Upgrade - 22: I Didn't Hate This Movie

Episode Date: February 9, 2015

Apple's new Photos app for the Mac has appeared, and Jason and Myke discuss what this could mean for iTunes and the future of Mac development. They also discuss some Apple Watch expectations, how Apple deals with change, and Myke watches 'Real Genius.'

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 22 today's episode of upgrade is brought to you by our friends at igloo an internet you'll actually like hover simplified domain management mail route a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam, and stamps.com. Postage on demand. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined, as always, by the one and only Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Mr. Snell. How are you today? Hello, Mr. Hurley. I'm doing fine. How are you? I am very well indeed, sir. I'm always happy to kick off my week with an episode of Upgrade.

Yes, it helps us mark time doesn't it it's like the passage of the week so this is our our monday for me it's our it's our little monday morning chat for you it's monday evening so you know i wish it was my monday morning as well i think that would be really nice but we should do that sometime where where i stay up late and do like late on sunday night and you're in Monday morning and we do a crazy maybe not. That's not you'd still have to stay up really late. Yeah, I suppose I would. Actually, no you wouldn't. If you stayed up till like

1am. No, well that would be 9am. No, you're going to have to get up earlier than that, Mike. I'm sorry. Okay. If this is going to have to work, I think you're going to have to get up at like 7. And I'll start, we'll start at 7 a.m. your time, 11 p.m. my time, and we'll do a...

This sounds like a terrible idea. That would be the most listless, sleepy version of Upgrade ever. We could totally do it. We should do it. I don't know why. Maybe for April Fool's or something. I don't know why that would be April Fool's. But maybe I could pretend to be you, and you could pretend to be me or something like that.

Who knows? It would be funny. It would be funny. And it would be interesting to see who we'd get in the chat room for that. Although The Incomparable brings out the night owls because we record those very, very late. I should mention, since we're talking about this, we should mention, I think we mentioned this in the after show or in the during show when your internet died last week

but I'm going to be visiting your your land your fair shores in March which means we're going to have to do a couple episodes of Upgrade in person which is weird and exciting

it's going to be wild i'm excited about that march 23rd we are going to find some place to do a podcast in london um i think probably the 23rd could be the 24th but i think i think we should shoot for monday because monday's our day and uh and then the following week the 30th we will both be in for Ool. And so we'll do an episode from Ool as well. I don't know. Maybe we'll have a special guest. Who knows? But so that's exciting.

So we're going to do a couple of these in person, which is fun. I mean, we've done podcasts in person before, at least at WWDC. But to do – and we've talked in person at UL last year and all sorts of things, but not this show. So this show will be live and in person a couple of times in March. I hope that we'll be able to do the show afterwards. I hope that it's like, you know,

we're not so, we don't love so much recording in person that we then just can't record anymore. Just never makes it the same. We'll see. We'll see'll see yeah we could ruin it it could all be ruined do we have some follow-up mr snell we do a little bit although some of it is a very very much a fundamental like question about follow-up but before we get there we talked last week about uh the power of youtube, if you recall. And listener Specky Classics on Twitter wrote in to say, will Google be remembered most for YouTube? Which I think we said. He says, I think Street View is more historically significant.

I think that's an interesting point. I guess my problem with that argument is although Street View is cool, it's pretty replicable. And YouTube, you can build all the video services you want, but YouTube's the winner. At least for now, it is a culturally significant thing. But I think Google is doing lots of things. I think we've talked about this on this show before, but I really believe that Google is well aware of the fact that their business of doing text ads on the internet and their search dominance is not going to last and it's not going to be enough to carry them into whatever the next tech transition is. And so they're placing lots of bets on lots of different technologies, some of which are interconnected, some of which are not at all,

because they want to hit on one or two of these world-changing things that will propel them into whatever the next generation of technology is. And I think making bets on something like Street View and saying, we're going to blanket, we're going to organize all the information about what you see on a particular street. I think that's great. Obviously self-driving cars and, um, and robot things and other ways that they will subjugate humanity. Did I say that out loud? Um, we'll, we'll come. Uh, but I, so I, I would actually place a bet that I suspect there's probably something that Google will be remembered for historically that has not even happened yet.

I think there's a decent chance because I think they're trying that. I think they're actually trying to change the world on a bunch of different fronts because they're trying to find their next big thing. And maybe they'll fail. But I think unlike a lot of other companies that were happy to protect the goose that laid the golden egg until they died. And they're like, oh, the goose is gone. We're done. We're out of here. Radio shack. That they're trying to find the next big thing. So who knows? But right now, I think YouTube is just such a cultural phenomenon to the current generation that the young, the young, youngins like my kids that uh it's pretty powerful that was a good buy by uh by google to buy youtube google x that's their entire division in which

they think about space elevators doesn't sound threatening at all does it the x the most threatening of letters what letter should they have used instead i think not a letter would have been a good choice call it like google's special projects or google gold or google uh you know i don't know awesome google future google volcano no that's worse no that is you're right it's not for bonanza so anyway that's that's the youtube follow-up uh apple watch follow-up but listener sean wrote in to say the watch may be to the iphone as the iphone once was to the imac to the mac it may become an independent device what are your thoughts um i'm not sure whether sean means ipad orod here. The iPod was really subservient to the Mac and the PC.

And the watch is going to be subservient to the iPhone. But the iPhone was never really subservient to the Mac. You had to sync to put some stuff, you know, to put some media on it. But my bigger point was that it's not about being subservient to another device. It's that the iPhone or the Apple Watch only works with the iPhone. And it's never going to work with Android phones. Let's just say that. And I actually wrote, we talked about it,

and that actually spawned a piece on Six Colors that I wrote last week about the same issue, about how the Apple Watch is an iPhone accessory, but the iPhone is so large, as we were talking about last week, the iPhone is so successful that Apple can launch an entire major part of their business and have it only work with the iPhone because they don't need it to work with Android phones. They don't want it to, and they don't need it to. The iPhone is so big they can launch the entire Apple Watch. Not to say that the Apple Watch won't eventually have its own cellular connection and lots of other stuff packed in it

and you won't need an iPhone with it, but I think you will always prefer to use it with an iPhone and they can do that because the iPhone is so huge. They can, and it's so huge, especially in the market that is the market for the Apple Watch,

which is the premium smartphone market. So I think the Apple Watch will which is the premium smartphone market. So I think the Apple Watch will, to answer listener Sean's question, I think the Apple Watch will absolutely become an independent device at some point, although I suspect it will be a lot less likely that somebody who doesn't have an iPhone will use it until the point where it's so powerful that you don't even need an iPhone anymore, maybe. I don't know. Maybe. But I think that right now, it's interesting that Apple doesn't need to worry about it being anything. It's not like the iPod, where the second generation, they put in music match jukebox for Windows and let it run on

Windows and then did iTunes for Windows after that, because they had to get to the PC for the iPod to be successful. The Apple Watch doesn't need to reach anybody but iPhone users to be successful. And that's how powerful the iPhone is. In a quick piece of impromptu follow-out, this week's episode, this past week's episode of the talk show with John Gruber and MG Siegler was the guest. They spoke a lot about kind of the Apple Watch and how they call it like a moat for the iPhone. I've never heard that term before, but it's quite smart.

Like it gets you in, you know, and it's one of those things that kind of like keeps you in the ecosystem, right? Because it's just something else that you have that then means that you must continue to buy an iPhone. And I just thought it was a really, they just spoke a lot about this. And if you haven't listened to it, you should.

I actually think that episode might be one of my favorites of this run. It's just absolutely fantastic. It's a shame that we don't get to hear from MG so much anymore, I think. Yeah. Yeah, because he's off doing Google Ventures stuff now. But people like to give MG a hard time

because he can be abrasive. And that's understating it a little bit. But he's a smart guy. He's a really smart guy. There's a reason Google hired him. Yeah. He's handling millions of dollars of Google's money. I think that there's a good reason for that.

But, yes, it's a really good piece. I think that there's a good reason for that. But yes, it's a really good piece. The more that we are getting closer to the Apple Watch, the more excited I am getting about the product. Like, you know, I keep seeing things pop up now, like people are doing design mock-ups of what they think some apps could look like and that kind of thing.

But just, you know, as we're getting closer to it and now we know that there's a kind of release date window, which means there'll probably be an event within maybe the next six weeks or so, I'm starting to get more and more excited about it. I am concerned that there may be a staggered release on this product, but we'll wait and see. Much more to be done there. Dan Morin and I have been working on a basically FAQ story for the Apple Watch. We want to start on six colors because we did one for Macworld on our last day at Macworld. But we want to do one for six colors so that we can also then update it as we learn more information about it. And it's actually been fun to comb through. Apple's released a huge amount of information about the Apple Watch. I think even now a lot of people don't understand all of the details that are already public knowledge about what is going on with the Apple Watch. So I'm hoping we'll post that in the next week or two and then really looking forward to more information coming out about it.

And I hope that you get an invite. That's what I hope. I hope so too. I'm not taking it for granted. I hope I do. That would be nice. Although the question is, what's the invite to? Because I don't think there's going to be an Apple Watch launch event.

So I hope they maybe contact me and have me review it. No, I think there will be another event. I think that they haven't given enough information publicly yet. And I think the best way to do a lot of that is to stand up on stage. Like, we haven't seen the demos from people that have made apps, which is something that they will want to show. We don't really know much about battery life. It would be really good maybe to show off some more of the customization options.

I think that an event would benefit the product quite a lot. And I'd be surprised. I don't see them doing an Apple Watch event. It is possible that what they'll do is try to time some other product launch, like maybe that MacBook Air that we've talked about a little bit, or some other product launch, or that iPad Pro Plus, whatever. launch that they, or that iPad pro plus whatever, maybe they find some other product, um, and do an event around that. That's timed to be a week or two before the Apple watch is going to come out. And that's when they do the, the, the, you know, reveal and they're like, Oh, let's talk about more about what's going on with the Apple watch. It's going to ship on this date and all of that. But I think that they would need to, I don't think they could just manufacture another Apple Watch event. I think it needs to be part of

something bigger. And so maybe that's it. If they can get their ducks lined up on that, that might work. And yes, I hope I continue to get invited to all sorts of Apple events. So we'll see. You never know with them. I'm not taking it for granted, but they've been very kind to invite me to at least one event as Mr. Six Colors. Although I'm everywhere, Mike. I'm all over the place. We'll get to some of this later, but I've got a thing, I think, today on tidbits, and I have a thing in iMore, and I may actually in the next few weeks make a return engagement as a freelance writer on a strange obscure site called Macworld. So I'm getting around. I'm getting around.

I'm around. I'm a visible presence in this industry apparently, not just on podcasts like yours. I love the idea of you writing for Macworld again. There's just something about that that's so beautiful i'm actually contractually barred from right from working for them until later this month so we'll see if i pop up after that but uh i'll leave that as cliffhanger we have one more um one more piece of follow-, which is actually about follow-up. Naturally.

Because we talked about follow-up last week. And the issues around how you structure follow-up on a podcast. And listener Nash wrote in and said, I'd be much more interested in your podcast if it wasn't focused so much on follow-up. I skip most episodes because of it. Sad face. And I actually talked to Listener Nash. I did a little back and forth with him on Twitter. And he said, I really like ATP. And I said, you know, they do a lot of follow-up too. He said, yes, that's my

least favorite thing about it. I'm like, all right, well. So I thought that was interesting. That's a person who doesn't like follow-up. I've always said that I like the idea of doing follow-up on this show because my other shows don't have it. Upgrading and Jeff also wrote in, and he suggested, I heard this from a few people, you could, I actually suggested this back in the day for Hypercritical, you could do two sessions, right? You could do a follow-up show and then you could do the topic show and you could release them both as sort of sub-episodes. So there'd be episode 21.1 and then there'd be episode 22.

I'm not sure what problem that solves other than the fact that people want to ignore feedback could not listen. At that point, you could put it at the end. I think that, you know, it adds complexity and podcasting. I found the simpler you make it. I'm trying lots of weird, complex things with podcasting as experiments. But it turns out that I think simplicity works best saying subscribe to this and you will listen to a show every week is the simplest thing to do. There's also some technical issues. And I'd be interested what you think about this, Mike. But I mean, there's a fundamental issue, which is we do a show with sponsors. And if you get a sub show, do you not sponsor that? Do you have that be sponsored separately? Are people listening to show A and not show B? It

gets messy in a way that this is messy in the sense that we've got a bunch of different segments, but it's not necessarily messy from a management perspective of the listener, because there's just one show to listen to i don't know it's it's i think there's no good answer here that pleases everybody um i've thought about we talked about putting it at the end we could do that uh i don't know what do you think i think follow-up at the end of the show is weird because you've probably already made more mistakes during the show which would also need to be followed up, and you don't have that follow-up yet. So it feels like quite...

I don't know, like, so you've completed episode 20, and then the corrections for episode 20 come at the end of episode 21, where you as an individual are now more informed before that point. So I feel like that there are some weird things there, and I see why we do it in this way. I think this is reiterating what I was saying last time. There is no way of doing this structurally that will please everyone. So if we want to continue doing it, which we do,

because I do think that it's an interesting and important part of the show, then I think doing it the way that we do it now is best because it's like the standard practice. If we started doing something else, you're probably going to upset more people than we would by doing it in another way. And the idea of having additional episodes, like the amount of problems that that would bring.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it adds complexity. Too much complexity, I think. The show episode numbers and the website pages won't match anymore right which would be a nightmare i i yeah i i totally agree i i think fundamentally i mean we need to be we need to not overdo it with follow-up because then the show is like literally and i felt like hypercritical would occasionally do this where it was eating its own tail like the show was not about new topics anymore. The show was always about what

they talked last week and other reactions to that. And you want to modulate that. You want to prevent that from going overboard. Also, the fact is, follow-up often is not about reading letters, although I did some of that last week, which I probably should have summarized more. But these are other topics. These are revisiting topics. So like us talking a little bit about the Apple Watch today, that was really a topic. It was follow-up that led to a topic. And this is likewise follow-up that leads from a topic. Anyway, I think what I would say is it's a young medium, this podcasting thing. We're always thinking about this stuff. I appreciate the feedback. I know Mike appreciates the feedback too. And then Mike and I talk about this all the time. Mike's got a

lot of shows. I got a lot of shows. We think about the right way to do this all the time. And so I appreciate the feedback and we're going to keep doing follow-up in the show, but we'll try to, we'll see how it goes. We're definitely talking about all the different ways we can possibly handle it. So, and I love getting the feedback. So keep on sending it. You can hashtag Ask Upgrade. You can tweet at me or Mike or you can tweet at underscore upgrade FM if you'd like. I think or send us email. One of the one of the frequent complaints that we do get on the show is that we talk about podcasting a lot and we're doing and not only are we doing it now i'm doing it more right now uh but i think the reason for that is is because of how invested we both are with the medium and it's interesting i think for

us because you said like because we me and jason we do talk about podcasting and this show from a technical and production perspective a lot when we're not recording. And I think it is because we are both trying to build parts of our business and our livelihoods on it. So naturally, that is going to be a prevailing topic on this show, along with how we talk about and we have spoken about what it's like to be an independent worker working on the internet, I think podcasting is always going to be a thread that goes across this.

But we're going to talk about a little later on something that you wrote on Six Colors, which kind of crossed the line between podcasting and writing. But just a quick question on that. Do you ever get complaints that you write about writing? No. No, I very rarely, or writing about podcasting. It's not for everybody. I think the difference is you can just skip a story that you don't like. Whereas one of the things with the podcast medium is you can't just skip to the next topic because that would require chapter markers. Every time.

And all prominent podcast apps to support them and a lot of extra work into marking the chapters. And even then, a lot of these conversations are free flowing. But I do think that's part of it is you just ignore it. And a podcast, I think people aren't in a position to just skip to the next thing. And so there's a responsibility there. In any linear medium, there's a bigger responsibility there. I get a lot of feedback from people saying, I love it when you write about the tools you use or how you write things or how you put together a podcast. I think some people want to know because they're trying to do it themselves. And some people want to know because they're fascinated by behind the scenes stuff,

just in general about how things get put together. And I think in our audience, we get that a lot. A lot of the people who listen to this show and read the sites we read and all of that are people who like to understand how things work and how things are put together. And so that creates a curiosity, whether or not they're actually going to do that stuff themselves. But I mean, like, seriously, that photo that I posted with the orange brain and everything else that was on my desk, everybody wanted to know what the stuff was on my desk and how I used it. They wanted to know that I thought, it's just my desk. It's stupid. Who cares? And they're like, No, we want to know. And so there's curiosity that and sometimes that can lead to good story fodder, too. So I don't know. Um, something I was going to mention and ask upgrade that I'm going

to, I'm going to throw out there now, which is we did get feedback from a particular listener who said, how much time do you spend each week discussing podcasts during podcasts? Basically, we answered a listener question about podcasts. Uh, this particular listener didn't want to hear it, which was so funny because we really had a good chat about that. Yeah. Well, and what's really funny is that he didn't want to hear it, but it was at the request of another listener. So he's basically saying, I don't care if somebody else wants to hear it. I don't want to hear it. So don't do it. That's fine. But what you just said is exactly what my response was, which is we're technical people.

We talk about technical issues involved in working in a new medium. That seems valid as a topic. This podcast isn't about podcasting, nor is it about working at home, but I think those are topics that can come up from time to time and that's okay. Also, this is where I want to talk about that.

I don't talk about that on any of my other podcasts. I don't talk about how to make podcasts on Clockwise or Incomparable or Total Party Kill. I don't do it there. But if I think there's an appropriate thing to talk about on Upgrade, I will. And I do aspire to discuss technical topics on Upgrade, including things like making podcasts. So this podcast doesn't turn into that, but we are going to talk about that from time to time as one of the many topics. And if that is too much, then that's fair enough.

But in the great words of Dan Benjamin, sorry to lose you as a listener. But that's just, we're going to talk about it as one of our topics. This show does have a focus on new media which i might put into the into the description sure because like we spoke about youtube last week right so there you go new media right let's take a quick break and and we're done with follow-up ding yeah we did it in about 25 minutes this week so it's not too bad this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by our friends over at hover quite simplyover is my favorite place. The only place that I ever go to buy domain names

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for this show. Thank you so much to Hover for sponsoring this week's episode. Okie dokie. So, Mr. Jason Snell. Yes, sir. We have a brand new app and we spoke about this a couple of weeks ago about how the Photos app had been removed mysteriously from the Apple website. And whilst I was playing conspiracy theorist, I believe that you did say they could just be getting ready to do something. And they did.

Yep. That made me look good, didn't it? Yeah, it's like a crystal ball over in California, over there. Amazing. Well, you know, we're breathing the same air, drinking the same water as the people from Apple. So maybe that gives me a little leg up on that. Yeah. So it turns out they were removing all those references to the Photos app, like coming later and very vague things,

because they were going to drop a beta of the Photos app and give it much more detail. And that's what they did. They released a beta of 10.10.3, which includes the new Photos app. And they briefed some people, Verge and Wired and Chris Breen and Macworld and a few other people about it in advance and released it to anybody with a developer account on Thursday, I think. on Thursday, I think. So yeah, now we've got a development version, at least, of this new Photos app and an idea when it's coming, which is spring, they said, and presumably whenever 10.10.3 is ready to go.

So have you tried it out yourself? I have. What has the experience been like? How did you get your photos into the app to start with? I'm interested. Well, I imported my personal iPhoto library, I think, and that imported okay. And then I tried to import a larger iPhoto library. And that didn't go as well. It crashed. It tried to convert it. And then I gave up after a while. And it was not great.

So I ended up taking those photos and just exporting them as originals and dragging those in. And that worked. And there are a bunch of different ways. I mean, it's a development version. So it's definitely got some import hiccups still that they're going to have to work on. But, you know, it's fast. And that's like the number one thing that iPhoto never was, is fast. It's even, you know, when you've got tens of thousands of photos, you want to be able to scroll through. And it feels very much like the iOS version of the Photos app. It's got that view of where it's trying to break it up into locations you've been over a small span of time. So it'll say

your home and this place you went on February 7th through 8th. And then it'll have photos there. It's very familiar if you've used the'll have photos there. And it tries to, you know, it's very familiar if you've used the iOS Photos app. But it's also got a lot of the same power. It's got smart albums. It's got editing tools that are, I think, pretty good. They've got simple editing tools, and they've got complex editing tools, and they've got some sort of preset tools that are in between. I think that's all good. The banner feature here is the iCloud syncing stuff, though, that it's going to use your iCloud photo library. And in fact, there's a setting in it that lets you say, basically,

I don't need to keep these files on my Mac. At which point, it's unclear what happens. There are a bunch of mysteries about this app that we have to investigate. Like when you import your photos, it says your disk space doesn't get used up. But if you delete the old photos from the old iPhoto library, I believe it still has them, which makes me wonder if it's doing some really weird like linking thing. I don't know quite what it's doing. So that's weird. And then when you set up the iCloud photo syncing, it says, when you say, I don't need to keep originals on my Mac, it doesn't say it's going to delete all of them off your Mac. It says it may delete them if there's not enough room, which is completely mysterious.

It's like, how does it know whether there's enough room? And if it's got 40 gigs worth of photos and I want to use that 40 gigs for something else, can I tell it to go away? How does that work? This is kind of like what – there's some stuff on iOS where this happens, right? So you have like – do you remember that thing where the apps would clean themselves? Do you remember that? Like when an iOS app would suspend

because it was removing data from the inside. Oh, yeah. Because your phone doesn't have a lot of space on it anymore. So it starts to get rid of data that's kind of like in limbo. So maybe they're doing something like that. Maybe it's like if you need, if you're getting close to your disk space and the system wants to free up like five gigabytes of photos,

they just remove the five gigabytes of photos that you haven't looked at in three years. Right. And you just get like really compressed thumbnails or something. That's my theory. Yeah, is similar, which is, I think what's happening is that there's a cache and it's like the iTunes cache where when you are using iTunes in the cloud, and you double click on a song to play it,

it downloads it. It doesn't just stream it, it downloads it in the background while it's playing it to a cache folder on your hard drive. And that cache folder, it'll sit there. So you're not re-downloading. If you listen to that song a few times, it's not going to re-download it. But obviously, there's a mechanism where if there needs to be disk space, either whether the system demands it or whether iTunes every now and then just cleans it up, that cache stuff gets wiped. And I think that's what's happening here is that iPhoto or a photos app is considering those cached once they're up in the cloud and that it can get rid of them at any point. I don't know the exact mechanism and whether it's app-based or it's system-based.

It'd be nice if it was system-based because, like I said, if I've got a podcast that's got 80 gigs of, or okay, maybe that's too many, 20 gigs worth of space and I need that space and the Photos app is using space that I know, does it go away or do I have to do something to make it go away? I think that's the unclear part here, but ideally it would just go away at that point. Cause once everything's up in the cloud, that's the beauty of this scenario is if you don't have the disk space and I don't have any computers that have enough disk space to hold the on, you know, other than on an external drive to hold all my photos now. I just don't have any computers because they're all SSD computers. So I'd like to be able to manage my photos on my Macs

without having to have 600 gigs of storage devoted to photos because I want that stuff out in the cloud. I'm willing to pay to have that stuff up in the cloud. And that's the promise here. So we'll see whether it delivers, but that's the promise. And I'm excited about that because I would like to have access

to my entire photo library from any device. I just don't want to have to manage the storage of that because that's a lot of stuff. And right now I do have this Mac mini with the Drobo attached to it. And that's where those photo libraries live, which is great, except we don't use the Mac Mini. It's like a server basically. And so if my wife or I want to pull out some old photo, it becomes this whole thing to do that. And what I'd much rather is even if we kept all the files on that computer,

I want access to the whole library from elsewhere quickly and easily. And that's the promise of photos is that if we do this right, it'll all be up in iCloud, it'll be on all our phones and iPads and our Macs, even if they don't have the originals, they can get them when we need them. So that's exciting. I think one of the fundamental problems though with the system, like whilst it's trying to be helpful, ambiguity in photo storage is a real problem. Like the idea of, we'll just take care of it. Don't worry, some of your photos will go away

and then they'll come back again when you need them. Like that is quite ambiguous as to how they're gonna manage that and what what you know it's kind of like up to an engineer's decision over what photos are kept and not kept and the problem with that is if there's a problem or you lapse in payment and don't realize and then your storage gets cut where do your photos go then because if they're not locally on the machine, because that's where there's 20 gigabytes of photos

from 1954 that you uploaded, right? Because you don't look at those a lot, but they're really important family photos that you want to keep. If they're gone and you don't back up locally or the local backup that you do is like a super duper clone, so it's just cloning what's physically on the machine, they're gone forever, potentially, at that point, right?

Because, I mean, I expect Time Machine will be enhanced to deal with this in some way, but if you don't back up that way, you might be in for a bit of a problem. Well, it seems to me that what Apple has done with the Photos app is said, look, if you want every file, you need to check this box and then every file will be there. And if you don't, you check this other box and then it won't.

It's on you, basically. And that's on you. And so for me, the way I will probably set this up, if I decide that this is good enough and we're going to use it everywhere in our family, what I will do is that Mac Mini that's got the giant Drobo, giant hard drive attached to it, will have it set to have all of them. So I'll have a hard drive with all the originals on it, and that one will get backed up. But if I didn't have that, I would be putting, yes, I would be putting my trust in Apple to not lose my data. And the fact is, Apple needs to get that right, right? I mean, this is not something you can get wrong.

Apple has to get that right. Even if people do, they don't get to say, well, you check the other box, you take your chances, we lost your photos. Sorry. Oops. You should have backed them up. This is not set up to work like that. This is set up like they are going to have your photos and period. That they will have your photos. And so they better be rock solid. But I feel that way about like, you know, my online backup. My online backup service better have my files, right? What if they screw up and my

backup goes away somehow? Well, then I'm in big trouble if I have a crash. And that's just something that, you know, at some point you are putting yourself in their hands, or if you really are concerned, you create your own backup. And in that case, you'd have one system with this, keep all the originals on this Mac setting set. And I would do that, like I said, on a different Mac. But what I'd like is on my Mac that's got an SSD in it to have access to all those photos when I want to from the cloud, but not actually have to use the storage space on this Mac because I don't want to do that. One of the things that's come out of the Photos app um through people digging through the code as they tend to do uh steve trunton smith is always a absolute like he's like a minor

you know like he just gets in there and he's just like digging in and he's finding things all the time like with his pickaxe his development pickaxe uh they've found people have found something called ux kit can you explain to me what this is and why this is potentially significant these development pickaxes, people have found something called UXKit. Can you explain to me what this is and why this is potentially significant? So UXKit is something that was used. It's a private framework, so it's only supposed to be used by Apple.

And it's in 10.10.3 and Photos. And, okay, without getting this is, welcome to Build and Analyze. This is, I am not a developer, so take that for what it's worth. The frameworks that developers use to build iOS apps are something called UIKit. And that doesn't exist on the Mac. There's something called AppKit that you use to build apps on the Mac, but it's not the same as UIKit. And a lot of the muscles that iOS app developers have built up using UIKit are not available on the Mac. So it makes iOS developers, people very familiar with iOS, building Mac apps, it makes it harder.

And developers have tried to find ways to bridge this. The Icon Factory spent a lot of time trying to find ways to bridge this so that they could bring Twitterific iOS code base to the Mac. And it seems like with the Photos app, Apple has done it, where Apple has built this UX kit, which it seems from the people who are investigating this that it's sitting on top of AppKit, that it's bringing some of the controls that you're used to in UIKit over to the Mac. Not all of them. It's not a total replacement. But the idea is it could potentially grease the skids for iOS developers who want to make Mac apps and use their iOS code, or maybe it's just their skill set. It's kind of unclear. Different developers can disagree.

Brent Simmons wrote a piece where he says, I don't think anybody's ever going to use this except Apple. And it's not a complete solution here. It might be useful for people in very limited ways. And then I saw another developer who replied to Brent's thing and said, yes, but those limited ways would be really great if we had access to easier ways to build this stuff that's a lot more like we know from iOS. So it's intriguing because this is the first time Apple's let this thing out of the box, out of Cupertino. And developers' ears all perked up because they've been wanting something that's more iOS-like on the Mac so that they could apply their skills in similar ways. Because again, this is not the same as saying, you know, it's going to run iOS apps. That's not what this is.

But it is ways of developing Mac software that are more like ways of developing iOS software. And developers would be excited about that. So if at WWDC this year, Apple were to announce, hey, we have this thing called UXKit, and now you guys are going to be able to use it too in 10.11, we're using it now in photos, don't tell anybody, but you guys will all get it with 10.11. It'll be official then. And here's the documentation and start learning how to use it. And you can apply your iOS skills on the Mac. They would be excited about that. Brent Simmons says, I don't think that's going to happen.

Other people think that it might, or maybe that's wishful thinking. But I think as Mac users, that's very exciting because the easier it is for these iOS developers to bring software to the Mac because it works more like the way they're thinking, the better it is for Mac users because there'll be either more Mac apps or better Mac apps. I think that could be a good thing. So anyway, that's interesting like super nerd trivia about the Photos app is that it seems to be built using UXKit, which my guess is the internal developers at Apple who built the Photos app on iOS built the Photos app on Mac and they wanted to apply same story. They wanted to apply some of that knowledge

and work to the Mac app and they built a framework that is more iOS-like on top of the Mac frameworks. It seems logical to me to do this because it's like it just feels like you should try

and find ways to bridge the gap a bit because i'm sure it's easier to do it front do it this way like ios to the mac rather than the other way around right naturally um but like to make more iose apps on the mac would enable people who make ios apps to be able to make mac apps easier right and and doing that, it makes the ecosystem better. As Apple is like pushing the integration between OS X and iOS, like we have handoff and continuity and stuff like that. I think it makes sense that you would enable your developers to do the same thing.

Like Marco has spoken about on ATP about an overcast Mac app and the struggles in potentially doing that. And I mean, I would expect not that he would necessarily do it, but it would make it easier for him to make a Mac app if there were some tools and frameworks that were more similar to iOS. To the point where you could reuse code, basically. you could reuse code, basically. Yeah, and again, even if you couldn't reuse all your code, if you could reuse some of it because you understand the way that drawing tables works in iOS, and now you've got a way that does that on the Mac, that would be good. That would make it easier. So, you know, again, I wrote a story about it really quickly because I saw some people

on Twitter getting really excited about it as they discovered this. And it would be exciting for some developers if this happens. So it's kind of a neat story. It'll be interesting to see. Yeah, Steve Trout and Smith will continue to dig through it and find what all the... I mean, that'll happen, especially since the Mac is not locked down like iOS is. They can reverse engineer this and use those tools if they really want to. The problem is it's a beta OS. And if things change in the next beta, everything they do will break. But, you know, certainly I love it when people play that, you know, they're doing the detective work to figure

out what's going on with Apple and hoping that this is a sign that this is something that they'll be given eventually themselves. Because if it's good enough for Apple, and Apple's trying it with and developing it perhaps with this Photos app in mind. Also, the other thing that I had several people talk about, including Gruber, and it's funny, Dan Morin and I the day before were talking about this same thing, which is, could you use this same approach to create a music app on the Mac instead of itunes that would be interesting too

yeah there's been there's been quite a bit of discussion about that recently we were talking about it on connected um in regards to the fact that apple were looking at not using beats right so that they're looking at creating a brand new streaming service that takes from both like at the point that you do that if you add that to itunes which is the logical thing you you itunes will start to implode upon itself so you know the idea that maybe this will finally be the key for what people have been wanting apple to do for years is to uncouple it from itself and have a music app and an iPhone or an iOS-focused app that has the App Store in it. Maybe just call it the App Store app or whatever, and it manages

your iPhone. You just look at iOS. And I had people say, well, iTunes does so much. How could you do that? Well, look at iOS. There's a music app, there's a videos app, there's an iTunes app, and there's an App Store app. Well, the Mac's already got the App Store app. You could very easily have an iTunes app that was literally storefront and syncing. And then music and videos could essentially be a rebranded version of even the QuickTime app with a little more UI. Or they could do something new again, but QuickTime 10 is already weird enough that they could just keep going down that road if they wanted to. And then there's the music app, and you do a much better dedicated music player that's got the subscription service integrated and it's got the music integrated. I think that

would be the way to go. And then I also hear from people who are like, but what about on Windows? What would they do on Windows? Well, I'm not sure they care. And if iTunes just continued to be floating around as a dog on Windows, whereas there was this super awesome new generation of apps on the Mac, I think that's okay. Honestly, I think Apple would think that was okay. I don't think they're going to turn off Windows compatibility, but if the experience of interacting with your media, I mean, this is core system level media playback, right? Music on the Mac is iTunes, and the Mac cannot be held back because we've got to do it on Windows. Forget that. That is ridiculous.

Like, that is not the way you got to play this game. That is not the way you got to play this game. iTunes for Windows can continue to be there and be kind of crappy and whatever, but it needs to not be the thing that holds back the Mac. And when you're seeing the trend with the Mac and iOS, where it's now not iCal, it's Calendar, and it's not Address Book, it's Contacts. This is the direction they're going, is all these things are going to match up and you've got the service on iOS and the service on the Mac.

And they're not identical apps, but they've got the same names and the same functions. And if you go down that path, then absolutely they're going to need to get to a place where there is a music app and a videos app and an iTunes app that's the store. And I think that is what's going to happen. I think it's just a question of when.

And I hope it's soon because iTunes is not, I use iTunes every day to listen to music and it is not very good. If you look at iTunes 12, it's kind of like that. It's like they siloed all these things and then put them together. In a tab. Yeah, which is so weird, but that's kind of what it's like. It's like five different apps in iTunes now it's very peculiar but the Windows argument I don't think it holds up because iTunes for Windows existed for iPods

and then for iPhones both of which you don't need a computer for anymore I think they want to keep it around but I don't think they need to invest anything in it and I don't think they need to invest anything in it and i don't think that it needs to hold them back with what they do on the mac there's no there would there would be no reason to create music.app for windows but no they may do they might do something

because like their talk of them making an android app of this music well there's a beats android app so i think they want to keep the they want to keep that around because there's a beats android app so i think they want to keep the they want to keep that around because there's a beats android app i think they want to keep that around as a subscription service but yeah maybe so maybe so i just i i just have a hard time believing that apple's going to let the mac get held back because they have a some sort of imaginary obligation to providing parody on windows that's not going to happen i don't think it will let's talk about a couple of things that you've written this week but before we do that let's to providing parity on Windows. That's not going to happen. I agree with you. I don't think it will. Let's talk about a couple of things that you've written this week.

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and you can sign up right now at igloosoftware.comcom upgrade so if you have a team you should go and check it out thank you so much to igloo for supporting this show and all of relay fm okie dokie so one of your new uh ventures um is you you i believe were the the inaugural person on iMore's back page column. Yes. So if you wonder where the back page of a website is, it's apparently on Friday and on iMore. So yeah, Rene and Serenity asked me to do a, I think I'm going to be doing them fairly regularly

until they tell me they don't want me anymore. And so I kicked it off. So they me to write a an op-ed piece and serenity gave me some specific uh ideas which i thought was great because a lot of what i've been writing lately is like completely wide open um what what the heck am i gonna write about today kind of stuff which is uh interesting but i like that the tables have turned and ren's now your boss yeah oh sure she's she's hiring you for work now yeah that's sure she she pays me and uh and uh it's an interesting it's interesting um although it's funny working with uh people that i've worked with on and off for for years you get that funny moment of relief, which I'm glad they're relieved and not driven crazy.

They're like, oh, yeah, you know how to do this. Instead of, boy, it's a lot of work. I got to edit this guy and all that. It's like, oh, yeah, this is good. Good. Thanks. Right? It's just like a relief that I'm not causing them trouble.

But, yeah, so she had some suggestions, which was great because that's kind of a nice challenge. And I was able to come up with something that kind of fit within the themes that she was looking for. And that was a lot of fun. So I wrote this piece called Apple and the Agents of Change, which I like to refer to as Marvel's Apple's Agents of C.H.A.G.E. It's coming soon to nowhere. it's coming soon to nowhere anyway yeah Apple and the Agents of Change which is about you know Wren wanted me to write about

changes in my life and changes at Apple and could I find ways to connect those and I tried to do that so people should go read the piece it'll be in the show notes which are in your podcast app or relay.fm upgrade 22 except for Monty Ashley, my friend,

who does not read show notes, but we'll get to that. Yeah, we'll get to that. So this is a really interesting piece. And one of the things that you're talking about is like Apple have no fear and have in the past had no fear to just move forward. And one of the great,

you picked out a couple of great things. I really liked the anecdote that Steve basically effectively threw away all of the nostalgia things that Apple were keeping around. They had like a company museum. Yes. And he basically said, get it away. And they sent it all off to Stanford to be kept by whoever in whatever department keeps Silicon Valley history troves at Stanford University. But he got it out of the building.

He was like, get it away. The other, like, Oh look, we're going to save this. And we've got all these old Macs and all Apple twos and all this documentation.

He's like, get, get it away. I imagine him saying that. Like he, like he was allergic to it. Like literally get it away from me. Ah,

that, you know? Yeah. That's one of my favorite Steve jobs, uh, quotes because it just says everything about his approach to, uh, the past versus the future. Like, very focused on the future, doesn't care about the past.

That was his thing. This is something that Apple were very frequently criticized for, right? Oh, you're making me buy that $25 dongle peripheral cable again. But that is an example of them wanting to move forward and move ahead and and so it's a very interesting thing so when i was reading this piece and i really don't want to be that guy okay so i'm just saying that up front okay i don't want to be that guy but i'm gonna you are that guy i am but you didn't want to be all right the examples that you give are examples of things that steve did right? Because that's the history.

However, and I know that you go in and you talk about like the what would Steve do type thing and how he effectively asked, please don't do that. But do you think that Apple will remain this way without Steve? Do you think that one of the prevailing things of the culture will be to continue moving forward or, as John Roderick would say, to keep moving and get out of the way? I do I I I said that in the piece that I I think one of the greatest gifts that Steve Jobs gave to his his uh future Apple executives was the you know the corporate culture that Steve Jobs built wasn't here are the things that I like, do these things. It was a way of thinking about this, how they do business and a way of thinking about change and changing your mind and analyzing what's coming down the road and making good decisions about the products they make, but also not being afraid to cannibalize their own business. Lots of things like that. And I feel like it gives them in some ways kind of carte blanche to change what Steve would have

wanted. And now eventually they're going to get past that. It's going to be so far away that you're not going to be able to hold up a Steve Jobs quote and say, Steve said you shouldn't do this. But right now they're in it, right? They're in the, let's do a watch, let's do an eight-inch tablet, let's do all sorts of things. Let's do a music streaming service. Let's buy a company for a lot of money and do a music subscription streaming service, which Jobs wasn't into. Because Jobs doesn't have the opportunity to look at the data that we have today and change his mind, which is what he did all the time. So I think they've got as good a chance. I've said this before.

I think they've got as good a chance as anybody does to succeed at this because that was instilled in the culture and because they built Apple University to try and continue to instill those approaches into the people who work at Apple. They might or might not make it. It's not going to mean that they're not going to make mistakes. They absolutely are. But I think that they are escaping from the paralysis of not knowing what to do because Steve isn't around. And I think it's a healthy thing for any company to have or anybody to have of saying, look, change is going to happen. Let's be the ones who make it and not the ones who resist it. And I think that is Apple's, that is one of Apple's great assets. In addition to all of the things about their supply chain and their product design philosophy

and all those things we talk about a lot i think one of the apple uh strengths is having this culture of um not being not waiting around for somebody else to do it not protecting their investment that not killing that goose that lays the golden egg but instead trying to be the agents of change and one other thing that i was interested in this because it just got me thinking you know because you mentioned a couple of ways that tim is like carving his own apple and i think that that is so clear like decisions that he has been making are so different but still kind of the same but like you know you mentioned like the acquisition of beats is a huge one um and you know like the some of the different changes that they're making in products like bigger iPhones like if they do a stylus like

it's another big thing that I think that they should think about. And if they do it in the right way, it's Apple-y, but it was not necessarily Steve Jobs-y. And you also mentioned like, I can't remember what it's called now, but like the employee giving program. Oh yeah, yeah. The philanthropy, the matching program that just wasn't there. The philanthropy stuff wasn't on Jobs' radar. And that was one of the first things Tim Cook did, which was reversing something that either Steve Jobs, I don't know if he forbade it, but he didn't do it. And it was an easy one for Tim Cook to be

like, yeah, we're doing that now. So do you think that some of these things make Tim Cook's apple maybe a better apple? It's tough to say better. I think it has the potential to make them better. I think really what we're talking about is you're losing all of the things that made Steve Jobs great because he's gone. But he spent a decade trying to instill those things in the culture.

And again, Apple University is meant to continue doing that. So hopefully you keep at least the way of approaching the world that Steve Jobs had in the company culture. You're not going to have the hold up a product and use it for a little bit and make lots of keen observations about what's wrong with this product and why it sucks and why we need to do better. You're going to lose that. But you've got people who work with Steve Jobs, people who've been trained in this approach who could individually have aspects of what he was good at. So, okay, maybe you lose a lot of product taste and, uh, maybe you make that up by having a bunch of other people who have good taste too,

um, but are in different areas. So you put that all together. Um, I, I, uh, it does that, does that company match the Apple with Steve Jobs? No, it doesn't. It might come closer than you might think. Cause there are a lot of people who would say, well, without Steve Jobs, they're, they're doomed. No, there are a lot of talented people at Apple. But what you do gain, and I don't know whether it's enough to make it as good or better or what, but what you do gain is a variety of perspectives from all those people as opposed to the perspective of Steve. had blind spots. Steve absolutely had blind spots. And I say that as somebody who, from the outside, would look at some of what his decisions were and be like, why do they do that? And I said this for a while that I didn't think Apple TV and Apple's approach to TV on iTunes made a lot of sense because I had this sneaking suspicion that Steve Jobs just didn't like TV and didn't care about it. And so it was a blind spot for Apple. I feel like the streaming service thing, the

subscription service thing, Steve Jobs had his way of consuming music and that was buying albums. And he was a child of the 60s. So buying albums was his thing. And so he could get behind electronically buying albums, but to get to singles, to get to streaming was a lot harder for him. And that blind spot is gone because Steve's gone. So you eliminate Steve's blind spots because through diversity, now you've got a bunch of different people who have different takes on all this stuff. And hopefully they're working in a framework where this can lead to good decisions being made where you don't have, ideally, you don't have one person somewhere who's like, no, I don't care about it. We're not doing it, which I think Steve had

had that kind of power. He was, he was such a strong personality that like, if he really loved album art, everybody was going to prioritize engineering things that showed off album art, like CoverFlow and the, that iPad music app, the original iPad music app. And I would argue that was always one of my pet peeves is that Steve really loved album art and I think it's stupid. And that bad UI led from the decision of showcasing album art. But I don't think album art as a concept is stupid.

I think Apple totally overemphasized it. And I suspect that's because Steve really liked it and liked to talk about it and they wanted to please him. So in the end do i think apple is a better apple than before uh you know i i don't know how you measure that i would say uh they're different and they they have the opportunity to not have the blind spots that were there when you have one personality driving so much of what they did my girlfriend just got a new um a new macbook pro and um one one of the things that I have been tasked to do

is to give her some tips and tricks as to how to use it. She has used Macs, but only really used them for work. So now this is her personal computer as well. And I was showing her column view in Finder because I said to her it's the best way to move around Finder, in my opinion. Do you agree or disagree with that? I hate column view.

Steve Jobs loved column view because it's the next browser view, but I hate it. What do you use? List. Okay. So I like column because it's also list list but you can get more on the screen you can and i like because it shows you your path so anyway but that's that's my my preferred um but

i noticed that like cover flow is still in finder and basically the way i explained to her is like this is only good now for looking at pictures but even then it doesn't make any sense just use thumbnails and i cannot understand why it's still in finder like i just can't see who's using it like no it's like a memorial to steve jobs it's like steve love this let's keep it in there no it's terrible and you're right even the great thing about the current finder is that you can set things to icons and have them be sorted and have them have very large icons And that's great for a folder full of pictures. And they're sorted and arranged properly with big preview icons as thumbnails as the icons. It's great.

I don't know why you would ever use CoverFlow View. Now we're going to get some follow-up of somebody who loves CoverFlow. If you have a real person, if you have a real reason for using it, I want to hear it. I'm interested now. Right.

So should we just, let's just quickly touch on this other piece that you wrote, because I think that it's an interesting one called Nobody's Listening. Right. What was the intention of this article that you wrote? Well, I was struck by the fact that Marco Arment got a firestorm of coverage for him saying that Apple might have some software quality problems when he'd been saying that and his colleagues on ATP had been saying that forever. And then he wrote an article about it, and people went nuts over that. And I was fascinated by that. I mean, it's obvious on one level. It's like, well, people don't listen to podcasts,

but I think it's true. I think Marco would even say, he suggested as much on Twitter that more people listen to ATP than read his blog. So what's the story? And the answer is, well, it got me thinking about audiences because the ATP audience hearing them talk is listening to them. It's listening to them for all their episodes. It's all in the context of what they're talking about. You get the history. You know who these guys are. You know what they're talking about.

Whereas Marco writes a piece there. First off, he's probably, he's admitted, he sort of dashed it off. He's probably thinking in the context of ATP. These are conversations that we've all had on his podcast, on other podcasts, on other Mac sites, other Apple-related columns, whatever. We've talked about this stuff. So he writes this thing saying, look, I think this is a problem and it's bugging me. And he uses some language that he regrets later, and that's fine. But the difference is that that's really shareable. And somebody who is not in the audience and doesn't understand the context can read that or can have it passed to them. And then it blows up. And it blows up

because there's a completely different audience that's now coming into contact with it and doesn't have any context. I think that's interesting about this collision of mediums. But also, as somebody who does a lot of podcasts, it made me think about the fact that, like I said, nobody's listening. People are listening, but podcasts are a medium that is kind of walled off from, and this is good and bad, walled off from viral sharing. It's bad because it means that a podcast clip can't go viral like a YouTube clip can. Certainly not easily. It's good in the sense that when we're having conversations on podcasts, it's to an audience that really, I think, generally understands a context that is richer and broader than somebody who comes to an article on a website because they

did a Google search or because somebody linked to it on Twitter, because there's no context. Then you get your loyal audience, and then you've got this audience that knows nothing about you, is never going to read anything by you again, has dropped in to see this thing. And if you've got comments on your website, well, then leave a nasty comment like a bag of flaming poop on your website will then leave a nasty comment like a bag of flaming poop on your door and then they're gone and they never come back. So I was just struck by that. And so I wrote this thing that's about like, we like to think that audiences are monolithic, but they're not. There are lots of different kinds of audiences and different stuff you do reaches them in different ways. We can't assume that everybody listens to the podcast and reads the websites. We can't assume people read the show notes,

because Monty Ashley says he listens to 10 podcasts a week and has never once looked at show notes before. I told the story about the guy who won our incomparable iTunes review contest, and I couldn't find him because he didn't read our Twitter account, and he didn't read the show notes. And until I put a thing at the beginning of an episode that said, please, if you're this person, write to me. And then he immediately wrote to me because he listened to the show. That's all he did. All that other stuff, interacting on Twitter,

that we think of as being our audience, is with a little chunk of our audience. The chat room is a little chunk of our audience. So I was just thinking about that, about how we think of audience. It's so easy to think of audience as monolithic and it's really not like not even close you linked to a dig article cool yeah is this thing on where they talk about the the fact that audio content doesn't get shared yeah in the same way like and and this led me to i was thinking a lot about this and it's not something I've done anything about because I haven't got a good answer for it. But I was thinking about this a lot when we were thinking about Relay. And I have my own little story about this,

which I don't know if I've ever told before. So if we've got a minute, I would like to tell it. Sure. I interviewed John Roderick on Command Space, and one of my most favorite episodes that I did. It was the second time they interviewed him. And there was a quote that a lot of people were sharing from the article. And Marco even wrote a little piece on his blog where he quoted it, he transcribed it. on his blog where he quoted it, he transcribed it.

And it was about the kind of the idea of the quote and Marco titled the kind of the clip that he wrote, we're just flipping through index cards. And he was talking about like the way that you create things and like being creative. And it was just such an interesting, like obviously Roderick was going through a time where he was thinking about how you create and where you put things and really it was kind of it blew my mind as it did for a lot of people like you know so it was it was just this really interesting quote and i was watching

marco's link getting shared a lot but it didn't change the listener numbers of the episode so people were tweeting about it like there was a musician i wish i could remember what band it was he was from um i might be able to find it actually and i'll report back on some real-time follow-up in a moment but like he even tweeted it and again i don't i don't know how he came across it i think he may have linked to marco's piece well. And it was just very peculiar. But what it showed to me is it's just the way in which people will find something is the way that they will just consume it. And they're happy with that. Very, very, very peculiar.

And the dig, it's funny. I wrote a piece and quoted Marco from an ATP episode. It's funny. I wrote a piece and quoted Marco from an ATP episode. And it was the same thing where I felt like on one level, I was kind of getting this statement by Marco out into a wider world. Because I went through the trouble of, as I do every week, it's not trouble, but I went through the effort, the time involved to listen to ATP and then think, oh, that's really interesting. I want to write about that, but I need the context. So I wrote down a couple paragraphs that Marco had said on ATP, and then I wrote a thing quoting it and then commenting on it. And I did have that moment of thinking, this is like moving this medium to this different place where if that was something controversial, this is what would get passed around because people didn't listen to the episode,

but they can pass this around. And that's what that Dig article is pointing out, which is there is no way to make a viral video from podcast audio right now that's standard and commonly used. And as a result, like I said, podcasts are great in that they have this context shared with them. They are bad in the sense that it's much harder to get a cool little two-minute bit shareable unless you transcribe it. And you're not going to transcribe a whole podcast. So it ends up being you transcribe this little bit. And most people are never going to do that for like a viral whatever. And so it just is lost. And I don't know what, you know, like I said, I don't know if there is a solution other than the fact that there really should be a really awesome

web embeddable audio player that follows a similar kind of format to what YouTube videos do where you can link to a particular time code that would be really nice I understand there's some technical limitations there but that would be great failing that though yeah I love podcast audiences because they're so loyal. But the downside is that there is such a it's like a little pocket universe off to the side of the Web. And until somebody writes something down like what Marco did when he wrote that story and stepped in a little bit, but he wrote that that was perfectly in context of his podcast.

But to the Web, it's like no other context ever existed. It was like, oh, now he's really had it. Well, no. He's been talking about this for months. But that's not how it read. It's funny. Funny world. It was Adam Lazarer of Taking Back Sunday. Okay.

So there you go. Real-time follow-up there. Anyway, it is funny that we think about people who listen to podcasts and then people who read websites and people who are on Twitter and people who are in the chat room. And, you know, and those people are great. People who read footnotes. I had a footnote in my piece that said, I also love people who read footnotes. But, you know, it's not everybody. And it's important to if you're making content on the internet, it's important to keep that in mind.

And if you're somebody who loves podcasting like I do, it's one of the peculiar things about the medium is that it is walled off. So that you can get this tempest in a teapot that happened when Marco wrote this thing that to a podcast listener was like not news. Jason, who is presenting Ask Upgrade for us this week? Hashtag Ask Upgrade is brought to us this week by the good people at stamps.com. Now, if you're a small business or you've got a home business, getting your mailing and shipping done can seem like a no-win situation. If you're working after hours from your regular job. You can't go to the post office because it's closed. You could lease a postage meter.

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I've got some stickers and t-shirts and things like that, and so it's been fun to use that as the fulfillment center instead of what normally happens, which is my wife and I keep making lists of things we have to go to the post office to do. We haven't had to do that because we've got a stamps.com scale and we've got the stamps.com service. And it's been much easier to fulfill orders and send out products with that. So pretty cool. There is currently a promo code available, by the way. It's promo code upgrade, and you'll get this special offer, a no-risk trial. And there's a $110 bonus offer, which includes a digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. So don't wait. Go to stamps.com. Before you do anything else, look up at the top of the homepage,

find the microphone, click on it, and type in upgrade. That's click on the microphone at stamps.com, type in upgrade, stamps. on the microphone at stamps.com type in upgrade stamps.com thank you very much for sponsoring upgrade and uh for letting me send a box to dan and something mysterious soon to mike thank you stamps.com jason hashtag ask upgrade uh listener aaron says jason and mike what is your thought about the news regarding Pebble and their new operating system and hardware? Have you had any thoughts about this? This came in as we were doing the show last week. Pebble announced new operating system and hardware on the way.

The thing that I actually found the most interesting, I mean, I saw that, and great because we are both Pebble users. New hardware, I'm not too fussed about. I'm not going to buy a new pebble yep uh because i will replace my pebble with an apple watch i'm sorry uh pebble people but i i will do that um the thing that i found the most interesting is that they sold over a million um and they they put a little, they made a little infographic and I'm going to try and find the infographic. But basically they sold a million Pebbles faster than Apple sold a million iPods, which I know is like a thing where it's like, well, you know, there are so many different factors

as to why that could have happened and why it didn't, like why it didn't, why it didn't. However, I just think it's really cool. I just think it's a really cool statistic that they sold that you know oh here we go i've got it from the website now um pebble sold 1 million smart watches after its first seven quarters apple sold 977 ipods after its first seven quarters so i think it's interesting i'm happy for them i think it's amazing i am too i i uh we talked about this before a little bit i feel like there is room in the market at this point for a nice

low-end smartwatch with long battery life i feel like they should not try to compete with the android smartwatches of the apple watch They should be a notch down. They should add some fitness features and all of that, but if they can be cheaper and have that week long, or even if it's like three or four day long battery life, I think that's their best approach going forward. Because I don't think, it's a little company, I don't think they're going to be able to keep up with Samsung and Motorola and Apple, but I think that there's a place for them. Samsung and Motorola and Apple, but I think that there's a place for them. As an iPhone user, they're really limited in what they can do with the iPhone.

Their Android features are much better than their iPhone features because the OS supports more. And let's be honest, the Apple Watch is going to be the thing that Apple connects really well. And I don't think that stuff's going to be available to other watchmakers. So I think the jig is up once the Apple Watch is out. But that said, I don't have anything against the Pebble. And in fact, I'm wearing it right now. I've been wearing this Pebble most days for two years. I got it two years ago, I think like today, two years ago. And for what I paid for it on Kickstarter, having this as my watch for the last two years totally worth it uh it tells the time it does some other neat things but it it's a uh a fun you know bit of technology that tells the time and yeah am i going to replace it when the apple watch comes out almost certainly that's fine like i have a relay fm watch face that friend of the show rob lewis built and i

every time i look at my watch i see the like a relay fm star watch face and it's like that's just so cool you know i love that that's the case and you know it will be a shame to for that sort of stuff because it is a little bit maybe a little bit more fun than the Apple Watch will be because it's kind of different. But I am, you know, as we said earlier, I'm very, very excited about the Apple Watch because the Pebble was kind of onboarded me to that, you know?

Yeah. You know, there won't be any custom faces in the Apple Watch at launch, but I think it's only a matter of time before there's a developer kit that allows for custom watch faces. It'll happen. It's a definite thing.

It'd be crazy not to eventually do it. It kind of is very surprising to me that there won't be custom watch faces at launch. It seems like such a logical thing to do. I think they want to control the look of the experience because the fact is with the Pebble, there were lots of custom watch faces from the beginning that were lousy. And so, you know, I think Apple doesn't want their watch to look junky. I think they want to have like total control and be really

happy with the refined faces that are available. So I feel like that's like step one is we're going to make some good faces. You're going to use these faces. And then step two will be, okay, you can do custom faces through the app store and we'll have to approve them, et cetera, et cetera. I think it will happen, but I'm not too surprised that they didn't happen, have it happen up front because I feel like that's like totally an Apple's wheelhouse of we want to control this. And I see why, because a junky face on that watch does not do them any good. watch does not do them any good i will i was just reminded by joe steel in the chat room that there would be a mickey mouse there will be and so i questioned that one but but i understand uh the jacob holt wrote in to say what do you think of the doom of radio shack and is best by next uh i don't really have an opinion i would say to the second part of the question yes like eventually all of those stores will will go away the age the age of the dedicated electronics retailer is has already ended and the ones that are left are kind of just there

on inertia like best buy tried to launch in the UK and they opened a bunch of stores and I think they were closed, all closed within a year. Like there is just not a need anymore for something like this to exist when every other big store sells electronics as well as online. We only have one of these types of stores left in the UK

and the one that's left is like the company that owns it we only have one of these types of stores left in the UK. And the one that's left is the company that owns it basically bought up over time, like the three major companies. What we have at the moment is a company called Curry's PC World. And basically there was a company called Curry's, a company called Dixon's. Dixon's was where the terrible Apple retail guy came from. You remember that?

Yeah. And PC World. And PC World. Yeah, they were the three that we had. And then Curry's bought Dixon's and then bought PC World and became Curry's PC World. So, you know, I say this to say, like, they are going away and there's kind of only ever space for one of them

because people will still maybe need one, but that need will go away soon as well because Walmart and Target, they will hold all the TVs and computers that you need in some instances. And then you've got companies like Apple, who the best place to go and buy Apple products is in the Apple store, and Microsoft is trying to do the same. So there you go.

These experienced stores will remain, but these big box retailers will go away i think you're right in fact i wonder sometimes if if uh you might not see tv manufacturers do something similar where they've got like a little experience store where you come and look at the 4k tvs and and have have something like that but generally yeah a lot of this is going to be online or it's going to be in other retailers and uh it's going to go away radio shack is to be credited for surviving as long as it did because it kept having to try and reinvent itself and so because it was a store for radio ham radio hobbyists that's how it started it was crazy and over time it adapted they were one of the leading computer manufacturers in the early days of the PC with the TRS-80. And they adapted again to be a cell phone store. And in fact, the fact that Sprint is interested

in buying up a bunch of their stores tells you the story there that these are located in places where having a cell phone store sort of makes sense. But as a dusty electronic hobbyist kind of thing, that stuff is on the internet. And in fact, I would never go to one here because we actually have an electronics hobbyist store that has so much more stuff than Radio Shack because it's like the place to go. And it's bigger and it's the people who are there are like totally into all of the technology and they know all of it. And at Radio Shack, it was like a guy who didn't know anything. I've been into RadioShack three times in the last like five years or 10 years, and it's to buy their little, they have little battery operated clip on

microphones that were pretty good. And so if like I was somewhere and I didn't have the microphone, I forgot it or something. This just happened in San Diego when I was down there for Comic-Con and I needed another microphone. I thought, oh, I'll go to Radio Shack and I bought one. That's it. Can't keep them in business buying a microphone every four years.

So, you know, it's amazing. They stayed in business as long as they did. And yeah, it's time to go. And I think retail is just changing. This is yet another way that retail is changing. Samsung opened one of those experience stores in a Westfield Mall here, which is quite a large Westfield Mall on the Olympic site. So where the Olympic Park is, a place called Stratford here. They recently closed it.

It didn't do very well for them. It was huge. It was so dumb. But there you go. We have one more, which is a list of Chris wrote in to say, Jason, sorry, Mike, hopefully it'll be in the UK soon. How frequently do you use Apple Pay? And my answer is, Chris, you know, I don't leave the house very much, right? I used to go into San Francisco every day, and I don't now. I'm in my little town here.

There are lots of days where I don't get into a car. And so as a result, I don't use Apple Pay that frequently. I use it every time I go to Whole Foods, and I used it at the World Series to buy a hot dog. But every time I go to Whole Foods, I pay with it because that's the place I go to. It's right by my house, and they have Apple Pay. And so I use it every time I go to Whole Foods, I pay with it because that's the place I go to. It's right by my house and they have Apple Pay. And so I use it every time I go to Whole Foods, but that's it. I have not used it elsewhere, but I'm not sure I'm on the best example. It does mean that sometimes I find myself having left the house with only my iPhone, feeling like I could go to Whole Foods if I wanted to, even though I forgot my wallet, because I can pay with my iPhone. We have a

Starbucks that just opened next to the Whole Foods, and I can pay with the Starbucks app at the Starbucks. So I could now leave the house without a wallet and do okay for myself. I could buy some manchego, get a hot chocolate at Starbucks, just have a grand old time before I had to come home. The wild adventures of Jason Snell. Oh man, Whole Foods is not enough. You got to go to Starbucks too. There's a Bank of America in there I could take out. Oh no, I need my wallet.

See? Apple Pay. Anyway, that's how I use Apple Pay is to buy generally beer, peanut butter, and Mignola Tangelo's at Whole Foods. I'm surprised. I am surprised that we don't have Apple Pay yet. I thought we would have had it by now. But alas, no. I know that I will use it a lot though, because I use contactless payment on my debit card basically every time I use my debit card. So there we go. I expect that I will be a big user of Apple Pay. If and when it launches. All right.

I think that brings to an end Ask Upgrade for this week, which means we're left with one more segment. Special segment. Yep. Who is bringing to us this week jason movies with mike that's what we're calling it this week movies with mike is brought to you by mail route imagine a world without spam viruses or bounced email imagine opening your email and seeing only the legitimate mail that you want and need to receive this is not a fantasy. This is a world that can be a reality with MailRoute.

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Mailbagging, that's right. I felt bad for you when you read the ad on The Incomparable. You sounded so sad. You weren't there to shout mailbagging. I will let you know that I did make a noise when you said it. Mailbagging. Anyway, this is all part of the glory that is MailRoute. So start a risk-free trial, no credit card necessary. You sign up, you change your MX record so your mail goes to them first

and then gets routed by them back to your server. Your mailbox and hardware are completely protected. It is simple and effective effective there's no reason not to try it you'll get 10 off for the lifetime of your account for being an upgrade listener so go to mail route.net slash upgrade now that's mail route.net slash upgrade 10 off for the lifetime of your account and a risk-free trial mailbagging yay and thank you mail route for sponsoring movies with mike i was very surprised uh how much positive feedback we received about the movies with mike segment from last week lots of positivity people are happy about. Now, I don't want to do this every week,

but I would like it to be a recurring segment, if you are happy with that. I think so. I think maybe we should even pick a frequency. I think every week is probably asking a bit much, but I have enjoyed movies with Mike, and we should definitely do it more, I think. Well, considering we're talking about Real Genius today, I don't know.

We'll see if you enjoy movies with Mike. Yeah, well, I enjoy movies. It's your favorite movie. I enjoy it. It's not my favorite movie, but it is one of my favorite movies. And I enjoy movies with Mike regardless of the outcome because it's fascinating because not only do we like you, it is fascinating to use you in this experiment to see what about these movies that you haven't seen before. I wonder one bit of a hashtag ask upgrade regarding this, which was just, can we have Mike watch a movie every week, please? And the answer is no, not every week, but some weeks maybe.

And this week. Maybe once a month and we decide like a X week of the month. I think that's a good way to do it. Maybe the first Monday, something like that. I think that would be fun. We should do that. And I like the idea of it being obviously a movie that I have never seen before. Typically a classic movie.

Let me be your guide to a movie you haven't seen. So, Real Genius. 1985 comedy directed by Martha Coolidge called Real Genius, starring Val Kilmer. So, I have some... My notes are written chronologically and I'm probably just going to go through them like I did last time.

But I think I want to start this week with my overall impressions of real genius and let me start let me start by saying um the difference between real genius and the princess bride which we talked about last week is the real genius is one of my favorite movies and i feel a great deal of affection to it it is also very much an 80s movie. The Princess Bride, I feel, is a classic that I like it, but I also would subject people to that much earlier in the relationship than I would subject them to Real Genius because I feel like Princess Bride is something that can be appreciated by all ages. And over the course of many years, it's just become a classic and i have a

great deal of affection for it real genius i love it personally but i think it is it's got it's got more issues and it is much more of its time so i think that's just to compare and contrast here um with the princess bride that they are i don't i wouldn't file them under the same like category in terms of even though they're both movies from the 80s. So that's my opening statement. And people should listen to either the Incomparable episode or the Defocused episode that you did about Real Genius to hear more about why you love the movie. And I actually do want to talk about that, but not yet. I want to get to that part shortly.

Okay. This is Movies with Mike, so you're Mike. I'm running the show. Go for it. I didn't hate this movie's with mike so you know you're mike i'm so i'm gonna go go for it i didn't hate this movie all right okay that's what john syracuse said yeah i i think i'm gonna be better than him i didn't love this movie but i did i did really like it there were parts of it that i didn't like and there were parts of it that i really liked so i'm fascinated now so together it's i liked this movie but there was like a part of it like in the middle it felt like i was fighting through the movie um and there are parts at the start which i get to which i found very confusing but overall i i did actually enjoy it um so let me we will now walk through the plot all right i

thought was such a terrible way of doing it. People seemed to like it. We'll walk through a plot and I'll give my kind of feelings as we went through. So the opening sequence has like that traditional 80s opening sequence, but it's super long. So long with really weird music. Oh yeah, the You Took Advantage of Me, which is a jazz song. And the idea there, I never even thought about this until like a

year ago i hadn't even thought of this that it's really the song is called you took advantage of me and the point is that they're taking advantage of the college students in the movie the the yeah the professor and the government are taking advantage of them but it's this weird you know my son says you can tell when a movie's really old because all the credits are at the beginning so right and this is like that they've got the jazz jazz and then like pictures of diagrams of like scientific diagrams and that goes on forever and then and you've also got then the uh the crossbow um segment where there's the the spaceship that fires a laser and the guys around the room in the Pentagon

that's also, so you've got like a long opening credit sequence and then you've got this long kind of prologue. The prologue is fine, but like the opening sequence, like the music is just weird like I get the point, but like it doesn't fit with the movie at all.

It doesn't fit the rest of the movie at all. I don't even think of that when I think of the movie. It doesn't fit at all. Just skip it. Because one of the things I really loved in this movie is the music. The opening should be a wide shot of Pacific Tech, a crane shot, slowly panning down as some really 80s song from the soundtrack plays we'll say since brian adams is on the soundtrack we could say that maybe or or like rock in the usa whatever something like that something very 80s on the soundtrack and it would just be like like

ghostbusters is real genius and then fade out uh the the name of the movie and we move down to discover what's happening in the quad. That's probably how this movie should start. And instead, it doesn't. It starts with a jazz number over scientific diagrams. And it's like, before the scientific diagrams, it's like cave drawings? Yes.

Oh, yeah. Well, yes, it's the progression from cave drawings and Michelangelo and all the way up to specs of lasers and military things. It's the history of it doesn't fit. It doesn't fit. I don't know. I think somebody got assigned to the job by the studio of making a title sequence, and this is what they came up with and that nobody cared. So let's not talk about that anymore. I agree with you you i am going to check the box there yes mike it is not a good uh opening credit sequence everything about the prologue i love i love it

it's because it's like we're in space and it's like oh we're in space and then it's like really dark room of people sitting in a triangle they must be super evil and it's like really dark room with people sitting in a triangle. They must be super evil. And it's like, I love it. I love it because it's so one of my favorite things about this movie is how they they waste no time in telegraphing things to you. It's like this is how that you need to feel about these people. And we're going to make you feel it. And I really like it's like lasers from space no way and then it's like when the guy uh one of the guys is like oh i don't want nothing to do with this it's like what does the thing we'll have to liquidate him liquidate him

oh no we'll have to liberate him and then the guy says liberate you mean liquidate and he goes not yes because it's kind of like yeah you're gonna kill him it's it's it's just it's great it's their evil well there's the line there's the line where they're like okay well uh we'll watch this movie about blinding techniques and then we'll have some lunch and then it's like it in the in another example of it then we go to the first time that we see our hero. Yes. And it's Chris, right? I don't know.

Chris Knight. Chris Knight, yeah. Played by Val Kilmer. So we see, and then he's like wearing a head bopper, right? Yeah. And bunny slippers. It's like, this guy must be crazy. You know, you kind of, so it's like another example of like, this guy's mad.

Okay. So you're going to see that from the way that we're presenting him. So it's you know it was kind of silly but it's like the same sort of idea right they are making sure that you know everything you need to know about these people by looking at them one of the one of the things i noticed that i found quite distracting at the start is the cuts like the edits are really abrupt especially in like the first third of the movie um there's lots of like really sharp edits with with very differing like uh diegetic sound look at me and so it's like you know you're at one point you're hearing like we're quietly in an office now we're at a party now we're in a bedroom so it's like they're just these real sharp changes

to the audio and it was quite frustrating to watch i think um there are also some questionable word choices especially at the start of the movie uh which don't need to be said uh i don't i don't i don't want to repeat the word it's not a bad word but it's like clearly they got clearance for a certain word and they kept using it so So we talk about this in the episode in Defocused and in fact play a game called Certain Word for Anatomy or Montage, which is how many of the one word are used versus how many montages are in the movie. And it goes back and forth. It's a battle throughout the movie. And yes, at the time when I saw this movie for the first time i thought they say that word a lot why are they saying that word and no other there's like no there's no swearing in this movie there's

just the one anatomical reference that gets made repeatedly and as far as i can tell yeah they had a uh that was their dispensation is you can say that one word but you can't go back you can't go beyond that all right it's but it does it seems like the movie's a little overly obsessed with the single word but like the three or four times it is used two of them are so weird and really out of context like yeah doesn't make any sense like can you use it to knock a nail hammer a section spike into a board like why are you saying this it doesn't make no one's ever used that phrase anyway very peculiar uh william i agree with you william is my favorite 80s villain because he's just so slimy so this is i i think this is his his pinnacle.

I think he's great in Die Hard and Ghostbusters, but I think he has more to do. And he's so great at being so slimy. Here he is like the slimy Carl Sagan, right? He is Mr. Famous Scientist guy, and he is just a weasel. He's exploiting his grad students. He's trying to put one over on the government.

He's having sex with the government, with the general's daughter. I mean, he is just the worst and the best because it's so great to watch him work. And I agree. Like, I love his character, especially in Ghostbusters as well. Oh, yeah. Because there's something about him where he just plays the guy that you want to hate so fantastically but you're right in this movie he's one of the star roles where in the other movies he's kind of just like the annoying thing yeah he pops in to bother you and then he pops out again and and like he's used in those movies to kind of advance the story a bit

more but in in this he is actually the story like yeah he's he's the end he's essentially the antagonist and in the in the movie even though there is this weird laser plot with the government that comes and goes you know really he's the bad guy throughout so we kind of have two heroes so we've mentioned we've mentioned chris uh and then we also have mitch who mitch would seem at least maybe in the first half of the movie to be your hero but it kind of yeah goes backwards and forwards a bit which i like that there's like there's two heroes this movie and and i think that's pretty cool like you don't really i can't think of many movies where you see that so much and they're both very different but you root for them both and they don't, there's never a moment where they fight,

which would be such an easy thing to do. And it would usually be the middle part of this kind of movie. They get upset at each other and they move away, but that doesn't happen. No, I mean, he gets a little, he gets mad when he gets taken to the pool party and gets yelled at,

but he's more just frustrated and leaves. But you're right, there's that, like, in Act Two, you would have the moment where they, in a romantic comedy, that's where they break up and then they realize they're meant for each other. In a buddy comedy like this, you would imagine that they would have that moment. But instead, what happens is each of them has their moment of despair, where the other one talks them out of it. And that's how they do it instead is they both despair for their own futures and their own lives. And the other one says it's a moral imperative. You know, we'll get back at them, but you can't let this affect you. So that's – you're right.

It's neat that that's how they end up doing it is instead they're – they both – the world causes them trouble. And the other one, the counterpart counterpart says we'll get through this um i love when mitch is first introduced to like the rest of the i don't know what you call them like the laser group the science group yeah and like they're a laser group that's good yeah they're already like they're bothering him but then it's just well it's like a 14 year old kid has been brought into these graduate students and told he's in charge of you now because he's a genius.

And you guys are only, you know, you're last year's geniuses. But what I love is they're having problems with the laser and Mitch just turns a dial and he fixes it. It's like, he's a genius. He turned the dial. And it's just, again, it's like another thing to show you this guy's really smart. Okay, he turned the dial.

And these other guys are kind of jerks and don't really know what they're doing. They're like nerd jocks, which is really weird. But that's kind of... Well, this is a whole movie where it's all nerds at Caltech, essentially. Pacific Tech is Caltech. And one of the funny things about the movie is it came out around the same time as a movie like Revenge of the Nerds or Weird Science.

But in this movie, it's not like stereotypical nerds in a world with nerds and jocks and stuff. It's like they're all super smart people. And then there's the social stratifications like inside the super smart people group so you're but you're right there are there are like the the humorless jocks who try to haze this kid because finally they've got somebody that they can beat up on this 14 year old kid 15 year old kid i really like jordan's introduction she's one of if not my favorite character of the movie because she's so

peculiar um and you guys kind of talk about this she's not really sexualized in any way you've spoke i've heard you i think you would talk about this on defocused and and where later she becomes a love interest it's not she seems kind of like on level footing and where some of the other women in the movie are a bit dim this is not a strong this is not a strong movie uh in terms of women's roles but there are signs in it of i want to say of the director because this movie was directed by a woman that there are some signs in it and jordan is a really smart strong character she's not there to be anybody's girlfriend, although she is kind of swept into a romance element with Mitch later. She's there equal. It's never questioned that she doesn't belong at Pacific Tech and she's actually kind of brilliant and can't sleep and

knits a sweater overnight and does all this other crazy stuff. It is, yeah, she's definitely the best female character in the movie, but she's a great character. She might be, yeah, she's one of my favorite characters in the movie too, because she's so, yeah, the hyper genius kind of character. And that's one of the things with it. You've got so many smart people in this movie that you get to see all these different types of genius

that come out. And she's the one that's like the super hyper i don't even sleep person it was at this moment so they're like this scene when they're ice skating in the in the hallway that i noticed that kent looks about 10 years older than everybody else yeah well it's the ascot that's the ascot like they put braces on him yeah in an attempt maybe to make him look younger. I know it's used as a plot device later, but he's visibly older than everybody else. Grad students, you know, they range. They range in age.

Okay, you're defending this. I'm going to move along. I don't know. I think it's the ascot. Again, I point you to the ascot. The ascot makes all the difference. Why doesn't that guy wash his hands in the bathroom? You know, that drives me crazy too.

And it's just such a little moment. But yeah, because there's a guy who's peeing and then he runs out of the bathroom. And then Jordan runs in, right, to show Mitch the sweater she's working on. Yeah. And the guy just runs out and he doesn't wash his hands. It's just so strange. I don't know. We don't even know.

I don't think we even know who that guy is. It's just in there. When you watched a movie as many times as I have, you do start to notice all these strange things in the corners of the movie that nobody would ever have been expected to notice when they watched it. Um, and then we kind of see one of the first moments of Chris's weird genius where he gets some liquid nitrogen out of the freezer,

cuts the slice of it and uses it as a coin in the coffee machine right the idea that it would evaporate i think i think i mentioned this on these other podcasts that we've talked about this i think the screenwriters literally had like a checklist of all of these famous stories about caltech and pranks and other wacky things that the students at caltech would do. And I think this is one of those, that there was like some student who realized that they could take ice or dry ice or liquid nitrogen or something like that. They could take something that was frozen and match it to the size of a coin and use it to buy something in a vending

machine and then it would evaporate. I think that's actually where it came from. But it's a funny... I'm not sure it actually would work like that, because I think there's like... These days, they're used based on magnetic signatures, but back then, it may have just been the size of the coin. We then get our first montage, and it's...

So many montages. It's so beautiful, and I love it so much. We have really strong 80s music, and it's just a montages it's so beautiful and i love it so much we have really strong 80s music and it's just a montage of mitch learning stuff and fitting in and making friends uh it's and there's there's some interesting things that uh boomboxes in the class at first i was like i don't understand and then i realized that they're using them as tape recorders yes but the the visual of a classroom full of boomboxes was very confusing to me but the the visual of a classroom full of boom boxes was very confusing to me but then the payoff of the montage is at one point uh mitch goes to class and there's a

bunch of tape recorders and then the professor is just playing his lecture from a reel-to-reel desk and yeah that there's it's just a good visual because he's older so he's using the reel-to-reel and the kids using the boom boxes and also of course the teacher's just a good visual because he's older. So he's using the reel to reel and the kids using the boom boxes. And also, of course, the teacher just given up at that point because Mitch is the only one that goes to class. And this has got to be a commentary on college in the 80s that people were starting to record lectures and record them for other people. And I think this is the commentary that the logical conclusion of that is that everybody will just leave their tape recorder at the beginning of the lecture. At which point the professor will say, well, screw this. I'm going to just tape my lecture and play it back to them, which is that I like this.

I like this montage, too. It is. I said this on Defocus that, you know, I love a good montage. And I think that montages are effective in or can be effective in telling you a story that you just don't need exposition. We don't need to see all of these scenes with Mitch becoming more learning about lasers and becoming part of the group. We get a quick montage of it. There's some jokes. And then we also understand now that time has passed and he's part of the group. And yes, there's super 80s music while the montage plays. it's the 80s there's montages but this month those happen in real life in the 80s by the way mike every now and then you'd hear a synthesizer playing and you'd be

in a montage and you just have to go with it it was like a tornado or something it's like oh we're in a montage now and and then that would go and then you'd wake up and the music would stop and it'd be like three months later and you would have a mustache it's very strange and you'd you'd either be a genius or you would have like grown 20 pounds in muscle like one or the other this montage does include i think the worst part uh worst direction in the whole movie there is a moment like a 20 second clip or something like that where chris and mitch are talking to each other. Are talking, yeah. I can only assume that was a cut scene and they decided to put it in there, but it's infuriating

because they're saying things and you can't hear them. It doesn't make any sense because they're just passing each other in class and then they're having a conversation. What is this showing me? They can talk? They could be arguing. I think they wanted a little more 80s music there. I just didn't get little more 80s music there.

I just didn't get it. Nope, I'm with you. Another thing I didn't get. What is Dr. Hathaway's show about? Well, it's everything. It's about everything. It's about science. The colon.

The colon. What does it look like? That's not the question we ask about the colon. Like I said, I get the impression that he's a local celebrity or maybe even distributed more nationally since Mitch's parents recognize him and the people at the science fair recognize him too. He's like, yeah, he's a low-rent Carl Sagan. He's got some PBS show where he talks every week about some scientific topic and they i i think they vary wildly obviously because he's not talking about lasers or physics that week he's talking about the colon which it sounds it's perfect because it makes it just seem like this is not a show you would want to watch

so then we get to like the pool party thing and I'm going to come back to that in a moment. The tanning invitational. I don't know what that means. Does that mean anything? Like tanning? Well, invitational. So it's like a tournament, like a tennis invitational or something. It's the tanning invitation. Like it's a competition.

It's just meaningless. It's meaningless. But they invited the girls from the school of beauty down the block. The beautician students. Yeah. They're not beauticians. They the beautician students yeah they're not beauticians they're beautician students yeah okay uh and i'll come back to that in a moment because it's it does tell someone something else i want to talk about but like at this at this party mitch um gets berated by dr hathaway yes why are mitch's parents such horrible people yeah he called he calls them on the phone and and like you can't come home we rented out your bedroom to the plumber

i don't know they're they're i mean they're trying the story's trying to trap mitch there but you you do you do get the sense that i think i think what the movie is trying to do this is a good question i think what the movie is trying to do is isolate mitch and say look home is not a place for mitch the why why can't he just go back and go to high school like a regular kid it's like he's not a regular kid his parents don't understand him his parents don't understand anything about that him and it's not that they're necessarily terrible people but they're kind of clueless and they're it's not a home for him. And so when they say,

we've rented out your room, I think that is the message here is that he can't go back there. He can't go home again. He needs to make it with his people at the college. He has to make it at the college. But it is, yeah,

there are lots of jokes. They're right from the beginning where hathaway says are you adopted or is mitch adopted and they're like no he's not it's like amazing yeah um and then there's like the prank where kent and and the other uh nerd jocks have um they record his conversation and play it back over the pa in the cafeteria yeah which then leads to boo probably my favorite part of the movie and i think the reason that you love this movie is chris then has a monologue about never fitting in and like how he had to change like he said you know i was like you i was i i used to be you yeah yeah i had

a briefcase you know and i had no friends and then he talks about laszlo right the guy who lives in the wardrobe yeah lives in the closet exactly um or turns out in the steam tunnels underneath the the building but he enters through the closet to get there and then it's like you know he says i saw him and i saw what he his life was like and i decided that i needed to change and it's just it was interesting to me because it was kind of a thing that i went through like i was kind of a nerd and then i kind of got in with a more popular crowd and kind of changed i changed as a person and became more sociable um and and i think that that is maybe you know because i know that you talk about the movie and how it has these like these people in it and it

has a real meaning to it so that that felt to me like that is definitely a part of the movie you love yeah i mean this is i mean this is the this is the going off to college story in many ways which is that that when chris says i used to be you and lately I'd been missing me. So I asked Jerry if I could room with myself again, um, that he's, he's telling Mitch, like,

this is, this is the arc of, of your, of your time in college is you're going to start as this innocent kid and you're going to end up in one of two places. You're going to either be the guy who just stands up at the table, um, in the study hall

where everybody's studying in the library and starts screaming and runs out. You're either going to be that guy or Laszlo who's completely burned out and lives in the steam tunnels, or you're going to have to adapt and not take things so seriously and be me. And then Chris realizes that he's still got his own issues, right? But it is – so he's talking about adapting and growing, which is part of the – for me, I mean, that was part of the college experience. It's certainly part of the just adolescent experience. And then the other thing that I like about that and the rest of the characters here is that they're all really smart people and they have a variety of different traits but they're all smart and and the movie is not about the smart people against the dumb people it's not about how the ways that it's embarrassing to be a smart nerdy

person it is you know they're all smart nerdy people and it's just a matter of like who do you want to be as a person because you are a smart nerdy person that part is given who do you want to be and that's what that's really a smart nerdy person. That part is given. Who do you want to be? And that's what, that's really what Chris is saying when he's talking to Mitch too. So then there's this whole like altercation between Jerry and Chris and, you know, Jerry's unhappy with the work that Chris is doing, that kind of thing.

Yeah. And he basically, he basically says to him, you're not going to graduate. And then we have the other moment with Mitch and Chris where Mitch basically makes it all better. But what I failed to understand is, how was getting even with Jerry,

why was the result that Chris was going to work harder? I didn't get that. How was that the getting even? i well that's a good question i i think chris decided he was going to be the model student and make it that um you know that jerry jerry would just have to entirely fail fail him out of spite um i think that was probably part of it and And I, is that getting even, I don't know.

They're probably plotting terrible things to do to, to Jerry Hathaway on their way out the door or whatever, or Chris is plotting his way to appeal to somebody else, uh, to save him. But I, I think, I think primarily he's,

he's just saying, okay, well I'll, I'm going to, like he says to Jerry, if you think you can make me do this, that's where you're right. It's like, Chris doesn't have a lot of, well, I'm going to, like he says to Jerry, if you think you can make me do this, that's where you're right. It's like Chris doesn't have a lot of, Chris has a lot of pride, but he doesn't have a

lot of leeway here. He's got to solve the laser problem or he's not going to graduate. And so when Jerry gives him the ultimatum and basically says, you're done, you know, yeah, Chris is basically saying, okay, well, I'm going to go back to being Mr. Perfect Student then, except I'm going to give you an exploding apple for the teacher I don't know it's it's funny it's funny that's the I think that's the reaction though that he does is okay I'm gonna I guess I'm gonna go back to work because otherwise what is he gonna do blow up Jerry's house maybe maybe Maybe. Maybe. So, now we have what I consider to be the worst part of the movie, and I still can't get over this,

because then it sets off a chain of events that I find really kind of uncomfortable. How old is Mitch? Oh, he's, I think, 15? Right, because we have the scene where and i don't fully i didn't understand this as it was happening sherry appears yep um no you're right this is this this i i said this um when i was talking to joe and dan on defocus that it feels like this movie is like five different rewrites each of which was given a task to do to make it like other movies. And this is the teen sex comedy rewrite where they've said, we're going to have this character who keeps coming back.

And her goal is to sleep. Probably, again, this was an urban legend of some kind, sleep with the top 10 minds in the country. That's her goal is to have had sex with all of them. And so she comes to Pacific tech and is waiting to ambush mitch in his room and she like kisses him and she's like whatever 30 35 she's not young and he's like 15 because then i mean he kind of pulls out of that experience. So that's weird enough. And what you find out later is she's attracted to smart people, right? Yes.

She was always looking for Laszlo, who was the smartest. But then you just go from them, Mitch, getting into his love affair with Jordan, who's got to be, what, 18, 19 minimum? Yeah. Yeah, she's probably something like that i mean who can tell because it's movie actors and this is apparently a college that admits people at 14 so it's just or or 18 like i don't understand like if they wanted to do the sex comedy thing chris was the obvious yeah answer for it because he is the like the van wilder

answer for it because he is the Van Wilder character yep I know what you're saying that is hilarious I think the Mitch and Jordan thing is played as being sweet and innocent like neither of them is

particularly socially adept and that what they're doing is expressing their interest in each other, but neither of them is particularly good at doing it. And I kind of don't, I don't have a problem with that. I think it, I think, I think you have to read it on that level, which is, it is a very sweet, innocent kind of interest that maybe will blossom into something else. But I think, you know, I, I don't, I don't think Jordan comes across as being this, you know, experienced,

you know, senior college student who is, who is making the moves on a little kid. I think, I think that we're to read that as that she's sort of the same emotional age as Mitch. Another interesting thing about Jordan is you could argue today we look at a character like Jordan and say she probably places somewhere on the spectrum. The sort of the autism spectrum or Asperger's spectrum. She's very she's got some. I mean, again, it's a it's a movie character.

She doesn't actually exist and they're picking up traits and using them in the movie but i think it's actually a very interesting portrayal that she's got these really quirky traits and is not portrayed as anything other than who she is and um but i do think that she's um she's intended to be innocent in the same way that mitch is and that's why she's so upset about Sherry trying to ambush Mitch and put the moves on him because she's got this kind of innocent interest in him. I don't know. That's my rationalization of it. But, like, that is illegal in the U.S., though, right? I think it depends on where you are.

If one of them's 18 and one of them's 15. I don't know. Let's just say, Mike, that this never came up for me. Right. These laws, I never was concerned with them. But my understanding is it varies from state to state. And it depends on the specific ages and the existing relationships and all of that. But I think nobody's going to bat an eye at a couple of college students holding hands and talking about going steady, which is probably the most that we would get from Jordan and Mitch at that point. Okay.

It was just really weird to me. It is. That whole thing shouldn't be there. And you're right. Chris Knight is the Van Wilder. He should be the one having the wild. I mean, he picks up on the one student beautician, but, I mean, he should be the one with the girls falling all over him. And that doesn't happen.

Or boys, whatever. But it doesn't happen. Instead, Val Kilmer is just kind of like, boop, he's around. And he makes the pass at the, which is actually one of the worst pickup lines ever with the student beauticians. His pickup line is, don't eat that or you'll get large breasts. Oh, no no i'm too late really that's you think that's gonna win her over dude it looked like it did though well that's because she's in a movie student beauticians student beauticians anyway so

then we have like the danger point and this one is like another point where i think we have like the danger point and this one is like another point where i think the movie is expecting you to know more than you should the more than you do which is when kemp puts like oil on the laser lens yeah like i did i assumed that wasn't good i had no idea what that was going to do i don't know yeah i i yeah spite he's just he's doing spite to wreck the experiment i think it's meant to be read at that again a super simple level which is i messed up the optics laser's all about optics there's there's a smudge on the optics and everything's going to get messed up and and that's his his revenge for them i think is that his revenge for assembling his disassembling his car and reassembling it in his room which is something that apparently really happened at caltech yeah yeah um then we have this like

then a bunch of things happen so then they like the laser works they have no uh concern for safety as the laser shoots holes everything in the entire town uh potentially killing lights a billboard on fire burrows a hole through a metal statue. Blasts through the whole building. But it works. It's a breakthrough. Has anybody ever tested the science? Like, do you know of?

My understanding is that they had a scientific consultant and the stuff they're talking about is vaguely, you know, science-y enough. Vaguely laser-y. But yeah, you like the i like the cavalier attitude they've got to lasers at a few points where where chris has got a catcher's mask on or some sun or he puts on some sunglasses so like this is the point of that right they're testing the laser and they're shooting it at a metal target so they're assuming it will go

for the metal because they put cinder blocks behind it right then they stand behind like a glass screen like a i assume bulletproof but that's not safe right by your standards of what you expect this to do anyway um then there's like the whole action sequence like so now like the laser has uh been made and chris via laszlo's helps come to the realization that it's going to be used for evil and they go to the army base. And for me, this is where the moment where the plot of the movie enters and the previous plot, which is hijinks in college, ends. And now we're in the serious government plot reasserts itself. So this is that moment where this becomes a very different movie, I think, when Laszlo comes to them at the burger place and says, you know, congratulations on building a giant laser. What do you think they're going to do with it?

Probably kill people. It's weird that in like a two hour movie, the last 30 minutes is when your main character's character develops. Like this is where Chris gets his character because he's like, oh, no, I don't want to hurt anyone. It was weird. I found it weird. But then it's like this 80 i don't want to hurt anyone it's it was weird i found it weird but then it's like this 80s action movie kind of sequence right it's like will we get caught i don't know here's some interesting hacking that we're doing oh you gotta love that you gotta love the hacking there's like modems and they're like doing war dialing like in war games and they've got like

little little uh e-proms and promss, so they're programming chips to swap in, and there's fake mustaches involved, and it's a whole poorly done, low-budget caper happening there, but with some great old tech. And then it's like, so that kind of moves on, and they adjust the coordinates of the laser. Yes, there's a fake plane that's flying a very fake plane oh yeah it's very very much a toy plane uh-huh um and they adjust the coordinates

so that the laser does not hit the uh kennedy assassination-esque target in the desert yeah but instead hits uh jerry hathaway's house which they've filled with a a homemade giant jiffy pop popcorn so that the heat of the laser pops all of the popcorn instantaneously thereby exploding the house for as stupid as it is i was satisfied with that ending oh it's a great it's a great ending it's just that all the plain stuff to get to it is kind of totally ridiculous but as an end i mean obviously they're like you know what would make a great ending and let's work back from there come figure out what to do i can't even imagine how much work that must have been and again you

get that great you get the great uh i mean so we skip there's a there's a montage later later which is making the laser so the first montage is learning how to do lasers and the second montage is we're going to build this laser and figure it out yeah and then at the end you get the uh everybody wants to rule the world uh tears for fears playing over the end credits as the kids frolic in the in the popcorn i love love that ending that i love that song yeah it's a great song that ending is fantastic so having spoken about this movie with you now, I now like it more. Huh? I really enjoyed this movie.

There are some fundamental problems with it. Oh, yeah. Some really, like, earth-shattering issues. Like, moral problems I have with the movie. But it is exactly... It's basically... It is the 80s movie. Like it's everything that happened in 80s movies is in this movie. Pretty much.

And I like it for that. I like it a lot for that. And like I said, I don't think they're that, especially in this period. I don't think there are a lot of movies that celebrate smart people. And these characters are all smart and they're not villains. I mean, there are villains among them. There are heroes among them. I really like that.

And as a smart kid growing up in a small town to see the positive portrayal of these geeky people that they have lives and they're going to college and they have relationships and friendships. And that was all something that I really appreciated at the time. And even to this day, I mean, not to bring everybody down here, but there's still in modern culture a surprising amount of anti-intellectualism. Like being smart is a bad thing. And one of the things I like about real genius is being smart is not a bad

thing. It is not a bad thing in this movie. And the smart people can have their own, you know, dumb eighties movie too. And this is, this is, uh,

you know, it's got smart parts and dumb parts and the laser, uh, plane is not a highlight, but, um, you know, I think you've nailed it in terms of the reason that I like it and the

stuff that I like in it and why, why I'm so fond of it, even though I'm well aware of its issues. Yeah, so I'm pleased I've seen this movie now. It's like a movie that I've known of and known about, like that existed for years and I've known the name, right? But I'm happy that this is on my list. This is a warm, this movie warmed my heart a little bit even for its peculiarness. It is a very strange movie. But I'm happy that I've seen it.

I'm glad that you didn't hate it and that you've warmed up to it a little bit. And yeah, it's got a lot of funny, strange, funny little bits in it that I enjoy and a nice set of characters, which I think is what puts it over the top that we've got. I don't understand quite why there are so many characters because there are several characters who are in like one scene and then we don't see

them again, where I feel like a smaller ensemble might've been a little bit better. But the people we do get to know, like obviously the leads, but also like Jordan and Laszlo. I really love Laszlo. That's, we didn't talk about him very much, but John Grease, also like Jordan and Laszlo. I really love Laszlo. We didn't talk about him very much. But John Grease, the actor who plays Laszlo, everything I see him in, and he's in everything. To this day, I say, Laszlo! Because he's this nice guy who happens to live in your closet. That's what a crazy character that is. And he wins the Frito Lake sweepstakes.

He wins 30% of the prizes. He wins everything. character that is and he wins he wins the frito lake sweeps sweepstakes he wins 30 of the prizes because everything because he uh he uh or he yeah he should have won 30 but he won like 60 of the prizes because uh and that's a true story from the 70s too they have the the you know enter as often as you like and so somebody did uh and they they won all of the prizes so a lot of the really good things in this movie were not created by the writers yeah well i don't know i i i suspect like i said i i haven't done one day i would love to see all the different versions of this script my guess is that there is a either either somebody started with a really strong script or somebody came in at the end and did a lot of great work to make it the thing that i love but i can see the the the like the archaeological like strata in in the earth in the of this uh screenplay where they said we need

let's do teen sex comedy let's do some action where they kind of like lay layered on this other stuff. And, uh, those are not the parts that I love the movie for. So somebody, some writer somewhere, one of these writers, or,

you know, or was it, was it the influence of the director late in the game, uh, did something. But, uh, yeah,

I think the weakness of this movie is it, at some point, somebody tried to make it a few other movies that it wasn't. So we've probably done enough today. I think so. I think we've killed movies with Mike for now, but it'll be back. It will be back. We'll work on that.

We'll work on that. We need to think of another movie as well. I'm sure we can do that. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode, they are at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 22.

I am joined as always by Mr. Jason Snell. He is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter and is the man behind sixcolors.com. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E on Twitter too and I host many shows at relay.fm, which this show is a part of. Thanks again to our sponsors this week, our friends over at

stamps.com, MailRoute, Igloo, and Hover, and thank you, most of all, for listening. Until next time, bye-bye. It's a moral imperative.