Upgrade - 149: The Taste of Danger

Episode Date: July 10, 2017

Is Apple taking a risk in potentially releasing a high-end, high-cost iPhone model in addition to the regular models this fall, as is rumored? Also, Jason and Myke try to come to terms with the possibility of a $1000-plus ‘iPhone Pro’. Jason also talks about inviting the Amazon Echo Show and its touchscreen into his kitchen, and we discuss peanut butter alternatives guaranteed to make Myke uncomfortable.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 149 today's show is brought to you by squarespace away and encapsula my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snow hola jason snow hola miguel hurley that was a nice try on the surname there but uh i don't think you nailed it i don't know what it would be i don't know what the spanish version of hurley would be but i don't think it was that or leo we can we can workshop this later on uh michael would like to know for hashtag snell talk this week as a 12.9 inch ipad pro user, I sometimes think that the lunch tray comparison is an apt one because the iPad is so large. Jason, have you ever used your 12.9-inch iPad Pro to carry things around the house? Only in moments of necessity.

Best example, I actually did this this morning, although I admit I did it after I read this, but I think I would have done it anyway, which is I had a cup of tea and I had a plate with my breakfast on it. And I had my iPad because I was reading while the breakfast was finishing. And I realized I needed to take these three objects back to the bedroom and so i closed my smart cover and put my plate on the ipad and then picked up the mug of tea and used it as a carrier for that but it was a little plate and it barely fit because you know it seems like a lunch tray but let me tell you a lunch tray is larger so but yes sure why not if if i've only got i've only got two arms. So if I need to carry three things and one of them is the iPad, it's a flat surface. You can do it. By the way, my cat likes to sit on iPads.

It's strange. Like on our bed, he will oftentimes sit or lay down on my iPad or my wife's iPad. Other computers too or just iPads? The laptops are very rarely any place where the cat would be um i don't i mean i don't know if he sits on laptops i don't think so i don't think i've seen him said like my son and my daughter have laptops and i don't think i've seen him sitting on them but the ipad i think it's like the leather case or something it's more comfortable um than the metal of a or something. It's more comfortable than the metal or stickers. My daughter's laptop is covered with stickers.

He must not like sitting on stickers. You can't cover the wonderful artistry. Oh, yeah. Good point. Good point. So I have some follow-up about peanut butter. Of course we do. Snell Talk has erupted into follow-up.

This is Snell Talk follow-up, not regular follow-up. It is, actually. This is Snell Talk follow-up, not regular follow-up. It is, actually. This is in the chapter markers, Mike. It's very important that we still remain in the Snell Talk chapter. If people haven't seen, there's a chapter of Snell Talk. There's custom art. We are still ensconced inside the Snell Talk set of parentheses for this follow-up.

Just want to be clear about that. So the Snell Talk follow-up is around peanut butter. So last week, we were talking about the fact that you love peanut butter more than anything else that you eat. And I reminded you. Thank you for that qualifier. I reminded you. I assume you like your family more than peanut butter. I figured it was just important to mention that. I also reminded you and the rest of the world that I am allergic. And we had lots of upgradians right in, Jason,

to tell me about all of the peanut butter flavored things that I could have that do not actually contain peanuts. So Gannon and Rob suggested a product called Sun Butter, which is all one word. Ted suggested something which is kind of wonderfully named Get Buzzing Wow Butter Bars. The Get Buzzing Wow Butter Bars, as I like saying that. And Phil, Andrew, and another Jason all suggested something called just Wow Butter. So I think Wow Butter seems to be the winner here because I assume that the Get Buzzing product contains something called Wow Butter. So I do have a thought about this, though.

So I was looking at all these products thinking how interesting i don't like the flavor of peanut butter because in my mind if i ever taste like peanuts or smell peanuts i get scared right so i i i appreciate all of this i appreciate the feedback um but as I started thinking about this and wondering if I should get some, I decided I didn't want to do it because it would probably make me feel rather unwell to eat anything peanut related. I would imagine you'd be, like, nervous, right? Like, it would set off something in you because this is normally the taste of danger, the taste of death or potential death anyway. And it's also interesting.

Sun butter is sunflower seed butter, I believe. So it's a replacement that doesn't use nuts because there's also like almond butter and stuff like that and cashew butter. Yeah, I get a bit funny with sunflower seeds as well because okay but they're tongue tingly wow butter seems like it's a completely artificial substance made to taste like peanut butter which is brilliant i mean the label on it says it's safe for schools you know a lot of schools have a have a uh a no nut policy so you can if your kid really loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the schools uh have no peanuts because they've got kids with peanut, then you buy a while better and use it. And hopefully your kid doesn't know the difference. I will say as somebody who does love peanut butter, and I'm going to bring in

our pal Casey Liss, who loves Reese's peanut butter cups to this conversation too. There are two sorts of flavors of peanut butter. There's actual peanut butter and there's artificial ish peanut butter like flavor and i wonder which one wow butter is because like reese's peanut butter cups taste like peanut butter but kind of not we just were um traveling last weekend and weekend before last and uh the small town we were staying in had a brand new fudge shop that opened and the kids went in there. And one of the fudges they bought was this peanut butter fudge, which I tasted because of peanut butter. And my reaction was, oh, this is like the filling that goes inside the Reese's peanut butter cups. It's not quite real.

It's real-ish. And even things like frozen yogurt. Sometimes I went to a frozen yogurt place in Southern California with my in-ish. And even things like frozen yogurt. Sometimes I went to a frozen yogurt place in Southern California with my in-laws and they had two different peanut butter flavors on the menu, which was weird. And I got tasters of both. And one of them tasted like peanut butter and the other tasted like Reese's peanut butter cup. It was not natural. It tasted kind of weird. Like it was not natural. It tasted kind of weird.

So my long point here is I wonder whether the artificial peanut butter tastes like peanut butter or if it tastes like what we think peanut butter should taste like, if that makes any sense. And I don't know. If I see artificial peanut butter sometime, I will buy it and try it and report back. How about that? Yeah, I feel like it's like how chocolate flavored things never actually taste like chocolate. They taste like the chocolate flavor. Which is an approximation and you can see where they're going with it, but it's not the same as the actual flavor. That happens with a lot of artificial

flavors where they are like an analog, sometimes closer to it, sometimes further away, like the purple, like purple flavor that you'll get in a in a popsicle or something that or even orange right like orange doesn't actually taste like orange but purple the purple flavor which is supposed to be grape and it kind of is like grape juice but it's not quite right or the red flavor that is supposed to be cherry but is kind of not um there there are degrees of how we can take artificial flavorings and get them close to what the real flavor is and some of them are close and some of them are far away and i i'm saying with peanut butter i can kind of tell the difference but um i'm curious about how good an analog something like the wow butter is so yeah peanut butter

talk here we are if you'd like to submit a question to snell talk which may later also be included in follow-up uh you can tweet a question to snell talk which may later also be included in follow-up uh you can tweet with the hashtag snell talk they go into a spreadsheet and we can pick them out for later in the show thank you to michael for suggesting the question and everybody this week who sent in uh peanut butter replacements for me um i appreciate the work that you all did um but i will be sitting this one out, I think. Gracias, Miguel. One of your favorite applications, I believe a previous Upgrady award winner,

Ferrite Recording Studio for iOS, which is a podcast editing application. It is actually, even on the Woojee Juice, who's the name of the developer, on their page, right at the very bottom, this is winner of best new iOS app for Upgrady 2015. They have the badge. badge yes one of the only companies that actually displays the the sash proudly which they all should um i wanted to mention is because ferrite 1.6 came out today and i'll mention this

for two reasons one it is a huge update so it ferrite now has the ability to encode into mp3 and export an mp3 and also add MP3 chapters. And I'm assuming all of this is available because of those patents that just recently expired on MP3. Exactly right. And also customizable keyboard shortcuts is one of the new features, allowing you to change any keyboard shortcut or to choose from templates which are modeled on desktop editing applications like logic now you said that this was a major stumbling block for you in editing was the the your frustration about like using it because you wanted to use this with a keyboard which i only used when i started and i very rapidly stopped using it with a keyboard and you were

frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts because they weren't the ones that i knew and the reason i want to mention this is because uh adam meet up in london the developer of ferrite was there and i begged and pleaded him to add this and he did and i played around with it today and it's great i have some some further feedback we're going to give him there's some there's some keyboard commands that are kind of hidden uh in logic that i would really love like for example if you uh i think it's shift i again i have all these mapped to a waycom thing um it inverts your selection which is really good i like that one a lot um so there's there's some additional stuff that i that but like i'm really pleased because the thing is an application like this i think it's really good to be able to uh wherever you can help people moving from other applications because you know i

speak for myself but i don't know the i mean if you say to me like oh what is the this this action that you do all the time on the keyboard what is the actual keyboard command sometimes i can't remember but like i just do them my hands know know them, right? Like it's muscle memory. So when I sit down at an application, sometimes the idea of trimming something in my mind is mapped to the keyboard command in which you use to trim something, right? So when you go somewhere else and it has different keyboard shortcuts, it can be really disorientating. So I was really pleased to see that they were able to do this

for Ferrite because it's also really interesting in that because when we're talking I've never seen an application do this before like where you can literally just change the keyboard shortcuts and like so when you bring up you can hold down the command key on iOS if you have a keyboard and it shows you

that little sheet that is populated by whatever keyboard commands you've entered in like it's really really powerful and it is another example of just a it a really fantastic application um which is just continuing to get more and more and more powerful over time so i just wanted to give them a shout out for this work i appreciate it i actually use this i've been using this beta obviously because i'm on the beta list and uh somebody somebody uh tweeted me this weekend and said oh look there's this update that does mp3 encoding and i said yeah these three podcasts that i did last weekend were all

exported using the mp3 encoder in ferrite which is great because i used to have to export a, like a WAV file or an AIFF or a high bit rate MP4, and then re-encode that or encode that either on device or on a web service somewhere. And with this, I'm actually able to, I haven't done the chapter stuff yet, but export it as an MP3, put the show art in, which I've got to give him some feedback about it because i think one of my frustrations now is that with ios in general is a lot of times apps just assume that everything image related comes off the camera roll and i kind of i need that needs to stop because like the last thing i really want to do is go out to dropbox find the right image save it

to my camera roll then go back and add it from the camera roll i should be able to just just pick an image from Dropbox. And they're still using, Fairlight still uses the camera roll for your podcast image. It's like, no, no, I'm not taking a picture of my podcast logo. It's stored in a cloud service. Let me get it from the files app or whatever. And I'm sure he'll get there. But I was able to output those directly. And in fact, using the commands in Ferrite, I was able to say basically, export this and open the result in Transmit, the FTP app. as an mp3 and tagged it properly and all of that and then just popped it into transmit which allowed me to transfer it up to where that file belonged for um for posting in in you know basically one step it's great that that like shaves this is this is what i was alluding to when i wrote that piece about how the mp3 long live the mp3 now that the patents have. It's like one of the developers I knew wanted to do this and couldn't because of the patents was the Ferrite developer.

So, you know, here we are, where now Ferrite is like way more useful for podcasters because it goes direct to the final file. And that's because the patents expired. So, yeah, this is just great all around. And I want to give them a shout out because continuing to add really, really interesting stuff to that application.

Yeah, and I love it. If I had to give up Logic, I would just start editing everything on Fairlight on my iPad. I would not find another Mac editor because Fairlight does everything that Logic does for me, essentially. Wade wrote in, Jasonason to ask your opinion on how the experience of reading comics in apps like comixology is uh on the 10.5 inch ipad pro does the bigger screen make it better um is you know how does it stack up against the 12.9 um it's a good question it's certainly one of the first things i looked at when i when i

picked it up um yes the 10.5 screen has more pixels and is larger and so therefore it is better than the 9.7 there's no doubt about it it is better it's not what i would call like a full sized comic reading experience everything is a little bit too small for me. I think, depending on how great your eyesight is, it might be doable. But like the 12.9 has really spoiled me because I can just read the pages, the comic pages full screen on the 12.9. And it's great. It's the right size. And it's the physical size. Like there was a time, I think this isn't true anymore, but there was a time when, um, the comics apps on the iPad were largely just scaled up 9.7 apps on the 12.9. So you weren't actually getting any more quality. I think that's not true anymore, but it doesn't really matter. The point is the size of it, just the, the, the, the ability to

read the text in the panels. And it's a little harder to do on the 10.5, but it's better than it was. It's definitely a better comic reading experience than the 12.9. But if you read a lot of comics on your iPad, 12.9 is always going to be better just because it's bigger. And the page format, you know, it's anticipating when they're doing it for print, it's anticipating a screen size, or not a screen size, a paper size that is better emulated by the 12.9 than the 10.5. But you can do it and it totally is better. Today's show is brought to you in part by our friends at Away. Your luggage shouldn't cost more than your plane ticket and that is why Away makes smart premium suitcases for under just $300.

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It's a big old thing. We'll be traveling with the blue and red cases this weekend because I bought a second Away case that's red. It's a cool color, the yellow. It's not yellow.

No. I mean, honestly, if the yellow was available when I got mine, I probably would have got the yellow just for the funs of it. It's a good color. So, Jason, I saw you, I think, over the weekend going through just a real situation in regards to the Echo Show, which is Amazon's new Echo product, which features their new system. Yeah, late last week. So before we get into the situation that

you were going through, I want to just talk to you about the Echo Show a little bit. And as a refresher, if anybody doesn't know, the Echo Show is Amazon's new Echo product, which has a screen on it. So rather than it just being a cylinder that you can speak to, it also has a screen which enables some new functionality if you're so inclined, and we'll go through what some of that is. But at its heart, it still features the assistant that we're trying our best not to name, so as not to set off people's devices.

But I want to kind of, just before we talk about some of the foibles that you ran into, I just want to talk about the Echo Show with you a little bit, because I don't think we've really addressed it on this show at all, actually. Sure. What made you want to get one of these? Was it just a work curiosity, or was this a product that you thought could fill a need that you had? Yeah, I mean, i like the echo stuff um we've got one in our home but the

what's just made me decide to pre-order one is that i i felt i needed to know about it and probably would need to write about it i could have gotten away with not because dan moran likes this stuff too and he buys this stuff too but I decided that I like my echo enough and was curious enough about bringing in a screen and figuring that, you know, so it's a combination. It's like everything else being equal. Would I buy one? Almost certainly not, but was, was wanting it because I like the Echo part of the math? Sure, it was. If I hated these things and never used them, but felt like I might want to get one to write about it, that I probably would have not bothered because I know that Dan likes them and Dan was going to get one. Yeah.

But it's a combination. What do you think about the hardware? But it's a combination. What do you think about the hardware? I think it is not bad and that the photos don't do it justice because they make it look like a giant television set. And it's really quite small. It's a small molded piece of plastic. The styling on it is kind of weird, but it's so small,

especially the black one, where it just kind of fades into the background. It's pretty unobtrusive. It doesn't bother me. There's some issues with it in a sense that it has a direction now. And the nice thing about the original Echo Cylinder is that it doesn't have a direction. Being a cylinder, it's sort of facing all directions at once. And this one, because of the screen and because the speakers seem to be firing forward you need to you know you're more aware of the position of the hardware and uh that was inevitable i guess you know really when you put a screen on it then then the location is more relevant and that's an issue but i think i think it gets i think it gets knocked because of its looks and i find the looks generally unobtrusive and um i i do think it looks much less of a big

deal in person than it does in a photo where you don't understand the size context and it seems like it's this laughably large old 80s kitchen television set kind of thing you're saying about the the direction of it. I know, you know, in our house, we have one of the regular echoes, one of the echo dots in another room. And kind of the way that we command the echo to do things, we just say it wherever we are, you know,

just walking around the house, you know, you just shout things out, whatever. But it doesn't really, we don't really think about the placement of the device very often unless it's not listening to us have you found that as a change for you do you feel like you're talking to the echo show more than the cylinder or is that not a thing like you know you say like i think you're maybe more aware of its place in the home because you look at it more often have you found that that's changed your relationship to the device in any way uh it's still early days um i think like uh my daughter just pointed out how much she likes the lyrics feature like that it'll just play the song lyrics along with the music she loves that and i

think lauren already my wife already um learned a lyric that she had wrong. Because it plays along like line by line with the song. It's great. And so they both have liked that. You know, the truth is that it's not all there yet. I mean, that's the truth is that it's kind of... When the original Echo shipped, it did a few things. And week by week, it has gotten better. Well, this has all of that ability, which is great.

But the screen is brand new. And it's just not there. It does a few things. And then the rest of it is just sort of potential. And I guess that's my frustration with it is if you consider the screen kind of an optional thing, I think it's fine because now when I ask it for my morning briefing,

I get a visual of the weather forecast and then it shows me what audio it's playing um it is that a big deal not really i don't need to look but it's there if i want when you're doing kitchen timers it will actually show you the timers that are going and how much time is left which is kind of nice that's a feature i really want yeah but it's all pretty rudimentary it's all um i think there's just way more potential here that is going to have to be unlocked in the next year because it's just not all there you mentioned stuff like the timers and things like that which is just you know

enhancing the functionality you had before have you found i mean in in your testing or in your you know what you can perceive you'd like to do with a device that the echo show does anything for you now that the traditional echo didn't i mean it does there are anybody who knows siri knows that one of apple's tricks with siri is punting to the screen when you can't do it with the voice anymore right like all right uh maybe this will help and they put something on the screen and like i always consider that a failure and i know it's not always a failure but for me when siri kicks something to the screen it is basically saying no you need you need your fingers and your eyes on this voice is just not going to cut it. And I feel like ultimately, uh, unless I'm asking, like, show me a picture, like it should be, the screen should be like annotating the results, not required. And so,

um, and in that context, it can be, it can be good to do that. So I see that with the Echo show already, that there are things that, maybe there's some things that it's punting, but there are also ways where it just gets enhanced by having that annotation. So like playing music on the Echo original or the Dot is hit and miss, right? I don't know.

I assume you've tried this too. It's like you say, play this album. And it says, oh, I can't find that, and it's because you didn't say it quite right. One of the biggest struggles I have is if there is an album where it also shares the name of a song, and trying to get it to play the album is basically impossible. Yeah, I've had some success in saying play the album so and so by so and so but it's it's hard so here's an example where that that i like which is screen is there if

you're in a position to interact with the screen you can say uh hey lady in the plastic box that looks like a tv um because it's not a canister anymore uh show me albums by radiohead uh okay that's vastly superior and and it will bring up a list of radiohead albums and you can literally from there if you tap on okay computer okay computer plays okay that is or you can say hey and it'll be like they'll they'll be numbered like number one is okay computer. Number two is the bends. Number three is in rainbows. And you can say, hey lady, play number one. And that will also work.

It's the equivalent of the finger tap. You can do either one. That is better. Also, you can play Jeopardy. I should mention that because my kids love it. That if you ask her to play Jeopardy, Monday through Friday, it will give you six trivia questions that are from Jeopardy

with a little blue screen from the TV show Jeopardy. And you have to answer in the form of a question like you're playing on Jeopardy. And occasionally you'll hear Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy's voice. That's pretty funny. There's some room for stuff like that. It's a good demo because it's like an audiovisual experience. It makes it into something that's not quite a TV but not quite a disembodied voice. And it has the look of something you know as well, right?

Exactly, because it puts up the familiar blue card on the screen, so you feel like you're actually sort of seeing the show. So there's a lot of little fun stuff that it's doing. And that's my point is, I think it's got huge potential. But the problem is, like, there's not a lot there right now. And there's not a lot of customizability right now. And I can imagine over time, like like the home screen is the great example. And I wrote about this because it drove me batty.

Like it's very limited what you can do to customize the home screen. Basically, the screen is on and it shows you some stuff and it'll cycle through some different stuff. But the amount of control you have over that is very limited. There is a setting for the home screen that's only on the device. All Amazon Echo users have been trained to do everything through the app on their phone, right? Everything. You can't do it on the web, really.

You have to use the app. And I look at the app and it has no settings for customizing the home screen. And I write this article. It's like, why can't I customize the home screen? And somebody says, oh, well, there's a different settings menu on the device. What? And it's like, well, you have to either tell it to show you the settings menu, or you can swipe down on the touch screen from the top and a little menu comes down and then you can tap the gear icon and go to settings and there's a display options. And there are some settings that are in common between the

app and the on-screen settings. And then there's some that are different, which is so terrible in so many different ways. Like you trained us to do the app, but now not everything is in the app. So why is everything not in the app still? And if you've got the device on device menu, why not tell people in the app that they need to go to the device to set their settings, but instead Amazon has split the difference that they need to go to the device to set their settings, but instead Amazon has split the difference. So if you go in there and you finally find it, what you get is a couple of switches. You get switches that say, do you want to show calendar events? Do you want to show tips or cues or something like that? And you can turn all of them off. Oh, and do you want to cycle through cards you know different different items

on that screen or do you want it to just play through them once and then and then stop because that could be distracting so if you turn all of those off it doesn't really there's no granularity you you can't as far as i can tell like install like a a skill that puts something cool on the screen and uh with everything off it still has stuff on it that is annoying like uh with everything off it still will put up um it stops saying here's this interesting video of puppies right which it does it's like totally uh wild car chase video um headlines just kind of appear by default it's really annoying it's like clickbait in your kitchen basically yeah it's like spam yeah clickbait in your kitchen exactly right they're spamming your kitchen um but you turn all that stuff off and it still will have

like uh say hey lady um make me uh you know show me recipes for steak or something like that like it has these little, like, hints of, like, here's a thing you could say, and they don't go away, and you can't make them go away. And again, are they helpful? Maybe. If I don't want them, I should be able to make that go away. I would really like that interface to be really calm when I'm not using it. I want it to be, I think I want it to be literally the time and the temperature, right? That's all I want on it. And that's my personal decision. And I'm sure that at some point I'll be able to do that.

But right now, I do not have that level of control over that thing. I just don't. So you can turn off some of the garbage, but you can't turn it all off. And this is an example of, it's a brand new platform. It doesn't feel done. The software doesn't feel done to me. It feels like Amazon has done what it's done with this product before, which is when the hardware is done, they ship it and they say, we'll, you know, we'll make it better over

time. And to their credit, the Echo has gotten better basically week to week since they released it. It is constantly being updated. It is not like Apple's products that tend to get a revision maybe once a year this is this is kind of constant and that's not just through third-party stuff but stuff that amazon is adding behind the scenes to the service that drives the device so this got me thinking right this is a new type of thing, you know, for people to allow a company to create a product that is a persistent screen that is on in your home.

I can't think of anything, you know, consumer tech wise that is like this. You know, we have these screens that we have on, but we choose to turn them off. You know, our computers, our tablets, our phones, our TVss we can just turn them off when we don't want them right or when we're done with right perform an action on them and then we stop using the thing but the echo show is always there right like it's always on it's always able to show you something right clues in the name so i'm wondering what level of control should we have of a screen that is always on and i really feel like personally there should be a million customization options for a product like this because if i amazon i'm gonna let you come into my home and be on all the time. This needs to be a two-way

street. Like, I am going to understand, knowing you as a company, that you're going to try and sell me stuff for this screen, and that stuff may appear randomly in the home, right? Like, I get this, right? Like, otherwise, I wouldn't buy a product from Amazon if I didn't want that to ever happen to me. But in exchange, I want to be able to be really granular about what is on that screen. You know, like, what do I want to be there? Do I want news or not? Do I want my calendars or not?

What calendars do I want? Do I want email to be on there? Do I want temperature on there? Where do I want the temperature to be? Like, I want a million settings for this device that I can get to. And again, you can nest them, you know, you can make them advanced settings, but I feel like that there should be a two-way street. If I'm going to let you come in my home and be a screen that is on 24-7,

then you need to show me what I always want to see, not what you think I might want to see. Like, this has to be an exchange that it doesn't sound like they're living up to. There is a tremendous responsibility when you have that screen that's always on somewhere in the house, I feel. Tremendous responsibility. And yes, Amazon does Kindles with special offers

and stuff like that. And I'd actually be okay if they said, well, you can get this for $20 less and we get to show you things on the screen. I wouldn't love it, but at least there would be a deal to be made there and people who don't want to see that stuff could pay to turn it off. But even then, I think billboards in your kitchen and having this product be viewed as a spamming thing is a mistake for Amazon. It's missing the bigger picture because of that responsibility.

Because as accepting as I am of commerce in many other areas of life, to have a device that my family sees as useful sitting in the kitchen, suddenly be just kind of showing us distracting garbage on the screen. It's like, I don't want that. And again, every, every family, every person is going to have a different, a different take on it,

which is why you have to have that customizability. And hey, if you want to set it with a certain set of defaults, great. If you want to make it really easy for people to turn things on and off with voice commands or menus or whatever, great. But in the end, yes, this product needs to be way more customizable than it currently is because of the responsibility you have in a situation like that i'm happy that in that uh settings menu that's only available on the device that i can turn off the the headlines right because that makes the viral videos and clickbait headlines go away and that makes me happy because those are the ones that really enraged me.

In other areas, it's like, yeah, I would like to say show the weather forecast at all times. I would like to say, you know, there are things that need to be improved. Like the calendar support in there right now is really poor. It shows you your next event. And if you have an all-day event, it just shows it to you as midnight. And it's like one event it's like i have five things tomorrow and it's showing me one and it's a thing that just says this is where my son is going for camp tomorrow it's like because we use all-day events that's that's the thing we use it's like that needs to be better they need

to do a better job of expressing what is coming up uh if there are multiple events and dealing with all day events better and things like that in a way that i really don't understand like with all of the companies that are currently making products like this why they think there's only one person with one set of calendars you know like if if we were gonna have this in our home we went on our calendars to be on it. Well, I would want my calendars and Adina's calendars on it and for that to display that in a clear way. Right. And I feel like from what you're explaining to me, it can barely even show events correctly, let alone do something which is relatively complex. You know, as that is to show these multiple people's calendars. But like I understand that like families have a family calendar, but, you know, everybody also has their individual calendars. But I understand that families have a family calendar, but everybody also has their individual calendars, and it might be nice to show those

rather than just all of Jason's calendars in the Snell household being the ones that everybody sees rather than their own individual ones as well. Yeah, we have a shared family calendar, and that's what's on that device. That's what I have on there. So it's not going to show me my stuff,

but it's going to show the shared family stuff, which seems appropriate. So we've got a good calendar for it. It just doesn't display it right. And this is, again, I'm not angry about it. I just, this is just the facts, is that this is a product that is, you know, when you ship the hardware,

the hardware is final, but the software is never final and the cloud services are never final. And Amazon has chosen to ship it, get it out in the world. And that's the way they start building more. There's a basic level that's built in, but they start building more. The more of these they get out there, the early adopters are the ones who are kind of

writing this thing when it's kind of not all there yet and we're going to figure it out. And their partners who are building the first video enabled skills for this. They're part of this journey. And I would actually bet that in a year that this product is gonna be way better than it is now. But the end, and again, I was just writing on Six Colors about my frustration with the home screen. And I had a bunch of people say,

wow, here's a really negative review. And it's like, it's not a review. Everybody thinks everything is a review, but it's like, it's not a review. It's literally me griping about the home screen being a mess. But at the end, I do say the home screen is such a mess that you probably shouldn't buy it yet. Like it's not going away. Amazon's not going out of business. They'll keep selling this thing. But right now, be aware that just because the Echo has become a more sophisticated platform for audio, the video stuff is not. The video stuff is where the Echo was when it started, which is a few partners,

a few things they're trying, and they'll figure it out as they go. And if you want to take that ride, great. I think it's kind of fun and interesting. This goes back to like, I want the Echo in my kitchen because I love it. And then as a writer and observer of technology, I want the echo show in my kitchen because I'm kind of fascinated about what it does, what it doesn't do and where their progress is being made. So that's why I am keeping it and am kind of happy to have it, even though it's weird. And I don't think I would recommend that most people get one unless they really are willing to take that journey. I mean, yeah, you can watch TV shows and stuff on it, too.

That's the other funny thing. It's attached to Amazon's video library. So if you want to just, like, watch a TV show while you're cooking, you can do that, which is interesting i think it'll be more interesting when you'll be able to fairly easily you know maybe tune into like if they if they did integration with your cable company or something that could be really interesting to say play this channel and have it just stream that channel in your house i have wi-fi access through comcast on my ipad to all live tv in my house right i can stream all of that when I'm at home because Comcast knows I'm on their network. Like, wouldn't that be interesting if the Echo show also turned into a TV set? Like it literally is a kitchen TV set. So I could say, play this channel and it

would just stream that live. They're not there yet. Maybe they'll get there sometime and that would be really interesting, but we'll have to see. Cause you know, maybe Amazon's like's like no we don't want to be a tv that's not what they want but we do want you to watch tv shows on it from amazon's library okay that would be something i don't know today's show is also brought to you by squarespace use the offer code upgrade at checkout and you'll get 10 off your first purchase make your next move with Squarespace. They let you easily create that website for your next idea, project, or even an occasion. I'll get to that in a second. With a unique domain name, the ability to utilize beautiful award-winning templates that are super easy to customize to your own feel, and so much more, Squarespace is going to be the perfect

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They have everything you need. They're the all-in-one platform that lets you take care of all of this stuff and so much more. There's nothing to install, no upgrades needed, no patches that you have to worry about. They've got it all covered. I'm about a year away, a year or so away from getting married. And I'm going to be setting up Squarespace site for all the people that are coming to our wedding. It's perfect for stuff like that. They have templates for these things. You can like password protect websites. It's fantastic. And I think that the tools that they have, like for stuff like this, I don't know why you'd go anywhere else. I can set things up really easily. I can integrate maps. I can put music in. I can put albums in if I want to. We can put

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And one of them sent me a link to something like a password protected area. And I knew the password kind of page was a Squarespace site. And I like ah good work photographer you made the right choice. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month. You can start a free trial today with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com and then use the offer code upgrade when you sign up. You'll get 10% of your first purchase when you do this and show your support for this show. We thank Squarespace for supporting this show on RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Jason Snow, I want to talk about expensive smartphones. Okay. Get your checkbook out, Mike.

I don't know. I think I've written three checks in my life. Hashtag, Mike was right, expensive phones. Right? You always buy a more expensive phone than I do. I do, I do. And we'll see how that ends up shaping up later this year. So I want to set the stage a little bit, Jason Snell, with some news that had been buzzing around

towards the end of last week. It's a company called RED, R-E-D, all capital letters. They make high-end cameras, and they have been for a long time. My memory of RED, they kind of came out of nowhere with this product, which was like a HD video camera, and blew everything else out of the water, and have continued to do so since they came around.

They make incredible stuff that's used all over the place now. Movies and technology YouTubers use RED cameras, right? They are serious, serious hardware. Well, they have announced out of nowhere that they are making a smartphone. It's an Android device. And everything they're saying about this, if this wasn't a company that had a good track record, I would be screaming Vaporware. Because it really feels like it. It feels like this is a product that is full of hyperbole, falsification, and will never ship.

But Red do have a track record of doing things that seem outside of the realm of technology in the current state. At least that's my feel of them over time, is that they have always been able to push the envelope past what you think is achievable

in the fields that they're working in, in camera technology. However, saying all of that, Red are saying that their phone is going to, it's called the Hydrogen. It's going to feature a 5.7 inch display that can somehow switch between 2D, 3D, and what they're calling holographic multi-view content. It's going to be a modular phone, which is a huge red flag flag not like this is like a warning flag to say modular these days is not a good sign uh apparently capital letters red flag yeah that's what i was trying to avoid uh it's shipping in uh early 2018 they say it's starting

at 1195 for an aluminium version,595 for a titanium version. There is a ton of stuff about this which is dubious, but there are people that are excited about it. I'm interested to see if and what they're able to produce. But I only bring all of this up to set the scene of expensive smartphones, because that is an expensive smartphone, right? They're making two models and they're both over $1,000. So, can Apple do this?

Can Apple sell an iPhone that starts at $1,000? So, I read a great article on Daring Fireball this week where John Gruber was kind of breaking down the potential for what the price ranges could be and why they would be that way for the next three iPhones.

So I'm going to try and sum up John's assumptions, right? So the assumptions are that there will be three iPhones, a 7S, a 7S Plus, and an iPhone Pro, we'll call it for the sake of this conversation, 7S, a 7S Plus, and an iPhone Pro, we'll call it for the sake of this conversation, that will be debuting in September. The iPhone Pro will be supply constrained because it will be harder to make and the parts will be more expensive. And because of this, Apple will charge a higher price for this phone because they are able to reliably make less of them than usual, right? It's more expensive to make.

It's harder to make. They can't make as many of them. It's going to be supply constrained. Charge more money for it. So let's imagine that the iPhone Pro comes in at a similar price range to this red phone, right? Like $1,100 for the regular one, and then $1,300 for the top of the line one, right? The iPhone Pro. for the top-of-the-line one, right, the iPhone Pro. If this is a price... So I wonder, Jason, is this a price, knowing everything that we think we might know, all the speculation about this phone,

everything we think this phone might have in it, this beautiful edge-to-edge display, currently face-scanning technology, and all of the other bells and whistles, all of the beautiful materials that an iPhone Pro may hold, is this a price that you would be willing to pay for an iPhone, $1,100? Would you be willing to pay that? That was not the question I thought you were going to ask.

I don't know. I mean, amortized over two years, that is $45 a month. Over three years, that's $30 a month. We are, although $1,100 for a phone seems ludicrous, we're currently paying $700, $800 for phones, right? Yep. and eight hundred dollars for phones right yep these are these are not despite all of the misconceptions based on carrier subsidies and contracts this is what phones cost so this is a higher end version of that phone um i would have to think about it again uh as with so many things that we cover i would probably need to buy one because I would need to write about it. But it's kind of hard to imagine, but if I had no need to do that and I was just a person,

I would consider it depending on what the details were and how long I thought that I would use it, two or three years. It might not be unreasonable. This is for a lot of people, as Gruber mentions in his story, the most important device that they use, right? This is your iPhone is your most important device. So would you pay for the best one and then use it for two years? You know, I think it's not unreasonable. And I think the fact is what this conversation is not doing is saying that Apple's going

to make the next iPhone cost $1,200. And so everybody's going to have to buy a twelve hundred dollar iphone because what this seems to be suggesting is that apple is intending on making an additional model that is that is more i mean almost aspirational or if you want to put it this way it's a it's a cutting-edge design that Apple is capable of making, but not capable of making at their standard price point. Or volume. They can't make 80 million of them. Yeah, well, that too. And it's funny because we talked about that when we were talking about one of these other devices.

Oh, what was it? Oh, it was that Andy Rubin phone that still hasn't shipped. Yeah, the Essential. That they admitted that there's no way they could ship in volume, right? They were trying to catch people's eyes with their specs and their cutting edge design, but all of that was rolled into a phone that basically can't be made at scale because it just can't. And one of Apple's challenges is everything they do, Gruber mentioned this, everything they do has to be at scale, right? This is the most popular single consumer electronics product in the world, probably, or among them them among a handful like lots of iphones get sold every year lots and lots and lots and so some tech is really cool and apple i think apple there's so much here i think apple's technical people and designers sometimes get frustrated because they see other people making cutting edge phone designs and using cutting edge technology

like Andy Rubin's phone, maybe like this red phone where Apple knows full well how to do all of that. They've investigated all of that. And if I'm an Apple, one of the things that might frustrate me is, yeah, we can do that too if all we want to do is sell 10,000 of them, but nothing we do sells 10,000. Everything we do, if I'm an Apple designer or a technical person, it's like everything we do, it's great. Everything we do sells millions and millions and millions of units. But it also means that we would need millions and millions

and millions of all the parts, which may not be possible. And then we would need to put them together at a speed at which we could sell them as fast as they're being ordered, which is not possible. So we can't make that. And that leads to a dangerous perception that Apple is behind. And this is one of those challenges of being the big dog, is that Apple has to fulfill millions and millions of orders. And it's easier in some ways because they get to buy in bulk, they get big contracts. There are lots of things that play to their advantage. But if you have technology that is hard to manufacture, hard to assemble, or not available in volume. And your Apple, it's basically walled off to you. So I can see the argument that one of the reasons

you do this is because you want to make a phone that shows off what Apple's capable of, but it needs to not be the only thing out there because there's no way you can make enough of them. And you raise the price because it's a premium. It's like next year's iPhone today. And that cuts down on demand, but it shows you as being a trailblazer, as being on the cutting edge. And maybe it teaches you about that technology so that by the time you get to the following fall, you have the ability to sell it in greater volume. I can see that argument. And the key to it is that you still have regular iphones at regular prices right that that you know this is

um not let's raise the price on the iphone three hundred dollars or two hundred dollars or whatever this is what if we did this other unicorny kind of product so the way that i've been thinking about this like would i be willing to spend the money is i think about the last two iphones that i spent nine hundred dollars on yeah right and that they kind of weren't really adding much right like really in the grand scheme of things not a ton you know better processors between the between the six and the success and the success and the seven yeah there wasn't really uh that extra camera yeah i mean so this is the thing right there are things right that there are there are nice but they're not huge advancements they're not like massive leaps right like the second camera is really great but like i don't

really use portrait mode that much i do use that second camera a lot but it's you know it's just a nice zoom line but like it doesn't always work right like i don't actually know that the pictures are always being taken from that camera because it doesn't tell you right like it's right is there enough lighting and all that sort of stuff so like it's it's nice these are nice advancements but are they nine hundred dollars worth of enhancements i don't think so really i mean really i mean i buy this stuff because i always want the latest and greatest phone which is why i think for a lot of people listening to this show, people that might be sitting there saying, I'm not going to pay $1,100 for a phone. Like, you know, if you've bought the last two, then you probably just should, because how much more of a difference is it? You know, I guess it depends what phone you're buying, right?

Like, I'm buying Pluses, so they're approaching $1,000. If you do the conversion, my phone cost over a thousand dollars, right? Because I'm buying it in pounds, but like I'm by already buying the model that's brushing up against this price anyway. But like, you know, I am thinking that if this really is a huge jump forward, then maybe that makes it worth the additional money. So there is a thing about this, though, which Gruber points out, which I think is a good argument. It's an interesting thought experiment. If

Apple do this, there are a lot of people who cannot buy this phone. It's going to be outside the price range. If you buy the small phone in the smallest configuration, you're looking at doubling your price to get this new one,

right? So if there are people that can't afford to buy the new one, would they upgrade to the 7S? Because if they can't buy the best iPhone, why buy a new iPhone at all? Why buy an old iPhone? It's like, you know, I would imagine for a lot of people, it's going to feel like, okay, so they brought out the new phone, last year's phone got bumped down. That's how the 7S will feel. It's going to feel like the old phone, even though it's new, because all of the marketing will be for this new unicorn iPhone Pro. Is this going to be a risk for them? Like, could Apple end up harming sales of the iPhone line overall because they have this aspirational phone that some people can't get so they just don't upgrade? They wait until next year?

Do you think that that is a risk? Yeah, I mean, that is consumer psychology, right? Is sometimes more important than... All right, okay, let me back up. Nerds like to believe, a lot of nerds, that it's all about specs, or it's all about price, or it's all about some ratio that can be calculated. I feel like a lot of people in our atmosphere, in our area, kind of make comments like that. But buying psychology is not always logical. And there are lots of unintended consequences of doing things like this.

So just the existence of, I mean, there's so much here. Just the existence of a high-end iPhone changes the game. Because as Gruber himself has pointed out on many occasions, everybody drinks the same can of Coke. The president of the United States and a construction worker drink the same Coke. Everybody has the same iPhone. There's no Tiffany iPhone. Everybody gets the same iPhone. gets there's no there's no tiffany iphone everybody gets the same iphone so there's a danger in having a higher end iphone at all because it makes the other iphones seem less special right just even if they're no different even if the iphone 7s and 7s plus are exactly what would have existed before and would have sold perfectly within expectations before the existence

of anything above them changes our perception of them now they seem older now they seem less capable so there's that that that is an issue and then there's also this feeling about the price that it's like you know it's going to make people feel like this is Apple. And this is about perception, not necessarily reality, but it's Apple squeezing more money out of buyers or it's Apple overpricing its products or it's Apple not caring about the little guy and going like super premium there's already this perception that apple is not a you know because apple doesn't play the low-cost game that apple is already an elitist company it's it's not make it doesn't make affordable products it's not interested in those markets and there are lots of reasons why but in the end like if you're somebody who feels like apple is kind of gross as a company because it doesn't care about people who don't have enough money to buy Apple products

and it's not interested in exploring those markets so much, then this fits into that, right? I mean, we know people in our business who can't let go the gold Apple Watch, right? Who can't let go of that and continue to use it as an example of Apple being out of touch and not making the world a better place. We know, you know, we know people who say stuff like that

to this day, even though the golden Apple watch is kind of coming on, this feeds into that perception. So that's an issue. So, so I do think that doing a product like this is risky and could really hurt the iPhone. But, you know, it is a calculation about how you want Apple to be perceived because, like I said before, on the other hand, you've got other companies making products that have features that Apple probably wishes they could make but feel like they can't. Then again, that is not a great excuse for, like, what Samsung is doing. Right?

Samsung is kind of advancing the ball and Samsung has huge volume on their phones. So I don't want to overstep on the on the on the volume thing because if Samsung can do an edge-to-edge OLED display Apple probably can too and make it available in high volume. display, Apple probably can too, and make it available in high volume. So there is an element of this that is, why can't Apple just make that the new iPhone? Why do they have to make that this high-end model? And there may be reasons. There may be things that Apple is not willing to do that Samsung was willing to do in terms of compromise. Who knows? I don't know. We don't know the details of these phones, but I think it's worth asking that question. What is special about this phone? Is this phone, if it really does exist, only available at high prices because of all the

things we've detailed here? Or is it there because Apple wants to squeeze another year of margin out of the iPhone 6 design family and doesn't want to give that margin back, the profit margin back on this much more expensive phone. I think that's a legitimate question. So there's's a lot here but i do think the buying psychology they risk devaluing their their bread and butter by doing it this way so it's a it's a risky move it definitely is it's a it could end up being a big problem for them it is a gamble it 100 this is a gamble because they cannot accurately predict the en masse feeling of people right that you can't, you can assume, but like, there's no way that they will be able to know what this would do.

But my feeling, my feeling on this, my take on this is that Apple is trying to protect themselves against the inverse risk, the risk of looking left behind. So I feel like in a perfect world, there would be two iPhone models and they would both be next generation edge to edge OLED screens, all the bells and whistles, right? Or one, if it's a little bit bigger phone with a much bigger screen, they could even get away with maybe doing the one and saying we don't even need the plus anymore. It's all in here. I mean, I think they will in the future though right like i think that we if we get this one model i think in the future there will be a bigger one right because then you could put a six inch screen in the size of the plus right so you know you you could keep potentially i'm just saying you could extend that argument down to the ultimate simplification which is here's our new iphone it's so great we

don't even need two of them. Here it is for sale. But my question would be, if you're Apple and I come in and say, here's the reality of building this phone. And I'm not saying this is actually what's true, but let's just do this as a hypothetical. Here's the reality of what's with this phone. We can't make it in volume to sell what we sell in the fall.

We can't do it because of various reasons. You can yell at me. I know we've had these conversations before, but you know, Mr. Cook, but we can't do it. You know, this it's because of the choice we made about this screen. And it's the choice we made about this sensor and whatever it is. We can't make them in that volume. You know, we can't we'll get back ordered. They'll be sold out. You're worried about the numbers being suppressed because people can't get iPhones and they'll buy something else. So we can't do that. We also, here's how much it's going to cost to make it,

at least at first. And that means that we can't keep our margins and charge what we charged for the last models or even 50 or $100 more. It has to be more than that if we're going to do it. So what do we do? Do we not do it? Do we just put it off?

We can give it to you in a year. I know we've been trying for a year to do this phone already, but we can do it for next year probably. Or we can release it now, but you're going to have these huge issues. What do you do if you're Tim Cook? And that strikes me as being the choice, right? Is do you sweep away the old models and release this thing and it's just not available for a long time and the margins are bad? Do you not do anything and just not release it and have us push the 7S out there?

Or do you compromise and create this kind of hybrid, which is the rumor that they will ship them both? This is what I'm getting at, right? Like, this is what I think. Like, in this ideal world, this is just a new iPhone, but they can't do it now. So what do they do? Do they just wait one more year? But if they do, when people go to the phone stores,

you've got this iPhone, which has looked this way forever, and then around it, all of these Android phones are these growing screens. And, you know And I understand the idea of people being tied to a brand and et cetera, et cetera. But when you're selling 80 million of them, 10% of those people is a significant amount, right? And if 10% of those people are willing to switch, that's not going to look good for the investors. That's not going to look good for a company that's already struggling because they can't keep their growth going. You don't want to start to see a decline because, you know,

it looks like the iPhone is kind of being left in the dust. So a way that you combat this, which is the route that I think that they're going now with this is, well, we can't do it for everyone. So let's make this phone that some people are going to buy. It's going to increase our average selling price and hopefully we'll still sell as many iPhones we would have sold anyway. And we then keep the perception that we're doing things well. We continue to make it for a year over that period of time. We drive down the cost. And then in 2018, all of the iPhones that we make can look like this. This is where I think they're going with this. I think that in an ideal world, Apple just has one or two models of the next iPhone and it's this only one, but they can't.

They just can't do it. So instead of risking, so they're taking a gamble, but I think it's the better gamble. I think this is a better gamble to say, you know, Apple is making a really expensive phone is better than Apple can't innovate. If you're, I'm going to agree with you here, but let me, if this is one year in, if this is when the 6 is out, or if there's two years in and the 6S is out, is out or uh or if there's two years in and the 6s is out i can see the argument of putting it off and letting the existing stuff ride but i agree with you that what tilts this approach

toward being the right one is this perception that Apple has not done a whole lot perception, but that it's, it's a real perception exists. Like perception is, Oh, it doesn't look any different. Even though we know that the insides get changed and all of those things,

the perception that Apple is going to for four years in a row, release basically the same shape phone. And it'll just have some differences on the inside like that is tough right and that that puts on the pressure to show something different and to get back to that red phone or the andy rubin rubin phone um the i think apple from a point of pride doesn't and a point of branding does not want to be perceived as making boring phones because part of Apple's brand and part of Apple's cachet is that they are on the cutting edge. motivated by, you know, you can call it pride if you want to make it personal, or you can call it branding if you want to make it more technical and business appropriate. But either way, it's the idea that there's cool stuff out there that you can do with phones, and we're not allowed to

do it because X, because of our market dominance, because of the huge number that we sell, which is great, but it is simultaneously eroding our perception in the market as being cool. So how do we make a cool phone? And if we have to ship millions of them, we can't do it. So what do we do? And that's that moment where you say, you know what? We have to make a cool phone. We have to, even if it hurts the perception of the other phones, we have to make the cool phone because at some point they're going to take, everybody's just going to think that Apple's phones are boring. And, and, you know, the question is going to be, if it doesn't work, everybody will

be like, well, why did you throw over your incredibly profitable business out of fear of boredom? But it does seem like it's a very Apple trait, going back through you know in the culture that steve jobs instilled in this company to throw out to risk throwing out the old popular thing in order to do what is clearly the future but it might be a rough ride if the market doesn't you know the the buyers don't like the fact that it exists if we assume that this phone is the future of the iPhone, and that in a year or two, all iPhones will be like this phone, I think it's a stronger argument.

But it is totally a risk. And picking the right time to do it, last year, this year, next year, that's why they pay the CEOs the big bucks. There is an argument that you can make, that Apple can make, and they can ride this for one year. Like if they see a dip, you know, you can make the argument of, right?

Oh yeah, sure. We had to do this. We have to move forward the iPhone to the next 10 years. Like you can make that argument that one time. And if you're going to do it, the anniversary is the right time to do it

because you can use the company's history, like the product's history, and you can do all of that stuff. And so if you're going to do this, you do it now. I feel that they would potentially be making the right decision if that's the route that they go through. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you've got lots of fig leaves to use to explain why you're taking this gamble and potentially harming your key product but uh and you say this is for the future we have to do this now because we this is apple and we have to do this now but um it's a tough one because they're saying that but they're still selling us you know if they're still selling a 7s then you're not really entirely embracing the future

you're just sort of you know but that goes back to the problem is whatever design that they have created here, apparently it's not something that they can ship in volume at the right price. And that may be, I don't want to take that as a given because I think it's worth saying this could all be because of a colossal miscalculation on Apple's part in terms of the design. They may have been, I don't want to say it's like, this is just naturally, this is how it had to happen. It's entirely possible that their reach just exceeded their grasp. And they designed this phone that they're now committed to. This is the design they've got for their next generation phone and they can't ship it in volume. And I would argue that when you go into a project like this, you're probably going in, assuming it's going to be the next iPhone and you're just going to swap it in

for the existing iPhone. And the fact that they might potentially have to do this third iPhone, we can tell the story about how Apple wants to be cutting edge. You could also turn it around and say, this is because whoever designed this thing made some decisions that led to it being not shippable so they have to make do with this and that may also be true it's hard to tell because that is incredibly esoteric stuff that you have to be deep down inside of apple and the suppliers and everything

else to understand but i think it's worth at least considering that that apple would not choose i think to do it this way this may just be where just be where they are with the hand that they've been dealt. Yes, but it's not random. Decisions were made to make that card in the hand that they've been dealt. And those decisions were made by the people building the next generation iPhone. the people building the next generation iPhone. Today's show is also brought to you by our friends at Encapsula, 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. Encapsula have a global network of 30 data centers

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Today's first question comes from Benny. Do you think that the iPad Pro will get improved next year, maybe with better screens, better processes? Do we think that in 2018, there will be new iPad Pros? Um, I don't know. I'm kind of 50-50 on it. I feel like there don't need to be. I would like to see them, because i would like to see apple say um we love the ipad pro and we're going to keep it updated but um i think they could go a year and a half if they needed to um so i don't know i don't know i'd say i'm 50 50 on it like if they've

got a next generation ipad pro that does other cool stuff, that's great. But like the problem with the iPad pro, I feel like the hardware is great. I don't feel like in two years or certainly I don't feel like in a year, everybody's going to be looking at the iPad pro saying, Oh boy, it's,

it's, uh, it's getting old. It needs to be updated. I feel like the hardware is so good. In fact, are arguably so far ahead of what is even needed on the platform right now that, um, Apple's got other fish to fry and they, they may be, you know, if it goes a year and a half or two years, in fact are arguably so far ahead of what is even needed on the platform right now that um apple's

got other fish to fry and they they maybe you know if it goes a year and a half or two years i think it's okay so doesn't mean they won't do an update on it but i'm not sure they need to yeah i'm tracing along that line as well i think that the ipad pro line will be a minimum 18 month refresh going forward. Yeah. And I think that's totally fine. There may come a time when we look at the iPad and go, wow, this iPad's getting slow. Where's the new iPad?

But right now, that's not the case. It's so much more powerful than almost anything that the platform is actually being asked to do that I don't think it's necessary. I think it's more likely that there'll be some iOS innovation, hopefully, in the next two years, that really requires more RAM or more processor that makes them be prompted to do an update so that that will be the hardware that best runs iOS 12

or something like that. But I doubt that will happen next year. Michael wants to know, do you still give the trip mode app for Mac your recommendation? Michael's going on the trip soon and may need to use tethering quite a bit. Yes, two thumbs up indeed.

They just came out with a new version. It's great. I highly recommend it to anybody who's tethering on a Mac because you can choose, you can toggle it on and choose app by app what gets data and what does not get data. And that is huge because the Mac doesn't really have a conception of that. And so

it'll be doing like crazy high bandwidth things in the background thinking it's on Wi-Fi when it's actually on Wi-Fi attached to a cellular device. So trip mode lets you shut everything off and then selectively turn things on. You can see how much data everything's using and turn off apps that are using too much data. Highly recommended. It's great. And it's not that expensive either. I forget what it is, but it's cheap.

It's worth it. There's a Windows version too. There is. Okay, so that's your bag. I'm looking at the page right now. Yeah, if that's what you do. It's $7.99. And you don't need it on iOS

because iOS actually has it built into the operating system. iOS knows the difference between cellular and Wi-Fi, which unfortunately the Mac doesn't. Jmush asked, why aren't there a bunch of uncertified smart connector accessories on eBay like how it was with Lightning? Why aren't there?

I turn this around and say, why aren't there a lot of smart connector devices in general? I suspect they're related. So part of it is there aren't that many iPads out there. There are iPads out there. But compared to iPhones, the number of iPad Pros is small, and only the iPad Pro has the smart connector. So it's a limited market. And then I think the reason that we haven't seen smart connector accessories in general is probably because the smart connector has some limited use that it was largely designed for Apple for the smart keyboard. And it's a, it's open. I think in the sense that apple maybe had an argument about

internally about other ipad keyboards and somebody agreed that why not make it open why not work with logitech to do a smart connector based keyboard as well which they did they made the create um and so it feels to me like a thing that was really designed for Apple to do keyboards and then kind of repurposed to be a little bit broader. But it's a very limited connector. And so I think that's the answer is it's limited in what it can do and it's got a very limited market. if you're gonna go to the trouble of making a keyboard that works with a smart connector um you would want it to be legit so what are you left with like maybe some weird charger thing like a apple pencil charger dongle thing i don't know it's just it's just not not worth it so i think i think this goes back to

the smart connector being of incredibly narrow, limited use more than anything else. Oliver asked, I'm thinking about replacing my dead MacBook Pro with an iPad Pro. Apart from iCloud Photo Library, what photo backup service would you recommend? There are many others.

I mean, I use iCloud Photo Library. You could use Google Photos. You could use Dropbox, which will let you do that. You just have to pay, you know, you have to pay for storage depending on what you want to do, but there are options. The only, I think challenge is that the, the iPad, the iCloud photo library is going to be the most reliable because it's

integrated into the system. And sometimes you may need to like launch the other third-party apps that do backup so that they can work in backing up your photos. But there are – from your Mac, I mean, well, if your MacBook Pro is dead, then where are your photos right now? But if you got them off of them, you could upload them sort of to any service. And, I mean, I don't have a comprehensive review of all these services. The Google people seem to really like the Google service. I know if you're a Dropbox user and you've got a lot of Dropbox storage, Dropbox really

wants you to share, share your photos and save your photos with them because that ties you more to their service. And then iCloud is, uh, I find it very reliable and the price is actually not bad. So. Wiki asked, we've heard nothing about the retina monitors to replace the cinema display do you still think they're coming apple said they're coming when they said that they were doing a mac pro we won't hear anything about those until the mac pro pops up yeah i think that's exactly it is that that will be

something that gets announced when the mac pro gets announced, because it probably was a decision that was made alongside the decision to do the new Mac Pro. And so I think, I don't think, even though they could release it and use it with the MacBook Pro or the iMac Pro or the iMac even, my gut feeling is they won't. I hope they do, but I do think they're still coming. I think it's just not a priority because it's really perceived, at least, as being tied to that new Mac Pro. So it's going to be a while. Frank asked, what are the chances, do we believe,

of upgraded AirPod hardware this fall, trying to decide if it's worth buying a pair now? I feel like we talked about this a while ago i i think the chances are low because i think the airpods are fine yeah and i think that it's a brand new product which means they are um they were ahead of their time they were kind of pushed into the market they're still kind of i think struggling to meet demand um they're a cutting edge product So what you want to do is let that product stay there for a while and get good at making it and improve your profit margins on every one you sell. It's got some upgradable software in it. So like even iOS 11 makes better use of them.

Also, I think it's possible that since it's such a brand new cutting edge product that Apple may even be doing hardware tweaks behind the scenes but won't disclose them um and won't market them so it's entirely possible with a product like this that apple may make changes to what's in them and how they work and not say anything because from the customer's perspective they're exactly the same and they could do a slipstream hardware change and until somebody took them apart nobody would really or somebody at the apple store squealed um nobody would know the difference because it wouldn't be about features it would just be about um functionality now i the hedge i'll put in here is um i could see them maybe

doing something with color but that would be it. I doubt that the hardware is going to change anytime soon. Yeah, if you have the ability to buy AirPods, get them now. I mean, really, you know, aside from cosmetic, I can't imagine there being any changes that are really going to make it so much better. Like, okay, let's say battery life. Battery is fantastic on these things.

Like, you're good, right? it's so much better like okay let's say battery life battery is fantastic on these things like you're good right like i i charge them every time i think about charging them but i've never even hit a battery warning and i use them all the time agreed um you know they could be they could be smaller although there's you know the problem is physics right you've got to have room for the battery and you've got to have room to have enough antenna space that you can receive. And to be able to hold them. You've got to be able to take them out of your ears. Well, that's true.

The stems could be shorter, right? They could be a little bit shorter. But is that enough of a reason? I just don't see it. I feel like this is a product that Apple's probably pretty happy with and that nobody's thinking, oh, I don't know. The AirPods are kind of long in the tooth. I feel like the AirPods are good. They're good for a while. And color is the only thing that strikes me as something they could

do fairly easily, right? Because that's just literally changing the plastic. And that would be fun. That would actually be a really fun refresh for the holidays. So I will put that out as a small possibility that we'd get them in black or maybe even get them in a few different colors so that you could you could choose even though apple lately is still pretty monochrome sounds like a draft pick to me jason i think that's yeah that's right we maybe we'll put that on the iphone event draft i i think colored airpods is a good one for that because it might happen but it might not finally today rafael asked does mac os high sierra bring some changes to the mac app store like ios 11 has brought to the iphone app store jason does the does the app

store look any different on high sierra i don't even remember i'm gonna be honest no right like because i feel like we maybe know about it now i know that um i believe it was during the talk show event uh that they mentioned that there would be stuff coming to like some of the new features would be coming to the mac app store but if it's going to happen i don't think we're seeing it right now i think it's possible that the mac app store will get a makeover but i think it's less likely that they're going to have like expansive feature stories on the mac app store it's possible but it's not i my my guess is it's more like they're going to roll that out on ios and then maybe someday they'll do it on the mac too but i don't i don't know for certain i'm trying

to picture it they are bringing that design to other things in Mac OS, but I'm not sure it's coming to the Mac App Store or not. I can't recall. I haven't spent a lot of time in High Sierra and especially in the App Store app in High Sierra lately. Although there's new betas. So everybody can rush out and update to the new betas and see what's changed.

Because that always happens. There's new betas when we do an upgrade, Mike. Is there new iOS betas and see what's changed. Because that always happens. There's new betas when we do an upgrade, Mike. Is there new iOS betas? Yeah. Oh, I'm really happy because I've been having some weirdo stuff. Well, we'll see. We'll fix those weirdo things and cause some new weirdo

things in the summer of betas. I like new weird things rather than the same weird things, you know? That's great. New weird things are are uh the best yeah sure yay betas okay so that's something to do when we're done today yep thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of upgrade i want to take a moment again to thank our fine sponsors the folk over at squarespace encapsula and away for supporting this week's episode of course as always thank you for listening.

We could not do this show without your kind... I can't think of... Listenership? Patronage isn't the right word. Just support. There we go. We'll go for that. Your support.

Without your support, this show wouldn't happen. So thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the show, why don't you share it with a friend? Tell them that you enjoy it. It actually really does make a difference. If there's somebody in your life that you think might enjoy Upgrade, why don't you tell them with a friend? Tell them. It actually really does make a difference. Like if you have somebody in your life that you think might enjoy Upgrade, why don't you tell them to go check it out?

Because those Jason and Mike guys, they're really fun to listen to. If you want to find Jason's work online, he's over at theincomparable.com, sixcolors.com, and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter. I am at imike,

I-M-Y-K-E. And maybe as well, if you listen to Upgrade and don't listen to any other RelayFM shows, just go to relay.fm slash shows and pick something else. There's going to be something else in there that is for you. I am sure of it. We'll be back next time.

Don't forget, hashtag AskUpgrade for your AskUpgrade questions. Hashtag SnellTalk for your SnellTalk questions. Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snell. Adios, Miguel.