Upgrade - 115: Rubber Chicken Scenario

Episode Date: November 14, 2016

After spending the last week with the new MacBook Pro, Jason reviews the Touch Bar and breaks down the approach Apple took in creating an entirely new way to interact with a Mac. Meanwhile, Myke prepares to record podcasts from an empty house with dodgy Internet access.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 115 today's show is brought to you by casper fresh books and encapsular my name is mike curly and i am joined by the one and only mr jason snell hey mike how's only, Mr. Jason Snell. Hey, Mike. How's it going? Pretty good, Jason Snell. How are you? Good. Good. Busy time. Busy time. You know, my mom always says to me, whenever we talk about what we're doing, the kids are doing all that, she's like, oh, you're just so busy. You're so lucky to be so young. You're just so busy. And most of the time, I just kind of roll my eyes a little bit and think, yeah, you know, it's just life. It's what we do. But the last couple of months, and I think this happens for all of us who write or talk about Apple, yeah, it's been really busy. It's the busy season. September to November really is the busy season.

It is high season. I feel like I was walking the dog with my wife yesterday and we were talking about all this stuff. and we were talking about all this stuff. And I said, the good news is we're kind of at the end of the Apple product cycle for this year. I mean, there's stuff, right? Because now we're going to kick into the holiday season and make lists and stuff like that. All the end of year stuff. And it's work.

And the work never stops. The upgradeys will be coming. All of that. We got a of year stuff. And it's work. And the work never stops. The upgrade-ies. The upgrade-ies will be coming. All of that, we got a plan. It's all going to happen. But it is also kind of nice to feel like as somebody who works on this stuff that we're on the backside a little bit, can calm down a little bit. Because it's been kind of nuts,

especially if you throw in the, you know, that I was gone for 10 days on my continuous travel adventure um with apple products on you know an apple event right before and a product that i took with me and then as soon as i got back i got i got the touch bar macbook pro and had an embargo for that that dropped this morning so it's i i'm feeling a little bit like i can actually like take stock of my where i am of my life and where i am in the world for the first time in a couple of weeks. So that's nice.

It's nice to get that review out in the world and be able to sort of look up from my desk for a moment and ask what's next. So we are going to touch on the touch bar later on today in the show. But I did want to ask. You've got to touch on the touch bar, Mike. That's how it works. You have to. I to i mean otherwise what's the point of having it you know but i do have this one kind of meta question about the reviews and saying it's busy okay i think something that's maybe made this uncharacteristically busy i can't ever remember a time where you or like the majority of tech press will review two models of the same computer separately yeah well okay so there was a

serious availability kind of rollout issue for the macbook pro models and um it's interesting i've never seen this either usually you you know they release a bunch and you get the best one yep right that's where you're like no no here's the best one you Yep. Right? As a reviewer, they're like, no, no, no. Here's the best one. And you're like, but what about the others? Bop, bop, bop. Nope, nope. You get the good one. Review the good one. That tends to be what happens.

But this time, because of availability issues, so after the event, a bunch of reviewers, and I was included in this, were, you know, it's the thing where you're told come back a little bit later. And I went and had a sandwich with Dan Frakes, my former colleague at Macworld, who works at the Wirecutter now,

because he lives nearby. Oh, the New York Times, right? By the New York Times, right, exactly. So he's employed by that company now. Anyway, we had lunch and all that. And then I came back. And basically, you get ushered into their new briefing center, and you get demos, and then you leave with a MacBook Pro in a bag.

And so I got the escape, essentially, right? The physical button to port 13-inch MacBook Pro. And that's what everybody got. And everybody was saying after the event, like, you know, they don't have the touch bar ones yet. So then the next week I'm in Ireland with the physical button, 13 inch MacBook Pro. And I get an email from my PR contact at Apple saying, can you come by tomorrow to pick up the 13 inch with touch bar?

To which I replied, no, I can't. I'm in Ireland. Can you send it to me? And there's no response. And I still don't have that model because I think they they were very limited supply and they gave mine to someone else instead so that's sad but um but then i get home and they say can you come down and pick up the 15 inch so basically on successive weeks each of these three

variations rolled out and that and so you end up with these interesting situations of like the first one had no embargo or had yeah i mean i think it had like they had the new embargo right which is just like talk about whatever you want but post your review at a certain point or whatever yeah the first the first one was um it was i think just like your embargo was tomorrow morning or something like it just to give everybody a little bit more time, but it was not a lot of time. And then the second one came out and they had an embargo. And it sounds like then the third one, 15 inch came out.

I don't, I'm not privy to all of this. It sounds like the embargo kept getting pushed back. The embargo I got was Monday morning and that's what I did. But so that, that was all going on. So there was a lot of moving parts this time, which is kind of unusual.

And, and so people had to choose, like some sites have multiple reviews of the different models um some sites conflated all the you know all the reviews are all on in one um i ended up writing a hands-on uh experience piece on day one and then a travel piece after i you know i posted it literally on the, over the Atlantic ocean on my flight back home. Um, and then about the 13 and then this piece is about 15 cause that's the only model I've got. So it's, it's kind of all over the place about how people chose to review these.

And in reality, what we can talk about this more later, what it ended up being was mostly I'm reviewing touch bar and touch ID because these systems are not that different from the 13-inch model without the Touch Bar. They're not that different other than the Touch Bar and the Touch ID. So I ended up writing a review of the MacBook Pro that's very much a review of – it's like an essay about Touch Bar and Touch ID essentially. Yeah, I guess the reason that you can write these reviews genuinely about these two machines is it's been very – I can't think of any time Apple's released a new product, like a new Mac, where they have two versions and one of them has this different feature. They've released in the past, like, oh, here's the Retina one. But there wasn't another Mac that was just like the Retina one, just didn't have Retina, I don't think. But this touch bar is completely different

as well like you wouldn't even what would you review a retina screen like screen looks good moving on like you know what do you do but this is like a really weird type of thing where they're just like oh here's a computer it's really powerful it has all this new stuff in it you can get it in space gray review it here's another one it has another screen on it and a fingerprint sensor on it review it it's strange every time i write a review of these things now uh i end up trying to think how do i describe basically you have to you have to wave at the retina screen as you as you blow past it you have to say like you know like all of these computers these days it has a beautiful bright wide color retina display uh It's great to look at.

It's like, what can I say about it? Your mileage may vary, right? You know what Apple does with displays now, and this has got that. And so there it is. And then I kind of move on because I'm not quite sure what else to say. It's got a big, bright, beautiful retina display. And next. So you can now buy these

machines as well but they're like 4-5 weeks shipping as it stands currently I don't know if you could buy them before but you can buy them and they're shipping in like a month it'll be interesting to see if and how the

touch bar versions slip were they buyable like could you already buy these things oh yeah i can't remember they're just i think i think they were on sale um the day it was announced and then the ship date was you know basically if you calculated it out if you ordered them right away the ship date was mid-november so about now and they may given that our embargo dropped today uh they may start trickling out this week right right i don't i don't know but my understanding is if you go and try to order one

today you won't you know you won't be able to get it tomorrow because they they're they're back ordered i guess my problem is like to check this personally i don't think i know anybody who's bought one i don't think of anyone that i know i can't think of any friends of mine that have actually purchased this machine oh actually our designer Frank has bought one so I mean he's based in a place in Europe so

a place in Europe he's very mysterious I thought he was in a spaceship hovering above Europe yeah a space place in Europe no you've revealed it now he's actually in a place in a location in europe imagine wow mind blown uh john was the first person to recognize the startup chime uh is gone from the upgrade music last week we'd like to make sure that we keep up with the times so uh apple removes the startup chime so do we yeah this was an idea we talked

about at uh at all and uh and and didn't do it then because we were just trying to get that episode out because it's live and we're at a conference and all that but we did it last time and and and presumably this time um and we'll see we'll see what happens i don't know if it's going to come back mike i don't know what our policy i don't know if it's going to come back, Mike. I don't know what our policy... I don't know if somebody can... Well, it all depends on whether somebody opened Terminal or not, right? Yeah, I know, right? So we'll see. We'll see what happens.

If we can get into the podcast command line and do some tweaking or whether we've lost the startup time forever. We've spoken a lot recently about your kind of mobile recording setup and your iPad recording setup and your ipad recording setup um and whilst we were at all uh listener ej uh elias who was the creator of the incredible podcast universe map you've never seen that thing it's amazing um he mentioned a way because he he

records all on ios and i believe he's writing a blog post. So, Elias, if you're out there and when you've written this, send it to me so I can put it in show notes in a future episode. And he had mentioned, because he uses the Zoom solid-state recorder like you do, Jason, and then edits using Farite on his iPad. Now, currently, there is no way without a without a mac i believe to get those two things to talk to each other right you need to somehow or using some kind of thing you have to use something there has to be something in the middle well there has to be a pc basically there has to be a computer

as an intermediary this is one of those things i've written about how one of my big wish list items for iOS, if they do a productivity update in the spring, is the ability to see more stuff on attached storage devices, especially if you're using the card reader that Apple provides. Right now, all it'll do is see videos and photos. Now that we've got essentially file pickers in terms of iCloud Drive and Dropbox and all the rest, and you can see files, why can't you see files on those cards? Because right now, a portable recorder like the Zoom that I've got and that Elias has, they are recording waves or MP3s onto that card, and it's great. It's a great way to do portable recording. And then you want to edit and you've got your iPad for editing and you can't get it over. You have to like attach it to a computer that can read or some other device that can read an SD card because the iPad can't read those files on the SD card and transfer them and then transfer them to the iPad. And then you can do it.

It's maddening. But now there are Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards, and the one I think that has kind of occupied the mindshare in this is a product called iFi. And photographers use this a lot in their cameras, and they're able to transfer images to a service or to a device very easily. However, the iFi SD card, it has a companion app on iOS, but it only allows you to transfer

media, movies, and photos. It's got the same approach that Apple took with their SD card reader and the software on iOS to read it, which is, this is a media transfer thing. However, Toshiba make their own called the Flash Air. And the Flash Air app,

when you press a couple of hidden little buttons not like hidden hidden but like just not completely it's in the settings it's in the settings you can turn on the ability to take documents from or basically anything stored on the flash air and it will download them to the application and you can use the open in command on ios so it is possible to grab these uh audio files from the flash air card that has been recorded in the zoom recorder from the microphones and then you're able to open in and then you're able to open them up into ferrite and i believe you've tried this out yeah i did and it works i mean that's the bottom line is you can see um and the way it works is you set it up, it's its own wireless network, basically, and you have to your iPad has to connect to it, or iPhone. And you can set in the settings in the app, how long because it uses battery, right? Or uses power. So you can say how long is it trying to set up that network before it gives up. So I you know, I have it set to like a minute.. So literally in order to connect to it, I need to turn on, cause I wanted to say battery. I turn on

my recorder and then, and then connect to it by my iPad in that first minute. And then we're good. And then I can see the contents of the file of the card. I can copy any of those files over to my iPad. And yes, if you toggle a setting in the Flash Air app, then it uses the open in, I don't know why this isn't on by default, but it provides you with the open in command, at which point you can move those files over directly into something like Ferrite for editing. The only drawback is the way that that app is written right now. You have to do them one at a time, even though you can make multiple selections. you select multiple files you can't choose open in i don't know why that's kind of dumb that's an ios limitation you can only yeah you can only open

in one thing yeah yeah i wish there was um you know it's one of those things too where yeah if there was something else if you could zip it inside of Flash Air or something like that, but you can't. So anyway, you have to do that one at a time. But this solves the problem of, if I want to go somewhere and record something, I can use, with multiple microphones, I can use the Zoom recorder,

and then I can get it to my iPad and edit it and post it. And this closes a gap that probably shouldn't be there, but it closes that gap. And that's cool. So I bought one. Elias told me about it. I immediately opened my phone, opened the Amazon app, ordered one, had it sent to my house. It was here when I got back home and it totally works. So it's a nice workaround for now. I hope Apple will update iOS to just read files off of SD cards in the future. will update iOS to just read files off of SD cards in the future.

Last week, Dylan wrote in to ask, has anybody bought the larger Apple TV, the larger storage Apple TV in our Ask Upgrade segment? And Steve wrote in to say that he owns the larger storage Apple TV as he heard it has a better buffer for streaming content. So it's able to stream more content. I've never heard this. I don't think that's true i think that that might be a uh rubber chicken scenario steve i'm afraid but he also bought it for future proofing which i can kind of get on board with what is a rubber there might be something that pops up uh in in the future that might mean he

needs the storage but um i'm afraid steve whilst these may be valid reasons for you they still don't seem like enough uh for why anybody should buy that one what is a rubber chicken scenario you never heard of that i know what a rubber chicken is but i don't i what is a rubber chicken scenario so like if you're swinging a rubber chicken across like above your head right have you ever heard this no i just googled for rubber chicken scenario in quotes and there's literally two there's two web pages so i picked this up maybe from mac break weekly back in the day they would talk about swinging a rubber chicken as a method of trying something out in the hopes that it will fix your problem oh i see so it's it's it's like a superstition thing like yeah uh you know nothing else is working so why don't i try this and see if it helps so let's

blame merlin for this uh i'm just gonna straight up just blame merlin for that but i think that if merlin man is out there he will know what i'm talking about like this is the thing that they used to to reference i can hear him i can hear him saying it so like the idea is you swing a rubber chicken above your head in the wikipedia page for rubber chicken it says the rubber chicken fix refers to holding a rubber chicken above a problem often perplexing and having the problem fix itself i see okay right so the idea being that like this isn't a real thing that exists but it's like a placebo makes you feel better all right well i i again, to Steve, I don't know for sure, but I think when it came out

we asked about this and they said that the way Apple describes it is it's to load information from apps so that you basically can have more apps and those apps have more room to put their data on there, but it's never been very clearly communicated. And I think Apple TV

it's providing been very clearly communicated. And I think Apple TV, you know, it's providing plenty of buffer space for media, is my understanding, that that is reserved for media on either model. So I could be wrong about that, but that's my recollection from when it came out. And that's why we've all been kind of scratching our heads about the storage difference in the Apple TV, because while it exists and they charge for it the communication on it is very limited basically more apps so if you essentially i think what they're saying is if you are using it for lots of games you can keep all the games on there um and it won't need to remove levels or whatever it'll load them and keep them there because it's got plenty of space. Yeah, and our resident Apple TV expert,

Joe Steele in the chat room, fake name, said that the apps don't have more room themselves. Everything is capped, all of the actual data that they can store in them. But as you said, you can hold more apps, but you can't hold more data within those apps than the smaller model does. I think it's not that you can hold more data. I think it might be that if you run, you've got your app with content in the app package

that it's got its content, and then you're in a low storage situation that it blows off stuff that it can redownload. And maybe that wouldn't happen. But I think Joe's also right that probably in almost any circumstance, you wouldn't get to that point unless you had lots of apps. So it comes back to more apps. I don't think that there are that many good apps to be honest. Yeah.

Yeah. Although I did see, who was it? I saw somebody talking about how they, I think, sideloaded an emulator onto their Apple TV. Marco did that. Was that Marco? Yeah. An emulator onto their Apple TV. Marco did that. Was that Marco?

Yeah. An emulator onto their Apple TV, and they have the Steelcase controller, and they play, like, emulated video games on the Apple TV. That's what Marco tweeted about. The emulated games that you can put, they're like Nintendo games. They're not going to take up a lot of space. No, no, I know. It's just I thought that was an interesting, like, but, you know,

that's an example where you can't do that legally do that legally you know right it's not in the app store so it's too bad oh i've got one for you um just a quick note i'm not i'm gonna write an article about this at some point i in the midst of writing my review and doing all this stuff and being really busy i got a text message from my sister um saying that she had a virus on her Mac and could I help her? And I literally ended up texting with her for three hours trying to figure out what it was and how to do it. And it was made more difficult. on something somewhere that reset her, it reset her homepage on Safari to load a page that loads a JavaScript that throws up a dialog box that says, you've been infected, call this number.

And you can't get out of the dialog box in order to go to the preferences and reset Safari. This happened, something like this happened to someone in John Syracuse's family, right? I think you were talking about NTP recently. And one of the amazing things about Safari that I think is actually a flaw in Safari that they need to fix is there's no way to reset Safari from outside Safari. That doesn't make any sense. Right? There's not a command line tool. I deleted every file I'm aware of that feeds safari on her system and it didn't

reset her home page this is a good thing for chrome right because you could just delete chrome well so this is the problem is she she had no other browser on her system so i couldn't even send her to web pages because she didn't have a browser i was i was we were in messages and she was started on her iphone and eventually i said, get on messages on your Mac. And I was sending, I was dragging like anti-malware apps into the chat for her to get them through a download, through an iMessage transfer. It was a mess. And it turns out that for all of this, and this is why I wanted to bring this up and why I'll write about it. There is a really simple solution here. And so I wanted to share it because maybe our listeners will experience this or experience this with family members.

If you get this like blocker, first off, make sure they don't call the person, make sure they don't let them share their screen or whatever, you know, and if they've done that, then it's even more problematic. But how you solve this Safari blocker problem is actually shockingly simple

which is you turn off Wi-Fi you make sure they're not plugged into any networks because the way this works is not a page on the hard drive that's getting loaded it's a page on the internet that's getting loaded that loads the JavaScript that does the blocker so if you turn off Wi-Fi and load Safari it goes oh I can't find that page

at which point you can go to preferences and go to home page and delete the weird home page url that's been inserted as your home page and then you're fine oh i hate that it's that simple so three hours to get to why don't you turn off wi-fi but there it is so i'm gonna i'll write about it then it just throws up the can't connect to the internet page and you're good to go right yeah yeah yeah and and unfortunately there are there i mean there are lots of other steps we tried if you hold down shift

when you launch safari it's supposed to kind of like not do it but it didn't work right like i thought it was a rogue extension i thought there was something no it was just this it was the homepage thing which is not solved so i don't know what apple can do here but that that seemed like and it sounds like maybe in el capitan and sierra they added more um more stuff and she was running yosemite so i it sounds like maybe this is solved in more modern versions but of course you know what all of our relatives who ask us for technical help they're not running sierra right i'm not they're running an old they're not running el cap right? I'm not running Sierra. They're running an old, they're not running El Capitan. They may not even be running Yosemite.

They're running old versions anyway. So if this comes up to anybody out there, try turning off all the networking and see if you can do that to get around it. Because don't be like me and spend three hours troubleshooting this. Don't be like this. And from Apple's perspective, yeah, again, maybe maybe they fix this but it would be awfully nice if

i could go to maybe settings and have something i could click somewhere that erased you know that reset safari outside of safari um i don't know ios man that's what you need maybe all right this episode of upgrade is brought to you by Encapsular. Encapsular is a cloud service that makes your website faster and safer. They have a worldwide network that can inspect every packet that comes and goes from your

website, blocking attacks against your site, whilst delivering your content to your customers faster than ever before. Encapsular's global network includes 30 data centers with 2 terabits of bandwidth. This network sits between your servers and your customers, routing and filtering traffic.

It stops attack traffic by scraping bots and making sure denial-of-service attacks never make it to your servers. Meanwhile, they cache your content and optimize connections using their powerful CDN so your users get your content lightning fast. Encapsular's custom software and servers plus their 24-7 operations team keep everything running smoothly. As a listener of this show, you can get one whole month of service for free. All you need to do is go to encapsular.com slash upgrade. That's

I-N-C-A-P-S-U-L-A dot com slash upgrade. This is where you can find out more about Encapsular's service and claim your free month. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. So,

let's talk about Touch Bar, shall we? Oh, let's! So, I spent some time this morning reading over your review i really like and i'm very happy that you included a video with this uh review to kind of give a real flavor for what's happening because you know this is one of the things like so far uh we've seen videos but they've been like real quick videos that people take in right demo rooms but you were able to sit down and try out a ton of applications including some some third-party ones, and really give an idea for what is going on in the touch bar when you're accessing applications.

And I believe that you were doing a screen capture and then actually recording yourself in, I assume, a very dark room touching on the touch bar. Yeah, it was. Yeah, so it's about a five minute video um i decided i finished writing the story mostly on friday and uh i spent most of sunday morning doing the video and it was uh right i mean i don't do a lot of videos mostly because i i they take a lot of time as you know and i want to pick the spots where i think i've got something that actually benefits from video but this seemed like seemed obvious right like i need to show people how this works and um and the room wasn't that dark but what i had to do is i basically put an iphone on a tripod

and with the glyph um mounting it on the tripod and i uh and i stopped down the the shutter so basically i i i had to make it way darker in order for the um for the the screen to be visible on it so it looks like a dark room it actually wasn't that dark but i needed to make it dark so that you could see the touch bar clearly and then yeah and i ran a screen capture uh discovered that uh quick time helpfully puts a big red button on the control strip that says you're capturing the screen uh thanks that's not what i needed but anyway i did a screen capture and also was videoing from kind of above and behind me the touch bar and then i put those two composite of those two things together so that people could see sort of like what was i doing on screen and what was i doing on the touch bar and how they

connect because you can't really first off you can't capture video from the touch bar right now you can capture screenshots but you can't capture video and uh the second thing is even if you could capture video from the touch bar you can't see the fingers and what they're doing on the touch bar frankly why would you need that like the the the use case of of capturing it is so slim apple's not going to build that in for for a long time if ever into quick well plus it plus it has to get it it has to like get the video stream of itself through the you know through the processor through the t1 it might not even be able to it may not right and so anyway so it was it was pretty easy to do it once i got the

setup once i figured out like the tripod and i i it was funny i i have this tripod that i um that literally i got in high school to shoot videos and i still have it and it weighs a ton but i still have it so i got it out it was funny though the the uh tripod i got in the 80s with an iphone 7 plus it, shooting 4K video. That tripod never could have imagined that camera could have. Yeah. No, definitely not. Pretty amazing.

That's had VHS camcorders on it, and it's had an iPhone 7 Plus shooting 4K video. Anyway, so I put it together, and yeah, I'm pretty happy with how the video turned out because I think it's good to show people. It's a new user interface system. And I think, you know, the real thing to do is to use it. But failing that, it's to see it in use.

And that was what I was going for with the video. I mean, I also wrote 5,000 words, but I did make a five-minute-long video too. So, you know, a little bit of both. So I've seen this in your video, in some of your photos, and in photos I've seen elsewhere. words but i did make a five minute long video too so you know a little bit of both so there are i've seen this in your video in some of your photos and photos i've seen elsewhere if you get the keyboard under the right light so like it's it's all evenly lit like you know like there's no light shining from it or you don't see any uh finger grease or anything like that on the keys the realness of like the display of the buttons

of the touch bar like how much they look like buttons to me it tricks my brain into thinking it's all screen not all buttons interesting so like it like that's a keyboard is screen too yeah because i know that's the screen so there's's like this weird, and you mentioned Uncanny Valley in yours, in your article. Where it's like, I look at this, like I'm looking at your top image, right? Your banner image with the ginger molasses cookies, which I'm a big fan of that type of cookie, by the way.

Just FYI, Jason. They're really good. Yes. Yeah, they're really good. If you look at like the left-hand side, right? Of that keyboard of the image, where it's all like just dark yeah to me like just looking at that whole thing i'm like i know my brain is like there's

some screen there maybe the whole thing's green it's really weird it's like tricking my head in a strange strange way i think it's because those keys are so flat and they're so dark and they're pretty well illuminated now it's a it's a weird mix but this is a really really roundabout way of saying that the touch bar screen does look really cool and apple have done a great job of integrating it it looks more like part of the keyboard than part of the screen yeah that's the goal and so you're you're seeing your uncanny valley you know you're coming at it from the other angle here but the idea here is that the the touch bar matches the screen it's it's designed to be an input device it is from from certain angles you can see that it's you know it's glass and it's shiny but not from where you're sitting if you're

using the keyboard from there it looks much more matte and the idea you can even see it on that same image with the cookies on the left side it looks very black just like the key next to it all the way on the right side where there's a little more of a reflection picking up because there's more light over there it looks lighter but so do the keys right below it right and that's the idea here is that it's trying to match the whole goal is to make it feel like an extension of the keyboard and i think they succeeded it's not a keyboard right because it doesn't have physical buttons but it it's not it's not an ipad either like it is and the way you use it is very much as part of the keyboard it's part of the keyboard process it's not it's not a third touch area nor is it a second track

pad it really feels like it's part of the keyboard i had a i had a a realization at some point um so i i our friend james thompson uh who does p calc he kept sending me builds uh that he's working on of p calc with touch bar support and the first build he sent me i one of the buttons on the touch bar was to do a conversion like a just like fahrenheit to celsius or whatever so you just have conversions and what it did was it brought up his conversions dialogue on the screen and then i would need to move my mouse out there and pick which one and and choose okay and i had that moment of realization like oh that's not good like the last thing i want to do when i'm in kind of keyboard mode is trigger a thing that makes me take my hands back off the keyboard, move down to the trackpad, mouse up and click on something. And I think that

was my moment of realization that although I kind of throw a keyboard and trackpad into one bucket, which is like input into my Mac, they're not right. They're not the same. And there are keyboard driven people and there are our mouse and trackpad driven people. And other people are kind of in the middle. There's a spectrum there, right? Where people want to do all keyboard shortcuts and stuff. And, and sometimes for RSI reasons and other things like that, they want to minimize the mousing that they do. And other people are very into mousing. They are visual people. They like to click on the icons. You tell them that they can hit command shift Z to do the same thing. And they're like, yeah, but the icons right there, I'm just going to click on that icon.

But what I found with the touch bar is it's part of the keyboard. Like when I'm on the keyboard, I want to be on the keyboard. And the last thing I want to do is like do, do, do, do keyboard. Oh,

now I need to move down to the mouse, go up, click something to do, to do. Now I'm back on the keyboard. Wouldn't it be better if I stayed on the keyboard? If I, if I could,

because switching from one to the other, and it doesn't matter whether you're on the track pad or on the keyboard from Wouldn't it be better if I stayed on the keyboard? Because switching from one to the other, and it doesn't matter whether you're on the trackpad or on the keyboard, from one to the other, you're going to take a little bit of a hit. So I told this to James, and I don't know if he was already working on it or not, or whether I influenced him, but I told this to James because he's just using the simulator. And he sent me a build where instead of it triggering the function or the the conversion image on screen what it did is bring up a list of favorite or recent conversions you've done in pcalc on the touch bar so i touch conversion and it says celsius to fahrenheit and i tap that and it does it and i was like that's it like that's the difference is is i'm staying on the keyboard. And so that was, it's stuff like that where it's, you know, it, it, it taught me that,

that Apple has taken a lot of care. I imagine that they spent a lot of time debating and, and, and watching how people use different approaches to this. And you still see it in some of the, the ways different apps implement the touch bar. Like it's kind of all over the place. Like I think some of them I use and I go, oh yeah, this is exactly right. And others I'm like, I don't really understand what's going on here. And over time, I think we'll all kind of figure out together what the best practices are for this, but Apple's given it a lot of thought. And it definitely

struck me that, um, that this is what they figured out is it's part of the keyboard. Like that is its purpose. And no, you can't feel it. Like you can feel physical keys, but I would make the argument that nobody really touched types or very few people really touch type F keys. Like I don't touch type F keys. And so I was always looking down to press a function key anyway.

This isn't that different. It's different. If you've got like a big slider and stuff like that, that's a very different kind of thing. And we'll see how people adapt to that but when it's just sort of like extra buttons that change based on what you need and you can quickly tap them and you know that in the calculator like it's really cool to be able to in i would use both apple's calculator and james's p calc like it used to be if i wanted to take the square root of something and there's probably a keyboard shortcut but i I never used it. Um, I would like type the number on the keyboard and

then I moved to the mouse and push my cursor to the square root button and click it. And then I get the square root. Well, with a touch bar, I put in the number and then I tap square root on the touch bar and there's my answer. And I've never left the keyboard And that's better. I mean, that is better. So this kind of leads into something that you said in the video and you kind of echoed it in the... I first saw the video. So you said it in the video, you echo it in the review as well.

And I'm going to paraphrase you a little bit. But you basically said that the touch bar kind of helps you keep your fingers in the keyboard position without needing to reach for the trackpad. Now, this is very counter to all of the uh upset that people were feeling before this was announced right the idea of like this is gonna ruin my touch typing experience this is gonna be a way i'm gonna have to keep reaching up there and that kind of thing so this it seems to me at

least that like as you're someone who's a touch typist that this is actually helping you improve your keyboard experience because you're staying on the keyboard as opposed to as you say reaching for the trackpad it just this just seems counter to what i think we were expecting yeah it surprised me a little bit too but it definitely was that feeling like it's not something i really anticipated but it's what i ended up experiencing that when i've got my hands you know i'm i'm as i'm talking here i've got my my 10 fingers sort of spread out in like keyboard positions like i've got my hands out and and in keyboard position right and i'm doing

things on my computer that are like you know typey typey, typey, typey, whether it's in a text window, or it's something else, I'm doing something very keyboardy. And then in other contexts, I will be entirely like on my trackpad. And maybe that maybe I got one hand on a keyboard shortcut or something, but that's a very different kind of mode. And what I and that's the part that I discovered is that when you're in typing, typey, typey mode, there are some times when you have to come off the keyboard in order to do something to interact with the app that you're using. And that's often because there's no keyboard shortcut or you don't know it. There may be one, but you don't know it. Just for whatever reason, you haven't learned it.

Because you can learn all the keyboard shortcuts, seriously. Right. All of them for everything. What you end up doing, right. And discoverability is part of this too um that that like i used headings and notes that i've never used before and there's a keyboard shortcut it's like command shift h to do a heading but i on this i was like oh i could just tap the touch bar and go style header got it um and that was different so anyway

when i'm in that when i'm in that mode of typing i think that's one of the big changes is suddenly I've got these other options that allow me to do, rather than taking my hands out into push the cursor on the screen mode and go up to the top of the window and click the button to do the thing I want to do and then maybe go back to the keyboard. the thing I want to do and then maybe go back to the keyboard. Instead, if that interface button is on the touch bar, my hands are staying in typing position and I'm reaching up with a finger and going boop and then continuing along my way. And I know that's a little thing, but I got to appreciate the fact that that was a useful thing. And and there is as small as it might seem maybe it's a micro distraction or something but it's a mode shift when you go from my hands are in keyboard position to my hands are in driving the mouse on the screen position and i think good touch bar apps let you reduce the number of times you need to switch. Yeah, that makes sense.

That makes sense. And switching from trackpad to keyboard is also a mode switch, right? I mean, that's the challenge. I would argue maybe that, yeah, trackpad in one hand and hand on a keyboard doing copies and pastes and things like that is not quite the same as the full-on typing feel it's a little bit different um and i do that all the time but uh yeah i don't know it's like that the modes are broken when you're using sliders on the touch bar uh maybe okay because that's more of a track paddy thing. Yeah.

Yeah. I think everybody, look, Christina Warren's piece at Gizmodo about this, she said how much she loved the Final Cut Pro stuff. I really didn't like it. And some of that may be just having to get used to it, but it was very complicated at points where there was like a slider and all of this stuff. And I was thinking to myself, is this better, you know, than using my trackpad or using, well, using my trackpad to make a gesture or using my trackpad to drive something on the screen? And it's certainly different, right? And I think that's one of the things we all have to learn is having that touch surface with the screen feedback where you're doing like swiping and stuff like that.

Is that, what kind of mode is that? Is that a totally new mode? Is that an extension of the keyboard? It doesn't feel like an extension of the keyboard to me. It feels like an alternative touch interface. And that's that, you know, I don't know. I don't know where this is going to go because we could speculate about the trackpad turning into a screen too, right? And they haven't done done that but they could do that at some point um i i don't know i don't know it those interfaces didn't work for me like the more kind of button exposing interesting features uh stuff worked for me i want you to try and explain to me jason the control strip i have no idea if i'm missing something here but i am very confused and continue to be very confused about what the control strip

is what it does when it's there when it isn't and i think part of this is i think that apple are trying to be too cute in giving a part of this touch bar a name that kind of harkens back to classic Mac yeah in the attempt to try and like make some Mac people happy because what they've done is they've created a new thing which has its own brand and then they created a sub-brand within it like because the control strip is being referred to as this thing, when really it should just be the permanent buttons on the touch bar. That's what they should be referred to in my mind. But calling it control strip, it only makes it more confusing to me because quite frequently I mix control strip and touch bar up in my head

as what they actually are. My argument would be that it's a little bit like referring to the max menu bar like the menu bar is part of the display but it's it's a special part of it and that's that's how the controls that's what the control strip is it's well it's not but then it's almost always there if it was always there a hundred percent of the time, then fine. That's the control strip corner, but that's not even how it works, right? It's there most of the time. It's actually, it's there except when it's not. Nothing like some consistency.

Well, no, it's there. Basically, if you think of it as a layer, like the bottom layer of the touch bar is the control strip and the application area. The control strip is three or four buttons on the right side, and then everything else is the application area. That's the bottom layer. Now, one of the things you can do with the touch bar is open an overlay where you basically tap on something and something comes up that's a layer on top of it. tap on something and something comes up that's a layer on top of it. And there's a little X at the far left that lets you close it again. When you open an overlay, it overlays the touch bar. So the touch bar is always there, except if you're in kind of a modal

context where you've opened a thing like the emoji picker. The idea there is it wants to give, TouchBar wants to give the most space possible to essentially a new window, a new layer that you've opened, that you opened yourself, that the app can't do it, but that you did it. You opened this thing using the TouchBar. So if I tap the emoji picker, the emoji picker takes the whole touch bar space. It doesn't just leave the control strip on the side. But it's modal, and it's got the X on the left to tell you that you can clear out of it. And then you go back down to the first layer, which is app step on the left and control strip on the right. So control strip is mostly there so the only things that can hide control strip are modal views within touch bar

i think so um modal things and touch id things which are kind of modal too right because the touch id label comes up right where the touch bar or the control strip is. See, I did it and points the little arrow at the touch ID and says, touch it, touch it. But otherwise, yeah, as far as I could tell, and there's things that are inconsistent,

that quick time recording thing, for example, like it was there. And then at one point it went away and I couldn't figure out why it went away. Sometimes iTunes loses track of, or the system loses track of what iTunes is playing. There, are bugs you know there are some bugs here but for the most part i think that's how it's supposed to work that's what it's meant to be is that the control

strip stays on that base level but if you usher something else up by tapping on something that pops up a new strip on top or if you tap the left side of the control strip to bring up like the full on because i think that's the more confusing thing about the control strip is when you tap the left side of the control strip to bring up like the full on, because I think that's the more confusing thing about the control strip is when you tap the little arrow on the left side of the control strip, it brings up a whole big control strip. That's not the same. Like it doesn't just reveal more to the left. The ones that are, that are in your standard control strip go away and are replaced with this like new layer of control strip.

And it's all customizable. Although again, differently customizable, like you can't put the same buttons on the with this like new layer of control strip and it's all customizable although again differently customizable like you can't put the same buttons on the big control strip that you put on the small control strip i'm so confused jason you have different options there i think see right that's more confusing to me because i can i can get with the control strips on the bottom layer but but then you can expand the control strip but it doesn't really expand it it kind of brings up a new level of like a full full-on control strip instead control control strip is such a bad name it doesn't it absolutely does not explain what is there to me like i just

don't i just don't get it it should have a different name in my mind but the idea is so the idea is it's like the system i mean they they you know i guess menu bar is already taken or toolbar or something like that system shortcuts or like yeah system keys because that's that's what it is i mean ideally one day third parties will be able to put stuff in there that would be really nice that's the one thing that i think this is apple opens so much up to third parties that i'm not going to complain too much about it because all third party apps can use Touch ID now. And I use one password and it works great. Third party apps have access to that touch bar now.

That's great too. What they don't do is they can't drop things in control strip, which would be kind of nice because if you had the ability to key off some sort of system wide macro or whatever, that would be really cool to have there. But you can't do that yet. So, but that's what it's for it's for it's for volume and brightness and siri and and all of that sort of thing that's why it's there maybe it should have just been called control center and then everybody would understand what that was well maybe so because yeah it's like control center made sense because there was already notification center but you know right i don't mind the name control strip because i've got i've got that history with it and it is kind of like the old control strip kind of sort of um but it's probably i could see your point

that it's maybe a little too cute yeah there is a will in the chat room mentioned there is can you explain what touche is he He's given me a link. This is something that Daniel Jalka has made. Oh, yeah. So Daniel Jalka wrote an app called Touche that basically lets you do an emulated touch bar on your Mac if you've got the build of OS X that is the one that ships on these systems.

So you can download it and install it. It's a new... Gotta love Apple sometimes. It's a later build of 10.12.1. So it's 10.12.1, but it's a more recent 10.12.1 that ships on these new systems. It's a later

build, which I don't know why you wouldn't call that 10.12.2. How do you get this later build of 10.12.1? Daniel Jalkut on the site, he's got a link to it. You can download it from Apple as an installer and then just run it as an OS update. And you're updating 10, 12,

one to 10, 12, one. Anyway, if you do that, if you've got the later version or, or a future version, 10,

12, two and on anything that's got the touch bar stuff put in there that wasn't in there before, cause they didn't want to give it away. And then they put that image in that gave it away. Um, if you have that you can run touche and it will show you like what the touch bar would show and you can take screenshots and stuff like that so that's that's what it is to tie up november's episodes uh into a question

for you what does the touch bar say about Apple's current attitude to the Mac? Does it show if they care and how much? And does it indicate how, or to you at least, how you think that the Mac platform should change? I think it absolutely shows that they care because of the amount of work they put into it. Now, I think the answer is going to be everybody gets their own opinion about if this is what they should care about but it shows that they care this is if you they might not care about your thing but they care about it as a whole the platform yeah if apple didn't care about the mac why would they build entirely new tech based on ios stuff uh with a custom processor and a custom

you know this custom screen and and that really on if you're if you've got these models um changes the mac ui like it adds a whole other layer of mac ui that didn't exist before if apple really felt like look the, the Mac is good. It's fine. It's a legacy system. Let's just eke it out for as long as we can. They wouldn't have made this product. They wouldn't.

Yeah, I expect the person hours of development on this is much higher than usual because they had to get all of the separate application teams to update for this, all right, and to add this, which they don don't they very rarely have something that that does this outside of like a full os update right like there's some new feature that all of the apps have to support yeah here are the apps that apple had to update to support touch bar so in addition to building the touch bar and all the hardware that went into that and touch id and everything they had to do with that and getting the secure enclave to talk to the Mac system and have that be secure. They had to update. Well, they did update. They probably

wanted to update others too, and they didn't, but they updated. Activity Monitor, Calculator, Calendar, Contacts, Finder, Final Cut Pro, GarageBand, iMovie, iTunes, Keynote, Mail, Maps, Messages, Numbers, Pages, Photos, Preview, QuickTime Player, Safari, System Preferences, keynote mail maps messages numbers pages photos preview quicktime player safari system preferences and terminal plus a bunch of other apps like text edit stickies notes and script editor that use the standard uh text uh interface pickup a touch bar but i think maybe they did that for free or for cheap but they updated a lot of apps so this was a huge effort on the software on the mac software side i love the activity monitors in there oh yeah the person dealing with activity monitor you know they're just having their moment in the sun you know yeah and terminal and activity monitor those

are key utilities that uh they have they they did it they i use activity Monitor all the time. Really? I love it. What for? See if there, why is my system behaving strangely? What app is behaving weirdly? Can I force quit it? Can I get it to go away? What's the, you know, am I right that my computer is slow? Is something taking a lot of CPU cycles? I use it a little less now that I have i stat menus but i still use it yeah if i have any of those problems i will open activity monitor but i very rarely have any problems that need me

to open activity monitor i yeah i i'm i'm in there i was just using it last night because i ran the i ran uh uh geekbench on a bunch of these systems and activity monitor is great because you can see if like the photo uh photo library sync or the photo uh detection the machine learning is running because that will that will kill when you you can't just start up a system brand new and run a benchmark on it because it's going to index like all your files with spotlight and it's going to do all these photo things and it's so i i just used that last night to make sure that the like everything had calmed down and i didn't and i didn't have like processes running in the background that i didn't want to run so that i could get kind of a fair uh fair test but anyway the larger point here is yeah this is a this is a huge

investment in apple on something new on the mac and i think if they didn't care why would they do that i i do wonder if this is one of the reasons why the mac has seemed so low-key for so long is that there's only so much investment apple wants to do in the mac and they kind of poured it all into this while everything else kind of stayed put at least for now and again maybe maybe there since this was supposedly rumored to be coming out this summer, perhaps they've already moved on and are working on something else now that we'll see next spring. But I, that may be part of it, that this was so ambitious that it took more out of the Mac, you know, prioritization queue than, than perhaps, you know, then perhaps they intended or, you know, it, it, it slowed something else down, but it totally shows they care. Now you could argue, it's like, know it it slowed something else down but it

totally shows they care now you could argue it's like well it's just the macbook pro it's not on any other systems it's not even on all the macbook pros that's true two-thirds of the max apple cells are laptops though so you could see i was having this conversation on twitter earlier today you could see like this will motive app developers will be motivated mac app developers will be motivated to support the touch bar because if apple sticks with this touch bar thing it will eventually be on all their laptops and maybe on external keyboards at some point too but even if it's just on laptops that's two-thirds of the max and that means that if it's not available on a majority of max at some point it will be probably pretty close that's a few years out but i'd also throw in there that if you're a mac developer you're looking you know you're hungry i would think for um original uh foundational features

of mac os because there aren't you know they don't do that many of them right it tends not to be mac is much more sleepy now and this is a big big one. So I think developers are going to be excited, and I think it's going to be something that is fairly widely used eventually just because the laptop is the definitive Mac, if there is one, is a laptop because for a long time they've sold way more laptops than they have desktops. Last question for you. they've sold way more laptops than they have desktops last question for you um if somebody bought the macbook escape the macbook with the function row the hard function row the actual keys there should they regret this decision that's a tough question because you know like it's you know that's a personal regret i would say you know a big part of it is that it's um is price right this is a

this is a much more expensive these the 13 and the 15 they're much more expensive than maybe a better question is is the extra price worth these two features to touch touch strip the control center oh my word what is it called touch bar touch bar i'm being serious i wasn't i wasn't like i just remember the name see this is where the names fit. Touch bar and touch ID. Control ID, you mean, right? Yes. ID strip.

Finger control. Are they worth the extra money? Like the extra, what is it? Like maybe a thousand dollars or something? Well, it's, so it's more than, I mean, this is, this is how they get you, right? It's more than, I mean, this is how they get you, right? It's more than just the Touch Bar. So it's also like the 13 Escape has a 2 gigahertz i5. The 13 Touch Bar base model has a 2.9 gigahertz i5.

So it's not just the touch bar and touch id it's also faster and that's 300 different yes i said a thousand i just threw that out there it's 300 yeah yeah if you i mean if you go up to the 15 from the 13 it's it's a big difference but it's a 300 difference so you know i think what i'd say is apple rarely charges less than $200 for a small, even a small processor bump when you do a build to order. And the bump between the Escape version and the Touch Bar version of $300, you get a much faster processor and the touch bar. You get two more ports. So I would say the reason you get the non-touch bar MacBook Pro

is either that you really love physical function keys or you absolutely can't justify an extra $300. The price is just, you have a very limited budget, and getting to $1499 was hard enough, and you don't want to go further up. So if you have the extra cash, if you have the ability to spend that extra money, you should. I got to say, I mean, everybody can decide for themselves,

but for $300 more more you get the faster processor and the touch bar and touch id if you i don't think i mean like i said apple puts specs build to order specs for a faster processor and it's it's 200 or 250 dollars when they when they do it usually it's a big change and this is a from a 2 gigahertz to a 2.9 gigahertz i5. It's a big, it's a big step up. So in the end, these are expensive computers. If you want more than 256 SSD, you're going to pay through the nose for that. If you want more than eight gigs of RAM, you're going to pay through the nose. So it's neither of these systems is going to be $1499 or $1799, right?

If you want to spec them up. And so that's part of your judgment too. But I think the $300 difference for the two extra ports, the Touch Bar and Touch ID and the faster processor, that's a pretty reasonable dollar difference for what you get. I don't think that the base model Touch Bar 13 is unreasonably priced over the Escape. Okay. I think that's a reasonable price.

Now, that may not be enough. Like I said, there are plenty of reasons why it might not be enough. But I look at the difference between those two systems and think, wow, only $300 for all of that extra stuff? That's not bad. Like that could be, if you would ask me to pick a number out for just the touch bar and touch id with the specs all being the same i might say three hundred dollars that apple would do but you also get the processor boost there you go this episode is brought to you

by freshbooks so you're racing against the clock to wrap up free projects you're getting ready to prep for a client meeting later in the afternoon, you're dreaming of your touch bar, or whilst trying to tackle a mountain of paperwork. This is life as a freelancer, ladies and gentlemen. This life can be rewarding, but it can also be very challenging as well. And our friends at FreshBooks believe the rewards are worth it, and they build tools to make those challenges easier for all of us. With the growth of the internet, the working world has changed. There's never been more opportunities for the self-employed. I have this whole rant about the millennial generation and, you know, I was levying this to Casey a couple of days ago after the discussion on ATP where they were talking about

millennials and I was very frustrated about that because Because I believe that many of the things that people think about millennials, that they don't want regular jobs, I believe a lot of that comes from the fact that we are the internet generation, and there are now more opportunities than ever could have existed before. I consider myself a millennial, and I work on the internet for a living. And the reason I do that is because I wanted to live that life. I wanted to live the life of having the job that I wanted. Anywho, that's a real tangent to say that FreshBooks has been working tirelessly on an all new version of their cloud accounting software to help the people that are self-employed and

especially those who are internet minded. The new FreshBooks has been redesigned from the ground up and is custom-built to work exactly the way that you do. You'll be more productive, more organized, whilst also being paid quickly, faster than anybody else. We all know, if you've listened to any FreshBooks episode before, FreshBooks customers get paid up to four days faster than anybody else because their system is so simple. Once their invoices go out with the online payment functionality built in,

it's super simple. Your clients are just going to pay you. The new FreshBooks is so easy to use. It's packed full of powerful features. You can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds now in a new WYSIWYG interface, so you'll see the invoice exactly how your client will as you're building it.

I mentioned those online payments. You can set them up in just a few clicks and add them to your invoice so your clients can pay you super, super simply. You can see when your client has seen your invoice and they have an all new notification system that you can think of as like a personal assistant. Every time that you log in,

you'll get an update on what's changed with your business, and you'll be told the things that need your attention straight away. FreshBooks is focused on the age-old question of, how is my business doing? And they have redesigned their system around this idea, focusing on simplicity and clarity. FreshBooks is offering a 30-day trial. It's unrestricted use, so you can go and try it out for yourself. Just go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade, enter the code upgrade in the how you heard about us section. So type in upgrade where it says

how did you hear about us? So they know that you came to them from this show. Thank you so much to FreshBooks for their support of Upgrade and RelayFM. I was not expecting to take that little rant in the middle of the spot there, but I did. And if you have skipped the ad, you should now go back and listen to it because I had some stuff to say. And plus, you should always listen to the ads anyway.

Let's talk about mobile recording gear again. I feel like it's all we talk about these days. Because for anybody keeping score, I just bought a house. I actually own it's all we talk about these days. Because for anybody keeping score, I just bought a house. I actually own it now. If you're keeping score with where I am across this process, across the various shows, we own the home, we have the keys, it's ours. And we have a lot of contractors visiting.

I'm actually going there tonight because I have a plumber coming at 8 a.m tomorrow morning oh is that gonna be your first night sleeping there uh if we sleep there we may actually stay in a hotel which is across the street the place is not like completely ready yet like the the the like mainly with plumbing being one of the things that we need taking care of so that's the plumber yeah once the plumber's been and tomorrow and and hopefully got everything done as we need it then yes we can start staying there um so because of this uh because we have multiple contractors coming multiple times for many different things

i am going to have to record some shows from this empty apartment right so i need gear that can help me with that and i have amassed a list of items so i just want to run through this list of items with you jason okay before you do that let me uh let me ask you some other things so you live in east london i live and you're just east of london so technically i am just outside of what is considered the london i live and you're just east of london so technically i am just outside of what is considered the london border and the is it would it be essex is that what we would call technically classed as essex yes okay uh but you're moving to south london yep but not south of london no it's if this is considered south london you'll be properly in South London. How long? So you're shuttling back and forth a lot. How long is that?

Currently, it depends on my mode of transport, like from place to place. It would take me about 90 minutes to get there via public transport and about 35 to 40 if I was to take an Uber or something. I'm kind of splitting that depending on what I'm going there for and when. So because we will be leaving here very late this evening we'll take an uber if i'm just traveling in the daytime it's like a train if i've got a bunch of boxes with me then maybe i'll take you with that kind of thing so it's all right yeah because i'm just trying to imagine moving that distance and not having a car is going to be a challenge yep yep but Yep. But hopefully it won't be very long.

A couple of weeks, maybe. Okay. Okay, so you're going to take in an Uber or in your backpack or something your packing list of Mike records podcasts in an empty house. Yeah, some of this stuff is going to stay there after I take it there today.

But some stuff I'll be bringing backwards and forwards. So this list currently consists of the MacBook Adorable, which I have kept. I have now adorned it with stickers. It is part of the course. Oh, that's it. It's in the... It's forever yours. Yep.

It's in the Mike collection. It's in the collection. I've been actually editing a show on it today um like a heavy edit of a show and it's been absolutely fine now i know the parts where it will cause struggles is doing things like bouncing the show so like exporting it out but to be honest yeah i don't care about that because i know it's going to do that i know it's going to take longer i'll just let it do its thing and i'll do something else but my feet my all i care about is can i perform the actual tasks to the my usual abilities and and so far seems like yes i can you know i have

it seems it seems funny uh and and it's very easy to get jaded about having a big 5K iMac or something like that. But I have edited hundreds of podcasts on an 11-inch MacBook Air. I've got the mid-2013 MacBook Air right now. I have edited so many podcasts on this thing. And it's an 11-inch MacBook Air, right? And it's fine. And that MacBook is quite similar, I think, in all respects,

other than the beautiful screen to this particular MacBook Air that I've got. So it's a totally suitable system for editing audio. It's quite possibly the greatest form factor of any Mac that I've ever used. The lightness and thinness of that thing is just incredible. It's incredible.

It's incredible. I like, am in love with the form factor. It's perfect, I think. Like the 11-inch MacBook was great. I mean, I had one of those. I used one of those for many years and it was great for that reason. This thing blows that away

from a form factor perspective. It's the's the spiritual successor it's it fills that same slot but it is it's a beautiful system um yeah it is however i don't love the keyboard but you know trackpad that's why i have the problems with the trackpad the the magic trackpad or whatever it's called on any of the laptops again i think it has a different name on the laptops i hate i hate it i hate it so much i i love my standalone one it's perfect you would never even know on any of the laptops i cannot stand it it feels terrible it just feels terrible especially on the the really thin one right like the macbook i just it just feels terrible to me it just doesn't feel like it's clicking at all i don't like it do you uh do you get missed clicks yeah i do yeah i've

always had that problem uh steven has the um or had the uh the first one that first macbook pro that had the the trackpad in it and it would miss my clicks constantly i've had that on the touch bar macbook pro too that i i'd never experienced it before but it misses like and it seems random and i thought it was originally like my shirt was pressing into it or something like that but no it just sometimes every 10th or 15th click just one of the clicks doesn't click and you got to take your finger off and put it back down and then it clicks again and i've never experienced that on my mac on my magic trackpad on my desk nope i never have that problem either but i have it constantly i've just loads of problems i just don't like it anywho let's go

back to the list yeah macbook adorable the macbook charger i have an anchor usbc hub so it has power pass through from usbcC to USB-C and four USB ports. Good, because you need to have power and have a microphone to record a podcast. I'm going to be taking the Apple USB-C to A dongle, just in case something doesn't work with the one that I have. Okay. A microphone. I'm going to be taking a Shure.

What is the one that I have? It's the one you have. It's the one you take with you. The Beta. Oh, the Beta 58A? Yeah. So it's the nice one, not the really expensive one. Right.

So take one of those. It's the Jason one, not the Marco one. The Jason one. An XLR cable. A microphone stand. The apartment is completely empty. So I have bought a foam microphone shield in the hopes that it will somehow maybe possibly help with some of the inevitable echo yeah um so

it's just like this little foam surround it might help it might not but it's all i can do um i'm taking my ee mobile wi-fi lte thing because we don't have internet in the place yet which is fine because you essentially don't have internet now so that's however i have a new problem in that uh cell connection is not very good in the new place oh no i just can't escape it so this won't be a problem when we get broadband when we get because we're getting we're getting fiber but right now we don't have it so we'll see what happens over the next couple of days. Who knows? Yikes.

I'm taking a Tascam USB audio interface to plug my microphone into and then to plug that into the Mac Pro. And also an iPad Pro so I can actually get some real work done while I'm there. Boom. Zing. Yeah. So I could do this with less stuff. That's nice. Backpack's worth. You could.

I could remove the Mac completely from this. You could. But I want to try and maintain as much audio quality as possible because it's not going to sound as good as normal. I know that because I don't think, for me, that microphone sounds as good, even though it sounds fine. But for me, it doesn't sound as good. And there's going to be echo, which I will be able to get rid of some of,

but not all because that's just the nature of echo. But I want to try and minimize the effect on the listener as much as possible. They don't need to go through this with me, right? So I want to try and minimize that as much as possible whilst I'm doing this over the next next couple of weeks i think it's going to be um where i'm actually going to be shuttling back and forth um so we'll say i have no idea if and how it's even going to work right like i have no idea right this this wi-fi thing might just crap out on me completely and then i can't do it and then i'll have to go to plan b

which i don't have um i have no idea how it's going to sound i don't even know where i'm going to sit jason i don't really have any furniture in that place yeah there's probably a counter in the kitchen or something you could use i could do that however that will cause the most echo possible yeah because the kid so i will probably be recording in what will be mega office because it's the smallest room. Right. We're going to be laying down on the floor. Well, I have a table and chairs. Okay, good.

But I don't think I can get the table out of the door in the living room to get it into the office because it's too big. And I have an inflatable mattress. We need MacGyver to come and solve your problems with. Well, let's see. What are our assets? We've got a table. We've got some chairs. We've got an inflatable mattress.

Oh, well, I can build a podcast studio for you. What I probably end up happening is I will be bringing the chair from the table and chairs into the office. Uh-huh. You'll put your microphone shield on that. Yep. Oh, I have a microphone stand as well.

So I will sit on the chair. Oh, microphone stand, okay. I bought a microphone stand for this as well. So I'll put... And then I have it all in front of me. There is also the possibility of sitting in a closet, but I don't know if I want to do that. Actually, no, I can't do that

because the only closet I could fit in doesn't have a light in it, and I'm not going to sit in the dark. So this is my life, ladies and gentlemen, for the next couple of weeks, and I just want to clue you all in on it so you know what to expect. That's exciting. I actually don't think there will be an upgrade. I have no plans to record an upgrade from there.

But as it stands currently, I will be recording Connected, The Pen Addict, Cortex, and maybe something I haven't mentioned to you yet. A standalone Mike at the Movies episode, which is not including you. I may also be recording from there this week. So many movies for Mike. Yep. All the great movies. Maybe there'll be some next week, and then Upgrade will be included,

but hopefully I will only need to be there this week. We should hopefully have the majority of this work done this week, which would be amazing. But then I'll have Mega Office, and then we'll be able to talk about all of the great things that i'm putting in there because i have i have grand plans jason grand plans that's good it's it's all part of a process but the transitional stuff is it's it's hard i remember that when when we moved to the distance doesn't help either i mean that that's the thing that

that's why i asked about that when we moved to this county from the county we previously lived in, that was a challenge because that was a long way to go. So we couldn't just pop over. Moving in a town, moving a couple miles away, you can just keep popping back and forth. And you have a big move, but you can also have the little stuff here and there. And when it was when it was distant it was very difficult because we could only do that a few times and yep yeah so yeah like i'm popping back and forth but my pops are very large it's a big pop it's a big pop because i don't really want to stay there on my own i just don't

really want there are no comforts in this place at all right now. So I'm planning on travelling backwards and forwards every day with the exception of tomorrow because we're going to be staying locally because I really don't want to wake up at half past five in the morning

to start this process. So there you go. This is it. So we should probably wrap up today with some Ask Upgrade. This week's Ask Upgrade is brought to you by Casper, the company focused on sleep that put their brightest minds

on creating the perfect mattress. They will sell that to you directly and this will help eliminate those commission-driven inflated prices that you may see from showrooms. Casper keeps all of the savings by eliminating the showroom process and gives that to you. So they keep their costs down. And this mattress, it's award-winning. It isn't just some fly-by-night mattress. This was developed in-house by Casper's team. It has a

sleek design. It's delivered in an impossibly small box. It combines springy latex foam and supportive memory foam that creates the mattress that creates, gives you just the right sink and just the right bounce as you know. And it has that breathable design to help you regulate your temperature throughout the night. It is obsessively engineered at a shockingly fair price. For example, you can get a Casper mattress from $500 for a twin size, 600 for a twin XL, 750 for a full size, 850 for queen and 950 for a king. To put this in comparison, mattresses that you're used to buying in showrooms could cost you well over $1,500, which is more expensive than any of Casper's offering. And all of their mattresses are made in America. So the Casper mattress team, they don't just make mattresses.

Casper also now makes an adaptive pillow and soft, breathable sheets as well. Buying a Casper mattress is completely risk-free. They offer free delivery and free returns to the US and Canada with a 100-night home trial. If you don't love it, they'll pick it up and refund you everything. Casper understands the importance of truly sleeping on a mattress before you commit, especially considering you're going to spend a third of your life on it. You can get $50 towards any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com slash upgrade and using the code upgrade.

Terms and conditions apply. Thank you so much to Casper for their support of this show and RelayFM. Casper mattresses. Thank you. Oh, look at that. Ask upgrade. is thank you oh look at that cost upgrade can i use a macbook pro charger of a usbc to lightning cable to fast charge my ipad pro or would that be too much power asks lucas i think it's fine because i think your mac your ipad pro will just take the power that it requires. Yeah, somebody was explaining this to me recently,

and I may be misremembering it, but it's good to go down, bad to go up, is my understanding. So if you have a brick for a more powerful machine, you can use it on a less powerful machine, but you shouldn't go the other way. That's my understanding. Right, because it's going to take... I mean, that's the example of it's going to understanding. Right, right, because it's going to take, I mean, that's the example of it's going to take forever

to charge anything or you're going to lose, even though you're plugged in, you're going to lose battery because it's not getting enough. Because it's trying to push more power than it can. I don't know how electricity works, but just to remind everybody too, it's only the large iPad Pro that that's got the fast usb3 charging um so that's the one where it will benefit from one of the those macbook usbc cables

or uh charging bricks if you use the usbc to lightning cable yep one of the nice things about all these systems by the way um that doesn't get talked about enough i think is that if you have a usbc computer and you get that lightning to usbc cable you only have to take one power brick with you and you can use it to charge either your computer or your ipad which is or your iphone frankly which is pretty cool because it used to be with magsafe that you know the mac charger only ever charged the mac and it couldn't be put to other uses yep in that vein rajiv asked do you think apple will keep the lightning port on ios devices but add usb type c to the ac adapter end i think next iphone will come with a usbc uh brick

yeah i think you're probably right they make the cable now they make the bricks uh i think i think the next iphone will come with that for sure i think maybe the ipad even will but we'll see yeah you know like the ipad pro if you can ship that with the usbc so it's going to have it's going to be a better charger it's got a large ipad pro yeah i think that's a good i think i i think that we may see that now roll out for for of the future iOS products from this period on. And the argument is always like, but wait a second, there's so many computers out there that don't have USB-C. Apple doesn't think that most people need to connect their iOS device to a computer at all, right? This is one of those Apple opinionated things where Apple has decided just because some people do it doesn't mean that we need to put make all our decisions based on those people and and they've they've made a lot of effort to

make it so you don't need to connect by a wire your your iOS device to a PC or a Mac that's like there's so many things that they've tried to make that not something you need to do so as long as they've got a cable for you to charge and if you absolutely need it then they you know then get an adapter but i do think that that that's what they're going to do i actually don't think there's any reason anymore that you need to do it i think because because now uh it's for esoteric reasons it's for esoteric reasons like side loading files or whatever but they're all techie reasons that most people who are getting a brand new iphone don't need to do and apple would say that they're edge cases and

everybody who's an edge case oh no but really this is what apple's been pushing everybody toward with these products even with the file side loading there's other ways to do that you should drop oh sure slow it do you mean that i don't think that there's any reason anymore because if memory serves that now iCloud backups are encrypted so other than the the you know the old my phone doesn't work i need to plug it in and restore it but that's it yeah take it to the apple store oh i mean that's again there are reasons there are arguments against it but uh i i think that apple i think the difference between apple and the perception of apple oftentimes is we all go but but look over there there are these people who

need this thing and that's like four percent of your user base and apple looks at it and goes yeah it's just four percent of our user base we're not gonna we're not gonna cater to them and make our product less good and those people will get adapters and they'll deal with it. And they won't say it that way, but that's kind of the approach they take. Because at some point, if you're Microsoft with Windows back in the day, you let the edge cases dictate your product because they were all, you know, oh, we got to be compatible with everything. And Apple's never been like that.

Apple's always like, yeah, you know, most people don't need it now. And if you need it, there's an adapter. And so we're going to pull the lever. And I think 2017 is the year where USB-A type connectors are ushered out of the Apple product line. I agree. All of them. Johnny just got a new 5K iMac and wants to know if he can connect

the 5K LG monitor to it. Johnny, you cannot. Nope. The system requirements require Mac OS Sierra 10.12.1 or later and a Thunderbolt 3 enabled Mac, of which there is one?

Of the MacBook Pro. Yeah. So, no. Maybe a person in the future will be able to, but Johnny, unless you buy another iMac, probably in spring, as we believe it will come out then, then yes, probably you will be able to, but

no, you will not. And not even with a dongle. Even if you take a long excursion to Dongletown, you will not be able to pick up anything that will help you with this. I'm afraid. That's where you're moving, isn't it, Mike? You're moving to Dongletown.

Well, looking at my packing list, yes, I am. Gabriel would like to know, would it help if Apple put a MagSafe-like connector on the other end of the USB-C cable, the adapter side? We were talking about the fact that we were unhappy that MagSafe was going away. I mean, yes, if they could do it, it would be great.

But they haven't, and I assume there's a reason. Yeah, and it's a USB-C standard cable, so you would need to create a breakaway in there somewhere, and that's going to increase the cost, and it's going to increase the bulk and the complexity of manufacturing it. And I feel like, not to go back to it, but I feel like this is one of those levels where again apple just said usbc is more um more of a benefit than magsafe so we're just

going to do usbc and the nice thing about usbc is it's a standard so if somebody wants to make a breakaway cable they can do it apple can't stop them It's not like the days of MagSafe where if you weren't an officially licensed MagSafe accessory manufacturer, you couldn't tie into charging a Mac on a plane from a battery. You couldn't do it because you had to go all the way back to the plug. is a standard so if somebody wants to invent clever ways to bring kind of breakaway tech to usbc charging they can do it apple doesn't have to do it anymore and i don't think apple will but maybe somebody else will try and finally today brando asked is there any more world on xcode for the ipad uh in latest in light of the latest mac news, the iPad seemed like a more and more appealing development option. At least for me, any conversations I'd seen or word about this was all leading up to Playgrounds. Swift Playgrounds. Since then, nothing.

Yeah, well, Swift Playgrounds is step one. Yeah, I think it will happen and I think Swift Playgrounds is step one. Yeah, I think it will happen, and I think Swift Playgrounds is the indication that it will happen, but I don't think we're going to see it at WWDC. You know, it's possible, but, yeah, I tend to agree with you, that I feel like, are they going to have x code even if it's uh you know a very specific kind of x code for for ios in 2017 because presumably they would they would unveil it at wwdc right um i don't know i wouldn't put money on it i i i do think it's inevitable but

see more from swift playgrounds at wwdc 2017 like it will be able to do more uh but i don't think they're gonna unveil xcode for for the ipad i think we need to be further down the swift road before that happens um because it i just assume it will be swift only so yeah there you go all right that wraps up this week's episode of upgrade if you'd like to find our show notes you can head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 115 if you want to find jason online he is at j snow j s n e double l on the twitter and he is at six colors..com. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to our lovely sponsors for this week's episode, the fine folk over at Casper,

FreshBooks, and Encapsular. As always, thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Beep! Oh no, Jason just booted. Doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle. No, you got it wrong.

It's not you. Oh, okay.