Upgrade - 180: Too Much Speaker

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

After a weekend with the HomePod, it’s time for Myke and Jason to discuss what they like and dislike about Apple’s new connected speaker. Is it so loud that Myke is angering his neighbors? Will Jason replace his Amazon Echo? How does the HomePod match up with other products in the category? Plus, Apple introduces its new battery interface and one of the company’s first big TV shows loses its creative team.

Ahoy, HomePod. Play Podcast Upgrade. Now playing Podcast Upgrade. From RelayFM, this is Upgrade, episode 180. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace, Casper, and FreshBooks. My name is Mike Hurley. I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Jason Snell. Hello, Mike Hurley. I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Jason Snell. Hello, Mike Hurley. How are you? I'm very good. We have a largely music device-focused show today as we're going to be

discussing our thoughts and impressions of using the HomePod. So I figured that our hashtag Snell Talk question, which comes from Connor this week, could be music-themed. Connor wants to know, Jason, do you use any EQ settings when you listen to music? Is this some kind of setup? This is the kind of question that I have no good answer to. Because people have, as we're going to find out as we get to the HomePod, people have opinions about how properly to listen to music some people uh so okay in truth i use eq settings on some devices where i feel like it is necessary it sort of varies by device because the devices

vary um i looked on itunes on my mac and i do have the rock eq set that happened a long time ago but that is for the ipod hi-fi because it didn't sound good enough so i did i used an eq preset there and that is most of the stuff i listen to sounds better with that um on most other things i don't so you use it when it feels like the device could could do a bit of a helping hand. Yeah, when the thing I'm listening to doesn't sound right to me in some way, I will it needs to

be at that level of a threshold where I finally decide, oh boy I need to change this. This doesn't sound good. But that rarely happens. Thank you to Connor for asking the question. If you would like to submit a question to open the show, just send a tweet with a hashtag Snell Talk

and it may be picked out for a future episode. Now, we do have some follow-up today, Jason. First of which is the iOS 11 battery information is now appearing in the beta of iOS 11.3, and Apple have updated a support document which was talking about the battery and CPU throttling stuff. So I'll give you a little bit of detail. So there's some new screens. There will be some new screens inside of the Settings app in the battery section, and it's called Battery Health Beta. And you tap that, and it takes you through to another page. And if you have an iPhone 6 6 or later this is where you'll be able to see if your phone

is being performance managed which is the term that apple give to what everybody else is calling throttling right well it's the first step before you um fire your battery yes you put it on a performance management plan and then if it still doesn't perform, then it's time for it to find other employees. Oh boy, manager humor. We've both been in those situations. So this performance management screen, like if your phone is being performance managed, it will only appear with any options or any information

after the first unexpected shutdown has occurred after iOS 11.3 has been installed. So none of this information, like about performance management, or none of the options will even appear until there's been a problem. And then it tells you you have these options because your phone has experienced an unexpected shutdown. So the option to turn it off is kind of of not what you would expect which is this is very telling to me the option to turn off the performance management so therefore your phone may shut down

and and the you won't be throttled it is not a button nor a switch there is a paragraph of text that explains that your phone has had a shutdown and that performance management has now been applied to it. The last word of this paragraph is the word disable colored in blue. When you tap that, it will disable it. So they are Apple doing everything they possibly can to try and dissuade you from doing it, which I think they're perfectly well within their rights to do that if they believe it. The option is there, but to find the option,

you have to be looking for it. And really, you probably have to read that text first, which is good because that is a way of informing people, which kind of we were all hoping they would do in the first place. If the battery health has seriously degraded on your phone, because you'll also get battery health information here. If you have or have not got the performance management option in the battery health section, you will see like a percentage of your battery health and if your battery health has seriously degraded another warning will pop up to recommend that you get your battery replaced you can also see what your battery's maximum capacity is here so you're able to check what the health of your battery is like so they're the options I would still hope to see that apple would do something to actively bring you to this screen like a notification at some point uh but i think that this is this is a step in the right

direction um from them but the the i take a look i recommend looking through the support document just to look at the screenshots because they are quite interesting yeah and this is fitting with you know what they've been saying part of the thing that they have to do is this is matching their statements on this, which is this is complicated and here's what goes on and here's why it's there. And I think what's interesting about it is you can kind of see, I mean, it depends on how you view this, but you can see now like when people say, well, why does Apple not let me do X? Why does Apple put that in the black box and take care of that for me? And then I don't ever see it. Well, here now we've got an example. This is rare where Apple has for various reasons decided been dragged into pulling this out of the black box. And what you get is something that is kind of complicated. So you can see on one level why somebody at Apple would look at the whole thing around battery performance and battery health and say,

wow, if we put a UI on it, what is that even going to look like? And it's going to be like complicated and it's not going to be easy and have somebody say, oh, well, let's not do it then. Let's just not give anybody any choice. We're just going to just do it in the background. It's going to seem magical, which I can see both sides of that, right? Like I understand the drive for simplicity, but it does lead you into places like where Apple ended up with the battery issue, where everybody was accusing them of doing all sorts of things some of which they were doing and some of which they weren't doing so it's just a fascinating little little

lab of uh of user experience when when you see a a design like this one yeah it's like maybe this is the way that they maybe discussed about it initially and decided not to do it because they felt the only way to do this was to put this text there. So like, you know, just Apple being Apple, like, no, we don't want to have a confusing setting. So we'll just, we'll take care of it for people. But in this case, it came to bite them because, I mean, I think a lot of people in agreement,

and I'm also in agreement about this, that a little bit more upfront would have been better. And I think that that's proven to be the case. I saw you tweet an article from VentureBeat in the past couple of days about tablet sales, which was interesting to me just to compare this to our discussion on Apple's earnings last week and just kind of the overall tablet market.

So this is from the IDC Research Group, and they are stating that the tablet market as a whole has declined 7.9% year-on-year in Q4, which is the 13th straight quarter decline. So year-over-year quarter just keeps going down for 13 quarters in a row. Amazon is now the second-place tablet seller, overtaking Samsung, and they estimate that they sold 7.7 million tablets in Q4. So again, for comparison, it's just interesting to compare this against what's happening with

the iPad, because the iPad sold basically close to double what the second place did, Amazon. So the Apple sold 13.2 million to Amazon 7.7 and saw a year-over-year increase. So Apple is bucking the trend. They are going against what the market is doing. Right. We talk about this a lot in the context of the Mac, where PC sales are down and the Mac sales are flat to up from time to time. And that is, you grow market share in a shrinking market by not declining. But we don't talk about it so much about the tablet market.

And that was what struck me about this is, according to IDC, the tablet market has declined 13 straight quarters. And we know like the iPad has declined, declined for many, many straight quarters. Right? Like, yeah. But in the last three, it has, it has sort of turned it around. And this is more impressive when you see what the overall tablet market is and how huge the iPad is in the tablet market. That it's number one buy twice.

And that's over Amazon, which is selling a very different kind of product right because i imagine a lot of the tablets amazon is selling are their you know 60 90 tablets which apple's not even attempting to sell something like that so the telemarket is is uh is rough and if you imagine it without the ipad it's itougher. All right, let's do upstream. So we have some media news for you. Viacom has acquired VidCon. VidCon is the YouTube and online video creator conference. You may have remembered hearing me talk about PodCon.

Well, VidCon and PodCon, they were run by the same company and were kind of intertwined, right? It's a similar idea. So PodCon was the VidCon for podcasts. were run by the same company and were kind of intertwined, right? It's a similar idea. So Podcom was the VidCon for podcasts. There are no details on the terms of the deal, like how much money was paid or if it was stock or whatever the situation was. Hank Green, who created VidCon, he had stepped away from running the company, I think maybe like six months ago. And Jim Laudebach was the CEO,

and he is remaining the CEO. Apparently Viacom have said, and like the VidCon team have said, and so did Hank in a video that he posted or put in the show notes, that VidCon will be running independently as a part of Viacom. And they wanted to do it because they wanted support and assistance, both financially and in expansion. Quite interestingly for me, PodCon is not a part of this deal. And the PodCon team, including Hank Green, have confirmed that they are currently attempting to run another PodCon within the next 12 months. I found that interesting. It was kind of like it was a part of the same company, but they obviously set it up differently. And whilst it was the same

people running it, it's not going to be, and it isn't a part of Viacom now. It's a big deal because who knows what VidCon is going to look like going into the future now, as it's becoming part of a big media machine, as opposed to being run by independent creators yeah i'm fascinated by this story mostly because i you know unlike you and gray and other you know youtube oriented people um i don't really care so much about vidcon i am fascinated by the fact that viacom bought it like a that an entertainment conglomerate got this thing that is a fan event about um and and a creator event too about youtube basically that is fascinating on a few levels it's interesting the podcon is not included in that and then uh and yeah yeah i actually know jim louder back at least tangentially i figured you

did i figured you would have crossed paths at some point he used to work as of Davis and was involved in the early days of tech TV when it was ZDTV. And so I crossed paths with him. One of my old bosses worked for him for several years. So it's kind of funny to see that that's what he's doing now. But anyway. where you're like, why do I know Viacom and YouTube in the same sentence? Well, because many years ago, maybe 2006 or something, I think, before Google acquired YouTube and YouTube was being dragged through the courts, they were being dragged through the courts by Viacom for copyright stuff. So it's very interesting to watch this kind of all start to turn around there where Viacom want this as part of their business, the YouTube creators. It's just a funny turn of events um showrunners Brian Fuller and Hart Hansen have exited Apple's amazing stories anthology what is going on here so this is really interesting so Brian Fuller I

made a joke on Twitter about this because this is the third TV show that Brian Fuller has bailed on or I think what Variety always called it was Ankled, which I don't even know what that means, but it makes me laugh. The three shows, like he bailed out of American Gods, he bailed out of Star Trek Discovery, and he has now bailed out of Amazing Stories as well. So I think Brian Fuller, even if he had really good reasons for all three of those, that is fascinating in terms of getting a reputation, maybe, as somebody who can't finish what he starts. But the backstory here is really interesting

in that it sounds like Brian Fuller was developing an Amazing Stories relaunch before Apple got involved, before Steven Spielberg got re-engaged in it. And he was really viewing it as a brand that he could use to do Black Mirror, basically, to do his take on an anthology series, a sort of sci-fi fantasy anthology series in the vein of Black Mirror, which is a fairly adult-themed TV series that's on Netflix now. So then Apple gets involved and is going to write a bigger check and Spielberg is going to get involved at some level with it. And it sounds like, one, it sounds like Apple's desire to have this be something that they could show on a screen at an Apple store. In other words, not TVMA-like adult material

like Black Mirror is. Something you can't watch on an airplane. You know, depressing and anti-technology as Black Mirror can sometimes be. It could be. It's unclear on whether the themes and the kind of like darkness of it or whether it's the adult themes of it were about that.

But it sounds like what Apple, who had written the check, wanted from it was not really what Brian Filler wanted to do with it. And so he bailed out of it. And I think it makes more sense in that scenario, right, where he wasn't building it for Apple. He was not brought in as part of the deal to do this show, which is sort of how they put it out there. He had been developing it, and so he was already attached. But regardless, he left. And then when he left they announced well hart hansen who is a a very talented writer on his own um he's still there and then he he also bailed out on it so they are seeking a showrunner now which means that this thing has basically been pushed back again uh to zero right they've got to reset reset

the whole thing and find somebody else to run the water for the moment right like it's just laying there they need to pick it up the deal is made but they have to hire somebody new so creatively i mean who knows if they've got scripts and if any of those scripts are going to be deemed acceptable by apple and steven spielberg and everybody else involved in this but uh but so that that that one announcement this is going to happen it's like everything else now that apple's in this. But, but so that, that, that one announcement, this is going to happen. It's like everything else. Now that Apple's in this business, stuff like this happens in this business. But it, I do wonder if it tells us something about Apple and the relationship it's got with some creators in terms of what kind of content it wants on its service and whether that's going to rub some of these creators the wrong way. But I think most of the creators who've

signed with Apple have done so knowing who they're getting into business with and in this case it sounds like brian fuller kind of came with amazing stories and he didn't you know enter into that knowing what he was going to get in terms of apple launching it youtube have taken a page out of amazon's book and they have updated their apple tv app to look like their smart tv app and their android tv app um the new youtube app on the apple tv basically follows no apple tv design conventions um it doesn't have a standard media player it doesn't have standard controls it doesn't do any of the um what is it called showcase or show something or that that like specific like way they do the uh when you're on the menu and you get things up at the top right when you're on the basic home menu i can't remember the names of

these terms and the focus stuff and all of that none of all of that has been completely ripped out um of the apple tv app uh i will, as a frequent user of the YouTube app, whilst it is now clunky in places and it's not great to scrub through that kind of stuff, like scrubbing through the video feeds now is a bit of a mess, this app looks a billion times better than what YouTube had made. Like, YouTube made what I assume is the most standard UI kit version of what an app could be.

It was just black with thumbnails and headers. It was the worst. And sometimes if you wanted to reload what was on a page, you'd have to go to different tabs or force quit things. It was a bit of a mess. So my feeling is whilst this might not be perfect, if it means that there's actually going to be some features and development going on in the app, then great. And for example,

there is a great one where you can now link your phone to the Apple TV app. So you can be on your iPhone and like almost like Chromecast, send a video to your TV. So that's a feature that you can get now that YouTube had decided to bring this in line with their other applications. I just think that this is a sign to me that the Apple TV is not going as Apple maybe would have expected it to go for whatever reason. Either the SDK isn't good enough or there just isn't enough buy-in. I don't know what it is. But even developers that tried to do it Apple's way have moved away from that. Well, I don't know what it is, but even developers that tried to do it Apple's way have moved away from that.

Well, I don't know. I feel like this is a trend among everybody who's got multi-platform experiences, which is they wanted to look the same. This is the classic argument. This is the same thing. I had an hour-long loud discussion at XOXO with a Google employee about a thing I wrote about how I was bugged by the fact that Google's iOS apps use Android conventions. And of course, his argument was, well, no, those are Google conventions. And this is the question, is when you're using a

platform, do you want everything on the platform to feel like the platform? Or is the platform the app you're using, right? So which is more important to have every Apple TV app feel like Apple TV, or to have every Netflix or Amazon Prime or YouTube experience to feel the same no matter what device you're looking at? And I can see both sides of it. From a traditional computing, especially Mac perspective, right, there was nothing more offensive than having Microsoft roll into Mac OS with Windows UI conventions and say basically, well, no, this is this is Word. Now, the good news is if you use Word on Windows and then go to the Mac, it'll feel familiar. And all the Mac users are like, I don't do that.

The argument with mobile devices and and home boxes and stuff is totally different because we do use multiple devices on multiple platforms. So I can understand that argument that the YouTube that you see and with with Google, you know, because they've got so many web interfaces, they have to build their own interface on the web anyway. There's no like platform specific really way to do that. So they got to build it one way for the web and they want the design language to reflect on their apps. I get it. And that includes the the iOS app and it includes the Apple TV app. So that seems to be really what's going on here is that there are a lot of multi-device,

big platforms, multi-device, and they want their experience to be the same or at least similar on all those platforms. And this is just like the Amazon app and the Netflix app looking the same across platforms it's it's uh it's it's almost like youtube like did the minimum like you said required to get it on apple tv and now they've got their real version and the real version doesn't look like the apple tv because that was just because they were not making an effort to make it look like youtube

and now they are annoyingly the new youtube app shows you if a video is in 4K, but you can't play it in 4K because nobody, neither Apple or Google, have moved on the codec problem. So, yeah. Yeah, they're, you know, using their codec for 4K video and Apple doesn't support it. And they won't re-encode in a codec supported by Apple, and Apple won't support their codec, and we're left with this thing where you just don't get to see those videos in 4K, which is really dumb. It's really annoying,

and I stand by my personal position on this, is that Apple should support YouTube in this instance. I think Apple should move to YouTube rather than YouTube move to Apple because I think it's more important that Apple support YouTube than YouTube support the Apple TV. That's my opinion on it anyway.

All right. And lastly, Apple has added some live TV news options to the TV app on Apple TV and I think on iOS as well. This is currently US only and there is support for CBS, CNN, Fox, Cheddar, CNBC and Bloomberg. So if you see a live stream in the tv app of live news uh you tap it it will open the application for that news uh company and start playing the video for you or will take you to the app store to download the relevant um the relevant application needed to watch the live tv stream it's i'm not sure this makes the tv app any more usable but i think this is apple's this is like a

long game for apple like they just want to keep adding things to the tv app because their their goal ultimately is to have that be the place everybody goes for everything i don't like the tv app on my apple tv i i i don't feel any benefit over just the videos and movies and itunes applications like i don't really know what it's giving me personally it doesn't really do anything for me um i would actually like the simplicity back of just how it was before but such is life okay today's show is brought to you by our friends over at casper they are the company focused on sleep dedicated to making you exceptionally comfortable one night at a time casper are inviting you to take advantage in an awesome limited time President's Day offer for the first time ever.

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to receive up to $200 of your purchase of $2,000 or more. But this offer ends on February the 20th, 2018. So check it out right now so you will not miss out. Our thanks to Casper for their support of this show. Alright, Mr. Jason Snell. It's time to talk HomePods. We've both had it over the weekend. I think we've probably both picked us up on Friday, right?

I guess you did too. So I've been putting it through its paces over the last few days. And I figure we'll kind of go through this piece by piece. There's a lot to talk about with the hardware and the software of this product. And I guess we'll start with where it begins. Packaging, very Apple, very nice, right? Like it all, I like the plastic you pull off the top,

and it all just like slides down the sides, and you do the friction fit taking of the box off the top it's all very all very appley and of course the something that people were mentioning a lot like the fabric rubber uh covered cable stuff like that it's all very nice yeah it's uh it's did you did it feel smaller than you thought it would be i mean i know i've watched a bunch of videos i've read a bunch of reviews everyone says it i know it's become like a meme but yeah it's it's it is smaller and heavier than i could have imagined it being this is a hefty piece of equipment yeah it's definitely dense it is smaller despite all of the other coverage of it it still feels smaller

i don't know what i was thinking it would be whether i thought it would be like that the the weird like jellyfish subwoofer that came with the uh with those uh harman kardon speakers back in the day you know a big tub but it's not it's it's bigger than the the sonos one i guess but not by much it is a it is it is compact and uh that surprised me and yeah the the the packaging is super simple it's just you know i mean there's there's almost nothing to it because there's there's like nothing there's nothing in the box right other than the home pod the cable is already attached um there's no additional stuff that you don't get a lightning cable with it or anything like that so

there's like the home pod is sitting in the box and then there's a little like piece of paper in the bottom that's like your getting started guide for the HomePod, and that's it. It's super, super simple. Did you go black or white? Well, black, which is, of course, space gray, the color of space being gray, apparently. That's what I did. I saw some people who had the picture of the white ones, and that looks nice, and I just thought, I don't need a white object that is going to get visibly dirty very quickly exactly because it's almost all the almost all the electronics i have are are black and almost all the you know it would fit better in my house being dark rather

than being uh white i i didn't really want to stand out i wanted to just fit in and so the black one was the right one yeah i went i went with black because i if it's white plastic right you can you can do something about that you can wipe it down but my thought is like if it gets dirty over time and it's white cloth it's probably it's going to be really hard to clean it was my thinking so i went with black and it but also in the same way for you like black would meet the aesthetic of my front room more than white would like if it was white it would super stick out it it would really draw attention to itself in a way that black uh doesn't so yeah it works pretty well

um i guess obviously the biggest part of the hardware is the audio but we're gonna talk about that in a moment i want to talk about the microphones first oh yeah now i i want to i want to like park the idea of uh multiple devices and how they all interact with each other because i've got a whole big thing i want to talk about with that but just from like a perspective how well did the microphone hear you when you were shouting the Ahoy Telephone or Ahoy HomePod command at it? Did you find that to be pretty reliable? Yeah, I found it to be spectacularly reliable, even at high volume, which people who have been testing it out have reported. And I feel the same way, which is even when it was loud, I could trigger it very easily. And it seemed to understand what I was saying.

Again, it didn't always do what I wanted, but it understood what I was saying. And even when it was noisy, it knew that I was talking to it. Yeah, I felt like if I wasn't looking at it it struggled a little bit more right like if i was just shouting into the room it sometimes wouldn't pick me up very well especially when this is interesting when i moved it i moved it from its original location and it seemed to take a little while to get settled right which i know it's doing something with the way that it's mapping out the room but after i moved it for a little while it wasn't doing a great job of hearing me which i thought was quite interesting because that kind of matches of what's going on um so but

yeah i found the microphone to do a pretty good job i i turned it up uh i can't turn this thing up very loud uh i live in an apartment building and I'm genuinely concerned because this thing is, it is loud. It's, it's bassier than any other speaker that I own. Like I'm just concerned about it in general. If it's too bassy and too loud. I mean, I will wait to see if I get any complaints, but like I moved it because I wanted it next to my TV, but my TV is next to like a neighboring wall, like I have my neighbor on the other side. And I was kind of uncomfortable with that

after listening to it for like an hour. So I moved it over to the other side of the front room. So it's basically facing towards the inside of my house because it is, as far as speakers go, is a little bit more aggressive than normal. So it can get a bit loud. But I found that to do a pretty good job of hearing me at basically all volumes which i thought was pretty good and but it is expected though like i do expect that from it um and it met that but in regards to the

hardware this thing doesn't have what i think every other device in its class has which is a mute button how do you stop it from listening to you well there's two ways you can you can ask it to stop listening and that totally works and then how do you get it to come back on again uh you you tap and you tap and hold on the top like you're holding down the home button on on the old iphone right okay okay and and it triggers the uh the the voice recognition at that point. You can also permanently put it in that. There's a setting on your iPhone that you can do to check. There are a bunch of different settings. You may not realize that they're even there

because they're not in the settings app. Any guesses where they are? Any guesses where the HomePod settings are? Home? Yep, they're in the Home app. You have to go in the home app and then you have to long press or 3d touch on the home pod in the home app and you get a screen with basically nothing on it which is really weird um it doesn't have controls or anything but

it's got a button at the bottom for details and then behind that are what you would think of as the home pod settings now i think it's interesting that they chose to use their smart home interface for this. There might be some reasons in terms of like by having it present a profile as a certain kind of smart home device, they can just pick up the home interface and they don't have to write a special app and that's all good. They don't have to adjust the iOS settings app or something something like that so i can see why they did it although part of me thinks one of the reasons they did it is to encourage people to explore the home app um because i think i prefer to have it here than have an app called home pod like i do watch right like i don't need another app on my iphone

i i agree i i had the thought of like i'm a little surprised it isn't just in settings somewhere yeah but where would it go because it's not a bluetooth device that's where the airpods i feel like you just throw in a new line right that when you connect to home pod it all magically shows up the home pod settings yeah shows up yeah i i thought about that but they chose to go this way instead so it's in the home app and you click on or tap on details and you get a bunch of settings, including never listen to me. They're, you know, the touch to touch to trigger is in there. Then there's a bunch of other stuff in there that you can turn on and off.

But that's where you have to do it is inside the home app. And then the other the other thing while we're talking about this that I wanted to at least mention was, have you figured out how to remote control the HomePod from your phone? Yes. And that's unusual too. And this is done from Control Center, right? There's some weirdness going on there, but I actually kind of like it. Yeah, but Control Center now, so instead of like opening the music app and picking the HomePod as a source or something like that,

that's not what you do. That's what you do if you have your AirPlay to it. What you do is you go to Control Center and Control Center shows you all of the AirPlayable devices that you're connected to, basically. So like your device, your iPhone, but also the HomePod and also any Apple TVs you've got. So if you tap in the audio controls and control center and then select HomePod, you can then control play, pause, volume, jumping around, next track, previous track from your phone, which it's funny, like sometimes I want to do that. And I had that moment where I thought, can I not do that from this device? Do I always have to talk to it? And the answer is no, you can, but it's through the control center UI. And something that I found that was a little bit quirky is I flipped to that one and changed the volume on the HomePod. And then I went about my

business on my iPhone and played a video on Twitter and the HomePod stopped playing. and the HomePod stopped playing. Yeah. And I think it's because it's set as my AirPlay output, even though I'm not AirPlaying to it. Something weird is going on there where it's trying to remote control that device. You kind of have to switch between the panes again, like back into Control Center,

because that's something that I actually kind of like, where if you switched in Control control center so you kind of like whatever's in the middle whatever's the expanded boxes where the audio what you're currently controlling if you switch to the HomePod you can then go to the Apple Music app and control what's being played but it's not I don't think it's even air playing

no it's just happening on the interface and I think it's I think I actually kind of like that honestly I don't like it because I don't like the idea that if I play, if I'm in that mode and I play a video on my phone that the music stops. Like, that shouldn't happen. My iPhone audio should be separate. And maybe this is a software update involving AirPlay 2 kind of thing that happens later. But UI-wise, like, it seems like it's a lot of

steps to be able to tell my home pod to stop playing from my phone and i get that i can talk to it and that's the primary interface but you know every now and then i am tired of talking to it and i just want to look on my phone yeah see what it's a bunch of steps what the iphone wants you to do like again it's not ideal what it wants you to do is to go switch back right so you pull down and now you're back onto controlling the iphone's audio and then you can go about and do whatever you want and no matter whatever you do including setting up like playing a brand new song from apple music the home pod will just complete play can like continue playing by the way i really love that they did that that if you play apple music on

another device it doesn't pause the home pod i didn't think of that but when i heard somebody say that was the case i was like oh boy i could have seen that going the other way so easily right that it's like you get one instance because that's how it is everywhere else right if you're on your iphone and you want to play apple music on your ipad you can't play them both at the same time but you can with the home pod it plays on its own and i think that play Apple Music on your iPad, you can't play them both at the same time. But you can with the HomePod. It plays on its own. And I think that's kind of great. I'm very happy about that. So what songs did you

play first? What was your first choice? Well, so one of the things that happens, and I don't know if you did this, but it's got a whole setup script. And so one of the things it does, and it actually, I don't know if you notice this but it's timed so like once you set it up if you if you do the standard setup it actually says here are

some things you can do and it lists them and they appear on your phone as it's as it mentions them it doesn't just bring them all up it says you could do this and it pops up or this and it pops up like they did some real work to sort of synchronize this setup experience yeah and then it says why don't you try something like say hey home pod um play some music so that's the first thing i did and at that point what it's doing is it's picking a personalized item it's basically because you can do that anytime from your it basically based on your it's knowledge of you from apple music it picks a song for and is i think basically starting a playlist of songs it's personal radio basically so that's what i did first and it played a

who's could do song called could you be the One from the album Warehouse Songs and Stories. And Husker Du, you may not know, is a Norwegian phrase that was turned into a board game in Minnesota, where the band is from. And it has umlauts. It has an umlaut over both of the U's. But of course, the lady in the HomePod decided to tell me what she was going to play and she said now playing could you be the one by husker do diuresis because apparently it got really confused about what umlauts are okay it was very so welcome to the there was like the good of bad it was like this is a song from a band i like that i like good job boy what you said there was really weird i immediately out of the home pod in one place that thing because i picked out my song i knew what song

i wanted to listen to so as soon as it said oh playing it was like oh hey home pod stop because i i wanted to pick my song that i want a specific song that i wanted to listen to first that i've been thinking about and i didn't want it to start playing me something else i wanted to pick a song of my own ah well my next one again i i decided not to do the what will be the momentous first song but all the discussion about like mono and stereo information and what it uses and if it tries to create something with with a stereo sound field where there's sort of like a left and a right and and it sounds like you know basically no is the answer but my go-to song for that is norwegian wood which by the beatles which pans the guitar

to the right and the sitar to the left and so i played that next and said to myself yep that's a mono speaker like it's all mixed together. There's no... There was no, like, spacing of the instruments? It's not trying to separate it, because it's doing its own separation, but it's separating not by sort of left and right, but trying to pull out the vocals to the front and have accompaniment kind of to the back.

And so that was interesting. And then I played Super Bonbon by um soul coughing which is uh has a nice uh rhythm section nice bass um to see how uh how rattly the bass is on that and then um and then my fourth and my first sort of non-testing that i just wanted to hear a song was that new uh song get out by churches because i like churches and they have a new song and it's a good song we share a lot of churches yes we do what did you play first uh the chain by fleetwood mac oh classic it's a song that i love i i love rumors it's like one of my favorite albums of all time because it's one of the very best but i wanted to pick the chain

because it's a song that i like a lot and the bass is very heavy right like and it is you know there is like the drums is is i knew was going to kick the bass off right so like i wanted to hear how that was going to come through um and it has obviously the great guitar solo right like i figured it was going to do an interesting job of putting the HomePod through its paces because there's a lot going on in that song. And it was excellent. Like I was pleased of my choice because it confirmed to me how good the thing sounds. And then after that, I was just picking out random stuff like songs that I know well.

You know, I remember some Beatles songs, some Beach Boys songs. I played some Churches. i played some churches i played some alt j like i was just picking out random stuff some foo fighters like just trying to run the gamut of my musical tastes to see how it handled kind of everything independently um what do you think on an overall basis of how the home pod sounds especially compared to some of the because i know you own more kind of professionally tuned audio devices than i do right like you have a home pod high home pod ipod hi-fi which again that was i do consider to be a serious piece of audio equipment right i know that you have 10 years ago yeah a sonos or some sonos is and i mean i have a sonos

play one and a sonos play five there you go. The most I have is some Numark speakers that are attached to my record player and some Amazon Echoes. I don't have an incredible amount of audio speaker technology at home to really compare it to. So what did you think about the HomePod? How did it handle and how does it handle stacked up against some of the other stuff that you own? Well, I'm gonna say up front that while i am a music listener and i listen to music a lot um and i like music that sounds good i'm not an audiophile no you can take that as a positive or negative i think that is better for this discussion that neither of us concern ourselves to be this way if you're an audiophile don't listen to us right like don't listen to don't believe what

we have to say because we're not coming coming from it from your perspective and also i'm not sure i entirely believe you so let's just go our separate ways on that there are some amazing posts there's a couple of guys who are in the the audiophile reddit which i followed a link to and was horrified when i got in there because i have i just my beliefs and you can take them for what they're worth, that a lot of audiophile stuff is all about justifying purchases and about just people believing what they want to believe in a placebo effect. And I totally believe that there are actual things going on. I think there's also a lot that's not going on that's in the head of the listener. But anyway, there are people who consider themselves audiophiles who are going to town on testing in detail everything that happens with the HomePod. And if you're somebody who cares about that stuff, you should

go listen to those people because I'm not one of those people. I'm just a music listener. No. I mean, I was even coming into this a little bit concerned about if I would be able to tell anything. Because when I hear people talking about mids and what's the treble, I couldn't even tell. I don't know what that is. Separation of the cymbals. Yeah, I can't hear it. I feel like I can appreciate when something sounds really good. And I could be like, oh, I like the sound of that. good and i could be like oh i like the sound of that but i struggle to be able to tell you why except for the fact that like this sounds different in a way that is appealing like that's

the most i can kind of ever really tell you you know i don't really have a lot more vernacular than that so yeah but i think that for the idea of this discussion i think it's better that we feel that way because honestly that's how the majority of people that will buy this thing or even consume music will feel like it's just like you know something you like sounds good or sounds bad the ability to describe it accurately i think fails most of us and i think uh the that disclaimer out of the way nobody will now probably hopefully write in and say how dare you talk about things you're not qualified? Because first off, everybody's qualified to talk about things that they experience and you don't need a certificate. But I am not coming from the perspective of an audiophile. So yes, the iPod Hi-Fi, let's get that out of the way. Stephen Hackett did a video

that was funny where he had the iPod Hi-Fi and also the HomePod. The iPod Hi-Fi is not even like... I listen to it every day, Mike. I listen to music on my iPod Hi-Fi attached to my Mac via iTunes every day. Every day. It sounds terrible. Okay. It sounds terrible.

Did it sound terrible at the time? No, no. terrible did it sound terrible at the time like no no but in the category of these these ipod speaker dock speakers at the time it was overpriced and over engineered and sounded probably better than what the market wanted but compared to any of these other like like the jbl on stage and the bows sound doc and both sound doc right so so the the truth is and actually i was looking one of the one of the founders of sonos was tweeting on friday and he was talking about how he has opinions about and he's retired he's no longer at sonos um and he said very positive things about the home pod and and said there are places where

it falls down in places where it does well and And as a first effort from Apple, he was very impressed with it. But he also said as somebody who was deeply involved in his entire career in trying to improve the quality of home audio, he said, these products are so much better than what used to be around. And I think that's true that the HomePod and the Sonos Play 5 that I have and the Sonos Play 1 that I have, and I have the Play 1, the one without the Amazon Echo integration,

but I do have one of those. They all sound really good. And I think they all sound better than the iPod Hi-Fi. Let's just, even though the iPod Hi-Fi is huge and has two speakers so for and we'll do true stereo um they all sound better than it so first off like they're and the amazon

echoes don't sound any good like i've got a couple amazon echoes they they sound in complete isolation where you're in your kitchen and it's the only thing around and you tell it to play music it plays the music and you're like all right there's music but when you when you tell it to play music, it plays the music and you're like, all right, there's music. But when you put it up against these other speakers, it's not even close. It shouldn't even be... It's part of the conversation because they're a popular voice-driven device, but in terms of audio quality, it's just not close. Now, do people care? I mean, people enjoy listening to music on their Amazon Echoes. I enjoy listening to music on my Amazon Echo. So there are contexts where maybe you don't care so much. But isn't it nice that there are also these devices that have much better audio? And in the

case of the HomePod, it's so small that it can go almost anywhere. That was my issue with the Sonos Play 5 is I wanted to put it in my living room. And it's huge. It's huge. It's bigger than the iPod Hi-Fi. It's this huge block, rectangular block. It's wide, and it's tall, and I couldn't find any place to put it. Plus, it's pretty directional, which the HomePod isn't. Wow, this is big. I've never really paid too much attention to that. I've never really looked into Sonos myself. But this is like a boombox. This is not a small piece of equipment. Yeah, I don't know if it's actually volume-wise

bigger than the iPod Hi-Fi. It's taller and it's almost as wide as the iPod Hi-Fi. It is a big block. And I couldn't fit it. And because it's also very directional, there was no place to put it in my living room. None. Whereas the HomePod will go...

There are all sorts of places that I can put the HomePod in my living room because it's this little thing that looks like a facial tissue dispenser or a ball of yarn. In fact, my wife, being a knitter, she had a spool of yarn out on the counter. And I said to her, you know, once you see a HomePod, everything looks like a home pod trash cans balls of string they all look like just is that a little home pod uh is that a big home pod anyway so um compared to the sonos one i think it sounds better than the sonos one um it's also more expensive than the sonos one but it sounds i think it sounds better although the sonos one sounds pretty good for a little speaker it sounds pretty good but i think the HomePod's better. Is the HomePod better than the Sonos Play 5? I thought I would say no. And my answer is it depends. It actually, in some circumstances, I prefer how it sounds. It doesn't have stereo separation and all that because it's a mono speaker and it's just building its own sound

field instead, but it sounds really good. And yes, in some ways versus even a calibrated for the room Sonos Play 5, there are some cases where I preferred the HomePod and other cases where I preferred the Play 5, but that's an expensive, big speaker that should sound better, I think, than the HomePod. And it was close enough that I thought the HomePod acquitted itself pretty well. And again, the size is a huge thing with the HomePod. So that's my story is that it is definitely playing with the Sonos's of the world in terms of the good audio quality, the bass response. There's a lot of things about it that I really liked how it sounded. It is, and you've seen this and I was talking to Stephen Hackett about

this, like it's processing the audio to build this sound field. And my experience back in San Jose was like this. And I've had a little bit of that this time, which is some, you know, every, every track you throw at it, it's going to do its magic. And sometimes it is great. And sometimes you go, well, is this, does this sound right? And its algorithm is making judgments about what that audio is and how it should sound. And they've tuned it for a lot of different music. But I think because it's a single speaker trying to do a lot of clever things, you will run into tracks where it really sounds spectacular and other ones where it's kind of muddy and i think that's just the name of the game when you're trying to process audio like this that you don't have an engineer living inside it

that's tweaking it you know they've had to program the software to do it take its best shot and for the most part it's pretty impressive every now and then you have something where you're like you know essentially it's remixing it on the fly and you can agree or disagree with some of the decisions it makes when it's remixing them but generally i think it sounds really good yeah i've mostly been really uh impressed by i don't know if there's a term for it but like the way i've been thinking it was like audio shaping like the way it takes the song and what speakers it's sending it to and stuff like that you know i've had instances where it sounded like the bass or the drums are further away from me and the vocals are closer to me.

And when that works well, that is very impressive. Like if you're just sitting and listening, you're like, there's some, like, it feels like there's some movement to this. I mean,

I've experienced this in a very serious scenario in your home because you have 5.1 surround and some 5.1 surround songs right like some albums where you can literally walk around the room and pick up different parts of the music louder or quieter and right whilst obviously the home pod it does not have the ability to be that good i did feel that like if i was getting closer to the HomePod, it felt like everything was more compressed. But it was all as you would expect. It just sounds normal. But as I moved away, I was able to pick up some things differently.

So the way that the bass or the drums sounded. And I was pretty impressed with that. And it's not directional in that way. If you're off to the side on a traditional forward-firing speaker, it's way. If you're off to the side on a traditional forward firing speaker, it's just sort of, you're off to the side and you lose a lot of it. And the HomePod does, tries very hard not to do that where you're supposed to be able to go. And I, you know, I've got a long, you know, you've been, you've been in a long front room that is kitchen and dining room and living room all in one and so it's very hard to

do if it's facing right at you it's all the way across the room and that's not ideal um and so this i put in the middle of the room against a wall and it did a pretty good job from any location including the kitchen in filling the room with yeah music which i was very surprised that too in mine and again you've you've been in my front room i don't have as long a room as you but it's like it's a kitchen it's a combined kitchen and front room area and no matter where i was you know i could have it the other side of the room and it felt honestly like as loud as if i was next to it and i found that to be quite impressive because i've never owned any uh audio equipment that would come close to being able to do something like that.

You know, if I was, if I'm connecting to my Echo and I'm on the other side of the room, I should just crank the thing up, right? Like there isn't really an option. It's not doing a good job of filling the room with sound. You just make it louder. But I didn't really feel like I had to make it louder just because I was further away from it. I found that to be quite impressive. Yeah, it's, yeah. I mean, again, I think in listening to this thing, it is clear that this is a product that has been designed over many years of research, apparently, to be as good as sounding.

This is Apple, the music company. This is Apple, the company that, you know, Steve Jobs would stand on stage and say, music's in our DNA. We love music, right? And this is Apple. Don't think of Apple as a, they used to be a computer company

and now they're like a platforms company with mobile devices of various kinds. Think about that. This is a product that's from that segment of Apple that you thought of more when they were the iPod company, which is they care about music and audio. Ironically, the iPod Hi-Fi came out of that, but it's that strain of the company that's in this product. Because this is a product that is engineered so heavily to make music that Apple thinks sounds the best. And again, everybody's going to have an opinion about

that, but I think it sounds pretty good. I think you're right that one of the things that it's doing is increasing the loudness and showing off that it can get pretty good bass out of that little tiny woofer that it's got pointing upward upward on the device on the inside um to the point where i wonder about people like you who are in places where a rattling bass is just going to get somebody pounding on the wall telling you to turn it down we haven't had any i mean i've been playing music significantly more than i normally would basically all weekend and nobody's complained but I will tell you we probably have the audio at about 10% like I actually think that the HomePod is is too loud in general I think that what I honestly what I want is to cut the audio in half and be able to control it that way because the increments that i'm moving it up and down in

the kind of the control center ui it's all down in the last kind of 10 to 15 percent and so like when i'm moving it i'm even making it i want to make a small adjustment but it's making a large adjustment you know like i cranked it for a quarter of a second and it nearly blew my brain off right like i had it i had it at 90 which is very funny because it says that will be very loud are you sure and i said yep it cranked it up and it was really loud it was really loud i really don't just i just don't think people need it to go that loud like i would honestly just like to be able to have some kind of setting where i can have more fine control over lower parts of the audio. Because at such small... I have it at 10%, and it is listenable anywhere in my apartment, right?

And I just figure that's probably too loud. And I'm assuming that I'm not the only person who's going to have one of these in an apartment. And I think that it might just be a bit too much. And I feel like, honestly, the volume of this thing, it almost feels like a hubris thing. Look how loud we can make this tiny speaker.

Who needs that at 100%? Who's ever going to use that? I don't get it. I don't really understand the choices made for the volume of this thing are they showing off i think they are in part i think very clearly very clearly many of the people who worked on this product uh live in uh single family homes but even then a single family home a detached home the home part 100%, you will be bothering your neighbors.

I have to say that I do occasionally take the Sonos 5 and I turn it up almost all the way while I'm sitting here working. And I imagine that people walking by on the street outside are like, what is happening in that garage? But generally, yeah. No, you're right. But generally, yeah, yeah. No, you're right. I think I have a hard time imagining what scenarios would use the HomePod at 100%. Because if you were in even a large room, it would be like, don't go near the center of the room. You have to carve out an area where no one can go because the thing will blow your eardrums

next christmas i'll just put a home pod on the roof and and put music on uh christmas carols on it and crank it all the way and the whole neighborhood will hear the christmas carols that's what i'll do so kate made a point right apple stores like his apple store at the place also no because there's stuff going on. People are trying to work there. Right? And like that, I know this is going to be a problem for them, that people are going to be cranking that thing up. So I was in an Apple Store buying mine. I went to pick it up, and someone was playing it pretty loud, and it was too loud.

Like, I don't think it was at the top, but it was like, you were disrupting everything in this store with this one little speaker. It's interesting. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what they're going to... I don't really know what the use case is, right? If you're ever going to play this at maximum volume in an environment, then the place that you're playing it in probably doesn't... Like, you want more, right?

Like, you're going to fill out a nightclub with this thing, right? You have, like, a PA system. It's just interesting to me. want more right like you're gonna fill out a nightclub with this thing right you have like a pa system like it's just interesting to me it's not really i'm not really complaining as such because like it doesn't the fact that it gets very loud it's not going to be a problem for me because i'm never going to turn it up i'm just kind of questioning what the thinking was to maybe they need like a mega mega mode where it's like you disable mega mode and the range becomes less and you can do a little more fine control although you know you can also just tell it what volume percent

like when you're turning up Apple headphones right like either the AirPods or the EarPods I don't know if this is in America or if this is just a European Union thing that's right you can cap the top of it so you don't damage your ears yeah and you have to like it gets into these colors, right?

So it starts off white, then goes yellow, then goes red as you get up to the top. And you have to do this thing where to get past, I think, the yellow on the volume indicator, you have to press the volume twice because you're engaging. Everyone's turning their keys at the same time kind of situation so you can pump the volume up and right i would basically i would like to see some some options volume limit is is the name of the feature and it's an ios 2 and i believe and and it was on the ipod and that the idea there is yes people that actually started that's to get back to the battery thing that started as a but there are a bunch of stories about people ruining their hearing by turning their ipod up all the way which led to the typical response of like well whose fault is that why did they turn it up all the way and and then other people saying well apple should make protect

users from themselves and apple was like all right here you go volume limit here it is you can set uh you can set what the top volume is and it won't go above that but i agree for somewhat different reasons that actually would be a great feature on the home pod like to so your friend doesn't come over and and crank it up all the way and get you evicted yep i would really like that so that would be that would be a lovely feature and and again i i would just assume this is one of those situations where the majority of people testing this product do not live in apartments. It can be my only assumption because they're testing it in these chambers inside of Apple, right? Where it doesn't matter about how loud the thing goes.

But yeah, one of my favorite things, though, is what this product does when it's playing music and you ask a question. I think this is just a wonderful Apple-like feature that it doesn't just lower the volume. It's doing something. I mean, I don't know what the exact terms are, but like some kind of audio distortion. I don't know what the exact terms are, but like some kind of audio distortion. So it sounds like if you're at a bar or a club and there's music playing and you go into the bathroom or you go outside of the main room and you can kind of hear like a muffled version of the audio, that is what Apple is doing. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes. I posted a video on Twitter that tries to highlight this and I think it does a good job of showing it i just i heard it and it really made me smile uh and and i think that it's it's just a nice

little touch yeah the um i agree i had that same note where i i said something and then i just heard the sort of like muffle echo effect and again you're right it's an apple touch which is all they had to do was dip the volume. Yep. But they didn't. And I think it's wonderful. I like that kind of stuff. That's why we buy these products, right? Let me ask you a question.

Music isn't the only kind of audio. What do you think about trying to play other kinds of audio on the HomePod? I haven't done a lot of that. I did a little bit of it. It's AirPlay. pod i haven't done a lot of that i did a little bit of it um you know it's airplay you get the what two second three second delay i tell you man i must not have ever used airplay for audio because i am like enraged that i will press play and overcast and i am waiting literally three seconds for the audio to start. Bluetooth doesn't do this. No.

Right? And yeah, I cannot believe it. I've been playing Overcast. Uh-oh. Mike discovered AirPlay, everybody. Watch out. Stand back. He's got takes from 10 years ago

or whatever, five years ago. But now I can see why AirPlay 2 needs to exist because AirPlay kind of sucks for audio. It's like you're in the mud you're just like in a wallowing and moving very slowly because everything is and the best part is when you're like all right i'm done i need to pause this now and you press pause and then you wait for three seconds and then for the audio to pause it's like i understand when i'm sending it right because it's buffering yeah why am i waiting on the other side? If I'm listening to the audio on the HomePod

and I press pause, why do I now need to wait again? Yeah, it kind of sucks. And I'm assuming that AirPlay 2 fixes some of this and I'm looking forward to it. You know what I will say for listening to podcasts? The HomePod is not very kind to John Syracuse. Interesting.

It is hard to hear John. What's it saying about him? It's very mean, very mean. I was listening to ATP very kind to John Syracuse. Interesting. What does it do? What does it say about him? It's very mean, very mean. I was listening to ATP and I, whatever the base is in the home pod just doesn't really do a good job for John. Like I was,

I was cooking and I could hear Marco and Casey fine, but with John, it kind of sounded a bit muffled when, when I was trying to listen to him. So it didn't, it was a bit difficult for me when when i was trying to listen to him so it didn't it was a bit difficult for me to hear him so john john circus has a bassy voice and the home pod doesn't like that um what do you think about uh the fact that you know you can't use other services here like

all you get is apple music right like that i mean can airplay, you can airplay anything to it, but you know, the Echo, you can use Spotify and Amazon have a subscription service. On the Google Home, you can use Spotify and Google has subscription services. Do you think that Apple should allow for companies like Spotify to be able to hook into this product?

I think I could take it further and say say i think that apple needs to extend siri and apple needs to extend um that both in terms of talking to apps on devices and also talking to web services i don't think apple needs to necessarily build you know build its own spotify integration with the home pod but it probably needs to i mean it doesn't need to do anything it can do whatever it wants i think it would be good for siri if it had more links to apps that are on your phone that you could control remotely by voice and that includes media i i and that includes podcast apps and um and uh other music providers and also web services like the skills on the uh alexa side i think there needs to be a story about it on macworld i think there needs to be a um an app store for siri basically that lets people

get qualified to put their you know connect to their web services and have them available as things that Siri knows about or that can be triggered. I think that's just the long-term health of Siri as an ecosystem unto itself. It needs more capabilities than it's got now. And we're at the stage now where if Apple doesn't add it, it isn't in there. And Apple has to move past that because there are lots of things that are going to be interesting that Apple is never going to prioritize as one of the things that it's going to do. That said, I don't get too rageful about there not being Spotify. First of all, I don't use Spotify. I use Apple Music, so I don't care. But I do use Overcast, and Overcast knows where all my podcasts are. And while you can play podcasts now using Siri on iOS devices and on the HomePod, it

doesn't know, you know, it doesn't know where my Overcast stuff is. I'm not sure if it knows where my Apple podcast stuff is. And if I'm halfway through an episode of a podcast on the podcast app, if it knows where to play it, it seems like it's a way simpler than that. And it's just using the where to play it, it seems like it's a way simpler than that. And it's just using the directory to play a podcast. But I would benefit from that from from being able to let demand my latest podcasts or from a playlist for overcast. And yeah, I mean, I would like it. It's I again, I don't think it's going to be that you're going to be able to just

talk to Siri on the HomePod and say play something out of spotify you'll probably have to have an even if they do this an iphone that's on spotify where there's been an update to siri kit to allow it and then you'll be playing and it'll essentially be playing it via airplay over the network to your home pod but the voice adding the voice control would be a good thing. But, you know, I don't know. I think it is a thing that if you're not on their music platform, this product is not really relevant to you. But I have a hard time getting up in arms about it

because I already feel that way. Like Sonos is the only one that plays everything. Like, you know, Sonos plays Apple Music. Amazon tries very hard to have you either use Amazon's music service or then they'll kick it back to Spotify, I think partially because they didn't have a good enough music service when they launched the product.

Yeah, but in the end, sure, yes, I would like Siri to be more useful, and that includes supporting other music services. There's a lot more to talk about with Siri in in the home part and we should dig into that but first i want to thank squarespace for the support of this show use the offer code upgrade at checkout and you will get 10 of your first purchase make your next move for squarespace that you easily create the website that you want for your next idea or project with the ability to grab a unique domain name, take advantage of awesomely customizable, award-winning, beautiful templates,

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It's all drag and drop. not have been able to put anything online without the help of Squarespace because it works the way that my brain does and I don't need to learn how to code. I don't need to learn HTML. I don't need to learn CSS to make it work for me. So I've been very, very, very happy with that. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month. You can sign up with a trial with no credit card required just by going to squarespace.com. Then use the offer code upgrade when you check out to get 10% of your first purchase once you sign up for a plan. This will also show your support for this show. Our thanks to Squarespace. Make your next move, make your next website. So I did some tests with the Siri trigger word, which we will call, as we always do, a high telephone.

Because I wondered what was going to happen if I had this turned on all my devices, right? Like, how good is the HomePod going to be at picking up the trigger word instead of my iPhone or my iPad or my Apple Watch? I usually have this turned off because I just don't use it. I mean, I never talk to my iPhone, right? I talk to the Amazon Echo or whatever if I'm just around the house. So I turned it on on my iPad. I turned it on on my iPhone and my Apple Watch, and I would just ask questions.

So I'd be sitting in the house, and I'd say, like, oh, hi, telephone, what's the weather? And what would happen is typically my iPhone and my iPad would both light up and would immediately kick off, and then the HomePod would answer. So there's two things going on here. One, it's good that the HomePod does pick up the question, because if I'm asking something out into the world in my home, I want the best speaker to give it back to me. But the other thing is all my devices are lighting up. And if I'm, as I was, I was listening to music and I'm on my iPad and I'm doing work and then I'm asking the HomePod to change the song or whatever. And then the iPad

just gets this full screen UI pop up for half a second. It's kind of frustrating, right? Like I don't need that to be happening, right? That's not something I want. I know it's difficult, right? Like how else are you doing it? But that was something that I was noticing and was a bit frustrating to me. The one issue that I was having consistently

was my Apple Watch. So if the face of the screen is lit up on my apple watch the request always went to my apple watch which is not what i want so i was finding that i would ask for some music to be played and it would be like oh and then my iphone would start playing the music so then i was like okay let me think about how i could fix this. Like if I noticed that my Apple Watch picks this up. So I said, oh, hey, hi, telephone. Can you play churches on my HomePod? And my watch said, no, I can't do that.

Which was really annoying to me. Yeah, what it's supposed to be doing is if you have been actively using or I think if you raise an Apple watch or raise an iPhone, it's trying to detect what you're talking to. It's trying to intuit what you're talking to. And I think the HomePod wins unless you're actively using some other device. It's trying to let the HomePod be the one to answer those requests. And they're supposed to be talking to each other and determining like who can field this request. But it seems like it's a work in progress.

I didn't do, I mean, I used it with other devices around and I didn't really notice anything about it. So it was working okay for me. But, you know, that's my understanding is that Apple is trying to intuit based on the status of all of your Apple devices that are within speaking distance of who should take it. And I found that, by and large, it was making the right decision, except the Apple Watch would be bumping in every now and then and trying to do what it could do. But the other problem I have with this is I want to jump ahead just a moment to talk a little bit about SiriKit and its issue there. jump ahead just a moment to talk a little bit about SiriKit and its issue there. Because let's say that I wanted to order a Lyft, right? So if I'm in the US, I want to pick up a Lyft. We don't have Lyft here, unfortunately, which is a shame, because I actually really like Lyft.

The iPhone can take that request, because that is an intent with SiriKit. So I would say, oh, hi, telephone, order me a Lyft. And my phone would say, okay. But if I'm at home and I'm used to doing this and I say, oh, hi, telephone, order me a Lyft, my HomePod will say, I can't do that. Now, that's not good, is it? Like, that's not, like... It's SiriKit, but, right? Like yeah it it is the home pod is connected to your phone if you want to let it but because that's a setting you can turn off when it's present on the same wi-fi network but not all of the siri kit stuff is connected and so the the like ride sharing is not connected so it doesn't work and so i feel that there are things that should have been done here either one they should have made that work or two they should send it back to send the request to my iphone why can't the home pod do

that right that's that's true like it could it could kick that up on the iphone and the iphone could start talking to you and say, all right, well now I'm over here and I've got this thing and I can, I can do that. Like my home pod should say like, okay, check your iPhone. Like I'm taking care of that for you.

I need to, you need to do that on your iPhone. Check, you know, go check that out and we can, we can do it over there or something like, and start to kick it off on the, on the iPhone.

Yeah. And it was, the answer is it should do it. Like, this is one of those things that if it, if you're going to connect to the phone, connect to the phone for all the things that you can do on the phone. There are several instances with the HomePod where there are things you can do on an iPhone when you're driving using hands-free.

And I think there should be no difference. I know the HomePod is a separate device. It's not just a speaker. But if I've got it connected, my iPhone has set it up. My iPhone is present. My iPhone is on the same network as the HomePod. I should be able to behave in my home. Like I behave in my car and you can't, not only is the Siri kit stuff not there, but although Apple makes a big deal about how you can use it as a speaker phone you have to initiate the call on or answer the call i believe on the phone and then transfer it to the home why why and like raffola on the chat room has made like the most baffling one for

me calendar you can't ask your home pod to tell you what calendar events you have and it's like but but why though because you can do my notes and my messages and my reminders why not my calendar i think the answer is why is the same as the answer to why is airplay 2 and why are stereo pairs and why is multi-room not there which is this is not a product where the software is done like it's not done so should they decided to release it why did they do this like i really can't understand that that like there are there are things that they should have added like the calendar stuff but we don't know if they're ever going to but we know there are software features for this device that

are supposed to be here but aren't they will they will i think they decided that it was good enough as a music player that they wanted to get it out in the market and have people start experiencing it and that they would add features as they go. And they just decided, look, let's great artists ship, real artists ship, let's get it out there and we'll update it. And the nice thing about it is these are all software things. These are all services things. I think that the HomePod can be made to do an awful lot more than it does now, but they're going to have to, you know, don't buy this product hoping that it will talk to your calendar because it doesn't now.

And you shouldn't count on that. But if I had to guess, I would guess that all of that stuff is happening in the background and they just wanted to ship it and they're going to ship all these other features and they're going to keep rolling them out, which is good. But again, I just had that. I never really thought of it before, but I was standing there thinking about all the different things that I could do. But I was standing there thinking about all the different things that I could do.

And I realized I considered because the HomePod is connected sort of to my iPhone, I really do put it in the same category as talking through a Bluetooth speaker in my car. And that's my frustration is that it's not like there's a whole category of things that it just won't do. And I'm sorry, but like the phone thing, like why have the capability to have it be a speaker phone, but not let you actually just make the call from the device and have it pipe the audio for, why do I have to use the phone? If you're going to make that a feature, make it a whole feature, not half a feature. It just seems so strange. And it's one of those areas where the thing seems unfinished and where it is harmed by kind of the lack of functionality that

Siri has right now that Apple needs to work on if they want this product to improve. So I want to talk about personal requests. So it is the part of the HomePod that allows you to connect to some things that are going on on your iPhone. So messages and notes and reminders. And during the setup process, there's a warning that pops up that says, allow anyone to use this HomePod to send and read messages, add reminders, create notes or more with this iPhone when it is connected to the same Wi-Fi network. notes are more with this iPhone when it is connected to the same Wi-Fi network. I honestly feel like this warning indicates that this isn't the way it should be. Like the fact that this warning exists saying like just making sure that you know that anyone will be able to send messages or read your messages in your home when you're at home

is like a really weird thing like it's this is very very strange and is something that i imagine that a lot of people won't want to have turned on even not even just from a like oh someone's gonna super my messages but just so you don't end up people sending random messages like it it's a very strange thing this is and we should say i mean all of these assistants struggle with this to a certain degree yeah of like picking picking voices out like some of them say they do it and but it's you know it's never perfect no and and we have we live in a world where our you know our ids are us our stuff lives in our ids and you need a device to be able to say ideally like i know who you are you're somebody i recognize i know what user you are and i'll

use your calendar and i'll tell you i mean that's that's the ultimate goal of all these assistants is that if i ask for a calendar and my wife asks for a calendar we should get different calendars right that's what how it should be. But we're right now in this really weird in-between state. And so with a phone and HomePod, you've got this case where Apple wants to take advantage of all the richness of the stuff that it knows about you based on your relationship with your phone and what's on your phone. It doesn't want to not have that, especially in a product like this that that as we pointed out is missing features right now, missing announced features. And then there are other things that are clearly lacking. The last thing it wants to do is say, Nope, like there's nothing on your phone that we can help you with. You just, it's not, we're not connecting them at all. But at the same time, they also recognize that they can't

actually lock that stuff out behind a security code or by voice recognition or anything like that. So you basically have to flip a switch in the details in the controls or in the home app. Like you have to flip a switch that says don't or on setup. You say, no, I don't want to do that. At which point all of that stuff is is is sheared away and is no longer part of the functionality. And it's like this is where all of these assistants are kind of right now but it's um it's frustrating and it does lead you to believe like wow this is a much more powerful device if you live by yourself yeah and and i and it's a shame because i kind of want to be able to use all of these features.

And I've left it on for me. But I can totally understand why basically everyone that has this product will probably turn this feature off. And I get that until it can be at a place where it really can understand different voices. And I've been thinking about this, right? understand different voices. And I've been thinking about this, right? Because in theory, this device can do this because my iPhone apparently can do this, right? You know, that if I say a high telephone, Adina's phone is not going to go off. And every now and then it will, but not always. And I think part of the problem that Apple are having here is the HomePod can't work like that, right right it has to be able to understand

anybody's voices so it can change the music in the home exactly they're struggling with it feels like it's a binary thing right it's either can do voice detection or can't do voice detection and that they're struggling to maybe implement it on a case-by-case, request-by-request basis. That you want to be able to have anybody to control audio, but not anybody to control messages. And that that is something that they may be struggling with right now, is working out how to separate that stuff. HomeKit. HomeKit is a big part of this um is it working for the stuff that

you have are there like a lot of things that the home pod can't control in your home or kind of how does that shake for you well so i've really um tried to put everything in the home kit um ever since i got my light switches especially that did home kit and i i installed homebridge on my server so i've i've uh even got like non-home kit things on my home kit network now through the home bridge app the command line servery thing that basically uh yeah my server there's a there's an article at six colors that you can link people to but i've got it running so it's it's talking to like the nest and a couple of smart switches like a wemo switch that aren't home kit related and it basically acts as the bridge there and um there i'm surprised that people that that hasn't been turned into a product i've heard from people who've just bought

it like a 40 raspberry pi and the only thing they put on it is home kit and or home bridge and that's all it does is just act as a home kit bridge for all of the older stuff you've got that doesn't support HomeKit. So anyway, because I did that, because I wanted, I've kind of gotten used to using the home interface. I like the home control center interface for turning lights on and off and stuff like that. Because I did that, it just works. You know, it's great. It all works because I'm already there. I'm already there on the HomeKit side.

it's great it like it all works because i'm already there i'm already there on the home kit side so now i'm just telling the lady you know set the living room lights to 70 and it totally does it just like just like it does with my amazon echo it's basically like the same stuff and it works the same and it's fine yeah and i've been pretty happy that um i don't find the home pod to be too verbose you know like what i like about the echo when i ask for the lights it just goes okay and the google home will not stop talking you know like i i have a google home mini and i ask it say like i'll turn off the desk lights because i have lights on my desk now steven bought me one of those huge strips for my birthday and i put it around the edge of my desk on the back and it's awesome so i can light my desk up but the google home would be like okay turning off the desk lights and i don't want that

right like i don't want a full sentence and i found that home kit to be okay i think siri's still a little too talkative and it's funny one of the things another thing i mentioned in that macworld article that i wrote when i asked a bunch of people like what are their wish list items for siri one of them was basically that they want the carrot weather feature for those who we've talked about carrot weather on this show carrot weather by default is sort of like super snarky and makes jokes but there's a setting and you can basically dial it all the way back to just tell me what the weather is dummy i don't know i don't care yeah yeah and and i think um i i think there might be a place for that for somebody to be like i stop with the jokes stop with the references keep it as minimal as possible for Siri, because I know it bugs some people.

But I agree, it's not super verbose, but it's more verbose than Alexa is. Yeah, it kind of sits somewhere in between the two of them, so I found it to be okay. Like, if I'd never tried the Google Home Mini, I probably would have gotten pretty annoyed by it. But I was expecting it to be just as bad as google home but but it's not um i really like that the echo just says okay like because that's all i need to know and it only tells me more if there's a problem and that's yep amazon really nailed that so let me ask you right talking about the echo do you think the home pod is going to replace anything in your home and you have more more of these types of products but you have sonos and stuff he's talking about right do you see well one i guess where are you leaving the home pod in your home and two do you think it's going to replace any devices that were

previously in that environment well i it's too early to tell my gut feeling is that i'm going to leave it in the living room or or on the bridge between the living room and the dining room like there's a couple of pieces of furniture in there like i had on the top of the piano um and i think that was actually a pretty good place for it it's a little too high for anybody to see like that it's been activated because the one of the nice things about the echo is that it's got like the tube echo has a ring around it so from basically any angle you can see when it's been activated but the little siri light is on the very top of the home pod so if it's a lot up too high you can't see it um but it's been activated, but the little Siri light is on the very top of the HomePod. So if it's up too high, you can't see it. But it's a good place for it.

And it sounds pretty good there. And if that's where it ends up, I think the net result is going to be that we're going to stop playing music on the Echo and we're going to start playing music on the HomePod. But I'm not going to replace the Echo. I have an Echo Show in the kitchen. And the fact is, i kind of like this i kind of like the screen it it does so little with that screen but like when you're you get used to it like when you're playing music you can look and see what music is playing when you're

doing timers you can see the timers and where they are instead of having to ask when where the timers are um and that screen has maybe spoiled us a little bit um i could see with some functionality increases on the home pod i could see maybe ditching the amazon echo entirely probably not but i think what will happen is that um i may ditch the music component of the echo and just tell everybody look if you want to play music in that room play it on the home pod that's that's what it's there for, because it sounds that much better. And the reality is, even though I've got a little Sonos box attached to my big speakers set up for my home theater, I never use that because it's too

complicated to turn it on and get it going when you're in that room and you can just say, hey, play this music. So I think that's most likely where it'll go um seems like a waste in my bathroom even though i do have a sonos one in there and it it i do listen to music on it um sometimes uh it's not really like plus it would just it's it's too much speaker for that location anyway just rattle the tiles off it would be it would be yeah there would be there'd be a lot what are you what are your i okay for me to be able to to explain this i need to give my entire summary my overall conclusion of the home pod all right so i think that the home pod is kind of showing that apple need to do a better job of integrating their products together inside of their ecosystem.

Like they have all of the ecosystem. It's all there, right? I can access all of my stuff on all my devices. But the devices don't talk very well to each other, right? Like I can't tell my watch to play audio on my HomePod, right? My HomePod can't give commands to my phone to continue with actions that it can't complete, right? Like I can play music from anything on my iPhone, any app, and it works in my AirPods,

right? But I can't do this in the exact same way with like Siri doesn't work for some like for Spotify and Overcast, but it works fine for my music. And it's like things are too disjointed. And I think there needs to be some serious thought put into how these devices talk better together. And a lot of that, I think, can be helped with Siri. And that requires Apple to open up SiriKit much more broadly. So that is a big frustration for me.

And I'm kind of annoyed at Apple right now because I don't like the HomePod for all of the reasons that I didn't think I was going to like it. That it wasn't going to be able to replace a lot of stuff that I do in the kitchen because the timer support is just not as good, right? And I'm not interested in setting alarms and stuff like that. I don't want to work around.

I just want multiple timers that I can name. It's not rocket science. I knew that I was going to have trouble getting all of the audio sources that I wanted onto this thing and that it was just going to be weird in a bunch of places. And I've got all of that. But the audio that comes out of this thing blows me away. Like, I can't fathom the quality of audio that comes from a speaker of this size. Like, it's sounding so good across my entire front room in the way that it does. And I'm hearing things in music that I haven't really heard very clearly, right? Like, the better quality you get, the more you can get out of it.

And I consider it to be incredibly impressive and the audio has won me over. I'm going to keep it and it's going to replace all of the audio functions that would be used with my Echo. You know, we would listen to music on it or I'd listen to a podcast on it and stuff like that when cooking or washing up and stuff like that. And i think the home pod is gonna have all of that

because i honestly have my fingers crossed that a lot of things i don't like about this product can be fixed as software but the hardware is so good it is so good so it won me over i feel like we have, this has been a theme the last few weeks here, which is when we were talking about the Apple report card story, it was the same theme as here, which is Apple is really killing it with its hardware and it's being let down by its software and services.

And the HomePod, it falls right into that same category, where this is a pretty remarkable piece of hardware. There are things that I'm sure you can criticize about it. We talked about, like, it is very loud. So there's, like, limited, you know, you may want to warn your neighbors that you're getting one. But it's just a really remarkable, it doesn't,

like, setting up the Sonos to compare it, the Sonos Play 5 to compare it to the HomePod, the HomePod, when it moves, because it's got an accelerometer, it knows that it's been moved. And in fact, at one point I jostled it and the sound really changed on the speaker. And I realized that was because it went back to a flat setup

because it got jostled. And then it was going back to doing its thing. And it does its training by using all of those microphones to kind of like measure the room as it's playing music for a couple of minutes. And then it uses that. Whereas the Sonos, I have to open an app and it emits a weird tone. And I have to wave my phone around up and down while I walk around my room for 45 seconds until it finally is like, all right, now I'm set up. And that's just, you know, there's an example of like Apple built this thing in. They don't want you to do any training.

It'll figure it out. It uses its microphones. It does the training itself. Just great hardware. And then the software, it's like, you know, the software is the reason it didn't ship last year, probably, almost certainly, I would say. And it's still missing features. And there's still stuff that needs to get better on Siri. And in terms of like its connection with the phone and SiriKit needs to be more. I mean, the list goes on. But the point is, if we have to draw a line somewhere, it's not, you know, I'm going to say Apple is at the top of its game still when it comes to designing hardware. And this product is another example. Without a shadow of a doubt i agree completely is that kind of your overall

feeling on it is that like your conclusion of the the compod as it stands right now yeah i think so i i i think it's a great piece of hardware um it sounds way better than um i expected compared to some of these other devices like the Play 5. The size is really remarkable. I think that keeping in mind the size of it and what it sounds like, they packed a lot in there. And bottom line is, you know, I'm reminded of arguments about like Apple trying to make the iMac thinner and people saying, who cares if it's thinner?

It's just an iMac. It's just on your desk. I can see how people will, would say, who cares about the size of a speaker that you're parking somewhere. But I can tell you in my home, I care because I can't put the play five in my living room. I tried, it doesn't work.

It's not in there. Can't do it. And I can put the home pod in there. And that, that's huge that I can put it in my living room and i can fill that living room in with a small space that i wouldn't want it to be any bigger because then it would be too dominant as a as an item in my right and so and in fact i could i could probably put a second somewhere else when they do the stereo pair thing

and see how that sounds. That's kind of intriguing too. But yeah, so it's a work in progress. And I think a lot of the reviews I've read come to this conclusion, and I think I agree with it, which is this is step one for Apple. I think there will be more products with Siri embedded in them. And I think this product will get a lot better. I think it will probably get a lot better without even needing new hardware because I think a lot of the ways it can get better are software-based. And it's a start for Apple in this

and it's late and it's not all there. And some of its competitors have, you know, built whole product lines while Apple is just rolling out its first product here. But, you know, that's happened before with Apple. And it doesn't necessarily mean that Apple is going to be doomed to being third or fourth place in this category. They're in the game now. And the next step is for them to keep playing it and not, you know, the alternative is that they just release this product and it just sort of

sits there and they drift away to do other things. And that would be bad. But they're in the game now and it's a very encouraging sign and uh and a fun product with a lot of limitations yeah like i said that you know it's often said about apple to the point that it's almost a meme now you know they they they show up late but they always like blow everything else away i don't think they've done that here um because there are more like you know apple is saying oh this is a speaker it's a it's music it's music but they're also trying to do the smart stuff right because otherwise why does this thing even connect to home kit then right like it's it's got that in it right but you know this this

has entered a market where there are good speakers like the google home max right like that's intended to be a good speaker but it also has has a lot of the Google Home stuff in. So they've entered this market and they've definitely done an incredible job at one portion of it, but they haven't at the other. So they've not blown everybody away yet. They've not blown their competition out of the water.

That, you know, so this isn't that, right? They haven't come in and shown everyone how to do this. Although let me tell you, the Google Home Max, I got to listen to that in a demo room provided by mysterious people who might be Apple. It was not a secluded grotto this time, but very similar. And the Google Home Max is not good. Like, it does not sound good. It doesn't sound good at all.

I think I would rather have a Sonos One than a Google Home Max. i think i would rather have a sonos one than a google home max i mean honestly it's like it's not very good in in my limited experience with it i would like to see and i haven't really seen some reviews comparing them where it's not an environment controlled by apple personally right like i want to see what absolutely right and that's and that's i don't have one so i can't test it personally the other ones i have here and i can test it personally because i'm not saying that they like stuck a screwdriver into the back of it but i'm sure they picked music that sounded really good oh sure yeah they did all of the standard calibration stuff and then they picked the stuff that made the home pod sound the best there's no doubt about it but that all said compared to just the sonos play one um i thought the Google Home Max didn't sound very good at all.

And it's big. It's not necessarily as big as a Sonos Play 5, but it's big too. So yes, it'll be interesting to see. But this is why Apple's positioning where it is. Apple's basically saying, look, if you want something that sounds really good and is a home assistant, this is the product for you. If all you want is a home assistant and you don't really care about it sounding pretty good, then it's not the product for you. And I think that is completely accurate.

It is, on one level, we have to judge it on what it is, which is an attempt to make a high-end speaker with voice control like a Sonos except from Apple. And that's what it is. And it's pretty good at that. What it's not is a sub $100 Amazon Echo. It's totally not that. And it is and it's a challenge because yeah, it's way more expensive. And it also sounds way better. So what do you care about? I mean, you care about the ecosystem, but you also are going to care about the price tag and the sound quality and and you are going to care about the price tag and the sound quality and you're going to make your decisions accordingly. All right, let's take a break.

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you're going to see when they've opened it, you're going to see when they've received it, you're going to see how long it takes for somebody to open it. You're going to see when they've opened it. You're going to see when they received it. You can even see if they printed it. So you're going to know where that invoice is over on the company that you're billing. And you can have late payment reminders set up automatically. So that can fire off. So you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to send anything. You don't have to chase anyone because it's all there. One of my favorite things is that when you go to each individual client, it shows you how long it takes them to typically pay you as well, which I really like. You know, every company works

how it works. Let's be honest. You may say, pay me an X amount of days, but companies work how they work. And sometimes it's going to be late. What I like about FreshBooks is that it will tell you what the average turnaround is. So you'll know when something is truly late based upon how you usually work with those companies. I love the notification system. So every time you log in, it will show you what's changed in your business since you last logged in

and what you need to deal with immediately. If you do any kind of invoicing or expense tracking, you need to try out FreshBooks. If for any reason you haven't, now is a great time because they're offering a 30-day free trial for listeners of this show with no credit card required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade and enter upgrade in the how did you hear about a section when you sign up. That is freshbooks.com slash upgrade to try out 30 days for free. No credit card needed.

Our thanks to FreshBooks for their continued support of this show. It is time for a hashtag ask upgrade and our first question comes from Nilesh and Nilesh wants to know how do you both manage your personal and business email accounts? One, do you even have separate email addresses? Two, are they all

in one app or in separate apps and do you use unified inboxes? So what about you, Jason? How is your email set up like that? I have one. Well, everything is mine. So when I was at IDG, I had my macworld.com mail or my IDG, you know, division email account. And I separately had my personal.

At this point, they are the same okay um I don't have a business email and a personal email like that I am my own employer so I just have one and I don't find it I have many email addresses they all go to the same place and and honestly for me I have no desire to separate them and do extra work in order to check two different mailboxes so i will do some labeling in gmail based on what the where the message was addressed but they all go in one gmail account i don't i don't want any i don't see any need to separate them and take extra effort to do that i have like four email addresses that I've accumulated over the years, two personal, two business. At this point, I just don't have it in me to try and consolidate them

because there's so many different logins and stuff like that attached to each of them. I set them all up in one application with a unified inbox. So they all look the same, but they're coming in and going out with the kind of corresponding email address to them. It is purely something that I have just built up over bad management over the years, effectively, is where I've been. So that's kind of where my situation is. Camel wants to know, what should be my first gadget purchase this year? The choices

are an Apple Watch, a 10.5 inch iPad Pro, or a Nintendo Switch. To give some context, Camel has an iPhone 7 Plus, an iPad Air 2, and an iMac currently. Now, we don't really know anything about this individual. So I would say personally, considering you already own an iPhone and an iPad and an iMac, I think you should get a Nintendo Switch because the Nintendo Switch is amazing. And I think that that is going to be pretty awesome. If it's even on your potential list of things to buy here, I would say sight unseen. That's what I would suggest, a Nintendo Switch.

Yep. Same. I agree. Because it's like, you know, you've got some good Apple products going on already. Like, you're good. Like, you've got an iPad, you've got an iMac, you've got a great iPhone. Go for a Nintendo Switch. Branch out a little bit. It's going to be awesome.

Kevin wants to know, Jason, what lessons, if any, do you think that Apple has learned from the iPod Hi-Fi for the HomePod? Do you think anything's happened here? Do you think they even looked at the product and thought, let's not do that again? Do you think anything's happened here? Do you think they even looked at the product and thought,

let's not do that again? I think the standard for what makes an Apple entry into an accessory category is higher than it was. I mean, honestly, I think the lesson was when Steve gets really angry about something um don't let him just create a product right away make make him make him wait like i think they learned that lesson after the ipod hi-fi i think steve jobs maybe learned that lesson at that point too because that was as i've said many times it's hard not to look at the ipod hi-fi and see that was literally apple just trying to take sales away from the bow sound dock because it was

wildly successful and apple wanted that money. And they made a product that was too expensive and nobody wanted to buy and they just kept buying the Bose sound dock and that was the end of the iPod Hi-Fi. So I think that's the big lesson is now Apple still does that, right? Apple still makes cases. Like there was a time when Apple did not make iphone cases of its own and it makes its own cases now and i think what it learned was to make products first off what it learned was have a thriving retail store but you can put your own accessories introduce those things at the same time like an iphone leather case and the ipod hi-fi didn't they come out the

same time there was an ipod leather case that came at the same time? There was an iPod leather case that came out at the same time as the Hi-Fi. Yeah, because it was before the iPhone, right? It was before the iPhone, yes. It was like the prototype, and they did learn a bunch of things. But now, I have an Apple iPhone case. And yes, it is more expensive than other cases

that I can get, but it's nice, and I like it. And of course, also, an Apple case is the only case you can buy that has the apple logo on it which you see all these cases with like a hole cut out so you can see the apple logo apple doesn't have to do that i hate the hole it's i know it kills me but i know why they do it because they're like oh people want to see the apple logo yeah you can you can put just buy an Apple case and the Apple logo is on it and Apple knows it. And that's an advantage. But I think they have made it work

where they are making accessories for their products that sell well, but that people also don't have to buy and they can buy something else. I think they fine-tuned it a lot in the intervening years since the iPod Hi-Fi. So I think they got the messageuned it a lot in the intervening years since the iPod Hi-Fi.

So I think they got the message that just sticking something out there that was just a Me Too product. I mean, the iPod Hi-Fi was kind of a Me Too product, unfortunately. So I think they've learned some lessons and they've made it work because now they do Apple-branded accessories and they're successful in bringing a lot of money for Apple. work because now they do apple branded accessories and they're successful and bringing a lot of money for apple as discovered by the chat room you can still buy that 99 dollar leather ipod case like apple will still sell that to you like that is 99 99 apple leather case for ipod classic and ipod i can't believe they still sell that as incredible fine italian leather mark mark's written in. My international hotspot uses a metered LTE connection that iOS and Mac OS see as Wi-Fi, so

background uploads and downloads occur and quickly eat up my daily data allotment. Is there a way to stop background data usage when on a metered Wi-Fi connection? Yes, use TripMode. TripMode.ch That will help you out on the mac now yes for the

iphone for ios devices there is a setting that you can flip um i don't know just how much stuff gets through if you flip it uh but if you go to uh ios settings go to general there is a setting called back uh background app refresh which you can turn off and i believe that will stop applications from being able to wake up in the background so that might help you but stuff like uh photos uploading and downloading i don't even i don't know i don't know if it's hard you may have to just you may have to yeah just that's hard i think ideally the i think there's a way for a wi-fi hotspot to communicate that it's a cellular hotspot using wi-fi and that the the device can see that and then and then it prioritizes it as cellular traffic instead of wi-fi traffic but it may not

for i think i may be making that up but i think that is possible and it may be that this one doesn't do that but yeah i mean the other thing to do is to is to start turning things off you know other things like photo syncing and then you're losing those features but it's if you've got a metered connection then you may have to do that and finally today l wants to know what is the ugliest most offensive app that you have to use regularly l says that student, which is a kid's school parent app, is an indecipherable disaster. For me, it is my banking app. It exhibits the worst parts of cross-platform design. So no polish of any kind, like it doesn't look good on any platform,

right? Because it's just trying to be the best for everything uh everything feels like a web view like it even throws up its own number picker right it's like a like if you're entering in an amount it gives its own keypad it doesn't even use the ios keypad and one of my one i'm going to find the most egregious you update the application in the app store you open it and then it downloads updates from something somehow. So yeah, it is just a disaster of design. What about you? Can you think of anything? Yeah, the Logitech Harmony app, I'm going to say, which is the Harmony remote.

And not only is it not great as a remote because if you touch the wrong thing at the wrong time, everything turns off or turns on. It's not great but to get to the right place to set to change a setting super complicated and weird you have to go through the right sequence of things in order to do it i think it also forces um into um into into portrait orientation so if you're on an ipad um you you have to rotate your ipad on my banking app does that too like so i can't use my banking app in landscape which is horrific on a 12.9 inch ipad yeah it's not yeah there's some bad apps yeah it happens and sometimes i think that's the way to do it is that those are apps meant for consumer consumption so those are the ones that that should be singled out so i think that's that's the way to do it is that those are apps meant for consumer consumption so those are the ones that that should be singled out so i think that's that's the way to go if you want to find our

show notes for this week head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 180 if you want to find jason online he's over at sixcolors.com the incomparable.com he's at jsnl jsnl jsnl on twitter i'm at imike i-m-y-k-e and you can also find both me and jason on a plethora of relay fm podcasts you can go to relay.fm shows to find this show and many others we have a great selection at relay fm that you should uh you should consider checking out i want to extend our thanks one more time to squarespace casper and freshbooks for their support of this show but most of all i want to thank you for listening. If you want to send in your questions to open the show,

hashtag SnellTalk. It can be about whatever you want. And then if you want to send in your technology-focused questions which you need our help or advice on to close out the show, hashtag AskUpgrade as always. Thank you to everyone who continues to do that. Every single week I have more than I can use and I really really really appreciate that because

we love doing those parts of the show and they couldn't work without your support and without your involvement so thank you for doing that. Jason Snell, until next time say goodbye Jason Snell. Goodbye everybody.