Upgrade - 268: Featchas in the Beatas

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Everything old is new for Myke, as he tries out his "new" Mac (released in 2017) running a "new" version of macOS (it's Mojave). With Apple TV+ launching late next week, there's an enormous collection of Upstream news. And we ponder what products Apple might release this fall, with or without a special event.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 268 today's show is brought to you by pingdom zapier and fresh books my name is mike hurley i have returned and i'm joined by mr jason snow hi jason snow you're not scottish. But everybody from the United Kingdom is just called English anyway. To the dismay of poor people from Scotland. Thanks to James Thompson for filling in last week. It was a very fun episode. I enjoyed

it very much. Yeah. But I'm back now to wreak my English form of havoc upon this episode. And hashtag SnowTalk question comes from david and david said and says because i listen to podcasts in the car these days i've found that i sing a lot less if there's no one else in the car jason do you sing along to music and if so what is your preferred music to sing along to um the music that's playing in the car is the music that i

sing along to if there's music playing in the car and I'm alone in the car... So you don't pick specific stuff? No. No, I'll sing along to anything. Yeah, me too. Absolutely. Me too. And I do sing along and I love to sing.

You're never in a car alone because you can't drive. Yeah, but you know, music happens in places other than cars. Okay, you're right. You're right. Whether I'm alone or with other people, I will sing because I enjoy singing. I'll sing along when we were driving

Jamie up to college and back, you know, I'm singing along when there's music on the radio. It's fine. Yeah, absolutely. But I don't do it as much

as I used to because of podcasts. This is true, David. Absolutely true. If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question to open a future episode of the show,

just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snow Talk and it will be captured into a spreadsheet. And I will talk about that spreadsheet a little later on in today's episode. It's a lot of detail. Follow up. Lots of follow up, Jason. Lots of follow up today. We have in the past on this show, or at least I in the past on this show,

have spoken about folding phones and the first folding phone has become commercially available which is the Samsung Galaxy Fold I own one and I gave my review of said device on episode 265 of Connected which I recommend people go and listen to

it also includes our yearly emoji guessing game which is a lot of fun um if you've never listened to connected this is a good episode to start with because it spans the breadth of what we do on that show and if you do not like that episode you will never like connected if you like that you will like the show um so there's two it's a it's a good two but double build i mean i could argue that that you like that episode, you may be disappointed that none of the other episodes is quite as much that as that episode is every year. That's true. Because it's the Jeremy's now where Federico's guessing emoji, and that is incredibly entertaining. Also, you talked about the Galaxy Fold, which I listened to some of.

I think I just to some of. I think I just never finished it. I don't think I got the whole thing because then I listened to ATP and they're like, oh, Mike said this. I'm like, did I hear that? Oh, maybe I didn't finish that episode. Because you have such folding, like Stephen, you have folding phone empathy and you just tuned it out. It seems like if you're interested in space, you do not care about folding phones. That's the only corollary that I've been able to draw. It's strange because one day they'll probably use folding phones in space, you would

think. Well, I would think because I believe them to be the future. At least amongst my friends, I'm in the minority of that thought process. I think it's all very interesting and I'm glad somebody is going through this process of exploring the folding phone and I'm glad it's not me.

I want to be the person that can help the people inside of our little industry understand this type of technology. In case it does come for us all, which I believe that it will. Good old Mike Valleyfold Hurley. Thank you for remembering that. Siri Clip Grading. You say, what are you talking about, Mr. Hurley? What you for remembering that. Siri clip grading. You say, what are you talking about, Mr. Hurley? What is Siri clip grading? You may remember some weeks ago, we spoke about

How can I help? Stop! I grade that an F. I grade that Siri interaction an F. So Siri clip grading, you may remember, was the report from the Guardian about Apple having contractors listening to Siri interactions.

Well, this and Apple... Would you like to go? Stop! Okay. Ahoy telephone interactions, we'll call them them from here on out in the episode because my technology will is refusing to play ball today you may remember that this was the thing where apple was sending uh misfires like those uh to uh contractors to have them listen to to grade them as to what type of interactions they were, whether they were right or not, and therefore people were having their private conversations

unbeknownst to them transmitted back to Apple for human beings to listen to. Apple initially tried to downplay this and then ultimately said, yes, we were wrong. We are going to give this as an opt-in. The iOS 13.2 beta, which is available in the beta process right now, which brings with it the emoji and other features, also includes this. It gives you the option to opt in to making your audio clips of Siri requests available to Apple employees for grading. But it is worthwhile to remember that text transcripts are still sent no matter what. Opt-in, opt-out doesn't matter. Text transcripts are still sent. And the only way to stop that is to disable Siri on your devices.

Yeah. I'm still unsatisfied wholly with this response, but at least they are providing an opt-in to the audio portion. I still think that sensitive information obviously can be transmitted back to Apple because text or audio doesn't make a difference, right? Like if you're saying something you don't want to have necessarily been heard, it can still be consumed by a human.

But at least, again, now these are Apple employees. And as I said at the time, and I still stand by this point, I'm not 100% sure why customers of these products, no matter what they would like to do, must be included in making these products better. It's an interesting form of technology, this, where it's like, well, the only way we can do it is to listen or read the communication,

where my challenge would be every other form of technology we found ways around this, right? Then forcing the customer to have their information used against them or used for the benefit of the service. And I find it wholly peculiar that that seems to be the only way to solve this problem. We're still waiting for a HomePod update too, right? Yes, the HomePod has received nothing. And also Apple Watch Series 1 and Series 2 have still not received WatchOS 6.

Right. Let alone the features that have been pulled out of of ios 13 and more uh this is it jason i want to tell you about a weird ios 13 bug that i've been having oh yeah pictures are deleting oh no yeah what pictures are deleting and where are they going i have been uh so the main the main way that i've seen this happening so far is so i edit my photos in VSCO, and I save them to my camera roll, and they just delete from the camera roll. I watch it happen.

I open the camera roll, and I watch the images disappear. That's creepy. I don't know if photos that I'm taking this is happening to either, but I'm seeing it happening to images that i'm saving and i've checked in both places you know like i've checked in like uh the photos tab and like the albums tab in all photos right to see like is it assigning dates to them or whatever nope they are just gone they will just i used to have a thing that i haven't seen in a while now where i would take some photos while on the lock screen and then i would i would unlock the phone and switch to the photos app and the the pictures i took wouldn't be there i i think i have i mean i i'm doing this by memory but i believe i

have had at least one instance on ios 13 i think it was the first time i noticed where i was trying to take a picture and it wouldn't it just wouldn't save um but now it's yeah but now it is these I had it I've had it multiple times now it's just like well so what am I living in a situation now it's even a cloud-based thing like where I'm just watching images disappear right and I'm not not super thrilled about that one so I'm gonna I will report back on. Okay, there's some advanced machine learning that's going on. This isn't good enough. Analyzing those photos and they're like, mm-mm. Poor edit, Mike, poor edit.

I reject your approach. iOS 13 is just terrible. It's been very bad. It really, it doesn't seem to be getting better. They keep pushing out updates and there are still so many problems and so many features that haven't shipped and i don't like to be that guy right like i'm trying to be optimistic i don't think this is the worst version of ios i think people forget ios 7 when they say that or ios 8 which were for bugs way worse um and i mean i iOS 13 may bear itself to be the worst, right?

Like iOS 7 and 8 have bugs the whole way through the cycle. And I am like hoping that Apple will somehow iron out 13. But 13 is not good, especially when you compare it to the stability of iOS 12. It's a shame. More follow-up. Upgradian Jack worked out that NFC-enabled bank cards can be used to create Siri automations.

How awesome is that? Isn't that great? I just wouldn't have thought about it. So you can scan your bank card, trigger an automation? Sure. I don't know what you might want to do that for, but go for it. But my thinking on this is, you may be thinking, why is this important?

Well, if you have a bank card that has a contactless chip in it, and you've just been wondering to yourself, like, what could I do? Like, you want to try out NFC triggering of shortcuts. This would allow you to do that, as opposed to buying stickers or whatever. It's just a way to see what that's all about. If you just want to test it, then this is a way to do that. Yeah, also, if you have any of those, like, you know, Nintendo Amiibos or... Yeah, they all have the little chips in them.

Yep. Because all it's doing is it's reading these NFC tags. It's just reading a unique serial number, essentially. And then when it sees that particular serial number, it will run an automation of your choice. That's how that works. Yeah. particular serial number, it will run an automation of your choice. That's how that works. So it's nothing magical here, but if you have other objects that have NFC in them, then yeah, you can try it out. You can bring a little Yarn Yoshi with you and scan it when you need to

do something, I guess. Jason? Uh-huh? I have an iMac Pro in front of me right now. Are you on it? Are you using it right now? I'm using it right now. This is the first show I've recorded on it. And have you ever used Mojave before? No, this is the first time I've been on Mojave. So that is it, right? So I bought this iMac Pro so I could skip Catalina. I wanted a new machine, and I've wanted one for a while.

I've been using my iMac since 2015. I wanted to upgrade. I have a family member who's desperately in need of a computer, so it was like the perfect time for me. And I wanted to get an iMac Pro before I was forced, I should say, to use Catalina. Because I don't like to be on the most recent version of macOS. I like to be a little bit behind. I don't want to be the first to encounter a bug, right, on a machine that is purely for producing podcasts.

You want to be the last to encounter that bug. Or the last. But you know what I mean by being on the cutting edge? It's like, well, here's an edge case you've just stumbled yourself into. This is the production machine argument, which is that if you've got something that you're relying on to do your job, then rushing headlong into new software versions is probably a bad idea. And we always, our production machines for our design and copy editing staff at IDG were always a step, at least one step behind,

because again, you know, they needed to be rock solid and working on whatever we were publishing and not toying around with new stuff. So they upgraded very carefully. So, okay, from RelayFM, this is Mike's iMac Pro review and Mike's Mojave review. Oh, boy. How's it going? Well, I mean, I've been using it for the best part of an hour at this point. Well, I set the machine up, right? Like the machine's been set up. I've been doing that over the last part of an hour at this point. Well, I've set the machine up, right? Like the machine's been set up.

I've been doing that over the last couple of days, getting it to where I wanted it to be. And this is the first time I've really sat down to do anything with it. I haven't really put the iMac for its paces yet. I was just wondering how much faster are the typical things that I'll do. And I've noticed things like Forecast, Marco's tool that will encode audio, runs way quicker. But the biggest thing that I've noticed is that the iMac is completely silent. Yeah. Right?

So things that would make my 5K iMac start screaming, which was Forecast, was definitely one of them. I'm on the iMac Pro, nothing. No noise. I'm on the iMac Pro, nothing, no noise. I really genuinely, this is so stupid, but a Space Great iMac is a significant improvement. It's much nicer to look at. I think it looks lovely.

It's different. I'm using dark mode on Mojave, which I am not sold on, but I'm trying it out. Dark mode on the Mac is much inferior to dark mode on iOS. Everything looks weird and ugly, and there are way more apps that don't support it, and it's very strange. So I'm not sold on that yet either. I used to use increased contrast,

which is a setting on the Mac, which it kind of just draws some darker lines around elements inside of Mac OS which I've enjoyed I had to turn that off because it's terrible in dark mode and

I have been, so I wonder if you can help me I have a persistent badge on settings now I have, persistent badge on settings now. I have, so you're, it's telling you to upgrade to Catalina, right? Yes.

I have just the thing for you. Okay. Who but my good friend, Rob Griffiths, who worked at Macworld for many years and does many tricks now. And of course, Mac OS X hints. Who but Rob, who is a cranky guy who does not want to be told to upgrade

and does not want to be bugged, would post a blog post telling you how to remove the Catalina guilt trip, as he calls it, from Mojave. It's a great post. You got to know Rob and know that he's just a cranky guy. And he says stuff like,

I have no plans to move my Mac to Catalina. Right. And it's like, yeah. And it's true. I mean, he's got stuff that will break. And there's some terminal commands you can put in that will basically say ignore Catalina updates and that will go away. And there is still a little persistent flag that gets generated. that will go away and and there is still a little persistent uh flag that gets generated and he's got a little script that he also that if you really want to kill it you can put this little

script in and uh and it will always suppress the uh the little alert flag so we'll put a link in the show i would say for me rob's blog post the only thing that i find frustrating is the one on on settings because yeah i have lived throughout the whole of high sierra being asked to upgrade to mojave right so like i already got that for like i can get used to my mac telling me that there are updates and then i could just ignore them do that every day um but also just like leave me alone macintosh just leave me alone please yeah that's the part that really bothers me is that there's no user uh intervention step to just say do not bug me anymore about this like I'll do it when I want to and it's just like no no no you update update update but you can it can be suppressed so you should probably follow rob's uh various steps and and

get that that flag completely out of there yeah i'm doing that on my server is the same story right like my server is not going to catalina it's going to run mojave for ever probably and so i want to turn all that stuff off and i don't use it you know the interface of it every day but i i want it all to be just gone because i want to park it for you know on mojave for the foreseeable future yeah so i love the imac pro marco loves the imac pro steven loves the imac pro like welcome to imac pro club thank you thank you congratulations and welcome and um my other question for you is how many cores did you get did you get the base model or did you get a custom with more i got a custom uh i don't know if i got more cores though i got the 3.2 gigahertz intel xeon w how do i know how

many cores i have uh if you go to the apple menu it looks like a little apple it's in the corner you choose about this mac don't do this to me jason i'm looking at that right now don't make if you go to the Apple menu, it looks like a little apple. It's in the corner. You choose About This Mac. Don't do this to me, Jason. I'm looking at that right now. Don't make it out like I don't know this. I've been using the Mac for nearly, I don't know how many years, 15 years at this point?

I don't know. Yeah, I know. All right, so now you've got a window that says macOS Mojave, and it says iMac Pro 2017, and it says Processor. What does the processor say? That's what I just said, 3.2 gigahertz Intel Xeon W.

It doesn't say how many cores? No. Well, that must be a new feature of Catalina then, because Catalina tells me I have eight cores. I have eight cores. I went into the hardware section on system report. Oh, system report. That's even deeper in there.

Now you're a power user. But I got two terabytes of storage um yeah and right i upgraded the ram i think i got like 16 gigabytes of ram no 64 gigabytes of ram sorry 16 wasn't a lot 64 gigabytes of ram in this machine that's great james thompson also a member of the ipad the imac pro club this is like everybody's doing it everybody finally finally you have so welcome to the iMac Pro and welcome to Mojave I guess this is uh you know 2018 called and congratulates you on your computer well you know I know I know and I know this machine is at risk

of being updated right but uh this is much more powerful than what I had I was very happy I was very happy with what I had like i wasn't feeling any issues and you don't want to get boxed into catalina yeah and i don't want to be on catalina um i just it's just not where i want to be right now because i have always i've been sketch of this for years years it has been since i have updated uh on day one to macalus um But even amongst my friends who always do, they're not this time. Or are advising against it this time. So, I definitely don't want

to be on the Catalina train right now. Yeah. I know you don't want to be there. It's a place you don't want to be. But I'll just say the high temperature today on Catalina 28C. 83F. It's a beautiful sunny warm day. So maybe you do want to be there. Catalina is a place.

It is a place. That's what I'm getting at. They're not just operating systems anymore, kids. They're also places. And yet it's still a cat. Why do they do this to us? After all those cats, they're like, no more cats. And then they're like, what's the prize? Catalina Catalyst. This cat's called Lena. And it's coming for your 32 bits bits and this cat's called list uh casey list i don't know don't

don't give that to him he doesn't need something else i withdraw my comment uh so the last piece of follow-up today photoshop for ipad remember that uh a year ago i believe we heard about that. There's a report on Bloomberg. The app is nearing launch, but beta testers are reporting that there are many well-established features that are missing. So I'll give a couple of quotes from the article. Users complained about less advanced

or missing features around core functionality like filters, the pen tool, custom paintbrush libraries, vector drawing, color spaces, raw editing, smart objects, layer styles, and certain options for mask creation. Some of the missing features. Bloomberg spoke to Scott Belsky of Adobe, who Scott loves to give a quote. And Scott said, the beta feature set won't represent...

I know, I was infected by James. James is making you say beta again. Beta feature. It's because the word feature was after it. I don't call it fature. Nobody does. The beta fature set won't represent the final version for consumers, and the need to collaborate with Apple meant that a lot of features are coming in hot ahead of the launch.

What does that mean, Scott Belsky? I don't know what that means. What are you doing? You're doing it again, aren't you, Scott? You're saying things you shouldn't be saying. I feel like Scott's basically saying that iOS 13 is a mess, and so their features are a mess. That's kind of how it feels to me.

Or maybe even that there are things that weren't in the betas, or betas, features in the betas that they couldn't, that they needed to use to make it work, and they had to wait for Apple to fix the bugs. He's throwing Apple under the bus a little bit here. Scott Belsky. At launch, says Scott, Photoshop will still lack some familiar features that will only represent version one of the product.

I don't really know what to take away from this so i the problem is okay first off it's obvious that if they're bringing photoshop to ios and to the ipad that it's not going to be exactly what's on mac and windows right yeah because i feel like at the time we even thought this is like Final Cut when Final Cut changed over, right? From 7 to 10. Right. This is going to be real Photoshop,

but I always assumed real Photoshop would be, you know, we're rebuilding Photoshop for the iPad. I did not assume every single feature would be there. And also it's less advanced or missing. Less advanced being a code i think sometimes for doesn't do it exactly like i'm used to doing it which is not necessarily different is not necessarily less advanced sometimes it is sometimes it's not so it's not surprising that this photoshop on ipad is not identical to the one that people are used to on Macs and PCs. It's not surprising.

It's a little disappointing because it does sound like they made this announcement and now it's more than a year later and they're still not shipping. I think we all hoped that they would ship it and then iterate on it and they still haven't gotten to the point where they can ship it and you know scott here is sort of suggesting that's apple's fault which is interesting um but he's also i think maybe setting expectations i think there's a little bit of like um you know i think important to set expectations of like it's not going to be exactly what you know it's going to be a work in progress adobe has shown actually uh a lot of ability to iterate rapidly with updates. That's one of the nice things about them having a subscription service now and you're in Creative Cloud is they just push out new versions with new features and they just keep doing it. And

there's something kind of nice about that. So I believe that they can iterate on this. So I am disappointed because, you know, in the broad scheme of things, I think we had hoped that we would have gotten it sooner and there would maybe be a little bit more time by now to iterate on this. But at the same time, I'm not surprised even a little bit because they are rebuilding Photoshop for iPad and it's not going to be every feature there at launch it's just not and that that was an unrealistic assumption i think that some people made so i'm sure so so beta testers are complaining i'm you know not surprised in the least about i am much more keen and i and we don't have a sense of this yet, I don't think. I want to know what it does, how well does it do it? That's what I care about more, right? Like of the features that are in this application, how good is this app?

You see what I'm saying, right? Like I don't care about what features aren't in there right now. If they're important enough, they'll find their way into the software. But what is currently in the product, how well does it do it? And we'll find out. The good thing is, currently in the product how well does it do it and we'll find out the good thing is like and the way that i see it is like it's better than when final cut launched because this isn't replacing anything right this is brand new it's brand new nothing's been taken away it's their intent that photoshop then lives on ipad and they'll continue to iterate it and that's good good for iPad users who like Photoshop. Because they will get these things over time.

Photoshop, at least from Adobe's standpoint, you pay every month for it, so they can keep iterating on it. It's not like a developer who's like, oh, we're going to make the competitive of Photoshop, but it's going to cost you $5. And then everyone downloads it, hates it, and then nobody uses it ever again.

It's not like that. So that was a lot of follow-up, but that is the end of follow-up today. And we have lots and lots and lots and lots of upstream headlines, and they're basically all to do with our friends at Apple. Yeah, it's true. It's true. But does that end the beta SIGMET? SIGMET? Yeah. Or is it a beta format?

I don't know. I'm just trying to think of other words we can mispronounce. Okay. There are none. I think you're wrong. This episode is brought to you by Zapier. Growing a business is hard work, especially when you're spending hours every day

moving data from emails to spreadsheets and all over the place. And wouldn't it be easier if all this stuff just worked together without you lifting a finger? That is what Zapier is all about. It is the easiest way to automate your work. It connects all your business software and handles work for you so you can focus on the things that matter to you the most. You don't have to waste time thinking, oh, how am I going to do about this? How am I going to do this? You can just automate these tasks.

That's what Zapier is built to do. If you work in sales, for example, Zapier can let you instantly work with leads and send them to a CRM or a spreadsheet. Then you can then have all of your team notified so everybody can act fast on a new opportunity. Whatever your business is, you can find and build the solution that you need

in minutes without writing code or asking a developer for help it has more than 1500 business applications that are supported with zapier it says there's no wonder why more than 4.5 million people are saving 40 hours a month using zapier including me so i mentioned earlier that i would be referencing the spreadsheet that collects all of our hashtag ask upgrade and snow talk questions. They're all brought into Zapier. So Zapier is looking for those hashtags and any tweet that has those hashtags, puts it into a spreadsheet in Google Sheets, which is formatted just the way that I want.

It can put out the name of the person from Twitter, put that in there, give me a link as well if I want it. But there's so many other things that I use Zapier for as well. So we use FreshBooks and FreshBooks has the ability to create a feed of when people like our clients are logging in and checking their invoices and stuff like that onto our system. I've got a Zapier automation. So every time there is something that's happening in FreshBooks, it pipes it into a channel on our Slack. So I can see all of that there as well. So I use Zapier for a bunch of stuff. That's just some of the uses. And there are millions of things you can do. You can integrate so many applications in so many weird and wonderful ways. It's awesome. Right now through November, you can try out Zapier for free by going to zapier.com slash

upgrade that Z A P I E R.com slash upgrade for your 14 day free trial go there now check it out it's going to save you so much time once again zapier.com upgrade now thanks to zapier for their support of this show relay fm and for making my time that little bit more easy upstream time jason snell oh boy lots of apple tv plus news we We are hurtling towards November 1st. Yeah, we're in it now, right? I mean, it's the end of next week is when this all goes down. Oh, you know what? I wanted to give a little bit of feedback from last week's episode where you and James were talking about Apple and China. It was all good. And it was kind of just reminding me of... You dodged a bullet there, didn't you?

Well, maybe I could just say what I think now, so I could just take the bullet. About the entertainment stuff, it was kind of just like... That particular thing doesn't necessarily bother me, because the entertainment is being made for the world, right? What is right in one country might not be right in another country apple doesn't necessarily have to make content that only meets the american standard right it's kind of one of the things that i was i was thinking about anyway and i say that as someone coming from

the uk right we have different standards around language for sure um and what is right and what is wrong um and i understand that it's mixed up in you looking at a very different worldview in China, right? And an authoritarian state makes things very different. And that is like, it's a real mess. But the idea of companies tailoring content so it performs well in different markets, that doesn't bother me, right? I think people are getting up in arms about that specific thing because of all of the other terrible things that are happening around China right now. So that was my thinking on that one.

Because as you and James rightly said, this has been happening in Hollywood for a long time now. Because you've got a billion people there. It would be irresponsible. But anyway, it doesn't necessarily mean they have to pander to countries, but not offending people isn't always the worst thing in the world anyway. I don't know.

But one of the things that I was reminded about when listening to that was kind of a thing that I've been saying for a while. When I first said it, people were really upset at me about like Apple as an entertainment company, different company, very different company.

This is another example of that and is just another example of why Apple is an entertainment company. And we are now all accepting this. Very different company doing very different things. A lot of it we talk about in the afternoon segment. That was what I wanted to say. Okay. But anyway, there's a lot going on.

So Apple have launched their own in-house studio to create new shows. So they don't have that right now. So all of Apple's content, they're working with a bunch of partners to create it, right? They're working with people who write the scripts. They're working with companies that do the casting. They're working with companies that will actually create the programming that is not them. But they have now launched their own in-house studio to create new shows. The first of which is a follow-up to HBO's

Band of Brothers. Pretty interesting one to start with. It's called Masters of the Air. It's going to be produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Van Amburg and Ehrlich, the two people from Sony that Apple hired to run their Apple TV Plus project, they are going to be in

charge of this new studio which will create this show as its first product um masters of the air will be written by john olof who worked on band of brothers yeah this is it's an interesting story because hbo stopped doing these because they felt that you know the price of these expensive things, Band of Brothers and the Pacific. And, you know, actually, I think From the Earth to the Moon kind of falls in this category. There's a series of these big budget HBO miniseries. They were offset, at least in part, by DVD sales.

And as DVD sales fell off, HBO felt like it was no longer as good an investment for them to do them. So this third World War II related miniseries was pitched and HBO turned it down and it sort of has sat there. And it's interesting to see that in today's streaming dynamic world, Apple looks at that and says yeah i'll have that um and is happy to spend the money because for them they're not worried about recouping dvd sales or whatever they're they're they want prestige content for apple tv plus so interesting how that the the sands have shifted there because if there's one thing hbo doesn't care about anymore it's prestige television well you know this is the funny, this is the funny thing. This is the funny thing, right?

I think the situation on the ground has probably shifted for HBO, too. Yeah. But Apple got back to them about this, and maybe HBO has moved on, or maybe I don't know what the story is. Maybe they weren't thinking about it, or maybe their budget just doesn't doesn't fit for something like this a mini series like this but um it works for apple apparently so it's definitely prestige stuff with the the imprint of the people who brought you band of brothers and the pacific and nice chamelon has been working on a project um and not a lot have been known about it uh it now has a name and a premise and a release date. So it's called Servant.

It is a horror show debuting on November 28th. I will read you the premise taken from a Verge article. Servant follows a couple in Philadelphia as they hire a nanny to look after a therapy doll they're using to cope with their loss of a child. Strange things start to happen as the nanny enters their lives the entire show takes place in one location which shamalan says gives the show a more play-like feel i have a couple of things about this one this is not a show that i

want to watch because yes it's too scary but also we've got a couple of topics that we're going to be talking about today which which go along this line so we can get into it now or in a minute um that this content is darker maybe yeah than people were expecting um and actually i will i will give the the second piece of news we're going to talk about along this line and we can talk about that in a little bit more detail because apple is also previewing their shows to the tv industry right now um and i saw this tweet from steven weintraub of collider stating that episode three of c features quote level of violence he was not expecting from apple uh and goes on to say uh it was kind of like a holy poop moment uh when uh steven saw how violent this episode was so this uh goes into

talking about something we've spoken about so much in the lead up to this as there have been many reports about apple won't accept this apple won't accept that i think that these two pieces of news show that maybe some of this was wrong there are things that apple won't accept but violence and and gore and adult themes maybe not so much yeah this will play i think interestingly with the people who have been uh reading about expensive nbc right that apple is sort of a network tv level standards body um and based on this sort of thing maybe i think this actually will be beneficial to apple potentially when it's making deals for the next round you know its next set of deals because it's actually one of the impediments apple has had to doing

deals with people is that nobody knows what apple tv Plus is. Nobody knows what's on it. Nobody knows what it feels like. Nobody knows the standards of it. And this launch gives Apple a chance to not just impress upon the world, like here's Apple TV Plus, but it lets it turn around to people who in Hollywood who are like, I don't even know what this thing is. So why would I make a deal with it and say, here's what it is. Do you want to be involved? And depending on how it goes, that could be really good for them. And this is an example of that, where if somebody has a concept and they're like, oh, I can't take this to Apple because they're not going to want it. And then they see that episode of C or they see the M. Night Shyamalan show, then they might think twice about writing Apple off. So it will be interesting to

see how Apple uh threads the needle here how they communicate it how they label it and maybe it was much ado about nothing and sort of grumpy people who were told to tone something down but um it got generalized beyond what it really was we'll see because it may have been one of those things where it was like they wanted a specific project to be different right and i'm thinking of the uh cancelled richard gear project with vietnam veterans right who were becoming vigilantes right yeah or or the amazing stories like the amazing stories thing because we've talked a lot about how all of these streamers want to have want to cover their bases and do kid stuff and appeal to families and also appeal to

adults and they want to cover it all. And I imagine people who are involved in that amazing storage project, which was originally going somewhere else. And then NBC, see, again, I said NBC originally aired it. It was a family-friendly thing. Apple comes in and looks at what the stories are that the execs running that show want to tell. And I think basically goes to Steven Spielberg and said, this isn't the amazing stories we wanted and that we bought. We want the bright, optimistic one like the one that you had back in the 90s. And those people left.

Now, I could see those people saying this is exactly NBC, right? They want NBC at Apple TV+. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's true. It means that Amazing Stories was one that they had tabbed as being more of a family viewing, and I'm just guessing here, but a family viewing experience. And that may not be true for some other show, but in the press, those are the people who come out complaining and it becomes this narrative about it. So the truest response to that narrative, from Apple's perspective, is probably to release shows that show that it's not true. Apple have got some new content and been winning some bids.

The first is for a musical version of A Christmas Carol featuring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. Interesting. And this is a film. Farrell and Ryan Reynolds. Interesting. And this is a film. Unclear whether it will get a premiere in theaters. I assume they're premiering most things in theaters, but this sounds very much like a holiday 2020 project. Yeah, don't expect it this year. They're producing it, but also starring in it. And so they would be starring starring in it and it's a

musical and you know i would imagine if they're going to do a theatrical release they'll do a small theatrical release and then also drop it on their service so that people can watch it next uh next christmas so that seems like some fun right like maybe uh just like some easy viewing let's compare this to... Singing Will Ferrell. An overall deal that they have scored with Alfonso Cuaron for a multi-year project to develop new TV projects. Yeah, and this is interesting because like J.J. Abrams, when we talked about him and he ended up signing with Warner, J.J. Abrams used to have two deals.

He used to have a movie deal and a tv deal and this is like that where uh alfonso cuaron now that he's in business with apple it's possible that apple will be interested in making deals for individual movies from him but he does not have an overall deal with apple for movies but he does for tv development so it's it's uh and his movie deal is a non-exclusive deal as well. Right, with anonymous content. So he can go all over for that. But he gets, basically, Apple is writing Alfonso Cuaron a check to say, make some shows for us because we like the way you think.

And that's also interesting, right? Because his movies are very stylish and some of them are harder edged edged um but he's a super super smart guy and i would imagine that he's surrounded by other really talented people and i would love to see some tv um from the mind of you know children of men and gravity and and roma of course which was a a netflix movie that was beautiful and amazing and if people haven't seen it, they should see it. It's gorgeous. But did Roma win an Oscar? It did not.

I think it was nominated for many. I'm not sure it won any. I don't recall. It didn't win Best Picture, but it's really good. And it did get many, many nominations. Oh, no, it won Best Foreign Language Film. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. But it was also nominated for Best Picture, and it didn't win that. And it won best foreign language film oh yeah that's that's right that's right but it was also nominated for best picture and it didn't win that yeah and it won best director cuaron was best

director and best cinematography which he shot it too so he won both of those so yeah it did win some oscars just not the uh not the big one and is an amazing movie so anyway he's that that guy is now gonna try to come up with some tv shows for apple and again it will probably be he will work with collaborators. He will direct maybe the pilot episode. I doubt it's going to be one of these things where he directs every episode and writes every episode and shoots every episode, right?

He's going to be doing that for films. But a lot of times what happens in these prestige TV projects is you'll get a prestige director, especially if he's also the producer of it, to do the pilot. And it's not just shooting an episode when you direct a pilot, it's also defining what the show looks like. And then what they do is they hand that off to other directors who will presumably be directors that Alfonso Cuaron knows or will cultivate, and they'll be excited to work with him. And they hand it off and say,

you know, this is what the show looks like and sort of like shoot it like Alfonso shot episode one. So there's a lot of creativity that he can pour into the beginning of the process, working with collaborators without him being like super hands-on on the whole thing. So it potentially a very interesting deal for Apple to get him. Again, you just kind of want to have really talented people around you when you're launching something like Apple TV+. This is a super weird one. Jason Sudeikis will be reviving his character Ted Lasso in a series written by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence.

Lasso was a fictional football, British football, soccer coach, that was used to promote NBC's Premier League coverage in 2013. Yes. They were really great ad spots. They were amazing. I remember them. A show about this, I don't even know what that is. They made a Geico

caveman show. It didn't go well, so who knows? But Jason Sudeikis is really smart. Bill Lawrence is great. Scrubs. Cougartougar town i think is also one of his uh really good uh writer producer and the character is brilliant premise the character premise is it's an american it's american football coach who gets hired to manage an english football club even though he has no experience with that sport because same name different sport and uh it's funny so um will they be able to do a show i don't know but i really like this just follow me here on this chain so apple has uh they have they are creating a show where the character was created on nbc this show is being produced for Apple by Warner Brothers?

That is a wild ride. There is a lot going on in there. Can CBS get in there somewhere? Does ABC slide on in there and part of the production process? Who owns the IP of this character? It's a good question. Maybe Sudeikis does?

I don't know. Which is just weird, right? Why doesn't NBC own it? I don't understand.. Maybe Sudeikis does? I don't know. Which is just weird, right? Like, why doesn't NBC earn it? I don't understand, but there you go. Maybe Jason Sudeikis went to whoever bought this thing and said, I'd like to develop this into a series and bought, you know, made a deal with them and they get cut in for some percentage and so maybe NBC gets a little piece of this too,

I would imagine, so. But I really like Sudeikis. I really like this. Weird story. The character's hilarious, so. I'm looking for for i think that there isn't a lot of uh comedy on apple tv plus i agree um and also i love these kinds of shows where it's a fish out of water kind of thing where you're trying to understand cultural differences and that leads to a lot of uh comedic potential as well and you see it in a

bunch lily hammer on netflix was like that um there was an nbc sitcom that was co-produced with a swedish broadcaster called welcome to sweden that was actually amy poehler's brother um that was really funny um i like shows like that with the the collision of of cultures and and that could potentially be what this is and that that would be funny so you know but then again it could be the geico caveman show so no no nobody get too excited about it and finally in apple tv plus news for all mankind has been renewed for a second season jason can you explain this because that seems peculiar right well this happens this happens sometimes where that like apple's seen it apple's seen all for, right? Apple knows how they feel about it and that they want to continue in business with Ron Moore

and it wasn't a disaster, right? Obviously they liked it and they want to do more. I would also say that based on some of the stuff that I've read, Apple originally planned to launch this a lot sooner, the service. And some of these shows have to be renewed because generally in these tv contracts there's a drop dead date after which the show's actors and stuff get released from their contracts

so you can't keep them around forever at some point you need to say yes we're ordering more or no we're canceling you and so i going to guess that Apple liked it and Apple wanted to proceed. And also at some point, Apple can't wait because they have to give an okay and let them start production of a second season. Also, if this goes well, they want that second season to be available, let's say next fall. And if they wait too long, it's going to be two years before they get a second season of For All Mankind. part of the part of the risk reward calculation here is um you've you know they didn't give it a two-season commitment like they did to the morning show where they they bought two seasons up front but still like if it if it's going okay and you like what you're seeing you know you really

need to move ahead with a second season as soon as you can because it takes a long time to make tv and i mean i i still think this i think this is going to be the the standout for all mankind i'm very excited about it and the more i've read about about their plan there was an article um i forget where it was that was just this week about how they took, you know, reporters behind the scenes back in the winter to see them shooting some of this stuff. And they talked to Ron Moore. And part of Ron Moore's pitch for this show is that he has seven seasons of it ready to go. He knows where this story goes. And what's intriguing about that is season one.

Now we know from that story. It's the first time I've definitively heard this, that story, season one takes place in the late 60s and early 70s. But the idea is that they will continue with the timeline. So you'll see you start from this one point in history being different and how it changes everything. And then you just kind of keep going with that story over the course of uh over many seasons and then over the course of presumably decades into the future which is uh pretty cool so i'm looking forward to it i hope it's good that's the one that i'm most excited by far to see because i love uh i love the space stuff so i'm really excited and the story i read said that they did a great job of

replicating um mission control which is cool, because Stephen Hackett and I were just at the real one, which was just restored, and apparently while that was going on, they were also building an identical Mission Control as a set for All Mankind. I have two pieces of HBO Max news, and then we can

round out Upstream for this week. One, they have scored an exclusive streaming rights deal for sesame street uh five new seasons 50 year library all going to hbo max this is that competing for families thing right where disney plus obviously has all that content apple's trying to do some of that and here is hbo max wanting that and uh this is And this is huge news. HBO Max has scored exclusive US streaming rights to the Studio Ghibli movies,

the Miyazaki movies, which have never been anywhere before on streaming and are incredibly hard to get digitally in any form. Yeah, there are a handful of later ones, like Ponyo is an example

somebody brought up, where they did get a run on like Starz and there was a a Stars deal with Netflix for a while. And so like Ponyo was on Netflix for a little while. So there are some exceptions. But in general, Miyazaki movies have only been available on home video. And this is the great Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki. And this is the great Japanese animation director, Hayao Miyazaki.

We've done a whole series of episodes about his movies, one by one, on The Incomparable. So great. And we do these episodes, and John Syracuse and me and a bunch of other people are talking about these great movies. And then we always hear from people who are like, is it really not available digitally? Like, you can't buy it or rent it on iTunes. You can't stream it on a streaming service. It's just not available unless you buy the disc or go to like a movie theater and see it because they screen them there.

And it's true. Like it's one of the great frustrations that this stuff has never really been freely available. The library has not been freely available on a streaming service. So it's going to be on HBO Max. It's kind of gigantic because those movies are treasures. And it's also interesting because they used to have a very close relationship with Disney. Disney released all of their movies on home video and that relationship ended. g kids took over the disc distribution and um so i heard from

several people who were like i i thought they were tight with disney and this would go on disney plus and it's like well no at i would say exactly the wrong time that relationship ended and although i'm sure disney could have bid for this and perhaps did bid for this it it went to warner so it'll be on HBO Max. It's a big deal. These are movies that some people have not seen just because they were not available readily on streaming. And they're so great. So it's amazing that they're going to be on HBO Max.

It's another reason. It's going to be hard. See, this is the thing. Everybody's like, I don't need HBO Max or I don't need Disney Plus. And then you see what's on it and you're like, oh, no. Oh, no. The libraries are going to keep getting better. They're going to keep making deals like this. It's going to, they're going to make it as hard as possible for you to not subscribe to their service. All right. Today's episode is also brought to you by

FreshBooks. FreshBooks can help you save time. If you're a freelancer, if you invoice people, if you work for yourself, especially with their super simple cloud accounting software. They simplify tasks like invoicing and expense tracking. With getting you paid online, FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for their over 10 million customers to deal with their paperwork. I am such a fan of FreshBooks. We have been using it for the entire time that RelayFM is around, and I've never thought about looking anywhere else because they make everything so easy.

I love the fact that with FreshBooks, when you send out an invoice, it can show you whether it's been opened. It can show you whether it's been printed. It puts an end to those guessing games of, hey, did that person get that invoice and you're having to chase it and just deal with all of that stress,

all of that time wasted in trying to track something down. And to make things even easier, FreshBooks can also automate late payment email reminders as well. So you don't have to chase things. You know, if people have missed their date that you've given them, like, hey, pay me in 30 days and it gets to 40 days, you can have it automatically sent out a reminder. So you don't have to do that chasing.

And one of the other things I love is when you log into FreshBooks, you get your notifications there. And it will tell you, like, these are the things that changed since you were last here. These are the things that need your attention. It's like a little personal assistant when it comes to dealing with what's changed in your business. It really is awesome. I love FreshBooks. If you ever send invoices, if you ever track expenses, you should really be giving this tool a try. They're offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial for listeners

of this show. There's no credit card required. Just go in and try it out yourself. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade and when they ask you how did you hear about FreshBooks, you say from upgrade. Our thanks to FreshBooks for their support of this show. That's freshbooks.com slash upgrade. Thank you for their support of RelayFM.

So October event, Jason? We were expecting one. We're at this point goading apple to send out invites uh but it feels like it might be a bit late yeah we're practically daring them to not like put an invite in people's email tomorrow but even if they do we can still this conversation will still kind of bear true because the reason we're expecting an event is because there are lots of products

that we're still expecting this year. There's also smoke around a lot of products. So kind of from a high level, we're talking Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, maybe new iPad Pros. What about AirTile competitor? AirPods, what about streaming bundles? All of this stuff.

There's loads of rumors around this stuff. And there doesn't seem to be any expected runway of when we're going to see these products because we would have expected there to be an event next week, which at this point seems incredibly unlikely. Yeah, it's been a while since they did an event with a week's notice. It'd be very upsetting because we wouldn't have drafted but uh we will i want to talk about these products jason i want

to go through them a little bit with you where are they currently at right now and then we can maybe talk about why we may have not seen anything so the mac pro being the first one this is a product that we know exists this is a product that is due out this year. Yes. And we would expect it to be very soon, right? But there's been nothing since WWDC. I mean, if we make the analog the iMac Pro, the iMac Pro, there was nothing after it was announced at WWDC until it shipped at the very end of December.

Yeah. So that could be the model here and and let's be honest the mac pro while our audience a segment of our audience cares about it a lot is a low volume product that is cared about in very specific circles and not broadly those people are paying attention does not need a broad consumer launch um this is one of those when we were talking about doing an october event uh that would be like well if you're going to do a pro focused event of course you would use that opportunity to talk about the mac pro but they're not worried about getting this one out before the holidays right exactly it's not not a big not going to be a big holiday seller

maybe maybe by the end of the year one of the nice things about getting out by the end of the year is companies that want to load it into their you budget, especially a big buy like this. And I have no doubt that's why it's coming before the end of the year in the same way the iMac Pro. But if it comes on like December 20th, like it probably doesn't make too much of a difference. Exactly. And if they put it up for sale on December 1st or something like that, then and ship them all toward the end of December, it doesn't really matter because it's not part of the holiday rush. It's just a thing that they need to do in parallel. And so they don't need to talk about it more on a stage somewhere.

They already did that, right? They already gave it time that is probably, even the time at WWDC is probably not a great use of their time given how many of them they will sell, even though it's an important product and they did it as a gesture. It's, you know, it's not for the masses. So, yeah. But we have no reason to expect that anything's changed here though, right? No, I imagine at this point, I kind of imagine that it is on that iMac Pro track where it'll just kind of come by the end of the year.

And there will be that moment where they put up the ordering where there are a bunch of stories about, oh, can you believe that Apple's making a computer that will cost $100,000 or whatever, right? Like, there'll be those stories. But, you know, they can do it just like the iMac Pro if they want to. So MacBook Pro. So there's been some more stuff going around this over the past couple of weeks. So this is the 16-inch MacBook Pro that we're expecting with a new keyboard, obviously a bigger screen, 16-inch, and potentially some new processors. It is effectively everybody's wishes just funneled into a computer.

This will be an ultimately disappointing computer for many people because there's way too much writing on it right now. It's going to have rainbows, like literally a rainbow logo. It's going to have the best touch bar ever and also no touch bar. It's going to have the best keyboard ever. It's going to be like, yes, it is everybody's dream of a macbook pro poured into it so inevitably disappointing um because of unrealistic expectations but the rumors for this continue to say that it's coming soon yep and there is again like more kind of stuff happening. So one thing was that somebody, it was a, I want to find the website, a French website called Mac Generation uncovered icons that appear to be a different MacBook Pro in the current beta of, or at least the first couple of betas of Mac OS Catalina.

or at least the first couple of betas of Mac OS Catalina. And it seems to show, especially when you put it side by side with the current kind of iconography, you're like, what are these used for? Like somewhere in the system, just like images of icons of Mac. Yeah, icons of servers that you connect to or, you know, yeah. And then when you compare the current one to the updated updated model you can see the bezels are slimmer uh people including yourself zoomed in uh and could see maybe it doesn't have a uh touch bar all the way right maybe there's some like an escape key and that kind of stuff but there's

stuff continues to appear about this machine there minchi quo is still saying it's coming and digitimes uh published a report today and I'll read a quote from MacRumors. Apple's widely rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro will be available by the end of October, suggesting that an announcement is imminent according to a supply chain sources cited by hit or miss industry publication Digitimes.

Ooh, Digitimes burn! That's why I wanted to put that one in there in a quote because it's referenced as maybe being not the most reliable one in there in a quote because like you know it's it's referenced as maybe being not the most reliable but there is a anybody who reports on rumors um and and that kind of stuff especially supply chain stuff will not budge on this machine being out not just this year but by the end of this month right and so this is the i think this is the core of probably a discussion that Apple had at some point, which is, do we have enough to hang an October event off of? But I think the answer, and we'll talk about the iPad, but if this is the real big hardware product that's coming, like, do you do a whole show just for a laptop, a Mac laptop that, you know, Apple has shown that they can introduce new hardware without an event. They could do an event if they wanted to, but they could just as easily

do a bunch of briefings for journalists and make a press release announcement and put up a video and call it a day for a lot less effort. So it may be that, I think you could build an event around this product, but you don't have to, I guess, because they've managed that. I have analyzed, somebody posted a little animation of the two icons of the current MacBook Pro and this MacBook Pro back to back and like flickering back and forth. And you can kind of see like the suggestion that there is a little gap on either side of what would be the touch bar.

Presumably that's the power slash touch ID button on one side and maybe an actual escape key on the other side. But, you know, it's who knows who knows how how right that is but uh i i i think it's telling that we have not had that big rumor story from somebody in the supply chain saying you know wave it off it's not going to happen so it sounds like it is going to happen whether there's an event or not um i think a potential reason if there is no event there will be no event like if they were going to build so there's other stuff we're going to talk about maybe stuff got moved around but if they were thinking about will we build an event around this machine i think one of the reasons they wouldn't do this i think it's going to be a very expensive computer right like we've seen those we've seen

those reports i think this thing will be you will not get one for less than three thousand dollars and it will sit at the top end of the current macbook pro line replacing nothing just being an addition. And I think it would be very strange for Apple to have an event where, I mean, even though it's a pro-focused event, where they're showing off the Mac Pro, which is going to be massively expensive, and the MacBook Pro, which is going to be massively expensive. And maybe they don't need to do that, considering that both of these products will be pretty niche in their ownership um if anything

just because of how expensive they're going to be yep uh but then there are some consumer focused products as well uh well there was there was rumors of an updated ipad pro um but this has maybe been pushed to next year new cameras new processors that kind of thing but the most recent uh rumors that i saw is like it's going to have a completely different camera module that it and it has like additional sensors right that like 3d sensing thing camera right like time of flight i think it's called yeah that's right and so that's going to be an iphone so they might want to hold off um on that right because maybe they don't need it right now yeah it strongly suggests that this is uh that the ipad pro is on an 18 month schedule not a 12 month schedule which is fine

which kind of makes sense and that they'll they'll bump the processors and change this camera technology but not until next spring and that that rumor has circulated recently to the point where i think all of us who carefully closely follow the ip iPad kind of nod and go, all right, it's not going to happen this fall. But there's still this tile competitor, the Apple tag, right? Like the thing that you can attach and it will work in 5-mile. Yep. Everyone's been expecting this. I mean, people have talked about it.

There's a lot of evidence for it. It didn't get announced when everybody thought it would. And so I think you have to ask the question, just because there's been a lot of smoke for it. It didn't get announced when everybody thought it would. And so I think you have to ask the question, just because there's been a lot of smoke around this, is there any fire still going on there? I think that's the thing you have to ask is, this product could exist? I'm sure it did exist. Does it still exist? Is it not ready? Did it end up not working? Did they look at it and say, this isn't good enough for us or we can't make enough money with this thing?

I don't know. But that is the question because it sounds like a cool product and a consumer product and one you'd want to roll out and get people to know about. But if you really had it ready to go, you would have done it at the iPhone event and they didn't. So I think it's an open question just because everybody said there's lots of evidence for it.

I have no doubt that they worked on this product and that it exists. But the question is after AirPower, especially like let's not discount the possibility that they decided not to release it or it's just not ready and they decided to kick it into next year. And there's also lots of rumors about new AirPods. We've been hearing about these for a while.

So AirPods with noise canceling in them. There has been some, I wanted to kind of collate a bunch of reports to give a very basic overview. AirPods Pro is the idea of what these probably be called uh almost also rumored to launch in october probably for 260 dollars is where the rumors are right now metal design water resistant with noise cancellation and we've also seen hints in the 13.2 code of a new design so like having the little tips that go in the 13.2 code of a new design. So like having the little tips that go in the ear along with sliders that could be included

in control center to adjust the active noise cancellation. AirPods are a big product for Apple. Yeah, good holiday product too. Fantastic holiday product. One of, I think, Apple's most, one of their most culturally significant products in a long time, probably the most since the iPhone. It's just like an item that has hit mass cultural appeal. People know what they are.

It's like a thing that people have on their body, like in the same way that you'd have the white earbuds. And that was weirdly like it became culturally significant after being around for like a year right just kind of like hit like it hit a critical mass and airpods exploded and it became a meme for a bit and stuff um i think that this product makes a lot of sense um maybe like if they're gonna if they're gonna have it this year it would come about now because you again you want that for the holidays and that the lineup of what this product could be makes a lot of sense to me i don't know about metal design that seems weird i don't know if they need that um i guess we'll wait and see but uh noise cancellation or active noise cancellation in a product of this size is

something that is beginning to exist more and more there are some sony headphones that are doing this now some Bose headphones i think they're doing this now like in ears so it would be a cool product for Apple to have and to have multiple products in an airpods line I'm sure is something Tim would love so I wouldn't be surprised to see this I would be very surprised if this product didn't launch this year maybe even more so than the MacBook Pro, because this just feels like if they've got something in the hopper right now, this makes a lot of sense, right? To get out immediately if they can.

Absolutely. And this is another product that would have had a lot of success in being part of a consumer media event, right? Consumer special event for them, but they didn't launch it in September. So where are we with it? This is one of those, a little more of a head scratcher. Like Apple can launch anything without an event. It's not a problem. So they may just do this and put

it out there. Also, I have to say, I think it's also possible that you look at something like the tracking tile or the AirPods and think maybe they have some production issues where there are only so many of these they're going to make. And maybe not the worst thing in the world to not stoke up even more demand for a product that they can't ship enough of for the holidays. So you put out there what you can and you sell every one of them, but maybe you don't need an enormous launch. Maybe you let the ramp up be slower because you are still not going to be able to make enough in time i don't know like the original airpods right very very constrained for exactly exactly so why go to the trouble of all the extra marketing

and all the extra time of building a media event if you know you can you're going to be able to sell everyone you make anyway. And lastly, I think one of the other things we've been expecting this year has yet to come, may never come, media bundles. But there was a report a few weeks ago from the Financial Times that they heard from sources

that Apple is talking to people in the music industry about a super bundle. So probably the idea of as well as their other things, like TV and arcade, also including Apple Music into a larger bundle that they will be providing

of all of their services. So I'd kind of maybe thought that the bundle was dead until I heard this. It seems that Apple is still trying to shake some trees as to whether this is a service they would like to offer.

So this is kind of like as where we stand towards the end of October. These are all of the things that we're still expecting to see at some point, and there's been lots of smoke about all of them. But maybe, as we said, maybe it's not already. Maybe only some things are ready. What do you think here, though, out of this list,

would Apple most realistically want to launch by press releases? You know, I remember they did that wild week of press releases. Sure. Do you think that we could see something like that? And if so, what is most likely, in your opinion, to be launched that way without kind of convening the world's media? I think the truth is all of these products could be launched with a press release and some media, coordinated media coverage. All of them, every single one of them. And, you know, who knows,

as we sit here today on a Monday morning as we record this in California, who's to say they could do it this week? They could do it next week? They could just roll all this stuff out, announce a price and release date for the Mac Pro. Announce a new laptop. Announce a Tile competitor.

Announce new AirPods. And just drop those off. They could do all of that. Media Bundle, who knows? I mean, they can literally, anytime they could throw that out there. My guess is that will happen later because they're about to launch Apple TV Plus

and they've got the free trial and all of that. So I think they're just going to, and the year of free, if you've got a new device, like I think they can go for a while with that. And I do feel like without the iPad Pro, the idea of doing a pro focused event loses a little something.

Like it made sense when it was a new Mac Pro, MacBook Pro and iPad Pro, but when iPad Pro gets pulled out, it is a less compelling event. It's more like a couple of here's a laptop and a bunch of little gadgets. And that's a less compelling event, I think, which might be, you know, one of the reasons why it appears that they won't do it. But I think they could do all of these, I think, to varying degrees, right? Like, obviously, I think to varying degrees, right?

Like obviously the MacBook Pro, you want to have people get their hands on it and under embargo and then talk about it and do some interviews and podcasts. And I know that this would be a bigger launch event in some ways than that iMac speed bump where we did the interview and all of that. But again, that was an example of a product launch where there was coordinated media,

but it wasn't an event. And they could absolutely do that with that product. And some of these other products, even less. I mean, they can do coordinated, like the AirPods, if there are new AirPods, they probably would want to do some coordinated media for that because they want some stories out there saying, oh, I use these and they're great or whatever. saying, oh, I used these and they're great or whatever. But I think they could do this all by press release and a little bit of behind the scenes work and not need to call people to an event at a theater somewhere. And maybe they will, if they're going to have any of this stuff, because it certainly seems like

there will not be an Apple event, another one this year. It seems very unlikely, at least. Apple have earnings on the 30th. On the 30th, the 30th yeah it seems it seems like we've run out of time it's still possible i still keep thinking like apple tv plus launches on the first and it makes me wonder like could you do an event you know would they do an event that was like an apple tv plus launch event that also they threw out some products in. That was something we toyed with.

We talked about like doing something in LA on the 29th or something like that and having it be both of those things, having it be kind of an Apple TV premiere event and then also make some product announcements. But that's also a little weird crossing of the streams of their different kinds of products. So maybe there's nothing.

Maybe the fact is Apple can get attention without calling an event. So maybe that's what they'll do. do all right let's round out today's episode as we always do with some hashtag ask upgrade questions but before we do let me thank our final sponsor and that is pingdom pingdom are amazing because they help keep your site and the sites that you love online pingdom monitor your website so you do not have to, giving you real-time feedback so you know exactly what's going on at all times. The internet is an amazing thing, but it breaks all the time. Pingdom detects 400,000 outages online every single day, and that is just of the websites that Pingdom is monitoring. It doesn't matter if you're a startup or a Fortune 500

company or something in between. You need alerts about any critical website issues so they can be fixed because you don't want something terrible to happen, right? And Pingdom can help you customize how you're alerted depending on the severity of an outage. And they'll also track and analyze the load time and responsiveness of your website so you can see what's affecting user experience.

It doesn't have to just be like, is my website down? But maybe it's running slowly and Pingdom can help you with that. If you have a site of any size, you need Pingdom. They have a no-fuss approach to help you get started. All you need to do is give them the URL that you want to monitor. They take care of the rest. So go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM right now and you can get a 14-day free trial of no credit card required. And then when you sign up, use the code upgrade at checkout to get a huge 30% off your first invoice. That is pingdom.com slash RelayFM

for a 14-day free trial and use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get 30% off your first invoice. So thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. So hashtag askupgrade. First question comes from Jamie. Considering the success of Apple's A series of chips,

so the chips that go into iOS devices and more, what do you think the new form factors could... TV programs matching this is us. This is us. This happened again. US, America... What is going on today? Siri, you need to chill out.

Do you want to hear the next... No! Stop! What is going on, Jason? I don't know. Maybe you've been hacked. Why is this happening so much today? Very peculiar.

Anyway. It was the A-series processors, I think. But still, though, this doesn't happen to me. I say this stuff all the time. Jamie's question was, what do you think that new form factors could be if Apple goes to ARM processors for the Mac? Could we see the mac mini become as small

as the intel nook um you know i love that size because it's so tiny but i think the answer is no because the fact is intel nook shows that you can do it with intel you can put a bunch of ports on it and it's uh little and it's uh great and apple didn't do it apple kept the same size for the mini so i think apple makes design decisions based on their own you know their own choices and priorities and all of that and they've decided that uh they want the mac mini to look like that so i i don't i think intel has products that are capable of doing all sorts of interesting things that's not what makes it drives apple with its decisions because i even think like oh you could say oh maybe they can make the laptops even thinner and lighter but i expect when when apple inevitably moves to arm that they won't do that they will want to get their gains for other

things right so if you keep the laptops around the same kind of size, imagine how long the battery life could be. They might go for stuff like that as opposed to changing the form factors immediately. Daniel writes in and says, I am in need of your help for a solution for system storage

issues on my Mac. It's currently taking up 40 gigabytes. Daniel has a small hard drive. It's tried disutility and cleaning out files, but nothing seems to work. I'm open to any and all thoughts about how to deal with my storage crisis. What do you think? Do you have any hot tips on this one, Jason? I mean, the thing is, right, the system storage stuff. So Daniel has a 120 gigabyte ssd as the startup disk and it's taking up 40 gigabytes system there's nothing you can really do about a lot of that right yeah it's weird because like i'm looking at mine and my system is 10 gigabytes that's it yep

i'm thinking something's gone wild here. I mean, could it be, what is that thing that was introduced? Could it be APFS stuff? That's doing it? I don't think so. I don't really know what's going on here. This is a tough ask upgrade because I don't have an answer. Well, my system storage is 91 gigabytes.

So, I don't know. I have a two terabyte hard drive though i don't know so all i would suggest is the only thing that i could recommend is using an app like clean my mac or daisy disk to see if it can maybe give you something um there might be some like backup stuff going on maybe it's like time machine could that be in it right and it's just not dumped it all off onto i don't know i don't know if i like this also something weird if you haven't if you haven't tried it because he says uh disk utility and cleaning out files if you haven't tried it yet go to about this mac click on storage and click on manage if you haven't tried that try that because that will open the system information app and it will show you all sorts of stuff that's in your, uh, in your, on your disk that you might be able to delete. But you know, when I look at that, the system entry is

grayed out because the system is intended to be just sort of this thing that you don't touch. And in fact, on Catalina, it's literally a thing you can't touch. It's mounted read-only. So I don't know. Try that. Try some of those third-party applications outside of that. I don't know. If any other, if any upgradians have answers that they can pass along, please do. Greg writes in, do you think the Apple Watch battery would improve from eliminating force touch the force touch layer in a similar way that the removal of 3D touch did

for the iPhone I'm not sure how critical this method is this interaction method is to watch usability what do you think my guess is that it won't do much because on a very small screen there is just a very small amount of of uh sensor and you know tension monitoring you need in order to get the sense

that something's being depressed i don't think it's gonna it's gonna save you what it would save you on an iphone screen um but then again every little bit counts on an Apple Watch. I'm sure that if they... The truth is that that force touch on Apple Watch is kind of pointless. It's very not discoverable. And it's been buried as well in software over time. I mean, really, the place that you use it is on the watch face in order to do custom watch faces. But again, it's not super discoverable. Could they just turn it

into a tap and hold? And would that be just as discoverable? Probably. So, you know, I think Apple has definitely decided that the force touch dimension is not a useful user interface thing, and that you might as well just do tap and hold. And so of course they're going to look at that for the Apple watch, but it, you know, it wouldn't, it,

it actually, because they've gotten rid of it on the iPhone, I would not be shocked if they got rid of it on the Apple watch, even if it isn't a great savings, just because they're feeling like telling people to push harder is not a thing that they want to do anymore, that they've kind of like decided that didn't work and they're going to move on um i would say though if there is uh some kind of gain to be made i think for the apple watch you take the thickness gain the battery gain like make the

device a little thinner because i think the apple watch desperately still needs that agreed it is way too thick and that they should be doing everything they can to try and make that thinner and thinner over time. Because I know people have had issues with the always on screen, but the battery life is great. Like it's still great. It's still an all day device.

It's fine. Matthew says, after listening to Upgrade 252, I was thinking about transitions in video technology. VHS to DVDs was rough. I lost access to lots of my movies this way. Do you think owning digital movies like on iTunes is a safe bet for future-proofing my collection going forward?

Yes and no. I think access is probably going to be maintained. Like if you buy something on iTunes or Amazon or you've got it in a Movies Anywhere collection, I bet you that's going to last a long time. I think what you're not going to get is what you usually get out of a format transition, which is improved quality. Like that's the thing where you're going to still need to buy it again if you want the 4K HDR version. And you buy it in HD. Can iTunes do that mean i know this is i know what you're saying is you can't always bank on it

but i'm i'm sure that like you got upgrades to like this hdr apple has updated some things um but a lot of other things not like if you bought an if you bought a standard def movie you didn't get hd i think you didn't get hd although movies anywhere i believe did do some of that so if you bought it in standard def and then it it was a movie that synced to movies anywhere then you got it back in hd it's weird some weird stuff in there but i think that's the thing that that is going to bug you in the future is is that you're just going to have these things where you're like oh but now it's 4k HDR or now it's 8K or whatever, however many Ks there are. And you're going to have your old 1080 version and it's just dumb old HD.

That's not good enough. And you'll have to buy it again. It would be nice if you could pay an upgrade fee and whatever, but, you know, or just get it upgraded for free because you bought it. But that will be, I think, what they'll have you do for those purchases where you own it you know own the streaming rights without it being on a streaming service somewhere and of course you know the other thing about owning it digitally like that is you don't necessarily always own it like if it's a dvd you at least always have the dvd in your physical possession exactly if the if the uh if the service goes away you know you're banking on on that service continuing on

movies anywhere or amazon or itunes uh to continue having that in the library and i those services are so huge that i think that that's not a bad thing uh to to bet on but yeah if you've got the disc then even if the services all die as long as you've got a disc, then even if the services all die, as long as you've got a disc player or can buy another disc player when that one dies, you will have it. And you can, if it's a Blu-ray and you can rip it and then you've got the file, like, you know, yes, that's, that's still the trade-off. The problem with the really beautiful 4K HDR stuff is that that stuff is not generally something you can rip today. There are some that you can, but it's like, you don't, you can't, those tend to stream only. Then again,

you know what I've been doing lately is movies that I really want to have. I have been buying the 4k HDR disc because I have a 4k HDR player and a 4K HDR TV, and that has the highest bit rate, and they're beautiful. And they generally come with a digital code that will pop the 4K HDR stream version into my iTunes library and movies anywhere. So I've been doing that, but that means I do have that disc, which is the highest quality. And if the world ends and somehow I still have power and a TV then I can watch the movie Alex asks will I be able to watch Apple TV Plus shows

on my Mac running Mojave not having access to 4K is fine but I would like to watch it in 1080p on my desktop there is a web version the web yeah you'll be able to watch shows on the web and they'll be in 1080p probably and that'll be fine.

But you won't get the TV app because the TV app is Catalina only. Right. You just watch it on the web. Yeah, and only certain Macs can do 4K anyway, like the latest MacBook Pro and iMacs from 2018 or 17 and 18. It's a limited group of systems that can do full 4k streaming and the rest of them just show that the hd version even on catalina finally today adrian asks does it bother you that todoist isn't updating their app for multiple windows support

for ipad os anytime soon i picked this question not just because of todoist it's to talk to error grievance that i have which is so many applications that i use i'm not just because of todoist it's to talk to error grievance that i have which is so many applications that i use i'm not doing anything on multi-window right now and it's frustrating because this is a feature that has not gotten off the ground it's very slow start and most of the apps that i want to use in multi-window nothing crickets i just got a beta of an app that i use all the time that and the beta enables multi window. And I had that moment where I thought, well, okay, multi window, but how am I going to use that? And then I immediately realized, oh, I can put these two windows side by side and have two different.

I had that moment like, oh, no, that's actually pretty cool. That's kind of what I want. So, you know, it's a, the multi-window stuff, I think there's a real question about how many people are going to use it. It's a power user feature. I think in the long run, it has a lot of benefit, but it's, it's a weird feature and it's limited, but there's also a whole chicken and egg thing happening here where you need to have the apps for people to discover use cases for them. And, you you know i think it all goes back to the ios 13 betas being rough and we know developers who have had to prioritize getting their apps to work right on ios 13 over any other any other priority right Like next is add features to the iOS version. And then after that,

you do the catalyst version. Like it, what might have in a perfect world taking place this summer, you know, has stretched over, you know, it's going to stretch over six to nine months of them doing this. So I'm hopeful that we'll get more of those windowed apps on the iPad soon, but I kind of understand why they aren't all there. Because, you know, if you've got to choose to get your app running properly first, you got to do that first and then go on from there. So I'm starting to see it. I've got two apps actually that I use a lot on my iPad that both have recently gone into beta with multi support. So they're working on it. And who knows, maybe Todoist is too,

but that's why it's happening so slow. And it's frustrating because there are good uses for that stuff. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer at the end of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade to open the show, hashtag SnellTalk. If you want to find show notes for this week, you can find them at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 268. Thank you to Zapier, FreshBooks, and Pingdom for their support of this show. If you want to find Jason online, he's at jsnell. I'm at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Jason writes

at sixcolors.com and hosts many shows here on RelayFM and also on The Incomparable as well. And so until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. I draft AirPods. Okay.