Upgrade - 182: March of Minor Products

Episode Date: February 26, 2018

This week we discuss rumors about new AirPods and this fall’s iPhones, speculate about what makes a good Apple TV app, revisit the idea of ARM Macs in the context of Windows 10's ARM limitations, and save a moment to praise Alto’s Odyssey.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 182 today's show is brought to you by anchor fresh books and mac weldon my name is mike hurley and i'm joined as always by the wonderful mr jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley how? I'm very well. Jason, we have a Snell Talk question for you this week that comes in from another Michael. Great name. Great name. Michael wants to know, Jason, when you're working at home, as you do most days. Yes. Is there a time of day where you switch to using your devices for purely personal use,

or does everything blur together? Everything blurs together i would say i don't have any artificial sort of barriers where i have things that i don't check or do check um for me and i think i've talked about this a lot on the free agents podcast that i do with david sparks where we talk about being independent workers uh but what for what, what has happened is that my device usage has a lot to do and my physical location has a lot to do with, with my work. So, um, uh, my anecdote is that Sunday I had, uh, to do a little bit of, of work because I got a message from Mike Hurley saying that, uh, you wanted me to look into the planning

document for upgrade. that you wanted me to look into the planning document for upgrade. And I had not set the timer on my heater in the office to be on. And we've had a cold spell here. So it was cold out here and I didn't want to do that. So I actually got my iPad keyboard and sat on the bed on Sunday morning trying to do my work that I usually do in front of my computer at my desk. It was just a very different thing. And I realized I have really compartmentalized my workspace to the point where I'm sitting there trying to work on the upgrade notes and

Lauren is talking to me. She ends up getting, because it's just like we, that's our hangout space. And we're talking and reading and stuff like that. And then she went and got like cereal and is sitting there going crunch, crunch, crunch on her cereal. And I'm trying to type like show notes and things. I'm like, I can't do this. I have, I've become unable to do this. I have, I've been, I ended up like going into the living room instead. But the point is, that's how I compartmentalize.

like going into the living room instead. But the point is, that's how I compartmentalize, is a lot of the kind of work I do, I don't do if I'm not sitting at my desk. And that is a thing that has happened over the course of the last few years, that there are certain things that I just consider office things. And I think that's actually one of the great advantages of not having my primary device in the house be a Mac. Because it's an iPad, it's more complicated to do some of the things that I do, less complicated to do others. But what it has led to is this kind of division of labor where there's kind of the max stuff I do at my desk. And then when I'm in the house, I'm not doing most of that stuff. So I'm still online. I'm still connected, which is I think what Michael's maybe initial idea here is, do you check your

email? Do you look at Slack? Things like that. The answer is yes to all of that. But there are certain kinds of tasks that I don't do out in the other room. Or if I do, it's like with my iPad. If I'm writing on my iPad in there, it's like with that little setup where I have the little stand and the keyboard attached and all of that. And I'm writing. And that's usually when there's nobody around.

So yeah, it does all blur together in one way. And it turns out that it's like the location and the hardware that are how I differentiate, which surprised me actually when it happened. Yeah, it's very normal to just allow everything to blur together. But the environments can change things for sure, like depending on where you're sitting. And this can be, as you say, like just as simple as it's just quieter here so I can get my work done in this room rather than the other. Now that you have your office, right, I would imagine that a lot of the work that you do now,

you sort of, that's work I do in the office. That's not work I do. I mean, I suppose you could do it anyway. You could be like, oh, I just do all the same stuff, whether I'm on the couch or in the office. But at least for me, it very rapidly became the stuff that I do in the office and then other stuff that I do elsewhere.

Right now, I only spend time in my office when i'm doing audio production um and everything else is done throughout the house but that is because um i have um i've realized over the last few days that i need to reorganize my office and change some of the furniture because now i've been in it for over a year i'm yeah recognizing what i'm actually doing in this room there's a whole episode of free agents about this because this happened to me when i bought my well we talked about it briefly when i bought my calax uh shelves from ikea right that was informed by after you know you set up the office not knowing what you're doing and then you

do it for a little while and you're like oh this is not how i want it set up so you've had that too yeah and so i'm at that point now and i think it happens after about a year right like you're kind of yeah i let it go longer than that but i and was just generally frustrated but i'm also about 18 months but like you know it's it's that it's that kind of idea right you get to a point and you're like you you have a vision in your mind for what your working environment will be like but then that's not changes with actual usage um so like one of mine is removing all of my video games consoles from my office because i don't play games in here i play them in the living room with the switches and that's where the better tv is so that means removing that also then removing the couch that i have and could put another desk in so like you know i'm i'm kind of working it

out right now in my mind. Great. That's great. It's nice. All right. So thank you to Michael for that question. You can send in a question of any kind to start our show. Just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and we'll pick them up and hopefully

use it in a future episode. So moving to follow up, the YouTube Apple TV app has gotten some updates. This has been, we spoke about it, I think, last week. I think I'm the only person in the world that was happy with the redesign. Everybody else hates the redesign because it doesn't make the bloopy bloop sounds. But I prefer the functionality of the new YouTube app. However, YouTube have made some changes. They've modified the layout for viewing subscriptions.

So the channels that you subscribe to, it was a bit of a mess to try and view those. They've changed that. But even better, they've changed some of the video scrubbing tools. So now when you pause a video, you can use the touchpad to smoothly scroll through the video. And it shows you a little preview on like a kind of a rolling carousel. And you can also use the left and right clicky buttons on the touchpad to jump forward and back 10 seconds nice and smoothly so honestly for me they have fixed the only problem i had with the app so i think it's great right yeah i mean

this is my experience with apple tv apps we were talking about there's a whole conversation that kind of came back up that i remember complaining about on upgrade a while ago, a couple years ago, about, about, like, you know, how Google's apps, I was complaining, like, they don't use, they didn't at the time use, like, the iOS share icon, they use the the Android share icon, which is the Google material design share icon. But it's one of those things that if you're just an iOS user, you look at it, and you're like, what is that and they've actually changed over time i i spent some time talking to a google designer at xoxo the last xoxo and um and he was kind of irate but at the same time they were actually already kind of on it and um as yasmin our friend who works at google now pointed out that that is you know they do have some very specific sort of design guidelines

about honoring uh platforms in certain ways. This is the challenge, right, is you want to reflect your overall product line, but you also want to respect the user of a particular platform and the fact that they chose that platform. Like iOS, my argument was always iOS users chose iOS, not Android. There's got to be a reason for that. And so if you're Google and you say, you know what, you really should have chosen Android and we're just going to show you Android stuff, that's bad. And likewise, if Apple does that with an app, I don't know what that would be, Apple Music, I guess is all, on Android, the same rules apply. Honor the platform choice of the person who's using your app.

And the same for Apple, you know, iTunes on Windows and things like that, which I've heard is really bad. So for me, though, on Apple TV, I really don't care about app UI. I mean, there are certain conventions of like, do I have to swipe up to see the menu? Do I have to press the menu button? What does that do?

Where it gets frustrating. I feel like they should be consistent across apps in terms of sort of moving down and back up in like a hierarchy. But the one that really gets me is video control. Cause like the Apple TV as a video playback device, like every app that does video on the Apple TV should do video playback more or less like what Apple's apps do. Like just honor the system convention for that. That's the thing that frustrates me the most. And I've, I've beaten up on them before, but I'm going to do it

again. Cause the Olympics just ended and all the video was on the NBC Sports app on the Apple TV for the Olympics. And the NBC Sports app is a disaster when it comes to video scrubbing. It doesn't follow any of the conventions of the platform. So every time I forget, it's like you have to click to pause it and then you can scrub, but the scrub doesn't remember where you were. It's just, it's a disaster. And so that's the thing, like seeing that YouTube has the tweaks for video scrubbing. Like if you behave more or less, it doesn't have to be exact, but like if the movements my thumb makes on the Apple TV remote to navigate through video are more or less the same on

every app, I'll be happy. That's the thing. It turns out, for me anyway, that is the killer UI issue with the Apple TV is just make it that if I want to go forward or back or pause the video or scrub through to find the thing I want, make that consistent with the platform because I don't want to play a fun game

where I can't figure out how to go 20 seconds forward in video like that is awful and the nbc app anyway that's exactly what it does and it is the worst so yeah so i feel like google they or youtube have implemented their own ui and kind of the way that it works for this but it's the base functionality is the same right it's in in the spirit of the way you move through video on apple tv which is that's that's all i'm asking i tend to hold the relatively unpopular opinion of like sympathizing with some companies over this sort of stuff like i think that this is a fine because youtube have the the way that their comp their platform works which is suggesting more videos to you like that's how their business operates and that's what

they're playing commands do because when you pause and stuff like that it shows you other videos and i understand that some people don't like that but i i also don't believe that youtube should not follow their own business just because apple thinks they know better um that that's my general feeling on this stuff uh we can get into this at another point again but people tend to disagree with me vehemently so i don't like to talk about it very much i think well i mean i think there's a balance there right like i don't i think they've achieved the balance on this one that's yeah i don't think and i i know people do disagree with you on the on this one but i don't think every apple tv app needs to look the same

i i just i don't the whole point of it as an app platform is that they don't think every Apple TV app needs to look the same. I just, I don't, the whole point of it as an app platform is that they don't need to do that. And that's why I keep getting back to maybe what I really want is just a certain set of behaviors, mostly involving the remote control. Cause that's the UI on the Apple TV. Like there is no track pad. I mean, well, there is a track pad, but there's no like keyboard and trackpad. There's no touchscreen. It is that little remote with the buttons and the trackpad. That's what I want to be consistent. So if I press, because this happens now when Apple TV apps, I press the menu button and like something weird happens. Like a lot of times it'll go back to the previous screen, but sometimes it'll just exit the app. Sometimes I'll swipe up and I'll

get a menu. Other times, if I press the menu button, I get a menu. Those are the things, along with the video scrubbing, that I would like the app developers to look at what the standard platform apps are at Apple TV and say, let's do it that way. Because that's how people like basic remote control interaction. And then within that, what it looks like, what happens when you swipe around, all that stuff, that's all to play for. But like there's a base level where if every Apple TV app

is different in how it implements the remote so that like pressing any button at any time becomes a real question about what's going to happen. That is bad for everybody. So that's where I draw the line. I get that other people don't, but for me, it turns out after using this Apple TV for a couple of years, that's my complaint. It's like, don't surprise me when I press a button or swipe the trackpad on the remote. That's where I don't want to be surprised. Because imagine if you had a regular

TV remote and on certain channels, when you press a a seven it doesn't go to number seven it does something completely different you'd be like why does that happen it's terrible uh so don't mess with my my controls i guess is is what i'm saying but otherwise i think i think we're pretty much in agreement i i think i think so i think so otherwise i'm happy to let youtube be um feel like youtube yeah let them be what they are. Okay, so AirPlay 2 has been removed from the most recent iOS 11.3 beta. Who knows what this means? Maybe they wanted to take it out because they had to do extra work on it.

Maybe it means it's delayed. Maybe it's being pulled out with 11.3. We don't know, but it was in all of the 11.3 betas. But the most recent one that came out just about a week ago, it was removed again. So who knows what's going on with AirPlay 2. I really hope that they're able to ship this soon because the HomePod, that's what it's supposed to do. Jason, I have a question for you. Okay.

When is WWDC going to happen and when is Apple going to tell us about it? When do you think all this stuff's going to happen and when are they when's apple going to tell us about it when do you think all this stuff's going to happen i'm not a developer mike i don't know it it sounds like people are are thinking it's the week of the first full week of june june 4th i'm hoping that given last year's precedent um which i i think we all laid kind of at the feet of uh a phil schiller and said phil uh phil had one of his little bits of uh reconfiguration of how developers and apple interface is that he's giving developers more time to plan their travel that's nice um that we'll hopefully find out soon well i forget when wwdc was announced last year but let's just guess it'll be similar and then um

like i said i have no knowledge of it june third june 4th that week seems like uh what everybody we know is making hotel reservations for um yeah it's a packed summer i took a guess and i've booked a hotel for the first week of july the the following week the following week is my kids last week of school which is traditionally right when Apple does WWDC because that's when all of the special events are for my kids school and I'm at WWDC the whole time so if that follows then it would be the week of the 11th but let's hope it's the week of the 4th but the um the Memorial Day weekend is the previous weekend so um so the fourth would be just just great if that's what they do yeah i i just think that just seems like it makes the most

sense to me what's not happened yet which is what happened last year it was announced in february um february 16th was when oh yeah so we're a little bit behind now. And I'm starting to think that that was an anomaly. Was that a San Jose, like because they changed the event, they didn't want people going to the wrong city, so they announced it early? That's what I think. I don't know. I think there's nothing stopping them from doing it early. Honestly, I think in March. I think we'll find out in March.

Okay. But that's just what I'm, I don't know why I think this. This is just what I think. Unless it's today or the next couple of days, it will be March. Okay. But that's just what I'm, I don't know why I think this, this is just what I think. Unless it's today or the next couple of days, it will be March or later. But March seems fine. Because I would like

to book my plane ticket. So that would be really nice if I could do that. Yeah. But yeah, it's rumored by looking at dates

of conference centers, which is how these things are always put together. First week of June, June 4 to 8. That's on MacRumors a couple of weeks ago. I am so happy that there is somebody who really likes delving into conference venue event calendars to make their big conspiracy theory map about what is happening um i i will point out that it doesn't have to be this way last so macworld expo back dearly departed macworld expo when you left the building the big banner on the inside of the expo center said see you next year and had the dates of the next year's event we'll

be back yeah right so so that's what we need from apple is apple needs to have like on the friday on the friday evening of wwc you should get a push notification saying you should check your wwc your WWDC app. And when you do, it says WWDC will return on these dates. And then you press OK and it deletes itself and that's the end. Something like that. Get on it, Apple. Oh, I would love that. That would be so good.

Alright, next week on the show we're going to do Mike at the Movies. We're going to be talking about aliens. So if you want to play along that will be our final segment of next week on the show we're going to do Mike at the Movies. We're going to be talking about Aliens. If you want to play along that will be our final segment of next week's episode. Alright, let's take a break and thank our first sponsor today and that is Mack Weldon. They make the most comfortable underwear, socks, shirts, undershirts, hoodies

and sweatpants that you're ever going to put on your body. Frankly, Mack Weldon is better than whatever you're wearing right now and there's a couple of reasons for this. Mack Weldon make all of their stuff with premium fabrics. They pair this with meticulous attention to detail and they couple it all together with a simple shopping experience.

Mack Wilden deliver a new level of daily comfort straight to your door. It is so easy to buy stuff with them. And then once you get it, you're going to be happy. They make undershirts that stay tucked, socks that stay up and waistbands that don't roll. Everything is made with premium cotton blended with natural fibers.

And Mack Wilder are so confident that you're going to be comfortable in whatever you buy from them. They offer a no questions asked return policy on your first pair. If you don't like what you buy, just keep it and they'll refund you. No questions asked. I think they also just don't want to deal with the returns of underwear. Yeah, yeah probably so you know that's just how that is just keep it

give it to a friend yeah put it on a scarecrow whatever and this actually happened to me first time i bought from mac weldon i ordered the wrong size and i returned to them and it was so easy they were like yeah cool no problem they just took it back and and did it it's like this wasn't like i had a problem i just ordered the wrong size stuff and they were like yeah no don't worry about it and then we just did the refund and i bought the right stuff and then i was super happy uh mac walden is my predominant like underwear and and loungewear now um i actually need to buy more of my sweatpants because i started using they used to just be my flying pants right the sweatpants but now i started wearing them to the gym too, because I love the comfort.

So I'm wearing them out. I'm wearing them now. There you go. So yeah. So good. I need to buy some. I need to buy some. Next time I'm in the US, I'm going to get it.

That's what I do, because they ship to the US. So when I'm somewhere like a hotel, I just buy a bunch of stuff, get it sent to me. Mack Walden have a bunch of fantastic stuff, including silver underwear and shirts that are naturally antimicrobial. And not only do Mack Walden's underwear, socks and shirts look good, they will perform well for you. They're good for working out, going to work, traveling or for everyday life. Listeners of this show can get a wonderful 20% off at MackWeldon.com with the code upgrade.

That is M-A-C-K-W-E-L-D-O-N.com, code upgrade for 20% off. Our thanks to Mack Walden for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. So there was a report at Bloomberg from Mark Gurman a couple of days ago that Apple is going to be revising the AirPods. This makes perfect sense, considering there was supposed to be a new case with wireless charging. Right. If they're going to go through that hassle, maybe upgrade the AirPods as well. So they have like a version two.

Apparently, you'll still be able to buy the case if you want to. Right. So you can use your current ones. I think that's what they said when they announced the AirPower mat, which BTW, where is that? Right. Where is it? There's 10 more months in 2018 so or did they say early or or i think they just said sometime next year so their actual press like plenty of time at the time but the website i checked it it just says coming in 2018 yeah see

so we got we got lots of time for the air power there are some rumors that that march your your favorite month that there are some rumors that uh march might be when the air power thing uh finally ships my my kind of feeling on that is that that will drop there was some rumors about um a revision to the ipad the 9.7 inch ipad uh for march as well um because there was some like european version of scc approvals for some ipads maybe the iphone se will get updated then too it's the march of minor products well i i honestly think that that will happen because this is what they've done in the past right you just throw out a bunch of press releases for some products that people were not like hugely excited about right like you just put

them out there and you have like just here's here's air power and some new ipads and some new airpods i i expect that that's going to happen at some point in march um yeah this is like it there was some in kind of in europe and asia there's some new regulation stuff. And some countries like Belarus and Kazakhstan, it popped up on the kind of FCC-like stuff that these iPads are going through and they look to be the 9.7s, which matches up with some supply chain stuff. So anyway, so the rumor for the AirPods

is that there's going to be an upgraded wireless chip. So the W2, most likely, which will allow you to be able to call uh siri via the trigger word which we will refer to as a high telephone as we always do um and that they will be water resistant not waterproof they will be like they will be at the level that the iphone is so like the watch is like waterproof you can swim with it right the phone is water resistant so you can get water on it you can maybe drop it in water and it'll be okay and that's kind of the route that they're going down with the airpods as well so i guess you can safely have them on in the

rain would be my yeah kind of like what they would show for that um that seems like what they're saying i can't really think of how else you would get them wet specifically right like you couldn't swim with these things in even if they were waterproof right because they would fall out of your ears um so i guess my question really is is does this excite you in any way like is this anything you actually really want from your airpods this this is interesting i mean it's great to hear apple doing what they do which is incrementing products forward and you and i have we had an ask upgrade question a while ago about um what about a next airpods and

the challenge right is i mean i i feel this way i i assume you feel this way too which is they're so good that it actually makes it hard for me to, I mean, maybe not imagine new features, but like, they're so good that I just think they're great. Like take your time, Apple, these are fine. And so, you know, you end up with wireless charger. Sure. That sounds great. Water resistance. Sure. I mean, push that forward. People who are getting, you know, getting out in the rain and all of that, like, or, or just getting sweat on them to make them more resilient for that stuff. Great. The, the rumor that they're going to listen, which is funny because when the idea of listening for the Ahoy earbuds, uh, is I thought,

wow, that's a lot of intelligence to put in them. And then I realized it's not really like all they really have to do is have enough power and processing ability for the microphones to be listening just for the trigger. At which point they do the equivalent of pushing the button and the device that it's paired with handles the request. And so it's not like, it's not quite like adding it to the Apple watch. It's, it's a little bit lighter but these are all nice it's just i have one of those things where i i have a hard time it's the irony of not getting super excited about the prospect of airpods updates because i think the

airpods are so good already can you think of anything that you would want from the airpods uh i have a couple of things personally i i mean i think i think ultimately they do need more battery life yep i would expect that by the way right so like this new version with the w2 i would if if they don't say that like oh it's increased performance which gets you better battery life i would be very very surprised about that like that feels like something that at this age of a product's life cycle it should be getting better battery like how the apple watch did like not that the battery life honestly is ever really a problem for the airpods like i i never have a problem with them which is funny because it's an intermittent charging device right you only charge it every now and then but i never have them die on me uh but i would it would just be nice to hear them say like the the air pods themselves not just the

case like the air pods last longer so you can wear them for longer because you know sometimes if i'm on a transatlantic flight they will die on me before i arrive yeah i have it every every so often i will be i'll go for a walk and i'll come back and i'm still listening to a podcast and i'll be wandering around the house and at some point i get that little you know that little beep that's the one that the first time it happens you're like what the heck is that right because you've never heard it before and i didn't ever expect it your airpods are talking to you right and i get that and i think oh right yeah the airpods battery life isn't spectacular and yeah they charge up pretty fast and you can put them back in. But I think in general, that should be a goal of these things. I think consumer acceptance of them, despite the fact that they've got the long kind of stems off of the end, the

long beams, I still feel like in the end, one of their goals is probably going to be to make those shorter. But I also understand that that's where all the electronics are and there are probably feel like in the end uh one of their goals is probably going to be to make those shorter but i also understand that that's where all the electronics are and there are probably other things to prioritize because i'm sure they would love it if it could just be a thing that just pops right in your ear um with almost nothing visible like on the outside but i think it's going to be a long time and then the other thing that i can think of is also going to be something that is a long time in coming which which is at some point they should just be like

there should be like a whole Apple Watch in there, but it's so miniaturized that I think it's going to be a long time and I think Apple figures you've got other devices for connectivity stuff, so they don't need to rush on that. And that's why I come back to like colors, Mike. Colors. I want colors. Yeah, I want colors

and I think they should make colors. It's kind of wild to to like colors, Mike. Colors. I want colors. Yeah, I want colors. And I think they should make colors. It's kind of wild to me that they don't. And I would still like some other less aggressive way of controlling them than the taps. I don't know what that is. Or maybe like making the sensors for the tapping more smart, you know, a little bit more sensitive like i don't know what the answer to that is but the that is the one thing i don't like about the airpods is the thunking on the side of my head i'm not a fan of that and i would like to see something yeah something more something better happen there one of the nice things that happens with with having

ahoy earbuds is you don't have to tap at all anymore for hands-free i know i don't want to i don't want to talk either i don't want to do it yeah well i can see i can see how having a different kind of gesture might be useful right like touch a touch gesture or something where you don't have to actually do the uh the big bump but you can just touch is what i want i want it to be sensitive to touch not sensitive to accelerometer movement that that's the big difference we should mention the other rumor that's out there which is that apple actually is going to do its own question mark um headphones in the style of airpods what do you think about this i honestly the honestly, the world of over-ear headphones

is just a mystery to me because I don't like them. I don't use them. I've never used them. I hate them. So I'm going to leave it to you. I think it's fascinating that there might be a place between Beats and AirPods that's an Apple-branded one. And that's, like, I assume that, you know,

that Apple would just ride the Beats brand, but I's a, that's like, I assume that, you know, the Apple would just ride the Beats brand, but I wonder if they figure like they can make like a premium Apple branded thing where people who might not buy a Beats headphone, but they buy an Apple headphone, even if it's very similar to the, the wireless Beats that are out there, maybe it's got a different sound. Like Marco, our friend, Marco Arment was commenting on how he was intrigued by this because he uses over ear headphones and doesn't like the Beats ones, the sound of them. I think it was Marco. But there are definitely people out there who are like, oh no, no, it wasn't Marco, it was Federico. Federico didn't like them and he was intrigued

by this. So maybe there's a case for something that does not have the Beats sound, but is still using Apple's wireless technology. And some people don't know anything about Beats, but they see the Apple logo on it in the Apple store, and they're like, oh, okay, Apple makes these. That's great. So I hope they're not white. But I think it's interesting.

They 100% will be white, Jason. Oh, my God. Can you imagine the smudges on that? Anyway, I um apple's got this tech and it's only in the two products now and they really like it and so why would they not put in other products right of theirs i agree that this almost feels like an inevitability now that i've seen it it's like yeah of course right of course you have this technology that is built specifically for wearables and headphones why would you not

have more like apple have always had like different lines of headphones right you meant like the ones they've always had the ones that go in your ear right like the more expensive ones um but when they just do the white ones like why not just do this they have the uh knowledge of beats to help them put this stuff together um honestly, I think that these will just effectively be Apple-branded Beats headphones with a slightly different profile of audio and the W2 chip.

I think that that's just what these will be. And that will be a great product and would probably be something that a lot of people will buy. I wouldn't. Sure. I don't think I particularly would want these because the only time i use these types of headphones is on a plane and i think i prefer and i prefer having a cable for the plane i would only want these if this is not going to happen if there was a way to connect it with a cable to a like a just a regular headphone jack because i

want to be able to take one set of headphones that I can play with my iPhone with an adapter and plug into my Nintendo Switch and plug into the airplane system and all that kind of stuff. So just a pure wireless over-the-ear headphones wouldn't necessarily fit my use case

for over-the-ear headphones. Yeah, but I think a lot of people would love them. Oh, 100%. It makes sense. Because there are people that will buy these in the same way that they have Apple. People just want these. Why wouldn't they? This is a genius product to make. I think, and I'm trying

not to be cynical when I say this, but I think this is one of the ways that Tim Cook and Tim Cook's Apple behaves, which is, what proprietary technology do we have? What products are we good at making? What product opportunities are there for us to make more money? Let's not leave those sitting out there, right? And this is a case where they can make these products, these, they will be good. They're not going to be bad. They'll be good and they will sell a lot and make a lot of money. And I think Tim Cook, his reign, that is one of the things that I've

noticed about it, right? Is provide products in all the different categories, lots of different price points. If there's something we can make that people will buy, let's make it, right? Especially, I mean, if it's good and I'm sure these will be good, right? I have no doubt because the AirPods are good. And they've got the knowledge from Beats about headphones. So I think these will be good for a certain audience who is not me. So you wanted to talk about Arm Max today. What's going on?

I know. It's like a blast from the past. I thought that it was a very 2017 thing to talk about ARM Macs. Why would we talk about them now? Why would we talk about what if Macs ran ARM processors like the Apple design processors that are in iOS devices? I brought this up. It's Stephen Hackett's fault. Okay.

So I blame Stephen. So last week on Download, a podcast that Stephen and I do with a panel, I was traveling, so Stephen put the show together, and then I just was the talking head who asked the questions, which was kind of interesting. And the documentation for Windows devices running ARM came out. So Microsoft is trying again to do a whole like separate line of Windows that runs on ARM processors. And it's Windows 10, but it's on ARM. And we got the list. There was like a leaked document. And so there was a list of stuff that Windows ARM laptops won't do.

Now, why would you have a Windows ARM laptop? The answer is the same reason you might have a Mac ARM laptop, which is they're going to get way better battery life, like dramatically, shockingly better battery life than an Intel laptop would. That's the reason you would do it. But on Windows anyway, 64-bit apps won't work. Certain classes of apps won't work without being recompiled for ARM, and that will probably not happen. None of the legacy x86 Windows drivers that exist for every other Windows PC, those won't work. There's no Hyper-V, so there's basically no virtualization to speak of, and certainly no easy virtualization to speak of. And, uh, a lot of older games and graphics apps won't necessarily work, uh, because only

certain modern versions of direct X will be supported. So the idea here is that basically the idea that you could buy a PC and it's a PC and depending on the specs, it'll do everything that windows does and compatibility. It has always been like a huge strength of Microsoft. And also their weakness, because they've got this huge install base, and it's hard to make a break. So here's Microsoft trying for the second time to kind of make a break and say, look, there's a lot of benefit to having ARM processors in these things, we're going to make them, our partners are making them. But some of this compatibility that you've come to rely on for old stuff is just not there. And so if you need that,

don't buy one of these. Buy a regular laptop, right? It's not like they're deprecating Intel PCs. That's not happening. But they're creating a class of computer that runs Windows 10 that doesn't do a lot of the stuff, the kind of old legacy stuff that a certain part of the PC market wants, feels they want, requires in some way. They may or may not use it, but they require it. Okay. So all this is interesting from an Apple perspective. It's sort of like, all right, it's it's forget it it's windows town but it got me thinking about this thought this thought process again about apple um which is and so this is a question i would ask you which is what would you give up to get a macbook that has 20 hours of battery life or 15 hours of battery life because that's basically what microsoft is saying here is yeah it runs windows but not all of this stuff and i think that's a really interesting proposition like

how much of what you assume be you know it being a mac is are you willing to forego in exchange for having this kind of incredible battery life and probably it's super small and thin it's like a macbook but like with way better battery life i don't i don't know what what would you give up what would you be willing to give up well before i answer that what this honestly sounds like to me is what somebody goes through when they decide to work on an iPad. It's like you give up all of the old stuff that a computer can do. That's effectively what's happening here. I mean, I know that Windows is still running on it, but what you're getting rid of is a lot of legacy, right?

So when you're talking about certain types of apps needing to be redone, it's because there's no shell extensions anymore right so all of that stuff has to be removed before it can work and so it kind of just feels like to me like yeah this is this is like what happens when somebody decides to switch to ipad they have to they have to shed themselves as their old ways of thinking about computers and then pick up again from what are all the good things about this new thing however if apple made something like this the reason the reason people would want it over an ipad is that it runs mac os and therefore runs at least some mac os apps right i honestly could see

this being a world in which like if apple ever did this, it would just be like App Store only apps is a possibility. But that's maybe a question for another day. Me personally, if I could get all of the apps that I wanted, like this would make sense to me. Like, sure, like I can work with that. Right. That seems like a great thing. Like, we'll just go with it. Like, sure. Fine. I'm happy with it. I can get huge battery life from my laptop, which would be good for me when I'm traveling, and then I can use Logic on a plane or Final Cut on a plane, and it will work absolutely fine. So yeah, I personally would do this, right?

And I would give up whatever I needed to give up because a Mac user like me is still probably going to be able to do everything that they want to do anyway, right? Because I'm not deep inside of AppleScript or whatever, right? But I think that this type of thing, it is that reason. It is the reason of giving up all the old stuff, which makes me think personally that Apple's just never going to do this and what they will do is what we have been talking about and you've been talking about forever creating that middle ground computer the thing in between the ipad and the mac which is more like the mac but runs on an arm processor

rather than taking what they currently have stripping away all of the stuff that's just going to make people mad because they can't do it anymore and saying here is mac os on arm and you can't do any of the stuff that makes a computer a computer to you yeah the argument is that if and apple has followed this so far which is microsoft has been making lots of changes to windows but microsoft only has windows apple has ios and the mac and the argument is the max strength is that it's the mac and it's everything you expect from a mac and why turn if you're going to turn the mac into something it's not then it's not the mac anymore and it's you know among android windows ios Mac OS, it's the least popular of them. It's the second most popular OS run by Apple. So this is the question, is does Apple want to invest any time or effort into creating a

half Mac thing that would be actually great for certain people. I get the feeling that maybe the MacBook was at one point going to be this, and they already made this decision, which was, let's not do that. What if we had the Mac running on ARM in a little thing like the MacBook? So they may have already just made this decision. We've seen it, and that's the end of it. But I think it's this interesting question of, if you're apple do you do that do you say well we're gonna make we're gonna make a mac that's not quite a mac or do you say look the mac should always be the mac it should be what it's going to be we're going to keep it around but we're not going to invest in a in a you know a fraction of the mac market which is already pretty small, that runs this totally different processor architecture. Even if what that would get you is like a laptop that runs iWork and

maybe Microsoft Office and some other stuff, but doesn't do a lot of things that you're used to doing. And the argument could be that at that point, yeah, you could also just do that on iOS, which is, I just think it's fascinating. Like what fascinates me about it is people are going to start comparing these arm laptops that run windows to Mac laptops, right? That's going to happen. And Apple's going to look bad, right? I mean, I think that's going to happen because these things are going to have insane battery life. Now, maybe they'll be slow and maybe the, you know, the Mac, but the MacBook's kind of slow too, right? It's going to be at least a possibility

that Apple's going to look kind of behind the game here. But I'm not sure this is a game Apple wants to play. I don't think, I'm not sure they could. They could do it. Like there's nothing stopping Apple from doing this.

But do they want to play that game or do they want to keep their eyes on, on something else? And that's, I just, I mean, I don't have an answer here because this is, I feel like one of the big questions of our time in terms of what Apple is strategizing is like, how far do you take the Mac? And when do you, uh, when do you step away and say, we're not taking it any further down this road than we've already already brought it the mac is the mac and it's going to remain so but when you see what microsoft is doing microsoft of all companies saying we're breaking a lot of legacy stuff that is like that's their bread and butter is the legacy stuff and they're like nope we're not going to do it i get

why they're doing it i think it's actually kind of smart. We'll see what Carolina Milanesi said on Download last week was, Microsoft talks about making these breaks all the time, but will they live up to it? Will they go back on themselves? There is a thing about, I want to compare between Microsoft and Apple here, right? It's like, so what will happen is Microsoft will start making these PCs or having their OEMs make PCs as well.

And they're going to be like, we're getting 20 to 30 hours of battery life or something insane. I know it's not going to be that much, but let's say 20, 20 hours of battery life, right? But that's all Microsoft do. So like Apple are going to be compared to be like, oh, the MacBooks don't do this and blah, blah, blah. And then that will be that and people will be upset. But I don't think Apple are going to do it because it doesn't necessarily matter to them. This is

Microsoft. This is the product that they make. They make PCs. That's all they got is Windows. They have no tablets that people want and they have no phones that people want. They don't even have a phone division anymore. They have to do this because if they don't do this, they have nothing to sell. Apple don't have to do this.

They're still going to sell the Mac, whether it's got 15 hours of battery life or seven, because they'll also sell their iPads, which get 10 hours of battery life. And you know what? Apple could probably start pushing that. If these PCs start getting 15 to 20 hours hours i wouldn't be surprised to see apple starting to push battery life on the ipads which has clearly not been a priority because the battery life of 10 hours is really all you need but it will give them a number that they can compare it to and they'll be like well this is this does 15 hours of battery life and is the future of computing anyway right that's kind of

right probably what they'll talk about but they don't need to compete with microsoft on the battery life of their laptops because the mac is not as important to apple financially as the pc is to microsoft right yeah no it's it's it's very much a if microsoft jumped off a bridge would you jump off a bridge kind of thing and apple doesn't need to do that apple apple doesn't have to do that if apple wanted to make a great battery life touchscreen uh super thin and light laptop today they could absolutely do it and it would be an ios laptop it would be that ibook that that i've written about a few times um i'm not saying they're gonna do that either right but i do here's the thing though i look at these products and i think apple's got to do something is the macbook their entire answer

here is the macbook running intel processors can they have can they update that and say this is our answer to these laptops these windows laptops this is and again apple doesn't have to do windows uh device for device so many mac users are mac users they choose that they're not like i'll use any operating system as long as uh as long as there's a piece of hardware that i want to buy there aren't a lot of users who feel that way but still i think there's some pride there like if if we have these laptops and apple's going to compete with them, what is that product? And is it just a revved MacBook again? Or is it something else?

Because I feel like Apple could compete with these products three different ways. But it's probably not going to choose all three ways. It's going to choose one or maybe two. So I don't know. Again, no answers here. Because sometimes the analysis is fun because it's like, here's what I think Apple can do.

In this case, it's like, Apple can do any of these things. What does Apple want to do? And that we don't know. I think that we're more likely to see Apple make your iOS laptop before a macOS ARM laptop uh yeah i mean unless they really just change uh change directions and uh but i i've seen uh nothing by the way a news alert just came in

from the chat room microsoft has apparently started selling lumia phones again nobody understands why it was i'm looking at this now and there's a report on gizmodo it just they just appeared it looks like they said like the gizmodo reports is what i would expect it looks like they just found a palette of these somewhere that's right it's like the flying dutchman this phone like appears and disappears every so often and this is like oh look this is not a revival of microsoft smartphone plan. They just have some stock they need to dump. Nokia is going to sell that phone from the Matrix. The banana phone? Yeah.

Yeah. Nokia is doing some stuff. They're, you know, more power to them. They're like trying. They're trying to get back in the game. And I think that's pretty cool because they're doing what they do. They're making cheap phones

and they're making some of those Android One phones, right? Like the super cheap Android phones, the sound developer markets. Somebody has to make those phones. It should be a company that knows what they're doing. And I think it's cool that Nokia are doing it. Okay, so let's take a break to thank our second sponsor this week, and that is Anker.

Anker is absolutely the fastest and easiest way for anyone to make a podcast. If you have a thing that you want to say or a moment you want to share, you can. You don't have to have a mobile recording rig. You don't have to have a podcast rig of any kind. You can just download the app from the App Store and record into it like you're talking on the phone. Then Anchor will take care of the rest. Anchor have just, like as of last week, made a huge update to their system. It is now even easier than ever to start a podcast, not just with Anchor,

but with anyone. They have their web system now, so you can upload files directly to them that you've produced on a full system if you want to do that. Anchor now have analytics and will help you distribute your show to a variety of platforms, and they do podcast hosting absolutely for free. As well as allowing you to create a quick podcast of your own, Anchor is also a cool social network. You can follow people, call into their stations, leave questions, you can have voice chats. It's really sweet. So if you want to find out more about Anchor, there's a great way to do it. Go to anchor.com slash RelayFM. This is where you will find our brand new show called Subnet. It is a tech news flash briefing show, which is hosted by Stephen Hackett. And subnet will give you the

latest headlines to help keep you informed about the top stories and technology we have worked with anchor on this we're using anchor for hosting because they have helped us get this show onto amazon echo and google home so you can have it as a flash briefing if you go to anchor.fm slash relay fm you can check out what anchor has to offer and you can check out subnet uh but you can also set up subnet on your google home and amazon echo today and start listening and that is in part because of anchor's amazing platform so if you want to start a podcast go check it out right now and our thanks to anchor for their support of this show breaking news mike breaking news from from mark german at bloomberg as we uh worked on the

show uh listener video in the chat room uh pasted this link in uh i wouldn't say that this is a new rumor so much because i feel like the supply chain and kgi already had this rumor but groomberg yeah sure german at bloomberg is reporting this story that we talked about a while ago which is that apple is intending on releasing one an iphone 10 plus essentially a larger oled screen in the style of the iphone 10 which i think is fair to call, at least for now, an iPhone X Plus this fall. And a replacement for the iPhone 8 product line, which, according to Gurman's report, the feeling is it looks too much like, you know, because it's the iPhone 6 design, it doesn't look new. And so what they're, what, according to Gurman, they're planning on doing is creating something that looks very much like the iPhone 10 but has an LCD screen and has you know aluminum bezel and is not made of like the

premium materials and stuff that are in the iPhone 10 that allows them to sell it at a lower price but has more of an iPhone 10 look about it and I assume that would be like the iPhone 9 so yeah this is a confirmation of Ming-Chi Ko's report that we were talking about a few weeks ago exactly so it's not not quite new and it's mark german and debbie wu on the byline there but it was just as we uh as we started this morning this this came out so it's yes it's a very it's a very similar kind of story um than what we've heard which is uh it's interesting like i mean and he frames it as iphone 10 sales haven't been as strong as apple um as apple had hoped i'm not entirely 100 sure i buy that part of the narrative here but certainly when we all discussed where apple could go next um a plus version is something

that you and i both talked about and then i think it's intriguing this idea that um you know people buy phones because they look new not just because they are new. And the problem with the iPhone 8 is that it looks just like the iPhone 7 and 6S and 6. And so do you want to do a next generation or a next version of the iPhone for 2018 that is literally just the 6, 6S, 7, and 8 again? And the answer here would seem to be no. Instead, we're going to make it look more like our super hot high-end 10, except it'll be made of cheaper materials because it won't have the OLED screen and it won't have the stainless steel and who knows what other details are in there.

And I think that's not an unbelievable rumor. That seems reasonable as a product direction for them. Yeah, I'm really struggling to get my head around these two ideas in parallel, right? Like one, that the iPhone X isn't selling as well as they hoped but they sold a lot of iphones which therefore means they must have sold a lot of eight and eight plus but then you're making a phone that looks like the iphone 10 because you want to make sure

that people buy your phones but they were buying the eight and eight plus if they didn't sell a lot of iphone 10s so it all doesn't marry up for me like the logic is is there in each of the individual components right like i understand the logic of all of them independently but when you piece them all together it doesn't they they don't marry up anymore this this is the um challenge with reading a lot of these reports that have some details and we've talked about it before with with German, but I think he's a very good reporter with good sources. Since he's been at Bloomberg, though, I definitely feel like Bloomberg wants to apply more of a broad narrative

to every one of his stories. Like at nine to five Mac, he could make news by saying, oh, I can confirm that report that they're working on an iPhone 10 plus, right? And he would write that story with a little bit of background. But Bloomberg editors seem to want to put it in the grand story of what's going on with Apple. And that means fitting it into a narrative. And, you know, again, having only read this story

while we were on the air here, it looks to me like the product stuff is probably solid. And then the reasons why are imagined, like based on the existing narrative and existing, like, well, we've already talked about how maybe the iPhone 10 sales are disappointing and this and that. But like, I discount when I read these stories, I largely discount the reasons why and just stick to the reports about the like, there's a new product here because the reasons are trying to build that, build that narrative. And Bloomberg wants to do that.

I get why they want to do that. Their audience is going to be a little less breathless, perhaps, about the specs of an iPhone 10 plus than the nine to five Mac audience is. But it does lead to some head scratching moments where you're like, yeah, I don't know if that actually makes sense. I'm not clear if it's actually like, I don't generally see in these stories, you know, somebody who's familiar with Apple's strategy says that this is what the strategy is. Instead, those are often sort of like just stated as facts without any sort of like according to the people, which is also weird. So yeah, there's a lot to think about on that one i haven't read the report yet because it's breaking news but that's very it is very interesting and i want it and i want the iphone 10 plus i don't care what it is i want it because that's i'm crazy like that there was a an article by charles arthur who is charles arthur Who is Charles Arthur? He's a tech journalist in your nation, the United Kingdom.

And he wrote a little thing about the... Basically, his MacBook Pro died. And so he's just started using his iPad Pro instead. And it's a good story. We'll put a link in. He has a newsletter, daily newsletter called The Overspill. And it was kind of cool to see somebody who was not like, all right, here I am. I'm going to make the leap.

But more like, oh, I need to continue doing my job and my laptop broke. I'm just going to use the iPad Pro pro it's here i can i can do it and then uh he went through the details and he you know he's got word and scrivener working on his book um he's you know got google docs and skype and you know all of that stuff works he has some workflow stuff that he built and even some python ista scripts that he built so it's a little shades of federico but yeah it's like he went through the process that everybody goes through but it's not a process you go through until you go through it like yeah he went through the process of somebody moving to the ipad but he did it under duress instead of like interest, but he still took the same path that you took and I took and Federico took

right. Like of, Oh, okay. So I'm going to use this thing for whatever reason. And what if I need to do this? Oh, what do I need to do that?

And what if I need to, Oh, this works. Oh, and this works and this works and this works. And I might need this work around, but I can still make it happen. And here are the five or six things that don't work very well and he nails those two that's the thing that i really was delighted by this is somebody with somewhat fresh eyes looking on

this subject and like he mentioned lappability which i think is actually a huge problem in all the tablets that try to also be laptops is uh sitting in a lap like a laptop is they're not good at it like the microsoft surface has a kickstand. The smart keyboard has its kind of like folding thing. They're not super stable in your lap. They're kind of made for being on a table. I actually tweeted at him and I said, I ended up getting the bridge keyboard because I really wanted to have that laptop context. And that was the only way I could do it because it's definitely a failing of all these products. And he talked about like selecting text is painful. Websites that are even on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, they are convinced that you need the mobile version of their site, which is so

frustrating. Like, you know, I'm not using a phone here. I'm using a 13 inch computer. Just give me the regular version of your site. Um, and some other stuff that, that he found it's really good. Um, it was, it was a really good story and it brought back the sort of like thoughts I just was traveling for a week and I didn't bring my laptop and I didn't even think about it. I just traveled with my iPad and, and it was fine. I recorded a couple of podcasts. I used my little Wi-Fi box thing that does the transfers really fast from the memory card in my recorder over to my iPad so I can add it on the iPad. Because Apple doesn't let you actually copy audio files off of an SD card with their own adapter. So I have to use a workaround, but it works. I brought my external keyboard.

Although it turns out I only use that a couple of times because I was trying to actually be on vacation and not work. And it just struck me that I went through this where Charles Arthur is. I don't do all of my work on the iPad because I do use my Mac, but if my Mac died,

I would find a way to do my job with my iPad just fine. I wanted to use this, though, as a way to check in with you and see where are you on iPad stuff right now. No change. I'm using the iPad as much as I ever have. Again, like as a reiteration for anybody tuning in, right? Like I use the iPad, I use iOS for all of my work that is non-production. So if I am not recording or editing a podcast, I am on my iPad. This includes entertainment, games and videos, as well as all of my email, all of my show preparation, all of my social media, all of my business running happens on my iPad. And iOS 11 has been a huge step for me productivity-wise. I have

settled with iOS 11 very nicely. The multitasking for me is so much better. The flexibility of being able to move the apps around, switch them around, have a third slide out, that has really, really significantly improved my workflows. The Files app has extended the system so much more it's made everything way more flexible uh and this is also kind of coupled with just some animation tweaks you know like applications they just open now they don't like flip around on some kind of carousel right every time you open it you know it's like little things like that have made me feel much more productive uh on ios 11 uh my current hardware i'm still perfectly fine with i have no burning need for new uh ipad hardware um i use the 12.9 inch at home it's like my desktop it's my home computer and then my 10.5 is for travel you know

it's like whenever i'm out of the house it's like the equivalent of a laptop and both of those are working incredibly well i have no problems with them speed wise screens are incredible like i don't feel the need you know like i have been in that situation right so when we're like 18 months into the first 12.9 inch ipad which it went for before it was updated at all maybe even a little bit longer than that like i felt the need for it but you know these things are six months seven eight months old and i could go another year on them i think before getting any hardware updates and i'll be perfectly fine with that i'm still using my original first generation 12.9 inch ipad pro i

didn't know that yeah it's just fine yeah of course it's always always a good machine right but like there were things that i wanted you know i wanted true tone uh stuff like that right like which because i had the the 9.7 it had it and i was missing it on the on the bigger one and the faster touch id and stuff like that but none of those things were necessary. It was just stuff that I wanted. I still use the Ample Smart Keyboard for both. This is purely on

the sense of versatility, its size and weight, and the fact that it uses the smart connector. Those are the three things for me which make the smart keyboard keep winning. I think about the bridge. I think about playing those are the three things for me which make the smart keyboard keep winning you're like i think about the bridge i think about taking playing bridge keyboard roulette to see if i get a working unit but i don't want a bluetooth keyboard and i don't want something that's going to make everything

so much heavier and stuff so like i go backwards and forwards on it and honestly for me the smart keyboard works and i know the positions that i have to sit in to make it work on my lap so much so that i don't even think about it anymore it's really good i don't love using it on the lap it's usable but it's not great um but yeah it's it's a good keyboard i greatly prefer the one the 10.5 than the 12.9 because it's just so bulky on the 12.9 for obvious reasons but yeah it's it's covering so much more more ground there but yeah it's a good keyboard just just as the way a keyboard feels it is my favorite keyboard like it feels great to the great disappointment of uh of the

ipad pro smart connector is that there are no really great alternatives to the smart keyboard but it does help that the smart keyboard is really good like that that that eases the pain of that a little bit and i still use the apple pencil uh for note taking and occasional ui navigation like during intensive tasks like if i'm putting a bunch of stuff into a spreadsheet i'll grab the apple pencil and tap tap tap around like i am as happy as i have ever been with my ipad usage i know there are people that go backwards and forwards but i couldn't be happier i could not be happier with it right now and uh i'm good i'm good i'm good for another year i think with everything you know i just want want some refinements to iOS 11 just to make sure that they can work out some of the kinks and some of the bugs,

especially those in Files app. And I'm good on hardware. I could go another year with exactly what I've got, and I think I'll be fine. Alright. Good. Good check-in. Do you want to just talk about Altos Odyssey real quick? Yeah, we should do it. It's such a good game. It is great

um so i there is a uh we did a review of the game on remaster um it was a video game podcast that i do on relay fm if you're interested um but i know that you were a big fan of altos adventure um yes so i wanted to see what your feelings are about Alto's Odyssey. Did it fulfill what you were looking for out of the application? Did it surprise you in any ways? Is it something that you're sucked into in the same way that you were the first time around? Yes. Basically, yes. What I love about Alto's odyssey is that first off alto's adventure one

of the greatest games for the for ios i played on the ipad but one of the great games for ios i i was playing i started playing alto's odyssey and i realized this is what a triple a ios game looks like like this is the real stuff this is the real stuff it is a great follow-up in that i can use my skills gleaned in playing lots of altas adventure and yet it is so that that's where i start from and then it adds other dimensions so because this one is set in a desert landscape instead of in a snow landscape it's got different graphics they are the the sound is beautiful the graphics are beautiful the the terrain is far more varied than it was in alto's adventure there are gameplay modifications there are improvements to existing gameplay where they took things that weren't great like the feather and replace them with new functionality that's different but better and

there are also lots of extra uh quirks to gameplay involving things like the there are the balloons there are different types of uh like the vine runs that you can go on that are that behave differently um there are uh the uh what else the wall riding is a completely different mechanic. Water and how the water affects your combos and stuff like that. So there's a lot in here. So it rewards the existing

Alto's Adventure user. It doesn't feel it feels familiar but doesn't feel like a retread which is a tough line to walk because if you with any sequel to anything if you make it too much like the original like the hunger games sequel not to pick on that but that's a good example of like a lot of a lot of books are like this which is like oh people like that book i'm gonna write that book again and they'll buy it again and like the second book

in the hunger game sequence sequence was like that where it's like how do we get them to play the hunger games again let's do that and you see that a lot right and a truly effective sequel the most effective sequel is one where it's familiar and it's you love it for the reasons you love the original but then it transcends it it goes further and that is something that alto's odyssey really does do well which um i was very impressed by because i was worried it was going to be Alto's Adventure with a couple minor tweaks and some new graphics and it is those things and more it took everything that was good about the last game and then made it better

right which is like everything everything is better in this game after about 10 minutes a phrase popped into my head which I completely stand by that Alto's Odyssey is the gold standard of iOS games like I think it may be the best iOS game ever made.

It is perfect in every way an iOS game can be. I don't think it works very well in other places. I don't think I would enjoy this on the Switch, for example, because it's not what it's about. The direct contact with the screen is what makes this game perfect it was designed for that the tactics on the iphone

are incredible but it's great to play on all devices like it's easy i find to play on the ipad yeah pick a screen you can kind of observe the environment more the music you hear this like one track i don't know how long it is but you hear it over and over again doesn't get old right because it's a beautiful piece of music the the graphics are incredible that they've done so much more with light in this game which i really like i love the lighting effects um it is improved in every single way but without being a retread as you say like i said there's a remaster i say here too like a good comparison for me is monument valley monument valley 2 i kind of got bored of halfway through and like and i loved monument valley but the second one for whatever reason it didn't it just didn't really feel like it was adapting in

the same way it felt like it was just making like a bigger more difficult version of the first game yeah it was that's how i would say it's like more levels of monument valley is what it is whereas alto's adventure is not quite more levels of alto's odyssey it's got because there's enough other stuff going on in there it is alto's adventure plus this sort of new thing that changes the game yeah just yeah no it's it's very good i i highly recommend it it is i mean you said it's the gold standard i said this is this is what a triple a game for ios looks like where it's like this is the stuff this is showing off the platform this is the this is the the best stuff it's great yeah it's it is it is as good as a game on ios can get like that's what they've gone and done which is i think

so you know that's because this is a studio that understands ios like it's where they it's where they came from it's where it's where their bread and butter is right like that's that's it for them like they understand it this is their thing and i'm excited to see some of the other games that are coming out of the studio so you know you know, it's built by Snowman. It's got a bunch of games on the way, including like a skateboarding game. I think it's called Skate City that I'm really excited about. Yeah, so they definitely want to keep an eye on.

Really, really cool stuff. Okay, so should we move into Ask Upgrade? Let's do it. Today's episode and today's Ask Upgrade segment is brought to you by our friends over at FreshBooks. Hey, freelancers, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. FreshBooks is one of the smartest decisions that you can make.

They simplify tasks like invoicing, expense tracking, and getting paid online. Because of this, they have drastically reduced the time it takes for their over 10 million customers to deal with their paperwork. I they have drastically reduced the time it takes for their over 10 million customers to deal with their paperwork. I use FreshBooks all the time. We're approaching the end of the month, end of the month in two days time. So I'm going to be sitting down, sending out a bunch of invoices. FreshBooks does not make this feel like a chore because it doesn't take me as long as you think that it would take me. I still have 50 invoices to send.

I'm done in like half an hour because it's so simple. The more you use it, the better it gets because it learns all your other clients. You can save items. So it's very easy to just pre-fill invoices. It's super simple. And then I'm not spending tons of time in FreshBooks chasing stuff either because I can see when somebody's received the invoice. I can set up late payment reminders so I don't have to go in and check it all for me.

And one of my favorite things is I can see from their system. It learns about the clients that you're billing. So you can see what their usual payment time is, right? So you may say, pay me in 30 days. But it may take this company 45 days to pay you. And FreshBooks will unearth that information for you. So you know that you don't have to worry about that invoice yet because it takes them a little bit longer, right? Like, it is such a fantastic system. It is built for people that, like me, they send invoices to

freelancers, they run small businesses. It's wonderful. If you're listening to this and you're not yet using FreshBooks, but you need to get paid, now is the time to try it. They're offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial to listeners of this show. There's no credit card required. You just go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade to try it out. They'll say, how did you hear about us? You tell them from the Upgrade podcast.

Our thanks to FreshBooks for their support of this show. It's freshbooks.com slash upgrade. So our first question this week in hashtag Ask Upgrade comes from Rajiv. Rajiv wants to know, Jason, do you use any of the colorblind settings in accessibility in iOS? I don't. That's the short version of that. Have you tried them?

I tried them. It makes everything look really weird. I don't have a problem differentiating stuff enough for that to be something that i need to turn on so i turned it on i was like whoa this is really strange and makes everything look strange and maybe that's uh you know i don't i don't know maybe maybe it gave you the colors right but it's like you can't maybe it gave me the colors i don't want to live in your your crazy color world it's no it's it's uh yeah no it wasn't necessary for me it's most of the stuff that i i notice is um sometimes there are games that have, actually during the Olympics, they had the finger skating. They had these little dots that would be like yellow under review, green means that they completed whatever properly and red was that they failed at it. And a little tiny dot that you need to know whether it's red or green. Yeah, I can't do that. That one's hard.

But it rarely happens on iOS. Usually there are games, but a lot of those games have a colorblind mode where they change the colors or they do something else to vary it or they put symbols in them. Change shapes and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And there's usually something like that. Whereas the colorblindness accessibility settings seem to actually like alter the color palette that's shown on the screen and it just seems strange to me and it's not for me it's not necessary i'm not quite sure um who it's for but i turned it off after trying that briefly yeah

like especially video games i see a lot of video games really trying hard to cater to color blindness which i think is really cool yeah you can't i't. I mean, that's the bottom line. It's like if you've got... What was the game? I think it was Trism for an early iOS game where you have to match items by color. And they had a couple of colors that

were very close for me that I had a very hard time differentiating. And it made that game impossible to play because I'd be like, aha, I'll go here. Oh, no, those aren't the same. Right. And I think they added a colorblind mode later on. But it's just one of those things that if you if you don't have a colorblind person, you don't think about it. And so, you know, it's good that I think most games have learned you don't want to differentiate by color like that. Or if you do do you want to offer

like an alternate view where the colors are different so that they spread out or that there's a shape or something jay wants to know are there any ios apps that can turn an old ios device into a home kit camera now the only option that i have for you here there's an app that federico has used called many thing which can turn an ios device into a camera but it doesn't have home kit support but like it does some of what you want but not the whole thing so if you have an odd ios device that you want to turn into a camera many thing can do it but you have to use the many thing app to set up like notifications and that's how you'd go into view it but it's not humkit interesting um i don't have uh anything to add other than steve trottin smith um hacker extraordinaire in terms of like digging through the internals of

ios especially um he went down a path i i looked it up when I saw this question and decided that the cheapest way to do a HomeKit camera is to buy a $45 Raspberry Pi Zero W with camera module running HomeBridge. And at that point, it's a HomeKit camera. And at that point, it's a HomeKit camera. And so if you are feeling like you want to build something yourself a little bit, that for $45 all in, Steve Trout and Smith says, you can get a HomeKit camera. So yeah, that's another thing to look for if you're really into finding a way to do relatively cheap home kit cameras jonah has asked how do you deal with text selection on the ipad when writing do you

frequently use copy and paste or do you drag things around uh what do you do i do both but it's way more copy and paste because a lot of the time with the the drag and drop it's like i like drag and drop a lot but i've already selected the text so i may as well just copy it and this is because a lot of times when i'm copy and pasting sometimes i'm copying into two different locations so drag and drop doesn't help because I have to do it all over again multiple times and the other like sometimes I just I just need to just just copy it like it's I don't need drag and drop just for like one sentence or like a word I use way more copy and paste and drag and drop for text I use drag and drop a lot for other things like for moving files around and stuff like that and using moving images but for text I'm way more copy and paste and drag and drop for text i use drag and drop a lot for other things like for moving files around and stuff like that and using moving images but for text i'm way more

uh in the the getting the grabbies and moving them around and just hitting the copy command i will just say like as an addendum to this like if you use ios a lot you have to get used to reaching out with your hands if you're going to be using a lot of copy and paste like this is just the way that it is because keyboard selection isn't amazing or sometimes just straight up doesn't work very well uh and this is where the desire for like people like me and you uh for a mouse would come in is because we'd like to be able to to have more refined uh text selection but yeah mostly i'm copy and paste a cursor's already there. Just do that. But anyway, so similar to you, I use both. It depends on the context. One of the things that I do when I'm doing like this show, I post a link to this

show on Six Colors. And what I will do is I actually put the Six Colors CMS in split screen with the upgrade show page. And I actually use drag and drop for that. I grab the title bar and drag it into the URL field. I grab the description of the show and I drag it into the description on the other webpage. I grab the title and I drag it. That's all drag and drop. So that's an example of it. If I'm using the keyboard, I am more inclined to copy and paste. But I do use both. And I haven't really thought about what all the different contexts are. A lot of my copy and paste is sort of, you know, if you can select something and then

drag it and you've got to go through like scrolling and moving and stuff like that, it's easier to just cut it and then paste it. But if you've got something where it's fairly straightforward to just move in that in the case of uh this show on six colors i have to copy like four or five different blocks of content and so drag and drop is actually way better because i don't want to go back and forth back and forth and back and forth and and it's my and if i was doing i i tend not to do huge amounts of text like it is a number so like let's talk about invoicing one of the big things for me is send an invoice and then drop it into two spreadsheets that we have was a system and a spreadsheet drag and drop is no good for me there it's a five digit number right right like

i'll just copy the number and then paste and then paste like drag and drag and drop would be too much work in that but urls are great because urls are actually hard to select in safari on ios especially they are almost impossible to select so frustrating um but you can just drag right out of the bar and drop it somewhere and the url comes with and it's great so i use that all the time because it's actually way easier to drag and drop than select and and your example is the exact opposite where it's way easier to just select that thing and copy it yeah exactly so it differs right like but i just for the majority of text stuff that i'm doing drag and drop is a little bit too aggressive like it's it's more than i need for some yeah and and since

jonah was asking about writing i mostly do text selection in a text editor with arrow keys and the shift key and i can't do a lot of that too yeah and i do that i i do that because i don't want to take my hands off the keyboard and so i just do all of it and if i can if i can do my text selection and copy and paste and maybe i reach up and scroll down to another area and then tap and then i paste it in but you know i most of my writing behavior i just want to keep my hands on the keyboard and not break stride in that way and so i'll just use i'll select and copy or cut and paste all right lucas asked uh do you think that the next version of the regular 9.7-inch iPad, so the cheap one, the kind of $329 iPad,

will get a HDR display? I don't, by the way. I'm going to throw that out there. Yeah, I would say no, too, just because... They're going to keep this iPad as cheap as they can for a long time. Yep, and keep the high-end features on the ipad pro so because that is a real selling price for the 10.5 right like this beautiful screen don't take away a selling point for the ipad pro like yep even if you could do it i mean if it was

up to me even if i could do it i probably wouldn't do it because you've got to have a differentiation in the line like you've got to have that right so that would make sense to me and then as a uh secondary question which i like to put these two together carl wants to know can you tell me what hdr is like i've heard people say this is a big feature in tvs but i can't really i'm not really hearing anybody talk about why and i don't know anything about it so jason what is hdr uh so dynamic range is the concept of like how uh how in this case how bright and how dark can a display um go and so like hdr allows more definition between darkness and brightness and as a result if you think about it like imagine your regular tv and then imagine your

tv being able to go have the blacks be blacker and the whites be whiter and everything can go from bright to dark and that has to do with like backlighting on uh on lcd tvs uh having different backlighting zones but it's more information. HDR means there's more information about, um, about brightness, uh, luminance. I think that, I think there's a whole bunch of stuff that's wrapped in there. And the result is you end up with a picture that is not just more pixels, but like what you're seeing, um, is over a wider range. Um, it's hard to describe, but if you've seen an HDR picture, especially if you've seen it on something like an OLED, which has kind of amazing black range,

but you're going to see that it's more dynamic. There's more, I mean, I hate to say it, there's more dynamic range. It starts, the palette is greater at that point. And it's, my words fail me i mean it really is one of those things where um it's a way to improve picture quality that is not based on adding more pixels but just having the display be more capable of uh a wider range of image that's a great way i'm trying to simplify it and i'm sure somebody will write in and say, well, technically you should have used this word. And that's probably true,

but that's the idea is that it's not, we've been talking about picture quality and it's been all about like going from SD to HD from 720 to 1080 to 4k. And HDR is this other piece of it where you can have a 4k, you can have a non 4k HDR and you can have a 4k you can have a non-4k hdr and you can have a 4k non-hdr um but you put them together and that that's an even better combination because you've got lots of pixels and you've got a display that is capable of showing because that's the key is it's not just decoding the hdr data it's having display that's capable of um of displaying a wide dynamic range from darkness to brightness the easiest way that i think i could describe it would just be like more colors that look better like i don't that's that's as much as i can do like your

description is way better but Well, it looks nicer. It looks nicer, and darkness and lightness is, like, a big part of it, where it's just, like, you have the ability to display a lot of TVs that are not HDR. You'll see that, like, if something's really bright, they ramp up all the backlighting. And if something's really dark, they try to crank down the backlighting. But, like, if you've got an image that is that is like super dark here and then super bright here a lot of those displays are like well i can't do that like the dark's only going to be kind of dark and the light's only going to be kind of light because i have to choose and with hdr they don't have to choose they can make the darks dark

and the brights bright and the display is capable of showing all that information um it's it's uh yeah that's that's what it is and i'll say uh i just want to give a shout out to a friend of mine is a fantastic youtube creator called austin evans his name's austin evans um and every now and then he does a hdr video on his youtube channel and they look incredible so he he just did a video, he got hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy S9, and he did a HDR video. It looks awesome. If you watch it on iPads, it's probably the best place to see it,

because the HDR... I don't know if the YouTube app does HDR on the Apple TV. I can't remember. Obviously, I know it doesn't do 4K, but I don't know about the HDR support. But yeah, it looks really good on the iPad. It looks really, really good. So you can go check it out there. So yeah, it looks really nice. I like the HDR look. If you want to see an example of something that is free, right, that is not a movie,

and you want to see what it looks like, well, that's the place that you can go and do that. All right. If you want to catch our show notes like, well, that's the place that you can go and do that. All right. If you want to catch our show notes for this week, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 182. I want to take a moment to thank our sponsors again, Anchor, FreshBooks, and Mack Walden. And mentioning Anchor, don't forget to check out Subnet. It's really cool.

Stephen Hackett is hosting it. It's just like I like listening to it when I'm making my coffee in the morning. I just get to hear Stephen tell me a couple of headlines, and I'm prepared for the day. It's really cool. So you can go check that out at relay.fm. Or you can just ask your smart speaker and get it set up with your smart speaker.

It's kind of cool that we've got that going now. If you want to find Jason's work online, you can go to sixthcolors.com. You can go to theincomparable.com, or you can head on over to relay.fm slash shows, where you'll find a bunch of shows that Jason does and a bunch of shows that I do as well. Jason is at jsnell on Twitter. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E.

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