Upgrade - 147: Outside the Zone of Secrecy

Episode Date: June 26, 2017

An Apple secrecy presentation is leaked to the press? Jason and Myke break down an exclusive from The Outline, before moving on to discuss Scott Forstall's emergence from Broadway to talk about 10 years of iPhone.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 147 today's show is brought to you by encapsular smile and jamf now my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hey mike how's it going good mr jason s. How are you? I'm just fine. I'm keeping cool. Keeping cool, man. We'll talk about why in a moment because, Jason, we have our hashtag Snell Talk question. It comes from John this week.

That's right. Can't talk about the weather. Not enough time to talk about the weather, Mike. There's never enough time. John would like to know if Siri on your iPhone had to take the personality of a fictional character, who or what would you like it to be? This is a tough one. I thought about many great butlers. I thought about maybe Alfred from Batman.

That might be a good one. Oh, he could call you Master Snell. That's right. It would be Master Jason. Master Jason. Oh, yes. Yes, Master Bruce. But I'm going to say Max Headroom.

Why not? He's a digital personality, and I love him. And that would be hilarious to have Max Headroom do my bidding for me. John wasn't asking me, but if he was, I would maybe go with Jarvis. I am as Jarvis. I just like the whole voice. I can't remember. Who's the actor's name who plays Jarvis, IMS Jarvis. I just like the whole voice. You know, I can't remember. Who's the actor's name who plays Jarvis?

He was a British actor who was in a Wimbledon movie. Paul Bettany. Paul Bettany, that's it. Yeah, I think he's got a good assistant voice. I like the Jarvis voice. All right. Do you ever think that Apple would do this one day? Like that they may do voices?

I don't think Google does it either. I feel like it's unlikely considering now these days how much brand stock there is around these characters that these companies create. It's just, I mean, I think the goal now is to get the voice to sound as natural as possible. And that requires somebody to record like every possible breath and sound combination in the language that it's being used for. And that's really hard. I mean, I know the GPSs have done it, but the GPS vocabulary required is a lot less. And then they kind of punt when it comes, like the Homer Simpson voice in the GPS doesn't tell you the name of the street, I think. It just says, turn left at this street, right? Because it doesn't, they can't do

it. So, I do think this is inevitable, though, that this will happen. Somebody will, this stuff will advance to the point where they'll be able to take probably existing recordings of people's voices and do magical things with them and chop them up and turn them into this, like, to make any voice speak any text. And then when that happens, then it'll be on all of these assistants, too. But I think we're a long way off from that. So, do you know what? I was thinking to myself that Siri wasn't still a human, but I guess it has to be, right?

Like I was wondering like, oh, have they created some kind of technology now to just guess these things? But I guess it's a mishmash of like somebody records a bunch of stuff and then a computer can see them all together, but there still needs to be the person at the beginning. Yeah, I think so.

Because the new Siri voices, they sound like new people, right? They don't sound like refreshed versions of the old voices. Definitely. They're new people. Some super weird follow-up today. Chris Lattner has left Tesla. Yes.

Now, this is a big surprise. He kind of just announced on Twitter, it turns outla isn't a good fit for me at all i'm interested to hear about other roles as for a seasoned engineering leader there is also this this funny thing to me in which chris latner is somehow trying to find work on twitter like i feel like someone of his caliber could i don't know like i figured that like he just has people he could call that was really weird to me uh that he and and that he not only this he has a resume which is online yeah it's very old school like all of this is yeah it's which is very strange to me that again like chris latner would need to have a resume yeah and that he he details on on in his resume he uses that as the way to

detail sort of like what happened at tesla which is also weird yeah well okay so it did weird and passive aggressive no it still has some of it there but it's what what an idea like you work somewhere for less than six months and what you do is you update your resume to say i worked here for less than six months here's everything we accomplished and then the part that got deleted is at the end which was in the end elon and i agreed that he and i did not work well together and that i should leave so i did that's what that was what his resume said for a little while but it's gone now right like i think that was that because it circled around the internet a lot yeah he probably got a call from a lawyer and then had to take it down. This is so weird to me.

Like, you think about what it must take to get somebody like him to leave Apple. And then it's all undone again. And I understand that it can be difficult for some people to work in some cultures, or, of of course there can be interpersonal relationships that can be tricky. But for it to break down in six months, you'd figure that they might have at least had an idea about this before they hired the guy. I assume him and Elon spoke. I think you can't – we talk a lot, I think, as people who are dealing with employment. There's a lot of discussion about how do you find somebody? How do you interview somebody?

How are you sure? If you're coming into an organization, what's the corporate culture like? But I think the truth is that it's always a huge leap of faith, right? That it's just like, all right, let's give it a try. This sure sounds good and it probably there are inevitably i think there are going to be things you discover that are terrible that you that you didn't know because they didn't want to tell you and uh you'll figure it out and you adapt and you figure out like okay this is a place i can work and but you know some percentage of that time, it's going to not be. I do think that that's the truth.

I think that all the due diligence in the world won't change the fact that maybe when you are all the way in it and you're working and the charismatic billionaire founder who still operates the company is also there. And it turns out that just when the rubber meets when the rubber meets the road to use a car metaphor uh it doesn't work it just it doesn't work in that in that environment of the doing the real work and that seems to be what happened here is that you know chris latler latner had his

ideas about how it should work and elon musk had his ideas about how it should work and in the end who wins that it's going to be the guy who owns the company. Yeah. Well, obviously, I mean, they're not going to be like, Chris, you're really good. I'm off. And then Elon leaves because he thinks Chris Lantz was great. Well, the other way to do it is to say, I hired you because you're really good. And we needed somebody to manage our software team for Autopilot. And even though it's not the way I would do it, you have, you know, I'm satisfied that you have us on a good path here. And so I'm going to let you do your job. But obviously, Elon Musk feels like and you know, there are lots of extenuating circumstances, maybe it was a bit

maybe Lattner was a bad fit for the team. Maybe the things that Lattner talks about being proud of doing at Tesla were things that the people at Tesla were unhappy about. Maybe the fixing of Autopilot did some things that frustrated the people who've been at Tesla a while. Or maybe they were asked to provide more. Maybe the reason that it was so messed up to Lattner's mind when he came in was because they were always being pressured by people like Elon Musk to do more quickly. And Lattner was trying to fix the mess that that created. And I could totally see that coming up with clashing with Musk the next time he again asks for something kind of impossible and impossibly quickly.

And Lantner says, no, we've got to do it the right way. I mean, I don't know. There are lots of different explanations for what went on here. But when you've got that charismatic, opinionated, actively managing a company, owner of the company, who's probably used to asking for the moon i mean we know we cover this on liftoff all the time that musk is a guy who um who has this horrible habit he's a very impressive person and i really appreciate what he's done with tesla and spacex but despite that i will say he has this this problem with um over promising and under delivering he hypes his stuff uh he says it's happening too

soon and then it's never the case the the real time frame is never what he says it's going to be and this is publicly right like he tweets this yes yeah we're gonna go to mars in 18 months we're gonna ship the tesla model 3 in a year and a half we're gonna and and they're invariably late because he's over promised and it's not like they aren't doing it and that they have been very successful, but he talks a lot. And I would imagine that can be corrosive on the people who work for him because he's probably, those unrealistic schedules are probably, they're being pushed about why they don't meet them.

Or worse, I think in some ways, they're being pushed to meet schedules don't meet them or they're being, or worse, I think in some ways they're being pushed to meet schedules that everybody knows aren't realistic. So they're doing all this work to try to get something done that is not actually going to be done by the time that everybody's acting like it's going to be done. So, I mean, that's,

I never really thought about it this way, but because I've been thinking of like Tesla and Elon and, and SpaceX and Elon Musk's pronouncements from the outside, but from the inside, I don't know. That could potentially be a really bad thing for the people who work for him. I don't know. Well, whatever it is, there is an incredibly talented software engineer out in the world now roaming the wilderness.

And as much as we've made fun, the guy is incredible. And I don't expect that you listen to this show, Chris Latner. But if you do, good luck to you. I'm sure that you'll land where literally wherever you want to, because you can, right? Wherever you want to go, man, just go there. right where he was probably quite comfortable my guess i mean maybe there was something going on there but my guess is that it was probably more that he thought that he wanted another challenge and he wanted to do something new um if that's the case and then he goes to tesla and there's six months and then he's out of there i do wonder if if uh maybe he would be better off taking you know take it take a year do some more woodworking, because I know that's his hobby. And, you know, and think about what he really wants his next thing to be rather than jumping into something else. Because this is two sort of major career moments in a very short time for him.

My armchair advice would probably be don't rush into anything else um if you if you don't have to and i kind of assume he doesn't have to and uh maybe maybe sit back and and recharge a little bit because he obviously went straight from apple into tesla and you know we know he likes to do podcasts so in the intervening time chris if you'd like to start a show uh just send me an email, mike at relay.fm. We can help with that. Jason, you're recording on an iPad today, in a way. You know, in fact, my iPad is not involved at all right at the moment,

although it probably will be before all is said and done. See, I'm in Arizona visiting my mom mom picking up my daughter from her summer camp hottest place in the world is my understanding it's been about 115 degrees fahrenheit every day gets down to uh the low temperatures in the morning here are hotter than it has been at home the entire time since i've been here so yeah it's the face of the sun basically we're on the face of the sun so i came down here and the face of the sun. So I came down here and I didn't want to bring a laptop. I just wanted to bring my iPad. And so I have a bunch of different methods of trying to record podcasts and edit podcasts

using my iPad. For this one, what I did was I brought my little Zoom recorder down. So I'm recording this microphone on the Zoom recorder. You're hearing me through on Skype as we talk through my headset microphone, which is attached. We're talking over my iPhone, actually, on Skype. And I had a setup that didn't work because I think I have an unshielded charging adapter that was making horrible noise that wasn't there when I tested with regular power adapters at home. I was going to try to route my microphone back to you over Skype, so you would hear the same microphone that I'm using for the episode, just to make it sound better for you. But that didn't work because of the power shielding problem. So I'm still toying with this. The dream, of course course is to record my end have you hear my

good microphone and for me to be able to get that recording um all happening simultaneously and i haven't quite gotten there yet but it's uh it's in the ballpark we were hoping today that we'd come to the show with a solution you know for the for the round trip ios thing but what happened instead is jason got on the phone and it sounded like there were i don't know like just tons of tiny animals screaming at us little electrical monsters yeah yeah it was bad the um yeah yeah the unshielded uh so i the work proceeds i i have another i what i didn't do is i brought because i recorded another podcast while i was down here and and um i wanted to bring bring two of my matched and better microphones down but the other thing I could

have done is brought the Audio-Technica microphone down and that's the one that would let me plug in I plug it into my iPhone or my iPad via USB and also record on the Zoom recorder because it also has an analog an XLR connector and in hindsight that's probably what i should have done and if i wasn't recording that other podcast while i was down here i would probably have done that is just bring the audio technica down that was the original idea but i decided to get a little more ambitious and that didn't work so we were reverting back to actually we recorded one episode of upgrade i think in this exact setup that I'm doing now. And it worked fine. It sounded fine. The work marches on, Jason. You're leading the way.

Yes. The dream continues. It's still unfulfilled. One day, Mike, one day. Today's show is brought to you in part by Jamf Now. You can manage your Apple devices from anywhere with Jamf Now. When you first start your business, it's pretty easy to keep track of your own computer and your own phone, right? You know where they are. They're with you all the time. But as you start to grow and you start to buy more technology for people that are working with you and for you, it gets harder to keep track of everybody's Macs, their iPhones and their iPads. Then, heaven forbid, you have to try and figure out how to secure that iPad

so that your sales rep can be fine when they're out on the road and that the one that they maybe just lost a week ago doesn't end up with data everywhere that is stuff you don't want to have to think about but that stuff can be super tricky unless you use Jamf Now because Jamf Now makes all of this and a whole lot more so much easier

you'll be able to configure settings, protect sensitive information, even lock or wipe a device from absolutely anywhere. Jamf Now secures all your stuff so you can focus on your business and what your business is doing instead of having to do a ton of IT support. You don't need any IT expertise at all to be able to use Jamf Now. It's super easy and super intuitive. You can find out more and create your free account today at jamf.com slash upgrade. That's j-a-m-f dot com slash upgrade.

Once again, that's j-a-m-f dot com slash upgrade. And because you listen to this show, you'll be able to start securing your business immediately by registering your first three devices for free. And you can add more for just $2 a month per device. Super affordable, super easy. And look, with three devices for free, why don't you go check it out right now at jamf.com slash upgrade. Go and create your free account today. Thank you so much to Jamf now for their support of this show. So the outline, somewhat ironically, published a big piece this week

detailing a presentation about Apple's security practices. So there was this big presentation that Apple put on, and it looks like they are doing this for many employees. I assume that this is like a multi-day thing where they're bringing people in, and everybody, I expect, is supposed to see this presentation it's titled stopping leakers keeping confidential at apple the presentation was conducted by three members of apple's global security team can we just take a second to focus on the really weird like really weird and i think somewhat uncomfortable irony of this you have a leak leaking leaks about leaks basically leaks of leaks telling you not to leak it leaked i i was thinking

like put myself in the mind of the person who did this i that that's exactly what i think somebody did was say probably that they were kind of offended that they're asked to go through this secrecy thing and so i'm like you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna i'll show them i'm not gonna leak any real secrets but i'm gonna leak their their secrecy presentation because i i remember that from you know times as a manager and before i was a manager that we would have company things that were mandated and people would be like you know really cynical and unhappy and and why are they making us do this and um i get that i like i i know that attitude i recognize that attitude i can imagine somebody like that um doing this absolutely so they they in fact it may

be a little protest i would imagine by somebody who says who's thinking that apple employees need to not be treated like suspects by their own company we'll come back to that point a little later on but can you imagine being one of the people giving this presentation to see it detailed on the web can you like the fury that you would have at that point i don't even know if it could be measured. It sounds like they actually recorded it. There's an audio recording that they had of the whole presentation. Which is... Like a bootleg.

Even more bizarre. Also, the gall of the person that does this, like the person that leaks this, you are really playing with fire at this point. This may actually, you know, from the people that are making the decisions, this may get you in more trouble than if you leaked an iPhone part. This is so, so far into the rabbit hole of stuff that Apple does not like to get out in the world. This is an act of employee defiance.

Yeah. Yep. I would say. act of of employee defiance yeah yeah i would say as opposed to like leaking info is not an act of employee defiance i would say i think it's usually an act and talking about people who are sort of like apple employees and cupertino not talking about people who are uh factory workers in the supply chain but in in cupertino i think we talked about like, what are the motivators for leaking stuff? And I think sometimes it is an act of rebellion against a decision you feel that was made in error. And you want to get a furor of, you know, I can't believe they're

removing the headphone jack. Let's get it out there. There'll be a protest and they'll ignore it. And then a lot of times, I think it's just just an act of ego where it's just like, you know, the secrets and other people don't. And it makes you feel really good to be a tipster, to be a leaker. And knowing isn't enough for those people. They want to share it with the world. The act of knowing a secret is fun, but the act of sharing a secret with someone else makes you feel special yep so i think those are very different motivations than this which is it is an act of

defiance this just reads to me as an employee who is saying um you know you're going to treat us like potential uh criminals basically and uh they're offended by that and so they're gonna i'm gonna show you how do you like it and that that's what's going on here i think yeah they talk about it in the article that apparently in the presentation um it is discussed that the apple is well aware that the majority of leaking doesn't come from a malicious place when it comes from cupatino it's like people that are excited about the thing that they're working on in a lot of cases and want to share it. And that's where problems can start to pop up. Yeah, I suppose that is true. I'm not entirely sure that the leaks in Cupertino are

happening. I think the people who are truly excited about what they're working on and want to share it with people they know because they're super excited i would imagine that the corporate culture has done a pretty decent job of having them realize you don't do that right but maybe well maybe maybe some of it is that there is a statistic that came out in this thing which i really struggle to believe but i do because why would they say it in this internal meeting that as of last year there are now more breaches that come from inside apple's now more breaches that come from inside apple's campus than there are that come from the supply chain i can't get my head around this yeah i i kind of don't believe it but why would they lie about it it just seems like a weird

thing to to say you know they're not saying it it's something it's something to scare employees about and it depends on how you count, right? I mean, they may be counting instances that are multiple instances by the same person. Who knows? Or maybe they're right. It doesn't seem right to me, but maybe they're right. It certainly is a number that serves their purpose in scaring their employees. Because here's the thing.

This sort of presentation serves two purposes, right? One on one level, it's a corporate reminder of secrecy as our value is part of our corporate values. We want to keep these things secret until they're released. They've restated the thing that I've heard other people say, which is, you know, it makes your coworkers sad when you, you steal their thunder. So they're trying to get, it's the appeal to your friends and colleagues at the company. So that's fine. I get it.

Like you trying to remind everybody what the ground rules are and why we keep things secret at Apple and all of that. I get it. But the other part of this presentation is fear, right? The other part of this presentation is to take

your employees and say we're watching you and you will get fired if you release information and that you know that's just a fact that's part of what is going on here and i can see why people would take take umbrage at that i i again i feel like ultimately the motivation for people to leak is because they have something that no other have something that nobody else knows and they got to let it out because it's just too good. versus somebody basically emailing a reporter and saying, I have a leak for you, because they want to see that story and know that they were the source of the leak. Yeah, either or. I mean, it's still information getting out that they don't want to get out, because I imagine that a lot of these conversations, they go to reporters, right? reporters right like they might not necessarily be someone writing a cold leak but like two people in a bar one of them's in the press one of them works for apple they're having a chat and then yeah you know information so like i was thinking right like what we consider leaks and how they're classified because i i'm very aware that there are lots of people in the media that get tips that don't report them as such but will speak about the thing that they're aware of

and i wonder if apple is aware like they listen they hear these things or they read these things and they're like the only way you know that is someone told you right and where it's maybe not being reported as a here is something from ming chi kuo spoke to the supply chain but like they're still they're still aware that there's like this stuff is out there, even if it's being reported differently. That was something that I was wondering about when trying to think, how are they coming to this conclusion that there is more stuff coming from inside of Apple? But some of the specifics around this and how things have changed over time are really interesting. So the presentation spoke about Apple hiring investigators all over the world who are tasked with preventing information from reaching competitors, counterfeiters, and of course the press.

They hunt down leaks if and when they do appear to stop them. And a number of these investigators have previously worked at agencies like the NSA, the FBI, and the Secret Service, which is pretty intense. So they've all got the dark jackets and dark suits and sunglasses, right? That's who this is. I think they got her, right? I mean, what else would they dress like? They've all got earpieces.

Yeah, Apple security. That's how it works. One interesting tidbit that came out, which I think might have been part of the reason why this whole double down on secrecy and this team was set up, is they tell a story about how enclosures of phones leak. So from the supply chain, the physical bodies of the devices, and they get out into the world so people can buy them. They're coming out of the factory. They've been stolen from the factories. and couldn't buy them, and so they're coming out of the factory.

They've been stolen from the factories. And before the iPhone 5C was announced in 2013, Apple had to purchase back 19,000 of these enclosures that had gotten out of the factory to stop the world from getting them. And then between announce and the phone being released, they bought another 11,000 of them. Between announce and the phone being released, they bought another 11,000 of them. So this is like to keep these away from the web, effectively. So they don't want the pictures getting out.

So these things are being stolen. They're being smuggled. Like it talks about some of the ways that people try and get them out of the factories. But Apple buys them back if they find them. And then Tim Cook did this double down on secrecy thing so in 2016 only four enclosures were stolen out of 65 million devices being produced that is a significant difference it's clear that apple has gone to its partners in the supply chain and has instituted a whole bunch of policies in terms of searching and having security on site searching employees having security on site and um that's yeah it

seems and it seems to be working at least to a certain degree it's hard to do this because there are so many different places where the parts are feeding through in Apple's supply chain that it can be a challenge to do this. But they spend a lot of money on the factories. They can spend a little bit more money on more security. And so that's interesting to see that that's something that's going on here, is trying to plug the leaks in the supply chain. Yeah. Apple is not their only client. And there is some horse trading of information that goes on among suppliers. And that's one way information gets out.

And the other is that you've got people who are oftentimes quite poorly paid, poorly compensated for their work. And they get offered a shocking amount of money, given what their wages are, to spirit away apart from an Apple product line. And it's very hard for those people to say no. And there are a few ways that Apple can approach that, right? Apple can approach that by fixing, you know, the however method they're using to spirit away the case.

They could also make it maybe a little less worth it by paying them better. And hopefully they're doing both of those things. Yeah, apparently there have been stories of people being offered somewhere between three to 12 months of their salary in exchange for getting a part of the factory. Yep. But the thing is,

these workers are paid about $350 a month. Like, what is the equivalent? Now, I don't know if that's good or bad. It sounds bad to me. I assume it's not amazing, but like in perspective, I don't know. I haven't been able to do enough research, honestly, to know how competitive Apple are now.

I assume that they're better than they used to be or better than most people, or maybe we'd hear about it more maybe it's just one of these things that now nobody talks about but it doesn't seem like a lot of money really but again I don't know what that would get you in these places in China

but you can see why if you're offered a year's worth of salary to sneak a piece of metal out of a building how enticing that would be but now Apple is screening like the TSA I think it said that in their factories

they're screening more people than the TSA does like on the whole because I don't know there's something about all of this which is a little uncomfortable I think, in places

like one, that this presentation is existing and then two, when you start thinking about what happens in the supply chain it feels a little uncomfortable to me, and I don't really know how I feel about it like

is all this worth this? I don't know like I know feel about it. Is all this worth this? I don't know. I know that the... It's all so heavy. I understand the surprise and delight thing. And I know that because of the way the app is secretive,

it's what gives me a newer job. The way that they protect their products builds intrigue and makes it interesting for people to listen to so like i obviously you know i appreciate it from that perspective but i see things like this and i'm like wow it's a lot of effort but if that's what makes you the biggest company in the world you know of course this is what you focus on but at the same time it's like boy i really hope you're

doing this ethically and correctly and right for the people that are being impacted yeah it's um i don't know it's one of those things where it's hard to imagine apple just saying oh whatever like every corporation has secrets and things that it wants to maintain internally and they have sometimes good reasons for that, sometimes not as good reason. It's hard to imagine Apple giving up on secrecy and just letting everybody like – Let it fly. A company wants to be able to tell its story, and I understand that. But you do end up in these uncomfortable situations where you've got employees who expect a level of trust, and yet you've also got evidence that some employees cannot be trusted.

Yep. And so what do you do? if you're somebody who would never leak and you are forced to sit through a security thing right i could understand the righteous indignation of like why am i being treated as a as a potential leaker here even though there's evidence that some of your colleagues are absolutely leakers which is why which is why i think it's interesting more from an apple standpoint than from an external standpoint we um you know because as a journalist i kind of don't really care about like um the argument that we don't want to but please don't report this fact about apple because it would make some people sad right it's like well that's too bad but internally the argument that it makes you what you're doing is you're running down your

coworkers' efforts and all their hard work by leaking. And that's what you should feel bad about. That's where your guilt should come from, is that it's not because this company is this big, rich company and you're letting down the company and the company is important above all. It's you're letting down your friends who work here by leaking the stuff that we're working on. And I could see how that could be effective as guilt. But yeah, it's kind of icky too, because it makes everybody feel like they're being surveilled and like they're being treated as a suspect, even if they're innocent. It says apparently that these investigations that are carried out

inside of Cupertino to weed out the people that are linking to the press can take up to three years to complete. And they mentioned recently two cases that they've stopped, one person who worked in Apple's online store and another person in iTunes, and that they are gone. I've heard that there have been a couple, maybe it's these two, I don't know, but I've heard sort of through the grapevine that there have been some you know a lot of times when somebody gets let go for cause there's a um it there's like a code of silence like they just disappear and nobody talks about it and it's just like i mean maybe behind the scenes they talk about it but like officially the company doesn't talk about it the company's just like they're gone

we're not going to talk about it you know over and the employees can all talk but the company's not going to say anything about it and it sounds these things that i've heard through the grapevine are that apple did a couple of kind of high profile terminations where they wanted everybody to know that this person was being fired because you know they wanted people to see the consequences of being found out as being a leaker, I think is the implication there. Effectively being put in the stocks inside of the garden, right? Like, you know, everyone gets to come and throw tomatoes at the guy. Or made an example of, like, you know,

security people come to your desk and walk you out and you're never seen again. And the word gets around and that, you know, that is that is maybe effective but again it gets back to at that point you're just trying to strike fear into people that when i worked in the bank that's how people were fired if you were being fired because you were up to no good your manager and a manager from another branch would come in to the office and they would do it in front of people will come into the office they would stand in the room that you're in they make you shut down and they would walk you out the building for this exact reason that's why it was the policy because you're supposed to discourage people stealing money so when you would fire someone you would embarrass them so it was a way

to show everybody else please do not do this because you don't want to be that person. And the downside there is that you're creating potentially an environment that is full of fear. And do you want a paranoid, fearful environment? Is that the best work environment? At the same time, you also don't want people stealing money from the bank, right? Yep. So that's the, it's a, it's a challenge. There are, you know, I've also heard through the grapevine that some of the leaked sources may have been a little less intentional. Rather than – I've heard that there is some shared information. We talk about these message boards and things like that that Tim Cook posts to and their mailing lists internally at Apple and things like that. I have heard too, that there are some places where more sensitive information used to get discussed. And the discussion groups were wider maybe than they needed to be. And that's almost like an IT issue where people who didn't really need to know got to see it and then those people who

weren't really directly involved are like oh did you know that this is going on and that some of the sources of of the leaks may have been indirect and closed solved by closing down or um dramatically reducing the amount of data that is shared um on you know, in email or message boards or whatever internally, if at all. So it sounds like that that's been some of the doubling down on secrecy has been sort of compartmentalizing a little more at Apple and doing a little less kind of easygoing kind of oversharing of what's going on. So I don't know.

It's tough. It's a tough problem, right? Because there's so many different paths that information can take. And companies would like, believe me, I've experienced this. I'm sure you experienced this. Companies would like to control all information that their employees receive about what's going on at the company. But the fact is, employees are full of people. they talk the employees are people they talk uh businesses are full of them and uh companies can't control it so even though they want to they can't even if you institute red zones which are hallways and public areas as

is described at cupatino do not talk in the red zones but yeah this was just i i encourage people there's way more than we're going to get to today in this piece. There's just all these really interesting tidbits that are inside of here that I recommend people go and read this article. It's really well written. I haven't, funnily enough, actually listened to the audio version. I just read the article.

So maybe I'll have to do that too now because I made a little podcast out of it. So it's probably worth checking out as well. So go look at it. There's more stuff in there than than we've gotten to today but there'll be links in the show notes if you want to go and check it out for yourself today's show is also brought to you by encapsular the multi-function 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 websites of all sizes can be focused to be attacked. It happens every day. It is a thing that is prevalent on the internet. Criminals use giant botnets to scrape website content. They might try and break into databases or even try and bring down sites with denial of service attacks. If this type of stuff happens to you, you want to have an infrastructure there that can handle it. And incapsular, boy, they got it. Their network holds 3 terabits per second of on-demand scrubbing capacity, which can process 30 billion attacks per second. Whether you know what this is or not, it doesn't matter.

Just understand that Encapsular can take care of it. And they've done this for some of the largest website attacks on record. They have made sure that things run. People coming to your website wouldn't even know that something was happening because of Encapsular's powerful CDN that's delivering your customers the content that they want quickly. And if anything bad is happening, you can see it happening just on the Encapsular dashboard. You can adjust security policies on the fly, and you can stay in control of your website. As a listener of this show, you can get one whole month of service for free.

Just go to encapsular.com slash upgrade. That's I-N-C-A-P-S-U-L-A dot com slash upgrade. You can find out more about their service and claim your free month. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. and RelayFM. So this week, later on this week, marks the 10th anniversary of the official release of the iPhone in North America. So, you know, earlier on this year, we were talking about the 10th anniversary of the debut. And now we are at the 10th anniversary of people actually getting them in their hands. And there have been a couple of interesting stories popping up over the last couple of weeks, and there are two, notably, that I want to talk about today. One is an event that was held at the

Computer History Museum in California. I really wished that this would have lined up with when we were all in uh san jose but hey ho um and another is a wall street journal kind of mini documentary one of the reasons i find both of these so interesting is they they usher in the return of an old friend scott forstall he's back baby how interesting to see him appear he's back he's back in somebody pointed out he's back in the same shirt he wore on stage a few years ago yep in the uh actually in the presentation uh the the computer history museum the the presenter remarks on the fact that he wore it wwc in 2012 and forstall gives the uh the jobs line of if I find something I like, I buy 10 of them. Amazing. So I recommend that people go and consume both of these things. There is a video on Facebook of the Computer History Museum talk, and there is a video

on Wall Street Journal that they did, right? So you can go and check those out. But I wanted to talk about Scott Forstall a little bit, because I'm assuming his NDA is up now, because we haven't heard from him since he left Apple. Was it five or six years ago? Something like that, with the Maps thing. He's not said a word. And he popped up a little while ago when he was becoming a Broadway producer, funding Broadway shows. And he talks about that,

which is actually really nice. The opening segment for him with the Computer History Museum piece is really interesting. He's kind of just talking about his life, telling some stories about him as a person. And it seems that he's really found a passion of his with these broadway shows but we haven't heard anything from him in regards to technology

at all but here he is it's five years i wonder if he had a five-year thing or if he just decided he would stay silent and and not talk and this is a good opportunity with the uh with the iphone anniversary he's obviously a main one of the main participants who's left like him and tony fidel and there there there are some but there are a lot of them who are still involved and still at apple and can't really talk about it so um i do wonder because it has been five years since uh or coming up five it's not quite five yet i think it's five years in in september when he left but we're i guess it's safe to assume that if there was a a clause which he couldn't speak you would assume that's up right the guy's not gonna well he's talking about what they were doing at apple right so yeah and i don't know whether there's a don't talk about it kind of thing um that it was

in his deal or not or what the you know, because sometimes what you end up with is a don't talk about the trade secrets. Sometimes you end up about a don't disparage the company for some period of time. There are different deals, right? So maybe so, but he's talking now. But, you know, I wouldn't put it past him that he just didn't feel like talking. Like he didn't talk for a while. And then everybody was like, oh, Forstall's not talking. And then when his contract was up, like nobody asked him.

And he was like, all right. But yeah, he's saying stuff now. And I would say one of the things that struck me about his participation at the Computer History Museum is that he was given some opportunities to throw bombs at apple and didn't he does not appear in any way to be bitter well or if he is he's not gonna like yeah it certainly comes across that he's kind of like moved on with his life and doesn't you know he's not he's not there to be catty and angry and um and that's uh that's that's good i get i get the sense that tony fidel is a lot more bitter scott forrestal is yeah it because you know there's there's a couple of instances where the presenter who

really sounded to me like john gruber and it it was freaking me out every now and then, and I remember that it wasn't him. John Markoff is the presenter. John Markoff, yeah. He was the writer at the New York Times, tech writer for many, many years. So he had some excellent questions. Some of them, he's asking, I think, really valid questions. Like, when you look at the phone now, do you see anything in there that annoys you? And he's like, of course, I'm a designer.

Everybody does this. He said there were things that I was using when i was there that i wasn't happy with that i had done like this is just the mark this is just like the the what happens in a designer's mind so stuff like that that we're talking about where like he has a real easy shot to be like i hate this non-schemomorphic design right because they bring that up as well but he doesn't he's like this is just the way that things are there there wasn't like and i wasn't expecting this like a ton of scoops in this right like whoa things we never knew before but there are like little details and stories that haven't been told that he can tell you know like one of them i didn't know this the

original multi-touch demo was a table-sized display that was used as a projector to control a mac that was the original technology that's what it was doing and this was what they were trying to turn into a tablet and then the story that everybody knows then the tablet project was turned into the phone yeah even the idea that this whole multi-touch thing and the tablet project began because steve hated a guy at microsoft which is hilarious he had a personal vendetta against this person that was a mutual friend who was working on some tablet project at microsoft and he's like no i hate this guy we're gonna do one and i love that as a reason to create to start the wheels in motion to create probably the most successful and

influential computer product of all time the iphone came from a personal vendetta that steve had with a guy at microsoft which is amazing like i really recommend that people watch or listen or however you want to consume this thing because there's great stories in here like there's a story where he talks about the first demo that they gave to Singular, AT&T, and just the story of Steve and Scott going and doing this. And it did strike me at this point that there are books, right, and there are folklore stories about all of these products,

but not a lot of them include four store and if i was him i would want some of these out in the world so that yeah when people think about the iphone they remember how incredibly influential he was to the project and that now it's the 10th anniversary maybe it's time to share some of those details. And something that I found striking between both the Computer History Museum talk and the Wall Street Journal documentary, he's talking about the same stories in both of these. So if you've watched one, you will have heard in the other one where he talks about something else, but it's the same thing. He talks about the same types of things and i wonder if you know and i mean i don't know i don't know the guy i

don't know how he feels about this but he deserves to have his place in history when it comes to talking about the iphone but there hasn't been a lot of him in those stories like these folklore stories yeah it's funny. I was thinking about this because we have some stories about the, we have lots of stories about the original Mac. We have some stories about the iPod. There is an amount of time that has to pass

where the act of creation of these influential products goes from being a trade secret to being history and not worth, not relevant in terms of the current state of the art, but incredibly relevant in terms of the cultural and historical value. And the challenge is that talking, I mean, this is actually a perfect connection to our previous topic, that you've got a company where secrecy is everything. Everything is siloed. Everything is kept secret. And we could say that's fine for building that product.

But what does it mean in terms of our understanding of how that product came to be built? You have to end up relying on the stories told by the people who were there years after they left, because that's the only that's the only way to do it it's unlikely that apple is going to you know retain and declassify all of the emails and whatever else right that's not going to happen it's going to end up being personal recollections that are going to be how the iphone which is an incredibly influential product in the history of technology and maybe even in the history of the world, how it came to be. And what's interesting about this is this is kind of the start of it. There have been some stories in the past,

but it will take some time. And the stories are going to get way more interesting when it's Phil schiller talking about his time at apple when he leaves apple if he ever just decides to do that right to leave and to talk about it when tim cook is reflective in his retirement about it like johnny's memoir right johnny's memoir it's going to be uh it's going to be the most beautiful book ever published no one will be able to afford it but it will be really great information no it will be on the highest quality paper and it will be yes indeed so all of that will change our our opinions but we're in the early days of it now i think it's great that there is a computer history museum i think this is important but it is it is

this funny case of having to um start lifting the veil on stuff that was secret only by sort of waiting for people to pass outside of the zone of secrecy and then be able to talk about it. So it's fun to hear these stories. The nice thing about the early versions of these histories is that the the time is so recent you know it's only 10 years that it feels a little bit uh like uh a little bit more current and and you know even if there are there's a better clearer picture done 10 years from now or 15 years from now um it won't seem as immediate then it'll seem like ancient history like i wrote i wrote a 20th anniversary of the max story and a 25th anniversary of the max story and those you know it was ancient history by then and this is 10 years of the iphone it doesn't feel like ancient history it feels almost like yesterday it's been

really interesting to hear from scott i miss him now when i hear him. He was such a great storyteller, and he's still continuing to talk about the product with such passion. Would you say he's a blow-away storyteller, Mike? He was blow-away. You know what I think is funny? Hearing from him now, just how things change over time, I think that there has been a vilification of scott forstall in a lot of ways since he left apple you know because maps was such a debacle and then people got tired

of the design that he was spearheading and it was like it all got pinned on him as if like he if he never left we would still have felt on our iphones which i don't think is true but like there is there was this whole like this all this stuff was pinned to falstall and because he could never defend himself it kind of stayed that way and it's when i when i hear him now again talking and presenting i'm reminded about how great he was in the wild world that we saw him in right like again i don't know what he was like behind the scenes i have no idea but it's interesting to to see him again back in the the role that i know him and remember how much i liked him when he was on stage you know like the affection that we have for federighi now we had for forstall then i don't know if that's entirely true i think i think federighi is much more of a folk hero

because he is a giant nerd in a different way but forstall was the embodiment of you know of ios for a long time and uh he fulfilled that role and he you're right there is a simplification that happens because he got he left the company and there were major changes and you know he became a representative of those changes and and and yeah he absolutely became a character in the story i was thinking he's a little bit like a character who got written out of a tv show and uh then he returns for like the reunion episode and you're like oh yeah i love that guy. I remember him. Yeah,

exactly right. So the wall street journal brought together three, uh, former Apple vice presidents or executives. So they brought Scott Forstall, Tony Fidel and Greg Christie together to create a 10 minute video documentary on how the iPhone was born. And again,

we've heard some of these stuff, but in a different, you know, in different ways before. And it is really weird to me now to imagine how much time apple clearly put into trying to create an actual telephone by using the interface of the ipod like this started off as we want to create something that makes calls like that was the project yeah there's an ipod phone ipod phone is what the original idea was,

is what if we took, the iPod is going to get cannibalized by phones because there are all these phones that are adding MP3 player features. So what if we make the iPod, leverage our power in this market because everybody loves their iPod to make an iPod phone.

That was absolutely the original conception here. And it's mind boggling to think of today that that might have been what it was going to be, right? It's the faster horse thing, right? I mean, it's literally, it is, that is the thing, is what if we just take an iPod and evolve it a little bit so it can make calls? And the funny thing is, what worked so great for the iPod, which is the click wheel interface that every iPod had, was actually one of the things that prevented the existence of an iPod phone, was actually one of the things that prevented the existence of an iPod phone because you ended up with like an old dial phone or something.

Like you couldn't pick numbers and stuff with the iPod interface. It was really bad. You would have to sync with a contact list. But how do you dial a number that is not in your contact list with this? You're spinning around and picking numbers. And how do you send a text message? It's like you're spinning around to pick texts. It was really bad like everything that was good about the ipod was was failed you

when you needed to be this and i that seems to be where they ran aground even tony fidel said like it was very clear to them that there was no way that interface was actually going to be usable on a phone so but that's where they started from and then there came this other path which was what if we use the underpinnings of os 10 what if instead of building up from the ipod we build out from the mac or down from the mac to make a device and that was that was the answer and that was that that um moment of revelation where where they went and made and made a product that was for the future instead of a slight life extension on the iPod. There was a point, apparently, in the creation of the software in which Steve Jobs, who was unhappy with how the project was progressing,

gave Forstall and Christie an ultimatum to either have something good to show to him in two weeks or it goes to another team. Now, i can only assume this is hyperbole but forstall said that it led to the team putting in 168 hours a week for two weeks that's 24 hours a day that's all the hours yeah that can't be that can't be possible right i i i would be i think what that means is that um basically everybody was said every waking hour has to be here um and probably people slept and showered maybe but that

was apple or yeah or they or they went home and slept and showered and then came right back but and and they were probably always people there all the time. Well, they did say that Christy was getting hotel rooms for people across the street. So they could just go backwards and forwards. See, I assume that what it meant was they weren't working for 168 hours a week. But for those 168 hours, when they were awake, they were. Every waking hour. Yeah, I think so. For two weeks.

Which, you know, a big big important project um a burst like that is not unreasonable i think the problem that i've got with a lot of the silicon valley culture is when you're expected to spend all of your personal time at your at your job all the time forever but this is one of those kind of legendary moments of everybody put it in high gear for two weeks and this is all they did. And this is what they got was, you know, what they had to show Steve Jobs in two weeks. And then again, another story I like from this is that in late 2006, the end is in sight for iPhone OS. But the keyboard apparently was terrible. Like you would give up trying to write an email on it, Falstall says. So he froze development on every other part of the OS,

and everybody was focused on building a better keyboard, like he gave a timeline of a week or whatever. And then people would come in and present their keyboards. And then one engineer created the predictive keyboard. The idea that the keys, the actual, like the touch targets for the keys, are changing as we're typing, but you don't see it. It visually stays the same, but using algorithms and predictive technology,

the key areas change. So it's predicting what letters you want to type next. And as long as you hit somewhere near them, it's like, oh yeah, we know what you want. And then somebody created that and they were able to ship with that. I found that really, really interesting. And like, I love the idea of him being like, nope, everyone stop what you're doing.

This thing is terrible. Well, they were terrified of it. That was the, they made this decision to go with the all touchscreen interface and the keyboard became this kind of terrifying thing. Because if you think back to then, like their competitors all had physical keyboards like blackberry was the king they ruled with their physical keyboard the palm trio had a physical keyboard little chiclet buttons so they were making this opinionated product which is great it's like nope we want to use that screen space we don't want to put a keyboard down there but then how do you get text input to not be terrible and that yeah that was really scary and i i do remember when they? And yeah, that was really scary.

And I do remember when they rolled it out that that was one of the things that they were very proud of in talking to the press was that the keyboard actually is making guesses about what letters you're going to be pressing. Even retroactively, I believe, where it'll see what word you're spelling. And it's a misspelled word. And it looks back to where you hit that letter and goes, oh, you probably met this other letter, which is a word. And then that's how autocorrect will behave. Or at least I think it still behaves that way. And that's just very clever stuff.

And that was a good breakthrough for them. Because if that keyboard was unusable, that would be the end of the product. Like that, the jig would be up and it although we can still debate software keyboards and how easy they are to use and how frustrating it can be um they they were good enough to push the phone market over the edge and it it will never come back and then to tie these two topics together like to relate it back to the secrecy thing they were talking about so greg christie who was uh in the the team they were creating the the iphone os right him and false door talking about the fact and fidel actually the three of them because they're kind of across the whole project are talking about the fact that the hardware and

software teams did not see what the other team was working on and said that while this was tricky, it worked because nobody knew what the iPhone was going to look like before it shipped. And so they knew at the time this was going to be a difficult thing to try and do, right? Like this was tricky, this was hard. You have to make the thing with having very little information about what the other team's working on,

but it meant that they were able to keep it super locked down and it didn't get out yeah it's true and in the end they knew that the screen was going to be the size and multi-touch and that they were having these buttons that's all they needed right clearly right like whether it would have been better or worse or whatever if they would have known what we know is we had a fantastic product, right? Like they were able clearly to find a way to make that work for them. But yeah, I mean, this 10 years of the iPhone thing, it's kind of wild for me because this is the first one of the big Apple products that, you know, I was around for and interested in when it was created. You know, like this is my is my history now you know like the mac was a thing before me um and before i was interested in these types of things but the

iphone you know i remember i have vivid memories of watching the first keynote like i remember where i was i remember what was going on when i saw it because it was such a groundbreaking moment for me and you know i know i watched that video like 10 times and all of that stuff. This is my history now and it's really exciting. I remember where I was too, Mike. Don't do it, Jason. I don't want to talk to you about this.

No, I was at Macworld Expo watching Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone. That's where I was. I'm sure you were. But no, it is something to have a milestone that you actually remember. That totally changes it. That's part of growing up and getting older is that you start – everybody tells you about history. And history was things that happened before you were alive or that you didn't pay attention to, right?

And then all of a sudden, something is kind of historic. And of historic and you're like oh yeah i actually was there for that and remember it and then that's like a really different experience and and that's where you are in fact when when did the prompt do its episode about the iphone oh i assume it was it was five years ago but i can find it i mean were you guys doing the prompt five years ago i think we were yeah wow how about that yeah i know right yeah we started we started the prompt in 2013 so not five years ago but but yeah okay so it was probably like the seventh anniversary of the eighth seventh anniversary maybe, maybe three years ago, four years ago, something like that. And that's a good episode, by the way, people could listen to that.

January 9th, 2014. So it was three years ago. Imagine an episode of The Incomparable, except instead of talking about a movie or a TV show, talk about a keynote. That's what that episode of The Prompt is. It's great. It's a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's, I've been, because this is the product release, right? Because there was six months between announcement and release. It's great. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, it's, I've been, because this is the product release, right? Because there was six months between announcement and release. I've been thinking back to my original review of this, which is still online at Macworld. And it's, the funny thing about it was that I had to review it at camp

because we were going to a summer camp up in the mountains um with my family and so uh we literally like got the iphone and then the next day i went to the camp and so i actually wrote the article in a tent and had to drive about a half an hour down the mountainside to get signal so that i could email it to the office to post it got four out of five it got four mice four mice yeah it had some issues but it was pretty great for a first attempt it was uh well you know thinking back to it now it was the thing that i thought most notable about that product was that it was really good at everything it tried to do. And this is a, it's gone on to be kind of a hallmark of Apple at points. And I think when we criticize Apple, sometimes this is the thing that we criticize about Apple is there are two ways to make a product.

Okay, they're not. It's a spectrum. But one end is it doesn't do everything, but product. Okay, they're not. It's a spectrum. But at one end is, it doesn't do everything, but everything it does, it does well. And at the other end is, what doesn't it do? None of them are pretty good, right? They're all just kind of mediocre, but it does lots of things. And in my mind, the quintessential Apple product is a product that does a limited number of things very well. It's a targeted, very specific thing. And with the development of the iPhone,

there was obviously an incredible amount of discipline for them to say, if we can't do it well, we're just not gonna try. We'll polish the hell out of the things that are good and everything else, we're just gonna punt and say, nope, we don't do that. Like text or MMS, uh photos via text message nope we're just not gonna do that it's just not there third-party apps how about the web but the web is

good use the web we're not gonna do that uh and so that's what the iphone is it does what it the original iphone does what it does and that's all it does and it was very good at that so that was my that was my take on it but it was funny to to use a uh a uh a phone that uh like i had to drive not just to turn in the story i had to drive to like use the phone because there was no service at the camp so i had to make calls and stuff like hey i'm on the iphone and the other thing is where did that iphone come from there were those long lines and and uh there was no review program for iPhone beyond your, you know, Walt Mossberg,

David Pogue kind of contingent of, of, of highest level friends of Steve Jobs, basically people, Steve Jobs trusted. And so we had to wait, we had to get people to wait in line. So we had a bunch of people waiting in lines,

iPhone lines to buy an iPhone. So I would have one to review. And that's my other story here. I hope that he tells it at some point this week but brian x chen tech reporter for the new york times was one of our junior editors then and i believe we had him waiting an iphone line all day and he wrote he wrote stories about the iphone line we did coverage about the iPhone lines. But ultimately, he brought back an iPhone, which I then took and reviewed. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Brian.

And yes, I should have told that story without the name. And that writer grew up to be Brian Chen of the New York Times. But yeah, it's funny. That's 10 years ago now. It's kind of hard to believe. But it was a big deal. Everybody was really curious about it. I mean, that's the other thing I remember

is having it at camp. So I had it around like all these people, like just kind of random, regular UC Berkeley graduates, basically people, just parents and their kids and stuff. And everybody, like that six months had built the hype so much. Everybody wanted to see it and see what it was like because it was like it was unlike anything they'd ever experienced a

lot of those people had blackberries and things like that or they just had little candy bar phones and then they saw this thing with a bright color screen and it was not retina by any stretch of the imagination but still way higher resolution than a computer screen in terms of the pixel density looked great and that multi-touch interface was like nothing that almost anybody had ever seen before, because we'd all been using like little capacitive touch things with a stylus. And so it was,

uh, it did, it blew people away. I remember that. Pitch to zoom wasn't a thing, right? Like no, all of this stuff was new.

Yeah. So, uh, happy birthday, iPhone. Yeah. Happy birthday happy birthday, iPhone. Yeah. Happy birthday, 10. 10.

Today's episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by PDF Pen from Smile. PDF Pen equips you with everything that you need for powerful PDF editing. And now, the new PDF Pen 9 is available and is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs on your Mac. You can upgrade today to go totally paperless and enjoy over 100 enhancements to improve your PDF editing workflow. Like, for example, accessing annotations and content of those in the sidebar. And you can also copy this annotation content as text so you can take it out to other applications. So you can now add notes, comments, and cloud annotations to your PDF documents. You can even fill out and sign interactive PDF forms.

You can find and highlight every instance of a word, just a couple of clicks, which is incredibly useful, along with being able to remove OCR text layers, create links to other PDF files, and with PDF Pen Pro 9, you can add table of contents editing or even OCR for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which I'm sure if you need it, is incredibly useful. I use PDF Pen all the time for documents and contracts and for redacting stuff. It is super useful. It is one of the applications that I probably use the most to get my work done on all of my devices, from my iPhone to my iPad to my Mac. I probably use it on my iPad the most, but when I'm sitting down at the Mac,

there's no other application that I'm going to open other than PDFPen to do my PDF-related activities. You can get everything you need for more powerful PDF editing by going to smilesoftware.com slash upgradefm at smilesoftware.com slash upgradefm at smilesoftware.com slash upgradefm Thank you so much to PDFPan from Smile for their support of this show. Jason, it is time

for hashtag askupgrade. Rajiv would like to know what are the chances that there will be a new Apple TV with 4K released this year? Rajiv would love to have amazon video and netflix 4k content available in his apple tv jason do you think we're going to see this yeah i i would probably put um would i put money on it i don't know i think it's a better than 50 percent chance

i think the challenge is not doing it um but like technically in the box, but what the content is, there's limited 4k content available like via Netflix and Amazon. But if you're Apple, you want to have 4k content on iTunes when you roll this out. And is that available? Is there enough? I mean, if I look at Amazon's catalog and Netflix, Netflix's catalog, there's not a lot of 4K content. There's some, but there's not a lot. So if Apple's going to do it, other than to check a box and be like, yes, we're thinking about the future and we are supporting 4K for TVs that have it, if you've got a 4K TV,

hooray. But it does make you ask the question, okay, you've got a 4K box, what does it do? And if you're Apple and you've got all of your content in the iTunes store, what, you know, what of it are you going to be able to make 4K? And is it enough to go out and say, look, there's a reason why this is good. So I feel like that's the missing piece is you can't, well, they can. Ideally, you wouldn't announce a 4K Apple TV and not announce a pretty decent catalog of content available on iTunes. I think just saying some apps like Netflix and Amazon will support 4K, yay, and then move on because Apple's their own content provider too. And they need to be in that

business, I think, in order to's their own content provider too. And they need to be in that business, I think, in order to justify their product having that feature. Do you think it's likely that they would do it even if they didn't have a ton of iTunes stuff just so that they can say that their box has 4K so it stacks up on charts and then they can just have companies like Amazon and Netflix put their stuff on?

Like, is it worth it for them to, to make a 4k Apple TV, even if there isn't iTunes content? Like I said, I think it's a lot less worth it. Um, it checks the box, right? It lets them say they've got a 4k device. I just feel like it it's a, um, if I was at Apple and we had a 4k Apple TV piece of hardware ready to go, I would, I would really be trying to get the iTunes people to make some deals where some content was going to be available on iTunes in 4K for the first time,

for the first time on any platform, and try to go out with a... It's a much better story if there's 4K content on iTunes, I guess is what I'm saying. Much better story. Not impossible without it, but it's a much better story with it. Tanguy wants to know, currently, in our opinion, what is the best keyboard available for the 10.5-inch iPad Pro? What do you think? Smart keyboard.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. I mean, right off, if it's custom designed for the 10.5, it's the only. There is the Logitech one. By all accounts, it is no good. It's horrific, Jason. I bought one and returned it. I've been talking about it on Connected a little bit, but I used it for five minutes and knew I would never want to use it again.

It's absolutely everything I loved about the Create in the inverse. It's just not a good product. So I would say that right now, the only real option is the smart keyboard, and I'm using it, and mine is exactly what I'm expecting it to be, because I've used a smart keyboard for nearly two years, right? I've always had at least one of my iPads with a smart keyboard on it, and I actually quite like the keyboard. It does what I need it to do. If you're looking for one right now, go for that. Otherwise,

any Bluetooth keyboard will work, right? You can get a stand. Anything will work, but if you're looking for something that attaches to it and is meant for it and treats it as a package, your only option right now it really is the smart keyboard that apple make and it's good it's very good i think

so richard wants to know do you think apple would ever buy a company like disney so that they could fill their apple tv service of exclusive content no that's my short answer disney is a huge company i don't see it i don't see them buying disney I don't see them buying Netflix. I don't see them buying Time Warner to get HBO. AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner. Do you think this is purely just because of the complexity of trying to have a company like that in your portfolio? like that in your portfolio i i think it's a question that a few weeks ago might have been um might have been a better question to ask although i think disney is the wrong i mean it's just the complexity of a company like that does apple want to own theme parks no they don't i can see why if you're asking that question you would go with disney because of their incredibly close relationship and the fact that the does the jobs

family still own that as well like the jobs family still owns a big chunk of of disney yeah um well i i don't know if they divested but at one point steve jobs was the single biggest shareholder not that he had anything close to a majority but he because of the pixar the pixar deal was in stock but i i just in general um the question has always been been buy or build a company like disney is already so diversified that why would apple want to be in that business and apple buys a whole company with espn and disneyland and all of that just to get some you know video production seems like madness to. So what they did was say, we don't need to buy, we can build. And they hired two incredibly well thought of TV executives and said,

and presumably are going to give them a big budget and say, build us a service. And I think they will. I don't think there's a huge barrier there. Honestly, I think if you've got the money like Apple has, you can build something that's like Netflix or HBO or Amazon in five years. I think you can. Amazon Prime, a video service with good content in it that's exclusive that people want to pay for. I think you can do that. Maybe I'm being naive about how the TV industry works, but when I look at it, I feel like this is something that you could solve with money and talent. And that it's not one of these things where Netflix has erected a barrier and it's now impossible to make.

And in fact, you can buy from those studios. I would imagine that Disney will supply Apple with content for their service, right? They don't need to buy Disney. They just need to pay Disney to do what it does well. So I think that's what will happen. They just need to pay Disney to do what it does well. So I think that's what will happen. Yeah, I assume it might be trickier for Apple to try and maybe buy exclusive rights to content

and stuff like that with a provider just because of companies are hesitant of Apple because of what they did to the music industry, right? Like I feel like that that is still there. I think it's part of the reason why the Apple TV did not launch with an over-the-top service. Like I think that that might be part of it, is that Apple believes that it can negotiate the way it wants to negotiate,

and companies are hesitant of Apple because they don't want to become the music industry. And I think that makes it trickier for them. So maybe it does just make sense, as you say, for them to just do what Netflix is doing. Netflix is also struggling to negotiate with some companies. So they're like, screw it, we're going to make our own shows, and they're going to be awesome, and everybody's going to want them, so we'll make money that way. Josh asked, does the Files app in iOS 11 allow you to open files other than photos using the USB or SD adapters? So the adapters, the lightning adapters that you can buy. I didn't know the answer to this question. I believed I knew what the answer would be and then over the weekend Federico Fatici

confirmed it for me that when you plug in the adapters that would open up files, they still, like the camera connection kit for example, which has USB on it, it still opens the Photos app on iOS 11. Have you done any testing of your own on this, Jason?

Yeah, it doesn't do it. That a real shame that's about it is a shame um i think apple's attitude is probably that everything's wireless and why would you need a memory card for anything but it's like well why do you have an sd card reader that you sell yeah well it's for it's for photos it's like did you know that there are other devices did you know you make an ipad pro which is a professional i mean the thing that got me and i actually did ask when I had a briefing about the iPad Pro, is like, this is a product for businesses, right? For business people, for workers. Do you not understand that workers still have like things on thumb drives and stuff?

Like that sometimes you're in a hotel room somewhere getting ready for a presentation and there's a file on a thumb drive. And you have that moment where you're like, oh, I have an iPad. So don't give that file to me. Instead, let's find a computer that can read it. And then you can email it to me or airdrop it to me and then I'll get it. And it's like, you've got a card reader, you've got a USB adapter. Why not? You've got a file browser. Why've got a USB adapter. You've got a file browser. Why don't you let them work together? It does not seem to be a stretch, especially since you're making the iPad Pro.

I would love to see them do this. There's still time, maybe some point in the future, but just realize there are these devices. Federico is showing me one. There is a lightning thumb drive right like i would love to be able to use stuff like that without needing this weird app right luckily you have that um those wireless sd cards and you need to use like because you know you want to transfer but you have to use these weird applications because you can't yeah get the files. The audio files that you need for this very episode, you cannot just plug them into anything and get it.

You have to send it through this weird application instead. It would be great if we could just have this stuff accessible to us. Yes, it's niche case, but the iPad Pro is a niche device. It should be, right? That's what it's, you know, I know more people buy it than kind of maybe how it's intended, which is like an iPad to do work on. People buy them because they just want the newest, the greatest, and the best iPad.

But understand, people want to use this stuff. They want to get this stuff. You have an app called Files. Come on. Rajiv is back with another question. Do you think that Apple would produce and release mature rated material through Apple Music or their Apple TV service?

And when I heard this question I was reminded of something that we haven't heard about for a long time, which was reported on last year that Dr. Dre was working on a TV show which would be mature. Do you remember this? Yeah.

So do you think that Apple, because I mean Apple in the past have been historically anti-mature I think would maybe be a way to put it. Do you think that they would themselves make stuff like this? I mean we've heard about this Dr. Dre thing but we don't really know how it's going to pan out

if at all. But do you think that they would make something like a Game of Thrones? Absolutely. You do you think that they would make something like a game of thrones absolutely you you don't think that you think that there's just like well they're going to make mature tv content because it's what people want yeah i love i love the questions this week because it's so many of these conventional wisdom things about apple where i'm just going to go and say nope like like are they going to buy disney no they're not are they going to be afraid about things with mature content and themes? No, I don't think they are. Again, I don't think you hire those development people and say, let's keep it rated PG. I don't think you do. I don't think you build a service.

Look at what's on Netflix. Look at what's on HBO. You don't build a service. Apple is not building You don't build a service. Apple is not building a family video service for family viewing, right? I don't think that's their marketing approach here. I think Apple is going to build a real video service with a diverse set of programming that is going to be considered sort of premium quality programming and what what shows are on those services it's it's game of thrones it's house of cards it's orange is the new black it's the like the marvel even the marvel shows on netflix are um way rougher than anything that would be on network tv and i think that's think that's just where we are. Or in the cinema. Yeah. And they'll have parental controls and stuff, which they already do. And that's just, I think that's absolutely what they're going to do.

And I think this perception that Apple is never going to do anything that isn't inoffensive in terms of content. I'll point out that iTunes sells all that stuff and Apple's platforms show it via Netflix and HBO and things like that, right? It's all there. Unless Apple does something completely weird and says, oh no, our service is going to be the family-friendly streaming service, but I just don't see it. I don't think that's how they'll do it. I think they'll have family appropriate stuff and more mature content stuff and it'll all be labeled

and that's going to be how it is. I don't see how you compete in this market. I don't see how you compete with Westworld and Game of Thrones and House of Cards and do it rated PG. I just know. And finally today, Chris asked, Jason talks about being a freelancer and podcaster,

but not about running a large podcast network. Is the incomparable much time and work for Jason? The incomparable is not a large podcast network. Okay, let's say it's large in the amount of shows and people, which I know from experience working with a large group of people can bring with it a lot of work just inherently in the fact that you have a lot of people to help and manage and work with well you know the the shows that are on the incomparable network that are not mine or that i'm not involved with. It's essentially self-serve. Like I don't have to work with Joe and Dan on Defocused.

They got it. They do it and it works fine. I don't have to work with you on the ring post. I'm off in my own little world like over there. Yeah. So The Incomparable is a hobby. It does bring in a portion of my income, mostly for the main show, but it is a small portion. There is some work there. There's some technical work in

terms of getting podcasts up and running. There is also some work in terms of we have our membership program. So every quarter, my wife and I have to do some accounting and bookkeeping and payments to the hosts for their shows that have been supported by members. But, you know, it's not, there are a lot of shows on the network, that's true, but it's not something that I tightly manage. I just try to keep the trains running and help where I can and do the shows that are the shows that I do there. And in most cases, it's a labor of love. The main incomparable show is also something that is part of my living, but it's not a huge part. And most of the other shows, the membership support essentially, or it basically goes to allowing the shows to exist and maybe throw a little bit back to the host. But a lot of it is like, we can afford to pay somebody to edit the show,

which is how the show happens. Like Random Trek is like that. Total Party Kill and Game Show are kind of like that now too, where there's support there. And the support really goes to the fact that I don't have to edit those shows anymore,

that we can pay somebody to do it. Cause I don't have the time to do it because I'm out on my own doing my own stuff. So, um, but it's not a, it's not a large, I would say not a large podcast network in terms of,

uh, in any term, except for maybe how many shows are on it. They are all great shows though. All the great shows. They're all the great shows they're all the great shows yeah i guess it's like it's difficult to to see i guess from the outside right because i talk about running a podcast network but relay fm is more focused as a business it's your job yeah relay fm is your job and the incomparable know, it's not my job. It is basically my hobby, or you could say it's a very small sort of side project.

In fact, I would argue, and I think I mentioned this on Free Agents at one point, I probably spend – if you calibrated, like, how many hours you spend and how much money is a result of that, like, it would be very clear then that the incomparable is a labor of love. Because I do spend more time on it that it probably is justified in terms of what i get paid but it is the thing i love to do i don't have like it is it is kind of my hobby like people are like oh what hobbies what do you do when you're not doing podcasts and writing things and the answer is no that's like i spend time with my family other podcasts and other writing things and then i do podcasts and writing i mean that that's i i am fortunate to be able to do the things that i like to do and want to do as my job and so it all just kind of gets intermingled you're saying like about you know relay fm is my job and the incomparable isn't so much your job like i think relay fm is more your job than the incomparable is your job

right yeah oh yeah yeah i mean in terms certainly in terms of how i make my living it is Relay FM is more your job than The Incomparable is your job, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly in terms of how I make my living, it is. And thanks to our sponsors. And to our listeners. Sponsors and listeners, thank you. We need you both. Absolutely. Keep coming, all of you.

Well, a lot of the Incomparable shows have the listener part. They just don't have the sponsor part. And that's fine, right? So, but yeah, no, I'd say Relay and Six Colors are my jobs. And The Incomparable is sort of a part-time job and sort of a hobby. I don't know if you noticed this, Jason, but I tried to skew the Ask Upgrades to you this week.

Because I know I took them all last week. So you can ask Mike last week. It was Ask Jason this week. TV. Oh, good. Lots of TV was in there. Lots of TV. That's good.

If you want to find our show notes, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 147. If you'd like to support our sponsors, which again, we really appreciate when you do, go to check out the great folk over at Encapsular, Smile, and Jamf Now. If you want to find Jason online, he's over at sixcolors.com, theincomparable.com. He hosts a bunch of shows at relay.fm,

and he's on Twitter. He's at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am imike, at I-M-Y-K-E. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Hydrate. Stay out of the sun, everybody. Stay cool.

Stay frosty.