Upgrade - 108: It's a Great Feature When It Works

Episode Date: September 26, 2016

The beta version of the iPhone 7 Plus’s Portrait mode is here, and Jason and Myke both took it for a spin. Then Jason recounts his favorite and least favorite features of macOS Sierra, and Myke explains why—despite the name of this show—he’s not going to upgrade.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 108 today's show is brought to you by help spot and cricket and we also have a message about childhood cancer awareness month in this week's episode my name is mike hurley and i am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. It's good to be here. Episode 108, it's near and dear to my heart. The highway that ran through my hometown growing up was Highway 108. So here you go. Here we are. I have literally nothing to respond to. No, that's fine. It's just just like let's hear it for uh highway 108 highway 108 you you ended up that was where although you know you have to go up the highway

to get to the to get to the supermarket to get to the movie theater and um and then there were a bunch of uh of uh number themed uh stores on highway 108 your your uh your pizza 108 and uh of course because every barbershop needs a pun hairway 108 it's not really a good pun no well every barbershop needs its own pun Mike and that means that they run out of the good ones

very early I'm just gonna like move real swiftly into follow up okay follow up is good Alan tweeted to us to point out that there has been an update I'm just going to move real swiftly into follow-up. Okay, follow-up is good. Alan tweeted to us to point out that there has been an update to the Spotify app in the App Store, which is significant because this is the first update since May, I believe. Oh, look at that.

So there has now been an update for the Spotify app, which could mean a couple of different things. The primary one that it means is that Spotify have... Spotify and Apple have come to some kind of agreement, it would expect, and they're partly satisfied with the current state of the Spotify application. You may remember we spoke about this before, that Apple was blocking an app update for Spotify because they were doing some things that Apple were unhappy with, trying to push people to other means of signing up for Spotify for cheaper than through the Apple system because they wanted to circumvent the 30%. and Apple were holding it up.

They said that they weren't going to allow the app update to go through. And yeah, this was originally reported on by Recode in June. And I think there hadn't been a version of the app since maybe late May. And now we are many months later and there has been an update. I think that there may be in here some fixes for potentially for 10 Apple have let through. If, you know, if it hasn't been that they're happy with the current state of the business practices. But we'll see if it continues to be updated. And Spotify is one of those applications that is big enough that it gets updates every couple of weeks, right?

Like it's just churning out that we're always making this app better for you kind of updates so if they continue to come through then we can assume that the situation has been resolved between spotify and apple but it is significant because this has been a story ongoing for many months now interesting how it's uh quiet just it happened it just happened no no fanfare nothing which is probably the best way to do it for both companies because it's kind of ridiculous. Yeah. Dennis made a suggestion for our future comics segment. If you remember, we were naming them and you were unhappy

with many of the names that had been given so far. Dennis suggested UpTrade. I'll put it on the list. Okay, so Dennis, you're also not the winner because if it put it on the list okay so that dennis you still you're also not the winner because if it's going on the list jason does not want to do it so keep suggesting names i'm not saying i'm not saying that i'm not going to do it but it you're i'm not gonna anyway uh i will say

i do have an update here the there we're gonna do a uh an of The Incomparable that will be a Marvel Unlimited draft and one of the origins of that concept is give Mike some reading suggestions. Oh, this is a crossover event we're doing here. Yes, it is. Talking about comic themed, it's a special

crossover event where we will take the idea from here, we will run it over there at some point in the next couple of months, and then we will bring a big long list back for you to read. I like this, and then we can find some way to take this and put it back over there. Sure. I like this. This is good. This is a crossover. I'm excited about this. Whatever we call it.

First, we need a name for our segment. Currently, we don't have one. I am expecting that we've run out of all good pun names and all good alliterated names um so maybe now we need to look in other directions i was thinking that like something that instead of just being mike at the movies maybe it's like mike hurley something like the so that we could play off of your last name hur Hurley at the something, right? Yeah, or iMike, or I don't know. But I think we got to get more creative for the name. That's all I'm saying. Well, Hurley and the Heroes was one that was suggested.

That's not bad. I mean, it doesn't cover non-hero comics, but that's not a bad. I like that one. That might be my favorite one so far. Okay. There have been many reports over the last week or so that states that Twitter is moving

for a sale. Now, we have spent some time on this show talking about our feelings about Twitter, the company, and Twitter the service. Especially when Jack came back, because it was a Jobsian-like tale of the founder coming

back to save the company. Jack has not done that. Twitter is not in good shape right now, and there have been rumblings over the last couple of weeks that there was going to be a board meeting in which a sale would be discussed, that Twitter was going to kind of put themselves up for sale in a way, in that they would send the feelers out to other large companies to kind of say, we are looking for someone to maybe buy us and start accepting some conversations and offers.

Now, there have been many reports last week. This story was running on Thursday and Friday in what was a monumentally weird week for technology last week. Lots of very strange stories like the Snapchat spectacles. Which we're not going to talk about today. I might talk about this unconnected with Federico because I'm really

interested in what they're doing but I just figured you would have zero to none level of tolerance for that topic. It's somewhere in that range, yeah. really interested in what they're doing but i just figured you would have zero to none level of tolerance for that topic it's somewhere in that range yeah but there was some just some weird stuff happening last week uh and and one of those stories was is this one so currently the rumored suitors are google salesforce microsoft and verizon so a real ragtag bunch of companies there. However, I read a report on TechCrunch, which stated that it is believed from some sources that they have

that Microsoft's bid is purely to drive the price up past the level that Salesforce could afford them because they want to stop Salesforce from getting them. Which I expect happens a lot. I mean, Microsoft probably don't want twitter but they don't want salesforce to have twitter because they are in competition right for the kind of the enterprise stack they i don't know exactly how they compete but i know that they do right because there's a lot of stuff that those companies do that i don't understand salesforce has been buying up stuff recently recently they bought quip the document collaboration

engine many people are very confused about why a company like salesforce or verizon would want twitter but it's for the same reason that a company like google would it's insane amounts of data like no company bar google maybe not even google has the potential information about me that twitter does right because i interact with brands and people that i'm interested in and i put all of my thoughts and feelings out into the world via twitter i would i would even say it's, if not the best, it is one of the best sources of user data that's on the market, right? Because like Facebook's got all of it

and Facebook's got all of its own and it's got all of the Instagram data. But what's out there that's on the market that is a service that people use, that is buyable, that has all this data and the real time data right which twitter excels at although twitter has lots of issues one of the things that it's very good at is what's happening in real time and what a web as well that they have you know

like to make to make logical jumps between people like if you follow a brand and i follow you and steven follows a brand that's the same brand that you follow. Let's say you're both following a company and I follow both of you. There's probably a good chance that ads from that company would be good to jump into my timeline. This is the stuff that is available. But Twitter has seemingly not done a very good job with it for a myriad of potential reasons. Maybe they're not good at leveraging the data. Maybe they're too slow. They can't deal with it quick enough. Maybe they just have not got very good advertising infrastructure, or maybe their applications

don't correctly or adequately serve these ads to people in a way that's engaging. Whatever the reason is, Twitter has seemingly failed to deliver on what is expected from them which is why their stock price is down and their revenue is down their revenues down their stock price is down it's a disaster but all of these companies verizon i don't really know what they would do with it but they're a weird outlier right now they're buying up some stuff yeah they're buying internet content because they think that it's important to be internet content. Part of me thinks that they're hedging against being a dumb pipe.

Yep. The danger, and Comcast is the same way. The danger is if you end up, if all this technology means that everything's on the internet and your business of providing data over a pipe is not that great a business, it's not differentiated, then owning content that goes over the pipe is not that great a business. It's not differentiated. Then owning content that goes over the pipe

is not a bad hedge against that. And so I think that's what's motivating Verizon. So they bought AOL and- It's preparing them for a future where they might not have any money whilst they have money now. Yeah, it gives them some leverage because they have content that people want

even if they're not on their networks. I don't know. It is a little bit weird but i you know i'm not surprised that verizon's being mentioned because they've made these other purchases it doesn't it seems like it it's in the uh it's in the ballpark i kind of feel like google is the best fit for them google's the company that i want to buy twitter because they could potentially um harness that. I mean, Google's actually not done a great job with social media networks, right? So I think Google having access to real-time Twitter data would be very good for Google.

Now, I'm not sure we can argue about, like, would that be good for Twitter in the long run or not, but I think it might be better. I think, well, that's not true, not almost anything, but there are lots of scenarios where Twitter is better off being run by somebody else than doing what they're doing now. true not almost anything but there are lots of scenarios where twitter is better off um being run by somebody else than doing what they're doing now there are also scenarios where somebody buys twitter and ruins it you know and makes it unusable so i don't i don't even have had terrible

history with social networks but i don't think it's ever been because of the quality of the tools it's just always been their timing they've've always been too late. Their Twitter competitor was too late. Their Facebook competitor was too late. I think that they have the ability to build something that works, but they've just never been able to get it in on time, right? That's my feeling about them. So I think that with this amount of data, with all of these inbuilt users, they could do something with it. And I also think that Google, believe it or not, my feeling is they're the one that's likely to keep it around the longest and keep it as close to current Twitter as we have. Salesforce, they're going to want to move more towards business because that's what they do. going to want to move more towards business because that's what they do yeah verizon i have no idea what they're going to do with it right because this is not their business google is the

closest company out of those proposed that would actually do something with it one company that is not mentioned that i really don't want to buy twitter is apple because that's like people think of them as like the white knight in these things absolutely under no circumstances do I want Apple to to own Twitter it just doesn't make any sense for me and I can't imagine what they would possibly ever do with that service it's so far out of their purview they would probably strip it for parts because Apple could get nothing out of that yeah but so fingers crossed for Google. I think they're the most likely candidate to do this because I think they will want it.

They have more money than Salesforce and they're more serious, I would expect, than Microsoft and Verizon would be because they need this more than the others. Google need the data that Facebook has before Facebook eats Google's lunch. You know? And Facebook's not giving it to them.

Because why would they? So I think this is a data source for them which could be really interesting. And quite frankly, I have no concerns about Google having this data because it's all out there on the internet anyway. Like, what are you going to do? Google's got all the data anyway.

Yep. So yeah, I know that they have access to the pipe, right? But they can't serve the ads. They can take the data, but they can't serve the ads. And I think that's what they want to do, serve the ads back to us in the Google-owned Twitter application. Well, it also gives, I mean, ads aside, I don't want to overstate Twitter's importance because it is a service that's more important to us than it is to the internet at large.

Well, you say that, but the hashtags are everywhere, though. It's true. But I mean, again, Facebook is the big story here, much more than Twitter is. My point is this, which is Twitter, if Google got it, Twitter is a data stream. It gives you signal. It gives you a lot of noise, but it gives you signal. And I think Google could use that, right? Like Google could tune searches in real time and ad rates in real time better than it can now if it's integrated that. I mean, Google has gone back and forth integrating the Twitter firehose.

But if Google got all of the inside Twitter data, I feel like that would just improve Twitter's business because it would know more about what's happening on the Internet at any moment in any region. And that's the business they're in. So in terms of fit, it's the best fit for Google. Part of this is as a Twitter user, I don't want to see somebody buy it who is going to dismantle it or make it not something that I want to use. And I think Google wouldn't do that. Google might actually make it better than it is now.

So in a feeling that I can't really unpack right now but it's a feeling that i'm having i don't think i would mind too much if twitter went away um as long as there was something to replace it i really wouldn't mind the service being boiled back down and started again i agree if there but but it's hard to find something to replace it. That's the trick. I know this is a joke now, but if app.net was now... Still wouldn't make it. No, but if it was now, and let's say it came now and Twitter just boiled away, I would be happier to go to a service like that.

Mainly just because Twitter is a cesspool now. And I don't think with their current infrastructure they can clean it up. I just think it's too far now. There is a world which I hope would exist if Google bought them where everybody would be changing their authentication method and signing in with their Google account.

I think that might help a lot because Google is very focused on real name stuff although um you know youtube comments is still a cesspool so yep so there is no there's no good way to deal with it the way to deal with it is to make it obscure again that's what i want right right and i yeah i get that and you know those were those were good days so maybe we'll get back there this week's episode is brought to you by HelpSpot. If you deal with any kind of customer support, you need HelpSpot. It is the most comprehensive and flexible help desk software around.

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and they will talk you through everything. Thank you so much to HelpSpot for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, Jason Snell, in a surprising twist late last week... What? A developer beta of iOS 10.1 dropped, which included the new portrait mode on the 7 Plus. And then later in the week, a couple of days later, a public beta dropped as well, which also includes the new depth of field feature in the portrait mode for the camera on the 7 plus and we both raced to install it we did to play around with it matthew panzerino over at tech crunch got the exclusive and had a

really great article talking about it showing off a bunch of stuff so uh before we talk about our feelings and experiences this i just want to know from you have you learned anything new now about portrait mode that you maybe didn't know before or had anything clarified uh anything that i know well i don't know it's i mean using it tells you a different story um panzerino you know had a lot of good details about like how, how it works a little bit. He had a lot of examples, places where it falls down, I guess, you know, Apple, what did we say when they demoed it? We said that Apple was showing us the best examples. And now that it's out, you can make lots of bad examples too. And we're getting a better sense, I think, of what the batting average is for this.

What percentage of photos that you shoot turn out and what percentage don't. And what circumstances is it good and what circumstances is it bad. I think that's the only other thing that took me by surprise a little bit, although I think they mentioned this, is that it's very chatty. That it tells you what's wrong in text on the screen when you're trying to shoot a portrait it's like a little game yeah yeah it's like too close no no no it's too far no you don't have a subject not enough light i kept getting not enough light especially because the feature came out in the evening for me um so i just started snapping pictures of things and not people. And I have been really surprised at how well this feature works for inanimate objects. Because Apple never said that this would work.

They explicitly said it worked with people. And it was using face detection and machine learning to pick out the subjects. But I've found that all you need to do really is just tap on the thing that you want to take a picture of and it will work. It will blur the background. It will try, right? And sometimes it fails. And when it fails, it just takes a picture. Yeah. I mean, that's the failure. The failure mode is that it just, it takes a picture. Yeah. Cause you get two pictures every time you take a photo with portrait mode, you get the original and you get the blurred one exactly which is good

because yeah sometimes you don't know how they're going to turn out until you actually take the photo and it's great for before and after samples too so that's nice i i assume i'm not sure if that's a setting or not but i assume that at some point that might be a setting, like HDR, about whether you keep it or not. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a while away, though. You know, like, until they know they've got it. Because they're still calling this a beta, and I think it will be a beta once it's even released. Because it is buggy, and it is a bit difficult to get to work.

But some of the photos that I have taken with it, I have been thoroughly impressed. So the first one that I took was a picture of my little BB-8, my Sphero BB-8, and I think it came out fantastically well. Real-time follow-up. That setting's already in there. There's a keep normal photo setting for portrait mode in the photos and camera settings. So if you were about to tweet at us that we got that wrong,

close that window because then we corrected ourselves it's too late so you can turn that off well well we'll know exactly who who sprung into action when we said there was no setting and didn't listen to the next 20 seconds of the podcast so we we i got my eye on you um but uh yeah so it is there. Your BB-8 photo was a very interesting sample. Yeah, so I took a picture of my little Sphero BB-8 and I tweeted it and it was quite early, right? Because I just installed it and kind of immediately ran downstairs. And it was subject to a lot of conversation from people

about how good the quality is because there are a couple of things about it. So I'll put a link in the show notes. You can go find it. If you take a look at the image, because there are a couple of things about it. So I'll put a link in the show notes. You can go find it. If you take a look at the image, you'll see a couple of different things, like the antenna on BB-8's head are blurry when it shouldn't be. And there's some kind of,

some people have pointed out some like blurring on the coasters and stuff, but I really horrifically stress tested this thing. It was dark out. There was no, like the sun was down i was doing this mainly with the light from the window and the overhead light and i am taking the photo on a reflective surface like and it wasn't a person yes and i was floored at how well it performed under those conditions and to me it looks really cool i think it looks awesome yeah i oh i agree i think it looks i think it looks great now

one of the things that i um one of the things i've noticed because i posted a picture of my cat that i took with this and uh i noticed i wrote a little thing about on six colors too i noticed something very quickly about how people respond to these photos. I don't know if you noticed this too, which is there's two completely different camps. They're the people who says this looks great. And they're the people who say this looks fake. Yeah. And the first-

Nobody's in the middle. No, no. And the first people are regular people who think it is a cool looking thing. And the second group is people who are photographers. They have knowledge of photography. They know second group is people who are photographers. They have knowledge of photography. They know how that effect is supposed to look and think that it is wrong. And they're probably right, right? I mean, they're like, well, the foreground should also be blurred in this, but it's not, it doesn't make any sense. And fair point, I think to those people that it's

not necessarily, although it is a beta. And in fact, like we were saying, it's a beta in a beta. Like when 10.1 or whatever this is goes final, it may still be a beta feature, right? So we're dealing with a beta of a beta. And that all said, it makes what a lot of people would consider pleasant looking images that are things they like to look at. And so I think even if Apple gets this way better than it is now, there are still going to be people who don't like it because it's not real, because it doesn't do exactly what a real lens would do. And fair point, but there are a lot of people who hate Instagram filters too, because they're not real. And the fact is people like them. And I just, it's a, it's an interesting split, but I think that Apple is not going, I think Apple would love it to be exactly what a real like SLR would do in

that situation. But what they really want is to make photos that people like to look at. And that's their, that's what they're shooting for primarily. So if some photographer says says yes but it wouldn't actually ever look like that i don't know if anybody cares and there are people just still in the chat room for example who can look at this and immediately see the issues and he called it out and you know he circled a bunch he marked up my picture of my cat and was like what about this what about this what about this and it's like there were weird foreground blur areas where light was reflecting off the floor and it was blurring those areas but not the areas next to them which has something to do with the depth finding where it was reading uh it was reading the depth of the light reflected off of the floor as different from the the part of the floor that

didn't have the reflection he called it out and it's true there are artifacts in a lot of these images um but you know what absolutely right i don't care because i think it looks awesome like you can show me them like so there's another picture i'm going to put in the show notes which is a picture of me taken by friend of the show jeremy burge of emojipedia he took a photo of me and i think it's a really great photo of me i can look at this and see that like around my hair in the photo it's a little bit weirdly blurred but I don't care because I look at this picture and I'm like that's maybe the best photo that's ever been taken on a camera on an iPhone camera of mine

because as well as this portrait photo the camera on the plus is amazing like it is amazing i am so happy with these cameras as like a slight aside like the photos that i'm able to get i could never have gotten before like with the zoom lens and stuff it's just superb and just the general quality of the pictures i think it's fantastic i'm so so happy with it and then coupled with a feature like this it's like here's something that is even more than and to a person that like doesn't feel like these things are like nails on a chalkboard and i know that like i have my stuff right like if i'm listening to something like a podcast i can hear all the problems because that's what i do and if what you do is edit photos or you're in special effects this is going to kill you right to see these things i understand that but i don't care i think it looks amazing and this

feature is built for people like me right it is not built for photographers it's built for people like me, right? It is not built for photographers. It's built for people who own the only camera that they own is the one that's attached to their smartphone. So the only way that they could ever do this is with a feature like this, because I don't have a camera that can take these depth of field effects and can really do this stuff in a great way. Like these these cameras the phone cameras they can do a little bit of it like if you get something closed up enough and it can blur out in the background but not to this effect and not to this kind of intensity like i love the way that these photos come out because this is a feature built for me and if you can't take it like if you

don't like it that's totally cool just don't ever use it i love it and i use it and i think it's great yeah i think this is and i think both i think both takes on this are perfectly reasonable so like you said like you said there are things that bug you and there are things that don't bug you and if you know look i was just watching um the other night I watched a new TV series that is called Pitch, and it's about a woman being the first Major League Baseball player who's a woman. And they shot it in a Major League Baseball stadium. They used the logos. It's done with Major League Baseball announcers. It was all kind of part of a, you know, basically it's not a co-production, but they had the full support of the real baseball

entity when they made this show. And as somebody who's a baseball fan, there were lots of things where I'm like, but no, no, no, no, but they can't, no, they wouldn't do that because, right? Even with all of the stuff that they got the cooperation, I have a hard time looking past all the things that I know aren't right. And so for me, that show may be very effective to lots of people. For me, it is in my way. And I'm not wrong, I'm going to say, about the fact that there are things that they do that are missing details of how baseball works. I'm also, the people who enjoy that show and don't notice those things,

they're not wrong either because those decisions were probably made for some good dramatic reasons, even though they make it, they stand out to me. And I feel like that's what's going on here with this feature is, if you know what to look for,

you will probably, it's like nails on the chalkboard for you and if you don't know then you're like oh it's pretty and i i would imagine that that's true with lots of photo effects and uh i do think it will get better i think apple it is a beta and apple will make strides here i don't think it will necessarily get better anytime soon enough for those people to not be bugged by it it never will yeah because it's the thing is like never say never computers are really smart they got two lenses back there all right but here's the thing though jason but it'll be hard it'll be very hard to do i think i think people of that

inclination will will it'll be like a placebo or a nocebo type thing because you know it's like what is it the pepsi challenge all right because you know it's fake you always think it's bad because your brain will tell you that you know so like even even if the computers get perfect at it there'll be this thing in your head you're like i know that's not real so you'll never truly accept it and that's again it's like a perfectly human thing to feel that way it's it's true and and i and i'm i'm fine with it but um it is i wanted to tell you the thing that i think is magical about this feature which is the live preview that is the thing that gets me oh i think it's amazing right because it

is it is doing all those calculations it's not like waiting for you to snap a picture and then cranking through what you've snapped and then showing you a magical kind of here's the outcome of what you what you've snapped. It's not doing that. It's showing you on the screen. So every frame and it's not like 60 frames a second or anything, but every frame that it's showing you is with that effect applied. So you know what you're going to get when you tap the button to take the picture. That part blows me away because that's a lot of work

that's going on on these little devices in order to make that happen. This is just one of the things, you know, so like follow up from last week, talking about this being a strange, weird phone, but it having things that I like, this is one of them. Like the the cameras having spent more time with the cameras and now having some cool features i love my phone even more for that uh i still think that things that are weird about it are

weird and i still think that things that are good about it are good but the camera in the in the seven plus it makes it even more of a thing that i will make it more it makes it more likely for me to recommend it to somebody now because just how good it is and the things that it can do that the previous phone could not do yeah but the telephoto lens being the real key behind all of it to me yeah it's it's it's a really good i mean the iphone 7 camera is better and as always and that and when you throw in the the telephoto it is uh that it really changes how you shoot a lot of stuff it's so nice to to be that much closer to something without i think about it like i think of a like shooting with a prime lens on an slr where when i put the

prime lens on what i'm committing to is having to walk over or step back when i want to take a shot of something because i can't zoom anymore and so having the two the ability to toggle to not have to walk over to the object because you probably can't in order to take the picture is pretty great too and something kathy's pointed out in the chat room that is really awesome that i love as well is you can switch to the telephoto lens whilst recording a video. Yeah. So you can be recording in the 1x and then hit it in the 2x. The one thing I don't like is the swiping to zoom gesture because every time I try and flick between photos and videos, I'm now just swiping to zoom because it's like right in the area where i

would be swiping so i just have to kind of adjust my uh muscle memory for that yeah yeah i i get what they're doing there because they want you to be able to do a one-fingered zoom and better than pinch yeah but it's it's uh they may they may want to tune that a little bit or we may just need to like you said tune our own muscle memory memory to get it yeah like the way to do it now is to swipe across where the camera the camera button is you just swipe there and it will change from thing to thing like portrait to video to whatever but i'm just used to swiping it on the middle of the screen but now activates the zoom i would like it if like you just press the 1x and then moved left and right

but it is easier if you want to do the zooming that way but i just need to kind of break my feeling about it there's just a little there's just a little area where you do that a little strip so obviously where you're tapping where you're swiping to move between modes is in that area so you could also move your thumb up a little bit and that would work or you can move it down a little bit. So that might be a pretty easy thing for you to train in yourself. Yeah, it will be. It will be.

Like in the way that I'm getting used to pressing the home button to unlock the phone, which I'm still not completely perfect with, but I'm getting way better at doing that. It's a pretty good feature. I got to say, people who are in the Plus Club are going to be really happy with that. It's a real bonus for us Plus Clubbers. and it looks like we're going to get it out quicker

than we expected yeah i mean we'll see how long this beta goes but um it uh it yeah i wasn't expecting a beta until the holiday season to be honest right i mean i mean the fact that like a week after the phone came out you can just sign up for the public beta and get that feature. And I didn't notice anything wrong with the beta. Otherwise, it seemed fine to me. So I'm not going to endorse people, random people downloading the public beta, but it seemed fairly safe to me if you're somebody who really wants that feature. The fact that they released it a few days later for public beta

means that they released it to developers and the developers didn't find anything terrible with it. that's that's also a good sign so i'll just very quickly add to that so i've had no problems with 10.1 but i've had some people telling me some apps that they use are crashing on 10.1 so it's a beta is a beta is a beta yeah so beware beware all right i want to take a very quick moment um to to mention something in lieu of a sponsorship break at this point in the show. We want to talk about Childhood Cancer Awareness Month

which is September. Now, we want to talk about this because it's something that's near and dear to mine and Jason's hearts because of the connection that we have with Stephen Hackett, co-founder of RelayFM, your co-host on Liftoff as well. You may or may not know this.

Go to firetorpixels.net slash September. We'll have a link in the show notes as well. But Stephen's son, Josiah, he has a brain tumor. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor when he was born, basically. And this little kid is one of the most incredible kids I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. And it brings to mind for us a lot, of course, that cancer is a thing in children. It exists, and it's horrible. And these kids have to try and live a normal life as much as they can, which is difficult.

And it's difficult for the families and for everyone around. One of the luckiest things, I guess, in the Hackett's life is that they live close to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which is a place that I visited in one of my trips to Memphis. And it's also one of the most incredible places that I've ever had the experience of visiting. I took a tour there and got to look at the work that they do, and it's kind of incredible. And one of the great things about St. Jude is that every family that goes to St. Jude

has all of their expenses covered. All of them. The amount of treatment and work that would have needed to have been paid for for Josiah's care over his life would probably be into the millions of dollars right now.

And mainly because of St. Jude and the work that they do, that's all been covered. And this little boy has been able to live the best life that he can live because of the work that St. Jude does to help them and the family and the family of many, many, many, many families. And also more importantly, St. Jude is a research hospital. And every day they are learning more and more about cancer and trying to help prevent these

things for children. This is something that is incredibly important to me. So I want you to go and donate some money. Go to 512pixels.net slash September. Stephen does this every year. There is a Memphis marathon that happens and he's raising money for that. I want you to all just go and give something. Anything. Anything you can will be put to great use to help try and fight this stuff and also to give a level of

care to these families which they really need. So go to 512pixels.net September. We would all really appreciate it. I was fortunate to visit the Hacketts when we were in Memphis last month and see the whole family. And that is a house that has been through a lot, and it is a house full of love.

And it was great to meet the whole Hackett family, including Josiah, who was an awesome kid. So, yes, please consider donating to St. Jude. Jason. Yes, sir? We spoke about this last week. Mac OS Sierra is out. It is. It is.

It came out last Monday. Or last Tuesday? Last Tuesday, I guess. Last Tuesday. Can you just say some stuff about it? Okay, sure. it came out last monday like or last tuesday last tuesday i guess last tuesday can you just say some stuff about it okay sure are you not are you not using it uh mike you not install it right away no should i start off with this no let's we'll get we'll get there i can talk about seer a little bit before we get to why you why you were not uh i think it is a perfectly reasonable thing we'll get it we'll get into it for a lot of mac users to not upgrade right away and i think that's fine i think the upgrading to it is inevitable but um is it something that you must have today

especially if you're somebody in a in a you know doing your job on the mac where every minute counts uh i'd say no but uh depending on what you want that there are reasons to upgrade sooner or later um i think the number one reason somebody was asking me last week on twitter why should i upgrade to sierra like is there any reason for me to upgrade to sierra and again leaving aside the fact that upgrading is inevitable because at some point you will upgrade the security updates will will be necessary uh it's free i I found it fairly, you know, I found it inoffensive in terms of like doing stability things to my system. My system, you know, once I switched over to it a couple months ago, really didn't change. I haven't had any major software incompatibilities.

It's all fine. But I'd say the number one thing about Sierra, the thing that I like the most, is photos. It's got the same photo stuff that's in iOS 10 in terms of the machine learning. So if you have a big photos library, when you turn this on, it will use your processor for a long time. You should probably keep your Mac up overnight and let it maybe for a few nights, depending on how your library, how big your library is. And it will index everything. It will learn about all your photos. And then when you say, show me pictures at the beach or show me pictures of cows or show me pictures of horses and mountains, it will let you do those searches. And it's a pretty great feature.

And it has a different face detection algorithm that's much more modern than the one that was there before. So you can classify people and make smart albums for photos with different people in them. Unfortunately, you can't do smart albums where you say, show me all the pictures with this person and on the beach. It's not capable of doing that yet, which is kind of weird. But what's the other thing? Memories is another feature that's on iOS 10, but it's also in Sierra. It's a really great feature. It surfaces photos. If you've got thousands of photos in your library, like I do, there's so many of those photos, you're never going to look back. You're never going to scroll

back through thousands of photos and say, oh, look, 2007. Remember that? It's not going to happen. And Memories does that for you. It's incredibly clever. It's got a lot of different cues. It's not just, here is what you did last year. It does that, but it also does things that are kind of blew my mind, um, both in generating memories and then generating related memories. So it'll say, you know, here's this, here's the best of the last month, or here's, uh, the one that really got me was in nature. And it's literally, it's pictures of my kids that are in like forests and deserts and stuff where we were out in nature and it made a memory of that and then there was one memory that involved us going to a baseball

game and one of the related memories that photos offered to show us was other times we've been to baseball games because it knows like the people who were in all those photos and it knows that they were at a ballpark and so it uses that metadata to then do essentially generate other searches of the library to find things in common and pull those out and make those into memories as well. It's pretty amazing stuff. And I will admit to being kind of emotionally moved at a few points while I was doing this because I was being hit with memories. It was a trip down memory lane as generated by this algorithm and pretty great stuff. So I think in general, photos is a reason to update to Sierra. Not that I don't have issues with some of it. If you updated your phone to iOS 10 last week

or two weeks ago, and it got warm as it indexed all your photos overnight because it does that, you might be thinking, well, I won't have to do that when I upgrade to Sierra because I already had a device that's syncing with iCloud that indexed all those photos.

And you'd be wrong because Apple did not build in any syncing of metadata related to machine learning between devices. So every iOS device and every Mac running Sierra that has photos on it gets to re-index all of your photos. Again, why did they choose to do that? My guess is this was such a big feature that they decided to forego. The machine learning part was so big that they decided to forego the, uh, sinking of data for now. That's my guess, but it is kind of silly that every device has to waste energy and

time to process your photos. And that if you train your Mac on who these people are in all of these, uh, in all of these photos that your iPhone doesn't pick that up because that's the current state of affairs it doesn't pick that up which is a shame but um but still i think it's a pretty great feature um i like it a lot and it has done some some great work on mac and ios of pulling out photos from uh days gone by my problem with this feature is an issue that exists across Apple's platforms right now, which is these systems are good when they work on their own, right? They do this stuff on their own, and that's what machine learning is supposed to do, and Apple has shown that they're able to do it. But I have kind of two trails of issue with it is inconsistency in data because it's all being processed locally.

There are inconsistencies. Yes, it's true. A photo may get missed. If you search for cow, by the way, on your phone and on your on your Mac, you may find a different collections of photos because everything seems to be sort of fuzzy matching. Which is, I mean, i wouldn't say it's unacceptable but it's less than ideal like to search for an image and then search for it somewhere else expecting to find it and you don't get it my other problem mainly lies around the people stuff you could spend hours trying to wrangle that system because it, in my opinion, isn't very good.

I have about 15 different entries for my own face, like 15 different people. And you can sit and train it, and I'm sure once you tell it that this is me, this is me, this is me, it gets better every time. But then if I spend the 20, 25, 35 minutes doing that on my iPhone I then have to go and do it again on my Mac and I know you've already said this but this for me is just why I have no intention of really digging into this stuff right now in the hope that Apple will add some kind of metadata syncing in the future

to alleviate this because I have no interest in taking a machine learning brain teaching it multiple times yeah and at the very least and i think it used to do this with the faces data at the very least a photo that's got two people in it it should just say these are the two people that i i saw in this photo and sync that so that if you're on another device and you search for those people it will know these photos that some other device says has these people in it, right? To sort of take it at their word. And you didn't sync it.

You didn't scan it. And, yeah, there are other levels above that where you actually match the face to the other device and say, oh, this person is that person. Okay, I'll pick that up and do a true sync. But even if all you were doing was in the metadata for that photo, you said this has Mike and Steven in it. So that on another device, if you search for Mike, it'll say, well, I don't know who Mike is, but this photo says that Mike's in it.

And it doesn't do that. Like, I know why it's difficult for them to do this with the way that they want to work, right? You know, like with the differential privacy stuff. It makes it harder. It makes it harder at least, because they can't just flat out just add this metadata but there's ways that this could be done i i don't i see i don't agree i think that this has nothing to do with privacy other than the optics of it i do have a theory i'm not sure i believe it but there is a

theory that i have that one of the reasons it doesn't sync this stuff is because Apple wanted a very clean message about privacy and that syncing metadata might muddy it, which is a dumb argument. But I worry that maybe that was something that they were concerned about from like people will misunderstand it. But I think it's most likely that this is literally like this is a huge feature and this is all we could do and ship it is what they would say if they were being honest about it but um because it's not you know you're it's not well we can't we can't move that between devices because it's in the cloud because your freaking photos are in the cloud it's moving them between devices the difference is the analysis is happening on the devices the metadata should be able to sync they should be able to do that no they're not doing what google does where the analysis is happening up on the cloud but the metadata should be able to sync. They should be able to do that. No, they're not doing what Google does where the analysis is happening up on the cloud,

but the devices should be able to share data among themselves. And that's what they haven't implemented. And they do that in all that data, just like the photos is encrypted. Only your devices have access to it. It's fine. So can they build this?

They totally can build this. Is it easy? No, of course not. I was thinking about it. I was trying to go through the steps of like how you sync machine learning data. And it's like, well, if different machines, do you have a master? First one to index it wins. And then that data syncs.

And how do you match that up? Do you just take it at its word and say, okay, well, this says horses. So I'm just going to accept that it's horses. How do you do that with the people database, which is even more complicated because you're tying that to other information. It's not an easy problem for them to solve, which is why I'm just going to accept that it's horses. How do you do that with the people database, which is even more complicated because you're tying that to other information. It's not an easy problem for them to solve, which is why I'm inclined to think that the reason this didn't happen

is simply that they had to make some choices about what they were going to be able to ship in time and they didn't make it on board. They've been consistent from the beginning that this stuff wasn't shipping. I asked them when I got briefed about Sierra in July and they said, nope, it's not going to sync between devices. And it doesn't. So every device has to do it.

I'm almost positive that this will be something that gets addressed in a software update. If I had to guess, I would say, though, it will be next fall's, a year from now, software update, not in a 0.1 or 0.2 release. I hope I'm wrong, but it is the biggest weakness. And it's, you know, again, it could either be an annoyance if you don't care, or if you're somebody who really wants to train this stuff and do all that, you know, name recognition, you know, connecting the faces to the names and all of that, it could be really frustrating because the last thing you want to do is keep training a device over and over again. iCloud.

Oh boy. thing you want to do is is keep training a device over and over again iCloud oh boy iCloud's the big thing right like continued iCloud enhancements is the biggest changes to the os i guess because photos is an app right like in its yeah you know i know you don't get it separately but like photos is its own thing and then iCloud is the stuff that they've baked into the OS. Yeah. So the big thing that they did is iCloud storage, which exists already, right? There's iCloud Drive.

Yeah, pay attention, everyone. This is confusing. So iCloud Drive is already there. The difference is that now... So iCloud Drive was a special folder essentially on your Mac, like Dropbox or Google Drive, special folder that syncs with Apple's cloud. Okay, that's fine. Fair enough.

In Sierra, you have the option of syncing. And I think it asks you when you upgrade. It says, would you like to sync these other things? And the option is to sync your documents and desktop folders to iCloud. And it's not neither or. You got to sync both of them. And that's in addition to your iCloud Drive folder. In reality, what's happening is it's creating a documents folder and a desktop folder inside the iCloud Drive folder.

documents folder and a desktop folder inside the iCloud drive folder and syncing them and basically linking those folders as a, as a, you know, more or less an alias. It's making those your desktop and documents folders. So even though you see them on your desktop, they're actually an iCloud folder in iCloud drive called desktop. Um are some issues with that. The biggest issue is that if you've got multiple devices, when you turn it on, it's going to, at least what it did for me, it's unclear whether this happens for everybody or not. But what happened for me is I turned it on on a laptop and it and it and it's all just sort of happened and worked. And then I turned it on on a laptop and it all just sort of happened and worked. And then I turned it on on my iMac and my iMac's desktop sort of disappeared. And what I got was my laptop's desktop with a folder inside it called Desktop iMac, which is weird.

But at the same time, I can kind of understand it that when you're turning on syncing on all these different devices, the idea is that they're all going to share the same desktop eventually but what do you do do you mix those devices together or do you do this kind of one-time place where you where you partition you know like okay the laptop files are here and the desktop files are here and you get to decide where you where you want to put them so i kind of understand instead of merging them all together to my taste they made the wrong decision like i my expectation would be i get more files now on my desktop and all the stuff that's on my current desktop is added stays to my other computers as well yeah i think well which it is but it's added inside a folder and i think maybe that's crazy maybe the right thing to do there is to ask and i

know that's asking for more ui as a part of this process but it's a complicated thing maybe the right thing to do there is to say oh you already have files synced uh to your desktop via icloud what would you like me to do would you like me to combine these two together or make a separate folder but it just in my experience at least it just made a folder, dumped my stuff in it. It was still there. I could pull it out. I did. And then my stuff was back out on my desktop. But it can be confusing. It's a lot of file moves that are happening. So if you've got the guy who does Talking Points Memo, a politics site, Josh Marshall, I think is his name. He was bitten by this over the weekend. It seems like he just had thousands of files on his desktop, and they were large files,

and it meant that it looked like they disappeared when, in fact, it was moving them to the iCloud folder. But there's weird stuff going on. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in Sierra that makes me, even when it works, it gives me pause because it's doing some stuff that people aren't used to seeing. It is saying your desktop is on your desktop when it really now is in an iCloud folder and linked to where you thought it was before.

And it's not quite the same. And we're moving your files around for you. And it can be, you know, again, sometimes that is disquieting to have the system be shunting your files around without you really understanding what's going on. But in the end, the way this feature works is if you've got enough iCloud space, if you're paying for enough iCloud

space, you can have everything you're working on. If you work on stuff in your documents folder and your desktop folder syncing to iCloud, which means if I have a logic project open on my desktop, which is where I keep my projects when I'm working on them. I'm somebody whose desktop is my workspace. When I keep them there, the idea here is if I open a laptop that's running Sierra and it's syncing those folders, I have access to all those on the desktop there too. That Mac's desktop is my desktop. They all share the same desktop and documents folder at that point via iCloud that's the idea that's the promise and there's a lot to be said for that of of keeping it simple I'm not shunting my files around or having to pull them into iCloud in order to sync them Apple now has

made it you flip a couple of boxes and your files are with you wherever you go as long as you're syncing them to iCloud. I know, right? This is what I mean by disquieting, right? Like I get the idea here and I can see the instances where for certain users, this is in simple use cases, this is actually great, right? It's like, I've got five files on my iMac and on the desktop, and then I'm on my laptop somewhere. And oh, look, the files are there too. That's great. It's like now my computer is the same wherever I go. I'm syncing more stuff.

It's just about me. It also means that on your iOS devices, you can get access to everything you keep on your desktop or in your documents folder because they're in iCloud Drive. So you have access to them on iOS as well without, again, using a third-party service like Dropbox. So that's all going on. I think that feature is OK. It's got some issues, but I get what they're doing there.

Then there's the other part. So optimize storage is also a feature and this is confusing because sierra actually has a couple different kinds of storage optimization that it's doing and some of them i really like because some of them are about cleaning up your hard drive some of them are just sensible right right exactly some of them and some of them are things only apple could do and some of them aren't some of them are uh an interface that says here are a bunch of your big files. We can delete them for you. Including things like, did you know you have this 50 gigabyte iTunes backup of an iPhone

that hasn't been touched in two years? And I had a couple of those. I'm like, oh, I don't need that backup anymore. Save some space. Delete that. It does a bunch of that stuff. It's much more aggressive about things like cleaning up log files that you never see, but that is part of the kind of Unix heritage of the Mac that it spews out these log files. It's more aggressive with that. If you download an installer to an app and you already

downloaded like six months ago, you downloaded an installer to that app. It will actually remove, it'll move that old installer to the trash and just download the new one. So you don't have like installer one, installer two, installer three, installer four, which it's a little feature, but I think it's probably a good feature. You can have the trash auto delete things that have been in the trash more than 30 days. So you don't end up forgetting to ever empty the trash and have 40 gigs of stuff sitting in the trash for a year all that stuff is good i i reclaim some space that's all good um what is also happening though there are a couple other things that are happening here that are weird one of them is they have this concept of purgeable storage now and i like the idea of it because this is um

this is putting a little more user interface on something that they're doing with, uh, iCloud photo library, especially where if you are, uh, if you're, you're set to not keep all of your files locally, right? Instead, uh, the idea is iCloud, the truth is in iCloud, iCloud's got all your photos and then it'll download some photos when you need them. Uh, and they're basically cached. They can be deleted at any point it's okay because the original is in the cloud um that takes up a lot of space that takes a lot of a lot of space on ios and on the mac and there's not a lot of great user interface for that because there's none like on ios i'll see like photos are taking up this huge amount of space on your device it's like yeah but I need to copy these audio files because I'm going to edit a podcast on my iPad. And how does it know to delete that stuff? And it doesn't do as good a job as it should with that. The iOS needs to do a better job of either giving you a

little bit of an interface to say, clean up the space or be much more responsive on, oh, geez, you're trying to load a bunch of big files on here. I need to delete some of my purgeable stuff. Well, on Sierra, it actually will tell you how much purgeable stuff you've got. And as far as I can tell, it's mostly like stuff that's in iCloud and stuff that's things like stuff that's iTunes movies that you bought on iTunes that are in the cloud so you could download them again. And it's things like all those photos in your photo library that are purgeable because they're in the cloud. They're safe. I can delete them on my drive because they're in the cloud. So where it gets weird is that in Sierra, it wants to show you your free space. And now all of a sudden, Sierra has two different concepts of free disk space. It's got how much actual free space is on the drive right now

and it's got how much actual free space is on the drive plus purgeable space that could be made free if we need it to be free i'm really confused well if you look at my review, the very top screenshot of my review contains, this is like a little Easter egg. The very top screenshot of my review shows simultaneously a screen from system information that says 54.68 gigabytes available. Oh, yeah. And a Siri response for how much free space is left on my hard drive that says 30.06 gigabytes of storage available. Huh? Yeah. Yeah. So what's happening here is that I think it gets confused. There may also be bugs. I actually went back to my Apple contacts after this and asked them about this. And the indication I get is that I also discovered some bugs. So yay for me

that I found bugs. But the point is that if you get info on your hard drive in Sierra, it will often tell you something like I could do it right now. I can get info on my hard drive and it says available 81.73 gigabytes. And then in parentheses, 35.91 gigabytes purgeable. Okay. First off, I don't know whether that means I really have 81 gigabytes free and that includes the 35.91 or whether I have 81 minus 36 free. I don't know which it is. So, and Apple hasn't, they never mentioned purgeable space to me when I talked to them about when I got my briefings about Sierra, it doesn't even come up. So that's a little bit weird because now we don't know whether you actually have space

free or whether you have space, you know, free in air quotes, which is not actually free, but it could be made free if it wants to. Okay. So that's weird. I haven't gotten to the best part mike all right the best part is there is another feature so so space considerations good ssds that we have in modern macs are small it's harder to fit. We don't have these huge drives, spinning drives in a lot of our computers anymore. Having the system be much more careful about deleting stuff you don't need and being aware that like something's got a copy in the cloud. And like on my iCloud photo library, I've got everything. And on my iMac, I have it set to optimize storage because this is not my

master library. I'm okay with it wiping out everything in that cache whenever it needs to. And being more aware of that is good. That's a good thing. I approve of the direction they're going. I think it's great. I think it's great that they're doing that. Here's a place where they maybe went a little too far, or at least they couldn't implement the feature quite right.

It's got some bugs, but it bit me, which is this idea of optimizing your iCloud storage. So this is a part of the optimized storage feature. And what it does is it, you, you, and I think it may actually turn on by default when you enable the documents and desktop syncing. I'm not a hundred percent on that, but I've heard people say that they didn't enable it and they had to disable it. And by the way, I recommend you disable this feature. I think you need to turn this feature off and I'll tell you why in a minute. What this feature does is dynamically, it's what I said about iCloud photo library for your files. If you've got files in iCloud, including files on your desktop or your documents folder, if you're syncing them with iCloud and the system says, oh, geez, there's a lot of stuff

being written to disk right now. I've run out of disk space, but I got a lot of purgeable space. I can make that available. I'm going to delete some files. Okay. Deleting files from your hard drive is scary, but the system is, to its credit, saying, well, this file's already in the cloud. I can get it later if I want to. So I'm going to delete it now, and it's available in the cloud. And the way Apple pitches this feature is,

it looks at your, it's a little like how it described Fusion Drive. It's like, it looks at your files, it finds stuff you haven't used in a while. When it needs to delete them, it deletes them. And it puts a it's they still show up in the finder as a file but there's a little download link next to them and you click the download link and it brings it back down right no problem not a problem so uh it's a little scary but right it's i'm sure it's fine i'm sure it's fine so here's what happened to me i was editing a podcast last weekend weekend before last uh and And I'm using Logic, a product made by Apple, by the way. So there you go. And I'm editing, the audio files in it are a couple

weeks old. So they're like 600 megabyte files. There are five or six of them. They're a couple weeks old, but they're being actively read. They're not being written to, but they're actively being read. They're being used. They're on the desktop. My system says I have like 60 or 70 gigs free, plenty of room. Even when I looked at the purgeable space later, it looked to me like I had like 30 gigs of purgeable space. So I had lots of room. There's like literally no reason for it to think that it needed to delete stuff, right? So I'm editing this podcast and all of a sudden, one of the voices in the podcast disappears, is silent. The rest of the conversation continues, one voice disappears. And I think, that's a weird bug. I've seen something like that in GarageBand before where one track becomes totally silent and you can't get it back and you got to move it to a

different track. So I'm like, all right, this is weird. I'm going to quit out of Logic and I'm going to open it again. I open Logic and it says, this file of this person talking, I can't find it. So I go into the folder on the desktop where I'm working on this project. And sure enough, several audio files from my project have been removed from my hard drive. But they're in iCloud, but they've been removed while I was working on them. hard drive but they're in iCloud but they've been removed while I was working on them um which again you could argue that since they were a couple weeks old and they were big they were ripe to be removed although I would say one I was actually using them and it seems a shame if the system is incapable of detecting that they were being read all the time while this was going on

that that it seems to maybe was looking at a last modified date i don't know yeah because reading in logic doesn't change the modified date of the file because you're not actually working on the file you are copying the file into logic and it does like a link between them then you edit the local version it's in logic but depending on how you start up your project the the actual file doesn't exist sometimes and it's just it's just mirroring it yeah it's reading the file off the disk and then i'm i'm editing like a proxy inside logic but the actual file is untouched it is just the source file it sits there and is red it is red which means the system should be able to track file read it should know it should just

know like there's no reason for me like from a logical perspective that this should have ever happened right so uh those files are gone and uh as far as i can tell my hard drive had plenty of space but it deleted them anyway um at this point i pretty much said shut her down boys yeah and i downloaded i i downloaded everything back from icloud copied it all some copied the entire contents of my desktop to a server somewhere in case something bad happened and turned off all of the icloud syncing features now why did i turn them on because i was writing a review of sierra and i wanted to live with it and if it was going to bite me i needed to have it bite me

and it bit me. And did I lose anything permanently? No, I didn't. I didn't lose anything. But what it did teach me is that this is a feature that is not working right because it's deleting files when it doesn't need to. It's incapable of discovering the files that are being worked on, even by Apple's own apps. And you could argue like, oh, well, but you're editing podcasts. That's a pretty serious feature. You're a power user. This feature wasn't really meant for that. So, well, let me turn it on, one. So, if it's not really meant for it, maybe it shouldn't let me turn it on for me because I'm using my files are too big. Two, they could make it so that it doesn't sync the big files. They could make it also make it better. They could make it not make mistakes. They could allow power

user type people to bar certain folders. It is true. If I really wanted to take advantage of this feature, I could move the stuff I'm working on out of the desktop and put it somewhere else. However, what I would argue is the whole point of this feature is it's places where people work on files and that if the solution to the problem of not being able to count on your files being around is not to put your key files in the places that sync in order to make your key files available everywhere you what's the point of the feature at that this this feature wasn't created to let people sink their junk because why would you make that feature like this feature was made because apple knows that people put the documents that they're working on on their desktop they know this which

is why they did this because why would you need the the files that you're just temporarily storing somewhere on every machine that you own that That's not what this file is for. So you may not use your desktop, like, listener out there for this stuff, and you may have a more sophisticated filing system, but that's not how most people work, including me. My podcast scratch files and all of the audio files, mostly, live on the desktop whilst i'm working on them right that's where they go because it's accessible right and you know fair enough i think i think

maybe one of the arguments is well you just don't turn it on and it's like yeah i i agree don't turn it on people shouldn't turn it on but it is at cross purposes with the entire concept here which is if this if this works correctly i should be able to flip open my laptop and start and pick up where i left off um and i can't and maybe it's like well your your files are too big fair enough um but there's no other ui here so it's either on or it's off uh will most people be editing, you know, wave files that are 600 gigabytes in size on a, or 600 megabytes in size, whatever it is, big files. Probably not. But I think it goes to the larger point here, which is I had things deleted silently that didn't seem to need to be deleted.

And then I needed them and they weren't there. And I was fortunate enough to be on a fast internet connection where I could download them again. But if you're on a slow connection or no connection, and those files got deleted silently, that's it. You don't have the files anymore. And there's no UI for saying always keep this file. UI for saying, always keep this file. So your only option then is to put it somewhere else, at which point it's not being synced. And what's the point of that? So I don't know the bugs. It's a problematic feature. It's not for everyone. The bugs make it so that I think it's not for anyone right now, because if I got bitten by by this other people can get bitten by this too um i get what they're trying to do here it's not as far as my experiences go i feel like it's not

ready to go because if if it can just sweep files out from under you while you're working on them um that's not appropriate for your work files One of the things that surprises me the most about a lot of this stuff is how it kind of feels like a company like Dropbox is doing this. Like they are hacking around inside of OS X to get this stuff to work. Like the renaming of your desktop and documents folders to desktop local and documents local that it does, right? Yes. Because then it starts pulling them from the cloud.

You can see the fact that those file names have changed, those folder names have changed. Why should you see that? Like, if you create the operating system, hide this. Like, it really feels to me like it was made by, like, some ragtag group who's hacking around

with only what they have available they've just had to build on top of a bad system to get it to work it just feels really strange this is the type of thing that might have been a really great idea to implement when you overhauled your file system which is happening in like two years yep yep um anyway i i think again i love the reason they're working on this stuff and some of these features are good and others of these features i think just it are not good enough and that's the the bottom line if it way if you know your mileage will vary depending on

what your files are and where you're putting them but i think it's a uh it's a feature designed for your key files and so that needs to be 100 trustworthy and i'm not sure the interfaceless approach here is the right approach i i feel like i get why apple doesn't want to put a whizzy user interface on everything i get it but to be able to right click on a file and say keep this always why not do that why not why not why not do that so everything i'm going to say here is based on the preface that my Macs are used for basically one purpose, which is to record and publish podcasts. They are complete work machines for me. They're workstations, yeah.

They are workstations. I turn these machines on to record shows, edit shows, then I turn them off and go back to iOS devices to get the rest of my work done. The rest of my business is run from iOS devices on my side. So all of this is important for the way that I feel about Sierra. One thing I don't want before I take my laptop on a trip is to have another place to check to ensure that the files that I'm going to need when I'm traveling are there. I don't want to deal with that, right? That like the podcast that I'm going to be editing or just the files that I'm going to be needing, maybe when I'm on a plane or maybe when I'm on a hotel Wi-Fi connection, I don't want to be checking that they are where

they need to be, right? because that's just another another frustration another thing that can go wrong another thing that can bite me is that oh that file that two gigabyte file you're relying on is not there don't want to be dealing with that like dealing with selective sync with dropbox is already a big enough problem for me right because right i don't have enough storage on my laptop like that's that's as far as I want to go with a problem. But do you know what? As annoying as that is, that is a complete interface in which I can go in and check and uncheck everything that I need. Well, and this is sort of what Dropbox wants to do with Dropbox Infinite.

The difference being that Dropbox wants to give you the control over saying always keep this. Yeah, my understanding with Dropbox Infinite is you will be able to explicitly tell Dropbox which files they should not take away yeah exactly and i think that i think and i get apple not wanting to be that fiddly about it but i i feel like maybe this is a this is a case where it needs to do that because the last thing you want to do is be on a plane without internet and need this image for your presentation that you know you kept in your documents folder and it's not there i mean it it's not like it's deleted again people freak out about this and think it's deleting my files it's like it's not gone it's just it's it's there there's a

proxy for it there but it's not really there and this goes to the unease that i think a lot of mac users feel about this which is is especially power users, although increasingly the Mac is a power user platform because people are using their phones and their tablets for the non-powery kind of things. This is one of those things that makes you uneasy is the folder isn't where you think it is. The file is there, but it's not really there now. It's a proxy file that is telling you you can get the file if you're on the internet by downloading it. It's not an actual, you know, the document isn't there that you're seeing. It's a ghost. Ooh, spooky ghost. So yeah, it's, yeah. I wanted to mention, since I'm bringing out all the

issues I have with Sierra, I wanted to mention two other features that are really good features that come from a good place that I can't endorse wholeheartedly because they aren't consistent. And if you think back to continuity, if you've used continuity features on your iPhone and your Mac, that's another really cool feature that isn't really consistent. Sometimes it works airdrop. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't, who knows why? Um, well, we got more like that now, more features like that. Uh, well, unlocking your, your Mac via your Apple watch. Um, when it works, it's pretty cool. I get it to work maybe half the time. And Universal Clipboard, really cool when it works. The idea that I can copy something on one device and then paste it on the other device, it's really great.

I can get it to work fairly consistently between my iPhone and my Mac. If I copy something on my iPhone, I can paste it on my Mac. The other direction, can't get it to work consistently. Other devices, can't get it to work consistently. Other devices can't get it to work consistently. So it's a cool feature when it works. Neither of those features work consistently enough for me to say, hooray, this is a great feature. It's a great feature when it works, but the downside, and of course they have no UI, right? There's no UI for any of this stuff. So

it's one of those, it just works features features and when it just works, it's magical. It's really great. The problem is a lot of the times it doesn't just work and that's really frustrating because there's nothing you can do. There's no real troubleshooting you can do.

It just, you paste it and it's not there. You're like, all right, it's not there. And you wave those rubber chickens around and maybe you're lucky you'll get that. Turn off Bluetooth,

turn it back on, go into airplane mode on your phone. I have this problem with personal hotspots. This personal hotspot became part of continuity. You know, it starts recognizing the devices and that you connected them easily. Like I was trying to connect my... See, this is the thing, right? Most people don't deal with this problem.

I was trying to connect my Apple TV to my phone yesterday because I wanted to watch something and it was the only consistent connection i had the life of someone with bad internet right this is this does not happen in cupertino california uh yeah and my apple tv refused to find my phone it just wouldn't do it i kept turning things on and off and on and off and on and off. Other devices could see it. I don't know. The Apple TV could not see it. But also, I don't know if anybody's noticed this. Does the Apple TV just not bother to save Wi-Fi passwords? Most people won't recognize this because who often changes their Wi-Fi network on their Apple TV?

I do, and I have to enter my password every single time. I don't know what it's doing. I don't know. All right, so let me tell you what I'm doing with Sierra okay nothing is the answer I'm not upgrading and this is nothing specifically against Sierra

are we going to have to change the name of the show now? staying put with Mike and Jason I won't be upgrading and this is not a Sierra problem I mean the issues that people are having with Sierra is another reason why I'm happy that I'm not, but it is more my issue with the Mac.

The Mac bores me now. There is nothing exciting happening on the Mac. I'm so sorry, everybody. And this is because it's a stable platform. The Mac, it is what it is. What we have now is what it will be for some time, because now there can't be big changes to it, right? The biggest change we've had in the Mac was some of the UI changed a little bit, and that's it. It's basically the same as when it was introduced, right? They add things to it every year, but it's not like iOS.

iOS can still go through complete overhauls, revision to revision, right? That could just happen. Huge, massive changes can still be added to iOS because iOS has a lot more work to bring it, to make it as completely capable as the Mac is, right? Someone like me can do all of their work, by and large, on iOS. Most people can do more work on iOS than even I can, because part of my work is very specialized, which is doing this stuff. But if I was the type of person that all I did

was meetings and talking to people and sending email, like if I did a kind of a more standard job again, like maybe the type of job that I used to do, marketing, I could use iOS completely, 100%. I would never need a Mac, right? Like if I was, like let's say, for example, if I was a writer and I didn't make any podcasts, I could 100% use iOS instead of a Mac, right? But whatever. So these days, my Mac is my workstation. but whatever so these days my mac is my workstation it is a dedicated machine where i do this type of work the mac is kind of is what it is for me there isn't really a lot of stuff happening there that's very exciting and anything that apple could do they kind of can't because it will destroy all the mac users right like if they wanted to completely overhaul it well you may as well start a new product line

exactly you can't do anything to the millions of people that are using your operating system no that's that's why they use the mac is because it's familiar because it's the mac and they've been using it and they've got everything set up this is this is every time somebody comes up with this thought about like what if we john syracuse talks about this a little bit, like what, what is the next generation of the Mac? And can you get there? And the answer is it's kind of, you're kind of trapped because, um, people, the Mac is, is in use because it is familiar. And if you throw that away, then it's not the Mac anymore.

It's something else. And they already have something else. It's iOS, right? They don't need another something else. And they already have something else. It's iOS, right? They don't need another something else. So the Mac is, I think you're right. I mentioned it earlier and you said it here about it being a workstation. It's like, it's true. People buy Macs for lots of levels. There's an education and people still buy computers for their home. They're not just on iPhones and iPads and things like that. But the mix is starting to change.

And I've heard, certainly in our kind of group of more technical people, I've heard a lot of, not necessarily complaints, but people expressing their feelings about Sierra and saying exactly what you said, which is this is a workstation, and none of the features in Sierra feel like workstation features. And so they just kind of don't care. They want the stability. Instead, they're just going to stay put because their computer works the way they need it to work to do their job. And they're not really into getting new features. And the fact is, most of the features that Apple is rolling into the Mac at this point

are to allow iOS users to feel some comfort and connection with the Mac that they've got so that they work together better. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. But I think it's also reasonable for a Mac user who is trying to use their Mac to do their job every day. And this has always been true, but I think it's still true, not to upgrade for a while and let everything shake out. And like I said, I think upgrading to Sierra is an inevitability because of security updates and things like that. And I don't find it.

If you turn off the features that you don't want, or that might be pernicious in some way, I find it unobjectionable. And there are some things about it that I like, but is it a, Oh my God, I got to have it now. This is going to help me do my job so much better kind of update for those people?

No, it's not. And I don't foresee a future where there is a Mac update that does that, that has that kind of feeling. It's hard to imagine what that would be. But, you know, I would love to see it. I'd love to see it. But it's hard to see the Mac as, to get back to the Steve Jobs truck metaphor, like it's a truck and we use it to do a job

and it needs to be a good truck. And if I had one, I don't know the mix. Apple knows the mix of who's buying Macs. But if I had one criticism, it would be that iOS is not a truck, and moving iOS features to the Mac is making the Mac – it's giving the Mac more non-work, non-truck features. And is that the focus? Should that be the focus? Or should it be on things that make the Mac a better workstation?

I don't know. It may not be realistic. It may just – this is what the Mac is, and it's always going to be that. And maybe that's fine. I would not want to do my job without my Mac. Although some of that is because of the power of the processor in it compared to my iPad and the software that's available for it. Like all of my, I can't imagine denoising audio files on an iPad. I'm sure I could do it. It would take forever and be painful. I sit at my Mac every day and do my job.

So I love the Mac, and I always will. But you're right. I do feel a little bit different about it than I did when it was the only place that I did my work. So this isn't a new thing for me. In the past, I've kept my Macs on previous versions of the operating system. Because if it's working, why would I upgrade it? When the work that I output requires a stable system.

If I'm writing into a text editor or into a web app, then I'm not going to have too much of an issue. But I'm recording long stretches of audio, which require stability just to make it work and to be able to output what then pays my bills. And I will probably upgrade to Sierra at some point. I would be surprised if I upgraded to it on the iMac before the next

version of OS X comes out. I probably will leave it until the next one, because then it's like the most baked it can be at that point. And what will probably end up happening is I'm looking to replace my laptop at some point this year to something more manageable from a weight and size perspective,

because of the uses that I have for that now so it'll either be to the MacBook or a MacBook Pro if it is super thin and super light which is unexpected and then I'll be using Sierra on there but there's nothing I can do about it that's just the version of the operating system that will come with that Mac so I'll just live with that

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Harrison asked, we're in Ask Upgrade now, by the way, which you didn't know. Okay. Ask Upgrade question from Harrison. Do you accept Ask Upgrade questions via iMessage, didn't know. Okay. AskUpgrade, question from Harrison. Do you accept AskUpgrade questions via iMessage? And if so, do they have to be sent with lasers? I like Harrison's thinking. We do not accept questions by iMessage

because I can't think of any way that that would work. Have you noticed that the lasers make the taptic engine move so the lasers are vibrating the phone a little bit? It's so good. Yeah. So good. It feels as it goes up and down it's really great i've spoken some people say they can't feel it but i can feel it we spoke about it it's awesome uh no but i wish there were lasers over twitter now jimmy wants to know if we're disappointed with the new watch os timer application i'm overjoyed with it i don't know why you would're disappointed with the new watchOS timer application.

I'm overjoyed with it. I don't know why you would be disappointed with it. If you don't want to use the preset ones? I know why someone might feel that way, but the application is more reliable now. So getting to the point where you have to hit the custom one is way quicker. And also, it remembers where your place is more often so you're able like the next time you open the application has a strong chance that it's going to be still on the customized screen so you can just set a new one and i use three and five all the time so

now i don't even have to enter anything in i just tap and i go yeah it's i find that it's got most of the timers that i need but when i need a custom one i can get to it way quicker i'm not waiting around for the watch to do something. I assume that Jimmy wrote this because he's disappointed with it, and this isn't some sort of setup where he actually loves it but wonders if we're disappointed in it, because that seems strangely specific. But no, I'm not disappointed with it at all.

Nope. Yeah, this is what I'd assume too, but I think it's fantastic. I really, really like the new timer app, as I do like lots and lots of watchOS 3. Connor asked, have you felt the need to replace the tip on your Apple Pencil yet? No. They do include an extra tip in the box,

and I don't know why they do this. I assume they wear over time, but I use mine a lot, and I've never had any wear. It's good that they do include it, though, or if it breaks or something happens, you've got another one right there. But no, I haven't felt the need to replace mine and if I haven't

I am about 116% sure that Jason hasn't either yeah Justin wants to know do you think that the W1 chip will be in the newest iteration of the Apple Pencil I do I assume that this W1 chip

is all about better connection and power management right and W1 I'm assuming means like wearable one or something or they just picked a random letter I assume that it will power the Apple Pencil or at least a new iteration of it

I'm not entirely sure that it isn't you know some version of what became dubbed the w1 isn't in the current apple pencil honestly like that was the starting point of it i think the difference is that the apple pencil doesn't have um you know you you do the plug lightning to pair kind of thing and to charge and you know i don't think they're going to create a little pencil case for charging the Apple Pencil. Because it would be amazing.

Although, wouldn't it be great if you could just take the cap off the pencil or something and have the iPad slide up and say, would you like me to pair this pencil instead of plugging it in? But it would be nice if the plugging it into your iPad and having it stick out thing was replaced with some other approach eventually. But I think this is all... I mean, this is the thing. Is it the W1? Are they going to call it something else? I think this is all of a kind. This is Apple's hardware group building tech to connect these little devices to their bigger devices.

And so I'm sure it's all mixed in there. I bet you the Apple Pencil informed the design of the AirPods. Yeah, I think you're very right actually. Although I do wish that they did make lightning connected Bluetooth stuff so I could do a quick charge on the road. I know the case is

there and the case does its thing but I need to spend time with the AirPods. I'm eagerly awaiting them to be released because I really want to get a feel for those things. And finally today, Giacomo asked, since the new Macs are going to presumably have USB-C on them or the new Mac line,

when do you think or how long do you think it will be before Apple start shipping USB-C to Lightning cables in the box with their iOS devices? Very interesting question. It's going to happen because they already make it, right? If you have an iPad Pro, you can get the USB-C connector, and it's for faster charger. It charges the iPad Pro 12.9 way faster.

I think it's going to happen eventually, but I think we are a few years away from it. It will probably be an easier transition to start including those in the box than it would be the headphone jacks, in all honesty, because I would expect that most people use the lightning cable that comes in their box to just plug it into the thing and then plug it into the you know into their phone right like the one that comes in the box is probably usually the one that you keep plugged in by your bedside or whatever it is you charge your phone every single day um as opposed to being the cable that you throw in your bag and plug into your mac i think

we're only a couple of years away in all honesty once we have maybe all current Macs, including USB-C on them, I think we may see a switch over because you probably already have enough cables. Well, so you're, as Mark in the chat room has pointed out, you know, iPhones, most iPhone users don't have Macs. and the USB standard is on every computer and lots of chargers. So I think this is a tough one. I think it's going to be tough for Apple to make this call. Obviously, they don't shy away from making everybody buy adapters, but I think it's a good question. I wonder if Apple would do something like include a lightning to USB-C cable

or maybe a USB-C to standard USB adapter in future Mac boxes. So in my Nexus P, which is a USB-C charging device, I got a little USB-C to USB adapter that came in the box. So that's a possibility. Also, a lot of these Macs that are going to maybe have USB-C on them, I think it might be possible that they will also have USB-3 on them. At least one.

USB 3 on them at least one so we may be in a larger a longer transition here if that makes any sense yeah so you would still be able to use the the cable because yeah the problem with putting the USB-C connector in an iPhone without an adapter is everybody who's got not just a Mac but a PC that doesn't have that. Again, if they're connecting to a computer, which Apple probably knows some small percentage of them actually do that. Yeah, so that's why I think, like, because they probably don't connect to computers, it doesn't matter. That's my feeling, that they connect to wall chargers. Yeah, you could charge them better, in fact,

if you shipped a USB-C cable and a USB-C charger in the box, right? That's my feeling. They connect to wall chargers. Yeah, you could charge them better, in fact, if you shipped a USB-C cable and a USB-C charger in the box, right? Because it can push more power, as we know from the big iPad Pro. So that's why I think it will change quicker than expected because it would just be the one that you plug in. So we'll see. I mean, but I think this may change it a little bit faster than we expected to because Apple already make the product

they literally make it already you know like they make these cables those cables are in production so we'll see what happens alright if you want to find our show notes for this week go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 108 if you have any questions

or follow upup or feedback, it's really great to tweet using the hashtag AskUpgrade because it all gets collected into a lovely spreadsheet that we can pick from for future episodes. If you want to find Jason online, he's over at sixcolors.com and he is at jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. Anything interesting coming to Six Colors over the next week, Jason, that you're working on?

Oh, I don't know. I'm still getting over having done those things. But people should definitely check out my book, $10. Take Control of Photos. Or Photos for Take Control Crash Course, I guess is what it's called. Good work on knowing the name of your own book there, Snow. Yeah, Photos colon Take Control. Well, I don't get to name it.

Crash Course, $10. We'll put a link in the show notes. What would your name be? of your own book there, Snow. Yeah, photos colon, I take control, well, I don't get to name it. Cash course, $10, we'll put a link in the show notes. What would your name be? I don't know, but there would probably not be a colon in it. If you want to,

oh my, if you want to support our sponsors for this episode, we would greatly appreciate that. HelpSpot, Cricket,

great sponsors we have here and also, go and donate to Stephen Hackett's fundraising page to help raise money for St Jude and bring awareness to Childhood Cancer Awareness

Month. There are links in our show notes for that. If you want to find me online, I am on Twitter. I am at imike. I am Y-A-K-E. We'll be back next week. Until then, thank you so much for listening. Say goodbye, Jason, now. Goodbye, everybody.