Upgrade - 181: Banana Slug Bookshelf

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

What does the death of Twitter for Mac say about the future of Mac software? Is Apple making big changes to how it releases software, and how will it impact the quality of the Apple product experience? We ponder these questions, note some surprising additions to Apple's video programming, and briefly discuss how Jason permanently scarred his bookshelf.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 181 today's show is brought to you by linode squarespace and pdf pen from smile my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley it's good to talk to you again. As always, I know that you are traveling this week, Jason. So I have a traveling related hashtag snow talk question for you. And it comes from Eric. And Eric says, I left my AirPods in a hotel room because they were the same color as the sheets. What is the most expensive thing that you have lost on a trip? I like the sheet detail there because you can imagine the horror of like, oh, white AirPods case, white sheets.

You don't see them and then you leave. I don't think I've ever lost anything particularly expensive. I remember I was on a work trip and I left my – and I was in my 20s. I left my one belt in the room and I get home and I realized the belt is not there. And the person I was rooming with, one of my coworkers was still in the hotel room. So I just called him and I said, can you find my belt? It's probably, I told him where it was and he said, nope. So that was that. I don't know whether he kept the belt for himself or is not somebody who can pay attention to looking around a room. But I lost that belt.

But I have no good tech stories. I don't think I've lost anything particularly expensive that I can recall on a trip, which is good. I'm a little obsessive about making sure that we're packing everything up when we leave a hotel a hotel room especially yeah i've never lost any technology um i've lost articles of clothing right right i i mean i may have done that too every now and then i have a an article of clothing that goes missing and i wonder if i left it somewhere but um i don't know for sure i can't confirm or deny you've never like left a kindle in a seat back pocket or anything like that uh my wife left a kindle in a seat back pocket on our way back from hawaii but um that wasn't me so i imagine yeah that they get that just happens

constantly i'm on the uh nintendo switch subred, and there are constant postings about either, A, I lost my Switch on a plane, or B, I just found a Switch on a plane. They're like, every day, one of those two things. And a lot of the time, which is kind of awesome, they end up getting paired together, which is so cool. And there's updates to it, and you see, oh, this person found it,

because there was another subreddit reader. And I love seeing that that that's really fun here's my travel tip i got a travel tip for you mike which is this don't put anything in the in the seat back pocket ever okay okay don't do it put it back in your bag put it on your lap put it you know next to you on the seat maybe although that's a little bit dicey don't put it in that pocket because you'll forget it if it's in that pocket so just don't do it especially solves that problem they slide down in the i once dropped on a plane the cap of my apple pencil oh no it went down the seat and i couldn't find it and i was digging around for ages and as we landed it rolled out and hit my foot.

Which is kind of amazing. Yeah, I've had those too where little things that have fallen down and I have to ask for the person behind to fish it out. Or I have to like try and find a way to get down between the bulkhead and the seat if I'm in a window seat. All of that. Yeah, that's always fun but i just this is why i i keep my um i keep my little carry-on bag that's under the seat in front of me um accessible and i just transfer my electronics in and out of that as i go rather than i know it's convenient that there's that little pocket there but if you put it in the pocket you're gonna forget it if you would like to send in a question to open up the show like Eric did, just send out a tweet into the planet

with hashtag Snell Talk and it will go into a document that we can pull from later. It can be about literally anything you want. However you would like for us to start the show, just send in a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk. And moving to follow up, we have some of a little home pod,

like little bits and bobs. I saw our good friend and your podcast co-host on Free Agents, Mr. David Sparks, talk about using the HomePod as a Mac speaker. And I saw that you were doing the same. And I kind of wondered why and how that went for you. Well, I mean, why is that every now and then you are at a device that is not the HomePod and it would be nice if you could control it. And you actually can. You can control it directly from iOS or Mac. There are, you know, you basically bring up the little panel in Control Center and it shows all of the remote controllable devices.

And if you select a remote controllable device, which is an Apple TV tv or a home pod you can pick a playlist and start playing it and then switch away from it and it's just it'll go off and and now it's doing its own thing you're not air that's not airplay that's this remote control feature and you can do that on itunes as well you got to have the latest versions but it does work and you know you can use it as a Mac output device too, right? Which is kind of interesting. Sure, you can set any AirPlay device can be set to do audio in the sound of system preferences, the sound pane, to do audio out to any AirPlay device. And so you can do that.

Now, AirPlay, one, remember, has a three-second delay. So if you need it to be instantaneous audio, you will be disappointed. But although I think QuickTime will sync up and iTunes will sync up like videos and things, they'll put in the delay and they get them to sync up. But if you're doing something that really requires immediacy, like a podcast, that would be a bad idea. like a podcast, that would be a bad idea. But yeah, it's there. And that's, I mean, my example is that I have a little keyboard shortcut for playing and pausing. You use your media keys on the Mac and you're listening to a HomePod in the room that you're in on your Mac. If you've got that setting set to control your HomePod and you press the play pause on your media keys, guess what? The HomePod pauses, which if you are trying to take a phone call or need to focus or something like that is and your hands are on the keyboard is more convenient than telling you know the lady to stop playing the music there you go jerry wrote in upgrading

jerry wrote in to say that uh the podcast playback from apple podcasts on your iOS devices and the HomePod, they do actually sync up. So like if you were listening to this episode of Upgrade and you're like at this point and you pause it and then ask your HomePod to play the Upgrade podcast, it will pick this episode and start it from where you previously were, which is good because otherwise that would suck so bad, right? Like that would be so so dumb and i'm really pleased that they've done that because it's great and i have done it with a few shows it's it's cool like i i like that i can just ask into the ether for my shows to play it's just a shame that i don't choose to use apple podcasts as my daily podcast app yeah no it's the right thing to do and i'm glad that they've rolled this out this is obviously

something that was being worked on i think even even though it got rolled out to iOS as well, that it's linked to HomePod is great news. And if I use the HomePod a lot, it would be a reason to consider starting to use Apple Podcasts as my podcast player but i i don't anticipate using the home pod for podcasts enough for me to switch to overcast and i'm going to hold out hope that at some point there's media access in some other way so that uh marco orment can write a a plug-in for services on on home pod or that there's siri kit support for media playback so that you can link it to your iPhone or something like that. But in the base, which is Apple Podcasts, which is the most popular podcast client, that is really great that they will let you pick up where you left off. And we were talking about comparisons to the Google Home Max.

YouTuber Austin Evans published a great review of the HomePod and he compared it against the Google Home Max. And of course, a great review of the HomePod and he compared it against the Google Home Max. And of course, you know, a lot of the speaker stuff is subjective and it's like based upon what you like to hear in the speaker. But Austin says that he feels that in comparison to the HomePod, the Google Home Max feels flat. And this is partly because of the fact that it's just got one direction, whilst the HomePod has the multi-direction, so it does a better job of filling the room, as well as just, to his tastes, sounding better.

It has more depth to the audio. Again, this is all very subjective, and you'll find people saying one thing and saying the other thing, and that's part of the problems with reviewing a product like this. It depends on your personal tastes for how you like to hear audio, But that was just another one. And Austin also does great work anyway. But this is a good video where he kind of broke down some of his opinions of the two devices in comparison to each other. That sounds good. Mike, are you excited to talk about um the details of how furniture is finished no i don't i don't feel like i need to talk about that uh the home pod leaves rings on some types of furniture

and so do other devices apparently it's a shame it's a shame that it happens i would be really really annoyed if this happened to me it didn't happen to me um and such is life like we're not we're not dismissing this as like uh we don't think this is a problem right like it is a problem i just am not very interested in going into detail on this i think i i wanted to at least mention it but i i think i agree with you that um you know if this is a known thing and manufacturers just don't care, because obviously people have reported that there are other electronic products that have these silicone feet and they leave marks on some kinds of wood and some finishes. And if that's true and nobody has ever cared or said anything before, I mean,

it goes back to something we've said a couple of times here, which is Apple's huge and everybody's paying attention to what Apple does. And so, no, it's not fair, I suppose, that a Sonos One does this and nobody cares and a HomePod does this and everybody freaks out. But it doesn't change the fact that if you're the manufacturer of the product and you're aware that this can happen, that you should probably get out in front of it and actually educate people rather than just slide it into the market. The only other thing I've got is an anecdote, which I was thinking of when this was all going on, which is I had a friend who went to UC Santa Cruz and their mascot is the banana slug, which is a little slug found in the woods. They're quirky at UC Santa Cruz. And she gave me a silicone glow-in-the-dark banana slug

as a souvenir um and i put it on my bookshelf and i came back like a month later i was moving things around on the top of the bookshelf and discovered that the silicone glow-in-the-dark banana slug had basically like melted into the bookshelf and it and it had it had completely removed the finish on an on in in a shape of the banana slug on the top of the bookshelf and in fact um not too long ago this is a bookshelf i've had since i was a kid and and i don't know well it was actually a long time ago maybe five or ten years ago i actually refinished that bookshelf myself i. I know I don't seem like a particularly handy person because I'm not, but I did. I sanded it down. We took off all the finish.

I sanded it down. I tried to get as much of the banana slug shape out as possible. I resurfaced it. I refinished it. And guess what? If you know and you look, you can still see the shape of a banana slug on the top of that bookshelf. So I am no stranger to the fact that silicone can behave very strangely with other kinds of materials. I mean, there are apparently many podcasts where people talk for a long time about furniture finishes and all of that. And I feel like that's enough for us to say is that if Apple tested this and was aware of it, I know it's maybe not fair and that other devices do it. But if they're aware, I would like Apple to step up and be more proactive about it like they were with things like scratches, micro abrasions and things on iPhones.

like they were with things like scratches, micro abrasions and things on iPhones. But also, I think we all have to be aware that this is the consequence of Apple being so huge as a company and has captured so much of the imagination that anything that happens with an Apple product that anybody has a complaint about will instantly be magnified to the worst thing in the world. And that's also true. I have a couple of pieces of follow-out. The first, if you enjoy our Mike at the Movies segments, every now and then a friend will say to me, hey, Mike, I want to watch a movie with you. And then we do little standalone episodes that go into the Incomparable feed at the incomparable.com slash Mike. Well, this time, the friend of mine who came to me was dan provost of studio neat and the thoroughly considered podcast and relay fm um and me and dan watched uh 1992's a few good men um which i will

not say whether i liked or did not like the movie because i think that's part of the fun um but it's a great discussion including a real weird 10 minute tangent at the end where we talk about those master class course things have you seen those you ever seen those like huge celebrities teaching you about screen writing or cooking or whatever they call masterclass we talk about those as well because that's like a whole thing at the end of the episode but yeah i won't i won't ask if you liked it or not but i will ask um could you handle the truth do Do you know what? I, when that moment happened, I was like, oh, that's that movie. That's where that's from. Yeah.

Yeah. I didn't know. I didn't know. Because everyone knows that line, you know? Right. Exactly. I guess we should also mention there is another Mike at the Movies on this podcast coming soon.

And if you want to study for that, you should watch Aliens. Yep. Aliens. to study for that you should watch aliens yep aliens jason convinced me after my horrific fear of watching alien um that aliens was was not so scary and more actiony and i think we're going to talk about that on march 5th but we'll confirm that uh probably next week but yeah march 5th we're going to watch aliens which is the sequel to alien which i have been told is not as scary by many people actually not just it's an action it's an action movie and not a horror movie primarily it's there's scary

bits in it but it is it is a james cameron movie we watch the terminator movies it is a it is an 80s sci-fi action movie in that kind of vein so i think you'll get a very different feel from it good because i'm a little scaredy cat and I don't need more scary monsters. Thank you very much. I also wanted to do a little bit of promotion for a new show on RelayFM that I'm co-hosting called Playing for Fun. It is a show between me and Tiffany Almond where we talk about

video games that we love. I really, really want people to go and try this show out because we think it's different to a lot of video game shows. It's different to a lot of video game shows. It's different to a lot of podcasts. And we only pick games that we both love. And we only talk about the things that we love in those games.

We don't talk about the bad stuff. We don't talk about criticisms. We don't even really review the games. It's just two best friends that enjoy something and they just talk about the things that they enjoy we're looking at doing an episode every month the first episode is about super mario odyssey the reason i really want people to go and check it out is we are obviously trying to be very positive in the show and every i've heard from so many people that have listened that they really, really enjoyed it.

So I think that this is a show that people will like. Maybe even if you don't care about video games. I mean, I hear this with the pen addict every now and then. We have a lot of pen addict listeners that don't like pens. They just like to hear two people just talk about something that they love, which is a little bit quirky. So also Playing for Fun has the,

I'm sorry to everybody else on RelayFM, the best artwork and the best music that we've ever put together. It's absolutely wonderful. Oh, by the way, if you have the RelayFM app installed on your devices, we have a sticker pack

and there is a sticker of an animated Mike and Tiff high-fiving, which is so good. So that's in there. If you haven't checked out the sticker pack in a while, we is so good. So that's in there. If you haven't checked out the sticker pack in a while, we've got a couple of extra ones in there. So please go and check out Playing for Fun. Just listen to the first episode,

and it might be something you like. It might be something you don't like. But I have a sneaking suspicion that I think that a lot of people will like this show because we're trying our best to just make something happy and nice. And stay tuned for the new show, Playing for Fun or Not, in which I talk to John Siracusa about what's wrong with all the games that you like.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to hear a lot from John. I've already heard a few little bits here and there. Nothing is so perfect that it can't be criticized, Mike. Turns out. Remember that. Today's show is brought to you in part by our friends over at Linode. With Linode

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because if you go to linode.com slash upgrade, you'll be supporting the show and getting a $20 credit towards any Linode plan. So you can use it for any plan, but if you want to try it out, you can use the one gigabyte of RAM plan, and that is for free months. With a seven-day money-back guarantee, there's nothing to lose. So once again, linode.com, that's L-i-n-o-d-e.com slash upgrade where you can learn more sign up take advantage of that $20 credit or use the promo code upgrade 2018 at checkout our thanks to linode for their support of this show and relay fm all of my

servers for all of my things are on linode all of them guess the j the Jason Snell seal. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. I give them money. Not as much money as what I get back because it is a great deal. And that's where Six Colors and the Incomparable live. I like this. The Jason Snell seal of thumbs up. This is a new sub-award brand. It's a picture of a seal giving a thumbs up, which is interesting because they don't have thumbs, and

somehow it happens. I don't know. The Jason Snell seals do. Alright, it's time for Upstream. Surprisingly to everybody, Carpool Karaoke has been renewed for a second season. Well, congratulations to them. It feels like nobody was really excited about it. It was a critical flop, and

I can't imagine it got a lot of eyeballs, but it's been renewed for a second season my only thinking on this is they can get a second season of carpool karaoke together and up and going quicker than they can get any of their other deals up and going yes so they're just gonna have some stuff that's there i will float a theory. My theory is that if you are launching a video service, one of the things that you're going to need, we've talked about it a little bit, is a catalog. And the people watching Carpool Karaoke today are doing it through Apple Music. It's not the same. It's not the same thing.

So I feel like maybe you get the show spun up. Maybe they like it internally. Maybe they think it's going to have some appeal once they get it in front of other people. It's not that expensive. So you keep it rolling. And it means that when you launch your Apple video service, you're already going to have one and probably two seasons of Carpool Karaoke ready to watch, and it adds more to their catalog so you know and and the theory is maybe when people are signing up and trying out the apple video service those people will then try out the show and like it and uh and so why not keep it around to fill up the catalog and to you know potentially catch the eye of people who are uh yeah who are

signing up that's my that's my theory so i mean i would expect that also they've done a lot of the groundwork for this show so it's probably cheaper for them to just renew this and let it run and do another season than having to like maybe try and find something else you never know they might be able to turn it around we'll see irrespective of bad reviews cloverfield paradox poured in five million viewers in the first seven days on netflix if you remember this was the show this is the movie i should say that netflix launched uh in a big surprise during the superbowl uh five million in seven days seems like a good number but it's worth comparing to

bright which was the will smith alien police movie on Netflix, which also received bad reviews, that netted 11 million viewers in its first, I think, couple of weeks. So that is a big difference. However, it is worth noting that Bright is one of Netflix's biggest successes to date, according to Variety. So I don't know, They paid a lot of money. I think like 50 million for Cloverfield Paradox, but it was a great marketing move. So maybe it was worth it in the end. 5 million is not nothing, you know? So it's a good stunt

and it gives them, either they can learn not to ever do that again or it gives them an idea of what a baseline is and then they can try again. And keep in mind, it's still being marketed, and it's got name recognition, and it stays in Netflix's catalog, so people will keep watching it. And I'll put the footnote here. These are Nielsen ratings because Nielsen is trying desperately to provide people measurements of what Netflix does

because Netflix does not provide its own ratings and doesn't need to. So this is an estimate based on a panel uh a sample put together by by nielsen but i i'm not surprised that bright did better than than cloverfield given given will smith quite frankly yeah yeah i mean that's a very good point like will smith is an international huge draw like a world war main so probably for many years to come um amazon youtube verizon and twitter are currently in bidding for NFL Thursday night streaming rights. Facebook was in the running but pulled out. I think Twitter had this last year, right? Was it Twitter or was it Amazon or did they split it? I know that they've both done some of

this stuff in the past, but they're all currently in the running to get some of the streaming rights for Thursday night football. Yeah, it's not yeah it's uh it's it's not super exciting in the sense that it's not like they're not broadcasting it in fact this is a this is a rights package that's being split multiple ways where it's on the nfl's cable channel then it has a broadcast partner which is going to be fox this year i think and um and then there's a streaming partner so it's it's not exclusive at all. In fact, it'll be shown on cable and broadcast and streaming. So still, it's something worth experimenting with.

And we go from live sports to sports drama. Apple is developing a show based on the life and career of NBA star Kevin Durant. It will be called Swagger, produced by Brian gazer and ron howard's imagine television this feels like an eddie q joint it does it's brian grazer by the way but you know it doesn't nobody cares except his family uh but it's a hi to the grazers um they uh it does feel very much like the we're gonna do a what was? Dr. Dre docudrama too. Whatever. It's,

it's not, I'm not a big NBA fan. I think Kevin Durant is an interesting guy. This is what I would say is this goes to a lot of what we're talking about, about making sure that Apple's service isn't just a bunch of sci-fi shows. So here we go. service isn't just a bunch of sci-fi shows. So here we go. We've got a show that is about the life of a black man. It appeals to sports fans, presumably. It does a lot of things that a lot of these other shows probably don't do in terms of appeal. So diversifying Apple's offerings

is a good thing to do. I think it's a smart move, even if this is not a show that I'm super interested in because I don't really care about the NBA. I think it's important for Apple to try and have a spread of stuff in the pipeline so that Apple Video has broad appeal. And so this is another one of those. I do, the whole like the life of an active player does feel a little weird to me.

But at the same time, the NBA fan base is strong. And it's easy to view this and just assume it's something silly and ego boosting. But it's also entirely possible that this has got some really great people behind it. And it's going to be great. It's also entirely possible that this has got some really great people behind it and it's going to be great. So good for Apple to keep on adding different pieces of this puzzle because they want to have lots of different stuff on offer and not just like we were worried about. Well, what we have is we have lots of diversity here. There's the sci-fi show from J.J. Abrams and there's a sci-fi show from Steven Spielberg and there's a sci-fi show from Steven Spielberg and there's a sci-fi show from Ron Moore those are totally different white guys with sci-fi shows so what do you want

and instead no they're going to do a lot of different stuff it's good and also Facebook is creating an eight episode docuseries about NASCAR star Dryl Barber-Wallace Jr. Barber is famous for being the first African-American person to drive in the Daytona 500 since 1969. And this series follows and has followed his story into doing that. This is part of a push that Facebook is doing for their platform, Facebook Watch, which they're really trying to develop a lot of content for. For example, people know that I'm a wrestling fan. They have worked with the WWE to create a weekly episodic show that's been going on for the last couple of months,

which has been pretty interesting. But I've not been able to watch it because Facebook Watch isn't available outside of the US right now, which is bonkers. I don't understand why, like, if you're creating your own content, you would region restrict it? That doesn't make any sense? Like, what are the rights you're making it? So that region restrict it. It doesn't make any sense. What are the rights you're making it?

So that's really weird. It's very, very weird. But the WWE, just going into specifics, they have been rebroadcasting it for their outside of the US viewers on their own streaming platform, which is really strange. But yeah, so that's something that Facebook is doing as well.

I will say just before we get out of this segment, and there are absolutely zero spoilers but black panther is awesome uh i saw it i look forward to it i i've been traveling so i haven't had a chance to see it i think i'm looking forward to it so yeah so it's a really really great movie i mean i don't need to be the person to tell you that right like i think everybody is universally saying this but yes you don't even need to be a superhero movie fan to like this movie so it's great it was yeah me and adina went to see yesterday we really liked it so it's great all right so uh twitter has killed their mac app which is very interesting uh they posted

two tweets which is funny to me that they posted two tweets it's like can't you just put us all in one tweet but like whatever um they're saying saying we're focusing, this was buried in the Friday news cycle. We're focusing our efforts on a great Twitter experience that's consistent across platforms. So starting today, the Twitter for Mac app will no longer be available for download, and in 30 days will no longer be supported. For the full Twitter experience on the Mac, visit Twitter on the web. Now, I don't necessarily want to go into a ton of detail about this specific thing,

but kind of like a way that... what this could potentially mean. But there are so many problems with this announcement. For example, we're focusing on efforts on a great Twitter experience that's consistent across platforms. I don't know if you need to remove an application to do that um i mean you may as well just say we only use the web everywhere right that is silly

well that well exactly right like they're not removing their android and ios apps so far as i can tell they're just removing their? There is a Windows 10 app. I would not put money on it surviving, but it's possible because Windows has a touch, you know, component on a lot of the, you know, and it's a Windows 10 app. Maybe they feel like it's basically their mobile experience.

So it's a touch experience, but I also wouldn't put money on it surviving either because what the heck is going on here it's sad this is you know they bought tweety and um then they kind of ripped that apart and made this twitter mac app that was i used it for a very long time but it was lagging behind uh for a long time it didn't get support for the longer tweets that everybody else did um the tweet that they sent out themselves, you know, it's doublespeak.

It's all ridiculous. It's focusing on a consistent platform. First off, consistent doesn't mean good. It just means that it's consistent. Also, I laughed when you said they killed it because, I mean, you could argue that the time of death was called, the body hit the floor, whatever was it was it already dead pretty much already dead before this

and i it's it's a shame uh it's another example of twitter's sort of mismanagement of everything it does but fortunately mac users who want to use Twitter in an app can still use Twitterific and Tweetbot. Those still survive for now unless Twitter decides that it really just wants to push everybody off of the Mac and into a web page. But Twitter's – I complained about it. I basically referred to Twitter's web experience as garbage. And I heard from people who were like, it's fine for me, which is like, I'm glad it's fine for you. It's terrible for me. I would never, I would not use Twitter remotely as much as I do if I had to just open Safari or, you know, and go to twitter.com. Like, I don't like anything about how the Twitter web experience works. And so I hope I don't ever have to try.

So Twitterific is currently on sale at $7.99 for the Mac. You can also buy TweetBot for the Mac. They're both really good apps. It is worth noting, because I remember this. I haven't seen a lot of people talk about this. I assume it's just not been worth mentioning. But I mean, we spoke about Twitter 4.0 for the Mac on episode 70 of upgrade because this was

an application that twitter had made by a third-party development studio if you remember and then yeah or put it out or they or they bought or they bought it and then they they paid somebody to update it it's unclear um but yeah but this was like a whole separate thing like they had a mac app which sucked and was really like dying then they introduced this new one which was new but missing a lot of features and then it kind of just never got updated so right it's a bit of a nightmare tweet deck still exists that's still a twitter property anyway this is all just to set up uh a conversation that i want to have with you about what, if anything, this says about the Mac as a platform. So in your opinion, is it a concern that a company like Twitter would pull Mac app support? Like, does it signal something?

Yeah, oh, absolutely. I mean, what the message here is, it's not worth developing a custom app for non mobile platforms. That's that's how I read it is it's still worth it to build iOS apps and Android apps because the app experience is is so good. And you want to have you want to be on the on the screen, on the home screen with your icon and all of that. You want to participate in that, so you will. But that on the desktop, if you're one of these services especially, you've got your website. Just kick everybody to the website. People on Macs can just load the webpage in their browser, and it's fine. Now, I disagree with that, but that is the truth that if you're paying for a custom app to develop it and keep it up to date, and you look at how many people use,

I mean, everybody who uses a Mac probably uses a smartphone or at least a huge percentage of them. And I think their argument is, look, mobile is where our stuff's being consumed. Mobile is where we get the best return on our investment. The Mac is a very small platform. Why would we spend the time on it? You can just use the web. And the Mac ends up falling back into this kind of give up zone where it's just it's not worth it. And you go to the lowest common denominator, which is the web.

And, you know, we're mentioning the Windows app. You know, I don't know how good it is, but that's probably going to stick around because it's on their universal platform. If it does, that's going to be the reason, is that it is kind of a mobile app because it's a Windows 10, you know, it's not a traditional desktop app like the Mac app was.

It's also apparently available on HoloLens, which I kind of love the idea of that. It's, you know, you're just reading Twitter in your big glasses in the sky. That seems like a fun thing to do. It's the future, Mike. You have Twitter pushed into your face constantly and you can read it on the fridge.

It's in the cloud. If you're outside looking up at a cloud. I guess the other problem with this, going back to the Mac, is it also signals something to users as well right like if you are you've bought your Mac and you go to the Mac App Store and you look for the Twitter app and there isn't one like do you think that that for a user of a of the Mac do you think that that says something to like you're like oh why isn't it here well i mean i think it says something but you could argue the

same thing about facebook right there's no facebook app for the mac it facebook is a website that has a mobile app and that's sort of the paradigm and what happened with twitter is that this this has to do with twitter's history right twitter became successful in a lot of ways on the backs of third party apps which they then pushed to the side and said, no, no, our website and our app are the most important. But the third-party Twitter clients is a big thing in the early development of Twitter, huge part of the early development of Twitter. Facebook never did that, right? Facebook never thought of itself that way. Facebook was a website. And then they built their own mobile app to go with their website. And so I think part of it is just it's a function of where these

services started. Nobody, or at least not very many people, think that Facebook is worse off because they don't have a Mac app. What would the Facebook for Mac app be? It's actually kind of weird to think about it because Facebook does sort of feel like a website to me a little more than Twitter does, where it feels like a messaging service. But I don't know. Services like this, I mean, it's a fair question about do they need to have a native client? And for me, people complain about Slack being this electron app. So it's basically like a web app wrapped in a little app wrapper.

But Slack has made the effort of putting it in an app wrapper. And I don't mind that. Like I know some people, it really bothers them, but it's like, I'm very glad I have a Slack app. I wouldn't use Slack as much on my Mac if I had to just open web pages in my web browser that were showing slack instances, I wouldn't use. First off, my web browser is like a multi tool. So if

I want to keep Twitter around, this is always the thing where people made like these like fluid or apps like that to make single site browsers, which are like little, you know, browser apps, you click on and it just loads one web page. And I always found those really weird to use and I never really liked them. I don't like that. And if I have to go to your... Remember to go to your website. I'm not going to keep your website open all the time. Sorry, Facebook. And then I forget to go there because it's not in my site. It's not in my use. I'm looking at what apps I'm running and things that are in the menu bar and things like that. And I know that there are apps that will do that with Facebook notifications and things like that. Facebook's just never been

as important to me so that I haven't cared about it so much. But Slack's a good example where the presence of an app makes a difference in my geography, at least when I'm using the Mac, that I don't want to have to remember to either... You keep a window open. I don't want to have to remember to either, like you keep a window open. I don't want that window. I'm not somebody who keeps windows full of tabs open. I keep windows open when I'm working on them in the browser. I don't leave them open. You can't really minimize them

because if you minimize them and then you click a link somewhere else, it automatically opens up that minimized window and loads a new tab, which is also infuriating. And so I basically stop using those sites regularly and just go when I'm reminded, oh yeah, Facebook is a thing that exists when I'm on my Mac.

So I think there's at least as one Mac user, I can say that there's a level of brain space occupied by apps that are not occupied by web pages. And so for me, that's the difference. You mentioned Electron and a lot of our mutual friends get really upset about electron apps why is that like what is electron and why do people get so mad about electron apps on the back i think i am not a web developer so i'm not comfortable saying much more than saying electron is a framework to develop mac or to develop web apps basically it's one framework and um it allows you to create something that's got kind of

app-like functionality and then you wrap it in uh an app wrapper but it's using web uh web based technologies to build that thing so it's like non-native feeling applications is what mostly comes out of it. Well, I mean, it depends on your definition of what is native. Some stuff feels real. There are apps, there are web apps with wrappers that always felt like I was literally, if you scroll a little too fast or in the wrong place, you reveal that you're really in a web browser, right? And that never is a good feeling as a Mac user, I would say, to suddenly realize that this is all just kind of a lie. But the big place you see it is in things like the preferences and the menu bar where there's nothing because all your preferences and controls are actually like in the window. And, and that's because it's actually a web page.

But I don't know. I mean, it's, I don't, I don't get as upset as some people do about this, because I think there are different classes of apps. And if a web based app in an app wrapper works more or less like a desktop app, I'm probably fine with it. If you tried to give me Final Cut Pro in a web browser, I would probably revolt. Because I think a lot of people get concerned about stuff like Electron and Twitter killing Mac apps. It's like that there's a problem with the platform right that like if people are

not developing native applications for the mac is an indication that the mac is a is dying right i think that is the the the fear and i i would say i don't think i would phrase it as that the Mac is dying, but the Mac is a very small computing platform. And it's smaller now than iOS, Android, and Windows, right? So if you're going to choose, and mobile is so important and growing. And so if you're going to choose, you're going to choose and mobile is so important and growing and so if you're going to choose you're going to choose mobile first off and at that point it's ios and android and the web browser is right there a lot of these things have web services to build a there's an argument that to build a custom mac app you need to build it because you have a clear benefit in building a native app and not everything is going to have a clear benefit in building a native app. And not everything is going to have

a clear benefit to having a native app. And if your market isn't so large that it's worth it just because you have so many customers who will be happier, if the market's not that big, then I understand the business decision there. I don't think it necessarily means that all Mac apps are going away and that the Mac is dying. But I do think that it shows that in the priority list, the Mac is way down versus especially mobile. So let's talk about Project Marzipan as a refresher for those maybe not keeping track. Project Marzipan is a rumored, mostly by Mark Gurman right now, project that is going to be unveiled probably at WWDC this year,

which will allow for developers of iOS apps to port their applications or to more easily develop their applications for the Mac. That's kind of the understood wisdom of this rumor right now. Would the ability for developers of iOS apps to be able to bring their applications to Mac, is that better or worse for this perception problem? It's a good question. I don't know. I think porting, I think the problem with it is that

depending on how it would be done, it might feel not like a Mac app. I would hope that the way that it would work is that Apple was designing it so that, you know, the pitch is going to be, you can make a great iOS app and a great Mac app without as much extra work and not, you can click a couple of boxes and your iOS app shows up on the Mac, because that's a very different kind of thing. And that may be the reality, regardless of what Apple says. But I would imagine that Apple would rather pitch it as being, you know, you get to your stuff that would go over here now comes over here, and you can have a real menu bar. And, you know, that would be nice

to see them do it that way. It's a question of how much work people would put in and if they would put in the work. I mean, I think it is a good question about whether Twitter would bother to take their iOS app and bring it back to the Mac, like for all the reasons we've already said. And Facebook might be the same way. Although who knows, Facebook might have a different calculation and say, this is great. We can get on the Mac in a way that gives us more access to those people in notification center and whatever when they're at their desks. So let's do it. But they might also just make the same decisions that Twitter has made basically and say, it's not worth it to us to do that. But as a Mac user, there is the risk that all of a sudden you're basically, yay, you get more

apps, but boo, they all look like iOS apps that have just been ported to the Mac. And what's better for the Mac in the long run? I don't know. I feel like there are a lot of apps that need to be native Mac apps. But if something like Marzipan lets iOS developers get to the Mac more easily with things that are decent, then maybe that's a good thing. It does make you ask, what's the future of the Mac? And is Apple heading to a place where, as we have talked about many times before, that there's a kind of a hybrid that ends up being the final destination for Apple users where you have things that look that like there's one os and if you're in a desktop or laptop context it feels more like the mac but in the end it's just

one os that this would be a step in that direction too i i'm afraid because it's going to be great if could get like overcast for the mac right or i don't know like um i'm looking at my phone right now well yeah i mean lowering lowering the barrier to get apps that uh are not worth building entirely for the mac on their own but would be worth building uh you know doing a little bit of extra work to bring them over from ios to Mac. I think that's a nice idea. And we can think of some apps that could do it. The question is, how many of those are there? How high is that bar? How much do any of these iOS developers care about opening up the Mac as another market for them? And I think that's a serious question. Is the Mac just too small

a market? Or is the power of Apple's platforms and saying, look, this gets you across all the Apple platforms. Is that enough to put in the extra time and money to do it? Because there's like something where, you know, I use a bunch of applications that have a Mac app, right? Something like Fantastical or AirMail. And I can't imagine that they would continue to build the mac app still right like i wouldn't be surprised if we saw a lot of more indie developers kind of retire their mac apps in favor for the one true cross-platform application i think what i would say is if this is done right by apple what it would allow would allow something like Flexibits to do with Fantastical is build one Fantastical that would still feel like the Mac version on the Mac.

But it would be easier for them to develop it because they would be using a lot more of the same stuff as on iOS. Right. That's the ideal is not a you know know, the, the, the scary one is I work, right? Where Apple had, I work for Mac and then they, then they moved to, uh, sort of a unified I work that synced and that was similar on iOS and Mac. And from the Mac users perspective, it was a huge feature regression, right? A lot of things just stopped working. They disappeared, features vanished because it was kind of a new version of the iWork apps. That's the fear is that if you get Fantastical trading their separate Mac and iOS versions for this new kind of combo version that from the perspective of the Mac user,

you just lost all of these features and now it seems weird and like you've got an ios app in a window i was also thinking about photos as another example where like it is maybe more of an ios app in its feel and execution than a mac app and it does some really weird stuff on the Mac. Like the fact that you can't really use it. You in most applications, you can't drag a photo from photos into another application. And it's like, well,

but why though, you know, and that would be my personal concern is that these applications, whilst feeling native would have these things to them, which clearly indicate that they are a marzipan app and then my kind of feeling on that would be would the people that hate electron applications are they not just going to feel the same about marzipan applications and what are the you know what are the further implications of something like that?

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't think your average Mac user looks at photos and says, oh my God, this is not a Mac app. It's got quirks. But that comes back to what I was saying before, is that's about how it's implemented by Apple and then by the developers. And there'll probably be a wide variety of them. But from Apple's perspective, the other thing,

and I'd say, I gotta be honest, from a user perspective too, one of the advantages of this is that when you go to your Mac from your iOS device, and remember, there are way more iOS devices than there are Macs in service. But then you go to a Mac and you use photos or you use pages or you use numbers and it's kind of familiar.

It's not the same, but it's kind of familiar. Really, in the long run, that the applications have even more familiarity than ever before, right? Across the entire suite. I think so. I think that is more important to Apple, to be honest. I think so. I think that is more important to Apple, to be honest. So when you look at something like this rumor of Project Mazapan, do you think that this is a likelihood?

Do you think that this is where Apple's going to go with Mac development? I don't know. I honestly don't know. I mean, I think one of the great mysteries, because they have so many choices in front of them, I think one of the great mysteries we have is what is happening with iOS, Mac, and the future of Apple's platforms. Because we've been saying for a while now, they're one company trying to do two separate consumer platforms at scale. Let's leave TVOS and watchOS aside for a minute because they're kind of iOS and kind of not, but just Mac and iOS. That one of those is really hard as we're probably going to talk about in a little bit. Two of them is even harder.

And so you start to say to yourself, all right, we built up all this user base, all these developers on the one side. How do we make it easier for them to be on the other side too? How do we lower the barriers there? How do we make them more similar? And I think that's a natural thing. I don't see how Apple can keep the Mac and iOS as separate as they are now in the long run. That doesn't mean that I'm saying that fundamentally the Mac is going to go away or just become kind of an iOS hybrid. But I think regardless of what Apple chooses, they're going to need to make the flow back and forth easier because it just makes sense.

It simplifies a lot of things if they're able to do that. But they do have those decisions to make that are incredibly hard decisions, momentous decisions, and maybe they've made them. And this is part of the slow cranking toward there. Or maybe they haven't, and they're leaving their options open. Like we said, can you imagine a future version of either iOS or a next generation operating system, because iOS is even 10 years old now, of something that looks like iOS when it's on a tablet or a phone and looks like the Mac when it's on a desktop or a laptop. And, you know, is that better than just maintaining macOS code base and iOS code base for them to get there?

And does that happen in two years or five years or 10 years? And, you know, that is why they pay the Apple vice presidents the big bucks, I think, because that's a hard question. Yeah, you mentioned about the issues of developing for all these platforms. And that actually leads into another report from Mark Gurman talking about Apple slowing down its software development cycle, which we're going to talk about in just a second after we thank Squarespace for their support of this show. Use the offer code upgrade at checkout and you will get yourself 10% of your first purchase. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea. You can make your next move with Squarespace. No matter what type of website you want to build, no matter what type of project it is, Squarespace has the tools that you need. You have the ability to grab a

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That's the code UPGRADE for 10% off. And thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of this show and RelayFM Squarespace. Make your next move, make your next website. So it has been reported by Mark Gurman that Apple is going to be moving their software development to a two-year cycle rather than a one-year cycle. I think he specifically calls out iOS, but it could as easily be everything. And what this means is not that Apple will be releasing versions of iOS every two years,

that they will be continuing to release versions of iOS every year, but internally they will have more flexibility over what features get included and which don't because features will be developed over a two-year cycle. And if they can make it for one year, they'll be included. If not, there's more time to develop for them. So taking this as, right, let's just take this as what the case is going to be. Jason, do you think that slowing down development like this and extending it to a two-year development cycle is a good thing, a possible thing?

Do you think that this is going to be going on inside of Apple, and do you think it's going to be good for them? Sounds like they're already doing this, right? Yeah. I mean, we've seen this. Not only things like we heard about iOS features for iPad for iOS 10, right? And then we heard, well, okay, they're not going to ship in 10, but they may ship a little bit later. And they ended up shipping in 11. So I feel like this has already been going on.

At least we have some examples of Apple sort of having things. And then recently it's been Apple having things that are announced that they don't ship, like messages, iMessages in the cloud. There have been a bunch of others that ship later. Apple Pay Cash is another example. And so I think that this is healthy. I think this is, as Steven Sanofsky, who used to run Windows, wrote a tweet storm that became a Medium post, he views this as being this giant machine that Apple has had to build in order to ship consumer software at massive scale. This is the machine correcting and reacting to the issues that are going on. And then, you know, you adapt and it takes time, but you adapt as you go. And it seems really prudent to me, doesn't it? I mean, the idea that, yeah, if something's not ready, don't ship it. And I also think it is a recognition that the world we live in today

is very different in terms of mobile platforms than it was five years ago. There was a time when it felt like Apple and Google were in an arms race. And if one of them didn't react to the other's moves, it would be all over. And I feel like that is not true anymore. That Apple is going to be here and Google is going to be here. Android is not going anywhere. and google's going to be here android's not going anywhere ios is not going anywhere so there's it feels almost like a like a disarmament de-escalation sort of thing that the priority now is not throw as many new features in as possible to keep up with the other guy it is do the things you need to do strategically, plan in advance, make sure that the things

you want to do, like face ID is a great idea, make sure those happen, but also have the flexibility to drop things out and push them back because we're no longer on the kind of footing we used to be. If you're Apple, you say this in terms of having to drive this stuff in there and now our scale has gotten to the point where the bugs that we used to be able to kind of just whistle and keep moving on about we can't anymore because we're too big and as i mentioned earlier when we were talking about furniture finishing uh everybody's paying attention we're huge every the smallest issue is going to get called out and so your priorities have to change and uh and so i think this is i

think this is healthy um the details of german's story i mean it sounds like that's you know he says that's what's going on internally we've seen hints of it already and externally we may never hear about it externally it may just still be the same process of here are our features. And some of them don't ship right away. And the features that got pushed to iOS 13 or whatever, we just don't hear about those. That may have already been the case and will continue to be the case. And it will be hard to actually see it from the outside. Apple may not change its outside messaging about this at all.

They may not say, oh, we're slowing down development and we're working on bug fixes. They may just not do, right? I mean, there's no reason they have to sell, hey, did you know that our software has bugs and that we're fixing them? Like, is that their marketing message?

Probably not. We'll come back to that in a second, but there's something I wanted to mention. You said about how iPad software development feels like it's been on a two-year cycle. And I think you're right, but I would expect, especially looking at this GoMem report, that that wasn't necessarily accepted as a good thing,

where maybe now, internally in the company, they're allowing for things to take longer instead of things being late and held back i think that things not being completed in time was maybe being frowned upon where it now is maybe being a little bit more encouraged as a let's take time to get this right as opposed to let's rush for the release well i'm reminded of my reaction to the to the multitasking features in ios 11 which was to feel like oh this feels really polished like it's very well thought out and you know there there are criticisms of the multitasking in ios 11 that that some people have but it felt like part of a larger whole and, you know, all these different

aspects of it, the multitasking screen, the dock, a bunch of different stuff went into that. And I think of it now and I think, well, what would it have looked like if they had pushed and gotten it into iOS 10 or iOS 10.2. And maybe it would have been the same, but maybe it would have not been. Maybe it would have been a little more haphazard, a little less kind of really well integrated and thought out because they were rushing to get it in a particular version. And maybe that feature benefited from getting kicked all the way back a year, if that's indeed what happened. That was sort of what we were hearing, but it may or may not be true. So I'm okay with it. I'm really okay with Apple saying, we have our priorities, but we're also not going to ship something that's also an acceptance of this reality, like I mentioned, that Steven Stanovsky talked about, which is the fact is Apple standards have to change because of the size. It's not just because of the scrutiny put on them, although that's part of it, but because of the size of their market and the size of the platforms that they're supporting.

The iOS is enormous. the size of the platforms that they're supporting. iOS is enormous. And things that you could get away with nine years ago, seven years ago, you can't get away with anymore. From this year or this past year, this past 12 months, Apple has taken a hit publicly, from a perception perspective, about software quality. Ranging from root bugs to autocorrect issues

to the battery problems to, you know, there's been a bunch of different things, right, that have occurred. There's been delays on software things like messages in the cloud. And you would expect that one of the reasons that they're changing their internal practices is because their external perception has changed, and they're starting to get a bit of a reputation for things being a bit less than perfect. Now, the last time that I can really remember, like, a big perception, kind of on a mainstream perspective of this, was Apple Maps with iOS 6 6 or whatever it was. You know,

that people will be like, oh, you know, we're really mad about Apple Maps and people were very upset. And this obviously led to Forstall being ousted at the company. From kind of when you think about it, like, are we at that kind of stage? Is public perception so bad that some kind of when you think about it like are we at that kind of stage is is public perception so bad that some kind of like execution needs to occur i mean because that's kind of what happened to forstall right no no they kind of they i mean just saying like that's kind of what they did to him and but you know we're not at that stage oh first off i don't think a public execution of somebody firing of somebody to solve a problem is ever ever solves a problem oh i'm not saying it solved the problem but like just from nope they did it right they

they kind of were like you know they had to make a big apology for maps and then forestall was ousted so yeah you you i don't believe that that's what happened okay but bottom line i don't think that's what happened i think what happened is that they wanted to get rid of Scott Forstall because of lots of reasons. And then if you believe the reports, he was asked to publicly apologize or whatever for maps and refused. And at that point, they're like, we really got to get rid of this guy. And they got rid of him. Maybe my memory is a little bit wrong on that one. I don't think Apple sacrificed Scott Forstall in order to, because there was a Maps debacle.

I think Apple maybe used the Maps thing as the last straw or whatever to just get rid of a guy they wanted to get rid of. But my read on that is you get rid of somebody like Scott Forstall because Tim Cook or other people around at the senior levels have decided that they don't want to work with that guy anymore. And so there's a power move and he's out. And I think that's what happened. So I think this is, you know, I don't think this is like that at all. I think this is stuff that emerges from having a complicated 10 year old, longer in many cases, code base for your operating system and a huge platform and trying to scale. And it's a very hard problem as Sanofsky pointed out and that they have to be better and they have to make changes. And the challenge with some of this stuff is we can't see the changes. We've said it all along.

Apple's hardware is way ahead of their software right now and they need to do better. So, you know, ultimately, I don't think there's anything we can see from the outside that will let us know whether there are particular people at Apple who are doing a bad job or whether this is a more about culture and is a more systemic problem. And so, you know, I can't say anything about Craig Federighi. For all I know, Craig Federighi is the guy who has been trying to get people to change the way Apple does software for ages and nobody's listened to him. Or perhaps he's the one who's been standing in the way and has been the impediment and has had to be told to change.

Or perhaps it's way more complicated and it's somewhere in the middle. I don't know. I honestly don't know. But my gut feeling is it's a huge organization and it's probably a lot of it is cultural like of having and changing cultures is hard as somebody who had to change a mag, a print magazine culture and try to drag them into the web. You know, even when you get everybody to agree, everybody agrees. And then I go back to their desk and then, and proceed to do what they always did without changing anything. That just, that is human nature. So I think, and that was just a small magazine staff.

Like this is an enormous software effort. It's a huge deal. And so that's my gut feeling about this is that they're trying to change the culture. They're trying to find ways to do things differently so that they can alter how they put their software together in order to reduce some of the problems that everybody who's out here using their software has noticed.

I'd just like to state for the record that I don't think that Craig Federighi should be publicly fired. I'm merely asking the questions today because I see people talk about this a lot right that like because of these bug problems oh sure that tim cook needs to resign or craig federighi needs to leave or uh yeah eddie q needs to be fired like we spoke about this a while ago on connected about like oh should eddie q be fired because of x and the answer that we came to was no that's silly right like it's not how this stuff works exactly right but people you know it's something that happens in the press and with

fans of things it happens in sports too it's the same way happens in lots of other areas i would my advice to anybody out there who reads anybody who says the solution to this is this person that needs to be fired and the person saying it has no you know doesn't actually work at that company and doesn't know anything about them because i wouldn't pay attention to it because like that's that's just somebody reacting emotionally from a position of uh zero knowledge and they're just you know the you always find well i only know the names of four people at apple and this is the name of the person who's attached to software and i have a bug that makes me angry so he should be fired but the reason that i brought up scott forstall in that question is i think that that is what people point to right that they're like well they did it before

you know like i think that is an example that people use and and i i think that's not accurate i think that i i here's the parallel i would make which is i get this sense that forestall had a did not fit what he believed was not a cultural fit for what a bunch of other leaders at apple believed after steve jobs and so and so after steve jobs died so they made a change so what i would say about somebody like craig federighi and this is just completely theoretical, is if Apple decided culturally that Craig Federighi was the impediment to Apple changing its approach with software and making it better in this way, that he believed it was the wrong approach and pushed back on it. And everybody else who had power within Apple believed it was the right approach, then he would leave, right? He would either leave or he would be fired because he would be standing in the way of what they wanted to do. But there's no evidence that that's true, right? Like my guess is that it's more likely that he either is supportive of this or realizes that the way that they thought they

should do software isn't working and they need to make changes, which is what I think any good manager should be doing is always paying attention to what they're doing and finding out how can we do this better. So that's my gut feeling about this is that I think it's rare that you get in a situation where somebody just stands up and says, no, you'll have to fire me. More likely it's, you know, is this person a cultural fit or is this person working against us? Or there's a power struggle of some kind. And I don't get any sense of that now. I get the sense that Apple Software Organization is recognizing, like Steven Sanofsky says, that there are issues and that they have to change huge processes in order to be better.

So Mark Gurman's article is very good. It's almost classic Mark Gurman reporting because there's a lot of really interesting little details, including pretty detailed lists of what's in and what's out for iOS 12 and what might be held off to iOS 13. So I recommend that people go read the article. But there was one part that I wanted to just get your take on, which is that Mark Gurman reports that new iPad features, including multiple instances of applications running side by side,

will be held off now until 2019 to make sure that it's done right. And I wanted to see what your opinion of that was well this is the classic uh thing with stories like this and this is what i've been saying all along about human nature which is we all want apple to slow down and not do as many new features in order to not have bugs and unreliability what new features all the time though, don't we? But we want new features. Absolutely. And I will guarantee you that the same people who write screaming, panicky stories about how Apple software quality is terrible and look at this latest bug and all of that will write stories saying when iOS 12 is announced saying yawn, Apple announces boring operating system update with no good new features. Same people will say the same things.

And those are contrary, right? Those, those you can't, you can't actually do both. I think as a user of Apple's products, it's okay to want both, right? Like i think it's okay to want it but i also think that maybe you just don't get upset if one goes awry for a bit like i think it's fine you know because they've set our expectations at this point right like of new whiz bang things every single year and if that slows down a little bit right like i think that it's okay for people to be like oh man it's not as good as it used to be but to kind of then just try and get used to it is my feeling on this yeah i mean it people look people want all sorts of things they can't have so this is the this is the truth of it is it's okay to want everything and not pay for anything but in reality you can't so i'm totally fine if there's going to be really great ipad features next year so that means that at that point history will then show every two years you get really good

ipad features the only thing that i want from ios 12 then is something that I didn't feel like we got in iOS 10 was refinement and slight improvements to the stuff introduced in iOS 11. So like, I would like to see that we don't just wait two years for everything iPad, like that they will make some tweaks, maybe in some polish and some refinement to what we got last year, this year, and then big new features the year after that. I think that's actually one of the strongest arguments about Apple slowing down its software process a little bit is if you observe what Apple does, a lot of what it does with software is throw out a big new thing and then walk away for a long time and then make major changes. It seems like in a lot of cases,

Apple's development is, again, I can't say what the inside is actually like, but it sure seems like the incentive is placed on the big splash and not on incremental change. Now that's not universal. Every group is different because clearly the people working on Logic and Final Cut are doing incremental change.

Like they keep releasing new versions with bug fixes and refinements throughout the year. And it's great. But there are other apps that we all know or segments of the system where it ships and then literally nothing changes for two years. And I would much rather, honestly, Apple take a little more time so that they can ship something and then refine it a little bit. And that's less exciting than a brand new feature. But having a feature that worked okay for six months suddenly work great for the next year. That's good. So I would endorse that too. And that's, again, going to be less exciting than a whizzy new feature, but maybe makes you happier about using your apple product so i think that it's going to be telling

uh this year i'm interested to see how the next couple of years go i mean what i would honestly like to see is a kind of flip-flop between iphone and ipad and that's kind of a way that you do your two-year right like iphone ipad iphone ipad year over that's what of a way that you do your two-year, right? Like iPhone, iPad, iPhone, iPad, year over year. That's what I would love to see as an iPad user, but I'm keen to see how this goes. Like there will always be new features, and I guess it's just about how they get implemented and refined over time, and that's how we'll see if there is any truth to this, I guess, or if we'll see how it actually performs. Because there is always the risk that the exact same thing that happens now

will happen then, but it's on a two-year cycle instead of a one-year cycle, right? Like, it's still a cycle, and do you end up in time with the exact same problems, and it's only a short-term fix? We'll wait and see.

Yeah, and we may never know. I mean, that's the truth of it, is we may never... If Apple suddenly's the truth of it is we may never if apple suddenly has fewer bugs did this solve it or did they get lucky and they were just unlucky before like if if the our favorite feature isn't included would it have been or would it not have been we won't know other than maybe secret mark german sources telling us things and so and it will take time. So it's frustrating for people who want immediate answers about, well, did it happen?

Did they win? Did we lose? What happened? We may not know. But yeah, go read Gomer's report. There's some really interesting little tidbits in there. We're going to move into hashtag AskUpgrade now, but I want to thank our final

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And make sure that you tell them that you heard about the pdf pen from upgrade when you check out thank you so much to pdf pen from smile for their support of this show all right mr jason snell it's time for hashtag ask upgrade so first question is from andrew andrew wants to know how do you avoid talking over each other on Skype when recording a podcast? So I've got a little secret for you, Andrew. It's a good question, Andrew. We do it constantly. You just did it to me then.

See, this is what the show would sound like if I didn't edit it. We edit those out. So when me and Jason talk over each other, we edit it out. Me and Jason are particularly bad at this for two reasons. particularly bad at this for two reasons uh one reason is there is a bigger delay in skype between me and jason because of how far we are we are away from each other so there's more of a delay uh jason is consistently talking over me now just to give you that full experience um the other thing is me and jason both suffer from the editor's dilemma in that we are both editors of the shows that we produce. So if we are speaking and the other person starts speaking, what will typically happen is we both complete our entire sentences knowing that the editor will fix it.

Is that fair to say? I know I do this and I feel like you probably do the same, right? We just finish the points. I think that happens. A lot of times what happens is that I've got one more point to make and because there's a little bit of a lag and you are, you know,

it's your job on this podcast to sort of move us on to the next topic. I think the most common one is that you start doing a transition to the next topic and I have one last thing to say. And by the time I get that out, you've already started talking

and then you have to stop. And that happens a lot. And that has to do with the delay and also just the way it's structured. You can't see me raising my hand or something like that. And that all just gets taken out. But yes, it does happen too that I was listening to a director talking about

the difference between directing and editing and what they said was that there's none and that the idea is that when you're shooting you are thinking about how you what you shoot gets edited and um that is true right and so when we do podcasts i think there's to a certain degree there's that too because we know how it will come out in the end. And so you just roll with it. And I find that actually when we're recording podcasts a lot with other people where they stop and then apologize and then say, well, what I was going to say is, and then they continue. And I can tell when it's somebody who is a lot of experience and probably editing podcasts as well because they know not to do that because it'll just get edited out it's fine just you know keep going and our next question comes from robin

with siri's apparent ai shortcomings surfacing again for how long do you think Apple will keep adding small improvements to Siri before going for a major overhaul from the ground up? Is that even a realistic scenario to be hoping for at this point? So do you think that Siri is going to, they're going to keep adding incremental improvements to Siri kind of year on year? Or do you think at some point they're just going to rebuild it? i hate to give this answer but i don't know enough about how siri is built to answer it i think i think apple does improve siri incrementally but unless i knew how it was made i can't say whether it whether the best thing for them is going to be to do a a te tear down and an overhaul or whether that is unrealistic and

that the way they are going to do all Siri improvements is by swapping in and out little blocks. The beauty of Siri as a service is it's in the cloud. They can just change it all the time and it should be able to get better all the time. What Amazon does is have you sign up for a newsletter and every week they tell you what they've added to Alexa. And Apple doesn't do that with Siri. So they don't communicate what's going on with Siri as much. But I hope they just keep iterating. I hope they just keep on cranking out new versions with new improvements all the time. That's what I want to see. And then just have Siri get better. So next question from Kyle, how do you decide between taking notes on your iPad with your Apple pencil and using a real pen and notebook? I like the idea of nice pen and paper, but also

the idea of having everything saved and synced digitally. So I'm just going to take this one, Jason. Yeah, that's what you. Yep. So my feeling is just about, honestly, like, do I need this in other places? So if I'm, for example, taking a call where I feel like I'm going to need some notes that I might want to easily get to later, I will use my Apple Pencil because then I use an app called Notability for this mostly. And then it will be on my iPhone. It will be on my other iPads. It's easy to get to.

If I'm just kind of on a call, which is not that important, or I'm just kind of taking some quick notes for something, or scribbling something, or just trying to get some thoughts kind of crystallized, then I'll mostly use pen and paper for that, because it's not that important for me to get to that data later on. So it's purely a case of, do I think I'm going to need this again? And if the answer is yes, then I will use my Apple Pencil for that. Okay, Dave asks, do you think sound engineers will craft specific mixes for the HomePod to maximize the impact of its spatial processing? My gut answer is, I sure hope not. Why is that? why is that why is that oh i don't know i mean it's it's well first off the home pod is um you know doing all that processing so i guess what you're really saying

is do you keep like playing your music on the home pod until it sounds really good and then you release it for that but it's a it's mono and does. Bottom line is if the HomePod is a wildly successful product and it is the biggest way that everybody listens to music in their homes, then maybe, but I don't think that's going to happen. It would need to be successful enough for people to start auditioning their music on a HomePod to make sure it also sounds good on HomePod, but I don't think that's going to happen. And the problem is it's software. So Apple can change how the HomePod processes audio whenever it wants with software updates. So I don't think it would be wise either.

But I don't think it will happen. And Matthew asked, why do you think that HomePod can't make FaceTime audio calls? Well, it kind of can, right? Like you just have to start them on your phone first. Am I right in that? Yeah, you can't initiate calls of any kind from the HomePod, which I don't understand why that's true. If you can have it do messages, but you can't initiate calls. I could do that on my iPad.

have it do messages but you can't initiate calls i could do that on my ipad like i can make facetime calls or phone calls i should say from my ipad because it just uses the phone my mac yeah i can do that from my mac too so why not from the home pod and i guess maybe just not ready um or maybe they are holding that because they want to have that when the home pod is more capable of understanding different people with different identities if they're working on something for that with different Apple IDs. But it's frustrating the fact that you've got some data that's coming from the phone and requires you to have your phone present. But then something like this, it's what we said last week, which is I kind of want the HomePod to act like my phone does in my car. And it doesn't. There are a lot of these things that it just won't do, like kicking off a call hands-free. And lastly today, Kapila wants to

know, what are your favorite things to eat that have ginger in them? I like this question. It's so specific. I enjoyed it. So Jason, what do you like to eat that has ginger in? I enjoyed it. So, Jason, what do you like to eat that has ginger in it? Well, I like everything with ginger in it. So I find it very hard to choose. The things I like most with ginger in them are ginger. So candied ginger, pickled ginger. Okay.

I like both of those. Those are amazing. I like ginger beer and ginger ale. I like ginger cookies. I like ginger. I don't even know. I like ginger beer and ginger ale. I like ginger cookies. I like ginger. I don't even know. Like I like it in everything. I basically like it in everything.

So I don't know if I could even pick a thing. I like it. There's a marinade that we make that has ginger, ground ginger in it. At Christmas, I make ginger cookies and ginger bread and ginger cake and things like that. It's just, it's the best. I love it. I picked two very specific things that are my favorite things to eat that have ginger in them. I love ginger like you do.

I don't know if it's as much, but like everything that you listed, I love all of those things. But my two favorite things with ginger in are the ginger molasses cookie that you can get from Blue Bottle. Right, which i make every every uh holiday because i have that recipe it's great they are wonderful i there is nothing in this world so simple that i love more than getting a new orleans coffee from blue bottle whenever i'm in new york or san francisco and i believe they are opening one in san jose i hope that it's open before wwc it made me very happy even though social policy was great. I do love these things. So it's a New Orleans

coffee, which is their iced coffee, with the ginger molasses cookie from Blue Bottle. They're fantastic. My other thing is chicken teriyaki. I make a very good chicken teriyaki, and ginger is one of the key components for the teriyaki sauce. So there you go. If I had to pick, it would be, and again, this

is not something with ginger in them. It would be candied ginger and pickled ginger. I just would eat those and do eat those just straight up. Good stuff. So that's it. If you want to send in questions for us at the end of the show, you can always use the hashtag askupgrade for that. With the exception of Kapila's question,

as you can tell, askupgrade questions tend to be more technical, but every now and then I like to end on a food question. Typically because we record this show at my dinner time, so I get really hungry, and I figure that, you know, I like to end on some food questions to go set me up to make myself something to eat, so that's that.

If you want to find our show notes for this week, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 181. Thanks again to PDFPen, Squarespace, and Linode for their support of this show. You can find Jason's work at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com for his pop culture podcasts. And Jason hosts many shows about tech and creativity and working and space at Rel.fm. You can go to relay.fm slash shows where you can find a list of all of the great products that we have available to you, including my new show, Playing for Fun,

which I would really love if you could check out. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.