Upgrade - 110: Never, Not Ever, Not Once

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

This week we discuss perhaps Apple’s biggest move of 2017: relocating thousands of employees to Campus 2, moving other teams into the vacated Infinite Loop campus, and what it means for Apple’s cloud services and the productivity and morale of Apple employees. Plus we’ve got a lot of Sierra follow-up, Google’s attempts to entice iPhone switchers, bad news for the Galaxy Note, Jason’s first use of the PSVR, and a new run of Upgrade t-shirts and hoodies.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 110 today's show is brought to you by casper and mac weldon my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hi mike how you doing i'm good jason how you? I'm doing just fine. Monday morning. So it is episode 110 today. That would be, in binary, that means something. Again, I don't know. I really don't want to go through this again. Do you have to go back on the talk show to find out the answer to your question? Mm-hmm.

I think that's how it works. Aloha. Five. I think it means five. Big news today. 2016 upgrade merchandise on sale we have a ton of links in the show notes and the reason there's a ton of links is because we have a plethora of products distributed from different nations yep yep we uh we're back on the merchandise horse people decided that they uh they let us know that they wanted uh the return of the upgrade merchandise which we made available what in the spring i think for a couple weeks yep and it's getting uh chilly out there so having uh having the hoodie come back when people might

actually use the hoodie seemed to make sense too yep i've been getting a lot of use out of my hoodie actually real-time follow-up uh 110 is six and binary thank you to the chat room for that thank you chat room it's super important right so please give me a moment dear listener to explain to you the merchandise options that are available to you now we have a couple of special things that we're doing that we've uh one of them we brought back which is the hoodie so we have an upgrade hoodie i have two of them we brought back, which is the hoodie. So we have an upgrade hoodie. I have two of them. I absolutely love the hoodie. It's no longer a secret

that there is a special insignia on the inside. It is a reprint of the original hoodie with the insignia on the inside and the patch on the chest. We decided, yeah, and it's an embroidered patch on the chest. We decided, we thought about doing a different one on the inside,

but we decided we didn't want to be like elitist i thought about like having something on the inside that said i didn't get the first batch something like that and we decided no we were just going to keep it the same because our elitism only extends to the secret society of upgradians and does not continue inside the secret society we don't want a system of upgrading no no no we're not like that now this hoodie can only be produced and sent and distributed from the u.s as we have cotton bureau making this because it's a special item even for cotton bureau because of the insane demands that we had for them for this hoodie um the same goes for a special version of the upgrade logo t this is the first time we have done a t-shirt with just the upgrade logo

on it. So just the circle with the power button and the up arrow. That's all it is. It's just the circles I can outline. Now, there is a grey version and a red version available from Cotton Bureau, but the real one is the jet black one. This is what you want. We have a black t-shirt with a

black foil logo printed on it. I think all of them get the black foil, so it's super fancy shiny black on all of them. But the reason for it is that we have the black on black option. How much blacker could it be? None more black. None more black. Now, these two items are only available from Cotton Bureau, again, because of our crazy demands.

We're also bringing back the Brainball t-shirt. Now, the Brainball t-shirt is available from Cotton Bureau and also from Teespring, distributing from the European Union. So Cotton Bureau for the US, Teespring for the EU, you can get the Brainball shirt, and there's also a version of the Upgrade Podcast logo t-shirt we have read, and we are working with teespring to get a gray option additive in the next couple of days so we'll mention this again next week and so if you miss it out because you don't want a red one you want a gray one and you're in europe you'll be able to get it yeah they don't have a fancy foil or anything like that but they you know we we hear

from people in europe like you mike that the cotton bureau shipping to europe is uh expensive which it is. And Teespring does a European fulfillment version. And so we've decided to sort of split it. I think the definitive versions are the Cotton Bureau versions. But if you're in the EU and you don't want to pay that very high shipping cost, we've set up these Teespring campaigns. So hopefully it will work.

This is an experiment. Yep. You can do it. Look, frankly, that black shirt, the black on black shirt black shirt i'm gonna pay the really high cost because i want it but you don't have to so there's going to be a bunch of links in the show notes it's all clearly labeled if you're in the european union and you want to buy from cotton bureau you want to get the hoodie you want to get a special shirt you can but just be forewarned that the shipping will be high and there is also a chance that you'll be hit with customs, right?

This is just a possibility because it's coming from the US, which is why we've done the best we can to put some additions on Teespring as well. So we'll talk about this again next week as a reminder in case you forget. But go and clad yourself out in upgrade merchandise. And remember that every time you buy a t-shirt, you're helping me buy my house. Remember that. Because believe it or not, buying a house is very expensive. So you can not only will you look good on the outside, you can feel good on the inside by buying Upgrade merchandise.

Beautiful. Last week, we spent some time talking about the potential of an October event for the Macs. Jason, you were very confident that there will be something in October this month. And just after we recorded, as always, there was a press release from Apple stating that they are going to be moving their fourth quarter results call because of a scheduling conflict. This doesn't necessarily mean that something's coming but it does mean that apple has something going on in october yeah tim cook uh has a dentist appointment that day he can't make so he can't make it yeah they had to move it for that i've made that joke like three times on podcast now but hey there it is i yeah and there's lots of

speculation about what that means and if it means that there might be an event earlier or later or something based on that. And we just don't know. We don't know. It sounds like it might be related, but I'm not sure I can look at that and say, oh, this is what that means. But it's more indication, right? It's just further indication of something coming. It's more indication, right? It's just further indication of something coming.

Jason, we were talking last week about all the purgeable storage. Was that last week, purgeable storage and iCloud stuff? Probably, last week or the week before, yeah. Yeah, so I wrote a couple of pieces on Six Colors last week. I sat down and wrote like 2,500 words about Sierra as a supplement to my review. Why not? About purgeable storage and about iCloud Drive, and we'll put the links in the show notes.

Purgeable storage, the question I got that I never got an answer to when I was writing the review, but that I've gotten some more information about now, is how free space is defined in Sierra. And the short version is, it's defined as the amount of free space on disk as we used to know it, plus whatever you have that is purgeable, which is basically files that the system knows exist in the cloud and can be redownloaded later. And so they can delete them if they want. And that's, there's a whole list of things that that can be. It includes things like

iCloud photo library photos, if you're syncing with the cloud and have managed storage on it's iCloud iCloud drive stuff dictionaries and fonts and some other stuff that the system knows about yeah and and it it uh ideally it's transparent which is basically if you if it says you have 60 gigs free and you actually have what we used to think of as 40 gigs free plus 20 of purgeable and you try to copy something that's 50 gigs, it should just happen and you should notice no difference. And what it's doing in the background is it will purge not just 10 gigs, but it'll purge more than 10 gigs because your Mac works best when it's got some free space. So it'll purge a little bit more than that. But that's the idea there.

The problems are that there are bugs. And I ran into them where my system lost track of how much actual space I had, and was also inconsistent in showing me free space between various different places in the system where you can see it. So there are bugs in Sierra that can affect this that my understanding is Apple's working on the bugs. That's always good to hear but um if you're a if you're a mac nerd especially somebody who who prides yourself on knowing what's going on on mac maybe helps other people with their macs too you should know that this is a complete change in how sierra defines storage it's just not um it's not what it was it's free space doesn't mean what it used to be it's a it's a very different concept now. Yeah.

The thing about this purgeable space thing is it's very confusing, right, about showing you this and you've got this, but it's this much. You know, like you have this much total, but this much. And, like, splitting it down is confusing. But I do agree with the reasoning. Like, if they know they have this amount of space that can be removed, I can see why you would show it in this way. Like, it would be even better from a user perspective if they just didn't split it up.

Like, they were just like, you have 90 gigs available, like, and then rely on the system to deal with it. But I think that maybe it's too new and they can't give full reliance on the fact that it will automatically do it, right? So they break it down a little bit. But it's super confusing and super buggy, it seems, right? Because you've run into some pretty nasty things that we've spoken about. It's been buggy for me. I mean, I ran into some, I have not seen them all repeatedly, but yeah, when I was writing my review,

I ran into some pretty nasty bugs where it, at one point it thought my drive was half the size that it was. And this is the thing, once you start monkeying with the free space calculation um the problem is that bugs can get really weird because now the system is making up its own number for free space and what if it gets it wrong because there's a bug and that that definitely happened to me i still i still wonder to myself why they they didn't wait for the new Apple file system to do something like this, where it could be built to think about it more sensibly than bolting this stuff on. It just seems strange to me. I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, this is above the file system level, though. That's the thing, is that here you need to have something in the system that designates what files are purgeable and not. And I wonder if— i don't know a lot about the new apple file system but it's possible that this is a file system level thing um where the os can define you know you can mark a file as purgeable and it it does all that calculations itself and it purges the files automatically but that's not i even then i think that's an os level thing not a file system level. So I think they had to do both. They have to do a new file system, and they have to update how we handle all this stuff in the operating system. Anyway, with so many of these features, it's not fundamentally a bad idea.

I think it's actually fundamentally a good idea. I think it's all in how it's implemented and if it's buggy. And it's buggy right now, or at least it has been buggy for me when i've uh when i've used it so yeah the samsung galaxy note 7 debacle continues and continues to rage on into new and unforeseen instances so over the over the weekend there were multiple reports of replacement note sevens catching on fire uh one caught fire on a plane before the plane took off thankfully uh well say they catch fire that they start billowing smoke is a better way to put it they don't sure i mean what i'm saying is like the idea of something catching on fire is... The image that it conjures up, I think, is slightly different in some instances,

especially the one on the plane. It got really hot and smoke started pouring out of it. But, hey, it was so hot that it burnt through the carpet. But I don't actually think it was a fire as such. I know I'm being super picky, but I just wanted to paint the story a little bit better. Because a fire on a plane means everybody is in like horrific trouble and it wasn't so much that if that makes sense however i don't know there have been i think five reports over the weekend of note sevens catching on fire i'll put some links in the show notes there's been some great

reporting from the verge jordan golson at the verge has done an incredible job with this story and i love the way that he is after maybe the second or third of these that went up he's been ending all of his stories in the same way where he's just like you just if you own one of these phones take it back immediately to the carrier like no joke this thing you cannot use it right and i really like his kind of just like i'm being just up front like i've done my reporting but now let me tell you stop using this phone right which and and i i've really appreciated that kind of reporting anyway uh as it stands right now there was breaking news last night, which broke during the presidential debate. Shocker.

That Samsung is basically halting production currently on the Note 7. And a bunch of carriers, including AT&T, I believe, have said that it will not be selling them. It will not be selling them. EE in the UK is not doing refunds now, but they're saying they will do exchanges for a S7 Edge, which is a similar phone but just smaller, I guess, and doesn't have the pen. So as it stands, this phone has been an absolute disaster.

Samsung have really done a terrible job with this from a production standpoint, and also from a communication standpoint as well. I think that they have done a terrible, terrible job of all of this, and it seems like right now, this phone is over. It is game over. And I think that the repercussions for Samsung on this are going to be long-reaching, because it's gotten to the point where to keep messaging simple, like on airplanes and stuff, they just say if you have a Samsung device, turn it off.

Yeah, I got that one yesterday when I flew. Did you? Yeah, it was pretty funny. It was, if you have a Samsung Galaxy Note 7, turn it off. Don't charge it. I was flying on Southwest, which is the airline that had the flight that had to turn around on the tarmac because of the Galaxy Note that was billowing smoke. So they're very sensitive to it. But yeah, it's,

I don't know. I mean, they could go on selling Galaxy Notes and they could even relaunch the Galaxy Note 7 and I'm sure they would sell some. I'm sure they could be, they could promise that it's fine now. I mean, they already promised that once i think and that seems to not be the case um but you're right i think that the problem you get is that in the end it becomes part of the mindset of everybody that this is a bad you know oh is that the one that bursts into flames and that's a hard thing to live down no matter what. And so you've got to ask yourself, if you're Samsung, what's the best play here?

Do you kind of try to sell, fix the battery problem, try to sell your stock, dramatically decrease the number of them you're making, and plan a new brand strategy for next year that maybe rebrands the note to something different or rebrands the galaxy line to something different and just you know do you try to get through it and and uh fix rehab your existing brand value or do you just uh not care and throw that away and figure we got we got to start again with something else do do your rehab on the samsung brand and uh and distance yourself from the note brand i think i think at this point they need to move away from the note branding

i think that's the safest thing to do remake that device but give it a new a new name um for i think they need to to know that they're gonna have to set out this generation i think they're done for this generation they're gonna have to wait until the next one now i think because they're going to have to set out this generation. I think they're done for this generation. They're going to have to wait until the next one now, I think. Because they're going to need some time between these. They can't come out with a new phone next week. If they do, it won't work, right? Because everyone will just, what were you going to say? This one doesn't catch fire, right?

You'll have to say that. It's time for sure. And you can't do that, right? That's just not a good marketing message. We promise this one won't catch on fire and kill you so here's my prediction it's going to be the samsung um galaxy s8 plus now i i i'm sticking by my what some people think is a joke but i'm being deadly serious that they call it something like the the galaxy arctic 8 they're going to give it some name which signifies cold interesting all right that's what i would do if i was in

charge of samsung you know like like all the colors would be like arctic blue and frost white cold steel yeah it's been a real a real it's just been bad it's just bad it's a bad it's a bad story and there have been people who've been asking the the people at the verge i saw a twitter exchange between michael gartenberg from mobile nations and neil patel from the verge basically saying are you guys verifying these claims of these people who say that their replacements are also exploding and he said yeah we've actually we've been trying to sift through a lot of these to get the ones that we can verify and not the ones that are suspicious. So The Verge seems to be trying pretty hard to have these be legitimate people.

With the one that was on the Southwest, they got the guy to take a photo of the box and the phone and send it to them so they could verify it. So they're doing a good job with it, I think. Yeah, I think they're trying to not get fished in by people who want to get their fake stories on websites, which is always a challenge in a rush to judgment like this. We got a tweet from somebody, I don't even have it here,

who basically said, somebody reported that an iPhone 7 had a discoloration uh battery problem why why is the press not going crazy over that my i didn't respond because first off it's not my job to investigate every report of everything that somebody on twitter asked me to investigate but second i think the answer would be because uh one phone is not a trend and many phones and a recall is a trend so i think that's the difference is that you you're going to have product failures here and there but these things have happened over history to apple products but in small batches like one it might happen to one of them but that's all you ever

hear but this is there's been a lot of these and then there's been a lot of these again it is a unique situation i think i can't recall ever seeing something like this before to a major handset. And I think Apple also has a team now devoted to very quickly making right the issues of people who bring those things up. Like, very quickly, they're like, oh, we'll get you a replacement

immediately and send you a gift card and all this. And basically, they silence those people. Now, what that does is, that's PR. That's not a cover-up, because these things are going to happen when you mass produce anything and if it's a trend then they can't do that but it it gets those you know one person had a bad experience stories maybe out of the media faster um you know not always stephen hackett got a buzzing phone and and got a replacement but that story still kind of went around for a couple of days but uh you know i'm sure apple does that samsung i mean one of the things that the verge

reported from one of the people was this mistaken uh text message that was basically do we want to string this guy along or just let him shut it down or just let him do what he's going to do which was very much that was your Samsung PR damage control thing. And I think one of the offensive things about that is it came across that Samsung was more concerned about this as a PR problem than it was maybe as a product safety problem. And I'm not sure that's actually true because it may be that that person's job was very specifically to worry about the PR problem. But that was the person that was talking to the customer. And, you know, the customer doesn't care about the PR problem. But that was the person that was talking to the customer. And, you know, the customer doesn't care about your PR problem. That stuff is tough because this message came out,

it was basically it was sent to the customer incorrectly. And it kind of makes it sound like they didn't care, but it was that person, the person who's doing that job, is removed, you know, kind of from this in a way like emotionally they're just getting their job done but this is the stuff that even apple i'm sure say to each other when they're dealing you know when it's somebody's job to deal with the damage control but it doesn't and shouldn't usually go to the right person you know it shouldn't go to the person that it's uh that is concerning so i had one more iCloud Drive item, or Sierra item,

but it's about iCloud Drive. We also talked about how in my review, and we talked about it, that I was doing a logic project and my files got deleted by iCloud Drive out from under me. Not good. And I just wanted to follow up and say

what I discovered is partly that was due to the bug I talked about earlier, which is my drive thought that I had less free space than i actually did so it got really desperate about what it was deleting and part of it is that the way that the icloud drive managed storage system works is it's kind of it doesn't know about every file on your file system it's not monitoring core storage or anything like that's not monitoring the file system to check on file access it's doing sort of what the finder does when it says last opened, which basically means you need to open something from the finder to let the system know that it's been accessed

recently. Because although iCloud drive says we won't delete files that have been accessed recently, if you open an app and then it opens a file and doesn't update that it's you know that it's just opened a file what happens like a like a secondary file like a file that it's referenced in its document nothing happens it doesn't get that other document doesn't get referenced and this is kind of a hole in apple's thinking where apple's really thinking about how it designs apps which is these keynote documents that are packages and they're really folders that have a bunch of files in them. But with a package, a project file, any access of it, it marks the whole thing as being accessed. And iCloud Drive is not going to delete things inside a package file.

The problem when I had my Logic files deleted was that the Logic project that I use doesn't keep the audio files in the project. It just keeps them in a folder next to the project. You can do both. You can do either one. But for workflow reasons, basically, I keep it outside of the package because otherwise I'd be digging into the package all the time to move files in and out, and it's not worth it. But then it runs into this where those files seemed like they hadn't been accessed in only a couple of weeks, which again, I think is related to the bug. But if they had been inside the package in a normal kind of package format, which is the other way to do logic projects, it would have honored it and it wouldn't have removed those. It turns out that there's an API for developers that Apple has provided for a while

now that lets apps mark all of the files they use in their project as being accessed. And it was put in, I believe, specifically for iCloud Drive, so that if you opened a project file, and one of the files you needed for that project was on iCloud Drive, it would say basically, I need that file and iCloud Drive would download it and it would keep it there and then you would have it.

So the APIs exist. If only third-party apps like Logic supported it. Oh wait, Logic is written by Apple. That's embarrassing. Anyway, Apple released a tech note last week that I very rarely take credit for this stuff because I'm sure they hear from a lot of people, but this tech note I suspect was caused by me. And the tech note basically says, if you are using a pro app with iCloud drive, here are your two options for optimized storage. One, move all your stuff out of the folders that are synced with iCloud.

Or two, turn off optimized storage. Those are your options. It's a bit nuclear as an option, right? So don't use this feature. If you're using some apps, don't use this productivity feature with your Mac. Oh, well. Oh, well. All right. Some apps don't use this productivity feature with your Mac. Oh, well. Oh, well.

All right. So just before we wrap up our follow-up slash follow-out segment, I wanted to get your opinions on the PlayStation VR as you are on the new screensavers on Twit this weekend. And there is a picture of you right on the page with the PSVR on your face. And it is PSVR week this week. Mine arrives a little later on this week, which I'm very excited about. So I wanted to kind of get from you your opinions on the hardware

and the titles that you played. Well, I only played Job Simulator. Which is amazing, right? I've played it on the Vive. I freaking love that game. It's so much fun. It was like I was in the Quickie Mart in The Simpsons. Yeah, that's what it looks like. Yeah, yeah fun it was like i was in uh the quickie mart in the simpsons yeah that's what it looks like yeah yeah it was pretty cool um so i've only my vr experience is really limited

i've spent you know 20 minutes with the psvr and i spent you know 10 or 15 minutes with the oculus rift and i guess what i'd say is the psvr seemed i mean in terms of the head tracking stuff i uh the the fact that I could move around, I didn't feel any lag. I think it did a good job there. I think the... I don't know. I mean, I think the graphics

looked better on the Oculus Rift, but I thought the PSVR looked fine. It was almost like a Wii versus Xbox 360 kind of comparison. You know, it's not quite as high resolution, but it was perfectly fine. You use the PlayStation Move controllers kind of as your hands. I thought it was good. I thought it worked really well.

As somebody who's never going to buy a gaming PC, if I get any of these, it will be the PSVR. And I don't have a PlayStation 4, so I'm definitely considering buying the bundle where you get the PlayStation 4 and the PSVR together. But I'm interested to see what other people say. I think in the end it's going to come down to what the apps are, what the games are. Because something like Job Simulator is fun from a novelty perspective but um you know i'm not sure developers really have figured out entirely what a good vr title is and what makes it worth playing in vr versus just playing it on a screen i've played some stuff on various systems that I think work well with it, but they tend to be in development.

You know, all of the stuff that I've played where I'm like, this isn't just fun. Like VR really makes this a worthwhile experience tend to be games that are being developed. Right. Like I've played pre-release versions or alpha versions of stuff. I'm super excited about this uh we're recording a remaster this weekend after me and federico have had some time to play because shahid has had one for a little while because he's a developer uh so yeah i'm super super excited and it's all all about psvr for me this week yeah i i um it was it was good my concern was that it was going to feel like a really substandard version of the Oculus Rift.

And it didn't feel that way at all. It felt pretty good. And I'm not... It's funny because I think in the long run, VR gaming is something that's going to be of appeal to everybody who's got a console. And I understand why a lot of these initial things are based on PCs because you want the power of the PC driving it. But it feels like a console gaming experience to me, especially since you have to have a controller.

You can't have your keyboard and your mouse. It doesn't really, because you can't see them. It doesn't really work that way. So I think having a console VR game is, that sort of makes more sense to me and uh but i'm biased there because i'm not ever gonna i'm not a pc gamer really and i'm never gonna buy a gaming pc i agree with you completely stuff because even the you know the ones that work on on pc they have controllers that they use right like this is they only use pcs in my opinion, because PCs are the only things that can drive them right now.

You know, like Microsoft are working on a super powerful version of their console to run something akin to Oculus, if not Oculus. So, you know, I'm interested to see what happens there. Yep. All right, this week's episode is brought to you by mac weldon now mac weldon i'm just going to say this because i know it to be true is better than whatever you're wearing right now the products that they make are so comfortable like they make amazing underwear undershirts they make great uh sweats like sweatpants and hoodies and stuff like that. Socks. Socks.

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So Jason, I wanted to get your opinion on something. So there was a lot of... You've come to the right place. There was a lot of news about Google last week. Yeah. They did a lot of stuff. And I just wanted to get your opinion

on one element of what Google is doing with their Pixel phones, which is the inclusion of a quick switching adapter in the box now what this allows you to do is to plug a lightning cable into your iphone you can plug the usb end into the quick switcher and then the the quick switcher into the usb c port of your pixel and it will then do a transfer of your Pixel. And it will then do a transfer of your contacts, calendars, music, iMessage, messages, and a bunch of other elements to kind of make the switch from iOS to Android easy. So I should say iPhone to the Pixel easy. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this,

especially compared to something like the switch campaigns that Apple did many years ago. Yeah, I think it's something that they need to do. It's essentially a cable. It's like a USB-C to USB female connector cable so that you can plug whatever sync cable you've got into it and it will then attach to an iPhone. I think it will also work with other Android phones. And, you know, I think saying that they've got a switching story for the iPhone and they're coming after the iPhone is a good thing for them to do. I assume, like I said, that this will also work with your Android phone,

and if that's the case then my guess is that it will be much more functional well with the android phone you'll just switch it via your google syncing like it's all done in the cloud i guess i guess but then then you have to do it all in the cloud instead of just transferring it over i think it's fine i mean again i think it's a nice strategic thing. All of Apple's stats suggest that the flow is not to Android from iPhone, but the other way around. But, you know, it's a good – they're making the case, right? They're saying, look, we're targeting iPhone users. This is an iPhone-level product, iPhone price.

product iphone price and uh we're going to make it easy because we want to bear one of apple's big advantages is that they built up a wall between you know their services and uh and android so that people can't go across that wall now you know it's only going to transfer the stuff that it can transfer so you know if you've got stuff that's in Apple's ecosystem like your Apple Music stuff, although there is Apple Music for Android, or a video you bought on iTunes or things like that, those aren't going to transfer, folks. That's not going to happen. But it's trying to ease the burden. And we talk about the upgrade experience here all the time, right? Every fall when a new iPhone comes out about having this sort of delight of upgrading that is not as delightful as it probably should be. And I think this is a way for Google

to give some of that to the Pixel. Like if you're an iPhone person and you've decided to make the move, how do we make that easier? And instead of having to like search on the web for all the different ways to do workararounds to transfer all your stuff or you know whatever that this is a you know it's a physical thing in the box that says yes we can get your stuff over through our software if you haven't seen it dear listener i've put google's ad for the pixel in the show notes because i love this ad so good just it's just a really well done ad i I love the music in it. And I think it's got a good attitude.

I'm excited for this phone. I have one on the way. Should be arriving in a couple of weeks. I'm excited to check it out. All right. So there was a story over at Bloomberg from... Oh, boy. Good friend, Mark Gurman. Mm-hmm.

About Campus 2 and some teams moving around inside of Apple. This is an interesting story. So Apple is going to be unifying all of the separate internet service divisions into one campus. Now, this includes Siri, Maps, iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple News, iTunes, and Apple Music. These are currently, all of these teams are spread out across separate rented office spaces in Cupertino and Sunnyvale. These are all of the teams that are currently headed up by Eddie Q. And they're going to be taking all of these different teams

and moving them into the old Infinite Loop campus. Right. So first what they're going to do is they're going to move everybody who's going into campus two. And then they're going to have a infinite loop. Presumably will be largely empty at that point because campus two is much larger. And I assume everybody who's in infant loop is basically highest priority. I'm not necessarily, but let's just assume for simplicity sake that the, you know, the most important teams are already at infinite loop. That's why they're there on the main campus. So they'll all move to campus 2. And there will still be room at Campus 2 at that point for more people. But

there will also be this whole Infinite Loop team. And so the idea here is that they're going to put people in Infinite Loop. They're still going to have other stuff too. I mean, Apple's got so many employees. And if you've never been to that part of the world, you can drive down the streets in Cupertino and see these office buildings, and there are office buildings everywhere, and almost all of them have an Apple logo on the sign outside because Apple has taken up a huge amount of space in Cupertino and Sunnyvale and into San Jose. They are all over the place. So one of the nice things about Campus 2 is that they're going to be able to get more of their employees together on an official Apple campus instead of just in an office building down the street. And it was definitely questioned what they were going to be doing with infinite loop.

And this is your answer. They're keeping it. Yeah. Oh, of course they're absolutely keeping it. I mean, I think they would, they would,

uh, they're the sum of, of, uh, campus two and infinite loop is farm is they're not going to be able to put everybody in there they're still going to have stuff in cupertino and sunnyvale probably for a while because that's there's you know they have a lot of people but they're going to get they were going to get a higher percentage of their employees into these campuses so i you know it was funny i was thinking

about this the other day like what a colossal bit of logistics this is going to be because you have to move all those people and you have to decide where they're going to go. And then you have the other space because, like I said, I don't think it's a one to one. It's a much larger campus. So who else gets to go to campus to who's currently not in infinite loop? So who are those people? And then you fill that up. And then and then there's the next question, which is who goes into infinite loop, because you've got this other great campus that's right there. And it's got the internal courtyard. And it's got the it's not the shiny new thing. But it's way better than being in some, you know, third floor of some office building

five blocks down the street from Apple. And so that's, and you get to go to cafe max, which again is probably not anything like the awesome, whatever it will be cafeteria at campus too, but it's maybe better than what you had. So, um, just, I've been fascinated by that. Like what, no matter the company, but in this case, it's Apple, like who goes where and how do you set that up and what are the facilities like? And so this is an interesting story because this says one of those things, which's Apple, like who goes where and how do you set that up? And what are the facilities like? And so this is an interesting story, because this says one of those things, which is that they're going to take the cloud teams, and they're going to put them together and where they're going to

go is in is in an infinite loop. That will be one, you know, maybe it's a building or two in infinite loop. I don't know, I doubt they're going to fill up the whole thing. But I don't know, I don't know the capacity. And I don't know the size of those groups but uh that gets them all together in one place and they're not now which german says in his story sort of like it one of the feelings may be that this is why apple's services feel so disparate is that they they are the those the people working on those services are completely separate i kind of feel a little bit bad for the internet services teams, right? I'm sure some of them thought that we're going to be going to the fancy new campus. Like, we're moving, you guys, to Infinite Loop, the old place.

You know, I kind of like, oh, man, you know, I wanted to go to the big donut, you know? That's where I wanted to go. So, yeah, you're right german sources are saying that it is believed that the location difficulties is what is relating in the poor product quality in places and it is felt internally that doing this bringing all of these people together having all of these teams work together will help them compete with amazon and alphabet as they continue to stride forward into internet services. And considering how important Apple considers this part of their business, they're making

some structural changes to try and increase collaboration between these teams. And you know, you're saying about like the amount of people going into Campus 2 when it was originally planned, they said we're going to put 13,000 people there and Apple believed that this would be good for them. But before it's even open, they know that they need even more space than what they've got which shows the scale at which the company is growing campus 2 is set to open early next year um and there is some again this is all coming from uh from german sources but the idea is that campus 2 is a modern, mainly open office space. And there is some talk about it is believed that you would have to be a vice president or above to get your own dedicated office space.

Everybody else is going to be working in big teams. And Apple are doing this because they think it will enhance collaboration between the people working in their company, which is very interesting. I bet that will be a big change for them. I think Apple, even within the company, is very interesting i bet that'll be a big change for them um i think app well even within the company is very secretive of each other and and i'm wondering like are they going to be mixing teams together or are they still going to be having these little fiefdoms within the open office space you know this is the kind of the the internal stuff which is very interesting i think my guess is that these open spaces will be for teams. But, you know, depending on the space crunch, they may stick people in there.

But I think that's the idea is that it's open space for a team, for collaboration. I laughed at this whole section ruefully, really, because open offices. I mean, we did that at IDG. We went from lots of offices and high cube walls for the cubicle space to almost no offices and sort of like VP-only level offices and low cube wall collaborative space. And some people liked it, and lots of people hated it. And Gurman's story kind of nods at that, that there are going to be people who had offices who are going to lose them, and they're not going to be happy,

and there are going to be people who feel like they're kind of out in the open. It's going to be a cultural change. I think it's an interesting idea. A lot of people at executive levels and a lot of people who are involved in space planning like to get really excited about, oh, we're going to make it a modern collaborative space,

and it will feel much more like a lot of other Silicon Valley operations probably by doing that. But they are not often the ones who have to live with it. And the people who work in the space will have to live with it. And what we found at IDG was that, yeah, it could be collaborative. But depending on what job you're doing, if you're coding or something like that, or writing articles, in our case, what ends up happening is a lot of people put their headphones on and are staring at their monitor and they can't hear you anyway if you try to collaborate with them from across the cube wall because they have to see how they, how they react. And, and, uh, that will be a, uh, facilities and HR, uh, challenge for them, uh, just in, they will get the shiny new space, right? But then reality sets in and you end up having to deal with how do I do my job in this space? And that'll be, it'll be interesting.

It's also going to be a productivity hit for them. There's no doubt about it. Like I hope they're planning really hard for you know losing uh several weeks of productivity at apple because that's what's going to happen when they move the whole company to a new campus and then move more of the company to the old campus they're gonna it's hard it's hard when you've got to pack up your stuff and you've then you've got to unpack your stuff and you've got to get used to new circumstances you definitely lose productivity and the hope is just that the new space is so much better that you gain more than you lost.

I expect there'll be quite a lot of work done during Apple's holiday shutdown for this. Well, that would be a great time to do it, right? That would be a great time. But even then, what you're doing is taking the last week before the shutdown and packing all your stuff up and labeling your boxes and all of that. And then when you come back after the shutdown,

your boxes have magically arrived in the new location, but then you spend the first week unpacking your boxes and asking why the Ethernet doesn't work and figuring out why the bathroom down the hall has a problem and one of the urinals doesn't work or the sink has exploded and is spewing warm water everywhere. Sounds like you've done this, Jason. I have done this thing, right?

I mean, i have moved buildings and i have moved floors in office buildings uh half a dozen times at least if probably more than that so uh yeah it's it's and that was moving small groups and this is moving tens of thousands of people it's going to be um and it'll be phased in over time but it's still everybody is going to have to go through that period so it's going to be uh i'm fascinated by it on the outside i wonder if we'll hear people there will probably be like leaks of people complaining that the new space is bad or that there's just wait i mean i'm i'm going to predict it now that there's going to be a bathroom doesn't work. Bathrooms don't work at campus too,

or an elevators don't work at campus too, or food failure at campus too. We're going to get all of those stories from people who are grousing about the fact that it's different because nobody likes change. Even if you're moving to the super spaceship campus, that's going to, that means that you're going to be survived. You're going to survive the apocalypse when it launches into space.

Still, if the bathroom doesn't work quite right, you'll complain about it. I do have a question about the thinking behind the collaboration. Yeah. It seems strange to me that Apple are taking their people and moving them into a space because open offices and collaboration from Infinite Loop to Campus 2 will enable teams to work better together. But then they're taking all of the disparate teams on the

internet services that they want to work better together and putting them into the old secluded building. Okay, so if I had to guess, and this is just a guess, if I had to guess what they're going to do is when they move a group out of Infinite Loop, they're going to then tear those buildings apart

and redo them. Yeah, I think that's what's going to happen. That would be the only way that would make sense, right? That's what I would do. This is the first time since Infinite Loop was built where they're really going to be able... I mean, I'm sure they've done it place by place, like to build Johnny Ives' group and stuff like that.

They would take a space and they'd gut it and then they'd put it back together. But they're going to be able to do that with every space. If I were at Apple and thinking about their facilities, that's what I would do. It's like, what can I do with this opportunity to have, uh, have this space empty for the first time in years? And the answer would be, I want to replace stuff. I want to, you know, I want to upgrade the furniture. And, you know, that's what we did at IDG at one point was we vacated the sixth floor on second street and they gutted it and then they rebuilt it and when they rebuilt it it didn't have offices anymore and that's my guess is they will do some

of that at infinite loop that those offices that the new groups will move into will be newly refurbished and probably in the same vein as what they're building at campus two so that the campus, the infinite loop campus, uh, offices feel similar or are meeting the same kind of philosophical workplace goals as a campus two. That's my guess. I don't know that I have no facts. I'm just making that up,

but based on my past, um, I, I would think that they would do that. And that, that, that, that way they say,

well, we're going to rip out of these offices because we, our belief now is that we do want collaborative environments and only vice presidents and other senior managers will have offices and everybody else will be out in bullpens. And so this office right now has eight offices and a small bullpen, and we're going to make it so it has two offices and a huge bullpen, and that's how we're going to do it. So that's my guess. Yeah, i hope that's the case honestly yeah and i mean at the very least they should be i would be shocked if they didn't do some of that just i mean leaving the goal of an open office aside just because some of those

spaces have probably not been renovated in a while and the and people moving into them probably don't want to feel like they're moving into the battered leftovers of the most favored Apple employees who have gone off to their spaceship and left you with the remains, right? They probably want to make it like a good new experience for the people moving in there, too. And, you know, unless they're so overwhelmed with moving to campus, too, that they decided not to do that. and you know unless they're so overwhelmed with moving to campus too that they decided not to do that but that would be my guess given apple's resources and that this is a unique opportunity to do some rebuilds at infinite loop and in true german style the report ends with a little extra three paragraphs it's like we why make a second story when you can just drop this in here a little tidbit that we've never heard of before and it's just completely put under the rug i don't know why he does this but i love that he does yep german is stating

that apple are moving their services infrastructure to their own system which apple is building and is codenamed to pi which is a great name apple pi yep the platform will give apple more control over the way that their online services expand and grow and is also said to reduce load times apparently parts of siri apple news and the itunes store have begun this migration and apple is also building their own photo sharing system so they don't have to keep relying on google storage and amazon storage for all this stuff so i feel like we did know some of this because i've seen reports in the past about how apple's goal is to build more of its own

infrastructure and because there was a story a while ago that was about like apple spends huge amounts of money paying amazon and google for parts of their infrastructure their cloud infrastructure which kind of makes sense right or and and microsoft at one point although maybe they're not using microsoft now they did some switches too i think that was what the story was is like microsoft was giving a lot of money to or apple was giving money to microsoft and then they they ended up giving it to amazon and they moved some of their servers i don't remember the details but the point is that story suggested that apple was working on uh the stuff that would allow them to deploy on their own stuff instead of using third parties for this

infrastructure because a lot of these services i mean it goes back to the story about the the the groups being separate a lot of these services were built separately and we've seen it you know anytime you use an apple id it's better now but like five years ago and google dealt with this too it used to be if you logged in with a Google ID in different places, different things happened. And with an Apple ID, still to a certain degree, you'll get that like, I just put in my password, but now it's asking for my password again. And that's often because it's asking from somewhere else and the left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing.

And they're working on that. And it's a lot better than it used to be. But when you build these services up separately, in large part, then at some point, if you're Apple, you're like, can we get this all integrated on one platform? And they all grew naturally on their own, and that's great because we need to get them up and running. But at this point,

they would work better together and work better on our platform that we control instead of having to rely on AWS or on Azure or whatever. If Apple truly believes in internet services as part of their business, they need to have their own platform

because what they're doing is using the platform of their competitors. Not that this is necessarily a problem, but it highlights a gap, doesn't it? Well, I would say it highlights differences in what those businesses are are doing i don't think if if apple decided that its expertise that it was being served well let's put it that way by aws or azure then you know apple is not in that game apple is never going to be i think a major who knows you never say never but a major

player in in providing cloud services for other businesses and and huge online storage right that's like amazon's got that business i'm not i'm not saying that they're going to make it for for other people but but like i basically mean that like it's just telling to me that google has mastered it for themselves at such a level same as amazon that they're able to give that technology out to other people like they're so confident in it and i don't think apple will ever have apple brand storage but they they i believe that it is prudent for them to make their own system that they run their own services on because i think it will help them make them better over time i think what i would say is that amazon and google

started on the web so they had to build their own services because what they did what they did was the web and so that was their business and so you have to do that you have to control that and you have to build that over time and microsoft and facebook and you know you have to do that over time and apple starts as a hardware company and a software company and they're not a web company and then they start adding web services but when you're building those web services and it's an ancillary part of your business what do you do you you use the tools that you can off the shelf and you including web services and and bandwidth from other providers because why would you reinvent the wheel there and then you get and so i don't think it's a problem that apple relies on them i think

though what you're saying let me see if i get this right because i i think i agree with what you're saying ultimately is at some point it's such an important part of apple's business like so many other things in the history of apple where they realize we can't be reliant on anyone else for this. We have to control this. Our products will always be limited by the limitations of our, whether they're competitors or not, by our providers, because there's only so much that we can get out of it. It's like using a stock processor on the iPhone versus using an Apple custom-built processor. At some point, they may want to do things with their cloud services that they

can't do unless they get new features. And at that point it's like, why don't we just do this ourselves? I think it took a long time for them to get there. And I think there are, you'd be surprised. I think most people would be surprised at how many businesses do use AWS, you know,

for, for stuff, use Amazon's bandwidth and Amazon's servers. You can tell when AWS goes down and none of the websites you use work anymore. Lots of sites just die, right? So I think that's not a black mark on anyone for using that. But I do think, yeah, you're right. At some point, services, when Apple's talking about the growth of their services industry, their services line in their budget, that that's when you look

at it and say, we need to take complete control over this because we're Apple and we can do things that we probably should do on our own. And honestly, I mean, there are a lot of people who roll their eyes at Apple and online services and they think Apple's really bad at it. But, you know, this is one of those signs of maybe Apple growing up in terms of online services saying, you know we yes yes they spent years cobbling things together and it was cobbled together because they weren't a online services first company they were online services third maybe um and and this is the point

where they're like we're going to move in to this building together and we've got everybody working together and we've got a new we've got this pie thing which is our new thing that we're building that everything's going to go on top of and it's like this is them graduating this is them growing up and saying yeah we're going to take control of this and we're going to make these decisions now product could be good product could be bad i don't know but it is a sign that they're taking it seriously which i think was always the biggest knock on apple and online services was that they didn't it was all scattershot and they they didn't take it as seriously as they as they maybe should have bringing up the system on a chip for the iOS devices, I think, is the perfect comparison for this, right?

They knew they needed their own stuff that they made or they designed at least so they could build their products out right. And we can't finish this segment without bringing up the Mac, right? This is the problem. They are beholden to Intel, right? And Intel's release cycles and their schedules, which is why we have no new computers. And I see there being a world in which if they don't build

their own online services infrastructure, they will be in that point with trying to use Azure or AWS if they're not already, you know? Right. That there is something that they want to do that these systems won't allow and frankly neither microsoft or amazon or google are that incentivized to help apple you know not that they wouldn't right because these are separate parts of the business

those business parts of the business want to make money and having apple use their platform probably makes them a lot of money a lot of money yeah but i'm sure there's some kind of internal politics which might mean that apple's requests get dragged ever so slightly slower i don't know about that i think i think it's more likely that they're just treated as a not even a generic client but as a good client but still a client right and they don't dictate how the product moves right even if even if apple is using four percent or two percent of amazon's web services bandwidth or whatever it's a drop in the bucket and it's probably not that much and and so are you really going to prioritize their services especially yes when they're a competitor but are

you going to prioritize anyway even if they're not a competitor their they their job is to um you know make their make all of their clients happy and grow their business and things like that. So it's not the same as being the number one and we'll do everything you want. For that, you really need to own it. And it could go as far, I doubt it will, but it could go as far as what Facebook does, right? Where Facebook's building their own servers

and their own reference platform for servers. And Google, I think, is doing that too. And in the chat room, we've got the suggestion from all that uh you know they could make their own chips for data centers too i doubt they would but they could if they wanted to there's a you know one of the calculations here is literally for apple like what's important like the mac it's like is it important enough for them to go down this route of building their own, doing a chip transition or building their own x86 reference system? Or is it not worth it? And I think probably it's not worth it for them.

For the iPhone, totally worth it. Yeah, I think at this point in the Mac's life, it's not worth it. I think that's probably true. I could see, again, I think the most it would be. I'm really sorry, everybody. I could see again I think the most I'm really sorry everybody but I think the most it would be is something like a deal with Intel where it's like can we do a custom thing that we do

or Intel or AMD where they say you know we want to work with you to do this variation that's an Apple variation on an Intel processor and Intel might be up for that might not be I don't know but I don't think they would necessarily take it beyond that because of where the Mac is in terms of its growth

potential and all that. It's a good business, but they've got to pick their spots. A good way to think about it is if you think, oh, well, they definitely should do that. Do you think, dear listener, that Apple should make a completely different chip for the iPad? Because they're comparable markets by sale volume these days. And they're not going to do that either. That's just where they are they've got their custom chip for the ipad they

get but it's the same one they use for the iphone right more or less yeah more or less the i just wanted to mention the classic example the rude example here of apple's independence is internet explorer where the mac why does the mac have saf Safari and iWork really is because there was a time in the pre-iPod days where the Mac was the only product Apple did and it was being judged by people as being too slow. And the number one reason it was being judged as being too slow was in web browser tests. And Apple was furious because they felt like the only reason that their computer was being judged badly against Windows was because Microsoft's web browser, which was the default browser at the

time on the Mac, believe it or not, was slow. And it was, i.e. was way better on Windows than on the Mac. And that's why Safari exists. Safari exists because Apple wanted the Mac to look good on web browser tests. And they realized Microsoft was never going to prioritize that because what did they care? And Apple cared a lot. And that's why WebKit and Safari came to be. So this is just, I mean, it goes back a long way. It goes back 15 plus years, 16 plus years where Apple has been trying very hard to pick the most important things and gain as much control over those things as it possibly can and so in the cloud i mean this

story makes sense right this is this is it's time it's it's maybe past time but it's definitely time all right so should i take a break yep this week's episode is brought to you by casper the company focused on sleep that has gone ahead and created the most perfect mattress So should we take a break? Yep. This week's episode is brought to you by Casper, the company focused on sleep, that has gone ahead and created the most perfect mattress, that it sells directly to consumers, they eliminate commission-driven, inflated prices, and a lot of the hassle that goes along with buying a mattress, like having to go to a store and then sit on that mattress

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Do you find it to have just the right sink? Definitely the temperature profile has changed where we don't, I feel like we don't have to regulate our temperature as much in the bed because it is it's not going to be all hot and uncomfortable and uh yeah it's a

very comfortable mattress like i've said on podcasts before um our old mattress felt kind of like a trampoline it was like you'd sit on it and the cat would be on the other side and the cat would be like ejected from the bed when you sat down on one side of the bed and then the casper you know again you got the sink but it's also uh it's also firm so you uh so you don't uh you're not like laying on a a waterbed nor are you laying on a a sheet of granite so it's uh yeah it feels great i've had it for what it's i think it's coming up two years now and uh i love it so you've well passed that 100 night yeah that's right that's right they can't take it back now and i that's fine because i don't want them to you can get 50 towards any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com slash upgrade

and use the code upgrade at checkout. Terms and conditions apply as casper.com slash upgrade and the code upgrade. Thank you so much to Casper for their support of this very program and RelayFM. So, Mr. Snell, we didn't have many Ask Upgrade questions in the document this week, which is very rare. There's always many, many, many to choose from. But for whatever reason, we didn't have many. So I asked our dear listeners on Twitter if they would share some. And I was inundated with fantastic questions.

So we're going to do a bumper Ask Upgrade this week because there were just too many to not pick. So we'll start off easy. We're going to start off with Elizabeth's question. She said that she noticed that I used Trello on my iPhone home screen and wanted to know what I use it for. Trello is a very interesting product. I believe that kind of at its core, it's made for software development. It's called Kanban, I think, the system,

where you have these boards and you move these cards between them. It's a very interesting system and there is a methodology of software development that I can't remember the name of right now that is Agile. Look at you. You just got it. I can always rely on you, Snow.

And people use it for this, but we do use it, me and Stephen use it at RelayFM to keep track of our sales funnel for advertisement, so sponsorship. So like where a company contacts us, and then we kind of move them along the process as to like if we're contacting them, if we sent them information, if we sent them documents, and then are they sold, and then do we need to contact them later? So we use it for that just as a way to kind of track our sales funnel, if you will,

which is a very important thing for us to check to make sure that we're keeping on track of everything. And Trello has really been a boon to our productivity there. So it's a great way for me and Stephen to collaborate on this, as well as just keeping track in our minds as to where these companies are in our system. Do you use Trello? A little bit. You know me in organizational systems, Mike. It's all in your calendar, right? It's all in the calendar. Yeah, it's in a reminders list.

So, yeah, I have used it, and I use it for some things, but it's very limited. I use it sometimes as a to-do list or a checklist if we're working on a project, um, when we were doing the, uh, incomparable and six colors memberships,

I, I used it as a place to list sort of like everything that needed to happen before we got to the end and we could leave notes and all that. But I've never really kind of fully embraced it. However, I will say, um, tidbits and take control eBooks.

They, uh, they use Trello a lot. So when I was going through the process of writing my eBook this summer and the last two summers, when we were doing the original and the updates, uh, all of the milestones for that are handled in Trello. So we'll end up like moving the cards along in their process. And that's very much like what we used to do with physical cards for a long time, uh, at the magazines that I worked at, where we used to

have a tracking system that was literally just 3x5 cards that would move from left to right across the process until they reached final. And Trello works just like that if you wanted to. So it's kind of a digital version of that same kind of card stack for workflow. It's very good. It's a very good piece of software.

And the iOS apps are fantastic. You can drag and drop little cards around. They're really, really great. Rajiv asks, is there a bug in iOS 10 where you can't send messages with the effects from the lock screen? I don't know if I would class this as a bug. It feels more like a decision or a limitation because you also can't send the effects or stickers or anything from notifications.

So if you answer a message in a notifications window, all of those stuff require you to open the messages app. the effects or stickers or anything from notifications. So if you answer a message in a notifications window, all of those stuff require you to open the messages app. I think this might just be a decision for the time being because I suppose that these aren't the full applications. They're not using the full memory. And these things require probably quite a lot of access to the system, to memory. So they need to be in the full application to use.

I want to mention something super quick. Do you remember we were talking a couple of weeks ago about lasers and the tactic that the lasers gives you yeah and there were a bunch of people that said that it wasn't the tactic it was sound now i have i have a little thing about this so on atp a couple of weeks ago they were talking about there being this third DAC or something in the phone, and that's part of the Taptic. So I did a little bit of investigation. If you send somebody lasers and have the sound on, it makes a sound that you can hear, like a sort of a bzzz type sound.

Very nice. If you put your phone on mute. I have lasers in Ask Upgrade, so thank you for doing that. Do what I can. If you put your lasers in ask upgrade so thank you for doing that do what i can if you put your uh seven i can only attest to this on the seven plus but i'm sure the seven is the same put your phone on silent yep hold your phone to your ear and you can hear the same sound that the taptic engine is making it is making the same audio sound as the sound actually plays.

Wow. Because basically it seemed that what the ATP guys had discovered was that the little Taptic Engine is actually a speaker and it's just playing it very loudly and very fast. So if you hold it to your ear, you can hear the sound. There you go. But it is, that's definitely true that if it's in silent and you get lasers, your phone vibrates. It totally does. vibrates absolutely 100 but if you put your phone to your ear you can hear the sound that it makes super cool so you can hear the sound of the sea you can

it's just your own ear jason that's all it is oh okay nick wanted to know uh because well he wrote in to say it's even weirder messages something he finds very strange so we talk about the strangers and messages last week that recent ink drawings show up in recent stickers right so you got the recent thing if you do the little hand drawing thing and i mean yeah it's just a strange thing but again i wanted to mention something else i find super strange recently used stickers also sync from device to device whether you had the pack installed or not yep you can also not use sticker packs on the apple watch right that's right but but your recently used stickers also appear on the apple watch ah it's craziness so close right so close to sinking them it's it's it's similar and then um

somebody else wrote in i don't have who this is but somebody else pointed out when i was um complaining about the fact that you've got your ink drawing interface and you've also got the digital touch interface that you can draw on that um there's a third interface you can draw on which is if you use markup on a photo that's another place that you can draw you can mark up drawing everywhere mark up a photo and send that to yeah i think at this point we definitely need the apple pencil for the iphone right if you draw everything yeah yeah i talked to somebody who suggested that the reason digital touch is so big on ios 10 is like literally when the apple watch ship with digital touch the the some messages team was like really excited about

digital touch and they were encouraged you know you got to start building the ios you know version of digital touch because we got it it's gonna it's gonna be big it's gonna be big and and then they finished it or got close to finishing it, and meanwhile, everybody had rethought Digital Touch, and they're like, but we built this whole thing. They're like, all right, put it in there, whatever. I don't know if that's true or not, but that has the ring of truth about it, right?

They get all revved up. It's like, we know the next release is going to have Digital Touch in it, so let's go, let's do that. Oh, oh well. Kim wrote in to ask, what smart home technology do I expect to be adding to my new house? So I have the Amazon Echo.

I have some Wemo switches that I've bought but not set up. And we're going to be putting hue lights in the house as well to begin with. Now, I just want to mention this to answer the question, but we're going to be discussing this on Upgrade in the near future once I've actually bought and used some of these devices. So we have a big home automation topic that we've been planning to talk about for some time. But I'm so close, hopefully, to actually buying and installing this stuff

that I think it might be best to wait until I actually do have it. But that's what I'm looking to get. There isn't really a lot of HomeKit stuff, so I'm basically just trying to find things that work with at least the Echo. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would be interested at some point, when you are done with the house business and you're starting to shop for home tech,

there might be a little preview that we could do of talking about what more stuff you're considering. But, yeah, when do you think that might happen how's the house looking house update with how it stands right now and i feel like i've said this over and over and over again we should own the home within about two weeks all right and uh yeah okay speaking of uh the echo Right. And, yeah. Okay. Speaking of the Echo, Blake wanted to know, do you think that Apple will really release a Google Home or Echo competitor? What do you think, Jason? Siri in a box?

I do. You think they're going to? I think they will. I mean, I don't think it's guaranteed. I think that there are now reports that they are building it. I wrote a story like six months ago saying they should build one because I'd been using my Echo and really liking it. And the idea of a better sounding speaker that has access to Apple Music and Siri kind of interests me. It would certainly have things that

would do better and certainly things that would do worse than these others. But I would like to see it. The rumors are there's a story that they are actually building one. Doesn't mean they'll ship it, but that they have a team working on it i feel like given apple's affinity for music and the fact that they have beats and they have apple music that this is a natural for them and they have siri right and it's not it's not like 100 like i said but i feel like they've got so many of the parts here that it would fit in their ecosystem pretty well. And that feels like that's enough. And then you add in HomeKit, right? Like there is enough in Apple's ecosystem right now. And my time with the Echo has convinced me that just saying, well, talk to your phone instead of having one of these

things in your house is not a good answer. That these things fill a niche that is not filled by having devices you can talk to that are in your pocket that um it makes too much sense for them to do it um so i think because of that not just because of my own wish for this product i'd say that there's a better chance than not that it will eventually be released now when next year maybe but um but i i think there's a chance, better than not. And Lachlan wants to know if we use Apple News. Absolutely not. Never, not ever, not once.

I have no interest for a product like Apple News, to be honest, because it's just not the type of content that I consume. And if I wanted to do this sort of stuff, then I would go with RSS because I know it works and I can choose everything that I want to get and I know there won't be any issues with the formatting or whatever. Yeah, I don't use it either. Do you use it as a publisher?

Yes. Six Colors is in there, although I'm not using the Apple News format, but the Apple News rendering is very good at taking my RSS, which contains full text of Six Colors, and rendering it quite nicely. And that's all I really need.

So I was going to say, I use it largely to check and make sure colors and rendering it quite nicely and that's all i really that's all i really need so i i was going to say i use it largely to check and make sure that six colors is displaying properly in apple news that's about it this is the first of two of the three questions actually submitted by relay fm hosts yes micah of disruption wanted to know what killer feature would it take for Jason to join the Plus Club despite his reservations? Is there something that Apple could seriously add to this phone that would be a real kind of, just like

a deal breaker, like you have to get it? You know, I'm going to answer this in an unexpected way, which is I'm going to say the killer feature would be cellular connectivity on the Apple Watch. Oh, that's really, you're so smart. That's such a great answer. Because, you know, the fact is I walk the dog and I run

and I am not going to bring a plus with me when I'm doing those things. It's huge. So if I could leave it at home and so that my phone didn't need to come with me in those circumstances, and then, you know know also maybe some podcast support from you know like overcast or something on the watch as well that would be nice but as long as I'm running and I and I have my phone with me

then I'm not going to get a bigger phone bottom line okay I get that so it's actually a really good answer for it right like because then you wouldn't need to carry it around and then you'd get all the benefits of the big phone when you actually wanted to use the phone i like the big phone i mean i have i have still my review unit of the big phone and i use it every now and then i'm impressed with how i like the screen size i like there's so much about it i like but i'm not gonna put that in my shorts pocket and and go for a run it's not gonna happen i think the feature that could also move you and will move a lot of people is removing the chin and the forehead and the vessels well if if the big phone got smaller that would help sure absolutely i think that's i honestly i think that will move a lot of people

but we're gonna have to wait and see if and when that will happen right i believe it will i'm really not sure what i think about this idea of the unicorn phone or glass or screen or blah blah blah like i don't know how i feel about that but i do think that the next version the next full version of the the new phones will remove a lot of the bezels around the screen at least because many other filmmakers are doing this for some reason google didn't with the pixel they added them back and it's just really weird because a lot of android phones have been getting rid of them but uh it brings the size of the phone down and keeps the screen yeah which is which is a really interesting proposition katie floyd of mac power users wanted to know jason that katie needs to demo watchOS 3 to her Mac user group.

Any ideas of the best way to do this? How can you show what's on an Apple Watch to a group of people? So I think there are two options here, and one is if you can get one of those overhead cameras that they do make where you

you've got a little table and it's got a little camera. They do these a lot in schools. But the other way to do it is take a lot of screenshots and put them in Keynote. And I hate to say that those are the two options, but that's basically it. There's no tethered... I guess, can you run watchOS in Xcode?

I guess that might be the other way to go, but I'm not sure how functional it is in the simulator. I'm not sure it's particularly functional for regular features. It's pretty limited to that. I think the best thing would be if there's a thing you could rent or borrow from someone

that's one of those little overhead projector things where you, you know, overhead cameras where you lay something down and people can see what you've got beneath it. And basically it's taking the camera input and then you could like put the watch down and zoom in on it. Because then you could also show the buttons that you're pressing as well. Exactly.

So it might be even better if you can actually find a way to do that. This is what Apple does, right, in their own little little way they just have somebody standing over the like the shoulder of somebody and during the demos you know yeah but that's almost what you have to do is just get a camera and do it or like i said take a lot of screenshots and that's a lot of work but there's no video capture that we know of for so i'm gonna'm going to combine this question and the next question into a potential answer for Katie as well. Dan wanted to know what tripod I'm using on my iPhone for my YouTube videos.

Now, I'm using two products right now. One of them is the Joby GorillaPod, and they make one for the phone which has magnetic feet, which is really cool, and it has this little clamp grip thing on it. But you can take that off and add something like a glyph to it because it's just a mount what katie could do is get one of these and film herself of her iphone and then stream the view of her iphone camera right because there's a bunch of ways that you can do that you could plug it into a mac or whatever so instead of getting an overhead projector you could use

your iphone as a camera and then you could kind of film yourself demoing it plus i really love this joey thing because it has the magnetic feet so i can just stick it to things so i've been like sticking it to things in my kitchen and stuff and taking time lapses and things like that which is real fun uh there is also one other product which i just just got and put in video. I kind of dedicated half of a YouTube video to it, which is called the Osmo Mobile by DJI. They're the company that makes a lot of the drone stuff, and they make a lot of these things.

And basically it is a gimbal for the iPhone, which allows me to take super smooth footage and to have really good control of the phone and move it around like a little camera and I absolutely love this little thing, Jason. It is a very, very nice piece of technology. But yeah, it ain't cheap. It ain't cheap.

But it's allowing me to get a lot of the quality that I'm looking for without needing to buy a big camera and I have this little thing that I can attach to my phone and I'm good to go. So I really like it. David wanted to also know, what camera app do you recommend to take advantage of the iPhone 7 Plus features and cameras? I've been using an app called ProCam for some stuff recently, which is really good. ProCam allows you to choose which camera you want to take things

with. It does raw footage. It really is a very cool piece of kit or app, I should say. So I really do like ProCam. I don't know if you've tried anything or have any suggestions for any products. No. No, I think

Lightroom just got another update that added some more features in and it's uh in its compatibility with the with the new camera where you can switch between the cameras and things like that in lightroom but i have not i have not gone down in there that's a that's a hashtag ask mike on upgrade question yeah that's the one i would recommend because it's the one that i've tried um and i and i think it's really cool because it it has it has way more controls than i could probably ever understand um and that's probably that probably means that it's pretty good yeah i i seriously don't understand a lot of what's going on there but uh i think it's really cool that's it confusion

is a feature confusion is a feature it definitely is um and we have a question from i'm gonna say stay uh stay asks can you remember the first time you thought the internet might be a big deal or what was your first memory of using the internet you go first um i remember uh as a kid i don't know how old I was, we used to go to my uncle's house, and my uncle had the internet. This is probably in the early 90s, because he had it at home for work, because he worked at British Telecom,

and he had the internet at home, and we used to have to ask him for the code, because he had one of those secure ID two factor thingamajigs at the time to log on to the the connection that you had at home because it was provided by the company and i remember uh going online and going to the bbc website to play these very primitive games that they had on their website and that was when like i fell in love with using the internet then and every time i used to go to his house we i used to just bug him constantly for him to connect me to the internet wow so that's my thing because i mean that's like basically the internet has been around for the majority of my memories, but that's the earliest memory that I have of using it.

That's good. So for me, it's the fall of 1988. I went to college, and the story is actually that I was working, I volunteered to work on my college, the college newspaper, which is not the university-wide, but of the one of the small colleges at uc san diego and they being a college of you know gigantic nerds they did their college newspaper in uh on the the

vax and unix systems at ucsd so i had to get I had to go to the applied physics and math building where the computer resources thing was and get an account on the, on the, the backs of VMS, whatever. And it was, uh, just, it was an account without a name. It was like PA 1033, where the PA stood for personal account. They didn't let you choose your name, nothing like that. And a password. And then I was taught by one of the editors of this little college paper how to use VI to edit text, which I still use to this day, which blows my mind that the stupid thing that I thought I learned for one ridiculous and arcane reason I still use

because if I need to edit a file in the terminal, I will just use VI because I know how to use VI. Because I learned it in 1988. So that gave me a computer account. And I learned how to use VI. And they would use PostScript to print out pages and lay them out. I wasn't involved with that. I was sort of writing and copy editing.

But now I have the account. And friends of mine from high school discovered that, you know, we discovered that we all had these, these internet accounts and that, and then we discovered we could send email back and forth and that this was a revelation because instead of literally we were writing letters to each other and with email, it just was instantaneous. It was free and instantaneous. We weren't calling them. We weren't writing them letters. We were sending them emails. And I remember going to the computer lab and having conversations with people in email where I would say, oh, how's it going?

This is going on and send it and then just sit there and wait. And then a few minutes later, you have mail and I would read the mail and it would be the response from that person. And in some places you could use the talk protocol, which was like a direct chat, live chat, but UCSD turned that off because I think everybody was using it to talk to their friends. And so we just used email for that. And that was my first memory of the internet. And then from that email, I also discovered, I don't know who told me about it, I discovered Usenet newsgroups. And all of a you know, a huge community of people on message boards basically talking about everything that you

could think of. And, uh, so that was all in like the fall of 88 and the, uh, in the spring of 89. And, uh, that's my, that's my story. And the first time I used the web was in, I'm going to say like the fall of 92 spring of 93, right when the web started. started um and i remember the first time i connected on my mac to the internet directly instead of through a command line and i got to load a web browser and and use eudora for my email and suddenly my mac was on the internet and that was a revelation too because up to that point using your computer to be on the internet was dialing in somewhere to a unix system it was basically if you've ever opened the terminal that's on the internet was dialing in somewhere to a unix system it was basically if you've ever opened the terminal that's what the internet was for the first five years that i used

it was a terminal window that's my story it's a nice story old times at the time we were on the cutting edge it was super amazing and now it's just a story about the olden days amazing how that happens finally today steven Hackett wants to know, how does Jason feel about fruit in other places rather than just pizza? What about in a salad or on top of a dessert? Wow. Well?

I don't put fruit other than pineapple on pizzas, unless you consider sun-dried tomatoes fruit. They're kind of fruity, but they're not. Tomato is a fruit, so I would consider it a fruit. I guess. How do I feel about fruit? It's so complicated. Stephen Hackett, listener Stephen.

I like some fruit. My favorite fruit is the mignola, which is a tangelo. I like it a lot. Other places than pizza, there's some nice fruit that can be used in desserts. I like a good, like, a pear crisp or something like that. Those are good. I make jam out of fruit, and we'll put those on things, and those are really tasty. Fruit in a salad?

I guess. I've had salads, like, with dried cherries and things in in them and they're fine, but I don't know. I, I, most of my fruit consumption is, uh, is probably just directly the eating the fruit and not using it as toppings in other places. But, um, you know, I recommend people listen to that members episode of clockwise and top four where I talk about salad and my general dislike of it. But there it is. I had some pineapple pepperoni pizza for dinner last night and finished it for lunch today. I made pizza the other night and I took a picture of it

and everybody freaked out on Twitter because it didn't have pineapple on it. My answer to that is pineapple pizza for me is like when I'm having somebody make a pizza for me and they've got all the ingredients. Because keeping a can of pineapple around just to top part of a pizza occasionally is not. It ends up being that we use like a tiny bit of the pineapple and the rest of it goes to waste, which is a shame. So at home, I generally don't put pineapple on pizza because I don't have pineapple chunks just at the ready at the drop of the hat. So I don't do it there. That's my story. Awesome. Right. That wraps it up. We would obviously love for you to continue sending your hashtag ask upgrade questions. You can tweet them

to me. You can tweet them to Jason. You don't have to tweet them to anyone, but you must include the hashtag ask upgrades that are going to our sheet. And way we'll be able to answer them on on other shows we love doing this it's actually one of my very very favorite things and i'm always very surprised at just how many come through every week like yes like the fact that i had to ask for more this week is a is a rarity there's always more than we can do so please continue sending them in we had some great ones this week so we just had to spend a little bit more time than usual to answer them. I want to mention one more time in our show notes this week, which you can find

at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 110 is where you will find the links for all of our amazing merchandise. I should have mentioned that earlier. That's where you can go. relay.fm slash upgrade slash 110 or it should be in your podcast app of choice. It should be right there.

You can see a lovely picture of our t-shirts. You can see what they look like. And then you can find all of the links to Cotton Bureau and Teespring to go and buy as much of that merchandise as your lovely frame can handle. We would very much appreciate that. If you want to find us online,

there's a couple of ways you can do that. You can go to sixcolors.com or theincomparable.com for Jason's work online and of course at relay.fm because Jason's host of all the great shows all the great shows four now right

yeah I think that's right you're catching up on me I'm coming for you watch out Jason is also at jasonljsne00 on twitter I am at imike I-M-Y-K-E of course you can find this show Jason is also at JasonLJSNE00 on Twitter. I am at iMike. I am YKE. Of course, you can find this show

and many more at Relay.fm. I host many and I'm also at YouTube.com slash Mike Hurley as well for my new little video project

that I've been working on. I am on Twitter. I don't know if I said this. I'm at iMike. I am YKE. Thanks again to our lovely sponsors

Mack Walden and Casper for sponsoring this week's episode. And thank you for listening. Thank you if you buy any merchandise. If you don't, it's okay. We still love you. And you'll be able to listen to us again next week,

as always. Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snell. Ascent with balloons. Why not lasers? I went the other way.