Upgrade - 170: The Rat King of Cables

Episode Date: December 4, 2017

All the Apple operating-system bugs in the world can’t stop us from discussing Jason’s office clean-out, holiday decorations, the new Kindle Oasis, and podcasting tools and techniques. And yes, in the end we have to discuss Apple’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 170 today's show is brought to you by balance open away and encapsulate my name is mike hurley i am joined by jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley how are you i'm very well mr j. Jason Snell. How are you? Well, it's a kind of a complicated story, but... Jason, nobody cares about it. If it's complicated, no one cares, especially because it's time for Hashtag Snell Talk. This week's Snell Talk question comes from Matthias, and Matthias asks, What Apple Watch watch face do you use?

Utility. I use? Utility. I still use Utility. Which one is the Utility face? Can you describe it? Utility is the one that looks like my old analog watch. It's got numbers and hands on it. Does it have four complication spaces? It's got top left, top right, full bottom, and it's got the little tiny room for the date and the day inside the circle.

And it is actually, I had two Swiss Army brand watches that I wore before I got the Pebble, before I got this. I found the Pebble the other day. More on that in a bit. I found the Pebble the other day. More on that in a bit. And anyway, I like it because it lets me drop those complications on there, and it reminds me of my old watch face, and that's pretty good. I also have the Explorer face active, and that's the one that comes with the cellular watch.

That's the one that has dots on it to tell you when you're on the cellular network. And I will sometimes, when I remember, I'll swipe to that and that's got like a phone button and activity button. And it's sort of a, I'm roaming around face. So sometimes I will swipe to that when I'm out and about and thinking about it. I have to say, I am disappointed in the evolution of watch faces. I was very excited with the initial batch of watch faces and I thought, well, we'll see where they go from here. Whether they're third-party faces or not, we'll see where Apple takes this and different variations and more flexibility and all those things. And that's basically not happened, which is really super disappointing.

They have added some animated faces that I'm never going to use. I'm sorry, Buzz Lightyear, never going to do that. Never going to use. I'm sorry, Buzz Lightyear. Never going to do that. Never going to use a Mickey Mouse watch, which was there at the beginning, Minnie Mouse, whatever. Those are fine, and I don't dispute them, but I'm a little frustrated that there isn't more flexibility and ability to move things around and add different complications and stuff on the other watch faces

or variations on those faces. Don't forget kaleidoscope. The fact that Explorer exists kills me because Explorer looks essentially the same as Utility. It's slightly different. It's not as attractive, but it's close. It's in the ballpark. And so Explorer has the little cellular dots in the background. But utility doesn't. Why is that? Why can't? Why? I don't know. It's really disappointing.

But anyway, for the most part, I am just using utility. I used a Siri watch face. Oh, really? Yep. I can't do that. It doesn't provide anything valuable for me. It does for me. I like it.

I wish it. I like it a lot. I wish it could do more, and I hope that it will, and I believe that it will. I also wish I had space for one more complication. If I had space for one more complication, this would be the perfect watch face for me. I like it. It gives me information about stuff that's going on, and it also does a good job of, like, it shows me some little photo memories every day.

I actually really like the Siri watch face. I've been a big fan of it. I tried it out because I just wanted to see and it never changed. And I like it a lot. I like that. I like having the hands. Something that I've always liked on. I have always liked analog hands on digital watches. I think that's a hilarious idea and i think it's i think

it's cool and fun and uh i don't know why but i always have i had a casio digital watch at one point that had little lcd hands that would move or move light up as they went around uh and i thought that was pretty cool so uh i i gravitate toward those. But the Siri face, just the data, I feel like it's not geared for somebody who with the data set that I've got apparently. And I keep seeing like calendar items that I don't care about and all of that. So I've just sort of given it up.

Why don't you care about your calendar items? Because the calendar items tend to be things. Okay, this is a little sidebar. I have all day events on my calendar sometimes. And boy, things are really bad at interpreting those. Amazon is the worst. My Echo Show in the kitchen just keeps saying, oh, here's this event at 12 a.m.

that's still going on and going on all day. And it's like, no, it's an all day event. It's a banner in the calendar app just let it be and the similar i i find similar things with a siri watch face where it's like i don't care about because i'm not rushing from place to place i don't need my watch to remind me oh you've got a thing at three and then another thing at four that that i rarely have things like that and so it's instead it picks up this thing and like i'm looking at my watch all day telling me you have a podcast at 7 30 p.m i don't care that i have a podcast at 7 30 p.m tell me it's 7 30 um and it just doesn't work for me i i get why i am not the use case for it i guess

is what i'm saying but i don't i don't find value in the stuff that it shows me there and it therefore it's just clutter it feels feels like it's not the same as something like with an ad banner at the bottom, like an app with an ad banner at the bottom, but it gives the same effect to me, which is there's junk on it that I don't care about, that it's trying to push at me, and I don't want to see it,

and that's why I don't use the Siri face. Okay. I mean, I understand, but for me, I have a computer on my wrist. I want it to be the most computery that it can be, and I feel like the Siri watch face is the most computery that it can be. They should make like a command line watch face. Yeah.

It just keeps on doing a readout of the current time. And there's a little prompt and you can, yeah. That would be super computery. Pound, pound, hash sign. Thank you so much to Matthias for submitting a question. If you would like to ask a question to open the show, just send in a tweet with the hashtag Snelltalk, and it will go into a document for me to pick out at a later date.

Some follow-up items. The Upgrade is Voting is still open. It is open until the 14th of December. We have had hundreds of submissions so far. I'm very surprised at the sheer amount of submissions that we've had. And I found a relatively rudimentary, but way that I'm happy with method of calculating the responses, because obviously this is an all-text entry voting system,

which makes it a little bit more tricky, actually exponentially more tricky when it comes to tallying up the votes but i've been doing some uh some spreadsheet work jason and i think i have an option so i'll be able to collate some of these answers for us to give us rough estimations of the most popular items um so that's going to be very useful for us when it comes to the upgradies i've also been starting to write down my personal nominations Jason I'm pulling in my list for the Upgradies now Upgradies Fever is we're actually in the Upgradies season

now this is a new thing all of December is the Upgradies season we are deep within it culminating on the 1st of January with the release of the episode exactly so if you would like to take part in the Upgradies the voting form will be in the show notes please go complete it you don't have to fill in every Upgradees, the voting form will be in the show notes.

Please go complete it. You don't have to fill in every category. Most people haven't, and that's great. Just fill in the things that you like, and it will help us when it comes to awarding our awards later on. Well, actually, at the beginning of next year. So I'm very excited about that um there is a holiday tradition that has been accidentally created um but now exists as a real thing like so many traditions are uh where i record a standalone uh mike at the movies episode with tiffany armand and this year we

discussed empire records um which was one of tiff's favorite movies i think i'm gonna pick the next one, we decided. So you can go listen to that. This is just yet another reason to subscribe to The Incomparable's Mike at the Movies feed, which is at theincomparable.com slash Mike, because not only do you get standalone cutouts of every single Mike at the Movies segment,

which includes everything on upgrade and and Analog, but also the occasional standalone episode. This is one of them, so if you want to hear me and Tiff talk about Empire Records, you can do that. You're coming up to the end of Firefly now. We're actually, as we're recording this episode, tomorrow, me and

Casey will be talking about Serenity, the movie, and then we're done. We have plans for something else, but I don't know if we're going to need your help on that. But that's what you'll see. Everyone will see. We have plans, but it's not media. It's not popular media is what we're going to do afterwards. We have a little plan.

All right, that's nice. So I think it was last year there was a runner-up upgradey or like an upgradey runner-up was a mac app by marco arment called forecast and the only reason that we didn't give forecast the upgradey for new mac app last year was because it wasn't available to the public of course i felt like it wasn't fair, even though it was mine and your favorite new Mac app. Yeah. We couldn't really give an award to something that nobody could use.

Nobody could get, yeah. And I think we made the right decision because almost a year later, this app has finally made it out to the public. And Forecast is a podcast MP3 encoder with the ability to add in chapters and metadata if you are a podcast producer i thoroughly recommend using forecast maybe more than anything else how fast it encodes mp3 files and why is that jason oh boy it's because marco marco armand doesn't like um software that doesn't use all the cores

of your computer that's basically it and i understand why if you if you have one of these like i stat menus or something like that where you can see how your computer cores are being used you'll find that so many things that you do that are processor intensive are single threaded, which means they're just running on one core. And so, yeah, they can run on the core that is the sleepiest and everything else can be running on the other core and it gives you some boost in performance. So you've got, you have two things going at once that can do that. But if you're doing something that takes like, it's going to take five minutes to do this thing or six minutes to do this thing. And you sit there for six minutes and you've got four cores. Your, your mind says I could do this in a quarter of the time if it

used all four cores. So why am I wasting my time? And then, you know, you multiply that over all the time you do this thing. And you're like, I'm sitting here waiting for this thing to conclude for like five hours a year, 10 hours year that's stupid marco is a software developer so he can do something about it which is parallelize um stuff and so he took the lame mp3 encoder and built a system that basically dispatches sections of of your podcast audio to different iterations of LAME running on different cores of your Mac's processor. And as a result, it encodes much faster. That's not a feature of the base encoder. It runs in a single. So Marco did the work to parallelize it basically. And then on top of that, the funniest trick of all, which I think comes from the fact that Marco thinks about a lot of this stuff from a kind of like behind the scenes, almost command line kind of perspective, is when he wrote this Mac app, which is his first Mac app, basically.

The, you know, on a standard app, you do all the work and then you'd press the button and watch as it encoded. And that's not what happens on forecast when you drag your file in to the forecast window it just starts encoding it in the background while you're doing all the work of filling in the tags and all of that and so generally by the time you're done doing all the metadata um your encode time is zero because it already did it it did it in the background even if it's like a two hour long file um it's it's chopped it up send it to all the cores and gotten it back and now all you do is press save and tell it where to save it and it's done my favorite thing about forecast is the auto filling that it

does as a person who produces multiple shows the fact that forecast if you use a relatively similar file like a naming structure for your files which i think most people tend to do so like for example when i when i uh export the wave file from logic that has all the chapters in because that's how you one of the ways you can do it one of the great things i love you add all of the chapters into the logic project is what logic calls as markers so you add them into the actual file in Logic. You export as a WAV file and it carries that data through. Then when I open the application when I open Forecast

and put the upgrade file in all the chapters are pre-filled. But because I will call this one Upgrade 170, it knows it's upgrade. So it pre-fills the title, it pre-fills the episode number, it adds the upgrade artwork in and then any previously used chapter name like hashtag snell talk and hashtag ask

upgrade it pre-fills those with the artwork there too and if i used links then it would do that like if i put in a link for ask upgrade it would also put the link in that i want yep so that's what i love because i'm able to add more rich data with less time because my biggest problem when it went when we were originally talking about uh adding chapters into shows was the amount of extra time it's going to take for me to do all of this stuff and then when me and marco were talking about forecasts and i tried it out i was like ah i can do this it still takes me more time but it doesn't take me as much time as the previously available tools so that's well because you're building your chapters while you're doing your edit which means it's right there as opposed to the other way which

is you have to write down time code and then if something changes you have to change the time code or if you go to the end and then when you're exporting the file that you have to go back through and find where your markers were and then input the code. And now with this approach, you just, you know, you're like, oh, this is a new segment. You press the plus button, a new marker drops into logic and you give it a name and the name is even picked up by, by a forecast. So yeah, it's all very clever. It also remembers what I have. Some of my podcasts are in different formats. Some of them are mono, 64k BPS, and some of them are stereo 96. And it auto-fills that too.

It knows what podcast it is and what settings you use for it. So that you don't have that situation where it's like, oh, it's set on 96, but I want this one to be 64. It knows that too, which is pretty cool. So yeah, it's a niche product. which is pretty cool. So yeah, it's I mean, it's a niche product. But if you're somebody who doesn't just listen to podcasts like this, but also sometimes makes them, you should check it out because it's free. And it's really good. It's got some issues in the UI. Marco built this tool for himself, and and then eventually for his friends. And you know, UI polish in areas where it's not necessary um didn't get

prioritized because it worked fine so you know it may not look like some some super fancy tool but it is is incredibly functional so it doesn't need to look super fancy no but i love it it's fantastic it's really great talking about really great apps that I love very much. I've spoken about Carrot Weather almost incessantly on this show. So now every time there is a Carrot Weather update, I feel like I have to talk about it again. And there's always good reason. So the Carrot Weather Watch app just got revamped.

Not only is the Carrot Weather app one of my favorite iOS apps, the Carrot Weather Watch app I think is the best watch app. It's the most functional, and it's always worked really, really excellently, and continues to get a lot of love from the Carrot folk, and I think it's fantastic. So the Watch app just got completely revamped. It's really customizable. It almost has, it's like taken from the design conventions of the Apple watch. Like you can add little elements in that look like complications inside of the app and you can tap on them and they take you to different elements. Like you can tap on like a complication and it will show you some additional weather information, depending on what

you've tapped on. It loads incredibly fast. It's still independent from the iPhone. It can talk now. It's like one of the things that a lot of people love about Carrot Weather is it has the personality, but the personality on the iPhone app could speak to you if you wanted it to. I turned that off because I don't need it to speak to me, but I do leave the jokes in because I do find them

funny. But now on, I believe it's on WatchOS 4 with the third generation Apple Watch, or Series 3 I should say, it does spoken forecasts so when you open it, it can speak to you and it will have as much character as you decide on the phone

so it can either do the jokes or not the jokes and just speak to you or whatever, and I don't have an ultra premium membership because I don't need the features that it gives you but if you have, because there's different tiers of subscription that you can pay if you have the ultra premium which is the top level which i think you need for weather underground you can get radar on your watch which is wild so just tons of incredible new features i absolutely love this app if you like

weather or you want to know about weather i I recommend Carrot Weather. It's so great. It's good. It's good, and the watch app is really good. That is now my... That's my complication, my weather complication on my watch face. Me too. Speaking of that watch face, it's Carrot Weather. You can also customize that.

You can choose what you want. It does a great job of... Well, I like feels like temperature. Like, that's what I want to know. And it does a great job of allowing you to prioritize feels like temperature everywhere. So's what I want to know. And it does a great job of allowing you to prioritize feels like temperature everywhere. So my complication on my watch, it has a little icon for the type of weather

and then the feels like temperature. So yeah, I absolutely love this app and recommend that you try it out if you haven't already. And the watch app is really great. All right, today's show is brought to you in part by Away. Away are a team of thinkers, seekers, and designers,

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and you'll get $20 off any of their suitcases. That is awaytravel.com slash upgradepodcast and the code upgradepodcast for $20 off. Thank you so much to Away for their support of this show and relay fm a holiday travel out there mike a lot of people are going to be traveling for the holidays yeah it's getting cold out there i don't know why that just popped into my head but there we go groundhog day but sure that that works um do you do you do any uh holiday we just we just put together it'll be next weekend's show. We did a, we did a holiday traditions episode of the incomparable, which was a lot of fun.

Um, where we just talked about, I mean, literally that was just, it was like stuff we do for the holidays. Do you have any, are you preparing? Do you decorate anything like in your house? Do you have little things that you put up? What do you do? This is our first year where we're spending a significant amount of time over the holiday season in this house so we've we've owned this house for a year but last year we we spent like four days in december because we were traveling

around so we are now buying decorations so we over the next couple of days we have like christmas tree and all that sort of stuff coming up i'm very excited because I'm going to be able to hook up to a Wemo which I've basically never used so I'll be able to ask my various canisters to turn the lights on and off for the Christmas tree. I'm excited about that. That is something which is bringing me

lots of joy. But all of my regular holiday traditions are going out the window this year as I'm going to be spending my first Christmas away from my family as I join Idina's family in Romania. Ah, interesting. So this is like a whole new one for me. So I have no traditions that I'm observing this year whilst also building some new ones. So that's good for us.

Are you going to do like a a uh a london christmas kind of like yes so next weekend um all of my family are getting together um because basically this year more than any other year the family's completely splintered into all different places um like people go into other family homes etc etc and like other partners homes and we have one one group of the family who's going abroad for christmas this year and so we're getting together kind of next weekend to do like the big christmas dinner you know we're all gonna have together yeah that's good okay that's good i um we have what do we have we have gotten a tree yet although we are going to, we're not going anywhere.

So we actually have delayed getting our tree a little bit because we know that needs to last back when, uh, we would visit, especially if we like drive to Phoenix and see my mom for Christmas. Um, we would get a tree really early because basically we would be leaving before Christmas and putting the tree out. Like, so it didn't need to last very long, we we wanted to last this year so we're kind of like waiting a little bit um and then you know the kids decorate it and that's all that's all pretty good my street however is totally obsessed they have put up uh the oak tree next to my window

here in fact now has lights all over it which is weird um but like the people are kind of aggressively like adding lights to trees in the neighborhood. Is our tree next? I don't know. It's a little bit scary. Well, it's like, no, no, it's more like, it's more like, hey, we're going to put lights in your tree, but it's not your tree. I don't care.

It's on my street. We're going to put lights in it now. Right. Okay. Okay. So it's like they're light bombing, you know, they're just like throwing lights into everything. Yeah. It's a

it's a little bit out of hand but uh but i do have uh my my tech angle here is the same thing which is i've i've got a uh i've got a home kit uh smart switch that's attached to our christmas lights outside so now those are those are on a schedule with the regular outside lights. And then on the inside, I've got another one of those switches for the Christmas tree lights when we get those so that I can also tell various people inside canisters or phones to turn on the holiday lights, which is fun.

And I'm looking forward to that. And yeah, I thought the next step obviously is to get some of those lights where you can actually control what they do from an app. But I haven't gotten there yet. That's a little too far for me. But other people, I think, are already there. Yeah, I have considered maybe, you know, those, like, Huda, those little strips, the light

strips. Oh, I've got some of those. I just got some of those. I'm not sure what I'm going to deploy. You can turn them red and green and put them in places. Yeah, I know. Well, I used to have smart bulbs outside, and they were red and green, and now I don't. Now I have regular bulbs out there.

So I thought about that, about whether I should maybe go get some colored light bulbs for the month of December, or whether I... I'm not that far ahead. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about that yet because it's not the plain white bulbs are not particularly festive and I'm feeling like some serious there is an arms race going on outside

my house, Mike, and I don't really want to participate in it. At the same time, I also don't want to be like the lemon on the block. So, I don't know. We'll see. Which is ironic because our house is yellow. So we are the lemon. You already are the lemon on the block so i don't know we'll see which is ironic because our house is yellow um so we are the lemon you already are the lemon there's nothing you can do yeah i know but i don't want to yeah exactly so there is a there is a specific topic today that me and you are kind of avoiding like we're going to talk about it but like we're not super enthused about

it so we've got like a million other little things that we want to talk about today before we get to that one big topic. One of those things was holiday traditions. The next one is the Kindle Oasis 2. So, Jason, I assume you have yours by now. We spoke about this weeks ago. I do. Scott McNulty is not here to join us, unfortunately. Nor is Stephen Hackett, who has one of these, too.

I do have it it's uh it's pretty good i like it um the screen is bigger i guess that's nicer i'm just in one of these positions now where since i often will buy like every kindle just because i want to write about it but i haven't written about this one yet because i'm still not entirely sure how i feel about it. I think it's good. It's waterproof, which I am very rarely in a position where I need a waterproof Kindle, but that's nice. Read a book in the shower. Yeah. It's like the old Kindle Oasis in shape, but the old Kindle Oasis came with a battery case that you would attach and it was small and thin. And this one doesn't have any case, but it's still got that kind of wedge shape where you've got a kind of grippy part and then a thinner part it's about um you know it weighs what most you know most kindles weigh it's not super light and

thin like the like the first oasis was um the screen is bigger which is nice it's more it's the high-end kindle so it's it's much more expensive than the Paperwhite. And my feeling is most people should buy the Paperwhite. I think the Paperwhite is great. That's the Kindle to buy. The Oasis 2 is nice. Nicer than the Paperwhite in a few ways, but they're different ways than the first Oasis. And that's what's got me kind of perplexed here is that i i i was expecting to react to this one and either say oh it's clearly better or oh it's not better than the oasis one and instead it's sort of like it's kind of better in some ways and not better than others and samey in others so i i'm you know it's a nice high-end kindle if you're somebody who uses a kindle all the time

and you've got a little extra money to spend it's it's a it's it the screen is know, it's a nice high-end Kindle. If you're somebody who uses a Kindle all the time and you've got a little extra money to spend, it's, it's a, it's, it, the screen is nice and it's big. It is waterproof. The back is aluminum back, which is actually very nice. I think it's, it's the, it certainly feels like the best materials ever used in a Kindle, if that makes any sense. And that it's not like a plasticky Kindle. It's a little bit nicer. But in the end, unless you're a Kindle maniac, like maybe I am,

the best buy is a Paperwhite. Paperwhite's an excellent, excellent device. And this is my disclaimer part, which is to say, why would you... My mom had this question for me, which is, why would you use a Kindle when you have an iPad? And my answer is, generally, I like that the Kindle is a dedicated reading device. When I'm holding the Kindle, all I'm going to do is read a book. I'm not going to get distracted by notifications on my iPad or anything like that. And then I also like the screen. I like that it's that e-ink screen that feels like I'm looking at print and not at a backlit device screen like all the other devices that I use. And I like that about it. And you can, you know, you can get a Kindle paperwhite for, I don't know, is it 99, 79? It's not, it's, it's cheap, um, relatively speaking, and they last forever and the battery lasts forever, by the way. So, um, it has a lot

going for it. If you're somebody who is, uh, somebody who reads a lot of books, basically, I prefer, I, I, I try very hard never to read a book on my iOS devices. And so every now and then I talk about stuff in the Kindle store on Twitter, and somebody reminds me, oh, it's also on the iBook store. And I'm like, oh, right, the iBook store, because I just don't buy books on iBooks because I don't want to read on my iPhone or my iPad. And if you do, that's fine. I mean, for a lot of of people it doesn't make sense

to have a separate device but i really like having that as a as a separate device uh the kindle paperweight is 119 dollars and then there's a real well no that's which is 79 now i don't think that's i think i think that may be with the special offers turned off which you probably should do um but they if not then they they put it on sale all the time. That's the, Oh no, it's one 19 with special offers. Dang.

Well, wait for it to go on sale then I say, or by the, by the certified refurbished one for 99. Then that's too high. That's a, they, they often are going on sale. I would not get the cheap Kindle.

There is a cheap Kindle. And that I don't recommend which, Oh, and now that's up to 80. They must've been putting them on sale when I looked a couple of weeks ago when it was like Black Friday and all of that. And now they're back up. I predict they'll come back down. I predict there'll be another sale at some point. And that's what you should look for if you're buying them because Amazon does put those on sale. And you don't want to spend 119 when you can spend 99 for for a kindle paperwhite but like the oasis starts at 249 it's it's a lot more and it doesn't really provide 150 more yeah i don't think so yeah uh it seems like there's like a lot of choice now and in a way that the movie hasn't been before

and they still sell the kindle voyage they must have made a lot of those because i don't know where that product exists like i don't it's not i mean if i have if i struggle to find a difference between the oasis and the paperwhite the voyage in between for 199 is it's like it's very vaguely better than the paperwhite but not really and it's not even that different it's like, it's very vaguely better than the paperwhite, but not really. And it's not even that different. It's got like, you can squeeze the sides to change the page, which is not a fun thing. I mean, that's the best thing about the Oasis, honestly, is that it has physical page turn buttons, which are the best. But yeah, anyway, the long story short, regardless of the price, and you should look to see if Amazon puts it on sale or if you can pick up a refurb, but if you're, if

you're looking for a new or, or to try a Kindle paperwhite is the, it's the right answer because it's so good. And it's the, you know, it's the next to lowest priced one. The lowest price one doesn't have the, the, the lighting on it. It doesn't light itself, which is a really great feature because sometimes it's dark where you are and you want to read. And turning on a light to read on an electronic device is dumb. Hey, Jason, do you want to talk about your office? I do.

I do. We got a lot of little topics, a lot of little things to talk about before we talk about the other thing um which we will talk about so we'll get there the um I do this is like kind of like follow out to free agents 35 which posted last week where David Sparks and I talked about all sorts of things going on in our lives and uh it's uh sort of the new format for that show where we're alternating between kind of like issues that have come up in the last month with an interview. And I mentioned this there. I set up my office, you know, I set up my office, what, four years ago, three and a half years ago, something like that? A long time ago when I still had a job and was commuting a lot of the time.

And it was sort of under the premise of being a home office. And then it turned into my full-time office. And I don't know if this has happened with you, with your office yet, but you make guesses about what you're going to do because you've literally never worked in the space before, right? Like when you're making your decisions about mega office, to use your term for it, that I guess I'll just, everybody're making your decisions about mega office um to use your

term for it that i guess i'll just everybody knows what it is mega office you you never worked in it you were making decisions and being like all right let's see how this goes there's a leap of faith that happens there right and i don't know if this has happened for you yet, but after being here for three years, I know more about what I need and how I work and the stuff that collects and what I use to do my job than I did when I had never done it before, which seems logical, right? So I've come to that. Are you thinking about that? Are there things going on in your office where you're like, I don't know, I don't know if this is right, or where you find that maybe decisions you made you're now questioning yes um i haven't got any solutions yet because we still got other just like house decoration stuff

sure there's like i thought that i had really good storage but there's like a bunch of things that aren't in the good storage solutions so like i clearly need more. I haven't completely nailed that down yet. Plus I have a bunch of stuff I need to get rid of, like eBay, put things on eBay and stuff like that. So in the new year, I'm going to do a bit of a clean out and then a restructuring. I'm also kind of putting it on hold a little bit because at some point within the next six months,

I'm going to be buying a gaming pc well actually i want to build a gaming pc uh so then i'm going to have to do some pretty serious office changes to accommodate a whole other computer coming into the room so yeah that's gonna i'm kind of holding off a lot of big changes for that because i have a corner desk so it could just go on the other corner of the desk right and i think it will work pretty well but then i need to work out like everything that's currently on that part of the desk where does that go and kind of like start a shuffling process down but i'm saving a lot of that until the moment when i decide to buy the pc because i think it's gonna it's gonna change a lot of um a lot of what's what goes on

in there have you talked about the gaming pc somewhere where i just haven't listened yet i've made reference to it mostly on remaster where like i've come to the decision that i'm doing it um and and there's a couple of reasons for it so one is just like i have dabbled in game streaming and have quickly come to realize that the mac is terrible for streaming no matter how you decide to do it. Yeah. It just doesn't work. I have a great little box that Elgato makes called the HD60S, because I want to stream my Nintendo Switch games, right? But there are problems with the software where I get a delay in my headphones of my own voice

if I want to do any narration, and there is absolutely no way to stop that from happening. But that's not how it works on the PC. It's fine on the PC. I want to get a good VR rig. I want to get an Oculus Rift. And so that's my only option, right? And there's games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which is one of the biggest games of this year that i haven't been able to play because it's not on playstation it's not on mac it's on pc and soon on xbox so yeah i have decided i'm gonna build i'm actually gonna build a gaming pc all right well i mean that's a fun project and i think that

there's discussion to probably be had from it on multiple of your it's going to span everything when i'm doing it because it's going to probably take up quite a lot of my life for a little bit uh so yeah yeah one of the things that i did when i put boot camp on my imac was uh one of the reasons i did it is because we were trying to figure out how to use Twitch to live stream Total Party Kill. And it's very difficult to do that on a Mac, to do all the different things you need to do. And there are lots of solutions for it on the PC. So I thought about doing it that way. And I decided not to.

And we went with sort of another approach to doing our live streams and all of that but um i i definitely got a a moment where i got to kind of peer in and even with the tools that we got to do podcasting which actually i think make it easier to do that sort of thing now um you know games on the mac are not like i just i i want to play um life is strange before the storm the prequel to life is strange and life is strange is actually on steam and works on the mac but uh the prequel has not been ported to the mac yet and uh that was one of those moments of like well i'll reboot i guess i'll reboot into windows for this one which i can do and i i just did that for one of the games that we played for the incomparable and i will probably do it again um but once you're you know i can play like general games on that uh on the imac in uh in windows but for stuff that's at the cutting edge it's not gonna be like the the harder you

push it the more it's not the right solution to use boot camp yeah i just bumped up against enough edge cases in the in this year where i've realized i just don't i just i have to do this all right if i want to continue down this road then this is a decision that i have to make and and okay and the oculus oculus riff makes a lot of sense because i was going to say you know you could also just get an xbox and you could you could also get do you have a psvr yes i have a psvr and i have an xbox but none of that solves the streaming problems yeah that's true all right okay all right well i look forward to more um more uh that was an unexpected gaming pc reveal that happened that's fascinating so i i don't have anything that exciting to reveal um

i went to ikea so congratulations to me i didn't see any monkeys in uh in uh coats there unfortunately every time i go to ikea i look for a monkey in a coat there's never a monkey in a coat um that's if we if i wonder if the guy who does the atp references uh twitter account listens to this podcast because that's a reference anyway uh i got two i got two i got it by the way good i got i got two um thanks casey good job casey um the uh i got two ikea storage things that are like these eight you know eight square shelf cube things the calx yeah? Yeah, the CalX. Yeah, my office is full of them. Oh, okay. Well, I have two CalX,

CalX-ies, Cali, Cy. I have two of them. And I also got some little baskets, little bins for some of them. I may get more of those. And because I discovered that I needed more storage, that I had sort of stuff

stuffed into my one piece of furniture I've got behind me in ways that were like inaccessible and not ideal. And then behind, literally behind the curtain, because I have a curtain, as you've seen, dividing my office, dividing my garage into two parts, my office and the sort of like storage there's a there's a giant metal like storage shelf uh storage rack and uh there's bikes parked behind it and other stuff and it's like that's the storage part and then there's the work part and and behind the curtain in my office were a couple of plastic bins overflowing and sort of on the side leaning up against the wall, overflowing with stuff. Old tech, like old music players,

and old, like there's a Slingbox or two back there, and the old Wii is back there. There's some like rock band instruments back there, and a giant ball of cables like literally every cable i own tangled together in a giant ball it's a rat king it is the rat king of cables and i untangled it this weekend that was what i did the whole week i untangled it because i now have a place to store stuff and put it in little bags and put in little baskets because one of the one of the nice things about what my family does is we try not to waste stuff so you get a you have a big plastic bin that used to feed the dog or

whatever and you rinse it out and you're like oh I can store stuff in there and it's not really appropriate but it exists already. So we might as well use it. And I've got a couple of chef's carts that we used to use in our kitchen. And so I use them and I have stuff on them now. And they're not appropriate. They've got like grills on the shelving instead of that being flat. So you try to put like a computer or a cable or something and little bits fall through and it just it's not appropriate for it but we have it so i try to use it and with the ikea stuff it's like all right i actually am going to store things that are valuable uh in a way that is appropriate um but the result of the

old way was the rat king of wires so now that they have a home that they can go in i untangled the rat king that's how i spent my sunday most of sunday was several hours was untangling cables and i have found a an amazing selection of cables mike mike do you need any spare hdmi cables i have all of them i'll'll take a couple. I mean, I'm good for that. All of them. I'm shocked. Like last time I bought HDMI cables, I'm like, why did I do that? I have like 10. I don't know.

I have long ones. I got short ones. That's the problem. I think last time I bought HDMI cables, I bought longer ones because these are all a little bit short. But I've got two ADB to USB adapters. I don't need those. For old keyboards. You can keep those ones. I have an ADB keyboard.

Oh, no, you can't have those. Those are too valuable. I have two USB to serial adapters. What else do I have? I have an HDMI to dvi video cable that's a good one and you took a real you took an overnight stay in dongle town didn't you i i went to the source i went to city hall of dongle town into the mines the dongle to mines i i i found i have a i now have a ziploc bag full of usb dock connector items i got it i got dongles in there i got cables in there i found two ipod you know or iphone uh

dock connector usb cables still wrapped you know you gotta send this to right like we have from the factory who just take this package. You just put them all in a big, little envelope and direct them straight to Memphis. Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, you never know when you're going to need a dock connector cable. I actually have had friends who are like, oh, we have this old iPod we still use attached to this thing. But our dock connector broke. And now what are we going to do?

Our dock connector cable broke. And I'm like, I got you. I'll send you one. Well, it turns out I got like seven of those, including two that have never been used. So those are in a little bag. Would you like a USB cable?

I have about a hundred of them. I have USB to mini. I have USB to micro. I have USB to A to USB B. That is the largest pile because they're in piles sort of by kind here. I have a lot of extension cords. I have a lot. I have so many power adapters. I have approximately a thousand of the little tiny cubes that you only get in the United States that are the little USB adapters for the iPhone. and i have approximately 500 of the

bigger ones like the one that you get in your box in uh in the uk that's the little bit bigger power block i have so many of those so those are in a yeah those are in a box i can imagine you would have an extraordinarily large amount of iphone and ipod and and iPad charging related items. I've got five AirPods here. I mean, earpods, not airpods. I only have the one earpods. Yeah, five earpods. I can't tell them apart.

I don't know the word for earpod because I don't use them, but I have them. I have many of them. I have five of those. Occasionally, my daughter uses those, so I just kind of hold on to those until she breaks her headphones.

I'm like, well, use these. And that's great. I don't know what else there's some i don't know if we need to do an entire inventory of your no no no no but i just want to tell you my last the last one that was really exciting is firewire i have a catalog of firewire items firewire 800 firewire 802 firewire 400 firewire 402 ilink which is the sony firewire plug that was only on like sony cameras and sony pcs um i have you know firewire thunderbolt adapters it's an amazing i i had no idea i was so invested in in firewire but i think basically every time you bought a device that had a firewire plug on it they included a cable and i had a bunch of hard drives over the years that i used as backup drives and the most most of the drives are gone long gone but the cables the cables remain you're gonna want to throw out a cable you might need a cable later

so i got lots of lots of these cables that i my computers don't even have firewire on them anymore thank goodness for the thunderbolt FireWire adapter, which is the only way I was able to check the two hard drives I did find to see what the heck was on them. So, yeah, it was quite a day, and there's still cables laying around here. Surprisingly, fewer Ethernet cables than I thought. I'm just going to say, like, you know,

I totally applaud your reduce reuse recycle attitude but you can 100 throw away the fire like it was like you can get rid of those now and that's fine they're gone no one needs them i actually have a few devices that still have them but but here's here's the next step actually in this process is, is with HDMI and the firewire, it's going to be one of these census things, which is like, all right, this isn't,

this is kind of not something I need like firewire. This is an outmoded technology. It's not coming back. But every now and then there's like, oh no, now I suddenly need this thing. So you keep one, maybe two,

if there's something slightly different about them, the other five, they need to go away because you need to get rid of those i do not need a selection of firewire cables that is not a thing that i need so uh yeah anyway it's it's a work in progress but um the oh and i threw away all of the telephone cords i had still had telephone cords like from phones that are plugged into walls oh right yeah yeah those are those are all gone and i have a bunch of like composite video cables and i'm like wow like you know old analog like you hook your vcr up to your tube tv i still have a lot of those that are no longer in existence so yeah it's uh

a lot of those that are no longer in existence. So yeah, it was exciting, but the good news is a lot of old tech is going to the computer recycling, and I guess, or Memphis, to the Stephen Hackett Library. To the Museum of Hackett. Yeah, he might need to hook some stuff up. Who knows? He always does.

My understanding is he's coming by some more rare items for his collection so uh he might need some strange cables sometime in the near future oh mike i got it i got it we could tie all these topics together i got it this is how i decorate the tree in front of my house idb is with firewire cables there you go go. They're like tinsel. Who needs it? Tinsel's for suckers. What you need

is a rat's nest of cables. Yeah, but you know what's going to happen is somebody's going to walk up to the tree and be like, you got an adapter for this? Someone's just going to

plug a hard drive into your Christmas tree. Well, they should. They should do that. I look forward to downloading their data. Jason, I want to maybe try and introduce

a new recurring segment. Not introduce a new uh recurring segment not weekly but but frequent recurring segment to the show and this is all going to be based upon the reaction to the segment which is uh podcast tips purely because i would say at this point it is fair to say that even though me and you have just spent 20 minutes talking about cables found in the back of a drawer in your office we are uh expert podcasters and a rat king in a rat king mike no drawers sorry sorry how inside of a chef's trolley or something he said i don't know jammed in there but i would say that by this point uh purely based on the amount of stuff that we produce we've done our 10 000 hours you know we are we are podcast experts so i figured that we produce. We've done our 10,000 hours. You know, we are podcast experts.

So I figured that we could maybe try and help aspiring podcasters, as I'm sure many of our audience are, into maybe spreading their wings a little bit and answering some questions because we get them from now on then. And it's purely because we had an Ask Upgrade question that came in from somebody called Finn,

and I thought we could just answer it here and maybe expand upon it a little bit. So Finn asked, can you do an explainer about how you record a podcast with hosts who are geographically separated? And again, this is something that me and Jason are experts on because every single one of the podcasts that we record are done this way. So it is actually, from a technological perspective, extremely simple. It's what happens afterwards that can make it a little bit tricky. And funnily enough, I would say for me as well, because this is the way when I started podcasting, this is the exact same methods. But I couldn't, it took me a while to work it out on my own about how to do this.

Like, for whatever reason, it didn't lock into my mind very quickly about what the logical way to do this like for whatever reason it didn't uh lock into my mind very quickly about what the logical way to do this would be so record over skype or facetime audio whatever would be your preference i mean literally you can record you can use a tool that lets you and your guest or co-host or whoever else you're talking to let you hear each other. I mean, it could literally be a telephone call if you wanted it to be. Because as we're going to explain in a moment, it actually kind of doesn't matter what that is. You want it to sound good for your own edification, but ideally no one will ever hear the contents of the actual voice over IP call. Because what you want to do is you want to have a way to record yourself locally um and there are every computer has free options available to

this which are top of the range right so on the mac you can use quick time and it's perfect it's rock solid um or on windows so you can use something like audacity, right? Like it's free, it's open source. Audacity is the most common one, yeah. Yep, and you can just go ahead and go for that, right? That will work really great for you. And then you want to be able to have some kind of application that can record the conversation that you're having. I use Skype and we use Skype.

And I have for many years used a wonderful application by a company called Ecamm. They make a product called Core Recorder for Skype. They also make a Core Recorder for FaceTime as well. So you could do both either or. And these applications are super simple. They sit as like an additional window to the application. They have with themselves a bunch of settings and then a great tool for extracting the audio. So when me and Jason are talking, I'm using Call Recorder to record our conversation. And then when we're done,

I export our conversation from Call Recorder. So I have a file, which is the audio of this call. I also have a file, which is my recording. I actually also use Ecamm for this, but you can use something like QuickTime if you want to. And then Jason sends me a recording of his file. And Jason uses Audio Hijack, which you can also use to do all of the call recording as well, because Audio Hijack can do that. So you end up with three files. You have a recording of the actual conversation over Skype or FaceTime, which is done with one of the core recording apps or Audio Hijack. And then you have the local files for every participant. And for me and Jason, that's two. Then you drop it into

your editing app. Do you want to take over from here, Jason? Sure. You drop it into GarageBand is a good example for Mac users because it's free and what you do is you put in your your audio and the call audio and ideally those were recorded at the same time so they are matched up in terms of sort of they started at the same time do it do a countdown like a lot of my shows to do a three two one and then everybody presses record countdown like we do that that gets that gets it close and then what you do is and you drop in the other the other person or people's audio files and then you you line them up so that they're all because they might not be at exactly the same time you want to match them up and that's the

nice thing about having a reference file is that if you've got a reference recording um of the of the conversation over skype or wherever then you can match you can line up their their audio to uh it to what it was as you heard it and at that point ideally and sometimes there's drift sometimes you need to like cut the file in in the middle and slide it over a little bit because it's running a little bit slower because computer clocks don't always run at the same speed believe it or not um but ideally what you want to end up with is a situation where you can delete your recording of the phone call, and all that's left are the microphones that were recorded locally by all the participants. At which point, ideally, it sounds like you're all in the

same room together because nobody is using a Skype connection that can go in and out. Now, you can use the Skype connection if somebody doesn't record. That's one of the nice reasons this exists is that it's kind of a backup in case somebody has a recording failure. You at least have a recording of their voice. But it will sound better if you use all the local recordings and just use the phone call for reference. And at that point, you know, the Internet's no longer involved, right? just use the phone call for reference. And at that point,

you know, the internet's no longer involved, right? At that point, all the audio is just the audio that happened on the computer when you were recording. So it's therefore the highest quality that it can be. So it works really well. And you match up the audio visually in your editing app. So you can match up the waveforms. Like that's kind of the way to do it.

Don't do it by listening. Do it by matching up the waveforms. And then you'll be able to get a great kind of mac mix there as jason says you want to go through the audio file and just make sure that everyone's staying on track because it can drift backwards and forwards that's just a case of making a cut and moving things around a little bit yeah the alternative to this uh that's coming and i think will you know, if, depending on the size of the conversations that you're having, it might be a nice alternative, are things using WebRTC, which is the real-time communication web protocol. Safari was updated to support it, but doesn't support it quite the same way that Chrome does. And as a result, these services don't yet, as far as I can tell,

does. And as a result, these services don't yet, as far as I can tell, support Safari, hopefully someday. But for now, you'd use Chrome and you can go, there are two of them, Cast and Zencaster. Cast is at Tricast, that's T-R-Y-C-A dot S-T. It's a very clever domain. And Zencaster is Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R dot com, I believe believe um and these both basically you log in and you send a link and they have paid and free tiers and you send a link to your fellow participants and they also go there with chrome and uh then you're having a conversation and you can all hear each other and what happens in the background is the web app is actually doing that recording locally on your computer and then uploading it to a server. So what's nice about it is that it eliminates a lot of the fiddliness of you got to record your own end and then you've

got to take the file and you've got to get it to the other person and all of that. With these, that all happens within the web app. There are some downsides to that. They're not as good at putting together a whole group and massaging the audio as Skype is. Skype has actually built a whole infrastructure about this and these are all just doing it inside a browser. And so it's a lot harder. But for two or three people, it can be a really effective way to do a podcast. And this is how I do the TV Talk Machine podcast with Tim Goodman every week, because he all he has to do is log in and i press the buttons and in the end i get a file that's a locally recorded file from his computer in and he has to do nothing

and you also get the merged file too right so like these these tools they they uh they replicate everything like they do all of it. That's it. And then one last thing, which is Antony Johnston, who does podcasts on The Incomparable a lot, and is a professional comic book writer, video game writer. He wrote

the comic, that graphic novel, The Atomic Blonde. The movie was based on Antony. Many talents, including he set up podcastguestguide.com. Just one word, podcastguestguide.com, which is a great site if you're a podcaster to send to people

who have never done a podcast before to tell them what to do to be a good podcast guest, what software to use, how to record, how to send the file, all of those things. I highly recommend it. There you you go there's a podcast tip for you i hope that that is uh of some use for you finn um if you are interested this kind of thing is interesting to you hearing us talk about sort of stuff tweet your podcast questions with the hashtag ask upgrade if you totally hate this tell me if you If you totally love this, tell me,

and then I can gauge people's opinions. But there we go. So we can know for the future if this is of interest to people. All right, it's about time that we spoke about Apple's bad week. Yes, I hope there isn't a bug that prevents maybe like iOS

just suddenly at this point restarts and you can never actually hear us talk about a bug that might happen. And maybe, we'll see. Let's cross our fingers. This episode is brought to you by Balance Open, a free open source Mac app for checking Coinbase. Coinbase is a popular market for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. And Balance Open is the best open source digital wallet

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They had two pretty embarrassing embarrassing pretty terrible bugs across their two major operating system platforms we've been alluding to the fact that we don't really want to talk about this and kind of my feeling for this is not that i think it doesn't deserve to be talked about to be spoken about i just think that at this point i personally don't feel like i have a lot to bring to this conversation um but we need to I think we should but for the pure case of cataloging this as a thing that happened we should talk about it on this show let me preface that too by saying that um you know one of the challenges here this is we we criticize apple all the time this is not the issue because you know there's always this

like why didn't you? Every now and then, we don't talk about something for, like we didn't think about it or we didn't think it was important. Someone's like, why didn't you mention this? You're trying to hide the truth.

And it's like, the problem with this story is that it has lots of real world ramifications. And yet when you back it up, you don't have to back it up very far to enter a black box, which is Apple software processes. up, you don't have to back it up very far to enter a black box, which is Apple software processes. And ATP, the excellent Hall of Fame upgrade-y tech podcast, ATP, those three guys are professional

software developers. And they had a very good discussion last week about this, but even they are a little bit stymied. They're kind of guessing because as much as this affects people, in the end, all we can do is say, and we're going to talk more about this, but I feel like it all comes back to, I hope this stops. I hope they don't do this anymore. Whatever happened, I hope they learn about it and they fix it whatever the root causes are i hope they realize that that was bad and they need to do something else because once you're talking about i mean like we're not software developers so first off there's that right but even even beyond that to software development maintaining giant operating system code bases with millions of users, billions of users, maybe, in a large organization with different code coming from

different places. That's not something more than a handful of companies do it's incredibly complicated and i'm not using that as an excuse apple made some you know has a real black eye about its software quality right now and deservedly so my point is i don't know you know i don't know enough about that i don't understand enough about that complexity to parachute in and say, oh, well, it's obvious, just fix this thing. Like this is a complex process. This is the kind of thing that people who spend years inside the organization might be able to have ideas about what they can do or an organization similar to it. But one of the things that makes me reluctant to talk about it in great detail

beyond how it affects users and how it makes us feel is because anybody who's just driving by and offering Apple a solution to this issue, I can guarantee you should shut up because they don't know. I almost guarantee you, unless it's like Steven Sanofsky or somebody, like somebody who worked at Microsoft on huge things like this in software development. There's a very small number of people who actually know

all the details and can make educated statements about what might be wrong on this because it's so complicated. And I don't want to be one of those people because that's the equivalent of being the person who says, uh, add a feature to your software. I'm sure it'll only take you a couple of hours where they have no idea. And that just, they've been exposed as having no idea. So I'm really reluctant to get into the, what could Apple do to make this better? Because I feel like it is going to be esoteric. It is going to be something that requires deep knowledge of how Apple's whole software development environment, the people who work on it, the way they work, the way they're managed, it's going to depend on all of that. That's what impacts this. And we don't know that. So all in the end, and this is kind of unfulfilling because in the end, software is really hard

to talk about in that way, other than what the result was and how it makes us feel. So I guess that's what we're going to talk about is the results and how it made us feel, because that's all that we're left with, basically. Because basically all me and you can say, which is what what we feel is please don't do this again this needs to stop right there needs to be a way and we can we can talk like we did last week about kind of oogie feelings which is like it feels like there's you know there's more attention that needs to be paid i mean i can say here's my solution which is from the outside I look at this and worry that Apple is running itself as a small company when it's really not because they like to think of themselves as a small company. And what I want to say is you've got lots of money.

You're Apple. People actually might want to work for you who are talented people, hire more of them if that solves the problem. But I'm also aware of the mythical, what is it? Mythical million man month or whatever that, the premise that twice the developers doesn't make your software project twice as efficient, it makes it half as efficient. I get it. Throwing money and people at problems is not always the solution. worry that apple runs lean which is admirable but to a fault in the case of what they're trying to do here but i don't know that might not be it at all we're already armchair quarterbacking again right like right right i literally all i can say is that I worry that maybe I know enough about some Apple culture to worry that maybe that philosophy of being really careful with adding headcount and adding people in certain places and being really conservative about how they spend their money, which is admirable in a lot of ways.

I worry that that's a contributing factor here when this is a company that has all the money in the world. But I think the answer is, if they can just throw money at the problem and solve it, I would think that they would have done that already. So that can't be it. All right, I'm going to speed through a breakdown of these two books. All right.

So last Tuesday, developer Lemmy Orhan-Egan tweeted about a potential security hole, and actually was a pretty serious security hole in macOS, which allowed you to access the root super user account without a password. So my understanding of this, Jason, is it allowed anybody to go to basically any Mac that didn't have the super user account already activated of a password create it or just access it right and this could be at any point the mac could be in a logged out state even you got to be running high sierra and not the beta is my understanding not the beta but like 10 10 you know 10 13, 13, zero or 10, 13, one, I think. And my, my MacBook Air

was in this, it was running 10, 13, one. And so I tried it and it totally works. Like I was able to go to system preferences and click the lock to unlock so I could make changes to the system preferences and log in as root with no password and press okay. And it said, you know, and it rejected that. And then I did it again and everything unlocked. This is about as bad as a security hole that can be, right? Like it was terrible. I can think of worse ones

because worse ones would allow you to remote. And apparently it was only if you had like screen sharing turned on or you would have to have turned on other things. But then apparently like if you had screen sharing turned on and somebody connected your IP and you know, they would have to go through if you don't have a firewall or something, you're just on an IP address on the internet,

they would be able to log in as root with no password. And I think actually do screen sharing, which is, which is bad. So it's, I'd say it's bad, about as bad as it gets in terms of local device security. Because it's like literally if somebody can type on your computer, they have access to everything.

They don't need your password. Apple apologized, which was very peculiar to see. They actually used the word apologize. I was wondering about this. Will they say publicly in press releases we are sorry like i wondered if they would do that because that is not i mean you can correct me if i'm wrong jason but that is not something apple doesn't apologize for things i think this uh is a class of thing that they have apologized before about when it's a like a major problem they will come out and say we're sorry a major security problem they will do that so i wasn't surprised because this

this reaches that level where yeah you yeah you better be sorry i mean it is that it is that level so i wasn't surprised which they gave to uh jason um is we greatly regret this error and we apologize to all mac users both for releasing with this vulnerability and for the concern it has caused our customers deserve better i love that line we are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again apple released a patch within 24 hours they also stated that they would force this update onto the users machines that they're running high sierra they would just update it for them which is the second time they've done this you were saying i believe that's right they there was a bug in the uh in ntp the network time protocol demon that was discovered uh there's an open source uh but it was it was discovered and there is a apple has a way of pushing software updates without your

uh without your interaction if you've got auto updates turned on and it doesn't require a restart, which was true with the NTP error and it was true with this one. So they were actually able to, there was an update released and you could update to it. But if you were running 10.13.1 and updated to it or it didn't update it it would it would do it it would update in the background just sitting there and get rid of this bug because they consider it uh that serious um so then very embarrassing egg on their face you know not and there's and and just to mention the other things that happened were um i mean, this release was like some people stayed up all night to do this bug pushout. And there was a short-term solution to enable the root user using the directory utility and then give it a password, and then that solved it.

But they did push out this update. Apparently, it then led to people who had file sharing turned on that the file sharing turned off, and you had to do a different thing to work around that, which is why they don't usually push out a bug fix in less than 24 hours, because there are side effects that they didn't go through their testing process. So that made people complain, but at least people didn't have unfettered root access to your computer, but still was it was a thing it also turns out that uh if you had a mac running uh 10 13 0 and you did this update and then you thought well you know i ought to just update to the latest version and then update it to 10 13 1 it undid the fix oh my god uh so that wasn't great again one of the side effects of fixing this fast you can't test everything right yeah so so yeah that's ideally everybody should be on uh 10 13 one with a uh with the thing with a patch applied like me not on 10 13 at all or not

in which case you would not have this problem. Yeah. So egg on the face, right? Terrible, not good look. It was kind of all resolved by Wednesday. Then late on Friday, December 1st, it was discovered and seemed to be pushed out via some channels. Like people were tweeting about it. Like it had come from somewhere

that there was a bug in iOS 11 that was causing springboard crashes when a local notification triggered on the device on December 2nd. So if you had an app like a weather app or like Due, which is an app that I love, or maybe a workout app, something that would trigger not a push notification from a cloud like a message, but something you'd set, maybe like a to-do app or something like that. If one of these notifications triggered you could end up in a reboot loop so the phone would just keep rebooting every time the notification

triggered right you would just reboot the device is this some what was this some kind of why was this happening do you know so uh it sounds like there is a bug in iOS 11 and actually in Mac OS as well that is related to the calendar. I think these are related. So earlier that day, I got an email from Rob Griffiths, who I used to work with at Macworld, saying, are you seeing in the Mac OS console logs this error like every fraction of a second in the log called that says month 13 is out of bounds which you can logic that one out right month 13 is out of bounds means somebody's getting to the 12th month of the year and trying to go up 30 days and finding month 13 instead of flipping over to the next year and and the system is like no no there is no month 13 unless i've been informed otherwise and uh throwing that out there and i think they've got to be related i don't know that for sure but that's my gut feeling is that this is the same

bug which is which is on the you know once you get into december um there are calculations that are made at a system level like by that apps call that say that say what's the next you know what's the next date some date function and there's something wrong there's a bug in there that's making it go to month 13 instead of going to month one of the of the next year so my guess is that this is all related and there is a bug in the core code somewhere that did this. And it turns out that that bug then causes the springboard, the home screen basically on iOS to reload because it's like, oh, that's a bad error. I need to, I need to reload because something bad happened. And so you've got probably, it looks like a bug triggering a state in a different app that was not anticipated or was

anticipated for good reasons, but now it's being triggered for bad reasons. The net result. So that's what I think is going on here. The net result is that yeah, the springboard crashes and you can end in a, in a, in a reload reboot loop,

which is bad. And it was fixed in 11.2, apparently. Yes. So Apple released 11.2 early is what looks like. And like late on Friday night. Friday night. Yeah. 11.2 was probably supposed to go out today.

It was supposed to go out during the show because Apple Pay Cash. Activated. Apparently just got activated as we were doing this show. So that's when it should have dropped. It should have dropped about now. Because the Apple Pay Cash, so this is the being able to send Apple Pay to each other and having Apple Pay Cash in your wallet, that was called out in the release notes. Like, oh, this includes this, which is kind of funny because it didn't. And it also said that for me, and it doesn't because it's not in the release notes like oh this includes this um which is kind of funny because it didn't and it also said that for me and it doesn't because it's not in the uk it's only in the us right now so that was kind of funny i think that was a case of like it's wrong but we just

gotta push it out so to put it out on friday so when i woke up on friday i woke up to a bunch of messages from people telling me to do this so the first thing i did on friday morning before i did anything else was update all my devices. So this didn't happen to me because I updated everything. 11.2 also featured something else that I want to mention, which is the fixing of another autocorrect bug. So everybody knows the I, which turned into the question mark and the box, right?

But there was another autocorrect bug, which impacted less users, but was still a problem where it was um changing it to it i.t now this is the second autocorrect bug dan and i uh talked about this on the six colors secret podcast last week that's like this happens to me all the time and it's funny because casey talked about it on atp last week too um where i have things corrected to just bizarre things i have words capitalized that should never be capitalized but suddenly they're capitalized um some of them go away if you keep typing it will if you don't stop because you see a bug uh or a typo you keep typing and it like goes back it's like oh i see

and it'll actually de-correct it or something which is also weird because then you are motivated to keep typing even though you see an error in the hopes that it will get retroactively corrected but i've also seen exactly what is described here well not not this particular correction but a correction like it where i typed a totally valid incredibly common word and it got corrected to something completely bizarre. And why did that happen? So this is the second time since iOS 11 was released that Apple have had to fix an autocorrect bug via an iOS software update.

So I'm just going to state on the record that I believe that Apple's approach for autocorrect being... My understanding of how it's working now is it's the differential privacy stuff and CoreML is creating via machine learning a new system for autocorrect. I think that is clearly the wrong one because they are spreading like viruses. And because Apple refuses to have any of this stuff live in the cloud, their only way to fix it is via software update which is arcane and ridiculous in my opinion like you have to update the software of the device to fix an autocorrect bug like i think that it is wild i don't see any of these because i use uh gboard and yeah i mean i've been meaning to recommend gboard to casey

but i figured he would just do a Casey thing and say something about Google. So I haven't bothered to do it. So Casey, if you're listening to me now, the Gboard autocorrect is better than Apple's. It just is. Like one of my favorite things about Gboard is, you know, if you're meaning to press space and maybe you do a full stop or you do an, and maybe you do a bunch of those, it can work out an entire sentence typed that way, which the Apple keyboard cannot do. Like, if you're typing, you're putting Ns instead of spaces, like, the iOS keyboard can maybe separate two words. I've had, like, four or five words separated by the Google keyboard. Like, it is way better for this stuff. And it's a third-party keyboard, so it comes with all the problems

that third-party keyboards come with, but it's vastly superior. But my point is other operating systems, like with Google, they keep all of this stuff in a, I'm sure in a list that they can just update on their end. Having to update these things via iOS software updates, this will not scale.

This happened twice in two months. This is monthly currently. This is not a good thing because all it's doing is until you push that update out, people are getting more and more frustrated with the thing that they are doing most on their phones, which is typing and texting.

If the word it and the word, like the use I is getting screwed up, like this is not good, Apple. Because when the i came out like i was thinking to myself how many more are there right like there must be more of these but we just don't see them and it turns out yes because the it one wasn't as frequent but i just think it's ridiculous i think they need to clearly change course on this um i don't i know what i want them to do it's not what they will do,

but this clearly isn't working. But anyway, going back to these bugs, these issues, right? The iOS 11 reboot bug and the root issue. I mean, what does it say about Apple, right? Does it say anything specific? I don't know. We said this. We don't know. Are they struggling? Maybe. Was it bad luck? Maybe. Is it embarrassing for them? Yes, right? They're the answers to those questions. We don't know. We said this. We don't know. Are they struggling? Maybe. Was it bad luck? Maybe. Is it embarrassing for them? Yes. They're the answers to those questions. We don't actually know. It's easy to say, oh, software quality is bad, all that kind of stuff that you can say, all of that. But my kind of point, my thinking on this is none of that actually matters. The reasons don't matter. The reasons this happened, bad luck, bad software practices, don't matter. Like the reasons this happened, bad luck, bad software practices, none of that matters. What matters is that in the space of three days, Apple had two huge PR problems.

Because I would expect that they were giving statements to everybody that they could about this stuff, because they needed their customers to know. Like this is one of the worst types of problems where you have a problem that is really bad for you but you actually can't hide it you have to tell as many people as possible about it because these are problems so bad that you have to have them fixed and the only way to fix them is to force your customers to do a thing and, so it doesn't matter how it actually happened. It matters how it's perceived. And the perception right now, I would expect is not good, especially because most people, most general users that I have interacted with, including me to a point,

are hesitant of updating iOS devices quickly, because for the last couple of years, there have been like horrible bricking errors that seem to happen on occasion, right? So like, if a big update comes out, I leave it a few hours, right? Like, I just want to see like, is everyone okay? Like, is the general consensus that this thing is installing okay before I install it? And this is me, right? Like, I know so many people that like, just won't update for months, because they don't want to brick their devices. And now it's like, now there are more problems, right? Like, I know so many people that, like, just won't update for months because they don't want to brick their devices. And now it's like, now there are more problems, right? And it doesn't matter what the actualities of it are, right?

Where, like, there is a problem in the already installed version and the update actually fixes it. That's not the point. The point is that Apple customers and just general people that have an interest in technology, which is basically everyone on the planet now, know that Apple had two really bad flaws in their software in the last week. It's not good.

Yeah, I mean, you call that a PR problem, and it is that, but I would say it's a public perception problem because this erodes Apple's perception as a supplier of reliable products. And that's hard. Perception of your company is hard to change. And you can't control it. If you're a company like this, you can't you can try, but it's very hard. And unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that gives you a reputation of being unreliable. And I agree with you.

I actually think the release of, was it iOS 7 that was the radical redesign? 7 was the one that started it because when iOS 7 came out, people realized that everything they think about their phone can change overnight right like that was that was the one where like people were upset because it was completely new and if you didn't want that you didn't know it's going to happen to you and and this is the thing is that's exactly right i there are so many people how many millions of people reacted with shock to the ios 7 update and said i am terrified of apple updating my phone i can tell you i have people in my family that that is absolutely true to this day i have people in my family who will see me and say months after releases have come out and said should we do this update can we do it now that you're here i I don't want it. Basically, it's like, I don't want to update my phone alone.

I just updated my mom's phone yesterday. It's because of iOS 7. I'm not kidding. And that tells you something about how long these perceptions can last. iOS 7, again, we can argue it was extreme. They've dialed it back. It was ultimately to move in a new direction

was probably a good idea in terms of the design, but it was such a radical change and it really upset people. And it was just like, yeah, let's update to the next version. Whoa, what happened here? And that made people feel like they didn't trust Apple and its software updates anymore. And it takes a long time to win people back. And what I'm saying is this is another ding on Apple. This is, oh, Apple software isn't reliable. You know what? Apple is going to have to deal with what Microsoft has dealt with, which is a lot of people rolling their eyes at what

they do. And rightly or wrongly, and I said, this is super complex stuff, but you get a reputation and your reputation sits over you. And it's know it's like a cloud it's it's a smelly cloud right and you can't as a company you can try to like wave it away but like there's only so much you can do and so that that's the thing here is no matter whether this is a systemic issue inside apple that has led to lots of problems. And it's something that the management of the software development group has pretended to care about, but hasn't really done the hard things that need to be done to do this. Or whether this is something that is just emergent from a complex system and happens to hit at bad times in bad ways and has nothing to do with what's going on internally from the outside doesn't matter like because this is a hit to apple's reputation so if you're an executive

inside apple involved in software development let me tell you you your your bad week is just beginning right i would think i think think the only, because think about us as outside observers. Now put yourself in the shoes of Tim Cook. Tim Cook's not a software development guy, not even a little bit, not even a little bit. He is a supply chain guy and he's a big picture product guy in the sense as to what extent he's a product guy it's about the final widget right the experience right how deep down does he go in knowledge about the details of the software development systems probably similar to me in you right like in our level we understand but don't get the detail yeah i mean he's going to

get briefings from craig federighi and he's going Yeah, I mean, he's going to get briefings from Craig Federighi, and he's going to have conversations with Phil Schiller, and they're going to talk about it, right? But it's not, and we don't generally get, the only briefing we get with Craig Federighi is when he's on the talk show, right? So, but still, like, so if I'm in that position, all I can do is turn to the people who are in charge and be like, you got to explain why this is going on because this is killing us.

And we've done this before. And you've said, no, no, we're on it. Where are we? Because this has got to stop. Like, what can we do? Right? It's going to be one of those conversations. Like, talk to me. Explain to me again why we're in this situation.

So if you're in senior software management at apple this is the beginning of probably many bad weeks to come merry christmas everybody because uh when it gets out into the world like this and it hurts apple um i was actually really disappointed with um with uh i mean i wasn't disappointed with the guys on atp last week but but the the conversation that that took place about how um you know they had heard from a lot of people about who's going to get fired over this. This is a firing offense. So ridiculous. I'm incredibly offended by this idea about people losing their jobs.

Talking about people losing their jobs in general, especially if you don't know what their jobs are or who they are or all the all the underlying um issues that might lead to something happening it's just like so easy for people to talk yeah kind of lightly about people's people losing their livelihood i i find it really distasteful there are scenarios in which craig federighi could be fired over this like if he had made a decision like and everyone was like craig please don't do this and he's like no yeah i doing this. But it's like literally it's like I'm holding you hostage, right? But it's highly unlikely that it's anything. This has got to be a systemic issue. Just because something bad happened doesn't mean someone has to be fired.

Exactly right. We don't need to stage executions in the town square. Exactly. Stuff like this. No, I would go so far as to say that just because something went wrong, if you fire somebody because you need to have somebody gone because something bad happened you're a bad manager and that's a bad company and you shouldn't work there which is what john syracuse has said because he knows he's seen stuff like that um that's bad that's bad headhunting in order to send a message

to people it's really gross and bad but this is not to say that like i said it's going to be a painful time for people in that group yeah many people are going to be raked over many coals right like that's right happen why do we do it this way how can we do it better they're going to be people in there said i told you and you didn't listen to me that's also going to happen because we also think of apple as this monolith and they all march in formation. And that's totally not true. Like I talk to people at Apple inside Apple all the time who say who say, I saw that you wrote that thing about this thing that we do that you don't like. I agree with you. I mean, that was great because it got people to pay attention.

Keep writing articles like that. I get that all the time. There are people inside Apple who are dissenters, who are like, we shouldn't do it this this way and then somebody else higher up in the chain and said no no we're going to do it this way and the only way they get them to listen is by having outside people say apple's making a mistake here and then their boss comes to them and says why are we doing this they're like oh okay fine maybe we should do that after all well there's going to be a lot of internal um or recriminations going on. And I hope, I hope they find ultimately,

I hope they find this as a solvable problem. That's what worries me the most is that this is so complex that in the end, they, they rearrange the deck chairs, not to get too dramatic, but that they make changes and like, and say, well,

let's see if that does anything like literally that. You can't, you can't solve people from making mistakes. But what you can do is make changes to your processes to stop these kinds of mistakes from as easily occurring. Like, that's all it is, right? Or decrease the, you know, I think the most you could hope for is to say, all right, we took this approach. I see now the downside to this approach. In a light of day. We could fix it by doing this or that

and then we'll pick one and we'll try to do it. It could also be, I mean, again, it could be that what somebody like Craig Federighi or somebody else lower down who we don't know and we don't see and we don't talk to says, well, I told you we need to hire more this. We need to hire more testers. We need to hire more OS engineers. We need to hire a Q and a staff. We need to split the split these groups in a different way than they're organized right now. Something like that,

where they're like, oh yeah, okay, well you warned me and this happens. So let's do it. Let's make it happen. Cause Apple can do from a money. And I would argue people standpoint, Apple can kinda Apple, maybe not do whatever they want, but they can do a lot money and I would argue people standpoint, Apple can kind of, Apple maybe not do whatever they want, but they can do a lot. Like the issue is not, well, we'd like our software to be better, but we just can't because we are a poor company. There's little moths flying out of their pockets. They got, we got no money.

What can we do? Resolved strapped. Apple is, is one of the most powerful companies in the world. They got, they got billions and hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. They can do it if they have the will and if their structure allows them to. And those are big ifs. But yeah, that's my hope is that this is something that can be mitigated and fixed by making changes to what they're doing.

My fear is what you said, which is that it can't, that it's just an emergent thing and that they're not sure why. I mean, they'll nail down why this specific thing happened, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can find the antecedent of like, what in our structure made this thing emerge? And if we change this, what do we change it to? And does that make it better or worse and it may be that they look at all that and they're like we don't know because these are incredibly complicated things so and and changing a thing might solve this um but then cause another problem that's the thing is you're always you're always fighting the last uh the last war the last problem you're fixing

that last problem and you may be creating new problems so i don't know i i i'm even hesitant to say what a lot of people have said which is what we need here is a snow leopard what we need here is apple to focus on fixing bugs and uh and not doing new features to which i'll point out these some of these are the same people who complain when apple doesn't do enough new things let's remember 2016 shall we right like the idea of saying i want no features means everyone's just gonna be mad again like the thing is here's the thing right like you have to do both fix bugs and release new features i don't care if it's not possible it's what you got to do it's what they're trying to do that's the only option that's the only option there is not an option of we'll be so happy if they only do this because like in the same breath you'll hear the mac is not being taken care of no one's paying any attention to the mac and please just fix bugs

on the mac i can do you one better um think back a couple of weeks to homepod being delayed and people being like whoa what is wrong at apple at Apple? What are the problems at Apple? Why did HomePod get delayed? What is Apple doing? Why did they announce it and then not do it? All of those questions, right? And we talked about it, I think, in much more reasonable tones here, but I would lay odds that HomePod didn't ship in 2017 because it wasn't good enough. And because there were bugs, there were software problems. And so they pushed it out. That's an example of Apple

doing the right thing and not shipping a product that was buggy. Apple Pay Cash running late is probably an example of that. The iMessage Cloud Sync thing, imagine if they had just shipped it and it ate your messages and was a disaster, right? And they didn't ship it because obviously it wasn't of a production level quality. So these bugs got through, but there is obviously at least some change at Apple in terms of pulling things out of the lineup if they aren't good enough which i think should be applauded but obviously there are underlying things still happening that uh and you know what stuff like this is going to happen it's going to happen in any complex system i appreciate that they fixed it um but i think it's worth saying

they need to do better and it and it erodes their reputation further every time one of these things happens and you know fair or not doesn't really matter why it happened it still erodes their reputation so you gotta do it all or you do nothing it turns out we had some stuff to say uh but it was more the big picture i mean what i was like i just don't want i didn't want to talk about the minutiae of every of the bugs, but we had to, because it's the only way to friend that conversation. So, let's hope that next week, everything's hunky-dory.

Well, I guess it will be with us. It's definitely not in Apple Park. It's not hunky-dory there right now. I feel really bad for everyone who has to walk into those doors Monday morning and just like, oh, it happened again. Congratulations, everyone.

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Check it out right now and find out more about what Encapsular can do for you and your beautiful website and claim that free month. Go give Encapsular a try. You're not going to regret it. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM and hashtag AskUpgrade. Joe Steele wants to know, we've had quite a few people ask us this question.

Are you going to watch Home Alone 2 Lost in New York this year? We have no comment on this question other than to say, stay tuned for the upgrade christmas special yep we're doing something wild kids uh something that they say you should never do we're gonna do it at christmas on christmas uh sam wants to know why didn't apple make the pencil compatible with the iphone 10 it's the perfect pocket notepad. So I have two thoughts on this. One, the current Apple Pencil would suck on the iPhone X because it's way too big.

The proportions are nightmarish. And I believe that one day we will find a phone that Apple makes that has a stylus. I do believe that that might be a later iphone 10 looking phone i believe one day there will be a phone called the iphone pro which will have a tiny apple pencil i still think apple are going to do that because it's just a way to discharge more like if you're thinking about like apple strategy right like keep having things on the top end it's what the ipad pro is all about it's what the iphone 10 is all about once this current design trickles it well okay but they have things right like they have pro devices where the asps are higher i was thinking it might be like if they do a there are rumors about an

iphone 10 plus yeah that's what i'm talking about right like that will become the real high end and then you could maybe have another version of that one right which could have a pencil attached to it that's that's my thing my understanding is that the apple pencil there are some very specific engineering things you have to do to support the apple pencil in terms of a refresh rate in terms of being able to detect that pencil on the screen it's not just throw it in a touch screen right and so for the iphone 10 which is already kind of reaching to the edge of apple's capabilities throwing in pencil support and the attendant cost and who knows what else that would have been involved in doing that that i can see why they didn't bother but i totally am on this i agree

i think apple pencil support on larger screened iphones should happen i do agree the pencil is the wrong the current pencil is the wrong size for it. And the iPhone 10 is still kind of small, although you could do it and an iPhone 10 plus kind of thing would certainly be perfect for that. But it might take a little while, even the first one of those,

if it exists, might not support it just because I don't know all the details, but there are technical details about the screen and what you need to do to support the pencil that are an added bit of complexity and the iphone 10 was the literally the first oled iphone right there was a lot of display complexity already i think that that was not something they wanted to to uh to try this time out but i think it'll happen i do i believe it

lee asked which chi charges do you recommend there are many on Amazon, it's making my head hurt. Do you have any recommendations? Yeah, the... Oh, which one is it? The Mophie. Mophie. What is it called? I've got it right here.

Boost Up. The Mophie Boost Up. The box is behind me because I don't use it. I'm not really... I don't use it um i'm not i'm not really i don't really like wireless charging i'm using it i'm using it all the time now because we've got them we've got two of them on the uh okay on on the table in the uh where we where we leave our phones and what really sent me over the edge is lauren started to use it she was like on her eight she was like oh yeah that's. I'll just lay it there.

And I'm like, well, that's interesting. And I'm doing that too now, quite honestly. Because I just drop it there when I go to bed. I don't- The Belkin's called the Boost Up, which is what I have. And that's fine. Don't do that. Get the Mophie one that's better.

Why? The Mophie one is lower and it's more kind of tacky. So the phone is much less likely to like slide off. I find that I have them both. And I like the Mophie one a lot better. There are going to be way more ones of these that come out. It's just called the Mophie wireless charging base. That's the one I would recommend right now.

Okay. So I have the Boost Up. It has a little rubber thing on it. And I don't know. I'm just not. I don't i just it's not i'll tell you i i'm much more inclined to like it now that i've had the mofi one because the mofi one's way better than the belkin one just the it's a ikea makes one too but the mofi and the belkin one also support the faster charging that is in ios 11.2 and uh and a lot of the other ones don't support that so i've also heard good things about i think there's a samsung one that's an upright bunch yeah they do an upright one which and i know the people who who like keep their phone at their desk and they want to kind of like

upright so that they can they can see it um which i don't uh like that like one of those samsung ones but i i haven't tried those and never have i um i i actually don't even know which one it is but there are i would stick with a real brand by the way to to uh to lee i would stick with a real brand i've heard you know questionable things about um some of the other uh chargers that are out there that have uh you know not necessarily burst into flames but you know you're dealing with electrical stuff here so i would maybe stick with uh brands you know brand names that's what you want bram wants to know i've been having performance issues on my iphone 6s since ios 11 and and i'm considering a clean install what are the risks

and do you think it will work so the risks are there is a possibility a very strong possibility if you are doing a clean install that you will lose data or some description from an app or game that you like because if you're going straight clean you know the only stuff that's going to get synced over is apps and games and stuff that use some kind of syncing engine if they don't well that's that right like you're going to lose that so take stock of that do any exports that you can do check that the most important things to you have some kind of syncing component do you think it will work i mean if you're having battery issues it is the thing that is maybe most likely to make a difference if anything will um but you know performance issues that battery issues are battery issues and the battery is there you know that's a physical hardware problem performance

performance issues i think it might work because i did this with my mom's phone and it worked so i would actually recommend the first thing you do is back up your phone and do a wipe and then restore because that might solve it and then you won't have as many problems and then if that doesn't solve it then wipe it again and just set it up from scratch and try it that way. But I, um, I put my mom on, um, she had a five S and I put her, we ended up with a, a spare six. That's Lauren's old phone. And I put, that's the one that I opened up and put a new battery in because the battery was dying. And, you know, six performance on iOS 11 is really something to be desired um but i that was a clean in that was a backup from a wiped six and the speed wasn't great but it was okay it was

not what lauren experienced on that phone with when she was on it which leads me to believe that maybe there's something to this idea that there's stuff that is wiped out by a clean install on a wiped phone that is present. I hate the idea that there's like, you know, if you want to make your phone go faster, erase it and then reinstall from the backup. But for these very slow, older phones, it might be true. And if not, then I would try moving on to the complete clean install and see if that makes a difference because it might there's one other thing that has happened for me before which i'll recommend adina had an iphone 4 and it was just horrible um i set her up with iCloud photo library and moved this was years ago but I moved like she was saving

all of her photos on her device so I moved those out to the cloud did a bunch of backups for her removed a bunch of stuff and gave her a lot more free space the phone ran a lot better with a lot more free space so if you have if you're kind of maxing it out that could be something else to try as well give yourself a bit of free space it might might help i don't know why it did but it did um tony asks my 2011 macbook pro is really bugging me to upgrade to high sierra is there any way to stop those notification messages jason do you know i think the way you do it is to go to uh app store store and like control click on the update and say hide update that makes it go away and the other thing I think you might be able to try is just go in your is is go in your apps folder and delete the installer for High Sierra I don't know 100% I i don't know 100 but you should be able to for

apple system updates you can actually like go in and say hide this update and then you never see it it doesn't bug you anymore that might work um but it's really annoying and i did a quick google search to try and find a definitive way and i don't think i found it so what really annoys me is that you can't turn off the notifications for the app store. Like, I just don't want them, like the notifications to pop up on the right-hand side. Like, they're not in Notification Center on the Mac. Like, they're not in Notification Center preferences. And I find that...

Yeah, yeah, there's no app store app in the notifications preferences, which there should be. There should be. And I find it a little bit egregious, honestly. And like, I'm good. Like, I leave the badge number, rightgregious, honestly. And I'm good. I leave the badge number. Let me just do that.

The App Store on my iPhone doesn't do this. Let's just chill, Mac. Let's just chill. But asking for any development on the Mac App Store is a fool's errand. And finally today, Stephen asked, this is a shame, your podcaster's question, what are your Apple Watch daily move goals? So what are the move goals that we have to achieve every day?

I will start, Jason. Mine is 400 calories. So 400 is what my Apple Watch wants me to do every day based upon my podcaster's lifestyle of sitting at home. Yeah, mine too. 400? Okay, we've learned that this is what the sit-at-home

podcaster will have. 400 move goal, 30-minute exercise goal. Okay, so there you go, 400. And now we will be getting tweets for the next seven days at least with people saying, 400? And the mine is

9 million, so I'll look forward to those so I wish congratulations to all of our healthy listeners if you would like to ask us any questions use the hashtag askupgrade on twitter and we'll be able to pull those in for another future episode

thank you to everybody that submitted a question for today's episode and please continue to I love seeing that spreadsheet fill up if you want to find Jason's work online he's over at sixcolors.com and he's at jsnell on twitter j-s-n-e-l-l I am at imyke

I-m-y-k-e you can find the show notes for this week's episode at relay.fm slash upgrades slash 170 and thanks again to our fine sponsors this week away balance open and encapsulate but most of all thank you for listening we'll be

back next time and we'll both be recording on pacific time until then say goodbye Jason Snell goodbye everybody