Upgrade - 24: Because... Luxury

Episode Date: February 23, 2015

This week Jason and Myke trade more thoughts on Apple Car rumors, dive in to some more details on the Apple Watch, consider why working within barriers can be a good thing and discuss transparency in editorial practices at Apple.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 24 today's show is brought to you by igloo and internet you'll actually like mail route a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam and pdf pen pro 7 take control control of PDFs on your Mac. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined, as always, by my host and yours, the one and only Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. How's it going? Very well, sir. How are you? I'm doing well. As always, I enjoy starting off the week with our conversations. It's

very nice. Yes, I feel like we should say this every week. It's a nice way to start. It's very nice. Yes, I feel like we should say this every week. It's a nice way to start. It's a nice way to kick off with a good bit of upgrade. Upgrade your week right at the start of your week. How much better could it be? Indeed. Absolutely. Should we talk about some topics that we've covered recently but would like to cover again briefly with feedback from listeners woven in most definitely all right it's not as catchy as pressing a button no hearing the words follow up we can i'm seriously integrating follow out into all of my shows now oh that's nice yeah see it all it all starts here i uh we talked about uh the Apple car last week, which we'll talk about in a bit.

But the one bit of follow-up that I wanted to get to is we had some people giving us feedback about your comment and mine. My comment was about traveling and needing to copy my podcast files, the large, you know, many, many megabytes, many, many gigabytes. In some cases, podcast files in order to edit when I was on the road. And you were talking about how you've got the Mac Pro and you've got the laptop and moving the files back and forth is problematic for you too. And we definitely got some feedback. I'm looking right now at some podcasts that are sitting on my, just for reference, the incomparable Star Wars Episode III episode. That folder is 12 gigabytes. Total Party Kill is 13 gigabytes. So these are big projects that we're talking about

here. So we got some feedback. Listener Rob said, looks like you guys need a remote desktop solution for working away from home. That's what I do. And a listener, the hexagon on Twitter said, what about just using an external drive for logic projects? Video pros do this all the time and it works very well. Um, I, we got a few people who talked to us about remote desktop and I like remote desktop, but, um, what I said to them on Twitter when they mentioned this is i have not i first off does remote desktop do you know does it stream audio streams from the remote system i thought it didn't do that i have no idea i i can't imagine if it does that it would do it very well well that's exactly it and the point is when you're doing audio editing you need you need um you need audio you need no latency you need no lag precision

as well and i really don't think i could get the precision that i needed um and also as well like when you're doing something i mean i'm not saying that anybody that suggested this doesn't do things like this but at least for me and i think it's the same for you jason when you're doing something that is so like it's really time consuming and you really kind of get into a rhythm with it, if something breaks your rhythm, it's so frustrating. And I can imagine just stuttering, that kind of thing in the stream being an issue. And keeping in mind, what we're talking about here is an alternative to copying the files. And that's where it really breaks down. It's like, look, if to copy a file would waste a day of productivity for me, I would consider using a remote desktop.

But the thing is, copying a file, I have a Thunderbolt gigabit Ethernet adapter for my laptop. I plug that in and copy the file over my gigabit network, and it takes a few minutes. It's not a big deal to go back and forth. And to the hexagon's point, I could have an external hard drive and bring that along with me too, but at that point, I'm copying the file regardless. And that might work better for you if you were constantly switching back and forth, you could use an external hard drive to do it. But the point, the larger point being whatever you would lose, um, in, in latency and the sluggishness of remote desktop stuff, not to mention the idea of trying to react to, uh, audio that's streaming with latency. And it just, there is, I mean, there is literally, I think, nothing I would rather avoid than something like that.

I would rather use GarageBand. I would rather edit on a single track in a single track editor than use Remote Desktop. So I don't think it's, I just don't think it's an issue, an option for heavy duty media editing. I just don't think it's an issue, an option for heavy-duty media editing. But what do you think about the idea of getting a drive and using that for your projects so that you go back and forth between your Mac Pro and your MacBook Pro? When it comes to work stuff, so like the podcast and the audio, I get very – not superstitious, but like very nervous about it I can't really explain it but there's just this part of me that's like I feel like if I add too many

layers into the process then I'm opening myself up to too many points of failure like which is why I tried to stay on like with the previous Mac Mini I tried to stay on Snow Leopard for as long as possible and then when I had to stay on, like with the previous Mac Mini, I tried to stay on Snow Leopard for as long as possible. And then when I had to upgrade to Lion for Logic Pro X,

I did that, but I stayed on Lion until I got the Mac Pro. And I really kind of wished that the Mac Pro wasn't on Yosemite because I'm having some issues with it that I think are hardware related, but they're really difficult to pin down. So adding anything into the system where I could make a mistake, or I could lose something, or something could go wrong, because of how important this is, I like to try and avoid those.

Where I know that a rational person would say to me, well, you have a problem, you've identified a problem, which is being chained to one machine, but you're not willing to take steps to fix it. And I know that, but I'm willing to accept that for the peace of mind that everything's going to be okay. Right. This isn't just a problem to be solved. A lot of times, and this happens, I think, when we talk about technology things on the internet, whether it's on a podcast or on Twitter, is you get a lot of people who are problem solvers. That's what they do. They're technical people. They like to solve problems. And they say, here is a solution for you. And the challenge is in saying, you know what? That's not a good enough solution for me to change my behavior. It is a solution. You could do it that

way, but it's just not enough. Plus, I mean, there's the financial aspects too. I mean, your Mac Pro has super fast SSD storage, which for something like this show is not that big a deal. For something like Inquisitive, where you've got multiple tracks and just huge amounts of stuff, it's a big deal. For me and my seven crazy seven person incomparables or total party kill, It's, you know, having that quick storage is important. So now if you wanted to be on an external drive, you're going to need to buy a fast external drive, a fast, like fast connectivity, fast read, write, and then, and then you've, you could move around with it. I don't know. I mean, my,

my thought was if gigabit transferring your files over gigabit ethernet, you could do that. You could just connect the two devices together and transfer the files if you were really like going somewhere for a week and needed to work on your projects. But, you know, I see it. I think there's, I see what you're saying. There are solutions that will get you what you want, but they won't make you, they won't make your life better because it will bring up all these other issues that concern you. So you're better off sort of dealing

with the problems you've got rather than these other problems that you anticipate. Does that sound right? Yeah, because the problem, I think, you know, to reiterate, the problem that I have is, like we were talking about the fact that, you know, using different machines

and how you can kind of have files on one machine that you need and then not having them if you want to leave the house. Right. So I can't I'm not going to take my Mac Pro out of the house with me. I have my MacBook Pro for that kind of thing. Yeah. But I was saying like with with Inquisitive, all of my files are there because it's multiple, multiple gigabytes of stuff. And I have a lot of the master stuff in Dropbox, but the project files, as we were mentioning, can be huge. So the thing is, my problem now that I see is just time management. So my solution to this problem is effectively managing my diary so i know i will be home on certain days at certain times to do this stuff that's kind of like my solution funnily enough my solution is not a

hardware or software one it's just time management it's a life hack it's a life hack i have to hack my life so i can produce the shows having having those kinds of barriers is useful, too. I mean, for me, I love the fact that my MacBook Air has the fastest SSD. It's got an i7. It lets me have the freedom to edit a podcast wherever I want. And if I'm traveling, that's what I do. But, to your point, I like the fact that my iMac is here at my desk. And when I'm here, I'm working. And when I'm somewhere else, there's some part of my work that doesn't come with me.

And that's, I'm okay with that. Because if everything was on my MacBook Air, like it used to be, I could, you know, taking that MacBook Air anywhere also meant I could do that work anywhere. And now there's an extra bump in the way. And so I'm much less likely to be sitting outside on a summer day editing a podcast under the tree, right? And that's, if I really want to do that, I can get over that bump. But I think what that makes me do is say, nah, I'm going to sit out here under this tree and do something else. I'm going to write. I'm going to do something that is not

that thing. I'm just going to put that thing back where it belongs. And that is about making some choices to order your life. We're getting very Merlin Mann now. It's about making choices to order. That's a good thing. Making choices about how you want to structure and order your life. And technology fits into that. But sometimes the technology can be a useful tool to actually construct those barriers, that the technology forms the barrier. And although we can solve the problem and tear down that technological barrier, sometimes it's nice to have the barrier. Sometimes it's nice to keep it up. The speed bumps are annoying if you're trying to get from point A a to point b but they're really great if you live on the street that leads from point a to point b and you don't want your cat run over by a speeder and so sometimes speed bumps are good

and and that's what it sounds like for you wow that was really deep yeah man anyway what's next i'm back to work well i want to talk to you about some comic books. Wow, comic books. God, I wish I had a bell right now. Ding! No, I don't have a bell. Ah, mailbagging. There it is. Anyway, I like the feedback.

I thought it was great. That's one of the things that I noticed about it is I love that everybody was trying to solve the problem. about it is, I love that everybody was trying to solve the problem. But it is interesting that in some ways, sometimes you want the problem to not be solved or, you know, because of the way that you've got your life structured. So, yeah, I mean, ultimately, the remote desktop is a solution. I just don't think it's a solution to my problem. But to most people, remote desktop is the perfect solution to getting the files that you need from another machine.

I mean, also stuff like Backblaze, I can grab my files there, you know, that kind of thing. So there are ways around a lot of these things. Absolutely. But then there are other barriers that can kind of get in the way. And at a certain point, at least I feel this way anyway, you've kind of just got to give in i think because you can you can you can continue to try and fix this forever and ultimately you're never really going to be fully happy with the results so just accept it look if you realize that you you needed to edit some of the time away from the mac pro something changes in your life and and you are you know you are away from where you live two days a week, staying with a friend somewhere because of something, just a theoretical life change. At that point, you might say, okay, I need the ability to travel and work on this stuff.

And then you would come up with something that would work. But in your life as it currently is being lived, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. I get it. i'm traveling a lot in a couple of weeks time right um so i will be i will be loading up a usb3 hard drive with a bunch of files and i'll be bringing that with me you know there you go but but that's not something that i want to do every couple of days sure yeah that makes sense i makes sense. I mean, yeah, when I go to Europe, I'm going to load up the SSD on my MacBook Air with projects of all these different things that I'm working on.

And I love nothing more than editing podcasts on an airplane. It is just supremely focused. But yeah, but I'm not, I don't do that every day. Anyway, I thought that was good. That's the follow-up. That's it. I've got some some stuff in ask upgrade at the end of the show and a couple uh notes on some of the topics in the meantime but uh if uh you want to tell us about one of our friends now might be a good time i think i think it's the perfect time to talk about our friends over at igloo the internet you'll actually like with igloo you can share news organize your files coordinate calendars and manage your projects with your team all in one place igloo is a fantastic way for you and everybody that you work with to get together socialize and make sure that you're

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to Igloo for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. I think the guy who invented Igloo owns igloo.com so don't go there. Unless you need to buy an Igloo. And if you do that's probably the place. The Igloo Emporium.

Could be. Could be. Yeah. Sure. But igloosoftware.com is where our friends live. So what do we have next, Mr. Jason Snell? Topics. You want to talk about the Apple car some more, Mike?

I do, actually. All right. I'm glad I brought it up then. I listened to ATP and I thought to myself, this is just what they've waited for like everything has led up to this for them you know they started out with neutral you could tell they were all so happy that they were able to have the car discussion yeah without maybe not marco i really enjoyed it though i i was a fan of Neutral

so I was happy to hear it back The only episode of Neutral that I liked was the one where they talked about car interfaces because that's something I care about I don't care about cars car interfaces, yes like cars as a hobby

as a thing you enjoy thinking about and reading about. I'm not a car person, but I did love their thing about, which they cited on ATP, their episode about Car UI, where Marco says quite rightly that relying entirely on a touchscreen for everything in a car is madness. And I think some car makers are now backing away from that. Like having a dial that you know where it is and you can turn it and you get the feedback and you know exactly how much you need to turn it or flip a switch or slide a slider when you're driving is really good because you can't look to see if the thing you did got, you know, accepted. And, you know, when I turn on the air conditioner in my car, I turn a knob and it turns on. And I

don't need to look because I know where the knob is and I know how to turn it on. Even skipping ahead on my radio is a button and I know where the button is and I can press it. So I love that episode and the follow-up that they did in ATP this week. Although I thought that was interesting. Marco expressed a lot of skepticism. And we talked about this last week a lot, that I'm not sure whether there's an Apple car that is going to ever come out. They talked a lot about what could it be

if it's not an Apple car, which I thought was interesting. I think part of this is, like we said last week, investigatory. Should we do this? Can we do this? Jean-Louis Gasset on the Monday Note had a piece today about that, since it's Monday, that was about his skepticism of the Apple car and how hard it is to get into the car industry, which I'll grant you, but Apple's got a lot of money and can recruit a lot of people. But they might be, you know, they might end up in a place that is not all the way at a car, right?

I mean, they might. They might not. Marco's point was, or I think it was John's point was, if all you have to differentiate your car is the experience, is the experience. You don't want to hand that over to Apple and then become just kind of the dumb pipe that provides the tires and things like that. Why would a carmaker do that? And you'd almost need a carmaker that was down on their luck at that point.

I don't know. I'm fascinated by it. I do think that Apple could do something that would be interesting, whether it would succeed or not is a, is an open question. But I think I, I, I'm interested to see what Apple, what Apple might try. And I would think that Apple would get something out of it, even if they didn't end up making a car ultimately. But the bottom line, I mean, even in that ATP episode, you know, you could hear them almost convincing themselves during the episode that it would be a good idea.

And the moment for me that that came across was when they were talking about the current state of affairs in cars and how car makers aren't very good at doing this stuff, at user interface and at software. And are they going to get better? I mean, these are companies that generally punt everything to their OEMs. They punt entertainment systems to someone else and they're lousy. So if that's the case, Marco's argument was, oh, well, they're lousy and we still drive them. Like, okay, but what if there was something that was non-lousy? And I think that's the Apple, that would be Apple's take on it, is if you're an Apple executive and you're driving down the 280 interstate in your fancy car and you're frustrated by how lousy the user experience is on the inside would you not ask yourself the question why can't this be better and could we do something to do this just developing an interior or like you know and and when they and they were talking

about interior this has turned into follow-out now um they were talking about like the entertainment system and just the way the car looks and feels on the inside that feels like such a non-profitable business like if that's all apple was doing like it doesn't seem like there could be enough money in that to really make it worthwhile like cars are sold to an individual maybe like a couple of times in their lives. And I can't imagine that a huge piece of the markup that's involved in a car, you know, that belongs to. So of the price that you pay on a car, I can't imagine that a large amount of the price of the markup belongs to the interface or the user experience inside or the leather that's used, right? A lot of the expense is going to come from the actual manufacturing of the motors and et cetera, I would assume.

So I can't imagine that people are going to pay a huge amount of money for an Apple design thing when they're already laying out an incredible amount of money already, you know, cars tend to be like the second big purchase in your life, I suppose. The, um, you, you gotta wonder if maybe what they end up with is they, uh, they experiment, maybe they experiment with this and they realize they'd rather not build a car. And at that point they take what they've built to a carmaker and say, you know, let's make a deal. And maybe it's not, we're going to license this to whoever wants it.

Maybe it's let's make a deal with Ford or, you know, or Nissan or Honda or whoever. And maybe it's as much as let's make a deal and create a new line of car that's a joint venture between you and us. And, you know, it'll have our technology and it'll be a new brand name so you can still have your other products and other brand names. There's lots of different permutations that could happen, especially since I can imagine anything because I don't know anything about the car industry. But, right? I mean, just applying those thoughts, there's lots of ways this could. That isn't just Apple is going to entirely make a car itself. Lots of different ways it could go. Let's make the rocker car, right?

Yeah, well, right. I mean, well, you could argue that CarPlay is kind of the rocker car. Right. I think I might have said that last week where it's not quite all the way there. And it's really compromised because apple only controls one tiny little part of that of that product and i don't know i i i uh i i keep trying to put myself in the mind myself in the mind of apple executives and thinking we we gotta be able to do better than what's out there and and i think they think like that. We can disrupt this. We can do better. We can push these guys. And if they won't come with us, maybe we'll do something ourselves.

Oh, I wanted to point out too, a bunch of people have said, well, why don't they just buy Tesla? It's like, well, how does that work? Does that work? Would that get them what they wanted? I mean, Tesla is a public company. So could they do a takeover? Have they talked to Tesla and discovered that Tesla would fight it or people would quit? Or have they not talked to Tesla? Is Tesla what they want? Is what Tesla's doing what Apple's vision of a car is? Or is it not?

Are they compatible or not? I don't think it's just as easy as saying, if Apple wants to do cars, they should just buy Tesla, because then what you're going to get is Tesla. Maybe Apple doesn't want Tesla. Maybe Apple doesn't want to be Tesla. Maybe Apple wants something different. We're left to speculate, as we will be doing for the next five years, probably. What is buying Teslala like what is that because you don't just like in these scenarios you can't just like i mean i know you kind of can but you don't just walk up to a company and just be like we will take everything exactly that you're doing change nothing but we have it this doesn't work like that no i'll look at what's happening with beats

where they're going to end up with a completely different music service the reports say that's nothing but we have it it doesn't work like that no i'll look at what's happening with beats where they're going to end up with a completely different music service the reports say that's not even maybe going to be branded as beats that is going to be their subscription service because it went inside apple and they're like oh no we're not going to do it that way and like it immediately started taking it apart and putting it back together again yeah but my point is that Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine were happy for that to happen, clearly, because they went with it. And I would expect that Elon Musk doesn't want to work at Apple. A man like him, not because there's anything wrong with Apple, but just like, why would he not be the man, you know? Right. apple but just like why would he work why would he not be the man you know um right because beats is kind of over time is going to start to get more and more hidden you know like especially

as beats music will disappear etc um and you know i wonder if eventually i don't think they have yet if they drop the by dre i don't know in beats i mean i i don't know if they will, but it would be interesting to see what they do with that. Because they kind of don't really acknowledge, like all of the marketing currently is still weird Beats marketing. I don't know if Apple have a hand in it,

but it seems to follow the exact same path that it did before. So there might just be a case of inertia still carrying some of that stuff along but anyway like you know so it's so much to say that i don't expect that you could just walk up to tesla and make tesla as awesome as it is there like things are going to happen and you could end up like back to square one again if after the two-year agreements literally everybody that's important leaves. Well, as Joe Steele pointed out in the chat room, you know, Elon Musk might just take the money and use it for SpaceX so he can go to Mars. And my thought there is just what if what if somebody like Apple looks at Tesla and says, you know, Elon Musk is the guy who's made all of this stuff happen. And without

him there and his expertise, we, you know, the company loses a lot of its value. You risk in, in, in a scenario like that, it's not like a poison pill. Um, but it is sort of, which is, if you've got a founder who's not going to stick around and you view the founder as having a huge part of the value of the company, then you kind of can't buy the company because by buying the company, you're sending a huge chunk of the value of the company out. And if there's one company on the planet that understands the value of the vision of a founder, it's Apple.

It would probably be Apple. Yeah, but like I said, it may not just be as simple as Apple. Apple's doing all of this because they very specifically think there's something that, they think Tesla needs competition. They have a different take on what the car should be. They want to do it themselves and not just buy Tesla.

They want to do what they want to do, and it's different. And that's another reason that you do it separately. It is a fair question to ask that if Apple looked at Tesla and said, man, that is exactly what we want to do, but they're doing it. What's the right thing to do there? The right thing to do there might be to do nothing. It might be if you feel like it's vitally important that Apple have a car strategy, you buy Tesla. It would be a shame if the strategy was, well, let's do that too. We'll just hire a bunch of people from Tesla and we'll make our own Tesla and it would be a shame if the strategy was, well, let's do that too. We'll just hire

a bunch of people from Tesla and we'll make our own Tesla and it'll be Apple. That could be the case. My hope, the optimist in me says that it's probably not that and that it's, I hope anyway, it's not that and that they want to do something different or they can't get Tesla for some reason. They're like, well, no, we can't do that. We're going to do this ourselves. It'll be interesting to see. It'll be interesting to see. I love – I was thinking about this the other day.

Do you remember the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? Yes. Great documentary about the first round of electric cars, which were basically taken off the road and junked, even though the people who drove them loved them. They weren't allowed to buy them. They were all rentals and they were all taken away. And it's funny now because now that documentary is like from a blip in time because enough changed that now electric cars are a thing again. But it's funny that we've come that far, is sort of my point there, is that we were at a point where it looked like, with despair,

the electric car was an idea that their time was right, but the car makers just were playing a game on us, a scam to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're working on it. And then they swept it under the rug. But what happened is a few years later, they came back. So now we're talking about it a lot. And I think it's very clear to see that electric cars and smart cars are going to be a huge part of the future, whether Apple's making them or not. The oil situation changed.

Fundamentally, I think car companies have come to the realization that it's going to run out. So if you want to continue to exist, you need to find different ways to power your vehicles. Anywho. I am at least, I mean, I know this is, this, this, this rumorous discussion is maybe getting played out a bit now, but I'm, I'm happy that we have something interesting like this to talk about. That is not just us making up what we would like to see. You know, like this is a, this is an interesting thing to discuss, I think.

Well, like listener Nick Foster wrote in to suggest that if there was an Apple car, would it have Apple Pay? And could you pay a drive-through with your footprint on the gas pedal? See? Making things up. Thank you, listener Nick. Yeah, sure. Apple Pay, you just drive over something and it buys something for you. Sure. Bare feet driving.

Why not? But there are also, it is good that we have this to talk about because although it may be outlandish and far off and meaty, it sure beats the alternative, which is tiny snippets of non-information leading to people pondering secret plans of apples that don't exist. Which is my way of saying my old colleague, Chris Breen, left Macworld last week and is taking a job at Apple. And I suddenly started seeing all these things that were speculating of like, why is Apple hiring journalists? What is their plan? Is Apple going to launch its own website? Well, besides Apple.com?

Seriously, are people saying that? Yeah. Oh. Why? What would you do on it yeah well no and i had and what they said was well you know whether smoke there's fire they hired anon lol shimpy and they hired uh chris breen and one one person pointed out that my old colleague john seth uh is working at apple right now and that's true and there's at least one other former macworld person who left last year who is working at Apple. So, you know,

I can report that exclusively here. So people are like, oh, what are they doing? Well, the answer is, okay, first off, a whole bunch of people lost their jobs and are looking for new jobs. So that's step one. And those are people who actually understand things about Apple and know people at Apple and all of that. So that's part two. In Chris's case, he didn't lose his job. Although, you know, with a staff the size that Macworld size is now, you got to figure he lost all of his former colleagues. He was probably being called on to do a whole bunch of stuff that he wasn't doing before. And also something traumatic like that happens and you reevaluate. If you read his blog post, he says very much like, I wanted to take this opportunity to do something else, which really resonated with me because that was what was going through my mind too.

It's like, I need to take this opportunity. I will regret it if I don't try something else. Before, as he put it, you put on the long shorts and sit out in the deck chair or an old man playing checkers at the park. out in the deck chair and or an old man playing checkers at the park um so the fact is i i mean i got i got recruited by an apple recruiter like two or three years ago to for a job doing like um it was i think it was app store curation of some kind um and that that that is considered an editorial job. Apple has lots of what you'd call editorial jobs, things that a skill set of being a writer and editor

for a place like Macworld would come in handy. And that's like not PR jobs. That's a different set of jobs. And most of the journalists I know are ill-suited for PR. Let me put it that way. They're ill-suited for PR. I don't think they could do it. But there are lots of other jobs. So there's App Store curation. There's documentation on the

inside. There's Apple University on the inside. There's documentation on the outside. There's writing content for Apple's website. I mean, the list literally goes on. You can go to Apple's career website and see all the jobs that Apple has and see that there is some chunk of them that are kind of like content producer jobs. I literally saw somebody tweet today about a job in London working on – I'm just bringing it up now. It's an editorial job. Oh, it's taking forever to load. But it's like they have many roles like this

which are editorial, and this is for an editorial producer of experience across pop culture and specific expertise in music journalism. I mean, so this kind of ties into what we were talking about last week with Zane Lowe moving across. Exactly.

But I thought this would be interesting for this topic is because it shows that there are just a ton of people that work in editorial. Like, that is a thing there. Do you remember we were talking

I think it was last week about Apple and the idea of them being in control of podcasts. And I was saying that I know that there are people that work on podcast editorial. It's a thing because somebody has to put stuff in the stores. It has to go in there somehow. And I guess it makes sense if you've got someone who you know is a good eye for this stuff, like a journalist who's written about apps for years and years.

It kind of makes sense. Yeah, exactly. And so there are so many different jobs. So what I would say is, is there a conspiracy at Apple? Maybe, but not to my knowledge. To my knowledge, no. These are the people I know who are working at Apple are all working in different places for different teams and doing different things that take advantage of the skills that they've had in the media on the outside in a different way that serves Apple. And so people just get very literal-minded and say, oh, well, this person does X, so they must be doing X at Apple.

And that's just not how it works generally. That's not what happens. Now, nobody knows what Anand Lal Shimpy is doing, but even there, just because he comes, his background is so very specific in that he's an incredibly technical person and a communicator. I have some ideas of where he might be, but really there are a lot of places they could plug him.

That's not, you know, but you don't hire him to write articles for Apple.com about processor performance. I think that there's more to it than that. Otherwise, I don't think he to write articles for Apple.com about processor performance. I think that there's more to it than that. Otherwise, I don't think he would even want that job. So I don't know. It's just funny.

People like to see patterns, and sometimes you see patterns out of noise. And I think that's what's happening here. That said, it is a fascinating thing. I had a good conversation. I mean, we talked about the podcast stuff and we talked about the music curation's anonymous. And I think that maybe that will start to change. But if you look at what Beats does, they have editors who are experts and you can see their names and they curate stuff and they write stuff and it's great. And I would like to see that in Apple's other stuff. Apple's attitude up to now seems to have been, and again, maybe this is one of those

ways Apple is going to change. We talked a lot about Apple changing. Apple's attitude up to now has been all the people who pick the, you know, they're curating apps, Mac app store apps, iOS apps, games, podcasts, all of that stuff. They're like essentially anonymous. stuff. They're like essentially anonymous. You don't, there's no names on the site. It's all just from Apple. And when I, when I talked to them about the app curation, I can tell you that the philosophy was very much like, you don't, you don't, you don't know anybody. You don't talk to anybody. Nobody knows that you're an app curator. Nobody knows anything. There's no communication. If you need art from them because you want to promote it on the app store, you go to somebody else at Apple, and then they go to the developer and get the art.

It's just like this totally weird black box, and that's a very old-school Apple way of approaching it. In my opinion, it's totally wrong. Beats has it right, and Apple has it wrong, which is, first off, this is something I learned at Macworld and Macuser before that, which is the idea that there's this voice of God that comes from a brand and tells you what's good or what's bad. And that is, it's a lie because somebody wrote that review. Somebody made a decision. A writer, an editor, somebody made a decision. It's coming from some source. It's not coming from the mountaintop, from, you know, Macworld secret lab determined that this product is good.

That's not what happened. It was a writer with an opinion or an editor and a writer who collaborated and they had an opinion about a product. And I feel that with Apple. And it's a very actually old media way of thinking, an old brand way of thinking, which is the way we show our authority is by pretending that no human beings are involved and that it's all just a black box and nobody knows where it comes from. And it's through, and putting this in 21st century terms it's through a lack of transparency that we are trustworthy and that's crap that's ridiculous that's completely backward through you get you get uh trustworthiness through transparency through disclosure you if you look on beats you the curated playlists are curated by a person and you can say, oh, that guy likes this stuff. I like that stuff. Or that guy likes this stuff. I don't like that stuff. But to say it's like, nope, our musical robots have assembled a playlist for you that you might like. Come on. There are no musical better if people could see the human beings.

If we knew that there was like this person who wrote about who curated game, you know, best game lists at Apple. And the argument is, oh, well, Apple needs to be impartial because all of the app developers are their partners. They're not impartial. They're featuring apps. They're picking apps and promoting them. They're doing best of lists at the end of the year. They're not impartial. So why pretend that you are when you're not? It's funny. This is one of those areas where I look at Apple and I think Apple is behaving like a magazine I worked for behaved 15 years ago 20 years ago and we learned whatever 10 or 15 years ago that that was completely wrong but apple i think still does that and so the question is will

will the beats thing maybe inject this other philosophy and the fact that steve is gone and people are able to revisit what apple wants to be and change it, will they change it? Because they totally should change it. Well, it would be insane to hire a world-famous DJ for his experience. So you can't talk to anybody ever again or admit that you're doing anything. Or even just not put his name by his pics. Right. It would be crazy.

Why would you do that that but that's what's happening and again this is happening in music so the question is uh would that happen somewhere else would that happen in podcasts would that happen in mac apps would that happen in ios apps there was a moment when they were recruiting people for the mac app store and i thought well you know the person they should probably hire is dan Frakes because he does the Mac gems column at, at, at Mac world, which is entirely highlighting amazing software. You've never heard of for your, for your Mac. It's like, well, that is a perfect skillset for, for a job like that theoretically. But if what you're going to do is hide that person behind a mask and nobody knows who

they are and they never actually write anything. They only just pick things on the site. And it's this weird kind of black box thing. First off, why would somebody like Dan ever want to do that job? And second, you've completely wasted what makes what the work that Dan did so great. So will Apple's approach to music change and will that bleed into apple's approach to other forms of media i don't know i hope it does because uh i think it should i think i think uh i think there are some great content people inside and curation people inside apple now who are not allowed to have a voice because that's not what the policy is. The policy is everybody, it's just a secret. It doesn't make any sense.

I do think that this will change. I think they're staffing up in an interesting way. And it would make sense to me if Chris Breen was going to do something like this. I would understand that. Not that I'm saying that's what I think he's doing because I literally have no idea. I don't think that's what he's doing. I don't think that's what he's doing, but yeah. It would make sense for at least somebody like him to go and do a job like this, I think,

would be very sensible. I don't think those jobs exist right now at Apple, but maybe they will someday. Maybe they will. But I just, it's that, I realize I've just ranted about this for a while, but it's that it really sets me taught to write when we review stuff is a lie. Because if you write a review and like something, that's you. You liked it.

And somebody else might disagree. So pretending that there's only one possible opinion here, and it's yours, and it's not even your voice anymore, it's this, you know, God up on the mountaintop is, is disingenuous. You're actually, you're, you're hiding, you're lying to your, your audience. And that, I mean, that really stuck with me and my belief that you need to, people need to see who's back there. And to see Apple kind of continue in some places to cling to this idea that it's all a secret and we're just a secret society that pushes things through a slot. And then they go out in the world and who knows where it came from or what the motivations are. It's not effective. It's not a 21st century approach to curating content.

And so, yeah, I hope with the DJ hiring and the purchase of beats, this is a sign that they're changing the approach. Because how great would the App Store be if it had a much stronger voice and stronger set of people who were visible saying, here are great things in the App Store? More curation on the App Store would not be bad. It would be really great. on the app store would not be bad it would be really great i would love to see um more and i say more and i'll tell you why in a moment guest sort of recommendations as well because apple do something called the indie game showcase it's something that's kind of i think it's there every week and they they showcase a game right and they write about the game a little bit. And then the developer of that game, they recommend, they have a section on the page

that recommends their favorite games, right? So it's a way like, I like that kind of thing, you know? Let's say, for example, they contacted you and they wanted you to pick your five favorite apps or like post a picture of your home screen and what are all the apps there, you know? I'd love to see that in the app store. and they wanted you to pick your five favorite apps or post a picture of your home screen, and what are all the apps there? I'd love to see that in the App Store.

It'd be fantastic. I mean, I know there's already a lot of places that do that, like your website, but I think it would be really nice to see that kind of stuff there as well. Well, Apple has the power to reach an audience that no independent website can do because they're Apple, because they built the apps. It's always been a challenge because Apple has had – I mean, remember they did iReview where they were writing reviews of websites and things like that. It's like Apple's history with content creation shows that they have no idea about how to create content. That was a long time ago.

They could change. I'm not sure whether they're willing to change or not, but wouldn't it be great? And winds of change are blowing at Apple, so maybe this is a place where we might see some of that. I don't know. My guess is that there are a lot of people inside Apple who think that to the old approach, which is, no, no, no, we're going to be totally objective. And, you know, and we don't put the names of who writes our software in our about box. So why would we put the names of people who have opinions about apps? It's like trying to. And again, this is one of these fallacies where they're using their thinking about their products to think about content. And that's why Apple traditionally has done a bad job with content, which is the problem when you've got a content store and

you're trying to curate it is it's not software, it's content. Different people have different takes. And what you're looking for is the experts with taste to make choices and let the user decide. And that's different than the way you build software, where you got to make the choices and you don't let the user decide, you make the choices. They're just totally different. And I don't know, my optimistic side says maybe that will finally change at Apple. I'm sure there are people at Apple who feel that way too, but they should, you know, yeah, yeah. It's just funny. We talk about it with music. Apple seems to have a little bit more comfort when it comes to music. But they should be doing that for TV and movies and apps.

Absolutely with apps. Maybe. We're running a little long now. Yeah. Because we both got very passionate there. I know. I know. I love it.

I love that. I didn't expect that. I don't think either of us expected that conversation, but I'm pleased that we had it. It was a very interesting one. I look forward to seeing people's opinions on that. Thanks to our friend Chris Breen, who is not actually doing any of that,

but is working at Apple and is awesome. And we'll wrap up this section on that note, which is I worked with Chris Breen. I did the math. I worked at the same publication as Chris Breen for 20 years, from 1994 to 2014, first a Mac user and then a Macworld. I think the world of him, I felt really bad for him when he was the last soldier standing when everybody else left Macworld last fall.

And I wish him nothing but the best. Also, he composes every podcast theme song out there, including ours. So thanks to Chris for that. He's told me that he'll continue to compose podcast music as long as I keep sending him T-shirts. So thank you, Chris. And best of luck at apple because now we're gonna sink beneath the sea and we're never gonna you know i those who know chris is writing well we'll look for his the words that are his favorite pet words that he works into

things that nobody else uses and then we'll know it's him it's like sending sending like uh warning shots over the wall you know so we know that he's still there. There are words. There are words only Chris Breen writes. And if we see one of those somewhere on an Apple website sometime, we'll know it's him. But anyway, I just I wish him the best. He's great. I think this is an exciting new adventure for him. The loafer is on the other foot.

He's been a work at home guy for the last, you know, forever, basically. And now he's going to be commuting whereas i am now the the longtime commuter is now the work at home guy so we uh we we crossed uh crossed jobs there a little bit which is pretty hilarious too so wish him the best absolutely congratulations chris yeah this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by PDF pen pro seven from smile. The new PDF pen pro seven brings new features to smiles, versatile professional grade PDF editor for OS 10. This new update includes the ability to edit OCR text from scanned pages.

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for the things that I need it for I find myself increasingly these days needing to sign documents and I do not want to buy a printer and I do not want to buy a scanner I just want to have PDFPen and it does a fantastic job for me so people send me contracts and stuff

to sign for sponsor agreements and things like that I open them I can open they send me them in Word I sign for sponsor agreements and things like that. I open them. I can open. They send me them in Word. I open them in PDF pen. I sign it and I can export it as Word again. And they'll never even know.

I love it. It's fantastic. If you are a person that works with a Mac, it's an app that you should be checking out. Because once you kind of recognize that it's in your toolkit, you'll find uses for it all the time I love PDF pen and you should check it out so learn all about PDF pen Pro and PDF pen from smile at smile software.com slash upgrade thank you so much to smile for their continued support of this show all right what would you like to talk about should we talk quickly about this Apple Watch

Magnum Opus that you and Mr. Morin worked on Yeah, let's talk We'll do a little Apple Watch We'll continue to tease Internet of Things and Connected Home stuff for a future episode It's our new Kindle

thing where we just promise it for weeks and weeks and never deliver it Let but yeah let's talk about the apple watch oh i should mention by the way for those who are listening uh uh special guest next week on upgrade special guest stay tuned for that next week it's not chris breen you make it sound like it's someone who has an apple watch we're not talking to the apple watch next week. No. Hello, Jason. How can I help? Ahoy, watch. So what made you want to write this? And what is this post? So it's called, what is it? Apple Watch, What We Know? Yeah. So back at Macworld, we would write these faq stories about uh various apple

products and um they were really popular and i don't want to give that up and serenity caldwell has learned this lesson well because she's writing them and i'm more now too i didn't want to give them up and so we wanted to do one about the apple watch and we wanted to start uh we probably should have started this you know back at Macworld but when the Apple Watch was announced but somehow you know the next day we didn't work at Macworld anymore so

somehow magically that just happened in the run up for the release of the Apple Watch I thought this would be a good time to start a document that explains what is going on with the Apple Watch and that thought this would be a good time to start a document that explains what is going on with the Apple Watch. And that way we can use, we can start that, we can ask people to, we actually did a form that's linked to from that, that you can ask your questions and

we'll do updates over the next few weeks. And from a pure sort of like website strategy standpoint, From a pure sort of like website strategy standpoint, having an article that is linked to about the Apple Watch is great because that helps us in search. And when the Apple Watch comes out, what we'll do is we'll update that post. So it'll be more current, but it will have already been out in the world. So if people are searching for a question about the Apple Watch, one of the answers in their search results, hopefully, will be our story. So there's a content strategy portion of it, which was sort of the playbook that we used at Macworld too. But I figured we're about to enter Apple Watch time. And so it's good to have that reset and refresh. And for us, it was good to pour through Apple's marketing pages and try to figure out all the details of this.

And it's funny. There's this whole conversation happening. John Gruber is sort of at the center of it about like what the different prices are for the watches and, and what the different bands are and all of that. And that was, it was funny that that was going on just after we had had that whole conversation ourselves,

me and Dan about what the different models were going to be and what the prices were going to be and are the bands available with the different models. And some of the feedback I got about our story was, you say it's this, but it's going to be this. And I said, where does it say it's going to be that? And a lot of times the response I get is, oh, well, I just assumed it was going to be that. It's like, well, yeah, this is one of the challenges for writing a story like this is there are a lot of things we can guess about, but what do we know? What do we know and what do we think is likely? And trying to keep those clear about what we know and what we don't. So hopefully it's useful as a

refresher for people who've forgotten the avalanche of information that came out in September about the Apple Watch. And we can use that as a jumping off point as more information comes out as we're now in the run-up to its uh being released is there any information in here that you were able to get yourself like either from being at the event i'm sure some of that these photos are yours um and or like if you've been able to get any information from Apple that has helped inform this piece. No, we've just been, it goes back to the Apple Watch time we had in September and all the stuff that Apple's posted. It's mostly just trying to glean from that what the details are because Apple's got these beautiful web pages that show a whole bunch of different things and there's just so much there and we wanted to boil it down into a into a simpler kind of like does it do this does it do that also we've seen a lot of people ask us these questions

where we know the answers and it's and they and we get them repeatedly and it makes you realize oh people just don't understand this thing about the Apple Watch so let's put that together I'd say the biggest new thing is the developer information because Apple rolled out the watch kit stuff. And there's like the first wave where they're projecting onto the screen. And, you know, a bunch of developers are talking about how you get your app to do

something in the, which is like a very lightweight kind of control that can go on the watch. And then down the road, there's supposed to be a more full-fledged app SDK, which they'll probably see at WWwdc um maybe maybe not maybe later than that so uh some of that got to got to be in there too um having looked through all of this information again and kind of refreshed yourself on it um what is your personal feeling about the device like do you do you want one like actually for yourself other than just like the need or the perceived need to write about it i mean i'm gonna have to have one because i'm gonna have to write about it but you're right uh

i probably i i've had a as i've said on the show before i've had a Pebble for a couple of years. Oh, poor Pebble. As we record this tomorrow, they're having an event. And some images came out today that were leaked. I'll put a link in the show notes. But maybe by the time you listen to this, you know what Pebble's device is going to be. And it looks a disaster. I feel so bad for them. Basically, they're making a color screen Pebble.

And if what we've seen is what they're making, they should have just not made it. They should have just stuck as they were and just went with the E-Ink screen, I think, because that made them different. But anyway. Yeah, it doesn't look good. So my answer is that, yeah, I think I do want an Apple Watch.

I think it's going to be cool. I've been primed by my two years with the Pebble, and I think that having something that works much better with my iPhone is something I'm looking forward to. So yeah, I think so. I doubt that was ever a real question, because it's me. I love this stuff. But yeah, I'll get it. In fact, I have to say, out of the research, the thing that struck me the most about this is that the more I looked at the gold ones, the edition models,

I kept thinking, I kept thinking, oh man, and this is why they don't do it, is I would love, they've got the regular Apple Watch, not the sport, but the mid range one. That's the Apple Watch. And that's in that's basically in stainless steel or black or black stainless steel, whatever it is. Joe Steele. It's wouldn't that be nice if it if it was gold, but it's not like colored gold.

But nope. If you want gold, you're going to get the real thing, and you're going to pay $10,000 for it. It's like, wow, I would like that watch, but I am not going to ever buy that watch. So, yeah. I see what you're saying now. What it's done is it's made me think,

I'm not sure whether I want the Sport or whether I would actually pony up, or I guess in Krispy terms, pungle up more money for the regular model which I really like the look of the regular model too. But the most beautiful one is the one that is

alas, elusive. So you mean the Apple Watch model? The Apple Watch model. Which is so why did they do that? I don't know. I like the Apple Watch. It's a very fashion industry. I think that that? I don't know. It's a very fashion industry. I think that's what I'm leaning to. But I don't know the price of it yet.

No. It could be $1,000. It could be $500. It could be $700. It probably has something to do with what band you get. Who knows? There's much more information to be downloaded that's why we will be updating that apple watch what we know story as time goes on do you have any sense about what's going on with the bands because it seems to be getting more and more confusing as the days go

on like originally it seems so simple yeah well one one of the things that uh different bands are shown on different pages, and it's unclear whether those are the only bands that will work. I have a hard time believing that the Apple Watch is configured so that a band from one can't work on the other because then they're building different bands for the different models. And the way Apple described it on the day when they announced it and when I got to see it demoed in person in a room with Apple executives, I saw them taking the bands on and off. And it seemed to me like they were really banking on the fact that you could just switch in new bands. So now people are sort of like,

oh, well, the sport band is only, or I guess the sport band's on most of them. It's like, this leather band is only on this model. So the people who have this model won't be able to use it. I don't, I'm skeptical of that. I think what we're seeing is when you buy a watch, you can choose which band it comes with from this selection. But if you want another band, I'm sure Apple would be happy to sell you another band for some ridiculously

marked up price, right? It's going to be a watch band that, you know, you can get that second watch band for another 100 or 120 or 180 or whatever it is. And that'll just kind of pile up. But I think that's different from saying, oh, it's incompatible. You can't get the whatever. In fact, I would say, and nobody can confirm this, but my recollection was that what the Apple executive said to me in my briefing was something about how if you buy the Apple Watch loop, it might also come with a sport band. So you can slide it off and slide on the sport band and then go with that. I don't have it in my notes, but I have a big tickle in the back of my brain that they said something about that. And yeah, so why wouldn't you be able to do that? If you're going for a run, you don't want your beautiful, expensive band.

You could put on the sport band. The more that I look at it, the more I see that, yes, you will be able to buy other bands, but I think that you will only be able to buy bands within your watch tier. So if you have the Apple Watch Sport, you won't be able to buy Apple Watch bands. And the reason I think that is because luxury. There won't be massive, to the eye, like the difference between the sport and the regular Apple Watch will be the shininess of the aluminium or the stainless steel. But the majority that you'll see on someone is the band so if you can maybe save 300 and then spend an extra 200 on a on a upgraded band you are um you're getting the

effect and the reason i say this is and i know it's hard for maybe us nerds to get our heads around because it's like well why wouldn't you do that? The reason is luxury and status. And if Apple really do want to get into that world, the fashion world, that is just something that happens. Like you don't get to get the cheap version and pretend you have the expensive one. So I agree with that to a point.

The problem is, one, that's a lot of different bands that they're going to have to make available. Two, are they going to make them physically incompatible? Because otherwise, you could just order a regular Apple Watch watch band and put it on your Apple Watch Sport, and nobody would care. So are they really going to engineer three slightly different connectors for this slide-on, slide-off connector that they they built i they could but that's a long way to go and then my third point is there's just going to be an aftermarket uh band that is a beautiful

leather band that attaches to your apple watch sport that's been reverse engineered that you can buy online that uh will let you do it and if if that's going to be the case does apple really want to be like well fine that's a bootleg that happens to luxury brands too or are they going to say no i want the person who cheaped out and bought our 350 watch i want them to give us 150 for another band i don't think it's out of the realm of possibility to create slightly different connectors because they kind of slightly different connectors because they're already creating different versions of it anyway for the larger and smaller. Yeah, so I don't know.

I mean, I know it seems peculiar. I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised to see it go that way. But we'll see. mean genuinely i i hope not uh because i i think that my tastes are pushing me in a direction that's going to be very expensive for me uh but but we'll see we'll see how that ends up uh ends up rolling out but i'm excited about it i'm finding myself more excited about it and you know and we've said this before on the show and you mentioned it like because me and you come from a slightly different uh background in that we we understand the utility of a device like this

um so i i'm excited for the utility but i'm also just excited for the product because i think it looks really nice um and and uh it's it's a totally new thing and it's going to be shiny and the battery is not going to last long enough but it doesn't matter because it's going to be awesome um shall we shall we finish off with some ask upgrade yes let's do it hashtag ask upgrade brought to you by mail route imagine a world without spam, viruses, or bounced email. This is the world that I live in. I open my email in the morning and I see only legitimate mail, the stuff I want to receive. The spam has already been filtered out before it even reaches my mail server. That is thanks to MailRoute. There's no hardware for me to install. There's no software to install. It all

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I literally have no idea, but I love it. I'm happy that it exists, but I don't know what it means. Yes. Let's see. Hashtag AskUpgrade. We made a slight change to how we're going to be processing Hashtag AskUpgrade in the future, didn't we? You made the change.

Yeah. They've got some new apps and such uh called do they have and they've rebranded the standard if right app so i've been checking checking those out and kind of like digging around and i came across a very similar to our google drive sheet basically it does a search. Well, I ended up creating on my own because the one that I found didn't work. It just does a search for Ask Upgrade

and adds it to our Slack channel instead. I don't know if it's going to be better, but I like that it's there. And so we have that. So I'll put a link to the recipe in the show notes so people can use it for themselves. If they also want to have Ask Upgrade tweets in their Slack channel, they can. So you can go crazy.

Lester Sean wrote in to say, Mike, what was that speed reading app you recommended? The app that I recommended is called Velocity, and it's made by my friends at Lickability. And it's an app that I've used. I really like it. Like for what it does, it does it in a very nice way. And they've got a nice little UI that they've created.

I'm a big fan of the work that those guys do. So you should check it out. It's called Velocity. I'll put a link in the show notes. The show notes which you can find in your podcast app of choice or on the web over at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 24. Lester Gary writes, why is there not more cheese vertical need more cheese? Two exclamation points. Well, Gary, here's my cheese related story for you.

My family and I. So last week, my kids had the week off from school. It was what they call midwinter break. They used to call it ski week. We don't call it ski week anymore because it's never, ever, ever going to rain or snow in California ever again. Fair enough. So they had the week off. And yesterday was the last day before they went back to school. They went back to school today.

And so we took a hike. We wanted to do something as a family, and the kids would rather just play video games all day. But we decided to do a family activity. So we took a hike, and we're fortunate enough to actually be so close to good places to hike that we could walk there from our house. So we actually walked kind of through a neighborhood behind our house and up a ridge and around. And it was a good, I would say, six-mile hike. We took a picnic.

That was one way to make it more interesting for the kids, I think. So we brought a picnic with us. They got to pick some stuff that they wanted to bring. So up at the top on a windy hillside, it was a nice sunny day, a little cool and breezy, but a beautiful sunny day. We sat down and had a little picnic. And I was happy to discover that my wife had decided, because it was a picnic, what better thing to have at a picnic than cheese and crackers. So we had cheese and crackers. There were two different kinds of cheese.

Gary, this is for you. There was a traditional yellow cheddar, I believe is a Tillamook cheddar, so from Oregon. Not the traditional cheddar. Traditional cheddar, Mike, would be from cheddar, England, correct? Yeah. Is that a place? No. Is there a place called cheddar? No, I don't think so. Oh, come on. There a place is there a place called cheddar no i don't

think so oh come on there's got to be a place called cheddar a village a little like village by a cheddar upon something river probably there is actually a place in somerset called cheddar yes boom i don't know if that's where the cheese oh no it is the village the cheddar cheese is named after i don't know why i can't just having lived here for this amount of time just assume that that's the case it's so obvious i'm disappointed in you anyway we did have some of that and we also had some uh like aged aged cheddar another cheddar That was a white cheddar that the kids don't appreciate, but grownups enjoy, that we got. That was really nice, too.

We didn't have any fancy cheese. There was no manchego. We had some gouda. My wife didn't bring it. So it was an all-cheddar picnic, plus other foods, but we're focused on the cheese. This is the cheese vertical. We had a good time, walked down the rest of the way.

It was beautiful. I took a picture from the high point. You can look out over these green hills and then you can see the bay and then in the background San Francisco across the bay and it was very nice. So that is my cheese update. You have any cheese related things, Mike?

No. I like cheese a lot, but I don't have any updates which are noteworthy for our cheese vertical today i'm afraid think about it think about it uh listener peter wrote in to say uh this is sort of our sub vertical about podcasts and chapters listener peter says you don't need to make chapter markers necessarily just make a simple list of time codes to scrub it to in the show notes how about that mike this topic is is i actually think it's going to kill me

eventually i will die uh all of these things are like but then i'm literally sitting there typing out like it's an okay i know that there are people that want it, and I'm sorry to the people that want it, but for me personally, I feel that it is an unproductive use of my time. There are many more things that I should be working on than

putting the time stamps in. And also, I'm going to be frank, Jason. I'm going to be frank for a moment, because I feel like I should. Okay, Frank. Whatever you say, Frank. We need to make money and we need you to hear our sponsors. And if we put things in like,

and you know there's going to be a new topic after the sponsor, then you may never get to it. And I kind of would like you to listen to them or at least give them a try. And I'm concerned that it would basically stop people from listening to them. Should I not have said that? I don't know. I mean, you didn't really say it, Mike.

Frank said it. So we'll just take what Frank has. No, I think you're right. So Joe also wrote in to say that we have clickable chapter markers on The In incomparable, which I've been experimenting with. They're not actually in the file. They're on the website. If you go to the website and you can actually pass a link

and the player will automatically go to the timestamp, which is neat. And I'm going to try to use that some more. And that might make podcasts more shareable. We were talking about having shareability problems. I think it's not unreasonable.

I am using on the incomparable, I'm using it for the broadest of show notes. Like for me, it's like literally, we talked about two movies. Here's movie one, here's movie two. I think that's reasonable. Also, I gotta say, if you're gonna go to a new topic

right after a sponsor break, put your bookmark at the sponsor break and not the new topic. Then everybody will have to listen to the sponsor. I think you're making valid choices. I do chapter marks very specifically for certain things. I don't do it for everything. I think the problem is what you say, which is I think people maybe underestimate the amount of work that goes in. You spend time putting together a podcast and editing it, and then you need to go back and do another pass. Or you have to build into your workflow a note-taking workflow where you're writing down time code. And if you change anything later that affects the time code, then all your time code is wrong, and you have to do it again. affects the time code, then all your time code is wrong and you have to do it again. And you're talking about basically annotating an entire podcast. And I think that's a lot of extra work. I think there's an assumption by a lot of people that that's not a lot of extra work and that's wrong. Does it have value? I think it does have value, but you have to weigh that.

And I totally understand you saying, look, like I said, I like the idea of chapter marks in a big scale. I think some people envision it as being super small scale, like every podcast episode is going to have eight chapters in it. That's kind of a lot. I would say, if I'm going to be a diabolical podcast entrepreneur for a moment, that there is an opportunity for crowdsourcing here and that maybe somebody should create some sort of a tool that lets you create annotations on the podcast you listen to that the podcast owner could then publish in the show notes yeah so you'd have to put it back to us because all it's going to be is just people saying this is where the ad stops like yeah well

that's in a pot in a podcast app that that you know whatever but i'm saying it would be great if you know maybe we should have some you know a form or a wiki or something where people can people can put in the time code or maybe somebody i i'd also say you know maybe maybe this is something for volunteers i'm not i'm not asking it for relay i'm just saying you know if somebody really wanted to volunteer to do detailed timecode notes for a show that they love, and they talked to the podcaster of that show, and they said, sure, you know, you listen on day one and email me the timecodes and I'll put them in, you know, then that would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But it is a lot of work. And a lot of podcasts are done with, you know, it's already a lot of work, and they're trying to shave time off of what they're doing. And this just adds more on top of it. And, you know, for me, I do timecode when it's absolutely clearly useful, and I try to keep it pretty minimal. So I do timecode on Clockwise because

it's very well defined and formatted, but that's, I think, an exception to the rule. Anyway. I just want to, in case it offended anybody, if you want to skip the ads, that is perfectly fine. Sure, sure. But making it,

putting in extra time in your work schedule to make it really easy to skip right over the ads without thinking about it that is extremely counterproductive isn't it it is a bad trade-off right i mean having marco this is why marco you know marco could very easily do an auto ad sensing thing based on user behavior and he doesn't do it in overcast but there's a 30 second skip button and what do you think that's for but the idea is if you really don't want to listen, of course you can, you can jump ahead, but to make it something that eliminates all ads for everybody is incredibly counterproductive because that's how these shows survive. And yeah, that's how Mike, that's, that's how Mike and I are, are not, we're making more podcasts rather than going back to other jobs and making fewer podcasts, which would be the other way to go.

It quite literally pays my bills and puts food in my stomach. So forgive me if it's something that I'm a little bit apprehensive of. Yeah, absolutely. And it's very hard to get the math to work where listener support can compensate to the equivalent of what the ads are. It's just the math doesn't work for most shows to do that. But look, fundamentally, right, if chapter support becomes something that really does become something, then we'll look at how we work with it. But like, you know, the fact still remains that right now there is not a solution that meets every need. And until that comes, I'm personally just not interested in going through the crazy loops I would have to go through to get it to work for a subset of people some of the time.

I would have to go through to get it to work for a subset of people some of the time. No, the tools aren't there yet. And maybe they'll be there sometime. And maybe there'll be enough momentum. The tools to embed it in MP3s, to have podcast apps that support that, to build, like I said, I just have been experimenting with this JavaScript that lets me jump in a web page. That's great. That'll actually give me, that gives me more of a motivator to do some of it because I have issues where we talk about two different movies where I want to be able to say movie two starts here so you can jump to it. But

we're just not, the work that I put in over the weekend to do the JavaScript time jumps for the incomparable was probably more work than will ever be gotten out of, you know, pleasure gotten out of it by people who are using that feature. But I wanted to do it because it was interesting to me. So we're not there yet. And I understand a lot of people are really enthusiastic about this subject because they're trying to cajole people into,

they want to get the momentum going. And so they're trying to control people who aren't doing it to do it because that's when you start saying, oh, well, all the relay shows have all these great time codes that aren't supported by Overcast. Marco, when are you going to support it? Marco goes, oh, well, I guess that's a thing now. So maybe I'll put that on my – and then it all happens.

But I think it's absolutely fair for you to say, sorry, I can't be the one to start this and invest that time on something that may or may not happen. That JavaScript thing that you have, we have that, but I just don't use it for anything. Yeah. It comes back to why you hate time code, Mike. Why do you hate time code so much? If you want to use them for clockwise, go ahead. Well, I've got the data. I guess I could. I've got the data, But people don't listen to podcasts. It's for shareability more than anything else. People don't listen to podcasts on the web anyway. But I do like the fact that I can tweet out a link to a very particular part of a podcast on those episodes of The Incomparable now. So it's something. Anyway, this has been really

boring. We have one more bit of hashtag ask upgrade feedback sorry to everybody for our little descent into chapter marks i feel like it's just gonna go on forever it's the chapter vertical you could just take it all out if you really wanted to but anyway uh maybe i'll put a time code in for just that section oh yes do that oh that's. Chapter mark vertical at this time code. Beautiful. Oh, I'm really tempted to do it now. All right. Our last bit of feedback is just from listener AppFreak.

No real name there. Saying, can you do the MailRoute sponsorship like serial? Support for upgrade comes from MailRoute. MailRite. Oh from MailRoute, MailRight. Oh, MailRoute. You know, I actually use MailRoute. You do. Yeah.

Turning away from it. Yeah. So thank you, AppFreak. There you go. And scene. And that's the end of hashtag ask upgrade brought to you by mail right mail route mail route and i think that's the end of the show it is the end of the show the show's over thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of upgrade if you'd like to find us on the internet, there's a few ways you can do that.

You can find Mr. Jason Snell at sixcolors.com. He is at jsnell on Twitter. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. And I would very much love it if you haven't already, if you checked out Inquisitive behind the app, which is at inquisitive. No, it's at relay.fm slash inquisitive slash 27. That's a new series that I'm working on. I would very much like it if you listened

because I think that listeners for this show may enjoy it. If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode of Upgrade, you want to go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 24. And thanks again to our sponsors this week, MailRoute, Igloo, and Smile with PDF Pen Pro 7. But most of all, thank you so much for listening, as always. And we'll be back next time. Say goodbye, Jason Snell.

Goodbye, Mike Hurley.