Upgrade - 2: You Start From Zero

Episode Date: September 22, 2014

This week Jason gets to address a bunch of iPhone follow-up (which he is *super* excited about) and Myke quizzes him about his first week of writing at Six Colors.

Hello listeners. September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Join us at RelayFM in supporting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Learn more and donate now at 512pixels.net slash September. Hello and welcome to episode 2 of Upgrade on RelayFM. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Igloo, an internet you'll actually like, and TextExpander from Smile. Type more with less effort. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by your host, Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Mike. We're back.

We are back. They didn't shut us down after one episode. I'm friendly with the guy who controls the network, so I convinced him to let us keep it going. Good, good. Great. We had really great feedback for episode one, so thank you to everyone.

That was very nice to us, and we're back for another episode of upgrade yeah and uh probably the thing that is going to make jason more happy than anything else on the planet is the fact that he had that we can do follow-up on this show and our google document um about two-thirds of it is follow-up. We just admit it. Accidental Tech Podcast has follow-up for like 90% of their running time, but we might as well just admit it up front. There's a lot of follow-up. I'm very excited that we have so much follow-up because I've never really done podcasts with follow-up before. And we got comments, which means we have things we can follow up on. Because that was the big question last week was, would anybody say anything or would there literally be no follow-up other than to remind

people that there was there could be follow-up before we start the officially ordained follow-up there was one piece of there was one correction that i would like to make from last week's show all right um and it's correcting you if if that's okay. Yes. You're fired. I'll get my coat in a moment. One question that I had for you was about if the screen was curved on the iPhones. Oh, yeah. The screen's not. The glass is.

I think my question was poorly phrased. And what I was asking was because they mentioned in the keynote about the corners like the the edges of the phones yes like they are sort of smoothed down to right so they kind of curve around a little bit but that's not the screen right that's the glass exactly in front of the screen so it was it was uh you know i'll take it i i didn't um i was reading it and also thinking about Apple Watch in a different way. But yeah, that's actually one of the things that makes it feel so nice is that the screen isn't just a flat slab and then there are edges or it doesn't go into like a ring. It just curves down and that's one of my favorite features actually of the phones now that I've been using them for a week. That curve really makes them much more comfortable to hold. Death to the shampoo, huh? actually of the of the phones now that i've been using them for a week is they're really uh that

curve really makes them much more comfortable to hold death to the chamfer yeah death to the chamfer i'm glad we learned a word though we increased our word power by learning that word and now we will store it away for future use never ever use it again no ever no i there is another correction that we should do which is um i mentioned reachability it revealed a black void at the top of the screen it's actually not a black void i complained that it didn't have your your picture behind like a fuzzed version of your of your backdrop your wallpaper it actually does um but it's really like darker and fuzzed out so much that it's almost unrecognizable, but it isn't just a black void. It's more like a, um, a dark, uh, wallpapery void, but it's, um, it's not like you just,

if you've got a picture of, of, uh, your friends at the top of your wallpaper, it's not like they peek through when you do reachability. It's sort of like you can see through the haze. Like I would see, like, uh, I could see sort of the corner of a mountain from the from the picture but just barely so it's it's definitely not meant to be anything but like a very subtle reference to what's in your on your backdrop um in reachability but it's not a complete black void it's either it's almost so hard to see that they may as well have not done it. Yeah, I don't understand. I mean, I guess they didn't want to distract, but I feel like it's a weird thing

that they should either have embraced the fact that you get to peek through and see your... That's the metaphor of iOS 7 and 8, is everything's sort of translucent and you can see down through the stack. And so you should either make it viewable or you should just not even bother. But instead, it very it's very subtle very subtle but it is there and i said that it was just a total black void it is not space gray oh ding so this is a weird piece of follow-up uh but it's a piece of follow-up that i would like to address

um so on last week's episode i creeped some people out by talking about the fact that i had really long fingers uh and how i thought that it would be okay for me to get a uh a plus and there was a whilst away in Italy last week, my lady friend took a picture of me using my iPhone. And I had many people comment on the tweet. And I've put it in our show notes, which are at relay.fm slash upgrade slash two. If you want to see a picture of my hands, you're free to do that. Many people commented on the fact that my fingers were very long.

Jason, I don't know if you've seen this picture i don't know if you have an official uh view or feeling on the side of my house i was confused to see you without glasses that confused me a little bit yeah i also was confused to see you um comfortable and outdoors that was different and um and yes your fingers seem very long i My fingers, I think, are long, but they're not nearly as long as yours. I believe my toes are very long, but that rarely comes up in a technological context. We are venturing into some very interesting areas. Interesting is a strong word for it. You published a very interesting article on not your website. Not on my website, no.

On The Verge, I think, is where that one is what you're talking about, right? Yeah, what was that about? Well, you know, Nilay Patel is an acquaintance. We've exchanged emails and text messages and just, you know, we're friendly. And he's the editor-in-chief of The Verge. I've always liked Nilay. and just, you know, we're friendly. And he's the editor-in-chief of The Verge.

I've always liked Miele. And he sent me an email last week saying, would you like to write a quick thing? We want to scan in all these old Macworld covers because he's old enough that he, as a kid, grew up reading computer magazines and Macworld in particular, which is what I did, although I didn't really come to it until sort of in high school. But the pouring over back before there

were tech websites, I mean, the only way to get this information was to get a magazine and just pour over every detail, every page. There are articles that I would read like 30 or 40 times when I was buying my first PowerBook. Every detail, like what does that mean? Parsing sentences? Does this mean this feature? Probably means that article could have been written better, actually, in hindsight, if I was that confused. But, you know, it was a big thing culturally before all this stuff was on the web. That was the only connection that you had if you loved computers and technology. And so they were going to scan in a bunch of old Macworld covers, and they wanted me to write something, you know, short, 300 words or something like that about it.

So I wrote a quick thing, actually on the plane, because I was going to and from Portland the weekend after this all happened to go to the XOXO Festival. And I just wrote a quick thing and sent it to them. And then they posted it right about when my site launched, which was very nice of them because they linked to it prominently in the header. And I got a lot of traffic in the verge, but it was nice. It was just a little, I'm trying to say farewell to the Mac world as a print magazine, which certainly I have a long history with.

And although I have not been thinking about it as a print magazine very much lately, because we've been focused on the website and I've been focused on other sites at idg for a long time uh it was a nice sort of viking funeral for for macworld in print and uh and to and the idea of computer magazines which was once a really big thing and is now no longer necessary we kind of didn't really address it last week um but it's very it's very sad that the magazine has gone away yeah it's it is and yet at the same time it's it isn't what it used to be it doesn't i'm i actually think the quality of it is has been quite good um and has has kept up over the years i mean it's never it doesn't have a fraction of the staff even

when i was still there it didn't have a fraction of the staff it did when i started and even that was a much smaller staff than they used to have but i think the quality was good um but it's not it's not um it's not really necessary anymore but that doesn't change the fact that you know this is a thing that had been in existence for the life of the Mac. It's been printing for 30 years. And, you know, and so on that level, it's sad. But time, you know, time moves on. That's what happens. It's just like I know a lot of people have said this, but I remember when Stephen Hackett was, he had a, I think it was the back page.

Yeah. And I just remember his excitement and like how excited I was for him. Well, print gives you tangibility that those of us who work on the web don't get. And that often that works very well with our parents and grandparents and other relatives, where suddenly the fact that you've been doing things on the internet has a manifestation that they can understand. You know, they can understand, oh, wow, you are important enough or knowledgeable enough that somebody with a printing press took your picture and put it on their back page with your words. That's a seal of approval that for people who grew up before the

internet era, you know, this internet stuff, there's no, they don't know whether this is all made up and fake or whether it's really like a real thing. And so for them, what a huge stamp it is to have you be on, you know, dead tree in ink. That's a real signifier of quality. And I can't tell you how many writers over the years we used, I mentioned this in the Verge article, who were web writers that we would find and say, we like your stuff. Why don't we publish you in the magazine? And they're like, that's cool. And they would always say, my mom went out and bought a copy. My grandma went out and bought a copy. They bought 10 copies and sent it to all the relatives. That was a very common phenomenon. What else do we have? Oh, let's see more follow-up yeah that's right we're still

doing follow-up it's very exciting um so uh the common bond in a lot of the follow-up this week was about our conversation about the phone sizes because we talked a lot about the iphone 6 and the iphone 6 plus and we talked a little bit about the fact that the 5C and 5S are still there. And this was a common thread is the question, is Apple going to abandon that four inch phone size? I've heard a lot of people say, well, Apple doesn't make this phone, they've abandoned this size. It's not really true. The 5C and 5S are still out there. abandon this size. It's not really true. The 5C and 5S are still out there. The new phones are bigger. But I think when people assume that that's the end of the line for the smaller phones, it could be. I am skeptical. I think Apple, I think there's a good chance Apple is going to

keep something around in that size for a while and perhaps even forever. Just because it didn't get updated this year doesn't mean that in a year or two, there will be something, whether it's called the 5 or whether it's called like the 6C for compact or smaller or something like that, that is on par or close to on par with these bigger phones,

but is in that smaller, a smaller size like the 5 series. And so we got some feedback about that. Listener Phil wrote in to say that the Plus felt way too big to use. He was planning on getting the 6 himself, but if there were a hardware-upgraded 5S, he might be tempted to stick with that. And listener Shep wrote in to say, I think a small functional iPhone Nano is possible if the technology behind the Apple Watch can be made affordably and in larger sizes. He had an interesting idea that there's actually a patent, an Apple patent about that is making, eliminating the physical home button. And instead making sort of a virtual button that would reduce the size even more while still keeping the screen at the same size, which is an interesting idea.

But definitely, you know, I heard a lot of women on Twitter, Brianna Wu was going on about this, like these phones are too big for them. They don't fit in their pockets. They don't like it. They like the 5. You know, I don't think the release of the 6 and the 6 Plus is Apple saying, you people who like the 5,

we, you know, forget it. We're never going to serve you again. You could assume that because they didn't do a new 5 this time. But I don't know. There is nothing stopping them from continuing to have a phone that size in their product line. They just didn't update it this year. I've been thinking about this a little bit too myself. And I don't think they did what we expected them to do, which was to take the 5S and put it in a plastic shell. Right. The 5C is still the 5C,

which is two years ago's model now in a plastic shell. And then the 5S is just the 5S. But I've also been thinking quite a bit about this, But I've also been thinking quite a bit about this, and I think that I wonder if Apple would be willing to do it. Like, you're looking at the sales numbers. We had the first sales numbers of 10 million sold over opening weekend with the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. And I wonder if in, I don't know, it would be like four years maybe

before the 5S would be bumped out. Potentially something like if you look at the fact we've just got rid of the 4S. How old is the 4S? Oh, the 4S is, well, if the 5 is two years old, the 4S is three years old. So maybe in about three years' time is when we're going to get the answer to that question.

Maybe. I mean, there's the work that goes into integrating the innards of the phone into a smaller thing. I mean, presumably they would at some point want to improve the industrial design, make it more curvy and less like the 5 is now because that's the

old design language and they moved on to this new look and feel. But I think there's nothing stopping them from doing that i think you know apple's got a lot behind the scenes apple does a lot of market research they've got a lot of numbers they know in what regions at what rate uh the uh you know large size phones sell that was one of the reasons that they made the six plus is to go into regions, especially like Asia, where those phones are very popular. They know what phones sell and at what sizes. So Apple probably knows the answer to this already about what the difference is between the iPhone 5 sized market and the iPhone 6 sized market. And they may have already decided, well, it's not a big enough market for us to worry about it. I think it's just as likely that they said, look, the 6 is our flagship. That is going to be

the size that most people want. Some people are going to want a bigger phone. Some people are going to want a smaller phone and we will serve those markets too. And if it's worth it for them to make a phone that's a little bit smaller, they will. They just don't need to do it right now because the 5S is a perfectly good phone. It's got Touch ID. It doesn't have the NFC stuff for Apple Pay, but it's a one-year-old phone. There was a huge leap in performance between the 5 and the 5S. The 5S is solid in a way that that free 5C is a perfectly fine phone too, but the 5S is that much faster. I don't know. They didn't need to change it now. I think the question is going to be in a year or two,

do they just say, forget it if you want a smaller phone? I just, I don't, they've done the market research, so they probably know, but I would be surprised actually. I would probably put a very modest bet that there will, on the fact that there will always be a smaller phone in the line, that they don't want to turn their back on people who refuse that. But they may know different. They may think, yeah, people are complaining, but they'll all get used to it, and then there'll be no market for a smaller phone. That may be. They're the ones that have lots of, you know, Apple does a lot of research. They don't make these moves entirely on gut feel. They have an idea of how consumers are seeing this product line. But

from Twitter, it seems like there is a market. Twitter, not a great research tool, but it seems like there is a market for a smaller phone out there that maybe Apple will maintain in the future. out there that maybe Apple will maintain in the future. I think it may have been John Gruber's review where he spoke about, I read it in somebody's review, about the fact that there'll probably never be an iPhone bigger than this because they were like testing sizes in increments. Right. Yeah, he said like every tenth of an inch or something like that.

So, yeah, here we go. I've got the quote here. My understanding, talking to people at the event last week, is that Apple's industrial design team mocked up prototypes of every single size between 4.0 and 6.0 inches in tenths of an inch increments. And from those 20 sizes selected, the two that hit the best sweet spots

are the regular iPhone and ginormous iPhone. So we might never see new iPhone sizes again, or at least not bigger ones. Keeping in mind, I mean, he's talking to people who are working on the hardware design. But like I said, this is also informed by research. This is also informed by who's buying what, at least on a gross scale, right?

They know people are buying big phones, so they wanted to make a big phone. And then they figured out what their right size was for their big phone. And the small, I think it works on the small side too. I don't know what they're thinking internally at Apple, obviously about this. Do they think the 6 is enough?

But yeah, the 6 Plus is big. And above a certain point yeah they probably would rather you just buy an iPad but markets change too people if Samsung or somebody else comes out with something that's crazy that everybody looks at and thinks

well that'll never sell and it surprisingly sells then everybody will take stock and they'll I think that's what happened with the Note this is the difference between Apple and Samsung Apple mocks up every sells then everybody will take stock and they'll i think that's what happened with the note is see this is the difference between apple and samsung apple mocks up every size in tenth of an inch increments and and and holds it in their hands you know internally at apple samsung just releases every phone in every size and sees what sells i wonder what the right the right option is in that

scenario though right because samsung found their winner yeah yeah they may have never found it yes exactly right and and apple uh didn't you know apple wasn't a believer in that i think uh in that in that large phone size and they learned a lesson no there's advantages to doing what samsung does because they're doing market research in the market. I think, I think Apple, I mean, part of it is, I think Apple can't make that many products. I think, I think Apple's attention to quality and detail is such that they really need to focus and they're not that huge a company. They need to focus on a few products and make them really, really good. And Samsung has the ability and especially Samsung with the Android interface being scalable that, you know, it wasn't a lot of extra work to make all those different models.

Whereas Apple has had to spend two years laying the groundwork to make these different phone sizes because they were locked into that sort of 1X, 2X mode for their developers. So, you know, in some ways it was easier for Samsung to do it because Samsung's playing Samsung's game and Apple's playing Apple's game. But Samsung got an advantage because they threw lots of spaghetti against the wall and something stuck. And it was the Note especially that surprised everybody. So we still have quite a bit more follow-up, but I want to take a quick break to thank our first sponsor for this week's episode. And that is the fine folks over at smile and today i want to talk a little bit about text expander touch text expander touch is an app that saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently used texts on your ios devices whether it's something simple like a frequently used address an email signature several paragraphs of a standard response or maybe a frequently used address, an email signature, several paragraphs of a standard response,

or maybe a frequently used email address that you use, you'll love how easy it is to use Text Expander to avoid typing the same thing over and over and over again. You can sync all of your snippets with Text Expander on the Mac via Dropbox, meaning that all of your snippets are going to stay in sync across all of your devices. You can access your TextExpander snippets inside Smile's iOS app, TextExpander Touch, or you can enable TextExpander in the 60-plus apps in this app store that have integrated snippets. So these are apps like some of my favorites like OmniFocus, Fantastical, DayOne, Drafts, LaunchCenter Pro, and so many more. But this is the really cool thing. This is the new thing. And we spoke about this last week, but now it's here with the new Text Expander Touch 3 on

iOS. There's now a new Text Expander custom keyboard so that you can expand abbreviations in all of your iOS apps on iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. So now even if you have an app that isn't one of the 60 plus that support snippets directly, you can now still get the great time and hassle-saving benefits of TextExpander everywhere because of this custom keyboard that they've made. This is something that simply could not be done before iOS 8, and the new TextExpander keyboard has quickly become one of my favorite new features of iOS 8. has quickly become one of my favorite new features of iOS 8. I'm able to just jump in and I'm able to trigger off little things like I have shipping addresses and stuff like that that I have Texas Bandit snippets for. And rather than having to type all of that out, I can just use the Texas Bandit keyboard and I can trigger them everywhere.

I want to make something very clear for a moment. So Apple have a limitation, not a limitation, it's like a security setting that they've enabled. So you have to kind of say, I want to give keyboards full access. And this can typically mean like connecting to the internet for whatever reason this that they may need to, like apps like SwiftKey, they go out to the internet for suggestions and things like that. Now, the text expander requires text expander keyboard requires you to give this but it's only so you can share snippet data with

the main text expander app and also play the awesome bloop sounds that you're used to hearing when you expand a snippet so that they need it so they can connect the two apps together so you can get the snippets now smile wanted me to bring this up because they've had some feedback from their customers. And so something that they've done, that they had done anyway, is they published an update to their privacy policy on their website, which you can check out if you want. And it outlines exactly what they need this access for. But it's effectively just so it can get the access to the snippets that you want. I love this keyboard. It's made a real improvement to my work on iOS. And I love how they use the lowercase and uppercase lettering on the keyboard so you don't have to keep second guessing that shift key so go right now to the app store and grab the new text expander touch 3 and start saving time

today thank you so much to text expander and smile of course for their sponsoring of upgrade and relay fm yeah one of the funny things about this update is there were apps that supported TextExpander, but it was a lot of work for the third-party apps. And then you'd get to an Apple app and there was no support for it because Apple wasn't paying attention, didn't care, wasn't going to work on that. And now with this keyboard, it's everywhere. It's literally everywhere you get that keyboard, you can use text expander shortcuts in notes in mail in safari wherever i love using it in mail yeah yeah big fan so mr snell back to your beloved follow-up follow-up yeah well you know episode one there's going to be a lot of follow-up um Listener Bonnie wrote in to say that she ordered

the iPhone 6 Plus for her 84-year-old mother. This is something that we mentioned last week. She's moving up from an iPhone 4, but Bonnie says, because of her failing eyesight, I've had to have the text on her old phone expanded so large she actually used a magnifying glass on her phone. And with the new 6 Plus, they'll have the display zoom turned on. So everything will be bigger. And then she'll also have an easier time finding the phone because it's just that much larger. And I thought that was an interesting real world example of how I've heard this in the past that people want, you know, you have two choices when you make a screen bigger. You can either make it show more or just make everything scale up and be bigger the bigger it gets.

I don't know if you remember, for a while Apple was making the iBook in 11 and 13 inches or 12 and 14 inches, something like that. It was two sizes, but the screens were the same size. So literally it was just on the bigger laptop, everything looked bigger. There was the same resolution, just a same size. So literally it was just on the bigger laptop everything looked bigger. There's the same resolution just a different size. So you could get small print or large print iBook. And this is a little bit like that.

So nice. So 84-year-old mom getting an iPhone 6 Plus. Mike, your phone is the choice of the octogenarians. Just like me, huh? You're very much like an 84-year-old mother. I'm an octogenarians. Just like me, huh? You're very much like an 84-year-old mother.

I'm an octogenarian at heart. That's right. Damn kids. Get off my lawn. Listener Russ wrote in asking, people were asking about the speaker, and the 6 Plus definitely seems to have a little bit louder speaker.

We talked about speakers last time, and his suggestion, which is an interesting one, is that maybe Apple doesn't care too much about the speakers because they know that people are using this with Bluetooth and Docks and things like that and doesn't really prioritize the speaker, which is true. So that may be why you're not getting as much satisfaction out of your speaker on your iPhone. Have you tried the speaker on the new phone yet? I've had it for like an hour, which I'm going to mention in a bit. So I haven't got to dig in too much. But I have seen people on Twitter saying that to them, it sounds better or louder. It is louder. It is noticeably louder than

the 6 or the 5. And to be honest, I mean, for me, and one of the reasons I asked, it wasn't so much that I needed it to have more accurate sound reproduction, you know, for my audio file music. You just want to hear a podcast while you're cooking. Exactly. I want to hear it over things. Yeah. And so, you know, if it's louder, that's great. I did not expect the vibrate motor to be so dramatic it's powerful well you get that big phone you got room for a nice powerful uh

vibration from the motor there was something that i wanted to ask you from an article that that i read on your lovely website which we're going to talk about in a bit, sixcolors.com. And it was about the – you wrote about the Apple Watch Edition, right? So the potentially $2 million watch. I should have charged everybody $1,000 to read that article because it's article edition. to read that article because it's article edition. But there was one thing that you mentioned in it that I hadn't seen anywhere else, which is the box that the edition comes in.

Yep. Can you just, for anybody that hasn't read it, or just to recap, what am I referring to? It just got lost in the shuffle. Some people wrote about it. I actually did a search because I didn't see it anywhere either. And David Pogue mentioned it. Anybody who got a briefing after the event got a chance to see it. And a few people wrote about it, but I think it got lost in the shuffle of the event.

multiple bands when you buy the edition, which again, I'm not 100% sure on that. But again, you're paying so much, we don't know how much, for this that they really wanted to load it up with features. And one of the things is it comes in a box. It comes in a leather box. So that's fancy, right? And it's just like any watch, you get a fancy watch box. It's part of the luxury watch experience. The difference here is that when you take the top of the box off, the base of the box, the bottom part, has a magnetic sort of stand where the watch attaches. It's a MagSafe induction charger for the watch. And on the back of the box is a little slot that is a lightning slot. And you can slot a lightning cable in there and plug it in and now your leather apple watch edition box is a dock that you can put by your bedside or

out by your hot tub or on your helipad or in your island uh island retreat or wherever you'd like and you can charge it right there at the end of the day. So it's not just a case. It's not just a box. It's a leather charger box. So you're not, like, threading the cable through this. It's, like, built in to it. Oh, the electronics are built in. So you plug one of those little white lightning cables into the little slot on the back of the box, and that's it.

And then you click, you know, you put the watch on the magnetic charging thingy and it charges. Because watch boxes are a thing in high-end watches. Right. So this shows that they are paying attention to it. I've been thinking a lot about this because I, like many people, have not considered the price of the watch edition it's too much a lot of us are like well it's gonna cost too much and who thought i didn't

think much more than that like it'll be a lot like i said to john syracuse on twitter you know how much you got yeah it's all of that. We'll take it all. All your assets. There's so many questions. Yeah. Well, that's part of Apple's plan here. One, they don't know the answers to a lot of these questions. And two, they're going to have to roll this product out next year and they want to save some mystery.

So some of it is mystery and some of it is they don't know yet what they're going to say. But it is fascinating. They are piling on. I got the feeling when I was looking at it. They're piling on the luxury features, that it's solid gold and it is definitely heavier than the other watches because it is gold. Yeah, it's impressive. They're loading a lot of luxury features into this.

This isn't just a, you know, you get it in the same plastic box. You get it in the special leather box with the charger built in. What are your thoughts about the one year shelf life? Potentially, you know, if we look at this, like all of our other Apple devices. I mean, that's a, it's a great question. I was listening actually to Accidental Tech podcast the other day, and they were talking about this too. And it was, you know, the idea of planned obsolescence, that after a year or two, this is going to be old crappy hardware, and you just spent thousands and thousands of dollars on it, and it's old crappy hardware wrapped in gold. all these features, it does make me wonder if part of the features that they pile into a product that's that expensive might not be upgrades, might not be a guarantee that for five years they will replace the internals, that you'll be able to take it to an Apple store and wait half an hour or wait an hour, like you would take

your watch in to be serviced at a high-end watch store, maybe it's a day, and come back and it will have new internals, that they'll commit to fitting the latest technology into that watch shape for some period of time. That would be very different. And it seems untenable, except when we realize we're talking about a, you know, whatever, two, five, $10,000 piece of jewelry. Maybe that's one of the new ways Apple addresses this market is with some sort of a guarantee against, against obsolescence for some period of time. It wouldn't, this, they're going way off the book here. So it wouldn't surprise me for them to take it further and say, you get concierge service and technical upgrades, and for at least five years,

we'll make sure that you've got the latest hardware updates on the inside of this thing. That's impractical to a point if they keep changing the look of the design. But, you know, maybe it's worth it to commit to finding a way to build something into this enclosure or to swap it for a different one even, just to give them some guarantee. Because that's what worries me, is you spend 10 grand on something

that's a family heirloom. It's different from spending 10 grand on something that's going to be completely outdated in a year or two. I think you could just swap it over right like the the cost of them getting the gold back yeah it could it could be it could be that simple um although whether uh i don't know i don't know it depends on how personal people feel about it but maybe maybe so um i don't know i i think there's something there i about it, but maybe, maybe so. I don't know. I think there's something there. I think that if I was at Apple working on the Apple Watch,

this would be one of the main discussions is the difference between a Rolex and the Apple Watch is that the Rolex will do exactly what it does now in 50 years because they're not going to change time, right? They're not going to add a 14th, 15th, and 16th hour in 2020. They're not going to add a new number. None of those things is going to happen. Watches are still going to work. But the Apple Watch is a piece of technology and we know how those things go. So I would have that high on my list of concerns for something with a high price tag like the Apple Watch Edition if I were at Apple. Do you remember when the original iPhone was released? And how long was it for it until it shipped? Was it like six months?

Oh, they announced it. No, wasn't it out in December and they announced it in October? I think so. I think it was only a couple of months for the iPod. No, the original iPhone. Oh, iPhone. Yeah, that was six months. That was January to end of June, beginning of July.

So six months. Between that time, everyone just spoke about what they thought the iPhone was going to be like and talking about, oh, imagine if this is the iPhone. That's the kind of stuff. That's what we have again. Yeah. We can spend the next six months just pontificating about the watch edition. It's great.

There's limited information. Some people know things that other people don't know. Everything's sort of spread through whispers. Plenty of room for speculation. Yeah. We've got something to talk about. Hooray. High five.

There's one last thing that I dropped in the document today, and it's not follow-up per se, but this felt like the best place to say it, and it was a tweet from our friend David Sparks. And he's obviously referring to the iOS 8 episode of Mac Power Users. And his tweet was, I think I angered the entire internet by repeatedly saying, hey Siri, on the podcast, think we'll need a code word for future reference. And it made me think about how much power we have for anybody listening on like a loudspeaker

or in an office or something could say, hey Siri, and then they're all just going to go off. So I don't know if you maybe want to give it a go when i was on um i think mac break weekly or it might have been twit a few weeks ago we were talking about this and it was only when it was in beta so the the potential for down downfall was was less but yes you have the ability because there's no way to train it to only respond to your voice or something if you're if you've got this feature turned on on ios 8 and your your iPhone is plugged in and listening to us, then I could say, hey Siri, send a text message to my mom

saying I'm sorry for what I did. Yes, send it. It's really dangerous and I don't think I like this feature this feature also i don't know if you're like husband and wife and you both have iphone 6s and they're sitting next to each other and somebody says hey siri they're both gonna fire off it's great i yeah i wonder about this feature i turned it off immediately when i because because i activated it and but the thing i was watching a tv show and it just randomly went off nobody said hey siri

it just fired off my zone um i can't understand why you would want this if the iphone doesn't do anything to try and learn your voice which it doesn't appear like it does or at least if it does i haven't seen anybody mention it yeah i like the idea of it being in in uh in some environments where you might want to be you know, you can't press a button. You know, you're not, you're really hands free and you want to trigger off Siri. I can see that. But, yeah, you'd either want to be able to set a code word or have some other kind of, you know, voice recognition that matches you to a person. Right now, it's just kind of dangerous.

voice recognition that matches you to a to a person right now it's just kind of dangerous and like i like i was saying impractical because if you've got multiple devices that do this then it's going to be a disaster every device is going to do the same thing and you're going to have many series talking back to you and it's crazy i should try that sometime because i've got i've got three of these uh devices right now i should i should we could just line up like five ios 8 devices and plug them all in and then see what happens when you say, hey Siri, that's bad. That's a bad idea. I got to do that. So let's talk about the new iPhones a little bit. So I received my iPhone Plus today, like an hour before it recorded. So I don't have a lot to say about it right now um i have a few

things um it is really really big yes how are you how do your fingers fit with it though not too badly you're crazily insanely long fingers it is big it is big i think i can deal with it i think i'm i i've not had enough time with it yet to get used to it but i can hold it and i feel like i have a secure hold on it i bought like this rubbery case from amazon so i had a case on day one because I ordered one of the Apple Silicon cases, but it doesn't ship till October, which seems kind of a strange thing to do, to have a phone. And I ordered them at the same time. So the cases couldn't have sold out faster than the phones. So I didn't really understand what's going on there. But I'm going to go to an Apple store tomorrow and buy one of the leather cases and apple care plus i've never had apple care for a phone before

but i think i will drop this one so i'm going to get that um lots of people will probably ask for the the case that i bought so i'll make i'll make sure i put it in the show notes it's one of these companies I think always always takes a bet on the rumors or you know is one of the companies that pays a ridiculous amount Spigen S-P-I-G-E-N I've heard people say that these guys are always kind of there on Amazon on day one I bought like a clear kind of rubbery texture case. I like a case that gives me extra grip. That's important with this phone, to have

as much grip as possible. I'm probably going to get one of the leather cases and the silicone cases and just decide between which one I like the most. I really like the... I've been trying the Apple leather case on the 6, and it's nice. It's nicer than the 5 cases, I think. The Apple 5 cases were kind of hard to put on, and the leather one didn't feel like leather.

It was stretched so tightly, and it was, like, not textured, and it didn't feel like a leather case, even though it was made of leather. And the new one is much easier to get on and nicer and feels like leather and feels a little more grippy and I've actually been enjoying trying it and I don't usually wear a case with my iPhone and I put it on and it's actually pretty nice. It's funny that you talk about having the device and not the case because for me I always flash back to when the I want to say maybe the first iPad mini came out and I bought it and I got a box from Apple and I was very excited. And it was the case. It was like the smart, the smart case or the smart cover. And for like two weeks, I had this thing that didn't attach to anything. I just had

this cover and it was just, it was, it was the worst. Like eventually these magnets will snap onto an Apple product, but now it's just a cover for nothing. So that's worse. Believe me, having the case and not the product, that is the worst. So aside from that, I don't have a lot more to say.

Like I've not used it nowhere near enough. Yeah. Oh no, you need to take some time with it. You really, yeah, you need to take some time with it, but that's, you gotta, you've got to live with it. You really, yeah, you need to take some time with it.

You've got to live with it and do all of your things that come naturally that you don't even think about and see where they conflict with this new thing and then how you deal with that. So in a moment of cross-promotion. So I'm recording Connected tomorrow with me and federico vittigi which is another relay fm show at relay.fm slash connected so i'm gonna get myself on that show i will have had my first 24 hours um and one thing that i'm going to do is not charge the phone my plan is to not plug my phone in from the moment i unplug it tomorrow and see how far I can go. I think that would be a really important test for me because one of the reasons of having this device is for the battery.

So I will have had it for a day at that point if you think that one day is any better than an hour. So you can tune in to Connected and hear my thoughts on the 6 Plus. Very nice. i look forward to that how have your impressions changed if at all um since the last time we spoke oh uh i don't know not not a lot um i i mean i like the six i think i made the right choice there. I think the 6 Plus is going to have its huge fans, and that's great, and that a lot of people are going to say, wow, that's a really enormous phone. I'm not quite sure about that. I like the 6 Plus. The battery life is amazing. The screen is amazing, I, um, the battery life is amazing. The screen is amazing. Uh, but it's huge. And so it's only going to be for some, for some people beyond that, I guess all the time I spent at XOXO,

uh, did teach me, uh, that I think the battery life, it's hard to gauge battery life. The battery life on the six feels better than on the five, although I'm using a one-year-old five S. So, uh, that battery is degraded already because that's what happens with batteries is you use them and they lose they lose life uh but it it seems better and then the 6 plus is that much better on top of that better it is more better yeah and you are used and you mentioned this are used in a a case, right, on yours? Yeah, I'm just trying out the Apple leather case just to see, honestly, just so I can write something about it to sort of experience what these cases are like. And like I said, it feels better than the five cases. It was easier to put on and it feels more like an actual leather case and it is grippy in a way.

And the old leather cases were so stretched out and and and they didn't they feel they felt weird i didn't like the apple uh cases on the five but on the six seems pretty nice and what phone did you buy i bought the six in space gray uh at the 64 so yeah that was that was the one i bought, and I've got it and it's great. It's nice to be back with the, uh, with the black phone after a year with the, uh, I got the gold last year. Uh, it's nice. It's fine. Uh, but I liked, I liked the, my favorite iPhone maybe of all time was the black iPhone five. I loved the black iPhone 5. It was just like Darth Vader's phone.

And this is not quite that, but although I've got the black leather case on it, so the space gray, you can't even see the space gray. It's just all black. It's the Spinal Tap phone. How much black could it be? None more black. The black 5 was the one that like really chipped up wasn't it and not for me but yeah

apparently for people apparently apparently it was it could show it could show some some wounds but um you know it didn't ever bother me i i it was great i loved it a black black phone as black as my heart no that's No, that's not true. That's not true. My heart is much blacker than that. Anyway. Apparently your heart consists of six colors. Six colors, that's right. It is pumping six colors through. This is true.

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Okay, go for it. This is from the Upgrade Twitter account, which is underscore Upgrade FM. And listener Leo writes, you almost sent a text to my mom with your Hey Siri joke. That brought podcast interaction to a whole new level. Wow, it worked. Yeah. Oh, Jason, you may have done both an amazing and terrible thing.

It's not me. It's Apple. Apple does this thing, it's a bad idea We were just doing some theatre It's theatre I know, it's just podcasting theatre That's what it is So I'm sometimes known for my interviewing skills Yes Will you allow me to conduct a mini interview

What you like to be known for are your interviewing skills. Well, now, I mean, you were one of my favorite guests on Command Space Inquisitive, and I can't do it anymore. Nope. You can no longer be a guest on my show. I've retired. I have to do it here. All right. So we didn't talk about Six Colors at all last week.

No, I wasn't sure whether it would be up by the time the podcast posted. So I didn't want to commit. I didn't mention that the old saying about bleeding six colors, but I didn't actually say that that was my site. That was like a little Easter egg. That was a nice nod. Yeah. I like that. I had a big smile on my face when you said it. So I want to talk about not just Six Colors, but the shift in your day-to-day life. Oh, yeah. So this has been your first week ever as an independent writer, right?

Yeah, it's day four now, essentially. My work day, day four of working in my garage, doing this as my job. Yeah. How's it been? Yeah. Well, it's been a crazy couple of weeks. That's the thing is that we had the Apple event, then the IDG layoff. And then I very rapidly was like doing, well, well then I was writing my iPhone review and, uh, and, and, and we, we did our first episode and I went to XOXO and I finished my iPhone review and I came home, um, and the iPhone embargoes dropped and I launched the website and that, and then I had, you know, three days where I was sort of like doing things with the website, writing articles,

fixing things in the HTML and all of that. So it's too early to tell because this is literally like day four of what, you know, would be considered a normal day for me. It's been a lot of fun though. You know, I've said in a few places on my statement when I left Macworld that, you know, it had been a tough couple of years. I hadn't really been happy and I hadn't been doing the things that I really loved at the job. And I can say that so far, I get out of bed in the morning and I have none of those feelings of like, oh God, I got to grip my teeth. I got to get through this. It's another

day. I got to go into the office. And that's just gone. Those feelings are gone. Now, give it a few weeks and we'll see if they come back. I'm like, oh, I can't believe I got to go to the garage now and start working. But for now, it's just sort of a glee of like, I get to go out and work and write things and find links and talk to people on the internet and do podcasts. And I'm excited about that. But, you know, I'm still trying to find a rhythm and a schedule that works for me. And it's a brand new thing. So I'm going to learn a lot about what to do and what not to do. And a lot of this is experimental and exploratory right now because it's day four. This is the first full week of me doing this. So we'll see how it goes. I'm going to learn a lot. I'm just open to the fact that I'm going to learn things that are completely unexpected. Like, oh, turns out this sort of thing is good and this sort of thing I should never, ever, ever do. And I look forward to that.

because I think I can probably assume that you weren't writing every day when you were at IDG. I assume you were also doing a lot of administrative work and meetings and planning and things like that. Yeah, I kept the Apple articles and occasionally I would write other stories just to keep myself sane. But most of my job was meetings and talking to other editors. And the way I phrased it, I think, when I announced my departure was I was managing the people who managed the people who managed the people who wrote articles. And that was just, you know, and even when I was EIC at Macworld, I was doing a lot less of that stuff than because I was managing. And it's not just managing. It's also that there were other people there to do those things. So like, I don't have any on six colors. I don't have any

comprehensive iOS eight coverage right now. And the number one reason for that is that this has been a crazy couple of weeks and I had to do the iPhone review and prioritize that. But number two reason is Dan Warren wrote that review for Mac world. And so I've spent, you know, that was a delegation thing. That was, Dan's going to do that. And so, you know, when you're surrounded by talented people like that, you end up not writing articles because you can't write all the articles and because you've got great people to write those articles anyway. And so, yeah, you end up becoming removed from the writing part of it.

And that didn't make me happy because I like writing. I like editing too. And that's something I'm not doing right now because I'm just writing for myself. But it's nice to get back to writing and to spread out a little bit in terms of the voice and had it be me because a lot of the stuff that i wrote i could seep through but it was also mackerel saying this this thing and i'm trying to establish six colors as being me and i've got some guest writers who've come in already dan freaks and dan warren both wrote something last week but it is it's my place and i want my interests and personality to come through because when i look at sites like Daring Fireball and The Loop, John Gruber and Jim Dalrymple, their personalities come through there. And I think one of the reasons people like those sites, who read those sites, is because they're reading a person and including their quirks and interests rather than having it be totally flat.

So it's been fun. It's been fun, but I totally recognize that I've got a lot more to learn about how to do this. You say about the sort of the personal aspect, I'm assuming that when you ever did write things at Macworld or TechHive, that you had to conform to the style guide in a way. Sure. And sometimes you internalize that. I mean, I'm sure I could have ignored it and gotten away with it. Yeah. You internalize it and you think to yourself, I'm doing this under the banner of Macworld and I need to follow the, you know, and sometimes I would leave out strange, weird references because I just figured nobody needed to see that or they would take it out anyway.

Sometimes I'd leave them in and then an editor would take them out. And that's been one of the pleasures of the last week is putting those references in and they just are there. And people can take them or leave them. But I've had a few of those. I think I did a – yeah, I've done a couple of those little jokes and things. And I think that's fun and it adds to it. But those are not necessarily things I would have done in Macworld. And you mentioned about your own personality coming through

in the things that you write about. I mean, obviously, people know that you are a big fan of pop culture stuff. They see that with your work at The Incomparable. Will you be writing about these things at Six Colors or are we going to see other aspects of your sort of personality here? I want some of that to come through at Six Colors. But what I especially at first want to do

is establish that I am writing about technology and I'm writing about Apple. And I will also write about other stuff. In fact, the first post that I did was, before this I launched as a test, was a link post about this Smithsonian Magazine article about the original Star Trek USS Enterprise model being refurbished. So I do intend for some of that to be in there, but I also don't want to turn it into a link blog of sci-fi links because I want to cater to the audience that cares about the tech stuff too and maybe also cares about that. And I don't want to send the wrong signal early on that this is going to be super nerdy sci-fi links with the occasional Apple post because I feel like that's the wrong balance. But I have to

find that balance. I mean, I made the decision not to turn the incomparable into a pop culture and technology podcast network and do my own podcasts about technology there. Instead, I talked to you and we're going to do Clockwise and this show here at Relay because I thought it was a different audience and a different kind of thing. And I kind of wanted a little separation. Six Colors is different and I don't know quite where it's going to go. I'd like to write about the geekier stuff there a little bit too and let my love of that stuff show through. But right now I kind of feel like I'm taking it easy and we'll see how it goes. I just don't want to go overboard with it.

How long have your days been so far? Are you working one hour, 25 hours? Well, this has been a weird week because of all the travel and the embargo and things like that. I try to do, this is what my wife and I have been talking about is how do you set up a schedule for something like this? Um, cause ultimately, you know, we'd like to be able to plan out sort of like, when am I going, when am I going in and starting work and when am I finishing? And, and I already had, um, some issues with that because I would come home from the office and do the incomparable. So I was working evenings doing the incomparable already. So we're still working it out. Ideally, you know, I get up, I get up in the morning, the kids are getting ready to go to school. I make a pot of tea. The kids are rushing out the door at some point between seven and eight, I am going into the

garage and starting, starting to work. And, and then in the, in the evening, at some point I come back, I emerge. Um, and I try, I'm trying to find time, uh, to do that. And also I will leave in the afternoon to pick up my kids at school and things like that if I, if I need to. So I'm still trying to explore it depending on what's going on with the incomparable. Sometimes there are, there are long, long evenings, but, um, you know, it's still settling down to like, I'm still making changes to the site, like Facebook tags and RSS tags and accessibility CSS and things like that, that, um, I just need to do because I'm building the site and the site templates from scratch more or less, which is fun, but that's also like site maintenance that i imagine will become

less of an issue going forward but right now it's an issue because the site's brand new so balancing the time of like writing versus um versus posting links versus updating templates versus emailing people um is all in there too what have been some of the other challenges you face this week uh i don't know i mean we've sort of talked about it it's it's trying to find a balance trying to figure out um what to write and what not to write what what constitutes a story and what doesn't what constitutes a link and what doesn't what should i be linking to how do i do that um i have a whole list of stories of things I want to write, but there's a question of, are those 300 word stories? Are those a thousand word stories? How do I balance out the topics?

What are people interested in reading? A big one for me, and I'm going to write about this because it's a big one for me, is finding links in RSS. because doing this job on my own, I need to be tied in with lots of sites that have interesting things that I might want to link to. And I don't use RSS. This is a problem. Most of the links I get are from Twitter. And I actually posted a couple of links today, both of which came from Twitter. but I realized that I probably need to do some more curation directly within RSS. And I kind of declared, I didn't even declare RSS bankruptcy. I like foreclosed on RSS and they knocked over the house and there's just an empty lot there now. And now I'm saying, all right, maybe I actually need to put in some effort to curate those sources for links

so that Six Colors can have some good, interesting links. And it's not just literally me posting links that I read on Daring Fireball because that would be a really crappy site. Not because those links are bad, but because there's already a site that does that. So that's something I'm grappling with is trying to figure out. And I'm going to write about it eventually. There's the different feed providers and there are the different clients. And I'm literally a babe in the woods.

You know, NetNewsWire 3 was sort of my end with RSS. So things are different now and I'm going to have to figure that one out. So that's something I'm grappling with is I had people who collected links for me before, sort of, and that's sort of my job now, and I need to figure out a strategy there. Do you want to know something quite interesting? I think this is actually extremely ironic. So I gave up on RSS maybe six months ago.

I just couldn't do it anymore. I didn't want to. I subscribed to way too many feeds and it was just getting too much. Then we started doing this show and sort of thinking about what my role is on this show and finding the things that we talk about.

I thought, I can't miss any of Jason's articles. Like, I can't miss them. Jason's articles like I can't miss them I have to see them because this is true of everybody but especially of you but especially one of my key jobs is to read the stuff that you post because that will form a lot of what we talk

about on this show so I've started using RSS again because of you see well see i'm right there with you i'm right there with you it's a challenge i've subscribed to like 15 maximum feeds i don't think it's that many yeah and like i'm also finding it better i'm pleased i've done it because it's helping me of the other shows as well so like i'm read i'm making sure that now i read everything that federico writes and everything that steven writes because i just followed their accounts on twitter like right for their sites but i would miss things or i would just scan through them but now

i'm actively reading them all and um when i was away last week i used instapaper to send a bunch of articles to my kindle and i was reading i read feder Federico's fantastic iOS 8 review on the Kindle. I'm quite happy with the decision. All right, good, good. Well, that's something I'm working toward now is I need to, that's actually one of those workflow things is I need to make time to read and find ways to find interesting things to read so that I know what people are talking about and thinking about and that that can inform me. And that's part of my challenge too.

Just having building up that ways to collect that stuff. Any high points from the week? Anything specific that jumps out to you as like a big check? Well, as somebody who's started a new website, getting, like I said, having Neelay post that article on the Verge after I launched Six Colors

with a prominent link in an editor's note at the top of it to Six Colors and seeing that drive traffic was great because you've got to start, you know, it doesn't matter if people know you, a new domain with nothing on it is nobody goes there. It's zero starts with zero traffic and it is hard to build an audience for something new.

And so that was great. And then John Gruber, um, late in the week linked to me, um, from daring fireball. And that was fantastic. And again, you know, you got it, you start from zero, any exposure you can get where people can say, oh, this exists, and then maybe I want to read that is a huge deal. Because you are, no matter who you are and where you come from, that site that you launch starts with zero traffic and zero page rank on Google. And nobody knows the name, and nobody knows anything about it existing, and it's in no no bookmarks and it's in no RSS readers. So getting people to link.

Also, I should mention TechMeme. My notes story about the review I wrote for Macworld got linked on TechMeme on the day that the site launched. So the site had been up for about an hour and I was on TechMeme's front page with Jason Snell's six colors. And I don't know if it was hour, and I was on TechMeme's front page with Jason Snell's six colors. And I don't know if it was Gabe Rivera or somebody else at TechMeme. I don't know how that happened. But that was also awesome, because really, at this point, I'm trying to

find an audience and remind people who might know me from somewhere else that this is what I'm doing now, and just get in people's feed readers and on their bookmarks and in their Twitter feeds. Um, so those were all huge for the first week. I'd say those are the high points is people with, um, great audiences linking, uh, to me and saying this thing exists now. Were you worried? Like, you know, and, and I don't mean this in like a jokey way but you are still jason snell um yes as as ever you know like so that does it does help right it's been that way for a while now like exactly 43 years or so yeah well what did you have concern you know did you think i love the past tense of this i have concern i have ongoing concern okay i mean that people wouldn't find you or that that the site wouldn't go you know

it's i've just i've seen it i've seen this happen before where you know just because uh it's just it's easy to lose track of people. And starting websites, having started some websites for IDG, starting websites is hard. People don't know they exist. I still have people, there was a guy on Twitter yesterday who said, I didn't realize that you were doing all these other podcasts at The Incomparable. I thought you were just doing The Incomparable. It's like, I don't know how many different ways I could have communicated that. And yet, thought you were just doing the incomparable. It's like, I don't know how many different ways I could have communicated that. And yet he just completely missed it until yesterday. And so, you know, you can, you can lay your plans and publicize and all of those things. But the fact

is any transition, you're going to lose people and potentially a lot of people. So you, you, you've got to try to be as diligent as possible to communicate that. And honestly, it would have been much easier on me if I could have gone to XOXO after the layoff and not worked on an iPhone review or launched a website and taken some time to deal with some of my burnout of my couple of years at IDG that have been the rougher years and to spend some more time with my family and to read some books and to just decompress a little bit. And I didn't do that. In fact, I was home from XOXO for a good two hours and I had launched a brand new website. And why did I do that? I did that because of the timing, because the iPhone release, the fact I had the iPhones in advance, we were doing our podcast, all of these things lined up. It was an opportunity for

me to expose the new stuff I was doing to an audience that was going to be paying attention at that moment. And if I let that moment go, I might never get that audience again. And so I had to do it. So I did it. And it might not be what I would have chosen, but given the cards I was dealt, I think it was the thing I needed to do because you risk just being lost in the shuffle. There are a lot of voices out there and, uh, and momentum and, you know, inertia is a, is a powerful force. It's just like, I've been reading these sites, I'll continue to read these sites. And so to make some noise and I've been very happy. People said very nice things and people have linked to me and that's actually been amazing. I'm really grateful

that people have been so nice. Um, but I, I felt like I needed to take those steps and not just take a break and not do anything for a few weeks because the timing was too good. And I, you know, I risked giving away that audience and maybe never finding it again. What's it been like working without an editor? I'm assuming that you, well, you mentioned it actually, that you worked with editors when you wrote pieces at Macworld. I'm assuming you don't have an editor now. It's just you? It's just me. Well, we all have an editor. It's the internet. And many of us have Chris Pepper as an editor. If you don't know Chris Pepper, he's a guy. I've had pizza with him in New York. He is an obsessive reader of tech stuff. He saves it all to instapaper and reads it and then he finds mistakes and emails them to you which we refer to as getting peppered um and who's me i was oh uh everybody who works

at macworld everybody who works at tidbits chris chris gets around um but i got peppered on my first day at six colors and that was i was honored to be peppered and i do read you know i spell check everything and I read everything in preview and then you post it. And then there are things that are wrong and you have to change them. And, uh, that's, that's different. Cause I, I did like running, doing a sanity check on articles at Mac world where it was literally, literally like, here's a preview URL. Can you give this a read before I push it live? And I don't have that now. So I'm trying to spend a little more time with it, but they're going to be errors because I'm just a guy. I always send IMs to Gruber when he posts things where there's,

if I see a mistake or he's got a bad markdown link or something, I'll just send him an IM saying, I noticed this and he fixes it and says, thanks. And it doesn't happen that often, but it happens. It happens to all of us. So it's different. And I'm trying to pay, I'm adding cycles to it. It used to be, I just paste it in and say, hey, somebody look at this. And now I, you know, I paste it in and then I read it in the editor and then I preview it and I read it in the web browser and then I post it. And then there's an amazing thing that happens, which is as soon as the story is live, even though you were previewing it in the template all along, as soon as it's live, then you see all the mistakes. As soon as it's live.

So that's been different. But it's fine. It's fine. I've been pretty comfortable writing stuff. I don't feel like my stuff needs a major overhaul or anything. And I think people are seeing on Six Colors that, you know, this what i sound like and it's i've sounded like this for a while now i just i'm a pretty good speller so but there will be mistakes and that's going to be weird do you know if chris pepper is at repep on twitter that's him found him yes it's pepper

backward on twitter oh yeah of course yeah rep-pep uh and that's that's yes he is the internet's uh copy editor how's the reception been like in general i'm assuming you've received lots of emails and people people have been very kind i've received lots of emails i got a lot of emails when i left macworld. And now I got another batch with Six Colors where people said, I'm glad you're doing this. I says something about, uh, I had that for my, for my temporary site for the, the Snell world, just my announcement that somebody was a jerk about that site, but, uh, you know, it's coming and that'll, then I'll know I've truly well and truly made it when somebody's a jerk about something that I've written. Um, but it hasn't happened yet. People have been very nice. Ironically, it was a guy

who said, well, no wonder Macworld went out of business when Jason Snell's personal site isn't responsive and doesn't load properly on an iPhone. That was great because, one, oh, if I had any control over what the Macworld website looked like or any influence

over it whatsoever when there was a large technical organization running it. And yeah, not my part of the business. All I could do was try to encourage them, but I was very limited. And then the real irony is that the reason that Snellworld.com wasn't responsive is because I was busy building all the six color stuff to be responsive and I didn't backport it to Snellworld because I was busy building my new thing and hadn't thought about the fact that I needed to move the CSS back because it's on the same templates basically and so then that guy was a jerk and I told him he was a jerk and then I made it responsive so yeah thanks jerk in his face right yeah yeah yeah but the connection was just being that that was why he

was a jerk it's not that he was wrong that the site should have been uh better on the iphone he was he was wrong because he was making lots of connections that are not accurate to make a jerky point and be insulting so you know that's why he was a jerk but he was he was right that the site should have been responsive and like five minutes later it was you bought the correct url this week congratulations so so yeah six colors is spelled out and and somebody was asking in the chat room if i if i looked at the numeral six colors and uh i did i think it cost like 1500 bucks,500, so I haven't bought it. But I did buy six colors with color spelled with a U.com. I didn't buy sixcolors.co.uk or anything like that, but I did buy S-I-X-C-O-L-O-U-R-S.com, and it redirects to the correct spelling without the U. I have hopes in the future of creating a site that dynamically loads the existing six color site

and replaces all of the words with britishisms and i'll let you know if that happens i can't even i'm sure there may be flags and and pictures of the queen and things put in there too at that point but right now it just redirects to the to the regular six color site i did it for you mike thank you thank you you know i was thinking about just buying you the domain like starting like a kickstarter or something and getting you the domain uh but so thank you so much for uh for basically because it i feel like it was done for me because i kept typing the url incorrectly like that was a big thing and so it's i guess it's you know i'm gonna say it was done for me because I kept typing the URL incorrectly. That was a big thing.

And so I guess I'm going to say it was good for you too, right? Because it means that people that are in... You know, people bookmark things. I don't think people type out URLs very often, but that seemed like a natural. And if I could buy the numeral six domains cheaply, I would probably do that too. But last time I checked, I think they were really pricey. And I didn't think it was worth the money. But sixcolors.com wasn't that expensive with the U. And so, yeah, there it is.

Real Britannia. USA, USA. We're all coming together. And you're really gunning for me now with this podcast stuff. You have another one. There are lots of podcasts out there and i'm not the only person who is on lots of podcasts i i i'm somebody who's on lots of podcasts but so are you and there are others but yeah i i one of the things i wanted to do when i made this decision to leave was do some dust some things off that were podcasts that i wanted to do

and didn't have the time. And so one of those was to do a tech podcast, and that's this one. And one of those was I know the guy who's the chief TV critic at The Hollywood Reporter, and he's really good on podcasts, but he's not technically adept enough to produce the podcast himself. He needs somebody to help him with that, and that's Tim Goodman. And so we're now doing a TV podcast together where, every Friday we're going to do a recording session and I'll edit it and post it and sort of like what you're doing with me. And that was on my list. And it's really his show that I'm sort of the conductor of, sort of like how we work on this show. but I wanted to get his voice out there and, and, uh, now I've got the time,

uh, to do that, that I didn't really have when I was working during the day in San Francisco because his time was limited and my time was limited and we couldn't find common times. So, so yeah, I'm doing,

you know, I'm still doing stuff on the incomparable and then I'm doing, uh, the two podcasts on, uh, on relay. That's, that's about the end of my interview.

Oh, what do you like to be known for? No. Ask me later. It's too early. You already asked me that once this year. You don't get to ask me again for a while. It's pretty different for you now, though. Yeah. What do I like to be known for? I don't know. Am I known for anything?

Known for writing things and podcasting that people like, hopefully. Known for the world domination of all podcasts. I swear I'm not going to be on every podcast ever. This was a very weird week. I've had people say you're on every podcast right now. Yes, but in the end I will

only be on the podcast that I'm on, not like every other podcast. That goes in cycles for people, though. Like when Overcast came out, Marco was on other podcast. That goes in cycles for people though. Yeah. Like when Overcast came out, Marco was on every podcast, you know, people have specific news and that brings them to podcasts. And it also makes people more inclined to want to be on them.

Well, and I want, I do want people to also think of me and visit my site. So I'm doing a little bit, it's a little bit like a book tour in that way. I am talking to Leo Laporte about being on his shows a little more often because I have the time now and it's a half an hour drive. The Twit studios are half an hour from my house. So, um, I'm, I'm hopefully going to be on Twit and Mac break weekly a little more often, but, uh, yeah, I, this is, this is what I'm doing is, is is what I'm doing. Some people were like, oh,

so now you're going to just do podcasts, or so now you're just going to do writing. And neither of those is accurate. My goal right now, and again, this may change, my goal is to do tech writing and tech podcasting and pop culture podcasting as all of those things as as those are the things i do and from that hopefully fashion some sort of a career that allows me to pay my mortgage payment and feed my kids and stuff like that and we'll see how it goes there was a very brief moment there where i thought you were saying you wanted to do fashion writing? No. He was like, and fashion. And fashion. A career.

A career, yes. Okay. We're going down that route now. I'm not going to do fashion writing. I'm going to do fashion designing. And you can just stay tuned for my fall collection. I'll give you a hint, though. How many colors do you think will be in the collection?

Seven. Yes, infrared is one of the colors. Anyway, yeah, so that's my ideas. You know, podcasts, videos, writing. See, this is the 21st century. You know, media is a different world now. And if I can find a way to make this all work, you know, we've talked about it before.

You know, your goal is to do this as your job. And that's sort of been my goal. And I'm already at the point where I don't this as your job and that that's sort of been my goal and i'm already at the point where i don't have that other job and that was sort of not my it was my direction but ultimately the the date and day of it were not my decision but i welcome it and so i'm on that side now of trying to make it work and we'll see what happens if you would like to catch the show notes for this week's episode of Upgrade, then you want to go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash two. This show records live every Monday at 12 p.m. Pacific time, which is 3 p.m. Eastern time and 7 p and 7pm GMT.

We are at underscore upgrade FM on Twitter. If you want to get in contact with us, you can also email us by going to relay.fm slash upgrade, and you can hit the contact button, and it will send us a lovely email. Wait, it will send Jason a lovely email. If you would like to catch up with us personally Jason is at jsnell on Twitter and I'm at

imyke and don't forget sixcolors.com for all of Jason's fantastic writing all throughout the week and the weekends too maybe sometimes weekends too do you write weekends now well I'm still trying to figure I'm trying to have some life work balance

but I've been putting some links up on the weekend of various things i should mention also our theme song is brought to you by the uh the lovely and talented podcast composer extraordinaire mr christopher breen so thank you to chris for doing the theme song i love the flavor of the incomparable in there i can feel it it's good's good. It's that Breen magic that comes with podcast themes from Breen. Themes from Breen. Yep, the Breen themes. Coming soon to iTunes. Breen themes.

We'll be back next week. Thank you so much for listening. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody. Thank you.