Upgrade - 214: Nobody Seems to Know Anything

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

What is going on with Businessweek's report that servers (including Apple's) got hacked by China? Apple, Amazon, and U.S. and UK agencies flat-out say it didn't happen. Jason uses his decades of experience in journalism to make some guesses about what might be going on. We also tackle a 9to5 Mac report with more exciting details about new iPad Pro models, which may come with their own special ticket to Dongletown. And in Upstream news, everyone's looking for the next Game of Thrones, which is really good news if you're the author of a series of fantasy novels.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 214 today's show is brought to you by squarespace and fresh books and simple contacts my name is mike hurley i'm joined across the airwaves by the one and only jason snell hello mike hurley from the airwaves how are those waves of air today there we're surfing them dude it's california nobody cares about this jason because it's time for hashtag snell talk and this week's question comes from someone named casey casey wants to know no has jason ever lived outside of California? If so, where? If not, where would he consider living? Well, hi, Lister Casey.

Upgrading Casey. It's good to hear from you. Sounds like the kind of person who's super into the West Coast lifestyle to me. Yeah. This person. I think that this person is purely asking because they would like to also move to the West Coast. I think so. I think they probably think it's the best coast.

I think almost certainly they think that. So, Lister Casey, have I ever lived outside of California? I haven't. I was born in California. However, I will say that, to put this in perspective, because I know some people don't understand this, California is a very large place. It's about the size of France. It's big. So I was born in Oakland, but I grew up in the foothills, which is about 100 miles east of the Bay Area. I went to college in San Diego, which is many hundreds of miles away. It was about a nine-hour drive to go from home to school. And now I live in the Bay Area. So

although I have never lived outside of California, I have definitely lived in three very distinct regions in California. I assume the climates and the terrain and stuff is very different in those areas. Yeah. Yeah. San Diego is quite different. And we have seasons up in the foothills and the mountains. I had a friend who was from Tennessee and went to college in Ohio. And she said, oh, you Californians, you're so provincial.

And I said, I will bet you that my college was further away from my home than yours was. And it absolutely was true by like 100 miles. Because even though she had to go through a couple of states to get there, because California is really big. Have I ever lived outside? Then no. If not, where would I consider living? I got to say, listener Casey probably will back me up on this. I'm kind of a West Coast guy. I think the places

that I think realistically I would consider living outside of California would be Oregon, Washington. It's probably about it. In a pinch, if I was forced to flee to higher ground, maybe I would go to, I don't know, colorado utah something like that um i don't feel like i'm an east coast guy i'd go i live in hawaii that would be expensive but i would do that i'd suffer that indignity of living in hawaii all the time for the time zone problems yeah i'd have to deal with it being being way back there in time but uh that would be pretty nice so anyway yeah i think realistically um i'm probably a California lifer and I'm okay with that

because I am, even though they always joke about how, you know, nobody is from California. That's not true. Lots of us are from California and I am. So yes, made by Apple, signed by Apple in California, whatever. Yeah, that's me too.

All right. So thank you so much to listener Casey for sending in that question. If you would like to send in a question to open the show, just send a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk, and it goes into a wonderful document for me to pick from in future episodes. And this question can be about anything, whatever you would like to know about Jason, you can ask and potentially I may ask Jason and he may answer.

But we do have some follow-up today. This comes in from Upgradian Oliver. We were talking in Ask Upgrade last week about if Apple Pay Cash may ever get outside of the U.S. And we were talking about some of the various complications that could be surrounding launching it out and rolling it out, because it's taken them about a year at this point, and it's just been US only, I think, right? I think it launched with iOS last year, didn't it? Yeah. Kind of around that time.

Yeah. So there has been some reporting done by MacRumors, because their readers have been sending in stuff, there has been kind of rumblings and little hints that it may be expanding into Europe. So some people in France, for example, have been seeing Apple Pay Cash setup screens on their Apple Watch. And then some digging has discovered that Apple Pay Cash support pages have been localized for Austria, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and Russia. So something's happening. This happened with Apple Pay when Apple Pay launched itself outside of the US. There was some stuff where it was starting to show up in this way, like screens were showing up on the iPhone and pages started to appear.

So it seems like Apple Pay Cash could be imminently rolling out to Europe, which would be wonderful. And I hope that that includes the United Kingdom. We can't tell by the page localization, because I assume we just use the pages that are written in English for Americans, I would expect. So I really do hope that this is something that pops up. And I do hope, again, as we spoke about last time, if Apple do do this, they find a way to make international transfers a simple possibility. Because that would be truly wonderful if I could send Jason a dollar every time he gives me a good idea. You know, very easy to do. That's great. My price is higher than that, but okay.

Yeah, this is great. Apple Pay Cash is good. I enjoy using it. When I get a chance to use it, it's easy. It is one of the few iMessage apps that I've ever used. And yeah, it's nice to be able to just say you wire it up and and then say here it is i'm going to pay you and and it's relatively easy to pull it back out um and put it back in your bank account if you have a large balance too so or you just leave a little leave a little bit

on the phone and and uh in your account and yeah it's good you can use it then can't you it's just like regular apple pay so like you could go to walgreens or whatever and and i don't know if they support it i just picked that name out yeah sure i go to Walgreens or whatever. And I don't know if they support it. I just picked that name out. And you could use that money. Yeah, sure. I can go to Whole Foods and buy some peanut butter with that. Yes.

Yes, you can. And then otherwise, it's like a PayPal balance almost where somebody pays you $15 and then later you pay somebody $5 and it just comes out of the $15 that you already had sitting there. You can pull it out. If somebody gives you $800 in Apple Pay cash, you can pull that out and put it back in your bank. You link it to a bank account basically via a debit card essentially, and then it all works.

Yeah, it's great. It's actually a really well put together product and has not – I envision that the banking system would have put up more roadblocks to make it more finicky and less sort of frictionless. more finicky and less sort of frictionless. And between Apple and the banks and the financial system, however, they, you know, they visualized this feature and then realized it. It is good. It's good. I like it a lot. So I hope other people in the world get to use it and that we get to send money to each

other. It would be really weird if they didn't deal with the currency and it was sort of like your wallet has 40 and three pounds in it like i don't want why are they there um but that's a it's actually a really good question like would they auto convert or would they give it to you in that currency and then you could choose to convert it or keep it so that you could pay another british person pounds later i i don't know that's a real interesting question to be sorted out everything that i've ever used that does this it makes you choose right so like the money will come in in dollars and then you you transfer it when you're ready so

paypal does this i just recently started right so transfer wise and it's the same right like you have multiple currencies and then you choose and the reason for this is like if you're receiving a lot of money the exchange can be a big difference right so you might want to exchange the money on a day when the market is in your favor so we'll see we'll see what they end up doing but there are there are pluses and minuses i think no matter what way they decide to go because if they do the multiple currency thing then that's just going to be complicated so yeah i don't know i'm keen to see um i am also personally in the

camp that i would be absolutely not surprised at all if it was inter-country only like you could only transfer yeah within your country. But I really hope that isn't the case. But yeah, I would like it if you could send me a dollar and literally be like, I want to send Jason US dollars one. And then it does the conversion on the fly. I get a dollar.

You have whatever needs to be deducted from your balance in pounds. And it's just, that's it. You sent me a dollar. I don't care sort of like how many pounds that is. You sent me a dollar. I don't care sort of like how many pounds that is. You sent me a dollar. I like that.

That's good. All right. So should we do some upstream? I think so. Is there anything happening in the world of streaming services? Yeah, there's a little bit. There most definitely is.

There's actually quite a lot going on this week. I think I'm going to save some of it for next week because I expect that, you know, there might not be as much, but there's some big movements happening with Netflix that we might get into in the future. But Amazon is quite clearly, Jason, trying to find their Game of Thrones.

Yep. Jeff Bezos wants a Game of Thrones. He wants an international sensation. Mm-hmm. He basically has said that, right? In not so many words. Yes, absolutely no i think in that in that many words he wants a huge international hit and so they've done a bunch of stuff already they paid famously like a huge amount of money just for the rights to the lord of the rings yep um characters the rings yes and and that is now being developed into a series but they like they spent huge amounts of money just for the rights now the series development is going on it's unclear

whether um i think they're trying to get peter jackson involved in some way whether it's just his blessing or as a consultant or something but they i think they would like to make it feel like those movies that were so wildly popular um or even just like just at least attach his name to it so it adds the credibility for people that are going to check exactly right but it's it's unclear i mean he won't be heavily involved but it's unclear whether he might be involved a little bit or not um but that's going on that was like the first. And they've made other deals since then. And the item that you've got in here is the latest in the line, right? Which is that they've got a deal to adapt Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, which is many, many books. It was a

book series so long that Robert Jordan died before he finished it, and they had to hire another writer to finish the story. I don't know this story. I don't think I know this. Is this a, See, I don't know this story. I don't think I know this. Is this a, I'm assuming it is, but specifically well-regarded series? It is an epic fantasy series. It is, I would say, generally well-regarded,

although most of the people I know read it for a while and then just got tired of it because it's so long. I will say our friend Kathy Campbell, Mrs. Soup in the chat room, it's, I think, her favorite or one of her very favorite book series. And she's read it all probably more than once. I don't know. Kathy in the chat room. It's, I think, her favorite or one of her very favorite book series. And she's read it all probably more than once. I don't know. Kathy can tell me that. But anyway, it is an epic series. There's a lot of material. There are a lot of characters. And so they've added that to their list. So they continue to build these uh these deals they've got a deal with neil

gaiman yeah that is called an overall tv deal which is another thing that they announced at the same time which basically just means anything yeah well he's doing so neil gaiman the for those who don't know a best-selling writer um he's actually doing a show with them now that's co-produced by BBC, but it's going to premiere on Amazon Prime worldwide. And that is Good Omens, which is a book that Neil Gaiman wrote with Terry Pratchett. Neil Gaiman, even though he's a novelist, he knows, I think between this and American Gods, he knows that there's a lot of money in TV too, and that part of his career... If you've written the book, the book's written. Why not do something more? You can totally see why this happens and why people do it. It's like, he wrote the book, the book is done. Now it can be adapted into a TV series. Great. Let's go go for it you see how this stuff is playing out now it's

it's so interesting like to see these companies you know these tech focused companies just picking like going to the library and just like picking these things off the shelves it's so fascinating so like there is that one right so like obviously Amazon's doing its thing. But Netflix have announced, I think, something equally huge, which is that they're going to be developing adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia. They're very proud of the fact that they are the first company to ever have the rights to all of the books. There are seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia series.

Most people know The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one of the books. There are seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Most people know about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one of the books. They have all of them. And apparently this has never happened before. So all seven books, they have the rights for them. Like the prime deal with the Tolkien estate, my understanding here is the idea is that they own the rights to Narnia at this point. And they can tell that story. They don't have to do... I think this is really smart, actually, because there have been so many adaptations of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe over the years that they have Narnia. So they can tell that story or stories in that world, and they can do it however they want. And they've said new series and film projects. So I think the idea here is they might be able

to produce films, if they want to uh that would presumably just debut on netflix but that they also could drill down and do series and they can cover this whole world instead of doing you know essentially rehashing the exact same story about the kids who find the the back of the wardrobe leads to a magical world they can take a kind of a bigger picture well especially because famously those books were kind of released out of order right so like they could go back to the start couldn't they exactly they could they could tell it in sort of any direction that they want to and you know i've i've never been thrilled with any of the adaptations i read those books when i was a kid but i i think it's interesting just again that basically these

companies that have all this money and we talked about Apple being in here, but Amazon and Netflix, and of course Disney and Comcast, these companies that are huge companies and they have a lot of money and they know that the world is going to streaming. One of the things that they're all looking for is blockbuster hits. HBO and Game of Thrones really made everybody sit up and take notice. That was a huge hit. It was a big picture epic fantasy, which has led to a lot of people saying, we'll do an epic fantasy too. My guess is that the next big crossover breakthrough worldwide hit won't be fantasy, that everybody's skating to where the puck was and not where it will go. that everybody's skating to where the puck was and not where it will go, but it is telling that Game of Thrones

not only has thrown a lot of money at Warner Brothers, which is now owned by, who owns them now? Is that Comcast? Yeah, sure. I don't even know who owns them yet. Some giant conglomerate owns Warner now. But it's... AT&T. AT&T owns them, another giant with lots of money to throw around. So it's not only that that's generated a lot of money for AT&T now and Warner Media, but it has cost the rest of their competitors a lot of money because everybody is now spending huge amounts of money on this stuff. And again, my gut feeling is the giant blockbuster rights deals that are being bought here are less likely to generate the worldwide sensation than something that happens a little more organically.

But, you know know it's hollywood i think that one of these shows like one of these probably one of these ones that we've mentioned today or at some point one of them is going to be a next big hit right but maybe not game of thrones but like you've got to assume that at least one of these is gonna you know break out and be like oh that's the show everyone's talking about right now yeah maybe i mean they're brand names that's why they do them um something that i talk about with tim goodman on the tv podcast we do is you know hit tv talk machine on the incomparable you can listen to it uh he he points out like especially network tv like why does network tv do reboots now uh in the u.s they're're doing reboots and remakes and revivals of old stuff. And they're doing TV versions of movie titles like Lethal Weapon and things like that. Why is that?

And the answer is, it's a name you recognize. It's a concept you know. There's some value in getting people's attention with something that they already know about. That's the idea there is that when you're desperate for attention trying to get an audience one way you do it is by using some concept or name that they're familiar with and that's what's going on here with uh you know maybe not so much wheel of time although it's got a little bit of resonance but like the lord of the rings thing the chronicles of narnia thing like that's part of what's going

on there they want a big concept they've got a a world that's prebuilt that some people know about. And we'll see how these investments pay off. Again, my gut feeling is that the next big thing will just emerge. And partly that's my, you know, I think it's more likely that somebody will find a book that nobody's ever heard of or that very few people have heard of and say, that's the book that will be like the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, which won three consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel.

I think that has been picked up and like that's a book series almost nobody outside of like the sci-fi world has read. I never heard of that. And it could be huge, right? And that would be like Game of Thrones, which the George R.R. Martin series was only really read by sci-fi and fantasy nerds. And it was gaining attention and it sold really well, but still not like when it reached a TV audience. a more likely source of the next big hit than a uh a book written in the middle of the 20th century

that's been uh that's they spent a lot of money on uh turning into a series or a chain of movies but we'll see like this is uh it's a high stakes game here and uh and these these players have the money so they're gonna they're gonna take their uh they're gonna take their chances because they think it's probably uh a bet worth taking. Can I just, super quick before we do our next piece of news, I'll be talking about Netflix. I just wanted to recommend a Netflix show that I stumbled across and watched all and really enjoyed.

It's called The Good Cop. I saw a trailer for it on Netflix and was really surprised to see Josh Groban in the show. It's like, oh, that's josh groban right the singer song and tony danza and tony danza i was like i saw the trailer the trailer looked good it looked funny it's a very good light-hearted uh comedy with detective mystery it's there's like whodunits and stuff it's really good i enjoyed it we watched it all so tim tim goodman's review of it was hilarious because basically what he said is uh it's watched it all so tim tim goodman's review of it was hilarious because

basically what he said is uh it's like it's like a basic cable show from the old days of like usa network and the blue skies like monk and things like that he said it's or it's like a network show it's like super soft and fun and no hard edges and he basically exactly what he does not like and and and he was like it's people are gonna love it he's like i hate this people are gonna love it i mean yeah i love me i am obviously the the people that tim is referring to which is fine yeah whatever i really you and everybody else probably and i think i was super surprised at how good and funny josh gorbin was in this show i was like all right josh gorbin, here's another thing you can do. I recommend it.

It's a good show. People should check it out. And this is my update. N.K. Jemisin's Hugo Award-winning books that start with the fifth season is being developed as a drama at TNT, which is a basic cable channel in the U.S. So it is definitely being made. Who knows? Last thing.

Apple was supposedly, reportedly, according to the Telegraph, working with UK TV provider BT to make the Apple TV its set-top box. So this deal would be available, this is where it gets confusing, to EE broadband customers. EE, the mobile network, owns BT. BT is British Telecom. It's now the parent company. So EE broadband customers would be given

an Apple TV box, which would come preloaded with apps, which allow for like BT Sport and the BT over-the-top TV service that they provide. This is, you know, we have seen these deals before like canal plus was one of them in canal plus in france is one of these two um and apparently this is uh just

another step for apple to try and get the pay tv stuff kicked off outside of other countries and to try and make the apple tv TV a more widely accepted product, which if you think about it, is kind of a genius move to try and find ways to sneak the Apple TV into people's homes before Apple has their own service that you can pay for, right? It's like, okay, this is interesting. Like, here you go. Here's a free one of these without Apple having to give it away, right?

So they work with other providers. The providers put them in people's homes as part of these without apple having to give it away right so they they work with other providers the providers put them in people's homes as part of the contract that they pay for and then when apple has its own tv shows available the apple tvs have already been more widely adopted it is an interesting move um and i'm keeping my eye on that one all right today's show is brought to you by our friends over at Simple Contacts. I'm sure that you're all busy people out there. I know this. I know that the upgradians are very busy,

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and I wanted to know what your experience was like. Yeah, it's funny because they've got a little video person, a little video helper who walks you through the process and will say like, nope, you need to hold it further away. And then you basically get an eye chart and you need to read the letters and it uses speech recognition to confirm that you're reading the right letters. And that's all part of the eye test because what they want to do is make sure that your contact lens prescription is still valid because that's the idea here is that they're renewing your existing prescription. So they want to verify that you have 20-20 vision.

And they can do that by you sticking your phone somewhere or your iPad and then walking away and using it as an eye chart. And then they do the test for you. It's very clever. You could even, I don't know, dress your iPad up in a little white doctor's coat, you know, if that makes you feel better. Yeah, make a mannequin. D your iPad up in a little white doctor's coat, you know, if that makes you feel better. Sure, yeah, make a mannequin, dress it up as a doctor, have a place where the head is to put your iPad, and then do that. If you really wanted to do that. That's less convenient at that point than maybe going to a doctor, and the point of this is that it's super convenient. Maybe more novel, you know.

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and using the code ahoy20. That's simplecontacts.com slash A-H-O-Y-2-0 and use the code A-H-O-Y-2-0 for $20 off. Our thanks to Simple Contacts for their support of Upgrade and RelayFM. So, do you remember last week, I thought I think it would be nice if we had a little chat about

some of the rumors and what we might like in the next iPad Pro. And then, friend of the show, best friend, I think Mr. Rambo has now insisted that he is the BFF of the show. The best friend of the show forever,

Guillermo Rambo over at 9to5Mac has published a report that I think, when looking at this, it appears that he has pieced together things that he has discovered in iOS 12.1 with some information from some unnamed sources, which, correct me if I'm wrong, I think this is the first time I've seen him write a report in this way, with, like, I have sources,

rather than I'm just like a great spelunker. I feel like he got into this along with Steve Trott and Smith because they were good at digging up details in public things released by Apple or things put out on the internet by Apple accidentally or whatever. And this seemed to, as I was reading, I was like, oh, he quotes or references according to sources like they're people he's talking to. So that's really interesting. Sources familiar with the development of the iPad Pro have offered additional details about the device. Yeah, how about that?

I really like this article. It's nicely written. It's nicely chunked up. I'm going to give you the details here, but you should go check it out anyway because you did a good job. Two sizes of iPads with two Wi-Fi and LTE models of each. Seems pretty normal. Edge-to-edge display, no

home button, and no notch because the bezels will be large enough to incorporate the true depth system and therefore making the ipad easy enough to hold right you've got to have some bezels so i will say if it's got bezels it's not an edge to edge display just saying yeah let's say then edge it's edge to edge in the way that we understand it of like edge ish edge ish because it's like the iphone 10 isn't edge to edge either but it's like you can basically you look at it and you're like this is the smallest it could be right and

i'm assuming it's going to be very small but if you actually had edge to edge it probably wouldn't be that convenient to hold because you'd always be covering something so exactly let's just assume it goes to the complete maximum that you would expect from the device to be. Think about what happened when they redesigned the iPad Pro and they reduced the bezels. And there was that whole conversation about how they had like... Increased palm detection and all that stuff. Palm detection and all that, right? So it's more of that.

The idea right now is that those iPads have a very large bezel at the top and the bottom and a narrow bezel at the sides. I would not be surprised if the side bezel doesn't really get much more narrow, maybe a little bit, but that the top and the bottom will get reduced a lot. And it won't be invisible to the edge, but it'll be much, much closer to that while still allowing them to have some hardware on there and some place for you to put your hands when you're holding my expectation is that the bezel will be about as thick as the notches on the iphone 10 right that they'll just be like that's the space we need to embed the camera so we'll make that the thickness basically the whole way around you know i think that might be a way to kind of think about it and that is about as thick as the the the side bezels on like the 10.5 inch iPad Pro, for example.

Yeah, I think that's fine. And you do have to hold it. So, and it's not just about palm detection. It's about being able to cover, to not cover content with your hands while you're holding the device, right? Because if you want to watch a movie or look at a YouTube video and you're holding it in your hands and your hands are covering up the movie, that's not good. So, yeah, need a little bit of space.

This iPad, these iPads, will include the Face ID system found in the 2018 iPhone line, so the XS, the XS Max, and the XR, but it will work in portrait and landscape, but not upside down is noted. So, as I think we spoke about last last week our assumption would be there is a landscape and there is a portrait right so that's how it will work you can't do it in all four orientations it will there has been uh rambo found code which said please turn your ipad the other way around right so there is a portrait and a landscape but it is not clear on if if this will be enabled via hardware or software so we don't know if it's going to come to other devices and there is no information given in this

report about whether it is extra cameras or different cameras or different sensors or software that is unknown but it will work in portrait and landscape but one of each, basically. These iPads will feature USB-C, and this will allow them to output to 4K HDR displays. Now, this is really interesting to me because this is the only place in the report that USB-C is mentioned, and it's almost kind of blown past, and that is intriguing

because adding USB-C to the iPad is is a huge deal that is a massive deal because of what it could potentially say um i just found that interesting this is the only piece of information about usbc it could be huge or it could be nothing right because if they if they have made no real efforts to do anything major with the software to support external devices other than perhaps the idea that it's got larger display support, so they're going to have to add some external display controls in the settings app. But beyond that, if that's all they do, then all this really is is you're trading your lightning dongles for USB-C dongles. And it's less interesting. dongles for USB-C dongles. And it's less interesting. Although my hope is if they go USB-C with these devices, that is setting them down a path where future software updates are going to enable more stuff you could do with USB-C. But you could see a gentle version of

a transition where what it means is you have a different video dongle. You still need a dongle you have a different you know uh you still need a dongle to go to usb a right it's just a different one do you think that these devices would have lightning or do you think they'll be purely usbc um if i had to guess i'd guess they'll be purely usbc because apple doesn't want to have two ports on it i would love it if they they had both both that would be super weird though wouldn't it if they had usbc and lightning i i just assume that instead of a lightning port it'll have a usbc i would prefer both just for charging complexity reasons um but again like i would totally understand it and to be honest whenever i travel i always have a usbc cable with me now anyway but like i'm more thinking like in my home environments where like lightning is just easy for so many devices sure you know really what i think that um you know i say it's a huge deal like i was

even thinking like even if it's just the display support uh it will be a big deal for us because we will have something to a drum to bang for a while right which will be for that add more add more yeah well i i think the way you look at this is that this is making the ipad in in a lot of ways fall into the laptop camp instead of the phone camp yeah it's also just what it says about apple's belief like how it views the ipad is also a big deal, right? Like, if you remove lightning, well, lightning has always been a symbol of iOS. And now if it's USB-C, well, that's more of a symbol of macOS. It is a statement. And it doesn't necessarily mean people will say immediately, oh, well, you know, the iPhone is going to go USB-C as well. I don't know if that's necessarily true. But the iPad being USB-C, you talk about charging. Well, I mean,

the answer is it charges like a laptop, not like a phone. And that's it. And laptops now in Apple's line are charging with USB-C. So it's like that. It's more like a laptop and less like the phone. And I think that is not unreasonable. But it does mean that it's more like a laptop and less like the phone and i think that is not unreasonable but it does mean that yes if you have invested in lots of lightning dongles and don't have usbc dongles guess what you too will be going to dongle town everybody goes to dongle town dongle town is an inevitability yeah all trains pass through dongle town yeah eventually um moving on from that there will be a new apple pencil that pairs via proximity um gimme mentions airpods my initial like like how you know the airpods will pair

via proximity right my thought though was like the logitech crayon is probably the technology they're using here the way it was described in the article that's immediately what i thought the logitech crayon uses a very specific frequency um it doesn't have to do a bluetooth pair to one device if you bring it in proximity and start writing on the screen it just works the airpods do not work like the crayon you have to manually switch them in software right you you can't just walk up to your iphone and it connects to your iphone that that's not how the airport stuff works well they they can but once they've been paired and that's the difference. And so it's unclear here, but I would not be surprised if what we saw with the Logitech crayon is the future of how Apple

Pencil works. And so a new Apple Pencil would use that same idea. I can't imagine, he says it's unclear whether the old Apple Pencil will still work. I kind of can't imagine he says it's unclear whether the old apple pencil will still work i kind of can't imagine that it won't because you could still do a you know you could still having a bluetooth pair like why would you give that up um but i do think that it's more flexible and it's a better user experience if you just take take the pencil and put it down and it works because it's all based on proximity and uh the crayon works that way so not? But we'll see that it's all about the details here, but it would not be a surprise if that crayon turned out to be essentially a first peek at what Apple was thinking for the future of the Apple pencil. And then the magnet,

what is being referred to as the magnetic connector for accessories on the back of the iPad. Yeah. So this is, I mean, this is wacky. And I, I should say like, I love Guillermo Rambo, but, you know, his track record is with

digging things out of the details of Apple's stuff and not with sources. So I think we have to be more skeptical of his sources, even though we're not skeptical of him, because we don't know his track record with sources. And could these be people who do, are these people who really know this or not? He obviously has some confidence in it, but I would be, I would be more skeptical of that. So, especially since a lot of this stuff is telling us stuff that we've already kind of heard. But so I'm going to just inject a little bit of

skepticism here. That said, this is one of those things that has been a big question mark for a while now, which is there's a new connector on the back. And what does that mean? And if you've got a connector on the back and not the side, what does that mean in terms of attaching the keyboard? If it's on the back, does that mean that the keyboard has to have a shell and that they're not

going to do the smart cover style keyboards, but they're going to do a different kind of keyboard. Or are you going to have something that kind of like snakes up the back and attach it? It's just, it's weird. This doesn't give us any more detail on any of that. It just is like, yup, that thing. And I don't know what that is or why it's where it apparently is on the back. So's and also it's like and other accessories it's like well yeah apple's been saying other accessories with a smart connector too and there have been none so what other accessories are there other accessories here this this connector has to be better at what it's supposed to do than the smart connector was what

it was supposed to do right now what it does make me intrigued by is another thing that you and I have talked about a little bit, which is would Apple go full on embracing the keyboard and actually build something that makes your iPad into a laptop instead of just an iPad with a little floppy keyboard? And I don't know. But putting it on the back. Suggests maybe.

Something like that. Something that gives it a lot more back support. So it can stay upright. In a laptop configuration. Maybe not. I don't know. I still don't get it. I still don't get why this thing is there.

And what it's for. And why Apple would do this. And that suggests to me that Apple has something. There's another shoe to drop. That we don't really know about. That is a reason why it's doing this because it wouldn't just do this for kicks and to make all of its accessories more complicated right it's got to have a a reason why you need that magnetic connector on the back i'm getting really excited i can tell it feels like that like i don't know what's gonna happen when they actually

eventually show these things off but it feels like it could be something pretty big mike this week is the time where finally my ipad has started to feel slow i i definitely am mentally prepared for a new ipad because i'm like come why are you doing this why don't you react this way and i honestly i think it's maybe just that i'm on the beta and the beta is bugging me because it's a little bit buggy, but because I needed the new emoji because Jeremy Burge, you know, bullied me into getting the new emoji so I could see what emoji he was setting me. But I'm getting that frustration of I'm ready to buy a new iPad now.

So I guess we're there. We're at the season. If only Apple would release them. Yeah. Pieces are falling out of my ipad screen right now so i desperately need one the the the cracked screen situation jason has gotten very bad like a piece fell off next to the home button so i keep sticking my thumb into a hole at the moment and it's sharp you know i really desperately need a new ipad

save mike's hands now please my kind of theory my my theory i'm still sticking to it i think that invites will go out this week for an event next week products shipping on the 26th i'm sticking i sure hope so stick into that i'm sticking to that let's hope let's hope i'm keeping my uh eyes locked to six colors to see that you know to see oh the invite's gone out the i got the invite post that's a classic i colors to see that, you know, to see, oh, the invite's gone out. I got the invite post. That's a classic. I want to see it.

I want to see it, too. Also, we've got our live event in Chicago, and I really don't want Apple to do an event while we're supposed to be in Chicago. Yep. We don't want to think about that, though. That would be super awkward. To all the freelancers out there, let talk to you about fresh books because you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business our friends at fresh books can save you huge amounts of time because their cloud accounting software is so easy to use they simplify tasks

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and then when they say, how did you hear about us? Tell them you heard about them from this show. So that's freshbooks.com upgrade and you can try it out for 30 days. Our thanks to FreshBooks for their support of this show and RelayFM. Okay, this is a weird one. You've probably heard about this by now.

It is a Bloomberg Businessweek story that has implicated Apple and Amazon in a Chinese surveillance issue. So this has been something that has been going on some very weird twists and turns. This is the type of story, Jason, that I ideally like to just avoid because it's super high level. I don't really have anything particularly insightful

that I think I can say about it. But it's taken so many strange twists and turns over the last seven days that i feel like we have to at least catalog it on the show because if we don't talk about it at this point it would seem almost strange because it has dominated the news cycle over the last week or so right would you agree yeah this is such a difficult subject because we don't know anything right and we don't know anything nobody seems to know anything everyone's saying something and it's all conflicting yeah exactly right so uh but at least

we need to address it if nothing else just to to say that they're hey how did this elephant get in this room and so i guess that's what we're doing now very big elephant in a very big room here's the timeline of events i'm going to try and break them down okay we're like now very big elephant in a very big room here's the timeline of events i'm going to try and break them down okay we're like the kind of like the big tentpole things that have occurred in this news so bloomberg business week last thursday published a report that claimed that companies including amazon and apple had had discovered Chinese surveillance chips in server hardware obtained from a company called Supermicro.

Bloomberg says that Apple found the chips in May of 2015, kept it quiet, and informed the FBI. They also say that there is an ongoing investigation still going on about this hardware hack this was the report it was this big report they did like a whole big like different layout for it like it was a big thing for them and again you have like let's let's look at this in just its uh bubble for

a second if this is the information you have that is a freaking huge story right like that is massive and they play it as that this is this is their magazine cover have, that is a frigging huge story, right? Like that is massive. And they play it as that this is their magazine cover story, basically. They got art. They got like lots of photographs of pencils. And fingers. Fingers with chips on them, you know? Yeah, exactly right. big expose about how China is infiltrating America's tech companies with their hardware hacking of motherboards where they're putting secret chips that compromise the systems on and

are shipping them into the data centers powering the cloud in the United States. That is their story. We're blowing the roof off of this thing. Look at this. Look at how China is infiltrating our cloud companies. And then something strange happened. uh aggressive like i feel like we're all fairly well trained on what your usual non-answer answer is from apple pr and this was not that this was categorical especially post steve jobs because you know jobs would sometimes write these kind of op-eds right which? Sure. Which are scathing. But that sort of stuff doesn't exist anymore. Nobody's doing that. So, as you say, they gave multiple statements to multiple press outlets. Then they published a press release titled, What Business Week Got Wrong About Apple?

Which is like the most passive-aggressive-aggress aggressive title i may have ever seen from apple why why business week disappointed us yes you it was they were holding it wrong yeah and and there were there was the escalation too where they did the initial denial and then people said well they could be told you know they could be not able to say that there are national security things here that prevent them from saying that at which point an apple spokesperson said no we don't there has been no uh no statement by government entities telling us not to say anything which you know i think technically means that that's probably true like i think they would have no comment on that if they

couldn't comment on it. But instead, they're like, nope, we have nothing like that. This is just not accurate. And that began a cycle where because Amazon also had a statement and a whole bunch of other organizations had statements. Like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security came out with a statement saying we have no reason to doubt apple's statements like what is happening so the uk national cyber security center said this first and then the u.s department of homeland security stated in their statement that they agree with the uk uh team to say they have no reason to doubt the statements from the company's name in this story which is like a real weird way to say it but you kind of understand why they say it that way like

they believe that it's true i did want to touch on a couple of things from apple's press release just because it's so kind of fascinating in its own way so they stated that over the past year business week contacted them multiple times about this story every single time apple conducted their own investigation and found no evidence and then refuted these claims to Bloomberg both as factual responses and on the record. But I love some of these, just some of the way that this stuff is written. So they say, these are direct quotes from the press release.

On this, we could be very clear. Apple has never found malicious chips, hardware manipulations or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement. We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg's reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed our best guess is that they are confusing the story of a previously

reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single super micro server in one of our labs that one-time event was determined to be an accident to be accidental and not a targeted attack against apple i love love that line, like, that they have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. It goes on that Apple wrote a letter to Congress, once again stating that they have found no sign of this. This letter was written by Apple's Vice President on Information Security, George Stathakopoulos.

And finally, BuzzFeed reports that multiple Apple executives have spoken to them on the condition of anonymity about this story. They all say they have found, they know nothing about anything claimed in the story. They have tried to find evidence of this internally, but haven't been able to. And as we focus on Apple, Amazon's in the same boat.

They're refuting the complaints, the claims. They're making statements. This is so weird, right statements this is so weird right this is so weird it's super weird um and the closest that you get it's what's interesting about apple's responses although it is you know what bloomberg got wrong we we are deeply disappointed uh that kind of language the real place where the knives come out from bloom Bloomberg is the line, they may not have been open. They were not open to the possibility that their sources might be wrong or misinformed. And I think that, looking at it from the outside, I think that's the crux of this for me, which is Bloomberg had somebody tell them that this happened and they ran with it which is fine it is it strikes me as possible that what that initial

inciting piece of information was not accurate even though it came from people who would seem to know what they're talking about and that it led them on this entire project. And I think maybe some of the fundamental skepticism that journalists often have about companies that deny things came into play. This is my guess. I'm just trying to extrapolate this based on what I know of journalism and how journalism works, that then they get denials and they are thinking back to the inciting incident here, the base information they got, which is that this thing happened. They're like, you're denying it, but we know the truth. This thing happened. My question is, what is that inciting information? Where did it come from?

Because the danger is that even though bloomberg says they have multiple sources inside apple who say this happened we can't see what the detail is there on that because it's anonymous sources um protected by bloomberg and that's fine they should protect their sources these are people who they're not characterized in any way other than being like senior Apple people or something. My if Apple is telling the truth here, which if let's just say it and several people have said this on Twitter that I follow who are journalists. If Apple's lying here, that's like a huge that they're like the law has been broken. Someone's gone to prison. People will go to jail for that.

Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. People will go to jail for that. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. So my guess is that this is a game of telephone. My guess is that something happened, perhaps the 2016 incident where a driver was discovered that was infected.

infected or perhaps they're discussing a hypothetical security breach that that somebody at apple used to discuss why they uh why they do what they do with their servers in terms of analyzing them and making sure that the suppliers are legit and that every piece on the you know on the motherboard is tested and you know everything they do to make sure that software and hardware isn't inserted into their uh their system that is hacked that all of that is going on um because they're like what if this happened right and they had that whole conversation of like what if they hacked us and put this thing in there and then this would happen and that's why we look and that and then you know whether it's the hypothetical or whether it's this 2016 incident or both there's a grapevine of people who don't work on this part at apple but have heard about it second hand and maybe it gets distorted into that this thing actually happened

maybe they conflate the infected driver with the hypothetical hardware attack vectors that are discussed as a boogeyman of like, this is why we do. This is why we're awesome and do what we do is because there's bad people out there. to somebody they know at bloomberg um off the record or at an event or over dinner or who knows where say oh yeah that that happened here when they're asked about hardware hacking they're like oh yeah i heard a whole story about how that happened here and we got these hardware things that came in and did this spooky stuff and it was bad do you not think that if that was the case though that like i mean obviously that would be documented inside of apple and they would have said in their press release like oh no they're thinking about this considering like how well that's what Apple said though is like maybe they were thinking about this other incident that happened right I see what you mean yeah okay so that thing happened

and some theoretical testing is changed yeah so what baffles me here is is is for this to all be true about why Bloomberg is reporting this, it would almost have to be a perfect storm where there were people who confirmed, quote unquote, confirmed this thing who maybe didn't know. We don't know. Maybe they don't know. Maybe it was just like they thought they knew a fact, but it wasn't a fact. That happens. Not every false piece of information given to a journalist by a source is known to be false to the source, right? That is a tricky one, but that's a true thing that happens, is you as a journalist have to gauge the quality of your source's information. That's part of it. And since these sources were apparently fairly senior Apple people,

they judged them to be a quality source. They aren't necessarily. That piece of information may not have been accurate. But still, to have those sources do that and then to have other Bloomberg sources corroborate this, there is this question of like,

is it an echo chamber where somebody in law enforcement heard that Apple had this happen, even though it was just this story that was going around Apple that wasn't based in truth? Is there another incident out there? Is it this 2016 incident that Apple's referring to? Is there some other incident that affected some other company and it got distorted into being this Apple thing and they all kind of played against each other to give bloomberg this uh this piece but what's fascinating is that bloomberg had such high confidence in this whole story that they did a cover story they got all that art they've got all this detail so that's that's the mystery like i can see a lot of ways how this could have gone wrong i am amazed that if if that it could possibly have gone through all of these different logical

steps to reach the fact that it's a cover story in Businessweek based on, even if that first thing was shaky, the fact that at no point with talking to other people, trying to parse the logic of this, reporting about these other companies that are involved, were there red flags put up, other than by the company's denials, which, you know, as a journalist, you are trained to be skeptical of that. Like, we've got this thing that Apple got hardware hacked by China,

and Apple says they didn't happen. Well, would they admit it if it did? Yeah, of course they did. Right, that kind of thing. But what you don't know is how to differentiate those two things. And then when Apple gives this response out in public like it does, I got to say, as an editor,

you see Apple's response the day you post your thing and you're like, oh. Because you don't know how they're going to react. You know that they're probably being full bluster with you to say, don't write this, you're wrong, you know, don't write this. You're wrong. You don't want to write this.

It's like, well, of course, they don't want any bad PR. They're going to try to intimidate us. But when you post it and then they come out with a very clear denial that calls you on it and says, you never listened to us and this is completely factually untrue. You get that sinking feeling of like, oh, no, that wasn't bluster. We ignored them because we thought it was PR bluster. It turns out it was because we were wrong. And at that point, it's really difficult because now you're in it.

You've published it. And what's weird is that we also, as far as I can tell, have not really heard a lot of additional detail from Bloomberg about it, which makes me uh really concerned that uh that they're unable to go back to their sources and confirm that this is you know in more detail uh that they kind of got some information a long time ago and have run with it but haven't really

been able to check it out it is uh we're in a really weird limbo state right now. And because this is about international intrigue and espionage and things like that, there's also that cloud hanging over this whole thing, which is there's some players in this who aren't talking because they're spies. Right? And so there's that part of it too. Like maybe Apple actually did get hacked and nobody at Apple knows about it because the only person at apple who knew is keeping it a secret except bloomberg right it doesn't doesn't really add up so it is it is a lot of detail a lot of possibilities i think the most likely scenario is that bloomberg based this on some sources who thought it was real but they were misinformed because they were getting it through the grapevine at apple They thought they were referring to a real incident and they weren't. That's my gut feeling

here. There've also been some technical people who look at the story and are like, I don't think this adds up. Like, I don't think you can just do this. Like there are way easier ways to compromise a system than something like this. So there's some skepticism that this may be a little bit kind of panicking about something beyond what anybody would actually do. Let me ask you a question on this. You worked in this exact industry for many years, right?

Like the tech publication industry. It's different to what you do now, right? I have a master's degree in journalism. I have been writing news stories since i was a high school student so do you think that it is at all possible that like you know you get a story like this a story so huge it's going to draw so much attention that you could get a little bit blinded like is there a possibility that like the story's so big and so tantalizing that there is like a,

like a, like a weird bias thing that goes on that like you want it to be true so much that you kind of, you are less likely to want to believe that Apple is giving you the truth in their answers. Yeah. I mean, that's,

there's part of that. I mean, you see it for me, I keep coming back to the photography and stuff, but let me tell you, like that's a sign that they knew they had a big story because this was a big takeout magazine piece where they got custom art and photography. They got a fake little mini chip thing and a pencil tip and a finger and all this stuff. They were doing it up. This was not just like a story with text that ran on a website on a Tuesday afternoon.

That is not what this story is. This was going to be in all the airports and all the magazine stands. Exactly. up this was not just like a story with text that ran on a website on a tuesday afternoon that is not what this story is all the airports and all the magazine stands exactly this this is we know we've got a big story you don't have people working on a story for for months or a year unless you are certain that it's going to be huge and yes there is some sunk cost fallacy that happens there where once you've worked on it all this time, you got to get a story out of it, right? So that is dangerous because that can push you toward, I'm not saying Bloomberg did this, but I can say in general, that pushes you toward running the story because you put so much time into it. One of the great temptations for journalists and for editors of journalists is you spend a year on a project and at the close of the year, you discover that your

project is not, you don't have anything, that the story just fell apart. You had this great story and you had a couple of leads that indicated it was going to be huge. And then through your diligent reporting, you find out that there's nothing there. That's a very difficult thing to deal with because you have to show something for the work that you've put in. And if there's no story, that's very hard. So there's some of that going on here, possibly. And again, I think there's a fundamental skepticism that is good, that serves journalism, skepticism of companies especially big companies their pr departments are not you know on a lie detector their pr departments as i said last week i think um in a different context i've talked to you know there was a senior person at apple pr for a long

time who i talked to and at one point the statement that was made to me was, my job is sales. Don't forget, the PR people, they work for Apple. They don't work for you. Their job is to spin everything positively. And so as a journalist, when you think you've got this amazing scoop and somebody from the PR department says, this is inaccurate, we deny everything, you just don't believe them. we deny everything um you just don't believe them and that's that's the right thing to do but the vociferousness of apple's response indicates that they weren't you know they weren't just trying to shut down the story that in this case they were telling the truth this wasn't just spin and i do wonder if if there was you how do you escalate that? How do you get, how do you break through? If you're Apple, how do you break through? Did

Tim Cook or Phil Schiller or something call whoever the editor-in-chief is at Businessweek or the editor of Bloomberg or Mike Bloomberg and say, I need to tell you something, which is that I know that your people at Business Week think this is a huge story, but I can tell you it is categorically false. And if you run with this, we're going to come out and say you're completely wrong. Don't make a mistake. This is not our use. We're not spinning here. An explicit heads up from them right right yeah and i gotta say if that happens and you're an editor you're like whoa they're really

trying to kill this story there must be something here oh and maybe there is right you can't again you can't tell this is this is when when the uh the secretary of state or the white let's say white house chief of staff calls katherine graham Washington Post and says, you got to not do the Pentagon Papers or you got to not do this Watergate coverage. Like, oh, I guess we got a story here if they're trying to suppress it. So that I suspect that this is at least at this point in the process, what happened is that Apple was kind of waving his hands like, no, no, no, seriously, this is wrong. And Bloomberg's like, aha, that's what they want you to think. Which again, I think is a good impulse if you're a journalist, because so often the companies are telling you things that are not true. They are spinning you. They want to minimize whatever it is that's going on. However, I will say I have never felt like, I've never felt lied

to by Apple PR. They spin, but I've never felt lied to. And if Apple came to me and said, look, this is completely wrong. I'd be like, oh, that is like if they said, look, off the record, this story is completely wrong. that would be a very different than we're, we're aware of the off the record. We're aware of something going on here and we're looking at it and we'll, you know, we'll be reporting on it as soon as we figure out something like that. I, I've experienced that. So,

you know, it's, it's fascinating. And I, I really, I hope we get to the bottom of it at some point. But again, if Apple is just flat out lying and Amazon to too, flat out lying about this not having happened, and these are blanket statements like this did not happen, then the stakes are high.

Because, yeah, I think you're right. Somebody's going to go to jail because they're committing fraud by making those statements. I love when we start a thing by saying we're not sure if we have that much to say on it yeah it's a small story small story i told you i had journalism feels and there they were there were no but the thing is this was what i wanted because i don't know anyone else who would be as uniquely qualified to have an opinion on the journalistic part of this than you right like you ran and we can't talk about if you could make a little chip and put it on a motherboard like we don't i don't even know like i literally have no idea if this stuff is possible but my assumption is always that like

military and spy technology is always so far ahead that like i'll believe anything anyone tells me right because like if you tell me that you can put make a chip which is that small and it will send literally every yeah sure i'll believe it like i'll believe it because military contracts and whatever that money's so huge you know like i'll just whatever i'll believe it right because i have no way of knowing otherwise but this is you you are like and were this you were this person you were the person who would have made the decision probably about whether this was going to run we we didn't do you know in that world we didn't do like big investigative journalism pieces but i mean i know i worked i worked for a newspaper for a while i did that

you know i i get it i get what this is and i uh the role that what has to go through i had heard one interesting theory about this which again, again, is a conspiracy theory, which is that there is a feeling like that they may have been played by somebody possibly in the executive branch of the U.S. government that was hyping them up about this stuff because they want to use it because fear of china matters when you're in a trade war with china and uh you know i think that's i think that's accurate that it is in the administration's best interest to have people convinced that china uh china's technology and its supply chain are a national security threat and that China is our enemy and is out to get us and is already spying on our cloud data and things like that, that benefits politically the American administration. I don't think that that means that it actually happened that way, but it certainly does benefit them to have fear, uncertainty, and doubt about our tech

companies and their relationship with things made in China. So I don't know. I hope we get more information about this at some point, though, because I would really like to know if there are secret chips that are reading all of our cloud server data, and if Apple is suppressing that, or if Bloomberg just kind of got something wrong. This week's episode is also brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace. You can make your next move with Squarespace because they will let you easily create a website for your next idea or project. With Squarespace, you can take advantage of beautiful award-winning templates that will allow you to show off your great ideas. You can easily register

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to get 10% off your first purchase. Our thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Should we do some hashtag ask upgrade questions?

Great idea. Josh wants to know, is there a way to make a shortcut run every day at a specific time automatically oh boy do i wish there was wouldn't that be a wonderful addition jason this is not possible to do um i expect this will be at some point it feels like a really natural next step it's going to be on the list for next year yeah you'd expect so right bringing it over was phase one bringing shortcuts over uh with phase one from workflow phase two presumably will be all sorts of things and and this has to be on that list it just makes sense but what i

will recommend to you if you want to do something that's that kind of can approximate this you can use an app like launch center pro where you can make a Launch Center Pro action to be a shortcut. It allows you to select a specific shortcut and you can set a schedule there. So you can say like, oh, every day at whatever time you can notify me or even by location. And what happens is Launch Center Pro will give you a notification. You need to tap on the notification, but then it will open the shortcut and run the shortcut for you. So, you know, it's not perfect, but it can get you like 70% of the way there, right? You need to tap something,

but it stops you from having to remember it or have like you set up an alarm to remind you to do something. So you still have to be involved in some way, but, you know, it will get you part of the way there. Yeah, I wanted to mention Launch Center Pro because the general perception has been like, well, because of shortcuts and workflow that Launch Center Pro isn't relevant,

but it actually has a bunch of features that do very clever things like location-based launching that doesn't happen in shortcuts. There's stuff you can do to actually trigger shortcuts from Launch Center Pro that are very clever. In terms of scheduling, you know, you can, there are alarms now. The Home app lets you schedule things. You have to have a HomeKit hub in your house, an Apple TV or an iPad to do that, but it lets you schedule things in HomeKit. So I feel like Apple is right on the verge of being

able to do this, but we haven't quite gotten there yet. There are probably, you know, there are security implications and user interface implications. If you can set a thing that is basically running code at a certain time, like is that surreptitious, you know, there's like lots of stuff that you have to step through in order to make that happen. But it would be super convenient to be able to run things at a particular time of day. So hopefully they'll figure that out for next time. Ted writes in both of you seem to be enthusiastic Instagram users. Do you ever feel down after looking at Instagram for a couple of minutes because everyone else's life seems so much more exciting. So I am an enthusiastic Instagram user. Would you consider yourself an enthusiastic Instagram user,

Jason? I would not. You use it every now and then. If I'm traveling or at a sporting event or am taking a picture of something amazing, which is usually traveling or at a sporting event, I will post it to Instagram. And when I'm there, I will look at Instagram, but I don't check Instagram every day. So I probably, you know, when I look, it's like, hey, my friends are doing things great. And then that's sort of it. So I definitely don't feel that because I'm not, I'm not popping in there to get feedback about what's happening in the world. I just use it as a kind of sharing service when I, you know, I work out of my garage. I'm not taking pictures most of the time, and I'm not looking at Instagram most of the time. I am consuming and, uh, what would you say? Like creating, like I, I am giving more to Instagram and spending more time in Instagram at an increasing rate. It's a social network that i get a lot more enjoyment out of than some of the other places

that i frequent on the internet um so you know jason is at jay snell on instagram i am at i mike i am yke on instagram you should follow us there especially follow me because i use stories a lot now i'm sharing a lot more to my instagram stories um fomo is the thing that ted is is reaching for here fear of missing out so you see something happening and you're like oh man I wish I was there I wish I was doing that it is a real thing a thing that people feel and sometimes I'll I'll feel this way like if I see a bunch of my friends together like that and I'm not there for some reason like I'll be like oh man I wish those were my friends but mostly no like I don't see stuff that Jason's doing or Federico's doing or Stephen's doing

or Serenity's doing and be like, like just in general, like sad that I'm not doing the cool things that they're doing. So my recommendation to you, Ted, and to anyone really, is this is a general blanket statement. If a social network makes you feel sad,

try to stop using that social network. That would be my advice that i would give to our listeners samuel writes in do you mix and edit your shows differently knowing how apps like overcast will change them with smart speed and voice boost and i will also add to that just general speed changes that people may do they may listen to the show a 1.5 times speed for example jason do you make any accommodations for this stuff i i am curious what you have to say here although i think we're going to be on the same page which is um overcast voice boost exists to make shows that sound bad sound better or shows that sound good sound louder is which

is another thing yeah but i i would say i would say the primary thing is a show that is mixed too quiet and maybe the the volumes are off and it helps boost it so my my thought is not everybody has voice boost not everybody has overcast i make my show so people can listen to it without needing to fix its audio. So I, uh, I don't do this because I want to take control of it and make it to sound as good as possible to begin with before getting it to overcast.

So, um, so I would say no to that and smart speed, you know, I never was somebody who was cutting out like a long, well, long pauses I cut out, short pauses I don't. And smart speed is all about the individual detail work. I don't do individual detailed dialogue edits where I'm pulling out every single um and ah. involves finding any time that there is a pause for longer than a second. I see those because I'm using strip silence. So everything, there's a break, there's a cut if there's silence for more than a second in the settings that I use. And I will close those up because that feels like there's a weird long pause happening that I want to close up. There's often an um or an uh that's associated with it. And I can just close all of that up and the person's

thoughts just continue to flow and it's all great. But smaller ones, I don't bother. So I don't do that either. Nor do I consider the fact that people are going to listen to this at all sorts of speeds, one and a half times, two times, three times, whatever. I can't like I edited at one X. I want it to sound good at one X. And then everybody's algorithms and personal preferences can do whatever the heck they want with it. I just want to sound good at one X and then everybody else can do whatever they want. Yeah, I there are too many preferences that people may have.

They're switching on and off in all of the different applications like so many apps do something like a voice boost or something like a silence removal right now that it's it's it's too tricky that if i did want to tune it to tune it in a way that would be best of all of them because every app does things slightly differently so i don't make any considerations to the audio to try and sound good in a specific preference other than nothing, right? Like no silence boosting,

so no voice boosting, no audio EQing. You know, like I'm just making it so like if you use nothing, the show sounds good. If you want to do speed stuff, that's for you, right? Like in smart speed and

silence removal and like the voice the silence skipping and stuff it's in pocket cast and stuff it's an overcast it's it's good you know like i use it but like every now and then they will all destroy something in a show right like a show with music in it it's just gonna rip through that music at times you know i was gonna say i would love and I don't know if this is ever even technically possible. I would love to be able to mark parts of my show that have like music in them. I actually saw Marco having a conversation with somebody about this on Twitter recently and his I think it was with Jeremy Burge.

And if I'm paraphrasing, but he was was like there would then just be some people that mark the entire show that way and it's going against the what the listener wants or like they would do it to ads or you know yeah i could say that but he could also limit it to 30 seconds or something like that as these very specific things i would love that or even better and i know that there are algorithms out there that claim to be able to do this marco will probably shoot this down too but marco does so much audio processing um maybe the next generation smart speed detects music and sets it off and says oh music is running but what if you run music under the you know you run me anyway but yes there are there are many ifs and buts but basically uh yeah i just make the show for how it's going to be, and then whatever preferences the listener wants to place on it,

I'm like, that's cool. Sometimes, if I'm making a particularly interesting or tricky, or I'm doing something that's a little bit out of the box, I will check it. This is typically around doing weird stuff with chapters for fun. I'm adding art in, i'm adding some secret art and then i'll check it that it works and yes well it doesn't break in a couple of apps right before i publish it but when it comes to the audio stuff there's only so much we can do and

we can't plan for everything so no my big thing is that i use a compressor on the voices on all the podcasts i do and then i do a master compressor on the voices on all the podcasts I do. And then I do a master compressor on the end. And what that basically means is I'm trying to bring everybody's voice up to essentially the same volume all the time, because not only do different people in different places have different volumes, but as speakers, sometimes we talk like this. And then, you know, sometimes we trail off and we talk like this and by putting the compressors on there and I'm kind of aggressive with it. What I want is I want everybody to be audible all the time. I don't want the podcast to need a podcast player feature so that you can hear every word that I say. So I do that, even though I could probably get away with not doing that, knowing, well, you know, Overcast will fix it if it's a problem.

I want it to go out the gate as good and as listenable as I can make it. Because not everybody listens in one app, right? And that's the great thing about podcasting. So I don't want to just master. We're not doing like master for Overcast or like Pocket Cast approved. We're not doing that because that's not the way it is. And again, I do things slightly differently to jason i do some audio leveling before rather than compression after if you want to hear about this in a little bit more detail listen to episode

200 of this very show where we go into also if you ever wondered why some of our episodes sound different from others every so often there's one that sounds a little bit different usually tell because the music uh is a little different at the intro it's because when i edit upgrade which i usually don't do it's usually mike but when i edit upgrade i use my template and so i use my compression settings and all of that and it does sound different and it does sound different i prefer the way i sound in my edit and i prefer how it sounds in mine and this is like because audio editing is like an art really it is an art it is there are lots of different ways you can go the editor has their preference for how things should sound and you know that's just how it is right and and i kind of it's a weird thing that i've i've come

to love i also i have software that you don't have and you have software that i don't have so i couldn't actually do what you do because you have software i don't have because i want you to edit your way right you know so there you go that's right even though i put the music at the wrong place that's my little card i have a very specific place that I... No, it's not just that you use completely different music. Well, that's also true. I have a very specific place that I put the music and where I begin to speak.

And I disagree with it, and that's fine. So you can tell those are the little tidbits for when one of us edits the show instead of the other one. Anyway, that was a fun question. We call it editor's prerogative. That's how I call it, all of these things. Thank you, Samuel. Whoever has to do the work, they get to make their preferences.

All right, I think that's going to wrap it up for today. We have a lot more to say on that one. I think anytime anybody ever asks us about some kind of podcast editing decision, we'll have a lot to say on it. So if you do have questions like that, that again we're always happy to accept them but i expect a lot of those answers can be found in episode 200 of this very program where we spoke for about an hour and a half just about that um and then that's most of one of my favorite episodes of this show if you've never heard it i recommend that you go and listen if you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode of this very program, just send out a tweet with

the hashtag AskUpgrade, and we will do so. I want to thank Squarespace and FreshBooks and Simple Contacts for their support of this very show. If you'd like to find Jason online, go to sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com for more of Jason's wonderful work. He is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter and Instagram. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Once again, please follow me on Instagram. I'm trying to share a lot

more stuff that I'm doing there and it's a very different medium that I'm enjoying greatly. Me and Jason both host many shows on RelayFM. You can go to relay.fm slash shows to find your next second favorite podcast after Upgrade, of course. We'll be back next time.

Until then, Upgradians, thank you very much for listening. And we'll be back next time. Say goodbye, Jason Snow. Farewell, Upgradians.