Upgrade - 178: On a Dark Desert Highway

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

How did Apple do in 2017? Jason and Myke break down the annual Six Colors Apple Report Card, based on a survey of 50 notable Apple-watchers. Also, the HomePod gets pre-orders, a ship date, and a new set of listening parties for journalists. You can check out of the Apple Store any time you like, but you can never leave.

from relay fm this is upgrade it's episode 178 and today's show is brought to you by pingdom pdf pen from smile and simple contacts my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley it's good to be back. And I hope you had a good weekend. And how are you doing? Good. It is my birthday week. But I just want to let everybody know that I turn 30 on Wednesday, just so you know, you know, in case you feel like you need to wish me a happy birthday, you can do that on Wednesday the 31st. I turn 30 years old. Everybody should care about that. I think everybody does care about that. But anyway, we're going to talk about our hashtag snail talk question and this one comes from leonardo leonardo wants to know jason what is the feature that you missed most when you use the ipad pro as a laptop replacement so what

is the thing you're sitting there with your your lovely ipad and your keyboard and you're typing away and you're like oh this is really great but First, I just want to say it's really great to get a question from one of the Ninja Turtles. And, sorry, I had to do that. You've just given Leonardo the thing that he has had for the last 20 years of his life, and he thinks he's finally escaped it as an adult, but no, Jason, no.

No, and of course, I could have gone the other way with a titan of uh of the art world but i i didn't um uh this is a tough one for me i was thinking about this before the show and i've got a lot of little things where i wish the ipad pro was better like ios with bluetooth keyboards still like uh if you command tab to different apps sometimes it um thinks the command key is still being held down when it isn't and then you type something and it instead of putting the letter it like issues a command and stuff there's occasionally i have that and that's across bluetooth keyboard that's not one keyboard like i see that happen a lot um and that's a cross Bluetooth keyboard. That's not one keyboard. Like I see that happen a lot.

Um, and that's frustrating when that happens. Cause my Mac is rock solid when it comes to that stuff. There's a lot of little stuff like that. File imports, these things that I miss a little bit, but I think this is, I know this is weird, but since I edit text a lot, cause I'm writing a lot on my iPad pro, I gotta say, I kind of miss having a trackpad. Like I kind of miss being able to select large chunks of text and move them around. Um, and I know I can put my fingers on the screen and do kind of like, sort of like a trackpad, but it's not, it's not quite the same

as having a physical trackpad. And know if if the if ios supported bluetooth pointing devices for you moving that text editing cursor around i would get i would get one because i miss that when i'm writing and editing stuff today i was putting our document together um and it required today uh a lot of copy and pasting where it typically doesn't. Like I was copying and pasting quotes out of some web pages and just text selection on iOS can get so fiddly sometimes and I'm dragging the little anchors

and then I let go of one and it just pings back to one character as opposed to an entire sentence for a reason I can't understand. And I wished for a mouse pointer at that moment. Just at that one moment, I really wanted one. The ability to be able to use a trackpad or something every now and then would be kind of nice. The moment that crystallized this for me is last year, my family and I went to Hawaii over New Year's. And I was working on the Apple report card story where I

talked to a whole lot of people. We're going to talk about this year's today. And that has lots of texts from people who write in their thoughts. And then I trim it, cut it down a lot. And I was doing that on my iPad using a Bluetooth keyboard, using the bridge keyboard. And I kept thinking, oh my God, this is so like, you know, I can hold down the shift key and the arrows and move it around. But I just thought this is something that the iPad is still just not good enough at. Is this like a whole lot of text selection and pinpoint cursor kind of stuff. And it's, I feel like, you know, if it's just purely a tablet,

you can kind of get by with the approach of using two fingers or standard kind of text selection stuff. It's when you get like with a keyboard and then it gets frustrating because I've got to reach up to the screen to move it around. Again, I don't really understand why Apple hasn't thrown Bluetooth pointer support in to the OS because it would be super limited and really a niche thing. But it would work for text selection and it would work for anyone who's using like a screen sharing app. You'd just be able to use those instead of having to buy like a special mouse that only works with spoke about a long time ago so i i kind of don't know why they haven't done it just because it would be like to throw a bone at people who are like pros you know in a particular area using ios and like the cursor's already there the movement's already there they don't have to they don't have to because the argument that i always get get when I talk about this is somebody says, well, but if they did that, they would need to have a whole paradigm for selecting

items in all apps using a pointing device. And my response is, no, they don't. They really don't. They could, if they wanted, say, you know, bullet point in iOS 11.4 added support for Bluetooth pointing devices for text insertion only done like done. And they haven't. So anyway, that that's the one that's actually the one that I that I miss because I work with words a lot. And there are a lot of little little details that I wish were more refined, like they are on the Mac. But that's the one I think that

that I would say when I'm traveling and doing doing remote recording, it's the file access thing. But day-to-day, when I'm using my iPad, it's text selection. Thank you to Leonardo for suggesting the question. I hope that that was a good answer. If you would like to submit a question for us to answer at the beginning of the show, you just send us a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and we'll pick it for a future episode. Jason, I don't want to do this follow-up item, but you are very insistent on it. So I will explain something here.

So many people may have noticed this. Many people didn't report it because why would they? When you were listening to the Hamilton chapter last week in If You Use Overcast, you may have noticed that during that part of the show, the Overcast app became rather unresponsive whenever the audio was playing. So it would judder or you couldn't scroll very comfortably and stuff like that. Turns out I discovered a peculiar kind of edge case bug in Overcast and Forecast, Marco's application, which was that I needed to make the file small.

I needed to make it as small as it could possibly be because there is like a limit to how much you really want to make a show's download bigger because of images right you don't want to make it too big so i try and keep them to like i don't know 100 150 kilobytes or something which you can do and you can crunch the heck out of those images because really they're never that big right so most of our chapter art is crunched down to like 100 kilobytes because of this and uh typically what i use is i just open these images in preview and it's really easy like preview just let you export it drag the slider down and it's done like i don't need to mess around it's like a super simple process but for whatever reason this image i couldn't get it that small as a jpeg so i clicked and one of the options i had in preview is to export it was jpeg

2000 i don't know what that is yeah it's like it's really advanced 2000 i didn't really know what jpeg i don't know what jpeg 2000 is i still don't know but i could make the image smaller with jpeg 2000 so i just did it uh turns out jpeg 2000 breaks basically everything ever in the world uh so never do that. In fact, to the point that to stop this from happening again, Marco has added something into forecast, which will now convert images to JPEGs or pings, I think, if they're not. So that's what happened. I felt stupid and it's done. So what I'm saying is you're a hero. I don't know about that. You didn't find one bug. You found two bugs. You found a bug in forecast which should probably

have converted that file. And I think Marco may have updated forecast now so it does some file image size compression on the fly in order to solve this problem so you wouldn't even need to do this. And then a bug in overcast where certain chapter marker

file formats uh freak it out and i believe that's going to be fixed in an upcoming version and is already fixed in a beta so you're a hero for finding bugs and uh and exposing them to the world and i believe we uh replaced that file right so if you download it after we discovered yeah unfortunately i had to just strip the image out um because there just wasn't an easy way i tried a bunch of things and there just wasn't an easy way for me to crunch that file down to a small enough size um so it was gone forever it was just a picture i'll put it i'll put it in i'll put it in the show notes because it was from my instagram um it was a nice picture of

me taking a picture of the hamilton logo and so that was that and uh yeah i'm sorry everybody i'm sorry for the uh hassle for developers across the world and for listeners what i did you found it you know i don't know you that's like yeah i think it's a great accomplishment to after all of this time of podcast app development to find something that chokes the podcast app is pretty impressive anyway my point is just wait for jpeg 3000 it'll be way better yeah then i'll get then i'll really is just wait for jpeg 3000 it'll be way better yeah then i'll get then i'll really get what i need jpeg 3000 it's coming any day now all right we have an action-packed show today uh i guess first we should say surprise the home pod

has arrived so on the last episode we predicted that the home pod would come late because of airplay 2 well Apple did something very surprising in that AirPlay 2 is delayed, as we were told, right? And we're correct about that, that AirPlay 2 is not ready. But Apple decided to just release the HomePod anyway. Pre-orders are available. No stereo pairing, no multi-room stuff. None of that is there at launch.

A lot of the really big features have just been pulled out until later, to an undefined period of time. Pre-orders went available last Friday and they're available for delivery and pickup on February 9th in the US, the UK and Australia. It's coming, it's

expanding a little bit wider to France and Germany later on this year. I assume you bought one? I did buy one. I mean mean i'm gonna i'm gonna write about it so i kind of have to have one um but i'm interested in it i think there might be a place i'm an apple music subscriber so i think there might be a place for it in my life um somewhere in my living room that is because right now i've got Sonos connected up to my speakers. But to get that on, you've got to like turn on the receiver and then open an app and play something. And if

I've got a HomePod lurking somewhere in my living room, that might be a better experience. But I, you know, I probably wouldn't have bought it right away if I was gonna, if I was just a civilian, but since I'm, I also want to be knowledgeable about it and talk about it and write about it i i need to have it so yeah i had no and still have no real interest in having a home pod in my life um and it decided i wasn't going to buy one but but i have ordered one. The reason I have ordered one... I took a twist. The reason I have ordered one, and I fully expect that I will be returning this product. The reason I have ordered this product is because of the last four or five days

where Apple has announced that a product is going to be available and have basically not really given any information about it. They've been doing these weird demos again, but still not letting people control the product to the way that they want to. So Serenity Caldwell, who is a host of Query and RelayFM

and writes at iMore, she had some hands-on time with the HomePod and there was an episode of Query, episode 23, where her and Stephen talk about her experiences in detail and the way that it was being presented and the way that Rem was explaining

it, it was still in a controlled environment with select songs and like some of the actions were just being done by the person who was demoing it for her I feel like this is a weird product

that could potentially be a very bad product that Apple is maybe trying to skirt around. That's kind of my take on some of this. It's weird. What they're doing right now with the whole launch of this product is very strange, and it's compelled me to get one

to see what the situation is would you agree like it's all very peculiar the way that they're doing this yeah i i'm i mean who knows exactly what happened behind the scenes i mean who knows people at inside apple know we have to speculate i think it's clear that this product rollout is not happening the way apple would have wanted right they delayed it they dropped features out of it uh there was a long gap between when they announced it and when it was even supposedly shipping nobody has reviewed one it seems like nobody has got one like it seems very peculiar right they did another listing party serenity went to another one of these secluded grottos like at wwdc um where they could talk to and look at it this time they didn't have to just avert their eyes and listen um still using some of the same demo music which i find funny somebody

at apple really likes that live version of hotel california because apparently they're still playing that because i got that and serenity got that too. So some of that closet Eagles fan in there. Oh yeah, I know, right? That's not closet Jason. They're making everybody listen to it. I guess they're pretty far out there. If you're like, you will keep the Eagles in the demo. Okay.

Can you imagine the pitch session for that, Mike? Mike, okay. Here's what happens in the HomePod room. On a dark desert highway. Nope, nope. We're not going to do a dramatic reading of whoever you are, unnamed Apple executive. Go back in your corner. We'll play the Hotel California live.

Just, you know, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. We got it. We got it. We got it. I can feel like I can never leave this meeting. Stop talking about it. Anyway, so it's weird. It's just, it's weird.

And I think some of it is, the question is, how weird is it from our perspective and how weird is it inside of Apple? Because like, if this is Apple going off the playbook and forcing things that they're not ready for and all of that, I guess that's a little bit worrying.

At the same time, a lot of stuff seems troubled from the outside. And in fact, it might be kind of like complicated and troubled on the inside. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. It just means that there were issues. It really could just be poorly communicated. Yeah. Because I just feel like there are lots of questions that are taking a very long time to answer like i feel like the last five days has been a constant battle from journalists to understand if you have to be

an apple music subscriber to use this product it turns out now that it looks like again no one's 100 sure that you can use itunes match with iCloud music library and it's fine. You don't have to subscribe to Apple Music. That's exciting. That is a really nice thing that we didn't know for sure. If all you've got is a lot of music in iTunes Cloud Music Library, you should be able to access

that even if you're not an Apple Music person. But it still feels like everyone's like we were like 90 sure this is the case you know what i mean it doesn't feel like anyone can really be like got that today maybe got that confirmation um i think she's gotten it now and it makes sense right it's basically like it seems to me that there is one way that iTunes and the music app look into the cloud and say, what music do I have? And it's kind of the same for Apple Music and for iTunes in the cloud, or at least it's very similar. And so it makes sense that they would do that.

There's still questions about like, if it's a track that you uploaded, how good is the access going to be via voice? Is that stuff all indexed and understandable? On download last week, Kirk McElhern brought up, like, he has a lot of classical music. So how does he give Siri a command to play a particular classical piece from a particular orchestra or album or whatever? And will that do the right thing or will it get really confused and you know these are these are open questions about like how that's all going to work when we when we get this thing but i mean i'm really interested by all accounts it sounds great and i mean it sounded great when i heard it too so i'm kind of looking forward to see how the the secret sauce of uh apple

processing the audio and then throwing it out to those seven different tweeters and trying to create kind of a, you know, directional sound and throwing things off of walls and stuff like that. Like how much, how much work did they put in that? How good does it sound? Cause that in any end, I think this product kind of succeeds or fails based mostly on if it's a really good speaker for that price, because if they can't do that for that price, I mean, that's a price of a good sounding speaker,

not a rudimentary speaker with a really fun voice assistant around it. So it's going to live or die based on that one. And then, you know, the fact is they can, the rest of it they can fix with software and service updates. So if they can get it out there and it sounds good, and it doesn't have to be a huge hit. Something that we all have to keep in mind is everybody

wants a brand new Apple product to be a huge hit right out of the gate. And it isn't always like, you know, the Apple watch has really grown and changed in the last couple of years. And the iPod took a couple of years to get right because they had to update it and make it work on Windows and figure it all out. And the slow is fine so home pod's a good place to start yeah so i'm i'm keen to see what this product actually turns out to be like i want to see what it's like if i connect it to my apple tv and what that experience is like yeah i've become keen to see what it looks like i still don't think i i particularly want it um and honestly i think that it might just be something that i spend a week with and return i just don't think i will want

to replace my echoes with it but i want to see because there is a shroud of mystery around it which is intriguing me so all right uh We have some Hamilton follow-up. First off, it sounds like you got more. Did you buy more Hamilton tickets, Mike? Yeah, I bought more Hamilton tickets today. We're going again in September. Okay, good. That's good.

I had a couple of people who wrote in to tell me something that is absolutely true. I was talking about how Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about how Hamilton is an immigrant story and one of his sources of inspiration is his dad who moved from Puerto Rico to New York. And I had several people point out Puerto Rico is part of the United States, which it absolutely is. I wish there were a word for that was not immigration, but was something different for coming a very long way from a very different cultural location to another place, but it's still part of the same country because that's really the story of Lin-Manuel Miranda's dad. It's also,

I think, the story of Alexander Hamilton because I believe that the Caribbean island he was on was a British possession, just like the US was when he came to America. So he wasn't really technically immigrating to a new country, immigrating, immigrating, depending on your perspective. But anyway, the point is, and it's something that every American should know already after what happened with the hurricane, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. They're U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico. They are not some foreign country that's sending their people into the U.S.

They're actually Americans. And that was worth mentioning again, you know, despite the fact that, you know, that movement of people from Puerto Rico to New York City especially is deep in Lin-Manuel Miranda's mind and his family history and was on his mind when he was writing about Hamilton. So, but thanks to the people for pointing that out. And it's worth saying again, because not enough people actually know that Puerto Rico is the United States. So there it is.

Good clarification. Last piece of follow-up today. Messages in iCloud has returned in the 11.3 beta, but it is not being promoted by Apple in their press release. So there was a press release for 11.3 last week, which added more ARKit stuff, some Animoji stuff, some health record stuff. And it's 11.3 will also have the battery. By the way, we talked about this last time. I love that Apple's doing this because this is, so Apple releases these betas and all the sites that cover apple write about them and what's in

them they tear them apart and they say oh it does this it does this i know i said this last time but i'm going to say it again this is one of those things where there was this old kind of like pretend agreement which was this is secret and apple would pretend like it wasn't happening and everybody would report it anyway yeah and somebody at apple has decided why are we letting you know macrumors.com break stories about what's in our new software why are we not doing that ourselves why why do we not control this story and oh god i mean they should have done this a long time ago but I'm so happy that somebody did that. So now when they're coming out with a new developer beta with a bunch of new

features in it, they, they put out a press release and say new animoji and this other thing is happening and this other thing is happening. So, so big thumbs up for that. This what's interesting about the, the messages in the cloud stuff is that that's absolutely being pitched as like, it's not in the press release. And it's like, we're returning this to testing. And that goes back to our conversations a while ago about like, you don't want to screw this up, right? You don't want to turn on messages in the cloud to every iOS user and discover that it's destroyed people's messages archive, right?

You don't want to do that. So they tested it in the iOS 11 beta, and then they're like, okay, it's not ready. And they took it out. And I think by not putting it in the press release, what they're saying is, no, no, seriously, we've brought it back for testing. We're not committing to release it with 11.3. committing to release it with 11.3. Let's see how it goes, but try it out. And I think that's really smart. So I like this whole story here. I like that they're not promoting it because there's clearly a lack of confidence in it being, you know, they already made this mistake of saying iOS 11 and then maybe not. Why do that again? If you're unsure, but they're still using the beta process to try it out and see if they can get it locked down before they release it to everyone else. Because that would be really bad if it didn't work right.

So, yeah, I think it's cool. And I think it's cool that they're new Animoji, too. that's a complaint that we had a lot about the iOS 10 messages improvements and came up with iOS 11, which is one of the ways for them to keep people interested in their updates and interested in these features is to continue doing, it's almost like DLC for games. It's like content releases, like adding new emoji, which they can't control. They're kind of up to what is going on with the emoji subcommittee of Unicode. But they can still do some of that. But the Animoji stuff, they completely control.

Like, you know, a little carrot to get people to update is, why can't I send a lion message or a skull or whatever? And the answer is, well, just go to 11.3 and you'll be able to do that. It's smart. Yeah, so that's a bunch of stuff coming. And messages in iCloud is back in back in testing again which is a good sign testing hopefully experimental because again it's like and I think apples are the right thing they couldn't get it right for the original release maybe they still won't so that's why they're not promoting it as the thing but yeah the 11.3 also

has the battery stuff in it but that isn't in the developer beta or the public beta right now. I think that's going to be coming in a future iteration of this beta period. All right, today's show is brought to you in part by Simple Contacts. Look, it's really awesome when an app that you have takes away a tiresome task and makes something fuss free. That's why we love apps, right? Because apps make our life easier. Simple Contacts does this by being an easy way to renew your contact lens prescription. You'll be able to reorder your contacts from anywhere in just minutes. Now, that's great on its own, right?

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too much control over news outlets. Because obviously, as well as Fox News, they own a bunch of newspapers as well, and that this would give them basically a monopoly on the news. If this regulator is able to completely stop the sale, they've blocked it for now and it's pending further investigation this would also mean that disney won't pick up sky when they make their purchase and the regulators are considering that disney are involved in this but they're still not

very happy about the fact that the murdoch family will get it in case the disney deal doesn't go through and then they're allowing it to happen because all disney will have it it's not the murdoch's but the disney doesn't go through and then the murdoch's have got it and they don't want that so this isn't over yet but it's not looking very likely um that sky will be able to fall under disney in the future right it's interesting uh there's going to be regulatory scrutiny of this deal all over the place and so the details i i don't think this is going to change like break deal, but it will change permutations of the deal, it seems. In Europe, it is not unheard of. Like we, a couple of years ago, a bunch of the mobile phone networks were buying each other.

And one of the big ones was a company called 3 buying a company called O2. And the regulators stopped it, wouldn't let it happen. Like it was basically a done deal and they were just like, nope. Would it have been like O5? 302, I think, is what they were going for. Oh boy. But no, they weren't really. They were just going to keep it all. It was all going to be re-rounded to 3. But yeah, the regulators,

they stepped in, and they were like, no, it reduces too much choice, and they killed the deal. So, we'll see. You never know. Damien Chazelle, you may not know that name, but Damien was the writer and director of La La Land, which was a very popular movie last year. Damien is the most recent individual to sell a series to Apple. It is a drama series and the subject matter is being kept a secret for now, which is peculiar. Chazelle will be joining up with a couple of executive producers from La La Land on a new project.

It is interesting because Chazelle also has already landed a deal with Netflix to produce a musical TV drama series called The Eddie. So that is two series orders happening in two different companies. Remember, there was a time when movie and TV didn't cross over. But this is an example where this guy gets this Oscar nominated slash winning film. And he's like, all right, TV money. Now I need to know where the real money is. It's weird, isn't it? And the nature of his deals is fascinating.

So he makes this deal with Netflix, which is he's going to create and produce a musical TV drama series, The Eddie. So the upgrade-y cannot be far behind. And he's going to write and direct

the first two episodes, I think, is a part of that deal. The Apple deal, where we don't know anything about it, but that deal, he's going to write

and direct every episode. So if i'm netflix i'm like oh oh so you know like he's got a better deal but he's also got this deal so he's now dealing with these two competitors it's really interesting but uh it is another one we were talking about like apple being interested in the jj abrams sci-fi series which we haven't heard any more about um and being worried that there was going to be like it's a little too too much sci-fi and you want to get a little more content diversity in your offering here's an example of they're going unless the writer and director of la la land is creating a science fiction series that seems unlikely you

never maybe it's a musical science fiction series musical drama sci-fi it's all they want just sci-fi sci-fi sci-fi oh no it would be terrible if that apple executive came into the room and said how about hotel california i have a great song for you no no let's get out of that get out back to your home pod room um anyway so this is this is presumably um adding another another piece to the Apple content library that's in another area. Because you just want to have, and I'm not saying they have slots or anything

because it's going to be what the projects are that come by them that they're interested in. But I think having things with different appeal to different groups so that the service as a whole has broader appeal, that there's going to be one or two things in it that you're going to be interested in, that's part of what they're putting together. So this is another piece of that.

And finally, YouTube megastar and filmmaker Casey Neistat has left CNN. Neistat created a company called Beam, which was purchased by CNN in 2016. Beam was an app and technology company, but they were going to CNN to also create content. And Nystat was going to be creating a news show with CNN. They created a YouTube channel and it was getting on its way. But now that has all been shut down. The deal in 2016 was reportedly worth $25 million. It's not really known about the breakup of that, like how that was, whether it was stock or cash or whatever. Beam, the app and the technology and the YouTube channel, it seems, is all going to be shutting

down with a portion of the team and their technology being absorbed into CNN. For now, Nystat is going to be focusing primarily on his YouTube channel. And a quote from Casey Nystat to BuzzFeed News, I really like this quote, actually, he says, I don't think I'm giving CNN what I want to give them, and I don't think they're getting value from me. And that's why he left. It just wasn't the right fit for anybody. So he's stepping away, and he's going to be pursuing other projects.

So it's interesting. Does he take his $25 million with him? Or was that one of the questions I always had? There is nothing said about that. My expectation from how these deals are done is whatever money he had, he won't get. Because these contracts are usually written that you have to stay there for a certain period of time

to get your payout. Yeah, or there's an initial payout and then there's uh further payouts the rest of it is later over time so so we don't know the details but it's possible that there was like an option point here where you know he may have just said look i don't want you to pay me anymore i'm we let's stop this it's also possible but cnn went to them went to him and it was like you know we really this is not working but either either way. Yeah. Like $25 million deal. But for his year plus how,

how much did Casey nice dad walk away from? We don't know. It is possible. They had a break point because, uh, nice. That had a co-founder. His name was Matt Hackett and he also left.

So they're both gone. Um, so it may have been, who knows what, why or how, but it's done. They've moved on. I'm a big fan of Casey Neistat. I think that his

work is incredible. I wasn't particularly involved in the Beam stuff that they were making, like the news stories. It just wasn't really my cup of tea. At least the YouTube numbers would suggest that that may have been the problem for a lot of people. So this may have been one issue that they just weren't seeing the results. So CNN took a gamble. Then it doesn't look like it really paid off for them.

Okay, so that's upstream. We're now going to talk about something that is becoming a yearly tradition because you do it every year, which means i want to talk to you about it every year which is the six colors report card jason what is the six colors report card six colors report card uh so three years ago um coivin the the um the web designer uh or designer should say came to me and said, I have this idea and I'm not going to do it, but I think somebody should do it, which is do a poll, do a survey of a bunch of people who follow Apple and about like a report card of how Apple did the previous year,

like an end of the year kind of survey. And I, I said, that sounds like a good idea. He actually came to me like the middle of the year or something and said this. and said this and i was like let me think about it and i'll get back to you in december or january uh and so i decided i would do it and so i've done that for the last three years so this is the third one and i went this year to about 75 different people in the apple observing world writers podcasters developers um and asked them to fill out a survey with a bunch of different categories and rate apple's year 2017

one to five and also put in comments about each category that i was asking them about comments about each category that I was asking them about. And that's the Six Colors Report Card. I don't vote in it. I just let them get their say out. And so I think it's useful in the sense of getting a broad sense of what the vibe is in terms of how people who observe Apple are feeling about Apple and seeing now how that feeling has changed year to year, because I've left the categories the same for all three years. So you can actually track sort of the changes in attitude over time. And I'm not saying that it's like definitive in any way. It really is a measure of how Apple observers are feeling about Apple. I think there's something to be gleaned from that, even though I think you could argue that there aren't going to be a lot of surprises because

you've spent a year picking up on everybody's comments about what's going on at Apple, right? And if that's the feeling for the year, then an assessment of sentiment at the end of it is going to reflect it. And it certainly did this year yeah whilst there aren't surprises as such there are interesting things where the comments in some categories seem much harsher than the grade and i want to get into some of that with you is to try and work out why some of that has happened well you know some people give give uh something a five and other people give something a one. And what I didn't do is pull out like, this is what they scored this category, which I thought about doing, but that was kind of a lot of work and I didn't want to do it. So I thought about it though.

So it's like Rob Griffiths gave this a two and this is why he's grumpy, but I didn't do that. Okay. So I submitted grades. You have my grades because I've forgotten what grades I gave. So you can tell me them as we go through. I didn't submit any comments because I saved those for now with you. But I also want to, as we go through each of these categories,

I would like to know what you would grade, like what your score would be if you were filling it out, just to try and get a feel for your personal feeling in each of these categories um and then i wanted to pull out some of the interesting comments that i found um in the in the article that you posted and we can talk a little bit about each of these categories so it starts with probably the most contentious which is the mac um So this year in 2017, so in the 2017 report card, the Mac graded with C with the average score of 2.9.

This is up from a C- last year. Where would you score the Mac for 2017? It's a tough one. I probably would answer something like 3. And that I think was the most common score. And it's about what the average score is. Yeah, I mean, 2016 was a tougher year for the Mac. 2017, though, we got promise of a better future.

And a lot of the people who filled out the survey filled it out when the iMac Pro hadn't started shipping yet because it was sort of fielding the survey was fielding in mid-December to early January and so a lot of them filled it out right away and we're like well we haven't seen the iMac Pro yet and then we saw the iMac Pro and I got an iMac Pro before the end of the year and I was like yay hooray that made the Mac kind of brighter for me uh the year in the Mac but um there's a lot of questions about the Mac's future. And there's a lot of commitments from Apple, but we haven't seen all the results of those commitments. So I think that in looking at all the comments that came in, I think there's a feeling like they're not going to rate Apple up for saying that they're going to change, that they want to see the changes. They want to see the Mac Pro ship. They want to see

products get updated before they kind of upgrade the scores. They want to see the Mac Pro ship. They want to see products get updated before they kind of upgrade the scores there. So I think that's going on. And yeah, so it was a, I guess there's a lot of keyboard angst too, laptop keyboard angst. That is definitely a part of it too. That's a little bit more specific later on,

like when we talk about hardware in general. Yeah. What was my score? What did I i grade you gave it a three yeah so that's that doesn't that's that is unsurprising from from past mike i i think that a three is good um i think i would have given it way less last year like i understand that the the product releases haven't been incredible you know for the most of the year. The iMac Pro was great, but on the whole, people were kind of upset about not an amazing revision again with the MacBook Pro. People were hoping for more fixes, and the keyboard was revised, but it didn't really seem to do much. I was interested in seeing in the article that whilst most people were unhappy, there were varying levels of unhappiness. And the most unhappy person is Rob Griffiths, who is a former colleague of yours at Macworld.

This is generally the case. Rob is grumpy a lot. Rob said, Tim can say whatever he wants, but the evidence to date is that Apple doesn't care about the Mac very much at all, which is a very strong statement. I found some hope from John Syracuse, who said Apple's apologetic recommitment to Pro Max in April is a big step in the right direction. And this is the thing for me where I am really hanging on with believing that things are going to get better because this isn't something that Apple do. Like they don't, they don't come out and apologize for a commitment to a product line. Like this was a, this was a, this was a first, this isn't a thing that they do. And I genuinely believe that this public change of course, is only going to continue throughout

the next couple of years to see real improvement in the mac and i think that the imac pro was the clear beginning of that right i think that that is kind of undeniable people were very very happy with that machine and that's what happens when you push and make it a real thing so i think that they i think they made a real commitment a real change and being very open about that i I think that's been great. Yeah. And it's weird because, you know, I don't have any rules for this. It's like literally share your feelings.

Yep. I think it's the right decision to say, I'm glad that, as John said, you know, it's a step in the right direction. It's an apologetic recommitment. step in the right direction it's an apologetic uh recommitment i think it's right to say that's good but i want to see them walk the walk before i you know truly elevate the the score here i think there's a lot of anticipation where people want to score the mac higher because they feel like maybe apple's attitude here has really changed and they they did that unusual recommitment, but that they're not all the way there yet. The highest scoring product or category was the iPhone.

The iPhone was graded an A with an average score of 4.4. Last year was hovering between a B plus and an A minus. So there has been improvement in the iPhone. I say that for me it's it's funny I feel like there should be a bigger improvement shown in the numbers than there actually is because the jump year on year has been more significant than like a B plus to an A yeah well. Well, I mean, it's a straight A from like a B plus, A minus. So it is, I mean, the scores definitely did go up. You gave this a five.

Yeah. I would give this a five. The iPhone 10 is great. And the iPhone 8 is pretty good too. Yeah. So it's a pretty good year for the iPhone. Like they didn't update the iPhone SE and I want them to do that soon.

But like they're they're they didn't update the iphone se and and i want them to do that soon but like they they managed to ship two three really uh top of the line models this year and uh you know push the old line forward a bit and then also came out with this completely new device that they were able to ship in quantity and that is really good and face id works all of these things it's a pretty good i mean if if you're not going to give the iphone a five in 2017 i don't know when you're going to give it a five like this is you know this is that one of the best years there has ever been you know i would i would say you've got the original, the 4, and this. Yeah, and I did have some complaints. For the record, only integer ratings are allowed. Dan Frakes from The Wirecutter, who I used to work with at Macworld,

kept writing in his comments. I was going through editing the comments, and there was a lot of, I would have given this 3.5 if I could have. I was like, you can't, Dan. You're not allowed. He just wants you to know. He really wants you to know. There were some great comments,

in the iPhone, one of my favorites, was from Joe Kissel, and he says, iPhone 10 baby, is everything I could possibly, have asked for, in a 2017 smartphone.

I could have put in like, 20 of those, there were a lot of people, who were like, come on iPhone 10. Stephen Hackett, the iPhone 10 simply put, feels like a new generation,

of phones from Apple, and Carolina, Carolina Milanese says I really think no other company would have been able to implement a core UI change like Face ID and make it feel like the most natural thing you've ever used which is a beautiful way of putting it because that is so true it is wonderful

I am very intrigued to see how this category scores next year because yeah now what because we're all very excited about the wonder of the iphone 10 but next year is vital right we were talking about this last time like how does it keep the momentum going what does the line look like and i would say i mean i don't know if you saw this but we got some criticism which is completely correct uh from last week's episode from people that like smaller phones right so like people in the se category or people that like currently like the iphone 6 size it's looking

like phones for people that like those sizes are kind of going to get left in the dust a little bit and that the most that they might get is like here's a new processor for you like what what happens to those phones and i'm interested to see how that changes over time like if all phones are trending larger and larger and larger and then there's kind of old phones or phones of older technology kept around at the small level it seems you know it's like why why if you like a small phone you have to have an old phone um so that i'm interested to see how that kind of thinking goes over the next couple of years if apple continues the course that they're currently on to people

that like small phones either get a bigger phone or get an old phone so i'm interested to see what happens there but yeah the iphone graded in a was not very surprising um not very surprised no it's just you you make a good point. What comes next? What's the next act for the iPhone? But yeah, but they did, the fact that they had this ambitious plan and then they executed it and we'll see what happens.

I mean, there could be some sort of, you know, security problem or hardware problem or I mean, there's lots of different things that could go wrong where they could have a kind of underwhelming refresh in the fall. knows but uh but for 2017 like that it was a good iphone year all all things considered it was a it was a really good iphone i love my

iphone 10 so much i still do i really absolutely love that phone i love it me too i had somebody ask me uh a friend of mine asked me last night we went out to dinner um and and lauren's got her iphone 8 and i've got my iphone 10 and he has a 6, I think. And he was saying, well, so why would you get the 10 instead of the 8? And I said, look, it's really nice. It's the most expensive one. You probably don't need it, but it's really nice. And Lauren said, I really like the iPhone 8. And I said, the iPhone 8 is great. It's one of those funny things where I really like the iPhone 8. And I said, the iPhone 8 is great. Like, it's one of those funny things where I really like the iPhone 10. The iPhone 8 is also great. And the iPhone 10, you know, is you're paying extra to get this thing that's from the future a little bit. And, you know,

that's, it's not for everybody, but it's really good. I mean, that's the, that's the thing about it is, is it's really good. So good year for the iPhone. Today's show is also brought to you by PDF Pen from Smile. PDF Pen equips you with everything that you need for more powerful PDF editing. It's the ultimate tool for editing PDFs and going paperless. Start the new year right

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so you can create collections of multiple PDFs of related files, which is great for presenting those year-end documents. I was using PDF Pen Pro on my Mac just before we were recording today with Jason. I was just finishing up a contract and just dropped it into PDF Pen, signed it, sent it off. It would be so tricky and difficult for me to get that done otherwise. I have a printer right here, and I never want to turn that printer on to sign a document. I just do it with PDF Pen instead. If you're thinking about trying PDF Pen, now's the time to do it. They've added over 100 enhancements with the release of PDF pen nine. Get organized this year. Go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast now to see what PDF pen can do for you and tell them that you heard about them from

this show. Thank you so much to PDF pen from smile for their support of upgradegrade and RelayFM. That's smilesoftware.com slash podcast to find out more. So we move on to the iPad. The iPad was graded an A- with an average score of 4.1. Last year it was a B+, so another increase. Yeah, and I think not too surprising, right? We get the 10.5 iPad Pro, we get the new, cheaper iPad, and we get an update to the 12.9 model too. We also got iOS 11 features that were focused on the iPad. So again, like, oh, and, and sales turned around,

right? iPad sales turned around. So I would argue, again, that this was a really good year for the iPad. Like, the only reason I think you don't give it a five out of five here is because you, you want to see it continue to grow. You want, you want, uh, you know,

even more growth in the iPad category. But, uh, given what the last few years have been for the iPad, this was a good, this was a really good year. So what are those scores, scores on the doors?

The, uh, you give it a five. And what did you, what do you, what would you give it? I mean, yeah, it's a four or a five, something like that. It was a really good year. I was very happy that the 12.9 got updated.

It's just a question, like I said, about whether you're holding the five back for the year that the iPad conquers the world or not, because it was a very good year for this product. This is why I did it. It's like, what am I holding for? Like, I couldn't have asked for more from the iPad than what I got this year.

I think this is the best year we could realistically have hoped at the end of last year for the iPad. Yeah, that is exactly how I think about this grading is to grade it within the context right like within the context of 2017 what could i have realistically asked for from the ipad well i got all of those things like everything that i could have realistically wanted i got like i can't imagine getting a better year than we got especially in the last six months

than what they gave us. I feel like it would just be holding back the points for the sake of it. So some of the quotes. One comes from you, Jason. This was a bounce-back year for the iPad as new hardware and improved sales gave Apple's larger iOS device a shot in the arm,

which is very nicely put. Federico Vatici, of course. I had to read Federico. Apple didn't disappoint with the 2017 ipad pros quite frankly after the lack of updates in 2016 they absolutely delivered with a refreshed 12.9 inch model and the new 10.5 the combination of ios 11 and the new ipad pros is a great year for the ipad now let's hope we won't have to wait another two years for updates on hardware and software uh james t green, this is the year that the iPad

has become my new general purpose computer. And to kind of back that up a little bit, Marco Arment said the 10.5 inch iPad Pro is the best all-round iPad ever made. I completely agree with Marco. And I think that that 10.5 is really what's pushing people like James, and I see this more and more every day,

to consider the iPad as much more serious in their computing life, which is exactly what this product is being aimed to do. And I think that this was the year that they really made some significant jumps and advancements in making the iPad a more general purpose computer for more and more people. Yep.

So we move on to the Apple Watch, graded A-minus of an average score of 4.0 last year at a b what's your score jason uh well you know what i think i have to say again um this is a four or a five uh i i think i'd go more for here because while this was a very good year for the apple watch getting lte uh having the new version having a watch os update that was fine although not not enormous but it was fine i think we're aware of some of the limitations of apple watch that Apple Watch that didn't get addressed in watchOS, like podcast support, for example, that is frustrating that the, the, now that the LTE stuff is there, there's this feeling

that apps need to be rethought, that the old approach to apps that sort of stems from the original conception of apps, that they need to be rethought again and be more independent and that the OS is not entirely up to the task right now. So there's still some issues there, but still, I think it was a good year. So I would say a four and you gave it a four. To back up what you were saying from James Thompson, the software is still holding things back.

I don't get the impression that third-party apps are gaining traction, even though the devices are a lot faster, which makes them more feasible to use. I completely agree with what you said and what James says. The hardware is becoming better and better at an increasing rate, but there doesn't really seem to be a lot going on in the software department. And I think that this is one of the problems with that, right? The software isn't good enough.

The apps aren't good enough. What is this product meant to do? From Jessica Dennis, the new hardware plus the incremental watchOS improvements have made the Apple Watch a truly good piece of kit, which I agree with, right? Like it is, and the scores show it.

This is the only platform in your survey so far that has improved year on year because the watch continues to improve year on year but this is way more focused in the hardware and apple's software is where it's getting better um there hasn't really been a lot of significant change in third-party apps and what's going on there so that is obviously something that apple will be trying to address as time goes on it may be time to allow people to pay for customization stuff like watch faces that would sell well it it feels it's funny where we are i feel like the the apple watch for a product that was so constrained from a hardware perspective right

like the idea of like how are they going to get a whole computer with networking on, on your wrist? Like, boy, that's really hard. Well, here it is. They've got it now. Cellular networking.

It's all there. Um, this, this pretty huge hardware challenge. And if you had told me that in 2017, this would be the hardware on the Apple watch platform, I would say, well, they got it made. Like, that's it.

And it turns out that this is one of those areas, and this is a trend, a little bit, where you look at it and you say, wow, Apple's hardware designers are doing a better job than their software people are. Like, the software, and it's not a bad experience. I love my Apple Watch, but the software is letting down the Apple watch hardware. Bottom line, like you can't, you can't overlook it.

Like this hardware is amazing. And the software, you know, for, for third-party developers and even the stuff that's on it and it's what it's capable of and what it's not capable of, uh, it's limitations. It's not good enough. Like of uh its limitations it's not good enough like it's not it's not good enough to take advantage of the amazing work the hardware side has done so that's what we have to like hope for in future watch os updates is that for them to get up to speed because if i was doing watch os software i don't think i could point my finger at the hardware people and say it's not us it, it's them. It's like, nope, that's, you know, the fingers are pointing the other way right now.

Apple TV graded C plus, average score 3.2, last year, C minus. Yeah, it went up to a C plus, yay! Does this match your thinking, kind of around the three, four level? Yeah, you know, I get, so there's two ways to think of this one one is to say look apple tv 4k was late it's too expensive apple tv in general is too expensive there are other

incredibly capable products in this category that are way cheaper that do everything the apple tv and maybe more other than apple's exclusive content you know airplay uh and uh and itunes content other than that like what they're they're the more expensive option that's like behind and less functional the other way to look at it is to say they finally shipped the 4k um and they are making progress uh but you know so i could go i could go either way with with that i i you know so and in my mind that's like it's a two or a three and i think i would probably say three because you got to give them a little bit of a clap on the back for actually finally shipping a 4k hdr product and getting 4k hdr content to go with it not just from amazon and netflix but in their in their store and doing the kind of free upgrade of a lot of that stuff if you bought it in hd really saved some of the scoring for me here because that was unexpected and a really nice bonus if you if you put down

what is too much money for the apple tv 4k to actually be like oh if you have a movie that's now going to be in hdr 4k we'll give it to you right like that's that was a that was a real bonus yeah you still gave it two out of five because i think that there's okay so again in the context all the reasons that i just said right it's it's it's it's the the remote i didn't even put in like there were so many things about how bad the remote is in the in the the text that people typed in so it's like the remote is still bad they didn't they put a ring around it uh that's that's that's not it it is still like so much more expensive than its than its competitors and its competitors are cheap and really good and so it feels like one of these Apple products that Apple's not really putting

as much effort into it as they should and that they really just want to kind of skim money from people who are so close into their ecosystem that they can't, that they're not willing to give up the stuff that they bought on iTunes.

And like they're going to just leverage that to get more money out of them. That is one legitimate way to view where the Apple TV is right now yeah so one of the reasons that I gave it the score that it was within the context is looking at the Apple TV as more than just the box it's also everything that goes around it and I think that Apple is is falling significantly behind in many areas because they have not put out any compelling programming even though they've tried

they should have had some kind of solution before now whatever it was they should have either been further along than they are with their current television efforts or they should have been able to somehow convince companies to allow them to start streaming and pay for the TV and movies that they should have been able to somehow convince companies to allow them to start streaming

and pay for the TV and movies that they currently have. Whatever it was Apple was going to do, it's taken them too long to get to the point that they're at right now when all of their competitors have different offerings. All of the Amazon stuff is super cheap and they have a great streaming service with their original content. Netflix doesn't care about having a box. They just get their stuff everywhere and they have a great streaming service with their own original content netflix doesn't care about having a box they just get their stuff everywhere and they have the like incredible content right like i just feel like apple has not gotten far along enough and that what they have got is underwhelming and disappointing in ways that are frustrating

like how long it took them to get the tv app outside of the US. Like we just got the TV app. Like why? It doesn't make any sense. Like I haven't got anything different. The TV app is just the iTunes app and my videos app pushed into one for me. That's kind of all I've got. So like, you know, I feel like that they really kind of dragging their feet with the product and the overall service.

And I hope that with all the news and the overall service and i hope that with all the news and focus i mean we put into this show now on what they're doing here i expect that score to start to increase but that comes with good content so that's kind of my overall feeling on it like i use it every day but i don't really think fondly of it to be honest it's mostly okay because even then right the apps that i use on it suck and that's not necessarily apple's fault but they still suck the youtube app is so bad oh yeah i'm really happy to be using it instead of the apps that came on my tv because it's a better experience than the youtube app built into my tv is better than the youtube

app on the apple tv yeah that's not the case for me. Plus, the only way I could watch 4K stuff on Amazon or Netflix was through the TV app. And now that I've attached a 4K box to my TV, I can do that, which is nice. But again, you could also have done that. I could have also done that with an Amazon box or a Roku box for cheaper. So, yeah. that with an amazon box or a roku box for cheaper so yeah and again right i can't watch 4k on youtube on the apple tv right also a frustration right so like i feel like that the product whilst i use it every day it's because it's the box that i have um and there are things that are better and it's where all my itunes purchases are so that's the library i built have and there are things that are better and it's where all my iTunes purchases are

and that's the library I've built up over the last 10 years so yeah, I'm interested to see where it goes, I think C++ is mostly fair, considering the way to think about it, like for example, Glenn Fleischman he was raving about it like the TV app evolving and starting to incorporate more streaming services has made it my increasing

my go-to location and I'm sure there are many people that feel that way cloud services are graded at a b minus of an average score of 3.4 out of 5 uh this is up from a c last year jason yeah it's funny um people it's a long road for people to trust apple's cloud services i think that's the short version of what i wrote which is it keeps going up apple keeps getting better the perception is that apple's cloud services. I think that's the short version of what I wrote, which is, it keeps going up. Apple keeps getting better. The perception is that Apple's cloud services stuff is better than it was. A lot of the verbatim replies that I got from people were basically saying, well, I don't trust Apple, so I don't use them. Or I've been using them and they've gotten a lot better. Or I've been using them and these got a lot better and these are still not great.

But I didn't get a lot of I tried to use Apple Cloud Services in 2017 and it was a disaster. I didn't get that. I feel like there are there are the people who have sworn off them. There are the people who have used them begrudgingly and sparingly. And there are the people who've kind of just embraced them and gone with it like david sparks i think does all of his stuff with icloud now he moved off of dropbox for a lot of his stuff um and i think that's i think that's about right like i use some but not all of apple's cloud services stuff i feel like they've come a long way and that

it's pretty reliable and a lot of my complaints about like iCloud Drive are that there are features that iCloud Drive lacks that are in Dropbox that, you know, over time, if they continue to iterate the software stuff attached to iCloud Drive, I might even stop using Dropbox if it does everything Dropbox does. It doesn't, but it continues to get closer. And the photo library syncing works great. Like I've got issues with like the lack of family sharing and I've talked about that a lot, but like the actual like trust and reliability for me is pretty high. Like it all works pretty well. I have issues with their pricing structure the fact that they had that stupid free tier and then the 99 cent a month tier which they they should get rid of and replace with a a more generous free tier because i i truly believe it's a better user experience and the more people rely on the free tier the more likely they're going to be willing to spend money on

more storage and that they're they're doing it wrong right now that calculation is off but in terms of like how the cloud stuff work when i put this question in two years ago it was very much a uh like oh boy apple cloud hmm get out your knives right and now it doesn't it doesn't feel like that i feel like a lot of the people who don't score it well are people who have sworn off of it because of a previous bad experience. Yeah, to echo some of the negative points you were saying, Aline Sims says, I think that they still have a lot of catching up to do, especially where photos are concerned,

which is an interesting point to put in the cloud services area. She says, I wish they'd at least let people back up their iOS devices as well without paying for extra storage. Yeah, I agree with those points. I think that they're things a lot of people feel. But I like Stephen Aquino. He had some really good comments

saying, I use Apple Music every day and love it. That is a cloud service. That makes perfect sense. Apple Pay continues to be magical and the editorial changes on the App Store have made browsing and learning about new apps a much more enriching experience. And I also like, uh,

Steven, I, I consider all of those things are part of the cloud services. And when you pull those things in as well, that is a much better, uh, thought than just like, Oh,

my backups aren't good, which is true, right? They should have more there, but everything that is now encapsulated in that cloud services bucket, a lot of it's really good. So yeah, there are definitely, I agree with you completely, right?

A few years ago, this was just like the easy one to get the bad score in. But it's getting a lot better now. It's getting a lot better. Getting better. And this is the constant question, which is do you give them credit for getting better because they were bad before? Or do you score them because there are still things that they need to do? Because they're in the middle there, right? They're in the middle. This has been, they have shown a lot of progress. I feel like Apple is getting better at cloud stuff all the time. In fact, most of the issues I have with Apple's cloud stuff is features that they haven't implemented in software, which I'm not sure is the fault of the cloud reliability, right?

And their pricing policies, which again, not the fault of the service itself. It's sort of Apple's approach to it. So those are all fixable if Apple wants to fix them. So yeah, I think the cloud stuff has gone well. This is better than expected for me. I feel like the Apple Cloud Services stuff has gone a lot better than I would have thought. Let's talk about HomeKit. Graded at a C-, average score of 2.7.

Last year it was a D+. Brought that grade up from D- to C-. Did anything drop so i think software quality dropped right oh lots lots of stuff yeah yeah software quality dropped okay so what about home kit then where where are you kind of feeling on that um i feel like i may be more positive about home kit than the panel only because i finally used HomeKit in 2017 after being in kind of parallel home automation, internet of things universes before that with, you know, Amazon Echoes and non HomeKit compatible devices in my house. I bought some HomeKit compatible devices.

I installed HomeBridge to get my incompatible devices in HomeKit. I'm using the Home Control Center widget all the time now, which actually is why I complain about the Control Center pull down in iPhone X a lot, is that I use it a lot. And that's my primary interface for turning stuff on and off in my home that's a smart device, my primary interface for turning stuff on and off in my home that's a smart device is that is just the home widget in control center. So I think they've I think they've made a lot of progress. I think the policy changes to make not require hardware encryption and to open it up to essentially have more third parties be able to support HomeKit. I think HomeKit is getting momentum. I think HomeKit is going to be okay. I think everybody's going to want to support HomeKit. I think HomeKit is getting momentum. I think HomeKit is going to be okay. I think everybody's going to want to support HomeKit. Um, and that HomeKit has got those additional security features, which makes people happy. Um, so I think that's all, I think that's all fine.

Um, I think internet of things stuff is in general a mess and HomeKit is a subset of that mess. So, you know, it's one of those things that I think, I think Apple is making progress and they've made some changes to open up HomeKit that they needed to make and that are good and will overall be good. So, um, so yeah, I'm, I'm kind of embracing HomeKit and I think Apple has, has turned has turned it around. But it's still a weird category that I don't think I would recommend to most civilians. It's still really messy. It's early days, for sure. Merlin Mann echoes your sentiments. It still feels like the Wild West, how it feels like the early days of the Wild West. how it feels like the early days of the wild west right this yeah everyone's moving around new categories and products are popping up all the time nothing's working with each other like it's there's a lot of real strangeness going on in the home automation world uh and carolina milanesi

says i think apple has a lot of work to do to make home kit broader and hopes that home pod will help i'm hoping that some of the software authentication stuff that they're doing and certification, I think it's called, that stuff I think is still underway. And I'm hoping to see some changes, some more products popping up when it becomes easier to make your product HomeKit certified. So I still have my fingers crossed for that. Today's episode is also brought to you by our friends over at Pingdom. You can start monitoring your websites and servers today at pingdom.com slash relayfm. You'll get a 14-day free trial when you do and use the offer code upgrade at checkout and you'll

grab yourself a lovely 30% off your first invoice. Stuff breaks on the internet all the time. Pingdom detects so many outages you wouldn't believe. 13 million outages a month they detect. Now, you don't want to be one of those people, but it's going to happen to you. This is the thing. Sometimes stuff breaks on the internet. You just have to deal with it. But when it does, you want to know immediately so you can go and fix what's broken. That's what Pingdom helps you do.

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as the first way you find out about it. You want Pingdom to immediately alert you so you can fix it before it affects you. You don't want to be caught out when someone wants to access your site. That is why you need Pingdom. Go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM for a 14-day free trial and use the code upgrade at checkout to get yourself a lovely 30% off your first invoice. Our sincere thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, moving on in the report card, we now get to hardware reliability. This is one of the really interesting ones because the majority of comments were negative now there were some good ones so dan provost says that apple is still best in class andy and arco says still the gold standard for initial build quality and overall endurance completely correct and getting a positive

statement from andy and i go about apple not an easy thing these days he's definitely very critical of apple and i thought it was interesting the places where he said no they've got this this is their this is why they're great but this one is was a tricky one now where this is an average score for last year a minus still in a minus so it stuck where it was does that feel right to you that it would stick where it was as hardware reliability not changed too significantly in the last year in your your opinion? I think it depends on the axe that you're grinding. Like, the keyboards on the MacBooks have been an issue, and people are frustrated by them. And if you've been bitten by that especially, like Stephen Hackett, like Marco, like, you know, other people we know, that is going to show up. But there's also kind of the bigger picture of, you know, in general, is Apple's hardware

pretty reliable? Yes, it is. I should say that the battery stuff about the iPhone, like six and all of that, the battery throttling and all of those things going on happened mid fielding of this survey. So it's possible that people might've changed their mind. Uh, you always have to roll with it. If there's a big story that happens during the survey, it can, it can affect the results.

And that's just something you just got to deal with it. But I think, I think the, the panel gave voice to the issues about things like the keyboards while also wanting to give apple credit for making good hardware that generally is uh is solid and trustworthy from jessica dennis the thing with the new macbook pro keyboards breaking due to dust and that condition requirement uh requiring an extensive repair is really really bad david spark says this year it became clear that the new laptop keyboards regardless of how you feel about their travel have been a reliability problem which is true yeah and this is the thing i think i saw i think marco may have talked about it a little bit but um the the fact is if it's truly a reliability problem apple Apple's going to change that keyboard.

They can't keep, because if you've got keyboards that break easily and are expensive to replace, it's going to have huge impacts on, as they age on warranty repairs and, uh, product liability. Like people start to do class action suits saying you've got to you know you got to repair this for free or whatever it's like if if a bad design that increases the cost for apple is like the going to be the number one motivator to change the design it's not going to be well we like the style we think this is a good fit for our product line. If that's all true and it's still like way more breakable than they thought, they'll change it because they have to, because it's going to cost them a whole lot of money and also make people feel less good about their products if they do.

So we'll see. I guess we'll get a sense this year, right, About whether they are going to rush out a new keyboard design that is better. That would be the third iteration of this modern keyboard or a first of a new one. And we'll see. There's some rumors out there that they may be working on something. There's some competitors. I think there's a laptop from, I don't remember the PC laptop manufacturer, but it uses like magnetic switches. So it's like a totally different switch approach where it's using magnetic repulsion. Like would that work for Apple? Who knows what they're going to do. But, um, but I do think it's worth pointing

out that like, I've been very happy. And most of the people who reported in the survey, like very happy with the reliability of their Apple hardware in general. So there's a sore point amid a lot of positivity. It might be Dell. Could be. The Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 has a magnetic levitation keyboard, whatever that means. Yeah. It sounds very interesting.

I think it's attached at the corners, but the repulsion that you feel in the middle is actually a magnetic repulsion not a physical pushback i think it's something like that but it's yeah so people are trying that stuff and maybe apple is trying that too uh but again apple could be completely because there's the i don't like it aspect of this and there's the it breaks breaks aspect. And Apple knows the numbers for people bringing their laptops back to Apple stores. Apple knows that. They've got figures.

They can tell whether it is truly an epidemic or whether we are overblowing this. They know. They know what that is. They may also have an opinion about how great the new MacBook keyboard is. Somebody obviously does because they've rolled it out to the entire laptop line. Um, but what I'm saying is like, if that, if the reliability issue is there, doesn't matter, right? That's going to override people thinking, no, but we, we like this keyboard.

It's like, but, but it's unreliable. That will be enough for them to change even if they're sad about it software quality so we went from hardware quality to software quality uh last year it was a b minus this year is a c minus with an average score of 2.7 now you were mentioning a moment ago about things in the news affecting the scores, and I would say towards the end of the year for a bunch of varying

reasons, there has been a lot of upset about software quality. Serenity Caldwell does a good job of summing this up. Apple, get your security house in order ASAP. Some of the bugs in ios and mac os here are outrageously bad talking about stuff like the root bug right like there was a bug

of a couple of weeks ago about the app store and all this kind of stuff this survey fielded as the uh enter in no password and get root access bug was hitting so i think that came up a lot in the comments but in general like this is the place that everybody took the hammer to apple and said you know this this score went way down and there's just this feeling like it's buggy it's really buggy um and and there was an expectation that this year's software releases especially high sierra would smooth things out. And yet people really feel frustrated about High Sierra and iOS 11. And yeah, this is the one that stands out as this is where people are grumpy this year is about Apple's, the quality of Apple software. And some people were very specific to say they thought the OS work was doing okay, and that some security issues are going to be are understandable, and they reacted to them quickly.

And so some people were willing to give Apple a pass on the OS and singled out something that's very common over the past few years, which is all the apps that Apple releases that are often not updated or kind of like just halfway addressed. And so some people were specific about that. But I think there's generally this feeling among these observers that there is a little bit of a malaise at Apple in terms of the quality of the software they're putting out. One of my problems is like,

I expect there to be bugs in new things, right? Like I spoke about files being buggy. I expected it to be buggy because it's a new thing and I expect it will get better over time. My big problem with Apple software quality this year has been where specific stands that Apple makes, makes things worse. Like the autocorrect issues that we've had this year where apple is deciding to to use their privacy methods to create autocorrect suggestions it's pulling in incorrect things and pushing them out on a large basis to people but then my biggest frustration with this is that the

only way they can fix this is via a software update. Like, you have to update the software on people's phones to stop a question mark showing where the letter I should be. Like, that feels like the wrong approach. I feel like something's gone wrong here in that now you have to issue a point release of the operating system to fix an autocorrect bug. That's the sort of stuff that has frustrated me the most this year. I like what Dr. Zhang says. This is not an illusion. Apple software quality is dropping and they don't seem to recognize it.

I understand that there's much more to keep track of now than there ever has been. But being sympathetic to Apple's difficulties doesn't make me blind to them. I like that. Trust Dr. Drang to say something succinct. Did I ask you where would you score the software quality? You didn't. I don't know. I would put it down I would put it down. I'd put it at like 2 or 3. Yeah. I would put it down.

You know, I'd put it at like two or three. Yeah. We move on to developer relations. Graded a B. Average score of 3.6. Last year, a C+. Got a couple of quotes from some developers. Marco Orment. The App Store and iTunes Connect keep getting better

since Phil Schiller took over. James Thompson. Review times are really quick on the whole. If I did have a complaint, it would be that the TestFlight app review process is now slower than full app review, which is kind of funny to think about. And that TestFlight for the Mac has just never happened.

And then Casey really goes for it here. Here's the Casey list. I really think that Apple is already having a bit of a reckoning when it comes to their obsession with secrecy, sooner rather than later. Apple can't be reliant upon third-party developers whilst also petulantly refusing to scratch our backs. The community puts up with it because we have little choice. So, like, whilst they, you know, you can see Marco and James saying things are getting better, Casey is saying that whilst, you know,

whilst they're getting better, the way that Apple keeps so many things close to their chest is still not very helpful to people, and that developers kind of just put up with a lot that they maybe wouldn't if there was somewhere else to go i have to say that this is a fun category because i had a lot of people who said well i'm not a developer i don't really know and and even some sort of like why are you even asking this question and the truth is i just decided because i wanted continuity that i would keep asking the same questions every year. And three years ago, at the very end of 2015, so I guess two plus years ago,

when I did the first one of these surveys, there was a lot of friction about Apple's relationship with developers, about App Store delays and App Store rejections and all of these things that frustrated developers. It was a hot issue. So I put it in the survey. And the next question is also sort of in that context of like, it was seemed like a bigger deal two years ago than it is now, but I want to keep it around just to see, to monitor it. And Marco said it all, which is what really is funny is Phil Schiller took over the app store and developer stuff and has made a lot of improvements and things have gotten a lot better.

So now I think it's gotten so much better that people look at this category and are like, why are you even asking about the relationship between Apple and its developers? And that's funny that it is. It has come that far, but it was much more controversial than it has been lately. This this is a this is trending in the right direction. And the final category is environmental and social impact. It's graded a B plus with an average score of 3.8 down from an A minus last year. Yeah, it's funny. The reason this got in there is there are a few reasons

when I started doing this, it was right at the height of lots of stories about, um, essentially human rights abuses in the supply chain in China, especially. And, uh, at the same time, Apple also has environmental initiatives and they bought all this solar power for their, for their headquarters. initiatives and they bought all this solar power for their for their headquarters and they taught they worked with greenpeace on you know improving their recyclability of their products and there's a lot of issues like that and they taught apple talks about making it changes in the world and they've got health initiatives and there's there's a lot of stuff that rolls into this but that was the genesis of it was especially around that time when they were talking about the supply chain in Asia and a bunch of other stuff that they were doing.

So I thought, why don't we just stick a monitor on this and say, how do you feel about this? And again, there's no rule about what this means to you, environmental and social impact, but it's really just like Apple's programs and behavior in terms of things that are larger than a particular product but how apple behaves as a company and uh the scores are uh are down a little from last year but pretty positive this is where um this is where apple last year got credit for refusing uh i think from a lot of the panel, for refusing to hand over encrypted data from an iPhone used by a person who did a mass shooting. And that was, I think people gave them credit for standing up for consumer privacy. But the issues change year on year. And so I'm not sure whether the trend means as much as it does to

sort of like see what people call out yeah i think also i'll read some quotes i think a lot of people are hoping that they would have done more in some areas than they have yeah and there seems to be some stalling so uh stephen hackett says apple continues to lead the way in environmental and social issues but diversity within the company especially at the top continues to be a problem i understand this stuff takes time, but I'd like more visibility into what's going on throughout the company when it comes to hiring and promoting women and people of color. And then Stephen Aquino says,

Apple continues to lead the industry in providing comprehensive assistive tools for its disabled users. Carolina Milanese says, I think Tim Cook has become a great ambassador and has given Apple a very human side. This is something that I have felt for a long time. I've said it before, I'll say it again. I think that Tim Cook is a better CEO for Apple

than Steve Jobs could be at this point because the biggest company in the world needs someone more like Tim who can stand and speak on social issues and stuff like that. And he has come under criticism. There were a few comments in the article mentioning that some people believe that Tim has not shown his hand enough in political issues this year, or in the past year.

But there are a lot of things that he does stand up for and there are a lot of things he has spoken very openly about and he can be good for that kind of stuff. Serenity Coldwell says, I'm incredibly pleased to see Apple's work in healthcare and accessibility. Not so thrilled of continuing diversity issues inside the company.

And Jessica Dennis points out how there is a lot of interesting work going on at Apple Campus, the Apple Park, for environmental issues. And they're thinking about lots of open spaces and stuff like that. But Apple could continue to go further. We were talking about this at the time. Public transport expansion in these areas could be something that Apple could push on

to continue to go further and further. I think that this is one of those areas that people will always want more in. And it's not wrong. But I think it's always going to be difficult for this one to go up significantly. Because every time they get close to something, it will uncover something more. And this is the peril of being the biggest company in the world. People want you to do a lot of stuff. And you kind of have to, because you should. So this is a tricky one. We talked about this last week when we talked about taxes and things like that, too, is that, you know, Apple is, it's a complex issue, because Apple is complex, because Apple is enormous. It is an enormous corporation that has huge amounts

of money and needs to lobby the government for tax changes and needs to lobby the government for policy on things like encryption that affect their customers and their products. They also want to say that they're making a difference and committed to change in various social areas and in improving people's lives through medical initiatives. And as Stephen Aquino pointed out, assisted tools for disabled users. And there's like, there's a lot. There's a lot. And so it's never going to be a simple thing to say, oh, they're good or they're bad. It's way more complicated than that.

But it's worth at least checking the pulse on this every year. So I do. So having completed the survey, did it go as you expected? Were there any surprises in the grading? I don't know. I mean, anything where you take an average, you're going to push everything toward the middle. Because that's just what's going to happen. So you're trying to pick things out. I think the trend of the downward trend for software quality is really telling that, like, in a year where everybody seemed to be griping about keyboards, people were really concerned about the software quality.

Like, that is, and again, is it real or not? We can argue about it. Every now and then I post one of these and somebody says that's not true or i don't agree and it's like okay it's just i mean like it's an opinion survey it's it's you can disagree it's fine i'm just trying to get a sense of it and clearly there is a sense among people who carefully watch apple that apple has a problem. And there's also a sense that Apple's most important platforms had a good year. Like the core platforms, the iPhone and the iPad, especially, like they had a good year. The Apple Watch had a good year. The Mac, not so much,

but I feel like there's a lot of anxiety about the Mac out there and it shows that and and that's why I keep saying in some ways what you do is you look at a server like this and you nod because it's sort of a formalization of the stuff you've been hearing on podcasts and reading on blogs and talking to people about about Apple because it sort of feeds into that. This is the summation of it. So not surprising in that sense. And I think, yeah, would you be surprised if I walked up to you and said, so in 2017, people really worried

about Apple software quality and not quite sure what's going on with the Mac. You'd probably say, sounds about right. So that's where we are. But the good thing and the interesting thing about doing something like this is the trends so being able to see how things change year on year is one of the things that i find so interesting about this yeah now that i have a little bit of a track record and the question next year is will i add some things to

the survey but one of the reasons you keep things things on a survey is that you get to start comparing. And there's a lot of interesting trends, like hardware reliability, although it's still got a pretty good score, is trending down. It did. There has been an impact with all of this discussion of especially like the keyboards and the um the you know the environmental social is actually trending down um but developer relations like i said is trending up and uh so you know it's it's just a and uh home kit is actually for as low a score as it's it's got it's trending up which I think makes sense. It's a

low score, but the perception keeps going up. So you can see where they're getting momentum. They're changing minds, even though it's a slow process. So yeah, it is fascinating to have that trend now, which I didn't used to have because I've only done the survey for three years now. Well, I'm asking you to crack out a crystal ball right now, but is there anything that you're currently watching for, for 2018 scorecard? Is there anything you're expecting to change or anything that you think that you will add or that you will want to add as a change of Apple? I don't know. I want to see where the Mac goes, but don't we all? I feel like we've really set the Mac up for... Expectations are high for Apple to change how it does the Mac.

I would say they did it. They brought a bunch of journalists into a room. They set themselves up pretty high. Yeah, no. Expectations, they set the expectations, right? But expectations are high. People are going into this year thinking, all right, Apple's going to do a new Mac Pro. Let's see if they're going to fix the keyboard thing. Do they know, you know, and it just takes them time to turn the ship. But this is this is the year they're going to get it together. We're going to see more of a recommitment to the Mac. You know, maybe some of that will be true. I believe that Apple is going to change and is already changing its approach to the Mac hardware and will continue to do that.

I think the big question mark is going to be, is the Mac as a platform something that Apple is going to really invest a lot of effort into? Or are they going to keep it going, but it's kind of in maintenance mode? to keep it going, but it's kind of in maintenance mode. And some people will react very differently than other people to that. My gut feeling is that a lot of Mac people could use a year of maintenance mode. But there is also a frustration like, why isn't this on the Mac? Why isn't this on the Mac? Why are they not doing new things on the Mac? Because they're all, all the new stuff is happening on other platforms. And there's, there's a lot of truth to that. So, um, I think the Mac just, there's still question marks there. There's more expectation and, uh, and we'll see where it goes. I'm curious about the watch

now that the watch hardware, um, they've kind of achieved their first major milestone of, of like the watch as a product by getting to LTE. What happens next with the watch? Do they change the design? Do they keep it static and work on the software side? That remains to be seen. And then generally software quality and hardware reliability. People are grumpy and they're giving them credit on hardware and not on software. And is that going to change this year? In terms of new categories? I don't know. I'm thinking about it. We'll see what sticks in my mind by the end of the year. I don't want to make the survey too long. A lot of people were very nice. I think I had about 25,000 words in total written in the survey boxes,

which is just, it was a lot. And that's why it took me until the middle of January to get the story out. But I appreciate that. I don't want to make the survey longer, nor do I want to mandate, because I don't, that people actually fill in all the boxes. But some of them do. So I don't want to do too much. But we'll see. So we have run out of time for Ask Upgrade today. But I'm going to save those great Ask Upgrade questions that we have for next week. So you can always send

those in with the hashtag AskUpgrade if you have any questions you'd like us to answer at the end of the show. We collect them up and I've got a lovely set already set for next week's episode. If you want to find our show notes for today, relay.fm slash upgrade slash 178. If you enjoy this show

and there's a friend of yours or a family member that you think may also enjoy it, why don't you ask them to subscribe? Say, Hey, Mike and Jason have a great discussion every week about Apple and technology and now media as well. You should go and check it out.

I think you'd enjoy it. I think people would, would be happy because we like this show and we think that more people would like it too. Um, if you want to find Jason online, he's over at six colors.com, the incomparable.com. He is at jsnell on Twitter.

I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E We both host a slew of shows at RelayFM and you can find those at relay.fm slash shows. I want to say thanks again to our sponsors this week, the great people at Pingdom, Smile with PDF Pen and Simple Contacts.

And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.