Upgrade - 202: I’m Going to Counter Your Jaguar

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

Guest co-host Stephen Hackett joins Jason to discuss the new MacBook Pros and what they mean for Apple's product line at large, adventures with the macOS Mojave beta, and the new Sonos AirPlay 2 update. And since this is the summer of fun, we cap it all off with a quick Mac OS X draft!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 202 for july 16th 2018 i am your host jason snell and not mike hurley who is not here he is on assignment and his assignment was to go on his honeymoon we assigned that as a collective we said it's no more podcasting for you go on your honeymoon and so our special guest to replace mike well who could replace mike to succeed mike for one week only it is of course another co-founder of relay why not steven hackett hello yeah just uh you close your eyes and squint we're basically the same person we both have beards yeah i mean really if you're face blind but not beard blind then you're like basically the same person as far as we both co-founded podcast networks you both you

both have um uh i was gonna make an accent joke but i don't really know what that would be we both have american accents um yeah oh by the way because mike likes to do this even though i never do it this episode of upgrade is brought to you by mail route pingdom and anchor anyway i did i said that like how mike says it uh we are here it is the summer of fun what is more fun than having a co-host who is a surprise like steven hackett so welcome steven to the summer of fun it's it's bright in here i really you said it and all the lights got brighter and someone handed me a drink with a fancy straw. There's a little ukulele playing in the background.

I've got a good microphone so I can hear it, but you can't hear it, but it's here. That's the best kind. That's the best kind. You know, when my wife was growing up, her dad, when they took family car trips, would say, we can listen to the radio, but the volume needs to be turned so far down that you can hear it and I can't. Which I always was like, first off, that's impossible and also kind of mean. But anyway, that's how the ukulele music is tuned in your house. It's just loud enough that you can hear it, but we can't. Jason, Jason, no one cares about ukulele music. No in your house it's just it's it's just loud enough that you can hear it but we can't jason jason no one cares about ukulele music no not even don ho we have a

snell talk question oh good i'm excited this is from mark mark writes if you had a boat what would you name it oh i think this may be the dumbest snell talk question ever or the best well i don't have a boat but it well but you know how yeah right like boats have ridiculous pun names on the background i have not i it would take time i would need to workshop a bunch of stuff i think um i let's call it professional podcasters oh that's good that's good that's let's just i'll throw it in there for now that'll be my placeholder name i'll come up with a better boat name probably between now and when i buy a boat which is never i never know but thank you mark for the ridiculous hashtag snell talk question you can send your own hashtag snell talk questions in by tweeting with hashtag snell talk into the void but the hashtag means

they won't be into the void they will instead appear in a spreadsheet that is accessible by mike and and also apparently steven and then they get read to me it's a it's a continuing ongoing experiment where i am the subject uh we got a little follow-up uh my follow-up is what time zone are you in right now steven and i don't mean memphis time i mean where is your body time right now because you and i recently went very far away yes and um for me it was on the way out, it was nine hours forward. And then coming back, it was eight hours back. Cause I made a, a time change in the middle of my trip. Um, so how are you doing? I'm great. So I don't know what happened. I go to the West coast,

you know, for work and I'm destroyed. I go to London, which is many more time zones away. i'm destroyed i go to london which is many more time zones away and i had basically very little adjustment to do when i got there and even less adjustment to do when i got back i'm totally fine wow i don't know how i have this superpower it's the world's worst superpower but i have it i seem to be impervious to jet lag on this trip that's amazing that's amazing how lucky for you i don't know it's all the vitamins, I think. This is brutal. And the ukulele music. This is brutal for me. This was a hard one. I think two weeks in that time zone made it harder.

I think part of it might also be, like, oftentimes when I make these international trips, it's just me. And this time it was my whole family. when I make these international trips it's just me and this time it was my whole family and I think that I suspect that my family like helps me adjust because they're all on pacific time schedule and then I'm jet lagged and so they're all getting up at at seven in the morning or whatever and and and going to bed at 11 o'clock or whatever and and I I kind of get into sync with that but we were all jet lagged this time and it's summer so the are not, they don't need to get up. My wife is also jet lagged. So, I think that made it harder for me.

I feel like I've kind of gotten it back now, but it's been a week. We got back a week ago today. So, it was, but it was, I had a lot of 5 a.m wake-ups which i don't i don't recommend in the middle of summer to wake up and it's still dark and you get up anyway no good it's it's no good and uh and a lot of a lot of falling asleep at at like nine or like 8 30 or it's like, no, no,

no. Got to stay awake. Got to stay awake. But, uh, yeah, so that, that was,

uh, that was tough, but, uh, it was a great trip. We had a great time. So you and your wife went and you left the kids behind and how, how many days were you there?

Uh, we were there for seven. So we did Tuesday through Tuesday and spoke on the, this on analog, which you can listen to in a couple of days, but trip we've ever taken together, longer than our honeymoon. And it was really great. I'm really bad at vacation. I did basically just one morning's worth of work for an entire week, which felt great.

Yeah. You paid all of us. Thank you. I paid all of you. So I figured a lot of really people on vacation, I'm on vacation. I'd like to get paid. Yeah. So we did that. Spending money. I'd like to get paid. Yeah.

So we did that. Spending money. Get some more money to spend. Yeah. That's right. You are bad at vacation if seven days away is longer than your honeymoon. Yeah. Well, we got married in college and we had like no money.

I could take four days off from the Apple store. So I guess I'll take four days off from the Apple store. But, you know, it's, we're in a different time and era of life now yeah it was really good and it was a lot of fun to see a bunch of people and to meet people's significant others um you know jason we have met each other's families but that's not true for everybody who was there from like the podcast world so like it was really great to spend time with other people's significant others and their partners and it was a lot of fun and london was a lot of fun i had not been uh to england before which seems shocking to some people but i haven't been and um that was that was great and i think mike and i may start to trade off uh i think people know in august most years we kind of have a retreat and i think

we may start trading off and maybe i'll go over some i think especially once they get settled into family life a little bit more that's a great um way to get yourself some trips to london yeah it's to say let's do it both ways mike let's uh and he may say no no no steven no no uh maybe you can settle on like every six months just trading off because you guys both need your uh international international trips it's it's a lot of fun i didn't make an international trip well i didn't leave north america until i was almost 30 but the last 15 or so years have been full of international trips and they're great they're a lot of fun. And my kids actually managed to, I think, have a good time,

especially my daughter who's 16. I think she ended up having a good time. And that was my concern. Like we were building the trip, trying to include things that they would be interested in and not just boring things like looking at paintings.

Yeah. Because that was the, I think, I don't know if I mentioned this last week on this show, but I mentioned it somewhere that at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, they were so bored of looking at, you know, amazing Dutch masters paintings, but they were so bored at that point that they were like counting the number of cats that they could find in various paintings, which is actually a pretty good way to pass the time. That would be a fun scavenger hunt, but

I mean, I had that moment with my spouse spouse we're in the science museum and they have a computer collection and i was just like taking notes and like well they have this but i have that too or they don't have this but i have one of those and uh mary was like i'm gonna go yeah i'm gonna let you you be alone with your computers now yeah for a little while as it is so often yeah um i have a mini topic before we get to the rest of the show that i wanted to mention something that happened last week which is uh it's kind of follow-up kind of mini topic because we've been talking about it on upgrade for a while now and it finally happened which is that sonos released their software update that gives i want to say all

their speakers but it's really not all their speakers it's like four of their speakers airplay 2 and so it's the play 5 the sonos 1 the play bar and the new one whose name escapes me the brand new one they announced but it's it's a relatively recent collection and it's the it's the second generation play five so it's a relatively recent collection of of devices not the play one the sonos one the one with the amazon assistant in it their names are so bad i have a i have a play one and uh yeah it's it's they've got colons too i should call it like it's the play colon one and the play colon five that i have uh that really rolls off the tongue beautiful names um so anyway i do have

that play five so i updated the software and uh airplay 2 is really good like i know it took a long time for them to get it but i'm really impressed with how well it works and the thing because i've got a couple of home pods the the thing that impressed me the most about it is that you know a sono speaker running airplay 2 is a peer to other airplay 2 speakers so i was able to connect the play 5 and the the paired home pods and they played music in perfect sync i could play music on the home pods and then say also i could say hey lady hey canister also play this in the garage and boop the sound just began coming out of the sonos play 5 in the garage just flawless just yeah it's really fast

it's like the dream right yeah yeah and it's super fast unlike airplay which has got that two second buffer it all feels very instantaneous. And that buffer was just long enough for you to think that it was broken, right? Like you go hit the button again, and then it plays for a split second and pauses, which is always fun. You can too, I believe, if you have one of these, quote, modern Sonos devices, and you have a bunch of older ones too, that new one can

act like a bridge to the other ones yeah that is an amazing feature it requires you to fiddle around with the sonos app but people were asking about this and because they couldn't wrap their mind around it when i wrote about it but it's uh so my play one that isn't compatible if i go into the sonos app and select the play 5 and say group and add the play 1 to the play 5's group at that point everything that plays on the play 5 plays on the play 1 including all the airplay stuff so if i say that does mean that if i say to my home pods play this in the garage it will also play it in the bathroom where the play one is right because they're they're linked but if you want to chain every device including non-compatible sonos devices compatible sonos devices and other airplay 2 devices into one big you know whole

home thing you can totally do it um and then somebody was asking about volume and yeah those two volumes if you try to adjust volume on those uh sonos speakers from the airplay side they go together but if you open the sonos app you can then adjust them individually so it's not perfect but i feel like it's way more than you would expect from that feature i i would expect that the other sonos things just when it's airPlay 2, forget about them. They don't exist anymore. And that's not how they built it. They all work together sort of as a linked single AirPlay 2 speaker using the Sonos. In the background, obviously, Sonos is doing Sonos things to connect those other speakers, but they've got that all built in. So I was pretty impressed. It's a cool feature and I'm impressed by AirPlay 2 as long as it took uh uh it's a it's a cool feature and and i'm impressed by airplay 2 as

long as it took to get it um i think they i think it is good and sonos did a good job of supporting it on the devices that they were apparently there's enough hardware like uh processing power going on here that a bunch of their devices are just not powerful enough to do it which is too bad it also means that that sonos one at 199 is um you know pretty compelling yeah i mean it's a pretty it's a pretty good deal it doesn't sound as good as the home pod but it's way cheaper than the home pod so yeah yeah and sonos continues to be a brand that is trying to work with everybody else right which i think is very admirable there there's amazon stuff there's apple stuff they're the only non-apple speaker that has like apple music sort of baked in you can't what i keep thinking that it would be great but i think i think the siri apis don't let them do this it would be great if i could use a siri command to tell a sonos speaker to play music

from apple music and have it just do it natively instead of from my phone or whatever. And it doesn't do that. But it does mean, this AirPlay 2 thing means that I can use my phone or whatever, my Siri devices to say, play this song or play this album on that Sonos speaker. And it'll do it. What it's doing is it's playing it in apple music and then using airplay 2 to stream it to that speaker but it but it does work the one caveat if you're if you haven't tried this yet and you're thinking of setting it up if you have a sonos speaker is

you'd have to add it in the home app which is a weird process where you add an item to the home app and it says what do you want to add you're like an accessory and then it says okay scan in the barcode it's like no there isn't one of those you have to say i don't have a barcode and then it brings you to this thing that's like the complicated setup wizard but the funny thing is um in that screen the sonar speaker is just sitting there like oh i found this is this what you mean it's like yes yes oh map that is what i mean and then once it's added um it works pretty well there is a weird quirk that made me laugh which is sonos cautions you to not change the name of

your speaker in uh to be different so like don't give it a different name in the home app than you give it in the sonos app because apparently that means something and that gets really confusing but uh but after i added it it worked pretty great so i i'm impressed cool i'm glad to hear it's working well yeah yeah so that's a nice good job good job everybody we got we got audio in more places and that that makes me happy um we got a lot to talk about this week we got a lot of topics but uh we also have sponsors. So I should probably take care of our friends at MailRoute. This episode brought to you by MailRoute, the leaders in email protection. I use them.

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i said to mike was well if there's no news the week after we record before you go on your honeymoon maybe i'll drop the pre-recorded episode then because there'll be nothing to talk about um that didn't get that plan didn't go very far because last week uh apple released new macbook pros and they called a bunch of people to new york city where they could where they were greeted by media professionals who were doing this seems to be a new trend in apple's uh rollouts because they did this with the imac pro too it's like pro products they they have you meet with people who are professionals who are using the technology to tell you why they're using it and so they're being much more aggressive in building this this narrative uh about like big time

professionals use these tools and here's why they love them, which is an interesting, like very active marketing technique that maybe Apple didn't use in the past where they're like, yay, there are laptops. Now they seem to be much more kind of intense about this professional tool story. And I have some theories about why, including the fact that I feel like Apple is actually trying very hard to impress on people the idea that these products should be judged as professional products and not as consumer products i'm getting a real i i'm curious what you think i'm getting a real vibe i was walking the dog yesterday and i had this thought popped into my head which is you know apple's doing with the

macbook pro what they did with the mac pro um which is if you think about the Power Mac era, especially, there was a time when Pro systems meant anybody who wasn't a base level consumer. And over time on the desktop side, Pro, you know, I used to only buy Power Macs and I stopped and started buying iMacs. And one of the reasons was Pro went from being sort of all of the market except the low end to being only the high end of the market and i feel like that's what they're doing with the macbook pro is that they really and the imac pro they really want to make it clear like the reason that this thing costs so much is because they have packed it with lots of expensive technology for people who really really need it and it's not for everyone. And that is the kind of like implication,

I feel like, of these dog and pony shows where they bring out all the professional video editors and music video directors and things like that. Yeah, I think there's something to that. I would feel better about that if they had a consumer notebook that made any sense, but they don't. Yeah, not yet. Although it does feel like that's the other shoe to drop, right? And that there may just be some Intel processors that need to ship for that. Because the MacBook Escape, right, which is really not a MacBook Pro, and I'm now wondering if that product is going to disappear or become something else because because that's the other part of this story right is like okay apple if you're saying these are pro systems they're really

only for pros what's the consumer laptops or what's the rest of market laptop story yeah i think that's a totally fair question because it does feel like there's this there's this gap there and and apple has like three machines down there they have the air they have the one port macbook they have the two port macbook pro and it's like there's a lot of overlap there and only one of them it really hits like the the sort of magic price of a thousand dollars and that one is several years old yeah but and it's like increasingly out of sync with the rest of the lineup and so yeah i agree with you i think something's going on there i do think there's

something to the idea that apple is trying to define these machines as pro machines like you said we saw it with the imac pro i am sure when the mac pro shows up next year we're going to see this again where it's like look at all these top data scientists doing their things on this new uh computer rebuilt totally and and and developers and again video pros and anybody who's doing incredibly intense high-end work because then it sets the context right like when i got my imac pro i basically i never got i never got a briefing about the iMac Pro. And I talked to my editor, Roman, at Macworld, and he got a briefing. And I said, well, I got my iMac Pro. And he said, we didn't even get one for review. They're not available. And I said, well, I could review it. And he said, sure. So, I contacted Apple and I said, okay, just so you know, my contacts at Apple,

I know you didn't give me one to review but i've got one and i'm going to review it and i got this i got the sense back that it was like well great we know who you are that's good but there was also like a worry of like but wait wait wait we have this whole plan about only seeding certain people and telling this whole story about the high end and i ended up having to reassure them, which they got. It was fine. And my review got, it's the only thing I've written, I think,

that has been retweeted by Phil Schiller, right? So it worked in the end. But I had to kind of reassure them like, you guys know that I don't just write articles. I do audio production and some video production. And I use high-end audio plugins that swamp every single core i can throw at it to do denoising on noisy podcast tracks they're like okay all right

and i'm using logic and final cut pro and they're like all right all right we're okay with it but they were like really nervous about it because it is outside they don't want i mean it really it seems like they don't want people thinking oh my kid is going off to college i'm gonna buy them a six core 15 inch MacBook Pro. Like they don't, they don't want people thinking that, which is good. Cause you look at the price tag and you're like, nah, you probably shouldn't buy that for your kid going off to college. It's probably overkill for them. Of course, there's nothing else right now. I mean, that is the other side of this, but, um, but as I still tell people to buy the air, I mean, I get the same thing you get, right? You've talked to us on the show of like you get friends like what should i buy my kid like my answer is most of the time is the air because i mean yes

it is older but like you get a bunch of ports that work in the real world i mean all the reasons the air is still a valid machine and it's the price right that the macbook and the escape both are what twelve hundred dollars thirteen hundred dollars 1299 i think is the is the price for those the um yeah i bought my daughter a refurbed um a refurb macbook and so it was i think 11.99 or something like that it was it was a little bit cheaper and she loves it and i think it's i think it's the perfect computer for her but that before we dig in a little bit more to these laptops, I think it's worth at least saying, again, there is another shoe that needs to drop here, which is what is Apple's story for the rest of the people who want to buy a Mac laptop? Because it is a mess, right? Like, at least the MacBook Escape, which, for those who aren't in on the lingo, although I did laugh because The Verge referred to the MacBook Escape this week and said it's come to be how people in the community refer to that system, which I was like, well, it's Marco.

But the MacBook Escape is the 13-inch MacBook Pro without touch bar. In other words, it has an escape key. So, that's why it's the macbook escape i like it because it sounds like um like a journey album journey escape macbook escape it's all don't stop believing is what i'm saying so um the the uh the macbook escape at least they lowered that price to 12.99 last year right so it's the same price as the MacBook, but in the long run, like they've got two 1299 laptops at the base. And then this 999 legacy laptop that doesn't really make sense. It's got the old ports, it's got the low res screen, but it sticks around because it's under $1,000 and the other ones are about $300 shy of that. so something's got to give there right like i had this moment uh of because this is this is what happens with me is i i you know i i think about this stuff at the strangest times so you know i'm mowing the lawn i'm walking the dog and i'm like oh wait what about that and i did have this thought yesterday which was um that what if the macbook escape is the macbook air which follow me here

all these rumors about like oh there's going to be a new MacBook Air. I wonder, and maybe they won't call it that, but I do wonder if that is the destination of that MacBook Escape is that it's finally going to be what it probably should have been all along, except maybe because of the price, which is that's the other consumer laptop other than the super thin MacBook. And they find a way to drive its price down even more so that and and and they have to give it a name right it can't be the macbook pro anymore so maybe it's the 13-inch macbook maybe that's the next max macbook escape is it's actually called the 13-inch macbook and it's because because it is not particularly bigger or heavier than the air um and if they can get it down low enough in price

they could get rid of the air because then it would serve the same purpose as the air or if they could get that down to 11.99 or 10.99 and they could get the macbook down to 9.99 that would be the other way to do it and i feel like that's i i think those are the scenarios that are at play here i i have a harder time believing they will actually release the MacBook Air with updated internals and a retina screen. I have a hard time imagining that happening. Now, it's possible that they could just do another chip swap and make it still float out there at $999 or even $799 something like that just to hold down the bottom end but but that macbook escape like i i sometimes i think that's kind of the key to solving this problem is like what where can that computer go because it doesn't need to be super thin and light

it's got a couple of ports it's using the same processor family essentially as the macbook air uses except newer and it's got the retina screen it's like that's the one that should be your like core consumer laptop yeah i think i think that's totally right i think they just haven't been able to price it there either due to the expense of the machine or margins or whatever it is but it that it just and just if you took all the price tags off the laptops and you covered up all the names, that's, I think, the product matrix you would build, right? If you had those laptops out on a table, you would say, oh, well, this Air is old,

and this one-port thing is the cheapest one, and then this two-port one is kind of the default, and then you go up from there. That's what makes sense from a purely product perspective. And I think they'll get there. And I think that they've, I think Apple's clearly aware that their low end of their line is messy. And I don't think Apple wants it that way. You know, I mean, I think it's different in the world of iPhones where you have older products sticking around to hit price points.

People understand that. That makes sense. That's the way the phone market works. But it's not so clear in notebooks, especially when the prices are only apart from, you know, $100, $200, $300, right? We're not talking that the MacBook Air is $500 cheaper than the MacBook, right? It's only a couple hundred dollars cheaper. And they got to close that gap and they got to make it make sense again. And I'm confident they will. I think we've seen from Apple

over the last 24 to 36 months a real recommitment to the Mac in ways that we've talked about on all of our shows, right? The Mac Pro Roundtable, the iMac Pro, you and I are both sitting in front of one. It's the best Macintosh I've ever owned hands down yeah um the macbook pro has been problematic but they are I think

with that we'll get into the specifics of this generation but they seem to be moving in the right direction and just another step along that trail is clean up the consumer offering and so and the more I'm looking forward to talking about that the more you push up the the the pro models i mean i feel like this is the clearest sign and this is strange and we will talk about the new pro models in a second but like the pushing them up doing what they did to them to me and so you know it's four core and six core and 32 gigs of ram and all of that um and then not touching the touch bar or the non-touch bar version, the escape version. It's like,

that's that moment where I was like, okay, you have literally made a space for your consumer strategy, which doesn't exist yet. Like we can't see it yet. It's clearly there's gotta be that story. So I look forward to seeing that because that is the place where they're kind of a disarray right now.

Whereas the, the pros have more clarity. And this is their third crack at this generation, this body generation of MacBook Pros. And there is a lot in there, right? They increased cores. I was listening to ATP, and they were talking about how having your sort of product line just get cores added to it doesn't happen that often like since the intel transition that which is 12 years ago we haven't seen something like this where it's just like oh yeah all of those two cores are now four cores and all of those four cores are now six cores

but that's what happened here because of this is the coffee lake and and that's intel but it's also like everybody gets who's using intel chips gets the that feature bump so that's happening there and you and i know having imac pro is that um you know more software like i love software that's it's not as much as as you would like but the software that's multi-core aware um is a beautiful thing and pro software is where that happens which is again why more cores matters for pro users more than it does for maybe anyone else. Yeah, we're clearly moving to a world where we're going to be more multi core on our professional machines. I mean, you look at raw clock speeds, that those increases have slowed

down over time. And so a way to make computers faster is to sort of shift the model to have you know hey the clock speed is going to be all very similar but this machine's got four cores and if an app really is built to take advantage of that which a lot of pro apps are now um you know everything from logic and the adobe suite all the way down to something like forecast by marco armo which you and i both use every day which is one of the few apps that really light up my iMac Pro and just really fill up all the cores. As we move into that world, both Intel and Apple are realizing that that's where they've got to be on the Pro end. And to our point earlier, it is a way to separate the pro and the consumer offerings. You know, I'll be very curious to see. So these chipsets can go in the iMac, the 21 and a half and the 27 inch

Retina iMacs can use these chips. And I think we'll probably see quad core and six core iMacs, and it's going to bump it a little bit closer to the iMac Pro. But I think even there, we're going to see it because this is going to be increasingly important. We're not going to see it in the MacBook. We're not going to see it if they refresh the Mac Mini in the future. Those are still going to be lower core counts, I think, definitely not six, to help separate them a little bit. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, the Mac Mini, if it ever comes back again, if there's a chip available that'll do more power and that they can do as a build to order i'm sure they'll do it like they did back in the day where they had the four core version

but um it's not going to be the focus right and if like if if if they have to make a decision about which um which you know reference uh logic board to use or you know which intel chip set to use and they're like well this one's cheaper and it only does two cores. I'll be like, fine. Right. They're not going to, they're not going to, uh, make a decision like that in favor of the other one. But one of the things that's really funny and people don't remember now the keyboard, one of my frustrations about this is like, look, I'm a keyboard snob. I am. I really am. I didn't used to be, but I am. I've got a bunch of mechanical keyboards i have opinions about keyboards i don't like the modern macbook keyboards i don't like them i don't like the reduced travel it bugs me it feels every time i use one it feels like i am basically just smack

smashing my fingers down on squares and letters come out and it's like look that's a personal preference thing but and and it's valid like if you hate that keyboard literally other than the air you can't buy a macbook that doesn't have a keyboard you hate and that's i i have issues with that i think it's emblematic of this entire generation where apple made some decisions that maybe um maybe were a little too extreme and they just had to live it down because it's a it's a hardware body generation and they're not going to redesign it for another year or two um but the reliability of those keyboards became a huge story and again we can debate how big is that issue apple says it's a very small percentage of people um if you listen to like we all know people who either we either have been affected by it

or we know people who've been affected by it which makes you think maybe a small percentage how how small is small to you five percent ten percent i mean it's not necessarily 0.01 but regardless that became the story about this generation of laptops is oh the keyboards and i'll tell you if you go back in time to what october of 16 when these came out that was not the story in fact the story then was oh there's a second generation and they're they're more clicky and they'll be okay and people sort of like accepted in large part that they were stylistically that they were fine right it was before the issues of them being perhaps uh very breakable came up what made the pro users who rely on the MacBook Pro

really angry in October of 16 was the RAM limit, was the 16 gig RAM limit. And they're like, how can you sell professional laptops with a 16 gig RAM limit? That was the thing that people were howling about that. That was the number one complaint, not USB-C, not the keyboard, That was the number one complaint, not USB-C, not the keyboard, among the real high-end pros about those systems. I remember it very clearly. And I think this is one of those cases where you can see, and it took time, but you can see that Apple heard that. Apple, I think, got frustrated by Intel's limitations on that side. And in these models, or on the 15-inch of this new version, the 2018,

Apple built like a whole strange memory controller with high-powered RAM so that it is different from the ones found in the other machines, and they had to have a bigger battery and all that stuff. But they did that so they could get 32 gigs of RAM in there. And I think you can draw a straight line back to October of 16, but they did that so they could get 32 gigs of ram in there and that i i think i think it goes you can draw a straight line back to october of 16 when everybody was complaining about it and probably apple already knew that it wasn't really acceptable but it was what they were stuck with and then they built like a workaround so let's not forget this is this is in many ways this 15 inch

directly addresses the biggest criticism from high-end professionals of the MacBook Pro. Yeah. Oh, I think even the 13 does to a degree. You can't do the 32 gigs of RAM in the 13. But for me, I prefer the 13-inch size. I currently have a 15, so I could have a quad-core notebook. I'm in the position where I'm in my studio most of the time using iMac Pro, but when I travel, I am editing and recording live audio and having as much horsepower as is reasonable. I'm not going to buy a maxed out machine. I try to balance it a little bit, but having as much power as I can reasonably have on a notebook is important four weeks out of the year. And I understand that's a weird use case and that I'm in a privileged position.

I can have two nice machines, but I've had a 15 because I want the quad core, but I, you know, I haven't ordered anything. I may, I probably will wait a little while and kind of see how the, how the, how the chips fall. But if these machines end up being, you know, sort of positively reviewed and the keyboard's going to be holding up that quad core 13 is singing my name and i think there are people who are just as excited about that as they are the six core 32 gig ram uh 15 inch um and you know they increase the core count but these machines are faster coffee like is a faster platform than what was there before. So they are faster across the board, not just in like crazy multi-threaded situations. And, you know, this is the third MacBook Pro we've had in about three years, you know, it's roughly three years.

And if Apple's, you know, saying, hey, this is going to be an annual cycle, if you don't like this one, then like, you probably only have to probably only have to wait anywhere between nine and 15 months for the new one. And that predictability almost is more important to me than the specifics of any one of those updates. Because for so long, there was just unpredictability in when Apple may ship something. And it seems like they're getting onto some sort of schedule it's not as fast as maybe some people would like it to be but i will take predictable at this point yeah we um heard a lot of people you know kind of screaming bloody murder when wwc happened and there were no new laptops right it's like oh no no it's awful and they're envisioning like there now won't be until the fall or whatever and this shows you if and there was already evidence but it shows you again

apple can release products whenever they want they can call journalists to an embargoed something and release products and roll them out however they want they could do they could do it anytime and stepping back from that as you pointed out the first rev of the mac pros came after like nine months and this one came after essentially i think 13 months yeah so they are averaging under a year or even if we say it's an annual cycle and one of the questions one of the things that really bugged people especially pros was um was their kind of erratic update cycle and some of that's on apple and some of that's on intel but i feel like with two of these updates under their belts i think i i do think

pros can look at apple's update cycle and say like you said every year or so we're going to get a new one and it might be yeah 13 months, it might be nine months, but they seem to have now for two update cycles, shown their commitment to getting these updates out a little more timely in a little more timely fashion, which I think is I think is good. I want to talk about the T2 briefly. But before we do that, let me take a quick break to tell you about another sponsor on this edition of upgrade. it's pingdom pingdom is a company that offers uptime monitoring and web performance management you may be more familiar with pingdom than you actually realize because they are working every second of every day to keep your favorite sites online sites like evernote and

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invoice. Thank you to Pingdom for keeping Netflix and Evernote and BuzzFeed online and for supporting Upgrade and RelayFM. Okay, the T2, which debuted in yours and my iMac Pro, is in these new MacBook Pros. And I wrote a piece in January that I told good old Roman at Macworld. I was like, you should link to that piece again. And I wrote a piece in January that I told good old Roman at Macworld. I was like, you should link to that piece again. It's like it's evergreen. And I linked to it on Six Colors too.

Because the T2 is a really cool processor. It's an ARM processor. It's running sort of like a version of iOS called BootOS that's being used in the boot process it's used for a bunch of security stuff it's the disk controller it's encrypting stuff on the fly it's doing a whole bunch of stuff that traditionally was done by other parts of the mac yeah i mean it's great apple can leverage their custom silicon team not only for ios devices but using that same technology this is basically what like an eight like an a10 ish processor yeah yeah it's an iphone processor basically that's inside every every macbook pro and iMac pro

and like repurpose that for these like very mac specific tasks and it's sort of cheesy but like that is one of the things that only apple can do because they have that expertise on hand. And they are redefining kind of what a modern Mac is. If you look at the core system architecture of the iMac Pro and MacBook Pro, it is now fundamentally different than previous and other Macs. And obviously much more secure and faster because they're doing crazy SSD stuff. And this is the way forward. Now, it comes with a cost. These MacBook Pros, the original Touch Bar machines were more than the previous ones.

People sort of wrote that off as, well, it's the T1 of the Touch Bar. And now we see it with the T2. Those prices are the same. So eventually, I think we'll see this like trickle all the way down to whatever the consumer notebook looks like the regular imax but i do hope apple can work to absorb that cost and not increase the price of every computer they sell by 300 to make this work but you know having it in the imac pro now i've had this machine what we've had these like six or seven months yeah um you never notice

it uh you can turn off the secure boot stuff if it gets in your way and you know it's just it's just there doing its thing and that's the best kind of technology that you know it's working hard for you but you never have to think about it that's that's what i want out of a workstation computers you know what i mean and it's a little bit silly on an iMac or at least it's a lot less useful on an iMac than on a MacBook Pro the this idea that as the disk controller it's also um encrypting everything and it's basically encryption at no cost it does all of the encryption work on the fly which means that file vault basically is free it doesn't slow you down in any way apple recommends that everything be encrypted and that matters on a laptop right where the laptop could walk away and if it's entirely

encrypted nobody's going to get the data off of it plus plus they do the striping where they've got like it's literally just banks of ram that are being used and it's doing all the it's acting as the controller which means it's able to sort of like use both of the banks together and that increases the the throughput of of it so it's it's got a performance story it's got a security story on the storage side yeah it's a little confusing that like so the hardware encryption is happening all the time you can then turn on file vault on top of that if you want apple i think recommends it for additional security yeah and what it does is it

changes the uh it links it to your password so instead of it just being kind of like attached to i think even though it's um even though it's on by default it's on based on uh data that's the identity of your laptop. So that like they could potentially get that information and decrypt it. But when you turn on file vault, it's tying it to your, your password, which means that now you need all the hardware ID stuff and your password to

get it to work. Right. Which is, but that's, I mean, for a, for a laptop, that's what you want.

If you're working on anything sensitive, cause then they'll never be able to read your your data yeah i run file vault and um the uh firmware password on my notebook so you can't even boot it from an external drive without a password if the iMac i'm a little more lax it's here in the office probably not going to go anywhere but yeah if you have a notebook you're crazy not turn that stuff on even with the new hardware like you said this is an extra layer and it works with um and with mojave it works even more this way right because mojave you're gonna have to ask permission for things like the microphone and the camera but it's it's controlling the camera the facetime camera so there's a whole um not

only is it doing kind of like uh exposure and white balance adjustment and stuff like that but it's actually you have to ask permission to use it which makes it theoretically much more secure because you you have to you don't the operating system doesn't have direct access to the mic or the camera it has to go through the t2 and then obviously the t2 is also running the touch bar which it isn't in our imax but it is on the on these also running the touch bar, which it isn't in our iMacs, but it is on the, on these laptops and the touch bar, you know, continues to exist. And some people really like it.

I actually think on a system that's designated for pros, the touch bar is, uh, uh, there's a better use case there in some ways, because so many of the pros are using these high end apps where the touch bar as a sort of like extra control surface, um, you can, you can at least make a stronger case for for it some people are never going to like the touch bar and that's

fine but i think you can make a stronger case for it in you know high-end apps like final cut and logic that that are you know able to do kind of wacky things and they're super customizable like logic i can tell you if you've ever looked at the customizability on logic for the touch bar it's like you can literally do anything you want in terms of like putting buttons and controls on the touch bar and logic it's it's it's amazing yeah if i do one of these i'm looking forward to checking out to see how that's evolved you know i had a 2016 a key fell off of it and I made a scene in the Apple store, and they repaired it for free, and then I put it on eBay. But the Touch Bar is a weird thing, right, because it's still only on these machines.

I think your argument for it being for pros is interesting. I think there's a really interesting counter-argument as well, that maybe people like that don't necessarily use notebooks as notebooks all the time. They're hooked to displays. Or they're like like me where i'm so wired into keyboard shortcuts i actually don't need anything else at this point or i find it distracting there's there's uh there's good arguments on both sides as some people have said but um i regret that immediately yeah no i mean the touch bar is divisive and just, I feel like if anybody's going to use a touch bar, it is a pro who's motivated to customize it or have it be some sort of wacky control surface that's doing something

complicated. I, you know, I'm not sure they are using the touch bar either, but I could see scenarios there. Whereas the scenario for like a consumer using the touch bar is sort of like um what it's sort of like clippy in a touch bar it's like yeah you appear to be doing a thing touch the touch bar and i will help you do that thing and i'm not sure that is a strong argument i don't know this is a um i think it's it's great news great news also at a time when there's not a lot going on other than us processing betas to talk about the some new mac hardware um and i feel like apple is being consistent with what they said a couple of years ago and last year in terms of their behavior of like how

they're training these systems the challenge is that their current product line isn't consistent right there there are pieces missing there it's a work in progress and this is this part like kind of makes sense what they're doing here and i understand why and not that there aren't things to criticize but kind of like i get where i get where they're going i would suspect that the next major like body revision the major generational revision to these systems is probably going to react to the fact that that so many people um have a hard time embracing them i i think on the four or five year time scale that those generations go they do have a chance to course correct but if you accept the fact that they're not going to be doing major hardware revisions on the outside of these devices in this in this um generation then I think what they're doing

is a really interesting progression and it makes sense with what they've said these systems are supposed to be. Yeah, agreed. So speaking of betas, by the way, worth a check-in on the Summer of Betas, part of the fun of the Summer of Betas. Summer of Betas!

I want to check in with you about Mojave, because Mike is going to be less excited about that. Mike's excited about iOS 12, but I wanted to check in. We're doing all the Mac stuff today. I told Mike, Stephen's going to be on, we're going to talk about Mac stuff. And he's like, go for it. So, have you been spending time with Mojave? How's that been going? I have.

I'm running it on an external SSD on my 2015 MacBook Pro. I feel like I'm getting pretty close to just booting from it. I've got one more work trip in about a week and a half, and I think after that, I'm going to be booting my notebook into it. It seems pretty good. You know, I think it's obviously fun to talk about dark mode. A bunch of people, including me, have written about it. But once you kind of get past that, Mojave does have some other interesting things. The additions to the Finder are, you're talking about Apple focusing on pros. They feel like very pro features, you know, surfacing automator workflows and scripting stuff in Fer with new buttons having that new sidebar where for instance you have a picture loaded in the finder preview and it shows sort of the metadata

the photo it can do different things depending on what you're looking at that's all very pro level stuff and that i think is is an is the other side of the story with the hardware of Apple focusing on, you know, consumers. I think at this point, most people, you could use a Mac or an iPad and be totally fine. That's not true with pros, all pros yet. And Apple, I think, is really spreading the good news that the Mac is for professionals. You know, if you're a professional Apple user, you're going to get a Mac. That's the way it is right now. And Mojave is working to cater to those users more and more. There's obviously stuff in there that's, you know, you could take it or leave it. Some of the desktop stacking and filtering stuff. It's not for me, but it's interesting

that it's there. But all in all, it feels like a pretty solid release. You know, I don't know, we're so far beyond the years of each macOS release being a really big deal. But in our current era, Mojave feels like the biggest deal we've had in maybe three or four years, you know, maybe dating back to like El Cap even. So I'm, I'm, I'm excited about it. I haven't spent enough time with it to tell you that it's bulletproof yet as far as a beta is concerned, but in my limited time with it, it's been a, it's been a positive thing, I think. Yeah. I am perilously close to cutting over to, um, this is the point and I've talked about it before on this podcast but there is that point where you have to use it and no amount of i've got you know i've got an external drive with it installed that i can boot off of i've got a laptop here that is a loaner from apple

that they sent when i was writing about the public beta i did my big public beta review um so that's running it and that's great but none of these is the system i sit at all day now the downside is if i sit at it all day and logic breaks or skype breaks or audio hijack breaks or something else that i use to do my job that's really bad but at the same time i can't write about it having not really really used it like at some point uh when it comes time for release i need to speak as somebody who's been living in it so i think i'm close to that and the way that works functionally is that i will install the beta on my existing backup then i'll install the beta on my existing and then i'll take that external drive that's currently running the mojave beta and i will install a pristine copy of high sierra on it um so that i've got a place to retreat

to in case of emergency um and a couple years ago i had to use that a lot last year i didn't so i can we live in hope that i'll be able to actually do my job running mojave and it won't be a problem but at some point i got to do it as dumb as it is in in one way to have your production machine be running a beta os um that's the job we have you and i yeah yeah because you're going to review it yeah um i'm going to review it i think i'm kind of debating if it's one review or like a a series of three or four kind of in-depth articles about the big features. I may change it up this year, but yeah, it's part of the gig. And, you know, I think it's interesting. Apple's clearly going to stay on this annual release cycle for macOS. We've been on it a long time now. And so I'm past the point of like

kind of wishing that that wasn't the case. And so it's much more about, okay, what can they do? What can they do this year? And of course, the proper way to think about it is not that once Mojave ships, they start on 1015. It's that some of these features span multiple years of work, and they land at one point or another. But I think the most interesting story moving forward from probably in Mojave, but definitely after it is going to be those apps coming over from iOS. Mojave shows what four of them are like. There's a lot of weird stuff there. You can kill a single process and bring down the whole, like they kind of live in their own environment structurally within the os and if you bring that that environment down they all crash which is

sort of hilarious but there there is clearly day one or before even before day one on these apps and it's going to be important i think to pay attention to how apple rolls them out how they change and evolve things like the the like the date picker in the Home app has gotten a lot of grief because it's the carousel date picker from iOS. Well, Apple could redo that or they may not. And you can't actually mix UIKit and AppKit elements in these apps. They're all sort of iOS structured as far as the interface. And so are we on the cusp of the Mac looking like iOS a lot more in three or four years?

Like I just don't know. And so those are sort of the questions that I'm thinking about this summer and spending time with it and spending time with these apps and trying to provide some sort of thought process around where are we today and where's it going. I think on this past weekend's ATP episode, they talked about how somebody, I don't know whether it was Rambo or Steve Trott and Smith, found out that the build, I think it was Steve Trott and Smith, found that the build numbers are the same across the OSs. So the suggestion there is that, is that these are basically the iOS apps. And that part of what's going on here is, you know, the iOS apps run and they run as Mac apps too. And what I came away

from that thinking was that's exciting because for this to work, it needs to be like that. For this to work, you need to be able to do the work in your app and have it work this way on the Mac and this way on iOS. And this is not going to work if what this is is a method to make a copy of your app and then tweak it and have it run on the Mac. have it run on the mac like i think for this to be truly broadly successful it needs to be as smooth a process from the ios developers standpoint as possible to to not just to move it over but to keep it updated and so yeah i mean it's logical like it's one app it's not it's not you don't break it off and then make the mac version using tools that are special um that make it easier like that that is not that does not seem to be the end goal here and that's good it shouldn't be the goal here is not to let you do a fork for the mac the the goal is you update your ios app and now it

runs on the mac as a mac app that's that so we'll see how it goes because i too have gotten that um that uh what is it the ui kit server has crashed and like literally all of those apps just die at once and uh that is a you know very different kind of experience it's a beta we are like you said it's not day zero it's like day minus 70 or whatever we got time but uh yeah i think it's fascinating and i it is the most interesting Mac OS release in a long time. Speaking of Mac OS releases, by the way, I think what would be fun here in the summer of fun is to do a draft. Do you agree?

I'm all for it. Okay, because the good news is we're going to draft versions of OS X. Yes. Or Mac OS, if you prefer prefer which i don't but either way uh mac os 10 we'll call it it covers all of the areas you don't know how we spelled it we just said it out loud mac os 10 anyway uh we're going to do that we're going to do a really quick draft and we're going to do it right after i tell you about our third and final sponsor for this episode of Upgrade. It's Anchor. Anchor is the easiest way to start a podcast ever. You record a high quality podcast. You can host unlimited episodes and distribute everywhere with just one click. It's completely free. The app has

some of the most innovative features around. It's really an amazing app. You can get voice messages from your listeners and integrate them into the show, transcribe segments, turning them into videos. You can share, you can add audio transitions and background tracks, and there's detailed analytics. So you can see how many people are checking out your show. They just rolled out the ability to record with up to seven friends anywhere in the world. So for group podcasting, the audio quality is very good. You get high bit rate stereo sound. Your episodes will sound really great and for all you people on the ipad the ipad app is amazing easy editing tools multitasking support and the ability to drag in audio from other apps steven i believe you do a podcast with anchor i do so i do

a show called subnet uh it's a daily tech like like headlines, just a couple of minutes, three stories. And I published it on anchor because it lets me get it out on the Amazon echo and Google home devices. So you can set those up and you can hear me read you the news, uh, five days a week as you make your coffee in the morning. Thanks to anchor. Yeah, it's cool. So go to anchor.fm slash upgrade and find out much more about what anchor can do for

your new podcast. And if you sign up there, your show could be featured by us in a future ad. Oh, that's interesting. Anchor.fm slash upgrade. Go there now. Start your podcasting journey today. Thank you, Anchor, for supporting this show and giving aspiring podcasters an easy way to get started. also steven yes uh okay i am the host of this episode so therefore i'm going to let you go first we're going to draft six three each os 10 versions from the catalog of by my count 17 different possible os 10 versions uh so tell me what's your first pick in the os 10 draft and why my first pick is 10.2 jaguar and that may not seem like an obvious pick because you think well that's like you know a later release it's not the first first one but it's the first one that was sort of usable um it was stable it was much faster than the first two versions uh it was the first version I used on a regular basis, so there's some nostalgia in this one.

But most importantly, Jaguar was the OS that introduced a lot of system apps to Mac OS X. So iBook, iCal, Safari, iChat, some apps you may have heard of, they all got their start on 10.2. And it made file browsing to Windows, a bunch of stuff better but those core apps that we think of like at the heart of os 10 weren't there until 10.2 and i think that's uh that's a pretty big win for this release that's good i i have a different one that i think of as the first usable version i should say what are our

qualifications by the way both of us have the ability to run and have installed somewhere near our near us right now every version of os 10 we we have we have old computers you and i i actually bought some old computers so i could do that i know who would do that i actually uh have been i'll just have a little share a little news here in the middle of our draft. I've been working on a project to do extensive screenshots of every version of Mac OS X. I've been working on it since the end of last year. It's almost done. And so I have run all of these in the last six months or so.

So I have spent lots of time with them. You've been witnessing the evolution of Mac OS X and fast forward. Yes. Yeah. 15 years of history in six months or so. So I have spent lots of time with them. You've been witnessing the evolution of Mac OS 10 and fast forward. Yes. Yeah. 15 years of history in six months. That's pretty cool. Also a lot of brushed metal, man.

Yeah. I think the number one thing that I like about, about Jaguar is that, um, Steve jobs always pronounce it Jaguar. Yeah. It's weird, right?

Yeah. How did he, how'd he end up with that? I don't know. I don't know. I had a, I had a, uh, a boss who did the same thing. I thought it's like, that's, that's weird right yeah how did you how'd you end up with that i don't know i don't know i had a i had a uh a boss who did the same thing i thought it's like that's that's weird there's no that's not how you say that word but people do i know that the jaguar like car company it's like jaguar or something like that but we nobody called it mac os 10 10.2 jaguar probably not i'm gonna pick um 10.8 mountain lion oh oh mountain lion um so a couple

reasons one is the line broke a lot of stuff yeah yeah line was weird um yeah and as a podcaster i will tell you they completely overhauled the um the sound subsystem in 10.7 and broke everything like everything like we at macworld i believe when i left macworld we still had our podcast room imac running 10.6 snow leopard because lion broke everything we used and if it wasn't we had just updated it and i think there was still a bootable 10.6 it was it was not good so mountain lion fixed not everything that lion broke but a lot of stuff that lion broke got addressed but my my number one reason for picking it is uh it's a little bit personal which is this was the surprise os release yes i got called by apple pr to come for a Mac-related briefing at Cupertino.

And I walked in and they said, so we're releasing OS X Mountain Lion next week. I'm like, what? And for those of us who are now on the annual update wagon, right, where it gets announced at WWDC, it ships in the fall, there were no rumors that there was a full-on new version of os 10 coming and this happened in like june or july it was not it was not tied to wwdc um nobody talked about it and then boom they didn't again they didn't announce it they shipped it they shipped it um and so i walked

into that that that is the biggest surprise because like even the ipod there was a rumor that apple was doing an mp3 player we we had an idea the biggest surprise i've ever gotten in an apple product briefing where i walked in and they said yeah we have a new version of os 10 it's shipping next week and you're under embargo. And I'm also proud to say, nobody blew the embargo. I think there was a story that mentioned there might be a new version of OS 10 coming the night before. And it was like a one liner in a larger column. But basically, it didn't leak. And that led to a very funny moment when um people didn't believe me i posted my story and i tweeted saying you know um os 10 mountain lion is coming out and here's my full review and people are like this is a joke right i'm like no and then you know jim dalrymple's posted and

and uh you know all these other people posted theirs and then that was the moment where we're like oh yeah mg siegler who i actually ran into coming out of my briefing and and he and i shared shared a look that i will remember forever which is like what just happened like neither of us could believe that they had managed to sneak this one by so not only was mountain lion a nice uh let's update stuff let's fix a lot of bugs kind of mid-point release that tend to be the favorites because they focus a little bit more on the on uh on not taking big steps but instead sort of just getting everything to work right but that was the that was the surprise release surprise brand new version of os 10 you didn't even know it was here now it's here it it was high on my list for

those reasons it also brought notification center and messages um so it again is a release that sort of added things that we now just view as like core tenants of the os my my review of it referred to ios apps coming to the mac in a very different way than in mojave reminders some other stuff so yeah it was a good pick jason that's good there was a lot of um oh yeah all our all our mac users use ios we should probably get those things in sync there's a lot of that in there too yeah what do you have a linen though lots of linen yeah uh i'm gonna go with the crowd favorite because i'm a man of the people and i'm gonna pick snow leopard yay i'm shocked it's taking this long it was really only two picks and i almost picked it it's really your own fault for picking jaguar instead of snow leopard first it should have gone first i know

yeah i wanted to throw you a throw you a right hook at the beginning yeah i mean snow leopard right what more can you say right it is i think by far people's most favorite version of Mac OS. I'm not sure that's completely earned. It wasn't as bug free as people remember it being. But of course, if it's famous for no new features, that really wasn't true because it included exchange support, included lots of under the hood stuff. So OpenCL. We counted it was either more than 100 or more than 200 new features, if you counted it. So despite the no new features thing that they said, it actually was massive in terms of the stuff they added. But it was a bunch of little stuff mostly and then sort of tinkering.

It was not quite as focused on a big marketing feature. Right. It was also notable because the first release that dropped PowerPC support. So Snow Le leopard was much smaller in terms of disk space from leopard that's because they got rid of all the power pc stuff but also they did some file system encryption stuff for the first time so kind of layering in some stuff that's now really core to the the underpinnings of mac os but you know everybody everyone loves snow leopard right like people get excited about grand central dispatch whatever but people love snow leopard you gotta you gotta put it in the draft yeah no i think i think you're playing to the crowd and well done

yeah um i can hear the applause from here yeah yeah you may be maybe there's a parade moving along outside your house i don't know i'm i'm going to counter your jaguar with 10-1 puma because i feel like this was the one we we spent several years writing about os 10 as this kind of theoretical construct rhapsody the public beta and even the 10 10-0 beta or the 10 10 oh which was basically a beta and it was slow it was not something it was the thing you installed on a separate partition and booted into and said oh yeah this will be the future and then went back to classic because it was just not any good and then 10 one came out and i remember distinctly because i i wrote the this is the first os 10 that i wrote the um i wrote the big article X that I wrote the, I wrote the big

article in Macworld about, the XO, I edited it, but there was a different writer, the X1, I wrote it. And I remember sitting there thinking, yeah, you know, you can use this, which is not to say that X2 wasn't way more usable and faster. And those early days of OS X, every release was faster for a while. it's kind of amazing when you think about it now that we think about os's they get older and they get slower unless you've got new hardware but these were faster on existing hardware because they kept optimizing them but 10 one was the one where i was pretty slow it's a pretty low bar is amazingly slow so 10 one was like i think people could actually use this now um in my article i

actually say this is what we've been waiting for it's more reliable it's faster the interface is better and it's actually got more software on it than than than 10.0 so what i said back then in 2001 was the first version of os 10 that's truly ready for general use and i i will uh i will stand by it although i will point out the very next sentence is although it's still not a feature for feature match for os 9 because it's still missing things right that um but but it's a it but it was a what i said back in 2001 was it's no longer a step backward it was more of a sidestep where there were the new things you got for using os 10 but some of the other stuff you had to leave behind.

And I will say, in proof that some things never change, Apple's line about X1 was, it's all about performance. I'll say this, one thing I don't think you mentioned, it was free. It was free. If you own X0. It was the initial, because this is in the era where OS updates cost, like cost $50 or $60, $100, whatever it was free if you if you own 10 10 it was the initial because this is in the era where where os updates cost like cost 50 or 60 bucks 100 bucks whatever it was right yeah i mean apple charged 129 for the majority of his life how about that it's hard to believe now again but that there it was um and this one was free and i believe this is the first one that we referred to as

the apology update where it was like 10-0 was so bad and you had to pay for it. I mean, and again, it was the future. Of course, it was bad because it was new and they were really struggling, but it was not, like I said, it was more of a curiosity and like what the future was going to be. And so Apple, in being very considerate, I think, said, if you already bought 10-0, you get 10-1. Like they, you didn't, you didn't, you could, I don't know if you already bought 10-0 you get 10-1 like they you didn't you didn't you could uh i don't know if you could download it but there was a package that was

basically like the free upgrade from 10-0 yeah i've got it yeah i think i've got a couple of those it didn't even come in a full box it was like a little envelope sleeve yeah yeah yeah so that there is that too that it was free but the reason it was free is that really they're like no no no no stop using 10.0 we're sorry here's 10.1 well that they you you have a very limited window to make a good impression of your of your new os that you've been talking about for four years and 10.0 didn't fulfill those promises 10.1 i think was them trying to um bring people bring people on board a little bit more uh i'm gonna go with my last pick i'm gonna go board a little bit more. I'm going to go with my last pick. I'm going to go with something a little more modern, but weird.

I'm going to go with 10.10 Yosemite. Brought, obviously, a new user interface, so it was the end of sort of the really lickable aqua that had been downplayed over the years. But you look at 10.9 mavericks and 10.10 yosemite they're very different 10.10 it's flat it also holds the title of the only release of mac os 10 to use helvetica as the system font which boy is it weird looking uh now we're used to san francisco which they did just a year later but uh there's it's strange to see Helvetica everywhere I kind of like it but it's the only one and I think that that makes it special um it also brought

continuity to the Mac so you know moving things back and forth between your iPhone and your Mac more fluidly it brought the photos app so replaced iPhoto with photos which also brought Apple's photo management app into the system iPhoto was for a long time a separate purchase through iLife and then sort of individually on the app store and it was free if you bought a new Mac but photos is part of the core OS so it brought photo management into the OS really for the first time and it brought with that new design it brought sort of what we now call baby dark mode where the dock and the menu bar and things like spotlight would be would be dark not at all what we see in mojave of course but um a big perhaps the biggest

visual overhaul mac os 10 has ever seen the rest of it was sort of a slow evolution, you know, dropping brush metal, dropping the pinstripes, going all gray. But Yosemite was a big break and we're still in that era. And I think that makes it worth a draft pick over some of the others. It's nice. That's a good one. for my last pick and the last pick of this little mini draft you know if i hadn't picked puma i would go back to the old days because i i feel nostalgic about the public beta it was so weird and yet at the same time that was the moment the public beta that was the moment where apple was saying here's the future of the mac and and and it has proven out to be yes that like for two decades this is it this is the mac that it has now eclipsed the classic mac os in

terms of being kind of like out in the world the primary mac os so i i i thought really hard about picking it but but i think puma it has gotten me covered on that end so i'm going to go on the other end and i'm just going to be a shameless uh crowd pleaser and say mojave i think mojave as we've talked about in a few different places is the first time in a long time where it feels like apple is really putting some effort into its conception of what the mac is going to be today and going forward and i think there are a bunch of features in it that are really interesting including the ui overhaul for dark mode but a lot more beyond that that are interesting in and of themselves and then the running ios apps on the mac even if it's just those four apps

like it points the direction for the future. And it is a huge, not just a huge step for the Mac, but it's a very large investment in Apple's software development for the Mac. And as a Mac user, the last few years, it's been like, eh,

you know, it continues to be a product in their lineup, but they are making an effort because this is Apple saying, no, the Mac is important. It's important for pro users and it's important for kind of their long-term computing strategy in some way. How do they fit the Mac and iOS together without necessarily merging them together? But how do they fit together so that five years out it makes sense?

Something that kind of doesn't make sense now, which is, hi, we're has two totally different operating systems so that's a bit that's a big deal so i think in the end mojave will be proven to be kind of like the branching off point although totally if i really wanted to pick like how history views like major os updates i should probably pick 1015 because that's the one where it opens the floodgates but for now you have a name for now 10 14 well it'll be joshua tree i think 10 15 joshua tree but 10 14 mojave that's the last pick uh that's great i think i think that all makes all makes sense uh do you have any runners up that you were disappointed you can squeeze in uh no no i mean public beta is the one that was my runner up that i had on my list and i thought about just because that is the start of it all in a lot of ways. Like the first thing that really felt like OS X or the Rhapsody stuff didn't.

It was basically next step. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But public beta was like, yeah, okay, here we are. We've, although public beta, public beta still had the Apple logo in the middle of the menu bar that didn't do anything. Right. No. That was just Rhapsody or was that the public beta? No, I think in the middle of the menu bar that didn't do anything, right? No.

That was just Rhapsody or was that the public beta? No, I think it was a developer preview maybe. I don't know. John Syracuse has already done this in Slack. Yeah, okay. My only one that I didn't get in would have been 10.3 Panther. I think for the same reason I picked Jaguar, that a lot of core stuff that we think about being os 10 was present in panther fast user switching expose file vault um the sidebar and finder finder in 10 0 1 and 2 is really weird because you don't have the sidebar you know where you could like

see your home folder and stuff you know the way we think about the Finder now, they introduced that as saying, hey, we have the sidebar in iTunes, a playlist, we just ported that to Finder. And it made a lot of sense. And it sort of put the user at the center of the computer and not the local hard drive at the center of the computer when you went to navigate for stuff. So Panther, I think is my runner-up but i think this is good this was a lot of fun i was very excited when you suggested this for this episode yeah no that's good i'm glad i'm glad we can do it fun it is the summer fun this is this is why we do fun things we do fun things all year round but in the summer they're the summer of fun that's it's more fun uh want to do some uh ask upgrade quickly before we go yes those are you got your lasers run at a different frequency than

my lasers but i'll accept it i'll accept it it's like laser pellets all right um listener jason upgrading and jason who is not me says face id on ipad means ios 12 is definitely going to have support for multiple faces it doesn't make sense otherwise right uh? I don't see how you got from A to B. Yeah, I agree. I think the suggestion there is that on iPad, iPad is more of a multiple user device, although Apple has not proven that since they don't let regular people use a multiple user feature on iPad. And the one on schools is kind of super weird and janky uh for school use um the ios 12 beta has this additional appearance kind of thing for faces and i i think that is their way of letting you get multiple faces in there in some way but i think that's probably it

unless there's like a an announcement that goes on with like new hardware that says uh we're explicitly going to support multiple faces on new hardware and i think that only makes sense like i don't really think the ipad's multiple user like people use it that way but it's not what i want to see is true multi-user support for everybody and i think you know i hold my breath for a while longer i think yeah i actually checked slack to see if john syracusa had already uh complained to us now he's got a job yeah he's not listening to us now he'll complain later but it's like the developer preview yeah that would have been a good one too um listener chris wrote in to say how do you pocket your phone bottom up or down screen facing toward or away from your leg

that's good uh i've been very consistent with this it's my front right pocket with nothing else in it and it is uh bottom down so notch first on the iphone 10 and screen facing the leg notch first is bottom up yeah wait you said bottom down bottom the top goes in first this is very confusing notch down notch down notch down in your right pocket and the screen is facing your leg yes even though in the iphone 10 it's more expensive to break the back than the front uh screen in feels much better to my mind so that's a good point i hadn't i hadn't even thought of that because yeah for me it's a left pocket and it is uh notched down uh and the screen facing my leg so that if uh if it if there's some cataclysm that hits my leg um it'll hit the back of my phone but yeah yeah and that way then i reach in with my left hand and

and pick it up and i got my phone good question though uh daniel wants to know will apple be able to fix the macbook keyboards without the seemingly essential step of making the devices thicker haven't they painted themselves into a thinness corner could they could they stomach thicker macbook pros i mean i think this may have come in before the the announcement but um i i think there's a truth in this right which is if they wanted to do something truly different they would need to redesign the case and they may do that um in terms i mean the macbook air is pretty thin and it's got more key travel. So like,

if they wanted to introduce more key travel, I am confident that the, that the wizards at Apple could do that, but they won't do it in the existing hardware generation, because I think there's just, that's way too complex to tweak something that major and keep everything else the same. At that point, you're just redesigning the entire case. And so I think think if it happens at all it would have to happen a year or two out when they do a new hardware generation uh agreed i totally agree okay uh zach wants to know a serious post-wedding question who was the apple related tech podcast designated survivor who was not in London? In case of a disaster in London, who did we designate to carry on for us? And I was thinking about it.

I was like, you know, there's a bunch. Like, Grouper, I guess. Dan Morin. Merlin. There's, you know, there's lots of podcasters out there who aren't who aren't the entire uh cast of relay who was there yeah mike doesn't mike doesn't co-host a podcast with everybody it would have been fine just most people yeah no atp would have been gone though atp would have been eradicated it's true yeah an upgrade and a bunch of the relay podcast but there are many look accidentally

terminated podcast yeah um i was gonna say to take a page from the marvel movies uh cut off uh one podcaster and two will uh take its place so don't don't worry about it there's always more podcasters it's very messy but it is how it works yeah that's totally how it works uh don't try this at home pat wants to know do you think apple would ever consider making a compact ip iPhone in the spirit of the old candy bar size phones, possibly running a beefed up version of watch OS, not the iPhone SE, something even smaller and simpler at the $199 to $249 price point? No. I don't think Apple cares about that market.

There's a report out today that they're like bleeding money in India. I just don't think, I don't think this is a product they want to make i i uh i agree with you i think that i think that's the that's the simple version of that is i have a hard time seeing apple investing a lot of money and creating almost a different platform just to make a 200 phone i think they would rather try to sell the iphone from three years ago in those markets or something like the se and i don't i don't think they want to go below that the same reason this is by the way the exact same reason why i don't think apple will make a 400 laptop running mac os because they're not interested in that market they're just they're never going to do that it's why there's also not going to be

a 99 ipad not interested yeah just that's not the that's not apple's business model cory wants to know will we see usbc on iphones and ipads that's interesting i mean uh i think there was some speculation that the usbc like the female port and all kind of the stuff the structure around it is thicker than what they what lightning requires and we all know apple likes thinness i don't know what usbc gives them that lightning doesn't because you can do fast charging over lightning you can do usb3 transfers over lightning and the downside is you have to live through another port transition and those of us who are around during the dock connector to lightning switch

we all have scars from that because everyone freaked out and i don't think apple wants to do that again and so i don't know what it gets them and there's a big downside so i think i think they're fine with lightning yeah what do you think i think that's true i i think i mean we're it sounds like the rumors are we are going to see a usbc transition on the charging end this time which is fine um because you can put more power through that cable and they're going to have a bigger adapter and it's great that's fine on the other other side yeah i don't see it either like apple went to all the trouble apple new usbc was coming and they went to all the trouble of making lightning

i'm not sure if they had known um and didn't do anything like i it would seem like a really weird sidestep for them to now move and lightning serves their purposes better on those devices than usbc yeah that said i'm gonna i'm gonna put this out there again wearing my hat as um sorry this is gonna make you feel like you're unconnected for a minute where wearing my hat as an ipad person oh yeah um i think the ipad pro needs usbc needs should get usbc because i think part of the transition in the ipad pro to truly being a kind of like professional level device over time maybe not this year but sometime is have a little bit better usb device support and that has to be in the os and then have a usb port and like it's like a computer because there's stuff that uses usb and you know it would

be like oh you don't need to buy a dongle for that it's just got a usbc on it do i think that will actually happen no i don't i think uh the best we could hope for is that there will be a little a little dongle that will continue to be a usb3 lightning dongle um it would be nice if maybe you know it would be nice if they didn't it would be nice if they didn't, it would be nice if they they said, Yeah, it really is a computer, it even has a USB port. But the problem with that is that that actually requires a major iOS update to support more USB devices than they currently support. But, you know, some of it's already there, they could do more. And I would like to see it on that side. But I think that's the only place in iOS that you would likely see it as if they made either an iPad Pro with a USB port port or if they made an ios laptop at some

point that ibook mythical ibook that would be again a place where you might see a usbc port that's about it yeah i can i can go with that uh bosie wants to know to wrap us up how's mike handling england's world cup loss to cro? I mean, he's not even here. He's so torn up about it. Yeah. I don't think Mike cares. He doesn't. Mike literally, you know, there are two kinds of nerds in our community.

The ones who care about sports or sport and the ones who don't. And Mike is firmly in the ones who don't. To the point where, I'll put it this way. Mike and Adina's wedding reception we mentioned this last week was on it happened during england's world cup match with sweden and the venue for the reception said we could put a tv somewhere if people really want to watch england and first mike is thinking well most of the people here are from not all but many of the people like what 80 of the people at the wedding 90 of the people here are from not all but many of the people like what 80

of the people at the wedding 90 of the people at the wedding are either um americans or romanians so they don't care very few swedes some english people and then second he didn't want that to become the center of attention of his wedding reception so those of us who cared were like checking our phones and but this is my point is um if my wedding reception. So those of us who cared were like checking our phones. But this is my point is if my wedding reception was happening during a World Series game featuring my favorite team, there would be a TV.

But Mike was not. I think he made the right call, but it also was because he just doesn't care. And that's fine. I think that was the right call regardless, but it made easier by the fact that he didn't care well that is all of ask upgrade steven hackett thank you so much for joining me as my special guest in the summer of fun while mike is off splish splashing around in his own uh honeymoon uh in a tropical location yeah i can't believe

it's taken almost four years for us to do an upgrade together. Yeah, well, you know, it was at the beginning, it was like, well, I could always use Stephen as the guest host, but it was like, oh, but what if I got Merlin? What if I got Serenity? What if I got John Syracuse? And I thought, you know, the result of that

is that I've never had you as the guest host on Upgrade. So I thought this would be a good time. We also do other podcasts together. We should point out, we do Liftoff every other week about space and related subjects and you should listen to it because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to care about what goes on in space uh we care and we're not rocket scientists and then every week we do uh we do download together that is uh sort of put out there as download with with me but steven is the producer of download and appears on almost every episode and will sometimes jump in but also helps put it together which is part of the the

subnet plan as well because you're watching the headlines for subnet and also for download and it all kind of goes together so so it's not like we don't talk but but not on on upgrade it took it took us 202 episodes to get there so thank you well uh i'll be glad to be back anytime well we'll have to have you back and before episode 404 hopefully episode 404 if i'm not found anyway cannot be found so next week the summer of fun rolls on yes indeed summer of fun with a surprise guest or two i will tell you you, it is two surprise guests. Plus, coming in live from his honeymoon, not true, pre-taped, Mike Hurley as well. And we have a great episode that we recorded a few weeks ago about iPad and iPad productivity and iOS 12 on the iPad and a whole bunch of other stuff like that.

Great guest. You're going to love it. That'll be next week. And I want to thank our sponsors because Mike always does that because he's very nice mail route pingdom and anchor and until next week say goodbye steven hackett adios goodbye everybody Music Music Music Music