Upgrade - 19: Marco Marketing

Episode Date: January 19, 2015

Jason and Myke tackle upgrading versus sticking with what you know, take Apple's CarPlay for a powerslide, judge the financial success of Apps in the App Store, and cover more on battery life and the 12" Air. Plus they answer your burning questions!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 19 today's show is brought to you by our friends at lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts for a 10-day free trial visit lyndaa.com slash upgrade. MailRoute, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. Snaps.com, posted on demand. And PDF Pen 2 for iPhone and iPad. Edit your PDFs from wherever you are. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined, as always, by the man about town, Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. I'm the man about town, eh?

Uh-huh, that's what you want to say. Interesting way to describe somebody who works inside his house. Hi, Mike. I'm a man about town, eh? Uh-huh, that's what you want to say. Interesting way to describe somebody who works inside his house. You're at Snelltown, you know? Sure. You're the mayor of Snelltown. I bring it with me, yeah. I don't know where that came from.

It was the first thing that came to my head. I have a little bit of a sore throat today, so I might be a little bit husky, Jason. I'm just getting over my cold. My cold is finally abating. I'm almost out of it. I'm almost done with the cold. So I'll probably get the flu.

I've been thinking about this recently. I have a sore throat because over the weekend I went to a birthday party. My brother celebrated his 30th birthday. So we celebrated. In celebrating, my throat became sore because out in nightclubs and talking to people it's loud and i think to myself these days i should take more care of my voice so maybe i'll take like an extra sketch or something next time and just won't speak this is how i always feel at wwdc i'm not used to spending a lot of time out in loud environments shouting at people in order to be heard. And so whenever I go to WWDC or some other conference, I have this where I shred my voice in very short order.

It happens really quickly. Yep. I can feel it going within like 20 minutes. Yeah. And what was it? I feel it going within like 20 minutes. Yeah. And what was it?

At Singleton, I was doing a podcast with Dan Morin after one of the events in the evening. And Dan and I looked at each other about 10, 20 minutes in and we're like, we need to stop talking or our podcast later is going to be, hello, Dan. You know, it just completely wrecked. So, yeah, you're going to have to watch that. Your voice is your professional tool now. It's your instrument. If you would like to hear myself, Stephen, Jason, and Dan very hoarse at WWDC, there is an episode of the pre-relay Clockwise where we did that. And it was quite funny.

Like, we were doing that that show and I was like, I can't talk, guys. I'll put it in the show notes. But it's quite funny to hear us. There was lots of drinks around the room to try and keep everybody speaking. Yeah. Yeah. It's not good.

It may be entertaining content, but down quality in terms of voices. You need to be able to be heard to be on a podcast. I think it would be difficult for somebody who's lost their voice to be on a podcast. So we have a real barnstormer of a show today. We do. This is a biplane that is going around from town to town

doing tricks aerially. It's that kind of show. It's that kind of show. So we're going to kick it off with some epic length follow-up, but in a good way. So why don't you tell me what we've got? Yeah, yeah, good follow-up. We're doing some restructuring of formats and verticals, and we've had some notes from the network executives, and it's all going to be good.

But we'll start with a little follow-up because I love the follow-up. follow-up uh listener rob wrote in to say uh thank you jason for motivating me to finally write my thing about all day battery life so we talked last week about apple solving for x with batteries and and uh mike uh pushed back on some of the theories in my charts which actually was quite enjoyable i really enjoyed that you were like well wait what about this and that was i love the give and take of that segment. I thought that was really great. Rob wrote a piece that we can put in the show notes where he talks a little bit about battery life and who uses, you know, people are creatures for habit, creatures of habit. He said, we get used to plugging in our phones.

More people would have their phones run out of battery if they never plugged in their phones, but you get trained to plug them in in order to hoard electricity, and then you end up in a place where your phone lasts, but it's been tethered. He makes a bunch of other points, and it's an interesting piece. I wanted to use that as a jumping off point to also based on some feedback that isn't in our notes that I got is just to discuss this. Apple seems to feel like Apple is well aware there are people who want more battery life on their iPhone. They're well aware of that. I think Apple seems to feel that the people who really, really want more battery life are a relatively small group that can just buy an external battery or a battery pack.

And I talk to people all the time. There are certain people who never use an external battery pack. And then there are other people who are like, oh, yeah, I always just buy a Mophie case. Like always. That's always what they do because for them, they like to live their life with that. That's always what they do because for them, they like to live their life with that. And Apple's approach seems to be that everybody else shouldn't have to take on more thickness and weight in their phone in order to fulfill the needs of this smaller group of people who want more battery life than what Apple is willing to give. Now, the question is, where do you make that cut off? If it's half the people want more battery life, or 70% of the people want more battery life. If most iPhones or many,

very many iPhones are always on battery packs, because the battery is just not good enough, to the point where it starts to also hurt sales of iPhones, because everybody says you can't buy an iPhone, it doesn't have enough battery life. You know, Apple has to make that decision about what is a niche feature and not fulfill it. And I feel like with a battery, I mean, that's definitely, that seems to be what they're doing is saying, look, most people get by just fine. It's not hurting the perception of our product. There are certain people who really, really, really, really want want more battery life but there are third-party products for them and we're not going to subject every person who uses this device uh to uh to extra weight because some people really want more battery life especially when they're third-party products so that seems to be where they're coming from so with my 5s i

had it living in a mofi case for practically all of its life because I wanted that extra battery. It doubled my battery power. But now with the 6 Plus, if I wanted a Mophie case, there's no way I could use it. It would be huge. Like, can you imagine? Although with the 6 Plus, there is one. But with the 6 Plus, it seems a lot less necessary

because the 6 Plus actually does have the best battery life of any iPhone. Yeah, definitely. I do wonder about battery life being a niche. I don't think it is. There's nobody in my life that I know that doesn't have battery issues. People are plugging their phones in multiple times a day or they're complaining that these phones don't get good battery life or whatever. I can't think of anybody that I know

that wouldn't be happier to have more battery life. But is that magic more battery life or is that more battery life but their phone is bigger and heavier? That's the tradeoff, right? And I want to make it clear, too. I got a couple notes about this. When I'm stepping through Apple's thought processes here, that is not an endorsement necessarily. I'm just trying to understand why Apple does what it does in some of this stuff. And I think that it's an interesting question of like, Apple presumably has an

internal research department that is polling existing Apple customers and prospective Apple customers and really trying to get a read on people's attitudes toward this stuff. And so Apple probably has a pretty good idea of what at least they think the add-on battery market is versus the people who buy an iPhone and don't buy an add-on battery. And I think it's an interesting question of where do you change your priorities? Where do you make the cutoff? I think we're talking about this because this is closer to being an issue than... I mean, there are things that are truly like so far out on the

edge that you're like, you know, I'm switching to desktop Linux. You're like, all right, you know, you're so far off on the edge of the mass of the people who buy this product that I'm not so worried about you. You're going to find a way to make yourself happy. I'm not going to take this product and mess it up a little bit just to satisfy these edge cases. But this one seems like it's a bigger bit just to satisfy these edge cases. But this one seems like it's a bigger issue and that there's more opportunity for Apple to revisit it and say,

well, which they may have done certainly by making the phones bigger. They've gotten battery life as part of the bargain. And so I think that's interesting, but it's not that I'm necessarily endorsing this line of thought. I'm just trying to understand why Apple does what it does, because I find that can be illuminating in trying to understand what else they might be doing. And I think this is an interesting question for that reason. So I had some follow-up and a little bit of pushback last week about my kind of claims about my battery life

and how great I think it is, basically. And I remember talking, I believe, with Nick Donnelly on Twitter, Upgradian listener, Nick Donnelly, and he was kind of saying that your battery life is great because of all the non-screen battery life it gets. It's not actually that much better, was his claim. So I was thinking about this and i think what he was kind of meaning is like yes the audio playback is way longer on

the six plus but standby and using the screen isn't so i wanted to think about this and kind of i took stock today of the way that i've used my phone now there is one thing that's really frustrating i wanted to include one of the usage statistics as like a screenshot. But I had to restart my phone at one point today because I'd lost data coverage. It was weird. Blame EE, my carrier. So now I can't get the numbers, the actual numbers, but I have times so I can give you that. So basically, I looked at it today. And so from 9am to 4pm, I have used my iPhone constantly. I've used it to check and reply to email. I've read the documents for these show notes in Google Drive.

I've read all of my Twitter stream for today. I was playing video. I was watching YouTube videos at one point whilst I was eating some lunch. I've been playing games. I've used Maps, and I've been listening to Overcast. I've been on a two-and-a round trip today for example where i was also listening to overcast and playing games at the same time because i i think when i use my phone i'm very rarely have the sorry very rarely have the screen off like even if i'm listening to a show i'm playing games or reading twitter or something like that so between 9 a.m to 4 ppm, so I've used my phone, I think constantly

throughout that period, maybe like an hour where I wasn't where I was in a meeting, I had 15% battery life left on my phone by 4pm. So I think I mean, and people can can argue with me, I think that's incredible. And it's way more way more than I got on my 5 and my 5S. Yeah. Like I would have sometimes 15% by like 11 a.m. doing the same kind of stuff. Yeah. I think most of the tests that involve screen on

show that the 6 Plus life is crazy. Yeah. And like to give kind of an idea to show like it is kind of screen on on time in the last 24 hours, I'm looking at 17% tweetbot, 16% messages, 15% home and lock screen, and then it goes down from there. I'm looking at it today and I'm like, yeah, I think that's pretty impressive. That's a work day.

I've done an entire work day working on my phone for the entire day, and it's lasted. Yeah. yeah yeah no it's good i i think um the the nice thing about the bigger screens is that by doing bigger screens apple is also picking up better battery life even if it was never on its own enough i I think with the bigger screen, it gives them an opportunity to do better battery life. And I liked, I mean, we had feedback based on our discussion from people talking about this idea that Apple, you know, Apple's power isn't solving the issues. They're not solving for X so much as they're a prisoner to the way that the technology grows and changes and all of that. And I don't really buy that because I think in the end, they could always make it bigger or heavier or keep it the same. And they often choose not to do that. And that shows where their priorities are. Yes, they are a prisoner in the sense that

this is a math problem. That's why I say it's solving for X. This is algebra. You change one variable and the other variable has to change, and you're trying to get the right balance. And the way I figure it, there's a number below which they won't go. And it varies some, but that number is lower than I think some people, mystery number of people, would put the minimum battery life. I think a lot of people would put it higher. But the good news is with the 6-line, at least, that number has come up perhaps as a side effect of having more area inside the device, so more places for battery to go just because you increase those screen dimensions and even though it's not very thick that's still you're adding a lot of area a lot

of volume inside the device um anyway i i it's a it's a i think it's an interesting interesting topic and i'm glad uh i'm glad we got some feedback about that um so let's see do we want to do a sponsor break now yeah let's let's take our first break um okay this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by our friends over at lynda.com lynda.com is used by millions of people around the world and has over 3 000 courses on topics like web development photography visual design and business all of their courses are taught by experts, and they're adding new courses to the site every single week.

With lynda.com, once you sign up, you'll get unlimited access to every single course that they have, including all of the new stuff that they're adding all the time. You'll be able to view these on your tablet, your mobile device, their apps for iOS and Android, as well as on the desktop. Lynda has out something for everyone. Whether you're looking to find a new hobby, you want to improve on some skills,

maybe you want to find a new job and completely retrain yourself, you're going to find stuff that you want. For example, if you want to learn how to build an iOS app, they have iOS app development training. They have a Swift essential training if you want to start learning Swift. There are a couple of courses that I've seen

around on lynda.com. You'll be able to work along with these instructors to help get a good understanding of what it takes to build an iOS app. Or'll be able to work along with these instructors to help get a good understanding of what it takes to build an iOS app. Or maybe you want to work along with these instructors to learn how to edit a podcast or to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop. They have everything you want.

Maybe you want to learn a bit about online marketing. They have experts that can teach you all of this stuff. Do yourself something good in 2015 and sign up for a free 10-day trial to lynda.com by visiting lynda.com upgrade i continue to be super impressed with lynda.com and i think you will too every time i go in to try and find new things to talk about i'm blown away by just the breadth of courses that they have and it's growing all the time so go learn something new this year go to lynda.com upgrade and sign up for that 10-day free trial thanks so much lynda.com slash upgrade and sign up for that 10-day free trial. Thanks so much to lynda.com for supporting this show and RelayFM.

Thanks, friends. Thanks, Lynda friends. More follow-up. Something related, it seems, to last week when I admitted that I don't use full screen mode very much, not even when editing, not even when editing and using Logic 10 on an an 11 inch macbook air which i admit is kind of crazy you can't really use logic in in full screen though because when you're trying to move around the interface it kind of sometimes requires you to drag outside of the app to move quickly enough so even i don't use even though i am a full screen person i don't use logic in full screen

because it slows me down i will sometimes use it uh once i'm i've finished dragging everything in and i'm just kind of motoring away with uh with editing for a while but um it's not it doesn't save me that much space either honestly it saves me a very small amount of space um any anyway uh i podcast editing, I'm going to write something about this on Six Colors this week, but I should pass on... I made a video. I made two videos this week, actually. I posted two videos this week. One of them we'll put in the show notes. Well, we'll probably end up with both of them in the show notes, won't we? But I'll put one in for you right now, Mike. I did a time lapse of me editing The Incomparable this weekend. And I'm going to write about how I edit podcasts and

embed that video. But it's up now. So we can put that in the show notes. And I saw CGP Grey did this with an episode of Hello Internet, I believe. And I thought that was the show notes. And I saw CGP Grey did this with an episode of Hello Internet, I believe. And I thought that was an interesting idea. And when I write about editing, people ask me how I do my editing. And I occasionally post a screenshot and people try to understand what the heck they're seeing. And I realized it might be useful sometime to do a time lapse. So there's a video up at, I think it's like 200x of me editing an episode of The Incomparable, a fairly straightforward episode of The Incomparable that you can

go see, speaking of editing things. The difference between yours and Grey's video is Grey's video is 65 minutes long, because he didn't really speed it up as much as you did. Depending on your tolerance. Yeah, I took the maximum speed of Final Cut Pro,

the 200x mode, and I just said do that. And so it's about 10 minutes long, which should be enough. You can pause it. You can move around in it and see stuff if you want to. And it's a 1080. It's a full HD, so the resolution is pretty good if you want to see it at that level. And you can set speed on YouTube, so you could watch it at a quarter speed if you wanted to.

Exactly. There you go. Brilliant. So plenty of options there, and I will write something up about that hopefully this week. That is a top tip from me, by the way, the speed on YouTube. If I'm watching a video, like a keynote video for something, like I'm doing some research, I tend to watch it at 1.5 and it helps me get through things a lot quicker. People who listen to podcasts at elevated speeds will appreciate this tip.

They will. Listener Connor wrote in related to this saying, establishing habits. Apple releases a new feature that allows greater productivity. How does JSON implement it? I have two answers to this. One is I tend to try all the new things because I usually am reviewing this stuff. So I have to use the new features.

And so I do. And sometimes those new features will stick. And I'll use them. And other times they won't. And they'll fall by the wayside. and I'll use them. And other times they won't, and they'll fall by the wayside. And there are many, many, many OS X features, for example, that I have used during the development phase of the operating system. And then the moment that I'm done with my article, I never use them again. That happens a lot. Why is this, Jason? Why do you think this is? Are you so ingrained that you

don't, things don't catch on? My second point was I've been a Mac user for 25 years, right? Why do you think this is? Are you so ingrained that you don't, things don't catch on? My second point was I've been a Mac user for 25 years, right? So, and I've, and it's not just, it's not just habit, but it's efficiency. And this is something that I think, the key moment to adopting a new workflow, I think, we should talk about this with David and Katie sometime, Mac Power users, vertical. The key moment is when you realize that your super optimized thing that you've built up over time, because I think that's what most of us do as users, is we build up these super optimized workflows that may not even make sense,

but they built up step by step. Each step made sense. I think that happens a lot in life where you create this crazy bricolage of things and you would never go that way by choice. But each step seemed to make sense. And so you end up with this thing that is efficient for you and really idiosyncratic. But it works and it works for you. And a lot of computer users have that. They're like, well, I do it this way. Well, I don't, why do you do that? Like my editing

video, right? It's like, why do you edit it that way? I had somebody who's a professional audio editor commented on the video on Twitter. And he said, he said, this is both, I don't watch and must watch because there are probably things in there that'll make me go, why? And other things that'll make me go, oh, right. So my point is we do this and we build these things up and then, and, and this is how we do our jobs on, on computers. Um, the trick is when something new happens to, if you're lucky, you look at it and you realize that if you do this new thing, even if it's slightly more work in the beginning, you can see that it will be less work in the end once you are comfortable with it. And that's a hard thing to do because there's a learning curve there and it's unfamiliar. And you have to have the kind of vision of like, oh, that might be a better way to do this. Maybe I'll try that. And that's hard. And sometimes people just, I mean, vision of like, oh, that might be a better way to do this. Maybe I'll try that.

And that's hard. And sometimes people just, I mean, most of the time, probably, people just don't do it. They just don't bother. They're like, look, I've got it the way I want it. I'm really efficient with this. Like Chris Breen tried to get me to edit podcasts in Audition because he thought Audition was superior to Logic. And I just, one is I just learned how to do logic. But the other thing was I had constructed what I think is a very good logic editing workflow for the kinds of shows

that I do and what I'm trying to solve for, back to algebra, which is I want a good quality show, but I also want it done as fast as possible. And I can do it really quickly with my approach. And I think Chris's approach is more careful in some ways, but takes longer. And it's one of those things that I could probably learn audition and it might pay off. It might not. And I decided, you know what? I just started doing Logic. I'm pretty happy with it. I'm going to stick with it. But I think we all have that with new features of any operating system, you know, any upgrade to software.

Upgrade? Okay. Ding. The show's paid for itself. And it's a challenge. It's a challenge for all users. I think actually the more efficient you are, the more a power user you are, where you're doing these weird things, putting different apps together, using utilities like TextExpander or Keyboard Maestro or things like that. The more of that you build on, the more efficient you get, but the harder it is to unravel that and go back to something and try something new. I have the assorted cruft of 25 years of being a Mac user. And

although OS X kind of broke a lot of that stuff, I've still had, you know, whatever, 11 or 14 years, 13 years of OS X hardcore use to do the same thing. So yeah, it's a challenge. So I try, because I have to write the reviews. At least I have to try this stuff. Although one of the challenges with writing the reviews is if you're if you're writing on like a a separate boot partition you know um you're not really using it you're like do-do-do here i am in you know this new beta of os 10 monterey bay and i'm using to do okay now i need to do work restart and then you do your work well until you're really using it on your real work, and I know that's dangerous, but until you're doing that, you're not really using it.

You're just kind of tooling around in it and clicking on things. And that's not the same. So it's a challenge. But I feel like I'm actually having a damage in that my job requires me to try it at least. But even for that, even when you have that, like you have to try it it's hard to adopt that stuff yeah i think i think it's it's you know you say you kind of hinge on that point by saying it's your history like your your long history with the mac but i think everyone's the same like we all we all have our kind of our entrenched workflows like and it's very difficult to break them like i i was editing in garage band for way longer than i needed to because it was what i knew i just knew how to use it and oh i i had logic i had logic yeah and i was just like ah but but i only want to spend three hours editing this show

and if i go to the new program whatever day i do that it's going to be 10 hours i just never do it seven never used. I had 7, never used it. I bought 7 and never used it because I was convinced that I needed to learn it. I mean, 7, the UI was just like a toxic hell stew, basically. And like 10, when they brought 10 out, I was like, right, I can go in and do this now. Because, or X, I actually don't, it's called X, right? Did they call it X or did they call it 10? They call this one X, don't they?

They could go back. No, I think it's 10. Oh, so confusing. Well, it's 7 to 10. And then when that came out, I was like, I can understand this and it's new. So I can kind of jump in and I did that. But that took me a long time to then learn it, you know, and I'm still learning it. It's the thing, like, I use Logic every single day and there are so many features I don't fully understand how to use yet. But I know what I know and I know what I need to know.

And that's kind of a very kind of a simple thing for everybody. Do you know what's hilarious? Right now, I've just been told on my Mac to learn what's new in OS X Yosemite. It's like they can hear us. Come on over, guys. Let me show you how to use it. The dialogue box should be like, accept or deny. Just, no, I don't want to know.

Do not tell me anything that's new. I think Connor's question is good. I'm kind of serious. I feel like we should come back to this at some point. I think this is something that interesting podcasts that I listen to touch on this sometimes, but I feel like maybe this is the – a lot of times it's the unsaid thing. Maybe Upgrade is the right place since that's really what the name of this podcast is to talk about like

something you hear on mac power users or something merlin talks about on back to work uh he does that sometimes too and um and there's this this i'm fascinated by that idea that software companies work very hard to create things that are new new tools things to improve your workflow and users tend to fight against it which is an interesting push and pull. Like, you know, we need to give you, instead of it being users with pitchforks and torches demanding new features, the way it seems to work in the software world is all the users are like, no, don't change it. And the software company is like, guys, we got to stay in business. You got to buy new features. Here are some new features for you. You'll like them, try them, come on. And the user's like, no, no, I don't want anything new. Not all users, but that happens a lot. That happens a lot with people who really rely on certain pieces of

software to do their jobs because they don't like change. They've got these super optimized workflows. And it's a challenge because it's hard to move things ahead. I think this is why Apple, this, I mean, this is exactly why everybody freaked out when Apple did Final Cut X. And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying Final Cut X was a good idea. All right, let's see. I am. I think it was a good idea in general to say we're going to, we want to do something that's very different. The problem was the way they communicated it and the way they put it out there, it was, it as being oh you should upgrade and it wasn't it didn't have the features that anybody who was using the previous version of final cut uh could you know so many of them couldn't upgrade to it because it wasn't

really an upgrade they should probably have called it you know something new new cut second cut i don't know what it should have been just labeled as a beta like initially and just i kind of feel like it should have been i kind of feel like it should have been a new name a new name maybe hearkening back to the old name 1.0 because that's what it was right but i understand why apple wanted to do that and i and i totally understand why the users rebelled against it because again you make your livelihood in final cut pro and apple gives you this thing and you're like whoa this is nothing like what i used. And there, again, optimized workflows. I've got everything where I want it. Now you're completely messing this up. And even if in the end, after a lot of

work and a bunch of updates, it is a better approach. That's a lot of work that people may not want to do ever or right now. And just like you and me with logic, same thing. It was clearly going to be in the end. And that's why I finally jumped, is I realized my frustrations with GarageBand reached the point where I knew that I needed to put in the time. This is actually very similar to our feedback last week about scripting and Automator and things like that. It's like, at some point, you realize, oh my God, if I put in five hours right now, I'm going to save 100 hours in the next year. And that's, that's what drives that change, I think, is that final realization that what you've got now, although you optimized it is just not good enough. And there's something

out there that probably is better. And then you you take the plunge. And also like Apple ripping out some of the podcast templates and features in garage band was like okay time to go to logic like their their apple making their like their decision made on this you can still use the old garage band but at some point it was like with final cut right it's like at some point you know you better use it anymore so you got to kind of learn the new thing so i decided instead of trying to get learn the workarounds which there are workarounds to get in garage band to still output as a podcast like you'd want i figured it's just time to move to logic but this this this topic this this idea

like you mentioned a moment ago about the company deciding that they need new feet that you know listeners need new features and and and so users need new features and users rebelling ties in really interestingly to the, to the software turnaround that we've been talking about recently, you know, like who then, who is actually pushing the need for a yearly, yearly release cycle? Like, is it the company, you know, Apple thinking that if they don't do this, they're going to be irrelevant or is it users really wanting it? And maybe users don't want it. You know, I just think it's an interesting thing that actually ties back to something

that we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks. Yeah, I mean, where is the drive? I think there's some features that users, I mean, the fact is, it's that famous thing about the faster horse that I guess maybe somebody actually said, you know, if you ask people what they wanted, you know, carriage horse and buggy users, they'd say a faster horse. They wouldn't say a car. Users don't always know what they want. And that's sort of Steve Jobs famously has said that, that they don't do a lot of focus group testing at Apple, right? Because people don't know what they need until Apple comes up with it and presents it to them. And there's some truth to that. There are features that you're like, oh my God, this is so great.

But there are also things that it's that march of progress. It's like, oh, well, you need to change how you do things. But in the end, it'll be great. And people are going to be much more resistant to that than if it's like a totally new thing, I think, that comes out of left field. Yeah, this is really interesting. We've gone beyond follow-up now. I feel bad because we had short follow-up and now that hasn't happened. But this is really a topic.

So thank you, Upgrady and Connor, for driving us into this topic, which is, I think, one of the core questions of being a technology user and I think one of the core things that we have been and should continue to talk about on this show, which is essentially upgrade or not, right? Yeah. And upgrades aren't always upgrades, right? Upgrades aren't always what the people want. It's really interesting. Subscription stuff for companies like Adobe, and Microsoft is doing this too, you could argue that that's a part of this too. ways potentially having a subscription service for your software could allow you to escape from the we're going to shove an upgrade at you every year or two because we need the money to this other model which is look just pay to use our software we'll keep updating it you keep using it um there's a nice thing right there's nice things about that there are also bad things like they just push you a new version and you're like what wait? Wait, what happened to my old version? And there's nothing you can do about it.

That can happen with some of that stuff, especially web apps that happens like Google Docs. We've got a new version, but I liked your old version. Too bad it's gone. Fascinating stuff. Let's get back to follow up. Yeah, a couple more quick follow up items and then we'll jump into some of the other big topics we've got. A couple more quick follow-up items, and then we'll jump into some of the other big topics we've got. Listener Diane asked if anyone was considering that Apple could be planning a magnetic charger like the Apple Watch is supposed to have.

And I think people, I've heard people talk about that. You know, MagSafe is that, though. MagSafe is the magnetic charger. It's smaller, I believe, than the one that's on the Apple Watch. I don't know what's going to happen you know i i um i i think it's unlikely that there would be an induction based charger on the macbook air i suppose it's possible but there are then you need to have a pad or something to put it on um i i i i don't feel like that's going to be what what they're going to do so that's my quick answer i think what people are wondering with that question is,

are they going to bypass that single USB for power completely? I think that's the question, right? I don't think so. No, neither do I. Because one, German probably would have found that out. And two, I don't know where you put it. Like other people said, what about on the Apple logo? That would be a disaster.

That would just be a disaster like there's no good would come of charging through that little uh apple logo though i can't see the window very well no um let's see upgradian zach wrote in identified himself as an upgradian so definitely an upgradian good man and diane of course is the one who suggested upgradian to us in the in the So she's an Upgradian, Diane. Upgradian Zach says, do you guys think Apple would dump the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air and replace them both with the 12-inch? My take on this is eventually. I think that's probably what would happen. But I don't think it would happen right away.

Only because Apple seems to have had a lot of success keeping old models around that you see the old iphone models around and and the way that works is every year that a chipset is out there every year all those components are out there being used they've already they've so they've set up the factory to build them so that's that no cost it's already there you just have to keep the lines running and the parts get cheaper over time. So a product with a small product margin to begin with can have a very large product margin later on in its life. Ben Thompson just had a two-part interview for Stratechery members where he was talking to Hugo Barra, who used to be working on Android and now is at Xiaomi in China, and he's the international VP or something. But he was talking about this very phenomenon that one of the ways

that they are profitable on their hardware is that they'll keep models around for four or five years in different markets. And after the first year, they get really profitable. And Apple has done that with the iPhone. The non-retina 13-inch MacBook Pro is still being sold by Apple even now. So my gut feeling is that the 11 and 13 Airs will keep on for a while. And that's why my gut feeling is that the new 12 will be more expensive than the old Airs

because it'll be retina and they're not. And they'll be old tech, so they'll be cheaper because they can cut the prices and still keep their margins really high. So that's my gut feeling, is that they will eventually fade away, but it will be a fade and not just a they're gone. If I had to guess, that would be my guess

because that seems to make economic sense and it seems to be a strategy that Apple really likes because that's their phone and iPad strategy too. It didn't used to be this way, but look at the current iPad line. It's the same thing, right? They're all three versions of the iPad mini are still being sold. It's crazy. Crazy. I would like to give my punditry based on uh please not as much knowledge as you have on these things i actually think that the 11 and 13 wouldn't be called won't

be called the air anymore um i i foresee uh the 11 and 13 air going away and the 11 and 13 as they are currently just become macbooks macbook 12 takes the air i like your way of thinking because i don't see if it is as thin as it is they're not the same line anymore and i think apple are then showing that that 12 inch line is the future of a new product line like they did with the air in the first place and moved the macbooks you know when they changed they've changed all the names around over time haven't they like what's become macbook has become macbook pro and that kind of thing. So I foresee another shift in the naming again. So they end up with the Air line, the MacBook line, and the MacBook Pro line.

It's possible. There's some confusion there. I would say I am on board with that way of thinking if they intend to keep those products around in some form. Yeah. products around in some form yeah i think the 11 and 13 would stay until then they can improve they can like stabilize the new air model make other iterations of that in different sizes and then bump the 11 and 13 out again like they've done in the past like we had the air the macbook and the macbook pro right and then the macbook doesn't exist anymore so i think it'd be a similar kind of thing so they'll bump them up and then when they can get rid of those they'll remove them. We'll see

I'm intrigued that's a nice bit of punditry well done. Thank you. Five points unfortunately we're not keeping score one last bit of feedback which was listener Joe

who said if I'm Mac and iOS only is there any reason to use 1Password over just using iCloud Keychain? Really good one. Without going into too much detail, because that could be a whole other topic. I think iCloud Keychain is good, and I think it's better than nothing. I've already invested in 1Password, so I feel like I want to keep going with that. But the reasons are it is more flexible. I believe iCloud Keychain only works on Safari on the Mac. Is that right, Mike?

Yeah, it doesn't work in Chrome on the iPhone, for example. Well, yeah, but on the Mac, does it work? Or just in Safari? I'm not 100% sure about that. I don't know. I'm going to say it does, actually. I'm going to say it does. All right.

Okay. So more flexibility. I'll find out. Other browsers on iOS, it doesn't work. And it has a great feature where if you sync your 1Password on Dropbox, you can actually access inside the 1 one password bundle is an HTML file that you can open in a web browser. And you can put in your password and you can use one password with just access to the file and no software at all, which is awesome. It supports for multiple accounts

on sites. Apple's iCloud keychain is kind of brain dead. It's really, really good for one login, but if you have more than one login, it's not so good. It's also, if it doesn't work on a particular site, you're just out of luck. Whereas with 1Password, you can actually go in and edit which fields you want to have it be saved, and then it'll work. It's an extra layer of security

because when you unlock your phone and are using Safari, iCloud keychain will work. It's an extra layer of security because when you unlock your phone and are using Safari, iCloud Keychain will work. Whereas with 1Password, you have to enter in another password in order to get it. I'd say iCloud Keychain is really great to have around, and I use it for some things. I've got something saved in iCloud Keychain, and I just don't even have to bring up 1Password in those instances. I can be like, yeah, iCloud Keychain, great. But it's a typical story of Apple doing a feature that is really, really nice and friendly and broad. And if you're using the very base set of features, it's good enough. And if you want to go beyond that, then that's where the third parties are strong.

So I found a Chrome support document that says on a Mac, Google Chrome uses the Keychain access to store your login information. So I don't know if it's pulling from it, but at least it stores there. I think for me, with one password, the other thing is I feel like I have more visibility of what's actually in there. I find the iCloud keychain to be a little bit more hazy and weirder to update.

It doesn't really have UI. You've got the keychain assistant, keychain access and all of that. And yeah, I mean, it's again, Apple's trying to keep it simple and faceless. And when it works, it's fine. As long as you're always on iOS or Mac. Keychain shouldn't do any more than it already does. It does everything it should be doing, in my opinion. And then if you want more, you go one password.

Same as like reading list. Like it does the bare minimum. And then if you want more. There was one password. Same as like reading list. It does to bare minimum. And then if you want more. There was one thing I wanted to mention, Jason. It's not really a follow-up, but I saw it today and I thought it might interest you. Mac user in the UK is closing its doors, the magazine. Indeed.

Now, I know that Mac user in the US. Is Mac user in the US affected? Do you know? Mac user in the US doesn't exist. Mac user in the UK was the only MacUser remaining. I started my career at MacUser. What happened is Ziff Davis licensed the name outside of the UK from Dennis Publishing in the UK. And so all the other MacUsers around the world were Ziff Davis.

And then when Ziff Davis and IDG got together and merged MacUser into Mac, all the Mac users went away except for Mac user UK. So Mac user UK, it's actually the reason why Mac world in the UK gives stars instead of mice. It's because the mouse rating originated with Mac user, whereas Mac world in the U S when, when it took over Mac user decided to keep the mic, the mice around instead of the stars just because it was a little more distinctive

and there were enough of us who were from Macuser who were like, come on, use the mouse, use the mouse. Mouse and the Eddie Awards stuck around even though those were originally from Macuser. That's a little bit sad then to see Macuser completely shut its doors now. It is. It's the last thing with that name.

And so that is said. It's a very similar story to the one that I told about IDG, which is like IDG, Dennis Publishing was run by a iconoclastic billionaire who did what he wanted and who passed away. I mean, Felix Dennis, quite more of a character, an outsized character than Pat McGovern. But same story, which is he passed away and they're running the business differently. And whether that directly impacted the shutting down of Mac user, my gut feeling is that like Pat McGovern, it was more difficult to get rid of some of the longstanding products with the founder around than when the founder was gone. But it is sad. Some great people work there and some great people came out of there over the

last 20 years. I first got to know Ian Betteridge when he was doing Mac user and it's a shame. Mac world UK, as far as I know, is still going strong, which is great. And I, I hope to be over there in March and actually visit with those guys. But not you. No. Well, maybe you. Well, if I'm not seeing you at Ool in Ireland,

then I will try to see you in London. One of those things will happen. Maybe we'll do an upgrade, live upgrade. Wouldn't that be something, an in-person version of upgrade? We haven't done that yet. We have not done that yet. Jason, would you like to thank a friend before we get into some topics and hour in?

Is that your way of saying that I'm thanking the friend personally? Yeah. Okay, well then in that case it must be MailRoute. You bet it is. I'm happy to thank my friends at MailRoute. I like to thank them frequently because when I open my mail and there's not spam in it, one of the big reasons why is because I use MailRoute. If you can imagine this crazy world that I live in, there's no spam, no viruses, no bounced email messages.

I open my mail and I only see legitimate mail, the stuff that I want to see. And that's because of MailRoute. MailRoute isn't hardware. It isn't software. It is a cloud service. So it sits between your mail and the big bad internet and it takes the mail in. It uses its intelligent filters to figure out what's spam and what's virus and what's bounces. It filters that stuff out and then it passes all the other mail along to your mail server. So for a while, I was running my own mail server in my house over my own internet line, and every spam message that came in was slowing down my internet line. And MailRoute stopped that, which was awesome.

And I still use it to this day. It is really good at filtering out just the bad stuff and letting the good stuff through. They've got a digest they sent me every day that says everything that they filtered out. And there's a one-click hyperlink in that message so that I can auto-deliver and whitelist any messages that happened to be marked as spam but weren't. And that doesn't happen very often. They're just very good at keeping the good stuff good and the bad stuff bad. If you are an email administrator or an IT professional, you'll be happy to know that MailRoute will work great for you. They've got an API for easy account management. They support LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, Outbound Relay,

Mike's favorite, which is mailbagging. Mailbagging! Everything you want from the people handling your mail. Remove spam from your life for good. Go to mail route.net slash upgrade. You'll get a free trial. You can try this out without paying them anything. And if you use mail route.net slash upgrade, you can sign up for 10% off. And that's 10% off the lifetime of your account with mail route.

It's not a temporary thing. It is the lifetime of your time with mail route. So thank you so much to mail route for filtering out my spam and sponsoring Upgrade. Thank you, MailRoute. And a good friend. So Jason, you did something really interesting this past week.

Uh-oh. You went into full-on video production mode at Six Colors HQ. Multiple cameras and everything. Tell me about why you wanted to do this and what the article was about. I think my children would dispute the idea that I'm a YouTuber, but I did post, I got some work to do to be a YouTuber. But I did post a video. This isn't new for me. I have actually done multi-camera video stuff all by myself before for the various Macworld how-to videos that we did

over the years. And actually for a lot of the stuff that I did under NDA, you know, new Apple products, they would say, you'd sign this NDA that said, we talked about this in episode one. In fact, they signed these NDAs saying nobody, but you're, you know, you can show it to your family, but they are also under the NDA and you can't show it to anybody else. It's just you. At your whole editorial organization, it's just you, which is kind of ridiculous because you got to have editors, and there's planning and all of that, but that was what the NDA was. And so I would sometimes do these videos where I was setting up two cameras, and I was editing it myself, and I was doing all the technical stuff and shooting it and editing it, and then I'd post it. And simultaneous with me posting this completely homemade video about the iphone 4 or something there'd be on uh on the d site at the

time all say all things digital uh there would be a walt mossberg video where he was like clearly in a studio with a bunch of cameras and that there was obviously a whole technical staff who put this together because i'm telling you walt didn't edit that himself and i was like god walt mossberg it was like he was he was uh he was uh going a little bit beyond this the the letter of the nda um but at the same time i was happy to do it because i i do know how to uh edit a video if i have to so um so i've done that in the past and i i want to do more of that i i would like to do regular videos on Six Colors. If I can find reasons to do them, I will do them. So I did one about CarPlay.

I followed Marco Arment's lead, and he bought a CarPlay unit for testing Overcast because he wanted to do Overcast on CarPlay. Overcast on CarPlay. And the way he did it was he bought a unit on Amazon, I think, and bought a couple of adapters so that he could just run it on his desk and not put it in a car. And so that's what I did. I bought a Pioneer CarPlay double DIN head unit on Amazon. And I bought a couple of those same adapters that Margo recommended and plugged it in and got to use CarPlay and then decided I would do a video because there are not that many. There's some, but there are not that many CarPlay videos. And most of them date back to the fall. And I wanted to give my readers a view of what CarPlay looks like today, because I think it's still a little mysterious.

And I figured not enough people are writing about or talking about CarPlay. And by having a CarPlay unit in my house, I can stay up on it if I need to. And if this becomes a thing at all, I'll be able to write about new stuff that happens with CarPlay. So I figured it was worth the 500 bucks

or something I had to pay to buy the hardware. So I made a video, which required me to, that was a challenge. I ended up with a camera shooting me on a tripod. That was fine. But to get a camera in position to shoot the screen with the CarPlay interface on it

was tricky. I ended up with an iPhone on a tripod and had that on my keyboard tray pointing at the screen of the CarPlay thing. CarPlay looks like a disaster. I don't recommend it to anyone. No, it looks like a total mess. If you haven't already, go and watch the video. I don't recommend it to anyone. No, it looks like a total mess. Yeah.

So if you haven't already, go and watch the video. I loved it as a video, by the way, because I like to see that kind of thing rather than just read it. Six minutes of a guy pushing buttons on a touchscreen. Woo! Yeah. So you can go over to our show notes, relay.fm.upgrade.19. You'll see it in there.

And that's where I am right now. That is Six Colors World Headquarters. I'm not kidding. That is the corner of my office with the microphone I'm talking into right now and everything. So if you want to completely ruin your vision of how I do this show,

watch that video. Perfect. It seems like the only app on the entire system that looks and kind of works the way you'd want it to is probably maps it's maps yeah everything else look it looked buggy like even like the phone like siri just didn't work it seemed like for some of it like you were trying to to call your wife right and i noticed that you cut the video because it looked like siri was just not not understanding it was like what number would you like and it'd be like home and it'd be like i don't know i think in the video i just tapped i just tapped the screen i might forget it you just like just go away um well there's

a timing issue with siri a lot of the time where where it will um uh it beeps maybe a little late and you're trying to say it and so it missed it and then by the time you say it again, it's given up. And so you end up in this really... If you get the timing wrong with Siri, it can get really frustrating.

And you mentioned you show the messages and you're dictating a message. It's like, why can I not just use the audio feature? Like, just record an audio and send that? Yeah, that one completely baffles me is that is they they put in this audio messages thing in ios 8 and carplay doesn't support it which would seem to be the best way to communicate in the car is that you could send an audio message to somebody and then they if they wanted to send text back to you at least as an

option i don't know how the interface works to say I prefer, you know, maybe Siri says you want to send this person an audio message because I think Siri knows whether it's compatible or not. But it would be, yeah, I don't understand why, because that would be much easier for me to just say, hey, Mike, you know, I'm headed over. I'll be there in 20 minutes and have it just send my audio of me saying that. And then if you wanted to reply,

it would just, I'd just hear your voice. And it's not, it doesn't do that. It's all text to speech, speech to text. Just that's, yeah, it feels like it's old Siri. It actually, Gruber was writing about how he feels like Siri's gotten a lot better lately. And I agree. When I use CarPlay, I feel like, oh, this is how Siri used to be. It feels like Siri's gotten a lot better lately. And I agree. When I use CarPlay, I feel like,

oh, this is how Siri used to be. It feels like old Siri. It doesn't feel like better Siri. It feels more laggy. And maybe that's just because it's going through the CarPlay interface. I had some people ask me also, could it just be that the Pioneer unit is lousy,

not the CarPlay is lousy? And my understanding is that what's happening is the iPhone is projecting CarPlay onto the Pioneer unit. So the Pioneer head unit is responsible for perhaps the scrolling being laggy and certainly for the touchscreen not being great and sometimes mistaking scrolls for taps and things like that. But I think everything else is the fault of iOS. Everything else, I think, is coming from the phone. I've had a couple people say to me, oh, I found it works a lot better. Third-party apps work a lot better

when you turn off the phone and then turn it back on. And I'm like, okay, one, that's terrible. As a thing to help, like in the car, whilst you're driving, it's the worst possible thing. And two, I tried it and it didn't help. I think it made the iHeartRadio app menu come up the first time, but then it still crashed. And in the video, you get to hear me crash Overcast. I believe while playing ATP, that's extra funny.

But certainly it crashes Overcast while I'm using it. And it just sort of sputters to a stop and then goes back to the main screen. It started to sound all distorted, and then overcast just exploded. Yeah, the third-party apps are... If it only happened on one of them, I would say, okay, this...

Marco or the iHeartRadio people didn't do a very good job with their first iteration of it, but they're both really buggy. So as far as I can tell, the third-party apps thing is still a mess. Apple's website lists all of these third-party apps that are supported by CarPlay. And I could only find like two or three that actually work on CarPlay. They've got like Beats Music. It's on CarPlay.

Nope. Nope. It's not. It's not. And it makes me think that this is a problem. And there's not a lot of scrutiny being put on CarPlay right now so they can get away with it, but it's just not fully baked. I think the third-party stuff is a mess.

I've asked Marco a couple of times. I sent him some emails saying, I'm seeing lots of problems with CarPlay, and I haven't gotten a response from him. I wonder if that's one of those, you know, can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. But I don't blame him or the iheart radio developers i feel like um i feel like the the the third party stuff is is really

half-baked like from carplay as far as i can tell it's all unstable and then the main carplay stuff isn't great maps is the best one i i do i do feel like this is a little bit um oh i should say i didn't wire in the parking brake which i need to do because the this is a little bit, um, Oh, I should say I didn't wire in the parking brake, which I need to do because the interface is slightly different. That was the while driving interface. There is a more full interface, like a keyboard will come up and stuff if you're parked. Oh,

um, but you, but that's wired into the parking brake and you can actually buy something on Amazon that overrides that. And that's for people who want to watch videos while they're driving, I guess, which is very dangerous. And don't do that, but you can do that. So I may buy one of those and wire it in just to do what I need to do to test this stuff. But the larger point is that, yeah, the Maps app feels exactly like what I want it to be,

which is, oh, this is maps in a dashboard context. That's actually kind of great. I like that a lot. The rest of it, not so much. Like the music app even, it seems like there are no concessions to long lists. You've got this little tiny screen and you can't do the ABCD down the side. You just have a list that you have to scroll through. And like on my Honda Odyssey minivan that

we have, that's about four years old, it's not got an iPod interface and it's just got a click wheel basically to connect to the iPod, but it's got on its little crappy slow interface. It has this A to Z mode where you, if you're, if you have a list of, you know, 500 artists, cause you have, have a device with lots of storage capacity attached, you can go A to Z. And basically, you can scroll through the letters until you get to the letter where your artist is. And then you click. And then it shows you all the artists starting with that letter. And it's a way to jump down in the list even though you don't have the interface for it because you could never scroll through that.

There are very few, if any, concessions to that kind of thing it's in this interface it just seems really rudimentary um and yeah i i would i haven't put it in my car and i'm not going to i've got a sony bluetooth um stereo in there that i bought a few years ago and i can you know my phone is paired with it and i can pause and press the back button and press the forward button and move around in podcasts. And it's fine. And it will not show me anything because it doesn't have a video screen on it, but it will play the audio of my turn-by-turn navigation.

And it's good enough. And CarPlay for these expensive units, it's just not ready. I think it's actually good for all concerned that there are only a few devices that support this and there are very few cars currently that have it because it doesn't feel like it's a finished product like carplay's one thing the one thing that uh is intended to do is to stop distracting you right that's the idea of it existing is to provide an interface that doesn't distract and allows you to focus

and concentrate on driving. So stability and ease of usability needs to be at the fore. And your video shows that that's actually couldn't be further from the truth because some of the things that you would want to do, like using the kind of the the voice memo stuff to send messages is less distracting um than then dictating and listening and having it fail um and stability kind of needs to be key maybe there

shouldn't be third-party apps at all um on carplay if this is the case right now especially if they're allowing them in one at a time. They should be really scrutinized. Well, what you want is... I mean, there definitely need to be third-party apps because the Apple apps don't... You want access to different music services, and you want access to different audio stuff,

and you maybe want access to different information, like different driving things, right? Like I could see them allowing Waze and Google Maps on, and I could see them allowing, you know, Beats and Pandora and Rhapsody and all the music services on there, like iHeartRadio and podcast players like Overcast. That kind of makes sense. As an Overcast user, I don't want to have to use the podcast app for my podcasts because I don't. And I'm not going to go back to the podcast app

just so I can play different podcasts in my car than the ones I'm playing when I'm not in my car using Overcast. And I'm not going to abandon Overcast. So having the third party stuff in there could be good. Major League Baseball is supposed to be one of the partners. Again, it's not actually, at least they're not in the season now, so they have an excuse. But that's one of those things that I've wanted. I've wanted a Major League Baseball display in my car for a long time. I keep thinking that would be a great use because they could have like a scoreboard and you could tap on a game and it would play the audio and maybe put up a little like simplified status of like, here's what the score is. And here's who's batting something that is not super distracting, but add some information. Um, and that those are good uses of it. But

right now it's interesting too, because I have not used Android auto, but it's, it's fascinating to see that with, with Android auto, Google is trying to, it looks like, make a more dense set of interface elements than what Apple is using, which is super simplified. And as a user, I like the idea that Google is going in where it's a little more refined. I understand as somebody who wants to not get in a car crash, maybe Apple's approach is better. But it's problematic. Let's just say that. I find it funny that this is supposed to be the solution to bad UI from car entertainment, infotainment manufacturers, and yet here's Apple with something that's kind of bad. That's fascinating to me.

I guess the car is a harder problem than maybe they thought it was. Basically, I think my kind of view on this is Google is better placed than Apple to understand how to develop for hardware they don't control. Well, I mean, the way Apple is doing it is they are, I mean, they're mandating, like the CarPlay window is always the same size and there are two approaches, which is touchscreen approach or button-based approach

that you can use. And it's got to have a microphone input and it's got to have audio output. And so it is, I don't think that's the problem. You know, again, I don't think that's the problem. You know, again, I don't love the touchscreen on this Pioneer unit. It's poor.

And using an Apple created interface on a touchscreen that reacts the way it does is a weird experience. And that is something that they're going to have to learn and that, you know, it may reflect poorly on them. But all the other issues that I'm having seem to stem back to – they stem from Apple's own software and their own decisions about this.

And like I said, this is like a stealth product in a way. I think people aren't even talking about it. In fact, probably whoever is working on CarPlay at Apple saw my thing and it's like, oh, why are they writing about CarPlay now? Stop. Someone's written about CarPlay. There's like an alarm went off somewhere. Because it's just, you know, it's below the radar. But, you know, I was really excited when Marco talked about how he was building a third-party app.

It's like, well, that's really interesting. I should get on this. And now I've seen the third-party apps. I'm like, oh, my God. It's not good. It's not good. So it was fun to do it. I put it off. I got that CarPlay unit in December and I just, I put it off for a while because I was traveling. And also just because the first time I used it,

I was like, oh my God, this is awful. And I had to think about it for a while and I wanted to get some other third-party apps and finally I had to do it. So if nothing else, the video will give you an idea of what this thing is without having to actually see it in person. And that's why I did a video, because I feel like even taking pictures of the screen would not do it justice, that you really needed to sort of see how the interactions worked. And I'll do a follow-up at some point with if I can find a way to enable the features that you have to have the parking brake on, the stopped, you know, when stopped features, if I can figure out how to enable that.

And there's something substantial there I'll try to do an update. I don't want to install it in my car. And I also, when GPS apps started to come out for the iPhone, I did a video that I shot in my car driving around. And it was so painful to do that, that I don't want to I shot in my car driving around, and it was so painful to do that that I don't want to make videos in my car if I can help it. So I'd rather have it be sitting on my desk. Podcasters in cars testing CarPlay. Exactly. New series from Jason Steele. Especially if I had camera people, it would be different.

But, you know, like I said, i shoot most of these videos by myself and so i was trying to figure out how you could lock down a camera somewhere and actually get a picture of the phone doing the thing um when you're going over bumps and the cameras are jostling or falling off where you had them tied up and it was yeah it was it was i don't want to do that plus i don't really you know i was really in love with it i would put it in my car uh because i would think oh it's so cool and i don't want it in my car i just don't i don't want to do that. Plus, I don't really, if I was really in love with it, I would put it in my car because I would think, oh, it's so cool. And I don't want it in my car. I just don't.

I don't want CarPlay in my car. I want DeskPlay. Okay. Keep it at that. Yeah. Jason, would you like to tell me about Stamps.com? I could do that. I could do that.

Stamps.com, thank you for sponsoring Upgrade. Getting your mailing and shipping done, if you are, especially if you're a small business, maybe you've got a side business, you work all day and then you come home and you need to ship things out for your small business. It can seem like a no-win situation

because you go to the post office, it takes up time. If you're not available during post office hours, you're kind of stuck. You can lease a postage meter. That's expensive. There are multi-year commitments and lots of hidden fees, but there's a better way. It's stamps.com. With stamps.com, you buy and print official U.S. postage. This is why Mike can't, he's not allowed, the queen will not allow him to talk about it. But I can. You buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package right from your desk using your own computer and printer. You can even get special postage discounts you can't find at

the post office. And stamps.com is much more powerful than a postage meter at a fraction of the cost. You can save up to 80% compared to a postage meter and you'll avoid time-consuming trips to the post office. So if you've ever considered getting a postage meter or you have one and have dealt with how painful it can be, please consider stamps.com. Now, right now, you can use the promo code upgrade and get a special offer. There's a no risk trial and there's $110 bonus offer that includes a digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. So don't wait. Go to stamps.com. Before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in upgrade. That's stamps.com. Click on the microphone, enter upgrade, and then you'll get access to the special deal,

and they'll know that we sent you. And I've sent a package with stamps.com. I've got some other stuff I need to fulfill for my incomparable business that I'm going to be using to test out stamps.com and something to Mike as well because he deserves it and because you can also ship internationally using stamps.com so thanks to stamps.com for sponsoring the show

and my sincere apologies to Mike because the queen is mean and will not let him send things with stamps.com it makes me sad but I'm happy that stamps.com uh is allowing me to receive gifts so there you go can't argue with that yeah exactly so the you'll receive something from the great incomparable incorporated empire at a future time wow i'm excited. Yeah, I know. So there's been an interesting, I don't know about trend, but there's a couple of articles this week about app sales. So the guys at Us2Games released a really interesting infographic

about what's happened with Monument Valley, kind of sales-wise and revenue-wise. And then Marco posted a fantastic piece on his blog about how Overcast has fared in 2014. So I was interested, Jason, because I know that you linked to Marco's piece. And there may be more to say about Marco's piece in our world than the Monument Valley.

However, if you haven't than the Monument Valley. However, if you haven't seen the Monument Valley infographic, you should because the numbers are staggering to see, sort of download-wise and revenue-wise, and also the piracy, which is really interesting and maybe is a topic for another day. But I wonder, Jason, one, what do you think about developers releasing this information? Do you think it's helpful? Who is it helpful to? And kind of what is your take on it? I think it's really helpful because it's very hard. It's very easy to get the dream of being an app developer and just making the guess that, oh, it's the luxurious life of an app developer.

And boy, these app developers, they really got it made. And I think it's good to get these data points. And we've seen other indie developers release information too, because I think it gives everybody a better sense of if you're going to become an app developer, what are you getting yourself into? And what are the success stories? And what do they look like?

And what are the hits? And what do they look like? And what are the misses? And what do they look like? I think the misses and what do they look like? I think it's good to have that information out there. I also feel like nobody should feel they need to do it. But I'm very happy for the people who decide. Like Marco said, nobody wants to talk about money.

But I'm appreciative that Marco was willing to talk about money because people, if nobody talks about it, then nobody really has an idea of what's going on. And the more disclosure you get, the better, the clearer a picture you get. A lot of the comments I saw about Marco's thing were about the fact that he totaled up how much money Apple has made on Overcast. And, you know, we all know that Apple takes 30%, right? And, you know, we all know that Apple takes 30%, right? But I saw a lot of comments that basically said, wow, 30% is a lot. $70,343. Yeah, it's a third of the total.

I mean, you think 30%, you're like, ah, 30%, whatever. And then you realize that Marco made $164,000 on Overcast and Apple made 70,000. So Overcast made a lot more. Overcast made $240,000, but Marco only made 160 of that and Apple made 70 of that because that's what 30% is. And so that, even that, which is this basic thing that we all know, to see it laid out like that was really interesting. But in general, I thought it was also fascinating because I view having, you and I see some podcast numbers and we see some statistics about podcast clients. And by all accounts from all the podcasters in our sphere, at least, Overcast has been a big hit. It went rapidly from being non-existent to being the number one or number two podcast client in my feeds.

It's number one for everything, really. Yeah, yeah. With a bullet as well in some instances. I think iTunes may be bigger on some of my feeds, but mostly it's Overcast. And you could actually see the other clients go down as Overcast went up. So it was a huge hit. And so within our little realm, which is a tiny, tiny realm within this larger world of iOS App Store. So what it's fascinating to see is that Overcast, which by all accounts is a huge hit in its chosen market, is not, you know, throwing off millions and millions of dollars.

It's throwing off something that looks like a maybe sustainable business for Marco. As he put it, something that he can do while he's, you know, not working for someone else on something I don't care about is what he said. He can work in his home office, drink his fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if he wants to, and be around for his family. And that's successful by his definition. And that resonated for me because I'm in a very similar position where I'm not looking to create a media empire where I'm going to build a business and get investment and grow and get millions and millions of dollars. I'm looking to create a sustainable business that will allow me to live my life and support my family. And that is, so on one level, I'm really encouraged by Marco's post because he's saying he can

do that. On another level, though, I look at it and think, this is what dominating your, granted, niche product category, but still dumb. He's dominating that category. And this is what he's making, which suggests to me that iOS podcast apps is a category that only has a couple hundred thousand dollars in it. And that makes me think secondarily, um, you know, ouch, that's not sustainable for at least, uh, an ecosystem of apps, right? It's, it's all those apps that Marco used to link to and overcast. Um, they can't all be making this. He, if he's number one and this is what he's making, then none of the others are probably

throwing off on iOS, uh, something close to that now. And, uh, that's I, so, so I'm happy that it's sustainable for Marco, but his app was also a real success and we see it continuing to be a success. So that, yeah, that gives me some pause because what it says is that if you're not dominating like Marco is, you're not, your app is not going to provide a comfortable living on its own. Maybe you've got other apps and you cobble them together. Maybe you've got other apps and you cobble them together. Maybe you've got some freelance work, however you do it. I think that's the other side of it is that, is that, you know, he's, it's not just, Hey, Overcast did okay. Yay. I agree. That's true. But then I also think, Hey, on my charts, Overcast dominates. So what we're seeing here is it's all okay, is what happens with domination in that category that's a little

bit troublesome to me but that's what it is i i understand what you're saying but i don't agree which is interesting that we keep going down this uh this this route all right let's fight mike so when i see you in london fisticuffs yeah um overcast is dominant for us because it's the audience that we roll in. And interestingly enough, Upgrade has the lowest percentage of Overcast for us. Interesting. Of all of the shows. Oh, Upgradians, you yourselves are all so iconoclastic.

We love you. It is still the majority holder, but it's less. And Apple and iTunes has a bigger cut for this show than any other show that we do. I genuinely think the audience is different. And I hope that as we start to move into different areas, we see different things happen. Like the pen addict as well is a lower figure because it's a different world.

But I don't see this as only a couple of hundred dollar, $100,000 industry because if you take a look at what happened at the end of the year, at the end of 2014, there was an uptick for Marco and he calls it the serial bump yes so what that tells me is there are people in the world that found out about podcasts and and downloaded overcast but it also tells me that there is room to grow because i expect that whilst marco is a dominant uh player for us in the wider market that is Marco is a dominant player for us,

in the wider market, that is not the case. And that Apple is the dominant force. And it's interesting as to why that's happening. But if you think, for example, so if Serial has had a million listeners, which was that number been bounded about a lot, but let's just say that that's possible, Serial has had a million listeners, right? Which was that number have been bounded about a lot. But let's just say that that's possible,

that they had a million people listen. And Marco is potentially around 200,000 active users. He doesn't really go into too much detail, but he says 200,000 people launched the app and got far enough to create an account. So let's just say,

best case scenario, it's 200,000 people launched the app and got far enough to create an account. So let's just say, best case scenario, it's 200,000 people. Those numbers, do you see what I mean? They're very different. So that says to me that Marco has like 800,000 potential more people to go just for one show. And then when you open it up to what the wider audience can be. So it's all just me kind of just thinking as I'm going.

But like what this tells me is there is a market for Marco to be successful. there is a market for us to be successful as well what we do in podcasting as a whole and i see these two things as positives that they're positive trends and the fact that marco is continuing to make on average like what it's like 15 15 000 a month and there's no that's that's huge because my concern was going to be he was going to sell all of his all of his in-app purchases and then no one would ever give him any more money ever yeah i i figured that i think everybody had that fear for for overcast was that it was going to have a barnstormer of a star yeah and then that

was it but it definitely seems like that's not the case i mean and i saw a lot of independent app developers were like this is good news um to see can can can i get your opinion on something because i see people complain or not complain but i see people make this um claim and and i wonder what you think about it uh marco's successful so of course he's famous so of course right that's fine for marco yeah um let's see i look everybody's different marco has some unique uh things about who he is um i you know marco's notoriety and the fact that he's got this wildly successful podcast helps him launch a product. So the numbers at the beginning, are those attributable

in large part to his notoriety? Sure. It's great marketing platform for him the fact that he talked about the travails of developing overcast on atp for weeks and weeks um it helps it made me it made me want to see it that much more um and so that's that that is true and that you know marketing is marketing and marco's got marco marketing marco marketing marco um he he's got his own way of doing it and he's got his own way of doing it, and he's got his own fan base, and that's good. That'll only get you so far. So I think that trend at the very end of the stats, where he's still selling things, that's the encouraging thing, like you said, that people who know Marco have got Overcast if they're going to get it. And now it's people who are finding Overcast. And yes, his initial success helps drive the visibility of that app, which helps other people find it. That's true.

that's true I think there are things to be learned from Marco and his numbers despite that, despite the fact that he is in some ways unique as a developer yeah, so I guess that's my take on it it's hard for me to listen to that's fine for Marco statements without feeling a little bit like it's kind of like sour grapes, that

somehow he doesn't deserve it or that he, you know, that just, it keeps coming back to that. It's like, well, he's not one of us. He's famous and he's got this podcast and all that. It's like, well, you know what? He was just a guy when he did Build and Analyze. He was just some guy. I mean, he is responsible for having a guy. When he did Build and Analyze, he was just some guy. I mean, he is

responsible for having a following. So you can't just say, oh, well, it doesn't count because Marco's got a following. It's like, yeah, okay, you know what? That's one way to market your stuff is to become a known person. And not everybody is going to be able to do that. Not everybody is willing to put themselves

out there like that. But Marco has and he's gotten benefit of it, not just from ATP, but from his visibility leading to people being interested in his other projects. This is the 21st century. That kind of stuff, that's how it works now. Being an anonymous developer who throws a penny into a fountain and hopes that it becomes a hit app does not have a great chance of success. But if you're somebody who builds, not to get back to Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans kind of thing, but this is how it works.

This is absolutely a model for how this stuff works. And yes, even now, Marco's success with Overcast probably has something to do with the kickstart it got from his audience. And I don't know. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I do think there's an element of sour grapes. I also see the, oh, well, he's got all of that Tumblr money, so he doesn't even need this money to live and things like that and save it for the rest of us. I see some of that too. There's a lot of stuff out there, but Marco is, you know, he's well-known. He's a polarizing figure. Sometimes he brings it on himself.

A lot of times he totally doesn't deserve it and he gets it anyway. You know, it's complicated, but I would say there are lots of ways that you can market your products. And one of them is by being visible in the world and having people who are interested in what you're doing. And Marco's got that, but that doesn't mean other people couldn't do that too. I mean, Daniel Jalkut has a following. It's not nearly as big as Marco's, but Daniel and Manton

doing their podcasts, that brings, you know, that you're part of the circle. You're, you know, you're, you're, you're one, you're a little bit more than a face in the crowd at that point. And I, I think that is part of, even if it's not intended to be marketing, this will sell me some apps being visible on a podcast. I think that it's still part of the, the whole the, this again, this little world we live in, but it's part of that. It's part of the marketing cycle. It makes you more visible to get covered on websites where the people who write the websites know you, but maybe the people who read the websites don't. And yeah, and it goes from there. So it's just, this is how it works today. So I've gotten off on a little bit of a rant here,

but I do think it's unfair. I know that, sure, Marco is Marco, and not every developer is Marco, but at the same time, I don't really like the implication there that because Marco is Marco, we have nothing to learn from him, because I think that's bogus. Nobody gives you fame.

No. You have to work at that. And if it helped him to get a bump in the first week well that's that's what he gets for working hard and if he has tumblr money that's what he gets for working hard yeah like he worked hard and he made good things and i'm not saying that other people aren't working hard and making good things but sometimes you have to work for a long time well and you can't you can't say he's got a podcast so it's not fair it's like well do you have a do you have a podcast? Well, no, I don't like to talk and all that. Do you have other things that you do? Well, no, I don't. I'm not saying everybody who complains about it is like that,

but it's like those all go together. They aren't separate. It's not like this is an Olympic event in programming where only programming is allowed and all other things are not. That's not how it works. That's not how the world works. This is, this is marketing. This is a store. You were wanting, you want to have visibility. You want people to be talking about what you're doing. And, and, um, you know, it's, as John Syracuse would say, it's necessary, but not sufficient. It is, it is, you still have to have a good product. People still have to want it, but it is part of the way you get people to be aware that your product exists. And that's just how it is. And it's not invalidating the work that gets done. I just look at all this and I see it as positive.

No matter where he came from or what he did, this is positive stuff. Same for Monument Valley as well. We haven't really... I think the marketing is maybe more interesting to this discussion. But they made a lot of money. Yeah, $5.9 million in revenue.

But they pumped like a million, a million and a half nearly into building it. But it's still an incredible, I mean, it's relative, right? Because games do really well on the App Store, folks. Yeah, exactly. But it's all relative, right? Like that's a huge increase in profit.

Like if you put 10 grand into it and you made like 100 grand, you know, it's all relative. But so they's a huge increase in profit like if you put 10 grand into it and you made like 100 grand you know it's all relative but so they put a lot of money and they got a lot of money out um so that that's interesting but i think it is it is i think that you look at stuff like what marco's doing and i think that sharing this is positive for everyone is it's proving you can do it and for me what it proves more than anything else is you need to think about your business model. Marco had a different business model.

He had a free app with an in-app purchase, and everyone says you shouldn't do it, or everyone said it's gross and it's disgusting. It's not about overcast, but about doing a business model this way. You should respect us and pay up front, and I understand all of that. But what Marco shows is you sometimes need to think about

doing things a little bit differently. Because I think these graphs and charts would look very different if Overcast was a $5 to entry. Oh, totally. So I think that this is a key to thinking differently. And he wouldn't get sampled by those people who bought it over Christmas and then paid for it that that are in that in that chart because they wouldn't have bought it they would have just stuck with the

free thing for sure so you got you got to think about these things and i think that that is a demonstration of that so i say congratulations to him to be honest and i think he's done a great job so shall we uh round off today's episode with some Ask Upgrade. I think we shall. We actually have a sponsor for our Ask Upgrade segment this week, and that is our friends over at Smile. Smile and Ask Upgrade, perfect together. They go hand in hand. Today I want to talk to you about PDF Pen for iPad and iPhone.

There's a recently released version 2 of this fantastic app that brings new professional-level features to this already incredibly powerful mobile PDF editing app. The new features that you're going to find in Version 2 of PDF Pen for iPad and iPhone include a brand-new editing bar that provides easy access to all of your favorite tools, super smart palm and wrist detection for when you're writing and highlighting, the ability to apply password encryption to your super secret PDF documents that you don't want anybody to see. The ability to view and navigate

through annotations in the sidebar. Automatic page numbering, including Bates numbering, which is something that I found out is very useful in the legal and medical fields as a way to place identifying information onto documents. I'd never heard it,

but I guess if you need Bates numbering, you can now get it. And support for iCloud and Drive, sorry, and AirDrop to easily store and share your PDFs between devices. Of course, this all builds on the already fantastic PDF pen for iPad and iPhone version 1. It builds on all those features like giving you tools to add text to images and signatures to PDFs, the power to correct text in original PDFs

via editable text blocks so you can type in the text that you need, and an easy way to fill out PDF forms which now include specialized signature fields. If you want to revolutionize the way you deal with PDFs on your iOS devices, you need look no further than PDFPen for iPad and iPhone. Go and search

PDFPen 2 on the App Store today or go to smilesoftware.com slash upgrade to find out more. Thank you so much to Smile for supporting this show, RelayFM, and the podcasting community at large. We love you guys, and go check out their stuff. Thank you so much. Yay. So what do we have in Ask Upgrade this week, Mr. Jason?

I feel like we're reaching into the mailbag. I love mailbagging. Yes, it is. And this is like our mailbag. Yes. Yep, there you go. It is. This is our mailbag.

It's the smile mailbag. The smile mailbag. Just a mailbag with a really big smile logo on it this week. Yep, that's it. That's exactly it. Listener Javi wrote in to say, this is a good one, wondering why J. Snell has me blocked on Twitter. We're approaching awkward county, guys.

The answer is, I use Twitter's powerful search feature to find all mentions of listener Javi mentioning me on Twitter, and I found no examples of him saying anything that would offend me at all. It doesn't mean he didn't say something and then delete it later. I block lots of people because life's too short, and they get in my timeline saying strange things, or they won't leave me

alone, or they're telling me, you know, stick to technology, or I don't follow you to listen to you tweet about sports, so stop writing about that and stuff like that, and I just have a life's too short to deal with those people. I just block them. Now, you know, listener Javi, I had no idea why I did the searches. I can't find any anything. I found over the years that the people who most deserve to be blocked are not asking to be unblocked. I've had a few people like say, hey, can you tell Jason to not block me because he can't see my tweets anymore? And those people have never been a problem again. I've never had a problem with that.

So, so listen to Javi, you are unblocked. I don't know why you were blocked. You know, I just and again, these days they have mute. And so if somebody is not abusive, but it's just like saying things that bug me, I can, I can mute them on Twitter and then they can continue to see me, but I just don't see them. And I think that's a nice feature. But back in the old days, you know, the block was much more aggressive and I'll block jerks, you know, I'll block awful, awful people. But if I just don't want to see you because you're saying crazy stuff or whatever, or I just saying stuff that I don't want to see because I've got other priorities, then maybe I'll mute you instead and then you won't see it. It takes a lot for me to block someone, but I will do it. Interesting. I block if people are being – if they insult me, like personally.

I've had people that have made really weird jokes that i i don't like and and if you do that i will block you because that's that's the only way that i i know this sounds weird we're going into analog territory now but it's the only way that i feel like i can get anything back because i'm not gonna if you insult me personally if you insult because i had um i had somebody insult my appearance once in a picture and i was like you're going like that you don't and this sounds so terrible and and i apologize already for how big-headed this makes me sound but you don't deserve any entertainment from me uh if i could if i could reach in and delete your podcast app i would do that as well because at this point i don't know why you're here like why are you doing this to me like even if you think that's a funny joke we are not friends like i don't know you you don't i mean even if my i don't want to say what he said but even if my

friend said what he said to me i would i would be really upset about it so it's like it's the only one i can think that i've blocked for that reason otherwise like i i i report a lot of people for spam you know um sure if i feel if If I see people being aggressive towards someone, I report them for spam. I do that quite a lot because that blocks as well. But I see why you do it because I've seen scenarios where people talk to you in a really weird way. And if I had that kind of response, I think I would take that view as well.

It's basically just like, you know, this isn't so much just me and Jason because we're so super popular. If people are aggressive to you or upset you, you don't have to see that. And the easiest way to do it is just to get rid of them and block them out of your life. Life's too short and the social networks of the world are not a place where you should feel harassed. And Twitter need to do – this is a whole long thing we could talk hours about. There is so much more that Twitter needs to do and all of their promises have just been ridiculous so far. And they are not doing what they need to be doing. And the government in this country is trying to push them into doing that.

I had a nice conversation with Brianna Wu about this uh that was not on a podcast but it's the idea that uh you know there's no precinct police precinct for twitter nobody's twitter is nobody's beat facebook is nobody's beat and so the police are are almost incapable of focusing on this kind of thing which is why that you know which is why we need to rethink attacks and harassment and things like that on the internet. And if there are illegal acts happening, then there needs to be somebody who's patrolling it. And we don't have that concept yet

because our structures are decades behind that kind of concept. I have had on our list since episode one, a Twitter episode, and we'll get there eventually. Or maybe it will be the grand crossover between upgrade and analog. I don't know. But there's so much that I use Twitter for and so much I like about it and so much terrible stuff on it too. I mean, let's be honest. And I block, I'm much quicker to block only because I've got a lot of followers and I, and I attract some people who say things that are, um, that are unfortunate. And I, you know, I have, I have no patience for, for that. I, I, I am, and they'll always say like, oh, you, you're going to block him because you don't agree with him. And he's, he's debating you. It's like,

no, I don't block people because they're debating me. I block people because they're crazy. I block people because they're rude. I block people because they're not really interested in having a conversation. They just want to bug me and just keep needling me. And they're not actually having a conversation. It's stuff like that. It's just life's too short.

Again, if somebody, this is, there's a guy, Derek Poizek on Twitter who has this, who I have blocked in the past and unblocked later. And his whole thing is if somebody is, you see on Twitter is like making you, you know, making you angry or making you feel bad about yourself or anything that is unpleasant, that is making you not want to even use Twitter because it's so unpleasant, just block them and move on with your life or mute them. I suppose you could do now, but just, just it life's too, again, like I said, life's too short. Just move on. Nobody, you don't owe that to anybody. Like, and I love Twitter and I love interacting with people on Twitter and I do

it a lot. But every now and then there's somebody who is acting really entitled, like, why won't you answer my question? Or is telling me, I don't want to hear you, don't write about that. I want you to write about this other thing. It's like, I'm not here for your amusement. I'm here for my own amusement. And I like having conversations with people here, But the point is not that I'm dancing for you. You know, dance monkey dance is not, I'm not going to do that. So, yeah, anyway, it's a funny thing. But I do actually like, the one thing that Twitter has done that I like is this mute feature, which is back on the Macworld forums we used to talk about,

there was a feature that some forum packages had that was called Tacky Goes to Coventry. And basically, it's the global mute. Because if you ban a troll, they get really angry at you, and then they come back with a new sock puppet account, and they just keep on trolling you. But if you send them to Coventry, if you send them to the cornfield, um, they continue to rage as long as they want and nobody sees them. It's a global mute. They just, nobody sees their posts. They're there.

They see them. They think they're participating and they're not. And, um, you know, that Twitter mute is like that a little bit, which is like that person can just go on and on and on to me all they like. I'm just never going to see it and they can follow me.

And if they get something out of following me, that's great, but they're not going to interact with me anymore. And I like that because it, the block is like, I'm just never going to see it. And they can follow me, and if they get something out of following me, that's great, but they're not going to interact with me anymore. And I like that because the block is like you can't see me anymore, which is also bogus because they can just log out and they can see you. Anyway, we'll do a whole Twitter episode. What else do we have?

Listener Gary says, why is it that the only apps that crash on my Mac are Microsoft apps? Hashtag askupgrade. You're not using enough other third-party apps? And maybe too many Microsoft apps. And maybe too many Microsoft apps. I have no serious answer here.

I have lots of apps that crash, and I have Microsoft apps that don't crash. I really don't crash. I really don't see many crashes on OS X. No. I really see more of that on iOS. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Every now and then I'll get one. I've had one with

Transmit lately that's been crashing that I sent Panic an email about and I said, why is this crashing? But it's pretty rare that that happens twitter twitter app the the the official twitter app on that crashes all the time i should say that one crashes all the time because you block too much yeah that must be it yeah i'm overusing it i've worn it out you're blocking it out you're tired now yeah it's true. Listener Brooks wrote in and said,

I just filed a feature request with Apple to add Ahoy Telephone as a trigger phrase for Siri. Brooks, why do you have to ruin everything? You're going to make us do a new catchphrase. And then Amazon Echo has some programmable ones. Alexa. Yeah, I don't. Let's just keep Ahoy Telephone pure, okay? Let's not ruin it by making it a trigger phrase.

If that day comes when you can set your own trigger phrase for Siri, then I do expect that many upgradians will do Ahoy Telephone. That seems like a next feature, to be honest. Because Amazon does it, and Google does it. It makes sense that Apple will go that way next. Unless they really, really believe in the siri brand so it's like sorry the uh brand yeah and they really just want people to be saying that and that wouldn't surprise me either to be honest you can say siri you just can't say ahoy telephone yeah well i think i just said something that will probably trigger siri sorry

about that i think you keep doing it. I think you're running around in a circle. We also have, at Twist of Matt, I'm going to go over Upgrading Matt. One thing people don't talk about too much on the shows that I like is jailbreaking. What are your thoughts? I had a nice conversation with Matt, Upgrading Matt on Twitter about this last night.

And he turns out not really advocating for jailbreaking so much as was curious about it. I'm opposed. There have been times when I think jailbreaking has been very important. In the early days of the iPhone it was important. That's how all the original third-party iPhone apps happened is that developers jailbroke their phones and figured out how to put apps on it, which is

totally crazy, but they did it. And then there was a time when the iPad was out. For the first year or so, you couldn't do video out on the iPad. And we jailbroke a bunch of iPads for Macworld Expo so that we could demo iPad things on screen without a camera. I guess maybe it was the second year the iPad was out. There was a jailbreak that let you do video out over the dock connector. And that was huge because up until that point, we were using those little overhead cameras to try to show a picture of what we were – it was terrible to demo things on the iPad. show a picture of what we were, it was terrible to demo things on the iPad. But mostly, I don't, I think the platform is robust enough now that I don't think there's any really great reason.

I think it adds a lot of instability. I think a lot of the software you can download that are hacks, it's just so tweaky and hacky that most people are not going to get a good experience using it. So I feel like I don't want to talk about it. If you want to bring it on yourself, then go ahead and bring it on yourself. But I don't think most people, I don't want to encourage people to do it because I don't think most people would find much value in it. It causes lots of problems for upgrading to new versions for the benefit of having crazy, weird, tweaky kind of stuff. And then also, we don't like to talk about it, but the number one reason for jailbreaking is to pirate apps, and I don't support that. So if you want to jailbreak your phone and you've got a reason for it,

that's great, but I'm not going to talk about it. Yep, I agree. I agree. It can become a bit of a mess, and it's a whole different world. It's like a whole different thing. It's not even iOS anymore. And again, if there was a feature, like tethering, there was a time when you could do something weird and you could get tethering. And there was a time when you could do video out on the iPad.

There are moments in the life of iOS where it feels like there's a reason to jailbreak because there's something that Apple hasn't implemented yet that you know the hardware can do. Why haven't they implemented it? And there's a reason to jailbreak because there's something that Apple hasn't implemented yet that you know the hardware can do. Why haven't they implemented it? And there's a jailbreak implementation for it. And those come along every now and then. But that's the only reason I've ever jailbroken because, you know, the super tweakingness of it. Actually, listener Matt mentioned this, is that, you know, he's seen some of his friends with Android phones tweak their settings to the point of unusability.

And I think that happens. I've seen jailbroken iOS devices that are very similar that are just, you know, I've got all this crazy stuff going on. It's like, well, that's great. But I think most people don't want to see that. They don't want to do that. They want to keep it simple.

I mean, another reason people have jailbroken in the past is so they can use the phone in their country as well and you know if that's still a thing then that makes sense to do yeah unlocking your phone you've got an old phone and your carrier is not cooperating to unlock it totally makes sense even if you are you know you're still on a plan but you're going to travel overseas and you find a way to unlock your phone so that you can go overseas and not use your your carrier's card when you're roaming. I'm totally cool with that.

I think there are some good reasons to use it. But they're very specific. And then, you know, again, I feel like when we're talking, the audience we're talking to, even if it's a very technical audience, I feel like even for them, 98% of them. You know, maybe for our audience, it's 95% of them should really not ever jailbreak their device. And for the mass of iOS users, it's 99.9%. So our last Ask Upgrade today,

Johnny wanted to know if we use the Ahoy Telephone feature on a regular basis. You can say Siri. Okay, I say siri uh you just can't say the other thing yeah say hey yeah say hey kid you can't say that you know you can't say like bail you know what what is a bail made of siri right uh on a regular basis uh do we use it how looking for use cases i think we both use the exact same feature and the only time I ever use Siri.

Should do this on three, two, one. Set a timer for five minutes. Yes. It's all I do when I'm cooking. I use Siri for time. It's great. That is it. Yep. Me too. Me too. I, it's great for that because that is the perfect example of something that a voice interface does better than the touch interface. Because you don't have to open the clock app and go to timer and set the time and all of that. And you've got stuff on your hands because you're cooking or whatever. You just say set a timer for five minutes. It's great. I love it.

And that is about all I use it for. Yeah. Mr. Snow, I think we did it. I think we didn't kill anybody. We learned a little. We learned a little. We grew a little. Cried a bit. Yep.

And left some topics for the next show, which is always good. Yep. I really enjoyed this episode. Again, thank you very much, as always. Thank you. I think we're on a bit of a, you know, I think we talk about ourselves now. Nobody's listening. We're on a bit of a roll at the moment.

We're on a bit of a roll. I moment. We're on a bit of a roll. I'm enjoying the show more and more and more every week, and I hope that everybody else is too. If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode, point in your web browser at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 19. We'd love to get your feedback about the show and topic suggestions and questions.

And, of course, all you need to do for that is tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade, and they're going to pop up in our lovely little Google document. And then maybe you will be a part of the AskUpgrade section of next week's show. If you want to find us online, you can find Jason. He is at jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. And he writes to fantastic6colors.com. And I am imike at imike on Twitter.

I am yke, and I am the host of many shows at the glorious Relay FM, of which this show has a lovely home. We'll be back next time with another episode of Upgrade. Thanks again to our sponsors for this week. MailRoute, Stamps.com, Lynda, and Smile with PDF Pen 2 for iPad and iPhone. Until then... Say goodbye, Mike. Oh, Linda, and Smile with PDF Pen 2 for iPad and iPhone. Until then, say goodbye, Mike. Oh, goodbye, Jason.

The tables are turned! Ha ha!