Upgrade - 191: Alien Spacecraft Sitting on an End Table

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

This week the Grim Reaper comes for AirPort, we imagine a future Apple AR/VR headset, and at the very end it’s time for Myke at the Movies to take on “Avengers: Infinity War.”

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 191 today's show is brought to you very kindly by pingdom pdf pen 10 and simple contacts my name is mike hurley and i am joined across the oceans and airwaves by jason s. Hello, Mike Hurley. We're an ocean and a large landmass apart, but the magic of technology puts us together. Every week, except when I'm not here. We have a hashtag Snell Talk question today that comes from Matt. And Matt wants to know, what podcast, if any, will always jump to the top of your queue when released? And is there any podcast that you will interrupt your currently playing podcast to begin? What podcast, if any, will always jump to the top of your queue when released?

And is there any podcast that you will interrupt your currently playing podcast to begin? The Flophouse, The Flophouse, The Flophouse, The Flophouse. So if you're listening to, I don't know, ABC Technology Podcast, would you? Yes, well, so I listened to a similar uh letter alphabet themed podcast called the fnr the atp oh oh that one okay yeah and um i uh i that and that usually jumps to the top of my list when it pops in i was listening to that and then on saturday the new flop house episode came out and the flop house episode gets priority and then i'll get back to the boys of the alphabet themed podcast atp alphabet themed podcast um when when done with the flop house but the flop house is is a higher priority so i do have a high a higher priority for a couple of podcasts not too many

but a handful and the the highest priority is the flophouse i don't have any show i think that i would interrupt for like i i it will just stuff will just go next i don't like to jump from show to show very often um unless it's like i'm listening to something that i don't enjoy particularly like i'm just listening to something because i have nothing else to listen to or i'm listening to something that I don't enjoy particularly, like I'm just listening to something because I have nothing else to listen to, or I'm listening to something for research or something like that, which I will do sometimes. If it's a show that is in my usual rotation, I won't interrupt it for anything. But I will answer this Snow Talk question today too.

And for me, it's two shows, either The Adventure Zone or My Brother, My Brother and Me. They will immediately go next. Both of those shows will go straight to the top of my priority queue. Many shows, I'll move around and maybe they'll go underneath the Bim Bam or whatever, but these two shows

as soon as they come out, they're immediately the next ones that I'll listen to once I'm finished with whatever it is that I'm currently listening to because they are my favorites so that was a good question I like that one I like talking about podcasts that I enjoy I'm sure that you do too

spread in the love these are all great shows by the way these three shows that we've chosen and it is kind of funny that they are all MaxFun shows so that's great they make great stuff and it's all just nice stuff to listen to you can go check those out, I'll put links in the show notes for those

but we should do some follow up I do want to thank Matt for sending in his hashtag snowtalk question, you can do the same just send out a tweet into the world with the hashtag snowtalk and it will pop into a document I have one element of follow up for this week, Jason. Last week in hashtag ask upgrade, Noel wrote in to ask for a

replacement for iTunes that would be simpler just to play their music. They didn't want to have all of the other cruft that comes with iTunes. And we actually got quite a few suggestions and they vary from this looks like open source to this was very nicely designed. That's kind of the variance of which these applications look like. So we got Paul who recommended an app called Fubar 2000. Thomas recommended Vox Player and John recommended Tiny Player and Swinzian.

And I will have links to all of those in our show notes, which you can find in your podcast player or at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 191. These are actually all pretty decent looking applications. We had a few more suggestions in this, but I kind of whittled them down to what I thought looked worth recommending or actually had what looked like actively developed Mac apps.

Don't use the word recommending. Okay, let's say... I don't... I'll say I have not tried any of these apps. Looking at the screenshots, I don't recommend any of them. But if you are so hateful of iTunes that you absolutely must um replace it with something anything anything give them a try and maybe one will work for you but i looked at them and i

thought like one of them reminds me of what um what sound jam was before they made it into itunes that looked about as functional as that that's what i think that's what I meant as open source. Yeah. And another one that seems to be pretty proud of its, its sophisticated design. I looked at it and I thought, Oh, who designed this? But Hey,

you know what? Everybody's got their priorities. In fact, one of these apps points says that one of its key features is that it is not itunes so i think that says it all like if you really are just trying to get a music player app and you don't want to use itunes anymore um give them a try yeah but um i don't endorse any of them i haven't tried them and in looking at them i don't think i would like them but um they're there if you uh if you need something the problem is that itunes as i've said

i think i said last week itunes just took the oxygen out of the out of the room right because it's so huge that um there it's hard to build a business so then it becomes like a labor of love for somebody who really wants to do a music player that's not itunes and in a lot a lot of cases then you've got one person who they care a lot about it, but it's still just one developer with not much of a user base doing it out of love more than anything else. And that's tough.

That's a tough situation to be in. So I would change my phrasing from recommended to suggest. I suggest like if you are looking for something like this, that's fine recommended by listeners listeners paul thomas and john uh the sound is paul thomason is very close we're very close to getting a beatles ensemble here but that that didn't happen today um so yeah i thank you to

everybody that wrote in about that and and i hope no that that uh that that's satisfies what you're looking for um especially they they're not iTunes. We know that much. So, Jason, I have a small handful of upstream articles for you this week. Okay. Netflix is making a documentary series about BuzzFeed. It's called Follow This, and each episode, which will be around 15 minutes long,

will be following journalists as they uncover and report on specific stories. It's a 20-episode series debuting on July 9th. This is, I think, from looking at some articles, this 15-minute thing, this is new for Netflix to do something short form. And so that's going to be something to keep an eye out for. It's not necessarily, from what I can understand, it's not like The Office or something, right? They are just, this documentary will be like following a journalist as they explain a thing that they are writing about, right?

So I don't think that we're going to start to see, I don't know, drama between the journalists, right? I don't think that we're going to start to see, I don't know, drama between the journalists, right? I don't think it's about that. It's just kind of like how a story is uncovered and how it's developed and kind of what you learn at the end of it. Yeah, I was going to say it's like cops except for journalists. Yeah, I guess so. It's a little like that. Showing the job, you know, this is what happens.

Yeah. So it's your, your, you know, thrilling in the watching a reporter, um, reporting on a story. And so it's also,

I think theoretically educating you about that story. Um, I think this is really interesting. It's, it's, uh, Buzzfeed trying to get you to, it's good PR for Buzzfeed, right? Cause it's trying to get you to it's good pr for buzzfeed right because

it's trying to get you to think of buzzfeed as a legitimate news outlet and not just a place that makes it seems like that they are becoming right like i mean i've seen a lot of stuff about them where you know they are considered this now and i think it's the the individual that owns buzzfeed is like really focused on news and uses the kind of fun side to pay for the news side is that right like i think i've read stuff like that before i think there's a lot a lot of buzzfeed that that is the idea is they they they have a lot of volume from a lot of silly things on buzzfeed and then they also have a serious news operation and because buzzfeed tech is no joke either right like they get they get top tier uh access to big

companies and they break good stories and it's just always funny when you see any article on buzzfeed because of what it's surrounded by like it's always just a kind of weird experience sometimes and you like go to read this like good article and it's like take this quiz to find out which saved by the bell character you are uh-huh um it's always side by side and it as they should i say jason as they should uh comcast is trying to buy sky tv um a new challenger appears we've spoken about this uh recently in regards to fox because 21st century fox before they're going to be bought by Disney, are trying to buy Sky. I can't work out what the kind of idea behind this is.

I think it seems like now that the company that is trying to buy Sky will be the one that is left after um disney buys 20 like the sale is complete with 21st century fox you remember we spoke about like there was like a news company that was going to remain afterwards i think it's that right that's trying to buy sky it's a little tricky because it's all up in the air right now right and obviously disney can't stake a claim to this thing until the sale is actually so who knows but from what i can ascertain it seems all up in the air right now, right? And obviously Disney can't stake a claim to this thing until the sale is actually, so who knows? But from what I can ascertain, it seems like it is the Rupert Murdoch-owned

21st Century Fox that is trying to buy Sky. Rupert Murdoch owns a large part of Sky as it is anyway, so I think he's just trying to secure himself a business post-Disney. But now Comcast has come in and made a 31 billion dollar offer this deal is it gives a 16 higher premium to shareholders than the offer from 21st century fox and they are matching all of the claims that 21st century fox is matching which is

stuff about like ensuring sky news that will be uh fully funded for 10 years, stuff like that. So Comcast seem very serious. As of now, Sky have not increased their offer. So who knows how this is going to go, but if this is going to be purely on highest bidder, Comcast may be the one to snap up Sky TV. And Amazon is raising the price of Prime for new subscribers from 99 to 119 dollars so obviously as we've spoken about recently that includes all of the other stuff that you get with

prime tv or depending on how you look at it it includes prime tv along with all the other stuff that you are buying uh but right you know it is worth noting this because now if you you know if you want to get amazon you've got to pay 119 a year like that is a that is your barrier to entry now that is a price point increase if you want to get the shows that are on uh prime tv right what's what's one of the good shows on Prime TV right now? Oh, well, they're coming up with new stuff because their old stuff is not commercially appealing enough. Like they won a Golden Globe for Mozart in the Jungle, and I really like Red Oaks, which is a comedy on there. They have Bosch, which is sort of a cop show procedural kind of thing.

The Man in the High Castle. The Man in the High Castle high castle i think was their show that maybe broke into the mainstream the most right yeah and that was because they very aggressively marketed that show um but yeah i think i think all of their other stuff with amazon it does tend to be a little bit more niche in some way than than netflix i feel like netflix tends to make content which is a little bit more niche in some way than than netflix i feel like netflix tends to make content which is a little bit more widely appealing with their originals but i but as you say amazon are looking to change that right they want to they want to go big now they want to get bigger than yeah so if you're if new subscribers starting may 11th will pay 119 a year um and renewal starting june 16th will pay the new fee your current payment will not

increase but when you want to renew when your year is up it's going to cost you more you're going to go up to 119 yeah which is basically um you know ten dollars a month yeah and what's funny is they currently offer a a standalone video option for um nine dollars a month oh god why would you do that i mean i i yeah well they did they did it because they did it for people who wanted to i think it was a psychology experiment basically it's like yeah it's more money over the course of a year but it allows you to buy in and only pay monthly instead of paying annually and it makes people feel like oh i don't want to be in prime i just want the videos but it was a weird kind of combination because you could save money by just buying a year um right but you know you have to

pay that money up front nine dollars a month is way easier than a one-time payment of 119 dollars like for a lot of people you know like it's it's way easier to be like oh just give them nine dollars a month then here's 119 dollars like 119 dollars is an amount of money you have to like you have to put that side right you have to think about that for a moment where like nine dollars is way easier there's apparently also a monthly prime option it's the same thing it's actually more expensive than the annual prime but they make it available so uh yeah it'll be interesting to see if they raise the video price. And there is a question of like, would there come a time when Amazon would consider unbundling the video service from the rest of Prime? I think not. I think that they want to

just have, they want to own you, right? They want you in their world. And this is, we talk about Apple having an ecosystem that they try to get people inside. This is how Amazon does their ecosystem is they throw everything into Prime and say, you just need to pay us to do Prime. And honestly, there are these reports that this stuff costs way more. Prime is not a profit center unto itself for Amazon. It is a way to open a door for the profit to come in on increased orders and, you know, increased, you know, we'll choose Amazon over other possibilities because I've got Prime now and so the shipping is free and all of those things because they do lose money on Prime when you look at shipping and all of that.

But you are creating a loyal customer, and that's where you have your advantage. So that's the game that they're playing here. Philip in the chat room is pointing out something about Amazon, which we get pointed out to every time we talk about Amazon, which is that one of the reasons or the reason that Amazon offer video standalone is for countries that don't have amazon no in them but i don't think that's the reason that's not no they they introduced standalone in the u.s they didn't introduce it because it's outside of the u.s yes they may have done it for other places but they also offer it in places where they do the

shipping thing so like yes they you know who knows the reason that they may have initially created it was for that but they do offer it everywhere um even in places that don't have amazon proper right yeah and it's not yeah it's not accurate amazon made a very specific decision to roll out a monthly video only option long after the fact in the u.s because they wanted to have this kind of other, you know, don't commit to a year, try it out. Don't feel like you're getting everything on Amazon because there's a psychology of like, well, I don't order things on Amazon, but I want to watch this show. And they'll say, okay, we have a thing for you.

Even if it economically is not, does not make a lot of sense. It psychologically can feel better to be like, I don't want to pay for the shipping thing. I'm not going to get the shipping thing. It's like, like fine you pay us more and you don't have to have it like okay that's that's weird um but yes of course there are lots of places where amazon doesn't offer prime shipping and in those markets they offer prime as a standalone video service essentially yeah i just wanted to mention it because every time we talk about this we always get it i know literally every time we talk about this, we always get it mentioned. Literally every time we talk about Amazon Prime, people say, did you know that overseas, outside the US and the UK and some other markets where Prime shipping exists,

it's just a standalone video service? And the answer is yes. We just don't mention it every single time. It was the Grand Tour is what they did it for. The Grand Tour was coming and like a week before, it just popped up like all over place which made a lot of sense because i'm i would love to know how much money they paid for that show because i bet it was a lot of money i'm sure it was but i bet i bet they got there i mean you make that decision thinking well yeah but we're gonna get this back and subscribers and visibility they probably did it's not even i don't know what the ground tour is

doing now but at least when it started right like i bet they picked up a lot of people just for that first episode because nobody you know people didn't know what it was going to be like um i didn't enjoy it is what i'm trying to say like shrouding it i don't like the run tour i love top gear didn't love the ground tour should just mention jason before we take our first break that at the end of the show today we're going to be doing a special mic at the movies, because a big movie came out. They happen sometimes with no warning.

We're going to be talking about Avengers Infinity War, obviously, at the end of this week's show. It will be the very end of the show after Ask Upgrade. So if you want to avoid spoilers, we'll make it very clear we're talking about it. Nothing else will happen after that conversation

so you won't miss anything. So you can either jump off or you can decide to, like, what you should do is pause the show, leave it in your podcast player, go see the movie. When have you seen the movie?

Come back, listen to it. That's what I think you should do. That's what I personally do with those types of things. So at the end of the episode today, special mic at the movies, Avengers Infinity War. Today's show is brought to you by PDF Pen from our friends Smile. The new PDF Pen 10 is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs and going paperless. If you use PDFs in any way, you need to see what PDF Pen 10 can do for you. Their brand new release has the ability to add watermarks, custom headers and footers, and even a new precision editing tool. There's so much you can do with PDF Pen 10,

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the best so jason the airport is dead and i don't mean the thing that you need to fly no that's it there's no more airports apple has shut down all the airports why did they do that that seems so mean it's blimps baby there's gonna be an eye blimp the The eye blimp is coming, and that's going to replace all airports. It's amazing they had that power. How did people give them the power to shut down all the airports? I don't know. That's when they let them do the mapping. Yeah, it seems like a mistake in hindsight.

Yeah. But as well as that, because Apple got so wild with shutting down real airports, they figured to themselves, with shutting down real airports. They figured to themselves, why don't we just shut down our airport program, which is Wi-Fi routers? They're gone away.

And this is one of those things. This is really funny. This shows how the example, like people sometimes call like Apple news and rumors and reporting like an echo chamber in the way that someone will mention something and then a bunch of people talk about it, right right and that's a thing that happens quite a lot talk about loads of opinions get thrown in there and all kinds of mashes together to the point that when this announcement was made that apple that apple made via some news sources that they were

killing the airport it led to many people saying i thought they already did that. No, no, that's not true. It was a year and a half ago. Was it a year and a half ago? Yeah, the Gurman's report was like in November of 16. Whoa, I thought it was last November. Well, there you go. In November of 2016, Mark Gurman wrote a report saying that Apple was getting out of the airport business. And now they officially have. It is interesting to me to try and think about what happened in that year and a half.

Right? Like, well, you know, I mean, I, I, Gurman's report is that they disbanded the teams a year and a half ago and they still had the products, right? So I think they must have just decided they're going to disband the team, sell the products for a while. And then when there comes a time when they would need to update them, they'll just let them fade away. Or when their metrics show that they're not selling enough of them or they can't get the parts tech companies, where they'll disband a team and they'll say, well, if it turns out we need to do a new version of this, we'll just reform a team in a year or two and do it then. And that didn't happen. So they just decided to be out of the business. But it sounds like they decided to be out of this business, yeah, a year and a half,

two years ago. And it's just been selling. Because some of the people that, I mean, I get why people who rely on this stuff are sad that it's not ever going to be updated again, that it's going away. I totally get that. But the immediacy of it, I thought was interesting because we know through the Gurman report that this was not, you know, it's not like the company has been actively updating this product. It's been years since these products were updated. And quite frankly, I didn not like the company has been actively updating this product. It's been years since these products were updated. And quite frankly, I didn't love the last update, but it's been years since then. So there's been no movement. But if you're somebody who thought, oh, no, no, no, there'll be a new airport sometime,

then it's sad because there will absolutely not. And at least, like, even if you didn't think that you would buy a new one, by Apple continuing to make them you would consider that the product that you have would continue to get updated and it's unknown what will happen to the existing airports that live out there in the world

how long will they work for, will they receive any kinds of updates, are there going to be big security updates they're not going to get as it stands right now, unless you can correct me I don't think that we know anything about that like what apple's plans are to support the existing user base i imagine that like so many of their products since they were selling it up till now basically that they will support it for some length of time in software a couple of years or whatever and at that point it will become a vintage product and they call it legacy or

something don't they this is stuff that i learned from steven and his k-based discussions that like there is a specific through phases document which apple has somewhere which has like all of the products that are now considered legacy and aren't supported anymore and they do this every now and then where they throw more things into that bucket yep but it's a long period of time right again one of the reasons that i think i love apple products and i know a lot of people love Apple products, is that they get support, they get updates, you know, they get taken care of for a while. You know, you can make the investment now.

Like if you buy an iPhone X today, it will still be getting software updates in like four or five years, most likely, you know, which is not the same on Android, for example, right? I think that is in the past, I think, been a thing which has long been used as a jab, like a joke towards Android, but there is truth in it, right?

You know, you could buy an Android phone today that doesn't have the latest version of Android on it, and it may never, right? Like, you never know, right? Because of the way that carriers and everything work. But anywho, what was so good about the airport line in the first place like why do people want these products opposed to competitors products like what made the airport product a special one well so one reason is it was the apple product

right um okay there's some historic there's some historic legacy there right which is when apple came out with the first airport and the original iBook actually was when that happened. Wi-Fi was new and there was no way that Apple was gonna get it to be at their level of kind of compatibility and quality if they didn't build the base station hardware themselves. So they did.

And that went for a while. And then it just kind of kept going. And over time, I think some people felt like the Apple stuff was of a higher quality than the competition. I think there were times when it was and times when it wasn't. I had some Apple hardware that I thought was, I had a couple airport expresses of the original variety and they ran hot and they burned out. And I had a base station at one point that I couldn't update the firmware. So if I ever wanted to change my Wi-Fi passwords or settings or anything, or run a software update, it would

just fail and go back to its previous state, which was, you know, awkward. But there were other ones that I had that were rock solid and that worked really well. And they were compatible in a way that third-party routers weren't. Third-party routers had weirdness sometimes with iOS devices or macOS devices that the airport obviously being very carefully tested on those Apple devices worked perfectly. Apple cared about ease of setup so that there was the airport app that you could use to configure them, whereas a lot of third-party routers would use just kind of incomprehensible and bad web pages to do the same thing. So, you know, a lot of that. And then we'll throw in that Apple would occasionally roll in a feature that was basically an Apple-specific

feature that was not available or not widely available anywhere else. And the two best examples of that, I think, are the Airport Express having the mini jack audio out so that you could use it as an AirPlay receiver, essentially attached to some other audio device. And the, what was the other big one? Oh, time capsule. Yeah, yeah, that's it. It was network time machine backups using time capsule where you could just plug this thing in and point to it from your Mac and the backups would happen. And it was super easy. And those are things that Apple built specifically for Mac users, you know, tied in to their platforms. And at the time, that was the only way. There are alternatives to those now, but at the time, that was kind of the only way you

could do that. And so, you know, so for various reasons, and we talk about like Apple cases for iPhones and things like that. I mean, there is a great ease of use if you're an Apple purchaser to get the Apple Wi-Fi stuff, right? Because I just think that there is a feeling like I'm in the Apple store or I'm shopping on Apple's website and I need a Wi-Fi base station. And what's the brand I trust?

I trust Apple's brand. So I'm going to buy their product, even if it was more expensive than the competition and maybe wasn't any better. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. But it was Apple and you were in the Apple support system and you were in the Apple store where they sold it. And all of that kind of went together. system and you were in the Apple store where they sold it and all of that kind of went together. So I think there's a lot of reasons why historical, some features, some convenience that airport had a big, you know, a big role in a lot of people's home networking worlds.

Now, you know, my feeling would be that one of the reasons that Apple probably got rid of this product is that if they were going to bring out a new version, it would probably have to be pretty significant, right? Like, I mean, I guess if they were going to make a new airport line, it should have been a mesh network because that's what people make now, right? Well, I think that's exactly it. And disclaimer, we've had mesh networking sponsors on this podcast. Yeah, Eero is a sponsor of the show.

In a moment, I'm going to ask Jason what the alternatives are, and Eero will probably come up, but they're not sponsoring this episode. It doesn't matter if they're a sponsor of the show. In a moment, I'm going to ask Jason what the alternatives are and Eero will probably come up, but they're not sponsoring this episode. It doesn't matter if they're a sponsor at all. Like we would talk about them as we would talk about them, you know, like they are not paying for this discussion. Right. That's true.

So my understanding is that several of these companies, including Eero, have some former Apple people at them and it shows certainly the influence of Apple shows regardless in the software that they write and in the way that their products are designed. Because I look at the I look at the Wirecutter's choice for best Wi-Fi router, and it's this black box with six antennas sticking out at the top. And I just think, no, I don't want that in my house. I don't ever want to see that. But that is, you know, that's sort of what the

state of affairs is for like your standard Wi-Fi router. I think you're right. If Apple kept this team together, this is what they would be doing is they would be doing some sort of fancy mesh routing thing, where they've got base stations and repeaters, and it's all just kind of working seamlessly with their software. I think that would have been the next evolution of this. But if you're Apple, you look at it and you say, we don't need to be in this business anymore. We don't make a whole lot of money making these products. We're using engineering talent that maybe we could put to use better in other parts of our business. And there are other companies out there who live and die by this. And I think that's a really important point.

There are lots of companies for whom building networking hardware for the consumer market and the business market are what they do. That's their entire job. That's all they care about. And you think Apple is distracted by iOS when it comes to the Mac. How distracting is it? How off center is it to be working in the airport group at Apple. And maybe there are some very special people who just love it and they don't care that they're at that. But I would argue there's a big difference between working on a Wi-Fi router at Apple

and working on a Wi-Fi router at Netgear or Eero, right? Or even some other company that is all about networking right because that's their that's what the whole business is aligned toward that's what they want to do or have a product google wi-fi but like how long is that actually going to be around you know what i mean like you don't know google if they're just going to be like no this isn't working we'll kill it whereas you say if you work at a company like netgear or ero well they're not going to kill the product because like that's the business that's the company yeah that's the whole the whole

company and if you're a router uh engineer aren't you going to be more excited to go work for one of those companies than apple like we're like oh but it's apple yeah but it's a backwater within apple it's the it's not where apple puts, unless you're somebody who really loves it, it's not where Apple puts their A number one talent, or at least the people that Apple managers have said, this person is going somewhere, we need to have them on a key project. And I'm not saying that that's fair, but it's absolutely reality. If you had a superstar developer who was coming up building hardware for your Wi-Fi router and your Apple, would you not say we need to get that person on other hardware that's more important to our future than our Wi-Fi

router? And that's just the nature of things. So I think that that, I do really believe that that's part of it is Apple got into this business because they had to. They stayed in it because it was, they had momentum and there were kind of advantages to dropping some stuff in there that was sort of Apple specific. And I think they got to the point where they surveyed the world outside and said, why are we doing this? There's a thriving competitive market out there for this stuff. Also, I think there's the argument like it keeps moving stuff. There's also, I think, there's the argument like,

it keeps moving ahead. There's new standards. There's all this new mesh stuff. And there's a question of like, well, if we're going to do the Apple take on this, we're going to need to make an investment here and do more. And there is a moment where you need to decide, are we going to do more or are we not?

And if we're not, we should probably wind it down and let everybody else. Because the next step is that Apple makes a deal with or is talking to some of these major Wi-Fi manufacturers to get them to be friendly with Apple and Apple's products and in return, get maybe showcased in the Apple stores, right? That is already probably gone on and will continue to go on. And so they get probably what they want, which is a way to get their users to an experience that they consider acceptable without having to have this project. So what is available out there that people should be looking for if they're currently a user of these products? should be looking for if they're currently a user of these products? Well, I think I recommend people go into the Wirecutter and looking at their recommendations.

They have Wi-Fi router recommendations and mesh networking recommendations. The Wi-Fi router, it's a single thing with lots of antennas sticking out of it that you put somewhere pretty good for coverage in a small space. The mesh routers are obviously better if you've got a larger space that you put somewhere pretty good for coverage in a small space. The mesh routers are obviously better if you've got a larger space that you're trying to cover with Wi-Fi. I had issues unless I put my router, my single router in a very specific location in my house, which is my son's closet. Other than that, I couldn't get coverage throughout my house. And even then it was pushing it and my house isn't that big. So I switched to a mesh network. And again, here's the Eero disclaimer. Eero is a sponsor. They sent me some units and that's what I'm using now. But that worked for me. So Wirecutter is a good

independent organization that has looked at all of these things. My only caveat about Wirecutter, and I don't know their reviewer and I don't know who the editor is on that piece. I've written some pieces for Wirecutter in the past. I'm not currently working with them on anything. But the one thing, I had a bad experience with a previous generation of their Wi-Fi router recommendation list, where they recommended a Netgear router that I bought. And I found that it had some very weird quirks where it would occasionally just drop iOS devices from the network. And it got really frustrating. And I ended up turning off all the Wi-Fi routing on it, bringing my airport extreme back out of a drawer and using it for Wi-Fi while the Netgear stuff did the actual

traffic routing, which was weird and dumb. But that's what I ended up doing because Apple's Wi-Fi was way more solid. Now, I've heard from people who are Apple users who say that the latest and greatest wire cutter picks work great with their devices. My caveat is basically, it's unclear to me whether when somebody who's got a lot of experience writing about networking, what's their experience understanding how consumers live their lives and also how people who use Apple products use their products in the home? And that's always the caveat with something that's written by somebody with a lot of technical background is the technical background is fantastic. but do they get like um because i i saw this in mac world and when i was also in charge of pc world you you would see that from time to time where there's somebody who's got all the technical chops in the world but their connection with like the reality of how users use their products

was a little tenuous and i'm not saying the the current wire wire cutter writer is is that way but i did have that moment where i thought, did this person actually, you know, spend time with iOS devices on their network when they were testing this? Or did they just use PCs and not worry about it? Because that was always the danger when you're doing a story like this. And then when I see their reviews with the router bristling with all those antennae, I realize that finding the best wireless networking product is not a beauty contest at the same time i'm not kidding i look at that and think i'm never gonna buy that thing it is so yeah i don't horrendously laughably ugly i don't want that thing in my life yeah so you know for some people like me i don't really have a place where I could put it. Like my router is on show, right? Like it, it will be in the public view of my hallway.

And I just don't want this like alien spacecraft sitting on an end table. Like, I just don't, I really don't want it. I want something that is simple enough. I mean, we have these, you know,

I haven't, I need to like upgrade my system here quite a lot, but i have this like just this netgear thing that plugs straight into the wall it's not very good but it would it does me fine right the connection's stable and stuff but it's not the best like for speed to take advantage of the fast internet that i have but it would do for now right um because to my heartbreak i can't get euro in uk which is what i want but that's right i'll get it um and i've looked at the google wi-fi thing but honestly like i don't i don't have the

feeling of like oh google are gonna snoop on me i just i don't know how long the product will last for that's that's my concern with with like buying the the google thing because they have their own like mesh network thing and then the Netgear one. Is it Netgear or Orbi or something? Orbi is from Netgear, and that's the wire cutter pick for mesh networking. They're huge. They're massive, these things. And I just don't want that. Linksys has a large set of boxes

mesh network too. There are many different mesh networks out there now. But that's what i like about google and euro that they're small right like they they're not they're not like huge but it seems that the other companies that i can buy the stuff of it's just way too big like i don't i don't want something that big yeah i want the orbi is is like the size of the last generation airports in that it's tall. Yeah, and that's too much. I don't want that. And the Eero's are like an Apple TV, right? Just to give you some idea, like there are ones that are small and there are ones that are huge.

And some of that has to do with antennas and radios and, you know, just how they want to configure it. Because remember, these things do have to broadcast and receive signal in order to do what they do. It's not magic. They've got to be built for certain specs so i it's just it's a funny thing like um that that all said i would i would choose an orbi over the regular wi-fi pick from a wire cutter because it hasn't got like alien tendril sticking out of his head like exactly right but i would prefer something that's small or one of these ones that plugs directly into the wall or something because it's it's just too much for me yeah so i anyway there are lots of options out there the other thing i wanted to mention is if you're somebody who relies on a time capsule to do backup um first off obligatory cloud

backup mention which is uh you should do a cloud backup if you're not because if you're backing up at home to a time capsule that's in your house and something happens to your house you don't have a backup that backup goes along with your house which means that you don't really have a bat a backup in case of a flood or a fire or something like that your your primary data and your backup will be lost simultaneously. So a cloud backup is super important. It puts your data somewhere else. I would do a cloud backup, honestly, before I would do a local backup if I had to choose for that reason. Although there are lots of advantages to local backups that can happen more frequently,

they happen faster, you can do more versioning and things like that. Like if you don't have the bandwidth. Exactly. Lots of reasons to do it, but you really should be backing up your most important stuff, at least, over the network as well. Then, you know, there are a bunch of other options. You can get a drive that plugs into your computer and do Time Machine locally. And you may think to yourself, boy, but I really don't want a big hard drive on my laptop. I get that. Although, first off, they make really small SSD external drives now that can be large. Again, it's not cheap to do that,

but you can get a big SSD backup drive and just attach it to your laptop every now and then. It's not the end of the world. It's okay. If you've got another Mac on your network, starting with High Sierra, you can, and Dan wrote about this at Six Colors this week, you can actually just turn on file sharing in Time Machine and back up to that Mac, any drive attached to that Mac. It's built into macOS now. It's not a macOS server feature. They can all very easily support Time Machine. You could also buy a NAS, which is network attached storage. If you don't have a Mac that's running on your network all the time, you can buy a NAS, which is basically a server.

It comes with drives. It lets you save your files over your network. If you've got an SSD based Mac, having a NAS in your house is great because your drive isn't very big. And these are, you know, giants. It's a box with spinning hard drives in it that can have huge amounts of storage. So it's a great place. I use one, or I use a server, but it's the same thing to offload a bunch of stuff off of the relatively

small SSD that comes in my Mac, because it's got, you know, like 10, 12 terabytes of storage that I can copy to. Well, I also do a time machine backup to that. And there are, and many, in fact, Wirecutter has recommendations. Many of the NAS devices support time machine. You can configure them and say, this is the volume I want for time machine. I want it to be this big. You point time machine at it and it works. Now they're not cheap, but that's another option. So you have options. It's not quite as easy as the buying a time capsule and setting it up, but they can have other benefits too. So that's an option. And then the buying a time capsule and setting it up, but they can have other benefits too. So that's an option.

And then the other one is for audio, like people who are using Airport Express. There seems to be no solution that's as simple and as reliable as using an Airport Express. There are some other options, whether it's an Apple TV that's attached by HDMI or optical, depending on what model you get, to audio. There are a bunch of AirPlay adapters that are sold by third parties that I hear are not as reliable, but again, they are available.

There are also Bluetooth adapters. If you're close to a set of speakers that you want to broadcast to, you could just use Bluetooth. And when AirPlay 2 comes out, I wonder if we'll actually see a new round, especially now that AirPort Express is going away. If AirPlay 2 ever comes out. If AirPlay 2 will come out eventually, that you might actually see a new set of adapters designed to take advantage of AirPlay 2.

I hope so. And attached to it. So there are some options there. It's not going to be a perfect one-to-one, but there are options if your airport device is going to die. Jason, there was a report at CNET from Shara Tibkin. According to a source, CNET are reporting that Apple is working on a headset capable of running AR and VR with plans for two 8K displays, one for each eye. This project is codenamed T288 and is being slated for a 2020

release, according to people familiar with the matter. The device would be connected to what is being described as a dedicated box which would power everything. In its current state, Tibkin is saying

that this box resembles a PC tower. Now, I have a lot of questions based upon what we decide this is referencing. Because the report goes on to talk about the box itself featuring wireless technology.

So it's not really clarified in the report as to whether this PC tower resembling thing is the prototype unit or not. I think for the sake of conversation and discussion, we should assume that it is attached to a big box now because it's early in development

and that by the time it comes out, the headset will be tethered to something you could maybe put in your pocket um yeah because otherwise what's the point in this thing being wireless if it's the size of a pc tower yeah i think the um you gotta go back to like what what is the source for this and this is a product that they're saying maybe a 2020 kind of product so it's it So it's a ways out there. Let's say it's at least two years out there and maybe two and a half years out there, or maybe it'll get delayed and there'll be three or four years out there. It's early and they're prototyping. And one of the important things is that this needs

to be wearable, but they don't have the ability to have a wearable thing that has enough processing power to run it. So rather than have you put on like a lead vest or something full of computer parts. Or do what a lot of people do, which is build it all into the headset, which makes the headset really heavy and bulky. Right. Well, I think that was what I was going to say is right now they don't want to do that because they don't want that to be the end product. That's not the goal here. So for now, you build the headset and you have the computing power offloaded because you're still developing this product. And right now it doesn't matter.

What you really want to do is model how it will ultimately work, which is a thing that you wear on your face. So maybe they've got a box now that's attached via cable, or maybe it's attached wirelessly, and they've got this external box because that's how they're building this product. It's not even how they're testing it. They're testing it and building it, like making it exist and trying to figure out the right way to do it. This is a product that's early in development, right? So that's where this report is coming from, which is why I kind of can't really think that it tells us anything about the end product other than the idea that there would be a dedicated box. I laughed at the idea of the dedicated box because I thought they say dedicated box and wireless.

And I thought, oh, so it'll work with my iPhone then because that's a dedicated box. Yeah, that's in my pocket it will event like so this thing is going to connect to something it's not gonna i don't believe that this is going to be a standalone unit right like in the way that your apple watch connects to something and it could be one of two things either it will be an iphone or it is another thing which i i totally can see both happening i expect it will probably be an iphone but you don't i mean we don't know at this stage but i think it's worth assuming it connects to something right either right wirelessly or tethered or whatever but what what it but this

also it's all kind of intermingled in this report by making it seem like it will be a pc which i think is not necessarily made very clear. Yeah, well, it's all because they don't know and they're just kind of speculating. And it comes from somebody who probably, who was the source of this? It's probably somebody who knows somebody who works on it or who has worked on it a while ago

and says, well, this is what, I got to see it and they have a box, but it's all kind of hazy. I look at this and I think, yeah, that first off, the ultimate goal. First off, okay. The ultimate goal is that it is all integrated in the device so that when you put on a headset or glasses or whatever, all the power is in there. But a more reasonable step. Apple's got a very powerful computer in your pocket.

So that would be a way to drive it to a certain degree. And I think, you know, when you talk about a box, like, it's not unreasonable that they might say when you're out and about, you can use your phone to drive AR. And when you're at home, it connects to this base're that's definitely not an airport base station it's something completely different this base and then it drives your vr experience and that that thing has got a lot of more computing power in it than when you get from the ar side of it that's also a possibility right that's a good that's a really good point that that it comes with a home base yeah that like that like has has does the vr stuff and is much more powerful. Like the Nintendo Switch.

Right, but when you're roaming... It's just your iPhone. Because AR and VR are so different, right? And this is why I was thinking... I wasn't willing to accept that this is a thing that always needs to be connected to a large box

because then AR is mostly pointless. Because I think a lot of what makes ar useful is being able to use it outside in the world right like yes that there are things that you can move around and see and get information from like vr is immersive experiences just you do that at home right like that's where that happens yes um so i feel that there has to be an element of portability with this thing that i'm interested to see i mean okay so i feel like we put that part to bed right we're just going to assume that like somehow this thing allows you to walk around with it indoors and outdoors my next question is how on earth do you make one device that does both of these things

because yeah those two use cases are so different because VR, it needs to close you off from the world and AR needs to leave you open to the world. Now, there is a thing called mixed reality, which is in between. Yeah, but that's really AR. Mixed reality doesn't do AR and VR. It's MR, right?

Like it is a different thing, which is closer to or like to to augmented reality stuff than vr but those two things they are so very different i i think mixed reality and ar just you know depends on who's using what buzzword at the time but you're right vr vr you are not getting external input from the world vr the entire world is defined by what you are being shown and and you know what you're hearing. So first off, I've got a question, which is just because they're testing AR and VR right now, it doesn't necessarily mean that the intent is to have a product that does both. I question that.

Is that really what's happening here? And if it is, because the other thing is the specs for AR are going to be a lot lower than VR in some ways, because you don't have to, you're, you're painting over, over the world. I mean, they're different.

They're in some ways they're harder because you've got to track reality in a way that you don't necessarily with VR. But, um, I guess it could be convertible, right? Like that they polarize the, you know,

they polarize the lenses or something. And so it shuts out the outside world, or you have a blast shield, a Star Wars style that you flip down, and now you can't see anything in the outside world, and you're entirely enmeshed in it. But it goes to things like audio. Like VR, you want immersive audio

that shuts out the outside world. AR, you want audio overlay over being able to hear the outside world audio right that's that stuff you can do where it's like you build into the arms and it like tickles your bones in your ears so you can still hear stuff if i'm apple and i'm developing this stuff i i would say um are we really going to have two different products the one that you use at home and the one you take out in the world or ultimately is the goal to have a single thing that can do both? Because I don't know what stage of development they're in and this report comes to, but I think in the long run, you want it to

be self-contained, capable of doing both. In the short run, that may not be possible. And they may have to break down and say, no, we're really just going to do AR out of the gate and we'll deal with the VR stuff later or vice versa. But, you know, it's that's the difference between like, what is Apple ultimately want this product to be? And what is Apple capable of building and having a price in manufacturing at a price that they can sell it to consumers like that is there is often a large gap between those two things because i mean i made this argument about the iphone 10 that in some ways the iphone 10 is probably what johnny i've envisioned when they started talking about the iphone a buttonless slab right just a slab of glass with a screen on it and they couldn't get there they couldn't get there for a long time but uh you know ar and vr are going to be similar like we know what this is supposed to be it's supposed to look like a pair of glasses or be completely invisible somehow and have all of its computing power either built

into it or attached via some sort of network that is everywhere and pervasive and and that you can get to and that provides high speed uh interactions and stuff like that, right? Like, you could sketch out what the ultimate AR VR product should be, but they're not going to have that in 2020. So what are they going to build? And do they know, or are they still just sort of trying stuff out and figuring out what to throw overboard? Honestly, I do not believe that Apple is building anything for VR. I just don't. I don't see it.

I think that they're going for AR, and I think that maybe people confuse the two a little bit. I really just, because VR is games, right? And Apple, bless them. Yeah. They try, but they don't. They're not big into games. And the power difference to make good VR games

compared to what Apple is used to providing developers to make stuff with is dramatic. And they would need to make a lot of really, really different choices about the way that they handle game development than they have right now. I would be very, very surprised if Apple developed a VR platform until VR became a success.

AR, they can pioneer. I don't think that Apple pioneering VR is a good idea. I think that they should wait to see if it catches on any more than it currently already has before they move into it. That's my personal feeling because now they've left it too late, right? Like I've always felt that Apple should do something in VR before now. I think at this point,

they are not one of the pioneers. They are not one of the companies that's at the forefront of it now, like they are in AR. So I figured they should just double down and focus on that and definitely not try and build one product for two things. Because this, in theory, needs to be something that you would feel like

not too much of a doofus walking around in the street with on your face. And I honestly can't imagine how they would combine a product to do those two things. It would just be really weird to me like i just don't i just don't imagine it um but in general i do believe that they are working on this product i do believe that they will release an ar glasses project at some point like i think that that is the natural progression for what tim Cook seems to be so excited about with AR. I feel like that is it. AR is only so useful when you still have to look at a phone screen. It can only be so useful if you have to go to it to get it

instead of that information just being constantly provided to you. That's the dream of Google Glass. constantly provided to you like that's that's the dream of google glass that said everything they're doing on the phone right now is is research for that right like all the ar kit stuff that exists now that's apple saying okay developers what what can you do with this now because that that teaches them teaches apple how to build AR stuff and gives developers tools to build interesting AR applications. And I would say that if over the next year or two, Apple looks at what is out there for AR,

there's a possibility, I don't think it's a huge one, but there's a possibility they'll be like, oh, you know, there's really not a lot here. Yeah, like they pull a ripcord and just jump straight out of it, rather than like, nope, nope, nope. It's possible. But I think the idea is that at some when i try to imagine what happens

after the phone or after the computer this is what i keep thinking is is the product after the phone or after the computer is something like this where it is your phone but instead of it being in your hand, it's just in your field of vision. And you interact with it with, and maybe you have a device you can pull out and use, or maybe the cameras will be able to look at your hand gestures and you'll literally be able to tap things in midair or like run your finger over the palm of your other hand

and be like, I wanna scroll with these gestures and have that work. I think that's quite possible because the idea in the long run is that if I'm doing turn-by-turn directions, it would be better if they just were a heads-up display in my glasses that I could just wear while I'm driving. And if I'm walking on a street and I want to know how to get to my destination, that it just is annotating the street that I'm walking down. And if I have a message or notification, it maybe tells me, maybe reads in my ear, depends on my notifications. But you could see that this device would start out as a phone accessory and ultimately could replace the phone because it's your interaction point for all that stuff. And for computers and tablets and things like that, I think that this is also a way that some of that stuff gets replaced because

once you have AR, you theoretically have a virtual screen. You theoretically have a screen that is as big as you want it to be that you can take anywhere you want. And maybe you're typing in midair or maybe you have a keyboard, but it means you maybe don't need a monitor anymore because you've just got your glasses and the monitor is in your field of view when you want it to be there. So, you know, in the long run of technology, when I try to imagine what comes next after these whole categories that exist right now, it does start to think get you get most of the hardware out of the way you don't need a screen anymore if you can see a screen in your field of view like that that solves that problem and you don't necessarily and what is a what is a smartphone it is a screen it is also a gesture control device and some other things that that that are more like questionable like i just did like how do you do that interaction

and that stuff to be figured out. But the screen aspect of it could get just replaced and would be awfully convenient if you don't have to carry a screen around and it could be any size and it could be in any part of your vision. And that's a little more VR-y in the sense that it's blocking out parts of the world in order to show you that. But it's also kind of AR-y in the sense that when I'm looking at my computer screen, I can see the world around the edges of the screen. It's not entirely blocked off. It's just, you know, my focus is just in the center. So, and this all like on the big picture level, this is why Apple has to be spending R&D money on this stuff, because it's probably the future of a lot of their product, the successor to a lot of their

product categories. And they can either lead the way there or they can be left behind and be made slowly irrelevant. And I know which one they would prefer, but that's a long run up. And the short term, we end up slicing like you just did, I think really well, which is what do we slice off of this thing to make a first generation product that's sort of like, we'll look back on 10 years later and be like, oh, it was so primitive, but the time it's released,

it will blow everybody away. What is that product? How do they get that out in the market? And they're not going to do what Microsoft does, which is say, oh, HoloLens, it's for developers. It's sold into some industry. What's it going to be? Like Apple's not going to release a product like that.

Apple's going to release a product that everybody wants to buy, or at least millions and millions of people want to buy. Yeah. Today's show is brought to you by Simple Contacts. It is something that we all love here, when an app can take a tiresome task away from you, making it fuss-free.

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little bit ago. And I kind of wondered what your experience was in using your phone instead of going to a doctor. Yeah, I mean, it was super easy to do. You set it up. They really just want to check that you don't have any red flags for eye health issues because it's just meant to be a renewal of your prescription that you already got from an eye doctor. And so, you know, it was very quick to set up and they had my lenses that are not, you know, I was concerned that they wouldn't have them because it took us a long time to find them. And they have an astigmatism correction and all sorts of stuff like that. And, you know, it was not a problem. They had them. So it was a very quick and painless process rather than going back to the doctor just to get a new set ordered. As a listener of this show, you can get $30 off your contact lenses. Just go to simplecontacts.com slash ahoy, h o y or you can enter ahoy at checkout that is

simplecontacts.com slash ahoy or use the code ahoy for 30 dollars offer thanks to simple contacts for their support of this show breaking news mike okay there's a um there's a report that is that I just saw at Apple Insider but it is a report from DigiTimes that just says that that much rumored refresh of the MacBook Air that we've speculated about and wondered what it might be or what

it might mean has been has slipped and that supply chain partners that's who the source is, supply chain partners were recently informed that it will be a second half product. So originally thought to maybe be coming soon, this report says that that mysterious, undead, revived MacBook Air thing won't happen until the second half of 2018. So nothing more than that.

And it's worth munching on and considering over the next few days. But interesting just sort of thought of like, we don't really understand what Apple's doing with the laptop line and what a revived and updated MacBook air might be and how it fits and we still don't know that but uh it may be that we have to wait longer to find out so that's there's your update thank you for that breaking news jason let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions before we talk about some superheroes yo i've written has written in and says i have a shared photo album with my family where everyone can upload their photos to do you know of a way

that i can import all of the photos that are shared back to my library without duplicating the ones that i have shared i've seen this so many times like i'll go on trips with friends and stuff and we set up like an icCloud uh shared like uh album thing and we all throw photos in and then I have to go through individually one by one and save all the ones that I want because like there isn't a way to just be like give me the ones that aren't mine now yeah I wanted to ask you because I figure everybody that I know and I thought and Yoav has written into the right person you know photos inside and out You've written a book on it. Is there a way to do this?

I don't believe so. I think maybe if you dragged everything back in, if it's a photos shared photo album, if you drag it back in, it might identify duplicates. Because there are some cases where photos does identify duplicates in an importing process and lets you skip them. But I don't know 100%. I don't have a good answer here.

I actually have a warning, which is shared photo albums don't share at full resolution. So if you want to put those photos from your trip or your time with your family in your photos library, I would recommend getting people to actually share their full resolution photos with you because the ones that come across via iCloud are not at full resolution.

Again, how does somebody make sure that they're sharing a full res photo with you? Like what is the way to do that uh you export them from photos and say you know export original basically and then how many how do you then send them i put them on dropbox or something like that i don't know is there a way to do this on ios to share a full res photo oh well yeah i mean if you share it if you share like in email or messages or something i think that they don't okay um i think that they don't change the resolution although in some cases they might yeah it is a pain uh google photos might be an option too like of course i think the the those

if you share if you share photos and google photos you the ones that you share i believe are full quality and you can download them i might just start using google photos for this stuff in future because that's really annoying i didn't know that that it wasn't sharing the i mean and it's because it doesn't make any sense right you it should be full quality and apple should let you say i want to import the photos that are coming from my friends into my photo library and it's just it's not there like it probably isn't a big issue for me right now because you know like it's when i'm looking at on my phone it'll be fine but like maybe five or ten years in the future like i will i will need it at a better quality than i have

you know than what they've shared because everything's just going to keep getting better over time that's a frustration nathan has written in with sonos announcing uh airplay 2 support for upcoming devices i started considering buying into the Sonos ecosystem. Jason, do you have any tips or something that Nathan should be aware of before diving in? I think you should be aware of the fact that although some of the new Sonos stuff, like the Sonos One, supports voice control,

it does not support Apple Music with voice control. So if you're an Apple Music person, the voice control won't work. However, if you're an Apple Music person, Sonos ecosystem supports Apple Music, which is great. So that you can listen to it. It's the only third party that supports Apple Music streaming on their hardware. So there's a lot to be said for that. Beyond that, I don't really know. The stuff sounds good. They've got stuff that'll tie into a receiver or that will power some speakers. If

you've got speakers that require an amplifier, there's a product that will do that. So there's lots of different options. The Play 5 is a very large device that puts out a lot of sound, but it's also really huge. The Sonos One is nice and small and will do AirPlay 2. Sadly, my Sonos Play One that I have will not support AirPlay 2. Apparently it is not powerful enough in terms of the tech,

which is, you know, it's fine. I've got a plug-in, you know, that runs on my Mac that is a bridge to Sonos that works with AirPlay 1 and that works fine. So I don't know. It's, I think just be aware of what music services it supports Sonos that works with AirPlay 1 and that works fine. I don't know.

I think just be aware of what music services it supports and what the features support because I think that's what will trip you up. Assuming that Amazon Echo assistant technology will allow you to and support for Apple Music will allow those two things to come together, which they

don't. So just be aware. And they're price pricey that's the other thing is that they're not cheap they're they're they're not cheap but uh they do sound pretty good and i loved my logitech squeeze box stuff but you know that was a platform ruined and and uh and and made obsolete by logitech so i switched to sonos a while ago. Rajiv wants to know what Apple accessories show up in the batteries widget for iOS 11. So I like this little widget. It's one of my favorites because it shows me the battery life

of any Bluetooth connected device. So for example, as well as it showing the battery life on my iPhone, how much life I have left there, it will show me my Apple Watch if it's connected, my AirPods, including the individual AirPods themselves and the case. If you use any of the Beats product with the W1 or W2 chips in them, it will show those as well.

So like the Beats X and stuff like that will show the battery life there and the Apple Pencil as well. So I really like this battery widget. I find it very useful. I keep it turned on on all of my devices because quite frequently, I would like to know the battery life of one of those things.

So it's good to have that all there, all in one place. Emmanuel's asked, when the Apple Video Streaming Service launches, do you think it will launch with only Apple's original content or will they license a back catalog of TV shows and movies?

If yes, what kind do you expect? It's a good question. It's entirely possible that they won't, but it feels like a nice way to add to the value proposition of the service is to have some catalog stuff. So there may be a lot of stuff that they can just license that's non-exclusive that's on lots of different streaming services that they'll

be able to just grab maybe some of the sony stuff if sony has rights to things since the the um the executives in charge came from sony maybe they will have some stuff that they know is available there i wonder if they will pair uh some of their existing content with things that they think are similar to the uh the stuff that they're doing originals of the usual argument or the usual option for all of these types of discussions of apple like over the last 10 years has been disney right like it was like oh they have a great relationship with disney they'll bring disney yeah but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen. But they're a competitor of Disney because Disney is going to have its streaming service. But no, I think of something like if they've got a Ron Moore series, do they license Battlestar Galactica or something like that?

And say, look, these are going to be like other things that we've got so that it gives the person who's coming for this show some shows that are similar. Do you think that Apple might struggle to make those deals with networks and studios though it depends on i mean everybody's competing with everybody now so the question is just going to be what the price is and what is their exclusivity or not if there's no exclusivity and it's just extra money to put it on more services i think that the studios are going to be more than happy about that because it might i always assume that like the tv and movie industry has always been so scared that apple is going to do to them what they did to the music industry right which was change the industry from underneath them i i feel like um apple is not the problem in this world, right? Like Netflix and everybody's getting into it

and Netflix is a giant and Amazon is a giant and Apple's not at that point yet. So I think we're probably over that now. But like Apple Music has gotten really big, really fast and is growing at a quicker rate than Spotify, right? And I think that was not what anybody expected. So, you know know they could come in and like in five years be bigger than netflix now it's a it's a different game though because

everything's exclusive in video and you know or at least all these originals are exclusive and nothing's exclusive essentially in music there are brief timed exclusives but that's it there is more of a drive towards making quality stuff where like Apple aren't actually commissioning the music to be made. I think that's one of the biggest differences, right? Like they actually have to make good stuff as opposed to just have the stuff that's already good on there. Like if Apple were doing this to be Netflix like four years ago, it's different, right? Like if what they were trying to do was just collect up all of the streaming right to be what netflix was not what netflix is becoming which is hbo which is what they're all going for so i um if i had to bet i might bet that they won't have much extra stuff

at launch because they want this to be a premium kind of thing that said uh licensing some movies doing some deals to kind of compete with hbo in getting some recent run movies and some catalog movie titles might be something they could do they could even say it's sort of like when you subscribe to this video service you get a bunch of stuff that's um the best of itunes if you think about what amazon does where they've got a they and rent stuff, but they also have free video, that they may view it like that, where it's like, you also get access to a bunch of movies and maybe even some TV shows on iTunes for free. And that's the way they kind of phrase it is something like, it's part of our store, if you're a member of this service, you don't have to pay to watch it. It's just covered. But what

reality, reality, what they're doing is they're licensing a bunch of movies for streaming. And that could, it could happen. It could happen. They don't have to do that. But they need a really strong slate if they go out without a back catalog. The other possibility is that they will buy a niche streaming service or two and just integrate their content and their back catalog. And that's something they could totally do. They could pull in, you know, something, there are a bunch of small services out there like Acorn, which does British TV in the US that they could bring in. There are options out there. It would be interesting to see. And I don't know what's available kind of like non-exclusively but I think they'll give it a shot

because better to go out with more content than less but it might be more movies than TV shows that's entirely possible. My bet is that it won't really matter too much because I think that the Apple video service will be bundled with music so you're kind of the value that you're getting

is having all of it right I don't think that apple is going to sell this service separately personally um i think that it is going to be primarily you know they might do what amazon does right where you can get it for some silly deal which isn't good because you might as well pay the extra dollar and get all of it that's what i think they're going to do i think there's going to be an entertainment bundle that they sell which includes video and music because i think video is going to be an entertainment bundle that they sell, which includes video and music, because I think video is going to be a harder sell. Like it's going to be harder for them to sell that to people,

because especially initially, it's like give us money for stuff you've never seen, stuff that nobody's ever seen, and a bunch of stuff that no one knows is going to be any good. Like we promise it will be. Like I think it's trickier to sell it than it was to sell Apple Music, which is why I think they're going to be any good like we promise it will be like i think it's it's trickier to sell it than it was to sell apple music which is why i think they're going to bundle it anyway do you think they're going to bundle it or do you think it will be standalone

yeah good good question i think ultimately yeah i don't know it's a tough question i i think they want to generate revenue but they could generate it by bundling it they could generate it by building some sort of apple prime kind of thing i yeah like one or two more dollars is more revenue right and like you know yeah i think it's more likely that they would bundle the two services together and sell them separately than say that everybody who has apple music gets the video service. I think it's much more likely that the video service will have its own subscription fee, but there'll be some sort of deal if you buy both of them together. But again, I'm also holding out some hope that at some point Apple may actually come out with a more complex offering that is more like Prime,

where you get a bunch of different unrelated or vaguely related stuff and that's the way that you get access to all of this is by giving apple whatever a hundred dollars a year i think i think you know we spoke about this a couple weeks ago with the news thing right like last week it feels like that they're pushing in enough directions now that they have a comprehensive offering including iCloud storage that they can give you um and our last question today comes from Josh. Josh wants to know, what is the best method to creating templates in Pages using iCloud so that are accessible on the Mac in Pages and iOS in Pages?

So the My Templates feature that exists in Pages doesn't sync to iOS. It's only on the Mac. So I have like a weird hack around this. If you basically want to have a template document which you can save in iCloud Drive that you can open on the iOS or Mac, my suggestion for this, what I would do, is

create that template document, and every time I want to use it, duplicate it in the Files app or in Finder, and then use the duplicated file. That's what I would do. Does that make sense? So you're not actually using any template feature you're just copying a document every time you just got a a template file file that's just a regular file yeah that's that's what i recommend it yeah it's because that's what i do right i've never even thought about looking for a templates in pages because this just always made sense to me as the way to do it

create the file save it in Dropbox so like a bunch of people can access it if necessary and then just duplicate it every time you want to use it. And that's really easy to do on iOS or the Mac. There's duplicate commands in the file browser. So that's what I would suggest. Okay, so that is it for

Hashtag Ask Upgrade. So after this break we are going to be talking about Avengers Infinity War. You have been warned. Today's show is brought to you by our friends at Pingdom. The reason Pingdom are awesome and the reason that I think they're awesome is because they help keep your sites, including mine, online. Because they will monitor your site so you don't have to.

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first invoice. That is pingdom.com slash RelayFM and the code UPGRADE huge 30% off your first invoice. That is pingdom.com slash RelayFM and the code UPGRADE for 30% off your first invoice. So thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and RelayFM. Fire the spoiler horn, Mike, later in editing. He will do, and he's doing it right now. So here it goes. Avengers Infinity War, Jason.

I saw it on Saturday you saw it when did you see the movie Friday I saw Thursday night oh look at you yeah my daughter demanded that we see it on opening light she had demanded it and so we found a way to make it work because I was not going to turn down

a teenager actually wanting to first off wanting to watch a superhero movie i'm gonna i want to you know approve and and uh encourage those sorts of uh those sorts of feelings and then you know presumably she would be seeing it with her parents which again i i want to encourage uh or take advantage of any time she's willing to be around us so we did we went on thursday only gonna decline unfortunately oh it's already oh man it's already declined so so much so yes so we did we did go on uh on thursday evening um and and saw the movie there is an incomparable flash cast which went up last night

incomparable episode 404 which just makes me laugh every time i see it um i haven't listened to it because i want the one-on-one snell opinion so i wait until afterwards okay um i will mention before we get into talking about our thoughts on the movie itself it isn't it's breaking all records right now um it had a 250 million dollar opening weekend in the u.s which beats the force awakens uh i'm i'm expecting along with everybody else probably that it will beat force awakens in everything and just become the best movie of all time in box office sales which makes sense right like it feels like the last 10 years would tell you that yes this should be the case right like marvel have built this empire which is in some ways culminating with this and then the next movie which is coming out what is it in may like it's

basically a year from now it comes out in 2019 um because it's kind of like a two-parter but not a two-parter in a way right like the story continues i really like that no plot details even the name is not out for that movie yet like marvel are super committed to keeping the end of infinity war secret and they're showing that right like they do not want people to know what happens at the end of this movie to the point that they have a movie coming out in a year that they haven't even told us what the name is yet like they're very serious about this and i understand because if you spent 10 years working on something like you know i mean they haven't worked on this movie for 10 years but it's this overall franchise which after next year apparently is going to change right like in some ways my expectation

is new actors for some roles right and they do or you know or they're going to retire some roles right they'll kill some people off and then and then they will continue with uh with the newer crop of with a new yeah a new set of a new set of heroes at some point they will probably have to either bring in like that here's the new whoever right which works though right because it's like unlike i think a lot of these types of things it makes so much sense in comic books because that's what happens in comic books right there becomes a new thor like it is a new person who becomes the superhero so like it's totally in canon for them to be like oh tony stark is dead but here's mary. She is the new Iron person, right?

Yes. In fact, yeah, they have, not only do they have James Rhodes, who's War Machine, who was sometimes Iron Man, but they have, what is it? Oh, her name is Riri something or other. And she's Iron Heart,

but she's basically a teenager who gets, who is like Tony Stark's successor and takes, you know, and she's got her own flying suit and stuff. yeah i like that yeah i i'm not they got options i'm not very up to date on what happens like in comic williams is her name it's a relatively recent thing that they did she's an african-american from a girl from detroit i want to say, somewhere in the Midwest, and designs her own suit and gets advice from Tony Stark's people and stuff and kind of becomes like a substitute Iron person. So, yeah, I think that's the kind of thing that's going to happen.

Yeah, and at some point they'll just kind of go away and then there'll be a future where they say, well, we're doing a new Iron Man movie with a new Iron Man. But I think that they've got a long way to go away and then there'll be a you know a future where they say well we're doing a new iron man movie with a new iron man but i think that they got a long way to go before they get there so one of the big things one of the big questions around this movie was how on earth do you deal with so many a-listers in one movie like and i think that on the whole they did a pretty good job now i saw it with adina who has only very recently become interested in these movies so like there are so many characters

where she's like who is that right like because she has no idea she had no idea benedict cumberbatch was going to be in this movie right like she has no idea who dr strange is right like she just doesn't know that character. But I think that they did. I think they did a pretty decent job of giving you all you needed to know about a specific character without a ton of exposition. And one of the ways they did this was, like, Tony Stark meets Doctor Strange for the first time, right? And it's like, well, that is actually a very good way of dealing with that like tony stark doesn't know who he is because i think maybe dr strange isn't as popular right like i love that movie but i don't think it was like what it definitely

wasn't like black panther right right you know like it i think it did it did pretty well but like no one no i don't really think it was a huge success. So I think in the places that they needed to, they filled in more information about either a superhero who isn't so well-known. They don't bother with Spider-Man, right? You get it. You don't need to have seen the movie.

You just know who that is. And then they didn't really bother with Black Panther because everybody saw that movie. Right? Like, we like we're good like everyone knows about that now so like i think that where they needed to they did a good job and i think that on the whole they paired people up well um and i think that they did a they did a pretty good job of dealing with a mammoth cast do you agree yeah i agree i think that um i remember when the avengers came out and our thought was like how are they going to put six different or whatever seven different superheroes in the same movie and have it make sense that's that's a uh that's asking too much to bring all these franchises together with this movie that is meant to join them all um and i remember

walking out of the avengers thinking wow that was like way better than i that given given how hard it was because they had the mandate of like you will bring all these characters together that they managed to find a way to have it to have it work well this is like 10 times as as difficult and i think they did my reaction is is the, which is I think they found a way to do it where it's not nonsensical. And in this case, what they did was they split the story up into little parts. So it felt like a Game of Thrones episode where you're just kind of cycling through four different storylines. and they took a lot of characters and didn't give them a lot to do and sort of had them in the climax yeah with a promise that they will appear because i read a couple articles that say this that they were the characters that you thought weren't in this movie a lot that's because they're actually going to be in the next one and and they kind of like balanced it out because like who's left they're the ones who survived the end of the movie so um so so that's that's one of the

little cheats is sort of like well yeah some of these characters really kind of show up toward the end they're in a scene before that or two scenes but they show up at the end and they fight in the big fight and you can say that they're there but then there are the ones that it spends a little more time with um and they're bouncing off of each other in unusual ways so you put spider-man tony stark and dr strange together and that is fun and you put thor with the guardians of the galaxy and that is fun which was just great like yeah thor and like drax it's funny how their characters overlap in certain ways that was really good and then just like star lord trying to like be thor i think it wasn't like my favorite part of the whole movie was when those two entities met like when the guardians of the galaxy and thor met like that whole scene

was hilarious like it was so good it was i think everything i liked about both of those movies in that they are kind of silly like the characters are silly but not in a like wacky way you know the way they talk is really funny and the way they interacted i really enjoyed that i also liked the team up of thor and rocket raccoon like i thought that they worked so really well together as well like there were a lot of noble rabbits noble rabbit yeah it was very like you know in group like group teenage group is hilarious right like i think that they did a good job with that um do you know why like ant-man wasn't in this movie like they referenced the fact that he decided that he didn't want to be involved post ant-man's not in this movie because there's an

ant-man movie coming out this summer okay and i believe like the way that these movies were produced ant-man and black panther were both actually written after this movie was written so there was some degree where with ant-man they basically said let's just leave our our hands off of ant-man because ant-man and the wasp is coming out this summer and it's presumably set before this movie yeah so the idea there is just like let's get him out of the way of this big story because he's got a movie coming and we don't want to confuse people with like, well, wait, what about Ant-Man in the last movie? They're like, no, he's just not in that movie. Nobody's going to be confused.

Everybody in this movie is just in this movie and not in Avengers. It's just in Ant-Man. And then Captain Marvel is the same way. There's one other movie between now and the next Avengers movie, the sequel to this one. And that's Captain Marvel. And by all accounts, that's set in the 90s. So that's a flashback movie. So that'll set up Captain Marvel, who presumably will appear in the next Avengers movie. And we'll know who she is because we will have met her.

It's teased at the end of this movie. I was just wondering. I just wanted to check that you knew that. okay i just wanted to check that you knew that yeah but it's very carefully very carefully i think structured where the next two marvel movies don't address what happens at the end of this movie so that this movie can then uh conclude in next may so like we may see ant-man in the next aven movie, maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Or maybe not. And if not, then this is my theory. My theory is that there will be a post-credits sequence in Ant-Man that addresses what happens in this movie. So that you watch Ant-Man and you're like, oh, this happens before the other movie. It's fine. And then at the end, you'll be like, oh, and there the other movie happened. And now we wonder about the characters in the Ant-Man movie and what happened to them, too. Right.

Which will, again, continue. And then presumably the Captain Marvel movie will have an end credits tag where she gets the beeper from Nick Fury. And then they'll go into the next movie. So I think it's all been structured that way. What do you think about Marvel's new strategy of two movies in two months i don't know i mean i they want to do it's it's it's interesting i i wonder about their releases like black panther they released so early and then this movie they really released early this is you know it used to be these were in deep in the summer and the summer just keeps creeping forward to now it's in late april and and black panther came out in february and they still have ant-man and the wasp to come and then nothing in because captain marvel is due for march and then the next event movie is due for may right

so it's like it's like the same yeah the same thing again it depends i i don't know i mean release dates have to do with what the competition is and when they think they can make their money i think what marvel's shown is they can make their money anytime so i i yeah i don't even i don't even i mean honestly i think at this point it's just disney pacing themselves out right that could be that could be you know they probably i'm expecting that they brought the avengers forward because of solo and yeah i wanted a bit of space between those that may be remember solo was originally supposed to be later yeah i think or no it it moved no uh the last star wars movie moved later and solo stayed put so it's this star wars movie that's not coming out at christmas i'm

a little surprised that they didn't slot the next avengers movie to come out this this winter because they shot it all together so i'm a little surprised that they're making us wait a year and that they didn't put out like part two in in november or something like that or even like leave this one to december and keep the other one at may right like to make them shorter together to make knowing it was a two-parter i was surprised when i looked it up after the movie and was like oh it's a year like that was a surprise to me i i've thought that we were going to get made because i you know i was thinking well there isn't a star wars at christmas so i assumed there would be the second avengers movie at christmas harry potter was about six

or seven months between part one and part two and like the hunger games i think was pretty similar to like i think a lot of the movies where they do them in these distinct like two partners they they kind of they pull them a little bit closer together um what did you lot of the movies where they do them in these distinct, like two partners, they, they kind of, they pull them a little bit closer together. Um, what did you think of the story overall? Like, did you find it simple to follow? Did you kind of have a grasp of what everything was going on?

Cause it's a lot of intermingling stories. I think they kept it simple. Um, there's a, the plot is relatively simple because they set people on these individual paths and they all have kind of something they're trying to do and you follow them. So I think that's easier to track. The joy of it is in the details, right? The dialogue. There are a lot of really funny lines where characters are behaving in ways that are familiar to us as people who've watched Marvel movies before. We know, you know,

Guardians of the Galaxy and they behave this way and we know Thor, he behaves this way. We know how Spider-Man and Iron Man work. And so that leads to a lot of funny dialogue, but they're also just fairly straightforward in terms of like Thor and Rocket are going to go find the forger of the great weapons. And Dr. Strange is being rescued by Iron Man and Spider-Man and then they sort of change their destination. And the rest of them are like, let's meet in Wakanda because they're trying to kill the Vision. And then the other,

obviously other Guardians are going to find the gem that Thanos has already taken. And so you get your little pieces of what's going on um and i felt they were i as somebody who watches game of thrones where they take the four storylines and run them in parallel all the time that's what episodes of game of thrones are like it didn't bother me i felt like this was look this is this is not a movie in some ways it's something different it is a continuation of an ongoing

storyline it's two and a half hours long in a different world with different economics potentially this is a tv show or it's a series of movies with the individual storylines but instead they just kind of have to tell this whole story in a in a load or two loads and so they just kind of jam it all in together so i thought i thought it was clear enough that you could keep track of like oh these people are doing this these people are doing this we can move between them fairly seamlessly and i thought they handled that well i thought that in the end like thanos is his goals are simplified in some ways but you know what what? He's a comic book supervillain. They do as much as they can to make him a character you feel has some depth, especially in his feelings for Gamora. And that's useful, but his overarching plan is really just, I'm going to get these stones,

I'm going to get the MacGuffin, and then I'm going to kill everyone or half of everyone. And he's got a speech and you understand why he's motivated to do that. Even though if you're all powerful, you could also just make more food for everybody. You wouldn't necessarily have to kill people. But he's a death cultist. So Thanos is going to Thanos. But it was clear enough. Like, again, I really appreciate the thought that went into this story.

There are a few places where they kind of like go, look over there, right? Like there's something that's really expedient, but mostly they know, they're very careful to get everybody on the same page, moving in the right direction, tell enough of the villain so you understand his motivation so that by the time you get to the end, you understand what you're seeing. And I think they did a pretty good job with all of that. My only real complaint is that the, I thought the Wakanda fight scene was a little bit too over the top in that they're like the space. We called them on the incomparable.

We called them like space orcs. Cause it's basically a Lord of the Rings fight at that point. There's just a giant horde of orcs that come through the force field. And even though you've got a, you know, war machine capable of bombing them all um everybody sort of immediately goes to hand-to-hand combat because that's what the movie wants you to see is is cool fight scenes involving these people on the ground but i it felt a little too star wars episode one to me i didn't really love that part of it even

though there's some good stuff in there it felt felt like unnecessary to have it be on that scale at the end of the movie. I think the problem was that if they were ever going to go to Wakanda, they needed an army to fight, because Wakanda has an army, right? You couldn't just have the two aliens arrive because the Wakandan army would just overwhelm them.

There had to be something. I was kind of hoping that the Wakandan army would defend against the space orcs or whatever while the super powered uh children of thanos like did their direct assault on where they're keeping the vision and that's not really what we got you know they they they you know they could have waved it away a little bit more it just felt to me like something that they felt was obligatory like this is the obligatory giant climactic fight that's a spectacle that's got lots of different moving parts it is their way of getting those characters who did not get a lot of screen time to at least get their little fight moment or laugh moment there's a great the great moment where um

where uh groot says i am groot and uh captain america says i am steve rogers yeah it's like very nice i'm pleased they took a break in the fighting to give me that moment because i enjoyed it it seemed completely unnecessary but i loved it but it was very funny yeah this whole movie builds to the ending right like the whole thing is based around this ending where all of a sudden half of the world's population i assume but all we see is half of the superheroes right disappear but it's half of the universe just uh dissolve yeah so i mean of course there are of course there are myriad ways that this could be reversed in the next movie like that's what you we all assume the next movie is about is like the the way that you reverse this because uh spider-man is dead and uh i really i

really doubt uh spider-man uh spider-man all the guardians of the galaxy and and black panther are all dead that was the moment i saw a piece today by the science fiction writer john scalzi where he was complaining that um the movie's impact is undercut by the fact that we know commercially these characters aren't going to stay dead i i think this was a deliberate attempt by the screenwriters to show you to to make you know that they're not going to stay dead by choosing some of the highest profile characters and maybe that's me reading too much into it but like i think that's choosing the highest yeah it when spider-man like they could have kept spider-man around other than the fact that they probably don't want him in the next movie that's what the other thing that's going on

here the people who get dissolved at the end of this movie one of the reasons is because those aren't characters they want in the next movie you'll notice all the original avengers are alive because they want that last avengers movie to really be about the avengers yeah the avengers saving the day and maybe sacrificing themselves yes sacrificing themselves to to bring them right but i read that black panther and spider-man and all that is also the movie saying because look the the key moment in this movie is when dr strange says oh i just went in time and looked at all the possible futures and there's only one where we win and then at some point he says to tony and he says and here thanos you can have the time gem and he says to tony um it had to be this way before he dissolves that is the movie saying this is all going dr strange saw the way they win he has a

plan and he has steered them to that reality and that and they are going to win the question is how who will pay but it's very clear from that and the fact that these are these high profile characters that we've just gotten to know that are not going to go out by dissolving that you know so i was okay with it i get if you're somebody who is not thinking on that level and you're just purely in that moment that it's super sad because like that scene where spider-man is telling tony that you know, he doesn't want to go. He's just a kid under Tony's, under Tony's supervision and responsibility. And he,

and he dissolves, right? It's, it's, it's a really tough scene, but at the same time and, and, and losing Black Panther,

same way losing T'Challa is very sad, except that really it's like, yeah, but in fact, I chuckled a little bit because I was like, oh, okay, you're not even going to try to convince us that these are permanent you're just you're just going to pick them all

off and and as a viewer who knows a little bit about how successful these characters are i was like oh all right you know you're not you're not i i kind of tip my cap at that like i appreciate that you're not even trying to convince us like oh no no most of the guardians of the galaxy are dead because once you kill off black panther and spider-man we know you're not serious were there any other emotional moments for you i would say for me um when thanos stabs tony stark that really got me because i i went into this movie expecting iron man would die that feels like real that feels like real jeopardy that feels like real jeopardy there and i think that there are a lot of things that happen before thanos snaps his fingers that will not be undone i think there will be deaths that like loki is a good example where yeah gamora in

fact they hang a lantern on it where where uh thor says um you know he's died before and come back but i think it's different this time yeah look gamora maybe although uh there's an argument to be made that she's in the soul gem and so that she could potentially be brought back out of that but because it's like an exchange if they destroy the soul gem she might come back right right or somebody else goes in or who knows what it is in the comics the soul gem is its own little world but who knows what they'll do in the movies i i thought that they were writing her out because of avatar she's an avatar right yeah she was in the i don't know if she's in all the avatar movies that they're making now it's possible that would be a tough guardians of the galaxy will not be as good if uh gamora's not in it though because that that relationship with with uh with peter quill is important to that series so we'll see i honestly

don't know that one. But I have questions about those. And I do believe that some people are going to sacrifice themselves in the next movie, you know, permanent death kind of thing in order to bring back the universe. Those are what the stakes are. It's more likely the people that we've seen for the last 10 years, right? So we'll probably lose Tony Stark. We'll probably lose Steve Rogers.

I don't think it's going to be all of them, though. I think that would be really weird. I think a couple of those characters might stick around. I don't think the Hulk is going away. But, you know, it's possible, like, the Black Widow will go away. Hawkeye, everybody wants to kill Hawkeye because he's not that interesting.

Oh, he wasn't even in the movie, right? Yeah, he was the other one. Yeah, at its core, it's about Steve and Tony. And those guys have been making these movies a long time, so probably they're going to get some resolution of their stories one way or another in this as sacrifices,

or they're going to go off and you'll be like, we've learned all we need to know about that guy. We're not going to see that guy again. I also believe that they're playing in the press with this, so there is a term in professional wrestling called kayfabe, where you build a fake story in the real world to support the stories that are happening on tv yeah and i think a lot of discussions everyone's like oh well you know i saw the interview with um chris what's his name not evans and he's like oh i'm not gonna do these movies

anymore i feel like you could quite easily say that even if you have a contract oh sure otherwise right like to build the idea of his character's gonna die yeah i'm surprised that uh they don't have chadwick boseman out there saying yep there'll never be another black panther movie because i'm dead now single tear like i it was so good for one movie and but it's not unfortunately it's too bad we can't no contract marvel hate me it's a shame they really regret it now but they had to do it right let's like no that's not that's that's exactly right so i think that that that is what's going on i think um i think once enough time passes that people know what happens in this movie because right now we're still clearly in the spoiler zone that that um we will start to get that next ground you know groundswell of like well what does happen next and did you notice this

and what's going to go on with this and they will start that but they're not at that point yet because they want everybody to experience this kind of shocking ending and it was very affecting like like jamie was crying in the car um she was crying in the theater and crying in the car on the way home was very upset and the next day she was still very upset about everybody dying. I love that she feels that much about these characters. That's awesome. Isn't that great? I think that's really great.

I think that's awesome. You did good there, Jason. And I don't think it's going to be, and people are like, oh, well, it's a cheat because they can bring everyone back. It's like, yeah. But the thing is, again, I think it's clear that they're going to have the ability to bring people back. This movie, as well as the Doctor Strange movie, show that winding time backward is a thing that you can do.

This movie goes to the trouble of actually showing that you can do that to remind you that that's a thing in this universe. So very clearly, they're going to find a way to wind time back and undo the very end of this movie. The question is going to be at what cost? And I think that's an interesting question. And I think that will lead to more emotional moments and more sacrifices and more death and and sadness that will and

goodbyes to characters that we know yeah my expectation is like they they wind it back to what we just saw right like they go on a big quest to find thanos and somehow get the gauntlet from him or whatever like maybe thor thor we've seen thor can kill him if he tries hard enough he can kill him right thor is the one i really like that they chose that as well because like thor is the only conceivable character at full power right that has been built over this period of time that could be in a position to do this well and he's got the magic magic uh enhanced godlike kind of capability right so it's like you know of course right like of course you can um and says you

should have gone for the head so maybe he goes for the head next that's it right like so i assume he will do that but that battle to get like when they do they redo the battle right when when he comes in and they're trying to get rid of Vision, the way that they fight that scene will result in the deaths in combat of specific characters is the way that I expect it will happen. I think it will be even more, kind of more than that.

I think there will be like prices to pay. Like the Soul Gem is a good example where you have to make a sacrifice to get the Soul Gem, right? Like the Doctor Strange Mystical Land mystical land right like someone makes like what is the character in spider-man is it mother m like in the what is that like that zone that he goes to sometimes and he's like hanging out in this like other reality oh yeah yeah i know what you mean like that kind of thing the web world yeah kind of

thing yeah like you know like they might start to dabble with stuff like that maybe i don't know right like because you like these characters go there they make the sacrifice for the other characters which allows them to right like yeah exactly and that's and that's the joy of this and that's why i i thought that this was a great movie and i thought that it had a great ending like i like i like having the bad guy win one time because you're like oh my god they are we you went against our expectations which is that you would bad guy wins the last job is that the bad guy is sitting down uh looking at the sunrise and smiling because he killed half the universe his happy ending like he asked for that earlier

in the movie all i want is to sit and watch the sunrise knowing I've done my thing. And he got that. And he gets it. Right. So the second movie, the question there is then the joy is in finding out how they undo what happened. And that, of course, because it's just like if you think it's a cheat, I mean, like a TV show where the lead character is put in jeopardy. It's like, you know, they're not going to die, right? You know, they're not going to die. The, the, the fun, the entertainment is in how they get out of it. Well, that's what the case is with

this movie. And the next one is how do they get out of this one? And the sacrifices, I think the other good thing about it is the scale is so huge. It's half of the living creatures in the universe have died, right? That was what he did. So your sacrifice is not just for your friends. It's not like, well, you know, I want to bring Dr. Strange back. I want to bring Spider-Man back the thing that just happened because it's on a scale never before seen. And so, what decisions do you make? What interesting adventures do you have? How do you fight somebody who has the power of a god or the gods? And they will figure that out and that will be an entertaining movie. And presumably at the end, they will make the sacrifices necessary to give us the big happy ending

that we were denied this year, which I think is fun. I think it's a bold move from them. I really appreciate that Marvel made a movie that has a downer ending. That is, you know, they're risk takers and I love it. Then they did it with their biggest franchise, which I think is pretty cool.

And in the end, I think it will make the satisfaction of the next movie that much more. People who are grumpy and grumbly about now. That's right. But next year, Thanos will get his comeuppance, presumably. It's way better they did this than leave it on a cliffhanger. Right? Because the movie could have ended with him clicking his fingers. Right?

That could have been the end of the movie. Exactly. Or it could have just been everybody lined up against Thanos and he's like, and standing between him and the Vision. He's like, I want that thing in the Vision's head. They're like, oh, you're going to have to come through us to be continued next year. It's not what they did. Because both of those things are satisfying endings in their own right, right? Like they, you know, you're like, oh, I can't wait for the next one, right?

Doing its actual job, right? If you see one of those two things we just posed, you know, you're like, oh, I can't wait for the next one, right? Doing its actual job, right? Like if you see one of those two things we just posed, you're going to be like, oh, I can't wait to see what happens in the kind of typical way. But this is like, oh, no, wait, you're going to watch half of your favorite characters turn into dust slowly, right? Like they didn't even all happen at once, right? Like, you were watching the Guardians go one by one, right? Like, it's like a five-minute scene of you watching people die, right? And the reactions of the people around them who are left. And that is incredibly powerful, right? Like, it was like, I came out of the theater and I was like, I don't even know if I like that movie, right? Because kind of how I felt initially was like, don't even know if i like that movie right because kind of how i felt initially it was like i don't know how i feel because it was super sad and i would say that

like on reflection this isn't my favorite marvel movie it's probably in my top five it's not my favorite avengers movie the original avengers i think i i enjoyed more just because like that movie should never have happened and like and if you were enjoying that stuff then it was like how you know like it was so impactful um but i i really really like this movie a lot like a lot and it is gonna rank very highly for me um in my kind of overall rankings of we should do a draft one day of uh marvel movies but it's not it's not it's not like i don't think it's top three for me um but but i did really really like it it exceeded my expectations i would say yeah i don't know where to rank it either but i liked a lot i feel like

the everybody gets together movies are just need to be judged separately so avengers age of ultron civil war and this movie are like, they're different movies from all the other movies. These are the coalescing, you know, you really need to know who these characters are from other movies for it to really work, I think. And they have a higher degree of difficulty to make them because you've got to keep track of all these characters.

So they fit in there. And where it ranks in there, I don't know. That's worth thinking about. I'm planning on revisiting all of these movies. This is as good a place as any, I guess, to make a minor announcement, which is if you like listening people talk about Marvel movies, I am toying with. but I am thinking seriously about having this summer's run of the incomparable be the summer of Marvel where we, we cover every Marvel movie that we have not yet covered on the show. And there are a lot of them.

So it will take all summer. And as part of that, I also want to do some revisiting of the Avengers movies. I think she's do all of them. Like, well, we've done, we've done some of them already.

It's a different panel. So, well, I don't know. I mean, also, the summer isn't that long. But there are some movies, like I want to do Iron Man and Iron Man 2. I want to do Thor and Thor 2.

I don't like Thor 2. I want to talk about the first Captain America movie, which we never did an episode about, which I love. Okay, you've got a lot of really important ones

to do. Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Thor Ragnarok, haven't talked about any of those so maybe i could finally make my first incomparable appearance in one of these that would be nice imagine that maybe so i hope you do that there's a lot in there you don't need to do revisits you've got a lot of really i didn't even know you hadn't covered some of those like oh Oh yeah. So there's a lot to go. You should totally do it. It'd be fun. It'd be fun. Chronologically.

I think so. Great. I'd love summer Marvel, the incomparable.com. That's where you can find all that stuff. Uh, yeah, I think we both really liked this movie.

Um, enough that I'm going to see it again. I'm going to see it again. I enjoyed it. Yeah, I am too. Hey, we should go see it together.

I would be great. Wouldn't it? If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode, go to relay.fm. Upgrade. 191. I want to thank Pingdom, PDFPen10, and Simple Contacts for their support of this show. If you want to find Jason online, go to at Jason L on Twitter and sixcolors.com. I am at imyke.

We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.