Upgrade - 183: It’s Dumb Until We Do It

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

Would Apple really update the MacBook Air at this late date? We break down the possibilities, plus Jason finally finishes his HomePod review, Netflix and Apple keep investing in original video content, and then we take off and nuke the site from orbit as Myke at the Movies revisits 1986's “Aliens.”

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 183 today's show is brought to you by linode squarespace away and clean my mac 3 from macpaw my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hello mr mike hurley I thought I'd do that like you that time. I like it. I like it. That was your true introduction voice. Jason, our hashtag Snell Talk question this week comes from Tim. And Tim asks, do Jason's kids appreciate

his internet fame? So, I'm always reminded of Andy Anotko quoting from a Mel Brooks movie. There's a scene where a man and a woman are waiting on a train platform and a train pulls in and a guy steps off and he's mobbed by a crowd. Across the way, one of the people who's looking at this says, who is he? And the other one says, oh, he's world famous in Poland. Which I like because, as Andy puts it, that's many of us, which is well known in a very small group of people. Famous to a small amount of people.

And world famous for one week in a Californian city. Yeah, that's right oh yeah yeah walking walking around the street in wwdc time uh any of us could get spotted and be like hey it's it's mike hurley get him or whatever um they get their pitchforks and chase me down the street could be i'm just saying uh uh so recommit yourself to the macintosh yeah well i was thinking it's like does does uh does marco get more positive about apple in the weeks preceding uh wwdc so that he's not harangued when he is walking around the streets of san jose uh i don't know um so the i have a funny story here, which is Jamie has a friend. It's actually her best friend's boyfriend.

And he apparently, in their Spanish class, you had to do a report in Spanish about a famous person. And Jamie's friend, Bastianion did a report about me yeah he did i said i said jamie that is so embarrassing and she's like oh i wasn't in that class thank god i was not in that class and didn't have to hear that but uh i thought that was really uh i thought that was really hilarious that he uh and i and i think a few of her other classmates but definitely uh bastion uh uh knew who i was from podcast things i guess which i just find hilarious does bastion listen to this show do you think i don't i don't know we'll find out yeah or maybe we won't because he's because he's never spoken to me in

fact we were at a we were at a college counseling conference thing and we were waiting to go in bastion his parents were across the room and and uh he didn't say hi and i don't think i've ever been introduced to him by jamie so she's falling down the job there hello bastion hello listen to the show that is wonderful though that is just wonderful isn't that hilarious so anyway do my kids appreciate my internet fame? I think they are vaguely aware of the fact that people know who I am in this certain sphere. And they don't. I think the point is appreciate.

Are they aware? Yes. They probably just find it embarrassing. I don't think. Well, anything a parent does is going to be embarrassing, right? So appreciate is not the word I would use, but are they aware? Sure, they definitely are. But I think that's as far as it goes.

They're impressed every now and then when I drop some sort of knowledge or reference to something because of my tech industry. Things where I'm like, oh, did you know that I met that person? And they're like, what, you met that person? Like, yeah, I did. But that's about it. That's as far as it goes. If you would like to send in a question like Tim did to open the show, just tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk

and we may pick it out for a future episode. Thank you, Tim, for your great question. Jason, you have finally, I will use the word finally here, posted your HomePod review over at Six Colors. And obviously people should go and read it and enjoy it because it is there for people's enjoyment. But I just wondered if you had anything that you wanted to share after having completed the review.

After having written 2,600 words about the HomePod several weeks after it came out. Yes, I am really happy. Sometimes this is just how it shakes out right like there isn't a thing to say until you've had multiple weeks of time with it you know more than what anybody else has said this is actually it's a little bit like uh gruber reviewing the iphone 10 and it's happened to me before too which is if you're not in that first vanguard of reviews, there's often no real benefit. There's no real benefit in rushing through a quick turnaround first impressions review of a product that a dozen people have already written, I spent a week with it, reviews of.

Because what's the point and sometimes the timing works pretty well where like with the iphone 10 i wrote a review and it came out the day the iphone 10 came out and i only had like an overnight to write it but i i felt like i was able to kind of like hit it uh enough to write it for there's like first impressions reviews honestly you really only need it for like 24 to 48 hours to get most of what can be gotten out of a short period of time what's the point i so i got the home pod the day that everybody else got the home pod in fact if you're in australia you know you got it a day before me essentially um. Other than that I've used a lot of Apple products and that I'm somebody who gets paid to write things, beyond that, my experiences with the HomePod are essentially

no different from the experiences of everybody else who got a HomePod. So on one level, it's sort of like, I've got these people who spent a week with it and wrote these articles in detail about it. And then what can I add to that? And wrote the, who spent a week with it and wrote these articles in detail about it. And then what can I add to that? And the answer is probably not a lot until I spend that amount of time with it. At which point it's not new anymore. People aren't just trying to glean like a quick first impression of this brand new product. It's been out there a while.

So you end up in this weird space in between where I just decided, okay, I will review it, but I'm just not going to review it yet. I'm going to just let it live in my house and I'm going to listen to it in my, in my office. And I'm going to listen to it in my living room. And I'm going to have that experience. And I'm going to think about like how I'm experiencing the HomePod and what I like about it and what I don't and how I feel about this market. And then I will eventually write something about it. And then there was a week in there where I was trying to write a HomePod review and nothing was happening, which was super frustrating. And then in terms of my workflow, I tried to write it at my desk and I couldn't. I

tried to write it at the bar countertop in my kitchen and I couldn't. I ended up taking my iPad to Starbucks and putting in headphones and sitting there with a hot chocolate and 2,000 words poured out right then. So the dam finally burst. I finally wrote the story and I was very happy when I came home that day. Were you struggling to try and find your angle?

Yeah, well that's exactly it. And I had some conversations with people that were really helpful about different aspects of this from people who used it and liked it from people who used it and didn't like it um some conversations in slack for relay and for the incomparable where we were having kind of conversations about the home pod and that that helped kind of burst uh the log jam a little bit um because it was useful to start to just think of like who's this product for and i had a moment where I thought, I think I actually woke up in the middle of the night and I thought, oh, you know, one of the angles here is this was a great product two years ago if they had released it then.

But now it's kind of too late. It's not like too late, it can't be successful. But it's more like they have a real window there when Apple Music had come out. And Apple is a brand that is strongly associated with music. And all that was really out there was the Echo, which doesn't sound very good. And Apple had Siri, which was more or less equivalent to Alexa at that point. And they didn't have a product. And now two years later, we got it.

I was hearing you and Dan talk about that on the Six Colors Seeker Subscriber Podcast. And I think that part of what happened is when the Echo came out, everybody just thought it was dumb and ignored it. Yep. And it took a long time before everybody else paid attention, to which point Apple got really behind and like maybe if they

would have been either paying attention beforehand to where some of the market was going or when the echo originally came out maybe they could have got something out quicker i mean i don't know what it was actually like inside when looking at this right product was made but my kind of feeling was everybody rolled their eyes and laughed at the echo. And I think that that didn't help. My theory is that there are people inside Apple who felt like, I felt like Dan Morin felt like a bunch of people felt when they tried the echo and they're like, oh, there's something here.

This is really interesting. And for whatever reason, some people in positions of authority at Apple to make product decisions didn't believe it. That's my best guess. My best guess is not that Apple knew immediately that this was a product category that was interesting to them, but was unable to put a product in the market for two plus years. I don't believe that. I think Apple would have been capable of doing that if they had wanted to. So it feels to me like that's the most likely scenario,

is that there were people inside Apple who also scoffed at this product category and said, no, it's dumb. Who needs that? You've got your phone. I mean, I heard it whenever I wrote about it, whenever Dan wrote about it. We would hear from people who were like, why do you need that? You've got your phone with you. It's got Siri on it.

You don't need a canister in your house. And we would say it's different if it's got siri on it you don't you don't need a canister in your house and we would say it's different if it's available just in the air where you're walking around and you you've got your phone in your pocket and it can't hear you and you can't pull it out because your hands are covered with you know chicken because you're making dinner and you just want to put on a timer and what do you do right like there are so many scenarios like that or your kids are are sitting at the dinner table and they can shout out the name of a song and it starts to play like there's so many of these use cases and everybody seems to have come around again it's not for everybody but the world seems

to have finally kind of understood there's something here and it's uh i'm disappointed if it is true that this is the scenario i'm disappointed in apple's's failure to recognize that this was a good product category. And if they did recognize it, then I'm disappointed in their failure to execute in a timely fashion in order to get this product in the market when it would have made a much bigger impact. Because they had all the pieces. They had the assistant. They had the music expertise. They had the music service. They had the assistant, they had the music expertise, they had the music service, they had it all. So what happened? And that's the thing, because it's not a bad product, but it's like two years ago, it would

have been a great product. And now it's just one of, I think what I said was it's a face in the crowd. And I could even argue that the only real reason to buy a HomePod now is if you are an Apple Music subscriber who very specifically wants to use your voice to control the music playback. That's it. Because if you're an Apple Music subscriber who's okay using an app, you can just use Sonos. And it costs half the price, more or less. You can buy two of them and it'll be in stereo, which the HomePod still doesn't do, even if you did buy two of them for twice the price. And so, you know, what are you left with? Or you can control with the Sonos One, you can control Spotify and Amazon Music, Prime Music or Music Unlimited or whatever, all the various Amazon services.

So that's it's also hard to write a review that's basically like, well, yeah, because it's not like, yeah, this is good or this is bad it's like it's kind of a missed opportunity except it does exist and it's fine but who's it for is like that's a lot less interesting uh in some ways uh story to write but um i got to you know i got to write a little bit take take a little a few little asides about things like my relationship with music like the idea that you know when i grew up listening to music we listened on an am radio for most of it which is terrible sound quality and i think that says something about the amazon echo is like yeah it doesn't sound good compared to all these other speakers but i'm not sure most people care and so that's a harder harder self convenience trumps quality for a lot of people in a lot of instances and that's fine yeah and out out of context of like a b comparisons the echo sounds

fine and and that and it's super convenient and so unless you're um you know playing another speaker next to it and then you're like oh yeah actually that does sound way better but when you're just using something like an echo it sounds fine and and my proof is that most of the songs that i listened to as a kid uh like i i was exposed to the entire beatles catalog via an am radio on a 50 000 watt station from san francisco 100 miles away like that was not good audio quality and And it was probably a little terrible piece of hardware to little transistor radio speaker or something like that. But I love those songs, right? So it, it, people's ability to listen to bad audio is actually pretty tremendous. So that makes it a harder sell too. So I don't know. It's,

I also came to the realization that I've been using connected music players for well over a decade because the Slim P3 from Slim Devices was the first one I had and that was like 2004 or something like that. So 15 years I've had networked music players in my life. So that part of it's not new. I love network music players. I'm glad Apple has one, but it's fine. It's fine. I feel like it's not a product that most people should buy right now, but that it's got a lot of potential and it's early days. That was my sort of pep talk at the end is it's also early days for this category. And anybody who's telling you that Apple's first swing means that they're out or that

Amazon's lead is insurmountable. None of that is true. It's all to play for. Anybody could win any, you know, you could end up with one or two or three dominant players or no dominant players there. If anybody rests on their laurels right now, they're going to, they're going to feel the pain because it's early days yet. There's so much

none of these ai uh voice assistants is particularly good i would say if you if you don't grade them on a curve there's plenty of work to be done joe still made a really good point in the chat room kind of about apple's attitude like for a long time they were giving quotes like fushida were giving quotes and saying that like, if these things don't have a screen, then they're good. Right. That was their position for a very long time, which is really interesting considering the thing that they released doesn't have a screen in the end. Yeah. And I actually think that was another moment of realization I had in writing the story is that I really don't like the top of the HomePod.

I really don't like the top of the HomePod. One of the things I noticed is that if you put the Echo up on a shelf somewhere, because it's got a ring around it, you can see that it's activated from below. And the HomePod has to be below you or you can't see that it's been activated. I'm never that close to the device, typically, when I'm giving it a command. And I agree, that little thing just shooting up at the ceiling doesn't illuminate brightly enough even for me to see that it's even on in the first place. Yeah. And I don't really particularly like the two kind of silk screened on touch buttons for volume either. I don't like how that's built, but it's true. When we talk about Apple's failure of imagination regarding this product,

that is one of the questions is when Phil Schiller was saying things like that, was he saying that in the typical kind of Steve Jobs maneuver of nobody wants to watch video on an iPod, which he set up to the point where they released a video iPod. So was it one of those like, no, no, no, it's dumb until we do it. Or was that truly their philosophy, which was built around using Siri on a phone. And, you know, my, I've always criticized Siri for that, that so too, way too often Siri, like something gets too complex and it just gives up and says, here, I found this for you. And that, that, you know, if you're using a voice assistant, uh, I get frustrated when it finally says, no, no, you have to look at the screen and tap on it. I can't help you. This is all I can do is bring this back. And it's possible that that was

just their belief is that they either couldn't do anything that didn't punt to the screen, or that it was just better to have that integration like that. I will also say, having used an Amazon Echo Show for the last six months or whatever, that I'm not convinced that the screen is really that much help. I like the Echo Show. It hasn't evolved at all since I bought it. It's got some nice things. It'll show me my timers so I can actually see the timers. It'll show me my to-do list.

I can actually add things to the to-do list and then see what's on the to-do list for my shopping list and stuff like that. It's got some good features. It shows song lyrics as it's playing music. That's nice. But I don't look at that product and think, oh, this changes everything. I just don't think that's accurate. So it's a real mystery about quite what the story is with the HomePod.

And I feel like either it's a failure of imagination or it is a failure somewhere in terms of Apple's product design skills, their product design prowess. But I don't think anybody could legitimately argue that the HomePod is exactly the product Apple wanted it to be at exactly the time they wanted it to exist. And that it's the perfect time for it to be at exactly the time they wanted it to exist. And that it's the perfect time for it to hit the market. Because I think it's not a bad product, but something happened. And it really decreases its impact. Should we take a break? Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at Way. A Way are a team of thinkers, seekers, and designers. And this is why they've made smart premium suitcases for under $300,

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and I used that little travel laundry bag. And it just, it delights me i know i could just throw the stuff in the corner or put it in the suitcase but i i love having that little hidden laundry because i'm never going to remember to pack a laundry bag but it's just it lives right in the suitcase it's great so we spoke uh a little bit uh about the rumor of apple headphones last week right and kind of talked about AirPods and a rumor that had come out that Apple were going to make their own headphones.

Well, there was a Mark Gurman report today which confirmed it from his end, right? From what his people have told him. And Mark also confirmed a few little details that we didn't have from the original report, which I believe came from KGI Securities, if I'm remembering correctly. I think so. Mark Gurman says that they will be noise cancelling over ear headphones.

That was a question that I thought about after we were recorded. Like, will they go for the noise cancelling route? Because my theory on this would be that noise cancelling feels like one of those things where Apple can say, we found this new way to do it, and this is why it's better. Our advanced processor in these headphones can make these noise cancelling headphones amazing in a way that they never could be before. Exactly, right? So there'll be like something that the Apple headphones can do.

They're hoping to launch by the end of the year. And obviously Apple are aiming at the high-end market, you know, like kind of where Bose is and stuff like that. That's kind of what they will be aiming for with their headphones, which makes sense, right? They're not going to make a $150 pair. No, it's that, you know, you're going to be paying for the Apple brand,

for the Apple logo to be on your headphones. That's part of what goes on here. And then having them be a little higher end and selling that as you're paying for quality as well. I think it makes sense. I'm a little baffled. This is two stories in a row where Mark Gurman has reported something for Bloomberg that we had already heard from KGI. And just from a journalistic standpoint, I am very confused at why KGI is never cited in this story. I assume that he's got his own sources who confirmed this, but generally you cite the previous reports of what you're reporting. But that doesn't happen here. It's very weird to me because like we literally saw this story last

week from KGI as reported from like Mac rumors or something like that but KGI was the source of it and I'm a little baffled why if you read this story on Bloomberg you would think that this was broken entirely by them and nobody knew about it before but that's not true so I don't understand that but the story makes sense like we said last week when we talked about it when it came from its first report um it i can see why apple would do this it makes perfect sense right like but once you hear it but yeah i do agree with you like i've seen this a few times i don't know if this is like a like a bloomberg thing or or whatever but my thinking would be that if Mark worked it out or got the information

himself, that he would just publish it without acknowledging it. But I agree, I don't think that's right. If something is widely publicized, you've at least got to make reference to it, otherwise it looks like you're trying to omit it, which is weird. So yeah, that's something that

I mean, based upon this, this obviously isn't something that you want. We've been through that. You don't like over-ear headphones. And I'm keen to see what they do, but I have such limited use cases for these types of headphones that I just, I don't necessarily see them in my future. But it is a logical step for Apple to take with the success that they've seen with the AirPods. It makes so much sense to make more and more expensive headphones than they currently do.

So at the end of this week's show, we're going to be doing a mic at the movies and we're going to be discussing Aliens, which was, was it 1989 or something for Aliens? That's going to be at the very end of this week's show. Yeah, when is that?

It counts as an 80s movie. No, 1986. 1986. Oh, great. Thank you. I don't know where I got 89 from. Who knows? Doesn't matter.

Let's move into Upstream now. I have a few good stories this week, Jason. All right. First off, Netflix plans to spend $8 billion on content in 2018 with a goal of bringing their catalog up to 700 available original shows. So I really struggled to find out how many shows netflix currently has um that i couldn't find a good resource to say just how many is right because i want to know how many are they looking to bring on this year and yeah and what do they call what do they call

originals because they netflix originals are essentially the movies that they, or TV shows or movies that they funded that might be original to them or they might have bought them from a foreign distributor. So it's a little bit of both. That number, the 700 number, or the increase that they wanted to do, doesn't include movies. This is just shows. Just original series, all right. Yeah, but I think that also means documentaries and comedy specials as well um but like to give you a comparison in 2016 netflix added 126 new shows so the thought of like their increase in budget it must be a couple of hundred 250 something like that they're looking to add this year which is

wild and yeah keep in mind they're doing it uh they're doing it worldwide so they have series that they're developing in all sorts of different markets it's not just sort of uh english language even they've got them all over the place yeah and they specifically mentioned that um 18 non-english language original productions uh coming from outside of the u.s they're also looking and that number 80 is interesting because they're also looking to add 80 original movies this year right to their right i mean so keep in mind more than one original film release a week on netflix that's what they're going for here. I will point out Netflix

won an Oscar last night. They won the Best Documentary Feature for Icarus. And that's not their first Oscar, but they won that. Another interesting thing about Netflix is they actually do a bunch of interesting documentary stuff. It's not all

Cloverfield and Will Smith action stuff. It's not all Cloverfield and Will Smith action movies. It's also lots of documentaries. But again, so that is eight times Apple's budget. So we're going to talk about a couple of things that Apple are doing today. I mean, you've been hearing us talk about Apple the past few weeks,

and it seems like they're doing a bunch of really interesting stuff, but they have a significantly smaller budget than Netflix has. And I wonder what that's going to end up resulting in. Like, what does $8 billion do for you in a year? We're going to find out. It's true. It's true, but you've got to start somewhere.

I think Apple's stream budget is... Oh, yeah, it's not a criticism. You've got to build. You can't go from, you know zero to 60 or zero to eight billion over because it doesn't matter that apple has that money to spend it's just a matter of scale right like netflix knows how to do this now but my point was more like not like a haha apple sucks netflix is netflix is the winner but it it's like Apple's making some really interesting moves, but Netflix has so much more budget.

What does that end up shaking out like? And talking about interesting moves, Apple have got another huge name to add to their roster. M. Night Shyamalan is going to be producing a series for Apple. It is a straight to series order for a psychological thriller tv show 10 half hour episodes have been bought by apple for this series so one of the big things that me and you talk about constantly with with apple's efforts is diversifying the genre and this is part of that i think yeah and this is and again shaman is uh producing and directing the pilot which is

not the same as it being like because that's a distinction that's important to make is that a lot of these people who are sort of like producers who've got their whole production company they're bringing jj abrams is a good example of this they're bringing other people's shows and making deals for other people's shows and they may not be involved beyond the basics. They may agree in some cases to direct the pilot. We saw that with the, one of the previous Apple hirings where they, where they got,

they got the director to direct all the episodes of their show after Amazon only got the commitment for the first episode. So here, Shyamalan is going to direct episode one, but the writer is a guy named Tony Baskalup, who people might know. He wrote some episodes of Berlin Station, which is an interesting show, and 24, and Hotel Babylon. He was the creator of Hotel Babylon if people know that show which some people will recognize that so it's an existing known showrunner who

is this is his latest project and Shyamalan is producing and will direct the pilot whenever I see this stuff I'm always kind of reminded of Boardwalk Empire like Boardwalk Empire for me is like one of those shows

that really started this like change in television about like some of the people that you have attached and of course it had steve buscemi in it but martin scorsese was attached right like he directed and produced i think and this and this happens um a lot these days you're right this is this is a trend we've talked about it on on the TV talk machine podcast I do with Tim Goodman from the Hollywood reporter. The idea there is that as a pilot director, you're brought in, not just to be, I mean, you are a hired hand on a certain level, but often those pilot directors also get a producer credit. And what they're doing is they're setting the visual template for the show. So generally what happens in television, since they're not generally all

directed by one person, although that's starting to happen now too, generally what you get is a high powered director will come in to shoot a pilot or maybe the first couple of episodes and they set the look for the show. They talk to the producers and they're like, you know, they work together and they create a look and then they can go away. Martin Scorsese is a good example, can go away and do other projects. But what happens is the next directors they bring in, they basically say, do what they, we did in the pilot, like extend that. That look we want shoot it like that and you know tv directors are frequently um not long-term collaborators they're brought in to direct a couple of episodes a year and along with four or five other people and so it's very helpful how do

you keep that visual consistency this is one of the ways that that shows have decided to like get that visual consistency and keep it and like have a look and a feel is you bring in a really good director uh who's maybe well known so you're getting a pr push from them but it can also be a not well-known director and still like a director you really like and you work with creatively they they work with you to build the look of the show as the producer and then you hand it off to other directors and say, do this. So that will probably happen with this show, right? Shyamalan is going to work. He's producing it. He's working with the showrunner. That pilot episode is going to have a certain look. And

then presumably they're going to say for the other nine half hours, do it like this. And that's kind of a model for TV. And it kind of makes sense because a TV series is a series. Unless it's something like Black Mirror that's an anthology, you kind of want it to be consistent visually. You want it, you don't want to feel like every week is a completely different show. It's the same show. And as a result, you kind of want to have a directorial vision, even if it's one that's kind of originates and then they just kind of point at it and say, do that. That's what our show looks like. Shoot it like that. And then the directors generally will oblige that because in the end,

television is more of a writer's and producer's medium than a director's medium. The director doesn't have final cut on a TV show generally. It's the producers. So anyway, that is a new model and you're quite right to point out the scorsese example that's a really great example steven soderberg has done that is another good name of somebody who who will define a visual look for a show and then he goes away amazon strikes a deal with the ufc to sell pay-per-view events um it doesn't there doesn't really appear to be any benefit to amazon customers for this. You just pay the full ticket price of a pay-per-view event. You don't have to be a Prime subscriber to be able to do this.

And if you are, you don't get any benefit for it. This is just another avenue for UFC to sell their product. So here's my theory about this, which is Amazon has really aggressively tried this, tried bundling. Like inside Amazon's video service, you can buy other video services like CBS All Access. If you want to watch Star Trek, you don't have to use the CBS All Access app. You can actually just sign up inside Prime Video and watch it there. And that's true for a whole bunch of other services that are right inside Prime Video. And I think Amazon likes that. I think Amazon is really positioning itself as a container for other video services so that you're inside the Amazon ecosystem. You're a Prime person. You've already got Prime Video. Come on inside and subscribe to streaming services inside Amazon and use our app.

And it's all in one place, is really interesting right the idea that instead of opening a different app you just have those shows too because now they're inside amazon and i think the pay-per-view thing is just another thing on the pile of every you know amazon trying to put a whole bunch of stuff inside their container yeah i found it really strange that that was all it was but i guess you're right right they just want you to i guess associate anything that you want to watch you just go to amazon and it will be there right like i think that's what they're attempting to do, right? Yeah, exactly. Apple hires Angelica Guerra as the head of Latin American programming. Guerra was hired away from Sony Pictures Television. She was senior vice president and managing director of production for Latin America at Sony.

Guerra is now the sixth person to join apple from sony television so there have been a bunch of hires like across the kind of spectrum of them from there from like sony pictures production team uh guerrera is an addition to that and so now i expect so one other way that we'll start to see i guess within the next few months is some latin american focused programming being signed by apple right i guess that's remember there was that there was that uh british tv exec who got uh signed to do um european and now they've got ahead of latin america and also the the two guys who had this uh apple video initiative were sony execs so it's not surprising that they're hiring uh people who they used to work with and uh it makes up some, but not all of the executives that

they brought on board. But this just is an additional idea of the scope of Apple's ambitions here. Apple is not planning to launch a little video service that's in one or two countries. They have global ambitions for this service. And they're starting small, right? If $1 billion can be counted as small, but they're in this for the long run. People who kind of poo-poo Apple's video ambitions because we haven't seen the details yet, which is very Apple. They're making these deals and people know about the deals, but the product has not been announced. Who knows when that will be? But they're going big.

This is not half measures. They intend this to be a worldwide thing with worldwide content. They are quite clearly building a foundation right well like hiring key people from the industry like they are building a foundation for the future um and it is also funny to me that like we don't hear about this stuff in other parts of apple's divisions but basically everything that is happening for apple's tv efforts is public all of it yeah the entertainment industry this is how it works right there's the hollywood reporter and variety and deadline and they cover and hollywood talks hollywood rumors uh where the execs are going and what they're doing what deals deals are being made. All of that stuff is just, this is how this business works. And it is constantly fascinating to see how Apple will

navigate it. And that's what I was saying earlier. The parts that Apple can't control, like these announcements, they don't. And that's just how it is. The part they can control, which is their announcement of their product that Apple likes to hold and control completely, their announcement of their product that apple likes to hold and control completely um they are doing that that's the part that they have been able to control up to now like the rollout and the name and the price and the strategy and all of that that has not yet come out but moving entertainment executives around it's and making deals that's just that's not that's what this industry does so apple just has to roll with it it is funny though because you create i see these entertainment journalists now

who there's this sort of like but they still won't tell us where it's all going and i get it like i get the frustration of that but that seems to be that's where apple has drawn the line which is yes we are buying lots of shows and where is that going we will tell you sometime and uh who knows when that will be wwdc the iphone launch event in the fall uh later possibly who knows who knows all right today's show is brought to you in part by our friends over at squarespace use the offer code upgrade at checkout and you will get 10% off your first purchase. Make your next move with Squarespace. They let you easily create a website for your next idea.

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You'll get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for this show. Our thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of Upgrade and RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So there was a report from our friend Ming-Chi Kuo, friend of the show now over at KGI Securities. It's very, very simple. It's kind of a one line as part of some other stuff. We've got a link in the show notes to 9to5Mac where Kuo suggests that there will be an update to the 13-inch MacBook Air in the second quarter of this year with a lower price tag than the current $999. So I want to pontificate with you, Mr. Snell,

kind of about the hows and whys for this product to even continue to exist. So I think first off, what do you think the price could be? And do you think that this would be anything more than just a simple price change to the macbook air i mean this is such a weird story i let's walk through it okay let's walk through it why does the macbook air exist at all it's because the macbook Air fills a niche that the MacBook doesn't.

Because the MacBook is more expensive than the MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is the $999 laptop. And it's still like, it still sells. It's a funny case where Apple, in Apple's ideal world, the MacBook would have appeared appeared and everybody would have said, I don't want this stupid MacBook Air. Give me my MacBook. But the MacBook's $1299 and the MacBook Air is $999. has the Retina. It also has USB-C. Every time somebody asks me about buying a Mac laptop, I say, you know, you will, it is more expensive and you will need to buy adapters. Like it's a double whammy there. And it's, and it's light and beautiful and has a beautiful screen. This is all true, but it is more expensive, $300 more expensive, and you'll have to buy adapters. So they kept the MacBook Air around. My understanding is that it sells well in education,

but it also sells well in general. We hear from people in Apple stores who say that the MacBook Air around. My understanding is it sells well in education, but it also sells well in general. We hear from people in Apple stores who say that the MacBook Air sells really well in Apple retail, potentially even better than other MacBook models. So this is a case where Apple would like everybody to buy the more expensive, newer laptop, but they don't want to. And Apple's not willing to close the door. That's the other part of it, right? And just say too bad, 1299 MacBook or nothing. They're not willing to do that. So we're left in this weird limbo state where you've got a MacBook Air that's based on an old chipset. So even though they updated the processor, they literally updated it to the last processor that was made that works with that chipset.

It seems like they've tried very hard not to put any engineering effort into this thing. So where are we now? What would a new MacBook Air be? And this is the vexing thing. It's like, do they, any work they do to make this thing newer is going to be, you know, they're building a new revision of this product. It's not just dropping in a new processor. It they're building a new revision of this product. It's not just dropping in a new processor. It's like a whole new thing. All right. Apple's going to make in 2018, Apple's going to make a laptop without USB-C. Apple's going to make a laptop that doesn't

have a retina screen. It seems not very Apple-like. And yet at the same time, especially if they're going to have a lower price tag, like what the heck are they going to do? Because they're not going to have a Retina Mac for $799. It seems unlikely anyway, that they would do that given that the MacBook is at $1299. So I am kind of caught in the middle here where there's this question of like, I can see them building that product, but i i it's not something that they've ever done before to create some sort of retro product if if if i except the iphone se yeah i guess so but the iphone se had modern had modern hardware in it it's not it would be like if the iphone se had a dock connector on it or something right i mean it does have a headphone jack but it doesn't have

force 3d touchscreen it's true but how i mean we could we could argue yes that that i'm not quite sure it's the best comp but it's the closest one we have so we can mention that the lower price tag thing is the part of this that really baffles me it's like i could sort of see Apple making a cheaper MacBook kind of thing, but not for less than $999. I could see Apple saying, how do we build a modern Mac laptop for $999 and doing that, but for less than $999? And the best I can come up with is, what if Apple decided that they were going to create essentially like an iBook, something that was designed to be a cheap entry Mac laptop. It's kind of like the Mac mini actually might be a good analog too, because people don't buy

desktop computers so much anymore. They buy laptops. And the Mac mini was when it came out a $499 Mac, it was groundbreaking in that sense because it was so cheap. So could you do that for a laptop? And what would it be? It would probably be thicker and heavier. It might or might not have a retina screen. Probably not. Would it have USB-C? Maybe, but it might also have USB-A on it. I don't know. I don't know what the different cost issues are. And there's also compatibility issues. Would they build something? Is it a little like the EMAC? Is it with the schools in mind because they want to keep selling into schools for that? And of course, every choice you make, you know, you have to realize if you're Apple that every $799 or $899 laptop that you sell is a $1299 MacBook that you're not selling or a $1299 MacBook Pro Escape. So it's a weird idea.

And it comes back to Apple feeling very strongly and unlike them, I would say, that they, or at least unlike them historically in the Mac, that they can't just kick the macbook out the macbook air out of their product line and wait for the macbook to drop in price because it's not happening um and so since since they can't bear to let go of the macbook air at some point they have to do something with it uh it's just it's it's it's fascinating because it's like a product. I've read this as, and I have an 11-inch air. I have loved the MacBook Air since the very beginning, despite all of its flaws, and it's turned into a really amazing product. I get why people want it. It just has felt like Apple doesn't want it. It has been on the chopping block for years now. And so this is fascinating

that somebody at Apple might've said, look, this is ridiculous. Why are we selling this old computer? Let's make a new great computer for $9.99 or $8.99 or whatever. But it's a weird one. It's a weird story. on previous actions, because let's imagine that they drop the price of this and they bring it down to probably $899, right? If you're going to take the price down from $999, you make it $899, right? It's probably what you do. I mean, in that world, like an $899 MacBook Air, and let's imagine in this scenario they're not doing anything to change it, isn't that just really weird and kind of just going to make the situation worse? Yeah, I wonder if it's just leaning into it.

It's like, you know what? People keep buying MacBook Air. They love the MacBook Air. Who are we to stand in the way of people loving one of our products let how do we make it better while uh keeping everything that they love about it which at this point is largely price right yes that's what i mean do people actually love it or are they just buying it because it's the cheapest one i think people love it i i think um as much, let's look at the differences, right? I know a lot of people who

don't notice or care about retina displays, especially on computers, right? I love my retina iMac. And when I see a non-retina Mac, I feel sad. But the fact is, a lot of people don't care. It's like we were saying about the Echo and audio. A lot of't, it doesn't bother them that it's not a retina display. And then USB-C, I could argue is a liability and not an asset. Like MagSafe is great. And USB-A, you don't have to have any dongles for all of the stuff that you already have, which is using USB-A. So those are, you know, so the two main advantages of the MacBook, and oh, and it's thinner and lighter, right? And that's true. But like the MacBook Air is pretty thin and pretty light. So, you know, one of your advantages, retina, nobody cares about like, or some, some percentage of the population does not care about. And your other advantage, which is the modern connection stuff with USB-C is something that's

actually a liability. So I do think people love the MacBook Air. I think they've always loved it and they have not stopped loving it just because there are other computers. So then you have to be like, well, what do we do if you're Apple? Like, well, they won't stop buying this computer. What do we do? At some point, we run out of chips for it. How do we do this?

And I think the most likely scenario is what you said, which is the iPhone SE, which is what if we don't touch the industrial design? It's still going to look. It's still going to have the silver frame around the screen. It's going to have that old keyboard, maybe, maybe all of those things stay the same. And all they really do is they take the little, you know, the little motherboard, and it's very tiny, that's on the inside, and they build a new one that is based on a more modern Intel chipset, which gets the more modern chips that are faster and cooler. And they just keep it going and just keep it rolling. And it's not very Apple-like when we think of the Mac, but it's actually very Apple-like, as you said, when you think about the iPhone.

It actually does fit in there, which is we're keeping an old model around because that's the one that we can sell for cheaper. And people love it. So why not keep it around? But it does seem like, really, like, really, they're just going to keep an old Mac design that they've completely replaced. Just keep it kicking around with, with lesser technology that doesn't do the, the big leaps in technology advancement. But this is, you know know maybe that's part of the

root of people's complaints about apple's current laptop lineup is some of these things that apple thinks are our assets are either neutral or are liabilities like retina i love but if a certain percentage of the buying public just doesn't care then it's adding price for you know adding cost for not a lot of value usbc is a complication that is definitely a liability even though we can argue about like the great things it does it's a liability if you've got a decade of usb cables and devices and things like that and you need dongles new dongles for everything so um you know this fits into that like that's part of the appeal of the MacBook Air is that it's just the laptop everybody expects

instead of the laptop that Apple's trying to get you to want. But I think it's safe to assume that this was not the plan when the MacBook was introduced, right? Oh, definitely not. Surely the MacBook was supposed to replace this product. Yeah, and I think that, I wonder if that's part of the source

of this because you're right the macbook when people say what's you know what about a replacement for the macbook air it's like the macbook is the replacement for the mac it exists very clearly they already made that product very clearly so part of apple's calculation is probably do we want to reduce our margin on the MacBook by cutting its price? Or would we rather just keep the margin where it is, protect the margin on our fancy super light retina laptop, and keep this old product around where presumably the margins are also pretty good. So in terms of profit margin, this is the right answer. But in terms of Apple's track record, what has happened is that they keep the MacBook Air around for a year or two maybe, and then it dies and the MacBook goes down to $999. But they aren't willing to lose that $300 of profit margin on every sale of the MacBook.

to lose that $300 of profit margin on every sale of the MacBook. And they still sell the MacBook, and I think it sells pretty well, but they also still sell the Air that sells pretty well. So I get that. I get the idea economically of saying, look, why would we do that when we can keep these two products and we have huge profit margins on both of them? And it's not like the existence of the MacBook Air is killing MacBook sales because I don't think it is. I think it's selling pretty well too. So maybe they look at it and say, why would we upset this?

Why would we change this dynamic? It actually benefits us to have an older, low cost, low-ish cost Mac laptop in the line, just like it benefits Apple to have older, cheaper iPhones in the line. It's different, but, but you know there's precedent for it so but i i agree with you i think perhaps that was not their original intent and that the macbook

air sales were so strong that they just couldn't kill it does this feel like apple does this like does this feel like a what is the oft used phrase like an apple thing to do like to be boxed into a corner because of pricing and then just like oh screw it like let them eat cake like is that like uh does that feel like apple like i know the se exists but like the se was at least a new product right they brought out a new product to fill a need when what they'll most likely do i mean really what they will most likely do is just bring the price down the current macbook air and keep selling it yeah but the five well i i mean this rumor says they will do something else to it like there will be something to it and and i was the mac se a new product it was basically a

5s with a new with new hardware inside i get i get that that that actually makes it a new product some new stuff in it right like there was sure there were new internals there were new things that went inside of it but i think this i think this rumor suggests that right that this isn't just a price cut on the macbook air ming Kuo didn't really say much more than Apple is planning a more affordable 13-inch MacBook Air this year. Like, it really isn't much more than just, like, it was like a single line. It is a new MacBook Air with a lower price tag during the second quarter of 2018. That was basically the quote. I think the question then is, are they going to do something to the insides, or are they literally just going to cut the price and keep selling it?

Which they could do. And that's a lot less interesting. That is a lot less Apple, I would say. I don't know. I think the real question is about Apple's assumption that when it comes up with new hardware features, which it needs to do because Apple has this sort of brand perception of being on the cutting edge. It needs – and we were all clamoring for Retina MacBook Air, right? We were clamoring for it. That they need to do things that advance the category,

new technologies that are going to excite you. You got to get the new MacBook Pro because it's got the touch bar on it and it's got a Retina display and it's beautiful and it's thin and it's light and all those things. And the challenge is when at least a segment of your audience says, I don't really care about that. Like I'm good, I'm okay. And that is a challenge for a company that prides itself on kind of like driving new sales by being on the cutting edge of technology so that you've got to buy the new thing because it's got this

awesome new tech feature in it. What happens if your customers say, we're actually very comfortable where we are and we don't need that new thing? And the challenge there with Apple is if the new thing ends up being something that you don't know you want, but you find out you do want and you love it, then that's a success. That's the secret to Apple's success. But what happens when that doesn't happen? What happens when USB-C comes out and you're like, eh, dongles, I don't need that. Or what happens when that doesn't happen what happens when usbc comes out and you're like dongle's i don't need that or what happens if a certain percentage of the audience looks at the retina display and says three hundred dollars more yeah i don't need that then you end up kind of stuck when when some of your customer base does not want to come with you on that journey um i i'll a little footnote here i mean how many people do we know who have extolled the virtues of buying the previous generation MacBook Pro hardware? That's the same symptom, right? Which is there are people who don't think it's worth it to go on this journey with you to your new laptop with new features. And that's not how it's supposed to work.

of the new laptop. But when you've got some people saying, I don't actually, I would rather just stay with this, then, and your Apple, who prides itself on pushing forward, you've got a decision to make about, do you serve them? Do you bifurcate? Do you have more products, some that have the old vibe and some that are new, and let people come along at their own pace? It's weird. It's a hard problem. And I think it's biting them now where some of this stuff like seriously people i've had several people ask me about laptops um in the last few weeks because their laptop their mac laptops getting old and i've had to do this whole like i really want to just say the macbook is great my daughter has one it's wonderful but instead i'm like well i like the macbook but it's $1299 or whatever.

You're going to not just need to do that, but buy a bunch of adapters for your old stuff. It's got one port. So if you want to charge it and plug something in, you need another adapter for that. Like there's this whole litany of things that I have to say instead of saying, oh, just buy the MacBook. And instead it's sort of like, well, maybe you just want another MacBook Air. I've said that to more than one person in the last two weeks, which is, I think, telling about where the MacBook Air is and why it's still popular. All right, let's put our money on the table here, right? Like, what is this going to be? Is it going to be a price drop? Is there going to be new features? Like,

what do you think this will result in oh boy um i'm uh i'm gonna say i could go either way like i'm just gonna i'm just gonna pick something to pick it i'm gonna say that they are going they're realizing that they're at the end of their uh life with the um the motherboard generation the chipset generation that's in there and so they're going to upgrade it to a new chipset. And the outside's not going to change. And it's literally just going to be a faster Intel processor on the inside. And I think maybe even the ports don't change. Although, you know, they could do that.

But my guess is it'll be the least they can do. It'll still look the same. It'll still be not Retina. It'll still have the USB- It'll still be not retina. It'll still have the USB ports and Thunderbolt port. You know, maybe they changed the Thunderbolt part out to a USB-C port or something like that. Depends on what chipset they're using. But that would be my guess is that they're literally just going to replace it with a newer Intel chipset that lets them build the same product. I am going to say that I mostly agree with you.

But like, I think that we'll probably, if we see anything, it will be a process of change. But just for fun, I'm going to say just a price drop. I'm just going to go with that. Just take what they currently have, lop $100 off it, keep selling it. Yeah, well, uh somebody in the chat room while we were talking basically said they seem to have these two choices and those are our two choices that's about it david shob in the chat room said that i think that's it i think the most likely scenarios are either it's just it's literally just a price drop that 13 inch macbook

gear is now 7.99 because they've got to make so much profit on each one of those because that's just like old tech the the i it there it's at the point now where to my point like i'm more concerned that they don't make those some of those parts anymore like are there enough of those displays to fulfill the demand or are people winding up the manufacturer of those displays because everyone wants higher resolution displays or other parts that are used in making that product. That becomes a concern, which is why I think they might rev the motherboard and use a new chipset

so that they can use some stuff that's still in production without hurting their margins very much. But I think those are the options, right? Because I don't see them designing a whole new laptop and putting all of that work in just to sell it for $799 or something. That seems like they would do an iPhone SE thing and then just do some internal changes, not do a product redesign on the outside, and just keep selling it.

All right. This episode is brought to you by CleanMyMac from MacPore. So we're talking about the Mac. Well, it's actually really good for maintenance and just to make sure you've got all the space you need to kind of keep an eye on what's on your Macintosh. And CleanMyMac can help you with this. They can help speed up the performance of macOS for you

with all of their maintenance stuff. It can remove temporary items and optimize system libraries for you so your Mac can run more smoothly and just feel better to use. On average, CleanMyMac can remove up to 64 gigabytes of junk on a typical Mac. It could be anything from system stuff, just like cruft that you don't want, pieces of old applications, outdated broken items, and so much more. Basically, just a bunch of stuff you don't need anymore that could be slowing your Mac down. Like, I find stuff like these weird iOS backups from that time that I did a backup

six months ago because I was updating my phone, and it's like an ungodly amount of size. This is the sort of stuff that CleanMyMac can help you find. Make your Mac as good as new with CleanMyMac 3. Show your Mac a little bit of love. Head over now to macpaw.com slash upgrade 2018. So that's M-A-C-P-A-W dot com slash upgrade 2018. And you will get 20% off. That is macpaw.com slash upgrade 2018 for a great 20% off CleanMyMac 3. Our thanks to MacPaw for their support of this show and Ask Upgrade. First question comes from Brock. Brock asks, I want to get a HomePod,

but the best places I have for it are either on top of a bookshelf or one of the shelves on that bookshelf. Will it being high up or recessed in a shelf negatively affect the sound output? Jason, do you know about this? I don't know. I need to try this. I've thought about it. I have put one high up and it was okay.

I mean, the idea here is that the HomePod is listening to you. It knows that the sound environment that it's in because it's listening to the microphone. So it would probably be okay. Atop of a bookshelf, I don't think it's going to be a problem. I think that that's a perfectly fine place for it. Although, as I pointed out, you won't be able to see it activate or touch it to control it, you know, the volume or play, pause or anything like that. But that worked okay.

Completely surrounded in like a bookshelf or something with stuff above and right right behind and all that it's probably not going to sound as good but it will adjust itself automatically chris asks i bought a samsung 4k monitor but now my max brightness up and down keys on my keyboard don't do anything are there any third-party utilities i can make a max keyboard brightness keys adjust a samsung monitor's brightness i don't think so right like i think that these are like independent things or am i wrong i was hoping you had an answer since you put this question in here because i haven't the faintest idea i've never used a samsung monitor i don't know anything about that um i used to have a third party. I used to have a Dell monitor

and I think I had to adjust the brightness with the little buttons on the monitor. So I used to use a Samsung TV at one point with a Mac mini and I had to use the whole adjustment on the thing. So the reason I put this in is I was hoping you might have an answer or what I sometimes do

is we put these questions in there to see if anybody out there in the world knows of a way to do this. I don't think it's possible, but if it is, I would love to hear about it. Logan has asked, what is the difference between an i5 and an i7 in an iMac or a Mac Pro? I'm looking into getting a Mac for school this fall and trying to decide which processor to get. My biggest priority is future-proofing

followed closely by budget. i7, I think i7 has virtual processor cores that the i5 doesn't have. The i7 is a faster, more efficient class of processor. Although I think a lot of the i7s are lower clock speed

when they're single threaded and then, or then the i5. It's, i7 is a better processor, but you may not really get all the benefit if you're not doing a lot of multi-core, multi-threaded stuff. And if you don't know what that is, you're probably not doing it um

but it's that that's i'm trying to simplify and i think my confusion is that some of those features have come into the i5 at one point which it makes me confused too i i you know details of intel chip architectures maybe not the best thing that this podcast does i mean my, my feeling would be, considering that this is a computer for school, so it's going to last you a couple of years, unless you're doing something that is specifically very intensive, I would just say go for the budget and then use the money you save on something like RAM or storage. I think that you'll probably be fine on an i5.

Yeah, the number of things that you... If you get an iMac, put that money toward Fusion Drive or even better yet, SSD rather than a processor. That's going to save you more. You'll feel that more every day. Yeah. Jake asks, do you think the 2018 iphone 10 will have camera hardware parity to the iphone 10 plus that's been rumored huh that's a good one um basically the question

here is does apple have something more up its sleeve when in terms of having a new camera module that is so awesome on the 10 Plus because it's using that extra space. If I had to bet, I would say that they'll be the same. What do you think, Mike? I don't think they will be. They're going to do something magical and special for the Plus Club? Yeah, I think so. I think that we're going to do something magical and special for the plus club yeah i think so uh i

think that we're going to go back to the world of apple trying to show some real differences between those two phones and one of the really easy ways to do that is to have differences in the camera because it's something that people really care about it's like if you want to push people towards the expensive phone, give it some difference in the camera that the extra space can afford, because you've got more space because the phone's bigger, which is, I'm assuming, the exact reasoning behind the dual lens and the Plus, and why, historically, the Plus has always had a better camera. I don't know if it's the case with the 8,

but I think throughout all of the time that the plus existed there was always something that the plus camera did that the non-plus camera didn't do right whether it was like optical image stabilization and all that kind of stuff like there's always been advancements and i think that there will be advancements again that the regular phone won't have. All right. I mean, I think that's possible. My gut feeling is just that Apple did a lot of work to get the iPhone 10 camera to be great and to do all the things that the Plus cameras did. And since they've done that, I think it would be easy for them to just progress that on both devices rather than do a second thing. But you could be right.

It is a differentiator other than size to have the camera to use some of that space to do more with cameras. Dave asks, the smart keyboard that I got with my 9.7-inch iPad Pro is limping along now. I don't want to replace it as i'm thinking about upgrading to a new 10.5 whenever that might come any suggestions for a keyboard that will work for now isn't too clunky and something i can just throw in my backpack i figured that an apple magic keyboard with the studio new canopy is probably a pretty good option for this what do you think yeah i think that's a great option because it'll also give you a uh a stand for your ipad um the other uh product that i will mention is the one of the logitech uh bluetooth like the easy switch which is sort of my backup keyboard

for everything and that's nice because it'll pair with multiple Bluetooth devices and you can switch among them. So you can be like on your Mac and then switch and now it works with your iPad. And now you switch with some other device, which is nice. And there are plenty of generic Bluetooth keyboards out there. The nice thing about the Canopy from Studio Neat is that it's exactly the size of the Magic Keyboard.

So if you can get a Magic Keyboard or you have a Magic Keyboard that came with with a mac you put it in the canopy it kind of sticks in and it snaps up into a carrying case but when you get to your destination you can unfold it and it will it will be a stand to hold your your ipad and that will work with uh the 97 and the 10 5 just the same yeah and the reason that i think we're both going down the route of not recommending a keyboard case is because you're looking to upgrade. So you may as well get a keyboard that you could use for other things. Once you upgrade your iPad pro,

because like, if you want a case, right, the, the Logitech create for the 9.7 is just a product that I couldn't say nicer things about right like i absolutely loved that and was just so sad that they ruined it but but he's got he's got he wants a keyboard that will work with both so something like the canopy the nice thing about that is that

not only does the keyboard work with both but the stand will work with both and so that that's not a bad option if you like the if you like the Apple Magic Keyboard, which is a very nice keyboard. Yep. So that's kind of the route that you want to go down. And you may have one. Yeah. This is another thing about the Canopy

is you probably already have a Magic Keyboard, right? You may use it for your Mac currently so that could make it a little bit tricky, but you probably have one. I'm expecting. Who knows? But I'm guessing you might um rob asks what is your favorite iphone gimbal jason what's the one you had me buy the dji osmo

is the one that i made you buy uh and it is osmo mobile yeah that's my favorite in that it is the one that i have and i have not tried any others so i have no buying advice to give you but i use that one and mike told me about it and uh i like it they have they have new ones now so like there's a new one um which is cheaper i think the osmo mobile 2 um which is an updated version it's it's it think, better and cheaper. So it's worth looking at. But the DJI products, DJI is an incredible company that does really, really interesting things.

What I like, they're known for their drones, mostly, right? They make the Mavic and the Spark and the Phantom. And I'm very interested in the drone technology, even though I don't really have a lot of use for it myself, but I find it just to be really interesting. And I think it was Casey Neistat recently said something that I thought was really, really cool, that like at this point, DJI are just competing with themselves.

They're so far ahead of everybody else that like in drone tech, no one's even close to them. And they just keep releasing new drones that compete with their other drones. And that's kind of just the whole the whole drone market right now is kind of just swept up in DJI. Really, really interesting company. All right. And finally, today, Rajiv asks, Do you think the iPads will eventually get wireless charging like the iPhones have? Eventually. Like on an infinite time scale, maybe.

But I think that there's much less need for it because first off, they're huge. And you have to make a little contact area for the wireless charging to happen. And it's a much larger thing. So now you're trying to get it positioned exactly right and all of that. So i think eventually maybe but i can't see it happening anytime soon i don't think it's gonna happen like with the technology we currently have like what what the chi charging that exists right now i don't see a benefit like i just it's like also it will take forever exactly do i think that

macbooks are gonna get g charging no i don't right and so it's like the same thing because so you'll be taking this big thing and putting it down on it you may as well just plug it in like it i don't think the convenience aspect is there in the same way um so, I mean, you know, it'd be cool because I have found myself recently needing to charge my iPad Pro up in the day. I don't know what's going on. I don't know. Maybe it's just age

or I've got something weird happening, but I'm not on any betas or anything, but my battery life seems to be taking a bit of a dive. So it'd be nice to have something that could charge it more easily, but I just don't think that Qi in its current form would really give me what I'm looking for.

All right, so thank you so much to everybody that sent in their Ask Upgrade questions. You can send us these questions in by just tweeting out into the world with the hashtag AskUpgrade, and we'll pick them up for a future episode. So any technology-based questions you would like our advice on, you can send them in with the hashtag AskUpgrade and we will get to them. But now it is time for us to discuss aliens. But before we do that, let me take our final break of this week's show and thank Linode for their support. With Linode, you will have access to a suite of powerful hosting options with prices starting at just $5 a month. And you'll be up and running with your own virtual server in the Linode cloud in just under a minute. Linode has hundreds of thousands of customers, many, many, many, many, many, many people

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sign up and take advantage of that $20 credit, or use the promo code UPGRADE2018 at checkout. Our thanks to Linode for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. Alright, so it is at this time, as always, Jason, where I pick up my other notebook that I have here, where I was taking notes earlier today when I watched Aliens. I really,

whilst it is a very strange thing to do in the middle of the afternoon to watch a movie, I do really like watching these before we record because it means that it's the most fresh in my mind. But there is that weird thing where I'm drawing the blinds

at 11am to sit down and watch a movie from 1986. It is very strange and it is one of those things where it's like what is this life I lead in which I'm doing this? But this is the life that i have and uh i will thank all of our listeners for allowing me to watch aliens in the middle of

the afternoon as part of my job um but here we are so uh i would do what i always do i would give my thoughts before and then my thoughts after and then we can jump into breaking down some of the parts of the movie does that work sure so i was very nervous of this movie because i was very upset uh the first watching alien uh it made me very uneasy um so i was nervous of that and you had told me uh you you tried to console me feel better this is more of an action movie uh where alien is definitely more of a thriller horror movie and aliens is more of an action movie um and it's kind of replicated uh in the director right so this so we had ridley scott for the first one and he's he's good at making really really tense environments we have james cameron for aliens um so it's you

know james cameron is more of a big action guy right like that's what he's more known for big big action movies with and in many ways in many ways this is the movie that made him a bankable action director terminator the original terminator which was low budget which we watched was like the oh there might be something to this guy he looks really interesting and on the back of the terminator he was given aliens and then aliens was a uh a big hit and this is this is the really the thing that propelled him to being like, no, no, he can make big budget action movies like Terminator 2, for example, and then on and on and on.

But this is the one that really made his name as a big budget, big grossing action movie director. The budget felt huge for this movie. So IMDB tells me that the budget was 18.5 million dollars is the estimation for the budget and it feels it felt like a really big budget movie like a lot of the practical effects stuff like the tanks and kind of the environments that they're in it all felt really well done and i liked that i think my favorite thing about this movie is the way everything looked everything looked really real real you know because it was practical

stuff and but it also looked convincing um and i thought that was really cool i liked i liked the overall look of this movie um in a way that kind of like alien alien was cool but it was all really contained you know within a relatively small environment and this movie had way bigger environments and way bigger props and spaceships and you know there was a lot more going on in this i was struck in watching it this time because i've only seen aliens once and that was a long time ago on vhs on a little tv so i got to see a lot more of the movie this time and one of the things that struck me having seen alien a bunch of times is i really appreciate how I really appreciate how this movie takes its cues from the world that Alien built in terms of what the future technology looks like on the ship and in the car and and then when it makes reference to the monsters and their life cycle the aliens and what they do like that's all uh you know they're honoring that that concept like it's it's a bigger canvas on in every dimension but like it does sort of

feel like they took that little tiny part that we saw in Alien and said, that's the starting point. And now we're going to expand on it. Rather than it feeling, if this makes any sense, it feeling like it's a totally different world. Like, you know, they expanded on it without making you feel like this is not the same world as the original Alien. Joe Steele in the chat room has informed us that the tank is a radio-controlled car. But nevertheless, even though it's not... I don't think I thought it was life- I don't know, but these things still carry with them an increased budget.

There are some shots that made me believe that there was both a model tank and a life-scale tank for some shots, and that they cut between them and i was like now is this the tiny tank or is this the full-size tank but i don't know so yeah they clearly had something that was part of the set right but what was driving around was not this big thing but but nevertheless like the way this film looks comes with a bigger budget right like it comes with needing to have a bigger budget i think they had a bigger cost um and i would say overall this is a really really good movie i i can see that in watching it i just don't think it's my movie i don't think this is a thing for me like i didn't dislike it i wasn't bored of it but there are just parts of it that like i just flat

out don't like the aliens like i i i know i'm i know i'm supposed to not like them but lots of them die in this one so that's true but like i i really just don't i really don't like them, and it makes me not like the movie as much. So, like, I don't have particular problems with this movie. Like, I don't have things that, like, you tend to frustrate me. You know, typically plot things frustrate me, right? Like, weird anomalies in the plot, or, like, peculiar decisions that somebody would make right that's the sort of stuff that usually annoys me about movies and this didn't really have that for me like there wasn't anything where i was like well somebody wouldn't do that i just i think i just think i like i dislike the aliens so much they creep me out so much that it it pulls me out of enjoying

the movie uh they are creepy and this has the new queen at the end who's like extra creepy they're really it makes she gets in an elevator it is i really wished that there was just me i want to just see her press the buttons you know like i want to see that happening because if you're gonna put it in the elevator make me watch the alien in the elevator what's the alien doing is it like listening to to the little elephant music that's going on yeah exactly right and then it's just waiting somebody gets in on the third floor there's no no i'll take the next one you've got all the space taken care of in this one yeah i will say when i when i bought this on itunes and i was given the opportunity the

opportunity i was given the option to either play the original or the 1990 special edition and i chose the original yeah me too okay i don't know what the difference is but like i so when i watched this the one time i watched the special edition and my memory of it is that it was overwhelming and that i thought this time i would be like you know what i'm gonna choose the least uh the shorter runtime just because the last time i watched this movie i felt like it was a sensory assault and that i want to like i don't need more of that so let's just take the original and go with that this is a long movie it's like a two and a half hour long movie right like which

i don't know that for movies that we tend to watch for this segment this is a this is on the long side it's 2 2 17 the original i think right two hours 17 minutes but it's it's it definitely is i i can put it in context for you a little bit like this first off this was a huge hit um yeah it was it's remarkable in the sense that you can see how clever it is to take the original concept and like i said honor it and yet also expand it so it i mean because you can imagine what the elevator pitch is so standing you know james canterbury standing next to the alien elevator pitch in the elevator, uh, saying, okay, imagine that they go back to that planet 50 years later. Uh,

and all of those eggs hatched like, Oh my God. You mean there was one alien for that whole movie and now you're going to have like 50 or a hundred aliens. Um, well, yeah, that's exactly it.

But we're going to have a bunch of space Marines with machine guns and flamethrowers and they're going to fight it out and it's going to be like a war with the aliens. That's what this movie is. That's it. It is, what if we took the claustrophobic spaceship, the Nostromo, and a group of four people and one alien, and instead we made it a semi claustrophobic, uh, you know, house housing center down on a planet,

but had a whole battalion of space Marines and dozens of aliens. And they blow stuff up and shoot and, and get eaten by aliens. And all that stuff happens. Like that's what this movie is. And, and to pivot from the one genre to the other, it's very clever. It's very well done. In looking back at it, I think the issue that I have with it, and this may be going into how you feel about it, is this is a really early example of what we think of now as a modern summer action movie.

This is an early example of movies that they make a dozen of now, which is special effects, science fiction, lots of explosions, lots of gunfire kind of movie. We get these all the time now and as a result i actually think i i couldn't believe when i was watching this movie that i thought this was an overwhelming uh intense experience to watch it yeah because i didn't feel that way i felt like

it was a nice little i was like oh it's so cute it's a nice little action movie it doesn't have like the plot isn't overstuffed where like there are eight twists to get I was like, oh, it's so cute. It's a nice little action movie. It doesn't have like, the plot isn't overstuffed where like there are eight twists to get to the end. Like it's really linear. It's very simple. It's, there aren't too many characters. It just flows kind of naturally. It's got the one twist at the end

that's the same as in the other one. And that's fine, whatever. But it's like, it was more impressive at the time, I would say. And it's so influential, like so many of these old movies you watch, and you're like, oh, it doesn't seem,

I don't see what the big deal is. There are lots of movies like this. And you have to say, yeah, but this is the first one, or one of the first ones that did it. And I do think it's a template, and it led to Terminator 2, which I think really is like

the prototypical summer science fiction action blockbuster that really set this on a trajectory to where every movie is like that. I mean, I get like Star Wars. True. It's true. But like Star Wars feels a little different. This is the with more explosions and gunfire and personal damage and stuff. And you get in a gentler Star Wars kind of movie. This was a rated r so what terminator 2 has that aliens doesn't is like an action figure superhero

right like the terminator is like a sellable action figure cartoon character right where like aliens doesn't have that it's real human beings dealing with this right and i think that's one of the big differences and of course sigourney weaver at the center of it doing an amazing job um this is right after she was in ghostbusters um an amazing job being being ripley again and there's a great moment where the lieutenant gets like bumped on the head or something and uh he's a jerk anyway and then she's just in charge at that point by the time he wakes up it's like sorry dude she's in charge now yeah that's why she's there that that it's really good she has the she has the she finds the little girl newt who's the only survivor um she other than the one ones who were like webbed up and say kill me and they're incubating

hosts but she's the one like undoctored survivor and so she's got there's there's like a mother-daughter kind of relationship that's going on while she's got her flamethrower and her gun um but she's also i loved that part at the end when she duct tapes the two guns together it's like so extra i love it i just loved it is that the best way to do this and it's a it's a fun collection of characters. You know, you get your collection of Marines and you know they're all going to probably die by the end. But you get to kind of get to know them a little bit. And then so you feel something when they're ambushed initially.

And then, you know, over time, more of them are gradually killed there's a i like that there is again something i didn't really understand when i watched it the first time that it's very clear this time is how um lance henriksen who is who is a bishop the the android like the android is the bad guy in the first movie an alien and here she doesn't trust him because he's an android and she's like stay away and he ends up being completely honorable and saves the day in the end which i think is really cool like that's a great uh and it's paul reiser the joe your jovial company representative who is the rat in all of this not the android yeah the difference i guess in this movie is that like the human is the real villain right well like in the previous

one it was a robot but it's like it's the human who's the villain yeah yeah well because the company is the is the villain the text of of both these movies a little less in this one but it's still very clear is that it's the corporation the whalen yutani corporation they are the villains because they don't care about people they just want to research this alien stuff like use it as a weapon. That's the whole reason, Paul, there is that moment where they're like, it's a classic moment. It's one of the most quotable lines. It's not the most quotable, but one of the most quotable lines from this movie is, I say, we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. And

that would have been, and Paul Reiser's like, no, no, no, we can't do that because it's important. And it's like, no, no, that's the right answer here. Take off. Nuke the site from orbit. End of movie. But, of course, that doesn't happen. By the way, the most, I don't know if you know this, the most quotable line from this movie is Bill Paxton who says, game over, man. Game over.

I hated Bill Paxton's performance in this movie. Well, I mean, he's a whining, freaking out guy. It's kind of awful. But there is that moment where he freaks out and he's like, when they lose the one flying thing that came down from the spaceship. And he just starts freaking out. And he's like, game over, man. Game over. I like that he's like super panicky guy. they're like calm down but yeah you're not supposed to

like him he's a panicky jerk i love all of the like 1980s view of the future i love this stuff god yeah right so like there's that meeting at the beginning and everyone's everyone's smoking and using pen and paper everybody's so everybody's smoking indoors they're using pen and paper and there's a line about how a spaceship costs 14 million dollars and i just cackled i was like this is the most 80s thing ever like million dollar spaceship and the smoking indoors and the pen and paper it's just hilarious like yeah this is this is the things that you don't bother to imagine what it would be like in the uh in the actual future just like yeah with it's a meeting there's some you know computer screens on the walls there's

also a moment i that you probably noticed where they're looking at a map and it's on a screen which which uh looks really cool it's like a flat screen but it's down it's it's it's on the table it's like a table screen it's got the map of a complex in it and they want to like move around on it and so they have to do like computer things to move the map and And I'm like, no, no, no. You just reach out and pinch. I love watching this stuff. Like, I don't think that there is a specific problem that people from the 80s have no imagination. Right. Because I imagine that like in 30 years time, the stuff that we're doing in future movies will look just as ridiculous.

Like, oh, they didn't know you could just imagine it. Right. Or like whatever, you know know like whatever it ends up being but like it's it's just always funny to be like what do people think that like i mean how far in the future is this even set because like it's 57 years after the first one yeah i don't know it's an unst unstated, far-off future, you know, a couple hundred years probably. And it's, yeah, what gets me is that mixture, which is like, okay, they've got a flat screen on a table with a readout on it that's like a live map. And, like, actually, a thing that they did really well that I liked is that all the soldiers have cameras. And they've got, like, a control center where they can see the video from all the soldiers it's like yeah that's i like good job that's you i think you kind of nailed it that's a really good

vision of like future uh soldiers and and tech um and they got the control center but they've got that screen with the map and it's a and it's like a a flat plane of glass it doesn't look like a crt i think um and i thought wow that looks really good but it looks so good that i expected them to to touch it like an ipad and they don't because that's that part that conception either that conception didn't get to them or the other thing is like how much money and time do we want to spend having the actors put their fingers on the glass and miming that you know tracking that perfectly with our computer it's like it's not worth it let's just not let's just not do that some of sometimes it might not be a lack of vision it's just a lack of the budget to realize other parts of the future that's that's

true it's less true now where we've got amazing uh vfx to do to rewrite almost everything you see on screen if you've got enough money again but it's a different kind of uh thing than it was back in the day where they had to do a lot of stuff you know practically and just stay inside the budget i also really liked the the exosuits the loaders that's that's yeah cool yeah james cameron liked them too because he brought them back in avatar, but, uh, but, but yeah, right. Where it's people in exosuits, but, uh, that's, that's a nice use of the, it seemed extraneous at the time where she's like, yeah, I can load things. I worked at the loading docks in a mentioned in a previous scene, I will move something

around and it shows her character wise makes sense. She's earning a little more respect from these, um, these Marines who have no respect for her as the civilian who's been asked to tag along with them who they don't know. But of course it pays off at the end where the door opens and she's in the exosuit and she's going to punch. In a really awkward drawn out fight scene. Like when nothing's really happening, like there's a tail rip in and she's kind of holding the alien's

head a bunch right but like there are great there's some great moments where she grapples and the alien's face is near her and you know the alien opens his mouth and that other like little sub mouth comes out and tries to snap at her and you're like ah right that was so great but yeah um by modern standards that is a really slow sequence where there's just sort of some grappling and it's not nearly as i think tense as uh that they wanted it to be maybe or at least as we read it today but again back in the day it was a that was a that was a big a big turn i thought that the fashion decision to kind of like upturn the top of the collar and lapel on suit jackets very strange this is like look really weird it's like oh in the future this is how we wear our suit

jackets it was very it's a very very strange i mean it's like back to the future too where it's like okay i guess it's just like let's just do wacky things and we'll say that's future oh i enjoyed the uh the uh back to the future to escape scene at the end of the movie where like you know the whole building's falling down and there's no spaceship anymore and the spaceship just appears from behind from behind yeah he says oh i had to take off it was it was getting too unstable i just had to take off because you know they're preparing to die there and he's like no no no I just was rather than hovering over the platform I decided to go somewhere where you couldn't see me and just come back at the opportune time but I'm back now so it's the guy who played Corporal Hicks is his name is Michael how do you say surname is it Byn? Bean Michael Bean so uh he was in terminator too right terminator also uh yes that was interesting clearly clearly cameron likes him well he's so he's the he's the uh guy from the future who sent

back in time yep um and father's john connor in the terminator and then dies and it's sad they had a one night together and that's all and the really awkward one night um and he's he's the abyss he's actually the bad guy if a bad guy there could be a. And he's the abyss. He's actually the bad guy. If a bad guy, there could be a single bad guy in the abyss, which is a James Cameron movie from 1989,

which I love and I would recommend that we watch at some point. Okay. The downside of it is that the theatrical edition has a really dumb ending and the special edition

has an amazing ending and is a much better movie. It's also very long. And the special edition hasn't been released in HD. I don't know why. I think because James Cameron's too busy with Avatar movies. And it really frustrates me because I love the Abyss special edition.

It is amazing. And it kills me that it's not available in an HD version because it is great. Anyway, he's the bad guy in that. He's a Marine who kind of goes um goes crazy in the high pressure situation at the bottom of the seafloor and steals a nuclear bomb and is carrying it around for a while so so yeah james cameron really likes michael bean and put him in a lot of stuff so you know there were lots of aliens almost almost too many aliens like there was just aliens

constantly like that was one of the big differences right there was one alien and it was like the tension of the one alien but this time there's just like how many at some points how many aliens can there be on screen we'll have all the aliens um but you know it i guess that's more of what this movie was going for right it's more action to be just shooting guns at like 50 aliens if you've seen alien and then you see that scene where suddenly you see them all kind of like coming off the walls and the ceiling it is a moment of like oh god no like they're i did feel like only one killed everybody you know but the cat and the one lady only one and now there's just they're everywhere and uh

there's there's that uh that scene where they're like beep beep beep and it's coming closer and it's like but i don't see them and they look up it's like no they're everywhere aliens falling from the ceiling yeah i think my moment my moment is the alien and alien was so hard to kill and they just plow through these aliens. And you have to remind yourself, it's like, well, yeah, but these guys have flamethrowers and giant machine guns, which the crew of the Nostromo didn't really have. And also, they know these aliens exist now, so they might know enough about them maybe possibly to know like these specific weapons will be good like this is what but nobody has nobody has formulated any acid proof armor yeah which is a nice that isn't that a nice complication yeah because that wasn't really

explored and i mean we knew the the acid was dangerous right right it burned through the the hull but it wasn't explored as like a if you shoot one of these and you're too close, your skin's going to melt. Yeah. And I really like that. You're going to get totally splattered by acid. Yeah. No, I like that a lot. That's an added complication where it's like, yeah, it's fun to shoot these aliens, except if they splash on you, you will be horribly injured.

Like whoever, like Hicks. Hicks, right? They have to carry him out because he's been horribly burned by acid. There are a couple of the Marines who were basically killed by it. I don't remember their names exactly, but one guy has his entire

face melted off. Oh yeah, right. Hicks survives. He gets splashed a little bit but he's still horribly injured because we know that that's that monomolecular acid or whatever that just eats through many and there is a call back to that which i really like where they find the hole that is going all the way down and all the way up and it's like oh yeah we've seen this before in alien this is proof that these aliens are i really like the tension at the beginning when they come into that that setup is is so great. It's like,

we've landed, we're on an alien planet. We know there's probably aliens here, but there are also people here. We've lost touch with this facility. We don't know what happened to the people. And they're like going through and there's like, I just,

I love that whole segment. The fact that they go through the doors and like stuff's pulled out of the ceiling and stuff. And it's like, what happened here? Like, it's a mystery at that point. Like we seeing it's half eaten meals right like so yeah you know it happened like all of a sudden that kind of stuff is cool i really like that and then you know in the end we find out that they it you know they all they all got killed other than the girl in the ventilation ducts they all got killed on that last thing that i wanted to

mention was i really liked the actual beginning of this movie because it moves very quickly like you are not waiting around a bunch for like something to happen to ripley like she is saved you see that she gets back to health you know she's having bad dreams right so it gets the kind of the fake out there she presents her case they say no you're not going there and then like jump cut right like multiple years later or however long it is now they're going right and i like that because i was expecting like oh here we go like there's going to be a bunch of committee meetings or like you know where she's like pleading her case and then there's going to be this and they're like nope nope you got to go everyone's dead the only problem i have with those scenes is that i feel like she's i mean and i guess it's like what did what did ripley learn when she was on the nostromo but we know that the company

was behind it all and she mentions it at one point but it's like she is not nearly adversarial enough when she's in that meeting with the company she could have been like she should have been like i know what you guys did i know what um what the android's job was um we were sacrificed those people died because of you like i wanted her to be way more aggressive because she knows what happened and that it was the and i i understand that the movie doesn't want to do that because the movie wants to like slow to be way more aggressive because she knows what happened and that it was the... And I understand that the movie doesn't want to do that because the movie wants to slow play that and then have the company guy,

have Paul Reiser be totally like, he's kind of squirrely, but then we find out that he's really bad and it's like, oh yeah, right, this corporation is terrible. But that's the one problem I had with it is that Ripley should be aware all the time at how terrible the company is and be pushing back.

And, you know, they can use their power to kick her out and disgrace her and all of that. But that scene played more like they were not believing her and she was kind of in good faith trying to explain what happened when I felt like that's not how I picture that scene going. I picture that scene going that she knows full well what, what went on. She's aggressive about it and they're, and they shut her down because they don't, first off,

all those executives retired. It was 50 years ago. And second, they've got plans and, and her plans don't interest them. And, and she's just going to get in their way. So I just, that that's the frustration I had is she should have started out

considering the corporation, the villain. And that might've made the dynamic between her and Paul Reiser when he finally has to try to recruit her because she knows something about this to be a little more adversarial. And for whatever reason, I think James Cameron just didn't want to go down that path because like that's what aliens all about is that all of those people got screwed by the

company. So anyway, that's, that's a complaint I've got about that all of those people got screwed by the company. So anyway, that's a complaint I've got about the beginning of the movie, but you're right, it does move fast. I also want to complain about the end of the movie. Can I do that? Yeah. Or after the end of the movie, which is,

and I'm going to spoil something for Alien 3, which you should not watch. So I'm going to spoil it now. Don't watch it. I hate that movie. I'm going to spoil it now, though, which is the entire emotional arc of this movie is that Ripley saves Newt.

And this movie ends in victory with yeah, Bishop's been ripped in two and has milk coming out of every surface. But he saves Newt from falling out of the airlock and they go into suspended animation and they've managed to save uh hicks who's injured and they all go into suspended animation kind of like the end of alien and it's a victory um she has taken care of newt who she promised to save and they've got that relationship there and it's great um alien three begins with the pod

being found on a planet and they wake sigourney weaver up and say oh yeah everybody else is dead so and this is this is and also oh and one of you had an alien face hugger on you but we don't know which one which is not supported in aliens at all it's just made up um and so i and i i got to see that movie i reviewed that movie from my college newspaper um i think it is amazing that a franchise on the back of an incredibly successful movie would in its first scene extend two middle fingers at the entire fan base of the franchise and the entire audience who is coming to see this movie and say remember that emotional arc that was the entire point of that last movie uh well, well forget it. She's dead. Let's move on. Let's, let's tell

a movie now. And it's like, it's one of the most inexplicable decisions, creative decisions in a movie. Uh, and especially in a movie series I have ever seen that literally the alien franchise said, Hey, you know, Ripley's relationship with Newt. It didn't matter. She died on the way back to their planet. And now Ripley's in another thing with stuff that we're going to gaslight you until you happened in Aliens. But it totally didn't happen in Aliens. It's terrible. This is David Fincher's first feature film. And I believe David Fincher is on the record and saying nobody hates that movie as much as he does.

But it's a disaster. So I don't recommend, Mike, I don't recommend you watch any more Alien movies. Great. This is it. I'm happy about that because they give me the heebie-jeebies. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade.

If you want to find our show notes, go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 183. You can find Jason's work at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. And we both host a variety of shows at RelayFM. You go to Relay.FM slash shows to find more there. Thanks again to Macpaw, Away, Squarespace

and Linode for their support of this week's episode, but most importantly thank you for listening and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye Jason Snell. Goodbye Jason Snell. It was for that guy! That guy who hasn't been listening long enough to having heard it. Having heard it.

I said it. There's always one. You got to listen through Mike at the movies to get to it.