Upgrade - 192: People Like Colors and Fun

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

The 20th anniversary of the iMac prompts a discussion of how it changed Apple and continues to define how Apple designs products, Jason has a theory about why so many people thought iPhone X sales were crashing when they weren't, and Upstream ponders the Arrested Development "remix edition."

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 192 and today's show is brought to you by ero story worth and simple contacts my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hello just hello mike hurley how are you I'm very well, Jason Snell. How are you? I'm doing great. Do anything interesting this last week? Sure did, my friend. I had my bachelor party in Austin, Texas.

Oh, nice. With a bunch of my favorite people. But nobody wants to hear about that, Mike. Oh, look at that. We're going to go into our hashtag Snell talk question. I like that. Very clever. Very clever indeed.

You suckered me right in. You took advantage of my jet lag joel wants to know jason if a movie is released in imax 3d and as well as regular 2d do you have a preference of which version you would like to see uh great question joel and my answer is i don't like 3d movies i have seen some 3d movies that i thought were fine that did a good job but in general i don't like them i don't like the fact that because of the way the 3d process works you generally get a darker picture i wear glasses so i don't really like the fact that i spend an entire movie with two pairs of glasses stuck on my face so much it is the it is the worst so I will always pick a regular 2d movie IMAX I've seen some IMAX movies and if it's an IMAX movie I like them but a lot of times there's an a film that's in IMAX oftentimes like the dark night I saw and it was at an I imax theater and it was most of the movie

was just the movie projected on the giant imax screen and then there were there were some parts of it that were shot in imax that were at the imax ratio and then they went back to the other aspect ratio my uh my only imax movie was uh blade runner 2048 and that had some imax stuff in it and it was glorious right look it looked wonderful yeah it looks great it's it's a little bit weird um but i don't have an imax theater near me honestly well i mean near me i have in my county i don't have any i would have to go to kind of the far side of san francisco or out into the east bay which means i never go to imax movies and i try to avoid the 3d movies in fact and we'll put a link in the show notes, I own what are called 2D glasses.

I've never seen these. And this is maybe one of the best things I've ever come across. So if you go to a 3D movie and you don't want to see 3D, you wear these. That's hilarious. And what it does is, you know, the way 3D movies work is that the two lenses are polarized differently so that you see two different images. And that's how 3D works is that they give you that depth sensation. That's how it works. 2D glasses are only one side.

And so it flattens the image. I will say for people who are maybe thinking sort of like what about the purity of the 3D image, I'll just point out almost every movie made now that's in 3D is faked. If you look in the credits, like Infinity War is a good example of this. If you sit through the credits of any movie, and a Marvel movie is a good one to sit through the credits through because you want to see what happens in the post-credit sequence, you will see an entire section of names that are the people who did the 3D conversion because 3D cameras are really heavy and hard to use. And most people don't bother. They just shoot it in 2D and let some company sit there and apply fake depth in order to give that 3D effect. And if you like 3D movies, that's great, but I don't care for it. I don't think

it's really necessary. I try to avoid them and I have 2D glasses for when I actually want to avoid them. I also did, in order to cure one of the other issues we've got, I have bought but haven't used yet, some 3D clip-ons. The idea there is, well, what if I go to a 3D movie and I can clip some little 3D lenses onto my glasses and don't have that second set of plastic over my face? And it's compatible with most of the 3D theaters. So, I've got those. And the next time I end up at a 3D showing, I'm going to try those. I've used the 2D glasses before and they worked just fine. But the 3D clip-ons i'm going to give

a try we'll put links into the show notes i i can't you know i haven't used it yet but just if you're curious about that but you know joel my standard answer here is 2d works for me in fact when they started doing movie pass and uh the movie pass service where you pay a certain amount of money and you can see a certain amount of movies that keeps changing um one of their restrictions is no 3d because of course 3d movies cost more that's why they do them so they can charge you more for them and create an experience that you can't get at home uh and i was okay with movie pass being like oh no no 2d only like oh what is what a shame i can only see a 2d movie that's what i want to see i just said what we're talking about movies absolutely no spoilers but i enjoyed infinity war more the second time but sorry me too for a second time

this past week and i enjoyed it more me too and and i will also say as an aside it was my first time in an alamo draft house and i loved it a wild experience i have to say i i looked at that and i thought this is how the movies stay in business this is how people keep going to movies is stuff like this because i loved it i loved it all i love the reserve seats which i know a lot of movie theaters have reserve seats now uh but none in my area do i love the reserve seats i love the fact that we you know order food and it's delivered and if i want another beer during the show i just write it on a piece of paper and stick it on on the little thing in front of me and somebody comes by and brings me a beer and then at the end i signed my credit card slip and it's done it's

amazing that's so funny like when the person's like crawling down and they like hand the beer up to you it's a it's a very weird experience but a good one at the same time yeah yeah so thumbs up to a second viewing of infinity war. Thumbs up to the Alamo Drafthouse. Thumbs down to 3D. I think I agree with basically everything you just said. I stopped going to 3D movies a while ago. I just wasn't interested in it anymore. It just wasn't necessary for me because it felt like more and more of it was being ham-fisted. And it's more expensive, right?

They charge you more for it. That's the other part of it. If somebody is wondering, by the way, why is it that I am sometimes forced to go to a 3D movie, it's mostly about logistics. Whether it is, I need to see something quickly

for a podcast, which does happen, or whether it's my family can only go at a certain time and we don't live, the closest theater to us does not have a lot of we don't live, the closest theater to us does not have a lot of screens. In fact, the closest theater to us has one screen, which is great, but, and it's a great

experience, except if the timing is that the only time we can take the kids is on a Saturday at this time and it's a 3D showing. Well, we're going to go to the 3D showing. If we can avoid it, we do, but we can't always avoid it. And likewise, if the timing, if I need to go see a movie, now that I have movie pass, this is probably less so where like, I'm really going to try to use that and not do a 3D showing. But it does happen sometimes where you just end up at a 3D showing. So it's not as if a big burly man comes and says, you will go to the 3D movie now. Like, it's not quite like that, but it's just expediency. But if I can avoid it, yeah, it's

cheaper and I don't need to see it. And I kind of don't want to see it which is why i bought the 2d glasses do you know if the new uh avatar movies are being shot in 3d again or oh of course of course i mean because i would see that right because i saw the original avatar in 3d and it was incredible in 3d i agree i mean the list i i can make a list of 3d movies that I really liked. I liked Avatar. I liked Tron Legacy in 3D. I thought it looked really cool. And Hugo is the one I keep mentioning because, yes, Martin Scorsese made a 3D movie that's a family movie and it's called Hugo. And not only is it a good movie, but it is beautiful in 3D because you were seeing a master working with the best cinematographers and they were like, okay, we're going to make this in 3D. We're going to make it really good.

And it was really good. But then I've seen all sorts of summer blockbusters in 3D and it just kind of leaves me cold. It doesn't really do anything for me. There are occasional moments where you think, oh, well, that looks pretty cool cool in 3d but most of the time i find it distracting and unnecessary so and plus it does make the movie darker i'm really i'm really happy about the fact that like it feels like the trend of a thing happens in a movie just because it's going to be in 3d seems to have died away you know like there's like a scene where like oh and it's all coming to the screen you know like there's been a big crash and there's debris flying directly at you like it feels like some of that's died off which is good because you watch a 2d movie and you're like oh that was the big 3d

effect that i didn't get to see because i didn't want to see that i think in star trek is it maybe star trek or star trek into darkness that there's a uh the warp drive is in 3d and i was like oh that was cute but it's like literally the only thing that made me excited about the 3D in that movie. So, you know, it's just, uh, it's, I don't think it's necessary. Um, I, uh, it's fine if you like it, it's fine if you like it. Obviously it works enough. Although I've read stories that say that audiences are lukewarm about 3D and that it is more like they go because it's the time that's convenient for them and that some people are unhappy when they have to put the glasses on. But as long as it is something that can boost the bottom line, we talked about the Alamo Drafthouse.

Bottom line is the movie theaters are trying to find ways to get people to come to the movie theater because it's a good experience instead of staying home and having movies that are exclusive is part of it and that's always been the case since home video happened that you know there's a period where you need to see the movie in the theater and that's fine but it is now about nice seats they bring you food they let you reserve your seats and 3d is one of those things that's kind of on that list of, especially since 3D TV didn't take off, that if you want to see the 3D version of anything, you got to see it in the movie theater. Because after that, you're basically never going to see it again until some other 3D tech comes along. Maybe, you know, with higher quality VR goggles, maybe 3D will come back in that format. But because you need to have the special glasses basically to do 3d or they'll

invent some amazing 3d tv that requires no glasses but the the industry's attempt to make 3d tv happened failed and is it's going to be a while before they try again so it's on the list of things good sound theoretically is on that list too and you know anything else they can do to make it a more pleasant experience and i I believe they can do it. And going to the Alamo Drafthouse convinced me of that. That, like, there are ways to make the movie theater experience a nice one that people actually are excited about doing. I'm not convinced 3D is a big part of that strategy. But I get why it's a part of the strategy.

Plus, it lets them raise the ticket price for a lot of showings because they charge extra for 3D. It's an extra fee they get to charge if you would like to send in a snell talk question just send out a tweet with the hashtag snell talk and it goes into a document for us to pull later on thank you to joel for his excellent question this week um i wanted to just give a piece of follow-up jason in regards to yoav's hashtag ask upgrade question last week where Yoav asked about finding a way to get rid of duplicates basically from the photos app. So when you have a shared file, a shared album of photos and you want to download them or you end up with a bunch of duplicates. And whilst we don't have a great way to solve that problem, Nash has a great way to get rid of the duplicates once you've got them as an app that he uses called best photos which will allow you to

detect and remove uh duplicate photos from your ios photo library so this isn't a complete solution to your problem but it can fix it on the other end well and i'll mention um i i kind of steered away from the post import scenario because there are a bunch of options there. And that wasn't quite what he asked. But I'll mention Power Photos from Fat Cat Software. They are an occasional Six Color sponsor. So they just sponsored the site a couple weeks ago. So there's my disclaimer.

But I have used it. I mentioned it in the book that I wrote about photos. And it is the successor to their iphotolibrary manager product and basically it does all sorts of stuff including deduping letting you merge libraries letting you separate separate libraries so if you're trying to do like stuff that photos doesn't do it's worth looking i think they've got a demo um uh version that you can you can try uh with power photos from fat cat so i'll put that in the uh show notes too yeah because i guess if there isn't a way to fix it on the front end yeah you can detect you can try uh with power photos from fat cat so i'll put that in the uh show notes too because i guess if there isn't a way to fix it on the front end yeah you can detect you can detect the duplicates later and and that that is not ideal right you'd prefer it to be smart about detecting duplicates

but a lot of stuff writing about photos for the last few years i get a lot of emails are like why doesn't it do this and and my response is always like, because it doesn't because I mean, like, literally, my goal is to show you what you can do and how you can work around it. You almost have to have to view the app as a force force of nature, almost like look, it just doesn't do it. So it's like we could complain. That's fine about the fact that it doesn't strip out the duplicates in some scenarios uh but it doesn't so what what are you gonna do and the answer is find a way to fix that because apple hasn't fixed it yet so there are some options there jason i believe you have some upstream news for me this week i i do i did have some upstream news that's not the theme song for upstream i just was trying it out but it didn't

work a little little horn um uh well so last week was something called new fronts which is this totally weird thing there's a to back it up there's a thing called up fronts which is when tv networks go to new york and they do a bunch it's like a dog and pony show for advertisers for the biggest advertisers and what they're trying to do is say here are all these great things that we're doing and you should uh you should give us advertising because aren't we awesome and that means that up front has become also a media dog and pony show for the networks to talk about their new fall seasons and what their strategies are and the new fronts are an attempt by uh like new media companies that are also wanting to reach with advertisers so it's basically like well we want to do up fronts too so we're going to do

this thing called new fronts there's also a thing i think called pod fronts that is by like podcast networks that uh yeah you remember that like where we saw like lex friedman got up on stage and talked about how great mid-roll was and and uh you know and the people from from uh panoply and all that anyway everybody wants to do a dog and pony show in new york city is basically the story because you wouldn't want to be in new york city it's a great city so new fronts was uh hulu youtube netflix uh i think well maybe netflix wasn't there because they don't have any ads anyway hulu was there youtube was there some other streaming services were there and they made some news so hulu was at the new fronts and they announced they have 20 million subscribers they're us only

they grew from they grew 4 million in i think four or five months so hulu showing a lot of growth one of the challenges with hulu is it's a us only service right now it's not just that they're 20 million subs are us only which is actually a pretty good number in the u.s but uh what's the rest of their strategy we've talked about how hulu is going to be if the disney fox merger goes through majority owned by disney and there's a question of sort of like what happens to it what's its fate does it keep its other owners or does disney buy them out does disney use hulu as the place where its content that's more adult oriented the stuff from fox and fx goes to and maybe even some of the stuff from abc instead of going to the other disney streaming

services um the handmaid's tale is like their number one show it's a success across the board among viewers and critics and it's won a lot of awards so they crowed about that a little bit and they pointed out again that their catalog is all about tv which i think is interesting like it's a tv brand they have more tv content than any of their competitors if you think about it that's kind of interesting because they've been as i think netflix and amazon have been less interested in having a massive library of old tv shows and things like that they kind of want some hits and they want originals and they want movies hulu is all about tv um and then they also have a live tv service that they introduced that's the over the top you

know cable replacement that will show you like shows and channels as they're running live so that's that's what's going on with hulu and then um youtube was also there and they made some news so they premiered their new original series on youtube red cobra kai which is the sequel to the karate kid movies um which has gotten pretty good reviews actually as far as i've seen which is kind of surprising and funny um and they also gave kind of a weird presentation where i think the the money line from the ceo of youtube who's susan wajiki wajiki i don't know how to pronounce that name. I think it's Wojcicki. Wojcicki. All right. It's a Polish name. Anyway, she said, there's not a playbook for how open

platforms operate at our scale. So it's an admission of weakness. Why is that important? Well, open platforms at scale is all about, remember, she's talking to advertisers. One of the challenges about having ads in an open platform like YouTube is, you guessed it, your ads as these very carefully planned and maybe uptight advertisers are working on their ad campaigns and then their ad gets put next to something violent, something sexual, something racist. And that totally happens with youtube so just something that becomes controversial exactly whatever reason and most advertisers don't want to be attached to anything controversial they don't they want to be just blend in and be in the

background um youtube also has its own youtube tv live tv over the top streaming service so there's another another aspect where youtube is doing that hulu is doing that um anyway i thought those i thought both of those stories were interesting just as a way of of uh youtube doing some original content that is also interesting because we think of youtube as a brand that is very much focused on um young people and their original content is a show that will appeal to like gen xers in terms of nostalgia which i think is a funny thing but yeah but i think they're trying to broaden i think between this and their and the youtube tv over the top service they're trying to like youtube red isn't just for my son it's for me too is what they're trying to say there right that's interesting the person who's

probably actually going to be paying the bill in the first place it's true it's true i am the one who pays that bill. So that's exactly right. And then Hulu, I think, is interesting because there's a lot of questions. Like, I think Hulu is actually a pretty good service, but there are so many different questions about, like, how do they build subscribers? Are they going to go outside the US? What's Disney going to do?

Because it's potential that in a year or two, what we're going to realize is that Hulu is Disney's worldwide content strategy for streaming stuff that appeals to adults. That's not their sports strategy or their Disney-branded, Disney-Marvel-Star-Wars-branded thing that's going to skew a little bit younger, but that it's their strategy for everything else. And that would be an interesting competitor. Also, if they are all about TV, that gives them another little talking point, right? Like that they pick up all the TV, whereas Netflix and Amazon maybe are more concerned with their own programming rather than like picking up programming from other places and putting it in their service.

So, I'm fascinated by where Hulu's's gonna go in the next couple of years uh because it there's a lot of potential there or it could just go nowhere that's also possible but they do seem to be growing and uh and they seem to have some sort of a plan but we'll see netflix has released a remix version of the fourth season of arrested development this is super weird yeah right okay it's weird and there's even a weirder backstory here because mitch hurwitz who is the creator of arrested development he actually did this a long time ago we talked about this on the podcast i do with tim goodman in july of 2016 so a year and a half ago, we talked about this. Coming up two years ago,

we talked about this. And Tim wrote a story, we can put it in the show notes. In July of 2016, Mitch Hurwitz said, and told Tim, he'd recut the original fourth season. So this was the Netflix original season

of Arrested Development. It got kind of mixed reviews. It was weirdly shot because they got the different actors at different points and so what he they ended up releasing this thing that was almost like rashomon style it was like different perspectives it was 15 episodes long um they episodes were keeping in mind a standard sitcom um and the first three seasons of arrested development were about 22 minutes each These episodes were 30 minutes all the way up to like 42 minutes long. They were longer. There were fewer of them. There were 15. And they were in these kind of blocks of like this character's story. And you'd see

them cross over with other characters. And then the next episode, you'd see a different character's story and you'd see them cross over. It was a very different format for the show. And my daughter, who's been watching Arrested Development, had that same comment. And she doesn't know the show. And my daughter, who's been watching Arrested Development, had that same comment. And she doesn't know the history. She was just like, yeah, that four seasons were really strange. Like, it's not like the first three seasons. Well, what Mitch Hurwitz told Tim in July 16 is he actually went back and edited a new version of season four that works like the traditional first three seasons. He goton howard to do new narration they use some shots that are not the same shots it's a different thing it's got some different

material in it and it's 22 22 minute episodes like it's it's just the old show the way it was done instead of this new format and that he had done that and netflix didn't want it basically and he said it was just sitting on a shelf or probably more accurately sitting on a hard drive somewhere. But he had gone back and made a new version of the show. And at the time, Tim wrote about it. People were tweeting about it. Everybody who's an Arrested Development fan went bananas about this. And I was baffled by why Netflix wouldn't do anything with it.

Because it's like the same content, you know, other than a contractual thing, it's possible that like they would need to pay 20th Television, I think is the producer of it, more money for an alternate version. But I kept thinking to myself, streaming shows and services, like this is the perfect way, like, yeah, put out an alternate version that's cool why don't you do that and why wouldn't you do that if you're netflix well almost two years later and with a fifth season apparently in production yes now netflix apparently my guess is netflix thought well now we can start warming up people for the new season of arrested development and get them

excited about it by doing this recut version of season four. Perhaps this is why they would pay the money and do the promotion to do it. But they finally did it after sitting on a probably sitting in a hard drive of Mitch Hurwitz for a couple of years. Last Friday, they released this remixed Arrested Development season four. So people who are fans of that show and maybe who didn't like season four or didn't watch it might want to give it a go because it's apparently a more standard take consistent with the first three seasons.

And I just love this story because this is a creator taking advantage of the fact that they've got all this content to do an alternate version of a show that they made and the streaming service can just post it and then you've got all this content to do an alternate version of a show that they made. And the streaming service can just post it. And then you've got an alternate version. It's a little bit like how a lot of the sitcoms, especially the Michael Schur sitcoms,

so like The Office and Parks and Recreation and The Good Place and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a lot of those shows, they would drop, the episode would air at 22 minutes. And then on iTunes the next day, they would drop like the episode would air at 22 minutes and then on itunes the next day they would drop like a 38 minute version that was the one that they wanted to release but it didn't fit in the time slot and in most cases those are the versions that are on netflix which i think is great because that means in the long run that's the real version of the show not the one that ran on a network with commercials and i think again that's the brilliance of the the world we live in now that you can do that that there's not just sort of like we do it

once and then we walk away forever and how could we even offer another version of it and here mitch hurwitz has done an entire different season of his same season that's it's really cool so i haven't watched them yet but i'm really excited to watch them because i think it's a great idea it's just strange that it took two years so the new season's coming out uh at the end of may and they released a new trailer oh good that goes alongside it so there you go that so it's part of the promotion of the new season yeah and something that i find interesting though the original season four has been replaced with this new one oh interesting so it's not alongside they just they just put it in there i can't find i can't find the original season four interesting season one two three and then

season four remix fatal consequence fateful consequences interesting interesting yeah well it's also possible that netflix and and herwitz talked about it and they're like yeah this is better nobody liked it the way we did it let's just replace it and never because at this point your viewers of that are people who are binging, which means they are, they are not seeing the context of the show going off the air for a few years and then coming back. Instead,

all they're seeing is, um, is that this thing happened. And, you know, we move from season three, last episode to season four, first episode and like,

whoa, what happened? So you just remove it and it's not a problem anymore all right should we take a break jason yeah great idea today's show is brought to you by story worth the easiest way to share your family stories story worth makes it easy and enjoyable for your loved ones to share their life stories with weekly emailed story prompts and questions that you might not think to ask then at the end of the year they're going to get all their stories bound in a beautiful hardcover book.

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StoryWorth, a new way to bring the family together thank you to story worth for their support of this show and relay fm yeah so over the weekend there the there was an anniversary a very important anniversary it was the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the imac yeah this is the computer we know, the iMac G3, as it became kind of colloquially known later on because there were multiple versions of it. But this is the Bondi blue and white case that you'll be very familiar with. So this happened over the weekend. It's been 20 years since it was introduced on stage by Steve Jobs in 1998. And I want to talk about a few things about this jason but what i don't

necessarily want to go through is the introduction itself because we've done that already we did um in may 2016 we had stephen hackett on the show because at this time i think he was coming towards the end of his project of collecting all of the imax right um and we spoke about kind of the announcement and you told some stories about what it was like when you were working at Macworld then, right? Yeah, I was in Macworld then. Right. Yeah, no, Stephen told his stories.

I told my stories and you sat patiently while we talked and perhaps doodled or colored or went away. I cannot and I will not answer that question. So I wanted to look at kind of in context, 20 years ago, this product, and then kind of looking at how it relates to products of today. So I think first, I wanted to kind of get from you a feeling of this iMac, what mark did it leave on Apple? Do we see anything else that is is a parallel today good or bad with this product that maybe because of its success kind of became ingrained in the company

i mean it it's always hard to point at one thing or one moment and say that's when it all changed right because the truth is that that what they said later is they started this project the day steve jobs came back in july of the previous year like that that was when they kicked it off and that there were this is the columbus project and they they uh ended up shipping these things and there was internally there was a lot of turmoil in fact you and i were i bet we're fortunate to spend some time with a friend of ours who is actually who was on on the iMac software team, the original iMac software team. Like, they were working on this for a long time, and there was a lot of there. So, we can point to the moment that it surfaced publicly and say, there's the moment.

But obviously, huge amounts of work went in before then and after that announcement to get that product to ship, right? I mean, it was a huge amount of work but um it is on another level i could point to it and say uh what what do they have here like they took the old ports away the the it's actually funny steven hack and i were talking about this yesterday um it's the macworld story on this actually mentioned something called chirp which not a lot of people remember. And I may actually dig through my old magazines and write something about this or Stephen will. That there was this idea to create this common hardware reference platform, which is, I think, what Chirp stood for.

And it was the idea of, like, could you make a PowerPC-based computer that was like a standard PC just like an intel pc was a standard pc something that everybody who made a power pc-based computer and at that point there were like different companies making them not just mac clones even but like for different operating systems and all and ibm really wanted people to use and motorola to use the power pc and they thought maybe it would be an a viable like alternative to an intel standard pc would be this chirp standard pc was the idea that by doing this other people would make max is that the idea well i mean i think that the clones was part of that story but it was also the idea that like if you were motorola or ibm or somebody else and you wanted to do or b actually is another example with the b os which was considered at one point a possibility as a replacement for the mac os that if you if you or or quite honestly if it had been successful microsoft could have done a power pc version of

windows and right to the common platform the idea was they wanted to create this common platform that basically any computer that was running a power pc processor would look like and it and it didn't happen basically there were some chirp mac some chirp devices shipped including i think the motorola mac clone was a chirp computer although i'm not 100 on that because there was motorola did actually ship its own mac clone at one point but um it all it all fell apart and of course steve jobs killed the clones and that was the end of it but what why i bring up chirp now and the clone wars right that's the clone yeah that was right they fought you know doth vader and steve jobs fought together in the clone

wars that's right um that's tell your kids that's the story so i bring it up because uh it in the macworld article uh it actually quotes an apple product manager as saying that the imac project picked up a lot of the stuff from chirp so even though apple didn't make a chirp mac it it uh used that stuff in order to you know simplify and modernize and it still used that as a jumping off point in terms of building the imac and what that got them was a modern mac and a break from the past and i think what's interesting about that is not apple participating in kind of a an industry consortium to build something which is not a thing that they do a lot uh today but the idea that apple used that tech to do what it

wanted to do which is make a clean break and you see echoes of that in all sorts of other times that they have dropped features we joke about like all the features that get dropped from apple's devices the optical drives went away at some point and usb-a went away on like the macbook only has the one thing the headphone jack went away on the eye on the iphone uh the when they went from dock connector to lightning people complain about that like that apple is fearless about doing that so that that's part of it. And the design forward is part of it too. Like there were a couple of Macs. I read a story today that said this was the one

where Apple's design language came forward. And it's like, well, again, the story's a little more complicated than that. The Power Mac G3, the beige one, had this weird plastic, like green, translucent plastic thing on it that was like it was like johnny ive trying to let me out let me out i want to do something interesting i put a green plastic thing somewhere of the beige cases and then they did i don't think the wall

street powerbook g3 gets enough credit those were crazy looking at the time they had the black laptops with kind of a rubberized surface and the white apple logo on the back like they were so different from the previous powerbook g3 that that preceded them that um they that you could tell that apple was doing some really different things from design standpoint even though that was probably a product that was in the works and at most they sort of agreed to pump up the design stuff a little bit and make it look a little more interesting in the time that they had. And that came out a couple months before the iMac was announced, right? So you could get the sense that things were starting to happen design wise, but then you look at the iMac and like the iMac design is unlike anything that was

out there. It was incredibly influential in the computer industry and outside the computer industry. Basically, I would say in the plastics industry, everybody who made plastic things suddenly said, oh, we can finally somebody is allowing us because I think they could always do it. Right. The question was like nobody wanted translucent plastic and colored plastic brightly colored plastic and once apple did the iMac everybody like every kitchen appliance and clock radio and everything else was available in a translucent bright plastic version it became premium right in the same way that making everything white became premium after the ipod it's like everybody agreed that nothing could be anything but black white or beige and then apple, yeah, we're making a bright blue computer and good luck.

Just deal with it. And everybody was like, oh, people like colors and fun. Maybe we should do that. And that was a big part of it, too. So I think you see that today. I will use this as my monthly request for more color in Apple devices. Yeah, well, I think you see it but it comes and goes right and right now apple stuff is like well we we it's everybody get excited because not only is there silver now there's a slightly darker silver that we call space gray and it's not like more shades

of gray it's very exciting and occasionally some product will get gold and then there'll be the product red is that one red one yeah that's six months later did you wait for the red one so yes i agree there should be more color in apple products that would be something that i would like them to uh come back to but if you remember like the ipod nanos and all of that like they that was the same kind of approach too so i i think that those are some of the places where you see this culture that ste Steve Jobs was basically building at that point that continues on to this day that is in the DNA of Apple. And the iMac was the first like full representation of all of that. And it evolved and changed as everything does. But I think that it was a clear first 100% step in that direction. So whilst if you look at any kind of successful company person entity

you can kind of draw a line between all of the dots uh to see if they're you know to go to the success you know you could be like oh they had that teacher and then they went to that class or that kind of thing but i wonder if we have a special case here when it comes to the imac g3 when i ask this question is, would we have the iPhone today if the iMac never existed? So, going back to my previous point about, like, pointing to a moment, in my article that I wrote on Six Colors about this, I said, and again, I gave, I hesitate because there's no such thing as a moment. That is all stagecraft like it's years it's months and years of work that lead to that moment but in terms of the outside world if you watch that that keynote from the flint center

and i i wasn't there because at that point apple i suspect apple was calling us in for briefings thinking they had something to show us and then and in the chaos of the early days of steve jobs then they ended up not because we had a couple briefings where like nothing happened and we're like why did we come down here you've got nothing to say and so for this one it was a little like the boy who cried wolf or like yeah sure apple's got something else and so only our editor-in-chief went but if you watch that video the first half hour of it or 20 minutes of it it's amazing. It's like Steve Jobs is sort of like saying, we're not going to die. He puts up a chart about employee retention and says, people aren't quitting at Apple as fast as they used to. That's really good. So we're doing better. This is no

longer a place that people are trying to escape. I'm really pleased to report to you today that Apple's back on track. When you have great people, the most important thing is to not lose them. When I came back to Apple last summer, Apple was losing a lot of them. The attrition rate annualized was 33%. And I'm very pleased to say that 10 months later, the attrition rate is 15%. And part of that is because people now see how Apple can win again. Another part of that is because we've made Apple a much more entrepreneurial place. All of the key employees have lots of stock options.

Boy, those presentations are different then. Right? And it was like, you know, and the Mac sales are going pretty well. And, you know, we had the PowerBook G3, that Wall Street, and it's really good. And we're going to, I think they made like some adjustments to it. But it basically had been out for a couple of months there was a lot of phil schiller coming out on stage to demo like various pcs from compact and dell against uh max so that they could show the megahertz myth because in those days what they were trying to do is say that even though the power pcg3 processor had a

lower clock speed than a bunch of the pentium 2s, that they were actually faster, that you couldn't just compare the megahertz, that you had to say, like, this 333G3 was actually faster than a 400 Pentium 2. But they had to do, like, bake-offs where they, like, start Photoshop results, and then Steve and Phil would stand there and watch as the computers, like, worked in split-screen. It was super weird tell us about your computer here i'm glad here to come out and try to take you on head to head because

you asked me to go out and get the biggest and the best and i did and this is the brand new compact gamarda 7800 it's got a pentium 2 the new mobile pentium 2 266 that's the fastest speed it runs at it's just been announced you can't get much better than this. I'm scared. So we're just going to have to find out. Now, up on this screen on your left, we have the Compaq Armada Pentium II 266. In the middle, we have our new PowerBook G3 running at 233 megahertz. And on the far right, we have the G3 running at 292 megahertz. Of course, both of these machines are less money than the Compaq.

So let's go ahead. What we're going to do now is we're going to run Photoshop, what a lot of our customers like to do and have been dying to do on a fast portable. So we've got Photoshop here and we've got exactly the same file on all of these computers. But it's all about like, I need to justify that Apple still exists because you all remember last year and figured we were going out of business. And now I need to justify that apple still exists because you all remember last year and figured we were going out of business and now i need to completely change the narrative it's amazing how hard he's working to get people to believe that apple is not about to die because

you have to do that before you unveil a new product right right well and he knows what's coming right he knows what's coming but what's amazing about it and he at one point he's like and and especially when you see what we have today right like haha i'm gonna tease what i've got coming all of that said the moment that he takes the little drape off of the imac and reveals it this is what they look like today and i would uh like to take the privilege of showing you what they're going to look like from today on. This is iMac. This is iMac. The whole thing is translucent. You can see into it. It's so cool. That is literally the moment that Apple went from dead to alive. Like literally, that is the moment. And from that moment to 20 years later it has been up up up for apple like that was the moment without that moment they probably wouldn't be

around no because the mac although the mac was kind of turning around i think if apple had just continued doing beige products and all of that like would they have gotten to the ipod would they have been able to sell the ipod? Would the popularity of the iPod have given them more gas because they weren't just getting the gas from sales of the iPod, but they got way boosted. The Mac sales got boosted because of the halo effect where people finally were having positive experiences with Apple as a brand that they had never, they'd never had before. Again, it's, we we've gone long enough now that people forget the iPod halo effect. The iPod was for most people, the first Apple product

they ever bought. And they, and they were like, Oh, this is great. Or they went into an Apple store and then they saw the Mac and they're like, Oh, Apple makes a computer. This is way better than that PC that I have. I'm going to get one of these too and that was that was the infusion of energy and cash that apple needed in the 2000s in order to keep going and they i don't think they would have gotten there without the imac which was a hit because it was different but also because it was priced pretty well and because it was the right time because up to that point so many computers the idea was well i need a computer at home so i can do some of my work when i'm at home and so it needs to be a pc and it needs to do everything that my office pc does but by like the late 90s the really what you needed was um you wanted to get on the internet

and maybe check your email and you could do that on a mac so like there was a real opportunity for the mac to no longer be seen as this weird incompatible computer but to be seen as a an appliance that lets you get internet and email at home and that jeff goldblum narrated ad where it's like step one plug it in step two get connected and plug in the phone cable there's no step three right like that was the whole appeal of the imac is you just plop one of these things down in your living room it looks kind of neat and weird and fun. And you're on the internet. And it's all just, you know, you don't have to hook up a monitor and do anything like that. It's like super simple, all in one. And that was powerful. And they sold a lot of them very quickly. It became the Mac product, the definitive Mac for

a very long time afterward, and set apple on its way to the you know to the ipod and ultimately to the iphone but they would never they would never have gotten there without a product like this because mac sales were kind of ebbing and everybody there was nothing to be excited about they were they there had been so much press about apple dying that there needed to be a turnaround and you know in the background they're working on os 10 because they came when jobs came back he came back with next step and they knew they were going to do a new operating system but they they didn't have it ready yet so this is not an os 10 device when it ships it's a it's an os 8 6 device i think and uh you know so there's a lot of stuff bubbling in the background but the hardware alone got people

excited about this computer. And that was how Apple changed its fate. Is the iMac G3 a product that can only come from a struggling company? Could Apple be that kind of daring again? Or is this always like a Hail Mary to do something so far out of left field? Or is this always like a Hail Mary to do something so far out of left field? I think on your average company, this is not the kind of product that they could do. But I think that's what Apple is trying to do all the time. I think Apple at its best and what, again, they don't succeed a lot of the time.

And they do have to maintain existing products and iterate them and all of that. But they also have those moments where they take a leap and i think steve jobs wanted that in apple's corporate culture i think that's the thing that he always wanted apple to strive for is what's the next big thing we're going to take another crack at this and we're not going to be afraid of upsetting the installed base like you know we laugh about it now about how mac users were kind of all up in arms about the imac because it broke compatibility with literally everything you think the headphone jack thing is bad when they took the headphone jack off you had every mac for the previous like 10 years had shipped with scuzzy ports and adb ports and serial ports and they're all gone in one system they're gone gone never to

return you can buy a dongle so you can go to dongle town dongle town was smaller than mike but it was still there out on the frontier on the main road dongle hamlet yeah it was more of a dongle village at that point but it was definitely there wasn't incorporated yet didn't have a lot of tall buildings but boy it was there because i had, I still have some USB serial adapters and USB ADB adapters, but they did, they made that break. It was a big deal, but part of what Jobs wanted Apple to think collectively in its culture was the users will come along if there's a benefit. Now, there are positives and negatives to that approach and all the conversation about the mac laptops over the last couple of years has

definitely it cuts both ways but there is something to be said like that iMac was the point was that it wasn't for those existing mac users like it was for new users who wanted to come to the mac the mac wasn't selling enough to just the the the faithful to just the install base they needed to sell to new people and the new people didn't care and in the end the new people would benefit from having usb where you could literally like this was the era where if you wanted to detach your hard drive or attach a hard drive you had to shut down the computer and then unplug everything and then or replug it and then turn it back on and usb is hot pluggable basically so you can just unplug or unplug and it's fine like that was huge and and how long did apple just kind of putter

around with this old this old stuff so i think steve jobs wanted to instill in apple the feeling that if they felt that there was a benefit to ditching something like the lightning port or or not the lightning port like the dock connector for the lightning port or like the headphone jack and we can argue about like the headphone jack was that a good idea and usb c for usba but you can see why they do it they do it because steve jobs wanted them to have that culture of like break the rules throw the old thing away the ipod nano is a great example of that where they followed that on um whatever five six seven years later where they later, where they had the iPod Mini, and it was incredibly successful, and it was more successful than the iPod, and they killed it because the Nano was better, and it was a totally different product.

And that was super weird, but that was the culture was throw the old thing away. We want to be our own replacement. Flash storage is the future. Let's just kill the old product. And that worked for them. So, that is, I would even say that's the thing when we criticize Apple, and they often do deserve criticism about it. What I like about them is they are always trying this stuff. And it doesn't always work, and they deserve criticism when it doesn't work but i do like that they try and that comes from

steve jobs instilling that in their culture like look at the imac it's a great example like they just made a break and it worked for them and there's something to be said for that because the argument is if you don't make a break because you're super comfortable someone else will do it and they will eat your lunch so you better be your own replacement build your own replacement be your best competition and i do think that apple at its best when it's working at its best is doing that happy birthday i make yeah yeah it's a it's it's funny i have on my wall a uh 20th anniversary of the macintosh cover from mac world. And we've come all the way, I guess it's 14 years later, because we've come all the way to 20th anniversary of the iMac. Amazing. I mean,

the iMac now is older than the original Mac was when the iMac was introduced. That's the thing that blows me away. A lot older, but that's how time works. This episode is brought to you by simple contacts it's amazing when an app takes a task that you don't want to have to do over and over again and just makes it so fuss free when it can take time away from you having to go somewhere and wait in a waiting room this is the sort of stuff that simple contacts can take away from you because it is the easy way to renew your contact lens prescription you'll be able to reorder your contacts from anywhere you want in just minutes so like if you're in the grocery store and you're like, oh, I need new contacts,

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That's A-H-O-Y. Or just use the code ahoy for $30 off. Our thanks to Simple Cont contacts for their support of this show so apple results were last week and there's it was a it was mostly good right i don't think that it was there was any there weren't any blockbusters in either direction really they they i think they slightly beat their their estimates they increased their revenue year over year they had good results in china even though people were worried about that the ipad did okay mac went down a smidge well mac went down in units but was

flat in revenue or flattened units and up in revenue it was one of those things where basically what you were seeing is that the even though it seemed flat uh revenue was better and that was probably at least in part because of the imac pro just because the imac pro boost is expensive and they they introduced it so they sold a lot of them um relatively speaking you know maybe not a huge amount but enough to boost revenue the ratio right we we figure out average selling price by looking at the ratio of the sales units to the sales revenue and it went one of the revenue went up so the average selling price went up which i point at and say well they're the imac pro was there and that's a much more expensive computer than they usually

sell and therefore it it dragged it up a little bit but yeah it was a it was i mean they get routine it was a huge quarter apple makes so much money but in the end uh most of it was pretty much what you'd expect it was the continuing story not anything kind of revelatory but there was one little thing which is kind of interesting it was because it was about a very big thing so since the release of the iphone 10 there have been many analysts reports and this we saw this last quarter we saw it this quarter as well last quarter it was just proven by numbers this quarter it was just proven by numbers that people have been saying that iphone 10 sales have been struggling this has been a thing that has been like even like the day before i think bloomberg published this big thing you know oh the iphone 10 is going to be

down it's been a big disappointment and they're going to forecast it down again and and they're going to miss their forecast none of this happened um and apple was saying that it's their top selling phone and has been their top selling phone since the day it was introduced every week too not just per quarter but every single week it's the number one selling more iphone 10s than any other phone it's difficult to know what the exact mix is but it's like they are selling more iphone 10s than like they are pluses you know i don't know if maybe when you add both eights together like but you know because they don't talk about a single handset exactly and again right like they're in their forecasts they forecast an increase in profit um sorry increase

in revenue year over year and the literal only way apple can do that is by selling more iphones right like there's there's nothing else that will drive the revenue so significantly for them currently it has to be selling more iphones yes so what is going on what why why are analysts consistently having this thought that iphone 10 is tanking well i i have a theory about the iphone 10 one i mean there is an overarching theory which is that which i don't know enough about the investing world to talk about other than to say that there is one theory that says that the apple bears are manipulating the stock right that they literally are contrarian because they're suppressing the apple stock so that they can make money on the apple stock which again it's a conspiracy theory and i don't

know enough about that world but you can see that though right like i mean it doesn't seem like a wild like it doesn't seem like something from fiction like of course i can understand that it's either that or or there's something about apple that brings out people who are um who don't understand reality um and maybe that's true too because that's been true for years but the thing is you can correct me if i'm wrong but in recent times this this feels a little bit out of place yes well the iphone 10 thing has been going on for a while now and i think i've got i've got some i've got my theory so here it is first off if we go back to before the iphone was uh 10 was announced when you and i were talking about it, and it was this theoretical high-end phone and all of that, there was a lot of consternation about, like, how are they going to do it?

How are they going to make it so that they sell this one? Are people going to want the other one? Are people going to just defer purchases because they don't want to buy what we now know as the iPhone 8 when the iPhone 10 exists? That seems to not have happened. But that was the beginning of a narrative that you could pick up. And I think some people picked it up, a negative narrative, like Apple's changing their strategy, fear, fear, right? So we get into the release and there's some skepticism and it continues to build. And there was like a supply chain report at some point that said that a couple of apple suppliers were were um cutting uh had their

orders cut including i think for the uh for the oled screens from samsung and you can see how people start to make those assumptions based upon that right you know yeah although there were some just totally weird assumptions like the one that said the iphone 10 is end of life which i can't tell whether that was somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about or whether there was a mistranslation or misunderstanding because they're going to stop making the current iPhone 10 and do a new iPhone 10 for the fall, which is probably closer to the truth, right? That it's not like they're killing the iPhone 10, but that they're going to end the, they're going to stop making that one and make the new one, which who knows whether they'll do that or not.

I think it's, I think it's possible. I think it's likely in fact but um so what ended up happening also let's back up and say what do we say when there are sources that are anonymous sources or that are insider sources you always have to ask what do they have to gain by sharing this information and in the case of suppliers what they have to gain is blaming someone else for their bad results because they didn't sell as many of these things that they usually supply. So they say, oh, well, our results are going to be bad because Apple didn't buy as many. It's Apple's fault. Apple's having trouble. It's not us. It's not us. We're great. Apple's having trouble. So that's all going on in the background. And then the results come out and it's like, no, the iPhone 10 is still the best selling iPhone.

iPhone sales are good. Where is this disaster? And I think Apple made those statements about the iPhone 10 specifically to bat down those rumors and say, nope, you're wrong. Here's my theory. If you look at the average selling price of the iPhone, wrong. Here's my theory. If you look at the average selling price of the iPhone, the holiday quarter, and when the iPhone 10 had just come out, and you look at the average selling price of the iPhone for this most recent quarter, January, February, March, it's lower sequentially. It's higher year over year because the iPhone 10 is more expensive and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are more expensive than the 7 and 7 Plus were. Let's not forget that, that Apple raised the price on their other phones too. So year over year, the average selling price is up, but sequentially it's down a little bit. What does

that mean? And my guess is what that means is that the iPhone 10 sold an awful lot at the very beginning and the gap between it and the other iphone models was greater and since it's a more expensive product the asp was higher and that after that initial burst of iphone 10 sales over the next three months in this new quarter they came down a little bit they're still number one but they're not as far ahead of the 8 and 8 Plus as they were. Yeah, they haven't done a lap around the course, right? Right. Like, you know, number two is catching up.

Which is maybe not shocking, given that there was the pent-up demand for the iPhone X, and so that there were an awful lot of those sold. I think it's impressive that the iPhone X did as well as it did in that quarter, because it was only available for a third of it. Exactly. well as it did um in that quarter because it was only available for a third of it exactly you and also you'd think that like a a one thousand dollar phone will probably do its best numbers at two points when it's released and the holiday quarter and it was simultaneous right yeah and so like you know that's when that's going to happen and you say it happens at the same time so here's my theory my theory is that apple looked at how well it did in December and said, whoa, it's going to do this gap away from the eight for its life. This is what it's going to be. So this is how many we need to make. And then as it got into that first calendar quarter of this

year, beginning of this year, they started to see that that's not really where it was going to be. It was going to still be above the other phones, but not quite as high up. And that means that they bought too many components for what the actual selling rate was. And that means they have more inventory. And Luca, the CFO of Apple said on the analyst call last week, basically that he said, Yeah, we ended up with a little more inventory, and it'll work itself out. And that was very pointed, pointed response to a pointed question about essentially the rumors that they had cut production of the iphone 10 and i think the truth is somewhere in the middle right i think he's he kind of shrugged it off as like look it happens we had a little more inventory

and we'll it'll it'll work itself out you know soon and it's not a big deal um and the question was like oh breathless oh iphone 10 was doomed what happened uh the truth is i think they looked at december and thought the iphone 10 was going to sell a bit more than it actually is selling they may have gotten a little bit overexcited right or as tim cook said we won the super bowl but not by as many points as we would have liked to which is a weird metaphor but you could sort of see it like we're very proud of the product and it's great and it is our number one product even if you know it didn't win by 30 points or whatever it still won the super bowl and it still gets the ring that's what he was trying to say and i think that's i think that's the source

of this entire rumor i think the source of this rumor is that apple in the natural course of things and again you might not even notice this if this weren't apple and everybody wants to know everything about apple i think apple made a judgment in december and then they looked in january and they're like oh it's a little less than we thought so let's and but we already have them in the process of we bought the screens and we bought the components and we're going to start producing them which means we're going to end up with a little more inventory of iphone 10s that we want but we know the demand is still there. And so we will, we will dial back on our orders and that'll get us back in balance and we'll be able to continue to make as many iPhone 10s as we can sell. But we have a little, there's a little hump.

It's like a snake eating a pig or something. And there's the bulbs and the bulge moves through, you know, okay. A cartoon snake eating a cartoon pig. Probably. I don't know about actual snakes and pigs, you know, and it snake eating a cartoon pig probably i don't know about actual snakes and pigs um you know and it just it'll work its way through and then and then out the other side and then that's it right like they made an estimate it was a little high they they put it into balance but meanwhile they had they had cranked up the machine a little

bit so they got to crank the machine back down to get it in balance i suspect that's it that's the entire story of oh the iphone 10 is terrible and doomed and they're going to stop making it all is sourced from the fact that apple made a judgment in december and then in january or february made a slightly different judgment to back off a little bit and that's it that's your whole story but i guess that's a window into how supply chain details and people who want to break stories about apple and make big speculation about like that moment when apple finally takes a big stumble will lead you to places that maybe aren't actual places and in this case i think that's what it is it seems like the expectation and i understand it is that it's got to happen eventually so sure maybe it's next quarter right like and i think

that's where a lot of this is coming from that like any indication that this might be the quarter will set people into a tailspin what is the greatest enemy of attention i was going to say of journalism of of being an analyst but really what's the greatest enemy of attention it's attention's arch enemy boredom the usual is boring and nobody clicks through on stories and listens to analysts about boring usual business as usual right no one wants to read that story of like oh it's gonna be all right so if i tell you it's just not fun i have insider information that apple is going to kind of continue on its upward trajectory this phone sales are going to be pretty solid the services are going to continue to go up they're going to introduce new products and in the end apple is not one of these companies that's

going to burn out and fade away it's just going to kind of be boring and grow slowly and make huge amounts of money then if i if i could come back from the future and tell you that, like, it's not going to stop analysts and writers from hoping that something happens because that's boring. It's like, come on, do something, do something. It's the same thing when we talked about, like, the Apple Watch and people are like, this is why Apple must release a watch and why it must be the next iPhone and why it must be a game changer. It's like, must? Like, as long as the iPhonehone is growing and doing well apple must not do anything they don't must anything at all all apple must do is keep making good iphones that's all that essentially true essentially true if apple keeps making good iphones and the iphone

keeps selling for a very long time that's all apple must do now they must find the next thing for when the iphone is no longer when smartphones are no longer the product category that everybody cares about that may be a very long time and that's part of the problem here it's like come on i'm i'm just in my career as an analyst writer whatever right now i don't want to wait 15 years for the next big transition i want something big to happen right now change change the world again i need that right now and it's not because apple needs to it's because we want to see it collectively and that's a more interesting story and so that's why i think these things are going to continue even if apple in fact even more so if apple is just a boring incredibly popular successful company

because boring doesn't sell boring is is the the enemy of attention and and i think that that leads to things getting hyped up that are are nothing which is not to say that apple couldn't do something that is really deserving of attention that they couldn't have a flop that they couldn't make a terrible decision that leads to harming their business totally could happen but in the absence of that people will still write stuff like this because they're desperate for something to say. And modern Apple is in many ways, as we pick through like where they're going with the Mac and stuff and iOS and how it's interesting. And it's very interesting to speculate about that stuff.

But especially as a business, modern Apple is super boring above the waterline where we can see it, where it's just not about future products. It's just about the stuff they release and how much they sell they're boring they're a money machine they make a huge profit they sell a lot of phones they sell other stuff too what more can you say and every time i turn on cnbc which i only turn on on the day of the results there is always somebody there is like oh apple's done for and somebody else and then the results come out and everybody's like money money money money money amazing it's an amazing thing and it's like yeah sure being a huge company that makes a lot of money and sells a lot of products um it is boring but it's also you know it's pretty good if you're that company and

that you know that's apple right now today's show is also brought to you by aero with aero you never need to think about wi-fi again because they have created the dream setup for you. It's a fast, reliable connection that you can get throughout your house, even out to the backyard. And now is a great time to get on board with Eero because you can get one of their beautiful second-generation devices. They have a tri-band second-generation model that they coupled along with the Eero beacon, which allows you to build a Wi-Fi system that is perfectly tailored to your home. The second generation Eero includes a third 5 GHz radio. This makes it twice as fast as ever before and also lets you do more than ever,

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i guess we were talking about this um aero aero is a great thing right now especially if you've been a customer of previous companies who made previous previous white products it definitely has uh if you're coming from an airport it definitely has the same kind of design sense these are little white bricks that you plug into a wall or that you know it's a little white block and they've got an app to let you configure it and it's pretty simple to configure it and for me one of the things i liked about it is that in the early days of wi-fi if you tried to have like multiple base stations they would kind of fight and aero is made to be a multi-station system and they talk to each other but what you see is kind of continuous wi-fi everywhere so you can put them in a couple places depending on the size of your

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starts at $399 for a second generationgeneration Aero and two beacons, and that's everything that you need to get started. Listeners of this show can get free overnight shipping to the US or Canada when you go to aero.com, that's E-E-R-O.com, and use the promo code UPGRADE. That is aero.com with the promo code UPGRADE for free overnight shipping. Our thanks to Aero for their support of this show and RelayFM. So we'll do some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Today comes from, our first one is from Gustavo.

Gustavo wants to know, what do you guys think about Apple's leather iPhone cases? What do you think, Jason? Do you like those? Do you use those? I do like them i would prefer not to use a case on my iphone but for the um for the six uh and for the 10 it's just slippery enough that i wanted a little more grip and i do like the apple leather iphone cases i think they're really nice you've got to like leather i did talk to somebody this week who uses a silicone one because they didn't like like how leather can discolor and it can get you know i like that leather is uh gonna age and change and look

i like the look of that but there are you know silicone doesn't so you could do that if you want but i really like the leather cases and i'll remind you that apple's secret weapon here is that apple is the only company that can make a case with an apple logo on it which is you know if you want the apple logo on your case, that's how you do it. But I wish the iPhone 10 is so beautiful that I wish I didn't have to use a case on it. Cause I love how it looks,

but I just, I don't feel like I can have that. I had a dream last night, Mike, that, that I was on a roller coaster or it might've been a go-kart. I'm not sure. And, and there was, and I got And I got crashed or bumped or something.

And I thought, wow, that was a really bad bump. And then I got out at the bottom and looked at my phone and my iPhone had been smashed in my pocket by the force of it. And what I'm saying is I'm afraid my iPhone X is going to get broken, which is why I put a case on it. That's a very good reason. I agree with you for all of the reasons of like why you have a case and also all of the reasons you wish you didn't have to have a case. Like I agree with all of

that. And I tried to run my iPhone 10 without a case because I love the look of it so much. And it was still just a little bit too slippery for me. And do you know what? This thing costs too much money. Like it was too expensive. And yes, I have Apple care on it, but I would still prefer not to have to go through that. Right. Like I just don't want, I don't want to break my phone and I'm happy to have a case on it because my desire to not have a broken phone outweighs my desire to have a phone without a case. Um, I'm, I'm not such a fan of the leather cases. I like the silicone cases for two reasons. I like the color range of the silicone cases more.

And I personally find the silicone to be more grippy, which is what I'm looking for. And honestly, I think this is a personal preference thing, because I spoke to many people who say the exact opposite, who find the leather to be more grippy. I have no idea if that's anything to do with the oils in your skin. I don't know. I think the silicone is more grippy. I actually think it's too grippy, which is why I don't like the silicone.

The silicone case, I have a hard time getting it in my pocket. And the leather case, I don't. So for me, that's the right one for me. Wayne wants some advice, Jason. Wayne's first generation stainless steel Apple Watch has broken. Is it worth buying the Series 3 now or wait wait i don't have a good answer for this i i'm pretty sure there'll be a new apple watch this fall how badly do you want an apple watch maybe you could get a used uh first or second or third generation watch or a refurb and you can make a you can get a deal on something like that and then use that for a year yeah i would really try that you can find

first gen apple watches like being sold pretty cheap get a series one or series two used or refurbed maybe maybe the sport and not the stainless and then figure and just figure you're going to use that for a year or two and then the new apple watch style if there is one and generations will have arrived and then you can make a good decision about buying one uh that's more or less brand new with the material that you want this is good advice i think because if it's if if the apple watch is something you must have every day and considering you were coming from first gen anyway if you can find a good deal on something that is lower than a series three do it because you you don't know what you're missing out on

with the benefits of it yeah because you don't own it right and um i was going to say my wife's uh battery on her series zero is dying and it's it's a tough time right to like buy a new apple watch right now and we're gonna we're gonna pay $75 and get a new battery put in it and wait. And maybe she'll get a new Apple Watch next year. But for this year, I think we're just going to wait and spend $75 and get her back up to speed with her Series Zero, which she still likes just fine. And it's stainless. So, again, buying a new stainless is that much more expensive. And it's a nice watch.

It looks great. So, we're going to do that instead and i think that that because it's a weird time right now if if there was a brand new apple watch out right now i would consider just buying that for her but there isn't so we're gonna we're gonna defer to so yeah maybe finding somebody's used uh old watch that they've replaced with a series 3 might get you through for let's say you know year year and a half until maybe the 2019 apple watch models in the fall and you never know in three or four weeks there may be some big indications of some changes right if they start doing stuff like hey your app should be adaptable for different screen shapes right like then you'll know then you'll know uh jason not jason different jason jason two

okay wrote in uh to say almost every online service i use has emailed me over the last week updating their terms and privacy twitter ebay amazon fitbit the list goes on and on did something happen across the internet that has necessitated this or is there another reason jason let me say four letters okay do it those four letters are gdpr basically in the eu there are a bunch of new privacy regulations um and it's all about one of the key things while you're seeing this so much is companies have to update their terms and their privacy policies to account for how they're keeping your data and how it's used and how you can get to it. But also, if you're on an email mailing list, you have to basically now reconfirm in a lot of instances that you want to be on that mailing list. So a lot of companies,

I think, are using the privacy and policy updates as an excuse to email you and be like, hey, you love these emails, emails right you should click this button so that's why you're seeing so many of those yeah that's exactly it and even if you're not in the eu you need to um you need to do it basically if you've got eu customers you're you're covered by gdpr you need to do it and you you are subject to their sanction if you break the rules so you know anybody any business that's got people who are users in the in the eu they have two choices they can either do the gdpr stuff which you're seeing or like some companies they can say sorry which is ridiculous we're not going to have people

in europe anymore which is usually a sign that their business is built on shady uses of of user data yes not always a really good there are examples of small businesses that maybe um fear the issues with the like the cost of of doing business they got to hire a lawyer to look at their statements they worry about the fines they don't have very many customers in europe there are going to be some outlier cases but mostly if you're using a service, like there's that service that unsubscribes you for messages that Slice Intelligence owns. And what that means is that they're actually reading through all of your emails to find out what you bought so that they can use that in their estimates of market share. And they have this service

that I think they bought. They have it to data mine you. And that service is no longer going to be available to people in the eu because in the end that's the only reason it's there is to data mine you and if they can't data mine you in the eu they're not going to bother um so it's a that's a sign i'll tell you if you get one of those things that says we're not going to be able to use this service anymore because uh europe is is out uh that's maybe a bad sign most of the time joe wants to know what do we use for mousing surfaces it's not a mouse pad what is your desk made of do you use a mouse yeah we don't use i mean i don't think either of us use mice oh joe is this was this sent in in i'm not gonna make

jokes about people who use mice if you use a mouse great I have not used a mouse with my computer since the 1990s, folks. I don't. I used a trackball for many, many years, and I use a trackpad now. So, I use where my trackpad is set as my surface, and that's the keyboard tray on my desk. And yeah, that's it i have a wooden desk i very occasionally maybe like once or twice a year will use a mouse which is usually just because of some kind of injury thing i don't know nope but uh then i just use it directly on the desk i don't have a mouse pad my desk is made of wood but you know it's wood in quotes because it's really like particle board with a wood fake kind of cover on it i think mine's like ikea i mean i have no idea i mean there could be a small family it's pressed it's sawdust pressed into the shape of wood and so technically wood but it's wood like a pringle is a potato chip it's sort of that kind of wood but most furniture is like that these days and i think my keyboard tray is that stuff

too although it might be plastic i'm not sure but But my desk is that, you know, Ikea-like wood surface. It's got a nice fake wood grain on it, though. It's very pretty, but I don't think it's real. Here's James's question. I have mixed feelings about the idea of AR glasses. It would make things like turn-by-turn directions better and could potentially, in some some instances make our lives better overall but how could an ar people wearing ar glasses affect face-to-face interactions i think

significantly and this is my reservation with this stuff yeah i think i think significantly is true i think change change will change things that will happen i I think all new technology changes aspects, right? Our aspect of our interaction now when we have smartphones is different. And you see people using their smartphones and all of that. And that changes things. Having cars change things

and having public transit change things. But it is true. This is a heretofore not intervened by technology, not imposed over our human experience, but now imposed through technology where you are getting, you know, jokes to tell, to make you seem more interesting facts that you're looking up data about this person. Um, even if it's as simple as like, oh, that's your name. I forgot who you are, but now I know like all of that stuff can be in there.

And it does mean the as we knew with the google glass stuff like the distraction issue where now we know you're distracted if you're looking down at your phone or your watch but with a heads-up display are we gonna know are they gonna people looking at you blankly but they're actually doing something else it makes that part that much harder too yeah my concern is just like the apple watch was a step right and i know that there are times where like and i still get this every now and then where like i'm you know things are coming in i'm just glancing at stuff and people are like it's not the it's moved away from uh oh are you checking the time if you've got to be somewhere which is what we all initially

thought it was going to be but now it's just like what's going on like they know it's notifications like why are you checking this stuff right so that that's the thing that i see and i and i've been privy to and it's something that i have to pay attention to if i've got something literally beaming into my eyeballs like that is very different right like how is that not gonna distract me like i don't i just don't this is my reservation with this like i i do genuinely believe that this could be a cool product like whilst it was wonky in a lot of areas i always thought google glass was kind of cool like some of the stuff that it could do is kind of cool right as somebody who primarily navigates by foot you know having turn by turn

directions in front of my face for walking is fantastic right so because like you know it's not like when you're in a car and you can just mount the system somewhere right like you're kind of walking around staring at your phone it's it's it's like kind of awkward but having it like right in front of your face is great right Right? Like all that stuff is great. But I think one of the reasons that Google glass ended up not working out is this exact thing, because you can't hide it. You're wearing those,

you're wearing those and everybody knows, and they're going to react to you differently. But imagine a world where everybody's got them though. Right? When everybody's got them, what does that mean? That's it though. I don't know.

Because this is the my feeling jason is this this uh awkwardness that people feel i think could be the reason that we won't all have them the so i don't know i wonder um i was thinking about things like there's somebody you don't like and so you have them you put a snapchat filter on them where they always look like a clown or their eyes bug out or something like that i mean where you're mocking them in your visual field even though they don't know it like there's all sorts of bad usage of this or maybe that's good if it's a really bad person and you want to not you don't want to deal with them but you have to um but it's a complete change in human interaction help me

remember people's names because i forget names all the time so that'd be nice yeah but completely i i think in the end um you know everybody will use it differently because of course people are people but that there will be like uh people will we will understand that there's a certain lightness of of an ar interface overlaid on the world when you're talking to somebody that that may be and of course these things are going to be able to detect when you're talking to somebody so it may go into a mode when you're talking to somebody that that may be and of course these things are going to be able to detect when you're talking to somebody so it may go into a mode when you're talking to somebody that you've set that that reduces everything it may maybe even just saying it they that everything else around them darkens so that you're focused just on them right like they could do that too there's lots of things you could do, but other people

will want to be like checking their email or whatever is the future email that comes in AR while they're talking to somebody and just be alerted when they say something interesting or have a transcript of what they've said up to then so that if you didn't hear what they said, you can quickly read the transcript and then respond to it. I mean, all that stuff is going to be to play for. And think in the end i think we'll all figure it out and it'll be okay but that doesn't necessarily mean that human interaction won't be completely changed by something like that in a world where everybody's got ar in their vision all the time that's going to be a while like there's going to be this really ugly transition

phase but ultimately if that's the world then it'll yeah it'll be a really different world and the way we interact with people face to face will be totally different. I mean, we did all get used to smartphones, right? Like we did, like that was a huge change because we had the entire internet available to reach us. Like this wasn't a thing that existed before, you know, the idea of the push notification right like when that became a thing the push notification someone being able to reach you via any method either personal or application from wherever you are like that was a huge change i think in social interactions and just smartphones in general and by and large i think we've adapted to that. People have understood certain etiquettes around that.

And my hope would be that if these things exist, maybe there is a thing where if you're sitting down to somebody with dinner, you take them off. And that's just how you live your life. But I don't know. Then there's the other awkward problem of people like me and you who wear eyeglasses. Well, they will be integrated into our eyeglasses, and then what do we do?

So we have a lot to work out before this can become a thing. But I think if any company has the track record to show that they can try and get some of this way, it's Apple, right? I believe that if anyone's going to get close to doing this in a way that is conscious of the people that are around you it's it's probably them yeah all right if you have any questions you would like to hear us answer at the end of the show you can just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade and we collect some out to read every episode thank you to everybody who has submitted one for this week um yeah if you want to hear us talk about literally anything at all it's a wide range of topics going to ask upgrade just send out a tweet with the hashtag

ask upgrade and we will talk about it on a future episode yeah and if you've got any podcasting questions we're collecting them now because we're gonna pre-record a whole podcasting episode as a special episode so uh in the next couple of, it's a great time for you to do that at hashtag AskUpgrade. If you want to find our show notes for this week, go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 192. That's where they live on the web. But I'm hoping that the podcast app that you use should display them in all of their glory to you.

So you can go and read along and pull in some extra information based upon the stuff that we've spoken about. There's a lot of great stuff in there today, including all of Jason's weird Amazon links for 3D accessories. They're all in there. 3D, 2D, 4D maybe

even. Maybe there's a secret one. Who knows? If you want to find Jason online, he is over at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. He is at jsnl on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. This show is a part of RelayFM. Both me and Jason host many wonderful shows at RelayFM.

Just go to relay.fm slash shows to find more there. I want to thank StoryWorth, Simple Contacts, and Eero for their support of this show. And we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Y'all come back now, you hear?