Upgrade - 276: It’s Always the Chips

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

How is Apple TV+ like a bicycle? Is the Mac Pro made in the USA? Why can you play Apple Podcasts from the Amazon Echo? This week Jason and Myke answer these questions, and ponder the negative reaction from some pro users to the price of the Mac Pro.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 276 and it is the last regular show of 2019 today's show is brought to you by pingdom fresh books and direct mail my name is mike hurley i'm joined by my friend and co-host mr jason snell it's only irregular shows from here on out mike indeed we have the holiday special and in the upgradies to finish out 2019 lucky lucky upgradians well they'll be the judge of that no they oh i've i've already judged it for them jason don't you worry we've got great great content hashtag great given that we we haven't done any of those episodes yet you're very confident look you're very confident is key right i'm very confident I'm confident in our

ability to create entertaining and exciting special episodes for the Upgradians. Okay. Gregory has a hashtag Snell Talk question for you, which says, Jason, what is your favorite Star Wars action sequence? To give a flavor, Gregory's is the Sail Barge in Return of the Jedi

as it combines everything that Gregory likes about Star Wars wars the characters the action and jedi humor can you think of a favorite other than mcclunkey uh scene which is your favorite star wars action sequence well i mean obviously the pod racing in episode ones anyway uh the i don't have a scene it just goes on it goes on there's one's one lap too many. I think I'm going to say there's the climactic space battle that is being intercut with the battle down on the planet at the end of Rogue One. Because it's a modern Star Wars movie that is trying to do a take on the kind of classic Star Wars battle sequence. And I think it's actually very, very good where they're up in space waiting for the shield to open and they're down on the planet trying to open the shield and uh that's a really good sequence I like it a lot um you know in terms

of classic Star Wars sure I mean uh Luke and Vader's uh lightsaber battle in Empire Strikes Back is probably high up on the list there too. But there are lots of choices. I don't know if I have one that leaps out, but when I thought about this for a minute, the Rogue One climax seemed to be the one that I had at the top. It's a good one because I don't think it's one that many people would have instinctively picked, but it is a good scene.

I meant the reason I picked this this week, Star Wars week. There's a new Star Wars movie coming out this week. It is. I know. I know. That's, yeah,

I got a, we planned our incomparable episode about it. I got a, I think I'm going to go see it at like 7.45 in the morning. What day is it? Is it Thursday in America or is it Friday? I think it's Friday release Thursday, but that means they do it Thursday night.

Right. Because I'm going Thursday afternoon because we get it a day early in the UK because we're very, very lucky like that. And I think give very, very good tax breaks, I think is the main reason why. And then all the movies are shot here. So there you go. Thank you to Gregory for the hashtag Snell Talk question.

If you would like to send in a question to help start an episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk question, if you would like to send in a question to help start an episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk. So we spoke about the Mac Pro, the potential of a Mac Pro on last week's episode. The potential came true because a couple of days later, everything was out. I mean, we knew it was coming because of the email.

But we figured it was like, you know, there'll be reviews. There were reviews. There's been lots of great podcast content. But I wanted to do some follow-up to episode 258 of upgrade and 356 of atp where we made a bet so we're following up and out kind of but it's all in the it's all in the past now okay yes but to resolve this bet there may or may not be some spoilers for the past week's episode of ATP.

So I'm going to play off the spoiler horn right now before we finish, Jason. All right, let's do it. Okay. Me and you had a bet on the episode of Upgrade about which ATP host would buy the Mac Pro and when. And now we have answers to those questions. So we both thought that Marco would buy both the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR. You said within two weeks, and I said before they start arriving with people, there has, at this time of recording, been no evidence of Marco purchasing

either a Mac Pro or a Pro Display XDR. Here's the thing, though. It's not within two weeks yet, so I guess I still have a week before i'm completely invalidated your your guess and my guess are very very similar because i think they have started arriving with people now right oh yeah that's a good point they have so i'm out right so but i but you know marco's not going to buy one so i'm going to get it wrong too but you but still it depends on if how much you win this bet uh you said that john will buy a mac pro within the first three months but not immediately and we'll wait because you'll want to wait for the bugs to be ironed out

and that john would not buy the pro display xdr wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong it turns out john syracusa is um much more irrational than i gave him credit for i said john would not be buying a mac pro on day one which i think i was wrong about right it seems like he bought it immediately um but and we can maybe get confirmation of this but i did say that john would buy the pro display xdr which i am correct about you are absolutely correct so so far again so far again john john has proven to be 10 years in the wilderness can can drive a man crazy turns out turns out i'm pleased that you did it so fast though plus it's a great episode of atp like the well the reason to do it is because atp right like he doesn't need one at all but it's so baked into not just his personal brand at this

point but the show's ongoing storyline that i feel like it needs to happen right like like i i've said in a few this is not how it works but i've said in a few places that if atp incorporated existed it should buy john a mac pro because it's like it's very important to the show that john get a mac Pro but he got one so good should we do some more follow-up yeah why not we're already here so uh makes sense column browser is back in the music app it's true it's true I updated my uh Catalina on my iMac Pro last week to 10.15.2 and one of the features is the return of the column browser which I complained about over the

summer with the public beta. And then I've complained about at slightly shorter length when the OS shipped, because I figured old man yells at cloud, you know, it was enough. I had said my piece, Apple had decided to move on. It was a feature I used all the time to create kind of arbitrary groupings and shuffles without having to build playlists and stuff like that. And other existing features didn't really work. The column browser is sort of the original iTunes interface, which is the sort of genre artist and album columns. And then you can click within them in order to filter what displays in the list below. On iTunes in recent years and in the music app under Catalina. It's something that exists only in the songs view.

Stephen Hackett actually sent me a message last week and he was like, where is that? I said, songs view, right? Because it's like, you're like, how do I activate it? It's grayed out in most places in a songs view, which of course you're filtering the entire thing. So the name songs is not quite right, but anyway, that's where it is. And it's great. I don't know why it went away. I really don't know why it came back. Perhaps they finally heard from people who, like me, were really unhappy that it went away. I don't really see why it had to go away. It's off by default. You can just turn it on. But they brought it back, and I'm happy about that. And it has already changed my music listening back. There was a whole kind of music listening I would do that was not playlist-based

that I stopped doing when I switched to Catalina because this feature went away. So I'm happy it's back. There have been lots of upgradians over the last week or so that have recognized what the chime is at the beginning of this podcast. So before our music, there is a beep. And you may have thought to yourself, that's just a beep that begins before the music. But no, it is actually the startup chime,

the original startup chime from the original Macintosh. And people have recognized this because on the second episode of MKBHD's series Retro Tech, he takes a look at the original Macintosh. And people have recognized this because on the second episode of MKBHD's series Retro Tech, he takes a look at the original Mac and he starts it up and you hear the beep. And it even did a thing to me where I know what it is, but I heard it and I was like, huh? Because I know that that means the beginning of upgrade. So there you go. And you may have heard in the past where we've changed the sound for a little bit.

They are just different Mac startup sounds that we've done. Yes, we have a little library of Mac startup sounds. Occasionally we'll vary it, especially when Mike is away and I get to play. I will sometimes vary it. When Apple TV launched, we used the cord that is at the beginning of an Apple TV Plus show, which is itself a reference to Mac startup chimes, right? But yes, the one that starts out upgrade most weeks is the original Mac. It spent me a lot of time to get

that sound and not one person commented on it at the end of Apple TV. It's very difficult. Well, yeah, but we were waiting for this moment clearly that we would finally 276 episodes in blow people's minds. That's good. The Upgradies, people's minds. So that's good. The Upgradies, they're coming.

Get your votes in. Upgradies.vote. Closing date, December 24th. Jason, we've had over 750 nominations made by Upgradians so far. That's good. So over 750, which is, that's more than last year. We could do better. We could do better.

And just keep in mind, for those who have not submitted yet, every submission you do makes Mike work harder. So please submit submit or at least makes the spreadsheet work harder but but yes uh upgradies.com you can see previous winners but upgradies.vote is where you will go to cast your votes you don't have to vote in every category none of them are required so you can just send in the votes that you want but please be a part of it because you can help with our award ceremony. I have some varied Upstream news this week. There's a few different things. They fall into the overall kind of sphere that Upstream

covers. One of them, which is a fun little oddity, this is interesting to me. Netflix are creating a new limited series that retells the story creation and kind of ascension of spotify okay but it's i don't believe spotify are involved in this netflix have bought the rights to a book called spotify untold all right okay so it's it's more of a uh uh social network kind of it's like

a biopic about a company and the rise of that company i guess i that is what i guess they're going to be doing right like when i when i read the story i was like oh okay it's going to be like one of those biopics because originally i was like that's strange like is it a documentary but it's not it's like a fictional retelling kind of thing if you know what i mean like a fictionalized retelling of actual events so that's coming at some point but i just thought it was kind of funny apple have renewed the anthology show little america so this is the show created by kumar nanjiani emily v gordon lee eisenberg and alan yang uh this is the kind of american like the average american stories right like from people like i it's, isn't it immigrant stories?

Yes, that's it. You're correct, of immigrants. But like, you know. But it's an anthology series and they ordered eight of them and they, and you're saying to yourself, well, wait a second. How is it that they've been renewed when they haven't? Did I miss it? Is it on? It's like, no, it's not.

It's not. It actually isn't coming back or coming out until january 17th they're apparently dropping all of them which yep i think it's fine for an anthology series right because there's no ongoing storyline you want to sort of let people pick and choose i think that's the the right way to do it and that's different from what they've been doing but um as we've said before because some other shows have been picked up, you know, the morning show was bought for two years, so it didn't get picked up. But like For All Mankind is a good example of this, where it got picked up for a second season before it premiered. A lot of times what this is, is this stuff got put into production so early.

impression is that at some point you have to you have to contractually choose to renew it and keep the in this case the producers um from moving on to other things by picking up their contract and also the stars too i guess yeah yeah except here there are no stars right because this is a yes an anthology series yes but um the same idea that apple tv plus took so long to gestate that they have these, I think this is what's going on. I don't know for sure, but they have these make or break dates in their contracts and they got to say yes or no. And they've seen them, obviously, at Apple and probably like them and decided that they're going to place the bet that they want more of it. Even if they're taking the risk because nobody's actually seen them on the outside that they like it enough because it's either this or they walk away from the project.

So yeah, Apple will be dropping all eight episodes at once and then they've renewed for more to go on. Yeah. Yeah. So this is just related to that. Apple TV plus, we should mention their first round of shows that we spent two

years talking about um are wrapping up c had an eight episode season it's done they dropped the last episode a week and a half ago the morning show and for all mankind i believe dropped their their season finales on friday and we've seen that there's that uh m night shamalan produced show servant that launched on thanksgiving um and truth be told and truth be told which is the the podcast true crime show has launched so we're in an interesting place now where the launch shows are are going away and and we're having to start to see apple's rollout of other content on the service. So this Little America is going to be one of those. But that's something I think we should keep our eyes on because there's the big splash launch, right? But then they're up and running and they got to keep it rolling, right?

So what's the rollout going to look like? And are they going to drop things in batches? Or is there going to be something new every week? Going to be interesting to see how they do it. And, you know, we don't know for sure how they're going to roll it out. So that's something to watch because we're kind of at the end of the launch of Apple TV Plus right now.

Yeah, it's kind of an interesting thing where it's like, all right, so you started off with three shows and they ran for about the same amount of time. I was interested in two of them. Now those shows are over and there's another two that are going week by week. And I'm only kind of interested in one of them. So then what if by the time those shows are over, I'm interested in none for two or three months. For me, there have been so many different shows on that we've been watching, for all mankind, week by week.

But we've been watching the morning show very slowly because other shows get in the way of it. The Mandalorian and Watchmen and The Expanse. And there's other shows that have gotten in the way of it. So we're only on episode four, I want to say, of the morning show. So we got a lot more of that to go. So I'll go back to that as some of these other shows wrap. But yeah, I think this is the ongoing question. And if you bought, you know, if you get it free for a year, you're giving them a huge grace period, right?

If you bought an Apple product and you get it free for a year. But in the long run, it's a month-to-month thing where Apple TV+, like any subscription service, has to prove itself month-to-month. And if you, at the end of the month, are like, you know, this happened to me with Hulu not too long ago, where I had that moment where I thought, have I watched anything on Hulu in the last month or two and I've been paying for it? That's not what you want if you're a streaming service, right? That's not what you want. No. And again, as you say, first year's free which is fine um but i you don't want me to forget that it exists for sure and if i've not got shows that

i'm going back for every week i might do now that first year is really crucial because you want to get to the end of the first year and get that little email that says hey uh you were about to charge your card for apple tv plus for a month, um, because your year is up, you want to be like, uh, Oh no, I can't miss the rest of season two for all mankind or whatever it is. Like I can't, I I've,

I've enjoyed this too much. It has too much value. I want to keep it. That's this year is their way to prove that. And, uh, they get a little bit of time to sort of do a shakedown cruise here. But by the time we get to the end of the year,

it needs to have proven its value to that initial um annual subscriber base that they that they speculated you know and basically what would tim call it a gift they gave a gift to everybody but like the gift now they need to prove themselves so uh so yeah i think it's fascinating to watch i think i think this will be really interesting to see how they uh how they make this happen because this is part of the the execution part right like we spent two years talking see how they make this happen, because this is part of the execution part, right? Like, we spent two years talking about how they were buying a really nice bicycle and putting a lot of cool, fancy parts on it, but they hadn't ridden it yet. And now it's like, okay, then we watch them get on the bike and start to ride it. Go with me here.

But now it's like, well, now they need to ride the bike to a destination. And like, how's that going to go? We don't know. It's interesting. So I'm happy that they are moving and we'll see where the bike goes. And Apple News is going to be hosting an American presidential debate. This was announced by the Democratic National Committee that Apple News will be partnering with ABC and WMUR-TV to host the eighth Democratic debate on February the 7th.

This is part of an election coverage content alliance between apple and abc oh you know it's not new in the sense that a bunch of other online kind of news services have been a part of the presidential debate mix but it is kind of funny that it's apple news right like? Like it's weird, you know, insert your own Apple News joke here, but it's not surprising on one level, but it is a little bit strange especially because we don't think of Apple News as an entity, like a news entity.

It's like a conduit for other news entities, but I don't know, maybe it's just a conduit for other news entities but i don't know maybe it's just a nice advertisement for apple news it's weird yeah they're gonna show it in apple news it's like this funny thing so that will be video content in apple news then they have like music content there'll be like a link for a debate and you'll be like oh i want to read this debate on the web and then it'll hijack your link and take you into apple news that's fitting yeah zing boom burned this episode is brought to you by direct mail our friends over at direct mail the easy to use email marketing app designed exclusively for the macintosh platform to help you send and create great looking email newsletters email marketing is still an incredibly cost-effective

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available but let's talk a little bit about some of the aftermath if you will sure uh you were on the talk show with john gruber and so there's a lot of like initial thoughts and impressions there if people want to go listen to that episode two two and a half hours long folks so there's lots and lots of initial thoughts and impressions sitting over there. We also talk about Perl and movable type and emoji. Sounds about right for you, too. We're on brand. Very little keyboard talk and no baseball talk.

I'll just say that. So two and a half hours, yeah. I would just like to, on the show, thank John Gruber for his kind words about Upgrade. It was very nice of him to say. Yes. So thank you, John. Very nice. words about upgrade it was very nice of him to say yes so thank you very nice um i have an answer to my question about where the mac pro is made if it's not an american product so this has happened

in a couple of ways this morning senior editor of french apple magazine mac generation uh who's anthony nelson santos they wrote in to us to say that they had heard from their readers that Mac Pros that they were starting to receive in Europe were being shipped directly from China and were stating that they were made in China, like assembled in China. I'd also heard this. It corroborates something that I'd heard. Mac Generation wrote this up on their website, but it's all in French. So Mac Rumors did a translation of this. I'll include both in the show notes, depending on if you know French or not. Go to MacGeneration, I guess. But you can see it. It says,

on the Mac Pro, hardware itself assembled in China. Why is this important? Because it proves a point that I think is important to prove, that the whole Donald Trump, Tim Cook thing is as much of a dog and pony show as I expected it was, because the Mac Pro itself is not assembled in China. It's not this American product. They are assembled in China if you've ordered it in America. It does not mean that the Mac Pro as a computer is manufactured or assembled there in the same way that iPhones are assembled in China. iPhones are assembled in China because that's where they're made, right? And they're shipped all over the world. The Mac Pro is only being assembled in America as a political stunt, right?

The idea of the Mac Pro being an American product made in America, it doesn't mean anything. Well, there are lots of different reasons to make computers in different places, and some of them are for politics and some of them are for tax purposes. I mean, we talked about how in, I think in Brazil and in India, Apple has experimented with making at least iPhones and maybe other products in the local, assembling them there so that they can avoid uh certain kinds of tariffs and taxes in the same way that we mentioned that some build to order products like my iMac pro was assembled in Ireland right like there are reasons to do it right which these are not which I think is an interesting quirk right like that that the it was possible at least that European iMac pros could have been made in Ireland but they're they're not there well, this is what I'm wondering, though.

So the ones that are arriving, I don't know. Are these just base models? Yeah, I don't know. Do they get configured in Ireland if you do that? I mean, there's a lot of complexity to the supply chain here. Also, I suppose you could say that when you say for political reasons, like avoiding taxes and tariffs are in some ways connected to political reasons. avoiding taxes and tariffs are in some ways connected to political reasons like that if you don't make a big show about you're assembling this product in the united states that you'll get tariffed and taxed and if you do then you won't um even so uh yeah so i i mean this is the

this is that other data point this is not a product that is being uh made in the usa for the world it's being made in the usa for the usa it is a, it's not symbolic because it's real, but it is a gesture. It is a tactical move to look good for the US government. I mean, the thing that bothers me is that we'll just allow the US president to just say whatever he wants about it, right? Like that's the thing that bothers me is that Apple just allow the U.S. president to just say whatever he wants about it. That's the thing that frustrates me. Apple didn't say, we are proud that we are making the Mac Pro in America for American customers. I don't believe they've said that. They just let it be assumed, if you want to assume, that the whole product line is being made there or assembled there.

But it's not. Now, the parts are presumably the same, right? Which means that it's still that mixture of parts that are sourced from all sorts of places, including in the United States. But as we've talked about on past shows, even with that, it's going to be way cheaper to assemble those things in China and then ship them around the world. So that's what they're doing outside of the U.S. or maybe outside of North America. There may be other regions that we discover

are getting the American-sourced products. It may not just be the U.S. Canada might get the American products. Mexico might even get them. But beyond that, it looks like everything else is in China. And that's what we suspected, but now we know. It was just important to me to close the loop because it was a thing that I cared about and we have now.

And I'm pleased that our hypothesis was correct, right? That they were not, if you were buying one in Germany, it was not coming from Austin, Texas, because that would have been wild. So we know the pricing configurations. We know how expensive this computer can get. This is exactly the amount of money I thought it was going to go to, right?

Like 50 grand, right? Like it just seemed like, of course, I don't know how you feel about it, but like, you know, I've seen there's,

there's rightly. So I think for how symbolic this product is and how important it is, there is a lot of hand wringing about pricing and who this is for and who it's not for. I think that it's a... I consider it very positive that you can spec this machine the way that you can because it means that this is finally a Mac

which, like, for nearly 10 years, right, we have not had the ability to create a Mac to go to wild purposes, right? That you could spec a Mac with internals that could be used in a vast, vast variety of use cases. And 1.5 terabytes of RAM is a very extreme use case. But you can do it now, and I think that that is great. Because if what you're looking for

is an idea that apple has commitment to the macintosh this is it because there is for most business reasons zero purpose to sell that machine right like right i was i was wondering like how many machines are they going to have to make to recoup their R&D costs for this? Considering this was a product they were never going to make in the first place. Right. Right. And I just think about the amount of money that... Because if you think about it, right, the iMac Pro doesn't need to exist in theory if the Mac Pro was always going to be made.

The iMac Pro exists because they were getting rid of the mac pro exactly and we know that that that there have been reports about that that the iMac pro was a project that was that was made because they were killing the mac pro and then they they decided not to kill the mac pro and that there's an open question there about updating the iMac pro a product that I really love by the way that we'll see like will they do that or was did is this the only iMac Pro that will ever exist because they went in a different direction I don't know so then if you imagine if somebody's trying to work out like what was the overall cost of this product let's just imagine for example that you took the iMac Pro into consideration right so like the amount of money

it cost to create and research and develop that product the amount of money it's taken for the mac pro and then the whole thing together people don't give that enough credit right like people think about the cost of the parts and all that but it's so harder to so much harder to think like this is time uh spent by apple designers apple hardware engineers to build this thing it's time being diverted from other things there's an opportunity cost here too because it's a it's a computer that's being designed instead of a different computer that could be designed and um you know they're also the benefits are broader like you know having making a gesture at a high end of filmmaking uh potentially means that apple stays in the good graces of uh some high-end workflows.

In an industry that they care way more about than they ever have before for various reasons. And you end up with not just selling iMac Pros, but you sell those monitors and you sell MacBook Pros. I think it also can't be discounted I mentioned this on the talk show that there's also a you know good feeling like an identity thing to say look at us look at how we brush up against the fancy you know Hollywood folks and that that makes us

look good that we're that you know we can make this and that they can use it even if it you know doesn't have a direct dollar benefit that that it's it's worth doing but it's very clear from the base price of this thing that like the conception all along was that apple wants to build something that can reach the stratosphere and um as a result like because if if this was if this started at two thousand dollars there would there could not be some of the stuff that's in it that is in it because they wanted to build

it with the at this very you know thing that could scale way way way up and as a result the floor is way higher than i think a lot of people would like it to be you mentioned a very key word there which was identity i think that this mac pro is in the identity of many people right like you were mentioning it in the idea of apple's identity who they want to be to the world right and they want to be continue to be as they have been for such a long time the place that creative professionals go to and the mac pro serve like serves a lot of high-end creative professionals but there are lots of people whose identity as computer users is tied up in apple and a tower mac yep yeah including the group that we would say apple itself has identified as its largest group of pro users, which are developers.

Yes. A lot of developers are very technical people and they love computers. That's why they're developers. And they don't like the idea of using a system that is enclosed, that is a consumer that works really well for consumers, but they're like, but I want to tinker. I want it open. I'm more technical person. And these are the kind of people who have been buying towers from Apple for years. You know, they had a Mac Pro cheese grater or they had a, you know, a Power Mac G5.

Maybe they skipped past the trash can Mac, but they would like to have a tower. And the fact is that this is, at its base model, this is overkill for them. And it's Apple, Apple's take on this is very clear, which is if you don't need the power

of the base model Mac Pro, you don't need a Mac Pro. Like that's the power is the differentiator here. And below this, you should just get an iMac Pro or an iMac or a Mac Mini or a MacBook Pro and not this. And the problem is that there's some people for whom it's not about the power of it. It's that it's a box. It's an open box that they can

swap out the storage and they can swap out the memory and they can put in cards and they can do all of these things. And they want to do that and they don't want to spend $6,000 on an overkill machine in order to do it. So I'll ask you, do you think that this configuration, this starting price, this $5,000 machine,

should this be the only pro-focused desktop option that's not an iMac so yeah you know I I can't win with this answer um nobody can I I feel I feel for the people who want Apple to make a Mac that fits them, right? And I feel for the people who are especially developers, but people who... We talk about pro machines, and there was a post that I linked to on Six Colors from Martin Pilkington that I think explains the argument very clearly. And in the end, what he says is, is the Mac Pro machine undoubtedly, there's no reason why anyone who is not a professional user should even consider buying one. But is it a machine for pro users for the vast majority of us out there? Because he places

himself in that group? The answer is no. The answer is, unfortunately, he says no. And that's, I think that's exactly right. Like, the issue here is that there are a bunch of people who view themselves as pro users who are upset that the Mac Pro isn't for them. I would argue that Apple makes a line of pro products, and Apple doesn't believe that the Mac Pro is for all pros, nor should it be. And they've made those decisions. I think the arguments I've seen, including Martin Pilkington's blog, which says it very well, is that there are a lot of pros who want a tower from Apple and Apple has essentially said, no, you should get something else. You should get a laptop. You should get an iMac. You should get a Mac mini, but this thing is not for you now i if i have um strong feelings about this it is that i don't believe and i think this has been true for a long time i don't believe most

people who feel that they need an expansion full computer so that they can swap out parts and plug in cards and do all of those things. I don't believe that most of them actually need it. I think they want it. I think it makes them comfortable. I think it's familiar. There has been a fallacy in computers for a very long time that people want to buy the the upgradable computer whatever the upgrades are because it makes them feel safe it it's like insurance it's future proofing in a way and i think if you look at and i know apple had research about this back in the day um you look at how people use those computers, they never upgraded them. Like they never did. They never did. And it's not to say that nobody did, but almost nobody did. And there's a famous, maybe apocryphal, I don't know, story about Apple at some point realizing

that they could dramatically reduce the number of slots in their tower or in their Macs that had openable boxes with slots in them because they realized that although people said they wanted six slots nobody ever used more than two slots or three slots and it gets overstated is what i'm saying um i think in general like i like max i would like max to have user removable and installable storage and ram let's say like and and apple doesn't do that apple doesn't do that for some good reasons which is they engineer without that and their devices can be um thinner and lighter and nicer in all sorts of different ways but i think there's an argument to be made there um but clearly that's not what apple believes um and and and my sympathy for Apple is at least exists in part because I do think that a lot of it is more about an emotional desire to have control over your computer that is understandable, but not necessarily logical or not necessarily something that actually gets put into practice. So, you know, would it be great if Apple made a mid-range mini tower for people who are

developers and not high-end video pros? Yes, of course. And that's been true since 2007 when we were running op-eds at Macworld by Dan Frakes and Rob Griffiths about this very issue, right? Like it's been true for more than a decade that Apple has been, back in the day, it was like, how about a thousand dollar tower? Now it's like, we'll pay 3000 for a tower. Please give us a tower that's not six grand.

So I get all of that. But I also understand Apple saying, look, we want to hit the high end here with this product. And we've got our products below it are so powerful already. And with Thunderbolt 3, they're so expandable that we just are not going to make another product. And we're not going to hurt this product by bringing it down in scale because every product has a cost. Every new product has a cost. So, you know, I understand the desire for it. I have some skepticism that that would be a popular product. And I have a great deal of

skepticism that that product would not just cannibalize sales of other Apple products, which while not the problem of the consumers buying the computer, it's a problem for Apple. Because if you go to Apple and say, well, okay, we're going to make a $2,000 or $2,500 tower that is kind of like the Mac Pro, but way, way cheaper and doesn't have the high-end performance. We're going to roll that out. And then I'm a bean counter at Apple and I say, okay, what's the net increase in sales? And the answer is, well, no, actually, we're going to lose sales. Net increase is nothing or almost nothing. We'll lose some sales of Mac Pros from people who are so desperate for a tower that they'd buy a Mac Pro.

So we'll lose those higher margin sales. And we'll lose some iMac sales and some iMac Pro sales and some Mac Mini sales. And maybe we'll have to kill the iMac Pro in order to do this. And I could see somebody at Apple being like, that doesn't make sense. Why would we do that? Why would we spend time making a product that is... and it's still going to be a niche product right it's still mostly not going to sell like all these other pro products that are especially desktops it's like yeah that's true so you can see why they would say no doesn't make it hurt any less if you're somebody who really wants that product and is frustrated that apple won't give it to you do you have any desire for the mac pro like forget cost for a minute because i would love one right i look at it and i'm like that's super cool right and the more videos i've seen on it the more

i've heard about it that's a cool computer like if you remember i was waiting to see what my option would be and the mac pro priced like the base configuration like priced me out and i bought the iMac pro right because it's like i don't want to spend that amount of money for what will be a machine that will be lacking in the areas that i need storage RAM right that i could get what i actually need storage RAM processor and basic power cheaper than i can on the mac pro which is what i did right because it's not even in a monitor too which i didn't have right so like the price goes up and up and up but in a world where i could get or could have gotten the mac pro and a monitor a nice apple monitor right that matches in some way

for around the price of the iMac pro i would have gone with the mac pro because it i think it looks cooler than the iMac Pro. Because it's a new design, right? Where like, yes my iMac Pro is space grey, but I've had three computers over the last like nine years that look just like this one. Sure. So, I am

allured by it in that way. Are you? Do I appreciate the idea of a shiny new Mac like this absolutely and i used to have a five uh a g5 i had a g4 i had a g3 like i had a whole and i had a power computing clone before that i had four four years or not four years four computers in a row that my desktop computer was a Pro Tower. So I get the appeal. I also kind of feel like

I never really took advantage of the Pro Tower and I kind of really love the idea that I've got my whole computer in this giant monitor that's floating above my desk on an arm and I don't have like a box on my floor somewhere that's the real computer wheels jason the wheels you can just move it around like you can't move it around you know just move it around so the new shiny appeals to me the fact that there's no apple monitor that is suitable because the pro display xcr is just a non-starter it's a waste of

money to buy that if you are not a high-end color video whatever professional it's a waste of money and if you want to get it because it's pretty and great but you are wasting your money again if it makes you feel happy great but like i'm never gonna buy that monitor i buy the lg monitor it's okay um it's not any better than what I've got. Cause I think it's the same panel as on the, the iMac pro. So in the end, am I tempted only by the fact that it's new and shiny and neat? Um, and you know, could I use more cores for some of the audio stuff that I do? Probably.

But first off, I wouldn't be tempted right now anyway, because I have a two-year-old iMac Pro that is great. In a few years, though, would I be tempted by a Mac Pro? Probably not. never say never you know i would need to buy a monitor and the computer and upgrade the storage and all of these things like and it's going to be a a big ticket item and the fact is my iMac Pro base model is more money than i've ever spent on a computer before and it's it with the exception of the audio stuff it's more computer than i need already so i think the answer is um no as cool as it is um i i would never buy one well you mentioned about like the next time you need a computer for all you know yeah mac pro might not be an option anymore it's true it's true if the next

time i need a computer if we're still in an intel world or if if we're still in a partial intel world where i need to have an intel system to run you know we don't know that's the other thing is we've got this transition coming up but that's true like at that point though i would hope that if they don't do another imac pro that they maybe take the lessons learned from the imac pro and put that in an iMac so that we have a better, quieter fans iMac, right? Yeah. I don't think we will have another iMac Pro after this design that we're currently in. So what I mean, whenever Apple revised the iMac in a significant way, so like they change its design, right? Like as well as internals, I think that they will just have lots of, you know, they will have a really powerful

version that you can get, but it probably won't be the iMac Pro. Well, there's two paths forward for the iMacs, right? There's a path forward where the iMac Pro kind of continues. Well, maybe there's more than two paths, but I keep thinking of it this way. The iMac Pro is a rethought version of the iMac with no spinning drive internals, right? So you could look at the iMac Pro design and say, in the end, the iMac Pro design is an iMac design, a future iMac design, and they will drop the spinning drives. Maybe it's just in the 27 inch, the 5K version. Maybe that version is the basis, and this design is the basis for future iMacs. And maybe because of the existence of the Mac Pro,

there isn't an iMac Pro, per se. There's just an iMac. Maybe there's a 6K iMac, which is bigger, more powerful. But with the cooling that's in the Mac Pro and no longer supporting spinning disks, but using the desktop or laptop class of chips, the Intel Core chips instead of the Xeons. And so it's got the power, because the power of the iMac already is up against the bottom of the... It's like the fastest iMac you can buy is faster than the base model iMac Pro already for most uses, I believe.

So you could do that and just sort of the iMac Pro kind of quietly goes away, but a lot of its legacy lives on in the iMac line. But there's another fork here, which is ARM, which is if Apple does an ARM transition, would it take its consumer desktop, essentially, and turn it into an ARM computer that doesn't need as much cooling and is thinner and lighter again. And just because it's cool that they can put it on a thinner or lighter stand, I don't even know where they would go with an ARM iMac, but they could go down that path. And then just pro means old at that point, right right they keep the pro around for the old chips i think there is a strong we've talked about this i think i think there's a strong argument to be made that if apple makes a an arm transition that when it starts at least the code is that the word

pro means intel i think that makes a lot of sense so like so that's that's a an open question there and then for me as somebody who's doing this high end audio work, and I've got a desktop computer that I use, that is a good question in two years, three years, what do I buy? And is that an iMac? Or is that not an option for me um and and is the mac pro the only option there the the challenge i i my guess is it it can't be because apple has done this where they've said you know we're not going to even start this until we get up to six thousand dollars that they they have to make solutions for pros that are below six6,000. And maybe it's the MacBook Pro and it's a high-end iMac. I don't know. I don't know.

It's a challenge. But by making the choice of starting at $6,000, they don't have that release valve to say, oh, well, you just buy a tower for two or three grand and then get on with your day. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. But there's a lot more going on here. And there's a lot more to talk about.

I want to come back to the iMac Pro, but before we do, let me thank our friends over at FreshBooks for the support of this show. If you ever send out invoices, track expenses, or if you ever need to get paid online, FreshBooks is the answer for you. If you're using anything else, I'm telling you, it will be quicker if you use FreshBooks. They have drastically reduced the time it takes for that over 10 million people to deal with paperwork. And this isn't just the creation of the paperwork. So FreshBooks' system for creating invoices is really speedy and simple because you can save a bunch of information in it,

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Okay, so let's talk about the iMac Pro. our thanks to FreshBooks for their support of this show and RelayFM okay so talking about the iMac Pro one little piece of information which has been interesting brought the iMac Pro up again even more over the last few days is the Pro Display XDR on the technical specs page

it lists all the devices that are supported with the Pro Display XDR, including all the MacBook Pros and all that kind of stuff. But one of the very clear omissions on this page is the iMac Pro. The iMac Pro is not listed as being able to actually drive the Pro Display XDR. So this is interesting, right? And there's been a lot of thought that maybe it has something to do with the chips.

Right? They haven't been able to update the graphics or whatever it is. Always the chips. Always the chips. Those darn chips. Those bags of sand inside of the computers messing up everything for us. But there's a slight wrinkle in this, but I can understand what's happening.

So this was confirmed by video editor Thomas Grove Carter who was on the most recent episode of Mac Power Users, Thomas has had a Mac Pro for a few weeks at least a period of time before it became available Apple gave one to Thomas to test out and to give feedback on

the Pro Display XDR does work with the iMac Pro but in 5K, not 6k apple doesn't state this anywhere i guess it's for good reason and that it's not fully supported you're not actually getting everything you're paying for but it's interesting right that it's like it is a it is a thing that will work but they don't want to tell you that's the case because I guess you're not going to get everything out of it that you should be. Yeah, I mean, it's weird because it, yeah, you could probably, it's better for a techno, right?

Saying that it'll drive it, but it won't drive it at the full resolution. And that's, yeah, I get it. It's a two-year-old computer and it's using an older chipset. And what it tells me is that they really ought to update the iMac Pro. But as you and I just discussed, that's a good question. Like, I hope they do. And this came up on ATP last week because we have the secret society of iMac Pro users now. And it's like, I hope they do an update to the iMac Pro because it's great.

And I hope that if they don't update the iMac Pro, it's because they have a bigger plan on updating the iMac to make it much more iMac Pro-like. But in the short term, if that's going to take a while, I hope that they could do an update and put a new chipset in it and support that external monitor and just keep it rolling down the road because um because if i like marco on atp if my imac pro died tomorrow i would get a new imac pro i just would be very sad if it was literally the same one that i had bought two years ago without any improvements but i would i would i'm very happy with it yeah Yeah, I find... Oh, it is worth noting, of course, that you can put a Blackmagic eGPU in the middle,

and it will work. And it will work, right. So, honestly, if you're buying a $6,000 monitor, then why not just buy an expensive eGPU, and that'll get solved, problem solved. How much is the Blackmagic eGPU? It's £599 for the regular one. It's a bargain.

I mean, honestly, at that point, why not, right? You've gone that far. So it is compatible. It's just, it's less than the stand. I will say, though, of everything, I'm most lost for the monitor. I just think it's super cool. There's a lot more coolness to it. It is super cool.

A lot of people said they're going to test it. I haven't seen any results yet of if it will work in any way with the iPad Pro. Just purely out of interest. I'm going gonna say no yeah i expect no too but i want to see somebody plug it in and see what happens i think it's a thunderbolt i think it's a thunderbolt 3 display and so the answer is no but hey i still want to see someone try um so overall jason where we are right now do you think that there's any takeaways apple should have like anything that they should have learned from this whole experience like that people maybe want more choice should

they get that choice or do you think apple's doing the right thing already with the way that they've rolled these products out well they change stream right we don't know what apple's end state is for this stuff right because as we said earlier said earlier, the iMac Pro was conceived as a replacement for the Mac Pro. They were going to kill the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro was the replacement. And then there was obviously an argument internally. My guess is that the Pro workflow group was formed around this point and that this was part of it. But there was this strong argument that Apple was, or they heard from customers, perhaps in the video industry, like an iMac is not going to do it for us, right?

Like we can't just use an iMac. And they changed direction and they made the Mac Pro. But that opens up the door of like, well, what is the strategy with the iMac Pro? Is that an existing product? Like what is the strategy? Like they upgraded the Mac Mini and it's pretty powerful, but again, it's this tiny little thing.

You and I joked, and there actually, somebody is Kickstartering this, joked that what you really need is just a Mac Mini in an enclosure with Thunderbolt 3 attached to it and some slots. And you just say, no, no,

it is a mini tower, even though it's literally Mac Mini. Don't open it. Tower, don't look at tower, even though it's literally a Mac mini tower. Don't look at that part. That part is just a Mac mini. Don't go there. So, you know, here's the question. Like, what does Apple want the end state of their Pro Mac desktop line to be?

Keep in mind, desktops, it's a quarter maybe of their business and most of that is the iMac so pro desktops is a sliver of a fraction of a minute shade of a like it's a tiny thing and it's important in our as a symbol like I said last week it's important to our concerns about Apple's commitment to the Mac. But Apple, it's not going to get a lot of attention from Apple in the long run. And I would say that among the people who are upset about the Mac Pro, like, that it makes it seem, their feelings are real. But it makes it seem more prevalent than it actually is because the truth is that most of the stuff that we're talking about here most people who buy max don't care about right we are we're talking about a very specific set of of users right but couldn't it be argued

that that those same set of users the discontent that they felt about the trash can and about other professional macs is the whole reason this mac pro exists anyway like the round table thing happening and all that stuff it's how you define it right like this is was that all was that all about uh developers and three thousand dollar towers obviously apple doesn't think so because they didn't make that computer. If you're a developer and you thought this meant that you were going to get the computer you wanted, you are right to be disappointed because they don't think that. And it really stinks to be told, we're not going to fulfill your desire with a product. We think that we've got it covered in other places and we're just not going to go there. Could it be a mistake on Apple's part? Sure. It could be. I would argue that those people have already not

been served by Apple for a very long time, catered to by Apple for a very long time. And even longer, if you consider that back when the Mac Pro was $2,500, $3,000, people like my friend Dan Fra um were writing articles about how they needed to make a cheaper tower computer right like this is this argument continues and continues and apple is always reluctant to do it so you know is it the right move i mean maybe not we'll see but i i do think that uh that it over it's such a small market that i think apple is not risking a lot there i mean like let's be honest apple screwing up the laptops is a way bigger issue right the pro laptops and the keyboards and people really being angry about the usbc

on the laptops and the touch bar and the escape key and all those things. Much bigger issue in terms of Apple's business. They sell way more of those. They are way more likely to be the tool of choice for developers. Like, that is a huge issue. If Apple screws up the Pro desktop, what happens? They lose some really high end customers, which they obviously have decided that they don't want to and they they symbolically make it seem like the mac is not a priority um but you know if if screwing up the mac desktop was fatal for apple apple would be dead now because they they did screw it up so and this is the this is the fix and maybe this fix isn't great but again you know

so so i you know we can we can we can over talk this but you know seriously um i understand why people are upset about it uh and it does matter especially symbolically but in terms of the grand scheme of things let's not lose track of the fact that uh the most important Mac thing to happen in the last month and the most important pro thing to happen in the last month was the 16-inch MacBook Pro by a mile. Should we talk about Apple podcasts? Are these podcasts by Apple? Not yet. Or from Apple?

Maybe. Or for Apple? Because Apple podcasts are now available on the Amazon Echo. Yes, you can say, hey lady in a canister, play the latest episode of this podcast or continue playing this podcast. And it will sync too. So if you're listening on the lady in the canister

and then you pause it and then you go to the podcast app on your iPhone, it should have the play position synced so it's using icloud using apple servers to sync that data which is a key thing right because it's one thing to say pick a random arbitrary episode of a podcast and play it and it's another thing to have it integrate with the database that they've got based on your devices that are using Apple Podcasts. So it's currently available in the US only. This is a thing with Amazon. They update their products internationally very, very slowly.

If you're, you know, you can all do this with Apple Music. It took months, months for them to have the Apple Music support in the UK and Europe and elsewhere. Doesn't bother me because I don't use Apple Podcasts, but it's just a thing. So the way that it knows your player position is because you sign in with your Apple ID inside of the app, the Amazon Echo app. It syncs all of the shows and playback position. This is, of course, the first non-Apple device to get this kind of integration.

There is no other Apple podcast client for anything other than Apple-made products. So this wasn't the case with music, because there was a music app for Android before it rolled out to the Amazon Echo. So holding off the obvious, which we've been speaking about for a little bit, which we'll get to, why have they done this? Like, it's easier to understand why Apple's paid services are on competing hardware, right? Why Apple TV is on television sets made by Samsung and LG, etc. It makes more sense for Apple Music to be on products that play music like the Amazon Echo stuff. Apple Podcasts is a client for an open platform of which apple owns nothing right

except a directory what is the benefit of doing this well i mean the benefit the big benefit is just apple services being available everywhere um this is the so apple wants you in its ecosystem and it wants you in its podcast ecosystem, partially because it doesn't want to, you know, it doesn't want to give that up to Spotify, let's say. And it's so much more convenient if, as I said a moment ago, when you say play the next episode of this thing, it knows what podcast that is and what episode you listen to. If you resume an episode, it knows where it was like, that's such a better thing that honestly,

it goes from being, I'm never going to listen to a podcast on this speaker in my kitchen to, Oh, I can listen to podcasts. Like it's, it's literally a, uh, a moment where you're converting from not using it to using it because,

uh, now you're, you know, you're not doing, cause it to using it because uh now you're you know you're not doing because i've done that where it's like i'll play this podcast and then i go back later and i'm like now i need to manually sync to it because there's no conversation between these things so i think it's just you know apple wanting to have its ecosystems be expanded further and further and then realizing that um that people are going to use stuff like other TVs and Amazon Echoes and things like that. And what they really want is to keep you in Apple Podcasts. So number one reason is fight against Spotify.

You want to be the default, not Spotify. You don't want people being like, oh, well, this works with Spotify, but it doesn't work with Apple. I'm just going to use Spotify. That's easier. And they're an important competitor here. Right. And it's worth asking the larger question, which is, we've talked about it before,

does Apple have designs here? Like, are they going to be- Yeah, because they could be preparing for things that are exclusive to Apple Podcasts, but it could just be, again, I think you could explain it away largely the same way by saying Apple wants to not have other people taking the podcast ecosystem and putting it inside their own proprietary thing. I think that that can be true too. I do believe that it's possible that Apple will do some Apple podcast only podcasts.

I think it's more likely that Apple will do podcasts and they'll just be podcasts and they'll be in the podcast app and that Apple will say, we believe in an open ecosystem. And that's why we're the leading podcast player. That's an open ecosystem. I think that could be true just as easily as Apple saying, aha, we just spent a lot of money on a podcast you could only get if you use our app. But it could be that. Yeah, it'd be interesting.

Like maybe it's potentially they're doing it the other way around that they have their other services, right? Where they get the platform, the free thing available before they then switch over to where are now offering this exclusive thing, this paid thing.

But all signs are continuing to point towards apple making some kind of move in this area whether it is some kind of paid podcast service or just original content we've spoken about it over the last few months of like first there being rumors now apple's making hires this could be a big part of that. And having their podcasts available on other platforms is, or their podcast app available on other platforms is important if this is a route that they want to continue pursuing. Right, they're laying the groundwork for something in the same way that they, I think, got kind of a little late to the game,

but they got there in time for the Apple TV Plus launch where they made those deals about a year ago now. We heard about those deals with the TV manufacturers and the TV box manufacturers to get their stuff. about if Apple would ever let you watch movie rentals or TV shows you purchased or their new streaming service on anything that was not Apple hardware. And the answer was, you absolutely can. Like, it's everywhere. I bought an Amazon Fire 4K stick the other week for $25

and plugged it into my 4 4k tv uh that's in another room and uh and logged into apple tv and now it's all there right like it was that simple and i didn't need to buy an apple tv to do it so this is like that and maybe you know maybe this is laying the groundwork for something but it's doing it seems like they may be doing it a little bit further in advance, which is a good thing. And like I said, their user benefits, regardless of what their future strategy is, because it means you can use this. And as people who know Marco Arment, who does Overcast, right? Like this has been something that he's wrestled with for a while, which is like, do I want to do this or not? Because there's a lot of effort that goes into it. But this is the benefit of it is that now Apple's podcast app

has a feature that's a leg up on him, right? That he can't do this right now. And so that'll be a question for him. Like, does it matter? Because it's like a checkbox on the side. And I think he would say that so few of his users would use something like this that maybe it's not worth it.

And we have to keep in mind, Overcast is a single person. like pocket cast has a whole team and and castro now got sold and has a whole team and obviously apple has a whole team and overcast is one guy you know him it's marco and so he has to pick and choose uh and and he't be like, oh, well, Apple's got it. So I got to do it as a response. Because it's like, what does he give up if he doesn't go that direction? But, you know, it is a challenge because this is a legitimate feature. If you are in the Echo ecosystem, the Echo system, and you love using this and you want to listen to podcasts and have been frustrated about it,

it's a good reason to switch to an app that syncs so that you can move around. And I'm an Overcast user. And so I don't use this feature. And if I really wanted to use my Echo speakers for podcasts, I would seriously consider switching because of it. So it's something that's interesting too. But my point is it's got a user benefit. It's not just, aha, this is part of our strategy

to be everywhere because we've got grand plans. It's also, this keeps people in our ecosystem because it helps them listen to podcasts in more places. This episode is also brought to you by Pingdom. The holiday shopping season is upon us. I've still got some great deals to look out for we have uh black friday we're boxing day we have in in the uk which is the day after christmas that's when there's always a lot of sales so i'll be i'll be

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and you can get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. And when you sign up, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get an amazing 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason, should we do some hashtag ask upgrade questions to rule out today's episode? Good idea. Have most apps that you use

been updated to take advantage of the 11-inch iPad Pro's different aspects ratio? You don't use an 11-inch. I wanted to check that, but yeah, this is a question for me. I'll put it in there because I know I do use quite frequently an 11-inch iPad Pro, especially when traveling.

And I would say of all of the apps that I use now, I could not find one that hadn't been updated. I'm sure that there is an issue, but I think there was a cut-off date where all iPad apps had to be updated. Apple will do this every now and then, right? To get through submission, you have to adopt certain technologies.

I believe they did this for the iPad Pro aspect ratio, but all of the apps that I use have been updated to take the full advantage of that screen now just to stop the black bars. So if you're considering whether to buy this iPad because of that reason, I would say not to worry about it. Because I can't think of any of my 12.9

inch ipad pro because that was also a thing it was less noticeable it's been a while it's been a long time uh noah has a question for me what has mike been doing with his custom built gaming pc so i built a gaming pc i don't know year or two ago now um and i do what you would assume i play games on it uh it is something that i use for some pc games um i don't have an xbox so i can play a lot of windows or xbox games on the pc because that's like a thing that you can do uh i have a oculus vr system and there are games that i will play every now and then i'm looking forward to the half-life uh alex vr game which i think is going to come out next year uh and also any video streaming, game streaming,

that kind of stuff that I do, I use the PC for it because it's way easier to do than I've found it to be on a Mac. And that was one of the reasons that I did it as well. So I have a rig for that kind of stuff too. So it's very useful for that. Adam asks,

if podcasts keep going behind paywalls, referring this to the spotify thing that we spoke about last week could third-party apps add some sort of login feature to allow access to services like spotify for podcasts now i heard from somebody by the way that the spotify exclusive podcasts aren't for premium that you can listen to them without spotify premium so you can listen to them for free but just you have to use spotify though right so they're not they're not behind a paywall they're just behind locked into an ecosystem right they're locked into an an app or into an ecosystem so it's not quite the same which is probably what apple would do too i think yeah if if right i i agree we talked about uh i don't know a few months ago about all the different

options that apple had and i think that's the most likely um maybe well i don't know i think maybe the most likely is that they just do podcasts and they say we love it open but i think um it's also likely that they would not say, we're going to create a service or this is only for these subscribers and just say, it's only in the app. It's only in the podcast app. That's the only place. But for this, I mean, there are login features for apps for paywalls.

There are lots of them. Authenticated feeds is one of them right yeah so you can you can have a username and a password and it's using authentication on the web server end and um many not all but many podcast apps support that so you can put in a username and a password and get the feed and then there are um other approaches like what i think patreon does which they give you a hashed url which is basically it's a url with a bunch of uh unreadable characters in it that is generated per user so it's just for you and um it has no username and password so if you gave it to a friend they could listen too but they're listening to your feed and if you stop paying it stops

working um and and that's what i think the patreon approach is um and then there's security through obscurity which is what relay does and what the incomparable does and what six colors does which is you have to log into a page and get a url and just put that in and that'surity, which is what Relay does and what The Incomparable does and what Six Colors does, which is you have to log into a page and get a URL and just put that in. And that's it, too, which is not that different from what Patreon does, but it's not tied to the user and it doesn't get shut off when the user isn't paying anymore. So there are a bunch of ways out there to do this. I wish there was a better way that everybody supported and everybody agreed on, and maybe we'll get there someday. supported and everybody agreed on and maybe we'll get there someday but i i my guess is that we won't because most of the organizations that want to do this want you to use their app and you know we don't like that and i i won't support that but um there are other ways it's like that's the thing

even if there was a new standard created spotify is not going to sign up for it yeah they don't care about exactly being a spotify customer they want you using the spotify is not going to sign up for it yeah they don't care about exactly being a spotify customer they want you using the spotify app they want you to be a customer in their application not just a person listening to the podcast that they are creating right and a lot of those the hash urls the individual um customized urls won't work in certain apps like i think like spotify because spot Spotify views podcasts as having a canonical feed that is for everyone. It's very centralized. And that's not how those work. Those work on, you've got a podcast app and you put it in and it's just for you and it doesn't sync

anywhere. And it's just your thing. And some apps don't like that at all. But I'm definitely looking into that for mine. I'm doing the obscurity thing right now, but I'm trying to work in the background on coming up with using a plugin that does what the Patreon thing does, which is just every individual subscriber gets their own custom feed URL.

And as long as they're a subscriber, it works. Yeah, because it's not just about piracy as a thing. It's also less work for you or for us because changing the feed every couple of years or whatever to kind of clear out people that aren't paying anymore is overhead and it's complicated. It's a pain. Yeah, it's a pain for the users too. Yeah, it's a pain for the users too. Also, when I changed the last time for Incomparable, or it was actually the first time I changed for Incomparable.

I left it for the first couple of years we were doing it. What we discovered is that there were a lot of people who signed up, got their feeds, put them in, and were very happy and didn't realize that their card didn you know, didn't renew or whatever. And they contacted me when the feed changed because I put an item in the feed that said, hey, everybody, you're getting this because your feed changed. You need to go log in. And then they'd log in and they wouldn't be a member. And then they'd sign up and they'd email me and they'd say, I'm so sorry. I thought I was a member all this time.

Right? I thought I was a member all this time, right? So if you have a feed that goes dormant when your subscription expires, it also is a reminder. It's a nudge to people who want to subscribe that something went wrong. And that's good. Is it a reminder?

Does anything happen? Does the feed just stop working? Because if the feed just like with this Patreon thing, the feed just stops working, you may never know. Then you may never know. That's true. I always put when I change a feed, see, this is a feature.

We can add this to our feature list when we design this for ourselves and build it ourselves, which we're not going to do. But is you want to have a, if a feed gets deactivated, you want a deactivated item to appear as the most recent item in the feed that says this feed just got deactivated. To reactivate it, you need to res resubscribe but i don't think they do that that's

what we'd like when we changed i uh i think a couple years ago we changed the relay fm url and we put a thing like if you're hearing this you need to go and get a new feed uh we're going to email it to you if you don't get an email you need to pay again right it's like because it means you weren't paying exactly so in short no this won't happen because it makes no sense for spotify's business plan to allow for this because they want people in the spotify app so we're going to use this this is what we're going to get is we what we've got which is either http authentication for feeds or uh hashed custom feeds or security through obscurity. And those are the ways that it's going to work. And I will say also, as a podcaster,

there need to be better tools for this. And I did find there's a company that I'm actually talking to this week that is building like a membership platform for podcasts. The problem being that, you know, we already have our platform, but I wish this, my point is I wish this technology was better because it would be great if I could just pay some amount to some service and have like, uh, uses the membership API for

memberful and it generates these feeds and, uh, or generates HTTP authentication or stuff like that. But as it is basically, most of this stuff is just being built by the companies that are doing it they're building it themselves it's very much like the early days of the web where it's just not there's just not enough critical mass here for people to develop a system so we use what we got well

you know I guess if we're going into the weeds in this one now which we'd most definitely are oh yeah we're in the weeds now we're below the weeds we're in the swamp beneath the weeds i mike i get concerned about stacking all these companies together because yes because then then one of them breaks they all break but then then again if you have one company that does it all and they break then it all breaks too but yes i i agree with you that is uh you know but then you can build it yourself, but that can be very expensive. And then you're reinventing the wheel.

But sometimes that's the way to do it, too. Yeah. Because where we are right now, where a lot of the people that do what we do are in it, was we're using a service called Memberful, which was bought by Patreon. Right. Which is probably a better overall outcome for Memberful as it stands, because, I mean, I don't know what memberful's situation was but they were seemed to be a small company yeah now owned by a much larger company

but that much larger company is a venture capital backed company which can who knows implode on themselves or bought by somebody who doesn't care about what memberful does yeah well or or to take it back to the MacPro conversation, they could decide that we're not their focus, right? And that all of their efforts go towards something else, and they're like, you guys have to go. Right? Like, we're not going to support your stuff anymore.

And that could happen, right? We're like, we don't make enough money from you, so we're going to go over here. And yeah, that would be that I dread that, right? Because I get a significant portion of my income from my two membership sources and if memberful disappeared tomorrow um i would be real sad there are other options out there but i would be really sad that would be uh rough and disruptive for everyone so um yeah it's it's uh it's a funny world out there but anyway this is one of those cases where i couldn't take something off the shelf even if i wanted to, it's a funny world out there. But anyway, this is one of those cases

where I couldn't take something off the shelf even if I wanted to, because it's just not. Memberful has made some strides here, but like, it's just, it's a complicated thing. And there's, I think there's not enough yet, not enough podcasts wanting to do a kind of premium podcast feed to have made it worth building those tools.

I have some light breaking news, Jason Snell. Okay. Breaking news. The iPad Pro does indeed drive the Pro Display XLR. Jonathan Morrison at TLD Today. As a what, a 4K? I don't know because he's got a video that I'm not hearing, but it works.

Okay. That's weird. Don't do that. Federico, don't buy the monitor. Don't do it. Who knows what's going to happen now over in Rome. Wow. So it does work.

Isn't that wild? Values of work, right? Yeah, I have a bunch more questions that may be answered by the time you're hearing this like what happens if you turn the ipad into portrait mode can you can you work with the monitor in portrait mode oh yeah that's a good question more questions to be answered but it does in fact work. So basically what it seems like is the Pro Display can be used as a 4K or 5K monitor. Yeah.

But it will also go to 6K. Now isn't that interesting? With HDR support. Yeah. Huh. support yeah yeah you can watch that Netflix movie in 4k on your $6,000 monitor I'm in I'm just saying I'm in the market for a new monitor that's what I'm going to say from there Darren says final question

today I'm ready to lead the iPad only lifestyle is Google photos or iCloud photos the best choice for backing up images is there a way with the ipad to also have some kind of physical local backup as well no no no no you gotta have a you gotta have a mac, to back up the files locally. Um, if you're iPad entirely iPad only, I'd say it doesn't really matter. Google photos is good and it's free, but it doesn't, you know, you have to keep it open and launch it occasionally because it doesn't necessarily always back up in the background. Whereas iCloud will back up in the background entirely. I think iCloud is the right solution

if you're willing to spend the money on it because it's the first party solution. The platform vendor runs it and they tweak it all to work well. If you don't want to spend the money, Google Photos is great because the price can't be beat and it's a very good service.

But in terms of having a local physical backup, guess what? If you're leading the iPad-only lifestyle, you're not going to have that. You're just not. You're not going to have that. You'd be better off leading the iPad-only lifestyle with an old Mac with a big hard drive attached to it hidden somewhere in your house with Photos set keep all on the drive and then you've got your backup but um i think if it's strictly ipad only you just have to give up on dreaming about having a local physical backup you can turn on sync only to your ipad but that's not a backup that's just it's i guess it's a physical backup on your ipad of what's in the cloud but you you need a really big iPad for that.

You can also use, I mean, if you just want another place to do some backups, you could also use Dropbox. Dropbox has a camera uploader. You can do all of that there using the app. Yeah, but then you're uploading photos a second time to a different cloud service out of your camera roll.

I'm not saying it's ideal. It's just like another thing you could do, maybe, if you wanted to. Well, I mean, if you're using iCloud Photos, you could use Google Photos too, right? Yeah. But you're going to use a lot of bandwidth to do that, and it's not necessarily a complete backup. So, yeah.

Yes, it's one of those things, but I really think that if you choose icloud photos and then maybe have another service that you periodically do some backing up to then you're probably i reckon you're good um but i understand the hesitancy if you're used to doing a physical backup as well all right if you'd like to send in a question for an episode of Upgrade to send in a tweet with a hashtag, ask Upgrade, we may or may not be doing any over the next couple of weeks. Who knows? We have something special we're working on next week,

and then the week after is the Upgradees. Don't forget to go to Upgradees.vote to enter your nominations for the Upgradees of this year. Is it 6th annual Upgradees? Is it 2019 or 2020? I think it's 2019, right? Yes. Yes.

Okay, cool. I'm just checking. I always forget about how we date those, but we date them for the year the upgradies are like... Honoring. Honoring. There you go.

That's the best way to say it. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. Thanks to Pingdom and FreshBooks and Direct Mail for their support. Go to sixcolors.com, find Jason online, he is at jsnall, I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E, and we'll be

back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason. Bye, Mike.