Upgrade - 269: A Beep Beep from Far Away

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

This week Jason has no power or Internet, so Myke gives him the details about the new AirPods Pro, the first reviews of Apple TV+ shows, iOS 13.2 and a perplexing HomePod software update, and Apple’s rumored reboot of its smart-home initiative. In exchange, Jason fashions a story out of a UPS, a floor lamp, and a cassette player from the 1980s.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 269 today's show is brought to you by linode kensington and tax expander from smile my name is mike hurley and i have the absolute pleasure of being joined by mr jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley how are you i'm fine and dandy my friend how are you um i'm fine we're gonna talk about the weather in snell talk this week because jason's been dealing with quite a situation and which is why we're recording a day later than usual uh people usually think that we have something exciting to talk about right that like there's some embargo but no uh we were embargoed by power outages yes yes we we were personally i was personally embargoed my house has been embargoed for a while now what's going on in california jason snell oh there's so much going on in california mike hurley um really so

yeah there this is the this is like a season that we have that doesn't exist in most parts of the world but exists in california and it's a season where there are high winds that blow um they blow offshore so they're blowing toward the ocean from uh out in the deserts that are um over the in like Nevada and Arizona and places like that. And so this time of year, this happens. And there are these immense pressure gradients between out in Nevada in the desert and on the coast. And as a result, the air moves toward the coast and you end up getting these incredibly high winds. They're dry, they're warm. And what ends up happening is this is, and another thing about our climate is that it doesn't rain between like April or May and November generally,

which I know is mind boggling for a lot of people, but it just, we are a dry summer climate. It doesn't rain in the summer. It only rains in the winter. And so everything's dry and the hot winds are blowing and there are fires. And a lot of those fires get started because electrical towers are in, forests are in tree areas that are very dry and the wind blows really hard

and there's a spark or something falls or fails and explodes and once the trees are on fire the wind whips the flames and we've had some pretty major fire catastrophes in california the last few years and it always happens around now so um our local power company or you know regional power company decided that um rather than being sued into oblivion by all of the all the people whose houses burned down the last few years uh it would try to save people from that fate by turning off the power in uh in in regions where the winds were happening And that turns out to have not entirely worked because a couple of fires still got started

and they were still the fault, apparently, of the electric company. But what it has meant is that several million people in California have had their power shut off in the last week. Our power went out Saturday evening. We got plenty of warning. We did all our laundry.

We charged all our batteries. But our power went off Saturday evening. we got plenty of warning we did all our laundry we charged all our batteries but our power went off saturday evening and um as of this recording which i am doing in an undisclosed location that does have power in the bay area um we don't have power and it's tuesday by the way just it's it's tuesday as we record this we may not get uh power back until thursday or friday it's entirely possible and at point, I think this is not true at the moment, but at one point over the weekend, essentially our entire county had no power. So everybody in Marin County was shut down as well as other parts of the Bay Area. And this has also happened a little bit in Southern California. So it's a mess and I have no power. And I just, you know, I'm at a friend's place now and where there's power.

I honestly cannot fathom this. Like, I will say that, like, OK, this is obviously a very terrible thing and it is hopefully protecting you against something horrific. And these wildfires have been devastating over the last couple of years in California. Out of interest, Jason, do you have any uh suggestion of where like people if the people wanted to donate money to relieve funds like is there i don't okay i don't if they if they exist i'm not aware of them but there's a lot this is going to be a great episode mike because this is going to be the episode where you and i um talk and you tell me what's happened because i haven't mentioned i haven part. So we prepared, we charged all our batteries,

we did all our laundry, we did all those things. You know, the one thing though that I really hadn't anticipated is most of the cell towers went out and lost their connections to the internet. And so we have had no internet or cell phone service. Now, our local Whole Foods that I famously bought peanut butter and manchego with Apple Pay, they have a gigantic generator that they had installed last week. And they have internet and they have Wi-Fi and they're open.

And it's been a zoo over there. But we have several times a day gone over and gotten on the Wi-Fi checked in, you know, very briefly, but it's really not a solution to this. So I am aware that there's been some news, and I'm looking forward to talking about it. And you may be able to tell me more about it. But before we did that, I actually wanted to give a tech angle to this story, which is how we have, you know have the positive and negative about how we've weathered this extended power outage. And one of them is I am very happy that we have some large batteries,

the kind of which you take on a plane with you. It's actually the two largest batteries we have are the ones from our Away suitcases. Away is sometimes a sponsor here. But it's a really big battery. It can charge a phone multiple times. And so we have those and I have a couple of other little batteries. Um, and that's been really helpful in sort of keeping our phones topped up. Um, yes, if it came down to it, we

could just go, we could like go into the car and turn on the car and do it that way, but we haven't had to resort to anything like that. Um, and so having those batteries has been great. I bought a few months ago in anticipation of has been great. I bought a few months ago in anticipation of this, actually, I bought a solar charger, which we can put a link in the show notes. It's basically, I think it's mostly for camping, but it's this little thing that you unfold and it's got three big solar panels and it's got USB ports and you hang it on. I hang, I was hanging it on my uh my fence yesterday afternoon and charging one of the batteries and i'd say you know in a day it will charge one of those away batteries that's not bad

though it's not bad and you can put your devices out there too but you know you then you then you're you know laying your phone out there and and it's just sitting out there and i thought why not just charge up the battery and then that'll give us that battery again. So I did that and that's worked okay. You know, the funniest thing though, is I had this realization on day two, which was, and I've been using the time productively. I've been putting my office, I've been redoing stuff in my office and moving furniture around and I painted and it's the whole, you know, I got a new desk and the whole thing is like setting up my office after five years in it as a temporary office space to embrace the fact that

it's mine and make it nicer. So I've been doing a lot of those tasks involved like rewiring and moving things around and you'd have to unplug everything anyway. And that's not a problem. So I did a lot of that. And I realized I have two UPSs. I have two uninterruptible power system devices, which are basically power strips with a giant battery. And the idea is that your computer, if the power goes out, you can keep using your computer for a little while. And I just thought, I was like, wait a second. I could use that now. I'd shut them off. I could use that. We could use that power. I could drain those batteries and so my first thought was well this will be great i will attach an ero and my cable modem and turn it on and then

we'll have wi-fi well my cable company there's no internet on the on the cable lines the whole thing is down that didn't work i mean i got it up and running and I got on the Wi-Fi, but boy, there was nothing on the other end of the line. Yes, but the cable modem never synced up with that. So that was a failure. However, what this made me realize is that at night when it got dark and you couldn't see anything except with a flashlight, I actually took a floor lamp from my office put it out in our living room ran an extension cord into the garage to one of these UPS's and turned it on and that's actually given us

a lamp and some light in a neighborhood that is by the way completely dark every now and then you can hear somebody running a generator for a little while there was one house up on the hill that had lights last night and we're like show off you have a generator. You're showing off. But I didn't want to buy a gas generator. They're expensive. And then you got to have like a gasoline tank and keep refilling it. And I really didn't want to do that. But the UPS gave us power. Now, the reason I could, it doesn't need to be plugged in because there's no power. I could have just brought it into the living room.

And so you might be wondering, well, why have a big extension cord on it? And the answer is, Mike, that UPSs are emergency equipment that is intended to alert you that the power is out and that you need to shut down your computer. power and they're supplying power via their battery they beep loudly so i put it far back in the garage ran this long extension cord closed the door had the lamp and still you know you're sitting there reading and every every uh 30 seconds there's a beep beep from far away but actually those things have been great because it was really nice to have something that wasn't like a flashlight or a little battery operated lantern, but was an actual kind of like, you know, floor lamp that was not super bright,

but we've had that the last few nights and that's actually been pretty nice. So if you're ever in a situation like that, don't forget that you have, if you've got another interruptible power saving device power system device one of these ups is for computers that's a battery and it's got outlets on it and you can put it to work until it dies you know you can put it to work for you and uh one i have two so i killed one the one that actually beeps the most aggressively it has four beeps every 30 seconds. It's super annoying.

The one with only two beeps, which is the CyberPower CP685. We'll put it in the show notes because it was less annoying to me. It beeps, but that worked. And so the other funny thing that happened is they told us on the

text messages we got and everything. It was like, well, stay tuned to the radio for updates. Listen to the local news station. We'll give you updates about if there are evacuations and where the power is and all of those sort of things. And I thought, well, you know, hopefully we'll have the internet, which we didn't have. And I thought, do I have a radio?

And the answer is, I do have a radio in my house. I thought about this before the power went out. I thought, no, I do have a radio in my house. I thought about this before the power went out. I thought, no, I do have a radio. It is, I have kept since my high school years, I have kept the, it's not a Walkman because it's not from Sony, but I've kept my fake Walkman cassette player that I used when I was in high school to play music. And it's also a radio, an AM FM radio. And one of the reasons I've kept it is because i have some tapes like when i did a like a high school radio station and stuff like that i have some tapes from them that are not music that you can get on apple music they're like like souvenir kind of things

that i've been meaning to and i have now mostly digitized that stuff and and and recorded it into a format that is not a cassette tape but that's why i mostly why i kept it around but i it's also useful if i need to listen to tune in the radio and so i want to praise the fake walkman from the 80s because um you know what hasn't changed in all of this time mike is batteries are the same it takes two two double a batteries they they haven't changed battery formats and it's got a headphone jack and you just plug in i plugged in a pair of old headphone jack earpods to it and it worked fine so um let's hear it for the headphone jack apple's trying to kill it but i still had headphone jack headphones around and my walk band uses that.

So I listened, you know, I listened to news updates. I listened to a World Series game. I listened to a football game. I've been reading my Kindle a lot because in airplane mode, those things hold the charge for a very long time. And we have been eating like kings because we have a lot of frozen stuff that's slowly thawing, meat in the fruit in the freezer slowly thawing so we've just been thawing that and you know having steak every night because it's either that or the steak is going to be rotten so that's um that's uh yeah anyway but we haven't been in any fire danger which is good and hopefully our power will come back soon and thanks to my good friends uh phil michaels and lisa schmeiser who are providing our studio space today and letting us

charge and also take warm showers which is a nice thing yeah thank you to them for their help in helping this show get together and thank you Jason for working against all of that to be here today it's much appreciated yeah well we were all hoping that maybe the power would be back on today but that didn't happen so uh this is plan b maybe c or d i think it's plan c at this point yeah i don't think this is plan a was doing upgrade at home on monday plan b was doing upgrade at home on tuesday this is plan c which is doing upgrade elsewhere yeah unfortunately there are other parts of our region that have power and are not in this situation so that's where i am we do have some follow-up we have a lot to talk about today

but we do have some follow-up to begin uh so should we do that jason snell yeah let's do it earnings call is coming this week whether you like it or not you probably not i'm assuming right now yeah it's when it's wednesday i uh i will um we're going to talk about it in a little bit, but I will be not doing my usual coverage for probably a few reasons, including the fact that I have no power at my house. But we'll look at the numbers and we can talk about it next week,

about just what's going on. As always, with Apple's business, we get this little peek into it. It's Wednesday that they're doing that. So there's something to look out for. It's been an interesting week so far. And there's still a lot to go this week. Your updated photos book is now out.

So Take Control of Photos. It's version two? Yep, second edition of this because it had a different title before. It was the Take Control Crash Course and now it's just Take Control of Photos. Big update. It covers Mac and iPhone and iPad. take control crash course and now it's just take control of photos um big updates um it covers mac and iphone and ipad and if you already bought it i think there's a cheap upgrade price i think it's

five dollars it's also there's a bundle that they have for twenty dollars you can get that book and jeff carlson's book about um digital photography and yes i this is how I spent my summer, uh, going through every feature of both photos apps for the iOS photos app and the Mac photos app and a bunch of changes, bunch of new editing tools on, on the iPhone and iPad this year. Um, and there's actually a, uh, the, the bookmaking tool that came out last year for the Mac is actually one of them is on iOS now too. So you can actually use iPad to build photo books if you want to. So that's all in the book and you can go check it out if you want to know more about photos. And last piece of follow-up, many upgradians including Glenn, who was first to tell me this, wrote in to say that the disappearing photos bug that I was talking about, how I was watching photos deleting from my library and

didn't know why, is actually a bug with VSCO, the editing app that I use. If you add photos to VSCO from their photos extension, this happens. But if you import directly into the app, it doesn't. Don't know why. I don't know why it hasn't been fixed. Maybe it's one of those things that they can't fix

it. I don't know, but that's what's going on there. So it isn't an iOS 13 thing. It was a VSCO problem. Upstream, Jason Snell. This is a big week because the end of this week on Friday is when Apple TV Plus launches. So there's a lot of content going around about TV Plus right now. And we will hopefully next week,

we'll be able to give our opinions on the first kind of crop of Apple's TV shows. But the reviews are out. Yeah, we'll see. I might be able to. Well, I will be able to. Who knows if Jason will have power? Fingers crossed. But there's been – I'm going to put a link in the show notes to an article on Max Stories where Ryan Christoffel has done a bit of a roundup with some quotes of the uh the reviews from media outlets that have been

publishing who have watched the apple tv plus shows apparently there is some confusion and uh head scratching about the fact that apple have only provided the first three episodes of their shows apparently this is a peculiar thing to do um well critics like more episodes um and they you know critics have gotten used to getting... For HBO's Watchmen, they got the first six episodes out of nine. Because there's this problem of saying, is the show any good? And it's like, well, I only saw the first one or I saw the first three. So you can't necessarily judge the whole thing.

But there's lots of weird things that Apple has done with the screening of these shows. And of course, with any type of media criticism the views on all of the shows are mixed and across the entire spectrum of whether people like it or don't like it but there are some general trends and overall it seems that for all mankind and dickinson are the most well-praised shows for all mankind is the show about what if the Cold War and space race never ended, and Dickinson is the kind of modern-slash-classic retelling of Emily Dickinson's life.

It's a... Yeah. I can't really explain that show. I feel like I haven't got my head around it, about what it actually is. But it's getting very well praised. The majority of the criticism, the negative criticism,

is aimed towards The Morning Show and Sea, which are arguably the most hyped shows. Right. And that could be why people are looking at these more critically. There is definitely a possibility for that. It seems that there is a belief that the morning show gets off to a slow start, but things pick up in the third episode. That's what's being said. And C, a lot of the criticism is around the pacing of the show and that maybe they just spent

too much money on it for the sake of it. It's kind of like the criticism towards C right now. And it seems that some reviewers don't really feel like they get it. So we'll see. But apparently there is... Ha! Oh, dear. Apparently there is, as we thought,

a lot of gore and violence in C. Mm-hmm. And also just other types of adult-oriented content in the show. And a criticism I saw in one of my times huddled near the Wi-Fi at Whole Foods was that the morning show, I saw one review that said they spent a lot of money on a show that looks like it just could have been on NBC 10 years ago. And again, I don't know how much of that is playing into the narrative

where this is Apple, they're new. The knives are new to entertainment. They're the knives may be out for them a little bit. There was that story about the expensive NBC kind of thing. And, you know, I will point out that saying it could have been on NBC 10 years ago, it seems really like a burn and really damning. But like,

if the review was, it's like the West wing, people would be like, wow, that's great. Right. And that was, guess what? A show that was on NBC like 15 years ago. So I think in the end, this was inevitable because it's TV. They're not all liked by...

Apple's going to take its lumps and they're going to have failures and they're going to have successes. They're going to have critical failures. And then what will be interesting is what the viewers think too, because there are also shows that critics love that fail and shows that critics hate that succeed. And Apple's going to have to go through all of that. But I, for one, after talking about this for two years, am looking forward to actually seeing the shows because as my pal Tim Goodman likes to say, in the end, you just got to watch the show.

That's the only real way to judge it. You can't judge the trailers. You can't judge the hype. You can't judge the deals. You can't judge the marketing. It is the show. So I'm looking forward to finally crossing that line where they're going to launch this thing

and we can actually see this stuff. Yeah. And I'm personally, like I've read summaries and stuff i'm not reading reviews in details because i don't want to have my judgment skewed um because i want to reserve my own judgment for these shows like i'm not surprised that they are not a universal home run because this kind of content is always to somebody's personal taste i have have no interest in anything I've seen of Game of Thrones I didn't like. Now, Game of Thrones is considered to be one of the greatest TV shows ever, right? By a lot of people, or at least most of it.

Certainly one of the most successful TV shows ever. Right? But it's just like people's tastes are different. And I want to make my own judgment about about apple's content but hey you know what though like and and this is i think this is why they've done this it's free right now so it doesn't matter i think the more i'm seeing this i'm like ah clever that's what i feel like that's why they did this they only have a smaller selection of shows i saw some reports today that like they're going to be launching new shows like every week every month

for the entire year right they just got content just pumping in i mean like we know what's there kind of maybe six or seven shows at launch we already know a bunch right that like we've seen like amazing stories there's a command nangiani show right there's so much content that's not here yet and it will roll out but if it's free free because you bought an iPhone or it's free because you bought an iPad or a Mac in the last year or whatever, what difference does it make? Doesn't matter how good it is. It's free. And maybe you find a few things you like. That's the point, right? So they hedge their bets against the content maybe not being a home run for everybody. So still more news though lee pace

and jared harris have been cast to star in apple's foundation series so it's a couple of uh great actors there um lee pace you may know from uh what did he play ronan in in guardians of the galaxy yeah you may know him from pushing daisies he was the lead in that and he showed uh jared harris he was in chernobyl madman and and uh yes and also the expanse yep so a couple of great tv slash movie actors there that they've they've signed up for what could be a very big show for apple this is the isaac asimov adaptation right of foundation and if you haven't read uh asimov's, right? Of Foundation. And if you haven't read Asimov's Foundation, which was a bunch of short stories turned into a book written in the,

I want to say 50s. I will just say that it basically doesn't even have characters. It's not by a modern standards. We did an incomparable episode about it. It's a weird series of books, but I would say that gives huge latitude to the producers

i think we talked about this when they when they announced they were picking this up huge latitude because you do whatever like you're you're putting your own take on this idea as outline sketched by asimov but there's so much room to maneuver in there. So I'm looking forward to it. It could be very interesting. And in advance of Friday, the Apple TV app has launched on Amazon's Fire TV. So that is now available now if you are a Fire TV customer. So I think at this point,

it's everywhere they said it would be. We haven't seen it on the web yet, but I guess that will come Friday. Yeah, I took this opportunity to install the roku app on my tv because my tv is a roku tv and it is weird right when you open one of these apps suddenly it's like you're using an apple tv in that one app it's very strange it's it's uh because it is like the tv app on the apple tv and it's all the apple tv interface conventions except in a different device it's very strange but it's uh it's everywhere i'm pretty excited right because i feel like we spent the last two years

focusing on this when maybe well definitely other tech podcasts have not been right like writing at this point it is both a joke and a serious thing that we focus on this on this show. It's like something that we have devoted time every single week to for like two years now. And it's about to happen. It was a great run. And this is the end of Upstream.

Goodbye, everybody. There'll never be any more news about streaming media and apple yeah and i don't know how we're actually going to structure the reviews like it might be that next week we just spend some time giving some overall feelings on them we're going to work it out right depending on how much we have to say and also depend on how the next week goes maybe we want to stretch it out a little bit i don't know but we'll work it out but next week we will be giving our hopefully Jason will but at least I will be giving my kind of first impressions on Apple's

big shows so see the morning show and Brawl Mankind there you go it's quite man on fire I don't know why I was going to do that it doesn't make any sense and Dickinson they're kind of the big shows maybe I'll check in I think we've got some good stuff launching as well

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so Jason yesterday as we record this out of the blue out of nowhere AirPods Pro appeared yeah well I mean the rumors it's not quite out of nowhere right they the rumors were out there for a long time you know we spoke about this last week is there going to be an event right like they put out a press release they put out a press release

so when i say out of nowhere i purely mean there was no event there was uh it wasn't an embargo at that time yeah there no there so there haven't been any reviews of it either there have been today uh there have been some youtubers that have posted first impressions videos and unboxings um that seem to be embargoed so i'd assume they got their airpods pro within the last 24 hours they made their videos they all went up at the same time this morning so i'm going to put a video from m MKBHD and from iJustine both in the show notes. MKBHD uses mostly kind of first impressions and unboxing and iJustine also goes through the whole setup process so you can see how that all looks,

which is there's some interesting features in there. So they'll both be in the show notes if you haven't seen them. But they feature a lot of things that we're expecting. Some stuff that we're expecting isn't there, but by and large, this is the product that we have been expecting Apple to be making for kind of about a year, I think, since the first time we heard about what this product could have been was in a Mark Gurman report quite some time ago, talking about AirPods of active noise cancellation and kind of water

resistance. And they're kind of two of the big things that this product has. So the active noise cancellation also comes with something called transparency mode. These are two different settings for how you can have additional sound or reduced sound with the AirPods. You effectively have three states that the AirPods Pro can be in. It can be everything off. So it's effectively just like a regular AirPod as we have them now, even though they go in the ears,

but it's not doing anything special. You can have noise cancellation, right? Where it's using a bunch of microphones to measure the outside sound. And also there's a, this is wild. There's a microphone inside so it can hear what your ear is hearing to try and listen to your ear more, like to try and reduce it even more, right?

So that's the noise cancellation. Then there is transparency mode, which is something you can toggle on and off or leave on completely, which is effectively bringing in more sound from the outside. So, you know, transparency mode could be really useful if you were, say, on a bicycle, right, in the street. So you were having actual sound coming in as well as your podcast maybe to balance that out.

I'm keen to see what that's like, the transparency mode, just on all the time. But another great usage of something like this is if you're using noise cancellation, you're on a plane, you want to hear the announcement, you just quickly toggle transparency mode on so you get that coming in and

then you go back to noise cancellation yeah i i have used this because other you know headphones have all this this is not like my my sony noise canceling headphones have a uh have an active noise canceling mode a not noise canceling mode and a transparency mode um so you know it's all in the user interface this may actually be a lot easier to control with this weird control scheme that they've got you're no longer mike i i think you'll be happy about this right you're not apparently no longer having to just uh no more tapping punch a hole into your eardrum in order to pause things without a shadow of a doubt my favorite thing about this i've spoken time and time again how i hate the physical tapping of airpods to try and get them to do

something this has all been replaced now by something called the force sensor which is hilarious to me it's like that finally moved away from force touch and now they've just brought it back again so the force sensor it's like a little indentation in the stalk like the of the of the airpod which is now smaller by the way so the stalks are way smaller like the airpods themselves are overall physically much smaller than the previous airpods so the the regular airpods but you squeeze it so you can tap it to pause you can double tap it to skip triple triple tap to go back. I can't find out right now how customizable they are. I'm not sure about if you can trigger one for the Ahoy telephone. I haven't got complete confirmation of that

because it doesn't have double tapping or anything like that to trigger that anymore. And the Apple website doesn't say that there is a pre-built one to do that. You just use the Ahoy telephone, you know, like the actual audible trigger word. But you can also press and hold the force sensor to toggle transparency mode on at any time. So if you want to be able to bring noise in.

And you may, even if you have active noise cancellation off, you still may want to do that because they go in the ears, right? They have silicone tips. So there's three sizes of silicone tips included and you can find the one that fits for you. Apple actually have something called the Ear Fit Tip Test, where

you put them in and you run it in the settings app, and it's using those microphones, the inside and outside microphones to make sure you have a good seal that there isn't too much sound leakage or whatever which is a very apple feature right like it's little it's little extra little thing that they're doing to make the experience nice right and the way the case is built it looks like uh you know basically they they leave enough space in the case for the largest ear tips yes case is very different um

it's it's now kind of more wide uh it's kind of like if you turn the current one on its side and just like stretched out a little bit shrunk it down a little bit it's a very very different shape and as you say they're doing that because they want uh kind of to be able to spread the the kind of the airpods further away from each other so you can allow room for different tips. This will definitely mean that you will see third party ones as well because it would be easier to store them. Yeah, but it won't fit, you know, that's the thing is like if you wanted to do custom ear tips, you could do it, but you have to take them off every time you put them in the case because the case will only fit those sizes. Or you could do it but you have to take them off every time you put them in the case because the case will only fit those sizes or you could do them in like foam rather than silicone right so they

would still be similar size as long as they fit in the case so i think we'll see some of that but we'll have to wait and see because i personally would have preferred foam to silicone i've never this is the thing i'm very i'm very conflicted about this this product i have ordered them they're arriving tomorrow. I previously have not enjoyed using noise cancellation at all, but Apple have said they're doing some... They say they have an innovative vent system to equalize pressure, minimizing the discomfort common in other in-ear designs.

So I'm keen to see what that feels like because that is the problem I've had. The pressure makes me feel nauseous, like I don't like it. it's like that vacuum feeling um and the the kind of the mkbhd saying that like it's more comfortable for him than other headphones like that the vacuum feeling isn't there as much so i'm keen to see if that makes it better for me the other is that in-ear headphones have never really worked for me they fall fall out. But I'm wondering, these are so light, right, that maybe it won't be a problem for me. We'll wait and see.

I'm keen to see what that's going to be like. They're IPX4 water resistant. I looked this up, Jason, because I didn't know what that meant. Apparently IPX4 means resistant to water splashes from any direction. These are not waterproof like an iPhone, right?

Like you can't dunk these, right? Like you would an iPhone. The idea is that sweat or rain or something isn't going to ruin them. Yeah. And it's probably rain resistance is the best thing here than anything else. But don't like, I don't know,

you can't swim in them anyway, but don't swim with them. You get up to four and a half hours of listening time with a single charge, up to five hours of active noise cancellation and transparency off. The case gives 24 hours more battery. This is pretty much exactly the same as the current AirPods,

which is great. I would not have expected that they're smaller and you have the active noise cancellation. You still get four and a half hours. It's pretty impressive. They obviously feature the H1 chip, the newest chip that's in airpods and the new beat solo the case is wireless charging lightning charging it comes with a lightning to usbc cable when i originally saw that i thought it meant it charged by usbc but no that's not how that works

and uh that's kind of where we are like Like, do you have interest in ordering this product? Like, have you? I am interested in it. Well, no, I haven't because I haven't had the internet. I should get a pair. I'm not going to go into great details, but yeah, I think I'm going to get a review pair of this this week. Okay.

We can check in next week. That's an email I got while standing outside Whole Foods. Oh, nice. Would you like to come down and see us and the new AirPods Pro? So, great. I'll do that later this week so we can talk about it next week. Yep. And I am excited.

I use custom. I have been using custom, but also like the silicone ear tips for a long time now um i the airpods actually fit my ears okay but i prefer this i prefer having a little more noise isolation i treat the airpods as sort of um the you know i can listen to them in certain circumstances but like i can't take them i can't use them with a lawnmower for example because it's too loud and um after spending so much time with custom fit ear earphones um in my ears people people are like oh you know are you comfortable walking around with airpods because you can't hear anything it's like are you kidding i can hear everything because there's no seal so how are these feel i i'm i'm very interested in that i'm keen to see if they

passed the little mower test yeah well that's okay uh it's a deal we'll find out no colors we were expecting colors those are the rumors and it made sense they would do colors but they were white i feel bad about that only because i mean i get it white white headphones is an apple thing going back 20 years now or 18 years now. And I get that at the same time. Giving people other options is nice. And I think people would like other colors, even if it was just a couple other colors. I think this is just a running thing for us on this show, which is, hey, Apple, people love personalizing their tech. And one way they do it is by choosing a color. And it works for the And one way they do it is by choosing a color

and it works for the iPhone. Let's do it everywhere. There was, so this was part of what we were wondering if Apple would have press releases. And we were thinking back to, when did they do all those product announcements day after day? It was like much earlier in the year right yeah i

don't remember but yeah i think the initial initial rumors of this were earlier this year so it's clearly something that they really um maybe they had trouble with but they wanted it out by the holidays obviously because this is a great product to have for the holidays but we're wondering if they would reduce release these product this product along with other products this week. You know, maybe there's still things we want to see. The Apple AirTag, as it's now called. Gamei Rambo found in 13.2 because that came out as well. We'll talk about that in a bit.

AirTag is something that is referenced in 13.2. So this is Apple's Bluetooth tracking device. So there's more smoke around that fire, we're expecting that, maybe new MacBook Pros and the kind of the wonder was oh are they going to do this thing again where they have like multiple product releases coming on at different times

and that was in March according to David in the chat room that Apple did this before where they had shots over the shoulder of Tim being posted to Twitter, right? He'd have like different products and stuff. That just kept happening. He had like an iPad.

Then he was drawing things on the iPad. And Tim Cook's Twitter avatar changed yesterday to him wearing AirPods Pro. They just did that silently. So it's like, oh, is this going to be a trend? But we are here on Tuesday. There have been nothing else announced. Tomorrow we have earnings, so it seems unlikely. Friday is

Apple TV+, so maybe Thursday for other stuff. There is a new version of Catalina, which has just come out today. 10.15.1. As it stands right now, there isn't any... I haven't seen anything before we recorded about

any more smoke around the MacBook Pro fire. We have AirPods Pro now. So they're, as Jason knows, they're going to be out before the holidays. We can follow up next week about what we think about those. But there was also a bunch of software that came out this week.

Lots of point revisions to Apple's software. And we'll talk about that in a second. But before we do, let's thank our second sponsor, which is Kensington. So Kensington, they're the people who make universal docking stations designed to increase productivity. With Kensington docking stations, you get access to more ports. You can make your sleek MacBook, your Chromebook, or any other laptop as powerful as a desktop. It's plug and play with no drivers, so you can enjoy up to dual 4K displays with HDMI and DisplayLink video connectors,

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Go to kensington.com upgrade right now to check out their products. That is kensington.com upgrade to learn more. Our thanks toensington for their support of this show and all of relay fm ios 13.2 jason it is here oh did that come out that came out i had the beta on a on a phone because i tried out deep fusion but i haven't been in any situation to update my uh my iphone so there's been a bunch of software updates, and all these software updates were needed to support the AirPods Pro. So 10.15.1 is out, 13.2 is out, Apple Watch 6.1 is out.

There it is. I'm going to install this on my phone right now. Great. Go for it. Let me run through. It includes the new emoji emoji so they're all available deep fusion uh jason i've been trying to take i've been taking some photos i was taking some photos with a you put on your sweater i did uh put on a sweater but it didn't have an intricate

pattern um so that was that was useless but i was trying i was taking photos of a woven blanket that we have with a 13.2 device and a 13.1 device i don't know if anything's happening this is that was my experience when i had a 13.2 and a 13.1 uh both iphone 11 pros and taking photos simultaneously and then looking at them and saying did it work did it fire did it and i can't i couldn't even tell if it was triggered or not because there's no indicator. So this is kind of just one of those things where I'm like, I will trust that in some situations

I am now getting a better photo, but I'm going to stop looking for it. Along with 13.2, with camera stuff, you can change video settings in the camera app, right? So if you want to change from 30 to 60 frames a second, you can do that and it also brought some features of ios 13 that uh had yet kind of not not arrived um announce messages for airpods so this is like you get a message when you're real it can can let you know and also the uh airpods audio sharing

came with ios 13.2 so this is where you can use multiple pairs of AirPods to listen to things on one device. HomeKit Secure Video and HomeKit Routers. That is now in 13.2 and in Catalina. I'm keen to see what products become available for this. Yeah, here's one of these things I've been meaning to mention it is that I, as somebody who pays a lot of money for iCloud storage for photos,

I really like the HomeKit secure video announcement, but that's all we heard about it. Like, I'm ready to buy some home cameras that use HomeKit secure video, but

where are they? This is the idea that you're rather than streaming to a camera makers, all your video from your house into a your camera makers cloud service that you're getting for free or paying them extra for whatever. If you're an iCloud user, you just use Apple and Apple is the one that that stores that video and if you trust apple and not the makers of various video cameras it's a great idea but where is it yeah i have not yet found any product that is available to buy right now that does this yeah mean, I don't think they exist. No, and it's the same as the routers as well. Like, so I know that there are companies,

I know Eero, I think Netgear were on the slide, but like, is it new products? Is it current products? Like, and what will this even do? So the support is there and I think it's going to be interesting to keep an eye on what becomes available there there uh the siri privacy settings stuff right so the the audio sharing i have denied this on all my devices good excellent i'm just angry about it uh shortcuts can be triggered on

homepod and apple watch and stuff like that uh apple watch 6.1 brings watch os 6 the series 1 and 2 so that's available now so if you have an older watch you can now get Watch OS 6 also there have been people that are on the beta saying that this improves battery life for some people so we'll see about that and I want to talk about the HomePod update

so there was oh boy all these updates that I look forward to my devices having power so that they can get these updates. Well, you might not get the HomePod update because there's reports that it's been pulled by Apple now. Because some HomePods were getting bricked during this process. And I had a problem. I had a very frustrating evening last night to trying to get multiple voice support to work.

evening last night to trying to get multiple voice support to work so this is the idea that multiple people in a home can who if they're in like a an apple home right so like they're both multiple people in one home uh can use personal requests independently on home pod so i'm excited for this feature i can say add something to my reminders and it will put it into mine adina could say add something to my reminders it will put it into hers so i was like i want to try this out this was one of the most painful experiences i've had of an apple product in years so i want to talk through how this went so i opened up the home app it said do you want to transfer your siri profile to the home pod and use personal requests for multiple voice i was like great yeah let's go for it.

So I did that, turned it all on. Went to Idina's phone, did the same. So then I was like, oh, you know, ahoy telephone, add milk to my reminders. Done. It added it to my reminders. Perfect. So I said to Idina, let's try it for you. So, ahoy

telephone, add milk to my reminders. It sat for a second and said who is this adina and me burst out laughing because it was like new phone who dis type thing because it said it's so strange she's like who is this and then when we stopped laughing she said adina did nothing then it went who is this again said adina nothing it's like halt who goes there it was very strange that was kind of what it was like so then uh we're like all right let's try it again so like a hotel phone at milk tomorrow minders nothing the home pod said nothing didn't confirm nothing we kept trying this and then it wasn't even so when adina would speak it wouldn't

if she asked for the weather it just ignored her the home pod would just then not respond to any requests of hers but would continue to respond to requests of mine i went into home toggled everything on and off we went through the whole thing again and we got after like multiple tries it once again said who is this she said adina nothing who is this said adina nothing went through this whole thing again turning off and on off and on so like if you have a slightly unrecognizable name just can it not work out who you are like Like I didn't understand what was going on. And then in this state, Siri would not work with any of her devices because when she would say something, her phone would pick it up,

pass it off to the home pod. The home pod refused to take any request from her. It would not give anything. It wasn't just a personal request thing. She couldn't turn on lights. She couldn't ask for the weather. Every time she spoke, the home pod just went off. After lots of toggling, I ended up having Adina redo the whole Ohai Telephone thing on her iPhone, like reset that whole thing up to try and retrain

her voice to her phone in the hopes that it would then push something over to the HomePod. That still didn't work. So she would say something and it would ignore her. Then I thought, well, let me try something else. So I went and held down on the HomePod, you know, like where you can press and hold rather than use the trigger word. That's how I've been using my HomePod for the last couple of months.

There you go. And then for some reason, this then worked. So then when she said, who is this? When it said, who is this? She said it was Idina. For some reason, this then worked. So then when she said, who is this? When it said, who is this? She said it was Idina. For some reason, this made it work. Now it works. So if she says to Az put something to her mind as it will do that. But this

process probably took me about half an hour. And I don't know exactly what it is that I did that I got to make it work. But it was absolutely infuriating. And I was talking to some friends about this. Somebody else tried to do it, went into the exact same process.

So this might be another reason why the HomePod update got pulled. But this feature is not ready. And I don't know why they put it out there. Because it just did not work. Like, it completely failed. And the idea that, like, like during this process if it doesn't recognize a voice it then just ignores that voice is madness like it was just yeah really really

just very frustrating it's like you got caught in a you got caught in a strange bureaucracy yes except siri is the bureaucrat right like that that seems to be what happened it's like i'm sorry you don't have the right form is this the right form i'm sorry who is this is this the right form like but i how do i get out of this thing yeah the answer is siri can't help you this is just one of those things where because i'm a nerd i know that there are certain steps of troubleshooting to go through right and can like because i know how these products work, I can try different things. If you don't know that maybe some way to trick Siri without using the trigger word is to hold down on the HomePod and have it force the request, your HomePod and then just Siri in general is rendered useless because now all your devices are passing over to the HomePod and the HomePod refuses to listen to you.

So that was really frustrating, but now we've got it to work. It's a great feature. Hand-off of audio is really nice. So this is where you can be listening to any audio and you go up to the HomePod and you kind of hold your phone onto the HomePod like you're scanning an NFC sticker and then using AirPlay,

it transfers it over with a little notification. I wonder if it actually has a little nfc thing in it that is really feels happening there because if i wasn't putting it super close to it it wasn't working so you know i don't know how exactly it's doing it but it really did feel like it was an nfc based thing so i'd be keen to know if anyone actually knows the answer to that and also the home pod now does quote relaxing high quality soundtracks of ambient sounds so you can ask it to play you like waterfall noises or rainforest sounds and stuff like that.

So that's all the software updates. The HomePod stuff, great if it works for you. Okay, well I... But it's gotten pulled. As far as I can tell, the HomePod update has been pulled, yes.

Huh. For maybe this and other issues. So yeah, there's some reports today. Apple is having a heck of a fall, aren't they? Yeah. So Apple, they've got a support document that there is a potential issue with the HomePod and it being bricked,

so they've pulled the software update. They just... Because now it feels like the HomePod update got rushed out because of the AirPods Pro, right? To support all of that. So all you've done is proven your problem again, that you pushed out a software update that wasn't ready to support hardware that you had to get out for whatever reason.

It's the same as the iPhone. I don't know what's going on over there. It's been a bad year. It's been a, it's been a tough, it's been a tough few months for them. Apple, apparently according to Mark Gur german is hiring a new team

to work on smart home software and hardware apparently apple is looking to revamp home kit to encourage more third-party adoption and may include them building more smart home products of their own again i don't know what to think about this um i feel like we did a show earlier this year based on some rumor because they hired somebody right didn't they hire a guy yes to be in charge of this yes they did uh they hired I have to sign into Bloomberg to now read this article. R.I.P. Who are you? It says. Who are you?

Who is this? Who is this? So I don't know whether the story is that, whether is it that guy is hiring a team? Did that not work out? Because we had, so we had a conversation about this, about how, you know, Apple obviously with things like changing their stance on allowing HomeKit based on software rather than having to have the HomeKit security chip in it. The Apple has been loosening its stance on this. And we were talking in that episode, whenever it was earlier this year, about how I like this idea, I think, just because I think that Apple needs to be more involved to make home kit more successful.

And that I, you, I buy a bunch of home kit stuff and I think it's good. Um, and I think that there, it adds somewhat to the ecosystem, but there's also just, you know,

this feeling that the competitors are focused on this on a level that Apple just isn't. So maybe this is the fallout. So I've, I've signed in now. It was Andreas Gahl who ran a company called Silk Labs and Apple acquired them in 2018.

And they are an AI company. And Andreas is running this team and reporting to Craig Federighi. And then they're looking to do definitely revamping of software and maybe looking at hardware as well. Yeah. I mean, hey,

might I suggest a Wi-Fi router? Be nice, right? Like Google just did the update to their Wi-Fi system where they've made each one of them a little Nest Home Mini, which is a very clever idea, I think. Right.

I mean, that is the argument that I think people had when the HomePod came out, which is why is this not a Wi-Fi distribution device? I assume now that Amazon owns Eero, they surely will put Echo into Eero. Yeah. Echo. Ooh. Put Echo into Eero. Echo Eero. That's weird.

Yeah. I figure that's the next step of this, right? Is that all of your smart home devices ought to be making their own mesh network and relaying your Wi-Fi. I think it's a good idea, right? If I'm already putting this little thing around the house, why not also make it my smart assistant too?

I just think it's a smart idea. Having taken my office apart and put it back together over the weekend, the number of redundant or at least potentially redundant little plastic boxes. It's like I have like four Euro plastic boxes. I have a Hue plastic box. I have a Lutron plastic box. I have two Apple TVs. I have so many of these devices that are redundant for various smart home things or for Wi-Fi.

And I think to myself, if my Apple TV and my, I have two of those and I have two HomePods, like I could cover most of my house with those if they also did Wi-Fi and talk to each other. And it just, that's gotta be a goal, right? Is to make this stuff a little more unified. And if you're Apple, like Apple's abdication of Wi-Fi, I understand it from the perspective of the like, do we want to make a router and compete with the Linksys of the world? But the answer is no, you want to compete with the Eros of the world, which Amazon now owns, by the way, your competitor. You want to create a system of easy Wi-Fi.

Right, but do they, though? Well, I mean, I think you look at this and you say you do, because if you want to have a home network, not just for your smart home devices, but for your iPhones and iPads and Macs, and you want to spread devices throughout the house, there's a real argument to be made that Apple already has those devices embedded in a lot of houses and they don't do enough and that this would be a way,

instead of having Amazon suddenly be the ones who rush in to provide your Wi-Fi for a house or Google, then have it be Apple. So, but like this is going back to what we were talking about earlier, right? Like they've got HomeKit for routers. It's true.

Is that not maybe what they want to do? I mean, I don't know. I was talking to Adina about this earlier on. I'm intrigued to see what the HomeKit for routers and the HomeKit security camera stuff does because I would like to include both of those product types into HomeKit. would like to include both of those product types into HomeKit. All right, like we have a canary and our router doesn't have any kind of smart stuff.

And I want to be able to integrate all of that into one system. And so I would like to see Apple trying more aggressively to make companies want to put their products in the HomeKit, right? Because I would like to be able to move to a future where all of my smart home devices are integrated via one system. And I don't need all these boxes and bridges and all that nonsense to make it all work because it makes things tiring and frustrating ultimately, right?

And you want to adopt this stuff less i think because of that like i just saw pretty excited about this era launched in the uk today so and then i'm hoping that maybe if i i want to see like well that how does that stuff work with the home kit stuff and all that like i'm really intrigued about it. Right? And I could view the HomeKit stuff that Apple's rolling out for routers as Apple abdicating responsibility and saying

we'll just work with router manufacturers who don't want to be swallowed by Google or Amazon. I could also view it as the start of a program that ultimately includes Apple playing in that game but it's basically it's your apple ecosystem compatibility thing that they're allowing routers to to support i don't know it the other thing about this is we live in a a funny world

where all of these companies want to do everything. And was it on ATP, I think, maybe last week? Yeah, that was one of their topics. Like everyone wants to do everything. Which fortunately they recorded early before my power went out. The ATP, it was, yeah, everybody wants to do everything. And it is, you know, these big tech companies have the resources and they feel like, well, if we don't go into this area our competitors will and so we have to too and so you see so many products that are being done by google and microsoft and facebook and apple and the list

goes on and amazon and you it it's competition but it's also they feel they can't let it go because it's a crack in the wall that they're building for their ecosystem. And I get it. I really do get it. One of the problems is, can you do it well? And if you're Apple, and part of your brand is supposed to be, these are good products, and they just work. Doesn't it feel like Apple's already stretched way too thin to take on a whole home networking thing? They've got the money and maybe they can hire the people to do it. But I do get a larger sense that Apple, culturally at least, up to now, has proven to be a company

that has had a hard time scaling in a lot of ways across a product line. And that is why I would be more keen to see them making HomeKit stuff than new airport products. I would prefer to see them building a system to allow other companies that all they want to do is make that stuff, to make that stuff. Yeah. And integrate with all of my iOS devices. It could also be somewhere in between where Apple comes up with a spec for HomeKit networking or something. That is using something off the shelf or something they invent themselves or whatever, that an Apple TV or a HomePod, like an Apple TV has got an Ethernet connection on the back.

So an Apple TV could be a hub of that. But if you build and sell one of these other HomeKit-enabled devices, it can also be a mesh relay for Apple's Wi-Fi network in people's houses. And Apple doesn't necessarily have to make that device if they get the third parties to build it for them. It's possible. It's interesting, but this is very much like Apple realizing that they couldn't just say,

well, you want to be in our ecosystem, here are the rules, go for it. Because the ecosystem is not as broad as Apple would like it to be. I would argue that the best stuff is probably there. But because people say there are like 60 HomeKit devices and 400 Alexa works with Alexa devices. I would wager that most of those that are not on Apple's platform but are on Alexa are probably not very good. They're probably a bunch of the same chipset. And they probably also work with skills which suck most of the time and skills are no good right so so you know it's there are different ways to play

this but i do think it's interesting that apple apple has realized over the course of several years now that they really do need to revamp this and it would be fascinating if they end up you know what do they partner with other companies about And what do they decide they just have to make it themselves? We'll find out. But it looks like they might be doing something. But this could also be like the car project and just disappear. And go nowhere. Yeah, could be.

All right, let's do some hashtag AskUpgrade before we round out today's episode. And AskUpgrade this week is brought to you by TextExpander from our friends at Smile. TextExpander lets you insert words, phrases, forms, templates, and more with just a couple of key clicks everywhere or anywhere you type. You can take control of your time and productivity by letting TextExpander handle your repetitive typing tasks for you so you can get back to actually doing what you want to do. TextExpander is available for macOS, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Chrome as well. Making and editing snippets is now even easier as well.

TextExpander's new visual snippet editor. I made a snippet just a couple of days ago. I had to send an email to a bunch of different people. I could very easily set it up. So I typed something out and then added the visual little editor. I could just enter the word tab so it would tab down, and then I could type out the rest that I needed. So when I go and open my email client, I just activate the snippet in the subject bar, and it would like subject line, and it would just enter that in for me, go down into the text field, and then put all the text in that I needed as well. It's really awesome. I love TextExpander for stuff like this. Companies use TextExpander for teams, my company does, for support, reports, email,

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Listeners of this show can get 20% off their first year. Just go to TextExpander.com to find out more and sign up. Our thanks to TextExpander from Smile for their support of this show and RelayFM. It is time for Hashtag AskUpgrade. Were the lasers affected by the power outage, Jason? There's no power for the lasers, Mike. What a shame. What a shame.

You know, Jason, I was having a thought the other day. This is, we're going on a tangent. I was thinking about doing, like, I was thinking about upgrade live shows and stuff. One day, we need to get an actual laser system. Oh my god. For a live show? Yeah, and then we do ask upgrade and the lasers fire. Mm-hmm.

Wouldn't that be great? That would be amazing. But we'd need a laser system that would also make noise so because our lasers are very loud they are they are yeah we could do that i'm sure we could do that first question comes from johan this week thank you very much oh they got on the generator they're on the generator yeah could you survive on an iphone 11 not an iphone 11 pro survive yes and i think would be fine i mean i would miss the telephoto lens camera but i would miss the telephoto lens and i don't want to i don't want a phone that big honestly i prefer the smaller size because it's bigger isn't it than the than the small size iphone 11 pro but i think like you know

especially this year like that product is wonderful. I'd be more than happy, I think, on an iPhone 11. I agree. I agree. I mean, I bought the Pro, but I would be fine with the 11. I would be sad at the Zoom. I want three cameras. I want the more battery, and I want the bigger screen.

But I would think that I could more than happily survive on just a regular iPhone 11. For sure. Ellie wants to know, does the TV app in Catalina support home videos the way that iTunes does? Do you know the answer to this, Jason? I don't think so. So there's, because in iTunes,

you could have your own movies, right? Which could be, of course, home videos, legally found yeah you could put them in so you could like load your own videos into itunes and then one of the reasons you would do that is then to put them onto an ios device as well i think it doesn't in fact my recollection writing my photos book there's actually a send to, I think it's send, if you make a video to export it, one of your options is to send it to the music app, which is hilarious because I think they just searched and replaced for iTunes.

And then it opens it in the music app, except nothing opens because the music app doesn't do videos anymore. Great, great. Like what just happened there? So I don't know if the TV app in catalina it's possible but um i haven't checked that i i feel like that is a feature that is just gonna uh disappear because one of as i said one of the things you'd have for that is so you could put them onto ios devices but you can probably do that in finder now yeah you can just sync them sync them over yeah so i bet

it's not there i mean i can't look because i'm on mojave but like my expectation is that's gone uh todd asks is there a benefit to using the iphone camera's digital zoom versus cropping a photo i don't think there is right you just take a photo i don't think there is either because you're gonna you're always losing fidelity i mean yeah that's what a digital zoom is it's literally you're just cropping around the edges and i don't know if they're doing things to try and refine the digitally zoomed image to make it look higher quality it's possible i mean like i know google google have an actual feature for this right so like of course they do if you're you know it's they call like super zoom or whatever like so that is like a thing they have a thing apple

doesn't have like a thing right they don't talk about this on stage like oh and if you zoom in we use all this machine learning i never zoom more than the 2x lens if i ever want to do i would just crop an image right that's what i do i crop an image that i've taken see if i want to zoom in more i was talking about visco last week and tony has written in to ask what are my favorite VSCO filters? People ask me this quite a lot so I will now share it here and then for the future I can say listen to episode 256 of

Upgrade in the Ask Upgrade section and you will find out that I like the C and A filters mostly. They're chromatic and analog. That's what they stand for. Primarily the filters I use, get a pen and paper, A1, A2, A8, A10, C3, C6, C7, and C9. They're my favorites.

They're the ones I use most, but I never just use what a filter gives me. I always go in and tweak the saturation. I tweak colors, sharpness, vignette, grain, all that kind of stuff. So I will always adjust from those. So there you go. That is what I use. Jim asks, is there a way to trick photos on Catalina into scanning for faces more aggressively? I've left it running in the background for almost two weeks, and it only seems to make progress very intermittently.

Do you know, Jason? There is no way to do this. You just have to, I'd say, I think the best thing you can do is go in and tag your stuff aggressively, is to say, go into photos that have people in them and scroll up and find the faces and tap on them, or if you're on the Mac, they just know, if you're in on the Mac,

you can, they just show up when you go to a single view, it puts little labels on all the faces and start naming people and saying, this is this person. You go into the photos or the people album in photos on again, iOS or Mac and go into individual people and it'll often ask you, can you verify some more faces? You can actually scroll down and force some more manual verification of faces if there's more that are possible. The more you feed that engine, I think the better it does and the more stuff aggregates, but you do kind of just have to wait and you're kind of at the mercy of the um of the of the software to run in the background to do it um i will say on the mac you got to quit the app you can't leave it open you

quit it and you let your mac run and if you if you don't usually let your mac run overnight or you have it go to sleep don't do that have it stay awake and that's that's all you can really do and then beyond that it's's kind of a mystery what happens. Rajiv asks, what is the advantage or point of using profiles in tvOS 13? So this is where you can have multiple user support, right? So you can have multiple people on a TV. As far as I'm aware, as apparently the tvOS guy, which is a connected joke, you have access to your own purchase content

and the tv app is personalized to your preferences so it's not mixing with anybody else's so if you like a certain type of tv show but somebody else in your house doesn't they're not going to get that recommended and up next nor are they going to even see it suggested as complete this show right so like if you've got a if you're watching tv shows in an app that supports the tv app and it's in your up next it will maybe then suggest oh hey maybe you want to watch this maybe you want to watch that um so it's not all going to get mixed up you can have it separated we just have the one thing here because me and adina watch tv together yeah watching stuff on the tv so we don't need it split apart i think apps can support the api maybe no one's doing it

though but no one's doing it because no one wants to share that information so this would be for example you if netflix supported it you wouldn't need to choose hey who's watching in netflix it would know but it doesn't seem like there is any app using that or any of the major apps this needs to be using it right now last question from uh bart today when you use lunar display of a mac mini in headless mode so this is no monitor just using lunar display as i do with my ipad can you use any of the mac gestures like mission control can use command tab in some fashion does that just control the ipad app switching so yes if you open luna display and press command tab you will cycle to the next app on your ios device so what i did was map you because

you can change keyboard shortcuts on the on the mac i've remapped them all so it when i'm using luna display on clever my mac mini i've changed them all to control. So control tab does the max switching. Control space does spotlight searching. So because you can just remap them. So I just remap them all to control. So that's how that works because that does nothing on iOS. So top tip for you there.

Good tip. I love it. All right. If you would like to send in a question for a future episode, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade. Or if you want to hear us not talk about weather as we did today, a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk, and we'll bring that in. But that was a much needed and interesting weather update today from Jason.

Thanks to our sponsors this week, the fine folk at Linode kensington and text expander if you want to find jason he's online at at jay snell and at sixcolors.com now you mentioned about the uh the apple earnings and you said you would you would say that you're going to be changing your coverage so what can people expect from six colors this week for apple earnings it's a mystery to me too um i'll do some charts i i will probably the to me too. I'll do some charts. The charts will exist. I will do some charts. They may not happen immediately and I will probably not do a transcript of This Is

Tim because I won't have the wherewithal to do that. And Dan Morin will do some coverage on Twitter at Six Colors Event, which is our live tweeting event account. So yeah, you can,

you can follow along there if you want to. And yeah, but we will be talking about that. If anything else happens this week, maybe there'll be some Mac news. Who knows? We'll talk about that next week, along with our first impressions of the Apple TV plus shows,

big episode on deck next week. I'm very excited already. Big episode on deck for next week. I'm very excited already. Hope I have power for it. Let's hope so, shall we? If you ever wonder, hey, there's no upgrade today. Do you know how you can find out when there's going to be an upgrade? You can follow. Is it tweet directly at us with hashtag askupgrade and say,

why was there, is there no episode of upgrade this week? By the way, there's never not been an episode of upgrade in a week yes we've never happened don't take weeks off that's and also here's the other thing jason doesn't take the time off sometimes i'm not here right so like you know i had the wonderful friend of the show dan moran sent me a message to slack today and said hey if you know if you and jason are struggling i'm i was wanting to let you know like morning happy to fill in and i said to dan thanks i said, hey, if you and Jason are struggling, I just want you to know I'm more than happy to fill in. And I said to Dan, thanks, I'll let you know if I need it. What I didn't say to Dan was,

Jason would not allow that because Jason doesn't miss upgrade. It would take a very serious, I mean, this is almost that case, but it's like the idea here is that I'm on every episode. That's the plan. But like we would find a way, right? So like it could even be, case but it's like the idea here is that i'm on every episode that's the that's the plan but like we would find a way right so like it could even be because we would call in on the phone and record

and send you the file from whole foods if i had to there would be a way because yeah i love it you never miss the show right like but i think if you if you're curious about why it isn't showing up at the usual time instead of tweeting at us and hashtag AskUpgrade, follow the Upgrade Twitter account because that's where we tell you if we're going to be late. It tells you when we're recording live, all of that stuff. And that is at underscore Upgrade FM. And that's a great place to go.

And if you don't use Twitter, you know what? Twitter.com slash underscore Upgrade FM will show you what we're tweeting. And that account essentially only does its live place to go and if you don't use twitter you know what twitter.com slash underscore upgrade fm will show you what we're tweeting and that account essentially only does it's live um you know we're live on twitter uh the episode's been posted and any schedule announcements that's why it's there and if there's much we'll post it and if sure that's true or if we ever did a twitter poll i guess that would be it but we don. So a couple of tweets a week. So it's a low volume Twitter account to follow.

But you will also get scheduling updates. And that can be very useful. Plus, every now and then, we change the avatar when it's in a new season. So a draft season, there's a new avatar. If it's summer of fun, holidays. Summer of fun! Summer of fun. It's gone.

It's a good place. It's not fun now now there's no fun now well it's like the fall the fall of fire i don't know of darkness full of darkness there you go we know we did say it would be like the winter of discontent like that was where we were going um but uh you know there it goes okay thanks so much for listening to this week's episode we'll be back next time until then say goodbye jason snell i'll leave the light on for you or i would but i can't because i don't have any light