Upgrade - 155: Apple Hardware Draft

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

The Upgrade Summer of Fun continues! A special panel of guests convenes to draft our favorite hardware created by Apple. And in an unprecedented installment of Myke at the Movies, John Siracusa joins us to discuss the Final Cut edition of "Blade Runner."

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 155 today's show is brought to you by blue apron ting encapsula and mac weldon i am very excited about today's episode as we continue the upgrade summer of fun. Summer of fun! Summer of fun! My name is Mike Hurley. I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. Are you having fun yet? I'm having the most fun. This is our summer of fun and we have an extra special fun episode planned for today. How are you enjoying your summer of fun? It's wonderful and I think what I really want to know is how are you enjoying your summer of fun? It's wonderful and I think what I really

want to know is how are you enjoying your summer of fun? Nobody cares about that Jason Snell because we have some amazing guests today. Indeed. I would like to introduce co-founder of RelayFM, Mr. Stephen Hackett. Hello Stephen Hackett. Hello Michael Hurley and Jason Snell. And host of Roboism on RelayFM, the wonderful Alex Cox. Hi, Alex. Hi, guys. And the host of a fantastic show called Reconcilable Differences, and it's all he does, Mr. John Syracuse. Hi, John.

Hello, everybody. Best known as host of Reconcilable Differences. No, I think best known as host of Robot or Not. Oh, yes, of course. How can I forget the number one smash hit of Robo or Not, where they talk about whether ships are robots or not oh yes of course how can i forget the number one smash hit of robo or not where they they talk about whether ships are robots or not uh we have a very special episode today um we're doing a couple of really exciting things the first of them is we're going to be doing an apple products draft which jason will explain the rules for in a moment which is why we have assembled

this crack team of apple enthusiasts the The second half is meeting a demand from John Syracuse that me and Jason and John must redo Mike at the Movies Blade Runner with the Final Cut Edition. This is purely on John's demands. So that's going to be the second half of today's episode. Now, Jason, because we have done so many drafts and I have yet to understand how the rules of the draft work, can you please explain them for our participants and audience? Yeah, so what we're going to do today is we're going to do a draft where, in a series of rounds, everybody in this podcast will be able to choose something from a category. And in this case, the category is Apple Hardware. That's it.

Hardware made by Apple at any point is eligible for this draft. Once you choose it, it's off the board. Somebody else can't take it. And it's a way for us to discuss some of the great Apple hardware of history. We'll do a few rounds until we run out of time, you know, two or three, who knows. And we can, the person who picks the hardware hardware will say why they picked it and then we can have a little chat if other people want to chime in and then we move on to the next person i believe one of the key parts of a draft mike that you you have gotten your head around is every

draft needs an order so do we have an order we most certainly do uh i consulted random.org to generate an order for our draft and it will go as follows first will be john syracusa then stephen hackett then it will be me then alex cox then jason snell that is going to be our draft order for the episode wow i am always last to pick on the incomparable i do it as a courtesy here i just get randomly selected last that's fine it's fine i'm used to it it's okay jason it's okay so uh i do before begin our picks, there's just something I want to talk about real quick. Right now, we are in our membership season at RelayFM. Throughout August and into September, we have a whole host of fun and exciting things that we do for our RelayFM members.

Memberships start at $5 a month, and as a RelayFM member, you get access to a behind-the-scenes newsletter, a preview of upcoming shows that we're going to be putting on at RelayFM member, you get access to a behind-the-scenes newsletter, preview of upcoming shows that we're going to be putting on at RelayFM, a members-only podcast in which Stephen Hackett interviews a couple of hosts about a big topic every month, and also access to a feed full of bonus episodes of RelayFM shows that go throughout August and September. And what we have planned for upgrade is very special. If you remember last year, you may have heard me and Jason and CGP Grey, we did a text adventure together called Six Gun Showdown. Well, we have another one.

It's called Spooky Manor, and it is unbelievable, and we're all very proud of it. And that is going to actually be coming out on this weekend. So as you're hearing this, if you become a RelayFM member or you're already a RelayFM member, that's going to be going live on Friday, August 25th. So you'll be able to hear us traverse through spooky manor which jason says with aplomb every single time yeah i was going to say it's not spooky manor it's spooky manor there you go and i would say if you will want to hear this we had a really good time and it came together really well. And you can only hear it if you are a RelayFM member.

So you can show your support for this show by just going to our page at relay.fm. You can sign up to support this show and become a member. But you will get all of this stuff if you're a member of any show of anything at RelayFM. So go to relay.fm. Find out more, become a member and you'll get access to a bunch of bonus content that's going to be happening throughout the month so without further ado we're going to hand over to john siracusa john what is pick number one in the apple product draft kind of excited that i got number one because we've done similar things to this before where we ask a bunch of Apple enthusiasts

who we all know, pick your favorite something from Apple. And in the past, it's been like, pick your favorite Mac. And a lot of people pick the same thing. So since I get the first pick, I'm going to pick it so nobody else can. My number one pick is the Macintosh SE30.

I think, not universally, but by majority declared the best Mac ever by people who should know, including me. What about people that have never used it, John? What do they do? So here, let me outline my reasoning on this. First of all, the original Macintosh, we all know that little, the cute little guy. It's all in all in one computer. It's taller than it is wide. You know, the whole mouse graphical user interface interface keyboard with no arrow keys on it it's like very important uh you know point in history right and that form factor lasted for a while like that was a macintosh

and then you had you know the macintosh plus which was just like the the first one or you had the 512 and the plus they all kind of look the same the surface details change a little bit at a certain point the line started to branch out sort of like the the iphone plus you get the mac 2 which was not a cute little guy with a little screen and a little floppy disk mouth and everything instead it was like a big flat pc looking thing but it had color and it was big and fancy and expensive and that kind of took the wind out of the sails of the cute little original macintosh it's like oh well you've got the original Macintoshes, which are adorable. And then you've got like the big, professional, expensive, expandable thing with card slots and color and all that stuff.

The SE30 was sort of the last great all-in-one Mac. Because there had been, you know, the Mac 2 was already out. And actually, the successor, the Mac 2X was out. Even more powerful Mac 2. The Mac SE30 was essentially a Mac powerful mac 2 the mac ic 30 was essentially a mac 2x in the original form factor right and the original form factor has a lot of things going for it as like black and white nine inch screen like just it is the iconic original mac and this was the best one of those that they ever made uh it was amazing internal all shoved

into this little tiny thing and as for like the color and the power and everything you could in fact add a 24-bit color card to this thing 24-bit color not 16 colors not 64 colors not 256 colors not 65 535 colors but millions of colors in mac parlance so you could actually connect an external color monitor to this thing that's how powerful it was that you could have two monitors and this little tiny computer. It was amazing. It was the best original Mac form factor and therefore the best Mac of all time because the original Mac is the best Mac.

Yeah, as a fellow old person, I know we're telling stories about the before time for the rest of you, but John's absolutely right. I remember my first mac was an se the se 30 was uh way more expensive and but it was definitely a cut above because it was yeah mac 2 power but still in one of those little plastic things where you that had its own handle but you just could pick it up and carry it around and it but it had all that power in it it was kind of mind-boggling how fast it was compared to an se or like later the classic um those were all the kind of baseline standard computer whereas this was like if you think about like the first mac this is the pro this is the mac pro the one time

that they made that original mac shape with the pro level hardware in it instead of sort of the base level hardware and uh yeah people loved it yeah and expansion even like how they managed to get expand like how can you have there's no card slots and this thing like well there actually there was a card slot like you the fact that you could have an external color monitor was just mind-blowing um and and the fact that if you didn't have an expansion it was just a little nine inch you know monochrome black and white screen so you had all this power powering this tiny little monochrome screen it was so fast like if you're used to you know using a 512 or a plus or something you get one of these it was amazing and then you mentioned the classics

they kept this form factor around with the whole classic line and the classic two and then eventually the weird color classic all those computers were lesser yes they were like well you know that thing that time is over these are classic it's like they're they're old-fashioned or crappy there's nothing old-fashioned about this this was you know the most powerful mac you could get in this you know form factor or any form factor because the 2x was basically the same power but with color and everything um and so this was the end of the line for for that for that strain of the species all right steven you're up so i prepared a couple of

different lists for this and one of my lists were things john syracuse will pick in order and sc30 was first so he uh john john played right into it according to form so my my first pick uh like john thought a lot about this and the machine i'm going to pick has a lot of similarities to the classic mac it's an all-in-one it looked great for the time and still holds up today and it was a machine that a lot of mac lovers really cared about because it was important and that is the original iMac in 1998. What a surprise. I know well you know this is a shocking turn of events shocking I said.

I kind of left that one for you too john and i are staying on brand today so steve jobs comes back to the company the place is a disaster he very famously kills lots of products and introduces uh the grid of four professional consumer desktop and portable and the imac was the desktop consumer machine. The quote is, it's from a different planet, a planet with better designers, wrapped in blue translucent plastic. And as a computer, it was very basic. It had everything you needed, had a bunch of stuff that people thought they needed, but Apple said no, like a bunch of legacy ports that had been on the Mac for a long time. said no like a bunch of legacy ports that have been on the mac for a long time all those were gone in favor of usb uh digging through old mac world in may of 1998 mac world magazine had a

had a grid of like 20 something usb devices and most of them weren't even real yet oh my god just a year later it was uh just like just pages and pages of hundreds and hundreds of usb devices you know i researched that table, Stephen. You're bringing back terrible memories. None of those things were shipping. There were no USB products. Everybody saw the iMac, and they were like, uh-oh, we better announce some USB products that don't exist yet.

We got this. This was before FireWire. It was before CD burners, NTVD burners. All that stuff would come to the iMac. The iMac G3 proved to be a very flexible platform and Apple added lots of stuff to it over time.

But that original Bondi Blue is a very important machine and it gets my pick in round one. Can't argue. That's a good pick. That's not a shocker, but that was a hugely important product in the history of the mac and uh yeah

that was the that was the return of goodness to the all-in-one i think even john would would agree about that not that it surpassed but like yeah the all-in-one mac kind of lost its way especially that molar mac that was what was that about but nice be nice i have one right here yeah but the iMac was cute though yeah it was a little cute gumdrop like and the fact that they riffed on in the same way that they riffed on the design of the of the original mac with you know the the plus and the se and the classic line and everything uh that it was it's a sturdy form factor that you could you know do different colors and different styles and slot loading and just play with it and

it was you know adorable the whole time and it's kind got you know if you if you had in the 80s you said steve jobs like okay uh there's going to be a computer in the late 90s that's going to be like like the original mac but all over again like an all-in-one mac what might it look like like imagine a futuristic kind of uh original macintosh form factor you might draw something silly like the little gumdrop things like obviously you'll never make a real computer like this, but wouldn't it be cool if it was like this weird, amorphous blob that was colored? And that's actually what he did. It's like, they even did

the hello, you know, advertisement with a little Mac paint hello word written in script, just like they had done with the original Mac. They knew they were doing it, and they did it. And it's like, how can you successfully pull that off to replay your own hits translated into a different decade? And it worked.

So I figured that I was going to be surrounded by everybody's first Macs, right? I get to go third in the order, and I figured that was what I was going to get. SE 30 was not my first Mac, Mike. Come on. Okay. Okay. Favorite Macs, then. I don't know.

I don't know how old you are, John. You span all the space. John is timeless, yes. I don't know. I don't know how old you are, John. You span all the space. John is timeless, yes. So I get to pick what I consider to be one of Apple's most important products, but I figured I would be the only one to pick it, and it's the iPod Mini.

The iPod Mini was my first Apple product, and I think a lot of people that are my age and are interested in this type of stuff now may have fallen in the same hole. Like, Apple computers were not as exciting then, I think, for people of my age and are interested in this type of stuff now may have fallen in the same hole. Apple computers were not as exciting then, I think, for people of my age. They became that way, definitely, because of the iPod and the whole Halo effect thing. This was an MP3 player that could hold all of the songs that I could ever want in my pocket. And it was tiny, and I had a pink one, and it was awesome, and the and the screen was blue and i loved it and i had every possible accessory i had like a belt clip so i could put it on my belt and then i could just walk around school listening to things with my white earpods it was the style

and this thing completely changed my life right like it enabled me to be able to have the freedom to listen to whatever i wanted to listen to have the freedom to listen to whatever I wanted to listen to whenever I wanted to listen to it. And it started me on this whole journey. You know, the iPod mini then became later iPods, which then became my first Mac. And it was, it got me into all of this stuff because it was this impossible piece of technology that was just interesting beyond its hardware. The idea of what you could do with this thing, what you could put in it, when before that I was using a CD player, right, and could listen to one CD at a time. I even had a mini disc player for a while, right, but you still could only listen to one album at a

time. It was this thing you had to carry around a little, like, weird mini discs and just put one in and take it out. But the iPod mini allowed me to have everything I could ever possibly want at a time when I started to become interested in music and technology. And it was amazing, and I love it. And a year ago or so, I don't have mine anymore, but Stephen bought me one. So I now still have a pink iPod Mini, which lives in my home. And I think it's one of the most important products for me. And I think just in apple's general history

the ipod mini is is incredibly important yeah it's the flagship example of apple uh cannibalizing itself like they had this very successful ipods and uh well i guess the nano was after the mini was incredibly successful um and then it was completely replaced by the nano and the mini itself uh was smaller capacity than the classic but uh you know like the price didn't match the the capacity decrease and be like why are you ever going to pay for a mini it is so much smaller but not that much less expensive uh and uh the answer was because it's pink that's why yeah and smaller them in all different colors and they were tiny and it was wonderful like it was just this wonderful little thing and uh i loved it much. Alex, you're up.

All right. So when the iPhone was announced, I was like everybody incredibly, incredibly excited. But I looked at this thing and knew that my parents were not going to go for it. So when a little bit later, the first generation iPod touch was announced i was just over the moon because i'm like okay this is something that i can totally sell my parents on that i'm going to be allowed to use all my christmas and birthday money to get um and at that time uh you know parents were still afraid of letting all the use on the internet so i didn't have like i i would have to the imac i had at the time didn't have um an airport card so i would go downstairs to still have to use the gateway 2000 to get

online it was like an animal um and as soon as i got the ipod touch it it was kind of like a disaster design uh or ui wise because there wasn't a phone so the icons weren't even uh there was safari youtube calendar contacts clock calculator and then settings and then just a blank space so immediately uh i jailbroke it and then there were apps uh yeah and um sidio was a huge thing and um like that's how the first time i used twitterific um and that's the first time i had internet all over my house and it was just the start of like a beautiful magical life um and then lo and behold my parents were like oh that's that's pretty cool that's that's pretty nice so eventually i did get the first iphone after the big price drop but uh i have a really really soft spot in my heart for the first

generation um especially because the edges they were like this matte black that almost um it was kind of like a precursor to the chamfered edges of the iPhone 5. It was just really pleasing to hold, whereas the rest of the iPod Touches for a while then had a metal back that got real scratched up real quickly because the metal like went all the way up to the sides, kind of like the iPhone 3G. So this is actually also my favorite iPod Touch design. 3g so that this is actually also my favorite ipod touch design people forget that that original ipod touch like didn't have many of the apps on it apple tried to like prevent people from using it to do anything other than play music and then like they did a software update at some point maybe steven remembers when but it was literally like all right we give up just have all the apps

it's we also had to pay for them yeah right yeah there's like it was like ten dollars or something yeah because the accounting software update it was very strange i mean i have very similar warm feelings about the original ipod touch and it was high on my list because it was my first ios device or iphone os device in the uk the ipod touch came out before the iPhone because regulations. So I had an iPod Touch for a long time. I have this memory of being on a family vacation in Spain and I'm sitting in the house and just entering contacts into a phone,

from my phone into my iPod Touch because that was like the best thing I could have possibly done on that vacation. And it was just like playing with the rubber band, scrolling and all that. I just was completely lost in this thing and it it was it's really important to me too because it opened that whole world up for me i think this one was also the fastest ios device or sorry the fastest iphone os device for a while was this one of the second gen i always forget yeah and and people forget that um like i know you guys think i'm super young but this is still at a point where

unlimited texting was was a luxury so what my friends and i did uh we basically used twitter as our texting service um because no one was on it and we didn't like sure you didn't know what it was at all public or you're doing dms to each other oh no it was all there was no there were no dms yet so it was all public. And I go back in time and there are just nonsense tweets that I'm like, okay, so are we meeting at the mall? What's happening? Oh, we're going to rent the movie.

Okay, cool. And the whole world can see those. See, this is why your parents didn't want you on the internet. Yeah. You were right the whole time all right jason do you want to close out the first round yes of course because random.org says i must um uh so the original macbook air was a terrible computer let's just say it it was it had like a non-standard video out port that was never used on any other mac to get to the usb and

headphone jack you had to pop down a little door on the side that kind of went down a little bit it didn't you didn't pop open a flap to reveal the ports the ports were literally on a door that kind of dropped down when you flipped it open and my favorite feature when it got a little warm in the room one of the cores would just turn off because it couldn't keep it cool enough. And your mouse would start to just like not move smoothly anymore. And you basically couldn't do anything. But it worked great. If you were in a meat locker, it went at full speed and it wasn't a problem.

Then Apple released the second wave. I think there may have been two generations of that first macbook air but there was a second wave macbook air and that was they did a 13 inch model and an 11 inch model those are the ones that we think of as the macbook air basically to this day and they nailed it and to the point where now they kind of can't get rid of it because it's $999 and everybody still wants to buy it even though it's got two-year-old processors in it. My list here of things that I could pick is full of smaller than they should be. Why did they make that laptop, Apple laptops? Because I love the little Apple laptops and the 11-inch MacBook Air is basically my favorite. But I want to take that second wave MacBook Air. When the MacBook Air came basically my favorite, but I want to take that second wave MacBook Air.

When the MacBook Air came out, definitely the statement was, this is Apple's vision for what a laptop should be. And while it isn't entirely practical now, it will eventually be. And the second wave went from being not as overpriced as that first generation, but still kind of like the iPod mini, priced for smallness right like you weren't paying more for more you were paying more for less in terms of size and weight and by the time it's gotten to what is probably the end of its life if if people will ever let it go and stop buying it it is now the cheapest mac laptop and if you look at all the MacBook Pros, they're basically MacBook Airs. The MacBook Pro Escape is essentially a MacBook Air. It weighs about what a 13-inch MacBook Air does. So the MacBook Air has fulfilled its kind of destiny of

defining what the future of laptops would be. But it's just a great the both of the 13 and the 11 they're great laptops and um and i have loved mine and it's probably my favorite mac that i've ever had is the is the little macbook air which is gone away except in education so i think uh i'm gonna have to take that that not the first one because it was really bad but that second uh second design wave macbook air i think that was one of apple's great laptop triumphs. And they were right in terms of where the future of laptops was going. There was a long time there where when anybody asked you who wasn't, you know, a software developer or some hardcore geek, hey, what Apple laptop should I get? You just say 13 inch MacBook Air, you wouldn't have to have any long discussion

about it, because it was such a good machine, such a good balance, like right when the price went down, but it was still fast. And before ret retina when there was nothing to be embarrassed about it and everything about it was great and everybody loved it that was nice we are out of those days now where there's a lot of caveats and hemming and hawing and introspection now we're in the why won't you die phase of the macbook air but even just like there's no there's not an easy go-to for like hey i want to buy get a mac laptop which one should i get you're like. Not that you like the small MacBook, but it's limited. But the MacBook Pro and Touch Bar. Oh, the Touch ID is nice.

But if you don't care about that, but it's expensive and the Air still exists, don't be tempted by it because the screen now sucks. It's hard. I'm basically the person who recommends like what computer everybody should get at my company. And it used to be, like you said, oh, 13-inch Air, or if you're doing any video, this MacBook Pro. And now it's like, we actually need to set a meeting aside for this to discuss everything you want.

Okay, let's go through what monitor you need. It's... I miss those days of, you know, one year ago. Days of simplicity. Mike, that's a round done. Hooray! We did it, everybody. So let's take a break.

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Macintoshes. There was just the one. So there was no qualifiers needed. Kind of like iPhone. It was just Macintosh spelled out all the way, not abbreviated Mac, which I also don't really enjoy. And this is maybe an old person thing, but the original Macintosh was a really important product. These days, everyone will say the iPhone was more important. And they're probably right in the grand scheme of things. For mass people, for the entirety of humanity, the iPhone was definitely more important. But for computer nerds, I would argue the Macintosh was more important. because it was like the turning point from a blinking cursor on a dark screen to what we now know as modern computing,

where the first thing that strikes me about the turning point is the inversion. Black screen, light text, this inverted it. It wasn't green or amber. It was white, like a piece of paper and the ink quote unquote on it was black and the pixels were super tiny it was the retina of its day today retina a lot of people you know if you show it to them their vision is not very good or you show them a retina next to a non-retina either don't see the difference or if you point out the difference is like oh i don't care i don't care that the serifs look a little bit smoother but the macintosh

as compared to like the apple 2 a anybody could tell those pixels are smaller they may not have care but there you could tell the pixels were smaller and b the things you could do with those pixels there was like a different class of things that you could do retina didn't really provide a different class of things because it's not like retina hairline suddenly open up a new class of application because they're just too darn small for people to see you can't say well now i can make art with retina hairlines and it couldn't new class of application because they're just too darn small for people to see you can't say well now i can make art with retina hairlines and it couldn't before that's you know maybe you could say the photos look a little bit sharper but that's about it but the original macintosh looked different than everything else before it and then of course

it had the gui and i've said this in many times in the past but the the overriding sense of what made the mac different from every other computer was that there was this sort of, you know, coherent world inside the computer that you could look at. It was like looking inside a little dollhouse, like a little diorama, like here is this little world and you can go in this little world and play it and it obeys a reasonable set of rules. And it's like a little toy box, which was so different from sort of the Enigma machine of a blinking cursor and knowing commands and typing basic into your you know television screen or whatever you're doing before in your commodore 64 or vic 20 or whatever

such a hard turn such an important change and so far ahead of everything else and that people looked at this and thought for a really really long time much longer than the iphone they thought this is weird it's not a real computer uh it's just a silly toy this whole gooey thing will never catch on computers with mice are stupid right we didn't have that with the iphone there wasn't like a six-year period where people kept buying blackberries and said the iphone was dumb everyone else said oh we're just going to do that like they they caught on and they figured it out with the mac there was this long period where we felt like we were the only people in the world using the future and we sort

of were and so the original macintosh super important amazing the most mind-blowing product ever to be introduced in my lifetime from you know you know for me personally even though the iphone is more important for humanity the original mac is more important to me i can't dispute this it was on my list for sure i'm i was a little surprised that it wasn't john's first pick but i uh yeah yeah absolutely how could you how could it not be picked it's hard to follow that but in thinking about products that really change the way we approach computing my next pick is it's a little bit of a trojan horse so uh it's a pick within a pick it It's a little pick sandwich. And it is the combination of the original airport base station and the original iBook. The original iBook's not that important historically. Colorful, it's like a toilet seat.

We're going on a really interesting route here that I was not expecting. I don't know what sort of toilet seats you use. You got two legitimate old people and one old person in training. Uh-huh. Yep. So the iBook G3, like it's a weird machine, but in the middle of the keynote

where they announced that Steve Jobs is on a bright orange iBook and then walks away from the podium as a web page is loading. And that moment is what I'm talking about because it was the introduction of wireless networking to the Mac platform. And the keynote is great.

I will dig up a YouTube link for the show notes where he makes Phil Schiller jump off a platform onto an airbag to prove that it's wireless while it's transmitting data. All sorts of crazy antics. He has a hula hoop going around the computer at one point. For me, the money moment was, and I'm going to go there, Stephen, when some brightly colored, bright shirt wearing Apple employees carrying those bright iBooks started coming from the back of the room down the aisles with the iBooks to show people,

you know, all of us who were in the room there that they were on the internet. And that was a great little magic trick moment where it's like, and here are these laptops. There's one right in front of you. Look at it loading web pages. And it was all orchestrated. It was a real showbiz moment when they did that. Yeah. And what that brought into our lives was being able to use a computer without having it plugged into an internet network. And that seems so trivial today. I have two Wi-Fi light bulbs on my desk. And, like, all of that comes from the technology introduced here. And it's just amazing.

At this point, Stephen, I can tell you, because I'm an old person, I was living in the same house I'm living in now. Our DSL modem was in a back bedroom. And I had literally an 80-foot long Ethernet cable that snaked down our hallway. foot long ethernet cable that snaked down our hallway you had to step over it down our hallway into our living room to the couch so that we could plug in and be on the internet man this is life before wi-fi it was stupid awful but the airport changed that and it's come a long way and now apple maybe doesn't make airport products anymore but a base station coupled with a bright orange laptop and you were you were free as long as you were within the you know three hours of battery life whatever you got but original airport is uh is my pick and it was cute too the era of cute things the original ibook was cute

looked like a little purse with a handle and the base station was cute looked like a little flying saucer all their stuff was cute adorable and the steve jobs thing where he made phyllis schiller jump off reminded me of the uh scene in conan the barbarian where uh what's his name demonstrates what power is you know what power is that's power i can i can make my executives jump and you think about like it was pretty high like you're if you're working at a tech company you don't think part of your job description is going to be to jump 30 feet onto an airbag while holding a computer. And they had like an accelerometer live on the screen too, so you could see. There was some silly justification, but it was kind of like the leg-stealing scene in Guardians of the Galaxy. You feel like Steve is chuckling under his breath the whole time.

No, yeah, this is important to show the accelerometer. All right, so we're up to pick number eight eight and i'm really surprised that we haven't seen the iphone in this list yet i know everyone wants to get their max in too many old people but i'm i am very surprised that there's no iphone so i'm gonna pick the iphone but not the original one oh good i want to pick the iphone 6 plus of course of course this is my favorite iphone it's not my favorite design like physically you know i would say that maybe the original or the iphone 5 or 4 i think are nicer looking. But this was the iPhone that I really wanted. Since the original, this was the one that I wanted the most

because it had a bigger screen and it had a bigger battery, and they were the two things that I really wanted from a phone. And I had been a plus-size believer since the beginning when everyone thought it was ridiculous. Many people still do think it was ridiculous, but I was immediately sold on this as a device that I wanted because it was the best of everything for me. Like, why would I not want a bigger screen for my most important computer? I want to get more information on it. I want to be able to read more. I want to be able to see more. And i think that the plus line of phones was a

fantastic decision for apple i think it helped as you know the numbers show it really propelled them forward even further into markets that they were looking to try and attract and i think that it was fantastic and they've continued to do great things with that line you know it's it's the line that seems to get some features first because they can put them into the bigger body. And I hope that even though we're going into potentially uncharted waters with the iPhone, I hope that into the future, we continue to get this model that's just a little bit bigger

than what most people want because there are some people like me that always want to be in the Plus Club. Not surprised. I know it upsets you, Jason. No, I think that was the mic the most mic pick that there could ever be i think it was really important for apple to introduce a bigger phone like i was yeah i still want them to introduce even bigger ipads and i always wanted

to do a bigger phone the question was always like the bigger phone but other people will buy it not me but to see mike and other tech enthusiasts somehow find room in their life and in their pants for this monstrosity it's always uh surprised i have big pants john don't worry they're they're massive city of big pants that's what they call london i tried for nearly a year to find jeans that would fit it nope nope so i'm sorry like a like a clown shop maybe magicians you know they can have big pockets right you might be able to get something that way that might look kind of normal magicians could help you out alex you're up all right uh i'm gonna go with another iphone but not the original iphone um the iphone 4 which is probably

my favorite iphone um it introduced retina which felt really magical i'm sure they said that on stage um but like holding it in my hand and looking at it that was the first time it felt like this is a device that is supposed to disappear and it felt like the perfect size the metal on the edge was just so cool um and also this is kind of a pick within a pick. Like when AntennaGate happened and like supposedly people would squeeze the phone and you would get less reception. That was the first time I remember like there being a big Apple scandal. And so then they gave everybody a free case or free bumper case that had purchased an iPhone 4. And that's also that bumper case is the only good iPhone case Apple has ever made. Now they make these terrible, squishy, squeaky, like plastic things or leather ones that immediately, like the patina isn't like a normal leather patina.

It just rips and falls apart. But this bumper was like exactly what you wanted. It still showed off the iPhone 4's design. It still like disappeared and looked like it was part of the phone. And there were a lot fewer cracked screens, even though both sides were made of glass. I think this was also the first time the Kindle app came to the iPhone. So that was a dream come true. My library was in my pocket. I think this is my favorite industrial design family. Like the iPhone 4 and 5 all are of the same design. Like the 5 got taller, but they're all

the kind of two flat surfaces with the ring, like a little baking mold around the outside. And it looks, it's very much, it looks like a Braun razor or something. It's, I like, I think it's a very pretty design and we lived with it for whatever, four years. And this was where it came in. And of course it was lost in a bar and found by Gizmodo. So it's got that going for it too. Oh yeah.

The Ford design was also my favorite. I think it was absolutely the most attractive and the best design for its era, because obviously eventually the phones got bigger. And if you look at one one today they look minuscule right i think it was you know it was the wrong size like i think the the seven six are more closer to the right compromise for size but back then you know cost and and uh the screen and all the other stuff there's a lot going into it um but if you look at the original like what what apple's industrial design team wanted the iphone to be i forget what this design was called. It had some code name.

This is what they wanted to make and they couldn't make for years. Like, they said, this is what the iPhone's going to look like. It's this weird, you know, ice cream sandwich thingy or whatever, and they just couldn't do it. And so they made the original iPhone and the 3G and 3GS before this one, but they didn't give up on it. They're like, we want to make this phone look like this, and eventually they did. And I think it kind of shows, like, this is what was in their head. You know, if you,

if you put the four next to the ones that came before it, they all look like weird attempts to do something. And the four just looks like completely realized. And I also love that bumper because it had the, the rubber grips on it. Like that, if a film, it actually made it like less slippery in your hand instead of just sort of,

you know, either more slippery or not changing it at all because the rubber right when your, your hand instead of just sort of you know either more slipperier or not changing it at all because the rubber right when your your hand met it and you did you get to see the shiny glass back in the last front probably again probably not a great idea but boy that phone looked good yeah and i think that the um one of the i don't entirely agree john i think that the the six and seven design is actually the one that's the most direct descendant of the original which i think is johnny i've wanting to make a like super curvy curved edges curved to the back kind of thing it wasn't johnny i've didn't you remember in the court case they said like here are possible designs for the

iphone and one of them was the ice cream sandwich one and when one of them was more curvy and the ice cream it wasn't johnny i've specifically it was some other guy i think came up with the ice cream sandwich one and they couldn't do that one yeah my point is that there's sort of two different design directions and with the four or five ice cream sandwich design they went with sort of design direction b and i do think it is a fantastic design whereas the six and the seven feel like those are uh descendants of design direction a which was that original phone which is super curvy um and it's funny that apple has flipped back and forth of course you can still get the se which has this design today my favorite in this family was the five because it had that it had the black phone for the five that was like the darth vader phone and i love

that and i like that it was a slightly bigger but yes until you touched it but yeah it's true i had to put it in the case but it would be so beautiful but it's great design has ice cream sandwich design become canon now is this the term i don't know no it had a code name in the court case they had like a diagram and a code name for that design i forget what it was though but does look like an ice cream sandwich kind of um so i'm going to close out the second round by out outdoing john as the oldest person on this podcast because i'm going to take you back to a time when apple didn't make max they made some other they made some other products and i'm going to select uh one of the first computers that i ever used i'm going to pick the apple 2e and now they're

apple 2 enthusiasts out there going no but like the Apple II Plus originally didn't do lower case. The Apple IIc is an interesting example of Apple kind of trying to do a closed case product, which they would end up doing a whole lot of in the future. But I love the Apple IIe. I had an Apple IIe. You could pop off the top and it had expansion slots in it. I had a couple of floppy drives. You know, it drove a color monitor. I played games on it and wrote short stories on it and wrote school papers on it. It was definitely different people can people can debate like the Commodore 64 and things like that. But to me, this was the computer until I saw a Mac for the first time. And so my, uh, my, uh, desire for Apple products

and my love of that, uh, six color rainbow logo goes back to the two E and, uh, it was the, I think the sweet spot in the Apple two line, um, because it was, you know, it preceded the two C and was more expandable, but it corrected a lot of the problems of the 2 plus and you know you could boot into apple uh dos you could boot into pro dos you could run at 80 characters per line or 40 depending and you know every now and then i take an apple 2 emulator out for a spin because uh that's pure nostalgia for me. Also, I played Karataka on the Apple II, and that was the best game ever. So, yeah, Apple IIe. Amazing longevity in education, too, because I'm not as old and decrepit as Jason, but I used Apple IIes in high school.

Like, in the school, in high school, they were teaching classes on Apple IIes, which even then were old. They had two GSs in the library, and they had Macs in the school paper office, but the IIes was like they had the most of them. There was, but the 2Es was like, they had the most of them. There was a whole room full of them and they were still actually using them. Pretty amazing. Yeah, well, I mean, even in,

I think you're like five or six years younger than me, but like the Apple 2E, the Mac had been out, I graduated from high school in 1988. The Mac had already been out for four years, but the computer lab was entirely Apple 2s. And I took an apple two to college with me because i i didn't get a mac until my sophomore year in college and and it it performed admirably although it was not what i would call a compact machine by any stretch of the imagination once

you attach the floppy drives and the monitor and got it all set up but it was uh it was great and you could just write a program 10 print hello, hello. 20 print, go to 10. It was just right there. No work required to write a stupid program. I wish I could say anything. I've literally never seen an Apple II in my life. You can go to a museum. That's kind of on my bucket.

Yeah, it's on my bucket list. I've also never seen an original Macintosh. Or just go to Stephen's house. He's got the mole. In high school, or rather in middle school, our computer lab only had molar max for some reason i feel like it would be steven's dream more like a nightmare i think but that's when they fall out it's a fever dream earthquake at the molar map collab

all right so that closes out the second round so I'm going to take a moment to thank our second sponsor of this week's show, and that is Ting. Ting is a mobile phone service that, believe it or not, wants to help you save money. Ting believes that you should only pay for what you use, and with prices like $10 for a gigabyte of data, the average Ting customer pays just $23 a month per phone, $10 per gigabyte of data, the average Ting customer pays just $23 a month per phone, $10 per gigabyte of data. If you are in the US and use a cell phone, which I'm sure probably most of you are, you will

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Just go to upgrade.ting.com and see how much you can save. We thank Ting for their support of this show. All right, so we are on to round three. So we're going to head back over to Mr. Syracuse. All right, continuing the trend slash theme, I'm going to pick another Mac for my number three choice. This Mac is vaguely relevant to our current times in two ways. First, the fancy new edge-to-edge screen iPhone with a notch on the top of whatever is supposedly codenamed Ferrari as a expensive but lower volume

but, you know, super-duper fast, presumably, you know, model in the line and also today as we await the sort of kind of announced for the future mac pro which is not coming this year but sometime in the future that will be like the return of the big bad mac the mac that is spare no expense make it as fast as possible make it awesome and also awesomely expensive and so my number three pick i am picking the macintosh 2fx one of the best names ever for a computer because fx is cool x's are cool and fx looks nice um and it was a mac that was faster than all the other macs more expensive than all the other macs and filled filled with stuff that was, you know, it's not like a parts bin Mac, and most of them weren't parts bin Macs back then, but lots

of custom stuff inside there to make it the best of any of the Macs. Like, every part of this computer that wasn't better than its predecessors, they made it not just a little bit better, but a lot better and a lot more expensive. It was on the cover of Macworld Magazine with the uh famous i don't know how this line became famous because it's not even that exciting but it was uh everyone knows who is alive this time that the mac 2fx is wicked fast because that's what they wrote yeah on the cover of the magazine and and it was and oh yeah it was a type of computer like a ferrari most people never saw like it was years before i saw a mac 2fx because where were they where could you even who had one they were they cost as much as a car right you could see a mac 2 if you were lucky and you

went to your local reseller but they wouldn't have a mac 2 fx out on the on the floor and again using it this is kind of weird because most people don't have this experience well maybe you did with it in the mac os 10 error like how do you tell whether a computer is fast back in the early days of the mac you could tell a computer was fast because it did all the gooey stuff perceptively faster. Like you'd pull down a menu and move your mouse through the menu, highlighting the items as you go down. That was perceptively faster on a Mac 2FX than it was on its siblings.

Opening and closing windows, right? The little rubber banding animation, opening and closing applications, you know, there was just using the computer, you could tell it was faster and you don't get that feel that much these days because in the modern era even a slow iphone maybe the animations are a little bit jumpy but scrolling is generally good everywhere and you know on the mac used to be resizing windows but that was slow everywhere and no matter how fast the mac you could get it was like more of a software problem than hardware one the mac 2 fx was like a ferrari an expensive lust object and the original embodiment of of speed of power and speed in the mac line i have no idea how my college newspaper in 1991 when the mac 2 fx was

a currently shipping model got a mac 2 fx but we did and it was or it might even been 90 it was like right when it came out and i don't know how we got one we didn't get it my first year there but my second year there we had a mac 2 fx and that was an update because originally our fast mac was a 2cx we got the 2 fx and i'll tell you what a great demo of how fast it was was is in page maker which we used to lay out our newspaper on a mac se you would do this i think it was like command option click would take you to a hundred percent so you'd be zoomed out to look at the page layout and it would actually greek the text it wouldn't even show you try to draw the text because it would be too small so it just was like the text was just gray

bars and then you do command option click and it would go to a hundred percent and it would redraw the screen the screen zoomed in at the point where you clicked. And you'd sit there and watch page maker laboriously draw the frame of the page, and then it would flow the text in. And maybe if there was a graphic or an image, you would draw that in. And you just sit there and wait. And on the two effects, you would do that same thing and go click and be like, boom, there, there you were at 100%. Like today, basically, except for us, that was the difference. So we fought over who got to use the two fx of course but it was startling how much faster it was than the two cx let alone the ses that we were using it was amazing i'm so happy this is one of those rare cases where i got to use

the top of the line mac uh it's the first time i ever got to use a top of the line mac and i didn't even realize it at the time i just knew how how fast it was, and it was awesome. I remember the hard drive sound because it had a fast hard drive in it, too. So, like, you'd be moving around on a page, and normally you'd hear this kind of very slow hard drive sound coming from the inside of, like, an SE. And on the 2FX, it was this distinct tick sound, and it would be like tick, tick, tick, and then it was loaded. It was magic. It's an amazing, amazing computer. Huge, too.

It was not like all the 2Cs were all these little tiny boxes, like a donut box or something. And 2FX was not. It was just massive. It was a slab. It was nothing like a little computer. It was a huge slab of metal, basically. On my John Syracuse prediction list, the 2FX was second. So, still rocking and rolling. So, I think I'm going to go with the theme of my first Mac.

And that comes with some caveats. It was actually a company computer, but the boss let me use it as my own. So I took it to college with me. I used it for years, even when I worked for them very part-time in college. He basically just let me keep the machine. And that is the Titanium PowerBook G4. First time we'd seen a G4 in a notebook. Before this, the PowerBooks were all plastic.

They'd been gray for a long time, and then they were black with the G3 series and curvy, and the logo was upside down when you opened the MacBook, the PowerBooks and the MacBook Pros we still use today. My MacBook Pro sitting here on my desk. It's thin. It's made of metal. It's got rounded edges. It's very clean looking. And the titanium introduced all of that stuff. Now, it had its problems that I'm sure people point out, mainly that the paint would flake off and sometimes the screen would just come off the hinges.

Totally fine. Just ignore those problems because it's a beautiful machine. And I had the one gigahertz model, had the fast, I think it had a super drive in it, a gig of RAM. It really was a killer machine for the time. And one that I still like the way it looks. It's kind of busy compared to the aluminum that would follow. Lots of different surfaces and colors and textures but i i think it looks great and it was an inch thick and it just it blew my mind at the time uh and looking back it's it's sort of the grandfather for all the notebooks that we that we know today it's also the ice cream sandwich school of design i remember that was that was introduced uh like you know we were waiting for a g4 to be in in a power book

and then it was introduced and they showed like the side view and it was like you know we were waiting for a g4 to be in in a power book and then it was introduced and they showed like the side view and it was like you know one inch thin or the marking thing was like people gasped like it's like a we're like oh maybe they're gonna put a g4 in there but that's gonna be really hard and b the fact that it got thinner like we weren't used to that at that point that apple i mean we should have been i don't know if this is before or after the nano but it was like a mini to nano transition this is the best fastest computer with this amazing super drive thing in it and it's incredibly thin it was shocking that computer was shocking it was one of the one of the first sort of future tech kind of like the macbook air like you can't

make a computer like that right pretty amazing yeah it was it was uh it was before before the mini in fact it was i think the as i stall as to look this up i think it was uh before even the original ipod i mean this was this was early days it was 2000 and um yeah i love the wall street and successors that were those first really kind of like redesigned steve jobs era powerbooks but they were still big plastic blobs and this was not this was a metal thin metal laptop and guess what every pro laptop they made after this looked like this i mean although it took them they realized titanium not a good material but they got there but this was the first iteration where you could see where they were going with it and you know it was the first one on the on the path to what we think of now as the macbook is this the first

product that apple made using a premium material uh well i mean they played john johnny i was playing with materials but they weren't premium materials they were like translucent plastic bits and stuff like that whereas this wasn't 100 titanium it was like magnesium and a bunch of like it was it was titanium the titanium name was as much marketing as it was reality yeah but it's like the first time that they really is it like the first time they made they made a point of it right like this is the titanium because you don't call it the plastic yeah almost luxury luxury like yeah feel yeah i think so and the thinness of that screen which again i think came back to bite them and they they moved away and made those screens a little bit thicker and

more rugged than that one because it was so kind of too thin but it was amazing to to move that hinge and feel that super thin screen that was that was it wasn't just that the computer was one inch thin it was that the screen part of it was like impossibly thin yeah they'd show all the side views in the marketing like they showed from the side and they were just it looked impossible look like you can't make a computer how could how can it be that thin yeah exactly right and then and then your kid just snaps it off with one hand and you realize this is bad yeah good times anytime i open mine i sort of say a prayer to the uh to the gods of industrial design first yeah please not this time i'm gonna pick a device that uh changed how i think about computers um and it's the iPad Pro 12.9. When this device was introduced, I was interested,

but I'd had a weird relationship with iPads since 2010 to this point. This was what? This was the end of 2015 when the iPad Pro 12.9 came out? Yeah. So those five years with the iPad, I'd kind of gone back and forth a lot, you know, from thinking it was amazing and I loved it to just getting bored of it and stopping using it and just going back to my Macs.

And when this device came out, iOS 9 was kind of in beta and I'd been playing around with multitasking on an iPad Air and was thinking that this is pretty interesting. Like, I like the way that some of this works. And I was intrigued to see what was going to happen. And then the iPad Pro came out and it was interesting. I picked one up and it changed everything.

I found myself being drawn to using iOS to do all of the work that I could possibly do on it. I'm aware of how it can be more difficult, and especially when this came out, it can be more difficult. And especially when this came out, it was even more difficult to try and do all of these types of things on the iPad than it is today. You know, multitasking was very much in its infancy. But there was just something about the whole package of this beautiful big screen, which was, you know, it felt really nice to hold and it was lighter than the laptop that I had at the time. Plus a keyboard that was also a case and a stand, you know, that would protect the screen,

but I could also stand it up to watch movies. And the Apple Pencil, which was a fantastic device for me, you know, it felt better than any stylus I'd ever used. And it allowed me to be able to change my input methods during a time when I was starting to struggle with RSI problems. And being able to use the Apple Pencil to navigate the UI was perfect for me then. And it changed the way I think about computers. In my mind now, Macintoshes are production machines. They are where I do professional things. I record and edit podcasts and videos on Macs. professional things. I record and edit podcasts and videos on Macs. Once the editing is done, the Mac gets turned off and I go back to the iPad to do everything that I want to do. My entire business, all of the stuff that I would do to run a business day to day is run from an iPad. And I wouldn't change it because I love it. And the 12.9 inch iPad Pro was what opened this up

to me because it finally became a device where the hardware and software really met for me and it just made perfect sense i i had this on my list um because i i knew we somebody needed to pick an ipad and it was definitely on my list because of that it's i i couldn't my my love for small laptops apparently is inverted into large ipads i don't know how that happened but small laptops and large ipads are basically the same kind of size right like you're meeting in the middle i have a strong preference for the 11 inch macbook air over the 13 and yet now i use a 13 inch essentially ipad i don't know what happened there but don't don't think about it jason confusing very confusing i'm just gonna let it go. This has actually turned into my family computer now because it's kind of unnecessary for my wife and I to share our laptops and just inconvenient.

And I know that iOS is sort of counterintuitive to having a family share it. But it's just so great to move it everywhere. And it feels like my home iPad. And I don't know. It's this weird soft spot that like I initially held it and thought I was going to return it and thought, no way, this is just too much. But it's still kind of my main note taking computer. And it is how I just completely completely changed it changed the way i thought about ios um and also it really clicked like okay now i'm the old person and this is

the future um this is the ipad long game yeah i was so glad when they came out with a bigger ipad because i always felt like i mean when they came with the ipad there was this promise before they introduced it of like what could ios or you know iphone os or whatever be what would it be like on a bigger screen like a tablet size screen and when they came out with the ipad and it was so similar to the phone it's like yeah it seems like leaving money on the table here like there's more you could do like the device would become even more powerful you just make it bigger and then the stylus obviously adding a whole other dimension that on the keyboard and when you have a keyboard it can be a reasonable size like just so great to see them break out of the

i feel like it's kind of the in-betweeny form factor to say if this is going to be the future of computing it's got to be bigger got to be bigger more powerful more flexible and i hope i hope they keep going this direction i was also glad when they didn't you know uh unify on the 10.5 inch but right but upgraded to the 12.9 as well so i say keep going with this and i'm ready for one that's even bigger alex all right so i am going to finally pick a mac and not uh an ios device um i so this was the last consumer laptop I used, and I think this is the Mac that I used the longest. It's the Apple MacBook Core Duo 2.0, also known as the black MacBook, basically. macbook basically and i remember getting this only because i thought the color was really cool um and i could get it used uh at like the base price um and this is also the first laptop that

i could get like i could get into the guts of it um and i maxed out the ram and maxed out the hard drive uh it it was kind of constantly lighting uh lighting up in strange ways like the screen wasn't great it was the first glossy screen i think in the macbook line um and also it like set my thighs on fire at least once a day because it it was so to speak it wasn't not supposed to have two two gigs of ram um but yeah i i just slowly upgraded over the years and it lasted i think from middle school all the way until i graduated high school and it just uh even even today um it just looks nice i don't know it also is one of my favorite um keyboards they ever had despite the fact the fact that I think this was their first black keyboard on a laptop.

Or sorry, a Mac. I don't even know how to qualify this. A MacBook. I know that the old PowerBooks had them. And it was also my first Intel Mac. So I could, what was it, boot into, I don't remember even what it's called anymore. Boot Camp. Yeah. And I could play Steam on the other side of my laptop. And it just felt really cool.

And I learned a lot about computers from this one laptop. So not important in the big scheme of Apple history, but important to me. I love this. I had a black MacBook and I loved it. This is the era where if you wanted a smaller MacBook than the MacBook Pro, you know, you got an iBook and then the MacBook came out for, which is the name change was when they went to Intel. And the black version initially cost more and didn't have anything more other than the color, but it looked so cool. I loved it so much.

And you're right, you can get to the hard drive and the RAM through the battery bay. So it was super easy to upgrade it. And I wish Apple would make a legitimately black laptop again, not this Space Grace Fine, but this one, yeah, it looked so cool with the white Apple logo and the black polycarbonate. It was great.

Yeah, it had the same problem of looking good as long as no one touched it, which is kind of a shame. It's like now they have the tech like the matte black iPhone. I feel like that finish holds up pretty well both to fingerprints and to scratches. Imagine a Mac laptop that was the same color as the matte black iPhone. That would be great. Yeah, it would be awesome. I do think that plastic MacBook was important, though. The black one was more expensive. I think that you got more

hard drive space, but it was basically the same computer. But at least when I was in school, in college, those MacBooks were everywhere. It really seemed to gain market share well above what the iBook

or even something like the 12-inch PowerBook every did. And like the Air, like Jason said earlier, for a while there, you could just say, hey, get a MacBook. Get the white one. If you got a little extra money to spend, the black one is way cooler. But it's sort of a well-rounded machine for everybody. And even though it wasn't a MacBook Pro,

you could still get some production work done if you needed to. I think it was a great machine. And they had, again, like many of these models, they had problems. The black one was a little better about the chipping and the staining that the white plastic ended up being plagued by,

but definitely a cool machine. I remember my brother had a black MacBook and I had a MacBook Pro at the time. And even being plagued by, but definitely a cool machine. I remember my brother had a black MacBook, and I had a MacBook Pro at the time, and even with the MacBook Pro, I was envious of how cool his MacBook looked. So stealthy with the black plastic. I still think they look great. Yeah, this is an important computer to me.

It was my second ever Mac on my first laptop. I absolutely loved it. I had the white one. I had little pieces of the wrist rest cracking off, but I loved loved it. I had the white one. I had little pieces of the wrist rest cracking off. And I loved that thing. You know, like the also the wrist rest started to go yellow over time, which was lovely. But that was just a absolutely fantastic computer. Like it opened my eyes up to what it would be like to have a computer that wasn't fixed into one position, you know.

And it was i absolutely loved it it was a great looking thing i that was that was a fantastic mac oh this was also i realized my first mac with the dvd player and this is when netflix you know uh still sending out disc and so i i this was my early binge watching experience. Just getting all of those seasons of Doctor Who via disc. That's great. All right, Jason, you've got the last official pick. Yeah, I know. I'm going to close this out.

So I had a bunch of things on my list that when we bring out our dead here in a minute, we can talk about. But I feel like they've been... I've got an iPhone. We've had iPhones picked. I've got an iPad. We've had those picked. So I'm going to go with something that has not been picked yet.

And also it firmly places me on T-Mold, but it's super important. So this is an Apple hardware product. Cost $7,000 when it was released in 1985. So that's like more than $15,000 today. But you know what in some ways it was the most important apple hardware product released i would argue in the top five like most important apple products of all time because of what it did for the mac and the and the uh different fields and industries that it revolutionized it's the laser writer which introduced i

i'm very okay oh yeah you better be agreeing with me because i'm right the laser writer the it's a brilliant it is the first time it's it's postscript it allowed whizzywig publishing It's PostScript. It allowed WYSIWYG publishing to exist. It let you print on regular paper at 300 dots per inch, which is impossibly good, like print quality, essentially. The LaserWriter changed everything. It made Apple successful in publishing. It made Adobe exist, basically. It completely changed the publishing industry. It created desktop publishing. It created service bureaus where people could go and get their stuff that they

made on their Macs printed at high resolution. Because that was a thing that you did back in those days when it cost $7,000 is you would take your files and fonts, you better remember to bring your fonts or it's going to be ugly. And you'd take them down to the local place that had a laser printer, a laser writer, and you would print it out. The first time I printed a paper, we had a laser printer. We had a laser writer, in fact, at my college newspaper, along with a giant image setter that was like the size of a car that did 600 dpi. And I would print out college papers on it.

And it was like unreal. It was like I had had a letterpress make my papers for me it was so unbelievable because in those days everything was dot matrix everything looked crappy and then this was real stuff and now we take it for granted and people have moved on to things like uh you know everybody's got an inkjet printer now but that laser printer it really did change everything it changed the computer industry the publishing industry and a lot of people's lives because without the laser printer you were printing you know your beautiful mac graphics and fonts and things and then they would end up on like an inkjet printer

and they would not look very good but when you did it on the laser printer they looked as good as anything you could get from a professional print shop, as long as your design skills were good. Otherwise, it still looked like a clown made it. Anyway, I know it's a wacky pick, but everything else we you made, you've all made some great picks. And I wanted this oddball piece of Apple hardware, we don't even think about it now, super important that this product existed. And it kind of came from Apple. Apple was the one that made it happen. And that means something to that Apple didn't sort of say, boy, I hope somebody makes a printer for our Macintosh. They're like, no, we're going to make it. And they did.

Did you mention this was also the most powerful Mac for a while? The most powerful Apple computer for a while? Did you mention that earlier? I didn't. But, yes, it was. The stuff on the inside was. I mean, there's a reason it cost $7,000. It was bananas.

It had a 12 megahertz motorola 68 000 cpu so it and 512k of ram uh and so at that point it was more processing power because the mac only ran at 8 megahertz and the laser writer ran at 12 megahertz yeah i don't disagree with the importance of this pic i just never could have picked it you know like if you was like i know that's why i work on jason's list it never would have come up right pretty good yeah yeah it's it and it's another one of those things where you kind of had to be there in terms of uh computers printing things not just like this is pre-inkjet right dot matrix printers and not not good dot matrix printers bad bad very bad printers where you could see the dot so if you had a computer at home and this

is my experience you handed in a paper for school instead of writing it on a typewriter yes an actual typewriter if you had a computer which was much better because you didn't have to use like white out or backspacing or retype the whole page and everything you know if you had a computer you could print it out on your apple 2 or whatever and your dot matrix printer and you'd hand in the paper and you were one of the impressive students like here i am i'm fancy i have a computer i'm handing in my paper that is printed on my printer on my computer, right? If you laser printed something,

it was like you had torn pages out of a book in the library. It's like, you didn't write this. This is, how does this even exist? Because it's like a page from a book, like from the library, but it's got your words on it. Like, is this a practical joke? It didn't, it looked like a different category of things. It didn't look like, oh category of things it didn't look

like oh you had a better printer because everyone knows you can't print things like that a better printer was the apple image writer like that was a better dot matrix printer and you could tell a difference of i'm gonna write for i'm gonna print from mac right on my apple image writer that looked better than the dot matrix printers laser printer looked like an alien had come down and like it literally looked like like a piece of paper torn out of a book or a magazine yeah but but it had your words on it and it was like impossible now i didn't have a laser runner nobody had a laser runner but now every once in a while you know if you had an uncle who had a laser runner you could do that and print out a paper on it it was like you were a published author it was like now i'm published because my serifs are 300

dpi i feel like in a hundred years on a future upgrade uh cyborg jason and mike are going to be talking about how yeah remember the original 3d printers they're really terrible now we just print our food remember stores wow was this was this changeover like akin to something like retina like the idea of like i've never seen something look so clear yeah this is retina for paper like right the dot like john was saying the dot matrix original like they had their own type so you just send the text there and it would be in whatever its font was would be and maybe if you're lucky it had two fonts but it was basically just you could see the dots and it was in a in a grid and then like the apple uh like the style writer or you know that was um

the image writer because you'd go to mac write and you'd pick a different font and i would always pick some hideous font and i would print it and teachers were blown away by it because it was not it wasn't a typewriter because that like like the courier typewriter font or whatever that was printed on the little metal heads and it wasn't a dot matrix it was different fonts i would have different size text for the title and my name and the body text and it was that a dot matrix it was different fonts i would have different size text for the title and my name and the body text and it was that was that was the big step forward was that you went from dot matrix like all those all those things that i printed out on my apple too where it was just like letters on a piece of paper with the dots and then from the mac you could go and

print these things where it would be like you could see the fonts but the quality was still really terrible and then you get to the the laser, which had a certain number of built-in fonts. And it was suddenly you went from kind of like you could sort of see the ink smudges and all of that to immaculate, like John said, like from a book. Like you ripped a page out of a book in the library. And so, yes, it was the retina of its day. And the fact that not only could you do that but then everything got accurate so like this is how you know we we did our college newspaper on on laser writer essentially and you couldn't before you would have gone to a newspaper and had them do your you know uh they would they would print it using their typesetter machine that cost a fortune and all of a sudden

you could just do it with this laser printer for seven thousand dollars yeah and it was unlike retina because retina was like it's not like there were professionals in the world that everyone knew like everyone knows that the professional people already have phones that are retina resolution but regular people don't because in the printing world we were all in a world where you'd get a magazine you'd go get a magazine and you'd look at the type in the magazine it was magazine type like it was nice little serif fonts and you know 300 dpi 600 dpi or whatever it was that had existed for a long time it's just that you couldn't do that at home you can't you can't make your own magazine at home

right madness uh and and then this was the laser writer was a thing that everybody knew existed that everyone was used to it was like and it was better than newsprint because newsprint was awful and smudgy right everyone knew magazines existed and all of a sudden you could make one in your house and that was what would blow people's mind because it seemed like an impossibility because it wasn't it wasn't a new innovation that everyone was coming along for the ride for it was like taking something that was once the domain of super expensive things that nevertheless the entire world knew about because everyone could read a magazine they just assumed they magically appeared and then now suddenly you could make one yourself it was amazing yeah and it was part of a big i mean desktop publishing is what it was the max

like strong like the stronghold for such a long time they had all sorts of weird products they had the two-page monochrome display and the portrait display so you could lay out horizontal and vertically oriented pages we had those both at my college newspaper yep uh all sorts of of stuff that was really geared for professional designers, newspapers, magazines, print stuff. And that industry, in a lot of ways, I think, helped Apple hang on there in the 90s. Oh, yeah. It would have been dead without that industry, for sure. No doubt.

Weirdly, I think we've ended up speaking about the LaserWriter more than any other product on this list. So good pick, Jason. I love all of you. It also looked really cool. Again, Snow White design language. Looked cool. All right, so the draft is now complete. The picks are done.

But in standard Jason Snow draft rules, we get to have a few minutes where we can just talk about a couple of other things that were on our lists that we didn't get to pick that maybe nobody got to pick and we'll get to do that just after this break which is uh what i'm going to talk about encapsular encapsular is helping support this week's show they have all of the website security tools and content delivery network stuff that you're going to need to make your website safer faster and more reliable and it's so easy to get started. To activate Encapsular, you just make a small change to your DNS.

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All right, John, I'm going to hand it back over to you to maybe pick one or two things to talk about real quick that you didn't get to pick in the draft list. Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead. I've got more than one or two, but I will go quickly because I'm well-versed in the bringing out your dead and draft format.

My number four pick was the power mac g5 it's another one of those computers like the titanium that uh seemed impossible when the specs leak people thought it was impossible like because we had waited so long like the mac had stagnated with the g4 and the slow front side bus and this one just was such a huge leap and you know you kind of get these huge leaps if you let the line stagnate and be crappy for a while uh but but again you know because because it had leaked, and Steve Jobs joked about it on stage, people didn't even believe the leak

because it was so amazing. So that was an important computer. My 2008 Mac Pro that I've used for almost a decade now, what a workhorse, what an incredibly flexible machine, sort of the peak of that tower design. So flexible, so powerful, so well-made, such longevity. I had the iPhone 4S as my first non-mac pick um but we already went over that the the four line i picked the forest just because i feel like the four was a little

slow compared to the forest the forest was so much faster than it but also you know was in that same form factor i love that design and i think the forest is the best version of that design i put the five in a separate category i like the forest way better with the more sandwichy thing uh the ipad pro 9.7 inch the original one kind of like 13 inch macbook air one of those computers that there was nothing wrong with it like it you know you just recommend it wholeheartedly it is great it is it is thin it is powerful it has an amazing screen on it like you can use the the apple pencil with it it was just i have one now i love it i feel like that is a really strong you

know in the 9.7 line it's going to be hard to beat that because it was just so there was nothing bad about it it was amazing uh the apple cinema display the 22 inch one with the little translucent feet i had that in my house as a review unit for a while and people would come and visit my house and wouldn't know what category to put it in like they would say is that is that a tv because it's obviously not a computer screen because a computer screens are crts and b it's big like a tv but it's skinny and it looks weird people it didn't even read as a computer screen it was so big um the 23 inch was actually a better version of that but uh that was a pretty amazing thing and finally power macintosh g3 blue and white which was again another big jump over its predecessors in terms of like the other ones

were there was the power macintosh g3 that was beige my boy that poor computer like you know it had a little translucent handle on top a little translucent button on top of it but the rest of it was boring this thing had the door that opened up and all the guts laid out for you a very interesting design different than the current one where the door comes off and the stuff was on the inside this the stuff laid down a lot of the stuff laid down um it looked adorable it was super fast it was really cool uh and uh i really love that it was the yosemite case design that we'll use that name later that's it for my bringing out the dead picks steven how many of those were on your uh john syracuse a pick list

on my list i had blue and white g3 i did have the pyromac g5 on john's but i had the quad core uh version but uh no i'm only the one that was the big jump over like we're waiting for we're waiting for a new computer liquid cooling by mopar what could go wrong that would be on my list of the worst. Yeah, I had a couple of unique things. I'll start with some of the more mainstream, maybe. I had the iMac G, or sorry, the iMac G5, sort of the same reason for the Power Mac G5 and some of these other machines.

To put a G5 in an all-in-one seemed bananas to me at the time. You know, it was like two inches thick, I think. So I mean, currently on a Mac now, it's chunky. But to have a G5 and an all-in-one just really was something. I also have a series of weird 90s Macs, the Macintosh TV and the 20th anniversary Mac, both big collector's items, of course, both unique, both kind of terrible computers, but show Apple trying to do things that were unique and different. And the TAM and the Macintosh TV, they didn't sell very well.

They weren't ever really popular. But I like that Apple was trying something different, even if they were false directions. And as far as like oddball stuff, I will throw in the Apple line of QuickTake cameras, specifically the QuickTake 200. It was the last one. It kind of looks more like a digital camera today. The QuickTake 100 series was like a little sandwich with a lens on the front of it. You kind of held a sandwich up into the air.

It was a thing from Star Wars that Luke looks through. Yeah, exactly. A product that didn't survive the Steve Jobs transition in 97, a whole weird corner of Apple products didn't make that. But again again signaling where apple would go in the future now cameras are a huge part of what they make with the iphone and ipad and they were doing it back then although really it was a kodak camera rebranded but i'll give them points for credit all right so i'm gonna i've got three things uh the first is my first Mac, the original polycarbonate Intel iMac.

I decided that I was going to buy a Mac and decided that the next Mac that came out would be the one that I would buy, and it turned out to be this one. So I consider myself pretty lucky there because I was just on the right wave because I was getting ready to buy a G5. Yeah, so the G5 with iSight was on sale like five months or something before this. Yeah, you really, good timing there, buddy. I lucked out. I lucked out.

The iPod video, because I have such good memories of this one, because I was maybe being a bit of a cheeky guy here at this point. So I got it for christmas and i explained to my mom that uh the ipod video had to have video on it to be useful so i spent a few days putting video on the device and telling her how difficult it was and that it would take multiple days for the video to transfer so uh at night i would unplug the ipod and i would watch episodes of tv shows like the office and family guy under the covers with my ipod video so you're the one the one person who watched video on there i watched and then i ended up watching video podcasts on it for years

here's the question how close to your face did you hold it incredibly close it's like touching your nose really close yeah it's it was almost like a cinema screen i held it so close but yeah multiple days it took to to set that thing up before christmas uh and that was that was that was a fun memory for me and the last that i will pick is the 10.5 inch ipad pro the the new ipad pro because i actually think it's the best ipad ever made i think it is absolutely fantastic it has the best iPad ever made. I think it is absolutely fantastic. It has the best of everything that people are looking for with an iPad.

So size and power. I've been spending a lot more time over the last few weeks and that is an incredible machine. And I think it is the best iPad that they have ever made. Am I up? You sure are.

Man, I'm bad at drafts, guys. Not as bad as me,lex don't worry i i also the ipod video for the same reason as mike but also because this ipod actually had games on it and there was only one game that was good and it was yeah it was it was like a rock band uh ripoff uh or a guitar hero ripoff um actually it might have been made by harmonics um and you could listen to podcasts and play this terrible game i listen to podcasts and listen to the music i don't know why they let that be a possibility uh what about breakout breakout was a good game with the wheel wasn't it yeah yeah i like that oh you're right you're right and maybe maybe peggle too might have been. I apologize, iPod video.

You were really underrated. I also have AirPods because it's magical. The iMac DV, which is the first iMac I used to edit video on, which was like, wow, okay, that defined my career, so that's cool. The original iPod shuffle which just was a usb thumbstick basically uh and i used it for everything um and also the sports case that came with it which had the like johnny ive secret orange around it so you could like just it stood out just enough um against the white um and now that i think about

it this probably should have been my number one pick the iphone 6 and 7 battery cases because the despite everyone made fun of that bulge um but you know we have camera bulges now why not have battery bulges um and i hate the design of these the the six going forward iphone lines so much they're soap phones i've never dropped a phone until now and this is this is the one thing that makes me able to to hold my phone comfortably uh and it's also made out of somehow a different plastic rubbery material than the other silicone cases and i don't know why they just don't make them all like this because this one doesn't degrade it doesn't get all linty um and it's it's just wonderful and perfect in every way in my opinion that's all i got all right uh i had a bunch of stuff that i felt like we were

close enough that I didn't need to go there. The first generation PowerBook really did change the game for actually the entire computer industry. It had the integrated point pointing device. It was a trackball below the keyboard. They were a sensation in the early 90s. It was a big deal that you could take a computer with you and that it was that that at the time thin and light and portable and i got a powerbook 160 in grad school and i loved it so much plus i could plug it into a color monitor at home uh which was pretty awesome too oh that was also like the iphone after that every single laptop looked like a keyboard pushed up towards the screen like it totally defined the laptop not you know those are those it was a cool laptop it

really was amazing like to this day i would i would argue like that that it still looks pretty great that original design and there's a reason it was a wild success yeah um the original ipod i i was going to mention uh except no substitutes i mean yeah i didn't have a door like on top of the firewire plug and the firewire plug was huge but like it was a huge deal and it you know with the stainless steel back and the click wheel front and the wheel really spun it was not a fake click wheel it's actually a circular piece of plastic that you had to spin it spun right off the device eventually eventually it would oh yes and you just pop it right back on

though it would just go right back on trust me um. I love the iPod Shuffle when it turned into the clip. I didn't like the stick of gum one so much as the clip version. I thought that was a brilliant piece of design. I love those, and they're little bright colors, and you could just clip it onto your shirt and mow the lawn or whatever. I love the original iPhone design. I've written many thousands of words about how great that was. I mentioned the iPhone 5 and then the 5k imac i think is a spectacular computer the fact that apple was finally able to make a computer with retina at a giant desktop size and with incredible power inside of it and i'm talking to you from one right now and it's great so those those are my oh and i i neglected to mention my other

out out if the laser writer hadn't been the direction i was going to go i was going to go with that machine they make that sucks off the iphone screen in the back of the apple store so they can replace your screen right in there that's an amazing piece of apple hardware too yeah but you're gonna say ipod hi-fi i'm surprised nobody i'm surprised nobody picked the newton no i mean i'm not desk right here but i didn't pick it either yeah yeah that's the story of newton's life yeah i didn't pick it yep and we all have apple watches on and no one picked that either so yeah well you know oh that's telling there's only so many picks you know there's only yeah three rounds that's all you got all right so at this point

we're gonna say goodbye to steven and alex um as me and and Jason need to go to movie class with John Syracuse, which we're going to do in a moment. So I just want to thank you both for joining us. Stephen, where should people go to find out more about the work that you do? You can find me on Twitter at ISMH and my writing at 512pixels.net.

I do a bunch of shows here on Relay. And what about you, Alex? You can follow me on twitter at at alex cox spelled cox um and do by friday.com which is a show i do with my boss max temkin and merlin man of the internet uh and i i'm at roboism.fm which is a show about robots and isms and technology and a bunch of weird stuff with my friend Savannah Million. Great. Thanks so much for joining us, guys. Thank you.

And congratulations, Mike, on seeing the correct version of Blade Runner. Oh, boy. Oh, God. Here we go. All right. So just after this break, we're going to talk about Blade Runner Final Cut. But before we do, let me take a moment to talk about our final sponsor for this week's episode, and that is Mack Weldon.

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And I'm very excited to be having more Mack Walden clothes in my life, including some of their lounge shorts and many more undershorts, which is a term that I found out recently to be having more Mack Walden clothes in my life, including some of their lounge shorts and many more undershorts, which is a term that I found out recently when looking at doing laundry in the US. Undershorts seems to be the way that people refer to pants or what I would call pants. And I guess you would call boxes in a more discreet manner, which I found really funny. Anyway, Mack Walden have a line of silver underwear and shirts and naturally antimicrobial. This is some cool science stuff. And I have to

say, I love this stuff. It is absolutely fantastic. Listeners of this show can get 20% off at Mack Weldon.com. That's M-A-C-K-W-E-L-D-O-N.com. You get 20% off when you use the code upgrade. Thank you so much to Mack Weldon for their support of this show and RelayFM. Okay. So a couple of months ago, uh, me and Jason watched Blade Runner for Mike at the movies because whilst Jason wasn't a huge fan of the movie, I wanted to see it. I felt like it was an important one to see because it has a lot of geek cred. Neither of us were really crazy about the movie. I don't think that we necessarily, well, I speak for myself, I don't think we necessarily disliked it,

but it didn't sit high up in the overall ranking of Mike at the Movies movies. John Syracuse heard this and demanded that we watch the final cut and talk about it with him so john why are we doing this i'm not so sure i demanded it in fact that i remember fearing i remember being afraid that you guys were gonna watch playrunner and like the movies because like jason doesn't really like it that much and you have weird taste in movies and are so young and impressionable and i didn't it just seemed like it was going to be one of those ones where you're like uh you know dumping on a movie that i like essentially but but i was pleasantly surprised that both of you seemed pretty even keeled about the movie even though neither one of you were big fans but you did watch the theatrical

release which i think was mike's sort of misguided notion that he wants to watch like the one that everybody saw right nobody saw the theatrical release, because when it was in theaters, nobody wanted to see it, because it was not a successful movie. Okay. I feel like the one that has all the cachet, well, I guess the theatrical one does in terms of set design or whatever, but this is one of the first movies where it was really important to the biggest fans of the movies that you watch a different cut. This obviously wasn't the first director's cut but it was sort of the most prominent director's cut among geeks that you know do you know a movie that has a theatrical release and a director's cut and it's like oh yeah blade runner and of course you have

to watch a director's cut of later that was that was the really important thing to do um i think the director's cut was like 10 year anniversary of the movie or whatever but it's one of those movies that you know it's a cult classic and it was not it was not successful in its release but it just grew in stature over the years that became clear all the things that all the other movies that it had influenced um so yes you got out of the way you watch a theatrical one but i think it is important to watch the one that everybody loves essentially the one the one people say oh blade runner i love that movie they're not talking about for for the most part, the theatrical release. They're talking about this other one.

And I guess you got the authentic experience of watching a theatrical one. And now you have the experience of watching what I think is the better, one of the better cuts. And seeing the movie that everybody is raving about, which is, I feel like, different in two very important ways than the theatrical. So I want to talk about the differences and then maybe we can talk about just the movie itself and a little bit about why you love it john but i want to make sure that i'm following this correctly so obviously the big what i assume is the biggest difference is the end right there's no happy ending there's no driving off which is just which i really didn't like in the original like it felt so strange and out of place right like we're driving down this road literally stuff shot for another movie yeah yeah the two do you want me that's not the one of the two big differences

that i was referring to do you want me to tell you what they are or should you yeah tell me what they are tell me what they are so i mean you know this one i'm sure you're going to get to it next there's no voiceover right yeah yeah yeah so that's that's the obviously the most prominent one because the voiceover is so so integral to the first one right yeah i didn't miss it either right like i you know i mean i have already seen the movie so obviously it helps me understand what's going on because like i do find this to be a very confusing movie like the story is i think difficult to follow at points especially like in the first 30 minutes um but i don't know if the voiceover particularly helps with that you've got a little bit of lex friedman disease where you find movies confusing just inherently and i smell like there

should be some remedial course for you and lex to just like following along with the plot of movies i have to admit that actually in this version um which i'm going to just come out and say is the most i have enjoyed watching blade runner um the uh i think the uh plot is fairly straightforward like i i didn't have i think it's maybe it's because i've seen it enough times now that i know what to look for but it's like literally there are these escaped replicants and they are trying to find a way to extend their lives and there's a guy who's going to kill them and that's kind of it is he's methodically chasing them down and they're methodically doing their thing and that's kind of it yeah but mike gets hung up on the details that you want to understand like i don't want something to be shown and not explained

because it's like is is i think it's like the not knowing what's important not knowing what's not important or wanting every wanting to understand everything you see and not allowing it to just be like just just accept it that people have umbrellas with a lot of handles just accept it like just it's not important to the movie just move on i know this frustrates you i know this frustrates you but when like when i say confusing like the plot of the movie is fine but like i have questions about the world and oh sure that's important to me right like the world building thing is important why is it raining so much in los angeles just all these things about like you know who is tyrell what why does like robots seem to be outlawed and so i think this is kind of what

people when they talk about like that a larger world islawed and so i think this is kind of what people when they talk about like that a larger world is hinted at within a movie they said about a lot of things where you'll see a movie and it'll have a story in a world but then people will say also for books they'd be like but but the world is so rich you see hints of such a larger world that there could be other stories in this world behind it like and what most people describe as an attractive quality hinting at a larger world beyond the realm of the story right you uh describe as confusion and that there is a larger world beyond the story that i don't know anything about and you find that unsettling rather than enticing yeah well okay i would say there's a mix of it like with some movies like i wouldn't

say that i i wouldn't say that, I only find it that way. But, like, in this movie, I feel like there are just questions that I have which I can't come to understand, and it frustrates me. Like, you know, about the replicants, and, like, they seem to be, like, illegal, but yet there's a man that everybody knows makes them. Like, it's just i have just these these hang ups about this movie which i struggle to get my head around i think i can help you with some of those because they are they are in the movie if you've seen it uh enough times or once and

paid a lot of attention um the second so that's so that's one one is voiceover yeah and the second most important change and and by the way before we get into more of these details is that i recommended the final cut just because it's the one i had seen the most recently if i don't know the difference between the final cut and the director's cut i tried to google it to see like i looked it up differences are there not a lot of significant differences uh ridley scott was approved the director's cut but he actually was unhappy with some things and they finally budgeted for him to go in and make some of the changes but they're pretty pretty minor timing things cleaning cleaning up special effects yeah and some alter the the the unicorn dream is extended um uh priss pulls on his nose when she's attacking him which doesn't happen in

the director's cut but it's not it's not huge does he feel the need to put that in like it's so strange to me all right yeah that's what i'm saying like and again the only reason i recommended the final cut instead of a director's cut was just because I had seen it most recently. And when I watched it looks way better, it looks way better. The final cut, my impression was, uh, I didn't notice any differences from the director's cut upon watching the final cut and it looked really good. So that's my go-to now, basically.

All right. But, but the second difference, the second difference, you got no voiceover. And the second difference is that the final cut and the director cut are unambiguous about the fact that deckard is a replicant that is super important it's not that there's a happy ending or a sad ending it's that the whole point of the movie like it colors the whole movie backwards and forwards like the end of the sixth sense right then it ripples backwards for the whole movie it's a different movie when it is not clear that deckard is a replicant it's not I don't think it's even hinted at in a theatrical one. It's just not, like, that's a different movie.

I like the movie where he's a replicant. That is an entirely different movie. It colors the whole movie for me. It's not just, like, happy ending versus sad ending. And so those two things, the voiceover, which I found cloying and his performance really stilted and I think is totally unnecessary and takes away from the things I like about the movie, and the fact that Deckard is a replicant those are the two biggies for me so i definitely felt that more but like i was wondering if i felt that way because i'd found out afterwards right about how it's intended like what are the hints like i mean i know that there

seemed when i'm watching the movie it feels that way but i'm not sure what the specifics are which make it clear that he is one i was going to say also for as background here um harrison ford uh felt felt and i think feels that deckard is not a replicant the screenwriter wanted it to be an open question but ridley scott prefers the deckard as a replicant so he in making his version of the movie and his his final cut he's amped that part up I I am not I'm a dissenter on Deckard being a replicant I think that one of the themes is uh affinity with the replicants and whether they're human or not and whether they're sentient or not, and what that means, and questioning ourselves as the sort of viewpoint of Deckard, and whether it matters,

and is he human or not, I think is part of, I really like the ambiguity of it. And so I'm not, I actually don't believe that it is definitive. And I refuse to go down that route. I think it's an open question. It's definitive, I feel like, in the director and final cut, but it's important, first of all, it's important that the writer wanted it to be ambiguous, because that means, unlike Harrison Ford, the writer put stuff in the movie in that direction, even in a theatrical cut, right?

So it's not like a retro, you know, like, what do you call it? Retroactive continuity. A retcon, yeah. There you go. Where you take a movie that was made one way and you pretend it's something different in the movie are the important themes that that lay the groundwork for this right you've got deckard testing uh what's her name sean young or is that it her name yeah sean young um what's her name in the movie rachel rachel um yeah you've got that test you've got

the fact you've got after the fact like the fact that she's being tested and she doesn't how can she not know what she is she doesn't know what she is right that we don't we as the audience don't know uh when the test begins but we eventually figure it out and then he figures it out right and uh jason's right that one of the major themes of the movie is like the replicants do we uh can we relate to them are you know are we different from them because they're human uh you know like just the affinity between like oh do you really separate yourself so much from these from these replicants are they so different just because they were made are they really different than us can we can we feel kinship with them in any way and that's in the movie whether billy

decker is a replicant or not the fact that you have that scene early where both the audience and harrison ford are fooled is the eventual thing that leads you to the ending thing where okay well how can she not know what she is how can deckard not know what he is um and his affinity for the replicants you know it turns on like affinity for yourself like it's the ultimate one that's why it works on the audience like what if you were a replicant what if it's like oh now suddenly you know in the same way that you it's suddenly easy to have empathy with the replicants when you realize that you're one and the whole time you felt like a person a legitimate person you never questioned it and what if we were to tell you that you were a replicant too um and what makes it definitive

in the director's cut and in the final cut is the unicorn dream um so the fact that like you know when rachel comes and she's insistent that she's real that she had parents and she has memories of ever and deckard's like let me you know rattles off a bunch of stuff she never told anybody he's like they're they're tyrell's nieces memories like yeah deckard knows them it's like you think they feel like they're your memories but they're not like i know about them let me rattle them off to you right so the unicorn dream we see deckard have or he's like drunk at his piano or whatever and falls asleep and dreams about a unicorn he's dreaming about ridley scott's legend which is a really

weird movie that you might want to watch but is not as good as blade runner um uh unicorn you know running through the fields or whatever um and what's his name edward james almost who's gaff i think yeah adama from battle star uh is doing little origami things all the time he drops off a little origami uh unicorn unicorn decker never told him about his unicorn dreams how would he know about decker's unicorn dreams the same way that decker knows about her weird dreams and the spider and all the other stuff or whatever because they were implanted because he's a replicant now it could be 100 coincidence that he dreams about a unicorn and that this guy just happens to do unicorn origami

but that is amazing coincidence there's a much simpler explanation and that this guy just happens to do unicorn origami. But that is amazing coincidence. There's a much simpler explanation. And that's why it's kind of the nail nailing this down is you are a replicant here. You know, we know that you're a replicant. You didn't know until now. And I'm being nice and letting you guys go free for whatever,

you know, will happen after that elevator door closes. We don't know. So it's an ambiguous ending, not a sad ending, but it's not, you know, a happy that elevator door closes we don't know so it's an ambiguous ending not a sad ending but it's not you know a happy ending uh but deckard deckard now realizes that he sees the unicorn he looks at it he picks it up he has that realization and then they're just out of there yeah do we know yet how this is working in the sequel the played run on 2049 oh let's not think about it yeah well i do i i have to admit that was one of the things that

always confused me is if they do a sequel that said with an aging harrison ford then that suggests that that they're making a statement either that he is a replicant that ages or he wasn't a replicant after all but i i yeah i feel like that is let's not let sequels affect talk about retroactive continuity affect your view of the existing movie so i want to say um the ending always seemed weird to me and um it actually reminded me about how they did a cut of brazil that has a weird love conquers all i think they call it ending it's like what are you doing uh did you see the movie and so i really like how this ends with them getting into the elevator i don't think I, I guess I,

I saw the director's cut at one point. So I've seen, I've seen this, but my memory of it, all my memories of blade runner or of the original, um, because I saw that several times and I, I have to say it.

I love having no voiceovers. It feels like a very different movie. Um, and I get why some people like the voiceover cause it gives it that kind of film noir feel, but I gotta say, um, I, I like it without because then it feels really weird and atmospheric. And you had to figure it out. And it feels more like a science fiction movie.

And it feels more about the images. Because let's be honest here. This movie is more notable because of how it looks than the words people say in it. There are some great words in it, some memorable words, some things I quote all the time. But I think the voiceover makes it seem like even more like this is a movie really about me telling you things about this world. And it's totally not. It's about showing me the world and letting me see these

visions of these huge billboards that are animated for different products and things that i don't even understand what they're advertising and the the little air cars moving around which are great the fact that tyrell corporation is like a like a big pyramid basically it's this ridiculous monstrosity but then at ground level everything is dirty and and mixed up like that's what it's this ridiculous monstrosity, but then the ground level, everything is dirty and, and mixed up. Like that's what it's about. So I'm, I'm actually really happy that the voiceover is gone.

I like it better without, I think it's a much better movie without it there. And it looked so great. So, um, like I said, I enjoyed it a whole lot more, even though I'm one of those people who thinks that you still have to do a

little bit of work to prove, uh, you know, if Deckard's a replicant why other things happen in the movie and likewise you could probably do a little bit work to explain why maybe that unicorn doesn't mean what what it actually means um it's ambiguous enough that i'm happy to embrace the ambiguity i actually prefer it ambiguous because then you know it's making the point that um if you it's the point of deckard

which is if you don't even know about your own humanity and yet you're judging them for theirs um i guess the implication too john correct me if i'm wrong is that is that deckard and certainly rachel are like next gen replicants they're nexus seven right yeah well that's the whole point they're nexus they're nexus seven well here's rachel is nexus seven that's why she doesn't know because it's a new thing they're trying giving them memories and backstories and not letting them know right i always assumed that deckard was like nexus eight or whatever right that like to get the other replicants you need the best replicant like so he's either nexus seven or nexus eight yeah and maybe that's maybe that's why he's different and why he's more human-like. And potentially they'll retcon it that way for the sequel.

They don't have to retcon it because in the theatrical release, you remember how the theatrical release ends. So you know Roy Batty and all his crew for your lifespan, right? Yeah. And you know Nexus 7s are different. Certainly different because Rachel doesn't even know what she is. So she's very different. And if he's Nexus 7 or Nexus 8, when they go off on the car driving down the green road

with the weird ending and the voiceover, the voiceover basically says, I don't know how long we have. I think he says something like, God, do any of us know? Or something like that. Idea like, they don't know what, they might have four-year lifespan,

or they might not. And the same thing with, you know, Edward J. Malos. What's his character's name? I'm so bad with character names. Gaff. Gaff says, it's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does? Then again, who does?

Basically saying, nobody lives forever, right? You're all going to die. You just don't know when. Exactly. I feel like both versions of the movie leave it completely open as to what is the lifespan of Rachel and... And Deckard. Deckard.

We have no idea. So, if they want them and the fact that they age again it's clear that there is a biological component to them like i design your eyes and he's got your squishy eyeballs and everything that all that stuff's got to age right like they're not they're not terminators inside i noticed this time they talk about i mean he's a dna artist and they talk about the cells so these are these are um organic creatures at least in part right they're not they're they're artificial but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're uh that they've got metal parts in fact they may not

they may be like they're stronger and smarter right in the same way a person could be stronger because you genetically design them it's like the snake it's like a real snake but it's got little which is why they're not a robot yes but that's a different show if if decker is a more advanced version of the nexus line why did they make him weaker so is he weaker that's the question i mean he does hold on to the edge of the building with like three fingers by all of the nexus sixes right like some of that yeah right so some of that is if you don't know your replicant you're running an abject fear because you're not going to go toe-to-toe with them because you have the expectation that they can destroy you but if we look at what actually happens in the movie he never like tries to go toe-to-toe and fight him he gets his hand pulled through a wall and his

fingers broken but you know anybody can break your fingers uh and how could he stop them from breaking his fingers well probably not with his hand through well he does hold on to the edge of a building by like three fingers which is in the rain which is a thing a real person could not do uh it's kind of like dumbo's feather if you had told them by the way you're a replicant and you're stronger like fight them and the second thing is maybe he's not stronger maybe part of the nexus 7 and possibly nexus 8 lines is you want them to think they're human and if you made them super strong yeah it would it would be a giveaway also the the nexus uh replicants that they're hunting are from off world and and the there's a strong suggestion

that they're they've been engineered for certain jobs like roy is a fighter that's what he's for so of course he's going to be strong doesn't explain why the prostitute would be super strong it's true it's true um i i was i was going to get there but yeah so there's a question like do they make them more robust for the off-world colonies i want to ask that i think one of the fascinating things about this is there are the ads for go to the off-world colonies like they're trying to get people to to leave earth and i wonder does that mean they want people off of earth does that mean the off-world colonies are really bad and they need more people on them but they you know we don't really know anything about i think it means the off-world colonies are really expensive and

everybody who's down there in the muck in los angeles would love to go to the off-world colonies but they can't afford it in the same way you see like billboards for go to hawaii or have a tropical vacation yeah sure we don't love to have a tropical vacation but it costs too much money if you had enough money to get off of this crap hole that is the earth you would go presumably to the off-world colonies assuming the advertising could be deleted we don't know enough about the universe to know are the off-world colonies actually good or are they crap and they're trying to entice you to go there to be slave labor and that's what fascinates me about it yeah there's the conversation between priss and sebastian right where like it seems like he's not allowed because he has that sickness that

makes him look old right like she's like why aren't you there is it because of the disease or whatever so like i always got the impression that it was like earth is ruined so we had to go and make nicer places to live like that's how i always viewed it right because he wasn't allowed because there's something wrong with him right but it's never said it's only hinted at which i kind of love that you have to fill in the get you have to guess about what this world is like. And it's communicated by advertising, like oppressive advertising that again, I like the idea that these giant billboards with these attractive looking people,

you know, with all their geisha makeup and all this other stuff, like, and you're just in this presumably acid rain and this crappy dark city, right? Eating noodles at the bar. Like, but always these ads are in your face constantly,

but letting you know what it is that you, you can't nailed it is this movie colored differently uh it looks and then the theatrical it looks like they did some color timing on it that that it's i saw some side by sides where even from the director's cut that they've done some work to get the it looks like it's been maybe regraded um not i think i think more just to get it be consistent because modern technology lets them do that i'm not sure it was like let's change it to look different so much as like ridley scott said i know how we make movies now can we get this to be all uniform and so it is well and also like it's a very dark movie right and it's actually very difficult to make a dark movie because especially when you were doing on film like this was it's a very dark movie, right? And it's actually very difficult to make a dark movie, especially when you were doing it on film like this was.

It's a fine line between this is a dark scene and I can't see anything. And so digitally, it's much easier nowadays. And they can take the film and try to tweak it so the scene... You want the blacks to be inky black, but you want to be able to see what the hell is going on. And if there's any difference, I imagine the original one, the blacks weren't quite inky because if they made them inky, everything everything else the scene would be all blacked out too and you wouldn't be able to see anything and now digitally you can you know adjust the curves and get it just the way

you want it i still don't like the last part of the movie i don't you don't like the confrontation the run the running around no no the running around the screaming the howling um i don't i don't like it daryl hannah thing is really unpleasant i i just yeah and it's and it's but it's purposefully unpleasant and when he kills her and it's slow and he has to like keep shooting her because she's writhing and and she screams and and she flails around this is one of the things she flails around i mean kind of like a machine yes you know yeah like forcefully and in a way that you would think a human wouldn't which is at odds with the the biological supposed biological nature of it but that's i think that's part of this movie there's a lot of things that are that are off-putting and

the final the final scene and the shooting and all that stuff on all the violent parts are a great contrast to the rest of the movie especially without the voiceover which not only is slow but without the voiceover there are long stretches where nobody says anything there's no dialogue at all and you know it's not just like that it gives you more time to look at the scenery it's that the movie slows down even more like you know one of the things i like about the movie is it sort of lulls you into this zen state where you're not like come on come on what's the next plot point um and you get into that state and then they they throw in like a scene with a you know the woman running through

the glass or some violence the violence stands out more in contrast to the rest of the movie where everything is slow and i think it works yeah they're just i just got just the howling i can't yeah like it it just doesn't it doesn't make sense to me and i know that so one of the reasons we're doing this is because me and john were talking about this at WWDC, right? And you said to me that the howling is meant to show a primal thing, right? It's why he takes all of his clothes off and he's howling because he's on the way out, right? He's dying. He's becoming more primal.

He's also kind of a predator hunting his prey and the idea there that the replicants are what's next and that the humans are going to be you know eaten by the replicants i think and he wants to be scary this is what it's like to live in fear right he wants to he wants to scare deckard and he's going a little bit nuts towards the end of it's kind of like if you know if you had 24 hours to live what would you do so you know go crazy right so he's he's he's enacting revenge he's he's teaching a lesson like he could kill that's the other thing that mike was confused about i think we talked about was that could he have killed deckard presumably yes like at many points he could have killed he's toying with him he's like it's the reason he leaves him alive he why didn't you you know you

could have killed that but you didn't you saved him you picked him back up onto the roof and you gave your little speech and everything right he's not trying to kill him he wants him to see what it's like to live in fear. And he wants to go out with a bang, which he essentially does. Why, though? One scene that I think in 1982 or whenever this, when was this movie made? 1982. That you can get away with that from 2017 made me very uncomfortable is uh rachel wants to leave deckard's

apartment and he blocks her and pushes her back and forces himself on her and you know what it was intended to be oh this is this she's reluctant and he's forcing things and you know it was meant to be read a certain way that is not how it can be read now. And I find that unpleasant. So that was a very difficult scene to watch. If they made it today, they could make it exactly the same way. But the lesson would be that Deckard's not the greatest guy, right? Whereas before, the lesson was supposed to be that Deckard is a man's man.

Yeah, and he just needs to show her that it's okay to to love him by telling her by barring the door and telling her what to say to him like right which is which is a fine dynamic to have in the scene in terms of like uh she's afraid and he doesn't want her to be for the way to do it is not physically assault her right so that like in a modern movie if they were trying to have that outcome of the scene she's afraid of of her feelings for him. They would talk about it. And he would, you know, they have that scene in a million movies. Like, you know, I know you have feelings for me, but you're afraid of them. Let me convince you that you should give in to them.

Right. Not by physically restraining you, but using my mouth words. Yeah. So that doesn't, I don't want to say that doesn't hold up. It's like, I'm going to say that doesn't convey the thing that the movie makers wanted to convey. Exactly right. The way, you know, we've changed right but if you read it if you say okay well ignore that and just read it in the modern sense it just makes decker a less likable person but

it's entirely realistic because dionyx like that happened all the time because people are bad sure it's just the movie doesn't want us to judge him that way and that's the that's where you get that that dissonance happening so that was yeah he could have he could have like gone i mean that's another thing that they could have changed or edited in a different way but uh either the people making the movie still think that it's a manly man thing to do or they didn't want to go like uh steven spielberg et walkie talkie and say look this is the movie this is the movie we made that's it these are the people that we were this is the time you know roger ebert did a great movies about this movie.

Um, and he, he was always, um, not a, not a huge fan. I think his feelings about it are kind of like mine, which is,

it is brilliant and it needs to be considered part of the canon. But, um, you know, I, even Harrison Ford has said he, he doesn't find it. He's never really warm to it.

He thinks it's beautiful, but that, you know, it's, it's making an emotional connection. It's not that kind of movie and i think that's true but i ebert wrote that this is very just deliberately not george lucasing this movie right it's just like this is the movie they made and it just it looks better

but it's it's still not any different more or less from the movie that that he wanted to make the effects got cleaned up but there's they're they're the same effects they're not new effects and they did a couple of digital things where they had like a continuity problem but they didn't add anything to the scene they more like wiped some things out that were wrong to just make it cleaner and so yeah you leave that scene in and it's just this is what that's the scene that's in the movie in 1982 and and yes we don't think that way now and that's that's just part of uh the part of the thing i wanted to also mention Rutger Hauer. I quote that speech of his all the time.

And John, you believe it or not, I mostly get it right. It's one of those speeches that I actually get right because I'm really bad at quoting speeches from movies. This time, what I noticed is the choices he makes as an actor are really interesting. The way he reads those lines, because those lines are really cool. You know, the whole thing I've, I've seen, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, you know, the whole thing and the way, and he knows he's winding down and he, this is his last statement before he dies. And yet the way he, the way he says those lines are like every line is said in an interesting way. uh and it's just it's a really

cool speech but the performance is so weird and and i think inhuman in some ways and superhuman like like incredibly human in other ways and it's just like it's a really great um classic movie moment it's one of my favorite speeches in any movie is that um is that red gerhauer speech at the end right before roy dies it's great yeah just like the way he says tears in rain is so strange it is like like the way he says the word rain it's like there's more letters in it than there really is it's very interesting you've got the little ticks and the pauses i mean because he is he's dying yeah yeah yeah and so hearing you guys talk about this on on the earlier episode you know and and hearing

jason complain about it over the years and everything like i'm not you know this is not my world's favorite movie but i always liked it but hearing everybody's oh it's boring it's long it's weird i kind of like started getting bored i'm like yeah well it's not it's not paced the way normal people want it to be and it's not that great but i have to tell you re-watching it again for this podcast i re-watched it again i'm like you know what this is a fantastic movie like i i understand all all the problems and the reason people don't like it uh you know i can see why they don't like it but i overall like i watched it again and i was surprised by how much i still like it right so that that was my impression of watching it again.

And the other thing I think about this a lot is, despite basically the majority of the movie, especially the long middle part, and especially without the voiceover where people fall asleep, you know, Jason falls asleep on his couch and everything, the opening scene to this movie with the interrogation is one of the best opening scenes of any movie ever, I feel like. It's so weird yeah the dialogue is so smart and and snappy and there's so much tension and it establishes the stakes and the world i really feel like this movie doesn't because this movie is not about snappy dialogue like there's hardly any dialogue in it and dialogue later in the movie starts to get weird and slow and the people having conversations are either replicants or sebastian who's weird tyrell who's weird um but there are i feel like the writing on this there are some great scenes the opening interview scene the final speech at the end uh you know uh tyrell his little discussion with roy we made you as well as we could man that is yeah and that that's

another director's cut change where the dialogue, he says, I want more life, father, now, which is how it should have always been. It's a much better line that way. But that whole conversation where Tyrell is legitimately saying, you know, we made you better. Your life is shorter, but you burn brighter. And there's some tenderness there right before Roy squeezes his head into pulp. He gets a skull crush.

But yeah. Anyway, that's what I feel like. Because that's not what this movie is about, it doesn't get credit for those parts of it. And I feel like there's some of the best writing. Like the speech at the end. Not just for the performance. But in so many movies that are trying to be like profound sci-fi type movies, they either go too abstract where it's just like uh you know word

salad that's supposed to mean something and it gets by with like the score and the effect or too on the nose and i feel like this all the those the good dialogue scenes uh strike a balance between let me be completely on the nose and explain to you in dummy terms exactly what's going on here and let me be artful because the tears and rain speech explains it well enough that anybody watching it understands what's going on there what is he saying about his life what is he trying to tell deckard right but it is also artful and the same thing with the with the interrogation scene where they don't tell you you know he's undergoing this test why are they asking these questions you don't know why he's asking these questions it's a really good snappy back and forth lots of tension ending in him getting shot they really

should have checked him for guns before he went into the interview um and magically being thrown back from the table which makes no sense uh but there's a reason those scenes are famous there's a reason you know like the turtle wire and she's flipping it over yeah you know the tortoise what you know what a turtle is same thing and the smoking oh god you gotta love the smoking like it's just we haven't figured that out it's not even like what smoking actually looks like it's like very purposefully these huge puffs of smoke with the light they've got that horizontal like the sunlight coming in the room so it's all meant to just make it again kind of noirish and super weird where they want it to fill the room and so that you can see the light filtered through it and it's

all very stylized yeah the pacing where he's asking questions or whatever and he just plows forward and making him ask him whatever and then after he plows through it he says in answer to your query they're written down for me because he had asked earlier about right make up these questions or like i love that i love it that guy helpful guy and then he is dead let me tell you about my mother like what i like about those questions is that they'd make me feel uncomfortable watching them right because they're just like what is this like weird nonsense that's what this movie is like ultimately i think what's cool about this movie and what's great about this movie is that's what it is it's all about it's set up as being humans and replicants and we got to find the replicants

and kill them and we don't even call them kill them we just retire them but in the end what it's really talking about is people, right? It is the replicants are just our story at a different pace. The whole point of Roy's speech at the end is he's just talking about mortality. He's not talking about being a robot. He's talking about be a person who has collected memories through their lives. And at the end, they realize that they die and all of his experiences will be lost like tears and rain and that's it and he's not talking about it because he's a robot man he's talking about life and death and this whole movie you know that's the trick of it is it's wrapped this whole thing about you know this future dystopia kind of looking place and these robots that we're after and all of that and in the end

you know it that's not what it's about. It's about looking at them and not seeing ourselves. And I think also with the Deckard as a Replicant angle, it's about the value of your own life to yourself. Is that based on an externality? Is it based on your understanding that, well, at least I'm not a robot. That's why my life is valuable. Or, you know, what if my memories are manufactured? Do I feel any less myself or any less any less, we would say any less human, right?

Um, because that's one of the things that everybody in the movie eventually has to face or consider is, you know, that their mortality, that everything's going to go away and be their, their value. Like if I'm only valuing myself because I know that I'm human,

I'm not like those others. Like it's there, you could go in a million different directions with how that, what, what you want to, what that's an analogy for in the modern world but they all i mean rachel struggles with it it's her main struggle even the escape replicants struggle with it because they want they want to be they want to live and not just because they want to live they want to be

like everybody else like why do why do i only get four years and you get longer uh and you know it's not fair that some people live longer than others and like this there's a lot in this movie to dig out and it's it's amazing that the the movie works in some fashion whether he's a replicant or not i just like the additional layer not the sort of twist or gotcha but the additional layer on top of that and i like it so you're like i don't like it when you know i don't want it to be nailed down i feel like it's not, but it is ambiguous in that people don't follow along with movies that well. Like, in the same way that Total Recall is not ambiguous about the ending of that movie, which is an entire other discussion, it seems ambiguous to people because it doesn't hit you over the head with it. You have to put two and two together with the unicorn thing.

And conceivably, if you don't understand probabilities and filmmaking, you'd be like, well, what if you just happened to pick a filmmaking you'd be like well what if you just happen to pick a unicorn that day like what if they just happen to show us a unicorn like it's you know but but it doesn't come out and say dickard you know says that's when i realized i was a replicant like he never says that or no one says it to him or there's no realization other than just a look on his face right and then you know he's out there in the elevator so i i like that for again walking the line between being on the nose and and being subtle and that's exactly what i want out of a movie i wanted to i wanted to flatter my intelligence by not uh spelling things out for me but i wanted to be comprehensible so

that i follow along like everyone wants that they want to be right on the edge like you want to be you want to feel good for figuring it out uh but you don't want to be so difficult that you have to like read a web page to do so so i mean i'll say overall like i feel better about this movie than i did before like there's still stuff in it that just it's just weird to me um but the the ending and and stuff like that and the removal of the voiceover i find it just to be more to my tastes um and i still think that this movie's beautiful like it's even more beautiful like in in this one i just found the visuals to be even more compelling so i mean i like this movie i do i do like it um it's just not one of my favorites and i don't think it ever will be yeah i i second that that it's i think going back to i don't think it ever will be. Yeah, I second that. I think going back to,

I don't make an emotional connection with this movie, so I appreciate it, but I don't love it. But I appreciate it for what it is. And the fact is, I have seen it like five times now. So there must be something there. Is it five full times though? Oh yeah. Is it like two and three quarters or something?

No, Lauren falls asleep asleep i don't fall so i get sleepy while i'm watching it but but when i've shown it to lauren she's falling asleep every time so i don't do that anymore i watch this by myself so i never i don't put this on my list of favorite movies not because it's dark because i do like a lot of dark movies but because it does you know it does have the all the things that we've talked about they sort of you know pacing unevenness and some of the weird dialogue choices in the middle. And, you know, in general, it's not as grand or epic or sweeping as, you know, some of my favorite movies or not as like as perfect as some of like the Miyazaki stuff is

that I put in there, right. But this stands in a category of movies that I remember seeing and noting their difference, noting that they were they were different than other movies they were weird outliers like there's a lot of movies that are like this a lot of them do become cult classics that yeah maybe they're not the best movies but they do certain things so differently than their contemporaries that they stand out and then you take notice like oh wait a second like i thought you know a lot of times you go you watch a movie you kind of know what to expect like oh it's an action movie it's comedy i've seen a bunch of these i kind of know the formulas you know of the contemporary movies that are going

to be like that and when one of them comes out and it's different it sort of stands aside and i was always attracted to that as a kid whether it's you know japanese animation that i would see and note note the difference like oh this isn't this doesn't look like the animation on saturday morning cartoons it is is different in a really important way and it set it aside blade runner is like that the movie making is different of course you discussed in the past episode how influential the sort of dark future design was that we now see everywhere this was the the first and most influential instance of that the ripple through history like that's why i set it aside but yeah and the pantheon of movies is not up there with like the godfather and kiki's delivery

service and the empire strikes back because it's just not as good a movie as those but it is as important to movie and that it goes off on this other shelf with me of like these weird movies i don't know i don't know how to categorize them like they stand out in history they're like they're like icons and that when i watched them originally and when you watch them now they're like you know this is so different than its contemporaries mr syracuse so thank you for joining us today for all of the wonder that you have brought to this episode where can people find you online and follow your work and such well i have a website that i write on almost once a year called hypercritical.co uh you can follow me on twitter

it's at syracusa uh and i do a bunch of podcasts on various networks uh that if you go to hypercritical.co and click on about you can find links to all of them all right if you want to find our show notes for this week's episode head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 155 i want to thank our sponsors one more time blue apron tingon, Ting, Encapsula, and Mack Weldon. You can find Jason online. He's at jsnell on Twitter. He writes at sixcolors.com. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E.

And don't forget, become a RelayFM member. Go to relay.fm membership to find out more, and you will get access to a whole host of incredible content that's coming your way over August and September, as well as just a lot of ongoing really great benefits that we try and do for our RelayFM members. I want to just extend my thanks to our amazing guests today, Stephen, Alex, and John. And also, as always, thank you, Jason. We'll be back next time.

Until then, say goodbye. Bye, Mike. We'll see you in two weeks, and I'll be back with time until then say goodbye bye mike uh we'll see you in two weeks and i'll be back with my special mystery guest next week thanks everybody