Upgrade - 142: You Want Applause

Episode Date: May 22, 2017

Jason and Myke discuss potential hardware announcements at WWDC--what they might be, and what message they might send. We also discuss a little bit about Google IO, including announcements about Google Photos and emoji, and get a little misty while thinking about Steve Jobs’ last product, Apple Park.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 142 today's show is brought to you by mail route pdf pem 9 from smile and encapsula my name is mike hurley and i am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Don't panic. Sorry, it's 1.42, so I have to do a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference. Oh, of course you do. Any 42 increments, so there it is. Don't panic. Always know where your towel is, Mike. Always know where your towel is.

I would be crazy to know, too. Jason, Matthew wants to know, for hashtag Snell Talk, what is your most anticipated movie or TV show for this coming year? It's funny. I was just watching the first episode of Twin Peaks, which I probably wouldn't have said anticipated because I sort of, as somebody who was really into that show when it was on 25 years ago, I am actually, I was concerned about this being really bad. But having watched the first 20 minutes, it seems to be exactly the same as what the old show was, which is weird and slow and deliberately frustrating the viewer. And I was like, all right, good. It's not, it hasn't disappointed me yet. Anyway, it wouldn't count because I took this to mean in the next year,

starting today, starting right now, in the next year of the things that I know about, what's the thing that I'm anticipating the most? At this point, I will refer you to this weekend's episode of The Incomparable that was just posted, which is all about our deconstruction of the trailer for the brand new Star Trek show, Star Trek Discovery. So that is my most anticipated thing in the next year. This fall, there will be a new Star Trek TV show, and I am excited excited about it how long has it been since there's been a star trek tv show i don't know when enterprise went off the air a long time though right like this many many many years uh more than a decade 2005 uh enterprise went off the air 2005 so yeah so 12 years 12 plus years since the last star trek tv show it's the longest gap, you know, basically since the original gap between Star Trek and Star Trek The Next Generation. So that was 17 years, 16, 18 years, something like that.

I've never seen Twin Peaks. It's weird. And I've never really watched Star Trek shows desirably. I just assume you haven't seen anything. I just go with that as the default. Twin Peaks was a real phenomenon at the time, even when there was no social media or anything like that. It was a rapidly rising kind of fan culture.

I went to a diner in San Diego to watch episodes of that with people who were fans of the show to watch it as it aired on ABC. I have a coffee mug. I still have. I tweeted a picture of it the other day that a friend of mine got when he visited Snoqualmie, Washington, where they shot a lot of the exteriors of the show. And Twin Peaks coffee break mug.

Still have it. And now 25 years later, it's back. It's a weird show. It was weird at the time. It was so unlike anything on TV. And it'll be interesting to see how they did uh this year or the show this this time but it looks it looks appropriately weird so they at least they got that going for it i really don't want to be that guy and i'm so sorry to ask but 25 years ago

how did you even find out that something like an event like that was going on well you know 25 years ago the media landscape in the united at least, was so flattened that there were three networks. I don't know if Fox even counted at that point. Broadcast television networks. And everything they showed when it premiered. And the question of who killed Laura Palmer that drove the first year and a bit of the show was a real zeitgeist kind of moment for television. So it spread word of mouth and people tuned in for the pilot because they were intrigued by the promotion for it, I guess. And it just kind of kept going. And then, yeah, I just heard from somebody that, or maybe we even saw it in an article in a newspaper that there were fans gathering at this diner because a diner is a main set in Twin Peaks.

And they were watching the show and I thought that would be fun. And I went with some people to do that a couple of times. And yeah, it was, and we had like viewing parties at college too in somebody's apartment. They'll be like, come on over. We're all going to watch this.

And you know, you get 10, 12 people sitting in a living room watching a show together. It was pretty, pretty wild stuff, but it was definitely of the moment in the early nineties. If you have a question you would like us to talk about

at the start of this show, just send a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and we'll include it. Let's do some follow-up i saw today that there are some new nike plus bands jason uh these are all there's four colors they're going on sale at the start of june for 49 dollars each um they're all solid colors this time um i think with the include actually not completely solid but they're not like massively, uh,

contrasting colors, you know, like between the holes and the band. Right. So like they are, they're like a gray, a blue, a purple and a darker blue.

And they're meant to represent day to night. So like a day to night schedule, they, they, they all, uh, are to mirror a color of the sky and the the holes you know i got the holes in the nike plus bands the colors that they're filled in with a less like clashing this time so that

doesn't stand out so much these look really nice and they're going to be limited edition at select nike stores um apple stores and at apple.com so go check those out great interested one one of us one of us is very interested in watch bands and the other one of us is not so great I haven't bought any in a while though these ones whilst they look nice I'm not so interested in sport bands anymore

yeah we're a couple of weeks away from WWDC so not only are our topics pretty much focused on that over this week and coming weeks and previous weeks, of course, so is our follow-up. A couple of things that I want to let our listeners know about, Jason. The first off is a second meet-up that RelayFM is going to be putting on. So we had a meet-up.

The tickets sold out incredibly quickly, and we have a really large waiting list so we've teamed up with the Women at WWDC organization to host a meetup at the App Camp for Girls benefit that they have every year so this is the City National Civic it's going to be on June 7th at 7pm the tickets, you have to buy tickets for this but their money supports

a great cause which is App Camp for Girls so you'll be able to go to that event and we're going to have a little section inside of the City National Civic, which is going to be dedicated for a real AFM meetup. So there's going to be a bunch of hosts there who will be in attendance. We'll be there, so come and say hi, and you'll be able to feel good for supporting a really, really great cause. There'll be links in the show notes for you to go and get yourself a ticket for that.

So come and say hi. for you to go and get yourself a ticket for that. So come and say hi. And maybe the most important news of the season next week will be the upgrade keynote draft for WWDC 2017. So we are frantically now putting together our list of rumors that we will be able to pick from for our draft. There will be rules next week.

There are rules. We have instituted a series of rules to try and make the drafts as drafty as they can be. Well, it's that sort of thing of, does it get mentioned on stage versus is there a silent press release? And we've got all those rules and they will be enforced by Stephen Hackett.

Yep. In person enforced, right? Because we're all going to be at wwdc so he will be able to tick off as the keynote is going on you know yes jason yes mike you know and then we can argue about it a little bit but steven will be there to be the ultimate decider yeah if we cannot that basically steven's role is in if me and jason cannot come to an agreement on something then we go to steven as uh our adjudicator to right because if we can if if we can work it out amongst ourselves i think that's that's fine we don't need to have

him the worst thing would be if he came in and made a decision that we just both disagreed with exactly nobody wants that nobody wants that so that's why we uh we have we have him as an adjudicator but if you have any suggestions of rumors for us to include, tweet them to me. I'm at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E on Twitter. I'm going to be collecting those up, and then me and Jason will make our silent choices. We need to decide how many rounds we're going to have.

We haven't done that yet. And then we'll be doing our picks next week. Yep. All right, this week's episode is brought to you by our friends at Encapsular, the multifunction content delivery network that boosts the performance of your website, protects it from denial of service attacks, and secures it from bad guys whilst ensuring high availability. To activate your Encapsular service, the protection that you want for your site,

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create custom rules to meet your exact needs. As a listener of this show, you can get one whole month of service absolutely free. All you need to do is go to encapsular.com slash upgrade. That's I-N-C-A-P-S-U-L-A dot com slash upgrade. This is where you can find out more and claim your free month. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. So last week we were talking about some potential hardware that may be on stage at WWDC, right?

We were talking about Siri in a can, and we were talking about the 10.5-inch iPad, which have both been rumored by Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities. Well, since the episode was posted, Mark Gurman and Alex Webb at Bloomberg, they have proposed the idea that they, from sources who may be familiar with the matter, that Apple will

be refreshing their laptop line at WWDC as well this would include a new version of the 12 inch MacBook the current MacBook Pros they will receive faster Kaby Lake processors along with some potential other changes but definitely the Kaby Lakes processors, along with some potential other changes, but definitely

the Kaby Lakes is what they're saying. And possibly new processors in the 13-inch MacBook Air. Nothing else changed, but new processors in the MacBook Air. The argument that they have made is that they're trying to compete with

Microsoft's current offerings. Now, on this front jason allow me to see if i can can can try and extract what they're getting at here because obviously they are not trying to compete on sales here because i'm pretty sure i mean i don't have numbers but just historic numbers and just anecdotally what you see out in the world, Apple will just, like, walk in the floor, like, walk in the floor and cleaning the floor with Microsoft's sales of these products, right? Like, MacBooks and MacBook Pros, you know. We don't know what the Surface laptop will sell like, though. That is the first real, like like not weird tablet convertible thing that they've done in that line so I think it's just a timing argument the idea that Apple is

is going to ship presumably systems in mid-June because Microsoft made an announcement in May is ludicrous because that's not enough time to do that. That strikes me as being a very narrative, you know, layer of narrative frosting on top of this story. Like, how do we connect all these dots and make it seem like it's part of an ongoing narrative? They put in the Microsoft response thing. I think it might be a response to all the criticism of Apple not updating its products, especially its laptops, as often as it should. I think that's reasonable. I think that this may be a reaction to Apple learning that the way it was handling this

was a mistake and they were being rebuked by people in the market. But as the idea that Apple saw the Surface laptop and went, oh no, what do we have? Can we put some new chips and things i come on so the what i well the way i read this or the way that i think about this and the only way that i could assume that this is in response to microsoft at all is just to change the pr narrative a little bit sure right like like apple has received criticism for their laptop offering microsoft is receiving praise. So they may have had this stuff nearly ready,

but didn't want to pollute WWDC with it. But now they'll spend five minutes, put it on a slide, and it's there. Yeah, I mean, it's possible. That's the sort of thing you can do. But the products have to be there. The products with the updates have to be there. And if this is an impetus to ship them at a particular time or announce them at a particular time, fair enough. I mean, I definitely, when I wrote my piece the other week

about comparing the Surface laptop to Apple stuff, it was very clear that the strongest argument was they need to be refreshed, right? It's not that, oh, Microsoft got you, you can't catch up. It's like, no, you're out of step. Microsoft's got one step ahead because they've got the newer processors. And if you refresh your product line, you could probably, if you're Apple, get back in line and have it not be an issue anymore. This is all true. It's just a better story that way. And I think maybe the way to really say it is everybody kind of caught Apple sleeping and then Microsoft releases products in that category and everybody says, see, Apple is sleeping. But it's more, you know, that's not quite cause and effect there. But I'm intrigued by this story.

There are two aspects of it. There's what Apple is doing here. And there's the WWDC question, which actually feeds into our more esoteric keynote bingo issue, which is, if Apple did this, how would they do it? And then separately, like I said, the what of it? What is this that they would be doing? And they're both interesting questions, I think. I don't know how I feel about this one, honestly.

Search your feelings, Mike. I just think that if all it is, is processor updates, like that's pretty much all there's going to be for the Pro line. I don't know if I see them putting it on stage. The wording of the 12-inch MacBook is new version, right? So it might be something more substantive. But if you think about how Apple does most of their presentations, and the WWDC presentation is a little bit different, but they're all still in the ballpark. There is usually an update section where they talk about all the product lines before they sort of dive into the details. They try to give you kind of a status

report on other stuff that's going on at the company. And that can be an area that they want to highlight. It can be, we're going to talk about accessibility, or we're going to talk about health. It could be, we're going to talk about environmental stuff and sustainability. But they also will say, let me tell you how Apple Watch is doing. level of like mac os ios watch os and i would argue probably the apple watch goes into the watch os section because there's not a lot there that those are going to be the big topics of the day right because that that's the uh os rollout opportunity and tv os easy to forget but still important sorry apple tv uh tv os as well right they're going to talk about the platforms totally going to do that but they have the opportunity at the beginning to say, let me tell you how our Mac hardware business is doing. Right. And within that, I think it is not unreasonable that you can slide in a product announcement. Like you could say, Hey, people love, again, I'm going to do like I did on six colors last week when I wrote a fake

introduction for the Siri speaker, um, like in dialogue of Tim Cook and Phil Schiller, which was really weird, but it was kind of fun to do it. Fan fiction for Apple. They would say like, people love the MacBook. It's great. It's the best thing ever. People love it, right? Because that's what they always do. And they're like, but you know, we thought it could be better. And people had some complaints and we took them to heart. And today we're announcing that there's a whole new MacBook that's even better because it's got fill in the blank. If they really have something that's a little bit different,

it's got two ports. It's got Thunderbolt support. Whatever it is that it's got, if they've got something that's substantially different, they could say that. And then in passing, they could probably say, also, we've heard the feedback. We know you want the latest and greatest Intel processors.

So today, the new MacBook Pros with Touch Bar are shipping with new Kaby Lake processors. And the MacBook Air, which continues to be an incredibly popular product with a certain set of customers, is being updated to the latest Intel Core i5 and i7 processors. Yay. Moving on. Right? I mean, that's all it takes, right? moving on, right? I mean, that's all it takes, right? Is that they'd spend two minutes or three minutes on the MacBook if it truly is a sort of second generation body model instead of just a speed bump. And then they just mentioned in an aside, because I think you wouldn't just relegate

it to a press release. I think you'd mention it as an aside because it's an applause line, right? Developers are going to applause if you say the MacBook Pros that we shipped last fall have just gotten turned over again with new processor generations. They know what that means and they care about that. So that's an applause line. You wouldn't forego applause on stage, right? You want the applause. So I could see that. And then if the MacBook is just a speed bump of the MacBook, then I still can see that in the Mac line, you'd say, you'd say today, you know, we're making all three of these products better with new processors. Yay. Everybody applaud. And maybe they say, we're working on a new Mac Pro too, and that's coming because we love you. Moving on, right?

There's room in there to do that and not make a big deal about it. It's not going to be like 20 minutes about a new MacBook. That's not going to happen. But they could totally take five minutes to an anxious developer crowd who's probably a little frustrated with the pace of the change in the tools they use to develop software to get a little applause for saying, we're going to show your product line some more love now. One other story that could be told with this, the thought around Apple this year has been like, what are they doing? Like, what is going on?

And WWDC, we said this, I think I said this last week, it's the beginning of the year, right? Yeah. And it is a time where under the right circumstances they can just blow us away and i think of maybe two years ago when swift was announced there was just so much stuff right sure in that announcement and we were like uh they could do this and be like great here is all this stuff we're doing on software on all of of the platforms. Here are all these things we're doing on the iPad, fingers crossed. And like, oh, and by the way, here is this whole new Siri thing that we're doing. Oh, and also,

here is a new iPad, a new Siri in a can. We're refreshing all the MacBook lines. We're going to give you a teeny bit more information about the MacBook Pro. Oh, and here's some changes we're going to give you a tint tinted bit more information about the macbook pro oh and here's some changes we're making to the way that we do with developers like and just totally blow our hair back right and then we continue with the rest of the year that way like this would be if like i kind of imagine like if they have anything to say about a line they'll say it because it will give them a real kind of way to change the the way that we're thinking about apple right now sure change the narrative absolutely if they can just come in and be like oh but bt dubs we've done everything on everything and then we move on from there let the year begin let's let the operating system uh turnover begin now could be a way of doing it and i mean and that's why i say the question

is not really um how would they do it or would they do it the question is will they do it and if so why right like you know will they do it if so why would they do it and i guess that's what we that's the criminology right is what we like to talk about well i i think i think what we want to see what a lot of us want to see what i want to see is i want to see this rumor makes me makes me think we could see from apple a commitment maybe even spelled out but if not then in actions that the macs are going to get turned over faster that right i mean and the only way to really do that you could say we're going to do it more they sort of said that in the Mac Pro little sit-down briefing thingy. But you've got to show it.

So if the next thing they do at WWDC is turn over the laptops and say, all new processors. There's still a question of, and where's the iMac? But this is an opportunity for them to show it. We have a laptop that we shipped in October with a processor. A new processor from Intel has come out since then. We're updating those today. It's not even been a year with the new processor because we know you want the latest and greatest, right? They could make that case. And that would be interesting. The question is, will they do that? If the rumor is that they will. And I think that's great news if it happens. And it'll be interesting to see if they also use it to tell a larger story or if they just say very matter of factly, like, we know you want this. second generation of this where they maybe back off on a little bit of the extremeness of the product or tech advances enough that they can add some stuff in without backing off on how extreme the product is would really excite me. Like the idea of a MacBook with GASP,p two ports that would be really good that'd be really exciting can they give it its macbook air moment right right because that's that's the question and then there's also a question about like the macbook air that we've had this rumor i kind of love this rumor i was listening to the atp guys talk about it last week the idea that

the macbook air would get a processor change because it hasn't really changed in two years they're just they're selling an old model of an old laptop because people still want it and they want something under $1,000, right? And it's a 999 13-inch MacBook Air. But I love this move if they did this. I love it because, yeah, it's a MacBook Air. It doesn't have a retina screen. I've got one right here. There are three in my house we have three macbook airs in my house that are used all the time mine my wife's and my son's and we uh we love them and and it's two years old it's like there's really nothing stopping apple from just dropping a new intel processor in there and keeping it going and saying look it's still 999 it still doesn't have a retina if you want that we've got other other products for you But if you want a Mac under $1,000, it's better than it was.

And kind of accepting that people are still buying it. So you might as well make it more modern without having to do all the work of re-engineering it. They're not going to build a new next generation MacBook Air with all the guts ripped out, right? They did that. It's the MacBook or the MacBook Escape. But it's still on They did that. It's the MacBook or the MacBook Escape, but it's still on the price line. It doesn't seem to be going away. They don't seem to be willing to take the MacBook and do what Microsoft did, which is do a really spec stripped version for $999 that nobody's going to really want and that isn't very good and then try to upsell you. That's what Microsoft's game is, is that that $9.99 Surface laptop has really poor specs,

but it's $9.99. Apple seems to not want to do that. They seem to rather just keep selling the MacBook Air, which keeps selling. So I love the idea that they would have enough pride in their product to say, we shouldn't be selling a product with that old processor in it

it's also possible that that old processor is becoming decreasingly available and they need to replace it with a new processor just because that's what intel's making now that's also possible talking about pride in product though like there are other things in that macbook air that i don't think that that they can be proud of in 2017. Like just the overall design of it, the screen, like that stuff is really old now. Like personally, I would just prefer to see the MacBook get good enough and cheap enough that the Air doesn't need to be around anymore. I think everybody would prefer that. And this rumor suggests that that's not going to happen this year. So this is where we are are well unless they they were able to keep the

current version of the 12 inch and bump that down make it cheaper i know that you know it's not necessarily a replacement for the air but like that that computer is so old now i know but this is the thing is as somebody who uses a macbook air and has family members using macbook air it's still pretty great i see why they sell a lot of them. I see it. I know that it's not a retina screen, but there are a lot of things like people like it. People like that laptop. And I think if you're Apple, what you're probably doing is analyzing the margins and the margins on the MacBook Air have to be great. And the margins on the MacBook may not be as great and certainly may not be able to be remotely kept at $999, right? So they don't do it because they've got to have the margins on their products. They've got to have

profit of a certain percentage on every product they ship. And so if you do the math and you say, oh, MacBook Air is insanely profitable and people are still buying them even though these other products exist. So let's not give them a reason to stop buying it until we're ready to move down with the MacBook tech or the MacBook escape tech or both. And they'll get there, but it looks like they're just not there yet. And I think maybe they like the idea

that there's a premium to be paid for a high resolution Mac laptop screen. But I agree with you. If they could get to 999 in a way that satisfies them with the MacBook, I think that would be a better thing for them to do. The problem is, if you look at what Microsoft is doing, which is a good direct analog, Microsoft only got there by stripping the RAM and storage down to what for Apple appears to be below bare minimum. Because I think it's two gigs and a 128 SSD in the Surface laptop at $999. And it's just not, you know, Apple doesn't do that. They're not going to have a two gig of RAM laptop. It seems, unless they do, unless they decide to do that.

But it seems like that's like, they're not going to go that low. Like if you want the MacBook, you got to pay, you got to pay up. And at that next level, at the price of the MacBook, the Surface laptop has the same specs, except it better. It's got a better processor, but it's got the same RAM and storage. So I don't know. I'm okay with it, accepting the fact that if they're going to keep selling the MacBook Air, having it be a little bit, you know, a modern version of the processor that lives in it

is better than having it be an ancient computer that they're still selling i agree the best thing to do is get another laptop under under a thousand dollars but they have it appears that they don't want to do that because of the margins last week we had google i o and you know so google showed up what they're going to be doing over the coming year, I guess. And there were a few themes. Google was continuing their theme of machine learning

in every product that they have and that every product physical and software that they produce has some kind of machine learning sprinkled into it. I feel like this is a meme right now in Silicon Valley, right? Machine learning.

But Google is the company that can convincingly show what they're doing with it. I think of everyone, they are the company that when they say, we're going to add some machine learning to this, I'm like, yeah, do you know what? You probably are. And I believe that it's going to work, right? Because I think this machine learning trend has been started by Google, right? They started it a few years ago.

And of maybe any company in the world, they are the ones that have the machines that can learn more than anybody else, right? Because there's just this sheer amount of data that they are able to pull in and gladly mine, right, as opposed to anybody else. So they have it, and their products continue to show it. So you are a man who is synonymous with photos because of the books that you've written on iCloud. Google showed off a selection of features coming to Google Photos, and I wondered how

if you could maybe sum up some of the ones that you think are most interesting and compare what you think considering to what Apple's currently offering yeah there's a couple things the uh one of the interesting things by the way about machine learning is that um google there's an article that i read that i think is in fast company that's by harry mccracken about how google is doing a lot of their in android o which is kind of boring we can talk there a couple interesting things but um they're doing some machine learning stuff that is running on the phone. They have a version, a light version of their TensorFlow, which is their machine learning system that runs on phones. And that's because in a lot of contexts, you don't want to wait for data to pass up on the internet and be processed

and passed back to your device. You want instantly and i think that's really funny because that means that google is going to where apple is for certain things because apple has to be on the device because of their philosophy of not processing your data on the server but google sees value in that too so it's kind of interesting that they're both doing something right like i think they're both doing machine learning on the server or on the on the client it's just on the server that that google has the advantage um and it's not you know it's not like apple can't buy buy access to data streams to do machine learning it's just that google has these massive streams um but it's definitely an arms race in machine learning because bottom line, we talk about this and this buzzword and for people out there who don't know or care, the idea here is

that you can have the way, it's sort of how it does it, how it does the magic. So when we talk about photos, Google Photos has this ability to identify the contents of pictures. And it does that not because there's a, somebody wrote a program to identify what a cat looks like. And it's not because there's people looking at your photos and saying, there's a cat. It's because Google has trained this algorithm with a bunch of photos of cats and said these photos have in common that these are cats.

And these photos do not have cats. And machine learning allows them to have these huge data sets dumped into the software. And then the software learns based on you telling it, these are yes, these are no. Over time, the software learns how to differentiate between them. Instead of having a human being program the differentiation, the human just programs the data set and the conditions and the software sort of writes itself, which is incredibly powerful because this is stuff that would be very hard for a human to quantify. But if you dump a billion photos into an algorithm, it's a lot more efficient.

So that's when we're talking about machine learning. It's a lot of stuff like that of being able to take a bunch of data and make sense of it in a way that our brains probably also process data, right? But that is very different than a programmer sitting down and saying, I'm going to try to write an algorithm that reads your email and determines whether it's happy or sad. Like that's not an efficient way to do that. So that's the background here. For photos, you know, Google Photos has been able to do a better job,

I think in general than Apple's photos that they introduced with iOS 10 and macOS Sierra of identifying objects in photos. Like Google Photos has lots of things you can say, mountains and valleys and cows and things like that. And it can do that. It can do multiple items in a photo and it can, it scanned based on the machine learning, it scanned your photo library and it can pull out all the photos or a particular person. And Apple's Photos does some of that. It's a first release. And because of the

way Apple does things, they don't have a backend server to keep tweaking. So Photos just sits there. And I assume we will see a progression of that announced at WWDC, the second take that Apple has done with their own machine learning on their photo library stuff. So Google's done that. Google's also added a feature that is the one that I think made me sit up and take notice, which is family sharing, where they're going to launch this thing with one other, you can share your photo library with one other person. And you can either choose that to be a very simple, I'm going to share this library with one other person. That's pretty cool, because I've written about that a little bit. Like when we take trips, after a trip is over,

I have to take my wife's iPhone and plug it into my Mac and import her photos. Because there's no way for us to say, look, we just want all our photo library to be shared, right? Which for us is fine. That's all we really want. And iCloud photo library, family sharing, all that just doesn't do it. There is, I commented on this on Twitter, and I got a bunch of well actuallys from people saying, well, actually, there's a family shared library in iCloud photo sharing. It's true, but you have to manually place your photos in there. You can't, they don't go in there as you take them, like iCloud photo library works. And I believe it's built on the same kind of older sharing infrastructure as PhotoStream.

But regardless, I will tell you, even if you use that approach, all your photos get scaled down to three megapixels, which is not apparently widely known because that's the sharing. If you airdrop something, it's full size. But if you go to Facebook or if you do iCloud photo sharing, it scales the photo down. So it's not ideal. And for me, it's it scales the photo down. So it's not ideal. And for me, it's like, if it's not automatic, it's not ideal. I don't want to have to remind my wife to share her pictures from our trip to Seattle in order to get those photos. And she shouldn't have to text me and say, I need that picture that you took of the kids

so that I can send, right? I mean, we should be able to opt in and say, no, we just want one library. So Google's going to let you do that. But Google also has this other sharing feature that uses the machine learning stuff. And that is to be able to say photos of a certain kind, photos in a certain place, photos of certain people. I want you to automatically share them. And it will even suggest sharing them.

So if you don't want to share all your photos with a loved one, you could share all your photos of your family with a loved one. And that will work. And it will remind you and suggest, oh, here's a photo you took that Bob is in. Would you like me to share that with Bob? And you can say yes. And then Bob will get the pictures of Bob or Bob's kids or whatever. And that is really interesting because what Google's saying is our machine learning can

now power, it knows about the content in photos to the point where it can suggest other people who want to see those photos, which if you've ever been to a party or something and there's a bunch of people taking pictures. That's really cool. Right? And we just did this because we went to a party for one of Lauren's cousin's daughter had a bat mitzvah. So big party, all the families there, and this was in Seattle and everybody's taking pictures. And,

and, and the vision I think that Google has is you were at a place with all of these family members. Would you like me to share your photos from there with them? Right. And that's, that's a little proactive. It's not like you can't do a version of that today,'s that's a little proactive it's not like you can't do a version of that today but that's a little a little bit more proactive because otherwise you're gonna maybe you

forget maybe just time passes on it's a week later yeah my favorite part of that was that once you share those photos with people google photos will suggest hey we think these photos were of that event do you want to share these with everybody as well? Which I thought was awesome. Yeah. So, like, it's doing, you know, recognition of time and location and probably of people's faces and some image stuff to be like, we think these were from that event. Why don't you share all of those? And then you create this, like, one big shared album.

And it's probably doing some duplicate stuff to make sure they're not the same image. Like, yeah, I think that that sort of stuff is really cool. And I mean, I've really looking at the landscape right now, it feels like Google is really the only one in the place to do a lot of this stuff really reliably because of just this huge data set that they're building up, which is bigger than anybody else's. Especially like based on real photos of real people yeah and you and your family and all your friends right like it's building up all this information it's not that apple can't do it it's just that it's a it's harder but apple could do this stuff and and this is this is great stuff because this is computers getting um getting doing stuff that we're not going to do because it's it's too complex or we're going to forget about it it's like this is computers making our lives easier

technology saying we can see the patterns and what you're doing and take that logical next step and make it so that all you have to do is agree like that's great that is better than saying well what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a shared album and I need to look up every, oh, I don't have this person's, I don't have Lauren's other cousin's email address because I haven't seen him since the wedding. And, you know, so I got to look that up. And so now, so I'm going to share it with a few of those people now created. Okay. Now I'm going to add some things in and people on iPhones can add their own, but the people who aren't on iPhones can't. And like, there's a lot, or I'm going to upload that to a service or I'm going to put on Facebook, but this person's not on Facebook, right? Like to have the ability for a piece of software essentially to say,

hey, you had a family get together. Should I make a shared thing and share it with everybody and say, yep, that's a great promise. And like, here's the difference of Google, right? You can do that on Android. You could do that on iPhone with the iPhone app.'s the difference of google right you can do that on android you could do that on the iphone with the iphone app and they said that like you can just text it to someone and they could just download them from a web page yeah so like anywhere no matter what they're using them even they don't even need to be google photos users you can email them or text them and they could just download the images right like i just don't see i just don't see apple doing that right like even if they were able to do pull all this tech together i don't see it existing on android so like you're

either in this system or you're not well i mean they they probably would generate a web link to an icloud uh oh yeah that's true web page i can't imagine an android app though i just so my point here is the, um, this has been announced by Google. It's not out yet. Apple's going to have their developer conference. Presumably one of their iOS 11 features will be photos related, whether they spend a lot of time with it or not. It was a huge iOS 10 update.

Presumably there will be an iOS 11 update with photos that will add a bunch of things to photos. And that's the question is like, how will, how will the machine learning advance? Will they add features to be more proactive about suggesting ways that you could share? Will there be better,

better sharing features? Will there be better ways to take advantage of the iTunes family accounts, which, which came out six months before iCloud photo library and yet have no connection to them. That that's a, that's the one that really bugs me is that I want to be able to say, I want to share my iCloud storage space and photo library with my wife and just be done with it,

right? But nope, can't do it yet. Maybe this time, maybe not. I did talk to them. I think a photos product marketing manager a couple of years ago, this sort of thing about like the sharing is actually part of their concern. I think about, about why, why it hasn't happened is do you really want to share every single photo you take with another person? And I heard from people last week who were like, no, I don't want to do that. Why would anyone want to do that? And my response would be, well, I want to do it. And I don't think it's unusual for a husband and a wife to want to share their photo library so all their family photos stay together

instead of being in two separate places but i like that google even answered that question themselves by being like exactly you can also take it of just certain collections of people they're the only photos that we share exactly right so so those are options and i think that's a nice way to do it and maybe that was sort of some of the stuff that apple's been thinking of as well although i will say again i think even a bear library share would work for a whole lot of people and i actually was quite disappointed with the response i got on twitter from people because the attitude seemed very much to be like well i don't want it so nobody should have it it's It's like, no, wrong, wrong. This is a convenient feature. I can see the convenience in it personally.

And I know lots of other people would use that feature just because you don't want it. It's a super important feature for families and especially for parents of kids to share their photos of the kids so that they don't end up in separate iCloud libraries. That's really dumb. And you can't share them.

You can't share full quality photos. Or the answer of like, oh, this might get some people in trouble. Like, it's so silly. Yeah, oh, that was really good. It's like, we shouldn't do this feature because it might get some husband who's cheating on his wife in trouble.

It's like, yeah, well, we have Find My iPhone. That ship has already sailed. And I don't want to have no access to half the photos of all my family until I plug my wife's phone into my Mac because of some fear that some dumb person who's having an affair and taking pictures of his girlfriend and sharing that library with his wife. I mean, come on. That's just such a bogus argument. But I appreciate Google's granularity here because that suggests something

that I think was on the mind of the Apple people that I spoke to about sharing, family sharing on Apple's side is can it be a little more granular if it's just like, I would love to be able to say, my wife doesn't need to see all those screenshots I take for stories I write because she does not want to see them and I don't want to flood her camera roll

with them fair right sure that would be nice some granularity would be great but in the end the fact that you cannot automatically share any version of um a the full quality photo that you've taken with someone else who's in your family in your itunes account family without airdropping it or doing an import over a wire is that's dumb that's really dumb so uh maybe they'll overhaul that stuff and like i said i think the sharing stuff is all legacy stuff from before i cloud photo library. I think it's all based on the older like photo stream kind of technology, which explains why it's it, you know, why it might be harder to update the sharing stuff, because they've got an existing sharing infrastructure. And if they do something new, they're probably going to want to base it on iCloud photo library,

which is a different thing. So there's there's I get it, this is not necessarily technically easy. But I would also point out that it's been now two years since iCloud Photo Library and two and a half years since the iTunes family accounts came out. So I hope to see more from Apple on that end. And they don't need to answer Google across everything, but they definitely need to keep stepping up their game because this is an area that is important. And right now, the only thing, I'd say the number one thing that prevents people from switching from Apple's photo stuff to Google's photo stuff on iOS is that Apple, as the system provider, as the platform owner, allows photo syncing to happen at any time in the background when you're on Wi-Fi. And Google can't do that because it's a third-party app. And although it'll sync in the background for a while, eventually, inevitably, it will be quit by the system because it's been running in the background for a long time transferring data.

At which point, none of your photos sync until you remember to launch Google Photos again on your iPhone. And until Apple, if Apple would ever do that, levels the playing field and allows certain kinds of apps to sync their data in the background sort of eternally when plugged in and on Wi-Fi, like Google Photos. Apple will have a huge advantage. That's a huge advantage that we will miss photo syncs and I'll have to tell my wife to launch Google Photos. Remember to launch Google Photos just so that we can sync our photos.

That's dumb. And iCloud, that's a huge advantage that iCloud Photo Library has on iOS right now. And that's an artificial barrier where Apple, it allows Apple to escape with a lower quality product because they've erected a barrier that they don't have to jump over. And that's not how Apple should be winning these battles. They should be winning these battles on their own merit and not because they give themselves permission to do things no one else does. The Assistant battle is continuing to heat up.

There are a bunch of enhancements to Google Assistant. One of the key ones, two, I think it's two key ones. enhancements to Google Assistant. One of the key ones, two, I think it's two key ones. It's on iPhone now, although in the US only, but there is an iPhone app, and Google have found some interesting ways to with a widget, right, to make it

very accessible, which is very smart. Yeah, US only right now. Boo. And they've also allowed it so you can talk in text to the Google Assistant now in the Google Assistant app, or from other parts in Android, which will be coming, I think, in Android O. But you can do it right now in the iPhone app, which is great. It's great to have that option available.

This is something I think many people have wanted Siri to do for a long time. And when Google Assistant came out, you could talk to it in Duo, but I think duo has not done what google wanted so they've now enabled it in the assistant app as well um you had a a great post that you mentioned earlier on uh imagining the introduction of a series speaker where you take on the role of tim and phil and like an anna johnny i video and you write out how you imagine it going in an ideal world and uh you showed your uh down with the kids in knowing a lord a song uh that i've never heard of but you mentioned it so i assume that you're down with the kids isn't just lord or what lord day i see again so like shaw day you are proving that you are more down with the kids

than me because i have always read that in my head as lord a i was thinking that it would be uh you know this is like when we did our draft predictions, not for the last event, where I was trying to predict a musical act. And it's like, there's a game plan there. I don't know if Green Light's the right song or not, but I thought that that was placeholder. I was like, yeah, some song that's popular now that's going to make Apple look cool, like Green Light by Lorde. And then I thought about changing, using your voice to change the lights in the room to turn green. And I thought, oh, well, that's a perfect song then. So anyway, yeah. So I did a

fake Apple event is what I'm saying. And I don't, I mean, they're the experts at it. I've just, I've seen so many Apple events that I can try to, what I said was, this is the best my Apple event emulator could do. I'm just one person. It was pretty good, though. I can tell you've been to a lot of these things. So yeah, there's more in the Assistant world. I can hear the voices there. Yeah, so Cortana is built into a Harman Kardon speaker. You've got the Google Home Assistant is getting built up.

Amazon keeps releasing Echoes. is getting built up the amazon keeps releasing echoes and apple is rumored to have this series speaker which i called apple home only because even though there's a google home it's like that's that's probably the right name for it i kept thinking of other things to call it but none of them were quite as good they've had an app called home for a while right like it's in apple's branding machine already yeah well and and in my one of the reasons that i did this is it made me think it made me think what how does apple describe this how does apple sell this product what features does apple highlight and home kit has to be one of them right like my thought is that that's one of the ways apple sells this as a

differentiator is it's a home kit hub so you don't need an apple tv or an ipad or something you plug has to be one of them, right? Like my thought is that that's one of the ways Apple sells this as a differentiator is it's a HomeKit hub. So you don't need an Apple TV or an iPad or something. You plug this in, you can control your home. HomeKit is great, blah, blah, blah, right? All the things that they're going to say about how much they love their own technology, because it's an Apple event. They're going to pump up their own stuff. Fair. And then you throw in, yeah, it's all the power of Siri and it'll talk to you. And maybe if it's got a screen and a camera, maybe it'll do something like FaceTime. Maybe it won't. I don't know. But I think HomeKit has to be part of the story because that's how these products get used is they're in your home.

So having it just lean into that and lean into HomeKit seemed to be like a logical way for them to tie it all together. So that's my, people can read the story. Imagine it in Phil and Tim's voices. And I invented a product video that involves the Apple Home in a kind of home setting with kids and parents and playing music and being notified that you need to leave for your next event and stuff like that. And I even threw in a feature that would be really cool that Apple wasn't promising when they launched the product, because they do that sometimes now too, which was that later this year, it will recognize your

voice. And so if you ask it a question about a calendar, it will recognize that it's you. And if your child asks about their calendar, they will be told about their calendar instead. And in my imaginary thing, that isn't ready yet. And so they're like, that's the thing that ships in December, on December 30th. And then the other thing that I did that was kind of a funny moment was that I guessed what I would want to pay for the product. And then I raised the price because the new Apple products always cost more than what you want to pay. So I guessed $299 and then I said it's $349. Yeah, the Google Home just started doing that voice recognition thing a couple of weeks ago.

And that seems like a feature that would be really great to have in MyEcho. Yeah, the fact that Google is now doing that, I think everybody needs to get there. I'm sure everybody's been working on it, right? Because this is an issue with all of these products. Like, The Echo should be able to know that when the little girl wants to order the dollhouses that she doesn't get to. That she needs parental approval for that. A code or something. And multiple, I mean, again, so many of these services were built on the idea that everybody's got their own account and they're siloed.

And the problem with that is that people's lives aren't siloed. A lot of our lives are messy because we live with other human beings, right? It's not, a lot of these things are envisioned as like, you've got your computer, so you log in with your account and you have another computer and you log in, which is great until suddenly you've got a voice box in the middle of your house that everybody can use and it cannot be one-to-one, right? And so they are trying to find ways to back out of that one-to-one thing, whether it's like a family account thing or it's the ability to log in multiple people and detect them by voice.

In the case of a voice assistant, it's hard stuff, but surely Amazon is working on it. Google has announced it. And so I kind of envisioned, and that's a little bit wish-casting on my part, but I tried to envision that Apple would have that be a feature that they could tout for a product like theirs,

because especially if it's tied into the family sharing, that kind of makes sense. The ability to differentiate so that if, yeah. And also the way I had them phrase calendars and reminders, they say, you can check your calendar, you can check your reminders. In the back of my head, I'm thinking, it's really only going to work with iCloud calendars for reminders, but they're not going to mention that part. Now, let people who use Google Calendar be disappointed later by the fact

that it doesn't work with them. Again, trying to emulate an Apple product. Could it not just take some information from what's in your iPhone, maybe, right? Because I have Google Calendars on my iPhone. I was thinking, well, one of the things I thought while I was writing the story was it could do handoff, right? A Siri speaker could do handoff stuff where, um, where like on your Mac, if your phone rings or you get a text, you get it everywhere that you could get that text and it could say, you just got a text, you know, or play the chime. And would you like me to read it? Or would you like me to answer the phone here? And those are all things that it could do too. So, so interaction,

that would be another way that apple could uh could make its product more impressive is have it sync and communicate with the stuff that's on your phone and your uh tablet but we'll see we'll see if it i'm not i'm not entirely convinced we'll see at the draft how we pick it but i'm not entirely convinced this product actually is going to get announced to wDC. But I do wonder if the reason to do it is it gives them a long run up until they ship it. And because they want to talk about Siri features across all their platforms, because they have SiriKit now, which means there's a developer story. And so they want to get developers really excited about supporting SiriKit. And one

of those reasons they could get excited is because it's going to also tie in to what they're doing with their Siri hardware. And that, for me, that would be the rationale to announce that product. But I'm not convinced. Some of it is wishcasting, again. Some of it is me thinking, I'd like that product. And that gets in the way of... So I've got a red flag in my mind that says, no, no, no, no, no. That's probably... Come on. That's a product you like.

That's a product you want. It probably won't happen. Come on. You're just dreaming. But I don't know. That's what the rumor says. So I guess we'll see. Android?

Yeah, it's not a lot to say about Android O. I talked to some people. People can listen to the download podcast from last week. We talked about Google I a lot. And we talked about Android O very, very little because there's not a lot. It wasn't a big focus. I suppose there will be more to come as it gets closer to consumers. There's not anything huge in it. There's a bunch of little stuff that's interesting. There's not anything huge in it. There's a bunch of little stuff that's interesting. The one thing about it, and this says a lot about me and my interest that I wrote about on Six Colors, was that they redesigned all the Google emoji. And Jeremy Berg wrote a piece about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, for those who know, the smileys on Google's platforms look like gumdrops. Or if you're less charitable like jeremy bridge was at emojipedia blobs yeah a little blob little blobby guy i like to think that they're like a gumdrop like it's a gumdrop shape they're rounded on top and and then and then sort of like come to an edge on the bottom and then there's a then there's a different kind of curve thing at the bottom it's a gumdropdrop guy. Well, those are gone. The gumdrop guy is gone. The blob, the Google blobs are gone in Android O and presumably on Gmail and all of that

when they roll this out, replaced by more traditional sort of circular faces. And there are people who love those blobs and they're going to be sad to see them go. But I think the number one reason that you do that if you're Google is because every other platform does not have gumdrop blobs. Every other platform has circles. And emoji is a language people use to communicate.

It's not the place to have a lot of flair on your platform that is not followed on other platforms because, as was the title of an episode of this very show a while ago, because of emoji fragmentation. Because what you don't want to have is, I send you an image that I think means this, but you receive a different image that you interpret to be completely different, and we have failed to communicate. So I think this is a good thing. I know it seems silly, but I think it's actually a really good thing for Google to do this, to sort of sync up their design language with it.

And then also, will be the first, this is the first announced support for the emoji 5.0 spec. So it's the one with like, with a dinosaur and a vomiting face emoji and other things like that. It's the latest and greatest emoji. Including the mind blown, which in Google's version of the mind blown

is awesome. It looks great. It's the surprised face with a mushroom cloud coming out of the top the uk flags the the independent uk flags of wales england scotland wales yeah also a monocle face i mean it's all for me really monocle face english flag top hat put it in there top hat good it's gonna be great yeah and ios 11 will obviously have all of this stuff too it's just a matter of it's like google beat apple as i well know google pre-announced their operating system three weeks before apple because that's when their event was that ios 11 will undoubtedly

support all of these could still be no could still come first race is still on um i i think calling it boring is is a little unfair um i i think that it is a polish release feels a little like ios 10 to me and that there are some some cool features but no blockbusters so we said this in download too and and i want to i want to repeat it here i think it's a good kind of boring like it's okay yeah it's okay that it's it's not we're tearing everything apart and rethinking it again i think smartphone operating systems at this point aren't at that level anymore. They've kind of moved past that. Android is just being polished and updated and made better by Google.

That's what they should be doing. They don't need to take it apart. But it also means that I don't have a lot to say about incrementally making your products better, even though for end users that may be the best thing to do. There are less big blockbuster features available now for smartphones. A lot of smartphone operating systems as we currently have them are getting pretty close to feature completeness, right? It's like what reminds me of the Mac, right? Isn't that much really whiz-bang stuff you can put into mac os anymore hard to do quantum leaps right now yeah on smartphone os's you could not that they can't be improved they absolutely all can be

improved but it's harder to see like we just added this thing that everybody's been clamoring for that nobody's had and now we've added it because i feel like we've passed this thing that everybody's been clamoring for that nobody's had. And now we've added it because I feel like we've passed that. All that stuff has been taken down and used. And now it's all about, could you make that better? That thing you introduced five years ago? Maybe you can make that better because five years have passed and things are better now. And that's not as exciting.

It is more boring. But like I said, I think in the end, that stuff makes the experience better and that makes users happy. And yeah, I'm all on that. Like more polish and fixing things and making everything nicer. That's where we are. And the wacky innovation has gone to other devices now. The smartphone is not done, but it is not, you know, it was leaping from like 10% done

to 40% done to 70% done, right? And now it's just sort of ticking through little tiny increments because the quantum leaps aren't there anymore. All right, Jason, do you want to take a break and talk about MailRoute? Oh yeah, that would be great. This episode is sponsored by MailRoute, which means I get to tell you that MailRoute is a yeah, that would be great. This episode is sponsored by MailRoute, which

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i don't know if it's we'd call it that it's not an expose if they invite you in yeah what what is it then feature it's like a big feature story by steven levy about about building this yeah it's not an expose if they if they give you the tour and give you a hard hat. Yeah, it's a, people should read it. It's in Wired. Stephen Levy knows the company better than anybody. It's a really good story. It is a lot of detail about what's going on at Apple Park and how they built it.

So I had a couple of notes upon reading it that I wanted to share. I wrote some of this up at Six Colors. One of them is the idea is, the concept of the story is that apple park is steve jobs's last product last product that he was heavily involved with and it's taken this long to build it but he was heavily involved in the details of the product up until or the the park up until he died yeah and it seems like from what le was saying, like significant parts of his final years were spent on it

because he was taking very, very, very long meetings with people that were taking up most of his days. And him and Johnny really spent a lot of time together. Like it was a big collaboration between the two of them, even from very early on. And I think it's not surprising to me when you see this information to maybe realize why johnny's not been around so much recently apparently yeah i think i think that one of the things about this article is and i've heard from other people who've said similar things is it's hard to see the description of the level of care that Apple

people took with this project down to the pizza boxes, right? That people mentioned, but also like the door handles and the toilets, like the amount of custom design throughout this. And people, you know, some people are going to roll their eyes at that. And I feel like one, it's Apple and Apple does stuff like this. It's part of their identity that Apple's not going to just move into a rectangular office building with cubicles, with standard kind of panels on the walls, right? If Apple's making their showcase headquarters of the future, are they going to do that? Are they just going to drop down an office block somewhere with generic equipment from the office depot? It's not going to happen. It's Apple. It's not going to happen. They want it to be inspirational to the people who work there.

And Apple does feel like they have things to contribute to making, you know, sort of what the future of a workplace is like. I think Apple is hoping that this, and Steve Jobs was probably hoping that this would be an incredibly influential project that people would learn from and take maybe some lessons of what not to do, but also take a lot of lessons of why don't we do that when we build our next thing? Why do we settle for less? So I think that that's all, it's a valid perspective what i wrote in my piece is it so feels like an apple product in the sense that they are coming from a point of view when they make this it's like we think that offices should be like this

and not everybody agrees when apple does a product that has a point of view like the macbook's a great example right which is we think a laptop should be like this and everybody's like but it only has one port yeah but it's really thin and light. But, but, but, but like, all right, well, it's not for everybody. But like Apple had a very strong belief, like this is the kind of product. That's how you get an interesting product. And that's, I would argue, that's how you get a great product is being opinionated like that. Well, Apple Park is like that. And I think that comes from Steve Jobs and carried on by other people. It is their vision, Apple's vision for what a workplace should be like if you've got the money for it

and if you've got the space for it and all those things. But it's like, imagine what a world-class workplace for 12,000 people would be. And Apple Park is that vision. It is hard though, when reading Stephen Levy's article, not to think that because they sweated all those details, and it's very clear that people involved in apple design including john johnny ive were deeply involved in this process it's really hard

not to walk away thinking they've been distracted for the last two years it's just and i've heard from other people similarly i thought that was very insightful um that you you put that in an article that you wrote which would be in the show notes and i'd never considered that you put that in an article that you wrote, which would be in the show notes, and I'd never considered that deeply, but if it was this, you know, the biggest product they've ever designed with more intricate parts than they've ever needed before, that there is a possibility that Apple decided to put a lot of its own people on that project.

I understand having an architect to design the structure, but all of the internal pieces, why would you not have your own people do them? You have people that you know can do incredible internal design for their stores. If you're Apple, you feel you're the best in the world at design. Why would you have someone else design your your building you would like to think that apple was trying its best to find the best designers on the planet right so they believe they have them so i understand that

i mean i'm not necessarily saying they should do this right like their products or what enables a building like this and in fact somebody who somebody who designs computers and phones and things may not be the best person to do industrial design on a workspace, right? They may be incredibly talented, but they still may not be the best because they haven't spent the last 20 years designing chairs and doors and things, right?

They've spent the last 20 years designing computers. And so you could argue that maybe that's not the best fit, but I see the temptation if you're a designer to be like, I've always wanted to design a better door because I hate these doors. So let's make a better door. And I can also see somebody who has been working in the real world for the last 20 years say, what do you mean a better door? We got the doors. We figured it out. Just use the door. Like, use the pizza box, okay?

The great example of this, the classic example, was when Steve Jobs was helping design the Pixar headquarters where anyone could put all the bathrooms in one place. You know? Like, that is a... You can see why he wanted to do it. It's an interesting idea. Probably not great in in

practicality well the the uh and and that that i will say that means this is not the first building that steve jobs put together right because he did put together some lessons that pixar yeah so i think that's interesting too and he obviously cared about this and the story quotes the architects as being amazed at the level of detail and care and knowledge that steve jobs had about this so i don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole. It's just, it's hard for me to read that story and say that Apple didn't have some serious design brainpower that was busy designing something that's not a product per se. It's the park. And maybe, you know, the fact is that if their brainpower was spent on that, that was less brainpower being spent on their products. And that was a decision they made.

But maybe that's something that helps us understand the last couple of years of Apple products better. I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to overstate it, but I also can't wave it away because I think it's possible. And like I said, I've heard from a couple of people who have connections to Apple who've said that that has been a perception as well, that some people have been distracted with a new campus. So how big a deal it is, don't want to blow it out of proportion, don't want to ignore it, right? So I want to just say, it struck me in reading Stephen Levy's article, wow, they did spend a lot of their brainpower worrying about a

lot of the details of it. But the fact is, now this thing is going to stand for a long time. And so I get why you want to invest some time in it, because then you're stuck with it, right? So the last thing you want to do is say, well, you know, I could spend a little more time on this slight change to the iPhone, or that will ship for two years and then be done. Or I could do this thing that will be in this facility for the next hundred years. I get it. I get it. The idea of Steve Jobs, this being his last product also was, it hit me kind of emotionally more than I was expecting.

I've been sad. I've been thinking about this a lot and it's made me quite sad over the last few days. Well, I mean, not only does the article say clearly that this is the, of all the things apple talks about like steve steve said don't think of what steve would do make your own products take apple forward the one place where that seems to not be true is building apple park apple park everybody viewed as steve's legacy they felt like steve was in the room with them they were working with steve on all of this this is he put huge amounts of the end of his life into. They wanted to make it something that Steve would be proud of, and that they felt like this was essentially the monument to Steve Jobs campus. And they felt uncomfortable with that and suggested,

somebody suggested that they named the theater after him because that's where the product events are going to be. And he was so famous for that, but it sounds like regardless of the naming, you know, this is a monument to Steve Jobs and it's his last product. And then the saddest note, whoever wrote the headline, what a great headline.

The headline of this story is one more thing. Oh, oh, because this is it. This is the last Steve Jobs product. what a great headline the headline of this story is one more thing oh because this is it this is the last steve jobs product at least they didn't call it one last thing right which i'm sure was also on the the naming board but uh yeah so you know it's it's an amazing i can't wait to see this place because it's just sounds bananas. Um, I cannot wait to see it. It,

I did. Did I mention that on this show that I did an overlay of, cause it's like a 45 acre site or something. I forget what it is. It's, it's, it's huge. I grew up in the,

in the, the middle of nowhere and we had 42 acres and you could just walk, you know, I would just walk back and up a hill and there's just like hills and there's nothing there. We had that, the house was right on the front on the road and then there was just, you know, hills and trees and cows and things. And I realized you could put almost the entire large property, barns and fences and horses and cattle, inside the ring of Apple Park. Inside the ring.

Not on the site, but in the ring. It is so huge. It's a mammoth. And then there's all this detail. I'm fascinated by all of it i hope to see it sometime and and get to see this thing because it will be a a pretty wild thing and then you know and then then history will judge it and i i think it will be um that's what happens when you when you have a big idea is history will judge it it'll be judged as being too

expensive or over designed or full of mistakes or it'll be judged as being too expensive or over-designed or full of mistakes, or it'll be judged as incredibly influential, but it will be judged and it will be thought about. And I think that is also true of anything that you do that is great, is you strive for greatness. You may not make it. I'm not saying this is going to go down in history as one of the great buildings. I'm just saying that you have a chance to be considered and critically appraised if you go for it and uh they totally went for it um so it's just fascinating i can't wait to see it the only other thing i wanted to mention before before we move on is um i put a line in in a in in my piece in macworld about it that just mentioned that I think that when I was thinking about it

and reading the story, I had that moment of, and having just seen Amazon's new stuff that they're building in Seattle downtown, that it is, I have a problem with big companies in general, not just tech companies, building huge work spaces in suburban areas

with poor transportation infrastructure. Because what it means is that a lot of people have to drive and it fills up the roads. It affects where you can live. It can make it harder for people. They have to have longer commutes in order to find places where the cost of living is acceptable. people, they have to have longer commutes in order to find places where the cost of living is acceptable. And the advantage that building in an urban area has is that there is not that urban areas that cities are cheap to live in because they're not, but that they tend to have the most regional planning is about getting commuters from outlying regions where it's cheaper to live into the city center to work. And so the commute structure builds up. And therefore, my example is I used to work in a suburb

and live in a different suburb, and it was the worst commute of my life. And then they moved our offices to a city center. And my commute changed, but the commute got better. The, as an aside, my lunches got better because way more stuff, places to buy lunch than there was when I was in the suburbs and there was nothing around, but a supermarket, go to the deli and get a sandwich. But, you know, the biggest thing was the options for where I could live and have a survivable commute got a lot better. And so when I think about Apple

building in Cupertino, which is not really a great place in terms of transit, the transit planning was never about putting trains in Cupertino. Like Mountain View's got Caltrain close by and Santa Clara has the Santa Clara light rail and is going to have, you know, BART is going to connect at some point maybe. But Cupertino is kind of not close enough. So Apple runs a lot of buses just like Google does. And I just had that moment of like, wouldn't it have been interesting if Apple did or if Google did what Adobe did, which is build a bunch of high rises in downtown San Jose and say, we want to be part of the city. And this way our employees can drive or take transit. And San Jose's

transit infrastructure isn't as good as San Francisco's. And I think it's worth at least thinking about that. But in the end, and people freaked out, they're like, oh no, cities are terrible, suburbs forever. And especially people who work in Silicon Valley were very resistant to this because they're used to it. They're used to that and I think maybe can't see outside themselves. And that's fine. But what stopped me is Apple is a suburban company, just like Microsoft in Redmond. Steve Jobs is from the suburbs. The garage was in the suburbs. Apple's always been in the suburbs. I can't picture Apple picking up and moving to San Jose or San Francisco. I just can't. I can't picture it. This campus is Apple. It is in Apple's DNA.

It is, to bring it back to Steve Jobs, the expression of how Steve Jobs saw Apple. Now, I'm sure Apple's got a lot of programs to try to tie in their workers to, whether it's the buses on the freeway or tying them into transit. I'm sure they've got a target number that they're trying to get to, a percent of the people who use transit. But Silicon Valley is a very expensive place to live. And if you have to drive, the traffic is really bad. There's lots of issues

there that might be different if you were in a more city environment with better transit options. The fact is, it wouldn't be Apple. I can't imagine it. Just like I can't imagine Microsoft picking up stakes in Redmond and building a bunch of high-rises in downtown Seattle where the transit infrastructure is better. I just can't see it. So in the end, I think it's worth thinking about it and considering that other businesses like Twitter is a good example of that and Amazon is investing in this. And even like Apple's got space in South of Market, San Francisco. It in this and even like apple's got space in south of market san francisco it's just not central google's got a building south of market in san francisco

so they've got like presences but in terms of like the dna of these companies and apple in particular this is what what they are apple is a cuupertino company and Apple Park is a representation of that identity. And I can't imagine it really being any other way. So, you know, in the end, I kind of came all the way around. and I've seen a lot of people talking about, is the fact that there are no childcare facilities inside of this mammoth building that Apple have created. I feel like that this would have helped a lot of young people and young families, especially when they're paying really high rental costs anyway, to have something provided by the company

so they have a solution for their children. Whilst there is something that, again, I don't have have kids so i can't really speak to a lot of this but something that i find awkward in the idea of like taking a kid to work and putting them in the child care like and then the company is looking after the children while you're working 14 hour days like there is a i don't know there's something that makes me shift a little bit about that but i know that for so many people there are no other options right so this is why this should exist i find it really disappointing that apple have created a brand new campus and haven't haven't decided to to give us a facility like this i'm on the fence about this because of detail uh like i don't know the detail of it i don't know what all the benefits

are about apple and child care yeah i mean i agree with you but like you know and and and most tech companies it seems and large companies don't offer it but i i i share the disappointment because i think you could argue that the providing on-site childcare is sending a message that parents of young children, especially, are welcome to do their jobs. We want you to be able to continue doing your jobs. We don't want to because it leads to a feeling like this company is hostile to being a parent. to a feeling like this company is hostile to being a parent, right? Like I, like if you're, and you know, one of the net results of that is if you're a woman who wants to have a kid and wants to, maybe wants to breastfeed the child, for example, like it's very easy to look at your company's policies and be like, they don't want me to

have a, have a child here. So if I want to, if I want to do that, I'm not going to work here anymore. And that's, that's not a great thing if you're trying to increase the, you know, retain your female employees. But even for men, I mean, it's for parents in general, it's saying, we don't want this. food facility i am also a little uneasy about the tendency of silicon valley companies to build uh build these spaceships like this campus that are designed for the employees to never have to go home you can eat here you can work out here you can do your laundry here whatever never leave you can check out whenever you like but you can never leave right welcome to apple park california but you can never leave, right? Welcome to Apple Park, California.

Yeah, or the Googleplex or whatever, right? We never leave. And having your children be on site is like, well, now you really never have to leave because you never even have to go get your kid. But I don't know what their benefit is. I don't know if their childcare facility is near the campus. There may be issues.

I heard from somebody who suggested that, and I thought it felt like kind of excuses, but just to get the mindset of it, I heard from somebody who said that there was a concern about, um, childcare being a distraction. If it was on campus that people were going to the childcare to check on their kids. Um, my argument would be set a policy. You got a manager. I generally don't like it when the excuse to not offer an employee something is because then you would have to manage, set a policy and manage your employees.

Yeah. So geez, you want to chain people to their desks so they can't go take breaks, right? Like we can't, we can't, we can't offer them something because they might walk away from their job and not do it for a while. It's like, well, make them not do that then. Set a policy about it. Don't say we're going to just not provide any benefits for you because you might be distracted by them. We're not going to have a break room because you might be distracted by it.

Or the internet. You probably should have a break room and a policy. Or the internet. Exactly. Right. So, I don't know. It's a complicated issue. It is a little bit disappointing, but I can see that there's probably a lot of other things going on. I think juxtaposing with the gym is a little bit weird, but at the same time, I do have an uneasy feeling about that. We're going to keep you

trapped here. Like, well, you could go to the gym somewhere else, but we don't want you to ever leave campus. Then again, as a work from home person, I tend to do my activity in the middle of the day, right? I start work a little bit earlier and then at 11 o'clock or one o'clock or whatever. I go out and do my, you know, walk the dog or go for a run or whatever. And so I can see the rationale of like, we would rather you take a break in the middle of the day and go work out and be reinvigorated when you go back to work. We'd rather you eat in our cafeteria and not have to go get your car and drive somewhere and drive back. It's like, it's too much. We're going to make it easy for you. So I guess what I'm saying is I think it's a complex issue that maybe has been oversimplified, but there's a lot, I have a lot of uneasy, easy feelings about a lot of aspects of it on not just the childcare, not being there, but also things like the, uh, the, the, the big gym being one of those yet another thing that keeps you inside. Cause I think, I think the ultimate goal, and I don't mean it

to sound this nefarious, but the ultimate goal is you enter the spaceship and you stay there. You enter when it's early in the morning and you stay there until it's dark and your entire life has lived inside the campus. And then you emerge from it. Maybe if it's still light out, you emerge blinking into the light, but you're in this other world when you're in there and it's kind of hermetically sealed. Your food's in there, your workout's in there, your shower room's in there, everything's in there. And that can be great for focusing, but it can also be a little bit like we don't want the rest of the world to intrude on our employees when we're getting our work out of them, which is great if that's what you want as an employee, but it also feels kind of a little oppressive.

So I don't know. It's a choice. This episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by PDF Pen from Smile. PDF Pen equips you with everything that you need for more powerful PDF editing. And some amazing news, the new PDF Pen 9 is now available

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Oplayers asks, now that they live stream the keynote, is there any advantage, Jason, to attending in person? Well, you get to see everything 30 seconds before everyone else. You get to see people that you know and don't know before and after. And usually there's access to other things uh afterward usually they have some area uh either an open press area or a series of appointments in order to get your hands on new stuff so um you know but it's less it's less of a big deal than it was when it wasn't live streamed it's true but you know i guess that there are it's nice to be in the environment as well, right? Like there are just some niceties to that. But I guess the real the real benefit does come from if there is a press room to see stuff in the hands on area, like if and when they exist at events.

I guess that's where the real benefit comes from from being a person now, right? Because you might get to touch a product that's not going to be out for six months. because you might get to touch a product that's not going to be out for six months. So Wes asked, I want to get my dad either a Google Home or an Echo and not sure of the strengths of each. He's a prime user. What do you think?

Well, I'd say wait. I would agree with that, actually. Wait, see what's going on. I mean, because if your dad has Apple stuff and there's an Apple product that might be better if he's a prime user you know it depends on what ecosystem you're deepest into if he's a heavy google user google home might be better if he's a prime user echo is going to be better um you can get one cheaper uh yeah yeah it depends it really depends right now if i had to say bottom line, I'd say get an Echo. But that could change rapidly. And if you're leaning toward one ecosystem or another, that could be enough to sway you.

Yeah, the home is improving a lot, right? But the Echo is really great right now. But as you say, who knows what's just around the corner? I mean, if you can wait like three weeks, wait three weeks. Yeah. That's what I would say. James asks, is there any possibility that Apple might ship the fancy unicorn iPhone at WWDC because it would be closer to the 10th anniversary ship date? No. I don't think so. There's like a whole industry built around September, right?

Like this is more than just apple we'd also know if it was shipping we'd know and and they do they do the fall event and the fall event makes sense and it works for them and they get them at that point and it doesn't yeah it's a it's a fun idea but it's on the level of that date that they spotted in in the uh in the board at wwdc last last year on which nothing happened. Something happened. It just had nothing to do with anything. Yeah.

If the next iPhone is only going to be 5.1 inches, as some rumors suggest, would Mike be okay to go down in screen size? I've been thinking about this a lot, right? This is Brent, listener Brent, Upgradian Brent. Of course, Upgradian Brent. Thank you, Brent. I've been thinking about this a lot, right?

Because whilst this phone would be bigger than the iPhone 7 in screen size, you'd get more screen size, it's less than the Plus, which I've become accustomed to. But my feeling about the Plus has kind of been twofold. I like a bigger screen, but I also like to have what I consider to be the best iPhone. And in my opinion, the best iPhone is the bigger one. In the past, it's had more features.

In the past, it's had improved statistics, whether it be battery life or something like that. So for me, this next phone, it may be a little bit smaller, but it will probably be the best iPhone available. And for me, best iPhone trumps screen being a little bit smaller but it will probably be the best iphone available and for me uh best iphone trumps screen being a little bit bigger so i would be happy to go down a little if i'm going to be getting extra features better features that's in the plus model does that sound fair jason yeah i think so and it's uh i mean it's still a bigger screen and higher resolution.

And so it may not be that much of a step down for you. I feel like for people who use existing iPhones, it'll be almost like getting a plus screen and not a bigger object. Yeah, I would expect that it wouldn't feel like I was going down too much. I feel like it would be okay, but I don't think I would mind too much.

So Patrick's written them as something that I go through quite a bit. So I got an, Patrick said, I got an Expedia flight receipt email. Gmail can add it to Gcal. Apple Mail doesn't. I thought this was a feature. So here's the thing about this stuff. So as a thing in Apple Mail and in Apple's calendar app on the iOS devices, I think it's probably on the Mac too, but I know it's on iOS devices, where it can see certain events, including hotel bookings and flight bookings, and can either suggest them to you in mail to add them to your calendar, you open the calendar app and you check the law, there's an inbox on the bottom right hand corner, at least on the iPad app, where it will show you invites, like if you get invites to regular events, as well as like these proactive things. Hey, we found this new inbox. This is super unreliable. And it seems to

only really reliably work with certain providers, right? So like, for example, if I book a flight with British Airways, no problem. If I book a flight with Virgin Atlantic, cannot find it. And there are certain hotel providers and aggregators that it works with and some that it doesn't. So one, there is a condition that you need. The email has to be in your mail.app, I believe inbox, but it has to be loaded into mail.app for it to find it. It can't just be in the server.

The local app has to know it's there, and then it can pick it out. When this works, it's great. When it doesn't, it's not so great. And this is a win for Gmail because Gmail works pretty much all of the time from my experience and from other people's experiences. I do find this really frustrating because I keep this travel calendar of mine in iCloud,

so I find myself doing a lot of manual entry where I really wish that my calendar application was smart enough to be able to pick this up more often than it does. So this is a feature of Apple's system, but it is a very unreliable one. And finally today, Matt asked, will Apple address the number one problem that I have with Siri that pushes me towards its competition? It's infuriating personality. Siri that pushes me towards its competition. It's infuriating personality.

So, personally, I don't think Siri's personality is going away, because it's something that Apple has built around it. And it's not the only one with a personality. You know, like, Cortana, I believe, has quite a strong personality. And then the Amazon

and Google, their voice assistants, have it to a point, right? It depends what you're asking. Like, for example, you can assistants, have it to a point. It depends what you're asking. For example, you can ask your Echo to bark and meow, which Adina found accidentally. It misheard her one day, and the Echo just started meowing, and she's like, what is going on? So that's a thing that it can do.

So it has this stuff in it. I don't think that Apple's going to remove the personality of Siri. I think there's a possibility they may tone it down, but I believe it will always remain in some instances. But I think that they shouldn't remove the personality as much as they should just improve accuracy and ability. Because if the accuracy and ability of Siri is improved, the personality will be more palatable. When it's giving you the information that you need, and it's doing it well, and in ways that you expect it to, the fact that it might

throw a bit of sass in or a joke every now and then might make the whole thing feel better rather than worse. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, and I agree with you. I don't think it's going to happen. I think they feel that this is part of their thing. Like Siri has this way about her slash him.

Yeah, this is Siri, and that's a feature, not a bug. But I do think that if they can make Siri more advanced, they can make it smarter, then its personality will become less annoying for us. And I hope that WWDC brings some of that. That's something that I've really got my eye on. And if Apple really

wants to play in this space, there are things that they really should be doing. Not to necessarily say that they're behind, although I think I personally feel that they are, but not to say that they are, but I think that they need to be ahead as well as just catching up in certain areas

because of where they are and where their competitors are right now alright so as we mentioned at the top of the show next week is going to be the upgrade WWDC keynote draft if you have any suggestions of rumours that you would like to see included for the potential for me and Jason to pick

for our draft picks tweet them to me I am at imike I-M-Y-K-E on Twitter. Jason, if you want to catch up with what his work, he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L, and he's at sickcolors.com and theincomparable.com as well.

I want to thank Encapsula, MailRoute, and Smile for supporting this week's show. If you want to find our show notes, go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 142. Don't forget to go and check out the WWDC benefit for AppCamp for Girls, which has links in the show notes for that. So you can come and say hi to real AFM people,

but also listen to some great music and support AppCamp for Girls, which is an awesome thing if you're going to be in WWDC. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snell. Goodbye, everybody. thanks for listening we'll be back next time until then say goodbye Mr. Snell goodbye everybody