Upgrade - 18: Special Interface Snowflake

Episode Date: January 12, 2015

This week Jason and Myke discuss the rumored 12" MacBook Air, how Apple approaches battery life on iOS devices, Apple software quality, uses of scripting and automation, Siracusa-style window management, and the first time Jason ever picked up an iPhone.

from relay fm this is upgrade this is episode number 18 and today's show is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts for a 10-day free trial visit lynda.com slash upgrade mail route a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam and stamps.com postage on demand my name is mike hurley and i have the pleasure of being joined by your host and mine the one and only man of action mr jason snow in this corner five feet eleven hundred pounds enough interesting ways to describe you might as well just keep going until until it ends yeah and i've got there yeah hi mike how's it going i am very well sir how are you uh doing good doing good good starting a week i i i'm in this

thing it's funny in my new life that i i'm in this, I'm realizing that all of my old sort of cycles of what I would do are gone, obviously, since September. But I'm starting to recognize the things that I'm kind of, are my new cycles that are starting to happen, things that I'm used to having happen. And these days, on Sunday, I usually am thinking about what upgrade is going to be and making sure that our topic list is up to date checking the hashtag ask upgrade spreadsheet and things like that and then Monday morning the kids are going

to school you know everybody's having a little harder time waking up and my wife and I will drop my son off at school and take a little bit of a walk and then I come home and then it's sort of like then I actually switch the sponsors bit of a walk and then i come home and then it's sort of like then i'm then i i actually uh switch the sponsors on six colors and then i get ready to do upgrade and it's like my monday upgrade my sunday night monday morning is uh that's a just a big part of it

is getting ready to do this so it's uh it's nice it's nice to have some mile posts like that so i'm not like waking up wondering what day it is which which could happen in this in this kind of when i don't leave the house to go anywhere um that could happen indeed yes i i went swimming this morning so uh did you go to the olympic pool uh yeah i went to the olympic pool oh good um i i i'm not one of these people uh and i know many people like this that that feel great after they work out you know oh yeah yeah the endorphin rush thing yeah i feel like i have the opposite of that but that's maybe something for another day well you're doomed then if you don't i did i i'm actually thinking i i i. I started running a couple of years ago. I ran when I was in high school just to burn off my extra energy and just not not like in an organized way, like literally put the tape in me because I'm old in the Walkman and run.

And I started running again a couple of years ago and then, and because my daughter had to run a mile. And so we did a couch to 5k kind of thing. And we did that. And then we stopped because basically if we didn't schedule it and I thought about going back to that and my experience doing that a couple of years ago after having not really run for a long time, except when chased by bears is that, um, I, I totally get that afterward. I feel like I felt like I'd accomplished something and I, I, I wouldn't say I felt good. I would say I felt good tired. Like

I felt like I was, I was tired afterward, but in a, like, I don't know, like a, like a, like a good kind of tired as opposed to just, I'm exhausted. It was more like I had accomplished something and that was why I was low on energy afterward. It's weird. It's fine. I'm not a fan of exercise. I force myself to do it sometimes, not as often as I should.

And yeah, but I should do more. It's the exercise vertical. It is. Jason Snell, do you have some follow-up for us today? I do. Listener and Up upgradian Wes Morgan wrote in to ask, can we refer to the shore-up release that's been theorized of OS X, 10.11?

Everybody is hoping that there will be rather than a major new release with a lot of new features. We'll get to that in a moment. Can we refer to that as SnowSemity? Hashtag AskUpgrade. No. Nope. We can't. Don't do it.

Nice try, Wes, but we can't do that. Nope. Anyway, moving on. Listener Justin. Okay, so Listener Justin appears to be our winner. We talked about the how many hours has Smart Speed saved you in Overcast last time. And many people, many people wrote to us. Lots and lots of many of lots and lots of many of people.

With their hour totals. Thank you for sending them over, though. It's been interesting to see how basically everybody listens to more podcasts than me i don't i thought i thought i was quite proud of my number jason and what was your number i'm gonna go back now it might be something like 40 or something like that yeah mine's like 20 it was so much that i had to double check the wording oh 28 i 28, I'm at. Because it said smart speed has saved you an extra 28 hours beyond speed adjustments alone. Yes.

So I wanted to just double check that it wasn't like all speed adjustments. Yeah, but it's just smart speed. It's just smart speed. So it's like, so when, we haven't said the amount yet, have we? No, so listener Justin, so the winner, so far as we can tell, is listener Justin, Upgradian Justin, who said, I have saved 222 hours using SmartSpeed on Overcast. And then he followed that up by trash talking a little bit and saying hashtag upgradians aren't hashtag amateurs. I can't even understand how. I don't.

He just listens all the time. Yeah. Like I don't get it. I just don't get it. Like to save 222 hours just to smart speed. Like how many thousands of hours that's i i i can't maybe he listens to lots of podcasts with lots of pauses so i i uh spoke to justin a little bit because i was i was taken aback uh and he says he subscribes to over 100 podcasts but he listens to probably like 25 um and he's allowed to listen at work all day.

So he does. He listens all day, every day. Amazing. Congratulations. And again, a lot of pauses, I think, are happening to listener Justin. So I think he wins, but we thank everybody for sharing their number.

We also helped somebody. It turns out there was a bug that Marco is hoping is fixed in the update that he's about to do for Overcast that some people don't see their saved hours. And we had a couple people, I think, who discovered that. So we did some good in the world and stop sending us how many hours you saved because we appreciated it and we don't need to see it anymore. My Twitter stream was full of just screenshots of Overcast with the text saying 26 hours, 34 hours, 52 hours. I did that thing.

222. Just to see what it was like. I did that thing with TweetBot where you turn it into the media stream. And I'm just looking for it. I'm like, it's just pictures of this. It's just Overcast. I only want to hear from you about this now if you've beaten 222 hours. You've got to beat Listener Justin. If you don't beat

upgradian Justin, then I don't want to see it. He's a proud upgradian. Moving on to other feedback. Listener Amjid wrote in to say regarding Apple software, has anyone mentioned the F word

potential impact of Scott Forstall leaving Apple? Could his leaving have been a potential cause for some of the software instability that we're currently seeing? As I said last week, one of our really big challenges with talking about this is that we're on the outside. I don't have any inside information about exactly what everybody at Apple is doing and whose positions were what and why changes were made. And I don't have that. And so there are people who've got sources or secret former Apple developers or whoever, anonymous Apple developers, who could maybe tell more. From the outside, I would say that if there's anybody whose departure strikes me as being somebody who might have had an impact on what Apple is doing with their software methodology,

it's probably Bertrand Serlet. Why is that? Well, he was for a long time, I mean, he was the OS guy at Apple. And while Scott Forstall was the high profile, big name, you know, big name on stage kind of guy, whereas Bertrand, you never saw unless you went to the State of the Union session after lunch on keynote day at WWDC. But he was the senior vice president of software engineering at Apple from 97 to 2011. Well, I mean, Avi Tavanian was in charge, and then Bertrand was in charge. After 2003, Bertrand was in charge until he left Apple. And, you know, again, I don't know all the details, but it strikes me that he seems to be a guy who had some very specific – he was not a public kind of person. But he struck me as being somebody who was pretty professional and was running that ship for a very long time. And his departure, it strikes me, probably had a big impact on Apple.

But, again, I don't know. That would just be – that would be my guess. It's easy for us to point at Scott Forstall because he was very high profile a big impact on Apple. But again, I don't know. That would just be my guess. It's easy for us to point at Scott Forstall because he was very high profile. He was on stage. There are lots of stories about Steve Jobs liking him, about him not getting along with other people. And then he was obviously sent to the garden for some gardening leave by Tim Cook. But I wonder about Bertrand and whether Bertrand had more of an impact. But I don't know because I'm not, you know, I don't have input into that. But I think one of the mistakes we sometimes make when we're talking about Apple is we're looking, like I said, at the surface. And we're looking at people whose names we've heard and there are stories about them.

And sometimes it can be not one particular person or it might be a person that you haven't even heard of unless you're, you know, at WWDC or, you know, engineers at Apple who know this executive. So I'll just throw that out there that maybe Bertrand Surlis, he had a, he had a lovely French accent. I always enjoyed listening to him talk about the operating systems and pronounce various operating system code names in French accent. various operating system code names in French accent. So my question with this is, who replaced Bertrand then? Did nobody replace him?

Yeah, I don't know. Because there's a gap there. Like if he left in 2011, because they didn't do the software group merging until later, until like what, 2013, 2014? Because that was after Forstall left, right? And he left later than 2011, didn't he? Yeah, it looks to me like Bertrand was in charge of operating system and Forstall was in charge of iOS.

So Forstall worked for Bertrand, so far as I could tell. But again, not on the inside. Don't have... I'm trying to rack my brain. So then maybe when he left, they just split them a little bit, and then nobody kind of took over from him, and then Forstall left, and then they squished it all into,

what, like, Federighi's team? Yeah, I mean, Forstall left in 2012, and Bertrand left in 2011. So it was right in there. So maybe Forstall, I don't know, maybe those things, Forstall and Federighi were both just reporting up rather than reporting to Bertrand. I'm not sure. It seems to me that Craig Federighi basically has this role now of the Bertrand role, which is in charge of all software. software. But anyway, I like Bertrand. Some sources tell me that the year after Bertrand left Apple or the year Bertrand left Apple, he was seen having lunch with John Syracusa at WWDC. Oh, to be a fly on the wall. Oh, really? Yeah, I think, I don't know. I mean,

they may just have had a friendly lunch, but I thought that was funny. That's like the guy who's been in charge of OS X development essentially since close to the beginning. Having a chat with John about OS X would have been a fascinating thing. I don't know if that's actually true, but that's what I heard

is that they had a lunch together. I like to assume that that was John debriefing Bertrand and thanking him for his sleeper cell work inside of Apple. I like to imagine that it was Bertrand saying in his French accent, John, you were so right. Right. That was more Russian. Anyway, I don't do accents. And I like to imagine that you were so right about everything, John. We listened to you, except for the file system thing. You were wrong about

that and something like that. And then John just throws his fork down and says, this lunch is over and storms. That's my John Syracuse and Bertrand Surley fan fiction. Maybe Joe Steele can write a screenplay about that. Do you remember the fam the famed eric schmidt steve jobs lunch meeting thing do you remember that when they were sitting outside of a coffee shop oh yeah yeah i remember man there were pictures of them sitting there there you've just created a new one of those yeah jobs and schmidt were probably like talking about how they weren't going to hire anybody and they were going to make everybody's suppress all the wages in silicon valley something like that yeah just. Just little things. Yeah.

Anyway, so that's that one. Speaking of Joe Steele, he wrote in asking about automation scripts and things that have helped us do work. If we could detail some of those, he linked to a Dr. Drang post on Dr. Drang's site about this sorting script that he built to sort of manually, to automated sort of, he was doing wind directions, I think, and he got the directions wrong. And then he wanted to write a script to correct himself rather than just correct it manually, which I totally understand because the fear there is if you write a script to do it, then it will apply the same rules to if you write a script to do it, then it will do apply the same rules to what you've done on every line. And it will either be completely wrong or, or

completely right. Whereas if you do it by hand, you may get some of them wrong. And that's scary because then you've got some of your list items are incorrect. Um, and it's fascinating because, um, you do get the sense sometimes with Dr. Drang, who is a brilliant guy, that, you know, he does like writing his scripts. And there is that question of, like, have you fallen down the rabbit hole at some point and spent too much time writing a script? I think there's an ex-KCD cartoon. There is for everything, right, about this. The chart of how much time you save and then how much time you spend building the tool to automate the thing that is supposedly saving you time. I don't know if you do any automation stuff. I can say for me,

you know, in Macworld, I had a lot of scripts in BBEdit that automated a whole bunch of stuff. Before that, I actually had, when we were using this home-built CMS for the TV website that Greg Noss wrote, I had some scripts that were basically like made BBEdit into a blog posting tool. I would run the script and it would post the story, which was pretty great at that time when there were no blog posting tools to do that. These days, I've got some automator stuff for uploading images to Six Colors and resizing them and things. And I posted about that and uploading podcasts to the incomparable. So I've got some. And then the other one that really saves me a lot of time, I've got a lot of little scripts in BBEdit that just do quick search and replaces in a sequence.

And I put some time into that because I feel like over time it saves me a huge amount just to, if I'm saving a fraction of a second, but I use it a thousand times, then I'm actually saving appreciable amounts of time and not breaking my concentration. And most of those are grep patterns. They're pattern matching regular expressions. And those take some time to build sometimes too. But when they work, again, you can save a whole lot of time and like dr drang's example it's consistent you can tell if it worked or not because either it works or it doesn't rather than it being something that you update by hand and it turns out that you made mistakes on five percent of the things you were

trying to update i have a very little experience of automator um i've used it a few times to build actions to like bulk rename a file or something but now anything like that on my mac i use hazel for so i have i only have a few hazel actions um i have one that that goes through and categorizes all of the photos that i upload to dropbox that I kind of stole and Frankenstein from Federico. I'll find that and put that in the show notes as well where he explains his photo automation workflow. And I also have one that just does some stuff. So, for example, all the calls that we have here and all the Skype calls I have and shows that I have, Core Recorder automatically

records them. And I have Hazel go in and clear old ones out after a certain amount of time. Yeah, I just go in and say, oh my god, there are a lot in here and delete them every now and then. But Dan Morin on Clockwise, we asked this question and Dan Morin said most of the automation

he uses was written by me. So I have been somebody who sort of, like, pushes this stuff on others. And that's how I felt at Macworld was I was automating stuff for me, but I was also then passing that around and saying you could use this too and save time, and it's already built. So if they were writing in Markdown and BBEdit, they could use the tools or not, but they were there for them. And that's mostly what it is. I don't, I'm not a, you know, Dr. Draring is a shell scripter and he's got these amazing scripting skills that I do not have, but I do have those moments where I think, like I said, uploading images to six colors. I did that for a couple of weeks where I was opening every image, resizing it twice, saving it out twice, and then uploading the file and then opening my template of like what the HTML was to place that in the document and then putting in the file name and all that.

And now I have a script that automatically resizes them, automatically uploads them, and puts the HTML for those file names on the clipboard so I can just paste it into my text editor. That's better. And although it's not perfect and I need to make some, I've actually been thinking I need to tweak this. It's been great to have that and that saved me a lot of time. So that's the kind of stuff that I end up automating. I do try very hard to recognize that I try not to fall into the bottomless pit. I try to think, like, how much effort am I going to be able to put into this, and what am I going to get out of it? And I try to be pretty – I'm okay with doing some tasks if they're not too repetitive, if the alternative is having to spend hours trying to automate something, because that's no good. But that six colors image uploader thing, that was great. That took me a couple hours, but that has reduced the friction in posting

stories to the site. And whether I've netted that time back yet or not, I feel like it's worth it because now when I'm done with the story, the story is done. Instead of when I'm done with the story, now I have to go through these 10 steps in order to get the story live, because that's no fun. So sometimes I wonder if it's better to be in a world like in my mind, where I know how to do these things, and then have, you know, then have like the pain of I need to tighten this up, or to be in the world that i'm in where i don't i don't identify the situations that could probably be scripted because i'm unsure of some of the power that these things have and i wonder what's the better place to be in like not scripting

things and just doing it as as it is or scripting them and then then feeling like oh maybe i need to tighten this up or something like that i i don't know what the worst tradeoff is, you know. So I have kind of blissful ignorance. I hate – this is true. This is true. I mean, what I hate is I hate repetitive tasks. There is that moment, whether you know how to do scripting or regular expressions or anything, there's that moment where you're looking at a text file or an

Excel file or something like that and thinking, oh my God, I just need to go through this line by line and make one change to every single thing in here. And that's that moment where you say to yourself, this is a computer. Shouldn't the computer be able to do this for me? This stupid task that is just going to take me half an hour of clicking and occasionally typing. There's got to be a better way. And the next step is I have some ways and maybe one of them is better. And if it is, I'm going to use that.

And that's, you know, that's great when that happens. But I think that moment happens regardless. I mean, I think there's a moment where you're sitting there clicking for 30 minutes where you've got to be thinking to yourself, all I'm doing is sitting here clicking and I'm using this, you know, this powerful computer. Surely there is some way, and maybe I don't know it, but surely there is some way to reduce this friction or not waste myself with this stupid task that I have. And that happens to me a lot. I have a lot of things that, that, that, that work like that, that I end up pasting text into BBEdit and running a regular

expression or exporting something and into a tab delimited text file and bringing it into Excel and sorting it and then putting it back out and lots of stuff like that, that, that does happen. So I think, I think, I think it does happen on a certain level to everybody. And the difficulty is if you don't have any tools to use to, um, get yourself out of that, get, you know, that, that predicament, then you just feel even worse because you know, this is stupid. There's gotta be a better way, but you don't know it. And so you just have to do the work yeah uh this is going on way too long now thanks joe steel i know i feel like i just had something else oh yeah well i think part for me is like a lot of the repetitive tasks that i have i can't automate like like the audio editing

stuff so going in doing a lot of that some of it can be but a lot of it the majority of it can't be ultimate there's nothing i can do about it so maybe i just have a higher threshold so i don't i don't even think about it because it's not something that i worry about you know i don't know i don't know i don't know well anyway that's our uh i guess that's our automation vertical yeah i have one more one more bit of listener follow-up, which is listener Andy, who said, Show 17, we mentioned those sort of dictionary passwords for something like 1Password that are easy to remember because they're all real words, but they're unrelated words. And XKCD obviously had a cartoon about this because XKCD has a cartoon about everything but Andy sent a link in that we'll put in the show notes

to a little tool that uses the XKCD method to randomly pick four words and you can just hit reload until you find something that pleases you and you can set the number of words and all of that and I just went there and I got Paddington, Carla Guildford films.

Oh, there's lots of beautiful British words in there. I know. How about that? Oh, Paddington and Guildford. That's Guildford, by the way.

Underwater passports, living programs. And that's pretty good too. Anyway. So thank you to listener Andy. And we'll put that link in the show notes. That's a, if you want a little tool to help you come up with a memorable but not really guessable password, you can give that a try.

It's perfect. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Andy. You're a true upgradian. Mm-hmm. And a good friend. Speaking of friends, Mike. Beautiful.

Beautiful. Is a segue really a segue if you acknowledge it? I don't know. Kickstart your new year and challenge yourself to learn something new with a free 10-day trial to lynda.com. They are helping support this week's episode of Upgrade. lynda.com is used by millions of people around the world and they have over 3,000 courses on topics like web development, photography, visual design and business. All of lynda.com's courses are taught by experts and they have new courses being added to the site every single week. lynda.com has something for everyone. If you're looking to your 2015 and

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breadth so first you build your app and then you need to market it. And this is the kind of thing that lynda.com can give you. Do yourself something good for 2015 and sign up for a free 10-day trial to lynda.com by going to lynda.com slash upgrade. Go ahead. I challenge you to learn something new in 2015. Thank you so much to lynda.com for supporting this show and all of RelayFM. Yay. So we have a little bit more follow-up but this is a verticalized follow-up yes this is follow-up from other

podcasts which i thought i would do because i have opinions and would like to share them so this may be particularly exciting for people who listen to other podcasts and maybe have 200 hours of saved things in Overcast, and maybe not. I wanted to mention, so we talked about Marco Arment's piece last week, which he had just posted. And since then, he made some edits to it, and he did a post saying that he kind of regretted posting it. And ATP talked about it last week.

And again, I kind of assume that most people who listen to this show probably also listen to Accidental Tech Podcast. So I don't want to really go over everything there. I liked the fact that, I mean, I was listening to it live. I was in the chat room. I was making dinner and listening to ATP, which is actually a lot of fun. and I don't know I feel bad for Marco I think they you know clearly the story is that he dashed it off and didn't expect it to get noticed and the reality you know by by a massive audience and the reality of writing something on the internet and putting it out there is that any piece you write could be that piece and you kind of need to be prepared for that. And I think Marco's take may include the idea that he's not willing to do that much diligence, and so he's just going to be more reluctant to say things on his blog, which I think is unfortunate.

I think everybody had a good laugh about the fact that those guys have been very critical of the same issue in the podcast for ages, and nobody noticed because nobody listens to podcasts who writes those stories. They don't do that. We don't yet have somebody who's the truth squad, who's doing transcripts of every podcast and then quoting those things on websites. And so, you know, you can bury opinions in podcasts like this one that might be more problematic if you just wrote a headline and, you know and a few hundred words on the website.

And I think that's just the world we live in. But I like their discussion about software stability. I come back to what we said last week as well, which is we don't know all the details and we don't know all that's going in there. There was also a nice piece that I saw linked to from, well, Daring Fireball linked to it, and I saw it on Twitter as well, from Ashley Nelson Hornstein, who works at Dropbox but used to work at Apple. a ton of smart people who work there. And I think they have noticed this problem and are moving to make the proper adjustments and we just haven't seen the results yet.

And that's encouraging, I think. Yeah, that's like via the horse's mouth, you know? I think you can, because obviously Apple can't, or not can't, Apple won't address it publicly in the media. So at least if we hear from people that either A, work there, or B, have and have seen this stuff, that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, but we're on the outside. And this is something I tried to say last week. And then I think it's worth repeating, which is a lot of what happens in the, especially people who write about Apple a lot in that sphere, a lot of what happens is us waving our arms to say, do you guys know that this is a problem? Do you think that this is a problem? Are you aware that this is happening? And then we just kind of have to hope that, you know, maybe something good happens. But I don't feel, as somebody who is part of this sphere, I don't feel like I can write something

and get results at Apple. I feel like I can write something that somebody at Apple might notice, at Apple. I feel like I can write something that somebody at Apple might notice and they might use it as part of their thought process, but they might just as easily never see it or just look at it and go, nope, he doesn't know what's really going on on the inside here. And so I feel like all we can do is say, hey, we think this is an issue, do you? And hope that they do. If we think it's a problem, we hope that they think it's a problem and we hope that they are working on it. And that's all we can do. And with Apple, you literally won't know

until the situation gets better or they make a nod toward it at WWDC or something like that. So that's where we are. So that's my... I just wanted to touch back on that and say that I liked the ATP discussion of it. I actually think there were two interesting discussions to be had about it.

One being about the Apple and software stability in general and one being about the funny media world we live in where Marco's piece got picked up and how you end up writing defensively sometimes because you're aware of the scrutiny that's placed on you as a writer and how I think Marco doesn't like to think that way. I don't want to say he wasn't aware of it because I think he's aware of it on one level, but I think he just doesn't want to think that way. I think he wants to be able to write the stuff that he wants to write. And the difficulty is that some of his stuff is a little provocative and some of it, sometimes he will write phrases that are a little bit too far and not more incendiary than maybe he actually intends. And the difficulty is he likes writing those pieces and he's now in a position of visibility where it's very difficult for him to write those pieces because people will quote him and use his

words to further their take on the issue, even if Marco doesn't share where they're coming from, and they'll appropriate his words. And you just, you know, yeah, that kind of sucks that you can't do what you like to do before, but that's just how it is. That's like, I'm sure George Clooney would like to go into his local 7-Eleven and buy a Slurpee like he did when he was 14, but he can't. He just can't. So that's life. That's life in the big city and on the internet now. So I thought those were two interesting discussions. I also wanted to mention briefly John Syracusa, who a couple of weeks ago did an ATP post-credits segment, I think, post-music segment about how he has like a thousand windows on his screen, a million windows, an infinite number of windows spawning. There's

a new one spawning every 30 seconds forever, and he never closes any of them. I exaggerate a little bit, but I wanted to talk about that briefly only because I thought it was fascinating. And I thought it was a good reminder that none of us uses our computer like anyone else. We all are special little quirky snowflakes when it comes to how we use our computers. And also many people on the internet are very judgmental about this. I can't believe you don't do it the way I do it. And the answer is nobody does it the way you do it because we all do it differently. But it struck me like John having all these windows open that I am a minimal window open person. I'm not a no windows open person, but I try to keep it small. I only

have web browser windows open when I'm actively using them. And even then I will often hide Safari or hide some windows because I don't want a thousand windows open. I very rarely have more than about eight windows open. And I very rarely have more than about five things in a particular browser tab. And I was curious, Mike, what your window situation is. Okay. So I, for context, I use a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. Okay. So my main desktop has one, two, three, four, five, let's say five on average apps open that all have a single window, Tweetbot, OmniFocus, Slack, Lingo, and Messages.

So they're always there on home screen one. I have a second home screen, like a desktop, sorry. Look at me, iOS generation. I have a second desktop uh which at the moment has uh by word and on the outliner open for for something that i'm working on a little project i don't always have this but i probably will have this for the foreseeable future then everything else i use full screen apps so i have two chrome windows in full screen. I have Mailbox and Evernote as well, and they occupy full screen.

I probably have about 10 or 15 tabs in window number one on Chrome, and then about the same in window two. Window two is pretty much completely Google Drive, Window two is pretty much completely Google Drive and then a couple of Wikipedia articles for some research for a show outline. And then in window one is all of the stuff that I browse on a daily basis and or some things that I want to come back to later.

I do, like John, I keep some tabs open for things that I want to get to. But that's good to get to. That's good to hear. I don't do full screen anything. Really? I don't. You do have a huge computer though as well.

What about on the 11 inch? You must on the 11 inch. No. How do you? I don't. One of the reasons why I've tried that, sometimes I will do that with Logic on the 11inch because I need every last little bit of space. But the problem is then something happens and it flies out of full screen or it slides your app away because something else is going on in the computer. And I have some, I don't know, I have some problems with what happens when things are sliding in and out

and you're over, now I'm over in this space and now I'm back over here and switching between apps, having an app be the size of the screen and yet not in full screen mode works okay for me a lot of the time. So I do a lot of that. So like right now I've got the Skype window open

in the background because we're doing a Skype call, but that's just kind of floating there. I have a web browser window open, a single one with three tabs, and it's our topic list and the two friend ad reads that are coming up. story ideas into it. And I've got my IRC window open for the chat room for the show. And that's it. That's it. I don't have any other like, I don't use open windows as to-do lists most of the time. And if I was working on a story right now, it would be open in BBEdit and maybe hidden. I might've just hidden BBEdit just to get it out of the way because I'm not working on that right now. I'm working on the show. And it's also very rare that I keep web browser windows open because there's an article I want to read, which is something John talked about. Generally, I will just, you know, put them in Instapaper. If I'm not going to read it right now, I'll just put it in Instapaper and I'll read it later and close the window. I don't know. See, everybody's different. Everybody is a special interface snowflake.

That's just how it is. They are indeed. I am very surprised that you don't use any full-screen apps on an 11-inch MacBook Air, though. I've tried. It's interesting. It's very interesting to me. I've tried. There's something about the way that you switch between them that I end up wanting to go back.

I just so often, like logic, when I'm editing, I can be in full screen mode, but then there's that moment when I need to drag an audio file in from the finder. And I can't be in full screen mode to do that. So then I have to switch out of full screen mode and then position the window and drag it and all of that. I use multiple apps a lot for things and in full screen mode you can't you're just using one yeah see i set up separate desktops as well though right to try oh my god yeah i've tried that too and it just it just never works for me i end up going back to it's very rare that i have i have two like totally different sets of windows that interact with each other and not with anything else. Um, I, I, you know, occasionally I have

done that for a project, but in the end I ended up just going back to, I think it's just because I, I, you know, started to use a Mac in an era when that you didn't do that, when you just did your own window management and you had one space and that was it. And I think that that is a lot of it too. Yeah. Anyway, so there's some window follow-up for somebody else's show. And then I have a couple items for other podcasts to say that we talked about Hello Internet and CGP Grey last week. I just wanted to um that i just realized that that video that was great that i watched about how robots are going to take over everything for humans and nobody really knows what humans are going to be good for anymore is a cgp p gray video and i think that was the first one of his that i that i saw that's very outside of his usual style it's like a 15 minute

video with lots of uh imagery and lots of pictures video and stuff like that and he's not so many cartoons yeah yeah it's very different but it's incredible and of course it will be in the show notes which are at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 18 yeah um so that i wanted to throw that out there um also mentioned that the uh latest episode of the flop house is a live episode that they did in front of an audience and it's awesome i'm about i'm about 20 minutes in and it's amazing yeah about that it's the live version and they're talking about the new the teenage mutant ninja turtles movie and as they put it the old not the old one and then there's an extended riff about what the 1950s teenage mutant ninja turtle movie might have been um but it's pretty funny. And I remember I was at Comic-Con last summer and I was actually in line for, I was in line

for a room that was currently doing a panel about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. And so I was there for what was coming next. But I was in the line with some of the people who hadn't yet gotten in, who were hoping to sort of get into the last 20 minutes of the Ninja Turtles session. And I was fascinated by that because I was too old to ever be into it. I remember what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the comic book was parodying, which is all of the ninjas that were in Marvel comics in the eighties,

like Frank, all Frank Miller's daredevil stuff. It's like, like, as they say on the, on, on the podcast, on the, on the flop house, like a hundred ninjas appear. And it turns out that a hundred ninjas are much less dangerous than one ninja. One ninja will kill you. 100 ninjas, you can fight them off. It's fine. Or fight one at a time.

Yeah, because it's one at a time. And that was totally, I mean, as much as I love some of those comics from the 80s, ninjas was a really, really overused trope. The Tick, the comic book version of the Tick did some great jokes. They had an issue called Night of a Million Kajillion Ninjas that was a parody of those Daredevil comics. And Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a, that was the joke, is that the X-Men were big, so that was the mutant and the Teen Titans and the Teenage Mutant and then the ninjas from the, that was the joke. So I'm old enough to remember what the joke was about, but I wasn't a kid whose formative years watching cartoons

coincided with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So for me, standing in that line at Comic-Con, I was just baffled. I'm like, really? They're remaking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? You know, really? And I just didn't get it. I was that generation.

Yeah, I know. you know really and i just didn't get it so i was that generation yeah i know i was i was the the teenage mutant hero turtles as well they were called was it hero i feel like yeah well it may it may have been you know like uh in the uk they may have changed some things that you know like oh ninjas are are bad and they you know, throwing stars and they're dangerous and children will be, you know, poking their eyes out with ninja stars. So we're going to say the hero turtles. In Europe, they were known as the teenage mutant hero turtles. That's weird.

Which is what I'm used to because there was a TV show and the song used to go teenage mutant hero turtle. Anyway, like that. And I was of that generation, but had absolutely zero interest in a Michael Bay produced anything. Yeah, it seems like a bad idea. Yes, local censorship policies,

says Wikipedia, deemed the word ninja to have excessively violent connotations for a children's program. So they changed it to heroes. And the lyrics in the song were changed as well because ninjas, well, you missed the whole ninja joke then. Anyway, that's a Flophouse episode.

I'm excited that they did a live episode. And I had one more podcast thing, which was when we talked in the Upgradies about podcasts we liked, I don't think I mentioned The Bugle and I wanted to mention The Bugle because that is one of my other very favorite podcasts. And it's a little more irregular now that John Oliver has his own TV show on HBO, but it's John Oliver and Andy

Zaltzman, two British comedians, one in New York and one in London. And they comment, seems to be every other week now, on news events with lots of comedy. And I enjoy it greatly. And that's another really great podcast to listen to. So The Bugle, check it out. You listen to The Bugle? Have you heard of The Bugle? Heard of it, never listened to it.

Yeah, it's pretty funny. I fear that it's going to fade away now that John Oliver has to devote all of his news satire to his own TV show that he makes his whole career on instead of this dumb podcast that he does. But it is a huge amount of fun and has coined many interesting phrases that I cannot say on this podcast because they would have to be bleeped out. But actually, one of the things i like about the bugle bugle is they bleep out a couple of words that john oliver's hbo show doesn't because it's hbo and they don't need to and i actually think they're funnier bleeped i think it's funnier to bleep out words and then you know what the words are rather than to just leave them in but oh yeah i definitely

think that like arrested development is so much funnier you know what they're saying yeah or when they like kind of then they kind of like weirdly obscure the mouth with like somebody's shoulder i love that i just think that is fantastic yeah so we're out of the follow-up we we have escaped the tunnel of follow up now well i mean that was sort of meta follow-up follow-up that was sort of like jason wants to talk about things that are not this podcast and that was but our other podcasts but we have we're done with we still have some really interesting topics but i think considering follow-up is completely over we should put a stick in the ground and thank a friend okay thank a friend uh not a stick don't

thank the stick thank the friend the friend i'm going to thank right now is stamps.com we talked about them last week uh some very exciting news on the stamps.com front that. The friend I'm going to thank right now is Stamps.com. We talked about them last week. There's some very exciting news on the Stamps.com front that I'll get to in a minute. But just to tell you about Stamps.com a little bit, these days you can get pretty much anything you want on demand, including this podcast. You are listening to this. We're recording this on, for me, Monday morning. Who knows when you're listening? At night, in the day, in a car, on a bus, anywhere.

You choose, and you're listening when it's convenient for you to listen. I say this in contrast to the post office, which has limited hours and a long line, and it's really annoying to go there and mail something out, and I hate it. There is nothing I hate. I discovered this about myself. There's nothing I hate worse than shipping packages. I hate it. Just mailing things, I hate out. And I hate it. There's nothing I hate. I discovered this about myself. There's nothing I hate worse than shipping packages. I hate it. I just mailing things. I hate it. I just hate it. I would have things sit in my office at Macworld for months because I did not want to ship them back. This is the beauty of stamps.com. It brings pointing and clicking on something on the internet together with mailing things. And now you can get postage

on demand and you don't have to deal with other human beings. I love that. So anything you can do at the post office, you can do now right from your desk with stamps.com. You can buy and print official U.S. postage, sorry, Mike, U.S. postage for any letter or package using your own computer and printer. And unlike the post office, stamps.com never closes. It's open 24-7, just like your computer can be on at any time. It's up to you. Super convenient. Now, I have now received my stamps.com scale, which will actually connect to my Mac via USB, and it will weigh packages and things. And I actually used it. I sent a little box with Apple's old, was it the Magic Mouse or the Mighty Mouse? The one with the little tiny ball on the top?

I'm pretty sure that's the Mighty Mouse. That's the Mighty Mouse with the little tiny ball, the little tiny track ball. So I have one of those from an old computer that was not being used, and I saw on Twitter that Brianna Wu's husband, Frank, who is near and dear to my heart, Frank is, because he's the one in that relationship that likes the original Star Trek and doesn't like playing super crazy video games.

And he's a lot like me. And so I'm in there for him, but he also uses this crazy mouse. And I've been there where you love a piece of outmoded technology and it's hard to find it. And you're like, what's going to happen when my thing that I love is broken? What am I going to do? And so I fell for him because his Mighty Mouse is dying. So I got a box out of the garage here. I got some bubble wrap.

I got the mouse, put it all together in the box, went to stamps.com. I weighed the box. I printed out all the information, the little barcodes and stuff, and put that all on the box. Stuck it in my mailbox with the flag up telling my letter carrier to take it away. And magical, it all worked. And that box is winning its way to the East Coast now with that mouse inside for Frank. And I didn't have to go to the post office. I didn't have to wait in line.

It was delightful. I haven't sent anything to you yet, Mike, but that is going to happen because they also ship internationally. But my first stamps.com moment was great because I didn't talk to anybody. I just printed things out and taped things down and it was really nice.

So to our listeners, use promo code upgrade at stamps.com. You will get a special offer. There's a no risk trial and there is a $110 bonus offer, which includes a digital scale and up to $55 in free postage. So don't wait, go to stamps.com. Before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in the word upgrade stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in the word upgrade stamps.com, click on the microphone and enter upgrade and thank you so much to stamps.com

for sponsoring upgrade and supporting our show and letting me not have to go to the post office to mail that weird mouse to Frank. I love that you can just put packages in and put the little flag up and the mail delivery recipient person picks it up and takes it.

We have to go to post boxes. He just took it away. That's magical. Amazing. All right. Other topics. What do you want to talk about? You want to talk about all this chatter about the Mark Gurman report about the 12-inch MacBook Air?

A lot of people have talked about that. This is where our Monday recording schedule bites us a little bit because I feel like this has been through the cycle a little bit. But I did write a piece on Six Colors about it. Yeah, this is one of the rare things where we got to speak about it on Connected before we get to speak about it on this show i think but i i do want to talk to you about it because obviously we've had more time to think about it and i value your opinion in such things as i know many people do and you did write a great piece on on one of the six colors so which color did i write it in blue blue in my mind he wrote it in blue got it so having some time to think over this and listen to what other people say and to kind of to

to maybe reflect upon your own piece do you think that how much truth do you think there could be in this rumor well mark german his his sources are good his track records pretty good recently for these types of things isn't it i i think and again you never know um they may have seen something that is going to change they may rethink about those things happen sometimes some of the wrong uh rumors are actually right at the time but then they change and what comes out at the end is not what uh was reported and they say haha they got this wrong and sometimes that's not true sometimes that was an accurate report and then somebody you know the product the product changed inside apple i so i i want to i

don't want to approach it as being like this is totally happening because there's a lot of time and anything can change. I will say I do give Mark Gurman a lot of credit. He has made, his reports are generally quite good. And so I think it's worth taking it seriously. And I think it's also worth just having that, this report contains some information that's so wacky that I think it's worth having the just thinking about it and thinking about what would this be if this was a thing. And some of the reaction to it was very much like, oh, this is crazy. It's impossible. It's not going to be like this.

And I didn't feel like that. I felt like if we take this seriously, let's try to walk through the process of why Apple would do these things. And having thought about it for a little while, I definitely came to the conclusion that this product, as wacky as it is described by Mark Gurman, is not unreasonable for Apple to do. Now, we can argue. I also don't want to say I'm defending the product and think it's a great idea. It may or may not be a successful product, but it seems to me totally like a product that apple would make if that makes sense yeah it does and i guess a lot of the thinking is now like you know if you look back to what the macbook air originally was right it was this um trailblazing device that did it was really weird things, I had it. And it was weird. It had, you could get

it with a hard drive that was a little iPod hard drive. It was slow and awful. Or you could get it with an SSD which was even smaller than I think it was an 80 gig hard driver you could get a 64 gig SSD. If you wanted the 64 gig SSD it was an extra thousand dollars.

Wow. And it had one USB port on a little door that flipped down. That was a USB port and a headphone jack on a little door. It had this processor that was a brand new processor that Intel had collaborated with Apple on that later would be in other devices. But Apple sort of drove Intel to build this low power, low heat kind of device. And then the thermal stuff on the original Air was a disaster to the point where if it got too hot, it turned off a processor core. And on the very slow two core processor in that system, when one of the cores shut down, you basically couldn't use the computer anymore. Like even moving the mouse was, got jerky. It was, it was a, as un-Apple-like an experience as you could possibly imagine to the

point where, I think I said this in the Six Colors article, it was a really great computer to use in a meat locker and a really bad computer to use if you had a west-facing window in the afternoon because the hotter it got, the worse it, you know, you could, eventually you could, you had to stop using it. I mean, I would, I would often take it to a place where there wasn't sun just to continue working because I needed to, I needed it to be cooler. Working outside on a hot day on it was not something I could do. So it was a compromised computer, and it was weird in all these different ways. The fact that it only had the one USB port, it had no optical drive, it had that little hard drive or the crazy SSD thing. And yet, you know, that's what this Mark Gurman report is sort of like. It's like, it's weird. It breaks a

lot of rules. But the MacBook Air over the years has really evolved into something that's a much more fully functional device. It's no longer a weird system. It's kind of a mainstream system. Lots of people have MacBook Airs. Lots of people use it. It's the 899 entry point onto Apple's laptop line lineup. And it brings into question sort of like what the point of the MacBook Pro is. I mean, yeah, it's heavier and it's got retina and it's more powerful, but they're not as far apart as you might think and as Apple might want them to be. And so that was the thought process I went through is having a weird computer that drops a whole bunch of things that we take for granted and put some distance between it and the MacBook Pro is a very Apple thing to do.

And in fact, it's what Apple did with the original MacBook Air. So why would they not potentially do it again? And re-christen the Air as a thing that is really about thinness and lightness and not about being a full featured laptop that's got all these power features that everybody who's kind of like us expects in a laptop. Is this a MacBook Air? Like this is what everyone's calling it. Yeah. But is this the MacBook Air? Is it something else? If it is a MacBook Air, did the current MacBook Air become something else? The way it's described is as a MacBook Air. And I would say it seems like a MacBook Air because

it seems like it is a device that is being solved for as thin and light as possible. Other features be damned. The features that are most important in this product are thin and light. Right? Weight and thinness are the things. And again, we can argue about whether Apple should be solving for those things, but let's just say they are, because that's sort of been the whole idea behind the MacBook Air in general. My gut feeling is they'll do what they did. I mean, you can still buy a non-retina MacBook Pro right now. That's still in the product list. So my gut feeling is that this product ends up being there alongside of existing MacBook Airs for a while, whether it's the 11 and the 13 or just the 13. You know, keeping the 11 around at $899 or even $799, Apple does that a lot now.

Apple does a lot of older models still hang around and you can still buy them and they're cheaper. So some people are speculating that this is going to be the cheap one. This is going to be Apple's cheap, you know, Chromebook competitor, and it's going to be $699. And I look at it and I think, eh, I think it's more likely that they'll take the existing MacBook Airs, keep them in the product line and have them go down in price. And that this will be, especially if it's Retina, that this is a higher-end device. This will cost more than the existing MacBook Airs do. So you think they could bring the cost down to the current

and this one will be higher anyway? That's my... If Apple is consistent with what they've been doing the last couple of years, when you never know, they could change things up. That's my guess. Apple seems to not be afraid to keep old tech around. Like I said, the 13-inch non-retina MacBook Pro is still available for sale to this day. That is pretty wacky, but that's what it is.

You can buy it for $1099 right now. So why not keep the existing Airs around? They are fully functional. They're not going to be as thin and light and awesome as this new thing. But they're very nice functional computers. And Apple knows how to make them. They're already designed. They're making them at volume. They can probably cut some price out of them and still have a pretty good margin.

You know, would you not? That just seems like a better move for me from Apple. And maybe I'm wrong. But to me, I have a hard time imagining that Apple would make a brand new design, especially if it has retina. Because I have a hard time with them making any new design that doesn't have retina at this point. I just don't see why they would bother investing in building a non-retina device. So at that point, the most likely scenario is that the new thing from Apple costs $1299 or something, $1199, and that the old things, the old MacBook Airs, stay the same or go down in price a little bit. And that's consistent with the 5C. It's consistent with the old iPads that are still being sold.

You keep the old thing around. The margins on it are better than they used to be when you introduced it. And you discount it and you keep that one around. But your new stuff, your hot new stuff, people want to pay for. And you should, you know and also that your margins on it are going to be less to start so for me this feels like a product that is going to go above the existing errors and then the existing errors will eventually fade away because that seems to be apple's uh stock and trade you know for the last few years anyway. So my next kind of line of inquiry is kind of,

maybe the elephant in the room, I don't know, but the weirdest part of all of it, which is the single USB 3. Oh, yeah. So one, I mean, what do you think about this? Is this possible? Is this livable? And the next, is this kind of saying that Thunderbolt is going the way of FireWire? Well, yes. Yes, I think it is. And I think maybe that's okay because USB 3.0 is pretty good.

And I'm not sure if Thunderbolt is really necessary given that this USB 3.0 can do a lot of the stuff that Thunderbolt does. And I'm not sure Thunderbolt is better enough to beat USB 3. And the fact that Apple has been a participant in this USB-C stuff makes you think, you know, maybe there's more to this. I don't know. This is not to get back to accidental tech podcasts for a minute, but one of the things those guys were doing that I think is a perfect reflection of people who listen to podcasts or do podcasts about Apple tech. And that's, you know, me and you and everybody listening to this is we are not every user. We are not necessarily even the target for a product like this. like this. So when Marco and John and Casey were talking about, like John, I think, was saying about, well, you got to put a USB key or you got to attach a hard drive or an external wired mouse

for clicking. And I just sat there while I was making dinner thinking, no, no, no, no. The answer, if you're Apple, if you think like Apple, the answer is, well, if somebody really wants a mouse, get a wireless mouse and a USB key. They're like, seriously, USB key? Who uses that? And if, yeah, okay. If you have needs for external devices like that, either this is not the computer for you, or you will need some kind of a hub. And I think this is the kind of product that makes decisions like that and says, look, most people in the future do not need those things attached to their computer. It's all wireless. So we're just going to, we're going to make it harder for those people who need that level of convenience, but we don't care because we want this to be super

simple and thin and light and wireless and only have one port. So I think that sounds very Apple. And we can argue about, again, this is not me saying I think it's a perfect decision. It's me saying I can totally see Apple making that decision. So I do wonder if there's another part to this story that Mark Gurman didn't report on. And I sort of touched on it briefly in my story, which is Apple might come out and say, hey, there's only one port and it's for power. So if you want to attach any peripheral to it you're gonna have to buy an accessory you know so long suckers jetpack and they're out right they could they could do that i would i tried to put jetpack in the story i was like nobody's gonna understand this it's like a flophouse joke anyway um but i could see apple saying this is revolutionary nobody's done this before but our you know it's not just the computer that's revolutionary. The power plug is revolutionary. And we've got a breakaway magnetic thing or the power plug is itself a hub. And so when you're traveling, you can plug devices into the little white plastic brick and it'll connect to the computer and it'll charge. And isn't that amazing that Apple's reinvented the power plug now? Or we've also got a $49 thing that you can put on your desk and that you dock to and it takes in power and attaches peripherals and then you just plug in the one cable. Isn't that amazing? And it's only $49 or $79 or $99 or whatever it is. I could totally see Apple telling those stories about,

we've got this amazing travel thing that's right on the power plug that lets you do some of this stuff. And then we've got this amazing port or something that you can put on your desk if you want, or that'll be a third party thing. I totally see that. And yes, is this going to be a computer that is not convenient for somebody who always is plugging in USB devices? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, sure. But they don't care. I mean, it was, the iMac was really inconvenient when it didn't have a floppy drive and they didn't care. This is very Apple is what I'm saying. And although we can debate whether it's good or not, I don't think there's a strong argument that Apple wouldn't do something like this. This seems very much like the kind of attitude Apple often has when it's pushing into new areas. Like, look, it doesn't matter that you've got USB keys. We're not going to let your USB keys be the thing that keeps us from making this product. Because they may even be able to say internally, we know that only two-tenths of our laptop users ever do that, or 1% or 5%. And at that point, they say, well, the MacBook Pro is for

you then. You're a pro. You've got lots of USB devices. You care about that stuff. Buy the MacBook Pro. This product isn't for you. Very Apple in that way too, I think. What about MagSafe? I don't know. It depends on how hard. Again, maybe there's a story there. Maybe they say, well, actually, this is a little cable and it pops right out if you put any pressure on it. So don't. Or like I said, maybe it's down the cable. Maybe the tripping point is down the cable and there's a magnetic something or other at the little plastic box or somewhere along the line that pops off if there's force attached. Then again, they could also explain that away. I am with John Syracuse on that point, by the way,

which is it would be a shame to just kiss off MagSafe. It is really nice that they have this thing that means my laptop isn't going to fall on the floor when somebody trips on the cord. But they may have another story there that we don't see in this report because this report is just, you know, the report looks like it's a complete thing with renders and all that but chances are pretty good that what mark german really got was like a bulleted list of things that are in it and lots of things that might be in it or next to it that he didn't get aren't in that report so it's even though i think his report is probably accurate i don't know i don't necessarily think it's complete right. I don't know. It's fascinating. I love thinking about this because it makes, you know, before Apple says anything about it, because you have to play that game of would Apple do this?

And that's not the same game as do I want it? I mean, I look at this report and I think, would I want one of those? And, you know, probably not. But just because I don't want it doesn't mean Apple's not going to do it. And it doesn't mean that there isn't a market for it. It just means that it's not for me. And I think a lot of us can make that mistake of thinking, oh, this doesn't fit my use case. This isn't a kind of product that I would buy and writes it off. When in fact, you know, you have to think of people who are not you who who might actually like having that thinner

lighter you know the the renders are kind of amazing i mean it would be a crazy crazy thin laptop we didn't even get to i didn't even mention that the rumor also says it's not going to have a clicking trackpad you're gonna have to tap on it and i hate that i i i never use tap to click. But, you know, that's me. For me, don't buy it, basically. All right, fair enough. Maybe I won't buy it. Or maybe they'll have a story that is better than just tap to click that makes it, you know, better than just sort of no feedback tapping in order to get a mouse click. We'll see if it's real. Well, there we go. You okay, Mike?

Yeah, I'm fine. I don't know. I'm just not sure how I feel about it. It's like the one thing that I keep trying to remember and like to get, not necessarily get my head around, but like just to force upon myself is like, this has been done so many times, you know, Apple have done this type of thing so many times where they're just like,

we're removing that thing that you think that you need. Just, you know, get used to it, you know? Like, oh, we're taking away the hard drive. Not the hard drive, we're taking away like this optical drive. You know, before that, you know, like we're taking away a floppy drive and you kind of just maybe this is the one right this is just the next one which is like we're taking away everything and maybe that's it you know i don't know but it's it's it's just interesting to me uh and i guess what you would expect maybe soon that we would see this, maybe?

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. I'm not clear. I think, you know, it really depends. They could at some point, they could have it ready to go. They could be making them now.

Although my guess is that they aren't because we would probably have seen leaked supply chain photos. But they could be making them now um although my guess is that they aren't because we would probably have seen leaked supply chain photos but they could be making them soon or they could still be working on it and not ready to release it and not happy with the supplies or the cost of the supplies or the margin on the product and it could be six months or nine months it's hard to say. Could be any time or not. Should we take a final break for this week's episode? I think it's a good time. Tell me all about MailRoute, Jason Snell. All right, MailRoute.

I've mentioned it before, Mike. MailRoute is a magical service. Magical. This is like an Apple product announcement. It's a magical service. Imagine a. This is like an Apple product announcement. It's a magical service. Imagine a world, Mike, without spam or viruses or bounced email messages. This is a magical world? No, it's the real world if you use MailRoute. I've been using MailRoute for a few years now. It is a service that sits between your mail server and the internet, takes in your mail,

that sits between your mail server and the internet, takes in your mail, processes it to see if it's spammy or has attached viruses or if it's just full of just, you know, bounced junk from the internet, and it filters that stuff out and then it passes it on to your mail server. So your mail server doesn't have to bear the load of receiving all that spam. It never sees it. And then you can optionally get a report every so often, and you decide how often on their easy web interface, that will list the stuff that got knocked out of your account. And if there's something there, if there was a false positive, you can with one click whitelist the person who sent it so their mail never gets caught again and have that mail immediately delivered into your inbox. And I do that occasionally, but there are very few false positives at this point. MailRoute is doing a great job. The stuff that is in my little MailRoute message or digest that I get, it's all spam. And I just laugh at the subject lines and then I move on with my day, which is great. So MailRoute has done this for me. It can do it for you. You don't

have to install any hardware. You don't have to install any software. It's all in the cloud. It's MailRoute software on their servers. It's easy to set up. It is reliable. I haven't had any problems with reliability with my mail getting delivered, trusted by large universities and corporations. If you are a desktop user like me, you will like the simple, easy interface for MailRoute. And if you're an email administrator or an IT professional, they've got all the tools that you want.

They've built them with you in mind. There's an API for easy account management. They support LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, Outbound Relay, and Mike's favorite, mailbagging. This is where you shout mailbagging. Come on. Mailbagging!

Hey, everything you'd want from the people handling your mail. I've been using it for a while. It's very good. Mailbagging. Hey, everything you'd want from the people handling your mail. I've been using it for a while. It's very good. Check it out. Go to mailroute.net slash upgrade, and you will get a free trial. You can try it out and see if it's for you. And you'll also get 10% off for the lifetime of your account.

If you go to mailroute.net slash upgrade, remove your spam from your email for good like i did and thanks to everybody at mail route for being a good friend of upgrade and for filtering spam out of my email be like jason use mail route sure sure i do i love the i love the one click thing that's my favorite thing is that when when it does misfile something which happens occasionally that you can make one click and then the mail is immediately delivered and that person is now whitelisted and you never have to deal with it again it's really nice so let's talk about battery life okay now you you wrote a piece on on six colors looking at ios devices and, thanks to Stephen Hackett. Yes. Who I believe you guys, not to spoil upcoming episode of Connected,

but I believe you guys are working on something that is iPad related. Maybe. And Mr. Hackett was looking, he recalled that I've talked a lot about how Apple tends to solve for specific battery life with their iOS products. That every year there's a new iPhone and people think, oh, maybe this year the iPhone will have a bigger battery. And the answer is always, no, this iPhone is smaller. And the amount of battery life that Apple quotes is pretty much the same as last year. And that happens every year. That Apple obviously is not trying to make their phones bigger

or even the same size and have more battery life. Instead, they're playing the game of how small can we make this thing and how much can we tweak the software and how power saving is the hardware so that we can get to the point where it's got that suitable battery life and no more. And so Stephen asked me, hey, did you ever write a story about that? And I said, no, I talk about it all the time and I've never written a story about it. So he did some research into the numbers that Apple has quoted for iPhones and iPads over the years and made some charts that I sort of adapted and wrote a piece around.

So now we've got a piece that if you ever do talk about this in a future episode of Connected, you can link to this piece because now that piece finally exists. And the numbers are amazing. You know, it was all anecdotal. Obviously, in covering these products over the years, I would always do the math and say, oh, well, it's pretty much the same as the last time. It's always pretty much the same as the last time. People would always shake their fists and be like, ah, I really wish there was more battery life. And the answer was Apple thinks there's enough battery life in the iPhone.

At least they're not willing to compromise and make the iPhone heavier or thicker for your battery life. Much as what we just talked about, about the MacBook Air, I feel like that happens here too, which is Apple saying, sure, if you really want mega battery life, go buy a battery pack. But we're not going to put the battery pack in every single iPhone because most people don't want it. I really think that that's the approach here. So with Stephen's research, we were able to generate some charts, which are in this story, which show he did iPhone battery life, the quoted standby time, and also the quoted sort of average time, talk time on whatever networks were in those phones when they were released, the prevalent networks supported by the phone at the time. So that changed over time from 2G to 3G to LTE. time. So that changed over time from 2G to 3G to LTE. And what you see is for the iPhone,

the quoted talk time has been, you know, it came up from the original iPhone in the 3G from, you know, in the eight hour range to about 11 hours in the 4S, regressed with the 5, went back up with the 5C, 5S, but they're not that different. And it's only with the iPhone 6 that the talk time has gotten sort of above 12 hours quoted. These are not based on, they're based on Apple's internal tests for marketing purposes so that they can figure out what numbers to quote. But it's not, these are not the independent test numbers. These are just sort of what Apple says the battery life is. And then there's the 6 Plus. And the 6 Plus, yeah, there's a lot of battery life in the 6 Plus.

That is the change to the equation. And if you look at the standby numbers, it's the same thing. They haven't changed a whole lot over time. There is not a strict upward progression over time because you can see that Apple is taking away some battery life when it needs to in order to get more powerful or thinner or lighter. And again, it's only really with a 6 Plus that you see something that is way outside the norm. So clearly on the normal, whatever they consider the normal sized iPhone, Apple is solving for that battery life. And on the iPad, it's even more hilarious. On the iPad, Wi-Fi iPads are always 10 hours of battery life that's what they're

shooting for the quoted number of 10 hours of battery life and the only exceptions in the entire life of the ipad are the ipad 2 ipad 3 and ipad 4 cellular models they were quoted at nine hours but the current cellular models are all quoted at 10 again so and i think maybe the first mini was also a a nine hour for the cellular version so basically the point of these dumb charts is um apple's trying to hit a battery life not grow battery life over time and the only seems to be the 6 Plus. Okay, so I disagree with that hypothesis. Interesting. 6 Plus user. Well, yeah, but for the phones.

Okay, so you look at the iPad, right? And clearly Apple are making decisions in the negative and positive to get it to 10. There is like a number on the wall in the iPad hardware development team that just says 10. This paper on the wall says 10, which is clear, right? Because you look at that and it's over these six iterations. It's sticking at 10. Those standby numbers for the phone are all over the place. So Apple have not decided on an amount. If they thought the original iPhone was the right amount,

which is kind of where we are again with the 6, then why did it increase for the 3G, the 3GS, and the 4? And then it decreased significantly for the 4S. It's only kind of building up from there. With standby, I wonder how much of software is embedded into the standby. And also, not only do we have software and hardware changes, but we've got these wireless changes that happen. If you look at the battery life with talk times, the reason the 4S goes down to the 5, it's got to be LTE. It's got to be LTE.

Like LTE, they took a hit and the battery life regressed because of LTE. And maybe, you know, 3G. When the iPhone went to the iPhone 3G, it regressed in battery life on cell. And that was probably because of the extra power required for the 3G.

And then they got better over time. But like I said, if we look at the cell chart though, they were happy to let it increase right and then lte come by and struck it down but that but you know if you look at the overall trend if you were to draw a trend line from iphone to iphone 6 that apple are increasing it and if they're increasing it it means they don't think that they've found the the number that they found with the original iPad.

Like the original iPad, the number is the same as it is today. We are not at that stage with the iPhone. Admittedly, it's not a huge increase, but it's big enough. It's basically double. So my argument would be they have not found that point yet, but they are making decisions in the way that they make the phone, which don't let it go crazy like it does with a 6 Plus. The 6 Plus's battery life is only that great because they have added space. They have extra space because it's so large.

They just chuck it in there. And the 6 has extra space too, which is, I think, why the 6 has the best battery life in terms of cellular talk. I guess what I would say is there is a positive trend over time, but it seems to be related to adopting a new technology and then improving within that technology. So the 3G era, you see improvement 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S. And then you take the step back with LTE, and then you see forward steps there. Although the jump from the 5C and 5S era to the 6 is a much bigger jump from the 5 to the 5C and the 5S. And I think that's because of size as a part of it. I guess I don't dispute that Apple is open to adding more battery life. I guess I would say clearly Apple is not concerned about, if you look at that base number for the 5, let's say, Apple felt like that was good enough and that they made, and the 5 is

so much thinner than the 4S. And they were okay with that because they thought that battery life was okay. And I mean, and these are all messy numbers and, but I just, in my mind, I look at this and I say, this shows that Apple kind of is not, they don't care if they regress

with battery a little bit from time to time. They just don't care. Whereas thinness, they really seem to care if they regress. Oh, I agree with that. Thinness and lightness,

they have to be marching forward. Battery, they're like, they're okay. Because again, you could have gone from the 4S to the 5 and kept the thickness of the 4S. And that battery life would have been better. And they didn't do it. They put it back in because I think they're just shooting for...

And underlying this, I would say, is they're shooting for all day. They're shooting for some platonic ideal of all day, which is you unplug your phone in the morning when you go to work, you're at work all day, and then you go home in the evening, and it should last that much time. And that they have models of usage that are based on that. It's like you can do that all day. But if you're going to be on your device every minute of that day using data, it's going to die. But then you're an outlier and they're not solving for you. They're solving for somebody who's got lighter use than that. So I just I would expect these numbers to look to improve, not because battery technology is improving, but because Apple wants to increase.

If Apple targeted this as a feature, it wanted to improve over time. It would have. And it hasn't really until the six. And I think the six is where the story changes because of the size so i definitely agree with you that that they're that they're not averse to cutting it for certain reasons it's just my kind of my the way that i look at this is they found something with the ipad that they've not yet found with the iPhone, which is the number, right? The iPad, I don't know why they made the decision that they made, but they decided to go with 10 and they stuck on it.

You know, they're just like, this is just where we're going to go. And it's just interesting to me that that is how that has been. Because even the Mini, right? The Mini is 10, isn't it? Yeah. So it's like, it's this weird... It's all 10. Because then you'd think, like, you know,

the Mini and the Air, in theory, they all had pretty much the same internals. The Air should have had bigger battery life, in theory, if you look at the 6 and the 6 Plus, right? Because that is like a... They are very similar in that idea. Pretty much the same internals, bigger screen. You'd think bigger screen would take more battery.

Clearly it doesn't, but Apple potentially made a choice and they're like 10 hours is what it gets, that's what we're going to put in it. There's a really, this is an example from another company, but I think this is really interesting illustrating how companies make these decisions. This is Nintendo. So on the Wii U, the wii u gamepad gets about four to six hours of battery

life something like that but nintendo sell a bigger battery that you can buy you can buy it from from nintendo's website and it says it's very easy the instruction is very easy to change it's just one screwdriver and you can put it in, and you get like 8 to 10 hours of battery life. Now, the reason I bring this up is because what that obviously does is it adds weight to the overall product and potentially makes it a less comfortable thing to hold in your hand. So it's just like this is from a company that is not averse

to letting you put things and change things, right? But they made a decision because the battery pack the the battery slot for the um the wii u the battery in it doesn't fit inside the entire pack it's smaller so you the place that you put this battery pack in it's the larger battery pack and it fits in the same place so like they have additional space for it sure but they decide that they don't want to use it that way i just think it's just an interesting like parallel you know they they make decisions based on that i yeah i i think um i think you make i mean you're right right. The battery life on the Apple stuff fluctuates. I think the larger point is that Apple clearly is not being driven by people complaining that their phone doesn't last all day to make the phone have more capacity.

Unless we look at the 6, which is kind of a byproduct of the size, and see that there is more battery life on the 6 than there was. It's funny. If it was clear that everybody hated the iPhone because it didn't last long enough, I think you would see in the numbers a bigger drive to get to 12, 15, 18 hours. It's just kind of not there. It's just this slow progression where the chips are getting more efficient and then there's a new cell technology

and it drops again. It explains to me why my daughter's iPhone 5 is constantly running out of battery because she's a heavy user and it doesn't have very good battery life. And it's two years old. But yeah, it's interesting. I'm glad that Stephen did the research here, and it was a fun story to write.

But, you know, Apple's not going to let you swap in a new battery like Nintendo. And Apple has shot – I mean, Nintendo has decided that for most people that base battery is probably fine. And if you're somebody who's an outlier, you'll buy the extra battery and you can put it in and that's fine, but they're not going to spend the money on the extra battery if most people don't need it. My son is kind of paranoid about the battery. It's good to know that that's the battery life because he's paranoid about the battery. He doesn't even want to run the Wii controller without being plugged in. Like, no, no, it's fine. It's got a battery. It'll last for a while i should let him know that because he tends to stay tethered to where it's plugged in

batteries huh i'm just pleased that you finally put in print that i made the superior choice with the six plus if if battery life like that is what you care about I know you need that battery life because of your long commute and all the time you spend using your phone at your workplace oh right you don't do that anymore I still make commutes I have a co-working space

it takes me about an hour to get there and then I'm off I very frequently continue to need my iPhone all day good for you well I very frequently continue to need my iPhone all day. Good for you. Well, do we have – what do you think? Are we done?

Should we do one more? Let's do this quickly. Okay. Because, I mean, this one, we've got to talk about it now or we lose it. Forever hold our peace. Which is is that this or until next year this this week is the eighth anniversary or last week i guess eighth anniversary of the uh of the iphone launch we just had it which also means it's the first anniversary of that nice uh episode of the prompt where you talked about the iphone launch yeah that was a great episode thank you put in

the show notes i will do that. That took eight hours to edit. That was the, I would say, listening to that episode was great because I thought, oh my God, they did an episode of The Incomparable that's about an Apple event. That's awesome. I never thought of it that way. It's an analytical, you know, it looks like a review, except instead of a movie or a TV show, it's a video of an Apple event. Broke it down.

I loved it. And that was, so January 9th, a few days ago as we record this, it was the eighth anniversary of that. The iPhone didn't ship until the summer. So the actual eighth anniversary of the iPhone on the, you know, being available as a product is a few months away. And I wanted to mention that it is the eighth anniversary. And as somebody who's been doing this for a while, I also wanted to mention I'm in the audience there, although unlike the iPod event, you can't see me in the video. I'm pretty sure I'm not visible in the video. But I'm there somewhere at Macworld Expo. So I may actually be up in one of the front rows for that one. And at that time, we weren't doing a live blog yet. So I may actually be up in one of the front rows for that one. And at that time,

we weren't doing a live blog yet. So I was sending instant messages back to the office and Peter Cohen was turning it into a live news story. So we would just write it as a news story, but just keep updating it as everything got announced. Because back in those days, live blogging wasn't quite the thing that it became. And then I just wanted to mention that there was a few days later, I got to touch the iPhone. I got to use a sample. And I remember that vividly because I remember picking it up and being surprised at how dense it felt at the resolution of that screen, which was, although not impressive now because it's not a retina display by any stretch,

it was roughly double what used to be the standard max screen resolution, which was 72 dpi, and that was in the 140 dpi range. So it was a denser screen than Apple had ever made before. So everything looked better. And the stuff that worked, worked really well. And then there were the apps that you would touch on and realize that it was just a screenshot. And that app didn't exist.

But that was a, there was a great like six month period where I was one of a handful of people who could say that they had actually held an iPhone and used it for a little bit. And don't think I didn't point that out at every possible occurrence. Oh yeah, I've used the iPhone. Really? Yes. Yes. Good times. Good times. Anyway, that's a, that's a classic event. That is sort of the pinnacle of the Steve Jobs keynote. People should listen to episode 30 of the prompt because that's a uh a great breakdown on that on that event and that was a really that was a cool thing to see it was amazing to be in the audience and hear the people tittering about the uh the the the um revolutionary mobile phone widescreen ipod which with touch controls breakthrough internet communicator as people got got it, right? Before he said, you're getting it,

people were like, oh, I see what he's doing here. And there was people, you could hear the audience just sort of like starting to come together. And yeah, that was pretty cool. So that was a good moment. Eight years ago, where does the time go? Amazing. And one question for you about this then.

How did that come about, you getting to go and see it then? Because obviously it was during Macworld, so Apple were around. Yeah, they had a room at Macworld Expo. And it was off in the mezzanine somewhere, and you'd go down a ways, and then there was Apple people that you couldn't pass unless you had the approval and then you went back so it was it was like you know come by on wednesday after you know or thursday i think it was the last day come by on thursday in the afternoon and we'll have a briefing and it was you know i i don't even remember who it was it might

have been like greg joswiak or somebody i don't think phil schiller was there it might've been like Greg Joswiak or somebody. I don't think Phil Schiller was there. He might've been, but it was like two or three Apple people. It was like a PR person and a couple of Apple execs and an iPhone. And it was spread out over the week because I suspect they only had a couple that were functional that you could actually, a member of the press could actually touch. And, but they invited me in and toward the end of the week and, uh, and I got to use it and, and write a story about it and, and have that in my mind of end of the week and uh and i got to use it and and write a story about it and and have that in my mind of like this is what this device is going to be like for those months when we had no idea um and it's funny to look back to my story now because that was you know after my 10 minutes with it and the 10 minutes were tough because

they wanted me to use it and also ask them questions and i found that i couldn't i found like i would start using it and be like i I don't even, I'd start asking a question and then I would be tapping on things and the question would just trail off and I'd be like, guys, I don't think I can do this. I don't think I can focus on you and focus on this thing.

It was pretty incredible. That is the most I have ever felt like I can't believe this technology exists in my entire career of using technology. That a product that looked and felt like i can't believe this this technology exists in my entire career of of using technology that that that a product that looked and felt like that was actually in my hands and not fictional it was it was like that it was pretty crazy so where people think that you're actually the lucky one you're actually an unlucky person because we all just imagined what it would be like before we get it. But you, like, you knew what it was like, right?

So I think it's probably worse for you because you know what you're going to be getting in a couple of months' time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was clear what that product was going to be. It was clear what that product was going to be. It was clear. It is funny now that I look at the pictures of the people looking at the one that was in the plastic tube. And everybody's like, oh, the phone, the phone. And it was all theoretical. And for me, it was never theoretical.

After I saw it, I had an idea. And it was pretty crazy. That was great. That was a great thing. And that was, it was pretty crazy. That was, that was great. That was a great, it was a great thing. It was, I'm glad that Apple did that because everybody who touched that phone got to hold that phone, knew what was going on.

So that was really smart of them because in hindsight now, with some of the reporting we've got, we know there weren't that many that functioned and that they probably didn't function for very long. So they didn't want you doing too much on it because probably after each briefing, they had to reboot it and reset it and get it back to a clean state because it was still under serious development but um yeah it was uh once you held it i mean i remember it there was warm and dense and and that the screen was so bright and clear and that the the you know that touch screen coming from a like a trio or something that that touch screen was so bright and clear and that the the you know that touch screen coming from a like a

trio or something that that touch screen was so responsive and that the keyboard was auto correcting and things like that just yeah it was it was pretty amazing it's the elastic scrolling man gets me every time yeah the bit of the the bit in the video where you could hear audible gasps when it gets to the end of the i I think he's in the music app. It bounces back. It bounces back. Yep. Every time.

I still get chills watching that video. If you haven't seen or you've never seen the iPhone announcement or you haven't seen it since the original, you should watch it again because it's still every bit as magical. It's a classic. In a weird way yeah and also it holds new entertainment value now because of all the things that they're doing which now look crazy like how steve's like you know he looks at the phone and he pulls down his glasses and he

holds it in one hand he's like just with one finger tapping to type you know and it's like he has no idea how to use this keyboard yet and there's just all these little nice little touches about it like that which makes it well worth watching yeah plus stan stigman oh skip that bit even when we did the uh when we did the iphone episode we we all skipped that bit skip the stan stigman yeah it's the worst some weird eric schmidt is in that too so yeah watched his bit and now the yahoo guy is the best bit like the yahoo guy he's like hey maybe give me one of those and it's like go away don't call me we'll call you good luck thanks for the search engine or whatever it is thanks for the weather thanks for the search engine. Or whatever it is. Thanks for the weather. Thanks for the stocks widget. Bye.

Cherry. Oh, they gave the push email for free. Oh, that's it. Push email. Revolutionary. Magical. I love that the CEO of the company providing the free things to get our device and then to ask on stage.

Just no luck. If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode, you should go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 18. Thanks again to our sponsors for this week, lynda.com, stamps.com, and MailRoute. My name is Mike Coholy. I'm at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E, and I am joined, as always, by the lovely Mr. Jason Snell. He is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L,

and writes thefantastic6colors.com. We'll be back next week with another episode of Upgrade. If you'd like to listen live, go to relay.fm slash schedule and it will give you all the information that you need. Or you can follow our Twitter account, which is at underscore upgradefm. Jason always

issues a lovely tweet to let you know when we're going to be recording. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.