Upgrade - 17: Somewhere on The Monorail

Episode Date: January 5, 2015

This week Jason and Myke discuss Apple's software quality issues and the difficulty in diagnosing problems from outside an organization, why Family Sharing is a problematic feature, and what's good and bad about CES. Plus, Jason listens to Hello Internet and Myke listens to The Flop House.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 17 today's show is brought to you by igloo an internet you'll actually like hover simplified domain management mail route secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam and stamps..com, postage on demand. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by the man, the maverick, that is, Mr. Jason Snell. That's mavericks, Mike, mavericks. Oh, the Yosemite. The Yosemite. I grew up near Yosemite. That's not a bad one.

I feel like there's probably a Jason Snell drinking game out there somewhere that has a, if Jason mentions he grew up near Yosemite, you have to take a drink. Because I did. I did. There should be a Jason Snell drinking game. There probably should be. Please, dark beers, I recommend. And somebody recommended we do an entire podcast about beer, which I thought was interesting, or drinking.

I was like, okay. That was one of our Ask Upgrade questions, too. So it is true, though. My wife always says this, that when I was in college, people would ask where I grew up, and I would describe it, she says, uncharitably as the place you get if you fail to make the turnoff, the correct turnoff to Yosemite, which was a common thing that happened, is people would drive up from the Bay Area. They were trying to go to Yosemite. They would miss Yosemite Junction and they would end up

in Sonora. And you'd say, and you'd see confused people and you'd be like, no, no, you missed it. It's back that way. And she thought that literally it was like a tumbleweed and a, you know, a one room schoolhouse and a couple of cowboys, and that would be about it for the town. It was slightly larger than that, but it is true that it was right there by the turnoff to go into the park that was the most common way in, I think, from people from the Bay Area. So, yeah, don't sell your hometown as a missed turnoff because it makes it sound like literally no one would ever go there

except by mistake, which wasn't entirely true, just partially true. It makes it sound like when you explain that there's no power, there's no phone lines, you know, it's kind of like this place. We have a traffic light. What? We have a traffic light. Wow.

Yeah, the light. We refer to it as the light because it was only the one. It's like, where do they live? They're on the other side of the light, yeah. It's right at the light. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Where's your bank?

It's at the light. It's the one at the light light. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Where's your bank? It's at the light. It's the one at the light. True story. Oh, dear. All right. Follow-up time, you think? Yeah. Not a lot today, actually.

Well, I've moved some of the follow-up into two verticals because I think that is a fun thing to do. But I've got one piece of loose, unclassified follow-up, which is from listener John. And I just, it was a nice thing. We'll put it in the show notes. He said that we were talking about 1Password and about, I think I mentioned last week that we were doing 1Password stuff with my in-laws because they were writing things down. My mom was writing all her passwords in a book. My mother-in-law and my father-in-law had, no, my mom wrote them in a paper book. My father-in-law had a Word file in a password-protected DMG on his Mac, which is pretty good. That's an interesting route.

Yeah. And it worked when he didn't have a smartphone. But now that he has a smartphone, he said, yeah, it was on somebody else's computer. I had to download the DMG. And I'm like, oh, my God, you downloaded every file that you have in your secure archive to that computer when you only needed like 5K of passwords. So we got them on one password. But the best one was my mother-in-law because she stored all her passwords in her bookmarks. Like literally the bookmark would be Apple followed by the password. And then she'd click on the bookmark and put in the password. Anyway, they're using one password now. So anyway, Lister John's point was he wanted to mention Diceware and he linked to a blog post

on Agile Bits from 2011, where they talk about better ways to come up with your master password for one password. And I thought this was really a nice idea, which is Diceware. You roll some dice, roll a six-sided die, or if you've got a bunch of die, you can roll them. And there's like a list of common words. And what you basically do is you randomly generate common words and string them together. And that allows you to come up with a fairly strong password that's also memorable. And keeping in mind that this is the password that's not sitting out on the internet. It's just sitting on your computer.

And it's in the show notes. I think that's a nice way. One of the challenges is to come up with something that's not really guessable, but is also a password that you can remember. And I thought that was nice. I think CompuServe back in the ancient days used a system like this because I remember all of my CompuServe passwords were weird words. They were words, but they were weird words.

And they would just be two or three of them with dashes between them. And that was the password. And I always thought those were really memorable in a way that today's modern, you know, right bracket, capital A, lowercase p, nine kind of passwords or not. So I thought that was a nice link from Listener John. So thank you, Listener John. Yeah, that's, it's interesting, right? Because that master password, that's kind of the killer one because you kind of have to remember it

and there's nothing you can do really if you forget it. It's my understanding you're kind of like that because you know there's no service to reset it like you're done right so like i have one that's personal to me but it has made up words in it like words that don't exist in english yeah well and i think i think now that i think about it i think maybe all of the compu serve ones that i remember and i would mention them except that i actually use some of them as passwords to this day. I've recycled them from CompuServe because I still remember them 25 years later, 30 years later. But they were not quite English words. They were based on English words and then would have prefixes or suffixes. And that's also really clever because that's harder to determine

algorithmically, but they stick in your mind, that perfectly cromulent word that sticks in your mind. So to use the Simpsons reference, if your password is imbigin-cromulent, those two words are totally unrelated except on the Simpsons, so don't use that password. But it would be something like that. It would be like ornery ing colon uh yellowed right and you could probably remember that but it's not really words and anyway it's it's kind of a cool idea because that's one of the challenges especially if you need to change passwords um but it's a challenge

in general is how do you remember the master password you still need to remember that one it should be good it should not be one two three password right yeah going back quickly just a few steps talking about uh people in family using one password we recently moved well my girlfriend wanted a better solution so she has moved to one password and i i we were setting up a pin number for something like a a grocery delivery service that we use. They like you to set up a PIN number for the app for like easy access. And she set up a PIN number for it and she opened one password

and I saw her putting it into a note that had a bunch of other information in it. And I was kind of like, I inquired, I was like, do you keep everything in a note? Like, and she was like, well, I keep logins in individual logins but stuff like pin numbers and stuff like that i just have one note that i put it all in and it's secure right because she's using a secure note in one password and i don't think there's anything wrong with it but it's a

different way than how i would do it i set up an individual thing for every thing like for example my like any pin numbers and stuff like that i might have for a banking app even though i don't log in via one password for those things they don't allow you to i save the pin numbers under the individual like in individual fields but i just found it interesting i think like structured you like structured data and she just wants you know to have it available in the list it makes it makes sense and if you're not using it it depends on how you think of it. Everybody's got their own mental filing system, right? And, you know, I think that you file it in a way that works for

you, and she files it in a way that works for her, and I think that's fine. I think that's fair. As long as it's perfectly safe behind that master password, then everyone's a winner, in my opinion. I agree. I agree. I like the title of this next vertical that we have, or the first vertical today's episode. First vertical.

Would you like to tell the listeners what you have labeled this? Yes, this is the Mike is Wrong vertical. I feel like all of my shows have these. You're the first person to label it. Let's just call it what it is. If there is nothing else that people can expect from Upgrade, they should expect some honesty from us. So this is the Mike is Wrong vertical. They should expect some honesty from us. So this is the Mic is Wrong vertical.

We have two pieces of feedback from the hashtag ask upgrade method, which is still going strong. Use hashtag ask upgrade on any tweet. And it appears in our magic spreadsheet via the if this, then that route. A listener, Jeff, wrote in to point out something that I believe I pointed out in last week's show, which is it can't be the first annual anything. It could be inaugural. At one, you slipped. That show was about eight hours long. And for most of it, you got it down. You just said this is the first Upgradees or the inaugural Upgradees.

And then right at the end, you referred to it, I believe, as the first annual. And I think you may hear me in the background saying something like, oh, Mike, it's not. No. Then I doubled down on it. And poor Jeff. Poor Jeff. Listener Jeff. Who contacted us.

I was feeling a little bit mischievous. And I had a bit of a back and forth with Jeff, I think. Which I would not allow it to be inaugural. I stuck by first annual. I know it's wrong. If you're going to be wrong, you might as well just stick to your wrongness. Embrace it. I love Jeff's tweet too because he used three hashtags.

He had ask upgrade. He had tell upgrade. We're not – don't tweet to tell upgrade. And pedant, pedant, however you want to say that. The pedants now will say it's pedant and the pedants will say it's pedant. And someone will make me a gif, and someone else will make me a gif. And anyway, listener Steven also wrote in. This is not Steven Hackett, by the way, although it could be, but it's not.

And he says, can we have an official register of those who only want to be listeners as upgrading is just awful, and may I be on it? Listeners as Upgradian is just awful. And may I be on it? And to which I say, yes, somebody start a register of people who want to be listeners. As I said, I'm actually feeling like Upgradian is a nice broad term for the entire listenership, but that the individual honorific that I prefer certainly is just is listener. But yes, listener Stephen, if you would like to create a register, I will be happy to bless the register of listeners versus the register of upgradians. Maybe it could be like a little message board where people yell at each other because that's

what happens on the internet. Anyway, that's two of the Mike is wrong vertical items. And then the last one, I'm not sure if this qualifies, but I threw it in here, which is listener Phil, who tweeted, Mike loves award shows like Jason loves drafts, which is true. That is solid. That is solid. And I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that you do love awards and I do love drafts. And it made me think that, yes, listener Phil has figured us out. And I started to think about what we could draft in a future episode of Upgrade. So maybe we'll get there sometime. Maybe we'll bring on a guest and we'll do a little draft of something because now that you've done an award show, it's my turn. But not today.

So that's the Mic is Wrong vertical. That was gentle. You weren't that wrong. Do you have anything to say for yourself as we reach the end of the Mic is Wrong vertical? I accept none of the blame for anything. Alright. You just refuse. Yeah, I just flat out refuse. And that was

kind of the first annual Mike is Wrong vertical, I think. Oh, you've turned it into an award show. How typical. And I win! I am the winner. Yes. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by our friends at Hover. The best way to buy and manage domain names.

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They have all the normal ones you're going to expect. You can get your.com, your.net, your.me from there, but you can also get your.academy. You can get your.sexy, if that's what you like. I own mike.sexy, and I bought that at Hover, naturally, because Hover is my domain registrar. They are my domain registrar, right? It's just flat out.

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off your first purchase at Hover.com and you'll be showing your support for Upgrade. So that's ENEMY at checkout. You get 10% off your first purchase. thank you so much to hover for sponsoring this week's episode of upgrade do you like that uh the code there jason yeah that was excellent enemy yeah they're not an enemy though they're our friends no they are our friends but uh the code is an enemy all right except if you use the code you get a discount so it's really a it's really a friend

in disguise oh yeah pretending to be an enemy yeah friend in disguise all right hover that's how i say it uh more vertical it's time for the podcast vertical now that's and this is our last vertical before we get into the full topics i I wanted to, I guess we should say the podcast vertical brought to you by Hover. I suppose they could sponsor a vertical. Listener Jim wrote in to say, Overcast has saved me 41 hours using SmartSpeed. Does this mean I have a problem? I looked up my Overcast setting in the settings.

If you scroll to the bottom, it tells you how much time it saved you by taking out silence. And I'm only at 17 hours, less than half of what Listener Jim is listing here. Mike, do you know how many hours Overcast has saved you? Yeah, I mentioned it last week, but I will look again because I don't remember off the top of my head. I didn't mention it last week because I haven't looked. 27. Oh, good. Okay. Listener Jim, anyway, does this mean

you have a problem, Listener Jim? Yes, it does. You do have a problem. It is a fantastic problem. Never stop listening to podcasts. Ever. So I feel a bit bad this week. Why is that? Because I have a really huge backlog

from the holidays. Yeah, me too. And I realized that, I mean, and this probably sounds bad, but a lot of our listeners, they also have my shows. Now, I don't have my shows in my backlog, right? Because I don't listen to my own shows. But people that listen to my shows probably listen to all of the shows that I listen to. So I don't know how anyone's going to get through them all.

In May, people will still be hearing about what I think of 2014 I have so much stuff I have like two episodes of Roderick on the Line now, I don't know how that has happened I blame John Gruber for four hours of epic Star Wars-ness

that I finished today I'm going to blame John that was a good show though, the talk show episode. But now it's all building up. I have ATP still to listen to. I have TPK to listen to. I listen to ATP, although I skipped. I don't always skip the super technical stuff,

but I skipped the super technical stuff where Marco is giving sort of details about Node.js, and I'm just like, yeah, you know. I like listening to the philosophy. I was going to do an ATP follow-up vertical because I have opinions about ATP, which hopefully most of our listeners have listened to or listened to.

But when Marco gets the deep down, it's usually Marco. Sometimes it's Casey or John. But I like the philosophy of programming and sort of how programmers think and how they evaluate their work. And I think that's all really interesting at a high level. And then every now and then they get down into the depths of sort of like real details about developing, and I'm not a developer. And even then I will often listen. But when I have a giant backlog,

that's when I go, you know, I'm going to skip the next 25 minutes of this and get to the next item in the show notes. They don't do chapter marks. Marco actually wrote a post about that. But they have helpful show notes, and you can just use the scrubber to go to the next thing. So that's what I did. And the backlog is the number one reason why. I haven't listened to the Star Wars talk show,

although it sounds like there's some alignment issues with the track, so they're talking over themselves at a few points. I'm not sure. That's a little scary. I have to deal with that with the incomparable and it sounds like uh there aren't usually three people on the talk show i guess so i think the the problem is as you may have heard in other shows uh john siracusa and guy english will they will basically talk until one of them stops uh there's a great episode. I think it was Debug where they argue about maybe Copeland.

Was it Copeland 2010? Yeah. Yeah, Copeland 2010. Yeah, it might be. Yeah, sure. They have a discussion about that, and basically it's like a war. It's incredible to listen to because they just fight like in words and just will keep talking until one shuts up and then they will continue.

Well, one method when you're on a panel show, I mean, this is true with The Incomparable, is you just talk until you realize that someone else is not going to stop and then you give up. And then in the edit you take out the person who lost that war. And if they said a complete thought, maybe you pull them apart. But if one of them gets sort of truncated and waits for the other one to finish and then comes in, there's some work that can be done there.

It sounds to me like what Guy was saying is that on the Star Wars episode, his track drifted or was misaligned. So where it sounds like they're, like John is always stepping on what Guy is saying and in reality, it's that they were shifted off a little bit from one another.

And so it makes, and that happens with drift. It's tricky. It's that they were, they were, um, they were shifted off a little bit from one another. And, and so it makes, and that happens with, uh, with, with drift. It's tricky. It's tricky. I've been there. And if you're doing a three or four hour long podcast, the drift can get pretty severe over time. The, the files don't line up. You line them up at the beginning is what we're talking about. And by the end, they don't line up anymore. And so you, you have to go through and, uh, every 20 minutes or every half hour, you know, depends on how bad the drift is, you need to like cut the files and realign them so that they line up again. So that everybody sort of has this consensual, you know, current time that they actually had in the recording session on Skype but didn't go into the audio files because they drift a little bit. And Marco wrote a utility that fixes that, but it's still in beta and private,

and so nobody has it. So, you know, it is a pain. It's also unusable to people that don't understand the command line like me. Yes, that's true. It is a command line utility. It's great. I can't wait for him to release it

because it's really good. I use it all the time. But he's a busy guy, Marco. I chop the files up like an animal. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the other way to do it. I do that for like TPK because it's, well, I mean, sometimes you just can't. The tool doesn't even do it. It's just, it's too messy and you have to sink it yourself and chop it up like an animal. It's too messy, and you have to sink it yourself and chop it up like an animal. It's okay. It happens.

All in the interest of podcast quality, I would say. The big thing is, and we talked about this last week as real-time follow-up, but Joe Steele helpfully did a NASC Upgrade post about this too, which is that we should make each other listen to The Flophouse and Hello Internet and discuss it. And this was our homework from last week, is that you went off and listened to at least one episode of The Flophouse and I went off and listened to an episode of Hello Internet, neither of which we had heard before and both of which we had professed to be among our favorite podcasts. So we should talk about that. We should report back now. So you listened to The Flophouse? I listened to episode 133 bullet to the head

bullet to the head that's the sylvester stallone movie uh-huh yeah so basically one of the one of the things that had kept me away from the flop house was um i haven't seen most of the movies they talk about and i'd heard which shouldn't stop you exactly i'd heard people mention it but i'm still like yeah but i don't know but it really doesn't even make a difference they do a really good job of explaining what they're talking about and then they just talk about it but at least in this episode that i've listened to they didn't the movie is not discussed in great detail right no it's kind of just the movie allows them to make jokes about things that happen in the movie. I started listening to The Flophouse. I picked episodes of movies that I'd seen because

there were three or four movies that I'd seen that were in their list. And I realized listening to those that it didn't matter. That knowing what was in the movie allowed me to nod along at points and go, yes. But that was was it and then i got past it you may need to help me with some of the names of people as i speak about this i don't know how familiar you are with this episode i i in fact uh knowing that you were listening to it i listened back to most of it uh this weekend okay so that's called preparation, Mike. The audio is tough. Yeah. Sometimes you have to look past things like that.

And we had several listeners who said, oh, I can't listen to this show. It just sounds terrible. And I replied back to one of them, I think, and I said, well, it's one of my favorites, and it's got great content, but if you just can't bear to listen to it, I understand. Especially at the beginning, it sounds terrible. And there are episodes that sound better, and there are episodes that sound worse. It seems like maybe since they joined Maximum Fun, they've gotten a little bit of a technical upgrade or some help in getting their setup clearer because it sounds it always sounds better as time goes along.

But, yeah, there's one famous episode that literally there was a cable that was hooked up wrong. Um, there was a cable that was hooked up wrong. And so there's a radio station that is interference coming from the radio station is broadcasting through the cables for the entire episode. And I think it's posted. Well, I think it's posted as like a, uh, as a side note of like this, you shouldn't listen to this because it sounds terrible, but it's over there. They kind of like put it on the side, I believe. But yeah, the audio quality is far from pristine. It is three kind of non-technical people in a room together with three microphones. And yeah, so there's no doubt about that. It is not a professional production in that way. So, but I look past it because things happen. I've had bad shows, audio-wise, and I got better at it. Some people say that we're still not at the level that they would like, and that's fine.

We're working at it every day. Sometimes you have to look past it, so I did. And within minutes, I was laughing out loud at the train station uh it's kind of i don't even know how it started but they were doing like this in this like impression of german people and i'm not 100 sure why it happened and i figured that that's probably just part of it oh it was that was they did a riff about like verner herzog yeah movies and it like completely inappropriate verner herzog movies yeah and they're yeah and then it was just kind of just like stereotypical like terrible german accents but it was really funny and within about maybe 20 minutes i kind of worked out what this show kind of is.

Yeah. These are, I mean, two of these guys are writers for The Daily Show. And when I subjected my friend Phil Michaels to this for the first time, he came back and he said, it's funny. It's really great. He likes it a lot. But he said, it's very writer's room. That is exactly what I was about to say. Just throw all the jokes out there and see which ones work.

Just let them all out. exactly what it's just throw just throw all the jokes out there and see which ones work just let them all out and it's like you're inside a writer's room somewhere where people are just comedy writers are sitting there just anything that comes to mind they just throw it out there and a lot of it is really funny and they riff off of each other but that's what it is it's it's almost like a uh just a stream of consciousness kind of thing collaboration because i've seen like documentaries like about south park and stuff, and they show what the writer's room is like. And when I was listening, I was like, this is just like that.

Because someone will say something that's mildly funny, and they will keep going until everyone is just bursting with laughter. They'll just keep making, keep building, keep building, keep building. Which actually I can see how that could drive people crazy, but I really liked it i've really yeah yeah it's it that's what you get

that's what it is and either that works for you not it makes me laugh so much that that that's that's why i that's why i love it um but uh it's yeah it's not for everybody the sound quality isn't going to do it for some people um i find it acceptable i've dropped podcasts because i terrible sound quality, but I think The Flophouse is good enough that once you get into it, most of the episodes are fine. Every now and then there's one where something is set wrong and it's bad and you have to kind of grit your teeth

or just give up and go to the next one. But yeah, it's very creative. And, you know, it's not just somebody says something mildly funny. Sometimes it's somebody just mispronounces a word, and that leads to a ridiculous chain of jokes. And the highlight of Bullet to the Head is that there's a recurring bit with a Sylvester Stallone impression that just goes on forever, but it's actually really, really funny.

But I also loved in that episode the letters song. Does that happen a lot? Almost every week. When they introduce the letter segment it would be as if every time we did a vertical or a topic on this show i sang a made-up improvised terrible song about the topic for like a minute or two or ten um because that's what elliot calen does on the flop house but it's it's become again it's one of those things i think in isolation would seem bizarre and not necessarily funny. But then I think with repetition it becomes incredibly funny because you know it's coming. And they know it's coming.

And then he has to find another, you know, original way to sing a stupid song. I don't know. It's one of my favorites. And I feel more emboldened to recommend it to people now because knowing so many people who I've recommended to who've liked it and people who recommended to me, you know, John Syracuse are recommended to me and I, you know, and Merlin loves it and Phil Michaels loves it. I mean, there's so many people who love the flop house now that I feel like, okay, it's got a pretty good batting average. It's not for everybody,

but most of the people I've turned onto it have liked it. So I really liked it. And I have downloaded more episodes. I went through and did probably what most people do. I look for some that I have seen. And I've got a couple here. It's unfortunately at a time when I have like 20 shows above it, but I plan to listen to more of the show.

I enjoyed it a lot listening to it and enough that I will keep it subscribed and I will definitely listen in. It might be one of those shows that like what I do is when I'm out of stuff, I'll listen to a bunch, which I kind of do anywhere. I have a few shows like that, which aren't so like topical or anything like that. And then I'll go back and listen to a bunch of them. So I'm very pleased that I was encouraged to listen to this show. Yeah, I'm glad you did.

I think Limitless was the first one that I saw, the Bradley Cooper movie, and that's because I had seen that. Oh, I'm going to find that one. Do you have any idea what episode number that would be? That is episode 85. Oh, I'm going to find that one. Do you have any idea what episode number that would be? That is episode 85. Wow, you really did know, didn't you? I was looking at their list to try and see what these movies are. I felt bad. I've seen movies that were on the Flophouse.

That's a bad sign when you've seen a movie. Night and Day is another one I saw. That's the Cameron Diaz, Tom Cruise movie. That's number 79. I'd seen that one. That was one of my first listens just because i'd because i had seen it um you know there are a few there are a few of those yeah not too many i think one of the i think there's an x-men or like a wolverine movie

that's that's in there that i'd seen i have about an origins colon wolverine dash colon something i have about eight episodes downloaded. Like just things that I think I might enjoy. So yes, thank you for that. There's a nice catalog and then it comes out every other week. So it's not, the pace of it is kind of nice where, you know, some of the, like we were saying, some of these weekly podcasts, like I just finished or I just gotten to the previous ATP and they released the new ATP and I was like, no, you lapped me again.

I was right there. And I kind of like that the Flophouse, although I would love a Flophouse every week, I kind of like that every, it's every other week that, you know, when it comes, it's, it's, it's a, it's special that it's arrived and I try to prioritize it. And the back catalog, like I said, it's a little spotty in terms of audio quality, but I finally i i'm going through um i listened to the new episodes and then i've still got about 20 or 30 that i haven't listened to that are in the middle which john syracuse would weep if he heard that but you know i don't think you need to start at the beginning with the clubhouse okay hello internet hello internet so you listened to

episode seven right was it seven one with wasn't it like 16 or something? The one with the flags. Yeah, no, you're right. It wasn't seven. I will find it now. I don't know why I said seven. That was random. I just picked a number. You listened to episode... 16. 16. 16. And part of 17, which I had queued up for ages. I didn't get very far into 17 before we did the show, but I did listen to all of episode 16.

So the episode is actually called The Worst Topic for a Podcast because they talk about flags. Flags, which is great because you need to see the flags. Yep, but they're in the show notes, so, you know, they're kind of there. So, Gawain, what do you think? Tell me. So I liked it.

I think it's funny. At the beginning, they talk about how they're firmly in the two guys talk about stuff podcast genre, which we know something about, Mike. I think they're really interesting. I think Gray is kind of like a combination of John Syracuse and Merlin Mann. He's an interesting, he's a character in that kind of uh you know he's he's got uh he's got opinions and he's got reasons for his opinions and uh i

don't know he he he's a really interesting guy his videos are great and then brady is australian and in all the best ways that one could be aust. He seems very friendly and smart and skeptical. And I don't know, he's Australian. He's, he's, uh, and they have a nice rapport. And,

um, I really liked their bit. They had a bit in there about brain crack, which is where you spend so much time envisioning how great it's going to be when you finish a creative project that you never started. Um, which I, I really,

uh, I totally get how that is a dangerous thing to do and how you, you need to not go down that path. I mean, visualizing success is great, a dangerous thing to do and how you need to not go down that path. I mean, visualizing success is great, but you need to actually do the work. And if you spend too much time imagining how great it's going to be when you're done, then you're not actually ever going to do it. I thought that was really great.

And then the flag stuff, I have opinions about flags. I could, you know, we don't need to take that terrible, worst topic for a podcast and do it here. But I enjoyed that because I enjoy, I've posted several things on the internet about the design of graphics on screen for sporting events, televised sporting events. And it struck me while I was listening to this flag discussion. Although flags don't really have a user interface. Flags are just like completely symbolic. So it's in some ways a pure design challenge. I find it interesting in the same way, which is it's sort of, you know, mostly an abstract, obscure, weird question that becomes more interesting when you look at it and say, why does this exist? What's the purpose here? How did this come to be? And I think about that sometimes when I'm thinking about, you know, sports graphics and other stuff like that, design of, you know, soda cans, things like that, that are design and that have relevance. But at the same time,

it is kind of funny to spend a lot of time and brainpower thinking about them. Also, the California flag is great. And I don't know what he's talking about, about having, I agree that text on a flag is not, is not great, especially if it's like Wyoming, we are a state and we put the word Wyoming on our flag versus something like California, where it says California Republican. It's a reference to the two weeks or whatever, when California independent before it joined the United States. And it's got a bear and a red star. How the red star on the California state flag got through the communist scare of the 50s, just I have no idea how that happened because it looks vaguely like there's going to be a communist revolution of bears in the near future in California.

I agree with Gray that the Maryland flag is just a masterpiece of insanity. The Maryland flag is like a fever dream. I don't even know how that could be a thing. And I never really looked at it that closely if you know i think if you look at it too closely you will pass out i think that's what happens yeah yeah don't don't exactly don't don't look at it too closely or you might die um you know we're here to talk you down don't look at the maryland flag while you're driving especially that would be that would be bad you would you'll crash immediately um and it

will rewrite your brain uh yeah but anyway it was it was a fun podcast and i would i you know would listen again um i it is a challenge because there are so many podcasts and my my my queue is so so large but these guys are really interesting and i love their attention to detail. I like their rapport. I like the humor of them talking about like, would you watch a video about airline crashes while on a plane? That was a good question. about it's applying, like I said, it's applying the kinds of analysis that you would apply to something like technology and on all these tech podcasts to other stuff in the case of the flags. And so I liked it. I approve of your choice. I understand why you like it. I'm not ready to say it's suddenly in my top five podcasts, but I will listen again.

And I'm glad I got the push from you to listen because like I said, I had people who told me I should listen to episode 17 for quite a while and they'd been sitting, I'd been staring at Mr. Phoenix on my overcast for a long time and where they talk about her

and some other movies. Oh, that's a good episode. I've been wanting to listen to that one for a while. So now I will listen to that next. But, and I also watched like a billion C.G.P. Gray movies or videos on YouTube that I hadn't seen. I thought I'd seen his videos, and I've seen like five, and he's done like a hundred. So that was actually a lot of fun. I watched a bunch of his YouTube videos too.

And they are all fantastic. Yeah, it's great. After I first listened, well, after I got kind of addicted to Hello Internet, I then went and just watched every single video. Not in one go. I mean, that's kind of crazy. But I kind of over a couple of weeks

just went through and just watched all of his stuff. And all his videos have millions of views on YouTube. It's amazing. He's very, very good at what he does yeah yeah no i was i was blown away by that it actually it's one of those things where you look at and you're like wow um so maybe i won't think about making youtube videos oh my god that is a high bar that is i mean it's just so impressive that he does that but i love it and i love that they're often on topics like that, where it's like, I think this is interesting. It's not like how you slice a, you know, slice an apple or something like that. It's, you know, explaining things that people are like, oh yeah, I always wondered about

that. And explaining it in a clear, entertaining way, which is a great use of YouTube videos, I think. So I, you know, and those are the ones I'd seen, but he has so many more. And I will, first I listened to the American or watched the American Empire video because they talk about that in episode 16. But anyway, yeah, good. So you're not crazy.

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broke the internet. Yeah, this is still going on as we talk marco is tweeting about it and and there was a screenshot that he retweeted of msnbc talking about his blog post uh which is crazy and he you know there and there's definitely i think marco feels really bad right now because he was he was intending his blog post called his apple lost the functional high ground he was intending that for the kind of like for apple and the apple nerd community and um the danger is always that you're going to get picked up by the apple is doomed crowd and um and used as fodder for that and that seems to have happened and i totally get why marco is um he's feeling funny about that now because that was not really his intent.

But, you know, as somebody who's in the media business and has been in this business for 20 years, it happens. I mean, this is just – it's like when you write stuff and put it out there, you can't control who takes it and which one goes big and how people – I mean, that's just – that's the part of the cost of being out there is that some stuff is going to blow up and you never really can control what it is. I can see it because he kind of said he intended it for the nerd crowd, as you said. I don't really fully understand that title. I feel like I kind of get the gist of it. But if you ask me to try and put that into other words, I don't know if I could, really. try and put that into other words like i i don't know if i could really i if i had to categorize his regret and i mean he'll probably talk about this much more on atp this week but um you know i looked at it and i thought for example there are lots of examples of this and yet the post

doesn't have any of them i think there's an assumption there that everybody knows what they are but i think it would have been valuable if he had said you know here are some just for example some of the things that i've seen that bother me about this, but there aren't a lot of examples in there. I think you're right. Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, as an editor, I look at it and I think he probably could have spent more time with it. And I'm sure that if he knew that it was going to get picked up like it did, he would have spent more time with it. And I suspect that's part of it too. But the main point, I didn't really want to talk about the effect of, of posting something as much as I wanted to talk about the post and the point. And that is, I mentioned this on Six Colors this morning when I linked to Marco's post, is that I've had a thing in my little reminders stack of story ideas.

That's what I keep in my single use of just like I use notes to do incomparable notes. I do reminders for story ideas for Six Colors. And I've had the phrase more about Apple and software quality in there for a couple months now. And I just haven't had that moment, that flash of like, I know what to say about Apple and software quality. But this is the issue. And this is what Marco is bringing up. But this is the issue, and this is what Marco was bringing up, and I think it's resonated because other people, at least in these kind of Apple nerd circles, have had the same feeling, which is. And that there's also a perception that it didn't used to be like that, that it used to be better at the Apple software quality used to be better. So it's interesting because like I agree with what Marco said

and it was a good post and it felt like a Marco post, right? It was just a post that Marco wrote. And it is really interesting that it has kind of ballooned, I suppose. Anybody who's listened to ATP has heard them talk about this same issue. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very interesting. I mean, I guess that the general public have a feeling towards this sense. Otherwise, I can't imagine why news outlets would.

Well, I can't imagine why news outlets would. Well, I can. I mean, it's the same reason the whole Apple Doom industry exists is because people want to write about, oh, is Apple in trouble? And I think that's the issue here is that this is fueling that. I tried to write,

and one of the reasons I haven't written this is that it's very difficult to, and Marco, I tried to write, and one of the reasons I haven't written this is that it's very difficult to, and Marco, I think, tried this and maybe came off a little bit more negative than he wanted to. It's difficult to do a balanced discussion of this issue because there are going to be people who are like, oh, you guys are just bellyaching. Everything's fine. This is just more doomsaying. Apple is doomed. Blah, blah, blah.

And then there are other people who are going to run around and go, oh, God, Apple is doomed, right? And you can't reach – the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think that the internet is littered with anecdotes about, oh, this feature doesn't work. This feature doesn't work. This feature, you know, I'm worried about. This app has been abandoned. There's a lot of that out there. And none of those things can be pointed to and you can say, see, proof, there it is. But I do get a general sense.

And I think the reason the Marco story resonated with so many people in this community is I think a bunch of us feel like, and there was a, I think Hacker News or maybe it was a Reddit thread where somebody who claimed at least to be working in the OS group at Apple said that the OS engineers at Apple feel this way too, feel that there's something wrong, that the way that the stuff is being pushed out is leading to a software experience that is not up to maybe what we expect from Apple. And maybe our expectations are too high, but boy, that's a scary road to go down and say, hey, it was okay for Microsoft. Maybe it's okay for Apple. That's not a good path to walk down. So I do think something's going on. And we may have even touched on this in previous episodes of this show. I feel like these yearly monolithic software releases with a whole bunch of new features tied, some of which are tied to hardware and some of which are not. My gut feeling is that they are probably part of the reason that we're seeing a little more instability. But there are lots of other issues too. I mean, Apple's apps have been an issue where John Syracuse talked about this at length in an ATP episode a little while ago about how Apple seems to,

you know, put a team on pages and numbers and keynote and they work on it. And then that team gets retasked and there's like one person there to do bug fixes. And basically the apps are abandoned for three or four years. And then somebody comes back and they write new versions of those apps and break all the compatibility and you lose features. And that's the new version. And I mean, the way iPhoto has been kind of mismanaged, I would say, over its entire lifespan, Aperture being launched with great fanfare and then kind of being allowed to just fade away to the point where, although you can buy it and bundle it with a new Mac, it's also going to be removed and replaced with this new Photos app that presumably everybody's working really hard on now. But that leads to the next

question, which is, what's the Photos app quality going to be working really hard on now. But that leads to the next question, which is what's the photos app quality going to be? And is it going to be updated regularly or is it going to be one of these things that gets released and we're told that it's great and then it's sort of never gets updated for four years? We don't know. Apple's had had issues with software before. It feels like there are more of them now. It's hard to get a read beyond the anecdotes and see is this just everybody kind of looking at each other and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm having bugs too. This is obviously a big problem. Is it really a big problem?

And that comes to the core of this, which is what's going on inside Apple? And we don't know. We don't know. Short of somebody saying, I'm an Apple insider and I can tell you the truth of what's going on on the inside. It's hard. It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell whether this is just, you know, our misty watercolor memories of Snow Leopard and that in reality, you know, things there are always issues. Like I said, I think with some of Apple's apps, there have always been issues.

That said, I think it's telling that a lot of Apple nerds have been saying for the last six months that the pace feels like it's too great and that they're calling for, you know, an OS release that's more like the old school snow leopards and mountain lions where you don't try to pour in every feature and you kind of calm it down and try to get this stuff to be less quirky and more stable than it is now. I don't know. It's tough because it's so easy to be on the outside looking in and make assumptions about what's going on on the inside. But unless you're inside, you don't know. My worry, and I think this is Marco's worry, and he mentioned it in his post actually, is that what if there's an issue here and Apple doesn't think it's a big deal? But it is a big deal. And you're making some assumptions there. You're making an assumption about what people at Apple, the powers that be at Apple, feel is important. And you're making an assumption about whether there's really a problem or not.

And my guess is that people inside Apple, that information is available to people inside Apple. They know whether this is a problem or not based on various metrics, whether it's the feeling of the engineering team or the bug tracker, or whether it is consumer complaints or support requests or whatever. And obviously they know what they feel about whether it's really relevant to their business going forward or whether it's just the noise that happens around software because software in general has quality issues and always has and maybe always will. And the fear is that this is a problem and that they don't care or they don't think it's a problem. And I think that was the motivation behind Marco's post and some of the other posts that

we've seen. And I linked to a whole bunch of them. Guy English had one. Kirk McElhern had one. I think people are writing about this because they want to air this question so that, you know, maybe somebody at a higher level at Apple asks, is this a problem? know because that's dangerous. That leads to Apple being in trouble because they left something to fester for a long time. And people who like Apple and like Apple's products and would like Apple's products to be great, you would see why they would be concerned about that. And they would want to raise the alarm. And I don't think they're coming from a position of trying to say Apple is doomed because they want to make money on stock manipulation.

And I don't think they're doing it because they secretly hate Apple and they want Apple to fail. I think that's the core of Marco feeling like his post has been taken by those people and used as an example, which of something that he doesn't really believe. But at the same time, you know, I do think they're coming from a position of like, hey, Apple, we think there's a problem here. And you've shown very little sign that you've given us no proof that you're aware of it. And that's concerning because if you're not aware of it, then this could lead into bad areas. But it's so messy. And that's the thing.

It's so messy. There's so many different ways that this could be true. That's the thing. It's so messy. There's so many different ways that this could be true. Systems on the inside are so complex that, you know, we have very little vision and purposefully on Apple's part into how this process actually works. But from the outside, all we can do is say from the outside, it feels like there's something that is not quite right here. And the only other thing we can do from the outside is kind of wave our arms and say, hey, do you guys know that it seems like there's something not right here?

And I feel like ultimately that's what's going on because that's all we really have the power to do is bring up the issue and say, you can maybe say, here's what I think might solve this. But in the end, it's going to be way more complicated than that if you're on the inside. But so I think that's what's motivating it. I do think, like I said, I think there's, I think there's an issue. I think it's very easy to

overstate the issue. And the fact that Marco links to a post that has since been taken down by a guy who basically said, oh, forget it. The Mac's no good. I'm going back to desktop Linux. I mean, really, I'm going back to Linux. Really? That's such a bizarre edge case, not something that a regular person would ever think about. I don't see that as a bellwether. That's just kind of dumb, in my opinion. Sorry to the guy who wrote that. And the piece wasn't bad, but I'm going back to desktop Linux. I mean, that's like a self-parody almost. I saw those posts a lot in the 2000s too. Anyway, I don't know. I think there are issues. I think that Apple needs to change the way they manage their software because what's working now isn't working on a lot of different levels.

But I don't think it's a total disaster and that Apple is doomed. And like I said, my biggest concern is, is this a thing that Apple is aware of or not? Because they won't say. And so all we can do is say, hey, wave our hands and say, do you know? Just letting you know. Did you know you left the lights on in your car? And the answer may be, oh, yeah, they go off automatically. It's going to be fine.

Or it might be, oh, no, thanks for telling me. And we just don't know because Apple's secretive and they're not. Short of Phil Schiller coming out or Tim Cook coming out with a statement about this, which is never going to happen, it would require a real crisis for that to happen. Or them saying something about it as part of a new direction, WWDC,

saying we're going, I don't know, we're getting rid of monolithic software updates and we're going to just roll out updates every few months and they're going to be small and we'll occasionally introduce new features and we'll warn you in advance. I mean, they could change completely how they do this and describe this in that context. That might be the clearest sign of them taking this to heart, but it's not the only one that might happen. So when I look at this and I look at what people say and the way that we think about it,

I try and look back at what has it been like in the past? Because, I mean, if you remove OS X from this, in my mind anyway, I would, because there isn't so much of a pattern. Because the release schedule has not been as defined as iOS, right? Because iOS has been every year since the start. So you can look at it and be like, right, so you've got a pattern here. Has anything changed in that period of time? So in the eight years.

And I look back and I think every iOS release or every iPhone OS release has had problems and bugs. Like I'm sure of it. I remember them. Absolutely. But it did feel like they got fixed and and i think ios 7 in my memory was definitely the the most unstable release because there were things that ios 7 did that were just crazy like the reboots which happened for a very very long time you know your phone would just randomly reboot sitting on your desk oh yeah oh yeah yeah i i got to experience that that was that was early on and it and it was a 64-bit devices

thing i think with ios 7 and then it went away eventually you're right i just feel like ios 7 and 8 especially exactly were so ambitious in a good way i don't know i mean if i feel like apple's hardware is so strong that they, that they don't need to hang their hat on software features in order to sell products. Um, but you know, at the same time, we're all, we are all the same people who complain that you can't, you know, airdrop from iOS to Mac. You know, we complained about that for two, for two years that there were two things called airdrop and they weren't compatible with each other. And now they are, but that was a whole new feature and it's kind of buggy. I use it a lot and it's great, but I know that for some people it doesn't work or they don't see the right people

and I totally get that. So that's a balancing act too. I just feel like, you know, that's the real question is what is the advantage of adding those features in versus the kind of it just works stability thing? And I think what people like Marco are worried about is that the general public is starting to feel like, I can't trust Apple. And I think, I don't know if that's true. And that is, speaking of which, if I wrote that on a blog post, that would get on MSNBC, right? Oh, you can't trust Apple, says Apple journalist guy. Post, that would get on MSNBC, right? They're like, oh, you can't trust Apple, says the Apple journalist guy. But

I think the truth is that the biggest black eye Apple has had in this entire process is iOS 7 because it was such a big change and it had some bugs and it upset people to the point where now they're wary of software from Apple.

That was bad, and they're still living that down, I think, because I hear that from regular people all the time. Like, do I want to apply this update? My mom asked me all the time now if she wants to apply an iPhone update, because that one time when she did it, crazy things happened because it was the iOS 7 update. And now it's bug fixes. And I said, no, it's bug fixes. You should install it. But boy, that changed the game. And it's stuff like that, I think, that has the biggest impact, big stuff like that on Apple. But yeah, if everybody feels like, oh, that's iCloud, it doesn't work. I can't get my bookmarks to sync.

They were supposed to sync and they synced for a while and now they don't. It just chips away at the perception of Apple's quality. And when Apple is executing hardware, I would say they are on all cylinders with hardware. Their hardware is just so amazing, the pipeline they've got for new hardware. You look at the software and you say, it's not up to the same standards. And how do you get it up to the same standards? Do you do the original iPhone OS thing and back it off to fewer features but really polished? Or do you feel the pressure from Android and feel like you need to keep up with them or you're going to lose on a software feature level and put things out but sacrifice quality?

I think as well people are still reeling, and I hear this from friends and family members, over the iOS 8 bricking. So I know people that are concerned to update in case it breaks their phones because they heard it on the news and that was an actual thing that happened. It didn't happen to a lot of people. It happened to people we know.

It happened. And I think it was something that still people are concerned about. When I look at this though, and I think from my layman's way of thinking about these things what what's the solution um i think that there's there's clearly there's clearly an engineering bottleneck right i think if you're churning out things on a yearly basis you've only got so much time you can do things in and i think i don't understand why os 10 is real has a yearly release

schedule now um it doesn't make sense to me i think apple is kind of kidding itself if it thinks that by doing that it helps sell max at the rate they sell iphones because people just don't think about the computers that way and i don't think that the general public get excited about an OS X update in the same way they do a phone update. I agree 100%. I don't think software updates as marketing is a thing anymore. And I say this as a guy who enjoys reading John Syracuse's reviews. I write an OS X review every year. It does great traffic. You can write books about new edition covering Yosemite, right? I don't think it's a thing anymore. I think with the soft auto update say, once a year, we're going to do a monolithic release. But I feel like as a user, it's not necessary and that they'd be better off with taking their time and doing incremental updates and fixing bugs and adding features as necessary. That all said, it makes it more complicated for the install base. And when do

you leave features out for certain things and you've got to test and maybe it's easier to just do that once. The big issue, though, is tying it with iOS. The big issue is if there's a new feature we want in iOS, and one of our advantages as a company is that we have computers and phones and tablets, and they all can interrelate, then if you add that feature, we saw this with iCloud Drive, we saw this with AirDrop, if you add a feature on iOS, you really need to have that tie into the Mac.

And that kind of pushes you to have a Mac release schedule that's very similar to the iOS schedule. Yeah. And so, I mean, that's why it's hard. That's why Apple is the only company that does that. The phone is the problem. For the Mac. Because if you have to put new – basically, you need people to buy your phones every year. So you need to do something to the hardware.

If you do something to the hardware, the software has to go along with it. So they will always have a yearly release schedule for the iPhone. Well, yeah, although that's not – I mean, they will, but we've seen iOS releases for the iPad that add new features to the iPad. And they're just the new features for that piece of hardware. There would be, like Apple Pay was enabled by a software update. I think you could do, we may just be arguing terminology now, but I think you could say, look, we're going to do a new version of the operating system for the new phones and not have it be what we think of now as a new version of the operating system where they get people together at WWDC every year and unveil hundreds of new APIs and thousands of new features and all of

the things they do on those slides and get the developers really excited. I do wonder how much WWDC and this, again, I'm not a developer. So I would love developers to sound off on this themselves because they are the ones who are there. When I'm there, I'm just covering it as a person who's interested in the platforms and interested in Apple. But I sometimes wonder if WWDC is not in some ways putting the cart before the horse.

That if we're going to have everybody in the same room together in San Francisco every year, that's the time we need to evangelize them on everything we're doing that's new. And so you will always have a monolithic operating system update in the fall because that's when you've got them all together in San Francisco. What's interesting is, like WatchKit, all of that stuff rolled out online. All that stuff, they built lots of great stuff on Apple's website for developers about WatchKit. And for me, that calls into question,

one, do you really need WWDC? Almost nobody can go to it now anyway. It's great for the parties, but a small fraction of people who want to go to the sessions can go, and they're posting them all online anyway. But if you can roll out new stuff online, that reduces your need to have that be the place that you roll out all of your features throughout the year.

So I'm not saying they might not continue to do what we call a monolithic or marketing operating system release for the Mac or iOS or both every year. But what they could do is roll out those features, new features to developers in advance online and not just at WWDC because they've done that a few times and it, you know, I think it would work just fine. So that's a possibility because I do wonder about that sometimes if like the whole product cycle of WWDC and then the phones and tablets in the fall has now driven the, you know, that drives the cycle, which is, well, then we've got to have all those APIs announced in June and shipping in September because that's the cycle to sell products for the holidays. But again, I'm on the outside looking in. Somebody at Apple, I've been through this as somebody on the inside

just in Macworld, but I,world, but where people make these crazy assumptions about how you actually do your job that are not right, or they're missing all of the complications about your business that people on the outside aren't aware of. So I want to say that again, that all we can do is look at the output from Apple and make some guesses and maybe throw around some ideas, but we don't know because we're not on the inside. I think maybe one last point that I want to make, unless you have any more. I think Apple need a release schedule in some way, because if you look back at them through history, if they ever have a date which is open-ended, are at the end of that date like that is like an

apple joke right they say oh it'll be in the fall right so we'll see it the last day of fall just before you know just as uh the snow starts to settle so if they don't my fear would be if they just said we're not gonna stick to this release schedule anymore then It's going to be a very long time between upgrades of the OS. And I think, going back again, I think the phone is the catalyst for it. And I can't see how they can break out of that because they've got to sell those phones every year. And the new hardware dictates new software,

so that means a new iOS. Well, again, I agree with you to a certain point. I would say that the fact is the selling point of the iPhone 6 Plus was not iOS 8. It was the iPhone 6 Plus. And you could have done iOS 7.3

or 2 or whatever. Was there an iOS 7.2? You could have done iOS 7.something and had it been bug fixes for iOS 7 and a few new features that were tied to the hardware of the new phones. You would not necessarily have to add a whole bunch of software features

that rolled out to all the phones and all the iPads on the day that you released the iPhone 6. You could just do what they did when they released the first iPad, which is do an update of the software and say, now it supports the iPad. It was 4.2, I think they released the first iPad, which is do an update of the software and say now it supports the iPad. It was 4.2, I think, was the first iPad release. So there's a spectrum of things they can do.

So, I mean, and that's part of the haziness and the gray area here is Mac several times, is even then sometimes Apple releases new hardware that's running a particular build of software that only runs on that device. And the other devices just don't get it because it's not for them. It's only for this. And then they sync up later with another update that goes to everybody. So that's also a possibility. So there's lots of, you know, I agree with you that the hardware cycle does drive software to a degree. But I would question the idea that what we think of as a big annual, like I said, marketing operating system release, iOS 8, woo, it's really exciting, is necessarily what has to be the software update for the hardware. Because in the end, I think the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sell themselves, and that the software that is needed to enable their great new hardware needs to be there. But that other stuff, like

extensions and all of that, that we got promised at WWDC that came with iOS 8, did that need to be there? I mean, after they promised it, it did. But did that need to happen when the iPhone 6 came out? It didn't really. That could have been disconnected from the iPhone release and it would have been fine, I think. Easy for me to say. I'm out here. I'm in my garage.

I'm not in Cupertino. Let's take a break. Good idea. And relax. Jason, would you like to tell us about a new sponsor we have for this week's episode of Upgrade? I would. And I believe they'll be coming and visiting us again, which is great because I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of my thing from stamps.com. So these days you can get almost anything on demand. That's the beauty of

the internet. Our podcast is one example of that, right? You can listen whenever you want. We, you know, we can say, Hey, good morning or good afternoon or whatever, but we don't know when you're listening to it. It could be, uh, you could be two in the morning and you can't sleep and you're listening to our podcast now. So drink some warm milk, listen for a little while, and then go back to sleep, you person who has insomnia. But that's great. So here's the question. If you live in that world, then why are you still going to the post office and dealing with limited hours and long lines, there's nothing more painful, when you can get postage on demand with stamps.com. So stamps.com is a website and a service that lets you do anything you can do at the post office from your desk. You can buy and print official U.S. postage. This is

why I'm reading this ad, by the way, because Mike, not in the United States. I'm going to send you something using stamps.com though, Mike. This is going to be a continuing story for us. You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package using your own computer and your own printer. And unlike the post office, stamps.com never closes. You can get postage when you need it 24-7. So you're packing up boxes in the middle of the night that you've got to ship out the next morning. You can get them all ready to go just then. This is really exciting. I'm looking forward to getting my USB postage meter weigh scale thing from stamps.com and weighing boxes and printing out postage and shipping them out. And I don't have it yet, so I can't tell you that story yet other than that I'm excited to do that because in December we sent out a whole lot of stuff and had to go wait in line at the post office. lot of stuff and had to go wait in line at the post office and it was really unpleasant our post office is you know it's dingy and there's a long line especially during the holidays but there's

always a line in the middle of the afternoon and i'm looking forward to doing this and bypassing the whole thing and just using my computer and the internet let me just say jason that um our friends at knock who look after the uh relay fm, we use stamps.com for that stuff. Look at that. And they tell me, basically when we were talking about postage, this was a couple of months ago, they said, nope, we're going to go with stamps.com.

It's who we use. They make it easy. We can print everything out here, stick on the labels and just get it out the door. Yeah, that's it. And also as well, when we were working out what our rates were going to be, they just have some great charts.

We could see how much they were and put them into the system. So it's, you know, I wish that I had something like that here because this just makes the idea of posting and dealing with commerce, if you sell physical things, just so much easier. Well, it's the equivalent of, you know, like I said, the internet, the way we view how we use the internet for things. It moves all the idea of shipping things and paying for sending that stuff out into that way of thinking, which is I can do this on demand. I can do this at my computer. I can do it right now with my printer and then ship it out. I can work at the times that I want to work and I want to get these things done. Now, listeners will be very happy.

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the special offer. And I look forward, they ship internationally too. So I enter upgrade to get the special offer. I look forward, they ship internationally too, so I look forward to sending something. I'm not quite sure what yet, but I will send something to Mike using stamps.com. Thank you so much to stamps.com. Our new friend at upgrade. If it's not a brain ball,

I will be sad. Maybe just a picture of one. I could just email you a picture. There'll be something good. I'll put something. A little Mike sad. Maybe just a picture of one. Well, I could just email you a picture of one. There'll be something good. I'll put something, a little Mike prize package together and send it to you. Maybe some Manchego. It probably would go bad by the time it got to you. A picture of Manchego.

I don't think the customs office would be too happy about that. No, I don't think they would. So what else do we have today? Well, we were talking about Apple and software quality, and I wanted to at least give a nod to family sharing. David Sparks, host of Mac Power Users, and he writes at MacSparky.com. Really nice guy. I try to have lunch with him whenever I'm in L.A.

He does this in his spare time, does books and podcasts and writes about Apple stuff. And then his day job, he's a lawyer. So he really loves this stuff because he takes time outside of his actual job and spends it making all this great stuff. But he wrote a post on Max Sparky about giving up on family sharing, that he and his family had been using the new family sharing feature in iOS 8 and they had given up on it. And I don't have a lot to say about this other than to point people at that article. And I don't want to draw a larger point and say, well, here's an example of Apple software quality going down, because again, these are all anecdotes. I will say my family and i have used this too and like david i found that the other members of my family are mad at me for subjecting them to this thing

because while while it works when it works it is a great idea when it works it is a great idea i love the fact that my kids no longer have to um bring their bring their ipad or iphone to me and be like can you put in the password? I want to download a free game. I can actually approve purchases from my own devices. Can we back up a second? Yeah, sure. I have never used family sharing.

You want me to explain family sharing? Yeah, I kind of ignored it completely. So the idea is you have multiple Apple IDs. So instead of doing what many families do, which is share one Apple ID, and there's a 10 device limit, 10 iOS device limit, or no, 10 device limit for an Apple ID. So it gets complicated. What this does is allows you to say, you know, my son has an Apple ID, my daughter has an Apple ID, my wife has an Apple ID, and I have an Apple ID, but we're all part of the same family, which means that we can share apps.

It means that parents can set an approval plan for their children so that they can approve purchases that the kids can request. You know, the idea is to make it easier to have an Apple ID per person rather than an Apple ID per family. And that gets messy when they leave the household. Then they can't take their apps with them and things like that. And it gets really weird. So the idea here is we just put it all together. It's a nice idea. The problem is it's got a lot of quirks.

And that's why it's probably not ready for primetime, at least for a lot of people. The app developers have to opt in, as David writes in his post. There are apps that don't work with family sharing because the app developer hasn't checked the box. And that means that you go through all this trouble and then suddenly this app that your kids use that was bought with your Apple ID, well, they can't re-download it with their Apple ID because it hasn't been approved for family sharing. Why do you think developers wouldn't do that? Because they think they might be missing out on sales or something?

I think more likely it's that they haven't opted in, that they just haven't checked the box, and so it's not there. They just haven't paid any attention to it. I wouldn't put it past some of them to say, why would I want to help people from doing this, even though they were already doing it. W, in at worse is in a purchases aren't included. Um, which, um, means that again, you're back to this idea that as iOS users, we've kind of come to accept that you buy it once and you get it everywhere in your, in your iOS ecosystem. And I can see how the argument here

is no, no, no. Now we finally we finally provided this this this way to do it where it is one you know a purchase is only for one person and not for a not for a household um yeah because the ea would be really sad well but that's how it works now i mean that's the thing is that's how it works now all the existing the question is are you really going to make more money because now every member of a family is going to buy their own in-app purchase of a particular game. Maybe in the long run, if everybody uses family sharing, that might be true, but I don't know. It seems like they're doing fine as it is. But anyway, if you're going from the old way to the new way, that is a limitation. And iTunes Match is an example, David cites, where once you're logged in, you're using different IDs and iTunes Match doesn't go across. I think your backup doesn't go across.

So now everybody's got their own pool of. So here's the problem is if I want to buy more backup space, I can't buy more backup space for my family. I can buy more backup space for my family. I can buy more backup space for my ID. So then if my wife needs more backup space on iCloud, I have to buy more backup space for her on her ID too. That seems kind of dumb. Ideally, the family should pool all of that stuff and be able to use it together. But that's not, that's not how it works. There, you know, my, how it works. Um, there, you know, my, my, for me, the biggest thing is my kids ask me for, um, approvals and we end up in a loop where I'm putting in my password and it doesn't take it. And I put in my password again and it doesn't take it. And then I go to their, um, their device

and it says you can approve on the device. So I put approve on the device. I put in my Apple ID and my password and it doesn't take it. And it gets in a cycle where it acts like it's approved it and then nothing happens. And we end up in this whole dance of like, let's log out of everybody's IDs and then log back in and then see if the approvals will work again. And it's just kind of a mess. It was unpleasant enough that it made me almost want to turn it off. And quite frankly, if I weren't thinking one of these days I'm going to need to write about family sharing and what all the issues are, I would probably have turned it off. We still have it on. I'm still subjecting my family to this mostly, I think, because I really do want to experience it, but I have a hard time recommending it to anyone else. And I was thinking all of this and going through this with my family. And then to

see David write about it was useful because he's dealt with a lot of the same issues and kind of come come to the same conclusion which is it may work for some people but it doesn't work for his family it probably doesn't work for my family and it does kind of call into question are the people behind this feature thinking of all the sort of like common use cases of families or are they or or was this a feature that somebody who, you know, doesn't have a family was like, I've got an idea of family sharing and kind of missed a lot of the issues that the individual, the family members have with it. I don't know.

When you look at something like that, you wonder, was this made by some single people, you know? Every now and then, every now and then you're like, did you do that? And I'm sure that they talk to parents and they talk to people about it, but there are moments where you're where you're thinking, you know, is this was this the design for the ideal of a family or an actual family? And you know what? This could be a great feature eventually. with the fact that you've got these weird aggregates of Apple IDs that have accumulated over time that are interconnected with one another. Amazon just did this too, that you can share. My Kindle lets me add family members and they have access to books. So instead of my wife having her Kindle logged into my Amazon account, she could have it logged into her Amazon account and still see the books

that I bought, I think is how that works. And, you know, we need to see more of this because the fact is, one of the ways that I think people's experience with software and cloud services is bad is about account management. I mean, Google, one of the big problems with Google for ages, and it's not quite as bad as it used to be, was the idea of account management. Like, oh, I've got this account over here for Gmail and a different account over here for YouTube. And it's still problematic. It's just not as bad as it was when you couldn't switch between them without logging out of one and then logging into another. But still, there's a whole lot of better experiences that could be built by having a little more kind of fine-grained control over

whose IDs are used where and how they can share together. And the fact that, you know, if my children want to buy, I would say buy music, but they don't buy music anymore, right? If they buy apps and then they want to take those apps with them when they go off to college or whatever, you know, if I bought them on my account, then they kind of can't do with them when they go off to college or whatever. You know, if I bought them on my account, then they kind of can't do that. I mean, they can, but then they're on my account forever and I'm not going to give them my password. So, you know, there are a lot of really good ideas behind this. It just seems kind of early days. And those of us who've tried it, at least David and I report back that it maybe isn't all it's cracked up to be just yet.

So we do have one final sponsor. And I want to talk to you a little bit about CES, Jason. Yes. Because that is happening. It is happening right now. That is like a true plethora of tech news happening right now. A plethora. A plethora of tech news happening right now in Las Vegas.

Right now. And we're not there. So let's try and work out why that is. Mike, I'm reporting to you live from Las Vegas at CES. Go ahead with the next sponsor. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Igloo, the intranet you'll actually like. Igloo's intranet works on any mobile device,

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up to 10 people for absolutely free and you'll also be showing your support for this show. Thank you so much to Igloo for being a great supporter of Upgrade and RelayFM. So, Mr. Snell. Mr. Hurley. Why are you in California

right now? Shouldn't you be in Nevada? Like, what's going on? You are a tech journalist, and there is all this tech there. Why aren't you there? I understand you've been before, so you know how to deal with CES. I was forced to be there before. Right, so this is the thing right now.

I'm jumping ahead of myself. Every person I see online that writes in technology seems to say that you should never go to ces it's the worst thing everyone hates it but everybody goes i don't understand that can you explain that for me well i i feel like it's got it's gotten overdone at this point um you know ces you know it's not my favorite trade show to cover. I think by a long shot, I would prefer not to go ever. But I mean, that's for me just personally. I don't particularly like Las Vegas and I like it even less when it's at 100% capacity, which is what it is for CES.

It's a complete zoo. And the show floor is giant, so it's kind of unmanageable. floor is giant, so it's kind of unmanageable. You know, if you've got a big team and also my, you know, I would go the first times I went to CES, it was like me or me and one other person. And we would go looking for a few, a few things. And the scale was overwhelming, but we were just looking for a few things related to Apple stuff because it was there for Macworld. And, you know, that was manageable, although totally insane. Just as somebody who had come up with Macworld Expo as the trade show that I always went to, CES was like 10 Macworld Expos happening simultaneously. It's just huge.

And now, if you're part of a big team, it's actually decent because you get your beat and you're told, you know, go look at the TVs. And you don't have to worry about, because literally it's so big you can't cover it as a single person. You have to, you have to pick like what thing you want to look for. You know, it's, it's fine. I, I, I in the end went because I was not just the Mac world guy. I was the PC world tech hive Mac world guy, the IDG consumer guy. And as the head of editorial for IDGs consumer group, you could really not get away with not going to CES, even though my idea of fun was not going in like a hotel suite and getting a demo from the makers of a PC laptop, which I did. And that was not interesting. But I don't know. It's a weird show. I'm not sure why trade shows exist at all. It primarily exists as a way for manufacturers to push their wares on the retail channel and get the retail channel to pick new tech. That's the primary purpose of it. And then around the edges, what it's become is a launching pad for new technology, the PR stuff. But the problem there is that, one, Apple proved that you can have big events. If you're a big tech company, you can have big

events on your own, which means the big tech companies don't need to go to CES and use the spectacle of CES when there are 10,000 products being announced to announce their products. Amazon can just have an event. Samsung can just have an event and announce their product. And Apple taught them that. So that means that some of that stuff just isn't there. Microsoft pulled out a few years ago quite famously, didn't they? They can have their own events now. And if you're not an A-list vendor, I would say there's almost no dumber place. Like I always said this about Macworld Expo, there's no worse time to announce your product than on day one of Macworld Expo because you are now competing with 300 products for publicity. And it's like, that's not good. I mean, I appreciate that there are some journalists at the event and you can meet with them there, but you're also battling with everybody else in the world. So I'd say that is part of it.

You know, it's just less than it needs to be. Mobile World Congress as a trade show, which is in Barcelona every year, has become the go-to place for announcing phones. So that stuff, which is the hottest category, essentially, in consumer electronics, that stuff is not really at CES anymore. So it's fine. There are always interesting announcements that come out of CES. Personally, and I hate to be this stereotypical CES tech journalist kind of person, but I always hated going to CES.

I'm happy to not be there. And, you know, it's also not cheap. You've got to get to CES and pay for a hotel CES week in Vegas. And as a solo person who writes mostly about Apple stuff, I don't see how there would be any benefit for me to go anyway. the terribleness that, I mean, I think it's terrible, but that's personal. I think there's always stuff of value to be found in CES, including bizarre things that you don't expect. And there are always some interesting announcements. And then there are lots of crazy things that get announced that never, ever, ever, ever ship. And that's always great to look back at the stuff from the previous CES that still haven't made it. Yeah. So, you know, it's just a weird observation, you know, to see like everybody seems to hate it but every year people go and it's like what as somebody who's never been i've never had the

experience i i'm kind of don't understand like i i would like to go one day just to have that experience because it seems insane right so it's you know I'm not going because I really want to find out the most about what's happening in toothbrush tech. But I think it looks exciting in its own way and interesting and kind of weird. And so it feels like an experience, like a thrill ride. Yeah, I don't think it's that thrilling. I get that from the outside.

In reality, you know, it's a trade show. Sure. You find your way to the convention center through terrible traffic in a cab or you're somewhere on the monorail and you take the monorail. You know, you get there. It's packed wall to wall with people. You're moving very slowly through these trade show halls that are loud. You might have a briefing somewhere that you have to go to, and then you sit in a little room and get a little press briefing for PR. Your feet start to hurt. like that. And then you go back to your hotel room and you write for a while and maybe you get some, maybe you go out to dinner with your colleagues and that's really nice. Or maybe you, you get some food, you know, in room service because you're too busy writing and you're

writing until two in the morning and then you wake up the next morning and you start it again. It's a trade show. It's work. I mean, that's, that's, I don't think there's a lot of glamour to it unless you're going, I was talking to somebody who is, who's being there this year as a PR person. And they said that it's actually great because they get to just kind of be at CES rather than what they did in the past as a journalist, which was cover CES. And I think it's a nicer thing to just kind of like be in the spectacle. But when you're working, you know, it's work. And you're working out of your comfort zone in a really crazy environment. And some people really love it. And it shows, and those really crazy environment. And some people really love it.

And it shows. And those people are great. And then other people hate it. I think, yeah, it is what it is. And I hate it. But I'm not saying that everybody should. Obviously, we're early in, right? Today's like the official first day.

Yeah, although in some ways, we're getting toward the end because depending on how you count the big announcements at CES often come in the first, you know, before the show and like the first couple of days of the show and the end of the, the end of the week, there's kind of nothing going on. So we're right, I guess we're right at the height of it now. And then it'll start tailing off. Is there anything that's interesting you? Are there any trends? Is there anything that's like something that you you care about in any way

you know i'm looking at i'm interested to see what the latest tv things are because the tv industry has been trying to do crazy tv things for a while now because they sold you know everybody bought a new tv in the hdtv upgrade cycle everybody bought a new tv that was great for tv makers literally you know almost almost every single person was like oh i have a reason to bought a new TV. That was great for TV makers. Literally, you know, almost every single person was like, oh, I have a reason to buy a new TV because it's a flat screen and it's high definition and that's great. And then for the last few years, they've been desperately trying to find another feature that will make everybody throw out their old set that's not that old and buy a new set. So it was 3D and that didn't really take off and they're trying 4K.

But there hasn't been a lot of content. It sounds like I saw somebody saying that there's a, Panasonic is showing a 4K Blu-ray player. So there's a possibility that we will finally see content for 4K coming in. That makes 4K TVs at least a little bit easier or more interesting, an easier sell than they are currently. They did curved screens, which seems like a bad idea to me. There's OLED, which is supposed to eventually have picture quality that can rival plasma, which they don't make anymore. So I think it's I'm always interested by what the TV tech is going to be and stuff around television, because this is this is a.S., has set up this thing called Sling TV, which is, I don't know if it's the first, but it's one of the first internet over-the-top TV services.

So basically, if you've got an internet connection and you pay them $20, you get a bunch of TV channels that are streamable, and you don't have to subscribe to TV. That's your TV subscription. that are streamable and you don't have to like subscribe to TV. That's your TV subscription. You pay 20 bucks and you get, um, you know, TNT, TBS,

CNN, food network, HGTV, cartoon network, adult swim, Disney channel, ESPN and ESPN too for $20 a month. Um,

that's interesting. Whether that will go anywhere, whether that will actually ship what, what the quality of the service will be all remains to be seen, but that's interesting news. Cause that could be the be the beginning of a flood of those kinds of services, or it could be this kind of quirky thing that we're like, oh, we thought that was a big deal, but it really wasn't. But that's the stuff that's worth interesting or that's interesting enough to be worth looking at. Then there's other stuff that's just like, why? Why is that there?

Like there's Sony is going to do a Walkman, I guess. And I was on Twit yesterday, and we were talking about that. And it's like, I don't even know why they're bothering. But, you know, so there's some stuff like that. And then there's the stuff that gets announced that never airs or never ships, airs. I'm still on tv tv for me tv and and dvrs and and over the top video services and stuff like that are are um some of my favorite things at ces because like i said those tend to be the that tends to be the best place to show those off sure yeah it's there seems to be like television

technology is kind of what ces is getting big for now because as you say like phones aren't a ces thing anymore right no one's still computers and and gadgets yeah but the big computer makers kind of aren't necessarily there i mean there are still some phones like lg has got their i think their g flex 2 um is is at ces but sure i guess it's like if they're ready at this time of year they'll put it at CES. Otherwise, it's going to wait for Mobile World Congress because that's where the... Most of them, yeah.

And if they do announce a phone at CES, that probably means that they have something else for Mobile World Congress, and so they don't need that phone there, so they'll announce it now instead. Yeah. Yeah, and there'll be other stuff there. I mean, your favorite topic in the Internet of Things, there are always, you know, different Internet connected devices, crazy and not crazy that you'll see there. And my favorite thing was always just to walk around. Some of the floors are entirely like little tiny companies from China you've never heard of that have products that are occasionally really cool and occasionally completely baffling about why that would be a thing that anyone would sell.

And I suspect what happens is that nobody offers to sell it and so they don't make it. But I was always fascinated by that stuff because there's just super weird, super weird stuff. And trends, sometimes it's trend spotting. You're just walking around sort of wondering about, like last year I think it was, there were like 100 different variations of e-cigarette technology at

the show. And I'm like rolling my eyes. And at the same time I'm like, well, obviously they think there's money to be made here that all these companies are coming out with this stuff. And then I, you know, I walked away, I was not interested in that, but it was an interesting kind of trend. And you see, you see that, you know, year to year where there's some, something where, you know, one year it's a, what And you see that, you know, year to year where there's something where, you know, one year it's a, what if we did this,

you know, a couple of companies. And then the next year, there are 20 or 30 companies that are all trying to do their own take on that. And I think that's just sort of the nature of it. That's how technology rolls sometimes is somebody has an original idea and then everybody else rushes to copy it.

And then a lot of those are terrible and fall by the wayside and then then it's uh then it becomes more popular so kind of the last thing that that i think could be interesting this week uh are we expecting any apple announcements do you think of any kind or any news because they tend to do this during ces week right they they They throw something out there to get a bit of attention back. I don't know. They do seem to do that sometimes to tweak the people at CES. I don't think it's a good time to announce anything because people are – the journalists are at CES. Unless they've got something big that's tried to steal thunder from CES. I think they might, you know, they might drop

a press release or something on Tuesday or Wednesday of CES week just to keep people talking about them. But I don't think they need to. I mean, it's just not their, it's not their thing. I feel like it's, the world has evolved to the point where Apple not being at CES is just sort of a given and everybody's talking about Apple and all the smartwatch announcements will be in relation, you know, juxtaposed with the Apple Watch announcement. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see if they do something. But if they do, I don't think it will be anything particularly huge because I think there are better weeks to do it than the first week of January when so many people are at CES. Because again, even if you're Apple, you Apple, you're going to be part of the noise of CES rather than

waiting a week and being on your own. So I think that that just about wraps up this week's episode. Have you got anything more that you would... Have you got any more burning issues, Mr. Snell, that you would like to address? We had a bunch of issues in our little notes

document that are just going to have to wait, which is, I think, just fine because this has been a good show, but it's been a long show. And that was not my goal going in. I was hoping that we would be tight and bright, as they say, and then out the door. But, you know, the Apple quality thing just sort of happened at the last minute, and I felt like we needed to talk about it. So we'll come back to, you know, I want to talk about some smart home stuff. I want to talk about

you know, why we criticize stuff and what people can take from it. You know, there's a bunch of stuff I got in my list. I still want to talk about Twitter that I've had on my list since episode one. But I think that's enough for today. If you'd like to find the show notes

for this week, of which there are many, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 17. Thanks again to our sponsors this week, the great people over at Hover, MailRoute, Stamps.com, and Igloo. Thank you to them for supporting us. We would appreciate it if you went and checked out their services, as it also helps support the show. If you would like to find us on the internet,

you can find Jason at sixcolors.com. You can spell it any way you like. And well, I mean, not any way. You kind of have to, in one of the generally agreed right ways. S-I-X and then how you spell colors in your language. Yeah. Of English, your English.

There are some parameters, but there are multiple options. I keep hearing you mention on shows that you want to do the British English version. Yes, yes. I can't tell you how much I would love that, by the way. Oh, we'll see. I don't think this is something that I've mentioned to you,

but I wanted to say it to you, so I'm going to say it here. All right, why not? I loved, loved your episode of the talk show. Oh, thanks. Listening to you and John talk about all that media history stuff Why not? I loved, loved your episode of the talk show. Oh, thanks. Listening to you and John talk about all that media history stuff was just super interesting because I didn't really have a lot of that experience. I wasn't really following this stuff at that point in my life.

And to hear about all those things, and just all the magazine stuff and how important magazines were i found it fascinating as somebody who didn't actually get to see it in the first instance thanks that was that was fun to talk about that you know it is always makes makes you uh aware of your age when somebody asked to tell you know tell me about ancient history and it's like oh yeah i was there for that ancient history but it's always a pleasure to talk to to gruber um that show what i love about it is that it is just a conversation and it just kind of goes on and occasionally there's a sponsor break but it's just a conversation and there there's no like the pauses and the the like slow pace is part of what the talk show is. So I feel like I just kind of drop all of my things that I have in the back of my head to be like, you got to step it up.

Let's move on. Let's move on to the next thing. It's like John's not worried about it. And I'm the guest on his show, so I don't have to worry about it. And yeah, you end up with a really long podcast, but a good conversation. I enjoy having those conversations with John. So, you know hopefully i'll be back we can't really say too much about long podcasts at the moment we're we're we're in

a two-hour trend no but this is packed packed yeah chock full of great stuff if you want to find us on twitter uh you can find jason he is at j snell j-L-L. If you enjoy the show, we don't ask for this very often. Leave us a review on iTunes. We would appreciate that very much. And we'll be back next time. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye. Bye.