tim i mean he's super super uh on message um and yet between this and the fast company story i mean there was there was good there was good stuff i I think this Washington Post story was a better read than the Fast Company story.

There was more information in this one. The Fast Company story was more like a little story that was being told. Fast Company story was a better story for people who don't know a lot about Apple and wanted to get sort of some reassurance about, like, Apple's fine. Here's what it's like at Apple. Isn't this cool washington post story is which is funny because fast company is a business publication you'd expect that these would be reversed and the washington post would be the one when i said reversed mike and i both did a little hand gesture of flipping our fingers opposite direction yeah

it probably happens all the time but we can't see it when we're not in person um washington post story is is much more nitty-gritty with uh tidbits about what apple's doing than the fast company story was so it's that fast company was more of a gloss and this is i mean down to the point where she she's got like four or five paragraphs and then it's just like here's the here's the q a and it just drops into a q a of like let's just here's what tim said pure like information yeah right so there isn't really anything new here but it's interesting to hear tim's words on something it's all the color the details yep that's where that's where it gets interesting because all of this because they they're never going to say anything secret right all of this is about what they're emphasizing what the details

are and how we can read that to make us understand what they're thinking like there was a bunch of stuff about tax reform which i found fascinating because apple is in such a unique and weird position when it comes to taxes they appear to be and they say they are following the laws but the laws are fundamentally weird and broken. Yeah, and they don't deny that, which I think is an interesting take. When Cook testified before Congress, he said as much. And I think that's a really interesting take that Apple has. We're taking advantage of the legal loopholes that you have allowed to be created because of the bad corporation tax rules in America.

And you should probably fix them. We'll bring our money back. And that's part of their argument is we pay we pay billions of dollars in taxes i think they said we're the largest taxpayer in the united states which doesn't i mean that's logical because they make the most money right right but it's like you know there is a feeling like the the big companies and rich people often are the ones who are best equipped to avoid paying tax and then everybody else pays the tax but apple saying no no we pay the tax and then again i like i like that tim cook is not just saying look do what you want if you change the rules we'll follow the new rules he's like no you should change the

rules and one of those arguments is about repatriating money bringing that money back to the u.s from overseas um and their argument is we made that money overseas we could leave it overseas if you change the tax law to make it more reasonable for us to bring it home we can bring it home and spend it at home so his argument is um this is the this is essentially the quid pro quo which is if you change the tax law so it isn't ridiculously expensive for us to bring our money back then we'll bring the money back and when we bring the money here we spend it here so that's the benefit to the the the united states is you may not get as much tax as you would if we brought it back but below a certain point we'll bring it back and above a certain point we're just never

going to bring it back home so it's you know it's negotiating and all of that what i find really fascinating read between the lines and he said this before is there will be tax reform in 2017 and i get the sense that because we know he's politically well connected he did the fundraiser for paul ryan he's doing a fundraiser for hillary clinton i think tim cook has been told in washington off the record by democrats and republicans that there's totally a deal that's going to be done here i don't even think after the presidential election i think tim is telling the presidential candidates that there will be tax reform in 2017 no i think i i think he knows i think he's one of the most powerful men in the world i think he's heard from the i think when he went to washington

he heard from the people in washington that this presidential election is over, they will, you know, no matter who wins, they will do something to address the tax stuff. It sounds like both parties, what he said is both parties are actually interested in fixing this messed up tax code stuff. So, and then in Europe, it's, I don't know enough about the European policy stuff, but he painted that, and this may be disingenuous or it may be completely legit. The way he portrayed that whole thing about the European Union and Ireland's tax code is, he said, look, they're not even arguing about how much tax we should pay. They're arguing about who gets the money. Yeah. So, let them squabble about that, which I thought was an interesting take on that.

It seems like from reading that and the little i know about it this is a problem between ireland and the european union as opposed to apple in the european union right but the european union think that island gave apple a special deal which tim is denying yeah yeah that sounds about right so i want to touch on a few other things that he mentioned social responsibility this is i've mentioned this before about how i believe apple incorporated to be a better company under tim cook than it was under steve jobs take out the products all of that stuff like just as a company as a thing in the world they do better their environmental stuff is better there he touches a lot on uh coming out as being gay and talking about the importance of all of that

all of these things are apple as a company and how they show themselves to the world and i think tim does an incredible job of that like you know things like the they didn't mention this but when he changed the employee contributions program for charities and stuff like it didn't really exist before and tim did a lot of these things and they talk about that they talk about the billionth iphone as well and it's fun to me that the throughout the interview that the iphone is sitting on tim's desk what are they going to do with that so you keep that they've like put like in case it in something they'll put that they'll put that in the apple museum that they're building uh on the new campus yeah but right now it just sits on his desk it's a paperweight

yeah i want to and now i have's a paperweight yeah i want to and now i have like a bunch of quotes i want to read because i just think they're interesting okay so on earnings we got 60 billion in revenue and they said you can't grow any more from this well last year we were 230 billion and yes we're coming down some this year every year isn't an up i've heard it all before in today's products we have services which over the last 12 months grew about 4 billion to over 23 billion next year we said it's going to be a fortune 100 company so there's a couple of things here I don't recall those numbers 4 billion 23 billion like kind of putting them in that context is really interesting and I just love the the the quote of

like every year is an up you know I've heard this all before, how candid he is, and kind of just like flippant is very interesting to me. That is a confident CEO in the future of his company. They're like, yeah, it goes up and down. But the thing was, we went up, up, up, up, up, up for longer than anybody else has. Now we're just going to be in the up and down period. And I can get on board with that. Right? Like if he's thinking that way, it's like, yeah, now they're running like any company does but they've established that their kind of regular position is monstrously higher than anybody else's right got to that now and now they're going to go up and down a bit and it's repositioning as they're not an exponential

growth company anymore they were for five years or four years and now they're not an exponential growth company anymore. They were for five years or four years. And now they're a regular company that's growing. And they're not, I think part of this and maybe one of the messages that they're trying to sell now in terms of the narrative is, look, as we know, as anyone who reads the Macalope knows, people have been saying that Apple

is one step away from doom for a decade now. It's always, those people always, they never understood Apple. They've never understood Apple's customers. Now there are more Apple customers than ever before. They don't understand them. They figure at some point, everybody's going to wake up from their days

and they're going to stop buying Apple products. And finally, Apple will be exposed as a company that makes no product that anyone actually wants or needs. Those people are diluted, but they have been continually diluted for decades, and they will continue to be. So when Apple sales go down, in their mind, it fits the narrative that they want to believe more than any other, which is they will continue to go down until Apple is gone, because Apple

doesn't make sense to them, and they don't know why anyone would buy their products now um what apple's doing here is the counter narrative which is yeah we're not going down in fact we're still going up we just you know we're down over last year but the trend is positive and we're fine yeah and the the truth is that's what that's that's where we are, is Apple's going to continue to have huge profits and okay growth, but the smartphone exponential growth period is over. And that's okay. And so in some ways, they just want to steady. They want to just send the message, things are good.

We've steadied the ship. Things are fine. Yeah, we went down from last year, but things are fine. we're steady, you know, we've studied the ship. Things are fine. Yeah, we went down from last year, but things are fine. Because the one narrative out there that I think they just want to combat is the Apple's going down. Like Apple going down from last year is the start of a crash. And I think nobody legitimately believes that other than these kind of nutty people on the side who, you know, but still, I think it's worth saying because it's very easy for somebody not educated in Apple's business or this industry to hear something like that and think, oh, I hear Apple's really having problems.

And they're not. They're not having problems. They're making billions and billions and billions of dollars every quarter. They could subsist on their cash hoard alone for a decade or two at their current rate of spend. So it's fine. On the iPad Pro, what we saw in this past quarter is that about half the people who are buying one are using it at work.

We have an enormous opportunity in enterprise. That is a repositioning of the iPad. Yeah. In a very interesting way. They've been talking up their IBM relationship and the Fortune 500 relationship. I think what features... Is it repositioning or is it that it's the only good news they've got?

I don't know. I mean, I feel like if you feel that this product is working in the enterprise, what do you add to this product to make it work better in the enterprise? That's true. In terms of prioritizing where you take the product i think that's absolutely true and i wonder what that's going to look like over the next couple of years i think that they've made their because you know in that government report as well apparently apple research have nailed that it's a three-year cycle now that's

that's new information yeah that was that was new so that that coupled with this i wonder where that takes the iPad. Well, I think it's good news for anybody who uses the iPad to get work done. Because even if we're not in enterprise, I feel like, you know, people like us who use the iPad to get work done,

more features that help business productivity on the iPad is good for you and me and anybody else who's like us. So that's, yeah. I mean, as it should be. And I know he's always talking up his Fortune 500 and- That's his world, man.

And IBM and all of those things. He even mentioned it when he said about writing his op-ed about coming out. And he said, I wanted to put it in a business publication because that's what I know. Yeah. And I love that. Because it was a kind of, where was it in, was it was bloomberg bloomberg business week weird place to put it but it's like for him it's like that's me well he wanted the context of i'm a businessman first it was kind of cool i like that whole section where he's talking about that talking about

getting advice he talks about where he gets advice from people um and he's talking about like calling other ce, calling previous presidents. It's like, I just wonder how those calls go. Because he doesn't even really know some of these people. It's like, hi, I'm CEO, your CEO. Can we talk about Congress, please? Yeah, talk about your humble brag, right? It's like, who do you call for advice?

He's like, well, you know, I called Warren Buffett. I called Bill Clinton. It's like, it's just such a weird thing. But he talks about how it can be lonely to be CEO. I totally get that. Because everyone he works with, a lot of his friends work for him. And that must be a real weird feeling. And so he talks to these other CEOs.

It's strange. Well, when you're in charge... The biggest company in the world. Well, regardless, big company, small company, small division, whatever it is, you have no peers in your group. So as the editorial director at IDG,

I had no peers in my group i had peers in my company who were like the head of sales and the head of hr and the head of development i had a boss which tim cook doesn't have other than the board um but he was the ceo and he was you know those those ceos were all from sales backgrounds anyway. So I had at the end, the last couple of years, I had a boss who was group editorial director at IDG and he came from the enterprise side. And that was at least, that was actually kind of cool because I could talk to him about stuff and it was a little less lonely to be honest. But when you're in that position where everybody in the group that you live in every day, the fishbowl you swim in every day, is somebody who works for you. It is. It puts you apart from them in some ways. You can't just

throw around wacky ideas about ways to completely deconstruct your business because it directly affects them and they worry, oh crap, am I going to lose my job or whatever, right? It is an isolating position to be at the top of any little ecosystem, any little bubble. So, and if you're Tim, yeah, you're at Apple and you're the CEO and who are your peers? And so, yeah, I think it's actually kind of great that he does have people he can reach out to, even if it is like, I'm going get warren buffett on the phone here but at least it's you know does he call up the the ceo at ibm and talk to her about what's going on there and uh yeah call bill clinton see what's going on there i don't know but he he's right i like it humanizes him but also from a business perspective, that is a relevant thing.

It's like, who does he talk to? Because in the end, he has to make those decisions. He can talk to Phil Schiller, and he can talk to Craig Federighi, and he can talk to all the people at Apple. But in the end, he has to make the decisions, and that's lonely, too. Talking about Steve, there's some just really heavy emotional stuff uh when i first took the job as ceo i actually thought that steve would be here for a long time i'd really convince myself and though this sounds probably bizarre at this point but i convinced myself that he would bounce because he always did you can see that in the wording of of the i was looking at that note the other week the apple press release where steve basically says i'm gonna the time has come for

me to step back from this but i'm gonna be around as the chairman and um at the time we were all like oh boy how sick is this guy and then when he died we're like oh you know they must have known but this actually explains why that language was that way is that steve was was getting sicker but that the people at apple and probably steve felt or hoped that this would be another one because he obviously had had this before where he'd really kind of gone down and then bounced back and gotten better and they expected that he would bounce like he says i convinced myself i know it sounds bizarre but i convinced myself he would bounce because he always did they they felt like they were on a cycle where steve would get sicker and they would work on it and he would get better and they figured that would happen again and in this

case it didn't happen when you look at someone like him um you can see why people just considered he was superhuman yeah how could you imagine i mean we think about that and didn't know him how the people who work with him his friends steve jobs steve jobs doesn't die had to think steve jobs is never going to die like he will fight it he will figure it out he has all of the world's resources to figure this out he's a tough guy he's never going to succumb to this and i i'm sure that they told themselves that he was an original of a species i never viewed that as my role to be steve i think i would have been a it would i think it would have been a treacherous thing

if i would have tried to do it yeah to try and be steve and yeah he could original of a species is the like the best way i have ever heard steve jobs described because he was and anyone trying to be him never would have worked and i think that that is like just the perfect way to describe that so at the uh at the ipod photo event at the california theater in san jose where uh where you two or at least Bono and Edge performed. They were, the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album was out,

they were promoting that with the U2 iPod and all of that, and they performed a song from the new album, and Steve Jobs introduced them and said, this is my favorite song on that new album, it's so great. And that song was original of the species. So this is a U2 reference that Tim is it's so great and that song was original of the species so this is a u2 reference that tim is making here whether he knows it or not that that

was that was a show that that was the song that steve jobs said this is this is the best this is my uh and so when i saw that i was like wow that's uh that's that's a u2 reference there that's happening um i mean it's word is weirdly original of a species yeah probably is me that's nice i hope that's the reference that's that's got to be i mean that's i think how that phrase got got to him was because i think when every time every time i hear that song i think uh this is steve jobs's favorite song on that on that album um but yeah i love the self-awareness of tim cook here because you get to that point, you're exalted, you're going to become the CEO of Apple.

I suppose it's possible that you could go on an ego trip and think I'm going to try to be Steve Jobs. And it takes some discipline to recognize that you're not that guy and you're never going to be that guy and you need to do something different. And, you know, Tim, that's why Tim Cook was the right selection to be CEO is that he knew he couldn't be Steve and who's going to follow Steve. It needs to be CEO, is that he knew he couldn't be Steve. And who's going to follow Steve? It needs to be somebody who's not like Steve, right? Anybody, Scott Forstall, who seemed to fancy himself like a mini Steve, whether it's somebody from the outside, an Elon Musk kind of character, right?

People who are Larry Ellison, people who are like sort of like Steve Jobs in a way. Nobody's like Steve Jobs, but sort of like Steve Jobs. Exactly the wrong person to lead Apple after Steve Jobs. Just go the other way. Get somebody like Tim, who knows he's not Steve, who's going to surround himself with people to support him and do the other parts of the job that he can't do. It was a good thing.

And I'm glad, it's nice to see the color we get from him here about how he knew that couldn't be his role. Last thing I want to touch on the fbi um there were just a bunch of quotes in here coming directly from tim yeah which were okay i'll read them could we create a tool to unlock the phone after a few days we had determined yes we could determined no they did it in a few days right like that's what he's saying then the question was was, ethically, should we? We thought, you know, that depends on whether we could contain it or not. Other people were involved in this too, deep security experts and so forth. And it was apparent from those discussions that we couldn't be assured. It became clear that the trade-off, so to speak, was essentially putting hundreds of millions of people at risk for a phone that may or may not have anything on it this is my favorite line there are 200 plus other

countries in the world zero of them had ever asked this wow yeah what like an indictment of the fbi yeah that's that's i mean it's it's not anything that they haven't argued before but you're hearing it here in his own words when things have cooled down a little bit cutting words right like he can just tim cook has a way of just like cutting straight to the core of what he says yeah it's like the fbi thought that unlike any other country in the world the fbi thought that it was their right to demand that apple engineer software to um break its own security and he also said what you didn't quote there is um is we it probably didn't have anything on it and in fact we knew that it was

extremely unlikely based on what else we knew that it had anything on it. Yeah, that what else we, because I said about the partners, like whether or not it had anything on it, but what else we knew? What did, that is, you know. They may have known, it may be that they knew more that isn't widely known.

My guess is that it's more that they knew that there was another iPhone that was the personal iPhone that had been wiped and that this one was a different model that they hadn't seen a backup in a while i think that they probably looked at the icloud backup as well and they were they were skeptical that it had anything in it that they knew that this was a phone that was not used because they were using their personal phone for all of my take on it is they'd worked with the fbi already to analyze an icloud backup that was like a week old yeah and

they knew that there was it was extremely unlikely that anything new was added within a week of that device, which is why it wasn't needed to be there. But just like unpopular opinion as not an American. You know, you're saying about like the FBI feeling that they can just demand this. That is the view that the rest of the world has on America, like that the American kind of idea with this stuff is just that you can

ask and get anything yeah like from a political level and like this is showing that like the american law enforcement agency believed they could just ask for this and be given it and i think thankfully apple said no because we've touched on this a million times, but that affects me in the United Kingdom when it should have. It has nothing to do with me. It's not my country. So yeah, I'm really pleased that they went the way that they did. But yeah, fantastic interview.

Really great insight and information coming from the man himself. I think they did a really, really good job of it. All right, we've been running along. Should we do a couple of quick Ask Upgrades before we finish out today's live and in-person episode? Reid asked, what do you do with your iPhone or Apple boxes? Do you keep them?

Reid recently moved and had to get rid of some of them. I got rid of a bunch of mine a little while ago and I opened a cupboard a couple of days ago and found all my old iPhone boxes in it. Like I got rid of a bunch of other product boxes. When we move, I'm probably going to throw them out. But I have every single box of iPhone all the way through. I save the ones where I have them. Especially the ones that are Apple, anything I've got that's an Apple loaner, I have to keep those boxes around and then I ship them back to Apple in the box. The ones that are mine, I keep them until I get rid of the phone and then I usually get rid of

them or I've had them for a year or two. Special ones I've saved, like I saved the original iPod box. I've got that. But most of them, I just sort of keep, I keep it for a little while. And then when I've decided that it's sort of been ridiculously long, then I get rid of them. I don't, it's more clutter. I'm not a, I don't really want more clutter in my life. And I find the, I find the hardware much more compelling than the box. So, um, I know people who save the boxes forever. I know people who compulsively save all their product boxes because they often will resell them after a year or two and they want to do it in the original box because they feel it gives the product more value

to sell it that way. I don't- We also know people that will collect 13 different colors of iMac, which you can see behind me. Yeah, I can see right behind you now. Yeah, I just don't have, honestly, my house isn't very big.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have a very small house with not a lot of storage space. And I'm not interested in renting a storage locker to keep Babel product boxes in. So generally, they don't last very long. And Nate asked, we get lots of flavors of this question. I'm not sure I'm a pro user, but I need a new iPad. Should I go for a 9.7-inch iPad Pro or hold out for the iPad Mini 5? And he says 128 gigabyte or bust.

If you want 128 gigabyte, I don't know if you're ever going to get that in the mini. Not ever. I don't think you're going to get that in the mini for a while. My feeling is the iPad Mini 5 won't come out until next year, as we touched on this earlier. Yeah. I don't think it's going to get stuff like True Tone.

Maybe spring 2018, honestly, until there's an iPad mini. I think that if you want an iPad right now, you should probably get the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. I agree. Because it looks so good. The screen is so good. I'm looking at it right now in this room, and I can tell that the True Tone is doing what it does,

and the screen looks so good. So I would recommend that. Yeah, I think so. All right, that wraps up this week's episode. As we mentioned, the show will play out this week with our trailer for our members episode. If you're not already a member, go to relay.fm slash membership and you can

sign up and you can become a Relay.fm member and you'll get all of our special member content that's coming out over August and probably into early September because we have a lot of it to do including the Cortex upgrade. It doesn't matter what membership level you choose. It doesn't matter what shows or show you support.

You'll still get the feed. You can choose anything. You can support everything. You can support upgrade. You can support anything you want. You can support clockwise. It doesn't matter. You'll get the feed and you'll get all the shows.

So go check that out. If you want to find our show notes for this week, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 102 thanks again to our sponsors Smile and Squarespace if you want to find Jason online he's at sixcolors.com and he's at jsnl

j-s-n-e-l-l on Twitter I am at imike I-m-y-k-e and we'll be back next week check out the other stuff we've got going on this week we've got connected later on in the week a relay.fm Q&A stuff like that so happy birthday

to us. Are we going to high-five? We're going to high-five now. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll be back next time. Bye, everybody. I mean, my instinct is to just kill him. And we have all six bullets. Mike wins. You have died. Game over.

Ray, Mike, welcome to Six-Gun Showdown. You're fresh out of the drunk tank. You're standing in the rundown shack. Look around. What's in this place? Is there a refrigerator? You are in the Old West. I don't know what a refrigerator is. You see a broken bottle on the floor, a hook, a burlap sack you use as a bed. Tired and parched, you sit down to rest. A lizard runs over your foot, looks up at you, and says, Howdy, partner!

Surely that can't be right. Blackjack is faster on the draw and hurls his knife into your chest. You have died. Yep. Would you like to load the game? Excellent, yep. How long was that?