Upgrade - 205: Monolithic Entertainment Console

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

It was a huge week: Apple broke a trillion dollars in market cap and Jason bought a new TV. And since money is on everyone's minds, Myke and Jason take Apple's $243B and go on a corporate shopping spree as a part of the ongoing Upgrade Summer of Fun.

From RelayFM, this is Upgrade, episode 205. Today is August 6th, 2018, and today's show is brought to you by Casper, Pingdom, and Inboard Technology. My name is Mike Curley, and I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Mr. Mike Curley. It's good to hear your voice. And yours. We are still in the summer of fun. Summer of fun. It feels very summer of funny here as we're still 31 degrees Celsius, 87 degrees Fahrenheit today in London. But nobody cares about that because that's weather talk. So we're going to jump straight into hashtag Snell talk. And today's question comes from rob

and rob says jason we know that you have and and you enjoy to use both apple and amazon smart speakers but which one do you use for your many smart home needs smart home needs is an interesting part of this question listener rob um and i gotta say i use basically for my smart home devices i'm largely using my phone or a physical remote control so like my lights my smart lights in the living room i've got a remote that sits on the on the coffee table and if i want to dim the lights i do that rather than go what living room, I've got a remote that sits on the coffee table. And if I want to dim the lights, I do that rather than go. What is the remote? I've got these Lutron Casita Wi-Fi light switches.

Right. So the light switch is smart rather than the bulbs. Okay. So it can dim and turn them on and off and all of that. And it's a smart switch. And it comes with a remote. And you can get them too. and it comes with a remote and you can get them too. But like it comes with a remote that it's actually one that you can, um, it's got a, it's got like a sticker on the back. You can, you can make a fake wall outlet, you know, wall switch for it,

but we just leave it laying on the, on the living room coffee table. And so if it's getting dark and you want to turn the lights on, you press the button. If you're starting a movie, you press the off button and, or, or dim the lights. And that all happens from there. And then for a lot of the other stuff too, I really am using my phone or my iPad and mostly just flipping down in control center to quickly flip something on and off or change the dimming or whatever. That's generally what I do. So I don't, I can say, hey lady, set the living room to 40%. I can do that, but I almost never do.

It's funny because oftentimes we're in a context where it's just, it's easier and less disruptive to just press a button or flip down, you know, control center on my phone rather than uh shout something out to a canister we mostly use the echo because um the echo 100 ties into everything right where the home pod doesn't always but yeah if we're watching tv or whatever then one of us would grab our iphones um adina uses the Hue app. She likes the app. I use the Home toggle and control center. Oh, yeah, yeah, control center. Well, it's just, I mean, it's the easiest thing.

You're not looking for an app. You're not launching an app. You're just flipping down and doing a couple of taps, and that's what I like to do, too. But I know I'm going to be using Siri more come September. Yeah, and I keep thinking about it. I was just doing, and this will be in a little bit, but I was just doing some retraining of my Logitech smart remote. And, you know, it'll let you do, like, when you press the button to turn on the TV, it'll also run, like, a whole thing where it'll change the lighting in your house and stuff like that if you want.

And I just looked at that and I was like, no, I don't want that. It's funny. I'm sure that I'll get there. But I think one of the challenges with some of this stuff is that the way they sell it to you is they say, well, you can set up a whole scene and it'll dim the lights and it'll do this thing and it'll do that thing. But I think our lives are more boring than that, where it's like, I'm not going to have a special button on the remote that dims the lights and turns on the TV. And because, you know, we turn on the TV way more than that.

And sometimes we want the lights to stay where they are, right? So I think some of that stuff is not as practical. But a simple one for me. So I have set up one Siri shortcut to set my alarms in the morning because I'm a terrible person sometimes and need there to be like six different alarms set to make sure that I wake up.

So Siri now sets all of those at once, right? Rather than me going and setting them all. See, and that's great. So eventually what I will do is once it's all, so once Siri shortcuts is up and running on my HomePod is I will create an action that will be bedtime, which turns on bedroom lights, turns off living room lights,

and sets my alarms. So this is the stuff. I will be doing a lot more of this once the HomePod gets it, because then I will just be able to shout it into the air, which is really what I want to be doing. So great question from Rob. Went to some places that I wasn't expecting. If you would like to open the show with any kind of question,

just send in a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk, and it will go into a document to be considered for the future. And we'll move into follow-up. Jason, I want to talk about that iPad stand that we were referencing last week, the Tabitha made by Colebrook, Bossen Saunders. So it arrived, but I think it's faulty. So let me explain what's going on here. The stand itself has much more weight

than the Vizan stand whilst having a smaller footprint. So like the base of it is much heavier. The mechanism that you hold the tablet in is much more secure. It holds it hold the tablet in is much more secure it holds it at the corners and it's very adjustable so you can have this one stand and it could hold anything from a 7-inch tablet to a 12-inch tablet which is also great the arm extends way higher like to the height that i actually want huh which i was very very surprised at um. But I have a bit of a problem. So you extend it up and then you turn this little locking nut to lock it, but it's not working properly. So when I extend it to

maximum and turn the locking nut, it just keeps spinning. So if I bring it down to about 75%, it will then lock. I have contacted their customer support. They have told me this doesn't seem like how this device should work. They said that it should go all the way to the maximum. And they're sending me a new one. I've actually found this support to be brilliant. I've had two separate people from two teams in this company email me. One is the customer service and one is like the product manager for this product. So I'm actually pretty impressed with them so far.

I'm going to get the replacement this week. So next week, I'll be able to tell you if it does work the way that it should work. And if it does, I'm very likely to be recommending this because if it does go to the maximum height that it should and locks into place

securely this stand is everything i want from an ipad stand that's great i the weight is the big thing for me where you know the challenge with going higher is that just the physics of it you now need to have more weight down in the bottom and what i don't want is a wide like a really wide base and that means you need a heavy base. So this is heavy. To keep it from tipping or shaking. But as I should say, right, I have not been able to use my 12-inch iPad Pro at the maximum height yet. Right, which is going to be the ultimate test of whether it can hold that thing steady, especially if you tap on it.

Right? Because part of what you have to do with an iPad is push it with your finger. Exactly. My simple test was I put both stands next to each other and push them and the viazon nearly fell over with the push and the tabitha did it so we'll see i mean hopefully i'll be able to report back next week and say that i have found the perfect solution so i feel like being an ipad user right now the state of the art of the ipad right now apparently is that you have to order a product a couple of times everything's defective like yeah everything's defective all right let's do

some upstream uh we mentioned last week jason that you were getting a new tv could you please tell us the most likely inscrutable model number of television you bought well the way that most people would probably refer to it is this is the 2018 tcl uh i think they say r series uh 65 inch so it's the 65r 617 whatever that means television manufacturing why can't they give them names like actual names yeah i i mean you got to have a code because they've got the different kinds they've got different levels and all of that but you're right i i do i do have those moments where i think can't you give it a fun name and say this is the the 65 inch tcl you know trailblazer well like 2018 model pc monitors managed to do it right and computers managed to do it and it's the same

idea right you're just saying this is the product name this is the size like i don't know why it's so hard for tv manufacturers but nevertheless i think well i think the right and that's why i sort of said what the way i generally see people referring to it especially in the in the media is it's the 65 inch model of the tcl r series 2018 edition so it's you know the model year is 2018 the manufacturer is tcl the size is 65 inches and then they have some different series in terms of uh picture quality and this is the r series which is the um this is the wire cutters best tv my word that is an incredible price for a 65 inch tv uh right so it's it's the it's in the sub 1000 category which makes me laugh because it's 999 dollars and 97 cents hey it looks it works i i was thinking of buying the tv and then i saw that

it was three cents under a thousand i went oh well if i'm saving those three cents then it's a perfectly reasonable purchase that's a lot of money a. That's a lot of money. $1,000 is a lot of money. But a 65-inch 4K television for $1,000, that seems really good to me. Yeah, it's a pretty good deal. We previously had a 50-inch TV and I had that moment where I thought, and it wasn't an HDR and it had some weird backlighting problems.

It was an emergency TV bot because our previous TV, I was kind of playing a wait and see game with 4K and HDR and our previous TV, I was kind of playing a wait and see game with 4K and HDR and our old TV, which was an LG, it just died one day. Like literally it just ceased to function. And so we went to Costco and bought a TV and that TV was fine, but it had issues including like a weird kind of bright spot grid in the upper left-hand corner.

It was not great. It was not great this is the this is the replacement for that and i'm very happy with it so far um it's a pretty good deal it is like i said the wire cutter pick and i decided that i wanted the bigger tv that if i was going to get into 4k video stuff in the in my living room like a bigger tv really was necessary so i thought about the 55 um and then and my so my my mom has a really big plasma tv that they bought like 10 years ago and i always think of it as the enormous tv that's in the living room in arizona and it's a beautiful i mean it's it's plasma, which means that it throws off heat and it's got fans blowing out hot air and it's crazy. But it is a beautiful picture.

And I always think of it as the giant TV. And I think it's a 60-inch TV. I would expect that its physical footprint is larger, right? It's much larger because it has huge bezels because it's 10 years old. It's got huge bezels and it's very thick. And this is not like that. So the screen size of this, though, is bigger than what I always thought of as the gigantic screen.

Yeah, we have a 40-inch Panasonic TX-40DX700B, as everybody is very familiar with that model. Good stuff. And I really wish we'd gone bigger. We were apprehensive. We were like, oh, it's going to be too big. It's not going to have the space. It's going to dwarf the room. And it's like, it's fine, but we have a lot of space for a bigger TV.

So next time, I'll probably go to like 55 or something. Yeah, it's a big change but uh but i like it and and it was it was a uh i i think pretty good deal at a time when i was ready also i wanted to really be able to talk about and write about um hdr stuff ever since the apple tv 4k came out especially and uh my old tv i really couldn't do that like it was it was weird picture quality and didn't do hdr and so on that level i think like i i could justify it a little bit more plus i just i really wanted a nice big tv so now i have one what is your impression of it is it full of junkie software full no but there's junkie software on it's a Roku TV, which means that it basically has the equivalent of the Roku streaming box embedded in it, which is this thing that there's been some speculation about.

Would Apple make deals with TV manufacturers to embed Apple TV in TVs someday? It's an interesting question. It's an interesting question. The Roku stuff, you know, it's got a setup assistant thing that works pretty well. There are things about it that I like. You can, you know, it's pretty customizable. You can set all sorts of things. Like the one that really bothered me or worried me was the idea that you were going to be,

every time you turn the TV on, you have to navigate through Roku menus. And that's actually not true. You can set on power on, you can set what it, what it does. So you can point it in input and say, when I turn the power on,

go to HDMI one and just turn that on like a regular TV. And it will, it will do that. Um, it's got a bunch of different picture settings it ships this tv ships with um does anybody who's listened to john syracuse talk about this on his various podcasts over the years it ships with terrible picture settings as the default it's it's slightly zoomed it's got motion smoothing on why would you zoom well the

way they describe it is to avoid kind of annoying things on the edges. I think they're thinking of sort of like in standard deaf TV, how there's like the vertical blanking interval at the bottom. And so you want a little bit of overscan. It's actually like meant for there to be overscan, but it's a bad idea. Like you just show me every pixel that is available, please. And, and motion smoothing and turning that off and turning the film mode on so that if it detects 24 frames per second content, it, it properly displays that. And all of those things I, you know, what's funny is that the play, the settings are per input and they're also per kind of mode.

There's a HDR lease mode and a non HDR mode, which means that the first couple of days that I had the TV, I kept setting the settings right. And then moving to a different input device or a different mode. And suddenly all the settings were wrong again. And then I'd set those settings to be right. And then it seems to have settled down now where in all the scenarios that I've been using the TV, I have now properly set the picture settings so that it all works okay. But that was kind of a funny moment.

It only has three HDMI inputs on it, which my old TV had like five. So that's a little bit of a downer. But my home theater receiver is an HDMI switcher with like four inputs. So I can manage to get like all the video game consoles attached and the Apple TV and my DVR. And it all there's, there's just enough space for all of it, but there is enough space for all of it. So that's good. And the first thing I did was

turn off all the quote unquote, helpful features, the stuff that you may have read about where they are using by default, it uses like pattern recognition technology to figure out what you're watching and use that to build a profile of you, which presumably they sell. Presumably Roku sells that. But they also use it to put ads in the app screen. So I turned all of that stuff off immediately. Good. Because I'm not interested in being a participant in their scheme at all when you do navigate roku channels like there's like a an ad that shows up that's basically for

other roku channels or for content that's found on other roku channels that you can add um which i don't like but uh my tivo sort of does that too and i I guess it's just like, I'm not a fan of that, but it's a thing that happens. Panasonic do it on our TV. All smart TVs seem to sell ads for like, it's like we have, and I've seen it in the past. We actually don't use any of the smart TV apps anymore because the Apple TV now has all of the ones,

like the YouTube app used to be better and the Prime app used to be better. We use the Apple TV for all of it now. Yeah. And they used to have like amazon prime ads in the main screen right right yeah basically they're like how do you how do we get these people to use our service and not just watch netflix and it was like hey we've got ads in roku that say don't use netflix now use amazon prime instead but and they add you know roku by default

has a bunch of junky channels that they added that I removed, and I slimmed it down to a very limited number. Because the fact is that for the most part, we will be using the TiVo or we'll be using the Apple TV, which gets us just about everything. There are a couple. There are a couple exceptions to that. But pretty much that's the that's all we really need. And so I removed just about everything else from it. But I like, I mean, the idea of having one of these TVs, and this is not my first experience with a Roku TV. First off, with Roku, I've been using Roku stuff. I had the first Netflix box before it was even branded as Roku. It was just the Netflix box, if you can imagine that.

That was the first hardware player that did Netflix. And my mother-in-law got a new TV last summer and we, or last fall, and we went and bought it. And it was the last year's TCL 55 inch. And so it's also a Roku TV. And so I've been through it before. It's pretty good. I mean, enough, enough to make me think, I wonder if it is worth Apple making deals with some partners to get Apple TV on board. I don't know. i mean i i feel like the complexity of what apple's trying to do with apple tv what the costs are in getting involved with tv manufacturing and all those things it

may not it may just not be worth doing and that's why we don't see it but roku has really you know they are a little company that has uh grabbed an opportunity to get on board on a lot of tvs and good for them because i think their stuff's pretty good i think it it all depends on what happens once the tv service launches for apple right because if they put all this money in but they're not selling apple tvs then maybe they have to do it right but i think ideally they would want to just sell more apple tvs as a way to get this stuff on people's television sets so i think that is like a right but they have to wait and see right like i'm sure that there is a project somewhere in the background right if like okay how do we partner

with samsung and lg and panasonic to do this right um or do we just hope we can sell we can like make our boxes cheaper you know sell it for 49 sell it for free, give it away, right? Like, who knows what they're going to end up doing. That's just a way to get... I mean, if you sign up for a year, right, with Apple TV, why not just give people a box? But we can get to all of that stuff later on. But before we wrap up on the TV, was it worth it?

Is the picture quality what you want it to be? Yeah, you know, the 4K HDR stuff, it looks great. Especially at night, with the lights out, where you can really see it's movie-like. You can take advantage of the high dynamic range, right? So the blacks

are so much better than on that old TV, where they were that LED backlight shining through the LCD, turning all of the stuff that's black, black as night into a kind of space gray, right? Where it's like, it's just not so, so yeah, the colors are vibrant. The picture's more detailed. My old TV was technically, it was a 4k TV, but was too small really for for the quality difference to be particularly visible this one it is clearly a better picture the hcr stuff makes it even better

and i have reached the point now which is unfortunate but i have reached the point now where some channels um so most broadcast channels or at least uh broadcasting cable channels traditional non-streaming are they're either 720p or they're 1080i and you know i'm at the point now where i can tell especially with the 720p like sports content um i can really see that it isn't that great like it had i have gotten to that point now where we've been in an hd world so long but now i'm not impressed by hd picture quality anymore and i I keep thinking, come on, ESPN, up your game. 720p isn't good enough, which is kind of funny. They're still broadcasting 720 in 2018? 720p?

Poof. Yeah, I wonder. I mean, that's a totally like side. Well, plus I think the cable companies, in order to maintain bandwidth, they're re-encoding stuff and making it even crappier. Yeah, it's not great. Yeah, but streaming yeah it's not great so yeah but but streaming you know you're you're it's funny

you your your bottleneck for streaming is much greater than it is for the coming over a cable or satellite pipeline but uh it's dedicated right like you're saying give me the stream and then you're watching the stream whereas they've got to get all their channels in across the wire. And so you do have situations where the streaming version looks better than the, than the cable TV version. So I don't know the current state of affairs of what they're doing in the past. Cable and satellite providers have done things like take HD content and

down-res them so that they're not quite HD anymore in order to, and they extra compress them just to get them across the line. And you know, it's, it's more, it's more visible. So, but the streaming stuff looks beautiful. Um, I have to say, um, but speaking of that streaming 4k, it is a mess. Netflix has got it, um, and looks good for K HDR, uh, Amazon prime videos, got it. Um, Apple TV, right? So if you go to the TV app and look at your library, one of the items is 4K and HDR. And it lets you see everything that you have in your library that's a 4K and HDR.

And that's great. The problem is that Disney is an outlier. Like Disney doesn't want to be a part of this. Everybody just gets 4k movies that they bought on itunes kind of thing and so i i have this issue of like so if i want to watch black panther or the last jedi let's say as recent examples in 4k and uhd how do i do that you wait and the the answer yeah the answer seems to be uh you can't get it on iTunes right now. But what I could do, and this is actually, I did this last week, is I bought the UHD Blu-rays, the 4K Blu-rays that don't work on a regular Blu-ray player for

Last Jedi and Black Panther. And what that got me was a disc I can't play, a disc I can play, which is the standard Blu-ray, and then a code that I could put in Movies Anywhere. And that code shows up in iTunes as a 1080 non-UHD movie, but it shows up in Vudu, which is another streaming service that's tied into Movies Anywhere, as a UHD movie. And there's a Vudu app on the Roku TV. So I was able to watch Black Panther in 4K HDR, but only using the Voodoo app. So it's better than nothing. Moises Chouillon, credit to Moises, who was like, here's how you do it. Here's the secret. It's dumb because, I mean, basically Disney thinks that you should pay more for UHD than for standard HD.

And Apple's whole approach is we're just going to upgrade everything. And Apple knows that it's like, this is how we get uptake on this stuff. If you already bought it, we're not going to make you buy it again. We're not going to make you upgrade it. We're just going to do it. And all the other studios seem to have gone along and been like, sure, okay, let's do that. Let's try that. And Disney's like,

no, we're not going to do it. We want to pay, charge extra. And my thought there is that, fine, charge extra, like just raise your not going to do it we want to we want to pay charge extra and i my thought there is that fine charge extra like just raise your prices uh going forward this is what they're saying about i think this is what it is i think they just want to make their charging extra is sign up for disney streaming right like that's where they're going to be it could be it could be it's just it's kind of funny that they're there for their you want to buy a movie and uh you can buy it but you can't buy it in in uhd and if you buy it on itunes like so i bought infinity war on itunes and that shows up in movies anywhere but that's not i don't get credit for the uhd version i only get the hd version i guess the 1080 version because i bought it i had the i dared to buy it on

itunes instead of what i should have done if i'd wanted to do this, which is, again, buy a disc I can't play. Or I think just buy it on Vudu, in which case I get the digital version and that will sync on movies anywhere. That would be the other way to do it. That's probably the way to do it. Speaking of the disc I can't play, the last thing I want to do is buy another standalone box. So I don't want to buy an Ultra HD Blu-ray player. Like, I don't even have a Blu-ray player anymore. The, if we have a blue, mostly I just rip Blu-ray discs on duplex, but if we want to watch a disc, it goes in the Xbox. That's basically how that works. The Xbox one

will play it. Um, and so I just, I don't want, uh, to buy, uh, uh, uh, an UHD Blu-ray player, even though if we're talking, if my inner John Syracuse comes out and talks about the highest a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, quality picture. But I don't want to buy a box. So I was actually thinking this morning, what I might do is buy a new Xbox and sell our old Xbox. Because the Xbox One S and X both do UHD Blu-ray. The original Xbox One doesn't, but the new ones do. And that would be, I would be trading one box for another instead of adding a box under my TV and uh so i might do that it's possible i would wait a little bit before buying a new xbox yeah yeah i mean things are always moving the frustrating thing is i don't have a ps4 and if they if sony put a uhd player in the ps4 i would just buy a ps4 it'd be like a perfect it's like the spider-man games coming out yep i would do that but they didn't do it i don't think they're gonna do it either

definitely it's frustrating that's the whole thing yeah they don't focus on entertainment anymore it's fine it's it's fine but like i i just don't want to add boxes uh with just to play discs right that's not enough it's too much of a unitasker um so yeah i may i may just buy a new a new xbox at some point here we'll see so yeah i may i may just buy a new a new xbox at some point here we'll see so i should wait i shouldn't buy there are there new new new xboxes coming next year probably uh well we'll see we'll see how long i wouldn't get one yet all right um oh so my last point is we to wrap this up up, when we started, you said, well, that's a pretty good price for a 65 inch 4K HDR TV for sub 1000, three cents under a thousand, right? However, when we bought our first HDTV in like 2004, it was a tube TV.

It was a Trinitron, Sony Trinitron 1080 HDTV. It's a beautiful picture. Weighed 200 pounds. There was no content for it. There were like two channels that did HD. But we bought a nice we bought basically a stand to put it on that was like a hutch. It's got

room for your DVDs and your video games and stuff underneath. And it actually had like a thing that went over it with shelves and stuff. So like an entertainment that went over it with shelves and stuff so like an entertainment center kind of yeah um not not the old style where it was like just like tv shaped and this was a widescreen tv so it was already kind of you know it was wide and it had room in the front where the where the uh the shelves were not so that as my tvs got bigger and flatter they could just sit at the front of that and they could continue

to expand but with this tv we blew it out like it could not fit this tv um so the net result is after 15 years of that furniture or whatever uh it's out we put it on the street with a big sign on it that said free. It's gone now. Somebody took it. Great. It's free. It's free. Take it. Take it away. But that means we need to buy something new because the TV is currently sitting on our coffee table, which is literally the only piece of furniture in our house that is not a bed that is wide enough to take this enormous TV. So yesterday we bought a new piece of furniture so a very nice table uh with with shelves underneath it that's designed to be you know

for entertainment room purposes it's got it's got um you know little uh vents in it and stuff so the electronics don't heat up and all that. But it cost like twice as much as the TV did. So what a bargain. Sub-thousand dollar TV. What a deal. But you kept that monolithic entertainment console for gosh knows how many years. A very long time and this is a nice piece of furniture and it's going to last us. It's like a sideboard kind of it's just a table so it could be repurposed

down the road and i will say it is awfully nice having moved that giant piece of furniture out of our living room there's like a lot of we can see the wall it's a lot less imposing even with the giant tv it's actually less imposing in the living room than it was because it used to be almost floor-to-ceiling furniture. And now there's a large portion of it that's the wall. So we're going to put the TV on that piece of furniture for now. And if we decide later that we want to put it on the wall, we'll do that. But we're going to try it just on the piece of furniture when it comes. So yes, in the end, for want of a 65 inch TV, our entire living room got changed. It's not always the way.

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So let's do some upstream news. CBS All Access announces a new star trek show featuring patrick stewart you know when i was watching uh logan did you see logan i have bought logan i've not yet watched logan oh well it's really good that's why i have patrick stewart's in it he's he's and he's really good and i i had that moment where i thought you know the x-men movies keep bringing patrick stewart back and he's so great. And I had that moment where I thought, you know, the X-Men movies keep bringing Patrick Stewart back. And he's so great. And he shows so many different aspects of that character.

And I felt really sad watching Logan, though, that I thought, why is it that Star Trek never got, you know, the people involved in Star Trek? And the reason is because they had a weird period where they're, you know, they're owned by two different companies now. And there's all sorts of complications. But, like, why couldn't they get Patrick Stewart to revisit Captain Picard from Star Trek The Next Generation? Because if the X-Men movies can do it, surely Star Trek could, you know, it's a huge missed opportunity is basically what I was thinking. But they've got their act together. And the reason this is an upstream is it's CBS All Access. So it's going to be a streaming show.

And I'm excited about it. Who knows what the show will be? It'll be out next year. It's going to be centered on Patrick Stewart. It's what the premise is beyond that. It's called Star Trek Las Vegas, right? Star Trek Las Vegas is the convention where it was announced. Oh, I thought that was the name of the TV show.

No, it's definitely not. Captain Picard runs a casino. No, it's... Well, my premise is that Captain Picard has taken over the vineyard, the Chateau Picard vineyard that his family has owned for hundreds of years. And he goes from place to place

getting restaurants to sign up for the wine from Chateau Picard. Interesting. Yeah. From planet to planet. And has adventures involving the wine business, the interplanetary wine business. Anyway, that's my pitch.

Call me, CBS. The reason that I put this in here is that when they did, I think Star Trek Discovery last year was kind of a test for them, which was let's get a group together and figure out how much it costs to make a science fiction TV show today.

And so they were taking it slow and full credit to them. Now there are reports that in addition to this show they're working on at least one other kind of like a mini-series that's a star trek mini-series for cbs all access and an animated star trek for cbs all access um and i think it's really smart because they're doing so they own star trek cbs owns star trek and they have a streaming service what do you do you do? You do what Disney is doing right now and you do what Netflix, if you think about it, Netflix did with Marvel before Disney started

its own streaming service plans. It was in business with Netflix. And Netflix was like, we're not going to do a Marvel show. We're going to do four Marvel shows, right? Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Iron Fist, and then also the Defenders miniseries that they did. And they're just going to keep doing those too, presumably as long as their deal with Disney lasts. But it's super smart. Like, we're not going to do, you know,

we got this Marvel license for these characters. We're not going to do like a show that's on for 10 weeks and then goes away. We're going to do a bunch of stuff. And I always thought CBS All Access, since they own Star Trek, it's a franchise that they control and there's an appetite for this sort of thing.

They should really start programming so that there's always some Star Trek show on at any given week on CBS All Access. And it looks like that's what they're doing. So good for them. I think that's a smart play. We'll see how it turns out. I'm very excited that they apparently backed up the giant truck of money to Patrick Stewart's

house. And he's on board. And as a fan who loved that show, I want to see more Captain Picard. I'm looking forward to it. Talking about expansive sci-fi themed universes with star in the name, themed universes with star in the name it turns out disney can't get the rights to star wars not that not the tv and streaming rights let's yeah let's back up a little bit i think that that that kind of line is very funny but it's also kind of true so disney owns star wars right but yes turner broadcasting mostly which is owned by at&, currently owns the TV rights to Star Wars. So Star Wars movies get shown on Turner channels. That's how that works, right? So if they're going to be on TV, that's where they are.

So Disney want them back. Now, this is being reported by Bloomberg as so they can put them on their new streaming service. Now, this isn't completely accurate. So we'll come back to that in a moment. Turner want a lot of money, as you can assume, because they know they can ask for it, and comparable replacement content. Now, this is where it's all stopped

because I'm expecting Disney would give them the money, would not give them the replacement content, because comparable replacement content means probably Marvel movies, and Disney doesn't want to give those away either yeah the only thing i can think is that would they make a deal to do something and i think disney doesn't want to do this right but would be to say we'll we'll let you have a marvel tv show or something like that they don't want that they don't want to do that they

want all of that stuff on their own on their own company services yeah and that is leading into this right so netflix currently have a deal for the new star wars movies like right now netflix in the uk it has uh last jedi but us too and and it's got marvel movies it's it's got like uh what's what's on what's on netflix there's a relatively recent marvel movie that's on there, maybe Black Panther. Or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, I think, is on there. And that deal extends through Ant-Man and the Wasp, and that'll be the last one. And then Disney has clawed those rights back.

But yeah, they've made... This is just like all those Marvel TV shows that are on Netflix. Disney made deals back when they weren't planning this streaming service strategy. And those deals are out there, and they can't unwind them immediately. But that Netflix deal is going to come to an end. When that Netflix deal comes to an end, Disney will be able to put these on their own service.

Right. So you think to yourself, if the streaming rights and TV rights are completely separate, then why do they care about Turner? Well, I assume the reason is they want the only place to get Star Wars and Marvel to be their service, which is probably why they're not willing to give up a bunch more to Turner to get these rights back.

I guess they'll just wait until all of these contracts come up like they end. When does the Netflix one one so the netflix one it runs out i guess in within the next year right if that man and the wasp is the last one because it's just come out so give it a year and it's right yeah presumably there's a window that they bought where it's like it goes on sale on home video and and rental for home video and then there's a you know six month gap and then it goes on Netflix for six months, and then it comes off. There's some pattern that I haven't followed, but there clearly is one. And the last one of those will be Ant-Man and the Wasp. And when that goes off of Netflix, that's the end of the deal.

Yeah. So then they're gone, right? And then Disney has them all. And it might be some kind of rolling thing, right? So they might start getting some of them. Who knows? I mean, we don't know what the deals mean. But all of this is just is it is funny to me you look at these contracts and what disney

have bought their way into to try and get what they want they are having to deal with tens of years of contracts by companies they didn't own right they're dealing with marvel's nuisance they're dealing with uh like uh lucasfilm then they're going to be dealing with fox and they've just got to go through like the next five years and then they'll get to where they want to be because right now they are having to unwind walk back all of these contracts that they found themselves into yeah disney is is turning itself into a very different company than it is today and than it was five years ago, but it's going to take time. And now buying Fox is yet another piece of that. And what it does with Hulu, as we've talked about,

is going to be another piece of it. But I think you're right. The end goal is that everything that's available on streaming, that's Marvel or Star or pixar or disney simpsons isn't everything else yeah is only on a disney owned streaming service that that is the end goal here you may even stop seeing itunes like you never like right something they may stop doing it i don't think so only because i feel like that's a different market the if you want to buy it or rent it and then there's streaming and and that it might be it might be different but i feel like there's ancillary revenue like um star trek discovery is going to come out on blu-ray this fall and that that's going to be the first chance for anybody who didn't stream it who didn't

pay for a streaming service to watch it but there's there's money to be made on on that and so cbs is going to do that i feel like there's money to be made on that. And so CBS is going to do that. I feel like there's money to be made making Blu-rays and there's money to be made selling things on iTunes and renting things on iTunes. And then there's this other market that's the streaming market, which happens a little bit later.

Now they may upset that, but I think the most likely scenario and the way it looks right now is that they'll kind of keep to that. But they want, if when our content goes to streaming, it's only on our streaming services. Now, you know, I don't know the nature of like their deal with Netflix for those shows. I assume that those shows are on Netflix as long as Netflix wants to keep renewing

them, which I think we mentioned last week. Like I anticipate that you will be seeing new seasons of Iron Fist for a long time, if only because Netflix wants to be in the Marvel business, and that's the only piece that they can control. And that Disney would love for Netflix to stop showing those shows so that they could take them over. In fact, there's a great example of this, which is that Clone Wars series that is coming to,

that they did the last, they renewed it for a last season after it's been off the air for years. Like, why did that all happen? The reason is that was not on a Disney-owned channel. And Disney, you know, Disney bought Lucasfilm, so they got Star Wars. And they basically said, we're not going to make that show anymore. And then they made a new show, Star Wars Rebels, that was on Disney's channel instead. And it seems like that deal has now lapsed to the point where they can go back and make new episodes and put it on their own streaming service deal. So in the end, the goal here is,

why should we make something for our competitor when we can make it for ourselves? And in some cases, they're going to have to wait out, just as Marvel has had to wait out things like Fox and Universal and other companies having rights to the Marvel characters that they want to have the rights to, or they bought them out, one of the two. Disney's going to have to wait out

some of these TV deals they made, including Turner with the Star Wars movies, unless they want to pay them off. Because you can see the appeal, right, of launching that service and saying every Star Wars movie movie and this is the only place you can get it and all the star wars tv shows and new star wars tv shows but they can't do it yet so talking about disney streaming service there was an interesting article in the new york times today which reads like a profile to me more than yeah right it reads like yeah disney sat down gave them a

bunch of information clearly fed them some stuff as well which came from anonymous sources but like way too much information that you wouldn't have sat on right like you know that there was a really really a lot of stuff in here try and break down down some of it. It's all focused around a guy called Ricky Strauss, who's been given creative oversight for Disney's new streaming service. Strauss was the president of marketing at Walt Disney Studios. He has credits like Black Panther, Force Awakens, and Inside Out to his name whilst kind of running marketing there. He's been described by people like Kevin Feig,

who's the head of Marvel Studios, as hugely supportive to storytellers and that he exhibits strong creative instincts and expertise. Strauss is going to be responsible for greenlighting and shaping the new programming that Disney will create. And you can expect to see here now, coming to Disney, what we've seen with Apple. So you're going to start to see now big names to Disney what we've seen with Apple. So you're going to start to see now big names, big projects, and big budgets. So you're going to start to see people being attached to properties coming to Disney or coming from Disney like we've been reporting on for ages, right? So like Apple signs this person, Amazon signs this person. I think you're about to start to see Disney's name in that hat a little bit more as opposed to just stuff coming from them we may start to see some some

things that they're signing they uh the rumors say there are at least nine movies in production some original stuff yeah but they're going to be doing uh kind of remakes reboots of lady and the tramp and sword in the stone uh lady and Tramp and Sword in the Stone amongst some others and some TV series adapted from Disney properties. It's going to be a new high school musical show and a new Monsters Inc. show. This is kind of all come out of this Disney

kind of article slash profile in the New York Times today. There's a lot of information in there. The movie stuff kind of fascinates me. I wonder about that. um the idea of i mean that's competing with next netflix i suppose the idea that in addition to having tv series they want to have kind of movie premieres and then they live on in the library and disney has always been if if anybody who knows their home video strategy where it's like it goes back in the vault they

sell them for a little while and then they they go away and then they come back this is a little bit like the new disney vault is their streaming service where they put these movies there and they say if you want to watch them you need to pay us to subscribe and that's part of their strategy is instead of direct to video it's like direct to streaming um and that's it'll be interesting to see how this turns out presumably netflix keeps doing this because it actually works for them um I always think that the Netflix movies are... I am a skeptic of movies being released on Netflix. I'm not sure, but apparently people watch them. I very rarely watch a Netflix original movie. But obviously there's an audience for it or they wouldn't do it. Netflix knows their audience and they're paying for these movies. So there must be some segment of their audience that's totally into the original movies. And Disney seems to be leaning that way. And I'm sure they're going to learn a lot about who their audience is too. I see Marvel and Star Wars as being, you know, Marvel runs the gamut, right? The Netflix TV shows are rated R level. The other Marvel shows are more like PG-13.

Star Wars is APG kind of environment. And that's interesting, but those aren't, you know, those aren't kids shows, right? They're older than that. So I wonder about the challenge of this Disney streaming service and how they sell it. Because if they're trying to sell it to parents of young kids and then also parents of older kids and also people who love Marvel and Disney or Marvel and Star Wars, which is a broader audience than that. I don't know. It's a weird combination of things, but I think they don't want to offer like five different streaming services, right?

So this is where they've chosen to put it. I don't know. It's going to be fascinating to see. And that's the thing I got most out of that New York Times article was I felt like this was also sort of Disney trying to introduce this concept to a broader audience through the access that they presumably granted for this article, which is get ready. Disney is also in this game along with Netflix and Amazon and Apple. And that first shot saying, you know, pay attention to us, too.

We are also all the way in on this strategy. So yeah, there's a lot. I recommend if you're interested in this stuff, which you probably are if you listen to this, go read the article because there's more stuff in there. There's more like titles that they're talking about. We just picked out a few of them. So there's some interesting stuff in there for sure. All right.

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So Apple results time. Let's do very quick headline. Revenue, profits, services, iPad sales and iPhone sales were all up year on year. Mac sales were down year on year. There's your headline. Let's dig into a couple

of different things record revenue for the third quarter they they made more you know again it's more records um the way i phrased it in my article was sort of like i hear people who are just bored now uh it's the best kind of board i suppose to the Apple just kind of reliably has huge profits and huge revenue. And that's just where we are at the moment. And, you know, have been for a long time, probably will continue to be for a long time. So Apple has actually, with this quarter, hit their new iPhone sales peak. So do you remember probably about a year ago, we were spending a lot of time talking about the huge six and six plus release. Maybe it was a year, year or two ago, because if

you remember, Apple had their first down quarters, right? Because the six and six plus pent up demand, all that stuff went through the roof. And it was like, those were the heady heights of the iPhone, probably never to be seen again. Well, it did it. It's revenue, not unit sales that's been beaten. So unit sales have not eclipsed the 6 and 6 Plus yet. Although I'm just going to go on record and say that they will do it next year with the ones that we're going to see in September. I think that those phones are going to be pretty huge. that those phones are going to be pretty huge. But they have more revenue than ever before year on year with a higher average selling price to ASP. And I guess, Jason, this is all thanks to the iPhone X, right? Yeah, this is the success of the iPhone X, that revenue for iPhone has been up

year on year for seven straight quarters. But the number that struck me was the four quarter average. So you take a look at like, it smooths out all the seasonality. You basically look at how much revenue has the iPhone generated in the last year. That's a different chart. I know it's not your favorite chart. It's kind of weird because it's synthetic.

But the most important point of it is to say in any given four quarter period any given year not even like calendar year but like four quarter period over the life of the iphone the iphone has made more money in the last four quarters than any other four quarter period including the insurmountable iphone six and six plus period and. And that's the thing that makes me laugh. Because remember, we had that year where it was great. And then we had the year where they couldn't live up to it. And everybody's like, oh, God, why? Everything's awful year over year. It's terrible. Even though that was sort of an aberration because the general trend was up. But there was so much pent up demand for larger screen iPhones that that was a huge year.

there was so much pent up demand for larger screen iPhones that, that, that was a huge year. Um, but you give it three years and here we are, the new kind of like that gradual increase has now reached the heights of the impossibly, you know, impossibly high sales of the iPhone six in revenue.

And the ASP average selling price is about the iPhone 10, right? Like the average selling price of the iPhone has been increasing, uh, you know, has been increasing since the, um, the iPhone 10 came out. And at this point, the four quarter rolling average is the highest it's ever been. The average iPhone selling price over the last four quarters, which includes the introduction of the iPhone 10 is $717. It's, uh, it's huge. And there's no other, I mean, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are more expensive than their predecessors. So that's part of it. But it's really about that

fact that the iPhone 10 is such a key part of the iPhone line, and it is the best selling iPhone. And that's the one that starts at $1,000. So for all of those dumb stories about how the iPhone line and it is the best selling iPhone. And that's the one that starts at a thousand dollars. So, um, there, you know, for all of those dumb stories about how the iPhone 10 was no good and it was failing and wasn't selling well, uh, that's the, they were just wrong. And the iPhone 10 has pushed Apple to its highest heights yet. And I'm wondering what is going to happen with, you know, the coming next year right with from september onwards when there's probably going to be three new phones with two of them hovering around a thousand dollars to start these numbers this time like next year or whatever are going to be mammoth yeah well the iphone 9 will presumably hit a lot of people who held out on the iPhone 10 because they thought it was too expensive.

But if that iPhone 9 or whatever it's called, that is, you know, the LCD version of the iPhone 10, basically, it's got Face ID and all of that and presumably will cost less than the iPhone 10. That will get some people. Some other people will be like, OK, well, now I'll get the iPhone X because I think we're assuming there'll be a new iPhone X as well, a new iPhone X model that they'll probably just call the iPhone X, the new iPhone X, second generation. And there's the rumor about the iPhone X Plus, which will presumably start at more like $1,100. that this is, I mean, this is the reality of where Apple is now, is that they pushed some models down by keeping older models around and by occasionally refreshing the iPhone SE. And they've also pushed models up because they know that there's some people who are happy to pay $1,200 for an iPhone. And as a result, the average iPhone sale price is more than $100. Apple is making more than $100 per iPhone more than they did three and a half years ago.

I'm also going to – if I was going to put my money on the table, I would expect that we will have like the iPhone 9, right, which would be like a $600, $700 iPhone X looking LCD phone. I reckon the iPhone X that we have now, they'll cut the price and that will be available. And then we'll have a XS and a X Plus. So that's how I think it's going to go. Just so they have like on the $100, right? From like $700 to $1,100, something like that. We'll see.

I mean, I do totally understand the idea of getting rid of the current X. And I know there's been a lot of rumors that suggest that. But it really feels to me like all of the iPhone X revenue and sales reporting that has occurred over the last year has all been wrong. So, you know, like the idea of them killing the iPhone, it didn't work. I mean, I totally understand the reason

if they just want to get rid of it, but I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if we see the current iPhone 10 kept around on the line just to have another model available at another price point. We'll see. The iPad is definitely stable at this point. I think it's quite clear. I was talking about this on Connected.

I believe Apple has a strategy in place for the iPad right now with how they're releasing it. You know, they didn't have Pros available for June, so they released, and they did release, you know, they had a cheaper iPad, right? They brought out a more regular iPad, and that's definitely what has kept them kind of on a steady to small growth, right? I think September is going to be very exciting for the iPad. You know, we think we're excited for the iPhone. My hopes are very high right now for what the iPad might bring in September as well, what we're going to see in the iPad Pro. So I think that Apple definitely have a strategy, a long-term strategy in place for the iPad right now. And we're seeing it unfold. And the numbers are showing that story where I think we're not seeing it for the Macintosh.

Yeah, it's working for the iPad. I mean, they have been executing when they split the line and lowered the price of the ipad and made the ipad pro they've been executing that um they had new ipad pros the next year basically and they if we see newer ipad pros this fall then they will have you know really been executing pretty quickly on turning that product line around and um there was a little twitter back and forth about, Federico and I had at one point, about how exciting this fall could be. I think I'm more excited about an iPad Pro announcement than I am about the iPhone at this point.

Me too. Because last year was really exciting. iPhone X was really exciting. But if what we get is sort of an iPhone X Lite and an iPhone X Big, that's fine. It's a huge product and they'll sell a lot of them. But I am really interested in what the iPhone 10 style

iPad Pro looks like. That's really, really interesting if they've managed to do that. I don't know what it's going to cost. Oh, a lot of money. But I love my iPhone 10 so much still. I think of all of my iPhones, this is the one that I have remained

in love with for the longest period of time. Like couple of days ago i was like wow we're like six weeks away from the new one right or something like that which is super close right forget the math right but we're maybe six weeks away from seeing the new iphone and i feel like i've only just had my iphone right like and i know we got it a little bit later right i know it came in like november or whatever but i still really really love my iphone 10 so that's why i like you guys are so excited for what the ipad's gonna be like right with this thinking and this new kind of design in mind very very excited for that and we're gonna talk about that i guess over the next few weeks as we ramp up to to those products being released but let's talk about that, I guess, over the next few weeks as we ramp up to those products being released. But let's talk about the Macintosh.

13% year-on-year decline in units, 5% down in revenue. This is the fewest Mac sold in a single quarter since Q3 2010. And this makes it the third straight down quarter. I don't know what to say about it. My feeling is... Yeah, it's not good. Apple's... I said this again. I'm repeating myself from Connected, but... I don't know what to say about it. My feeling is... Yeah, it's not good. Apple's... I said this again,

I'm repeating myself from Connected, but I think that they're showing they have a really good strategy in the iPad and it feels like it's kind of reversed and the strategy maybe isn't so good in the Mac right now. They're not releasing things quick enough. What they're releasing isn't making people happy. There's potentially stuff on the horizon,

but nobody knows anything about it. And that feels like what the iPad felt like to me a while ago. Yeah, I think they do have a strategy, but the problem is that they haven't executed it yet. Sorry, yeah, I should say a strategy that we're seeing, right? Because there's always that. The iPad didn't just have that idea six months ago, right? There is a plan, but the plan has fallen down right like

where we are at the moment in their plan is the bad point i would hope yeah as steven and i talked about a couple weeks ago um the idea that the this this um thing is just hanging out there with the consumer part of the laptop line it's's just like, what is going on there? And the answer is, yeah, it's a disaster. I am pretty sure that Apple knows exactly what they're going to do with the bottom half of the laptop line, but they haven't gotten there yet. And some of that is maybe misjudging, as we've talked about, misjudging sort of like how they could make a MacBook

and the popularity of the MacBook Air and the pricing, where they can put a $999 laptop and what they want to make for that. But I think it's going to get resolved. I have high hopes, actually, that it'll get resolved this fall and that we'll see that. And in fact, this quarter doesn't include the MacBook Pro, whereas last quarter or last year, the year-on-year comparison quarter did include the MacBook Pro because it was released at WWDC last year. So that's what they call in the business a tough compare, which is they released a product last year, but they didn't this year. So of course,

sales are down. It's possible that it's all going to be up from here for the Mac because they'll start with a quarter with a lot of MacBook Pro sales, hopefully for them. And then if they roll out new Mac laptops and then new iMacs and all that, they could get this going in the right direction. Yes. But it is hard not to look at the numbers now and say that the Mac is in the roughest state it's been in in eight years, seven or eight years. Like right now it's in this tenuous position where they have not released a lot of new stuff.

They've got people kind of grumpy about the laptops and the laptops are two thirds of the business. They've promised a Mac Pro, but they haven't delivered it yet. Not until next year. They had the iMac Pro out there, which is nice. Although the existence of the Mac Pro probably suppressed sales of it. And it's not a mainstream huge product. Anyway, the huge products are the laptops and the consumer laptops, I think, are especially huge. And that's the part that they have done not a lot with and it's kind of confusing and a mess down there. So my optimistic side says what you said, which is this is a low point and that the Mac will turn it around from here. I hope that's true because if Apple thinks

that everything's fine in the Mac, they are deluded because you can look at the numbers. It's very clear now that all of the kind of unrest that we've heard among Mac users for the last year or two, I really believe this. You can see it in the numbers. We may be a tempest in a teapot. We may be this echo chamber. We may be the non-representative of the Mac market as a whole, but we're also keen observers of the Mac market who care about it. I mean, and I'm not saying you and me, I'm saying like all the people who listen to podcasts and talk about this on the internet and write about it and listen to, and send us feedback and all of that. Right. I think you could also say maybe we were a canary in a coal mine for some of their kind of baffling decisions and uh

i think that that has actually borne out but if i had to put my my finger on the one thing where the mac has kind of lost its way in terms of the sales i would say it's the consumer laptops the fact that there's the macbook air and the macbook and that MacBook Pro non-touch bar, and they're all kind of like weirdly priced and have weird sets of features. And they're kind of like number one laptop is basically five-year-old technology. It's not a good place to be. So I believe that they're working on it, that they knew this a year or two ago, that that round table when they invited people out to talk about the Mac Pro and how much they love the Mac, the fact that at WWDC, they reiterated how much they care about the Mac and that bringing iOS stuff to the Mac is part of a goal to reinvigorate the Mac and make it

more relevant. I believe that Apple at some point made a decision that they weren't going to just let the Mac linger, that they were going to actually make an effort on the Mac, even though it's only 10% of their business. The problem is, as we've seen with something like the Mac Pro, like doing new, or the keyboards, quite frankly, doing new hardware takes a long time. It takes a long time. These are very, very big ships to turn, and they turn very, very slowly. And they're paying now for mistakes that they made in like 2015 2015 2016 where they made these things is you you you come out and say your intention but you're the really their products can't meet the intention because they're in it they got they're in a pipeline right which you know and that's why

they spoke about the mac pro it's why they had the imac pro right and why they showed those things early because they needed to show something because maybe they knew their intention for the next couple of years wasn't going to meet what they want. They knew the pipeline. Yeah, that pipeline is great when it's popping out amazing new iPhones all the time, right? The pipeline is not great when you realize you've made a horrible mistake and you realize you have two years of stuff in the pipeline that is going on the assumptions you made that turned out to be wrong or that you've you change your strategy and the strategy that you thought was the right strategy in 2014 or 2015 turns out to be wrong and you're going to be you know you're going to be living it down until 2018 or 2019 it's a tough position to be in and that is why you call in

people and say we don't have anything to show you but we want to tell you that we get it and that's where they are so So I'm choosing not to say that Apple's going to make decisions on the Mac that we, that we like or agree with. We'll see. Like, but I do feel like they're probably, they're probably having some of the same thoughts about this. They probably had several years ago, the same thoughts we had several years ago. The difference is they can't talk about it because they can't say, yeah, our current laptops are crappy. Don't buy them because they got to sell them, right? Like, but they know that they've got something better coming along. And imagine the torture of being somebody at Apple, right? Who, like Phil Schiller, like

every time he goes out there and says, boy, this product is amazing. He knows that there are two products more than amazing in every category, two more amazing products than this one that are being worked on. He knows it. He knows at least, right? And that's the tough thing about being kind of a marketer is that you need to sell this year's product, even though you know that next year's product, of course, will leave this one in the dust because it's about now. And if you're turning and you're changing your strategy, it's even harder. And I think that's what's happening. So we'll see because it can't go on like this.

The way they've been doing it, it's not good. And the numbers are there that it's been like 3.7 million max in a quarter. That's a terrible number. It's just, it's awful. Services are still going strong.

Not only is it growing year on year, there are more revenue streams on the way. The Apple Video service being the main one. One of the most interesting parts of the call for me was where Tim was talking semi-openly about the fact that their TV stuff exists because, as we've spoken about, there's nothing

they can do to hide a lot of it because they have to work within the Hollywood system. Analysts, we speak about this every quarter analysts focus on services heavily because it is apple's main uh year-on-year percentage growth right like that's where the growth is going to be plus you know when iphones do stop growing because it's got to happen at some point it hasn't yet but it will i mean it's going to you know at least at least unit sales have slowed down right but revenue's going up least unit sales have slowed down, right? But revenue's

going up, but unit sales are slowing down. How does Apple keep making more and more money, which everyone wants them to make, when they're not selling as many iPhones? Well, the way they do that is charging their existing customers for new services and make more money from them this way. But I know, Jason, that this rhetoric has started to grate on you a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to make too big a deal of it. I just, I had a moment when I was writing up the services revenue and when I was listening on the phone where I thought like, I get why in the context of wall street and results, which is what these quarterly earnings are. You talk up your services growth and you set a target as we're going to double it in four years

or whatever they did. And they're excited about it because they want to see growth because Wall Street's all about the growth. That's what they want to see is growth. And that's fine. I did have that moment where I thought, let's not forget. And I'm not saying that Apple has actually forgotten this, but I just had a moment where I thought, let's not forget that Apple's expertise is making products, not services. And they're getting better at services. They're getting way better at services, which is good because it's an important part of their business. And the fact is that's how the game is played today. You can't do this business. Imagine if Apple had no video strategy, no music strategy, no cloud services strategy. All they ever did was say, you can connect to Dropbox, you can connect to Box.net,

you can connect to Office 365. They would be less successful than they are, and they would be creating success for others, but the product would also not be as good because they can connect that stuff better. This is how this game is played. Amazon.com has a video streaming service. Like Google has all the stuff that it's doing.

Like you got to be in this game now. That all said, it all comes back for me to the quality of the products, the hardware and software working together with the services. And I think I don't – the focus on services makes me uneasy just in the sense that apple is not a services company apple unless you want to define as i've seen a few people define it define the iphone as a service which is like i guess like technically if you especially if you're on that iphone uh program where you just get a new iphone every year and you pay them a monthly fee. Like that is iPhone as a service. So that, okay, you got me there. But in the end, the service that's most important is still a piece of hardware and software that works with different cloud services to give you a product. And again, it's a little thing. I'm not accusing,

I don't want to overstate this. I'm not accusing Apple of losing the plot here because I do think that they're speaking the language that Wall Street wants to, that they understand and that they want to hear. But it does give me a little bit of pause because services revenue and the way it's framed in the calls is about increasing. They don't generally use this term at Apple, although the analysts on the call will, of ARPU, which is average revenue per user. But that's in the same dictionary as monetizing somebody,

where it's the magic wand that turns a person into a pile of money. ARPU is what you do with the money after you've monetized someone uh how much money is in the pile you count the pile and i just it makes me uneasy that apple will apple will maybe be a successful company financially but i think it loses its way if it starts to think more about the value of extracting revenue from its existing customer base than it does on making great products. And I'm not saying that's happening now,

but I am saying that I can tell that like Wall Street would like that, at least the first part. And the danger is, do you lose focus on what matters? Because Apple does make mistakes. I think the Mac has shown that the last couple of years that they've made mistakes. And I don't know, it's just, again, I'm not like angry or on a rant here as much as like, it just gave me a little tickle on the back of my neck. I was like, let's not get too carried away with services. Like services are good and they're a part of the whole, they a part of this nutritious breakfast right but they are additive and uh i don't i'm not as enthusiastic about any company who says that one of its major goals is just to extract more money from the people who are already giving it a lot of money because it feels kind of empty like your goal should be to expand your market

and to make the great products that make people want to enter your ecosystem. And then once they're there, yes, they're going to give you money. And that's great. And you could argue that Apple's been bad at this historically, and they've finally gotten good at extracting more revenue from people. I see the bills that I get from Apple on an ongoing basis for iCloud, for Apple Music. Like, you know, that's all good. Just at the end of the day, you still got to make good iPhones. You still got to make good iPads. And I think they are, but I do see how this gets distorted when people talk about the

services revenue. It gets, I worry that some people kind of lose the, lose the bigger picture of what Apple is at its core. Mm-hmm. So all of this led to the stock market being very excited. And on August 2, 1148 Eastern Time, Apple became the first ever American company to hit a market cap of $1 trillion. It's the second company to do this in history. So a lot of people thought they were the first.

But in 2007, PetroChina, which I believe is like an oil company, they hit $1 trillion. They first but in 2007 petro china which i believe is like an oil company they hit one bill one trillion um they they did that in 2007 very briefly but so they're not the first company ever to do this um but apple have done it and the thing i think that will be different for apple is they will do it a bunch so they dropped lower, but my expectation would be come Q4, they will be very comfortably in their one trillion mark for a lot of time, once we get a new iPhone, et cetera, et cetera. So this has happened, which is, it's a big deal. It's a big deal for Apple.

It's a big deal in general that this has happened. But this is going to become more normal. Amazon is getting very close now. They're in like the $900 million range. So I think over the next few years, Alphabet's going to get there. For a reason that we'll get to in a moment, I was looking up a bunch of this stuff today. And a lot of companies are trending towards this trillion dollar market cap. I did see a funny thing where somebody looked at the

price per earnings ratio for these companies because Apple traditionally has very low price per earnings, which means that to a lot of people that means that it's undervalued. And the stat that I really liked is if Apple traded it at Google's price per earnings ratio, it would be worth $3 trillion.

Holy moly. There are a lot of people out there who say Apple is really, it's funny, you know, being at a trillion in value, there are a lot of people who think Apple is severely undervalued by an investment community that doesn't really understand Apple's business very well. But Apple's always been like that. Apple's always been a controversial company,

and now it's no different. Yep. So there you go. Trillion dollars and interesting earnings all of this though jason led me to our summer of fun topic today um and so after this break me and you are going to play with 243 billion dollars how does that sound money money money money let's do it today's show is brought to you by our friends at pingdom the company who offer uptime monitoring and web performance management you are more familiar with pingdom than you may

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Summer of fun! Let's play a summer of fun game today. Okay. You are put in charge of acquisitions at Apple. acquisitions at apple and you are told you can spend as much as you want of the 243 billion dollars that apple has as cash on hand what companies do you buy and why okay uh how are we doing this are we doing it are we are we buying these things together are we doing this as a draft are we just compiling separate lists what what's the now i know i know you love drafts so i thought we could make it we could make it very simple we could just go through pick a few companies and we could just do it in draft kind of in draft style you pick one i pick

one that sort of takes i think i think you mean taking turns sure but i'll call it a draft because i know you like it i i i do why don't you go first? All right. Okay. I'm going to go with Valve. Oh, interesting. Valve have an approximate market value, a kind of a valuation. So what I did today was I went through and looked at a bunch of companies. So I threw some options in our document that we could pick from, but we can pick from anyone and I'll check if it's possible. And I looked at market caps and I looked at approximate valuations

where a company isn't publicly traded, and just made sure it was kind of within the realm of this 243. It was purchasable, basically. So you say Valve, right? Valve make video games. They make some of the most popular video games in the world. They also own Steam, the most popular gaming marketplace in the world. The reason i think that valve would be an interesting fit for apple is one for the games right apple have lots of platforms with games and it would be great for them to have some interesting parties available to them they also make one of if not the best uh vr headset in the Vive, which, you know, that is technology. It's becoming more and more important, especially if you think about AR as well.

Companies that know VR know how to do AR. They know how to make hardware that goes on your face. Valve know how to do that. They know how to use sensors. They know all that stuff. They know how to do a good marketplace. All of that talent could be used to help make the app store even better. Valve know and have their hands in a bunch of pies that Apple could also use some help in. So I think that they would be an interesting buy for maybe not that much money. I think if that valuation is even close to like $10 billion, that is really worth it for them if Apple wanted to do it. I think the talent that they could get from Valve would be super, super useful to them. So that's who I would go with first.

I think that's of covered it when you said that they've got the VR headset is I have a bunch of things that what I want to pick is like a collection of little companies in an area. And so I had on my list a bunch of little AR VR companies. Now Valve is not little, but like that would have been a pick is find me five companies that are working on AR and VR stuff because I know that they're, that's what Apple is buying, right? That's the kind of stuff Apple buys is they spend a hundred million here and they spend 50 million here and they spend 200 million here for these smaller companies that nobody's ever heard of that are building a certain kind of tech that isn't a place they want

to go. And they do that. If you remember back to when they bought PA Semi, which basically started them on their chip making business that they are. So it's such an important part of their strategy now. That was one of those, that was one of those things. And that's why I'm going to go next with whatever chip companies they can find.

I don't know what the price is. It's probably, you know, the bottom of the bag of chips where it's like little crumbs. That's what I'm talking about. Little, well, just the, I did have in there, jason if you wanted to spend basically all of

your money intel are currently valued at 227 billion so apple if they wanted to could roll in and just buy intel i looked at arm could just buy a soft bank bought arm and apple can't buy soft bank so you know yeah yeah it's it's true um yeah i i don't think they need to buy arm because arm holdings like they have the license and yeah i think that's all they really need um so i'm just going to say chip companies which i know is boring but like they keep doing this they keep buying like is there a company that has a new you know thing that they're doing they're they're full of talent and they have a new you know uh cellular radio that they're working on they're full of talent and they have a new, you know, cellular radio that they're working on. That's like, I mean, I guess they could just, what does Qualcomm cost? I guess

I could just buy Qualcomm, but I don't think they want to do that. I think what they want to do is find, or Intel, they want to buy small companies and I'll say, I'm going to create a fund and I'm going to do my research, which will require more research than we can do for this show, to find some of the brightest lights in chips and buy them. Because Apple wants to be, I think Apple wants to be the best chip maker in the world and have it all be limited to their products. And they've done a pretty good job so far and they will continue to do that. So even though that's kind of a boring generic answer, I think that that's actually what's happening and that there are people at Apple who that's their entire job is to analyze who's out there for them to acquire in the microprocessor area. And I endorse this plan. You could buy Taiwan Semiconductor for $205 billion if you wanted to.

Well, maybe. Maybe. I'll do some due diligence there. That's all of your money. Don't spend all of your money that's all of your money don't spend all of your money yeah um all right next one now i'm gonna go entertainment here right and so there's a couple of players and you know i guess i guess so apple could buy Disney, right? But right now, Disney feels like a veritable minefield as a company to buy. I would maybe go with the super obvious one and say Netflix. They could pick up Netflix for probably about $150 billion.

People have said Apple should buy Netflix for a long time because there is a lot of really valid reasons for Apple to buy Netflix, right? Like Netflix, no technology, and they have some really excellent shows. There is a good fit there for Apple's potential future in entertainment. Netflix is probably the company that makes the most sense they could also pick up hulu from disney to untie that mess but they're probably not going to be left with much content from right what content will they have there exactly right so i would say if you know if they want to pick up a streaming service netflix is the only one that makes if they well if apple wants to buy an entertainment an established entertainment company today netflix is probably the best bet for

them all right i uh my next pick is going to be every small streaming service okay so uh crackle to be shout factory warner archives know that they. No, they're owned by AT&T. We're not going to get them. The horror streaming service, the Acorn TV, maybe take a run at BritBox as well. All small streaming services. What about a company, something like the UFC or the WWE or something like that? Would you think that would be interesting in any way? It's a lot of footage.

It's a lot of content. I got to say, that feels more like a Disney buy. If I were Disney, I'd be interested in that because it's in the more broad entertainment, right, including the live entertainment and all of that, whereas I think Apple is going to be less interested in that. But one of the thoughts that I've had about apple building its streaming services why don't they buy all of the little specialty streaming services that are not already inside like warner archive like a crunchy roll crunchy roll right and i don't know who owns all of these things and whether

they'd be willing to sell although you know i think our premise here is that apple's gonna make them an offer that they can't refuse but uh that's what i would say is my is my next purchase is i'm gonna i'm going to roll all of that content and all of those deals into the launch of apple tv and give myself you know that much more catalog content my catalog is now the deals made by all of these other things. So like all the British shows will now be on Apple TV and you get them there. So let's say that that's a billion. Let's just say just for whatever. We need to give you a chip company's number. Let's say 20 billion for chip companies, which is meant to make sure you're not going over your budget. I'm bargain shopping so far.

You are. I'm at 160 billion. So I'm going to make this my last pick, which means I've got less than $100 billion to spend at this point. Or we could keep going. We can see. Maybe we'll see. I'm going to keep spending money. I've got more money to spend. I've got to be careful here then because if I was going to go for $100 billion, I'd go for. No, no.

I'm not going to stop. I'm going to get some more here. stop you go for no no no i'm not gonna stop i'm gonna i'm gonna get some more here uh let's go with dropbox dropbox are valued uh well their market cap is 11.5 billion dollars right now yep dropbox know what they're doing all right like they they have file stuff just locked down. It is consistently reliable. They know what they're doing. It is a company full of incredibly smart people in services. They know how to make services that stay in sync

probably better than anybody else. And again, like Rick Allen in the chat room has said didn't they try to buy dropbox once yeah they did steve jobs tried right but that was an acquisition dropbox is a publicly traded company now so they could just buy it all right like what is that called um when it's what is what is there a term for it right what is the term when you forcefully buy a company? It's a hostile takeover. Hostile takeover, right? So any of these companies, when we're talking about market cap,

Apple could perform a hostile takeover on them. And $11.5 billion, which is their current valuation, Apple could come in and just double it. They'd say, all right, we'll pay you twice the amount if we wanted to want it that badly. But I think that there's, you know, in the same way for Valve, right? Like, you could potentially be buying a lot of really talented engineering talent and patents and underlying technology that could be rolled into the stuff that you currently do for what is a sliver of your cash on hand so i'm gonna go with

dropbox now so um the two guys who run apple's tv organization zach van amburg and jamie erlich were hired away from sony entertainment and although we think of sony as an electronics company and it is although you know it is not what it what it was i'm gonna i'm gonna throw out there for 70 billion we're we're going to pick up Sony. Maybe we'll sell off some of the electronic stuff. But I'm going to pick up Sony because we get all of their movie studios. It's good. Sony's good.

And all their content. And those guys already essentially, they know the lay of the land over there. And that makes Apple a more powerful movie studio. It gives them their own studio arm and uh you know and the people there are no strangers to being an entertainment uh set of people inside what is essentially a technology company so they'll go with the flow and they'll probably be more enthusiastic about being at uh apple than at sony so i'm gonna i'm gonna put that down put down sony right there i'm gonna

go very obvious again uh do it at 59 billion dollars tesla yeah i i thought about that one that was on my list i mean that's not a i mean you want to so you want to change the world in terms of car technology there's somebody who's already out there trying it battery technology right you know they're clearly doing some cool stuff with batteries and i bet they have some really smart people that know batteries and wouldn't it be great for apple to have even more smart people that know batteries all the sensor stuff with the self-driving stuff production line stuff and you know i i think tesla would again same with netflix production line stuff. And, you know, I think Tesla would, again, same with Netflix, countless articles have been written about why Apple should buy Tesla. And for 60 billion, you know, I'm, I'm going to go with it. I'm going to say, let's go for Tesla.

All right. That's, uh, I, I accept that. I think that would be an interesting match and, you know, does Apple want to own a a car factory but at the same time i said not too long ago does apple want to you know be in the business of commissioning tv shows and uh the answer is yes so i think apple wants to be in any business that they think there's potential in and they do think that the car business has potential um sometimes i wonder with tesla's valuation um and this is a separate show but like i sometimes i wonder if people are hanging around tesla waiting for it to implode so that they can scoop it up for cheap the car companies are but for sure yeah they hope but but at that i mean but apple could do it if they thought that i think the challenge there is elon

musk right and like how much of this is elon musk and if you thought that I think the challenge there is Elon Musk, right? And like how much of this is Elon Musk. And if you take him out of the equation, um, then is it worth what it, what is worth with him there? Yeah. But again, maybe this is, this is a conversation for somewhere else,

but Tesla with Elon Musk is also potentially a problem today, right? Like, you know, because he is, it's true. He is an interesting, it's true.

He is a problematic guy, individual. The chat room really wants me to pick SpaceX so that Apple can start shooting rockets off. because he is it's true he is an interesting it's true he's a problematic guy individual the chat room really wants me to pick spacex so that apple can start shooting rockets off i'm not going to do that doesn't make any sense i i am going i don't get that i actually am i'm going to spend uh about three billion dollars on yelp good one sort of like how you know, I feel like, again, is that really directly attached to Apple's business? I mean, it's the data source inside Apple Maps. So I say yes. But I also think it's just one of those things where there are two kinds of acquisitions. There are the kinds of acquisitions you do because you want it. And there are kinds of acquisitions you do because you don't want your

competitors to own it. And I think Yelp is public and I think they are worth about $3 billion. So I'm just going to, I'm going to plunk that down and say, hooray, we have Y I think Yelp is public and I think they are worth about $3 billion. So I'm just going to, I'm going to plunk that down and say, hooray, we have Yelp. Yelp will keep running, but it will be deeply interconnected even more so with Apple's data sources and part of the Apple Maps group. Tim Cook's Apple loves enterprise and has seen, has done a lot in the enterprise, right? They have, right? Is this part of star trek las vegas is this going to be part of that star trek oh that's gonna i'm never gonna live that one down i know it's just nope i'm dreading it i'm dreading it look all i saw i don't understand star trek right and i just saw a bunch of images and it said star trek las vegas

behind a picture of of uh captain picard so i don't know what to do right like what am i supposed to what i'm supposed to know all right so apple loves apple loves the the enterprise is what you're saying apple loves the enterprise so they'll buy the enterprises darling at 5.1 billion dollars which is roughly their current valuation which is slack you just buy slack and you get you open yourself a lot more doors and again it's a company that does some really interesting stuff so why not pick them up and see what else you can do that that's what i'm gonna go with slack and i'm running out of money fast i don't have a lot of money left i got a lot of money left over a lot of money um

okay so here's my next pick for approximate approximately let's say three billion dollars uh you've just seen what i've typed in our document i i'm going to buy digital first media which publishes about 40 newspapers in the united states i'm going to buy the new york times i'm going to buy sports illustrated time fortune and money from uh from meredith publishing which has put them on the market for a few hundred million. I'm going to buy McClatchy newspaper chain for about 78 million. And follow me here. Apple made that deal with what Next Issue Media about like to buttress Apple News.

Let's just go all the way. Apple is buying a whole bunch of newspapers and magazines. And they are going to do that so that they can increase reading in the Apple News platform and support journalism around at least the United States and maybe other places. So, you know, Jeff Bezos already owns the Washington Post. There are other kind of rich benefactors who have bought other things. I'm going to say, strategically, Apple seems to be heading down a path where they can just buy a whole bunch of available newspapers and magazines and operate them and make their content flow best into uh apple news so they're going to make apple news like apple tv is all the tv apple news is going to be all the news i would be pretty uncomfortable with that prospect but yes sure

i don't like the idea of one company owning so much but the tech cover well i mean here's the thing mike one company companies already own this much it's just that's not companies you've heard of yeah that's very true you know that's that i'm just gonna throw that out there i mean i might am i serious probably not but they could do it it would be it would be nothing and they would have probably be a better owner for all of those news organizations and you could end up with a you know a thing that can cover local and national and world news uh between the local papers and something like the new york times and have uh you know that roll out great on apple devices and other devices too so

yeah all right i'm going gonna use the last of my money to pick up sonos that's a good one yeah two reasons one i feel a little bit sorry for sonos i think they're a company with really interesting technology that that will eventually get pushed out of this market like almost a market that they created you know like the idea of these devices that play media and can be connected and you know know, like all of that multi-room stuff, which is all stuff that, I mean, I honestly don't know who or why isn't patented, right? Like that is a confusing thing to me. It really felt like Sonos was the first company to have these boxes that could talk to each other and play music. But now it just seems like a feature of other things, you know, reminds me of all those picture services, right? You know, which is now

just a feature of operating systems. So Sonos, they're about 970 million, their market cap right now. I think it would be, you know, I would pick them up for the technology for the talent again. And also to have a brand like Beats, you know, like another brand. It's Airplay 2 only now. Really high-end stuff, multi-room, but also on the lower end too. You can go pick up a Sonos for $100 or whatever, right?

So your HomePod brand can be separate and you can also have another brand like Apple owns Beats. That's my last purchase. I think that's a pretty reasonable thing. For my last purchase, I've got a lot of money left over. That's fine. I'll keep the cash around for a rainy day. But I will buy... Well, you took some of my big ticket items there and I'm not going to take them now. So I'm going to spend $4 billion to attempt to take over Roku because I do think that that would be an interesting purchase and that Apple getting

involved in their deals with TV manufacturers and doing that. I don't think that that would be a an interesting purchase and that apple getting involved in their deals with tv manufacturers and and doing that i don't think that would actually be approved because that would be a major competitor that oh yeah eliminating okay we have to just assume that none of this conversation has even touched um on whether regulators would allow it yeah because basically a large portion of all of these would not um but let's just assume that this is apple was not bothered to go to the lawyers we're just spitballing here that they're the lawyers are going to stop most of our transactions from happening certainly but i'll throw no more for my daily life yeah sure you can check it everything checked by a lawyer that's the uh anyway so

roku because of what i said before i think it's interesting that they have built this platform that's in tvs and i think it would be an interesting sort of feeding into what they're doing with apple tv and maybe making better deals and uh you know i've got like 120 billion uh burning a hole in my pocket so why not spend 4 billion on on roku but i generally i'm going to just keep the rest around for scooping up more ar and vr companies and more chimp companies as we go all right jason snell before we wrap up today let's knock off a couple of hashtag ask upgrade questions good idea yeah i don't want to skip another week that that would be we can't have two weeks without ask upgrade that would not be fun and this is summer fun so all fair uh so the first one comes from bob bob says with the

announcement of a full version of photoshop for ipad probably coming we're definitely coming in the future could potentially mean a full version of audition for the ipad is eventually written if this was to occur would you consider moving to audition for podcasting because it could mean that you would be able to do more on your ipad jason uh no because i already have an app that is fantastic for editing a podcast on my ipad which is uh ferrite from woojee juice and it's uh it's like 20 bucks so uh no also because part of the benefit would be if I used Audition on the desktop, I might consider that, but I don't. And I'm not really interested in learning Audition and replacing Logic with Audition. I've really optimized Audition for my work or Logic for my workflow. I'm not sure that Audition would really gain me enough to spend all of the time learning a new workflow and then paying an annual fee to Adobe for that versus the

buy a copy occasionally of a new version of Logic on the Mac. I'm more excited about the idea that next year there might be a Mac version of Ferrite that could exist if Apple continues on with its plans to bring iOS apps to the Mac? I would consider it because I want to only learn and use one app if I'm going to do iPad editing, right? So, but this is the same thing, right? Like if would you just bring Ferrite to the Mac, then maybe I'll switch to that, right? Like one of the reasons that I haven't really delved into Ferrrite very much other than just kind of like some tinkering around is I'm not really keen on learning something that can only be used in one place for audio production. Right.

I'm going to go back to the drawing board in some senses and learn something again. If I'm going to do that, I want it to give me additional benefit. And that additional benefit for me would be to be able to use the same piece of software everywhere. So if a company, any company can do that effectively and I'm not going to be losing too much, then I would do it. And if it's Adobe, great, because I do already use Audition for some tasks, as we spoke about in our podcasting special episode 200. in our podcasting special episode 200 and i know from some testing that steven did that you can replace audition uh like logic of audition and get basically everything right so uh yeah i would consider it but if if bob was also asking would i consider it if uh ferrite made its way to the mac the answer would also be yes so so yes i i'm not going to bother learning anything new until

something is truly cross-platform is in essence uh where i feel about this right now because I'm not going to bother learning anything new until something is truly cross-platform, is in essence where I feel about this right now, because I'm not that keen on taking all of that time out of my working life to learn something that can only be used in one place today. Lee has written in regards to episode 200, so the iPad episode is inspiring me to use my iPad more. As someone who works at a traditional

Microsoft-centric company, I was surprised with your minimal mention of the Microsoft iPad apps and Office 365. For you, is it cost, bad history on Microsoft, or that other apps are better for you? I think we did actually gloss over it very quickly, right? But we both use Office iPad appsad apps right yeah i don't think i'm an office 365 subscriber so i think didn't didn't i i think maybe that was on my episode

of canvas but like the google like spreadsheets app the sheets app is so much worse than excel excel is so good the microsoft apps on ipad are very very good. I don't use them regularly because I'm not in an office environment. And when you're a solo person, you're working with various people in various places. You can't count on everybody having access to Office 365. And you can count on everybody having access to Google stuff because it's free.

And so that's the fact of it is- Yeah, because if they don't have it, they can get it. Yeah. And it's not going to be a problem. So if you know, everybody at Relay had an Office 365 account, we might use the Office 365 tools more, but the problem there is like, okay, well I could do that for Relay, but like if Federico doesn't have that with his collaborators for Mac stories and I don't have it for the incomparable, then now I'm using two different tools depending on the context. And if I've got people who are in both places, we have to be like, well, wait, are we going to use

this? Are we going to use that? And it becomes a mess. And that is the truth of why lowest common denominator things like Google Sheets end up being used, even though they're not as good. This is why people love the enterprise, including Apple and Captain Picard, is you have a homogenous work environment. Everybody has Office. And it's good stuff. You just have to count on everybody having it. And it's overkill for a lot of what I do in terms of writing. Word is not necessary because I'm just doing plain text and Word is overkill for that. But Excel on iPad especially is spectacular. And I will use Excel and Numbers on iPad way And I will use Excel and numbers on iPad way before I will use Google Sheets. I only use that for collaboration. Right. So for me, Google,

sorry, Excel and Word, I use both as utility apps. There's a couple of spreadsheets that I use that only really work in Excel for my accountant. And I use Word for when someone sends me a Word document and I need to send them a Word document back. Sometimes pages can ruin things, but Word never does. The thing for me is Excel's real-time collaboration is nowhere near as good as Sheets. So even for collaboration purposes, right now 365 does not have the real-time in the way that I want it um so i used these apps

but i use them for specifics so like office 365 one great thing for me is it is a great way so uh with i i have a twitch stream uh for like a twitch channel for a show that i do called playing for fun we stream video games right you can go and watch, twitch.tv slash playingforfunfm. Me and Tiff Arment do it. We have a show on RelayFM called Playing for Fun, and we stream video games on it, on this Twitch stream. Now, I need to do thumbnails for our YouTube channel, right? And something that's awesome for me is I have Office 365 on my PC.

I can just hit the print and screen button. Then I can pick up the screenshot on my iPad from files to put into Pixelmator to make the thing when I upload it to YouTube. So that's a great use of 365 for me is because I can get Office, I can get my 365 OneDrive, right, in the files app. So that's a cool little utility that I have. But this is what I use my Office 365 subscription for is little utilities. I don. But this is what I use my Office 365 subscription for, is little utilities. I don't use the apps in any significant detail.

Question from Gareth. I don't know if the situation is different elsewhere, but most cell carriers in the UK allow data tethering from your phone, which you can turn on and connect to your iPad without having to look at your phone. So why spend the extra money on an LTE iPad? So I'll answer for me as someone who has an LTE iPad,

which is one that I take traveling with me. There's two reasons. One, tethering from the iPhone never really works as well as I would want. It works, but sometimes I'm jumping through a bunch of hoops, turning things on and off and on and off to get it to work. But it does work most of the time. Two, I don't want to drain my my iphone battery significantly

whilst i'm traveling right it's one of the reasons i have the ipad so i'm not killing the battery on the phone uh the other is i am able to get really good deals on t-mobile in the us i can spend like something like five dollars for five gigabytes that lasts for five months well i do that twice a year so i pay ten dollars a year basically for my service on t-mobile so they're the reasons that i do it yeah i similarly you've got to make sure it's turned on it doesn't always connect reliably um it always is more fiddly than i would like. And I did that. I tethered for a long time. But most of the time, I would just not bother because I would be just unhappy with having to do that. I just used my phone at that point. And then what you said about battery life is absolutely that's part of it, right?

It's great. Now I'm out and about and draining both batteries simultaneously. That's not as good. So when I bought my iPad Pro, I bought the cellular model and I added it. Eventually I added it to my AT&T account. So I pay them $10 a month. And it's just part of my data pool and it's great. And I have used the cellular features a lot. And it's just very nice when I'm somewhere where there's no wifi or there's bad wifi, which happens a lot. I can just flip over to cellular and it works great. So that's the reason. Like, can you get by with tethering?

You absolutely can. But having a cellular iPad is way nicer if you want to spend the money on that. It's a simple equation, right? Traveling is frequent with an iPad, get tethering. If it is infrequent, so get an LTE one, right? If your travel is frequent, get an LTE. If it's infrequent, just tether, right?

Yep. Last question today. Corey asks, do you think we will ever get Siri shortcuts on the Mac? I'm not that good of Apple Script and Automator and Siri shortcuts is much more user-friendly. I say don't hold out. Maybe one day, right?

Especially when Project Sneak Peek is in full effect, you know, there is more possibility of it, but I wouldn't hold out for it. That's my feeling too, is that eventually if this Sneak Peek stuff, bringing iOS apps to Mac happens and takes off, I think you will see it because it will be able to access the same

sort of things that Siri shortcuts can access on iOS, but it's going to be a while because Automator and AppleScript are just a different set of technologies from what's going on there. I'd love to see an updated version of Automator that gets renamed Shortcuts that has a simple interface and that can do both the Mac stuff and use those apps, right? And if we're lucky, that's what we'll get next year or the year after is a new version of Automator that feels more like the Shortcuts app and maybe gets its name, but still has some of the power of Automator in it, as well as everything that's going on with Shortcuts to control those apps. Because if you think about it, there are a lot of ways that you can control traditional Mac apps today in Automator. They could add in for apps that are coming from iOS, the commands that

shortcuts uses and put them together. And it should work. It's even, it shouldn't even necessarily look different. If you know that, even if it's two different methods behind the scenes, so they could do it. I would not bet for that being a 2019 thing, but they could do it. And I hope that that's actually the ultimate goal of user automation on the Mac is shortcuts app and Siri shortcuts. But I think it's going to take a while and that transition bringing all those other apps from iOS over is going to have to happen first. All right, that's it

for this week's episode of Upgrade. You can always send in questions to us for the end of the show with the hashtag AskUpgrade. This is, of course, a bumper episode in the summer of fun. Summer of fun. And if you want to find more about this episode go to relay.fm upgrade 205 and i will say just very quickly if you're looking for something kind of fun and interesting to read i'm gonna put a link in the show notes to a twitter thread that i've been engaged in over the last few days where a guy called Rob is taking me on a text adventure.

It is wild and is, I don't know how long it's going to last, but I'm on a Twitter text adventure right now, which came from an AMA I was doing whilst getting an x-ray in the hospital. So everything's fine. It's just a bad sprain, as I mentioned earlier. So just go and read it. I have no idea what...

But it's fun. It's a lot of fun. It'll also whet your appetite for the forthcoming member special. We're going to be talking... More in the next couple of weeks on that. But yes, if you have been a RelayFM member, we have done another text adventure. Might be my

favorite ever. Check that out soon. You can follow Jason online he is at jsnell on twitter I am at imyke go to sixcolors.com for Jason's work and we both produce many shows over at

relay.fm and theincalpable.com as well thanks again to our sponsors Casper Inboard Technology and Pingdom and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.