Upgrade - 136: My Screen, My Stuff

Episode Date: April 10, 2017

Together again in Ireland, Jason and Myke discuss their current approaches to travel tech. We also revisit the new Mac Pro and answer your questions.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 136 today's show is brought to you by encapsular squarespace and mac waldo my name is mike hurley and I am joined across a glass table by Mr. Jason Snell. Oh, hi, Mike. I didn't see you there. That is podcast comedy, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, that's the highest of the highest caliber. But look out the window, Mike. This is the best view we've ever had for an episode of Upgrade, I think.

I will put a picture in the show notes of our view right now. Me and Jason are sitting in a hotel in kilani called the europe because we're attending the all conference i think this is the third episode of upgrade recorded at all indeed in this very location yes um it's like our second home as a show i guess it's the place we've recorded most frequently probably other than our own homes yeah yeah i think that will work this is the place that we're together the most so we are here and we're enjoying uh the all conference but obviously we took time out of the the day to record the show for you and we should begin this episode as we begin every other episode we have hashtag snell talk so you send in your questions

we have the hashtag snell talk on twitter and i get them for jason now jason there's been a trend over the last couple of weeks where people are asking me baseball related questions and i think they're trying to get me to annoy you they keep like mentioning other teams um but what i will take a question here i think is maybe the most innocuous which comes from ro, which is, what do you think of the Giants' chances this year? I think they are, well, they've started the season poorly, but there are hopes that they will have an okay year. And in the end, all you can hope for is that they finish strong enough

to get a chance to win at the end. And they've done that a lot lately. So I enjoy baseball is what I'm going to say. And we've had a lot of success in San Francisco lately. And if we have more, that's great. Congratulations to baseball. Hooray for baseball. Welcome back to baseball.

Baseball now being played. We love baseball i guess uh yes we do it's the official sport of upgrade i thought that was brainball uh okay it's the second official sport of upgrade so we last week in ask upgrade somebody was asking about dropbox related media players and boy did we get some response we got many responses of options um so if you are somebody who has dropbox files that you would like to have a media app to play maybe music or podcasts or audiobooks i have four suggestions um many of these were suggested by multiple people but i picked out the people that suggested them first james suggested an app called bound mark suggested an app called

infuse ali suggested cloud beats and john suggested n player now full disclosure i have not tried any of these because this is not really a thing that that i need or that i that i would use so what i'm going to do i'm going to put the one in the show notes so you can go and take a look i looked at the screenshots they all look like legit applications some are free some are paid so if you out there need this type of application in your life you now have some suggestions in our lovely show notes um which will be in your podcast app of choice or relay.fm upgrade 136 so you can go and take a look for yourself and i don't know listen to music i think from dropbox from dropbox everybody's favorite music storage solution yeah that's right i i'm rocking on dropbox

drop drop rocks yeah we were rocks in it sure yeah we could do that rock box rock box we did it we did it everyone we're on fire today today. We're cooking with gas. So it was a week ago that we had the Mac Pro announcement, Apple's recommitment to the professional Mac user. And we were surprised. I mean, really, we recorded last week's upgrade. We were on the heels. I was visiting your co-host from Remaster Shahid at his house, and then he drove me over to your house.

And when I was at his house, I got the notification that that had happened. So I had a little car ride to think about it, and then you were already on connected. And so it was hot on the heels. It could not have been timed any better slash worse in terms of just sort of having the instant reactions. So now we've had a little bit more time.

The one correction I wanted to make, although we, it's one of those things that we said we thought was true that, but then we expressed a lot of skepticism about whether it was true or not. So I feel like this isn't necessarily an error as much as a, I want to restate that we were right when we said we had no idea which is the specifications for the mac pro um like within a half an hour after i was done with upgrade marco arment uh and i had a twitter exchange about how the the update to the mac

pro was literally a pricing change and the the hardware didn't actually change at all and the high-end model is just a high end of the former build to order so the prices are less but it's not they're not new in any way they're just existing configurations that they repriced and we we thought there might be something new there but we didn't know and the answer is we didn't know because there isn't one there's nothing new yeah like the processors aren't new processors right they're just they've just chopped off the lowest end and brought the more powerful ones down the line yeah yeah and the same with the gpus as well because this was something i think i think we kind of talked spoke

about this on the show especially with the gpo gpus that we don't me and you i think don't really follow that stuff so much so it was easy for us to kind of for it to slip by um because it was basically just a lot of numbers and letters really yeah but we knew they were better but that nothing new was introduced yeah that's exactly right and and it's just a as we said and i think we've said for a while we've heard from people who buy mac pros sometimes you need to buy a mac pro because you have a specific need and it fulfills it and you need to do it. And that's the answer to the question, who's buying Mac Pros? There's some people who have to get one. Doesn't matter that they know that it's old and it hasn't been updated and all of that. They need

that system. And so that's why Apple's keeping them around. At least now it's a better value that they're getting a higher end version of that old system. Yeah. If you have to do it, you maybe feel a small percentage less ripped off by the fact that you have to do it because you're now getting a little bit more bang for your buck. Right, at least you're not paying the same price that somebody paid for that exact same computer three years ago.

Whilst we're here at all, I did want to mention that I'm merely attending, but you are participating. You are reincarnating all radio, which was something that you did last year, which was a fascinating mini-series of interviews with people that were giving presentations at all as a way to document what was happening, but also to give people that can't be here a glimpse into what it was all about. So you're going to be doing that again this time, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we're bringing it back. That's why they asked me back. There will be more this time because I'm a little more organized in scheduling my interviews. So we'll be doing a bunch of interviews tomorrow afternoon and rolling them out. I guess

as I get a chance, it will probably, some of them will roll out after I get home because I'm doing so many interviews that I'm not going to be able to produce them, but I have a very long trip home on Wednesday. So I may do some of it then. But lots of interesting people come here and speak. And the reality is, even though they do some some capturing of the sessions it's it's kind of lost if you're not here it's kind of lost to history and even if you are here there are oftentimes sort of questions that people have and that in this case that i have about what those uh why those people are here and what they're talking about that i get to follow up so they're fun little interviews with interesting

people is sort of the bottom line of it. And I was happy with how the ones turned out last time. So I'm glad to be back and do it again. So I'm going to put in the show notes the RSS feed so people can go and subscribe. I recommend that you actually

go and listen to episode seven of the previous years. It was Chadwick Seven's escape room where we did an escape room and you recorded the audio of the escape room. And it's a really fun episode. It's weird, but fun. It's not like the others in that way it's not quite representative but it is it

is kind of fun but it's a fun little thing just to listen to yeah all right today's show is brought to you by our friends at encapsula the multi-function content delivery network that not only boosts the performance of your website but also protects it from denial of service attacks securing it from bad guys and ensuring high availability. All you have to do is make a tiny change to your DNS and you will have the ability to activate Encapsular. There's no hardware or software needed to install. It is ready to go whenever you are. Then once you've made that small change to your DNS, you'll have access to Encapsular's global network of 30 data centers with 3 terabits of bandwidth. All of this will stop attack traffic, making sure that denial-of-service attacks never hit your servers,

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and also claim your free month. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their very much continued support of this show and RelayFM. They're a great company, great service, great people. Go and check them out. So, Mr. Jason Snell, I had an entire episode planned last week. Yes.

I had taken the time, as always, as we always do, to we go through and we think about what do we want to talk about? And then Apple, every now and then, drops a bombshell on us. And we ended up last week talking about the Mac Pro stuff for even longer than I expected. So when I woke up this morning in Dublin, before we got the train down to Killarney, where we are right now, all I needed to do was copy and paste from the previous document,

and I have our entire show here. So this is what Upgrade 135 would have been. This is an episode like a time machine episode. If we weren't so hungry and exhausted last week, we could have just recorded this episode last week. We could have. We wouldn't have had any follow-up. But yes were we were planning on things and we would have come up with something to talk about this time some new topics but it was uh this is easier i suppose and

the fact is last week i was traveling in some way since one of our topics is travel this is better because this week you were traveling you were preparing to travel last week that was going to be the idea and now we are both traveling so we're going to talk about how we travel with technology in 2017. I feel like this is, along with home screens and stuff like that, this is a topic that me and you have come back to maybe a couple of times. It's what we call an evergreen topic. It's something that you just want to revisit every now and then because the technology changes and your approaches change.

And I think it's not, if somebody said, what about travel tech? revisit every now and then because the technology changes and your approaches change and i think it's not if somebody said what about travel tech we could say well go listen to when we talked about it at the end of episode 24 or something like that but the fact is our travel experience now is different than it was when we started this podcast it keeps changing so why not talk about it a little bit while we're here so let's start with the beginning of the trip the packing so where does your packing checklist live and how does that work well it's a series of calendar events do you keep it in game center or like do you write on the back of a postcard and take a picture of it and save it in iCloud photo library

well i have a copy of stickies running in an emulator that's running mac os 9 stickies there is a version of it. I know. It's still there. I was using it for a while to remind me to press the button on Audio Hijack. So, nice. That's very nice. My packing list lives in two places.

You might be able to guess them. One is in my head. Oh, God. In the noggin. And the other is I have a reminders list that is before i go things to do that is that is essentially where it lives and this list is it just a growing list yeah i would say that it's it's not one of those sort of like standard i've got a list of everything i need to take we do that for some it varies uh depending on what trip i'm taking when we went to camp every

summer we had a camp list that we had compiled as we went that we knew like specific things that trip yeah and you forget yeah from the year before but for for most of these sorts of trips um what i what i have is and it's always there it's just usually empty uh before i go list and before i go list every time i think of something that i need to do before i go i need to post this podcast i need to record this thing I need to do before I go. I need to post this podcast. I need to record this thing. I need to send this thing. Whatever it is, I put it on the list. And then before I leave, I make sure that I've done all of those things.

And that means I don't necessarily do them all at the same time at the end. Sometimes I just will remember I need to do that and I'll go do it and then I'll check it off the list. But it does ensure that everything gets done. So I have a, I use Clear for this because Clear is like for me a perfect kind of checklist app. And I have just a packing checklist in Clear

that nothing ever gets deleted from. So all of the items I may ever need to pack for any trip are in Clear. And what I do is they're all deactivated. So I go in and just activate them all because you swipe to like check and check off but it doesn't delete unless you ask it to do that so i'll go in before the trip i'll take a look at everything in the list i'll activate all those items and then as i pack them i check them off again oh that's nice so it's just like a list that i add to over time as things change but it's for any trip i may ever need to take all

of the items should be in that list and then i just go in and and kind of activate and deactivate and then do my packing checklist so that's that's worked pretty well for me over time and and like i uh i only really i only use clear for that and clear is a lovely little application it's uh he hasn't received any love in the last couple of years i think it might just be a kind of feature complete and it just lives there um but it's a great little app for stuff like checklists like just very simple checklists like shopping lists and packing lists so that's that's kind of how i do it nice what devices are making your trip today what what kind of big devices are you bringing well i you know i like to travel just with my ipad yep but for this event i brought my ipad and my macbook air the macbook air um mostly because i have a lot honestly it's not i had

to edit the incomparable last week i i did it actually on a on the train from london to glasgow and um i used logic for that on the on the uh on the macbook air i could have done that in fair right on my ipad um but since i had the macbook air it is a little more efficient to do it there really for me it's as we mentioned i'm doing all radio and that's a lot of a lot of interviews it's a lot of podcasts and what i decided was i probably wanted to start processing those before i went home and they all require some processing it's not complicated but there are a lot of them and there will be a lot of processing and i just thought it would be more expedient to do that all on the mac and also that it is, the Mac is more flexible. And

if I have any issues that come up, if there's a technical issue, I feel like having a Mac with me is a little bit safer. And since I'm coming all this way to do podcasts, I felt like it would be irresponsible for me not to bring it. So it's one of those things that in another circumstance, I wouldn't have bothered. But it is an 11-inch MacBook Air. It's very small. It doesn't take up a lot of room. So it's fine.

And I had to bring the extra charger for it, but it's fine. Yeah, I brought my smaller iPad Pro, the 9.7. I used the Logitech Create. That for me, that combo is like the perfect travel machine because it's small and i got the full keyboard and i can you know that's what i was doing my outline work on this morning right but i do have my macbook as well um the 12 inch macbook i'm looking at it aka the macbook adorable because we're recording this show and in this show i could have gotten away with it and it's like oh jason can i borrow your macbook

but like i just this this computer is so small really for me the thing that was the the most that added the most weight is and and annoyance was bringing the usbc charger because it's just this big thing that you have to bring yeah but now i have my nintendo switch which is needs a usbc to charge and also i brought my android phone with me, my Pixel, because I'm going to use it to take some video stuff. So having a good USB-C charger is just a good thing to have. So I threw the MacBook in the bag because it's easy. Well, like the 11-inch Air, it's so small that it's really not that big a deal to bring it. It doesn't add so much weight to the already heavy ish bag that you would notice like what it adds obviously adds

something but it's adding so little in proportion to everything else i just brought it with me and it just makes things easier when i'm doing the shows if we weren't recording this show this this computer wouldn't be here right yeah and like i said i think if i weren't doing the old radio thing i wouldn't have brought it and the reality is i could i could have just come with my ipad and made it work even because i mean we're not recording into a computer no right now we're recording into the zoom um h6 recorder so yeah it's not necessary but um i think both of you and i made the we made the same, which was it was a little more efficient and a little more flexible and a little safer.

Safer is a good point, right? Because I like that word. I feel with some of the things that I do, I feel safer with the Mac than with iOS because it's more, it's just got a better lineage and history of doing certain tasks. And if you,

there are ways to work around problems on the Mac and on the iPad. This is something that we've talked about many times before. On iOS, if you hit the brick wall, you can hit it, and you may not have a solution. And we're fortunate to be in a place with lots of people with Macs, so we probably would. Although it's funny, you and marco arment have both told me that you didn't you refrained from bringing podcast equipment which is fine because i brought

all of it in my suitcase but you guys didn't need to if you if you need an emergency podcast at some point just let me know i've got all the microphones just always is on the hip yeah i'll just i'll pull out the microphones and you can do a podcast we had the meet we had our upgrade meet up earlier this week thank Thank you for everybody that attended. It was so great. It was excellent. And I was talking to somebody about if Apple were to bring really good audio support to iOS,

the kind of audio support that we're looking for, the ability to record and listen, and basically an audio engine like the Mac has, which would allow us to have a Skype call and then use another application to capture that audio. I still wouldn't trust it immediately because it's new. Right? And this is the trust thing. I know the Mac will do this because I do it on the Mac and I've been doing it on the Mac for actually seven years today. Actually, I've been podcasting for seven years. So congratulations to me. But I've been doing it on the Mac for that entire time.

And honestly, the failures that I've ever had, it's not because of the OS. It's not because of the apps. It's something I've done that breaks things. I don't have things that can't be repaired. Well, I had all the Mac Pro woes, but we don't have to talk about that right now. Yeah, I think comfort is a part of it and security is a part of it so for me like

i'm i'm comfortable in ferrite i know that you aren't but i am comfortable with that app and so i'm comfortable editing on ios it's a different experience but a lot of it is the again it's the details and that's what we would have in this scenario of yours that's what we would get is you know files transferring and being able to do two things at once and all of that and then yes this is what we both do for a living so there's a level of uh of of being careful and seeing how it goes and trying it out and and let's say the first time i try out if if the ipad gets an update ios gets an update and suddenly we can use it somehow so that i i don't need to travel with a mac to do all of the recording stuff we do the first time i do that is not going to be while i'm traveling certainly not

going to be one on five thousand miles away from home i'm going to do it at home so that if it fails i can switch to my mac exactly and then after a while of using that maybe i feel confident enough to take it on the road yeah most it's like i bring my mac on a trip like this for the same reason i pack an extra set of clothes right because it's whatever the the computer equivalent is of spilling something on your pants yeah you need another you need to change your clothes you need to actually need You need another, you need to change your clothes. What are you going to do? You need to change your clothes? I need to change your computer. Yeah.

I only brought one set of pants on this trip. And Lauren said, what happens if you spill on your pants? And I said, I guess I go wash them off or everybody gets to see me wearing my pajama pants for a little while. I'm not going to say I'm going to spill any soup on you. Don't spill any soup on me. I would like to see you walking around in your pajamas well i've also got a pair of shorts so i might just walk around in the shorts too i know i uh wanted to just you

know these are the devices are computing devices but they're not the only devices that we bring on a trip and i bring something like my nintendo switch on a trip like this is this your first time traveling with a nintendo switch yeah it's the first time i've been on a plane with it did you play with it yes on the plane yes i did i only had like a 90 minute plane journey yeah but it was incredible it was so good i just i for when we were taking off and landing i just had it in handheld mode right like i'm just holding it and playing. It's playing Zelda naturally. And then when we were, you know, just in the air and the seatbelt sign was off,

tray table down, stand it up and just, I disconnected the controllers and I can have the, the switch closer to me and my hands around the back of it. Oh, operating the controllers. Cause that's, you can kind of sit however you want.

And it was, it was incredible. Like, I mean, I'm in love with Zeldaoda i mean i will categorically say now it's the best video game i've ever played like i i think that it's just unbelievable and the switch system is so great for stuff like this um i'm very excited as more games come out over the next weeks they're bringing games out a lot but like big games and the next one is mario kart

at the end of the month which is a shame because by the end of the month because i'm traveling basically all of april and mario kart comes out on the 27th like the day i can't finish my travel but then i can play it at home yes that's right i am great i've got a uh i've got a kindle with me as well i actually read a book on the plane and you know i my other all my other entertainment is loaded on the ipad i've got i've got movies and you know netflix shows and things like that but i did bring the kindle oasis with me yeah for a trip like this for me i don't need to worry about movies um but on the trips i'm going to be taking over the next couple of weeks like one of them is going to be a trip to the US. You know, I'm putting stuff on there as well,

like movies and whatever. Like I know that there's always stuff on the plane to watch, but I like to use my own devices. Yep, my stuff, my screen. I just way prefer that to anything I get. Because as well, like the screens are never that great, no matter kind of where you are in the plane. And iPad is always going to be better

so that's what i bring there now i can see your backpack it's right over there and you're still using your trusty brent haven that we've spoken about in the yeah indeed this is the uh this is the ebay duplicate that i got that is a duplicate of the other one that's falling apart and you'll notice that mr james thompson who is all here at the conference uh if you look at his backpack you'll find it's identical um except in color but this bag is not made anymore the brent haven bag right they don't make this one no they don't so i ended up uh yeah and i've had it for like 15 years and i liked it so much that i realized that as it was falling apart maybe i could see if somebody was selling them that where they just had an old backpack around and sure enough on ebay i found a couple so for 20 bucks

i got a duplicate of it so i can just never change you better find another one my theory is that by the time these ones fall apart i will not be well enough to carry things on my back is that is that this be an old man that's my hope okay um i've got a new bag by a company called manal and i bought the bag that they make called the daily carry bag and this is the first trip that i've taken it on so this is a bag that i use kind of on my back um we both i mean they're not a sponsor of this episode but we both have our away suitcases that's why i got my clothes in and this is the first time that i've i've checked that bag and it's worked fine for me me too um but i have kind of all of my stuff in my backpack um and i've been really happy with this bag um it's made really nicely it's got a lot of compartments in it which i was looking for

and also everything opens flat which i really like so i can unzip parts and just open the whole thing up and i can get to what i need and the computer compartment is brilliant it has two neoprene slots so i can put a larger device and a smaller device in there and they're kind of held in by velcro nice and they're just suspended in the center of the bag so i can put macbook and ipad into this little compartment and it's done really well. The straps are super comfortable, like some of the most comfortable straps I've used. And the bag is relatively heavy right now, but it feels really excellent to put on.

This is a relatively new company. They're based in New Zealand and they had two successful Kickstarters, I think, one for their original bag and then they did one which had two bags because they do a carry-on bag and a daily bag and I have the daily bag um so i actually really really recommend it i'm i'm very pleased with this bag um so if if that sort of thing interests you then it gets a big thumbs up from me so a friend of mine uh his name is chase reeves and you've met chase he uh he actually

does hilarious and really entertaining bag reviews like backpack reviews on youtube i'll put a link in the show notes to his review of this bag because he is the reason i bought it because he did a really great job of explaining it and kind of going through it and reviewing it um so if you're interested in that you can go there he reviews a bunch of stuff so you can go see if there's a bag you're looking for. He's always got good solutions and good suggestions. So what's going in this carry-on bag? So my cable situation is mostly taken care of by the Anker USB wall charging hub thing.

So I have one of those. You just plug it into the mains and you have like 5 cables available to you so you can just plug a bunch of USB cables in so you're not searching for plugs all over the room and they have a new one now which I don't have but I will at some point upgrade to

which has USB type C and with the power delivery thing so it charges those devices quicker, that's going to be something that I will be getting in the future because that will charge something like this MacBook on my Switch really quickly or even my iPad because the 12.9-inch iPad has that fast charging thing

if you have USB-C power delivery. So I'm grabbing you one of those now. The reason that I like these devices is, say me and Adina are traveling together we need minimum four usb cables right and no hotel room on the planet gives you four plug sockets near the bed it just doesn't happen yeah they just don't do it i don't know why but it doesn't happen so these i really recommend these anchor usb things yeah i've thought about buying those and i just haven't done it um because my approach has been i still have a bunch of the you're using one right now

in fact i have a bunch of the long cables that i think apple doesn't even put in the box anymore that's the long power cable that clips into the apple power brick and then for international travel i just use a plug adapter and so what i end up doing is i have i think i brought three of those you just have these long cables just trailing all over the room one of the one of the ways you can get what i found is there are outlets around and they're often inconvenient and i have a long usb cable and i have these long plug plug cables and you put those two together and that outlet that's over by the window is far enough you can get you can get it to so you can put your apple watch or your by your bedside or your iphone by your bedside

and not everything needs to be by my bedside i can you know put the ipad across the room or whatever but um and so right now like here i traveled with three of those. And that was enough for me. But I'm intrigued by this because, yeah, the fact is when I travel, if it's all of us, we have my daughter's phone, my son's iPad, my wife's phone and iPad, and my phone and iPad. And at that point, we have six USB charge devices. So right now, what we do is everybody brings their own stuff and it works fine, but this would work better. Yeah. A couple of those and you'd be set.

You'd need one, but like you had two. I should just get one that's got six on it and I'd probably be done. Yeah. And I think those things are really good. Then you just need the one kind of European adapter or for me, in my case, a US adapter. Plug it straight into

the wall and you're good to go yeah what about battery packs do you bring any batteries with you i uh i try to i actually forgot to bring my little anchor battery this time that it's in the drawer at home but since i have the way the away suitcase um which again not a sponsor this week but um that has a battery in it yeah away carry on and little known fact about the away since they're not a sponsor um is for parts of asia it's not you're not allowed to bring the battery to check uh the suitcase with the battery in it didn't know in the rest of the world you are they say because it's attached there's specific regulations they've looked them up.

Because it's attached to the case and it's below a certain capacity, it's considered safe. But because in some places you may need to detach it, it comes with a little screwdriver that actually you zip inside. I didn't know that. And you can unscrew the case and the battery charger pops right out and i did that um because i was curious and i was looking all this stuff up and you can actually slide that out and put it anywhere and it's a fully functional battery pack even when it's out of the the suitcase it's just another big custom battery pack so um so i have used that a little bit but i normally i do have an anchor a little a little black kind of uh oval um cylindrical battery charger that i keep around for emergencies right it's that moment where your

iphone is about to run out of gas and and you need a little bit more to to get to a charger i was thinking about this i i over i overpack batteries um i have i have a mofi that i don't think they make anymore it's one of their power station ones but it has an integrated lightning cable in it and i found it in an airport a couple of years ago and i don't think they make this exact one but they do you know mofi do make a ton of different solutions so i have that which is just always there and it's like i can i can charge my phone and put both things in my pocket if I need to. Right. Because it's big, but not too big. So it's big. It's smaller than my phone. I also have a huge anchor battery called the anchor power core. This this is like one of

those batteries that will charge your phone five times. Right. Like this is a all else fails. Here is the battery that I have. And then and then on this trip, I also have my suitcase which has a battery in it. And I was thinking, am I... You're more battery than man now. Is this overkill was my thinking. And I kind of came down to two things in this. One, yes it is. But two, I care about having my devices with me at all times.

And this is a way to ensure especially when i'm doing long travel that i have access to those devices like if i'm traveling for 12 hours maybe on a plane or like from door to door like from when i leave sometimes i'm traveling for 18 hours something like that my phone will need it will need to be charged more than once most likely with the amount that i use it on a trip like that if i'm playing like games on my nintendo switch that's gonna need to get charged as well if i want to like i i if there is a solution for a problem when it comes to travel that can be solved by technology i will i will take that road right so i guess my question

would be do you really need it because so many you know planes so many planes now have power plugs or usb chargers always they don't always it's true you know it's true and then and how much how many times do you need i can see it look it's you can do as much as you feel you need to to be comfortable i think in the end this is it in the end if this relieves your stress then then that's fine for me i have i have driven a lot of this stuff out because i realized that it's not now it's stressing me out because it's unnecessary and i'm mad that i brought it and that that's the time when you kind of shed those but exactly because i feel like this is less of a worry than it used to be, that battery life has gotten better, that there are more chargers in more places.

And if you've got a battery that you bring with you, then you've got it for emergencies. I rarely need it for anything other than... Honestly, I rarely need it when I travel. It's when I'm at my destination and I'm not in my usual sort of charge all the time mode and I'm walking around with my iPhone and then at the end of the day, the iPhone, I've been using it heavily because I'm not at home and I'm out and about and that's when the iPhone battery drains, which is why I like having like that anchor battery

that I've got that I can keep in my pocket and I can actually charge my phone while I'm walking around just in my pocket. Back pocket's got the battery, front pocket's got the phone. So that's the most common place for me not on an airplane but it's happened I've had I've had an international flight and I was listening to music and doing another stuff and it ended up the my my phone was uncomfortably low for me and I was thinking I'm just getting off the plane in another country and my my phone's dying and I had my battery and i was able to charge it and then i

felt a lot better yeah i feel like i just have an increasing amount of devices in my life that require power yeah like my headphones now yeah well so this is the same thing we talked last week about how i got an electric car yeah and and despite the fact that 95%, 99% of the time we drive it will be within about five miles of our house, 10 miles of our house, we still spent most of our brain power the first week we had it dealing with range anxiety. Yep. And range anxiety is not just for cars. It's for any device with a battery. You know, there is the reality of when it runs out of battery and if you can survive. And then there is the anxiety part of it. And it is psychological. It is,

you're trying to plan ahead, you're concerned, but what if? But what if this lets me down? What if I end up in a situation where I can't do this anymore? And, you know, that's true for a laptop or a phone, just as it's true for an electric car. And you just have to manage it. And batteries do provide peace of mind. They also weigh. So you have to balance that out. I feel like when we're traveling with bags and stuff like we are right now, as opposed

to being out in an event where you just have your phone with you, that's one of the nice things about those little batteries is that you can just stick them. We can stick them in these bags and it's not a big deal to bring them in the bag. And then if we want to bring them with us out for the night, we can do that too. All right. So when we travel on, when we take these long trips, and people take long trips, they want to be entertained. So I wanted to kind of touch on some things that we would recommend or things that we're looking at right now for anybody that's got summer vacations coming

up how to entertain themselves but before we do that let me take a moment to thank squarespace for supporting this week's show use the offer code upgrade at checkout and you will get 10% off your first purchase squarespace lets you easily create that website for your next idea make your next move with Squarespace maybe you're looking to create a website to start a blog maybe you have a travel blog that you want to write so you can get people ready for their trips maybe you want to create an online store to sell that little thing that you've created

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when you're a plane yeah sometimes although i do more tv shows than movies only because i feel like it gives me more options to I'm not committing to watching the same thing for two hours I can watch an hour here and an hour there um I do sometimes watch movies on planes but it's a little more TV and do you choose kind of whatever you're watching right now do you have go-tos it's a combination I have some I have some comfort food like I um Doctor Who's coming back this next weekend and i have the not the last series but the previous series the eighth the first peter capaldi series um i want to kind of revisit him before the new season starts so i loaded i loaded those on yeah um using plex

actually i just downloaded them from my plex server onto my ipad so that's some some kind of comfort food um and i also have there are shows that i want to watch and that my wife probably doesn't want to watch yes that are fair game for a trip like this so i've got i've got some of that you know i've got some and these days what it is mostly is um stuff from amazon and netflix that i can download Now that those services both allow you to download videos to your device and watch them when you're off the internet, that has made a big difference. So those are my two techniques right now

is stuff from streaming services that are not on the queue to watch at home and then some favorites that I can just offload from my plex server um because plex lets you download to a device and so that was that couldn't be easier and sometimes if there's a show that i'm watching that my wife's not watching um that's on our our dvr um the tivo tivo has an app that lets you download those files too and you can download them locally yeah that's awesome yeah so i can i can walk away with i've got a few episodes on there too and has an app that lets you download those files too. You can download them locally? Yeah. That's

awesome. Yeah. So I can walk away with, I've got a few episodes on there too. And it's way more than I will ever possibly watch on this trip. But what it means is on my, you know, 13 hours of flights that I've got back to the US on Wednesday, I will have a bunch to choose from and I'll just see what I'm in the mood for. Now flying over here, I didn't watch anything because I read a book instead. But that was because that was what I was in the mood for. I just didn't feel like, you know, it's kind of hard to explain. Just I didn't feel like it. I didn't feel like sitting there and watching a TV show.

I just wanted to put in some music and read a book. Music, by the way, as I learned the hard way i think the last time i traveled um part of my checklist now my digital checklist is making sure that some of my favorite playlists are downloaded to my phone because now that i am using apple music and all of that and not syncing from itunes i need to make sure that i've got files stored locally sometimes feels like i mean i have no way of testing this but something i feel like should be downloaded like i feel like i would have downloaded this isn't well it's marked as purgeable just like on the mac and if certain apps in ios need free space uh the the stuff i think can be. Although it tries not to do it

with things you've explicitly downloaded. I'm not sure. But sometimes I've had that same thing and I don't know whether it's, have I not listened to this since the last time I upgraded my iPhone? Or is it just that they went away because they were just sitting there for a while

and now I need to get them back. But I did get stuck on a plane. I think when I was visiting my mom in Phoenix, so it was only an hour flight, but I got stuck on a plane where i looked at my music and i realized i had no music to listen to so i podcast and i listen to podcasts some too but i music was not going to be an option that's a big thing for me making sure i download shows because i just stream everything oh yeah yeah then you have to i download them all yeah but i still go back into the archive a lot

of times i'm listening to a show from way back so like for me it's magic tavern where i'm like 50 episodes back 40 episodes back and so i will go in and i'll just tap you know down do do do do download these five download these six of whatever podcast i'm listening to um going through the back catalog so i have those on the plane yeah my my my all-time kind of plane show is The Flophouse. And I actually had a couple of episodes that I was behind on. So I got those to listen to. That's great. But also, I've mentioned this show on this show before.

And it's My Brother, My Brother and Me. That's my show in which I'm going back. Right? Like you do with Hello. You're dipping into the back catalog. Yeah. Yeah. and it's my brother, my brother and me, that's my show in which I'm going back, right? Like you do with Hello. You're dipping into the back catalog. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know,

because it's just a lighthearted, fun show, it works for me on a plane because that tends to be most of what I can cope with on planes. Yeah, my only problem with podcasts on a plane is it's, I'm tired. I'm tired of these podcasts on this plane exactly right um that's a terrible movie podcast on a plane it's just people listening to podcasts it's really boring or recording shows of horrible sound quality my problem is um is it that stimulates me auditorily but not visually so unless i'm staring out the window i would you should be playing an iphone game or something uh that could be when i do that so i i don't do that as much

although i do it some um if i'm not in the mood honestly a lot of times it's like if i'm tired and like i don't i don't want to use my eyes i want to close my eyes they're they're dry because they've been in a plane i haven't slept, whatever the reasons, podcasts are good in those circumstances where I can kind of close my eyes and zone out and just listen to the podcast. So listen and close your eyes, unless you're driving. Zone out and listen to our voices

when it's time to rest your dry eyes. Are you on an airplane now? We're talking directly to you. Airplane people, relax. Play an iPhone game if you like. Close your eyes. Close your eyes. If you want to to if you're driving

pay attention to the road pay more attention um i for movies for me and and tv i always go with the comfort food route when it comes to planes yeah you know i always have real genius loaded on my phone do you on my phone on your phone in case immediate need in case i'm it's like carrying i carry a bar of chocolate with me when i go on a long trip just like feeling feeling you need some comfort there's a little there's a little chocolate for you and there's real genius godfather one and two good fellas okay and glengarry glenn ross wow they're always on my ipad you need a need some mob action mob violence serious just serious movies i don't know why they're just movies that i love i just absolutely i could just watch them over and over and over that's what it is

and also i've been very slowly going through curb your enthusiasm it's a show adina has no interest in watching even though she loves seinfeld she just doesn't click for her um and it is because it is just like 30 minutes of awkward yeah and sometimes it can be painfully awkward um and i just i've just been going through this show very slowly um and of course my another big huge source of entertainment for me right now is video games i mean i play a lot of iphone games like threes and um is remained i could be continuous and um autos autos adventure yeah is another game that like that continues to get a lot of play especially in these sort of scenarios because they're very mindless and easy and today on the train you were playing um what's it called type shift type

shift which is another great game i was playing that today that's that's a great game but i i don't know if that's going to be a timeless right like right like threes and like alto's adventure but i continue to play those games very frequently and especially when i'm traveling like these are these would be the games that i will play whilst i'm listening to episodes of the flop house nice so i mean i think do you i mean you've been reading right i mean i'm sure reading continues to be a big thing for you yeah i read an entire novel on the flight here did you read uh it's uh one of the nebula nominees and it's called borderline okay uh i wonder if i know who wrote it it's a um it's it's good it's like a noir story about um it's a book in black and white huh uh about fairy uh fairy people who can can cross over to um hollywood okay this is kicking up a kicking up a storm yeah no it's it's interesting because it

is written very noirish it's technically it's urban fantasy which is a genre that's very popular these days but um i felt like that it doesn't fit with my conception of urban fantasy because it feels more um to me like um like a uh a film noir where it's about hollywood and there's a there's somebody who's missing right and they're trying to find somebody and they they you know there's a the person who's called is a a kind of cranky unpleasant person like a like a noir detective and she has to find these but she's also then revealed to her as the fact that that fairies are real and they're problematic in many ways. And there are issues and they're the secret creative power that's powering Hollywood.

And so there's a whole other layer of like Hollywood over it. It is Borderline by Michelle Baker. And that was really great. So I read that on the plane over here. And on the way back, I will probably read one of the other Nebula nominees, Ninefox, Gambit, or Everfair. But Borderline was good. Really good. Took up the whole plane.

Didn't need to watch a movie. Had Borderline. We've been talking quite a lot in the past, and you have, on Six Colors, about flight tracking apps. Oh, yeah. Because our favorite app went away, Flight Track. Sad. Have you made a decision on which app you're using well the one that i'm gravitating to a lot is um is called flight update pro okay

um i've it's not pretty Not pretty, but it has all the information in it. Okay. And so I like that one. I've tried App in the Air, and it's a very beautiful full-featured app, but it's also a subscription app, and the subscription is priced for people who basically are business travelers and fly all the time. And I don't begrudge them that, but it's not an app that i'm i'm not willing to

pay the price that they're asking for it so although it's a beautiful app i'm not um i'm not gonna you know subscribe or or i think you can unlock all the features forever for like 50 bucks or something and it's just like i'm not gonna do that that's it's not enough of me. I am trying some others. Kayak is okay. TripIt is okay. TripCase is okay. I've got more work to do here, and probably when I get home, I'll kind of try to wrap it up and do some more testing too. But it's funny. The one I've been gravitating to is Flight Aware or Flight Update Pro

because it's pretty straightforward. It's got all my whole trip. Even though I'm using two different tickets on two different airlines because I had a flight in the middle from Glasgow to Dublin, it's all in there in one place and it's got all my details. And so I feel like it's the best one so far i'm using app in the air i paid for like i think you get like six months or something yeah and it's like 20 it's not cheap um oh no i pay for a year which is like 30 or something

i like it a lot it's good. Because it's a stupid amount of money to pay for a single app that all it's doing is this. I mean, it's not... Apps can be that price, but it doesn't really do a ton for what you do. Like, I'm used to paying that kind of amount of money for an application that the Omni Group make. If I was flying all the time, I would feel different about it.

But it's because I fly a lot. And you know what? The fact is, great flight tracking apps are going out of business because they were bought in the case of Mobiata, who did Flight Track Pro. But the business model is a question, right? Like, they need to develop these things, and they need to have access to the data,

and they need to do all of the stuff they need to do. So I don't begrudge them paying paying and there's a business traveler market for app in the air so it's actually like good for them that they're doing it and and you can see the results it looks very good they take a lot of care with it it's just that i i don't think i can prioritize it because i don't fly enough to do that oh i should, because we did get some feedback about this, that I always poo-pooed the idea of using airline apps. Because in the early days, the airline apps were awful. But I have to give it to them. I downloaded some airline apps for this trip and also for another airline that I use frequently.

And they're a lot better. If you're on an airline, it probably benefits you, even if you have another app, it benefits you to have the airline's app because they will send you push notifications, they will send you change information, and it's often where you can stash your boarding pass if it's not in wallet.

So I had the United airlines app on this trip and and it was not bad um i don't know if i would rely on it on its own but it was it that was a good tip that i i had i just written them all off and they were actually um worth downloading yeah i the the airlines i tend to fly with the most are uh british airways virgin and delta and all of their apps are i think they were built on the same platform honestly yeah i think someone's made a platform and there's a white label for airlines yeah but it's good good because like ba was ba's was a good app and virgins was terrible. And then they changed it and they started to look very similar. And now I find them fine. This is Virgin Atlantic.

And yeah, they do what I want them to do. Now, App in the Air, it's an expensive app. I want to pay it because I want the features that it has. Like the real-time notifications and just a lot of the stuff that it does is things that i want and using on this trip i feel vindicated in my decision because it's the app i'm looking for yeah it is for me it's a good replacement and enhancement on flight track because it's doing everything flight check was doing and it also offers some extras as well and it has good customization it has some tools that i don't want like it can automatically check you in for flights like i just don't want to do that but it really is focused around people that take more than one

or two trips a year and you know i'm you keep saying this but like i'm going to be taking like eight or nine airplanes in april right i'm going to be taking eight or nine flights in april so after your year with it you'll know yeah if if you if you look at the price and go oh do i really want to pay again or if you say yeah got it no brainer right yeah then i'll know so but that's the one that i've that i've gravitated towards it looks like it's the best one my my frustration with it is the price and also it seems like i think i have to i think i could sign up and it's a trial and then they'll charge me but it's one of those things where yeah it's the standard apple 14 day but like that you know the canceling is is better but still not great you know yeah

what would you like to see improved upon to kind of make traveling better. For me, one that jumps out is USB-C. The rising of USB-C, for me, makes things a lot better because I think about most of the technology that I bring with me on a trip. If USB-C could make it to iOS devices, it'd be the only cable I would ever need. And I would like that, to not have to be like, did I have such and such cable? Did I have X cable? Did I have Y cable? It's just like, bring a bunch of cables,

they're all the same. I like the idea of that. Yeah, it's going to be a long time before USB-C is common, because USB-A is so common. I mean, we still have hotels with dock connector radios and things, right? The one I'm looking at right now has both a dock connector a lightning and micro usb so this hotel is is with the time yeah that's actually pretty impressive because most of the hotels i stay at all the connectors have the dock connectors they got burned they aren't going to reinvest in in their hardware so it'll be a while. USB-A, the nice thing is we'll have adapters or converters or something. And we'll get there eventually. But I agree with that. I think that one of the nice things about the fact that basically all electronic devices charge on USB is airlines started to add power plugs.

is airlines started to add power plugs and now they seem to have converted where they are they are embracing usb which is better because especially if you're flying between countries everybody's usb plug is the same yeah exactly instead of having to to adapt it and and they're small so that you can put them more than one of them in a place. You put two or three in the same place that you put one of your enormous UK plugs, right? Safe UK plugs. Yeah, safe and enormous. Safe. And enormous.

Anyway, yes. So that would be the more USB, the better, I think, in general. USB-C will get there eventually, but just having USB would be the more USB the better I think in general USB-C will get there eventually but just having USB everywhere and also as a man who lost his wallet six days before he was going to be taking international travel

and I had to get all the cards replaced and ID replaced I can't believe that our money is tied behind these pieces of plastic that could be lost. I find it just started to make me think about the fact that we still don't have a real kind of digital lifestyle in this way. Like, Apple Pay is great.

But it's still tied to your card. It's still tied to a card. It still doesn't work everywhere, and it's still limited by price. Do you think a bank one one day we'll do a uh like an apple pay credit card that they literally never send you a card there's no reason why they couldn't all they need to do is generate a number it doesn't need a card but they do yeah like i know that it's tricky because of things like the numbers on the back, the CCV numbers and stuff. But you could work around that. Sure.

You know, but like my thinking is just, you know, why doesn't my bank just have an app, which is this payment app which ties into Apple Pay? Like, that's all I ever do? You know, like, and I know there's so many things about the system that are not built for this. But it's just, it's crazy to me that, like, I can lose my wallet and then I have no money but think about it you can lose your wallet but you still had apple pay

i did which was great but then i had to cancel my card and i couldn't use apple pay that hasn't happened to me when i've done it they've sent me they've sent me a new card and my apple pay has continued to work dependent on bank implementation oh so they changed the number of my card they don't always do this because i lost it they changed the number and depending on how a bank implements that i did a little bit digging on this there's different ways you can implement it and it can be that if the number is changed on the card the long card number which doesn't usually change when you have a typical renewal. It will cut the support.

So my Apple Pay support was cut when my card was cut, so I had no access to money. And it just made me think, like, it is just surprising to me that we still have our money tied behind these

little pieces of plastic. It just seems strange. Time to live the cash-only lifestyle, Mike. No, that's the wrong... Cash, cash, cash. That's going in the wrong direction, Jason. Cash it in now. No, you're not doing this correctly. That's the wrong direction.

It was good that we went from cash to cards, but now we need to go from cards... To cash. Back to cash. God, no. I think we have to move on. I it's time for ask upgrade this week ask upgrade is brought to you by our friends at mac weldon they make the most comfortable underwear socks shirts undershirts hoodies and sweatpants that you're ever going to put on your body mac weldon is better than whatever you're wearing

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Listeners of this show can get 20% off at MackWeldon.com. That's M-A-C-K-W-E-L-D-O-N.com by using the code UPGRADE for that 20% off. Thank you so much to Mack Weldon for their support of this show and RelayFM. Time for Ask Upgrade, jason's now thank you so much for the laser accompaniment robert asked what is jason's preferred blu-ray blu-ray ripping it's difficult to say uh method and equipment used well i'll reference a post that i wrote a couple years ago on six colors that maybe we can put in the show notes of course it will be that is about how i rip blu-rays and i i go into all the

details i i bought a blu-ray usb drive quite literally called how i rip dvds and blu-rays yeah oh that's it and uh it's got a link to the the the drive that i bought on amazon for i don't know 50 bucks it's a usb blu-ray drive and i use make mkv is the name of the software that extracts uh blu-ray and turns it into a giant mkv file and then you can either use handbrake at that point or you can use don melton's transcoding scripts which are a little harder to set up and if you're afraid of the command line like mike hello don't do that but uh don has done a lot of work with presets to make the uh sort of the best trade-offs but you can also just use handbrake at that point and point it at the mkv file

and uh and do it and i still do it that way and then at that point i um i put it on my server and and it's on plex and i can watch it on my tvs or my devices wherever I want. Yeah, if I have ever ripped a DVD or whatever, I do it via Handbrake. Yeah, and Handbrake doesn't do Blu-ray directly, basically, so you use MakeMKV, which is not free, although it may be free to try, but it will do the job of pulling out the video file, and that's what I do because i i prefer in general

uh i'll play a blu-ray from time to time but um our blu-ray player is our xbox and so you know you start up the xbox and then you have to launch the player and it's got unconventional controls because it's a game system and it's not my it's not my preferred way i i actually would rather rip that blu-ray and then just watch it on plex yeah ben has been looking all over he's done his research and he's coming to you because he cannot find the answer to his question ben wants to put his photos library on multiple macs without icloud is this possible um If you have a server or some device running with like an AFP, like a standard Apple kind of server connection, and I think it's got should be able to open that library over the network, but it's going to be really slow unless you're like on a gigabit network

and all your computers are wired. But if you're over Wi-Fi and it's a big library, it's going to be really slow. So it's not really made to do this outside of iCloud. That's sort of the point of it. Can you save the location of the library in a cloud storage solution? The location of the point of it um can you save the location of the library in a cloud storage solution the location of the library because the the library is pulling from like it's a file isn't

it it's like a big bundle file well yeah it's a package with all the files in it so you have to put that somewhere where photos can read it and photos want it to be box no no okay it has to be and i don't yeah that that's a bad idea okay because then it would sync it but they'd get out of sync and that would be that would be incredibly bad i don't i don't recommend do not follow mike's advice no you can't you can't do that so i'd say i hate to say it the other solution here is to buy a big hard drive and put it on the hard drive and connect it to the computer you want to and that'll be the fastest of all these solutions just walk it around yeah but um but their photos the app is not made to do this because they want you to use iCloud and if if

the alternative is to use some other some other system but yeah so there are ways but they're not ideal okay uh Oplayz asked do you buy the cellular and Wi-Fi iPads or just the Wi-Fi only ones? My current iPad is a cellular plus Wi-Fi. I think I wrote a six colors piece about this too. Of course you did. Of course you did. Well, you got to use all the parts of the Buffalo. So yeah, my rationale was that I wanted it for kind of flexibility since this was the iPad Pro and I expected to use it for a while. And since it's kind of unlocked, it gives me the flexibility to... I have the T-Mobile deal where I get 250 megs or something of free data every month.

It's not a lot, but there's a little bit there. I signed up for that, actually. And the reality is I basically never use the cellular features on it and i have it it's like that range anxiety we're talking about i am almost never in a place where i don't have wi-fi and am using an ipad yeah like if i'm at a cafe they have wi-fi so it it very rarely happens i thought about it that if i had it i might wear it i might use it in places like cafes where the wi-fi is poor i might use the cellular instead and not bother with the cafe wi-fi and not get frustrated by it um but if that had happened enough i would have

done that by now it would take one call to at&t and ten dollars a month to put this on my AT&T plan. And I haven't done that either. So I've got it. And I've got it sort of for safety and comfort. But in reality, I don't use it. So my, my travel iPad, the one my 9.7 is cellular, my other one isn't. And my reason I bought the Wi Fi and the 12.9 is I wasn't sure if I was going to like that device when I bought it. Like I was interested in it, but I wasn't in the iPad camp that I'm in now. And that's fine because that device stays at home, right? So it doesn't need it.

But the 9.7, it comes out with me and I use it whenever I travel. I use the cellular on that thing because most of the places I go to in the US is faster. And so I get the T-Mobile because i have a t-mobile account um and so i get that right so i sign up and i have a u.s t-mobile account because i have a u.s t-mobile sim for my phone and then and then it's easy to uh to buy more data yep from t-mobile which is or anywhere free this is i use this all over the world because you could just use i I have an Apple SIM in there. Right.

So I can just buy anything. Any plan for like a set period of time. In fact, I thought about doing that here in Ireland. And I haven't done it, but I thought about the same thing, right? With the Apple SIM, you just turn it on and see what you get and what the deals are. If you travel, I think you should get the cellular. Yeah, for me, it's just that I always have my phone with me in those circumstances,

and so it's generally not a big deal. Tethering is good, and I tether a lot, but I also like having my own connection with that. Because then I'm draining the batteries of both devices. Yeah, I see it, and I would use it more. I mean, I would use it if I had it, but it just hasn't escalated to the point where i thought i need to do this yeah that makes sense dave asked given the success of amazon's echo uh do you think that they would make another attempt at a phone if you remember they made a phone called the fire phone um i don't think that these two things go together uh the echo the echo success

is not a story that's easy to tell because they may have sold 150 000 of those for all we know there's just a chart because they don't talk about it that's right the success that we refer to is how people that use it feel about it and a lot of people that own one really like it. Does that translate into other people buying them? We have literally no idea right now. And phones are just entirely different devices. It's a completely different thing. In fact, you're seeing Android phone makers talking with Amazon about integrating the Echo technology,

the lady in the canister, their devices which makes a lot of sense so does amazon really want to to build hardware that's a vehicle for for this they failed so hard with that fire phone they could try they could scale it back right they could do something that was an amazon phone that stock you know that's it's because amazon's not out of the android business right the fire tablets and the fire tv are all android based so they could do a new fire phone that is much more stock android like or much more much less like 3d cameras and super weird and um integrate this technology this voice technology i think it's possible i'm sure they're prototyping stuff like that all the time because it's not like they have they have a custom version of android that has their own app store it would not be it would not

be a lot for them to do this and now they have their their voice agent but i i would say that it would learn the lessons of the fire phone and be a much more understandable normal phone. And then they would use the power of Amazon, right? They'd use their ability to, you know, maybe it's got a, for Prime members, there are features that it has. Maybe if you're a Prime member, you pay very little for your, you know, your service or something. And it's a weird reselling.

I don't know. It's possible, I guess I would say. but it's not going to be the Fire Phone. And I do think that they got burned a little bit by the Fire Phone. Oh, I see. Yeah. And so I think they're going to be a little more careful. Finally today, Brent asked, Do you think that the new modular Mac Pro will be previewed at WWDC or the full event like the trash can was?

Brent, I think it's too early. I think WWDC 2018 will be the first time we see anything about this product. Yeah, you may be right. Because the idea here, most people seem to believe that this is a relatively recent decision on apple's part like it's from everything that i'm hearing and seeing like it was maybe a matter of weeks from when this thing became an actual thing before we found out about it what they said was that they said they made this decision they didn't make this decision this year but if that's true i would say it happened in december because it has not been very long and i've heard that it's

been a much more recent decision than that it's like they may be places i think apple's being careful about the way they're talking about it i think they they began thinking about if the mac pro was going to live again yeah about maybe about four or five months ago but the actual like do we have a product we can make i think that has been a very recent decision and it takes a long time to make a new product. So if they only now are discussing what the new product is going to be, I think we'd all like them to do

sort of a crash course here and get it out quickly. But it's going to be next year. And so, you know what? I don't see them showing a Mac Pro at the iPhone event, right? I don't think it's going to happen. No way.

So more likely they will... You're right. I think if I had to say what the most likely time that Apple would show a new Mac Pro, it would be WWDC 2018. I agree. I think that's fine.

Yeah. I mean, Mac Pro buyers want it sooner. They'll want it January 1st. Of course they will. But that's not going to happen. The iMac, I think the iMac will fill a gap for a lot of people, but we need to see that soon. Yeah, what's that new iMac and what's that iMac Pro style,

the higher-end iMac? We'll see. What's that going to look like? And I think that's going to help a lot of people. And at least they may show in this announcement a renewed commitment that makes Mac Pro owners happy. Like they maybe show something which is like, ah, there you go. Like that's the type of thing we want to see, right? And that may help kind of keep the goodwill going with the idea that Apple knows

and maybe we'll give updates, you know, to say, hey, we're still working on it and this is the type of thing we're thinking about. But I think it would be from a goodwill perspective, like the biggest bang for your buck, the place you do this is at WWDC. You've got all those people in the room, you've got some whooping and some hollering, because that's not going to happen

anywhere else. But it will happen at WWDC. And if they can get a product out before then, I'll be surprised right like this stuff takes a long time it's not this isn't a quick thing especially if they are they are starting from scratch and if you listen to which people showed the excellent atp from last week they they went through the list of of things this needs to do and and i would say think back to the power mac g5 the power mac g5 enclosure was also the mac pro enclosure until the trash can that that was a

decade long enclosure and it varied on the inside they did some different things in different models but they built something to last and be a platform for different technologies to come in and out to have the have different kind of airflow systems all all still running sort of front to back and they had the water cooling at one point i mean and they changed processor architectures but kept the device the same on the outside right i would think that if apple's gonna pay all this attention to the mac pro this time when it really obviously large parts of apple don't want it and don't think that it's going to be the best return on the investment but it's something they need to do well if you're going to design it and i'm i'm managing that i'm going to be the best return on the investment, but it's something they need to do. Well, if you're going to design it, and I'm managing that, I'm going to say, design me something that's going to last me 10 years, that is as flexible as possible. Put in the work now so we don't ever have to work on this thing again in the big picture for a

decade. And we'll tinker around the margins after this. But this is your shot to get something. And I want it to not not i want you not to come back to me in three years and say oh we didn't anticipate this thing anticipate all the things this is this is this should be the last one right because if you imagine in 10 years time it's very likely that technology is moving in a different direction that we can't anticipate so approach it that way take take the take the time and my point is if you're going to do that you're not going to slap something together in six months and it's not going to be a triangle and it's not going to be a triangle triangles are scary they'll kill you you stay away from triangles go back to

squares i mean like i i would be very surprised if we get a whiz-bang-dazzle machine. No, I think it'll have a sleek case with some curves and things. It will look beautiful. But in the end, it's going to be a box with a computer in it. You will see a lot of function one out of a form in the overall industrial design, which is the right way to go. In fact, I feel like the story here is ultimately going to be that story, which is people who thought even the Mac Pro should have consumer things applied to it, which is we're going to do wacky stuff that's right at the edge of tolerances and make this make this trash can mac um they won out over the people who are like you

know what people like marco and john who say you know what we really want is you to update the chips every year with the fastest chips possible and and that's all we really care about. This decision seems to be finally an understanding within Apple that that is the right approach, that that is the way to do it, that the pro market doesn't need to follow consumer rules. It needs to be served. But it may take some time for them to get that final product out because I do think they need to do it right, not just do it fast. Let me do my best johnny ive here okay we see designers more than just on the outside

design is on the inside too and then he opens the case right yeah they show all the the wonder that sits inside of the mac pro but there'll still be a you know a curved something or a funny something and all that and they'll say look at this flourish. Chamford cases. Once you see the rose gold of the new Mac Pro. Oh yeah, that's what I want. That's how you get me to buy one. Put it in rose gold.

I think that wraps it up for this week. I think so. It's been a pleasure to have two upgrades in person with you. I know. We'll do it again before the end of the year certainly in june right june maybe in august maybe if i uh if i uh come to memphis for members week relay host con members in memphis we'll see but yeah thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of upgrade if you want to send in uh ask upgrade questions just tweet at us with

hashtag ask upgrade and we'll answer your questions at the end of the show If you have a Small Talk topic That you would like me to discuss with Jason Hashtag Snell Talk Small Talk, you're confusing it They're going to give you hashtag Small Talk Well that's going to go to somebody else That's to Jason Small

Questions, AskUpgrade, Small Talk is Snell Talk I see what you're doing I'm phrasing. I'm making sure the questions are diverged. We're in sync now. I don't want people to ask me, what do you think about the Mac Pro and snail talk? No, that would be a disaster.

That's what that's for. It's like, you know, how's the baseball season? Yeah. See? I'll just say it's good. It's good. It's good. Mac Pro's doing great.

I've seen it. It's lovely. And then we just move on. It's just small talk, so we're not going to get into details. If you want to find Jason online, he's at sixcolors.com. If you want to go to find more of his shows, they're over at The Incomparable. Of course, he has many more on RelayFM as well.

We're going to be recording Glockwise live at all, and we'll be doing that in person. I'm going to be taking the place of Dan Moran for the day. And if you want to find Jason in in person for the next i don't know 48 hours yeah he's in the europe hotel in killarney in england otherwise you won't find me you can find him and i don't know i said a secret word what's the secret word this time i uh pineapple pineapple say pineapple and we got a sticker for you oh nice i've got some stickers you got the stickers say pineapple to Mike. If you're here, if you're at the Europe and you say pineapple,

say pineapple sticker because then I'll remember because last year we said banana. People keep saying banana to me. I had no idea why they were saying it to me. And I will give you some stickers. And I'm online. I'm at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to our lovely sponsors of this week's episode, the fine folk over at Encapsular Squarespace and Mack Weldon.

But most of all, thank you for listening, and we'll be back next time. Say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley. Thank you.