Upgrade - 274: More Clunky!

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

This week we get caught up on Apple services (Apple Pay, Apple News+, Apple Arcade), Jason gives Myke a tour of CarPlay in iOS 13, and we feed the tech podcast ecosystem with discussions of office lighting and weather stations.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 274 and today's show is brought to you by squarespace fresh books and text expander from smile my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley how are? I'm very well, my friend. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you had a happy one. Oh, thank you. Yes, it was delightful. Good having a four-day weekend. Love it. How is Thanksgiving in England? It's great because I get special time off because

everyone I work with is not working. So that's lovely for me. Well, nobody wants to hear about that. Nobody especially wants to hear about what Thanksgiving's like in England. So let's go to our hashtag SnellTalk question. It comes from Joel. Joel wants to hear about that nobody especially wants to hear about what thanksgiving's like in england uh so let's go to our hashtag snow talk question it comes from joel joel wants to know do you let someone touch or take your phone when scanning a ticket boarding pass or coupon my precious my precious you cannot have my precious um yeah you know what? I prefer to just scan it myself. Like I go to the airport and I get to the security and I just lay it down on the little scanner.

And I hold it out and have it kind of like when I'm boarding the plane. I prefer to do that myself. If they want to take the phone and scan it because I'm not getting the angle right or whatever i'm fine with it it's fine i don't care i don't have some weird like oh don't touch touch not my iphone i don't care my thing with this is my typical thing like in in airports which is in airports you you lose all of your ability to do anything right right? Like you lose your dignity, your individualism because you want to get on the plane and airport situations are such that

it feels like at any moment someone could deny you to get on the plane. So if somebody reaches their hand out to take my phone, my phone goes into their hand. Like it's- Thank you, sir. May I have another? Yes. I don't want to give them my phone you, sir, may I have another? Yes.

I don't want to give them my phone, but I feel like I have to because I don't want to be seen as causing trouble. Airport's the worst. Thanks, Joel, for that hashtag Snell Talk question. If you would like to help us open an episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and it may be kept for a future episode. Last time, last warning.

Warning maybe isn't right but uh dongle town merch at upgradeyourwardrobe.com uh it is basically available for one more day after you hear this today is the 2nd of december uh tomorrow is the 3rd of december and it will go off sale at like midnight uh i think uk time So if you're hearing this and you haven't yet gone to upgradeyourwardrobe.com to get one of our Dongletown t-shirts, you need to do it now because we don't know when or if ever they will be back on sale. So upgradeyourwardrobe.com

Yeah, it's 5pm Pacific so 8pm Eastern on Tuesday, December 3rd. That's when it ends. So do not wait. Do not wait at all. Do it now or regret it forever. Or at least until next year. Forever.

So on ATP, Marco took our follow-out and followed out back to us. So they were talking... You reversed the streams. No! They were talking a couple of weeks ago about John preparing the way.

You then spoke about preparing your way.co then thought he would talk about lamps so let's close the loop what is the lighting situation like in our offices oh it's lamp talk hashtag lamp talk excellent excellent um well i i don't know about you but i thought it was funny because it's it's just this all this conversation was going on and i was listening to ATP on the first kind of like really dark and rainy day here in California. And I'm listening to Marco talk about how he doesn't think his office has enough light while sitting in a garage with a single floor lamp thinking, wow, it's really dark in here. I need more light.

And it wasn't that Marco influenced me. It was more like I noticed. And then I listened to Marco and I laughed because he was describing the situation I had just recognized about my new office that I got set up that we talked about last week. I mean, new office. The wall is orange. The shade of orange is in the show notes. But the lighting thing, it's totally true. I need more light in here. There are, especially for like darker, darker days, like it can get really dark and cave-like in here. And so I'm trying to figure out what that is going to be. And I'm not quite sure. I don't have a ceiling per se. I have some beams and then I have like insulation in this garage. So I'm not quite sure. I can actually mount things on the beams fairly easily.

I actually have a video light up there, which is more for me than to light the room so people can see me when I do video stuff. But I am thinking about like, I need another light either hanging from the ceiling or maybe aimed at the orange wall to give me a pleasant kind of glow from the orange wall. maybe aimed at the orange wall to give me a pleasant kind of glow from the orange wall right now i actually have a hue strip light strip that i had on the back of a piece of furniture in my office i've actually got it kind of like hanging over um along the along the wall and that that is more for demonstration purposes of like what would it be like if it was well lit over here and the answer is i like it and I definitely need more light over there.

But having the kind of randomly snaking hue strip is probably not a long-term solution. No. It's super ugly, but the light it puts out is quite pleasant. So I'm thinking now maybe I do want something that's kind of high up and pointed at the wall so it can kind of bounce off the wall. But anyway, so that's my lighting story is that i'm with marco i actually do need more light in my office so i don't feel like i'm um in the winter especially like working in a cave it's not great it's it's fine when it's uh the sunny summery time and the the sun is shining in my my big window but uh this time of year that doesn't happen i i'm a big fan of the phillips hugh stuff

i like those we have them dotted around the house and some lamps and we have a lot of like ceiling lighting which is just the whatever random ceiling lighting we have sure in my office i have a just a kind of a bulb hanging from the ceiling with a BB-8 lampshade around it, which is fun. It's just a paper lampshade and looks like BB-8. And I've forgotten that that existed until I just looked up at my light because it's just a part of the room and has been for a long time. But I have that. And then I used to say we have multiple hue products. I have a couple in the office.

I have one of those light strips stuck to the outside edge of my desk, which is just a fun thing. So it can light up the wall that's in front of me because my desk is against the wall. And I also have one of those lamps as well. So whenever I do video stuff, like just the little kind of like half, like ball lamps that they do, I can't even remember what they're called now, but it looks like a ball that they've cut in half effectively. And you can just move it around and it has a battery in it so you can unplug it um i have one of those as well uh which is just used for if i'm ever doing video stuff so i like the hue stuff i like being able to talk to it i like that it can change colors it's not the brightest but i don't need more than what it gives yeah i definitely i definitely need more lighting

in here. I do have everything on a smart something or other, my floor lamp, which is, this floor lamp was in our house when I was a kid. Like it's an old floor lamp. I don't know where it came from. I don't know when we got it. It's very old,

but it's the floor lamp that was in our living room. My wife reminded me the other day that we put overhead lights in our living room when we did our kitchen remodel. We also put lights in the living room. And the reason for that was that we had no lights in the living room except this little floor lamp that I've got in here now. And it wasn't enough light. And so when I commented that it wasn't enough light for the garage, she said, we already learned this lesson that it's, it's not enough. So I'm going to have to deal with that. But, uh, what's nice about it is that I have a, a smart switch. I've actually a Phillips, um, one of their push buttony switches that has no battery.

Yep. Um, I have one of those at the door so I can turn on my floor lamp cause it's on a smart switch. I have one of those at the door so I can turn on my floor lamp because it's on a smart switch when I'm walking in. And I don't have to walk over to the lamp and flip it around and turn it to the brightest setting or anything. It's just on that. And then the other smart lights are also on that. So if I want to turn on the hue strip, if I want to turn on the lava lamp that my daughter got rid of that I was like, I would like a lava lamp sometimes. It's fun. Those are all on those buttons, which is great. So whatever I get to amplify the light in here

will either be a smart fixture or it'll be plugged in to an outlet and controlled that way. So there you go. Are we done now? Do you think we've wrapped around enough lighting bendy straw reverse super double reverse uh follow out uh side follow so thanks it's now next up uh i don't know what maybe casey can talk about his garage door opener that's well

we'll see where where this goes i don't have a garage or a door to open. Yeah, it's a pronounced garage. I hate you. If you would like to hear more about Tim Cook and Donald Trump, then you should listen to episode 270 of The Talk Show. It features Matthew Iglesias as the special guest. Very, very good episode. Very good conversation. If you did enjoy our discussion last week and or just want to know more about this from somebody who is much deeper into the political side of things, like Matthew Glazes, who works for Vox, I thoroughly recommend this episode.

It's a very, very, very good discussion. It was a very, very, very good discussion. I'm surprised that we touched the third rail a little bit last week and didn't really get any complaints, which is amazing. Because I think that we did a great job, not to do our own horn, but I think we did a really great job of only touching on the things that we should. We didn't go too far in any direction. I think we kept it pretty fair, and I was really happy with how the conversation came out. Yeah. Well done us, basically basically is what i'm saying all right well done us all right uh johnny is gone he's gone johnny's gone so that's that's that's sir ghani sir ghani

he's gone johnny's gone if you go go to the, this happened over the Thanksgiving weekend, which is the perfect time to do something like this, I guess. Sir Johnny Ive was removed from Apple's executive leadership page. So he just doesn't exist there anymore. There were no other changes. Evans Hankey and Alan Dye have not been added as vice presidents to the page.

Alan Dye was actually previously on this page when they did that big reshuffle and johnny kind of like moved to a more over like overseeing role and they split design into like uh user experience user interface i think that was it was like ui and hardware Alan Dye appeared on the leadership page, but then got removed when they kind of reshuffled that again. But there is no design leadership role on this page. I said in our document for the first time in a very long time, Jason had a note that says since the page has existed, which is an even better point.

Yeah, right? Like this page hasn't existed for as long as johnny ive has been a senior leader at apple so it it goes back um way further than that and i don't actually know i mean he he's been there so long so long before jobs came back yes i mean yeah there was he designed he he had a hand at least in designing the E-Mate, which was the Newton laptop, right? It had translucent plastic and stuff. It was him experimenting with some of the materials that would end up becoming a big hit in the iMac. So he's been there a long time, and this is a big change. It goes beyond, like, it predates there being web pages for Apple for stuff like this.

Yeah, which is kind of wild right yeah but so you know he's gone he's not listed there in any capacity that that's it i was gonna say the final shoe dropped but there have been so many shoes i don't know the shoes of all the shoes are all on the ground now and the laces are on the ground and they've had time to settle and it's like the last final move of his departure the long slow fade has has faded all the way out now i guess it's fine it's been happening a long time it's good to get to the end of it according to podcasting industry newsletter inside podcasting apple of hired national geographics former director of podcasting emily auctions lager um that's the name i'm going with i i've yeah i think you i think you might have nailed it yeah maybe we'll see uh auctions lager had previously worked at npr in both reporter

and producer roles apparently this is the first of quote many content hires in the coming weeks so we spoke about this a while ago, the idea that Apple could be breaking into the original podcasts game. It was previously a report from Bloomberg. They are now hiring in a way that would suggest that, yes, they are most definitely doing that. Yeah. So I think what we don't know

is the form that this might take, because there are some very simple ways that this could take where Apple has decided as a leader in the podcast medium to make to produce some podcasts perhaps even related to other stuff it's doing for example um what about producing a run of podcasts for all of its apple tv plus programming yep right like that's a the the um the chernobyl podcast was really great hbo has now decided they're going to do podcasts for everything because it was so well received um the good place podcast is really great like podcasts to uh you know get people even more engaged with your

with your programming is a good idea so there's that right who would do that apple would do that i mean they might not work in-house they don't't necessarily have to, but you'd need in-house people involved in somehow and Apple having control issues, let's say. It wouldn't be surprising if they built it like that. They could be building premium stuff that is like the Spotify stuff that's like, if you're not an Apple TV or Apple Music subscriber, you don't get it. It's possible that they're doing something like that. I also kept thinking about other ways that they could do this. They could make things

podcast app only, which seems really weird, but they could do that to reward people in the podcast app. If anybody out there listening to this show has any say in this, you don't have to publicize it. You don't have to make a big thing out of it but just

make these things available in other applications yeah well i think that this is the one of the big questions is does apple build apple is such a leader in podcasting that you could make the argument that apple wants to make some of its own podcasts and that's the point of it and it's not to like wall it off inside something although i did think about like i don't know could there be like an apple news plus podcast right that something something that's journalism related or a couple of those things like the new york times is daily that come out of the apple um news uh editorial organization because there is one and would that be a thing that they would use to promote apple news plus and give away for free um or would that be a thing for apple news plus

subscribers because i could see it either way i mean i could argue given and we're going to talk about what's going on with apple news plus in a little bit like using it to promote apple news plus might be a better use of that than to wall it off but uh there are so there i guess what i'm saying is there are a lot i guess what i'm saying is there are a lot of different ways they could go here and we don't know which way they're going to go but uh it sounds like they're one way or another apple is hiring people to make podcasts public podcasts for apple and what form it takes you know it remains to be seen it's kind of a fascinating question and adobe have shared a

roadmap of features coming to photoshop for ipad um there's a list of stuff here that i don't really understand enough because i'm not a photoshop user but basically they've published some blog posts talking about the features that they want to add uh going from 2019 and into 2020 i think it's really great to see them be in public, right? Like Adobe has faced criticism for Photoshop for iPad for not being complete enough. And people are like, oh, you lied. You're not doing a real version. And Adobe is saying, no, no, we really are.

But this is just the start. So I think sharing the roadmap of the features that they are going to be adding only helps to signify to people, like, we are working on this. We are continuing to be adding only helps to signify to people like we are working on this we are continuing to expand this right they they definitely communicated their uh priorities in going into the 1.0 version like here here are the reason we did those features first and then they're like by the end of the year this and then next year we're planning on doing these features and it's not like a feature it's like a section of photoshop that they're going to be bringing over um and yeah that needs

to be communicated because they need to have their users understand where they're going and the rate of improvement that they're planning on on the ipad version of photoshop i did use photoshop on the ipad for the first time at length on the weekend. Basically doing a dumb Photoshop to reply to a thread from Joe Steele and Todd Vizzieri. Just to say like, this is a thing that I could Photoshop very quickly on my Mac, but I was sitting on the couch watching a college football game and had my iPad and my office was very cold because I didn't have the heater turned on. I thought, I'm not going to go out there and leave the warm confines of my couch in order to do this stupid joke in Photoshop. I've got Photoshop on the iPad. Let's see if I can

make it work. And the answer was, I could make it work more or less. As I went, I figured out what the tools, the analogs of my Mac tools were, and I was able to do a passable job with a dumb Photoshop thing and could I use another iPad tool? Sure but I thought let's try this and would this work and the answer was yes I can confirm really dumb bad Photoshop stuff can be done

on the iPad so hooray for that and we'll see where it goes from here Don't forget you can cast your votes for the Upgradies. Go to Upgradies.vote, and there's a form that you can fill in. Please fill it in with your nominations for our categories in the Upgradies, the sixth annual Upgradies. And if you want to get some inspiration, see maybe who has won in the past,

you can always go to Up upgradies.com for previous winners of the upgradies but upgradies.vote is the place to go six six six did i get it right that time six no not really one day it's fine one day one day should we take a break jason snow i think we should. All right. Let's thank our first sponsor for this week, and that is our friends over at Squarespace. Big fan of Squarespace.

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There's nothing to patch, nothing to upgrade. And they have 24-7 customer support in case you need any help at all. They also have great guides and documentation that I've used in the past as well to answer quick questions. If you want to create an online store, a portfolio, a blog, a site for your business, a site for your band, for an event,

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support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So yesterday evening, there was a press release and I saw a bunch of tweets coming from a bunch of different places about a thing that affects me personally, which I'm very excited about. There is a feature in Apple Pay on the iPhone and on the Apple Watch called Express Mode. This was previously used, I believe, only in Japan on their transit service. So it basically allowed for you to use Apple Pay, so you would use whatever device, without needing to authenticate with either Touch ID or Face ID.

So it works basically like a debit or credit card because you don't do any authentication for those. You just tap it and go. And yesterday evening, it was enabled for the TFL, Transport for London service in the UK. So wherever we use the Oyster card or wherever we were previously using Apple Pay, we can now use the Express mode. So what this means is now now I tried this out today,

I took a bus today to go somewhere. And I just tapped my phone on the reader. And that was it, it was faster, because there was, I don't know exactly what it is that makes it quicker. But it was as fast as if I put a credit card down, which was not the case before, even after the authentication, it always took an extra second or so for the transaction to be authorized so there's absolutely no delay and it works and i think it's fantastic one of the really cool features people keep pointing out um is that this feature will work even if your battery is dead on your device which is wild yeah so it must and i don't know a lot about NFC, but I feel like it's writing a, the NFC thing must be like a programmable radio tag where you can basically say, here is the tag, and then turn it off and even turn off the phone. And at that point, until you rewrite that tag, that tag is just going to sit there.

So it doesn't actually have to use any power. And it will be read just like the chip in your card would be read. I'm keen to understand how exactly it works. Because I think it's taking a little bit of power. Because it will only work for five hours. Yeah, keep traveling up to five hours. So there's, well, there's enough power to hold it or whatever. But they're not, like, even if the battery dies.

So you're out late at night, your phone dies. you've got five hours where the card still works which is pretty great which is just it's just a nice thing to have right that like knowing that you still have that extra even if somehow your battery dies so it's just like a nice little feature but the real win here is that you don't have to do like face id and then tap or any like you don't have to do any authentication like that you can just tap your phone and uh and go because i've said this a bunch of times my biggest downside for face id over touch id is needing to authenticate in that very like specific way when on public transport because with touch id you never had to look at your phone you could just right take your phone out your pocket you're already holding the home button.

You double press the home button and it will work, right? Because you're already authenticated. But with Face ID, you always have to bring your phone or look at your phone. And I've always found that kind of frustrating because it was a much clunkier way of authenticating. But now I don't need to do that. I could just have my phone, tap it on and go.

And I just think this is a very nice, like quality of life feature. And I'm very, very happy to see that this is making its way out to different places. This is used in a few other transit areas. It's not just in London. I mean, I think when it started, it was just in one place. But now it's really, it kind of stretched out a bit more. But I just think it's super awesome. And I'm very pleased that I have it now.

Yeah, also Face ID, not an issue issue but it works on apple watch as well so you don't have to double tap on an apple watch and then tap which is what i do mostly when i'm doing apple pay stuff so you can actually just um do a quick tap and that's it it's uh it's done that's pretty great um and uh yeah i like that it's not, what did you say, more clunky or more clunky? Yeah, more clunky. Exactly. More clunky. That's what he was saying is that.

This is a more clunky way of dealing with it. The safety on a Star Wars blaster is more clunky. More clunky. I will kill you before you kill me because your blaster is more clunky. Talking about clunky, let's talk about Apple News. Oh, boom. Or more specifically, Apple News+. This is the Apple services segment, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. We're going to talk about some services stuff today. Yeah, okay. A few weeks ago, CNBC reported that Apple News+, has struggled to grow its subscriber base. I think to nobody's surprise. So during the first 48 hours of launch, which was last March, Apple was apparently able to attract

around 200,000 customers to the free trial period, but it has basically flatlined since then. So my assumption, they don't go into detail about this, but my assumption is they got like 200,000 people to sign up, a bunch said no, and then a bunch more people have signed up since but they haven't really broken that initial figure of 200 000

that's the read that i take from that article um as a reminder apple news plus is 9.99 a month i always forget this and that just seems like so much money compared to other services that apple have and for that 9.99 a month you get access to over 300 publications which include magazines newspapers and some online only subscriptions apple takes 50 of the revenue from each subscriber then the other 50 is shared amongst publishers based on engagement time so the more time you spend reading a publication, the more money they will get. One publisher told CNBC they receive $20,000 to $30,000 a month, which is far less than expected, and is a very small amount of money for a large company. That is not a lot of money from a service like this, I feel.

Would you agree with that? I would agree with that. It's not a lot at all. Another publisher said their revenue has been climbing consistently and bringing them a new demographic of reader, but it's a slower growth than they had anticipated.

Financially, this seems like not good for anyone. Well, I just feel like the model that works successfully for the major publications is a direct subscription model it's what i pay i mean i have a bunch and i'm happy to pay the athletic and new york times and the san francisco chronicle and the washington post and the san jose mercury news and like there are you can pay them directly and you get access to all

their content without the without getting annoyed or there being a paywall. And like there are, you can pay them directly and you get access to all their content without getting annoyed or there being a paywall or something like that. And you can pay for Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or whatever. So then you look at Apple News Plus and you think,

okay, well, it's a great deal because instead of paying for one, I can get a whole bunch for $10 a month. That's great. Except that's not a great price for many of these new services that actually will give you a year for a much lower price than that but even if that is a decent price like you're only getting you're not getting the ones that you want necessarily unless you you're just getting kind of a spread of other ones and um the last time I visited Apple News+, which was in the trial period because I canceled my trial, the big problem with it is that the interface was atrocious.

That what Apple wants to do is take Apple News Plus articles and then kind of like float them in along with your regular Apple News articles. And I don't use Apple News, and that's part of the problem, I understand. But I don't particularly like Apple News and its interface. And then this thing kind of sprinkles more in there. I think it's actually a similar problem to the problem that you and I spoke about a few weeks ago about the TV app interface, where Apple is trying to do two things at once. It's trying to be an aggregator of content from other people, as well as a pusher of a premium product that's got content inside it. And that's also in the case of Apple news from other people, but it's wrapped in Apple service. And that's difficult from a user experience standpoint, because sometimes you want to mix

them all together. But you also want to kind of highlight out what are you paying for? And here's what you're going to get. And it's not, not just kind of marketing. It is literally like, I want to see the stuff that I paid for. I want to see the stuff that I get because I'm a subscriber and Apple news is still, you know, it's to, to my last, last time I checked anyway, it's, it's just kind of a mess. And if you're a publisher, you're not, you're getting a fraction of what you would get for a direct. So all the publishers that think that they're going to have a successful direct subscription system are not going to want to be a part of it um i don't know i don't know where they go from here i think i think this is a tough product to make work like i pay for uh access to the war street journal and to bloom Bloomberg because they are two websites where like they

publish stuff behind a paywall that I want to be able to read for myself because it's a lot of really good tech coverage and you pay for them directly I pay for them directly and I don't know like can I don't even know can I get that through Apple News Plus I don't even know well my understanding is that the Wall Street Journal I don't know about bloomberg wall street journal you can get in there but they float up only certain articles although my understanding is that you can search and find other articles and it's a way that they're putting up a barrier so that it's better for you to pay them directly rather than be a part of apple news plus and this is it right like so bloomberg so Bloomberg, I can get Bloomberg Businessweek, but will that get me all of Mark Gurman's articles

when he publishes them? I don't think so. And so it's like, I don't, it's not clear enough to me as a user as to whether I would be getting the content that I actually want to pay for out of it. But so that's why it's just like, I've never even bothered

because I don't care for everything else. Like I don't feel the great. I don't feel a great requirement to read X or Y magazine. I wouldn't, so it would be a waste of money for me. And honestly, I think $9.99 is too much money, especially if Apple's taking 50% of it, which just seems like way too much. of it which just seems like way too much i feel like the the way this works for publishers is if it means they don't need to spend money but i think it's too late they all did this already spend money to make and then update their individual apps um and major publishers are going to want complete control but i could see small publishers saying you know what this is a lot of money we're spending on development. What if instead we just tell people that if they want access, they sign up for Apple

News Plus and they'll get it there and it'll be super easy. In fact, I wonder if Apple is doing this behind the scenes. One of the things that if I were Apple, I would build is an API for news authentication. So basically you can read apple news on the web but you can also log in to a participating uh company media company's website with your id like a single sign-on because what that would yeah because what that would do is allow smaller publishers to just walk away from maintaining their own stuff for this and say, if you want, you know, but they need to be able to have it be on the web too, and have it be related to that so that they could get people who aren't using Apple devices.

But that would be a way that Apple could maybe make it appealing to them in saying like, look, Apple's just going to handle all of this pay content stuff for you. And you can kind of walk away. Is that scary? Because Apple's in charge of your your strategy well sure but if you don't have the money to build the technology to compete with apple's app um then maybe you could do that but but from an apple news plus product perspective you are you know you're talking talking about the third tier stuff being in your service, which is not great, right? So I don't know. I don't know. This is perplexing to me, this entire thing. And it doesn't mean that people who don't like it aren't getting something out of it. I think

the more perplexing things are, why the app isn't better, and also what the business model is for publishers. But I don't know. I joked about it last year, but I'll say it again. Part of me wonders why Apple isn't doing something as outlandish, but maybe necessary as buying some of these flailing, often hedge fund purchased, falling apart newspapers and building its own sort of news network out of existing regional newspapers in the US. Maybe Apple doesn't want to be in the news business, but Apple's in the media business. And that would be one way to turn this around is to say Apple's going to save local news and it's going to pour it all into Apple News Plus and have that be this amazing journalism engine. But instead, they're just sort of like laying back and saying, here's a service we made.

We take half of the money. Give it a try. And it's just I don't I just I don't I don't see a path forward here that makes sense to me. So a few days after the CNBC report, the Cove Media Conference, Roger Lynch, who is the CEO of Condé Nast, who became CEO after Condé Nast had entered into their agreement with Apple News Plus. He didn't arrange it.

Lynch said that the jury is out on whether News Plus will be a success for them. Lynch also says that Apple News Plus did not hurt their own paywall subscription. So people aren't switching to it and leaving them behind. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me actually oh well also for the black friday weekend uh apple is offering a three-month trial instead of a one-month trial to us and canadian subscribers so that's good is that is that

it's cyber monday as we're recording this my favorite holiday that includes the word cyber um i don't know if it's continuing to be offered or not but uh yeah it is interesting regardless it is it is interesting that they are doing a three-month trial right just like please sign up like we'd love it if you would um do you think that this is something that can realistically be turned into something better? Because at this point, I really feel like it is just waiting to be bundled. Yeah, well, I think

bundling it will make it better, because it'll make it a better value. I don't know if that'll work for the publishers, though, right? I would say... You'd hope that in a bundle situation, that Apple would cut their own cut. You would, you would hope so. I think that there's probably something Apple could do here that would work.

I'm not a hundred percent sure about that. I don't even want to say probably there, there might be a system here where Apple makes a service that works for publishers and it works for Apple. I am afraid that the current structure of this is designed to work for Apple. And I just don't, I feel like if Apple wants to be in this business, that's great. It can throw off a little bit of revenue for them and also make the experience of using an Apple device better potentially than the competition. They've got that potentially going for it.

But I feel like it's going to require, at this point, it's going to require somebody at Apple to admit that this is just broken and doesn't work and that the initial conception was a failure and that they need to go back to the drawing board. And who would that be? Because who came up with this idea and who instituted it and who is going to, is Eddie Q going to say, wow, I really screwed this up. We need to start again. I hope so because I think one of the big problems with companies in general, not just Apple, but including Apple is this reluctance to accept that something is just a failure and to move on from it and a little bit too much pride. And, you know, this Apple News+, I'm not quite ready to call it the butterfly keyboard of services, but it's close. Like, I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it's going to work for anyone in the long term. It doesn't work for customers. It doesn't work for publishers. Maybe it works for Apple, although it seems like not well enough for them to not do some free trial, extended free trials to get people into it.

I just, I think they could, I think tweaking it is not going to work. I guess that's the way I'll put it. I think this needs to be broken and reconceived. And I doubt they're going to do that. So can it work? Maybe. Will it work? Maybe. Will it work? I'm doubtful because I think it would require Apple

to admit that they made some big mistakes up front with it and that that didn't work and that they need to try again. I don't know who that would be and how they would do that, but it just seems broken to me. Talking about services that I think,

well, I think this one is in the complete opposition to Apple News and that it was a surprise that the quality that we have gotten is Apple Arcade. So Apple Arcade has been around for a few months now. And you said to me, why don't we talk about some of the games we've been playing because you were maybe looking for some recommendations as well.

So I want to give you some of the games that I've been playing, some that I still want to play, and then we could talk about maybe our overall thoughts. Sure. So I've only been really diving into a small handful of games, and I really want to get into more. I haven't had the time to put into Apple Arcade games because there's been some console games that I've been wanting to play recently.

But the games that I've spent the most time with is Grindstone, which is a matching puzzle game with some action elements. It's a fun little game. It's made by Cappy Games, who are a pretty cool game developer. You know, these games where you have to match up a bunch of colors in a grid. You get like a, I don't know, I'm trying to think of something that know in like a grid you get like a i don't know i'm trying to think of something that it's like not like but kind of like bejeweled i guess in in that idea you know it's like that but it's got some action kind of elements to it and rpg like elements it's kind of fun uh cards of darkness is another one it's a card based strategy game which is i think even more difficult to explain but but was made by Zach Gage,

who's made many of my favorite iOS games of all time. Yeah, Hearts of Darkness is great. I have played it. I love it. It is a complicated concept, although it starts you off fairly slowly. I hit a roadblock in terms of gameplay and stopped, so I was really enjoying it for a couple of weeks.

And then the difficulty level ramped up very quickly for me to the point where I hit some levels that I simply couldn't beat. And so if my... I appreciate the complexity of it. I feel like it gets too complicated too fast. And I feel like the roles that the various cards have are complicated and not entirely obvious. Like, I completely didn't understand. I still don't entirely understand some aspects of the way some of the cards work. And it got me.

It just was at some point I just hit the wall and was so frustrated and I gave up. And it's a shame. And I feel like there could be something there that there's something there that is missing, that it could be better. Because I really got into it until I hit the wall. And I think I hit the wall because I'm misunderstanding some aspects of the game. But when I try to figure out what I'm misunderstanding and what it means, and I will admit I didn't go on a Google search. Although a little side note by the way one of the challenges of a lot of these apple arcade games is because they are of limited appeal because they're mostly just on apple arcade not always but a bunch of

them are primarily apple arcade games and nothing else what i found is that a lot of the resources that you find for games on the internet aren't there for these games a lot of these games because they're new and they're only for people who are doing apple arcade or that's the primary audience for them so uh i didn't look up how i could figure out what is wrong with my conceptions of cards of darkness and maybe there's stuff there now that wasn't there a month ago but um it's too bad because like i i literally i was i was playing it all the time and then i hit the brick wall and i just that was it and i haven't played it since i wouldn't say i've hit the brick wall but i do find it

difficult but i enjoy playing it when i have a lot of time but it is a game that on the surface to me it kind of looks like oh just jump in and play a level whenever you want but i can't play it like that i have to really devote time to it to actually really work out what i'm doing like i have to be in a situation where i'm getting into a groove if i'm not getting into a groove then i can't i can't focus on the game well enough you know what i'm saying yep yep it takes a lot more thought for me than I had initially expected when I saw it kind of like on the surface.

Right. What the Golf, which is a game that I actually don't really want to spend a ton of time explaining because explaining it can spoil it. It is a golf game, but is nothing like any golf game you would expect or ever play before. It is absolutely golf game, but is nothing like any golf game you would expect or ever play before. It is absolutely hilarious and fantastic.

And it's one of my very favorites, actually. I will go further and say, much to my surprise, What the Golf is my favorite Apple Arcade game. I completed the entire linear storyline and went back and completed. I ended up getting to like 98 wow basically there are like three holes that i i can't get through at the highest difficulty because i just can't like they're the three that i'm like i don't even know how i would would win this level and i gave up so i didn't i didn't 100 it but i came very close and if you know me i am not a go back and do 100 person i just i'm not i'm not but it just every level every permutation

of every level hilarious loved it and i'm not a golf game person uh but it's not a golf game but it's not really a golf game in fact i would say it's a it is a satire and not just of golf games but of all games and yet also a great game so cannot recommend what the golf highly enough i like that it really has a like show your friends mode which is just genius because sometimes i want to show it to people and like i opened the game up because i was going to show adina and it was like right there it said show your friends and i was like did you video game you are genius because you know this is a game that you have to show people for them to understand it right yeah and to have it so you can play through some of the weirder levels just there it's very

very clever it's very very clever um what else have we got on this list so uh sayonara wild hearts rhythm based action game this one probably got like the most uh critical acclaim from the original lineup you know people really going wild for this game and it's on a bunch of different platforms it's really great to play on ios uh it is it's much more comfortable with a controller but it's not it is necessary uh but it is better to play i have found that if you struggle with the touch controls you can change the sensitivity of what swiping will do in the game like swiping left to right you can change the sensitivity of that i found that that helped um but it is better to

play with a controller this is a good one to play on the apple tv So this, this is my story here is that I found it unplayable on my iPad. And so I put it on the Apple TV and I got a, um, I got a controller and I paired it and I played it and it was much more playable and enjoyable. And I played a couple of levels and I have never gone back to play it on the Apple TV because the truth is I don't do a lot of turning on the TV when it's just me and I can play video games. It more often happens on my iPad, that my iPad is my primary gaming device. And I had a very, very, very hard time playing. I just wasn't enjoying it. So it looks great. It sounds great. There's a lot to be said for it, but I have kind of just never gotten over the hump with sayonara wild hearts in a similar vein for me ios gaming happens on my iphone like 90 of the time i'm playing games on

my iphone if i'm ever playing a game on ios so the games that are more optimized for larger screens like sayonara wild hearts are the ones that i'm not playing as often because it's not as good on the phone and i'm more likely to play games on my phone so uh the pinball wizard is another one it is a pinball game but also like a dungeon crawling game it's super fun like there are these little levels and you have pinball mechanics to defeat enemies and you go from level to level it's a very very clever kind of like subversion on the pinball genre. So I actually really like this because I enjoy pinball games a lot too, especially on iOS.

So this one's good. So I recommend that. I didn't love it. It's based on a really dumb joke that it then takes literally. And I thought it was okay, but I played it very briefly. And then I was just like, yeah, and I passed it by. I have a list of games I still want to play I haven't yet Mini Motorways which is the sequel

to Mini Metro which I'm assuming you have put time into this I have I like it a lot but it could be better I hope it gets an update I hope they consider some of their gameplay this is the question with a lot of games I have is like cards of darkness.

Like, is there something they could do to alter this, to make it better and, and make players like me not get frustrated. And will they like, or they're like, no, it's fine.

It's fine the way it is. And I feel the same way from about many motorways, which is good. But, um, like mini Metro, first off, it could, it could stand to have an endless game

um where you just keep on adding roads and it keeps on adding houses and you just kind of keep going and and you can't fail because it's it is not just a game it is what they used to call um i think this came from the from will wright of SimCity back in the day, a software toy. It's a toy. You can just keep playing with it and it's soothing and fun. And it's not about winning or losing. It's just kind of drawing out the map and seeing what happens. Also, I think there's some fundamental problems with the gameplay. Stuff gets placed in weird places that are not realistic for a city simulator and i think if you're going to pretend that this is you're making it a city having a giant uh uh giant uh like big box store open where its only entrance is on the water

away from all the roads it's like like, why would you do that? Like nobody would do that. And it's just, cause I think they didn't program in any intelligence, nor did they make the rule that you could connect at once at any point. And that that would be where it would build from. Like it's little stuff like that,

where I feel like it just, it makes it feel, it makes the game feel unfair in a way and less real. And I think that when you're playing it, that takes some of the joy out of it and it is supposed to be a game that is is joyful to play um i don't know it's it's uh it's not i don't like it as much as mini metro but it's got a lot of potential i think it could potentially be better than mini metro but they need to do more work on it and i'm not sure sure they ever will. That's kind of like the real thing about these types of games, with these games on Apple Arcade, I should say.

What is going to happen? Our assumption is they have a deal with Apple. Does Apple give them a revenue cut? If they do, that incentivizes upgrading. But if Apple just gave them an amount of money up front and the agreement was make sure the game doesn't break, then maybe there aren't going to be new features. I think it really depends on what that looks like.

Because if it was an up front payment, why would you keep going in and fixing it if there's no more money? But we don't know. We don't know what these deals were like. It's just an interesting thing to keep an eye on as time goes on. Will Apple Arcade games get updated with more levels? I don't know. I have none of the games that I've played that has happened to yet. So I'm keen to see what happens there.

Exit the Gungeon is a game that I've been having my eye on. It is difficult to explain but it's like a riff on a sequel to another game it's effectively a dungeon crawling game so you're going from level to level, you're actually going up you're trying to get out of a dungeon

and it's called a bullet hell game it's just like firing tons and tons of bullets at lots and lots of monsters it looks fun it's it's it's a game that i've had my arm for a while because it comes from a great publisher uh so that's one that i've had my eye on so i have a uh a special uh guest review of it which is that this is a game that my son has been playing for a while on uh on console i see that's enter the gungeon oh this is oh this is like a sequel it's a sequel oh interesting well i will say for enter the gungeon uh he thinks it's great yeah that's why because like i i haven't played into the gungeon but i know people love it so i've been wanting to play exit the gungeon because it's

like a sequel to it basically which is like built for ios where enter the gungeon was built for the platforms and really the biggest appeal of it is that it is a retro style game the graphics are all pixel art and uh it's uh it's adorable overland is a game that i have known about for a long time it is a post-apocalyptic mystery point and click type game it's just very beautiful and i've wanted to play this one for a while again still haven't been able to okay possessions which is a puzzle like game in what is like referred to as a zen style i've played a few games like this where you're like exploring a room or exploring an object to solve a puzzle and this one just looks very cute and it's published by noodle cake who published uh super stick man golf yeah i started playing this

and kind of got bored okay i can see that because i think it's kind of like a very chill right so it's like a very chill chill game uh guildlings this is probably the next game that i'm going to get into um it is an adventure game like an rpg game uh which has been developed by uh one of the individuals was the person who created my favorite ios game of all time threes nothing like threes uh it is more of like an rpg point and click type game uh but i've heard very very good things about this game from like friends and family members so i i really really want to get into this next that this is probably the next one on my list uh and then outlanders as well which is a you mentioned like sim city earlier it is like a town building sim game with like, it's like a little village, like a little

farming town. I like games like this a lot. This is a genre that I enjoy on iOS, like kind of like a SimCity or whatever. But for years, these games have been full of in-app purchases, right? Pay to speed up this and pay to upgrade this. So I'm keen to see what a game on apple arcade that has this type of mechanic would look like so there's some of the games that we've been playing and i've had my eye on um i think we would both love recommendations from the upgradients

stuff that we may have missed that's worth playing um so you should tweet those to us but i think that honestly like for five5 a month, £5 a month, or whatever it is, this is just a fantastic deal, Apple Arcade. There is so much good stuff. And they're adding new games every week, nearly. I think that this has turned out to be a great service because I've found five, six games

that I've liked out of it. I mean, I would have paid each of those. I would have given a few dollars for each of them. so i feel like i'm getting my money's worth from it yeah i'm i'm a little more negative than that i'd say i'm on the fence about it i think the launch apps were great and i found a bunch that i really enjoyed and i i was able to just sort of luxuriate in playing all those and there were so many of them and I kind of moved my way through them. And if there was one, like a good example of possessions, one where I just sort of didn't grab me,

I was like, all right, moving on. I'm going to go to the next one because there were so many. However, since launch, I've always felt like the big question was going to be after launch, what's it like? What are the new games going to be that that are rolling out and how are they going to maintain and i think the truth is i have yet to find a post-launch game that interested me so it's early yet and the launch titles were

really uh really strong and there were lots of them and there were lots of them but i'm that's where i am is okay uh i i so if people have recommendations i'd love to hear them um i think given where you and i are i'm i'm tempted to say that we should revisit this every so often and maybe even dare i, can you do a podcast where you challenge your co-hosts to do something? I don't think so. Not without horrific trademark infringement. Oh, I see.

Well, because I was thinking maybe we could challenge each other to like play a specific game and then talk about it. But we could challenge ourselves. Maybe we could do that. But this is my challenge right now is making Apple Arcade worth it because for me post

launch i have not been impressed and some of that may be the way that apple's marketing it like they do have a new this week area um but for whatever reason i go there and i'm like and then i kind of move on sometimes you need you need the personal recommendation so tweet at at Jason L, at iMike, I-M-Y-K, if you have games that we have not mentioned that you have put time into and you really enjoy. It would be great if you can to say very quickly what you like about that game rather than just tweeting the game. So let us know.

And then we can maybe follow up on some games that we found that maybe otherwise have gone a little under the radar. Ooh, yeah, that's a good idea. And if we really want to play a game, then you and I can agree on a game and then we'll play by Monday. Yes, we'll do that.

It's just an idea. We call it a segment, something like that. A weekly Apple Arcade challenge. I don't know, whatever, we'll work on it, yeah. This episode is also brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks can help you save time with their super simple cloud accounting software. If you're someone who sends invoices, if you're on your own business, if you're

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Our thanks to FreshBooks for their support of this show and RelayFM. That's freshbooks.com slash upgrade to check it out and sign up for your free trial. A few weeks ago, Jason, you said you had some thoughts on CarPlay. And I wanted to kind of... I did. I wanted to get a check-in from you about those.

I thought I would also, because as somebody who does not have a car, and as somebody who's only ever seen CarPlay in use once, I kind of who's only ever seen CarPlay and used once, I kind of forgot a lot about what CarPlay did. It is effectively a service that can be wireless, so you can plug in and you get access to a bunch of features from your iPhone. So this can be like text messages and maps and calls and all that kind of stuff.

iOS 13 added a bunch more features, like, for example, the ability to see multiple things on the screen at once. It's called the multifunction dashboard. This was something that didn't do before. So it lets you see a map, what's playing and also turn by turn information on one screen, rather than just like just looking at the map or just looking at your podcast app or whatever. That seems like a pretty good upgrade. upgrade yeah i think that's the the biggest thing about ios 13 carplay so to back up mike uh the way carplay works is you attach it to a car and then the car's screen becomes and then it will play you're like iphone uh kind of and then there's also android auto which will do that

on android phones. And it means that you don't have to rely on the terrible, mostly don't have to rely on the terrible software that is in the entertainment system of whatever car you're in. And, um, I have, I spent the last, the reason I mentioned this a while ago is that I've spent some time in rental cars with car play. And then I also have a CarPlay system now in the car that my daughter often drives. But since she's been at college, I've been driving. So I've spent a lot more time with CarPlay and iOS 13. So I've been able to spend more time with it than I think I have ever done before. Like all of my previous CarPlay time put together would not match,

even close to match the CarPlay time put together would not match even close to match the CarPlay time in the last three months that I've had. So the dashboard thing is huge, right? Like the dashboard thing, instead of having one app, you can have this very, I find it very pleasant dashboard view where you've got your now playing essentially of whatever audio is playing. You've got a navigation window. It's showing you the map and, uh, and then it's got like another tile that will be showing you, it could be like a Siri suggestion, or it can be turn by turn of like what your next turn is. And it's really nice to have the, uh, the now playing and the map on the same screen.

I like it a lot. Um, could they do more? Of course they could do more, but it's like a good, it's a huge upgrade from what was there before, which was very much like you're just in this app and then you're in this other app. And like literally, because the way it used to be is that when you switched apps in CarPlay, it would switch apps on your phone, which means you couldn't have the passenger looking through your phone while you were using CarPlay as the driver, because every time they moved to a different app, the CarPlay would change. And every time you tap something on CarPlay, the app would change. And it was very bad. And in iOS 13, that's gone as well. It's completely independent. CarPlay is happening on the screen. And then you can use the phone, uh, if you're a passenger in

any way you want. So that is great. The dashboard stuff is great. Um, I really like in not a new feature, but I really like the, um, toggle. There's a quick one tap toggle between ETA and, um, or, or turn by turn and non ETA or non turn turn by turn modes which is really great because of course what you want is um if i'm going someplace that i don't know how to get there at the at the far end but i'm leaving my house like i know how to get to the freeway from my house right i know how to go across a bridge from my house i'm well aware it's late in the game where I start to have those questions like, now, where do I get off the freeway? Where do I turn? And so with that toggle, you go and it'll tell you your ETA and it'll tell you where you're going in general. And that's helpful to have,

you're on the path and it's going to take, now you're going to get there at 138. Now you're going to get there at 129. That's all good good but it's not talking to you and telling you things you already know and then when you get closer if you need um first off it makes it nice you can just do that even though you don't need directions just so you can see the eta that's very convenient yeah but if you tap it then it jumps into turn by turn and i found that very useful likewise likewise the other direction if i'm someplace and i found that very useful likewise likewise the other direction if i'm someplace and i need to get home i can say take me home and it will get me home but at some point along the way i will have reached the point where like i know how to get home from

here and then you tap it and it stops talking to you so not a new feature but like something that i've really uh gotten into using since using carPlay and that I like a lot because it gives you like the benefits of having an onboard map computer thingy without it interrupting you to tell you to like make the right at the light next to your house to get home. And this is an Apple Maps only? That's, well, I think it's a map feature. So I use Apple Maps because I live in California where Apple Maps is good. I don't know if Google Maps has that feature. It may well have that feature, but it definitely isn't Apple Maps and that's where I'm using it. But you can actually choose, can't you, on CarPlay if you want Apple Maps and Google Maps?

You can use Google Maps on CarPlay. Yeah, for sure. And you can use, there are different audio apps that you can use. Now, I mean, I mostly am just using Overcast Music and Apple Maps. That's pretty much all I'm using in CarPlay. And during baseball season, I was using the MLB app, but it didn't get really updated for iOS 13 and didn't work quite right, which was unfortunate and I think could be a lot better.

That's one of the things that I don't know how much of the limitation is CarPlay and how much of the limitation is just app implementation. Like Overcast doesn't do chapter markers in CarPlay. And I don't know whether it can. I should ask Marco, but my guess is that it can't because that's a sort of a standard now playing thing. But it's one of those things where I would really like it to show me the chapters. And for Major League Baseball,

I know that Apple wants safety in cars. So I know Apple doesn't want to put too much data on the screen. But that said, the Major League Baseball app should really show the score and the inning of the game you're listening to. And it doesn't. And it's really frustrating. Even my satellite radio in my nine-year-old minivan shows me the score of the game I'm listening to. So I would like, you know, the apps could be better, but I think some of that may be limited by CarPlay and some of it is just limited by the interest in the app developer to update CarPlay.

But still, it's pretty good. There's, oh, also new in 13 there's a light mode which i turned on and then immediately turned off because it was very bright and i didn't want it but there's a light mode it always ran in dark mode so they added a light mode and then they added the option to run in sort of light in the day and dark in the night if you wanted to do it that way but i kind of like the dark mode in the in the car all the time um there's calendar in there now which can be useful and it's kind of it's also mode in the car all the time. There's Calendar in there now, which can be useful. And it's kind of, it's also tied in with the, like,

the Siri suggestion stuff. So you can see what's on your schedule and it's going to recommend things for you. And also get directions to an event, which is clever. Yeah, right. It's like, when I saw it, I was like, why would you want a calendar in the car? It's like, oh, because you may have, like,

this is the location. And the easiest way for you to get that is just to tap locate, like, to go there from the event right yeah ideally you would i mean yeah you can do that i've also found that serious suggestions is actually pretty good and even in the maps app i think of saying i think this is where you are going next and then you can just tap and it's in there because of course if you're in carplay mode adding a location is a pain. The best thing to do is probably to trigger voice and say where you want to go because you're not going to want to type it or whatever. But it'll look in your calendars and say, I think this may be where you want to go. But you can also open the calendar and say, that's my next event.

That's my next event. And yeah, it shows that they have made some good progress, I think, with this, from it being kind of a halfway version to having it be a lot better than that. Do you think CarPlay is important to Apple? I think it is because I think, honestly, I think we've reached the point now where having your phone be able to drive the entertainment system in your car is almost table stakes. Like even on the best, not every car has CarPlay and Android Auto, but like even on the best cars, I think the entertainment systems aren't very good. And there's an argument to be made that by the makers of the entertainment system sort of saying, look, we're not going to get in the way. We know all of your music, all of your podcasts, your GPS navigation and all your favorites and your calendar. All of that's on your phone.

We're not going to even bother. We just are going to let your phone handle it. All of that stuff and and maybe we'll overlay all the car controls although even there i would say that there seems to be a movement to have more and more kind of like support in the between car controls and these operating systems so that they can they can sense that this car has this certain control and can use it in the ui and there's also weird shaped like different screens that are like in the car, presumably like heads up displays will go in this direction too. Like, I feel like this is a trend is that car makers know that people have all their stuff on their phones. I think over time, what's not going to happen is car makers reasserting that they want complete control and they want to block out your phone. I think they're going to build around the fact that you're going to connect your phone to your car and including interface stuff like this, that's richer than just like a USB, you know, music library collection. And so I think at that

point, like Apple has to do this because this is the world we live in now and i also apple wants to take control of that experience as much as it can so um yeah i think i think it's here to stay just because i i don't think this this concept is going to go away yeah i think that it's at this point they have to keep doing it because android do it too right like you you get certain situations you find yourself in and it's almost like an arms race right it's like well they have to keep it going now even if they didn't want to and i think it's yeah table stakes is the way i put it but it's like yes android is going to do it apple's going to do it the car makers know they're going to do

it and it feels like we've reached that status quo now where it's really more like the car makers are going to innovate uh where they want but they're also going to know that the phone is there. And I think we saw some indication with some of the updates in iOS 13 to CarPlay that Apple is building some features into CarPlay specifically because car makers have said this would be a thing that we want. And the weirdly shaped screens is a good example of that, which is we've got a screen that's a different shape and we want to put a CarPlay interface in it.

So what do we do? And Apple built that feature so that you can do that. Weird shaped screens, multiple screens. I think all of that is on the table. And that if I'm running CarPlay or Android Auto, that's like top part of my job is just talking to the car makers. And literally, you are all partners in this because CarPlay doesn't exist without a car. But the car makers know that people have their phones and they're not going to be going into their cars without their phones.

So what I'm saying, Mike, is that it's nice to have CarPlay. I never had it. their cars without their phones so what i'm saying mike is that uh it's nice to have carplay i i never had it i had a i had a carplay box that i wired into a plug that could sit on my desk which is really not the same because it doesn't go anywhere so it's nice to to have in jamie's car to have the uh to have that now so i've seen it in a few cars with friends and it does seem like yeah okay this is probably the experience that I would want because the applications that I would most likely use are there, right? Because it is worth noting, right? It's not an open platform.

There are third-party apps, but they're under much more strict controls from Apple about the approval and stuff, which I actually agree with. I wouldn't want it to be an open system. It just seems wild to me. You have to have these things really well reviewed for safety concerns you don't want distracting stuff on the screen and all that kind of for sure

yeah you don't want some random like video app to play video which is like illegal like because there's legal reasons why that said i think sometimes it's taken too far the mlb app is a good example of that where like i think they could probably put more data on the screen about the game you're currently listening to and let's not not forget, CarPlay is not just for the driver, it's for the passenger. And as a passenger in a car with CarPlay, you know, I would especially like more data on my screen, not video or anything like that, but like for a baseball game to have like a line score and a little bit of information, I think that would be okay. And you do have to draw a line somewhere because you don't want to be distracting the driver. That said,

you have a big touchscreen with a bunch of buttons where you're saying, you know, forward and previous and pause, and there's a menu button. Like, it is inherently distracting. And I'm not sure you couldn't put a little more data on some of these apps without it becoming a huge distraction all right it's time for some hashtag ask upgrade but today we will thank our friends over at smile for their support hashtag ask upgrade we're going to talk about text expander you can unlock your productivity with text expander make everything that you are repeatedly typing available to you wherever you have a keyboard for mac users upgrading to catalina text expander ready and working of course and it's available on mac os windows chrome iphone and ipad text expander works everywhere you type in every

application whether it's word google docs in your email app in web forms and so much more you can send more emails and personalize every single email with TextExpander's fill-in and pop-up features. TextExpander's for teams helps your new employees get up to speed faster as well because all of the things that need to type right away are already there in the snippets that you have been collecting with your best writers. I love TextExpander. I've used it for years. I use TextExpander for teams with our team here at RelayFM. That's a small group of us, and sometimes we need to be able to type things consistently.

Actually, just before this show today, I made a change to a snippet, and I was able to just make that change and know that it's for our invoicing process, that the next time an invoice is sent out, the information that I need to be updated will be updated without me needing to tell anybody about it, because when the snippet is fired, it will all be correct, because I changed it. And I don't need to tell everyone, oh, hey, everybody, you now need to address this invoice to this person, because it's in TextExpander. Because I know that all of these snippets are used by the team, it's going to be updated for them because it will sync in the background.

Genius. I love it. Upgrade listeners can get 20% off their first year of TextExpander by going to textexpander.com slash podcast to learn more right now and sign up. That is textexpander.com slash podcast if you're meaning to try it out now is the time because you get that 20% off. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. off. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions. And the first one this

week comes from Eric. This is relevant to Cyber Monday. Eric wants to know, two HomePods or a Sonos Playbar for home theater use? What do you think? I use two HomePods for my TV all the time um but you can only use it with apple tv

for the homepods that are up to work and it doesn't work of all apps it doesn't work of youtube for example and it's very frustrating because if you have it set up like we do so we watch i don't know say we're watching something from the apple tv app or we watch something from the netflix app or whatever we something from the Netflix app or whatever. We can set it in kind of the settings in the little control center menu that they now have on Apple TV. We can set the audio output to be the HomePods and it sounds fantastic. It's like a great way to get a kind of like pseudo surround sound like room filling system. I love it. Right. Like it works great for us. I don't want to put a 5.1 arrangement in my home. I just don't want to do that. But the HomePods work great. But then,

if I then want to watch a YouTube video, the audio will come out of the television and the volume will be changing the volume for my HomePods if I turn the volume up and down. Yep. So it's not yeah this is this is what i was going to say is home pod is great if you are entirely all in on the apple tv lifestyle and apparently don't use youtube on the apple tv uh because that's weird why is it not outputting properly i don't know that seems like a bug that seems like it's been that way for as long as i've had two homepods it's so weird so um that is a very narrow and mike has made it even narrower i'd say i'd say it's not really a good uh replacement for for something like a play bar or some other sound bar like it's not because

unless you literally have no other devices hooked up to your TV than an Apple TV. And then every other instance of this, it doesn't work. It all falls apart. So don't is what I'm saying. I think, I wrote an article about this. I would love to see Apple use HomePod tech to make a soundbar because I think that would be really good.

And then it could consume input from other devices. And that would be really nice nice but that doesn't exist so for now you want something like the play bar or a different sound bar or some other kind of audio system attached to your tv i would it's funny our friend uh alex cox was saying how their speakers are shot on their tv and so they're in a market the market for a new tv and i thought to myself uses the speakers on their tv i haven't used the speakers on my tv in so long um and i don't really recommend it there are better speakers than whatever tv you're using the speakers aren't very good that's the that's my message to you so get something but probably don't get HomePods. Yeah, my kind of ruling on the HomePod things for the TV is they're good if you already have two HomePods.

Do not buy two HomePods for this. We didn't buy our HomePods for this. I bought the HomePods so just the music would sound better. But you get a bonus, which is you can make your sound better sort of manually if you want to. Yeah, but don't buy it for that. And then you put it back to the tv speakers yeah it's a good bonus but it it's not like like video games you can't play video games with this system right like you can't play play state you can't play playstation games you can't even play apple arcade games i don't think with this uh just because

the latency i've tried yeah that's right because what's happening is that there's latency in even in airplay 2 there's latency which is why you ideally don't want that. Yep. Yep. Jeffrey asks, I'm a fellow weather geek, just like Jason. How many, Jason, how many weather stations do you have in your home? And what do you find is the most accurate weather app? So I asked Jeffrey on Twitter what he meant by this, and he didn't answer me.

I only have one weather station, and I keep it outside where the weather is. So if he is asking how many weather like things do i have in my house so oh i guess there's technically two weathers okay here let me tell you so i've got i've got maybe jeffrey wins um i have a a davis vantage pro weather station in it's attached to the side of my roof i have had it since 2004 and i changed a couple of parts out um this summer but it it uh it still works which is amazing um and then so that transmits to a console that's on the inside of my house that's a davis little console that's got all the readouts of all the all the data um it has a an ethernet port on it that's uh did not exist when I bought it, but they have since

made an Ethernet adapter for it that you plug in and then it can relay all that data to the cloud. I also have a piece of software called WeatherCat that runs on my Mac that can talk directly to the console, the Ethernet-based console, and get the data directly from there before it even goes to the cloud. It pings that and gets that data out. That's generating a webpage that I can check from my computer. I just went to the WeatherCat website. This is software of a time. It is software of a time,

but weather stations are not... All the hot, cool, modern weather station software is generally being done by app developers who are going to sell you a weather station, which is not what I have. I have an existing weather station from a time of 2004. And in fact, that shipped with a Java app on the Mac. That was terrible.

So when I found WeatherCat, it was very, very, very, very good because it's actually a Mac app and it has a huge amount of data. So when I found WeatherCat, it was very, very, very, very good because it's actually a Mac app and it has a huge amount of data. I like that the WeatherCat website is using the leopard or snow leopard wallpaper as its background on the website,

just showing you exactly when the software... I don't even use their templates. I actually use a PHP template that I wrote myself like 10 years ago. So it's really of a time itself but anyway it also outputs a text file with a lot of data in it and that i've got a thing in my menu bar using a little uh tool called bit bar that uh just reads that data file every minute and updates and parses it and then puts my the temperature and in this case

how much rain we've had today in my menu bar um i have a uh cool gadget called a limetric time steven's got one and it and i actually first saw it at uh at twit they've they've got one there um and it's like this little square that they say it's like a music player and stuff, but it's really, it's a clock, but it's a programmable clock that's on the internet. And so I wrote a, you know, a one line app for it that basically queries my weather station data and puts it on the screen. So I have right below my TV, there's a little black box with the current time and temperature. And then beyond that, I have, I bought a little plastic gadget from Ambient Weather, which is like put batteries in it and stick it outside because I wanted the

temperature in more places and I didn't really want a sophisticated internet-based weather station display system everywhere in my house. And for like 30 bucks or something on Amazon, I'll get you the link. I got these little ambient weather things that are basically on the inside of the house, you get two or three, they're a little plastic things that show the current temperature and the current temperature outside. And then there's a little plastic thing that you stick outside that measures the temperature. And that means that like, because Lauren was saying, I can't see all the way over to the little black box by the TV when I'm in the kitchen. And I just put a little, one of these things in the kitchen. And so you can look and say, is it cold outside? How cold is it? And that's it. I love how much you care about the weather.

And a friend of the show, Kieran Healy, actually discovered that I have all this data, historical data, on my weather station. And he made a bunch of, because he is a data visualization professional, wrote a book about it. And he made a bunch of graphs about my historical weather data. It's the best. It's amazing. So thank you to Kieran for that. What about the app, though? Jeffrey wants to know about the app. What's the most accurate weather app?

Where I live, relying on weather apps, it doesn't work because of the microclimates in the Bay Area. They are frequently deeply inaccurate because they're either measuring Sausalito or they're measuring San Rafael or they're measuring someplace that's not right where I live. So the most accurate weather app for me is Carrot Weather with the premium subscription that allows me to point it at a weather station, which is my weather station. Like that's how you would get the most accurate. Like in my mind is you need to have an application that will allow you to refine the source to the most accurate source that's right right and so so that's what i use is i use carrot weather in their subscription and then i pick my weather station from the weather station list and then the temperature the forecast is obviously coming from their forecast sources but the

current temperature on my apple watch on my phone is the current temperature on my Apple Watch, on my phone, is the current temperature at my house. I love carrot weather. It's one of my favorite iOS apps. Yep. Really solid application. So there you go. Jeffrey showed you. See, I got to talk about it.

Thank you, weather nerd or weather geekery Jeffrey for letting me talk about the weather. And to Ask Upgrade question picker Mike for picking it and putting it in the, and ask Upgrade question picker Mike for picking it, putting it in the document. Thank you, question picker Mike. Gotta throw your weather every now and then. I know you love it. Well, it's been raining, so it's a perfect time. We actually have some here.

Jim asks, since upgrading to iOS 13, my Series 0 Apple Watch will go flat most days. Prior to iOS 13, it was fine. What would you suggest for my situation? The Series 3 seems outdated already, so should I update to a Series 5? Wait for a Series 6? It does seem that the Series 5

has reported battery life issues too. So I would say I feel pretty safe in guaranteeing you will get better battery performance from a Series 5 than your current Series 0, even if the Series 5 has battery issues. I would say is also, I think the battery life on a Series 5 is fine, but I hadn't used an Apple Watch in a long time, right? But I get all their battery life. I recommend taking a look around for good deals across the holiday period now, because I reckon you could probably get a good discount on Apple Watches, series 5 one somewhere i wouldn't recommend necessarily waiting for a series 6

if you're using it every day and i bet from a series 0 to a series 5 you're gonna be very happy right with the advancements in that surely yeah definitely i i also don't really have issues with the battery i don't know quite what the story is with that but I feel like that was I think that's been mostly cleared up now yeah I think so were some people having battery life problems but I think the battery life

inverted comma problem that they were having is they were now getting what Apple said they were going to get in most instances rather than what they were getting before which was much longer than what Apple quoted, right? The 18-hour battery life period. It seemed that there were some people that were having problems, but I think that that mostly got cleared up by this point.

I think like 13.1 had some fixes for battery life problems with the Apple Watch. So I recommend that you go ahead and just look at, Jim, go and look ahead at getting a the Apple Watch. So I recommend that you go ahead and just look at, Jim, go and look ahead at getting a new Apple Watch. I think that you'll be very happy. I like my Apple Watch. I use it in the most stupid way anyone's ever used an Apple Watch, by basically leaving in do not disturb mode all the time. But I like it. I think it's a pretty watch. And I enjoy wearing it, but I don't i think it's a pretty watch and i enjoy wearing it but i don't really really use it like an apple watch um but that's okay such as life it there are many different ways to uh to use a watch it's doing things right like you know i'm getting data i can get data if

i need it i can be notified if i want to but most of the time when I'm wearing it, I am wearing it because I like the fashion of the white one. Kent asks, is it safe to upgrade to iOS 13 or macOS Catalina? I think at this point, 13 is as good as it's going to be. It's fine. Yeah, and then Catalina, is it safe? Sure. I'm not experiencing any major Catalina bugs. I don't think. But unless you need to update, like you need it, need it, need it.

You can also wait. And the number one thing, as we said, when it came out is one thing they're not going to fix is that it doesn't run 32 bit apps anymore. So if you have software that's old and is not compatible with catalina and may never be like you it's not safe right and you need to start planning if you eventually will have to upgrade to catalina or beyond when you get a new mac and so you can buy you can do what mike did and buy a mac that's currently shipping that was shipping before catalina was announced or before Catalina was released final, which means any Mac shipping today, other than the 16 inch MacBook pro, those will all run Mojave.

So you could do that, but eventually time will march on and then that will die. And you're going to be in a position where you need to update and your software that you're relying on will not come with you unless you put it in a virtual machine or unless you start now finding alternatives to it that you can upgrade to now and that will then run on your mac when you upgrade it so it's a it's a process and that's the story with catalina is straight up update if all your software is current it's fine and patrick asked i like this question this is a weird question i like weird questions patrick asked am i overly paranoid for not using hotel usb ports to charge my iphone or ipad um i mean it's a good it's okay it's good to be cautious always good to be cautious uh I like when hotels have USB ports

because it means I don't have to use a bunch of adapters when I'm in other countries. The phone should be asking you if any data is trying to be accessed. It's like, do you want to trust this computer or whatever? You trust or don't trust and you still gain power from it. But I understand the cautiousness i just plug them in anyway because i want the power but what do you do i well i don't travel

i travel with a charger so i i generally don't do this but i think that while there are security exploits that are out there in the world, Apple has hardened iOS from a lot of them, right? Like, you have to, like, trust a USB charger in order to, if it's trying to connect via data, like, it will let you do dumb power without a problem. But if it's more than that, you actually need to say, yes, I trust this thing. And don't trust it don't do that um but yeah i've noticed that like sometimes when i've been on a

plane and you've got like the usb port and the like the headrest is seen in front of you and i plug the interstate you want to trust this computer like no no i don't know it shouldn't be a computer well it wants i think it wants to some of those they're like they want to read your music library and like make it available using the entertainment system or whatever. But what, why would I do that? I just know I have my own headphones if I want to do that. So, yeah. So what I would say is it's probably not that big a deal unless you're in a place like if it's, if it's, I would say if it's sketchy, if it's like, I don't know if I trust this place.

And this random USB port that's here yeah sure but i think overly paranoid probably all right that wraps it up for ask upgrade and therefore this episode so if you would like to send in a tweet with a question for us to answer on the show just tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade and it may be included for future episodes hashtag snell talk to help us open an episode if you want to vote in the upgradies go to upgradies.vote and you can submit your votes for the upgrades we had hundreds of responses already which i'm very very excited about um so make sure you get those in we don't have a closing date yet but we will announce that with some time to spare. I'm going to be working on that over the next few weeks because it's very complicated to amass the nominations because people write them in plain text. It makes it a tricky thing to do, but I've worked out a system by this point. But yeah, upgradeys.vote. And if you're still in time,

upgradeyourwardrobe.com to pick up up some merch we have all the great URLs over here on the upgrade podcast don't we Jason Snell all the great links to weather hardware are in the show notes this week Mike oh yeah all the great all the great links there too go to sixcolors.com for Jason's work he is at

jsnell on twitter I am at I am yke we'll be back next time. Thank you so much to Squarespace, FreshBooks, and Smile for sponsoring. Say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.