Upgrade - 123: Sheer Gadget Magnetism

Episode Date: January 9, 2017

Jason and Myke return from their well-deserved holiday to discuss the 10th anniversary of the iPhone and Jason’s reactions to the iPhone back in the day. Then we tell the tale of the day San Diego got Ahoy Telephoned.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 123 today's show is brought to you by our friends at encapsular fresh books and mac weldon my name is mike hurley i'm joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Aloha, Jason Snell. Aloha, Mike Hurley. It's good to be back. Listeners heard us a week ago, but we actually haven't talked for a couple weeks because we pre-recorded the Upgradies. Like all good award shows. Mm-hmm. Pre-taped. Sure. Yes, pre-taped.

In case of any run-ins, you know, as we said. I do want to note that this is episode 123. Yes, easiest one, two, three. Exactly. Which means that Upgrade has now caught up with Connected. Oh, interesting. Because we just published episode 123 last week. So if trends continue, Upgrade will pass Connected next year. Well well it's just because we're consistent mike that's that that's the important thing is where we just put you posted

every week have we missed a week we've never missed a week i don't think we have we may have missed one but i don't think we have i've had a couple of guest hosts to fill in but i don't think we've missed a week nope so good for us so the upgrade he's does yes gives us the ability to just to pass through that christmas week unscathed that's right and that's good that's good because i was i was gone i will get to it we have some follow-up about where we were because neither of us was was near our home in the last week talking about the Upgradies, Johnny wrote to him with a pretty good suggestion.

Shouldn't the worst gadget or screw-up category get a downgradey at the Upgradey Awards? Do you know what? I really agree with this and hope I can remember it. Yeah, let's try to remember that for next year. So Johnny, set a reminder for December and let us know. You're talking to Johnny like he's a voice assistant. Hey, Johnny, set a reminder to tell Mike to make it a downgrade in December. Perfect.

Something like that. Thank you, Johnny. Johnny Five is alive. Yeah. It's a great suggestion. It is. It did make me think like is there you know how like you get like those those award shows that are just for making fun of things is there like an april falls

edition of the upgradies which is the downgradies? Oh my God, I hope not. Who do we have to ask about that one? That sounds terrible. Okay, well, I ask the person who makes the decision, which is you. Yeah, well, we'll see. Ask me. I like April Fool's things. So you never know.

There could be a downgradies coming your way in April. Otherwise, it will just remain as a section of the upgrade. Do we need more awards and drafts on this show? I don't know. I don't know. Somebody else. So do you want to mention that you did a draft on one of your other podcasts that I've infested? I've ruined you and Stephen Hackett now forever.

Yeah, we did an Apple predictions draft on Connected week um in which i decided to go big i'll go home and picked some truly outrageous uh predictions that sounds familiar yeah sounds sounds like your your strategy for drafting things well i don't know i mean you can look at the previous event drafts and i think you've tended to be the most outrageous in hindsight. Well, until I decided I wanted to win. But I think for entertainment purposes, making outrageous predictions is great. And if you get one right, you're going to be able to point to it and say, see, look at that. Who would have guessed? Well, this is what I said on the show. This is the basis of Michael's right. Is picking things that nobody else would believe in and then you're one of them and then you're you know you're

you're really smart like big phones everyone thought i was was crazy some people still do many people have come around to it nose tapping yeah all these people nose tapping that's a real thing yeah i do it i do it every now and then i think to myself it's damn it mike on episode 121 of the show so we're going uh mild catalog now um we were talking about and i think maybe an episode prior to that as well we've been talking a bunch about where apple products have been made right and mihir wrote in to say that his im, which was a 2013 pre-retina, was assembled in the USA. So my assumption is parts made in China or sourced from China assembled in the USA. And he said, what about ours? So we have done some searching.

Yes. I don't know where it's printed on my imac uh i took a look and couldn't find it but luckily i have my imac box just sitting here in my office which i kept for when we moved and i was able to find out that my imac was actually assembled in ireland which i did not expect yeah that that's weird i mean i guess i guess mac i i didn't understand this realize this but yeah i guess mac mac products get assembled in all sorts of different places if they're assembling in ireland which must have something to do with like eu import regulations or something that if it's if if the parts are assembled inside the eu that can be advantageous so a lot of

products in the eu are assembled in Ireland. I didn't know that. Or if I did know it, I totally forgot it. I did get a bill to order, right? Where I didn't just buy one of the stock ones. Like I wanted a bigger SSD and more RAM and that sort of stuff. I have no idea if that plays into the decision.

I don't know if they have maybe regular ones in China and then if you want to build to order, they have the parts in Ireland and they put them together. I don't know, but that might play into the decision. Who knows? But this is something I had no idea that any Macs were assembled in Europe. Yeah, by the way, all the FCC information,

all of your regulatory, that little printed fine print stuff that has to be on the computer somewhere, I believe on the iMac, it's under the foot. I'm pleased I had the box because I was not going to lift up my iMac before the show today. Yeah, and my iMac doesn't have a foot, but it's printed also on VESA mount iMacs. It's printed on the inside of the block. to mount iMacs. It's printed on the inside of the block. So I can actually see it if I look straight down at my iMac. It's inside the mounting bracket block. And mine was assembled in China. As we've learned with AirPods, Apple love to hide that stuff. They do. They don't want to. They don't want you. You don't want to see it and they don't want you to see it. So they'll do like, what's the

minimum contrast we can do? What's the smallest type we're allowed and where can we put it that nobody will notice that it's there didn't they get away with something recently with the iphone and that they're able to remove a lot of that in the us but it's just not there anymore it's not the case um outside like in europe the stuff's still printed on the back of the phone um but i believe that it's uh they're able to hide a bunch of it in the u.s now because i know that people were saying but i'm happy that made them um kyle is asking where is it in the airpods it's like printed in all of the places that you would not be able to see easily like if you open up your airpods case you're able to kind of like peer inside of where

the headphones rest and there's some tiny print on the inside on the yeah it's on the inside of where the headphones rest and there's some tiny print on the inside on the yeah it's on the inside of the cap right yeah it's on the inside of the cap and then there's um there's some printing on the underneath of the earbud so i'll put a link in the show notes where uh a good friend of the show casey list was taking pictures and there's a a good photo from uh raphael, back to him, showing some additional print. Apple really wanted to hide that from the AirPods because they had some funny places

they could put it, which you can't do on the iPhone. If you have to display this stuff on the iPhone, there's nowhere to hide it. But with the AirPods, you can hide it. And they try. Or they try. They do their very best. elias has uh got in contact with us you may remember elias is the person um who originally recommended that jason try out the flash air

storage card sd card for you to uh improve your ipad podcasting workflow. Elias has written a whole blog post about his iOS podcasting setup, which is, it's tricky and a little convoluted, but he makes it work for him. And there are some tricks and tips in there for people that are trying to do the same. Yeah, it's super tricky. Basically, it's super tricky. Basically, it's super tricky.

But you can do it if you... He has a lot of different setups and he made these flow charts, which are kind of amazing. And very useful. Yeah. And he put one of mine in there. He was nice enough to send me an email about

that he put the one mine in there. He was nice enough to send me an email about that. He put the one where I'm recording using the XLR port on that Audio-Technica mic and then using the USB to go into the iPhone or the iPad. And so he put that in there. But his methods are fascinating because he has some pretty wacky adapters. They're like splitters. And some of them are using the headphone data, which is a different splitter that's required for that than the microphone information. So there's like a microphone plug splitter and a headphones plug splitter.

And this is why he made all those charts, but it, you know, it, it works for him. And, and, you know, this is, this is the workaround for, uh, the fact that iOS just doesn't let you record audio device, audio or app audio on device. And so instead what you end up doing is intercepting your microphone audio as it goes in, intercepting the audio from Skype as it comes back out, routing it to you, but also routing it to a recorder. It's, you know, again, this is what happens. Mac users know this because back in the day, and some people still do this, but back in the day, that was a common way that you did audio stuff on the Mac is you'd have multiple Macs, or you would have a Mac with plugs

that would run into like a mixer. And there were, you know, you can do almost all that stuff on in software now with tools like audio hijack and loopback. But, you you know the analog hole has always been there uh and and uh it's just it's an amazing piece of work by elias to to do this i love that he's continuing to hammer on this i also know now that he will be the canary in the coal mine um when there's another option for doing any of this i suspect he will be on top of it. So that's good to know. You are a reporter in the field, Elias, letting us know about any weird dongles and cards that you might uncover.

So you mentioned that we've been on some trips. You've been in Hawaii. Yes. Aloha. Where were you? What island were you on? We were in Kauai, and we had a great time. My family went a couple days before New Year's, so we got to actually spend New Year's Eve in Hawaii, and there were fireworks at Poipu Beach that we went to. It was pretty great. that we went to. It was pretty great. And then my wife's parents and her sister and her sister's husband came on the first on New Year's Day. And then we rented a house in Princeville, which is

in the north part of the island. And so that group, large group, we spent the rest of the week together. It was pretty great. Pretty great. That sounds lovely. Hawaii is so high on my list of places to go. And it's very far for you. It is very far, very far. At this point, I'm saving it for a hopeful honeymoon destination. Yeah, that's not a bad one.

That we would split with a trip somewhere else in the U.S., right? So it's not too much in one go. Yeah, because it's about five hours from the West Coast to Hawaii. It's a long way. Yeah, for many people that I know in the UK that choose Hawaii as a honeymoon destination, I know a few people that have done that, they'll go to somewhere like Vegas or San Francisco or LA first,

spend a few days there and then go on to Hawaii. And that's what I hope that we'll do. Makes sense. Just because I want to go there so bad and to Hawaii. And that's what I hope that we'll do. Makes sense. Just because I want to go there so bad and it's so beautiful that I want to couple it with an occasion. And I think that that might be a good reason. Or, you know, me and Idina both turned 30 in the same year, so we could do that. We had a great moment flying. So we flew through Honolulu on the way back and as we're leaving honolulu there was

a moment where um so we were sort of moving so kawaii is kind of to the north the northwest and then we went to oahu because that's where honolulu is and then as we're leaving oahu to fly back to san francisco um we had a great moment where we're flying between, it's the channel between Oahu and the islands to the southeast. And I could see from my airplane window, I could see the islands of Molokai and Lanai right in front of me with Maui and the West Maui mountains behind that. And then I could see in the distance, I could see the two big volcanic peaks on the big island. So I managed to see all the major islands on my trip back, which was kind of cool.

So yeah, it was a lot of fun. And I always like going there. I've been there several times in my life. And every time I go there, I think, why do I not come here every year? And the answer is, because you got to fly five hours to get there, and it's expensive when you get there, but it's beautiful.

I love it. I took a surprise trip for some people over to the U.S. for New Year's. I previously said that we were going to be traveling to Romania, but we weren't, and the reason I had been saying this is that we knew. I knew. I just want to be clear i knew all along you were one of the small handful of people that knew uh because we were we went out to new york we were there for a couple of days staying with marco and tiffany arment who we then drove with to virginia to the underscores home uh david and lauren and the reason this was all a secret is that we were surprising

Casey-less and Aaron-less, me and Adina, by showing up. And as I mentioned on Analog this week, John Syracuse was collateral damage in the surprise. He also didn't know that we were going to be there, but really we were going there to surprise Casey. And the Syracuses got

a surprise as well, but really this was just because everybody knew how much it would break Casey's brain if we just appeared. And it did, which was awesome. Beautiful. And I have a video footage of this all unfolding, of course, on my blog on YouTube, which I will put in the show notes. So you can see the moment at which Casey's brain kind of gives out on him for a second, which is kind of incredible to see. Did you have a good trip?

Was it fun? Yeah, it was a lot of fun. To be on the... So you were down in Virginia then after leaving New York. It's a little East Coast New Year's trip for you. Yeah, it was nice. It was really relaxed and it was nice to be able to spend some time with a small selection of my close friends

in regular environments, which I always enjoy immensely because I see most of my friends as part of conferences and events. So I really like it when we can be normal people together. So getting to see everybody with their families is a normal thing that means a lot to me you know because you know you get to see the whole families you get to see their children and you get to see more of the

person um as opposed to it all just being centered around conference stuff. Yeah, well, no, it's a very different, that's something that people may not know about these people who talk on podcasts and write articles on the internet and things like that is that we are often, I mean, these are our friends and colleagues and we talk on the internet to them and all that and we see them in person. But it is extremely rare that we have any kind of normal personal interaction time, right? It's generally at a conference or something where everybody's traveling and there are lots of things to go to or parties to go to or you're in large groups. And it's weird, right? Because I think it misses a major portion of any kind of friendship to be sort of like you talk to people on the internet and then you occasionally see them in these super hyped up kind of circumstances.

And so it's cool. super hyped up kind of circumstances and so that it's cool what i'm saying is it's cool that you had the opportunity to spend some much more kind of calm time with people you know that's great and i i any opportunity i get to do things like that i i jump at like for example when uh every year wwdc when a bunch of us descend upon the snail household yeah right it's a similar kind of thing like we're all just having a meal together in your home although even then it's like 18 people in a house it's not quite the same it's still a little bit more elevated than if it was just me popping over for tea uh but that's tricky to do so yeah i try and i try and maximize these things and it was a really really lovely trip and i'm very pleased that we that's great that we did it and that we were able to keep the secret from ky that's beautiful surprises we did we did my um on my

uncle's 50th birthday we did a uh we we we flew and he lived in florida at the time we flew to florida my parents and i and um he neither he nor my grandmother who also lived in florida um knew we were coming and uh those are very special surprises although i believe they let my my grandmother in on it a little bit early only because they wanted to be gentle with her um and not frighten her to death or something like that yep well where we just went full-on out for my uncle and it was pretty funny. I love those surprises when you can pull them off, which is hard because usually it's not worth it because there's too much complication,

but you managed it. It's great. We did. This week's episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Mack Weldon. Talking about travel, I got to travel in my favorite traveling pants for a couple of days which was great and

they are my mac world and sweatpants um i was also wearing mac world and underwear um but that they weren't the pants that i was referring to but you know whatever floats your boat but i did get to travel in my mac world and sweatpants which are so comfortable i am a huge fan of them when i'm on like these eight hour plane journeys i've decided now that i i just want to be comfortable and you are going to start taking flights just to wear the the uh the sweatpants aren't you i think we're getting to that point now yeah maybe i will i don't know i'll fly over and pick up some more from mac walden who knows but mac walden is a great company that provides you with a fantastic shopping experience to get really smart looking premium fabrics on your body.

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So they will eliminate odor. And no matter how many times I talk about Mack Wilden, I cannot say that word. Antimicrobial? I always put that word. Anti-microbial? Anti-microbial. There you go. I always put extra R's in there and call it anti-microbial. Oh, interesting. Don't know what to do about that.

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Let's go from Mac Weldon to Mac Welding. It's 10 years since the introduction of the iPhone today as we record on January the 9th. And the reason that I am talking about Mac World now is because 10 years ago when Steve Jobs took to the stage at Macworld Expo, you were still working for Macworld Magazine at that point. 10 years ago? Yes, I was. So there's a lot of Macworld involved in this. Now, what was your position at Macworld 10 years ago?

I'm sure I was the editor-in-chief at that point. So you were still kind of working on the magazine and the website. Oh, yeah, it was only at the very end that I was not. Oh, absolutely. So this is not the day that the iPhone went on sale. That is like June sometime, I believe, was when the first iPhone went on sale in the U.S. Yeah, in fact, that's a major... This is why everybody's going to see

10th anniversary of the iPhone stories this week and also in late June, I think it is. Because there are two birthdays. The iPhone's basically like the queen. Yeah, sure. Okay. How many birthdays does the queen have? Two.

Her real birthday and her holiday birthday? She has a real birthday and then i believe it's the birthday celebration of the like top member of the royal family in which it is like the same time every year and they have a parade for it oh but i believe that day is reserved as a specific day which is just the celebration of the monarch's life the idea here is that everybody is able to schedule the the public holiday for that day and if the queen got hit by a truck or nibbled to death by corgis whatever don't save her those things but yes carry on well i thought it's highly unlikely that she's going to get hit by a truck because you

have to be somewhere where there was a truck. And I think that's unlikely that they would allow the queen to be someplace where there would be a truck. Also, it would be a lorry, wouldn't it? And so what I'm saying is if something bad happened to the queen, she's getting up there now. And suddenly Charles is the king and everybody's been planning their holiday. If it was just on the actual birthday, they would have to move the holiday. Or what if they already had the holiday this year and then the birthday was later, would they have another one? And so I can sort of see how they would just say, all right, there's just one holiday. Yep.

Okay, good. I've learned a lot about, about royalty now. Um, but anyway, so this is the point is the iPhone was announced and then there was this huge gap where it didn't exist. And then there was this huge gap where it didn't exist. And a few of us, and it's fun to talk about this, a few of us got to hold an iPhone prototype in a briefing at Macworld Expo that week, including me. I got to do that. And I got to lord that over everybody for like six months because I was one of the very small number of people who had actually held it in his or her hands and been able to tap around and get a little bit of a sense of how it worked.

And there were so many challenges with this, including the fact that we obviously did a big cover story about the iPhone and all of that. Here's the problem. There was no photography available other than like one shot from Apple because nobody had the phone. So for Mac world's cover about the iPhone, phone we actually hired a a 3d artist to build a 3d model of the iphone based on photography based on imagery and then render it photo realistically so that we could have our own product shot of a product that we didn't have wow and if you look at the first or second iphone cover we did we did an iphone cover in that picture and it's got the clown fish on it and all those the imagery from apple but it's not a real it's not a real product shot because there wasn't a real product that's kind of you gotta do what you gotta do yeah it was cool but uh yeah we had a guy named joseph do it and and it looks great i mean you couldn't tell you could you couldn't tell it was fake can you find you have to look very closely yeah i'll

look for it sure yeah i would like to see that uh google is not providing me with much use here in my image searching that i'm doing right now partly because the problem is macworld and macworld right yeah at that point i got it i'll look at you you're you're you got all the skills i got some serious google foo wow yeah look at that that looks really good it isn't the clownfish though it's a home screen oh you're right well i think we have the clownfish inside ah apple's new calling that's smart did you come up with that uh fantastic back in the day certainly but i don't want to you know it could have been someone else so i wanted to talk about this with you a little bit because you unlike many um i guess the people that are in this apple podcasting community you were actually working in

reporting on this stuff seriously for your living then. Yeah. Many of us were appreciating this stuff then or were fans of this stuff and you were actually like this was your day to day job like it is now. I know it's different circumstances but

you were doing this for a living and you were reporting on this stuff. You were going to events. You were at this event, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And again, you got a briefing and all that. So I want to talk about some of that.

And I'm taking a page out of the book of one of my favorite podcasts, which is Control-Walt-Delete from The Verge. And on the shows, like every episode, Nilay Patel will dig into Walt Mossberg's archives to pull out articles that are relevant based upon the topic at hand. And one of the things that I found today was an article that you wrote five years ago

about looking back at the iphone five years later and that was from a macbook magazine a macbook web article i guess i just it's funny i just did that um i just did that uh not too long ago for the os 10 anniversary where i found a i found an article i wrote after 10 years of os 10 that was looking back on my article that i wrote after five years it's like wow how how many layers down can i go here but really once you've once you've written the reminiscence article do you need to write it again or do you need need to say, hey, I reminisced about this. There it is. But yeah, I did that too with the iPhone. I wrote a piece five years ago about it. So I want to read a couple of quotes from this

and we can talk about it. This is from younger Jason Snell. As far as I'm concerned, the 2007 introduction of the iPhone is the definitive Steve Jobs presentation. It's the one that people will reference for as long as Steve Jobs is remembered. So I did what I assume many people did today, in which I went back and watched the key moment.

You know, like the three things moment. And I just want to read the quote, and I'll put a link in the show notes to the video so you can go watch it for yourself. But this is the thing that everybody remembers. A widescreen iPod with touchscreen controls. A revolutionary mobile phone. A breakthrough internet communications device. Are you getting it? This is one device, and we're calling it iPhone.

Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. I've trimmed it down a little bit but like they are the key parts of it you know the idea of saying we have these three things and this i really urge people to go and watch it i was thinking about putting an audio clip in but really like just go watch the youtube link because it's the whole build up to that point which makes this hit even stronger and then listen to that episode of of connected right that one of the best things any of us the three of us have made and we're gonna we have like a different take on this um the three of us on connected want to want to talk

about this week we're like the the effect of it's the prompt number 30 yeah that's what it was it was back back in the prompt days so you can go and check it out so i'll put it in there but we want to we want to talk on connected this week and we're going to about like how uh with all of us when none of us were working in this stuff then and the the effect the iphone has had on our lives because of that like the path that it's let us take but as i said like what's interesting for me is that you were there and i kind of wonder for as much as you are able to really remember, rather than just kind of how it's felt over time, what it was like to sit in the audience and kind of feel the furor building.

Because, I mean, what we had then in the way of rumors is very different to what we had now. Everyone believed that Apple was working on a phone, but nobody knew anything. believed that apple was working on a phone but nobody knew anything yeah and in fact the phone rumor the phone rumor had been going so long that it was exhausting like they had been talking about apple making a cell phone for years like like like a decade i, it had gone on a very, very long time. And I'm sure, which was sort of leaked in the last few days, that we started to get an idea of what might be in there. But it was very much the three blind men and an elephant parable kind of thing where we had details, but nobody could actually extrapolate from the details what the real product was going to be not really there was just no way right because the iphone

nothing was that was like it it was right so unique it couldn't have been imagined i don't think like in its entirety i don't think anybody could have sat down and given as much time possible come up with what was shown because so much of it was new right yeah and and it wouldn't have felt realistic nor would the price as as much as the price in very rapidly in hindsight, was too high. I think that in reality, what was shown and what was described, I think a lot of the rumors were kind of squelched by this idea that there's no way that could be a product that they could sell because that would be $1,000 plus of technology in that phone.

And what did it start at? $600 on contract? Something like that? Something like that. And it was rapidly cut by, what, $200? I mean, they did cut it pretty rapidly when I think they saw the demand for it. And the early adopters got refunds

or they got Apple credit, store credit. So they changed direction on that. That's something that people forget now, but it actually did go out probably $100 or $200 more than even Apple realized it needed to be, especially given they were learning how to make it and all that.

I think they very rapidly realized that they could move a lot of these and they just needed to lower the price. And so they did. But I think the concept of making this thing touchscreen, you know, with this for the time kind of high resolution display and it's all touch and it's got an advanced processor in it that makes it capable of running a no compromises kind of computer interface and not something that was like a lightweight phone interface. And people would be like, well, you know, we've got to scale it back. It can't have all these features because it would cost too much. It would cost $1,000, and there's no way they're going to make a $1,000 phone. And so I think that reduced the expectations a little bit strangely.

So that was part of it. And then when you're in the room, the funny thing about that is having been in the room for this one and for the iPod launch too, you know, in hindsight, it looks like one of the most important technology moments in our lifetimes, maybe the most. But at the time, you know, you're evaluating it as Apple doing something new and everybody brings some skepticism with them when Apple does something new. They're entering a market that they don't know about. And the downside of the reality distortion field is that when Steve Jobs shows you something, part of you is like well we'll see like we'll see if it really yeah can do that and that is uh you try to because you try to counter it and and so at the time it was like it was a very impressive thing i was like wow this is way more than anybody thought. It was very clear, I think, that this was a huge deal.

But, you know, it wasn't... I mean, he went on with the... I mean, there was a whole presentation around it, right? I mean, that's the thing that's kind of amazing. And you had Stan Stigman from Singular, who was really boring. And then Schmidt, right? Eric Schmidt came on stage. Eric Schmidt, yeah. singular who was really boring and then that was right uh eric schmidt eric schmidt yeah so there there was there was some other stuff in there that is not it's not so great but the core of

it was incredibly impressive and you could definitely tell in the room um my memory is that after he went on to the second thing you know he was like oh we're gonna announce three things that uh that he started to cycle through. And I was like, oh, I see what you're doing here. And then having twigged to it, I got to enjoy, as he repeated it, the kind of rumble in the audience of people who were getting it. You know, like he said, you're getting it, right? And you got to remember, too, that this is a Macworld Expo audience. So it's not WWDC.

It's press and VIPs and it's members of the public. We've talked about it on a previous show. This is not an audience that can get to an Apple event anymore, right? Apple doesn't do public events apple does invite only events but for macworld expo some portion of that crowd was people who probably had like the fancy badges for macworld expo and got to stand in the priority line and they were definitely super enthusiastic because they had to stand in a line and pay money to get the badge and all of that all those things but it was a it was a a crowd of of fans so that was that that adds i would say a little more electricity to the event than even the developer crowd at wwdc i think even as good as you know as good as this

event was you know going back to what you were saying about like the trepidation of apple entering a new market and nobody knows how it's going to be i have no doubt that there were people at the time that were like this is changing technology forever but i don't think that you would get many of those people willing to put like a money back down on that right like you could look at it and be like oh this is going to be incredible. Steve Jobs thought that the Segway was going to transform how people lived in urban cores. I did not know that. Oh, yeah. That was one of the money quotes when Dean Kamen came out with the Segway.

And nope, it didn't happen, right? You can look really bad. The other thing is you can look at something and think, wow, this is really good, but do I want to go all in on it because you can look really bad if you're wrong? And I think that restrains people too. Because the thing that we could have just frankly never predicted is that within 10 years, that product, Apple would have sold a billion of them,

and it would make Apple the most valuable company in the world by a country mile. I don't think anyone would have made that prediction. No. It's too much, right? It's too much. Because on stage, they were talking about capturing, what was it, like 10% of the phone market? It may have been less than that.

It was maybe a single-digit percentage point, and what that would mean for them. They spoke about, like, you know, we just need this much and it will be huge. Like 1% of the smartphone market and something like that and like a tenth of a percent of the cell phone market. Their sites seemed sort of ambitious and were incredibly low. Yeah, like at the time it was like people like really

you're gonna you're gonna think you're gonna get this much like that's a lot you know it's a big it's a big business but now they own it to an extent now well now they've got 25 of the phone market and 100 of the profits in the phone market essentially yeah for this most recent quarter. And it really is mind-boggling to look back on that. And there were so many things, though, which really hinted at Jobs' feeling about this. The way that the event is set up, the way he sets the event up, you know it's important to him

in a different way to maybe some other devices. That whole build up to that moment. And you know what was also announced at this event apple changed its name they changed the company name at this event from apple computer incorporated to apple incorporated like they i think that this was a point where the company and steve really believed that they were onto something new but again they didn't know how big it was going to be what what are the two products on that on that mac world cover the iphone and the apple tv yeah which was had been had been previewed that fall as the itv yep which is the name of a tv network in your fine country and or a tv channel in your fine country

and uh they uh didn't bother with that one. They got iPhone from Cisco, right? They licensed that name or took that name or whatever. Afterwards, yeah. The product launched, I think, and they didn't have it. Yeah, but Apple TV, they're like, you know. But the point being, their two major products are not computers per se, right? And so, yeah, Apple incorporated. Makes sense. apple incorporated makes sense yeah it makes sense the

other major product at this point is the ipod right yeah and yeah i said this on that episode of the prompt but the thing that always makes me smile about the introduction is everyone went crazy for the phone everyone went crazy for the touchscreen video ipod nobody gave nobody gave a hoot about breakthrough internet communications device which is frankly all anybody cares about with their iphones anymore that's what what this device ended up being was an internet communications device but in 2007 nobody knew why that was important i was struck i read my review of it today because stephen hackett linked to it from his post on 512 pixels about about the anniversary um i haven't written anything about the anniversary yet although i suspect i will

today because you know i just got off a plane but um the the thing that struck me about my review, which I wrote in a tent in the mountains on my vacation 10 years ago, what struck me about it was I spent a lot of time on the phone features. Because it's a phone, so you care about the phone features. and I gotta be honest when I review like I wrote my review of the iPhone 7 and I had a couple people ask me afterward like you know what's your experience with the quality the call quality

on it and I'm like like have I made a call on it like it just doesn't matter to me I just don't care I have made some calls but it's just the phone aspect of it just doesn't matter at all but at the time it was a big deal it's easy to get lost in the hype about touchscreens and web browsers and forget the phone is like its name says a phone and it works pretty well as one when an incoming call arrives the

iphone gently interrupts what you're doing to display it works carrier id information about who's i had to explain how the iphone worked right i mean that was part of it too is like okay let me tell you you're using your computer phone thing and then somebody calls you what happens do you miss it because you're too busy in a in a web browser no but we didn't know. I remember having a real worry about if the iPhone had a vibrate motor. Because they weren't very clear in the announcement as to whether it had one. And that was such a big thing for me whilst I was at school at the time. Like I was in my last years at school when the iPhone was announced. at school at the time, like I was in my last years at school when the iPhone was announced.

And I was thinking, like, if I'm in class, I don't want my phone to go off. And if I have it on the silent mode with the switch, will I still get a notification? Like, will it still buzz in my pocket? You know, there are all these things that we had no idea about. It really was, it's really such a funny thing to look back on uh but i want to go back to your five years later post and you talk about uh seeing the iphone for the first time yep you say sometime during that expo week i finally got my hands on the iphone i remember it well i got to hold it in my hands for a few minutes during a briefing and for about six months i was one of the very small number of people outside of apple's cone of silence who could say that you also said like this was something that you quoted in this five-year article of your original

kind of at the time you said i can admit that i found the it quite difficult to form complete sentences when i was holding the iphone oh. In terms of sheer gadget magnetism, its power cannot be overstated. Oh, it was terrible, Mike, let me tell you. I'm in a room with, I think Greg Joswiak was there, I think Phil Schiller was there. It was not the B list of product briefers. It was the, and this was back when,

now what Apple does is they do all their briefings in a short period of time right after they announce a product. And there are a couple different teams and they move you through. And if you're, you know, if you're really liked, you get the A-list. And if you're not quite as well liked, but liked enough to give a briefing, you get the B-list of like the, you know, you don't get the, I don't talk to Phil Schiller so much anymore is what I'm saying. oh but um back in those days they did like two days of briefings and they just kept rolling i think partially because maybe didn't have enough iphones to do two sets of briefings at once that were functional at all um so i'm sitting there with the high-powered apple executives and this is my 15 minutes or whatever 30 minutes with them to ask them a huge number of questions that we've got because i think i did it

the second day which is a great time to do it right you want second day not first day yeah right i mean i i can't i can't have first day reactions to having touched it but i i did get to see it that week and so i've got all these questions and all these details everybody on the staff has asked me and readers have asked me it's like what what we ask them these questions well like the reason i said the second day is good because you got that time to get the questions and plus oh yeah yeah if i'm wrong but immediate her first look impressions weren't as important 10 years ago right right true i mean they were important but you were writing for a magazine no i mean we were writing on the website you know this this hands and fingers on the iphone story that i wrote back then was a, you know, that was a website story.

But here's the thing. I'm ready with my questions. I've got my notepad, all that. And they slide the iPhone over to me and say, pick it up. And I pick it up and it's like i seriously i can't form complete sentences i'm trying to have a conversation with these apple executives while i'm i'm touching an iphone for the first time and i'm like um uh uh like i just can't even get words out because it was such a sensory experience of like just uh it was it was it was warm uh it was probably because it was a prototype i don't even want to know and it was

that the screen was of a shockingly high resolution and we laugh at it now, if you look at the original iPhone screen, but it was, um, it was 160 pixels per inch. And the Mac book pro at that point was like 110. It was a, it was a much higher resolution screen. Everything looked very pretty on it.

Um, it was, it was, uh, it was unlike any kind of product. And I had a Palm Trio, I think at the time. It was unlike any other product I had ever held in my hand. And so it was tough because I would have liked to have asked them questions for 30 minutes and then spend another 30 minutes with the phone. And I couldn't, I had to do both at the same time. It was very, very difficult.

What I also remember about that briefing is that, I mean, everything seems smooth. You know, I could press the button. I could do the things I saw in the demo. I could open the mail app. I could open the web browser. They had me do a few things with it. I did open the Notes app, and that's the one that I really remember. I think maybe also the Contacts app, but the Notes app for sure. And it was a screenshot. Like, literally, the Notes app was a screenshot of what the Notes app would look like. But it wasn't there.

Did they say anything? Do you remember when you did that? I don't remember. Oh, the calculator also was a calculator was also a screenshot. I think they said something like, you know, we're shipping in June. It's not all, it's not already yet. That one's not ready yet. Something like that. They, but they probably said something that was just a, yeah, that one's not there. Um, but I, I just, I remember that too. And that, and years later, you know, you get the behind the scenes stories about how this product came together and how they were. It's very rare that Apple announces a product six months. I mean, the Apple Watch is another good example. That was the one that struck me the most as being like the iPhone where they announced it and then they didn't have it and they had some units that you could look at but at the at the apple watch event it was like you don't touch them or you could touch it on the wrist of an apple employee but um only the things they let you touch and i touched something i wasn't supposed

to and they're like oh boy oh no right because it's not really done oh it's on fire and the iphone and the iphone was like that too where it wasn't it wasn't like it was gonna blow up although i'm sure if i tapped the right thing it would have it would have crashed but um but there were placeholders and stuff too but still it didn't matter i mean that magnetism that's it that's absolutely right what i said what i wrote 10 years ago it was it was this amazing slab that felt like it. I know this is kind of a cliche, but really, if there was any moment in my life where I felt like I was holding technology

that had come back in time, it was that iPhone. It's like, how is this possible? I wonder if we'll see anything like this again. Like, the closest I have felt to this, and I've said this before, is when I got to try the Oculus Rift for the first time with the

touch controllers which are now shipping and I got to play with them in June and it was the closest that I've been to that because it was the quality of the experience and the otherworldliness of the experience was similar

in the way that it was like I feel like I've felt the future ofliness of the experience was similar in the way that it was like i feel like i have felt the future of something right because the the quality of the arc this is so good and it's not necessarily the that it's your first experience with a technology because the first experiences with a lot of technologies aren't very good no it's that first experience where it all comes together because i had a i had a palm trio i had a phone that was on a on a 2g network or whatever and and could do email and all of that i had that i had phones with apps before i had a i had a what the sony ericsson one with isync and all that i had i had these phones right

but then you get the iphone you're like oh like it all came together i think vr maybe something like the oculus rift with the touch controller is that maybe it is a product as yet to um as yet to exist where the vr stuff or ar stuff comes together and you have that same moment of like oh this is they they got it like this is no longer creeping toward what we think is there this is that leap where it's like no this is it i mean see my my argument on that would be that they did it right because no this is it i mean see my argument on that would be that they did it right because i've been playing video games my entire life and i've had very immersive video game experiences but how about you now are in the game and you know i've played many vr games especially with the high powered uh vive and and Rift stuff where it's like,

this is just your life now. You are in this train car shooting these people. And it's an incredibly real feeling that stays with you if you get the opportunity to try out the best of the best of this hardware. And so it's similar.

Happy birthday, iPhone. Yeah, seriously. I've said it before and i'll say it again i think in our lifetimes this has a very good chance of being the most important technology product ever released yep because the smartphone is probably again there may be something in the next 30 years. And I hate to say never, you know, I don't want to say it's the end of history. I mean, in 20 years, who knows what they'll be. But that leap that started with the iPhone, so that so many people all over the world have access to a powerful computer attached to a fast connection to a global data network like that pretty soon essentially everybody is going to have that is a transformative moment for for global

civilization and i think you can draw a line from the moment that ste Jobs introduced the iPhone. I think that's where it started. Maybe there'll be something else. Again, maybe VR technology is going to get to the point where we are all just in VR all the time and that'll be a bigger deal. We'll see. But this is certainly, if not the biggest, it has got to be one

of the biggest technology things in this era. I think ultimately VR changes video games. I don't think it's going to have the wide, like overarching change of technology that the iPhone did. You look at the word app and what that has done. Like the iPhone has like retconned PCs.

Well, this is what I was going to say is that we, you know, there was a time when we were talking about, well, what about the introduction of the Macintosh? And what about that? It feels to me now, like the entire PC industry was a prelude. It was like we, for a long time, we had computers the size of rooms. And then finally we got computers on desks, but it really didn't take off until we could put them in our pockets. And that the the whole pc era was just a prelude i'm not saying pcs aren't great computers are great it's great but

in terms of the biggest impact it seems now like that was just the beginning of the story of the smartphone yeah it is i i don't think in that we will see anything like this for a long time i agree with you that it's like at some point there is going to be another huge product there has to be right but it's not direct brain interface like it's nothing nothing we have today is this you know and it's like prior to that like we got this in 2007 we had it 20 years prior in the 80s right like with the invent the advent of the pc as a thing and yeah it will probably be another 10 years from now you know and that's my intuition about about vr and ar and voice interfaces like siri and and amazon echo and all of those is that my feeling is there's

something there that is going to be a sort of transformative thing in terms of seeing the world differently and interacting with it and tying into our senses even more directly than the smartphones do. When smartphones take a leap because now we're touching the screen instead of moving devices that move pointers on a screen, right? Well, the next step would be to get even closer to our senses. I imagine that all of these things that we're doing now in 10 or 20 years will lead to that moment of convergence where somebody takes the synthesis of all those things and there's there's something that just blows everybody away but what is that and when is that who knows yeah it's like laptops really changed computing but they didn't it was a

revolution right and i think a lot of the technology that we see right now in front of us like wearable devices they're like they're changing technology but it's not an overhaul you know vr it's changing gaming it's maybe changing technology, you know, what Microsoft's doing with HoloLens may change the PC industry, but it's not something completely new that we've never seen before. And that's really what the iPhone was, because there weren't any compelling touchscreen computers. And really, this wasn't a phone like anything we'd used. You know, there were devices that had touchscreens on them which needed styluses, right? It was not like what Apple unveiled on that day. And I don't think that there's any

argument available against that. Yeah. This week's episode is brought to you by our friends over at FreshBooks. Life as a freelancer or somebody who is independently employed can very frequently mean that you are incredibly busy trying to wrap up projects and prep for meetings or that call that you have in 10 minutes with a pile of paperwork that you have to take care of. And you have to do all of that before you even think about the invoicing part. Freshbox is set out to try and make all of this easier for the people that are stuck in these situations. I'm sure for many, at least I know for me and Jason, it's like this is the thing that we choose to do. But when you're on your own, you have to take care of all of it. And having tools that can make these things easier really makes a huge difference.

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Yes. We are not going to use the trigger word. You know, many people will be aware of Ahoy Telephone, which was a movement that we spearheaded many, many episodes ago, years ago even, because we got in trouble for uttering the iPhone assistant's name. So we came up with uh a high telephone shout what should we go a high canister what do you want to go with for the rest i don't know hello hello lady in the canister um i don't know i don't know this is this is so there was a new

story where what we're discovering is that um things that came up to us two years ago are, as these products become more prevalent and are covered more in the press, other people have to deal with the issues that we were dealing with with our technically savvy crowd two years ago. So there's a little bit of backstory with this. Yeah. Yeah. crowd two years ago so there's a little bit of backstory with this yeah yeah so i think it's kind of like last week there was a story uh about a young girl who ordered a doll's house via the amazon echo um she kind of beckoned with a hoy canister yeah well she was playing she was like doing make-believe like playing and talking to her little friend in the canister. And they were talking about dollhouses and, you know, would you play dolls with me?

And we're going to take our dolls to the dollhouse and they're going to have cookies and all of these little, you can imagine it, stories that a little kid would tell to this device that talks. But she doesn't understand the details of how it works but she knows that she can say things to it and it says things back and then uses her imagination it's adorable and somehow in there they she triggered among the things she did she triggered a purchase because a hundred dollar dollhouse and a box of sugar cookies showed up at their house two days later yep amazon responded to this story um by basically saying you can turn off the ordering the the kind of voice ordering if you want to but they did also say like the the device speaks to confirm it because there was like one of these like storm in a teacup attempts of a story of like

horror as people can buy like you know and amazon just did their best they just provided some statements they said look you can create a confirmation code if you want if you're worried about your children ordering stuff and ultimately you'll get emails and things have ordered when they're shipped and you can return any unwanted item for free right it was a dumb story like whatever well i mean what's what's funny about it is that the you know what what happens is you know you're a little kid who doesn't understand when the the little friend she's doing make-believe stuff and her her little friend in the canister says would you like a dollhouse um there you know there's a voice confirmation and she's like yes

who exactly right and and you can make a you can make a code that has to be there. And there's an email goes out, which I believe you can then say, no, no, I actually didn't want that. Cancel that order. And you can also return the item. So it's not that big a deal. Although it's funny, right?

It's a funny story. It's a funny story, but it's not a problem story. I tried it out myself today by the way and uh you can ask you say like uh oh hey canister i would like it although me a dollhouse and for me what it does is it just lists off the top searches on amazon and asks me if i want to buy it you know it's you know it's kind of as you'd expect it to be it's like yes it could you know you can imagine a world in which a child could order something by accident. But Amazon has built in the tools to stop this.

And I agree with the idea of Amazon including this functionality as on by default because they're a company that sells stuff. It would be mine, by the way. And they have the tools for you to turn it off. But, yes, Amazon's whole shopping is what Amazon is about. Exactly. it would be mine, by the way. And they have the tools for you to turn it off. Or to protect it. Shopping is what Amazon is about. Exactly. So, as this kind of proliferated around the news agencies, there was a San Diego news station that ran a story about this

in which the reporter says, and we have a quote, I love the little girl saying, blank, order me a dollhouse. At that point, point echo devices all over san diego picked it up and tried to order the item yes this is now another story based upon the same thing because this so new story talking about the little girl and then it lit up over san san diego and they ahoy telephone san diego by by inadvertently saying a a command phrase just conversationally so at most this is kind of just a funny thing nobody's nothing's ordered because the devices will start speaking backwards like back to the people asking them to confirm

the order right and unless you do and remember unless you do the whole thing which we did in one of our in one of our ahoy telephone things to dan moran yeah we i mean you can you can pause things out and say hey lady uh send a text message to so and so saying this and then pause and then and know that it's responding to you and then say yes i mean you could force it things if you can if you know exactly the right order and are being a jerk but in this case it's a it's a multi-step process and this person made a a mistaken use of step one and people noticed and probably called the station and said hey what are you doing but it seems that it's not that doll houses were suddenly ordered by 100 houses in San Diego, right?

Apparently. So here's the question. Because now this became a news story because this happened. So we have layers. There's layers upon layers here. So here is the question. Should people on television, news broadcasters, writers in TV shows, should they be able to knowingly speak the wake phrases of these devices yeah i mean the way the way i put it is if i was working at the cw station in san diego

or really any news any broadcaster really i would probably send a memo to my staff saying take a look at the story there's's a lot of our listeners who have these devices in their homes and they've got them in their cars, the phones that are set to this. And the backstory here is my news readers may not be the most technically adept people. Some of them are. Some of them don't know anything about it it's like the here are some activation phrases that you should be aware of and if you can steer clear of using these phrases in this specific way uh you won't be upsetting our our listeners and they won't we won't get complaints and we won't be intruding on this stuff and and uh i think that pragmatically that is probably a smart thing to do as a as a

professional broadcaster kind of person to to make the decision we made which is let's let's not screw around with our audience and use that phrase even if even if we're not trying to mess with them we're using it to specifically refer to the key phrase let's maybe not mention the phrase because we know it's going to set off their devices and and inconvenience them so i would say my feeling on this is that if it's a genuine accident then fine right which was in san diego right nobody's going to get nobody should get punished because they said it and it was an accident also i have to say although we're often very diligent about it here. It happens. We trigger it.

We get emails. We trigger it. I mean, we get tweets especially. When we say things that are not quite what the trigger phrase is, but close enough, the syllables, something about it,

the sounds are close enough that we trigger it anyway, even though we're not even saying those words. It happens. Which, you happens, which, you know, which is why we cannot put aside that all of this stuff needs to be better, right? All of this technology needs to be better. It needs to be better at recognizing when I'm not saying the key phrase, but something that sounds like it. It needs to recognize that I am a voice on a speaker and not a human being in the environment and therefore it should ignore me and probably it needs to get to the

point where it recognizes that i'm not a voice that it knows and therefore it should ignore everything i say there should be like voice training you know you should be able to tie these things to you which there is an element of that in a lot of these devices but it's not like it doesn't then exclude other people but it can do a good job of picking you out and that would also allow the little girl to have a conversation with it and not be not have access to the buying tools for example if it was good enough smart enough to do that but i would say that in the modern day if a story like this is being reported they should know not to say it someone should be telling like in this instance exact case, this shouldn't have happened.

They were reporting on a story in which something was accidentally ordered by this device. And then they give the trigger word. It should have been common sense by a producer to say, do not say that word well and i think this it's just uh first off it looks like this was very much a a an in the moment comment about the story by oh it was it was hey i i was a i was an intern at a tv news station in san diego uh i you know i know how this works they've got their script they've got they run the package the anchors come back they make a little comment and they move on and this was the little comment because this is kind of a cute story. And the challenge is to learn from it, right?

And to say, if you're somebody who's speaking to hundreds or thousands or millions of people, do I want to inconvenience them? They tune to me. Do I want to inconvenience them? Yes, this technology is dumb. It shouldn't do this. They all need to get better at it. But that aside, there's idealism right there.

It's like, yeah, that aside, do I want to arm my people with the knowledge of how these things work so that they can just think like, oh, I should try to not say that if I can avoid it, because it's going to inconvenience the people who are listening to me. And your feeling on this is that, yes, they should, right? People should know this and they should steer away from it in the same way that me and you try our level best to not say these words. I think it's basic professionalism. And I'm not saying that you should end up sounding like you're speaking in code. I mean, if you need to say it, you need to say it.

But in most cases, it's you don't need to say it. You're saying it and don't mean to. And if you just file away, oh, I shouldn't use that particular phrasing. I can talk about Siri all I like. I can say things about what Apple's doing with Siri and we do it here. But I'm not going to say the first part of that phrase if I can help it the problem with what amazon has done is they and and also we can talk about google and what google does because google is a two-word phrase that includes the word google but it's there's a thing before it that you can say the problem with the amazon stuff is that it's a one-word trigger and that makes it so much easier to accidentally trigger especially if you happen to have a name that

is or very similar to. So again, there are lots of issues here. I think Amazon needs to consider complicating their command phrase a little bit so that it's less, you know, or they need to make their tech better. But I do think fundamentally from a professionalism side those of us who are communicating to to people who have these devices uh should basically take it easy on them and give them a break and not uh look if we were constantly prank ahoy telephoning our audience um would they would they get mad at siri or would they get at us? I think they would get mad at us. Yeah.

I do think that Amazon do a decent enough job in that they have given a name for their assistant, which is not the name of the product. The product is the Amazon Echo. Right. We are able to refer to, like, you can say, and she asked the echo to order the thing now i know that i have maybe triggered some people because some people whose name is the a l e x a name you can change it to say echo but like you've got to stop somewhere um like you can actually change the trigger word and you can and i also think you can trigger it by saying amazon as well yeah and so sorry to those people who've done that. Which is bad. And that's the thing

that Amazon have, you can change it. All of the other assistants, as far as I'm aware, there is no way to change it. I actually think that Amazon do a much better job than anybody else. But what I like is that Microsoft, they have their name, C-O-R-T-A-N-A,

right? Like that is a name which is not Windows right iphone you know you've got s-i-r-i right that's good google's you can say it i'm scared to say it uh all right google's is is the worst i think in this because it is just okay and then followed by the name of the company right yeah like It's a bit much. And I know that they've kind of, a way that you can kind of get around it now is by calling it the Google Assistant

when you're referring to it. But I think it's a lot easier, I think, to trigger that one than maybe some of the others, accidentally even. So all of these need to be, yeah, all of these need to be better, you know, and have more customizable trigger words or even let you pick your trigger from a long list. I mean, there are lots of things that could be better here.

So the reason that we even brought this up is that I wrote a really brief piece on Six Colors about it just because I thought it was a funny story and also how it was another group of people dealing with the Ahoy telephone problem. And what surprised me was I got pushback from some people who said basically, no, none of us should ever change how we talk. It's on the manufacturers to fix this problem. And I found these people's reaction bizarre and unpleasant because it sounds to me like what they're really saying is nobody's going to tell me what to do i'm going to do whatever and i'm going to let the technology people fix the problem which is like okay you we do need to have the technology people fix the problem but in the meantime is there not some kind of consideration we should give our fellow

human beings to not mess up their devices if we can avoid it isn't that a basic bit of courtesy and i was a little surprised that for some people they don't care about courtesy because if it's a bad piece of technology all bets are off i find that kind of disappointing yeah i i think we we both agree on this one like as as professional Yeah, I think we both agree on this one. As professional broadcasters, we try our level best to stay away from it. And I know that we have obviously been thinking about it for longer because our audience and the things that we talk about, we have a much higher likelihood of triggering these things.

But I think now as this stuff is becoming more and more, and I only think increasingly become more and more prevalent in our daily lives i think this is something that more people need to consider yeah about the way that these things are done and i want to make it clear yeah this stuff needs to be a lot better and i hope that all of these companies are working on it because it's not good enough now but as as people who talk to large groups of people for a living which we do i think having respect for your audience and not trying to mess with their technology just because you know you can, I think showing that basic level of respect

and professionalism is probably the right move, which is why, like I said, if I was the editorial director of a broadcast news organization at a TV station somewhere, I would send a memo around, or a radio station, let's say. I'd send a memo around or, or, or a radio station. Let's say I'd send a memo around saying, Hey, this stuff happens. It happened in San Diego. Here are the phrases that are out there now. We'll try to keep this list updated, but just be aware that if you can avoid the actual triggers, you will, you will be avoiding complications for our, our audience. This goes back to, by the way, the classic moment, I should mention it, right, the classic moment where there was a

commercial for the Xbox that showed how great it was that you could use these commands to control the Xbox, including to turn it off, and it uttered the phrase that you could use to turn off the Xbox, and if you happened to be someone who had the Xbox playing that video,

it would turn it off. Because the Xbox was created to run TV through it, this version. Exactly. It would turn off. That commercial would turn off the actual device that you were using to watch the commercial. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

And my understanding, and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong on this, is that some of Amazon's commercials where they do this, they play like a tone that the echo picks up so it doesn't trigger. Clever. I've heard that somewhere, or that it knows just the sounds that it's hearing at that point. It knows the ad so it doesn't trigger when you're when the ad is on tv yep but it all needs to get better i just want to underline that that that all of this stuff

needs to get better right we need voice activated interfaces are so great for so many things but accidental triggers are a problem triggers from people who are not people in the room but voices on the speaker it's a problem uh making sure the trigger words don't get triggered accidentally we do have it you know we will watch tv and there will just be dialogue it will not be a commercial it will not be trying to trigger anything and it will go and and the echo will go off yeah every now and then you hear it go or it's like i'm sorry i didn't understand what you just meant. Just shut up over there. Shut up. Yeah, exactly. Today's episode is brought to you by Encapsular,

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to claim your free month. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. It is Ask Upgrade time. The first of the year there's some extra lasers there for the first of the year

fireworks maybe yep, Zlatan asked wondering how charging cycles work in regards to the airpods, every time they're placed in the case, they start charging are they going to burn through their cycles quickly? now, I don't know enough about this stuff but I'm sure that Apple engineers do

and that they considered this. My expectation is that all of this power management stuff is built into the AirPods. Maybe they don't charge all the way to 100%, even if they say so. You know, I'm sure that it's very careful about the way that this stuff is done.

I have a couple of things here. One is I've talked to people on the iPhone power management team and I know for a fact that what you see isn't always the truth because it's doing stuff in the background to make you feel comfortable. because that's bad for the battery. So it will let it drop down to 90% and then it'll push it back up to 100%. But in that area, it just shows us full because otherwise people freak out

and start saying, why is it? Oh no, I unplugged my iPhone and it's only 93%. What's wrong with it? So they just say it's 100% even though it's not quite. And this is just, it's people, what you're going to do? You want to give them reassurance that it's people what you're going to do you gotta you gotta uh you want to give them reassurance that it's it's behaving properly even if the information that you're imparting is not actually accurate which is a challenge that's a real user interface thing that people don't often know about um the

other thing i wanted to say is my understanding about how these about how modern modern batteries work is we think about battery cycles like the idea that it'll it's the recharges are good for this cycle and so if you if you charge it from you know use it down to 70 and then back up to 100 it's a cycle that's not a cycle a cycle is using it all the way down and all the way back up and it's it's not like oh well what i need to do every time i i unplug them is I unplug them is to put them down to zero and then put them back up again. There used to be batteries that were like that, and that if I only went down halfway,

then I'd be shortening their lives unnecessarily. It doesn't really work like that anymore, is my understanding. My understanding is that you could take that battery and discharge it halfway 100 hundred times or all the way 50 times and it's basically the same so i think what apple would say is don't worry about it rajiv asked i started playing with nsc tags and with android do you think apple will allow native nsc tag reading in the iOS ecosystem? I don't. I don't.

No, it would have been done by now if they had any desire to do this. I don't imagine that they will ever do this. I will, I do have to say, I slightly edited this question. Rajiv asked, when will? Yes, my original answer was never. Yeah, and I'm sorry to break this to you, Rajiv.

I would say the same time that um lets you pull out the camera app and scan a uh a 2d barcode and have it automatically do whatever because that's been something that android's been able to do forever and uh you can't do that on an iphone or puts an sd card reader or replaceable batteries none of these things are bad ideas. They're just things that I don't think Apple is ever going to really do. I think Apple looks at the NFC tag. The NFC tag stuff is fun. And I know people who've got them and you can do things like scan a tag when you're at some location and it gives you the Wi-Fi information and all of that.

And that's all fun. But most of the NFfc stuff that like third party nfc stuff beyond transit passes and apple pay and things like that they're kind of nerdy and not used frequent super frequently and therefore not a priority for apple like not and for for them to then have to deal with how to what's the ui for that and what are the security implications and all that i think apple is much happier to just leave it at completely locked down. Two quick tales on this. So one, I was in a department store yesterday,

and they were encouraging people to download their app. And they had like, you know, download it in the app store. And it said, or tap. And I thought that was kind of cool. You know, you could see an ad and just kind of download it. So that's nice, but I don't really need it. Like I can just go to the app store. I know how to search.

But I do like that idea. I can see why people enjoy that convenience. You see an ad, you just tap it, and it goes. It's fine. The other was I used to work for a big bank, and there was a trial, I believe, of putting QR codes on the ads. The numbers were just hilarious like so low you wouldn't even believe

nobody was using these things to scan like QR codes in my opinion very very silly the NFC stuff I can see a little bit more where people might want to use that but I still think nobody would use it like in the grand scheme of things nobody would use it

Brent asked after you release an episode of a podcast how long do you keep the production files um it's like until i start to get warnings of uh of disc space for most shows like most weekly shows you know like i just i don't keep them uh for some shows that are more evergreen in nature, I keep them a little bit longer. Like, for example, I still have all of the Inquisitive ones. And me and Gray keep all of the Cortex stuff and Selective Sync from Dropbox. But for most of my shows, I kind of just keep them around for a couple of months and then just trash them. Because really, the likelihood of me needing the entire logic project again

it's i've in the last six years that i've been doing this past a week it's not been needed for me i i delete after a few months anything that is a timely podcast so like i've got the last 40 episodes of clockwise or 30 episodes of clockwise i don't even know why i have those other than i figure i i basically i keep them around because if somebody finds a horrible mistake a week or two later i can fix it yep and then they just sort of sit there and then once every six months or so i'll go in and delete all but the last 10 or 15, and then they queue up again. For stuff that I feel like isn't timely, particularly, I will keep it around forever if I can. And that is largely because of two things. One is I do retrospectives every year, and then

for various anniversary numbers for shows like The Incomparable, where people will say, oh, let's play a clip from that one. And sometimes I'll go back to the original and pull the clip out. Sometimes I can actually clear out some of the noise around it because we're trying to call out a very specific thing. And so once a year, I will often do that. I'll go back to the original file and make some new clips and do that. And the other thing is every now and then there's some episode that becomes wildly popular and i'm surprised by it and technology has advanced time has moved along and i just recently did that with our holiday music episode of the incomparable i went back to the original logic files and it's

two years old or something like that i actually pulled out the ads the old ads and i uh i i put and I put the bonus stuff on at the end of the regular episode. And actually I stereo panned the tracks a little bit and I made a new high bit rate stereo MP3 mix of that episode and dropped it because people say they listen to it every year. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to dress that one up and I'm going to do that.

And I've done that with some of the Total Party Kill episodes. I'll do that where I will go back to the master file and put all the heads and ends of them together so that they are just continuous. And there's like a big audio book file of like 18 hours of that entire story. And I'll do that too. So there are times when I go back, but it's for those. It's for something where people are like, oh, I really liked that episode from two years ago where this thing happened.

And I'll be like, oh, really? Like I did that with the Star Wars episodes we did too, where time had moved along, the bit rates that I had saved out the MP3s were really low and I split them into two parts, but now I can release a full version of it with all the breaks taken out so i do i do actually do it enough that i want to keep those around as long

as i can craig asked mike are you installing a smart thermostat in your new home um i am not my house is powered completely by electricity we do not have any gas heating of any kind. So all of my radiators, you just turn them on on the wall. We have no central heating system, so you just turn on the radiators that you want. We actually do have this really cool Dyson hot cool fan thing, which we've been using a lot,

because it's just really awesome um yeah so i i'm i don't think that there are any systems that we could use or uh there might be one where like i don't know you get all new radiators and they're all kind of connected or something we're gonna hear about we're gonna hear about how there are smart radiator things where you put on the things and they can control them all and all that but we don't have radiators like that you have to adjust the heat individually in every single room yeah huh interesting but like we don't have the radiators that have those things that you twist it's like a little knob that you turn we could probably get new radiators that maybe have

some sort of central control unit by Wi-Fi. I'm sure that they exist. Maybe. Actually, I'm not sure. Maybe they exist. I don't know. We might look for those at some point, but frankly, this house is super well insulated. Like, it's cold now in London. Not super cold, but it's cold enough. Cold enough

where you'd want heating. I've not had any heating on today. I'm totally fine. They totally make smart radiator things that replace your little knob and it turns the knob automatically and it senses the temperature. No, no, no. I know that,

but we don't have radiators like that. So what do you have? I know what you mean about the knob, like the thing that you twist. It's like a big dial thing. The radiators that we have have this tiny little thing that you turn on the side. They're not like the radiators that we have have this tiny little thing that you turn on

the on the side that they're not like the radiators that you're used to seeing it's not a twist it's a turn i'm not used to seeing radiators at all i don't understand radiators i know what you're talking about so it's it's a turn and not a twist i don't know what the difference is right i know but what i'm saying is what you're telling me i know exists it does not work on my radiator okay right like that what the thing that you're referencing that is what goes on gas like central heating stuff like where you have this big dial that you turn like left and right that is not like how ours work um and i i wish i could give you some kind of thing right now i can't there's no picture but trust me i've looked into some of this from a base level and those things tend to work with gas radiators or but we don't have that type of radiator um anyway so no wow that's a radiator tragedy again but it's it's

it would be a concern if i felt like we needed it uh and frankly we don't like we turn the big radiator on in the in the in the in the living room um and that will heat the living room the kitchen and pretty much the hallway if it's on and then we have our little dyson thing in the bedroom which is way more advanced than any radiator would be uh and we put that on when we sleep and we're all good. So maybe at one point one day we might change it all, but we have no intention of doing that right now. And yeah, I know the products that you're referring to, like I think Elgato or someone like that.

There's a company that makes the EVE thermostat. I don't know. Yeah, and there's To to do which is the smart radiator thermostat and there's a net atmo smart radiator valve net atmo right that's the thing i'm thinking of that's not what our things look like it's like you turn that left or right that's not it's not what our temperature control looks like on our radiators because i think that's i think that's what what they're doing is it's just allowing the hot air to flow in or not or the hot water to flow in or not flow in from the central boiler yeah but we don't have water going to us right okay yours are just electric heaters

on the wall yeah they're yes that is the best like the one that i've got i've got i've got an oil radiator here on the floor that is my space heater for this room and it's electric because that so that's what it is you don't you don't have you don't have water from a central boiler moving to all your radiators yeah and we don't fill up with oil either it's like they're just basically two electric heaters it's like they heat up uh well i don't fill this up with oil it's filled with oil it comes filled with oil and stays filled with oil. The oil is just the transfer medium. It's not the, it doesn't burn. It just gets hot and stays warm.

I think they're kind of just like toasters for us. Yeah, basically. It's a metal toaster. Okay. So yeah, that's it, right? So like the existing stuff that I've seen doesn't control what we have. I have not looked into electric radiator technology enough

to know if there's a radiator system you could replace, but we just don't really have the desire to go down that route right now because it's going to be expensive, and frankly, we're good. So that's a really long answer to that question. And finally today, this is a long question, and I don't know how long the answer will be, but Jamush asked, Jason, you have mentioned how your mother now uses her iPad as her main computer.

In the transition from taking her from a Mac to an iPod, how did you manage documents, iTunes library, photo library, etc.? My retired aunt has a 9.7-inch iPad Pro and a dying 2006 Mac, which we want to get out the door and not replace. So I'm trying to figure out how to advise her towards an iPad-only life. This is a work in progress for me. My mother doesn't have documents. She also doesn't have an iTunes library.

So the photos are an issue. So there you go. You want to get rid of those. So photo library, she has. She's taking a lot of photos. I did a couple of things there uh she is paying 99 cents a month or something for more iCloud storage and the idea there is that i've got her ipad and her iphone syncing to iCloud photo library so she's getting to you know those photos are backed up somewhere that is that's part of it she She had a large-ish, um, a large-ish photo library, um,

on her, on her Mac. And what I did was I synced that. I kept it back up myself. I've got it somewhere here. Um, but I synced that with Google photosos and put Google Photos on her computer. So she can look at old pictures on Google Photos on her phone or her iPad. And I did that mostly because it was free to upload those photos to Google Photos. And it was going to cost to increase her storage at icloud um if i do it over again i'd probably do the same thing i might not i might i might put them all in icloud but that's basically been my solution right now so there you go uh first delete all the documents yeah uh i guess apple music itunes in the cloud does that yeah well i mean that's itunes match

yeah i mean any if if if she's got a large itunes library and it's not just stuff bought from itunes but it's other things uh apple music does include itunes match you can also just pay for itunes match if she's not buying new stuff so much because match is cheaper right it's like yeah 25 a year. Right, and I think you could do it with I think you could do that with Amazon too because Amazon does have a matching service as well because I pay for that just you know, it's like $25 a year

just to get my entire music library available on Echo. And or buy her another iPad at some point in the future of 256 gigabytes of storage just put all the music on it. How much music should it have? Well, that's true. You just have to get it to there from somewhere. The Mac still exists, right?

It's dying, but it's still there, right? Yeah, but if it dies, then you're out of luck. So you can't, I think you need to have a cloud backup solution. But I think that's the way to do it. If you want to find our show notes for this week's episode, go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 123. I want to take a moment to thank our sponsors again, Encapsular, FreshBooks, and Mack Walden.

Thank you for supporting this week's show. And thank you as well, not only for listening, thank you to everybody who is a member of RelayFM and helps support us there as well. We truly appreciate that. So thank you for doing so. If you want to find Jason online, he's over at sixcolors.com.

Jason also hosts Free Agents, Liftoff, and Clockwise on RelayFM, as well as his incredible shows over at theincomparable.com, where you can find many, all the pop culture shows. All the great shows. All the great pop culture shows

for your delight over there. Jason is on Twitter. He's at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. All the great shows. All the great pop culture shows for your delight over there. Jason is on Twitter. He's at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time.

Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snell. Bye, everybody.