Upgrade - 234: The Ideological Folding Wars

Episode Date: February 25, 2019

Major players Samsung and Huawei have introduced expensive smartphones with foldable screens, but do their different approaches tell us anything about the future of the category? And where goes Apple fit in to the equation? We also take some time to contemplate the roll-out of Marzipan and what it means for the future of macOS.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode two three four today's show is brought to you by lunar display squarespace and green chef my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley how are you i'm fine and dandy my friend how are you uh doing great um and i'm not going to tell you what the weather's like here you're just going to have to guess well it's probably similar it's pretty warm here today actually but nobody cares about that because it's time for a hashtag snow talk question and today's comes from tyler and tyler asks the simple three-word question jason of bagged or loose leaf it's referring to groceries obviously yeah do you loose leaf your groceries because you have a nissan leaf is that when you

just throw the groceries inside you just let them roll around that has happened where i've forgotten to bring the the shopping bags to the store and they're they're like do i can charge you extra and put these in bags and i say you know? Don't just put them in the cart. I'm rolling loose leaf today. I'll do the loose leaf grocery. And then, well, I did that one time and I didn't bring the bags in the store, but I had them in the car. And I'm like, you know what?

I'll bag the groceries in the parking lot and then do it that way. So that was that. It's like between loose leaf and bag. Anyway, this question is actually. Well, there was that one time when you had loose leaf cans rolling around in the back of the car while we were recording an episode of upgrade yeah sure hashtag car cast that's a deep cut that's that's right long time upgrade listeners and if that was in the loose leaf it would be a loose leaf leaf

and when tweedle beetles battle it's a tweedle beetle battle anyway this is a question about tea and the answer is uh the tea robot that i have that i love that's the uh breville tea making thing that uh that automatically makes my tea in the morning and it's great uh is a loose leaf thing so you put the tea you put a couple of scoops of the tea in the in the little basket and then it automatically boils the water and puts the tea down in for three minutes or whatever time you set and then it pulls the water back or the basket back out um and then if i'm traveling and stuff then it's just it's bagged because uh it's convenient it's convenient and and uh it's fine so that's my answer but but i buy tea loose leaf tea in bulk and uh use it in the tea robot the tea robot i have found uh by searching for your name and

tea robot and i'll put it on show notes okay it's very very easy to find there is one of my favorite ridiculous gadgets because i love it because it means because making tea is fussy because if you leave the tea in the water too long um it gets bitter and it's bad and so what this thing will do is heat up the water to whatever temperature you want then put the tea in the water too long, it gets bitter and it's bad. And so what this thing will do is heat up the water to whatever temperature you want, then put the tea in the water for as long as you want, and then remove the tea from the water. So you can basically wake up in the morning like I do and put water and tea, press a button and walk away, and come back whenever, 20 minutes later, an hour later, and there's hot tea for you. It's pretty nice, but you do have to buy a gadget for it.

later and there's hot tea for you it's pretty nice but you do have to buy a gadget for it uh jason i have just a very quick uh piece of follow-up and some very quick upstream news as well today we're just gonna fire through this so you were thinking more um as is as is the way the the the upgrade cycle right which is either one of it typically goes this way jason writes something and i think that might be interesting to talk about on the show so we talk about it on the show and then jason thinks about something on the show and then writes another article that comes out of life it's like composting for ideas yeah so you wrote an article on macworld kind of fleshing out a little bit more uh about the thinking behind uh the your thoughts on apple moving more into the smart home product business and a little bit about your great idea of the Apple TV soundbar as well.

So people can go and read that. But is there anything more that you wanted to expound upon from last week? No, I mean, it was a good conversation. It was a story that had been sitting in my to-do list for a long time. And then we talked about it on the show, and that was enough of an impetus for me to say, why don't I just turn this into an article? In writing the article, though, it went from originally, as conceived by me, being kind

of a pitch for the Apple TV soundbar, which, for those who didn't listen last week, is a combination of a HomePod and an Apple TV, because I think there might be actually a product there, and I think that might be interesting for Apple. But it was a larger point of as Apple's competitors buy the other products in the market, that was my larger point. I feel like all the same arguments apply that Apple shouldn't get into the smart home business necessarily because they have bigger fish to fish to fry basically they're focused on these enormous hit products um that is all still reasonable the problem is that if their competitors buy up every other smart home gadget and infrastructure uh tool that's out there so that um their customers apple's customers can't get on the internet without passing through a gateway controlled by their competitors, that maybe Apple needs to start thinking about strategically buying companies that are doing home tech just to keep them, even if they just put them in a

subsidiary, just to keep them out of the clutches of Google and Amazon, especially, and maybe Facebook. And I've kind of come around to that feeling like maybe you need to be present here because if you're Apple, because your competitors are very much present there. And if they snap up every innovative company that's going in here, and like, I know you don't want to make a Wi-fi router apple but what if all the wi-fi routers are owned by the competition they're going to work less well with your stuff and you know the priority is going to be on your competition's um products and also their business model so that's the that's the long and short of it i understand the argument of like bigger fish to fry but they can fry as many fish as they want. They can.

They could fry a lot of fish. I think Apple is not built that way historically. They don't hire a lot of people. We see it, right? They could have an enormous operation, but I think they believe that part of the magic of what they do is that they keep it on the small side. But like I said, maybe the answer, they hired a new person to be in charge of their smart home efforts, right? They hired a new person. So the question was, what's his charter? Is his charter to make a different HomePod or whatever,

or is it to do something to have a bigger impact in this area? And again, does Apple have to make it all? No, but Apple has a lot of money. So another model would be for Apple to invest in a bunch of these companies or maybe even buy these companies outright and then just say, no, they're going to run out there. It's fine. This is a model Apple already employs, lest we not forget Beats, right? Beats is a separate company that seems to have its own marketing and it's all of its own product development and they share with Apple,

but there is nothing to stop Apple from having its kind of like alphabet moment with Nest or, you know, like that they can have a separate company that makes technology for the home that is still owned by them. And as Zach in the chat room is pointing out, FileMaker, never forget never forget file

maker but like beats is the better example here right if like that is a hardware company with a different brand that apple wholly owns but you could very easily forget that they do and maybe they could do that for smart home yeah i mean i think all options should be on the table but if the argument is that apple should never invest strategically in keeping products that are innovative away from their competition in the home, especially, and in the home infrastructure and smart home markets, because Apple culturally can't focus on that many things at once, then I think the answer is Apple's got a lot of resources. Apple doesn't need to focus its people on it it apple could set a budget and set up a company with somebody in charge of it to just uh either make investments or buy companies and then allow them to run on their own there are lots of other models here uh but i

do just i had that moment where i thought is it really good that amazon bought ero and that that uh that google has bought you know has bought Nest back in the day and Dropcam and a whole bunch of other things? Is it good for Apple if Apple says, we're just going to sit out and do HomeKit and HomeKit's going to be great and people are going to support it. And meanwhile, every company that makes something that is part of that infrastructure gets bought by their competition. I'm not sure that's a good thing for Apple,

even if Apple is right in saying, guys, we don't want to make a smart switch, right? Like I get why they don't, although I think they could make one and have big margins on it and sell it at the Apple store and make a lot of money. But that's another thing I mentioned in that article. But anyway, I'm fascinated about where Apple stands currently in the smart home market and what that might mean in the long run now that they've made this new hire.

What's his role? Is his role to really expand what Apple does or is it his role to do what Apple's been doing up to now, which is kind of just, I don't know, having a lot of remove from it, doing some infrastructure stuff in terms of like HomeKit, but otherwise sort of saying we're not going to play here at all so we have a quick piece of upstream news it was the oscars last night and netflix have picked up a selection of oscars um yeah they did not get best picture for roma which they were clearly going for but they got maybe second best they got best uh alfonso coran good the best director oscar yep uh for for the movie roma they also won best foreign language film and best cinematography three ain't bad for one movie it's not bad uh they had i think one previous feature oscar before so this is this is they got three this year. They were hoping for Best Picture. I am not an Oscar handicapper, but I will say I'm kind of not surprised.

Like the fact that Roma didn't win makes me feel like there's a section of the Academy voting group that is just down on a Netflix movie winning. They did not want them to win. And it's a ranked choice. They rank them all from top to bottom. And so, like, it wouldn't surprise me if there are a bunch of people who are like i'm not even going to put a netflix movie there was somebody in the t in the industry um in the last week and i forget who it was maybe it was a theater owner but somebody actually referred to roma as a tv movie which i thought was like come on man come on but that that was like there are people

who have that that are that angry about Netflix playing in the Oscars at all because they feel like it's an assault on the livelihood of the movie industry. And so it doesn't surprise me that it didn't win. My gut feeling being that that's why it didn't win. By the way, I saw Roma this weekend. It's spectacularly good i will say that is a very very very good movie so um i'm sort of sad that it didn't win best picture um but uh i'm glad that it won what it did but yes so netflix the the netflix wanting to win awards uh story continues it's it's progressed but not maybe as far as they hoped and our favorite spider-man into the spider-verse won uh best best animation which was yeah that was really isn't that funny i mean that's such a

great story where everybody assumed that the winner would be one of these other uh powerhouse animated movies um especially like incredibles 2 but there was like so many movies that there's a prestige animated movie and there's like the winners in the category almost every year and then into the spider verse came out and everybody said oh no this is one of the best movies of the year uh this should totally win and it did which was which was really great to see so i was happy about that too and i um i'll just i'll just make a shout out a uh an elementary school friend of mine a childhood friend of mine uh was up for best documentary short subject and he lost but um his name was read on stage and what they do with the people who are in the awards that are um they don't get a good seat they're seated far away is they bring all the nominees up they have these two

little rows off to the left and you might have seen them during the show um sometimes they didn't even have i saw somebody tweeting about like why are there empty seats at the front of the stage and the answer is well they're moving the old uh nominee group out and the new nominee group in because that's one way they tried to speed up the show is that you can't have people coming from 90 rows back um anyway uh my friend sky was in the front uh on the aisle front row when his category was announced and he didn't win it but i i was like oh that's sky that's great so the kid i played on the playground at columbia elementary school and in uh columbia california uh was nominated and uh and was there and i got to see him and they said his name and that was pretty awesome so his movie was light lifeboat but it

didn't win never mind But that's still great. A nomination. That's pretty amazing. That'll take you some places. All right. Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at Green Chef. Green Chef is a meal delivery service that includes everything that you're going to need to make delicious gourmet meals at home that you will be able to cook and feel good about. Green Chef sends a wide variety of organic ingredients and imaginative new recipes to your home every week.

Their meal plans include options for paleo, vegan, vegetarian, keto, gluten-free, omnivore, and carnivore diets. This is what really sets Green Chef apart. They are also the first USDA-certified organic meal delivery service. Every ingredient that Green Chef will send you is thoughtfully sourced, and its journey is tracked from planting to plating. The recipes include pre-made sauces, dressings, and spices as well, so you can get more flavor in your meals with less time for you to work on. Jason Snell, I understand that our friends at green chef sent you a box of lovely ingredients yes we have been feasting upon the green chef uh for the last couple of weeks

anyway the yes it's very good and i was i was really impressed with the packaging one of the things that we noticed about the packaging is that it's um it is kind of uh sanely packaged there's not a lot of plastic wrapping and stuff it's it's uh good ingredients proportioned well and then also um i i like that they used a lot of they have like little paper shells and there's a minimum of plastic in the box and i thought that was all pretty good too so yeah and good and we've had some several good meals even complaining children uh did not complain as much i'm not going to say didn't complain at all because that never happens but did not complain as much so that was a win that's a win that's a big win with green chef it's easy to maintain a specialty diet and enjoy

exciting new options as well and anybody can be a cook with green chef's help for 50 of your first box of Green Chef, go to greenchef.us slash upgrade. That's G-R-E-E-N-C-H-E-F dot U-S slash upgrade. That's greenchef.us slash upgrade for $50 off your first box of Green Chef. Our thanks to Green Chef for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, Jason Snell. It is Mobile World Congress right now.

And we just had samsung unpacked which is samsung's kind of that's the branding for their events that they do and some of the big trends coming out of the samsung event the s10 by the way i think it looks really cool but we're not going to get into that today um we're going to talk about foldables and i would say at this point that is the name of the category now foldables I don't think that was a thing that really existed before the last few days. There was like a lot of like, oh, folding phones, fold that might look like. That was on episode 229. So you can go and check that out there if you want to get more details. But I wanted to talk about the two big phones

that have been announced in the last week, which is the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate 10. So Jason, if you will permit me, I would like to talk about some of the specs and some of the features of these two phones, and then we can kind of compare them a little bit with our thoughts on how they look and how they seem to be acting so samsung galaxy fold has two displays there is a 4.6 inch display on the outside and then you open it up to see a 7.3 inch display on the inside it has half a terabyte of storage and

12 gigabytes of ram 12 gigabytes of ram and i thing you're holding in your hands is so much. It has two batteries, of course, one in each side. And their hinge system is this like fancy thing full of gears. They showed this animation and it looked bonkers. Okay, the Galaxy Phone has five cameras. It has three cameras on the outside and two cameras on the inside. And Samsung has also been doing some work with some large developers

and they've got some SDK information to enable three-app multitasking in the Galaxy Fold. It's going to be shipping in April, April 26th, and it will cost $1,980. We'll get to the prices later because that's like a whole separate discussion. And nobody was allowed to touch it or even see it off of the stage i believe there is which suggests that this is a product that doesn't really quite exist yet like

literally at the samsung event nobody saw it the only time people saw it with their own eyes was basically they have it in a case reminiscent of the first iphone on the show floor at mobile world congress um there you go there you go it's like the the original iphone or the mac pro right which is probably for the same reason as those devices were encased in glass because it's not done they've got a couple of months left to finish the software don't touch it yeah and then we've got the huawei mate 10 so this phone is a little thinner than the galaxy fold it has a bigger screen and it folds more flat when closed so the galaxy fold it kind of has like a small gap towards the hinge when you close it up but

it's not it's not as bad as our friend the royale flex pie of cheese um the biggest difference between the mate 10 and the fold and this this is where I think the ideological war will be waged over the next year or two. The Huawei Mate 10 screen folds outwards, not inwards. So it has one screen and it folds outwards. So the Galaxy Fold, it's kind of like a book where you open it up and the screen's inside. But the Huawei, it folds in the opposite direction. So it's an eight inch OLED display. When you fold it up, you get a 6.6 inch main display, which is the one

you're using, and then a 6.4 inch rear display on the back. And there is a grip section kind of reminiscent of the Kindle Oasis, which is where the cameras are. So there's like a chunkier section that you can hold on to. And that's also where the folded side clips into. It has like a latch. It also features half a terabyte of storage. It only has eight gigabytes of RAM. And the Huawei Mate 10 will start at $2,600 and shipping, quote, in the middle of this year.

So these are two very different phones kind of in design they're doing the same thing very very differently um do you have a favorite of these design wise oh you're gonna set me up here because i know we disagree on this so uh you're gonna set me up to go first that's fine that's fine i could do it yeah i think i think no how much should i overplay this no reasonable person will disagree with me um that the uh i think the huawei one looks way better right but that you are in the consensus from people that i've been seeing online i think most people prefer the look of the huawei phone yeah yeah and i've got lots of reasons why i mean i think the galaxy fold like uh when it's in its folded configuration, I think it looks way stranger than the Huawei phone does.

Super weird. It's, like, super skinny, and the display is, it doesn't quite touch, because it can't fold completely flat. And so it's got this kind of space that's like the hole in the donut that is very strange. Huawei has the space, but it's way more uniform and way smaller, like the gap in between. What Huawei has done is they've made that grip section, which reminded me like the grip on my kindle oasis is actually kind of like this too but what they've done is the grip is not just a grip and a place where your sensor bar is but it's also there so that when you fold the phone back around itself um it the the screen comes level basically to the grip and so you create this um like sort of sandwich instead of the donut yeah that's it i prefer the sandwich to the donut hole is what i'm saying mike and this is we're gonna have to find better words to describe these products

as the foldable uh ideological wars continue so So I prefer the design of the Fold, and I know I'm in the minority. And I have a few things for this. I think that the Mate 10 looks less premium. If you've seen any pictures of this, the hinge is super weird looking, I think, compared to

the Fold's hinge. I think that the Galaxy Fold is a more premium- product in in general we need to come back to that because i feel like every single early folding phone is just going to be a game of hide the hinge right like how do we deal with the fact that we've got to have this weird superstructure to make our uh display not crumple yeah Yeah, exactly. And I think that Samsung has done a better job of building it as part of the design and making it attractive.

They're even allowing customization of the color of the hinge on the phone, where Huawei, I think it's more a little bit rough and ready, right? Like it kind of looks like an inner tube or something. Like it's like a super strange looking design to me. But the overall product probably does look better on the huawei but i'm thinking about like if i'm gonna own one of these i'm thinking about like the long-term usability and i was watching a youtube video

from super saff and he pointed out like how durable are these displays going to be because they're made of plastic because glass can't fold yet. I don't know if it ever will be able to or there'll be something in the middle. But if the screen's on the outside always, is it likely to get scratched? I don't know. Right, well, that's one of the things

the market may and long-term use by people will reveal. But you're right, one of the fundamental differences we can talk about the look and feel here one of the fundamental design choices that samsung made that huawei did not make is adding a second screen and folding the big screen in on itself to theoretically protect it from the environment whereas huawei is completely in on the idea that your entire phone is going to be exposed to the world as a screen like the front of the screen like we make a big deal about like oh apple did glass on the front and back of their phones now you can scratch or break but like the huawei it's literally your screen all the way

around and that means that you've got twice the surface area exposed to the world in terms of scratches you can't literally can't lay it down on a table on its back because it has no back really no it's all screen and you know samsung i gotta say samsung has a little bit of home field advantage here right because they've been building these screens and they uh have experience with them probably that nobody else has this is why i look at it i'm like oh okay like and they're like no no we're not gonna we're not gonna open it to the world they know samsung knows that so like my other thing on this as well of like kind of having

a preference for the for the samsung line is i believe if any company is going to make this work. Samsung will be the company to make it work because they have a history of making really weird phones and turning them into products that make sense down the line, like the Note line, right? When the first Note came out, it seemed ridiculous, but they eventually not only have made that a great product, but have pushed a lot of smartphone design towards what the original Note did in the first place, right? Like, if you just look at screen size as one of the bigger things, right? That was the first big phone, and now all phones are that big. I would probably, I mean, I haven't looked this up, but I bet most regular phones now are bigger than the original Note was,

the screen size. Yeah, probably. But so my thinking is, like, the Fold has some real awkwardness about it, which I think is that front screen. But when they eventually get to, like, Fold 2 or Fold 3, where they can tighten the gap up and make that front screen a more regular looking phone and then have the open screen in the in the middle i think that it will become a much more compelling product um i mean let alone the fact that huawei have significant issues trying to sell their products worldwide worldwide right now like you will not be able to buy the huawei mate 10 in america like you just won't be able to do that so that's gonna hold them back a little bit irrespective of

it um one of the bigger one of the big issues um and one of the things that i'm interested to see how it will eventually play out is creases creases in the screens you can see them like if you look at videos and gifs and images you can see like the the the galaxy fold has kind of a real thin line that goes down the middle and the huawei has like a book spine basically it looks like that goes down the middle this is just going to be another one of those things that it's going to look real bad in these first ones but they're going to they will eventually get there the same with software you know you mentioned like nobody's really allowed to touch these devices yet um huawei are letting people touch it today but they're not really allowed to use it um the software is going to be an absolute dumpster

fire for a while even when it comes out it's going to be janky as hell because this is like fundamentally a different experience to any phone that's come before right and like again i also have faith in samsung's ability just because of their size and scale as a company to be able to get more companies on board and like they they mentioned like whatsapp and office and and like google working with them on making the kind of they call it app continuity where you have you're looking at it on the front screen and you open it up and then it's in a bigger view. And I think it looks really cool.

I will say, Jason, you can probably tell, I'm really excited about this trend. I don't think that either of these phones are like what this is going to be. Oh, no, no. You got to start somewhere, right? Yeah, and I feel like as well, these two devices are a lot better

than I expected the first foldables to be like i was expecting them to look way more like the royal flex buy than these devices right well i was going to say um you i'm glad you mentioned look because these devices will ship and it's going to be like a disaster right like they're going to have all sorts of things wrong with them and that's part of the process i don't think anybody is uh people who act shocked are silly people that you shouldn't pay attention to when they when it turns out that there are all sorts of issues with these first generation foldables because uh that's gonna happen but uh but as you pointed out like they look they look better than then again in two years we'll look at these and we'll be like wow those

were terrible yeah look at those ridiculous hinges Can you even believe they're creases? Now we have this magic foldable glass that nobody knew that existed. There's a really nice, we can put it in the show notes. There's a really nice link to a thread on Twitter by Steven Sanofsky, who of course worked at Microsoft and has lots of very smart things to say about technology on Twitter.

And he links in it to a different thread he did, like, I don't know, a couple of months ago about foldable phones. But his point, and it's a point that I made in a in a mac world or no in a tom's guide column a while back too um you know talking about apple in in the context of this too it's like uh what what says is very much what we've been saying um it's early days these first products are going to be ridiculous um there's a software issue i mean he knows this from having been at been at Microsoft when they were trying to put a touch interface in. Like part of the issue here too is like,

what's Google going to do with Android? And where is it going to bend over backward to help its vendors with stuff like this? Because it does do that sometimes. Remember, it came out with like ways of doing notches and stuff. Oh, I 100% believe that one of the next, that Android Q, one of its things will be supporting uh flexible displays like like like they did in in pi with notches like they built

exactly a bunch of notch support exactly so so but it's still an open question of like where do they throw do they throw their weight behind what samsung is doing where there's like a single screen that becomes two screens or do they put effort into something because if they think that what Huawei is doing has merit they could for example build it so that you can more easily put you know different status information on the front and back of the screen when folded or something like that right like there are things they could do or they could be like, no, we're not gonna support that. Like when it's folded, we're just gonna put status on the front

and there's nothing on the back and forget it, right? Like they could, it's sort of like gonna be interesting to see what their, where they place their bets in terms of their resources that they're putting in. And because again, if we don't really know how these foldable phones are gonna work ultimately, if you're Google, you're probably not gonna be able to support every possible configuration.

So you may make some bets. And that will be interesting to see. And then Sanofsky's other point that I thought was really good is something about Apple, which is everybody's going to say Apple's behind. But Apple, and I would argue maybe Google with their hardware as well, had the great advantage of sitting and watching these other companies spend all this money. had the great advantage of sitting and watching these other companies spend all this money and also let's let's be clear is apple building foldable iphones inside apple as prototypes to try to figure out what the right way to do it is they undoubtedly they have been doing that for years now years they've been they've been doing as soon as they could get like these screens from samsung for like crazy amounts of money just so they could prototype with them sure bought them

right like yeah every time samsung comes up anything, you know Apple's buying it. Like, okay, let's just get this screen and see what we can do with it, because you'd be silly not to. And Apple also has an advantage that Sanofsky points out, which is Apple actually is further along in terms of dealing with these larger screens, because Apple has the advantage of having introduced the iPad nine years ago, and having it be be successful and having it have lots of apps that run on it. Whereas Android has not had as great a success with that. And so there's a little more work to do there.

So Apple's got some advantages as well because of the iPad to go into a larger foldable device. into a larger foldable device. So I think that Apple's not behind, even though pundits will probably say that, that they are watching closely and will make their move. And as Sanofsky points out, like Apple is the ship it when it's ready at volume and is the sort of seal of approval

on the market in a sense. It's like, oh, okay, mom and dad are here now, right? Like now it's gotten serious because we and dad are here now right like now we're now it's gotten serious because we've exited the throwing things against the wall to see what sticks mode now apple can go too early and they can go too late but they're generally uh they've generally historically been pretty good about hitting it pretty close to on the nose um in fact i think the the large phone thing was a counter example where their philosophy of what made a good iPhone got in the way of the reality of the market. But we've seen through

patent filings and things that Apple has been on this idea for a long time. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if they were prototyping foldable iPhone designs before there were foldable screens ready for them, like just as a test of what would we do with this just to get out in front of it. And I think, uh, I think this category, like, look, this category could be a loser, you know, in the end. And this is why I want to say this as fascinating as this is from just a pure tech enthusiasm perspective of like, Oh my God, this is like a science fictional product. That's come to be reality. I think there is truth in the fact that this is all being driven by the idea that with OLED technology, you have the ability to make flexible screens. And once you're

at that point, everybody says, oh, flexible screens. That means we can make foldable smartphones. So let's make those. It's not motivated by a desire necessarily, at least not primarily motivated by a desire in the market for a foldable phone. It's more like the technology lets us do this. And this is where Apple secret sauce comes in, honestly. And I know at this point, Apple's not a secret. Everybody knows about Apple and there are lots of companies trying to do ways

and things in the way that Apple does. And that includes Huawei and Samsung. They're trying to figure this out. They do it in public. Apple does it in private. is that moment when you can take what technology is possible and use it to create a product that serves a need or solves a problem. And right now, I think we can see that there is a problem, which is that people like bigger screens.

But at some point, I think the perception is they won't fit in your pocket. Like people like bigger screen phones. They might like tablets. Some people love tablets, but a tablet won't fit in your pocket. And maybe that's the thing, the problem this solves. I don't want to leave. I don't want to close off the possibility that that is not a problem and that nobody wants this because I think it's at least

a possibility so i'm not ready to go 100 and say this is our this is our foldable future um it may be further off than we think because in the end this may be so costly have so many issues and solve a problem that is not perceived as a problem by most of the market that it's just not going to be a big deal but it it might. And I think if you're somebody at Apple who's working on this stuff and filing patents for the last three or four years, that's the debate, right? Which is like, how can we do this in a way that makes sense and that people are delighted by because it makes their experience better? Because right now, a lot of this stuff is very much like, hey, I've got a screen that can fold. Let's make a phone that

can fold around it. And that doesn't say anything about the people who want to buy it. It just says, we have cool tech. Let's stick it in a product. And that's the difference between the art and the science here. And that's why I think you and I are so fascinated by this. We don't know how wide the chasm is. We don't know whether somebody's going to be able to jump

across it, whether it's going to happen. I'm going to take this metaphor a little bit further, whether it's going to happen now or whether it's going to take years and we're going to have to bring in some heavy equipment to build a bridge across this chasm, or if it's simply unbridgeable because nobody wants to go over there. And we don't know. And Samsung and Huawei don't know, and Apple doesn't know, and Google doesn't know. But this tech is here now. So everybody's going to give it a shot in their own way. And we'll see. And that, to me, that is one of the most entertaining things about following technology.

Because this could be transformative or it could be nothing. We don't know. We don't know. I wanted to just touch on the price angle real quick before we move on because these are expensive right they're starting at 1980 1980 dollars but like or the or what is it 2600 for the other one so yeah yeah that's i really am intrigued as to why the prices are so different like i'll, is Samsung willing to take more of a hit on it? I don't know. But it makes...

I mean, is anyone surprised? Like, two smartphones stuck together, essentially, right? It's what's going on here. Especially when you look at, like, the Samsung. They're doubling up a lot of components. And I just wanted to, like, you know, they're cutting edge, right? There's a lot of, like, the design and the R&D is going into this cost,

and it will come down over time. But I just wanted to mention, like, so you've got 512 gigabytes of storage, right? The XS Max at 512 gigabytes of storage is $1,449. It's $500 cheaper than the folding phone. gigabytes of storage is one thousand four hundred and forty nine dollars so it's five hundred dollars cheaper than the folding phone that doesn't seem like a bit as big a difference as i would have expected um so you know i just wanted to mention that like because i so i've been talking about this online and people like oh apple will make it cheaper i don't think they will yeah i think i think you're right in fact this is if we know anything look at the iphone 10 the iphone 10 I don't get the folding phone.

Like you have to pay more. There's more tech in here. Costs more. I'll also point out early generation stuff that does what no stuff did before, like is expensive. The original Mac costs $2,500, which in today's money is $6,200 for that little original Mac. It was really expensive. And it took a long time for the Mac to come down in price. And that's just, that's, that original tech, like you're paying, the people who buy a $2,000 folding Samsung phone are doing it because

they want to be on the super cutting edge and maybe don't care about the fact that it's not practical and are willing to pay for it. And, you know, good luck to those people. But right now, like, as you say, of course, it's going to be massively expensive because as well, Samsung and Huawei do not expect to sell a lot of these. They don't, right? Like this is probably something that's really difficult to make, and they're probably not going to make that many of them, and they probably don't expect to sell that many of them. But that's not the point of the first one. The first one is like, let's get it out there. Let's see what people think about it. Let's actually do something for all of the research and

development that we put into it, and then move ahead. All right right today's show is brought to you by lunar display now i love my lunar display it's fun like lunar display is almost like a foldable display for your mac i guess you could just you know lg did this jason they bring it out a case which has a second display that's the way they're dealing with the foldable display thing you can just buy a case for your lg display lg phone and it's just a second display and i think that's the that's their answer to this solved it's all taken care of but luna display is the hardware solution that turns your ipad into a wireless display for your mac meaning you'll have a second display that is super portable with basically zero lag and stunning

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of this show and all of RelayFM. Alright, so Mark Gurman had a report about Marzipan. Do you know what I found interesting about this report? I know it's just Gurman's name in this report, which is different. I'm starting to think, jason that there's something about where the information is coming from and who's writing the reports and then kind of how the reports feel at bloomberg like i haven't put my finger on it

yet but like this one's pretty concise but anyway uh basically the thing to take away from this is a timeline of Marzipan. And for the refresher, Marzipan is iOS apps running on the Mac. This was Project Sneak Peek shown off at WWDC last year, which brought with it the News app and the Home app onto the Mac, very iOS-y apps. So this is the timeline. At WWDC 2019, developers will get the tools that they need to help them port iPad apps to the Mac.

In WWDC 2020, this support will extend for iPhone apps. And then WWDC 2021, the ability to merge iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps into a new universal app for customers to buy. What do you think of that timeline, Jason? Does that pass the sense check for you? Yeah, I think so, right? Obviously, Apple has said that in 2019, developers are going to get tools to do this. I'm a little bit baffled by the iPhone in 2020. We only have two sentences from Mark Gurman on this, so everybody is trying to extrapolate here. Um, best I can come up with, cause like, again, I think of iPhone apps and I think, well,

you know, I could get a little iPhone app in a window on my Mac and that would be fine. I think what Apple's thinking here is they're thinking about laptops because that's two thirds of the Mac are laptops. And they're thinking about having something that can fill the screen. Not that it has to fill the screen, but I think they're thinking about it that way. And the problem with the iPhone, as any iPad user knows, is that iPhone apps don't work right. They are, you know, they're orientation locked and they're scaled and they're weird. And I think maybe that's what Apple is talking about here,

but I'm a little bit strange, like support would be added for iPhone. I don't know why Apple wouldn't just say, look, iPhone apps run in a little window. And if you want to make a universal app, you want to make an app that runs on iPad and Mac, you need to add that. I'm not quite sure why there's an interim step where they say, oh, now we're going to

add support unless it's some other technological update that Apple is doing that makes iPhone apps scale better. Like, you know what I mean? Like tools that make the iPhone apps more kind of intelligently scale, or they're thinking about some other kind of multitasking interface that allows them to be, I'm just, I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit baffled by that, but it may just be like tools to make people who have iPhone apps

get them to run on iPad and Mac more quickly, more easily than anything else. Because so I, that's a question mark for me. Like, is that what 2020 is all going to be about? They're going to do, presumably 2020 will also be about lots of improvements to the marzipan stuff that drops in 2019. And maybe they're anticipating that that's going to be a more painful conversion. Also 2020, the suggestion is that that's when the R max start to appear.

So maybe there's like enough going on in 2020 that they're like, this is all we're going to do for now. to appear. So maybe there's like enough going on in 2020 that they're like, this is all we're going to do for now. And then in 2021, we end up with the idea of, you know, these, these end up getting converged together where you can build them in a single binary and they can basically be on, on any of the, you know, on the Mac app store or the iOS app store, maybe the app stores come together in some way. Um, and that makes sense. So it's not a lot of new stuff here. It feels a little bit more like this is kind of apple's um rollout strategy in terms of some milestones like so that they can constrain

what the um what the work is for 2019 like they know there's going to be more work required in 2020 and 2021 so they're they're setting their agenda for what's going to fit into 2020 or 2019, which presumably they have now, right? Like WWDC coming in kind of soon at this point. I mean, I know it's four months away, but it's coming soon. Yeah, it's almost three months away. So, yeah, I'm a little bit baffled by some of the details here, but it's not surprising. This is going to be, we've said it, this is a many years process of trying to unify the application platforms.

Is it three years? Probably more like five years to get to a very different place where there's a unified Apple application platform, which doesn't necessarily mean that the Mac application platform will go away, but the new one is this unified thing across iOS and Mac. So if iPad apps come to the Mac, there is a question about if any changes will be made to the Mac to make iPad apps feel more at home. And this is an article that you wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and we've been saving this topic, and it kind of perfectly dovetails with this Marzipan, extension of the Marzipan rumors.

So you posed the question in a MacQuad column, what if Apple uses macOS 10.15 to further unify the interfaces of its platforms so let's not say and what we're not saying here is this is the unification but what if it was a little bit more like when apple did that back to the mac event where they introduced a bunch of ios like designs to applications on the mac so like is it a sensible path to consider that Marzipan might work a little bit more easily if the operating systems share some common design elements at least? Yeah, and I think Marzipan is not necessarily even the reason you do it, but I think the

reason you do it is that Apple wants consistency across its product lines. And marzipan is a symptom of the fact that Apple has decided that it wants much more similarity between Mac and iOS products than maybe it has had before. And you're right, the Mac to the Mac was a great example of like, no, we want to make the Mac have stuff that's going to be familiar to iOS users. There are way more iOS users than Mac users, right? So there's a huge advantage for Apple in having Macs feel more like iOS. And I know that makes Mac users uncomfortable. And I am one of them, a Mac user. I'm not super uncomfortable because I like iOS too. I think Apple's theory

is most Mac users like iOS and iOS users would be more comfortable on the Mac if it was more like iOS, therefore they should push in that direction. And so Marzipan is an example where the app platform comes over, but this article was like, do you also at this point start to say there's stuff in the Mac that is not really anything like iOS, and maybe it could be more like iOS. Are there other features that we could make a little more Apple-like, more unified across, just because it's better if people don't say, well, wait a second, you're Apple. Why do you do it this way on this device and this way on the other device? Which I think is a strong argument. Like, argument like oh yeah we shouldn't do that we should probably be these all these devices should probably be as similar as possible in terms of the language they use the interfaces they use to do

certain things so i tried to imagine it and this is one of those things where it's like all the things that will infuriate long-time mac users if they're in the next version of mac os right like what did you do why is it like this now but it kind of makes sense to do it that way i keep coming back to something that continues to be a surprise to me it was even more so this year when we look at the upgradies and we try and think of mac apps and what makes a mac app mac like and like this year, we awarded Audio Hydra the upgrade because it was probably the most new, like the most Mac-like app we could think of.

And that was pulling from a pretty small selection for us, I think, of apps that were even new or being heavily updated. I feel like that, you know, it's unfortunate, especially for people that care about it. But the time of being a Mac-like app is changing and there are just not many of them anymore. No, we are in an era where there are Mac apps

that are go-to apps for Mac users and they will continue to be made and updated. But there's not a lot of investment into new apps on the platform. There are some here and there, but there's not a lot. Because, you know, priority one is iOS. Priority two is probably Android. Priority three is a web app to get you everywhere else. Maybe priority four is Windows. And there's Mac at priority five. For a lot of companies, that's the truth of it is

Mac and Windows are not really high priorities, but iOS and Android are. And so, you know, the Mac being maintenance of the existing rich apps that are out there and then an influx of new stuff that comes over from ios i mean that's the idea that's the idea plus again i'll point out like if you love the iphone and the ipad apple should have an in on you as a customer to get you if you want a laptop or a desktop to buy one of theirs but the advantage there is that their um their devices on the mac side are reminiscent of ios so that there's a familiarity there that kind of doesn't exist right now um and so that was that was my thought with this list was like you know multitasking things i've already got full screen

and and split view but like could you do a slide slide over idea where you dock an app and you can swipe it out with your trackpad or whatever from the side and it slides out and you click on something and then you slide it away. That would be a familiar thing for iPad users. Or like making notification center more iOS-like, making control center, which is currently what we call icons on the right side of the menu bar, like making that more explicitly control center and having a different interface for it than is currently there now. That will break a lot of longstanding kind of Mac user interface conventions, but I can see it. I can see Apple saying, actually, we're going to change what the menu bar is and what the status bar is with the icons, and we're going to make it more refined

and more iOS-like. And then the big one is the touchscreen thing, which I keep talking about touchscreens, and I don't know for sure that Apple will do them. But if, again, to back up and say, I'm an iPad user, an iPhone user, and now I want to get a laptop or a desktop. And I want to ideally, you know, Apple would be where I would go because I'm comfortable with Apple's platforms. But then I see Apple's laptop, and it doesn't, it's not a touchscreen. And it doesn't look anything like anything that I use on iPhone and iPad. And in fact, the Windows laptops that are out there and the Windows desktops that are out there are more like it in the sense that they have a big,

you know, have a touch interface that is at least sort of familiar. It's not a completely different interface to me. So, you know, again, I look at that and I say, adding touch to the mix with the Marzipan apps, not as the primary interaction method, but as an interaction method, I think it's got to be on the table. So I assume this is not, in your mind, a huge redesign of macOS or a new operating system?

This is like something, again, I brought it up earlier, but something more like when they brought some iOS design to Mac a while ago. I think that's it. I think the idea here is to incrementally update macOS to be more like iOS. And when they've said we're not merging them together, I believe them. together. I believe them, but they are, I think, you know, pushing the application platform together and perhaps pushing a lot of the interface conventions together. I think what Apple means when it says they're not merging them together is there is probably not going to be a day five years from now, sometime in the 2020s, where Apple is going to say, I'm sorry, you can't run BBEdit anymore, right? Or maybe Audio Hijack, right? sorry, you can't run BBEdit anymore, right? Just or maybe Audio Hijack, right?

No, you can't run a classic Mac OS app. Only stuff that comes from iOS will run anymore. I don't think that is where they're going, at least in the medium term, maybe. I mean, long term, everything changes. medium term maybe in the long i mean long term everything changes but i i would imagine at that point they would have provided ways for apps like bb edit to to adopt new technologies because bb edit was a literally a classic mac os app and it over the course of a decade plus they you know they very slowly moved onto the new systems that Apple was building and Apple provided a way for them to do it.

And that was true with a lot of those classic Mac apps. There were ways to come across and now BBEdit's never gone away. It's never been non-functional, but it very slowly evolved to use modern features. So that may happen, something like that. But that's how I read when Apple says we're not going to merge the operating systems is that they're going to make it so that the operating systems have as much in common as possible, but that they understand that there's a subset of the Mac market that wants the stuff that iOS doesn't provide and that their choices are going to be to just keep that around or to

provide it on iOS so it doesn't matter. And, you know, I think that's a long-term plan, long-term goal, but it could also be that they're like, yeah, you know, we're never going to do the terminal on iOS and that's fine because we'll keep it on the Mac and you can use it there. But I think likening this back to the Mac is the right way to say it, which is this is a progression of things that will be added to the Mac to make it more in parity with iOS and more familiar for people. And like, I get it. Again, I think there is a very strong argument. Maybe the strongest argument is Apple's products should feel like one another on a certain fundamental level. And because of the history of where the Mac came from and where iOS came from, they don't now. Apple mentioned last year at WWDC that one of the things that they'd been working on and continue to work on is this effort

that is almost invisible to users, which is to get the subsystems of the Mac and iOS back in parity because essentially they forked off of a Mac OS 10 in 2007 when they built the iPhone and they've been drifting apart and they're trying to push those back together. And I think Marzipan is a reason why, but I think also that's the idea. It's better if everything is just more consistent. If the way that all Apple's products work has things in common, it also saves them a lot of effort to not be maintaining these completely separate code bases if they can. So it's not a complete merger, but it is that gradual seeping in of more and more iOS conventions. And I think they could do it badly

and they could do it well. I don't think it's a fundamentally bad idea. And I think there's some benefit in saying just like an iPad as an iPad user, like having synced up the iPhone and iPad behavior in the last updates. I don't love the control centers in the top right corner everywhere because I don't love that interaction. But i like that it's in the same place on both my ipad my iphone and it wasn't before when you mentioned bb edit something popped into my head which was like huh i don't remember bb edit appearing in the app store and it was on stage at wwd, right? Like that was one of the apps. Transmit appeared a little while ago, Office as well. And as of an hour ago, there was a software update to BBEdit,

which sandboxes the app. So it's moving to the App Store. So like this is the step they needed to go through, right? It was to make a sandboxed app. But it was just like, oh yeah, okay. I forgot about that. And so it looks like it's still coming,ed app but it was just like oh yeah okay i forgot about that and so it looks like it's still coming i guess because they've gone through that my understanding with some of those announcements is that they announced that they're going to do it

but that some of the behind the scenes and then not just bb edit but also like the panic apps is um that it requires changes in mac os to allow them to ask for certain powers that they weren't and this is the this is the effect of policy change on software, which is they had to, Apple had to say, okay, we're going to allow apps to ask for more permission. But then they have to build in to the operating system, the permissions and the requesting of them. It's not just a policy decision.

It's like a policy decision that then is an implementation issue in the OS. So my understanding about Panic and BBEdit and other apps like that that were called out in June is that some of those features were in the shipping version of Mac OS 10.14. But some of them were not. Some of them were in a later release. but some of them were not. Some of them were in a later release. And I was always unclear about whether that meant 10.15 or whether that meant 10.14.2 or 10.14.3.

But I definitely got the word even last June that like not all of those apps weren't all going to be able to go on the app store immediately because it wasn't just an issue of, oh, well, they'll ship Mojave and then we'll be ready to go. It was an issue of they got, well, they'll ship Mojave and then we'll be ready to go. It was an issue of,

they got to ship these particular things that we need and then we can be in the app store again. So it was kind of a statement of principle, but that's also a great sign, right? And that's a good example of what I was saying before about BBEdit too, which is like the world may not change overnight. It may be a slow progression, but I do believe that Apple is kind of committed

to allowing these apps that people need to continue to exist, they may just, you know, there may just be continually every year, a little bit of drift that has to happen. And that I think that happens in software anyway, right? Like there's, even if it's not a global thing, where you know that your company is going from point A to point B, your platform vendor, you know, where you know that your company is going from point A to point B, your platform vendor. Platform vendors do still make changes every year that software developers have to deal with. So it's a little bit different,

but not necessarily enormously different. All right, we should do some hashtag ask upgrade questions to finish off today's episode. But first, let me thank our friends over at Squarespace. With Squarespace, you can easily create a website for your next idea. You can make your next move with Squarespace. No matter what type of website you want to make, Squarespace has the tools that you're going to need.

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to get 10% off your first purchase and to support this show. Our thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode of upgrade Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So our first hashtag ask upgrade question comes from nor easter who would like to know jason can they get a two-minute user review of the bed at sleep monitor sure um i bought one i'm going to write it up at some point this is apple owns this company this is an example of apple buying a company and yet keeping its uh product kind of on the outside it's not apple branded or anything they just did a new version you can buy it in the apple store right like you can it's not

like one of those ones where they're like oh we'll just run it down until it's done like no this is like just a brand that they own yeah it's interesting so i um i bought it because i was kind of curious and i like the idea of sort of locking. When am I getting a good night's sleep and not, and am I getting more weekend up in the middle of the night and all these things, it's a little pad that you put on your mattress basically. And it's got a USB cord that comes out and you plug that in. And on the,

on the plug end is basically like a Bluetooth thing. And then you have to connect it to a device. What they want you to do is connect it to your iPhone. And then it syncs the health data with all of your other health data and from your apple watch and all of that um and monitors your your uh your sleep and it has to be by your bed in in range of the the bed at dongle because you're doing um bluetooth le to connect to the sensor and get the data and collect it and it also actually uses the phone microphone to do snoring monitoring. So it listens and it logs when there's snores. So you can see how much snoring you did in the night as well, which I think is pretty clever. I like it. I don't love

it. One of my big problems with it is speaking of iPad apps and iPhone apps. It does not work. It does not have an iPad app. It really wants you to use your iPhone. And you know what that means? That means it is making a fundamental assumption that you sleep with your iPhone next to your bed. I don't. I don't. And so I paired it with my iPad, but that means that my iPad is not connected to all of my fancy home data. And it means that I'm using- And the health data is not connected to all of my fancy home data. And the health data can't write to health, can it? Exactly. And yeah, that's what I meant.

And that's not great. And I have to use it in the blown up iPad compatibility mode, which is dumb because they don't have a proper iPad app. Do you have to leave the app open all night? Well, so it is using a background task to do the uh snore monitoring and talk to the bluetooth le thing so you have to have run it and not have it be killed which i haven't had a problem with if you kill the bedded app and go to sleep it won't log you though it has to it has to have been launched it's like probably the last thing you do before you go to bed is is open it and then you like can go back to your home

screen and close it and then it will just run in the back which is not great it should it should just work and it doesn't and that part that part bugs me it's a little like it should be more like the apple watch where it just they they get to talk to each other and i think maybe that is an effect of it being owned by apple but not apple proper that they're not allowed to do that um but the the fact that i have to use my ipad and that my ipad is not part of the great health database i'd like to be able to sync it across all my devices and stuff and that's not i think you can do so that's silly if you put the better app on your iphone and like have an account can then the phone not write the data to health? Or does it have to be where it's performed?

I don't think it travels. That's annoying. I haven't tried that, but I don't think that travels. I think this is just a fundamental problem where maybe they discovered most people sleep with their phone next to their bed, but I don't. I have my phone on a charger in the kitchen because I have an iPad, and so I don't need my phone. I have my iPad instead a charger in the kitchen because I have an iPad and so I don't need my phone I have my iPad instead so that's that's weird but anyway that's there's the short review of the bed at sleep monitor it has I think it works pretty well and I think it's very clever and I was just curious about how it worked in terms of monitoring my my sleep and when I go to bed and when I wake up and am I getting a good night's sleep and am I waking up in the middle of the

night and you know all of that seems to work pretty well after a day or two i got used to the feeling that the pad was there i and now i just ignore it i don't even notice that it's there so dominic asks with the rumored wireless charging coming to the airpods combined with the uh rumor that we spoke about like the iphone being able to charge like samsung's doing this so the s10 you can take the galaxy buds and put them on the back of the phone and they charge up it's like bilateral charging is the phrase so dominic wants to know do we think that the next airpods could be the first portless product from apple i think not this version. No. But maybe version 3.

I feel like the AirPods are probably the product I can imagine going all wireless first. I mean, let's not include the Apple Watch because technically the Apple Watch doesn't have any ports in it. And the Apple Pencil. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like those are the apple pencil yes that 100 works but i get dominic's question of like a product that has a port having it removed i think

that's probably a better way to think about it so you know and again it's like let's the apple pencil i think we're gonna we're just gonna pull out from this conversation because like yes it had a lightning port but you plug it in to something it was all it's always been a little bit of an outlier even though let's just say the next the next yeah all right there you go thank you product so uh the next one but can you imagine like what can you imagine this happening with the airpods i think it's it feels inevitable to me but not with the next one yeah i i it's going to be a while because you're going to need to sell while because you're going to need to sell it you you're going to want to sell it to people who don't have a you know don't have to buy

a wireless charger and don't have a phone like even if the next generation of iphones can do wireless charging of devices like the samsung s10 can like that's not your own that's not your whole market that is slow charging coming from the phones so you wouldn't want to charge like you'd have to like leave it overnight on the back of it doesn't make sense oh you leave it on a chi charger like it's it's less than ideal but i think that it makes sense for this product to go that way in the future um but i don't think we're there yet i think i think the money of people who don't have wireless chargers is more important to Apple

than making a super cool thing without a port that requires another accessory in order to charge it. And they're not going to put a charger in the box with it. So that's, yeah, I think it's going to be a while. James asks, do you think Apple will continue to update the iMac Pro after the new Mac Pro is released? I do.

I think the iMac Pro is going to stick around. I think it won't get an update, you know, super often. But I think that there's, I mean, you could argue that the iMac Pro is more, is what Apple wanted to make. I was just going to say this. It is worth remembering the iMac Pro is the computer that Apple will not wanted to make. I was just going to say this. It is worth remembering, the iMac Pro is the computer that Apple were not forced to make. That was the one they decided to make,

and they were basically forced to make the Mac Pro. I mean, the argument is that maybe they have changed direction now, and therefore, since they're making a Mac Pro, they don't need an iMac Pro. But I think Apple will watch the sales figures, because I think the argument is strong that you don't need a Mac Pro, and you could just use an iMac Pro.

But if everybody who's in that market buys a Mac Pro with an external monitor and the iMac Pro sales falter, then maybe they would stop doing it. I would also argue that I feel like the iMac Pro is also pointing a direction for the future of the iMac in terms of removing all spinning storage space and redesigning the fans and all of that. So I think that there's some, you know, it's not impossible that the iPad Pro will disappear. Sorry, the iMac Pro will disappear. But I think it's less likely and that it's more likely that Apple really does believe that the iMac is the ideal desktop and that they're, they'll continue to push it. But, but, you know, who knows, who knows. But I think, I think in the end, the sales will tell. We don't know whether Apple's opinion about this has changed. But I do, I do want to point out that yes, Apple initially thought the iMac Pro

could just replace the Mac Pro and they may still feel that it's the real product that's going to sell well but iMac Pro sales will tell Tom asks how do you record and publish the show so quickly do you just get it in one take with no editing I don't understand the no take question as such but i do understand why people ask this because we do publish upgrade pretty quickly upgrades usually published kind of within 90 minutes of us stopping recording right and the way that we do that is i edit the show immediately and the way that i kind of take stock of what needs to be edited is during our conversation, I'm writing down time codes of all of the things that I need to go back and fix.

And this includes when we mess stuff up or when we cross talk over each other quite excessively. I go back and then go and fix all of that stuff and publish it. I like upgrade to go out as quickly as possible. I don't know why I feel that way, but I always have. I kind of, I pride ourselves on the ability to do it. Well, it's very timely. Yeah, it is very timely. And that's part of it is that we can get the,

we can catch the Monday evening commute in the US and we're talking about stuff that's going on right now. So I think there's an advantage in that like anytime like atp um there tends to be what a day and a little bit gap between episode recording and release they record on a wednesday night it usually goes out friday morning i think yeah sounds about right um and you know that sometimes that bites them sometimes that bites them. Sometimes that bites them because news happens after they record and before they release. And I really like the idea, if at all possible, of getting the show out immediately because then it's out and it's of the moment and it's about what's happening right now. And if something happens tomorrow, well, of course we didn't cover it because we already released our episode and then we just have to deal with it. Incomparable, I record way in advance. And although I don't do a super heavy edit on that most of the time, I do spend several hours with it, usually because there are way more people. Two people podcasts are also way easier to edit.

and then sometimes you have shows that are much more topical and are a heavier edit is more appropriate and cortex is an example of that where you and gray you know are not super timely and you guys um sweat that a lot more plus your session i believe is a lot less um you know free flowing whereas ours is pretty close to the final yeah it's like atp sounds better i think than our show some of the like a lot of the time because marco is really going in and like fine-tuning it sure they've also got three people so they got more cleanup to do yep but i do think that this show does sound really good and we take a lot of efforts in making that work the best that we can but it's different so like it takes me probably about an hour an hour hour and a bit,

depending on the episode, to edit this and publish it. If I edited this show the same way that I edit Cortex, which is, I think, closer to what Marco does, we'd be looking at maybe four hours. And that's not really the way that I want to do it because that means I couldn't get it out the same day because we start recording at my 5 p.m.

And it changes the dynamic of the show. It becomes a show where you're spending four hours a week on editing instead of one or one and a half. And, you know, like I said, the incomparable I put in time like that because I've got a large panel and because there are often a lot of kind of content decisions that I've got to make. It varies from show to show. I've also got weekly podcasts that I do where there's almost no editing. And it's the choices you make. Because it is a cost to go through. And part of the calculation is, how much can I improve this versus how much time am I spending on it? Because you could spend four hours every Monday evening not having your dinner and editing upgrade.

How much better would it be? And the answer is not a lot better because there are only the two of us. And we mostly do it pretty much straight through. And there are just a few little nips and tucks here and there. And so you could spend more time, but why? Yeah, most of the differences we'd get out of that not many people would notice. Yes, which is the beauty of of fixing like when i do a podcast with eight people on it and i edit it so it's like wow nobody ever

interrupted everybody and everyone let everyone finish and it's like yeah that didn't happen right like i made it seem like that but it wasn't like that but with this it's not um i think nobody would notice at all because it would be little examples of crosstalk or little nips and tucks here. I think it would not be worth your time, quite frankly. Now, Rick Allen in the chat is asking another question. Rick wants to know if I listen to the final version. I don't anymore because... All right, so I feel like I'm dooming myself on this one.

So like, I feel like I'm dooming myself on this one. I trust my editing now because I cannot remember the last time I made a mistake in a show that I had to go back and fix it because I edit so much that I know my process and I know how to do it. And I've built in enough checks and balances, you know, into the way that I edit and like different checks that I'll do to the it and I've built in enough checks and balances, you know, into the way

that I edit and like different checks that I'll do to the file before it goes out. That most people would think that I had lost my mind sometimes with some of the checks that I do because I, but these are all checks based upon mistakes I've made in the past. Sure. And it becomes a, it becomes a, like a safety net. Like I will check, I don't listen to the shows back that I I edit because, again, I don't have that kind of time. And I'm fairly confident in my workflow. But do I open the final export and look at the waveform?

Yes, I do. Because what if there's a big gap or something weird that exported wrong? I can see it. And then I can go in and fix it. And that does happen from time to time. Forecast, which I use and you use to encode MP3, Marco actually built in a silence sensor, and it will actually say,

warning, there's a three-second-long silence at 24 minutes in the file. And that's a nice little safety net, although I would see that in the waveform. So there's some of that, but yeah, a 90 minute podcast i don't spend 90 minutes listening back to it you when you edit it you can listen to some of it enough to spot check it but it's more of a spot check than it is anything else yeah so that's that's podcast editing for you folks uh maybe i tell one last little thing on this because I like talking about it and then maybe we'll wrap up on this so because of the way that me and Jason edit and because of the way that we both know I'll

edit the show we have this funny little thing that happens that you'll only notice if you listen to the show live which I refer to as like the editor's prerogative uh or like kind of like the the the kind of the fortune of people that edit shows so both me and jason know that if because we remove crosstalk we'll pick the best thing that's said so if me and jason are talking over each other and sometimes you will hear us say like it make entire points for like maybe five or ten seconds sometimes of the two of us just talking yeah and we both know that i will go back and pick the best one of those but this is something that typically people that edit podcasts do way worse to each other because we are both safe in the knowledge that i will fix it later on and i think it's just this funny thing that we do

but this is totally how you get used to the way that a show is edited so with cortex i very frequently will take another shot at saying something if i kind of messed it up in a way that doesn't really happen when i record this show because my brain is like in a different mode because there's way more of like what I'm saying will be committed to the audio unless something terrible happens where if I know I have the safety net of like Mike in the future will listen to this and he'll fix it

then I will allow myself to kind of flub and then be like okay let me redo that and say it again but the funny thing that happens with this show is me and Jason just talk over each other and then move on knowing that i'll fix it later on which is just kind of funny you'll pull it apart or you'll find out that one of us didn't need to make that noise because it was right like you may and that's editor's prerogative and i do that too i do a lot on the incomparable of like uncovering jokes and sometimes two people make the same joke and i'm like that one's better and i'll just make a decision it's like sorry other person you also made that

joke and nobody's gonna hear it now but that's just how it has to be and that's that's also a part of it i did make a new year's resolution of a sort this year which is if um because i default to what you described about um our show which is to just let it go. It's live for the most part and you fix egregious things later. I did make a little bit of a New Year's resolution to do a little bit more of the, can we stop because that was wrong? Just because what I was finding

is that I know something was wrong. I let it go because I don't want to create an edit point and make more work for you. And then we spend a week having people complain that we got something wrong. So I have tried to do a little bit more of that because, but I still think that there's value in it being the default, because if you don't think of it that way, what happens with Cortex is exactly what happens, which is suddenly every five minutes you're stopping

to say, can I rephrase that? Let me do that again. And then you've got a whole list of edits and then you have to be sure that you edit it diligently. Otherwise you're, Hey, wait, wait, let me, every now and then you have to be sure that you edit it diligently otherwise you're hey wait let me every down on atp someone will rephrase something and it'll get through the edit and they'll be like oh you missed that one right and it's like i'd rather not do that but sometimes you have to sometimes you do all right should we should we redo that part jason

it's not gonna get any better so let's just go with that one alright thanks everybody for submitting their questions this week you can ask questions of us with the hashtag askupgrade and they will go into a document for us to pull from later on and if you want to open the show you can use hashtag snelltalk for that one to ask some random question that may find its way into a future episode

if you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. Jason is at jsnell on Twitter. You can find me on at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. And you can find this show, many other shows that both me and Jason host over at relay.fm slash shows. You can maybe find something new there

to pick up for your commute, for your dishwashing time, your lawnmower time, whatever it is that you do when you listen to podcasts. There's something else there for you, I'm sure. Thanks again to Green Chef,

Lunar Display, and Squarespace for their support of this show. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. You're going to edit this part out, right? Yeah, 100%.