Upgrade - 280: De Niro Can’t Bend

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

With Myke reporting live from Hollywood, we discuss Netflix's record Oscar nominations, and Apple's first TV award and TV critic press tour. Jason makes a chart that explains why Apple execs can't stop talking about Services and Wearables. Then we both give updates on our home-office upgrades, Jason abandons his solar dream, and Myke turns to mechanical keyboards for solace.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 280 today's show is brought to you by hello express vpn and booze allen my name is mike hurley i am joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley how are you i'm fine and dandy my friend fine and dandy i have a hashtag snow talk question comes from james this week and james wants to know jason what is your favorite gluten-free beer oh my well this is a very targeted question isn't it so it is you're the man you're the man with the answer for those who don't know i uh it's a long story that i am i don't enjoy at all but uh at the advice of my doctor i have been uh told to not have gluten in my diet anymore uh it's a lot a lot i don't even want to get into it people ask me do you

feel better because it's been like seven months now that i've done gluten-free i was like no that's the problem i have no symptoms but they told me that i'm allergic to it so okay great just stop drinking regular beer start drinking beer brewed with weird weird weird grains and uh i have tried a bunch of different ones although a lot of people on twitter were suggesting ones that are not available in california which doesn't really help me i'll look for them when i travel but something i did find that was available in california actually comes from canada comes from montreal it is the hilariously named Glutenberg Brewery. I would drink this beer because the name is so good. It's great.

And they have these little pint cans with the kind of German writing on them that say Glutenberg. Anyway, the Glutenberg Stout is my favorite style of beer. And the Glutenberg Stout is good. It's not great. It's not nearly as good as some of my favorite stouts back when I could have gluten. But it's good. It's not great. It's not nearly as good as some of my favorite stouts back when I could have gluten, but, uh, it's good. And they have a, uh, a ghost, which is a, uh, uh, kind of a sit light, uh, beer with sort of citrusy things in it. That's great. Like legit, legitimately great. Like I would drink that, um, whether or not I had a gluten thing because it's really good um and and uh so

that's those are the two that i think are my favorites i have tried others um and i will share you share a last little bit of trivia about this which is i've gotten a lot of people say saying have you tried these beers where they brew them normally and then they use this clarifying enzyme that removes the gluten from them, which like omission does that and the stone gluten-free beer does that. And the answer is, technically, those aren't gluten-free. They have gluten in them. They are very low in gluten because of the enzyme, but there are still traces of gluten. And if you're somebody who's just sort of like on a diet you can you can do that but um if you're somebody who is supposed to have zero gluten in their diet you you can't drink those beers it's not they're not really gluten-free you need to drink a beer that's

not brewed with wheat or barley i guess that uh it's the same as like non-alcoholic beer right there's still like a tiny amount of alcohol left because you can only remove so much yeah i don't know what the rules are for that or whether it's like it's it's it's an acceptable level or not but since this is technically an allergy you're you're not supposed to increase the you know no it's saying that you're allergic to i don't like it's not good for me to just have like a little bit of peanuts in the same way that it is for me to have lots of peanuts. Just don't eat the peanuts. What we do, Mike, with this peanut beverage is we make it with peanuts, and then we have a chemical that removes most of the peanuts. You know what?

I am not going to have that. I'm going to draw the line right there. Anyway, I have been drinking a lot. In terms of alcohol, anyway, I can drink wine wine and i've been drinking more cider but um just to get my alcohol cider's good there's lots of great options for sure yeah but uh but i don't want to give up beer entirely so anyway there's your gluten-free beer talk i endorse glutenberg thank you canada thank you quebec everything quebec if you would like to send in a hashtag snow talk question like james did just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and it may be included in a future episode.

I have a couple of quick items. Well, one item for follow-up. We probably have something to say about it. I ordered one of the Bridge Pro Plus keyboards. I ordered one for my 11-inch. I believe I should get it within the next few weeks. I think they started shipping in February. So, yeah, that's the one that I can see myself

more frequently using the trackpad because my larger iPad, I do tend to use just at home. So I use it, as I spoke about last week, with like a mouse in a stand. But my 11-inch, I treat more like a laptop, right? Like it is my travel iPad. It's like the one that I would take with me when I go work anywhere or I'm traveling anywhere. So I can imagine wanting the integrated trackpad more there. Um, but yeah, so I ordered the 11 inch model. All right. Interesting. I, um, have hopefully a review unit coming, uh, off the assembly line. I only used the prototype, so I'm curious to see what they, what they tweak. Cause the prototypes, you know,

they're not quite right. The firmware is not quite right. And the, uh, and the, even like the tension in the, in the, in the mounting clips and stuff is not always quite right. So I'm looking forward to seeing what a fully functional bridge pro plus is like at some time soon. I don't know. I wouldn't mind reviewing it for my larger one though.

Oh, sure. You know, it's, it's great when they send you stuff. Yeah. They have been pretty good about that stuff though in the past, but I'm really excited for my larger one though you know sure you know it's great when they send you stuff yeah they have been pretty good about that stuff though in the past but i'm really excited about it because you know i i as i said last week i really am a proponent for the even the mouse support in its current form i know that there's there are features that are lacking and i know that like yourself right like do you think that it's it's maybe not that great but like i really value it now

so would like to have that option more readily available to me so i'm really excited about it i mentioned you in my not by name in my mac world story i think last week where i where i said that i wanted apple it was sort of keying off of what we talked about last week the idea that um the mouse support should be better but there's a lot you can do and then and then it might lead to apple potentially doing something more than the smart keyboard for the ipad pro if you could do better touch support you could or a pointing device support you could then put a a pointer controller of some sort on a smart keyboard and that would be better for apple but one of the things i mentioned in passing is there's lots of different kinds of accessibility and i mentioned

you not by name and just said that there's somebody i know who has um you know like rsi issues and uh you know having pointing device for that person so they don't have to reach up and touch the screen that's that's like a legitimate reason to do this kind of thing so you're you have a perfectly legitimate use of it whereas for me i feel like when i try to use the the mouse um i feel like i'm doing more harm to my arms than good but everybody's body is different yeah yeah and it's like you know if i use a mouse for too long then it can cause me trouble i just have to rotate my input methods and that's why i really like having this as an option all right so should we do some upstream yeah since now i feel

like i'm in a really good place for upstream ladies and gentlemen now live from beverly hills it's upstream hosted by mike hollywood hurley that's a very good intro for for upstream and it's not a joke i am sitting right now located in beverly hills high in the hills of beverly hills that's where i am right now jason and i wanted to say that it's very funny driving around here this kind of part of of beverly hills la these kinds of areas because there are billboards for tv shows everywhere they are everywhere like every billboard is a television show and that is i mean i know you see advertising for this type of stuff in all big cities but it is very it feels very different here it feels much more like oppressive it's a company town it's an industry yes it is oh yeah i mean we drove uh that past like the fox lot

and stuff like that um is it century city so like we've driven through there and we've seen some of that stuff when we was in a taxi but what i like is a lot of the billboards at the moment say for your consideration which is funny right they're appealing to the academy come on academy give us the awards yeah so speaking of which you got to be in beverly hills in in hollywood let's say more or less for this morning's as we record this academy award nominations did you i'm reporting live i don't know did you get any nominations yourself still waiting i'm still waiting to see uh they told me they'd call me so i'm waiting on that bad news the ones for this year already out so don't hold your breath you're gonna have to

wait at least one more year for your oscar nomination i'll keep working on it but netflix so netflix as you would assume are leading the academy award nominations because they produce the most movies of all of the streaming companies that we work that we talk about right like uh you know amazon apple they have some but netflix really and especially in 2019 really pushed with movies original movie content um they have 10 nominations for the irishman um and marriage story as well received a bunch and these are the two movies i think that have occupied uh the vast majority of the water cooler conversation right like i feel like i've seen a lot of people talking about these i've only seen the irishman um which i i am predisposed to love this movie because i martin scorsese's movies are among my very favorite movies of all time especially when

they feature de niro and pesci all right like that they are absolutely my favorites. And so I actually really enjoyed The Irishman. It is not Goodfellas. Like Goodfellas it is not. But it is a very, very good movie. The special effects in that movie where they're doing a lot of aging, it's really impressive. But I still can't help but notice it all the time sure because i'm aware of the truth and so i find it distracting still even though this was like you could fool me and there are points where i was definitely fooled watching this movie thinking that like oh this is joe pesci now but no this

is like joe pesci where he would have looked like 15 years ago like it is very very impressive this is the most impressive of that technology use of that technology that i've seen but i still can't help but be aware of it you know what i mean yeah yeah no i get it that's always that's always the debate with de-aging and with virtual characters like i was just listening over the weekend to um the flop house guys were on or elliot calen anyway was on the star wars minute a couple months ago and they were talking about rogue one and they were um talking about the peter cushing you know double that they used there and there's it's that great debate of like if people people don't know you may you may not notice you may let it go by you and then other people know and once you know you kind of can't not see it but it's a yeah but but that it doesn't necessarily mean that it might be on us for looking for it or for being like,

I'm so aware of this actor that I'm aware. If I'd never seen this actor before, I wouldn't know whether they had been maybe aged up or aged down or whatever. But instead, I know exactly what these actors look like at various phases of their life. And it's a challenge. Can I ask you about this, actually? Because there's also a really interesting, it's called like in conversation with on netflix it's just like a 25 minute dvd extra basically of uh pacino pesci uh de niro and scorsese sitting

down and they're talking about the movie and they talk about this technology a lot. And they touch on the idea of, you know, like, if we didn't have this technology, we wouldn't be able to do this movie. And we'd have to have somebody younger come in and we'd have to teach them to be like us. And like, to act like us. Right. And they were like, that doesn't work the same way. And I kind of wonder, what is your, this is maybe a bit of a hot button issue, I don't know. But what is your general feel on this type of technology, this like de de-aging technology do you think that it is like holding back younger actors because my kind of feeling on this is like i understand that argument where they're like oh

if you're using all this technology to make people younger or older you are holding back the roles from other people but my i understand that but i feel like these days there are more opportunities for more movies than there's ever been before but right so it's like it's a bit of a weird it's like a weird thing that's happening right now but i don't know if it's necessarily having that negative effect so two things one is i feel like the history of film from the very beginning is about pushing technology to tell stories in different ways because they talk about like oh we could have just used makeup yeah i mean and there are there's some great like people should follow todd vizieri on twitter he he posts out some great stuff there's

a video of like how they did this shot in a silent movie in the like 20s i think where there's like a mirror. And I mean, it is for a hundred plus years, movies have been about fakery in order to tell the story they want to tell. So I think it's funny when people are like, oh, there's too much of this CGI or too much of this de-aging happening now. Like, I want to see it the way, first off, you don't,

a lot of it you don't even know. Like, I want to see this movie that doesn't use it. That's really great. It's like that movie totally uses it, too. You just don't know because you're not looking for it. Again, to get back to, like, if you don't know to look for it, you may not even notice that it's there. But also, it's the history of film that they do this. There is no point where you could legitimately draw a line and say, well, this far but no further.

I think that this is just how it is. They're always trying. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. The tech keeps getting better. And then we find something new to complain about because the thing that we used to complain about is now so good that we all just kind of take it for granted. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is you talk about opportunity for, are there not opportunities for younger actors because of de-aging technology? And it actually makes me chuckle a little bit because the truth is hollywood is famous for discarding older people because everybody needs to be young so i would say i would say there's plenty of opportunity for young beautiful people and that if some technology more opportunity for older actors

you know i mean seriously now i do i do have those moments where i was reading articles about the irishman and i was thinking i'm not like maybe you do want to do more body doubles maybe this is something that that uh people learn over time is that uh the the you can de-age people but you can't de-age the old man body you could they actually had this conversation yeah because it's like de niro can't bend like he used to they were saying like there were times where like they had to stop like scorsese stop he's like no like bob you are supposed to be 20 years younger you need to walk down these stairs more quickly like and it was it seemed to be quite difficult for them it's like they had to push themselves physically more than they normally would because there are times where they have to act like they're 45 not 75 so maybe they end up

with more maybe these are all lessons that are learned and that in the end they're like okay we're going to do this scene with a body double and face replacement and we're going to do this scene where you're just standing there where we're just going to use you entirely and de-age you and you know those are all as weird as that sounds those are all tools those are all paintbrushes in the tool kit of the artist they're all colors of the palette whatever metaphor you want to use they are all tools that can be used to make the final result look right and maybe they learn over time that some of the physical acting of d of older actors who need to be de-aged need to be uh you know some of the physical acting needs to of older actors who need to be de-aged need to be uh you

know some of the physical acting needs to be done by a body double instead and they'll figure it out but i i'm not worried about hollywood discarding young pretty actors i'm not anyway getting back to the the note and um i lost my body and klaus who have nominated for the animated feature so two of the five i think nominations for best animated feature are netflix animated features yeah frozen 2 didn't get nominated by the way woof uh wow yeah i watched klaus over the holidays it's a cute movie the the animation is beautiful um but and and the story the story is fine like it's and it's a it's a funny little movie it's actually it's pretty good actually like it's you know for an for an animated feature which includes no property that

i've ever heard of before right like i actually think it did a good job of creating something pretty pretty original i'm going to give my endorsement by the way in this category for a movie called missing link which a lot of people missed which is a uh it's actually a stop motion animation movie so it's in the style of like artman but it's not it's actually the guy who did oh what was his previous movie paranorman and uh coralline coralline yeah sure and paranorman which is a if you have kids you know about paranorman anyway but missing link really good really good uh it's like it's a movie about a sasquatch who's adorable it's great um uh so netflix has the most nominations that That's interesting. You've been listening to us talk about it on Upstream. You probably are not too surprised. This was inevitable, really.

Another angle that you may have not been surprised by because you've been listening to us is one of the nominees is American Factory. And that's notable because essentially that's the Academy inviting Barack and Michelle Obama to the Oscars because that's the literally the first release from Higher Ground Productions to Netflix as part of their deal with Netflix and it got nominated for Best Doc. This one missed me. I had no idea that this stuff had even begun. Like I was waiting to hear about the fact that they had things on the way uh i've not heard anything about this at all so um yeah there you go and uh and uh congratulations amazon studios they got one nomination hey they got a nomination though right what did they get the nomination for uh les miserables i think okay

okay yeah good good for them i suppose yeah i know but still netflix this is the uh i think it's interesting because we've had these conversations about how the movie industry is like well i don't know about netflix like should we change the rules remember steven spielberg's like change the rules so netflix can't be nominated and you know what happened next they got 24 nominations so yeah we are also like i feel at this point spielberg like look at who's working on netflix you can't ignore them anymore that's okay when they were new movies from up-and-coming directors you can try and use your clout to ignore people but when scorsese's making a movie which is

nominated for best picture and it comes from netflix you have to ignore where it's coming from now because the establishment is now moving into the streaming services so there's nothing you can do about it right like i feel like at this point you have to accept it for sure to to your point about the people like martin scorsese making these movies i think there's an argument i we may have made it at the time when spielberg was complaining about this like there's an argument to be made that given the kind of movies that get put in theaters these days uh there's a whole class of movies sort of like these mid-level movies and more prestige movies that don't get much time in theaters and so i think netflix and amazon and

apple and whoever else is is funding stuff for their streaming services like movies are getting made and seen that would otherwise not get made and seen and that's look at adam sandler right like these movies on netflix people millions of people are watching strong counter-argument there mike well you know what i'm saying though right but like but if if that's what people enjoy if it's what they want to see let them see it but people wouldn't see those movies in those numbers if they were in cinemas so like this is just allowing for people to be seen i do want to see uncut gems though right like the adam sandler movie where he's the jewelry dealer.

Okay. That looks interesting. That looks like an interesting movie. We've taken this way further than we expected. Let's take a break and we'll come back and do more upstream. What about that, Jason? Okay. All right.

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apple's first award for any of their tv plus things it was their only nomination that they received and uh crudup took home the gong which is great right i think he deserves it it's a really i saw carolina milanesi on twitter yesterday completely agreed of her like it's wild to watch a character who at one moment you absolutely hate and then the next moment you're completely cheering for like just moment to moment yeah it is a legitimately great weird performance a weird character he's so slimy at the beginning and you're like whoa who is this guy and then you see him do things where you're like oh i kind of like what this guy did wait a second this is the really creepy slimy guy and it's just like it's fascinating he is he is fascinating to watch in that show so uh deserved i think yeah i think so too um apple will be

presenting at the tv critics association press tour on january 19th here we are here we go we talked about this last summer this is the death march with cocktails as dubbed by my tv talk machine pal now retired tv critic tim goodman um the where all the TV writers come and for like two weeks, there's a summer and a winter press tour and the networks and the streamers and everybody else will do the cable and broadcast and streaming. They will do days where they bring in the shows that are launching or coming back and the writers and the cast and there are panel interviews and there's cocktail receptions and set visits and it's this whole dog and pony show.

And the idea here is you're doling out information and getting the media to pay attention to the stuff that you want to shine a PR spotlight on. And our question was, would apple come down off the mountaintop and go to the death march and here's your answer winter press tour they're going to be there yep which is i think the way that i know i fell in this update that we agreed on this is that they would get into this because there are things in this industry they can try to avoid them as much as they want but they need to try and be involved if they want to take the awards they also have to play the game and this

is part of the game there's schmoozing of all sorts but it is uh definitely i think primarily a pr rollout setting where they can get like and and if you're a tv writer not just necessarily a critic but a writer in general you, you load up your notebook with stuff. So you listen to the producers of some show that's launching in April, talk about their motivation and what they're planning and all that. And you put that in the notebook. And some people might write stories about it or live tweet it at the time. But what happens is then April comes around and you're writing your story about that show and now you've seen it and all of that and you empty out your notebook and you say oh well i talked to this person and that's all coming from the press tour that um so there's it's a it's a

big kind of concerted between the you know tv critics and the networks to get their like this pr thing and then they all go back to wherever they're from and they've been downloaded with the marketing spin of the networks. And news breaks here and they announce casting and they announce renewals and there's all sorts of other stuff that happens here. So it will be fascinating to see what level, that's the next question, right? What level will Apple disclose? Will Apple play this game like everyone else or will Apple be more reluctant because Apple as a company, if not their TV be more reluctant because apple as a company if not their tv division so much but as a company has that kind of culture so i guess we'll see

how open they are do they feel like hbo they seem to be playing the hbo song like literally hbo stopped playing that song and they're like we will play that song now so maybe we'll also hire your guy on stage with everybody. Yeah. Who knows? Funnily, maybe it's interesting. They're the only company named on this day. So it's January 19th. Yeah. So in the kind of that's not not surprising. There's a lot of times there's like a company will take a day, sometimes more than one day

to do their events. So like there's Apple Day and people will come and Apple will have a whole thing and they'll serve people lunch probably and they'll do their whole dog and pony show and they'll it'll be interesting to see what they're promoting too because as we've talked about there's the stuff there's the stuff we know that is probably not coming back to the fall so will they talk about the morning show or for all mankind or will that be like completely off the table and they're going to be talking about whatever their next wave of programming is that's this spring um i don't know interesting in theory it will be stuff that we don't know about because by then they won't have a lot left on the slate to talk about that's actually we know about

dates for yeah and so we might find out stuff like uh amazing stories right like when is that coming because this is winter press tour so they'll have a summer press tour presumably in august so it really is sort of like what is on their agenda between now and july august oprah pulls out of the documentary focused on sexual assault that we spoke about last week she was the executive producer on the project but in a statement given to the hollywood reporter she says that she's decided to pull out and therefore cancel the agreement to air this on apple tv plus this is a quote from oprah first and foremost i want it to air this on Apple TV+. This is a quote from Oprah. First and foremost, I want it to be known that I unequivocally believe and support the women. Their stories deserve to be told and heard. In my opinion, there is more work to be done.

And it's become clear, though, that the filmmakers and I are not aligned in that creative vision. So something happened with the kind of the way that this movie, this documentary was coming together to the point that oprah decided to pull out i think it's going to be very interesting when this movie eventually does come out to to see why like what happened i think it'll be pretty obvious um so this was focusing on a an executive in the music industry um who has been accused of sexual assault and that was going to be the documentary was going to be about following the victims but now oprah is pulled out so again one of these things where

the story sort of reflects on apple even though it's sort of been put down a layer by having it be oprah and the creative differences it's a classic hollywood statement and who knows who knows what it means but it does mean that she's basically said i'm out and that means apple is also out of this documentary uh apple released a trailer for mythic quest this was the uh video game company comedy show this trailer looks great like it is a it looks like a lot of fun it's more of what i wanted from this and less of what i expected it to be like i expected it to just be like a you know because we were super strange about like why is ubisoft involved in this and it seemed super weird but it looked pretty funny and it looks like they do maybe touch a little bit on some of the

difficulties of working in video game development like they're talking even in the trailer there's references to like working all night and that kind of stuff so i'm very intrigued about this now i think it's going to be pretty i have high hopes now it's got a i was going to say a silicon valley kind of vibe but i actually think it has a little bit more of a veep kind of vibe the uh the trailer but that's not to say that again apple is trying to be hbo but it's got that kind of feel to it yeah i, I think it looks like a lot of fun. It seems like it's got a great cast and it's got an interesting feel to it. I'm intrigued to see if it joins over to the show.

Does it marry up? Yeah, it looks great. And finally, the Apple TV app is coming to LG, Sony, and Vizio TVs this year. So currently at the moment, the Apple TV app itself exists on Samsung TVs, and then other TVs have AirPlay 2 functionality. But Apple did reference that other manufacturers would also be getting the smart TV app. And by the end of this year, this is all announced over CES, LG, Sony and Vizio TVs will be getting it. If you have one of these TVs, each manufacturer has like different cutoff times as

to what TVs will get it. But this is a continuation of Apple rolling out their content to as many places as they can possibly put it. Yeah. Yeah. It continues. This is the answer to the question is loud and clear. Apple wants the TV app to be everywhere. Should we talk about, so we're kind of on this topic list. Let's move over a little bit and talk about services in general general we've spent obviously a lot of time talking about services over the last couple of years because apple's been focusing on it a lot but they put out a press release uh on new year's day uh celebrating their successes um what's the new year's day no it's just like last week sorry and they basically said we have a quote app store, so this is people in the App Store, spent a record of $1.42 billion between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve,

which is a 16% increase. And the biggest day, I think, was $386 million on New Year's Day, which is a 20% increase. So they kind of also used this press release as a wrap-up of kind of where Apple are with services right now. It's just like promotion for all the stuff that they're doing but you look at these numbers and you can it's just more evidence of why exactly apple is pushing the way that they have been into services they are able to make more and

more and more money without selling a proportional amount of devices right like these numbers if you look at how many iphones were sold over you know in 2019 if you look at how many iPhones were sold in 2019, if you just looked at that number compared to last year, you'd be like, they probably won't make as much money because they're not making as many iPhones. But it doesn't count the fact that all of the iPhones existing out there right now can still buy apps, can still sign up for TV+. The install base is getting larger and larger,

and that's what Apple's capitalizing on. Yeah, I did a piece last week, which we should probably talk about, about services and wearables. But you can see it. We're entering 2020, and three years ago, Apple set itself this goal. They said they wanted to double its services revenue by 2020. It's services revenue by 2020. And they will blow past that because their services revenue in 2016 was $26 billion. So double that, that's $52, right? Well, in 2019, it was already $46. So they would actually have to slow, severely slow down services growth to not make that target and it's just it's it's an enormous part of their business the um the services and wearables put together um back in 2015 was about 15 of their business and now it's 30 and going up so you know that's gone from being kind of like a nice small part of the apple business to a third almost of the

apple business yeah in that article that you wrote i liked you you were looking at it and basically said that since going back to 2015 every single quarter there has been a double digit percentage growth over the year-over-year quarter so they are growing massive amounts yeah that's we we talk about iphone slowing down right and if you go back to our early shows of's we we talk about iphone slowing down right if you go back to our early shows of upgrade you can talk about us being amazed at the year-over-year iphone growth and that was iphone was in this explosive growth growth phase which it's not in anymore and so it's very profitable but it's not growing a lot but you look at services and wearables by the way but starting with services um it it has for years now, for like five years,

growing at double digits per quarter year over year, which is, that's a lot. It's a lot. That's my point is it's a lot. In 2012, they made 15 billion on services. And in 2019, they made 46 billion in services. That is a lot of growth. And one of the great things, I think, for Apple is the fact that services revenue, unlike their products, is not going to be as affected by seasonal changes. So they're likely to make more money over the Christmas period, right, as they sell more iPhones or whatever but then that those spikes should bring the average higher because people sign up for these monthly subscription things and yeah you'll get some people canceling every now and then but if you just sold a bunch more phones you just bring

up the average and then it keeps going like it just keeps growing and growing and growing in theory as long as they're making people happy and you're paying monthly or quarterly or annually or whatever you are for these subscriptions which means the money just keeps flowing in it's not seasonal at all i mean again they obviously will at some point reach a saturation but they've probably got quite a way ahead of them which means you know like the iphone there will be a point where there has to be something else right because services will stop growing but you can see they have a lot of opportunity here because there's many ways to kind of like on this pump, right? Like you can not only try to convince existing customers and new customers to sign up for whatever service, you can also create more services, which they've obviously been doing,

right? Like you can give people reasons to sign up for iCloud and they did that, right? Like you can give people reasons to give you money to get their news, but then you can also create gaming subscription services. You can create television content, right? Like there are more ways for them to affect this area of this revenue than there was for the iPhone. And look, don't get me wrong we were talking about

this last week they're probably trying to do this with the iphone too right oh you want four five iphones let's just do it right make all the iphones right like it's a similar kind of model you give everyone everything but it's probably easier to do this with services than it is for them to just keep making iphones well you could buy, everybody's going to use one iPhone. It's very rarely that somebody has the night phone and the day phone, right? But services are, I mean, theoretically infinite. They're not because there are only so many that you would want and there's only so much money in your pocket. But you can have more than one.

So Apple sells an iPhone to everybody. Everybody's got an iPhone. How many services can they have on it? They can have more than one. They can have an iPhone to everybody. Everybody's got an iPhone. How many services can they have on it? They can have more than one. They have two or three or four or five or six. And you might roll your eyes at that because at some point it becomes exhausting. But if Apple offers 15 services

and you only want four of them, they still sold you four services, right? So this is why they're doing it. And my point of my article too was to do a fun chart and also to point out like this is why they talk about services and wearables right the this is why you can see it um you know i hadn't made the year year by year chart before so that was my new chart of the week basically and um you can see why like and you can you can be skeptical you can not like

what it says about apple as a company i think all i think there's lots of criticism about these strategies that you and i have talked about over the years but the the money like you cannot argue the numbers look this is why they're doing it and and you know that they're a profit seeking company um this is why they're doing it yeah Yeah, the wearables part is fun. So the category, right, it's called wearables, homes, and accessories, but it's basically all wearables. And wearables is two products, AirPods and Apple Watch. That's what's driving this.

It's not HomePod, right? It's not silicone cases or whatever else they put in accessories. These are the two things. You look at the charts that you put together, and it's really interesting to see how there was, you know, kind of in like, there was a nice little bump, right, that happened with the Apple Watch. They sold a bunch of Apple Watches.

And then it was relatively flat, right? Like it wasn't really doing a lot. And then in 2017, this category exploded, which is probably AirPods, right? Like I would look at this growth growth and it's like oh yeah that's airpods so because yeah you have so many people that want to buy these products that already own your iphones and they become this fashion thing and a meme thing and it just went wild i think the i think you can't undersell the apple watch because for sure it creates something

the apple watch no i mean i think it's more than that i think in 2015 which was really the first year of the apple watch um they showed four straight quarters it was like 49 61 62 and 30 percent growth year over year that is the that is everybody buying an apple watch series one year two that was something that was hard to live up to that first initial the initial spike of a brand new product and so they had three quarters in a row where that category went down year over year because you had to do that. But since then, that category has grown way faster than services has. It's been in the more than 20% growth year over year every quarter, all but one have been more than 30%. And the last two have been both around 50% growth year over year every quarter. All but one have been more than 30%. And the last two have been both around 50% growth year over year. I think it's both the continued momentum of the

Apple Watch and AirPods. I think together, I think it really is a one-two punch. I think they're both because Apple Watch, they don't disclose sales figures. So we have to guess, but it seems like Apple Watch had a huge spike. They tailed off a little bit, and they have been killing it since then on Apple Watch sales. If you take Tim Cook at his word, and occasionally he throws out a superlative of like, oh, this is our best and whatever. But I think the Apple Watch is a big part of this. But I think you're right that AirPods is a huge driver as well and this is why so so as much as we talk about services this is why if i'm apple i am you know very highly prioritizing any other wearable product not only

in the long term with that you know they're supposedly working on air glasses and all that but this is the um search through the couch couch cush Like, what else can we do? Like, do we want to do in-ear AirPods with noise canceling? Yes, we do. Are there other, like, this is why I think that they absolutely will make over-ear AirPods headphones, headpods, right? Because how could you not? You convinced me. How could you not? Because I was really sure that they were going to do this.

Look at how successful the AirPods have been. If I'm in charge of AirPods, you just, like I said, until they usher me out because I don't work at Apple, I'm like, what other things can we AirPod? Like, do them all. Do them all. It's all wildly successful. Keep doing them. Yeah, I'd start to believe that, oh, because we haven't seen them yet, they probably won't do them. But now I'm back in the camp of, yeah, they're going to do it because they're definitely not to.

Why would you not just do it? just do it why not like even if they're essentially beats headphones except with a slightly different sound profile and they're white like still and more expensive because it's apple just do it yeah they have no they don't care about beats and like they don't care about beats in that way like they they have because beats just takes the technology and makes their version right and then they make an airpods version and beats is a brand that has an audience apple is a brand that has an audience and there are people who will buy apple uh over ear headphones that would never buy beats over your headphones and that's just i know that that doesn't make sense vice versa it's true and vice versa exactly we are back on that train here like they're gonna at least i am headpods so over

ear headphones with i don't know like and more kind of encompassing now. Noise cancellation. But it doesn't matter what the features are, right? Just make it because then you can make more millions and millions and millions of dollars from people. AirPods Max. AirPods Max. Massive. I like this quote as well from your article that in 2015,

these two categories combined were 16% of Apple's total business. In the last quarter, it it was 30 and continuing to grow so you know like we could be 2022 2023 maybe a few more years 50 of the business could be this i i don't believe it'll if it's gonna take a long time for it to get there uh it could it could but i think that we are definitely about to enter a period where a third of apple's business is services and wearables yeah yeah i mean it depends where they're going right like i'm still so conflicted about ar glasses right like i really am conflicted about it i i don't

i just don't know if i get it but if that is a product that they make and it makes sense in the way that the apple Watch made sense, it's just going to continue to pump that line. But I'm not convinced about that yet. I think the jury is and should be out on the idea of something to put on my face to connect to my iPhone. I'm not sure. Apple's next earnings are on January 28th. I'm really excited for these ones because i want to see what the

iphone did like i'm really keen to i like to talk about all of this stuff now because it sort of sets the stage for what happens in that holiday quarter which will get reported on january 28th how well did the ipad or the iphone do in the holiday quarter where are the other businesses now and what's the next stage of services and wearables and we will we will hear that in two weeks so the apple arcade revenue will begin i suppose so yeah yeah so they because it was in a free trial period and they don't break that out but they if it did well they'll say oh and apple arcade exceeded our expectations by you know they'll say some superlative about it that's what they do if they if they say something superlative if they have something to say that's superlative they will say it um otherwise they won't so like apple news plus also exists you know it's a remains a product

in our lineup yeah or they'll or they do that thing where they're like we are really pleased with apple news plus which is great and offers all these things it's's like, okay. And how's it doing? It's great. We love it. Okay. All right. You didn't say how well it's doing, but okay. So we'll see. We'll read the tea leaves,

but that's a couple of weeks away. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. We know that a VPN can protect your privacy and security online, but it can also help you take your content consumption to the next level by unlocking things that could be restricted to you in other countries. Or if you're away like me and you want to watch stuff on Netflix in the

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that uh to reference back to your to an episode from two years ago episode 170 the rat king of cables it's back the rat king of cables has been has grown has regrown because over two years you know you got a cable you put it somewhere and that's how it starts so i'm i'm speaking to you now from a room that has a lot of uh i i've begun the process of kind of upturning all of these boxes that have cables in them and then going through the cables one by one and putting them in the USB pile and the HDMI pile and the Ethernet pile and all of that so that then I can organize them, reorganize them and try to find, you know, get them back in their place. Because I had a moment where I needed a particular USB cable and I couldn't find one. I was like, Hmm, this is not great. Cause you know, search through the rat King of cables or just buy a new one on Amazon. It's so sad to do. I like, I know I have this cable, but I can't find it. So I'm just going to buy another one. That's a bad idea. So I'm, I'm, I've reached that step now where I I'm trying to pull all this stuff out.

And I found a bunch of old stuff in a box. I literally had a box that I filled with stuff from my desk at IDG five years ago, brought home and never opened that I opened last week. So I found a lot of really great old stuff. I was sending a bunch of pictures to Stephen Hackett of like, you get a load of this. Look at these two Newtons that I have. Look at this B cd-rom that

i've got uh all sorts of just wild old stuff that's in there but i have to figure out like what of that is salvageable and what of that should i dump and so i i'm i'm in the decluttering process there's also a lot of stuff the garage is also our sort of storage room for the rest of the house so there's a bunch of stuff that needs to go to the Goodwill or to the dump, depending, or the electronics recycling. So I'm in midstream on that, which means that my office is much messier than I would like. But I have made a bunch of changes. I mentioned on this show as part of our ongoing conversation with ATP about lighting and Marco's many, many lights that he has, that I was feeling it that on a particular dark winter days, it's not sunny today, so it's great. But on dark winter days and nights, that my one floor lamp in here is not quite enough. And I was debating what to do, get another floor lamp, get some other lamp that I could like shoot onto the wall so that the orange wall is sort of lit up.

That would be nice. And I ended up, and I think I like it and I think I'm going to keep it, is I had a Hue light strip, a Philips Hue light strip, the little LED strip lighting. And I put it on the frame of my window. So it's like shining up toward the ceiling and also against the wall. And this is the, my wall that I painted orange. And I kind of liked it. I left it there for a while and I kind of liked it. So I bought some extensions of that and now it's on the top and the bottom of that window frame. It's just stuck on the, on the window frame. And that's pretty good. So I don't think, and it means I don't have a floor lamp cluttering that part of my office that I have to keep moving out of the way to go anywhere. It's just attached on the wall. So I

think I'm going to go with that. And that gives me that extra little kind of hit of light, especially in dark times when I need a little bit more brightness. And it shows off that orange wall, which makes me happy. And that's a smart thing. So I can put it on. I've got a smart switch at the doorway that is actually a smart light switch that's actually turning on my floor lamp, which is plugged into one of those little smart outlets. And so now I have it wired up so that I can turn that on.

I can turn on the hue lights on the wall. So, you know, I, I'm doing that. I have some video lights that I use when I'm doing, you know, when I'm shooting videos or doing live stream of, of something. And then I, I'm actually ordered some more mounts to mount more of them up on the ceiling because the great thing about having those lights on the ceiling is that they're not somewhere else on the floor. Like they're out of the way. There's no tripod. There's no, you know, there's none of that. And, and out of the way. There's no tripod. There's no, you know, there's none of that. And, and it's a great place to store those lights.

And then I can just either on smart switches, so I can just turn them on whenever I am recording. So I'm doing a bunch of that kind of stuff. And like John Syracuse, I prepared the way, but I'm not getting a Mac pro. I just bought a new uninterruptible power supply because after the power outages this fall and also hearing John and Stephen Hackett talking about getting these like tower UPSs, they look like a tower computer almost. And all my UPSs, I've got two are like big, fat, thick power strips. And I thought, oh, actually that is i what i want and need for this right right where my computer's plugged in so i haven't i have one of those now too a big ups and the best thing about it is that it's got a silence button on it so when the power goes out and i need to use it in order for my lamp to work i won't have beeping coming to me endlessly from the garage like i did

in october these ups is like i get it but i don't know if i want this like massive thing right like a big computer sitting under my desk it seems like so much well mine is sitting against the wall right it's not under my desk and i've got i've got a whole that's another thing i did is i've got a bunch of cable organization that i've been doing where i've got you know i'm trying to tie the cables together and reduce the number i actually actually bought a new, like a USB 3 hub so that I can extend, I can run one USB cable down off the desk and then have a bunch of stuff plugged in, kind of stuck under the desk, including the one that runs to the UPS so that it can talk to the UPS. And then it extends.

I've got a little thing that goes all the way toward the wall. And then there is where the UPS is. So I don't see it. But this UPS is tall and not wide like the other one is. So it's actually kind of less intrusive. And if your power goes out, your computer doesn't die, which is nice. I had the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD. CP1500CPFC cpf let's see yep i see it look at that look at that thing wow yeah it seems like so much how much how how long would do you know how long your computer would last plugged into this thing i don't know i don't know we could find out but not right now no i don't want you to do it right now oh it turns out only 20 seconds yeah and you have it i mean because i never really understood how this works but you have it set up

or do you have it set up that it can talk to mac os yeah so people don't know this i think but uh these ups have usb on them um and they often come with like windows software and some of them have mac downloads but I'm always very skeptical. You don't actually need software, special software on the Mac for these things. If you plug them in via USB and go to the energy saver pane in system preferences, there's a UPS thing and you can configure it to like, you know, your Mac knows when it's on UPS, knows what the battery status of the UPS is.'s like like a laptop battery it's aware of all that and you can say you know after five minutes on the ups shut down or if the ups only

has five minutes left shut down or if the ups reaches 10 of its battery shut down you can you can do all of that stuff from right within system preferences you don't need any special software to do that yeah it looks really cool that kind of stuff but see i want i wanted to hear all of this from you today because i'm in just like i'm in such office limbo right now jason because i want to there's so much stuff that i want to do to my office but also at the same time i want an office outside of my home which is like a whole right of a big thing right that i'm looking at because we live in a two bedroom apartment and you know if our life goes the way that we want over the next few years i need to give that room up uh-huh and so i can't and so like i'm in this real limbo right of like

what to do we don't have another room like we don't have a garage we live in an apartment it's like i am looking kind of for an office outside of home which is like it's holding me back from making too many significant changes to my home office like i don't want to redo the whole thing and then rip it all out again but there are there are little things that i can do that i can also take with me right like if if i get an office outside of my home right like if i buy a ups i can still take that with me sure um but yeah so i i'm in a little bit of limbo myself right now, which is just like the worst. It's a challenge. And you've got to think about the expenses of an office versus the expenses and inconvenience of doing something like selling your place and buying a place with

another room, right? Which which you could do but is incredibly inconvenient right that is obviously something that we will want to do at some point in our lives right but we don't we don't want to even think about moving for like another two or three years yeah so you're in limbo you know we have like a like our mortgage is in a contract like a fixed term contract so you don't want to break it yeah because then you lose your rates all that kind of nonsense i recommend it's not a good thing that you just uh you know go work in a big glass cube bad for audio yes a little bit a little bit a little bit bad bad for audio that is true you got to worry about the audio uh because that's your job like the problem i've had is like trying

to find office space where we live is very very difficult because i i have also have like particular needs i can't work in a shared office right like i can find a desk in a shared office super easy but cannot find private offices very easily i had a friend who ended up working there was a law firm that had rented out a building and they had extra offices and he ended up working there he basically sublet an office inside this so it's like before there was we work there was yeah hey we have an extra office does somebody want to use this and you know that's uh you know i don't know if that would be your best bet or or not to just see How do you find them? And like I found an office and I've even gone to see it and thought it was really great.

But the letting company is not responding to my emails. It's like, I want to lease this office. Will you please let me lease this office? And they're just like ignoring me. It's like, I don't understand what's happening. Like, i want to give you the money that you're looking for it's very it's very confusing to me but that's i'm you know that's kind of where i am right now like i had this whole plan of like oh doing a bunch of

stuff to redo the office but now i'm in a little bit of limbo but there are things that i still want to do so like i spoke about it last time, right? Like I want to make my kind of second desk more of a fixed iPad writing desk. So I'm still looking at stuff like that. I'm still trying to work that out myself. I actually want to talk about keyboards in a minute. Right.

Because that's kind of like a place where I am in my life right now. We've all been there. We've all been at the keyboard part of their life but i'm also at the same time still looking for just general inspiration as you know i've been we would again we spoke about this when we were together i've been working out of that office now for three years and it was put together in a way that is very different to how it's used now yeah yeah like my initial conception your you built your office just as i built my office sort of speculatively saying well what what would i do if i had this office and then you use it for three four or five years and you're like okay this is not quite what i you know i i made i made some guesses and some

were right and some were wrong and it's not quite how I work now. And then you have to, and that's what my kind of project has been about is making some revision, like getting a new desk. Cause like that, that was a, I thought buying that relatively cheap, very small, uh, sit stand desk was a good idea at the time. And I guess it was, but having sat at it for five years, my, it's not the right desk for me. So yeah. And you're still happy with the desk that you have oh i love it i mean it's the because it's the it's like the reclaimed hardwood uh desktop and you know this one's got multiple settings so that it remembers

like my standing position and my sitting position and stuff which the other one did not um it's uh yeah it's really nice and because of the size that actually i can tuck more stuff underneath the the desk and so i can do talking about cable management like i can attach i actually at one point have i've given some thought to uh i bought the drive i bought a samsung ssd i've given some thought to um putting like velcroing the drive under the desktop as my backup drive as my like super duper clone drive although since my iMac is visa mounted um I can actually just there's like a little space in the visa mount where the drive goes like I don't even need to attach it it just kind of like sits there and it's completely invisible to me and it's just directly attached by USB-C to the to the imac oh i uh i just stuck my samsung ssd drive that i use for my time machine but with velcro onto the back of the

of my imac pro i don't care yeah i i agree but i thought about putting stuff under the desk and i do have like i said i have a hub under there and i i bought a a metal shelf for my um my usb audio interface and so i don't even see it anymore it's down there and i it's accessible but like I bought a metal shelf for my USB audio interface. And so I don't even see it anymore. It's down there and it's accessible, but like it's not on my table anymore. And I may do that with the mute switch at some point too. And just like trying to clear some of the junk off the desk. But I am happy with the desk. I have, by the way, I have two points of additional follow-up.

One is USB follow-up. I guess this is a follow-out. There's a bug happening in Catalina, and none of us have been able to pin it down. Casey Liss has talked about it on ATP a little bit. And I've seen it, too, where something is going on, and I think it's USB. I don't think it's actually Bluetooth. I think it's USB, and I think the bluetooth is on the usb bus is that bus headed for dongle town no that bus is driving away from dongle town and it's on fire i bought a

uh a new dvd drive to use to do like you know i i back up my dvds and put them on a plex server which is great because then i don't have to fish out the DVD and fish out the Blu-ray to watch something. I can just kind of like, it's very easy then to put it on my TV using the Apple TV app or even sideload it to my iPad and take it on a trip, whatever. So I bought a new one of those. And so I was at a point where I was ripping a Blu-ray, doing a podcast. So there's a USB audio interface there and Super Duper launched and was that new Samsung SSD. It was doing a clone backup to my SSD. Those are all USB tasks, right? And my USB audio interface started cutting out. My trackpad started getting jumpy because it wasn't plugged in

and then i plugged it in and it was it was okay after that my but my bluetooth mode trackpad was getting jumpy the uh the ripping procedure on the blu-ray disc failed oh and i thought what is happening here and then i stopped the super duper clone and ejected and unplugged the drive and i turned off the blu-ray drive and i unplugged and replugged the usb audio interface and then i didn't have any problems and i thought to myself something there's a bug here somewhere because i did not see this before overloaded somehow yeah something is happening where the usb bus is getting overloaded by something it is unable to prioritize all of these things and it has dropouts and the dropouts can result in dropped audio from a usb interface or a drop that leads to a failure from a blu-ray drive or

jittery potentially it's related to jittery input from, from keyboards and mice. And I think it's all because of that, that backup that was, that was going on. So this is similar to what Casey has seen. And I, if somebody from out Apple out there who knows about USB stuff,

like I'd love to know more about this or tell you more about it. But, you know, USB was broken in, what was it, Sierra, maybe? Or High Sierra? There was a release of OS X a few years ago where USB was really broken and we all kind of like couldn't move our podcast machines to it because it became really unreliable and it very slowly got more reliable. But something happened with Catalina and it's back to being kind of not reliable, at least under load. So that's a real bummer because that kind of like puts back a lot of my ideas about chaining things for USB and doing a local direct super duper backup instead of just using the network. And, you know, because I have not have my usb audio interface for podcasts be unreliable like oh i can't record any podcasts

when any other usb devices are attached is not a great look so so i have that update so casey if you're out there you're not alone and um my other update is a power outage update since we're talking about my office and so that's what this segment is about. Yeah, I can understand now a little bit more. I've forgotten about the rolling power outages, right? That's one of the reasons you probably are thinking so much about UPSs and are maybe a little bit more sensitive to it, because you've lived the life of multiple days. We had the three-day outage, and the UPS isn't going to protect you from a three-day outage, but it will at least give you a little bit of battery to finish. But it just at least will make you, this whole thing will make you think about power a little bit more.

Right, exactly. So after the outages, we looked into doing rooftop solar with a battery backup, because with that on a sunny day, you could basically, the power could go out for a few days and you could still have power in your house, which would be great. But you also have other additional benefits for that, right? Like your power bill will get cheaper. Exactly. You'll be using more renewable energy. There are lots of benefits for solar. Yeah, but losing power for three days was the impetus to be like, okay, we should really do this.

And then I looked into it and it turns out we have a, you know, please do not send advice. By the way, I'll just say that now because I know I'm going to get advice from people who don't know all the details about this. But here's the thing. I have a 20 plus year old roof, which doesn't leak, which is great. However, technically, that roof is getting toward the end of its life. And everybody i talked to about solar said well you really have to replace the roof if you're going to do solar because otherwise the roof's going to fail and you're going to have to de-install all of your panels

and then reinstall them on the new roof and that's no good so we really advise that you know you need a relatively recent roof start with a fresh roof. So, because the damage is way worse when you, if you have panels. Right. So, guess what? That takes a project that was already really going to be expensive when we've got a child in college and another one going to college soon and said, yeah, take that number that you were already wincing at and thinking you might not be able to afford, but you could probably grit your way through it. Now add $20,000 to it, at least. And at that point, I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. So the rooftop solar is off. Maybe after I have to replace my roof, I'll think about it again. But I had a moment where I thought,

okay, it's inconvenient not to have power for a few days. But when I think about a project that would cost, I mean, a lot, let's just say a lot of money, all told, versus finding ways to make the pain of an occasional outage less painful and then just rebuying the groceries that spoiled in the refrigerator. It's like, I can't really justify it that way. Like, there are reasons to get solar. But in the end because of our particular circumstance i just don't think we can afford the the scale of it having to replace the roof and then do solar and then get the battery it's a lot so um i'm the moment i made that decision of like we're not going to do that um and that all that money that we were going to

spend is not being spent i was like oh i can spend a small amount of money that we were going to spend is not being spent, I was like, oh, I can spend a small amount of money on a few things to make life a little easier if we do get an outage. So the first thing I did was I actually bought this thing called a power bank, which is like a giant UPS. I bought one from Goal Zero. I bought the Yeti 1000. You plug it in, and it's a giant it in and it's it's a giant battery and it charges and then when the power goes out you can use it not to you can't like run a giant appliance on it but there are certain things in our house that we could run off of this thing and they also sell a uh a solar panel that charges it um in like 20 hours or something like that. So it would be,

and I'll explore it because you can get a second panel for it and then charge it faster and all that. But so I'm going to buy that. I just bought that. So we'll have more power available to us in a giant battery to get us through like at a very low level with some of the stuff in our house. And that's a start. And I'll look into some other stuff too. I'm not sure I really want to buy a gas generator because for lots of reasons, like having to have a gas can and oil and it's noisy and smelly and like I'd rather not go down that route.

But anyway, all that stuff is kind of back open just because i'm not going to spend 50 or 60 000 at least on a solar project because i don't have that money to spend i'm not going to do that so instead i just bought a giant battery so a lot of batteries coming to my house mike lots of batteries all the great batteries uh can we talk about keyboards let's do it there comes a time in every person's life when they must make the walk of the travel. Sorry. The travel to the keyboards. The Dolphins of Cortex, the Cortexans, they got to me. So it just started as like a couple of questions through Ask Cortex.

And then some follow-up was sent to me. And now I am like deep into mechanical keyboard land. So I currently own two mechanical keyboards. I own a WASD keyboard, which I really like. It was the first one that I bought. And I learned a lot. I learned that what switch I like, I like Cherry Brown switches because they've still got some clickiness,

but it's not a lot of force. It's like the least amount of force to apply. So it doesn't really cause me any strain in my hands right so like because like you know you can you can really go for it and plus i don't want it to be too loud i just like a little noise um i liked the wsd keyboard because you could basically customize every single key to be the color that you wanted and i got like some wild colors um but i bought a keyboard without arrow keys i wasn't really paying attention i didn't really think about it and i hate that i love the keyboard and it's possible to use arrow key like you can hold down a little function key and use uh like i think it's like the i j k and l i think so it's like instead of the arrow keys like on the keyboard which is

fine but it just doesn't work properly for me like but i do love that keyboard then i bought an ergodex keyboard which is a split mechanical keyboard so it splits in half which is like the keyboard that i use on my mac all the time which is the microsoft sculpt right like it has the split in the middle which is which feels good to me. Yep. And the ErgoDex keyboard is really nice, but I'm really trying to get used to it because a lot of the keys are unprinted and you are supposed to assign, you could use like this web tool and then you have to like plug it into your computer and like you flash the

firmware. You assign what you want the keys to do, which is fine because you can kind of customize it the way that you want, but I can then not remember what all the keys do, which is a problem of its own. And there's ways to fix that, like buying different keycaps, right, to replace the blank keys, which is good. But then I'm into the keycap world, right, where now I'm like, where do you buy keycaps

and i see a lot of keycaps that i really like the look of but then they're these like group buy things and it's like they're ever sold out or it's like you'll wait for like six months it's like a whole thing and then you and then i asked you what keyboard you're using and you're using the keychron keyboard and now i'm looking at those and they look really interesting and they have a kickstarter campaign coming up for another new one that they're making I am like deep into this mechanical keyboards are just like a great thing to follow on Instagram like I follow a ton of just like these companies making tiny keyboards and and little key it's just like beautiful it's somebody the reason that this got to me is someone said this is probably would satiate Mike in the way that pens does and it's just like beautiful it's somebody the reason that this got to me is someone said this is probably would satiate mike in the way that pens does and it's very similar it like to to like the

the type of pens that i buy like you can get exactly what you want and you can have them made in certain ways and they're all nice and colorful in the ways that you want like it's uh that's where i am yeah yep yep so i've been there i've been where you are um the like part of the exploration is figuring out what you like and what you don't like so like i got a i got a wasd keyboard and because they do let you order custom keycap sets you can order your keyboard with custom keycaps but you can also just like get custom printed key caps and they are they are good and they have like a you can build your own key layout in illustrator and then put it in there and they will print them out and they will send them to you so that you can spend a lot of money on that stuff and that's fun um although what i

learned is that the keyboard that from them that i bought it it's got the, um, it's got, it's wider cause it's got the arrow keys and the, like the home and end keys and they're off to the side. Yeah. And this is why I say it's important to learn what you like because I've learned, I don't like that. I want a much narrower keyboard than that. So I don't use that keyboard at all essentially at this point, but I do use that, the keyboards that I told you about, and actually, you know, I've been using a couple of them. The Keychron K2, I think. And there's

another one that I've been using that's very similar. And, you know, so that's your first step, right? Is like, you said, oh, this little keyboard is really great. And then you got in, you're like, oh, there's no arrow keys. And I've had people send me keyboards and they're like, this looks great. You'll love this. And I look at it and I'm like, no arrow keys, deal breaker. And they're like, but you can use a modifier key. It's like, nope, nope. I've learned this about myself that I am not there.

So you're getting there, right? Part of this journey for you is learning what not to do with your keyboard. Do you have anything else you've learned from from that journey or or is do we just we just know about the arrow keys the arrow keys is the main thing that i've learned uh my love of rgb remains i love rgb i just think it's amazing i love to just have my keyboard lit up in a bunch of weird and wild colors and the ergodex has that um and i just it's just fun i just like the fun of it right like to look down at my keyboard sometimes it's like there's a rainbow there it's like oh how lovely right like i like that kind of

thing and i've i've also learned that like this is it's like just this fun little thing because i can end up really ultimately what i want to do is is build a keyboard because like you can really go with this and i think that would be a fun thing to aim towards one day like getting all the parts and building one and that it's like a whole different thing right but uh i'm i am enjoying going down this rabbit hole so i'm basically saying this like upgradians if you have things that you think i should be looking at in the custom keyboard world the mechanical keyboard world please tweet them at me because i would like to see them all right um so the other keyboard that i like is the vortex race 3 which i wrote about um which is similar it's got i think real cherry

switches whereas the um keychron is uh gator on they're like knockoff cherry switches they don't feel quite as good but they're good my other recommendation so wasd is great because you can get them to make anything for you um i recommend uh reddit the mechanical keyboard subreddit um there's stuff in there that is good i recommend um mass drop mechanical keyboards it that's one of the group buy things but there are key sets that come up on there that are really great if they match the keyboard that you're using and so i think i keep an eye on that and i've ordered a couple of things from mass drop uh in mechanical keyboards um ebay believe it or not there's a lot of mechanical keyboard stuff on ebay i've been trying to find it there's a really good store on ebay but i can't find its name right now um that that sells a bunch of different um keyboard layout

stuff and their their storefront is on ebay but i can't find their name right now but if you search for uh whatever kind of things you're looking for you will find a lot of keycaps and stuff you search found a lot on etsy as well yeah just. I didn't buy anything, but I was just like poking around. Especially if you're looking for custom keycaps, there are a lot of custom keycaps on eBay. And then, yeah, Instagram, as mentioned by Joe Steele in the chat room, there are a bunch of keyboard companies that are on Instagram. So you can follow Pimp My Keyboard, which I've ordered from, and Joe linked to Originative Co. on Instagram. So there's a bunch. You can fall down deep, deep, deep down that rabbit hole if you want to.

I am not looking for keyboards right now. I've got two really good keyboards that basically, um, that I love. I will probably at some point here feel that pull of like, could I get another color set and replace the key caps? Because that's fun. Um, I think I, I, I, um, was writing on my iPad this week with the Vortex race three, which is why I actually couldn't find that cord. I was trying to find my USB-C to micro USB to hook this, because it's not a Bluetooth keyboard.

It's just a wired keyboard. And I couldn't find one. And I finally found an adapter and I used that instead. It feels great, though. It's a really great keyboard and it looks great. And I like its keycaps better than the the ones on the the keychron which of course immediately makes me think maybe i could get new keycaps for the keychron and then it's like man don't do that to yourself but maybe we'll see oh i'm just looking at loads of stuff now

i really like this is all for me this is all joshua topolsky's fault because he tweeted out a picture of this micro keyboard that he had with this amazing, weird, yellowy, old school layout. And I was like, what is that? And he said, here's the rabbit hole. Enjoy. That was the end for me. But the result is that I got a keyboard that I really like. So, you know, it's not bad.

All right. Today's show is also brought to you by Booz Allen. Modernizing for the future is a challenge, especially for large organizations. You may need to integrate legacy systems with new technology. You may need to incorporate AI and analytics to work more efficiently and make fast decisions. And everyone needs new ways of thinking to move to what's next, whether for government or commercial goals. Booz Allen understands, and they're helping some of the world's largest organizations to modernize. They understand the missions of government and industry and the need to adapt to constant change. They provide open source solutions so clients can integrate innovation from anywhere,

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you both record separately i've been thinking about doing a podcast of a friend but wondering how you sync the show up for easy editing first off first and foremost episode 200 of upgrade right right that's the index like a little footnote there always listen to that we talk in detail about how we do podcasts but i'll give you the short version which is both of you record your end but one of you ideally is recording your end and maybe both of you and the person on the other end on a separate file or a separate track and the easiest way to do this is to use skype call recorder from ecamm software with skype easiest way to do this is to use Skype call recorder from Ecamm software with Skype. Easiest way to do it.

You can use Audio Hijack. There are lots of other tools. Skype call recorder will record your voice and the other person's voice on separate tracks. You can export them later. And that's great because if you're recording your voice and the other person's voice at the same time, you can lay those down in your editing, you know, in GarageBand or Logic or wherever you want and then you get your friends file and you line your friends file up so it's exactly making the sounds at exactly the same time as the one that you recorded on your computer you can visibly see it and then you've got that reference so the reference track whether it's just one person or multiple people the reference track is the most important thing you can do a three two one clap kind of thing um but i don't think you need to and the other tip i'll use is when you're lining up tracks to get them to match if you don't have

a reference track um people start recording at all sorts of times but they tend to all end recording at the same time so line up the end nice not the beginning but that's that's the way and then there are syncs you can do and if there's drift in the recording where they're lined up at the beginning and then by the end they're off by a little bit you just kind of snip and slide it a little bit halfway through and get it to be could it be close but the short version is just have a reference track and line up your files to that and my additional tip is don't just line it up once because it's a thing called audio drift. So the audio can get out of sync again later on,

depending on how long you record. So keep the Skype reference track in your audio project. And as you're editing through, make sure that it's continuing to match. You might need to adjust it a little bit here or there. This is something that you and I do differently. I don't keep the track in there, but what i do is after i've lined it up at the beginning i go to the end and hear if it's lined up and if it's not lined up what i'll do is i'll go through

maybe every 15 or 30 minutes i'll split the clip and line it back up and then move ahead and then split it again and line it back up and deal with the drift that way but once i've got it where i feel like everybody's matching the reference track i delete the reference track because i don't want to deal with it like i don't want to account for it either way i keep the reason i keep the reference track is in case i mess up something in the edit and get it out sync myself which i have done many times and then that keeps it in there so i can then get it back into sync again but it doesn't matter however you edit it edit it your way but you want that's the way that you do it. That's the way that we make sure that we line things up is that we

keep the reference track. Plus it's good to have in case something goes wrong with somebody's audio. And then you also, I mean, you have Skype. Yeah. If you're back at the recording. Yep. Gary wants to know what was your top song from 2019 in your Apple music replay? Okay. So I went and looked at this and my number one song was a song called My Honest Face by Inhaler, which is a fun song. I sent it to a bunch of my friends who like

U2, so like John Syracuse and Merlin, and I said whoa, these guys sound like they've listened to those early U2 albums as much as we have. Only yesterday, in preparation for this podcast did I look up who Inhaler is and was amused to know that this band that sounds a lot like early U2, their lead singer is Bono's son. So I'm sure he's heard a lot of U2 and sounds a lot like bono because it's bono's son i had no that's wild no idea but if you like um you know boy and war and the early you too

check out my honest face by inhaler it is like a tribute to early you too it sounds great jason that's hilarious i had no idea now my number two in the list was bags by clara which is actually my favorite song of 2019 but uh she didn't make it to number one for some reason because i guess i played that song my honest face a lot too uh my my favorite song uh was by is overnight by maggie rogers which i mean this song was my number one but like my top 10 songs of the year is just full of maggie rogers like her album is just incredible it's just unbelievable i have a maggie rogers story here which is also really funny that that i just realized on friday so on friday i was listening because I keep playlists of like my favorite songs of the

year. And Friday, I was listening to Love You for a Long Time by Maggie Rogers. And I thought, I really love this song. I need to look up Maggie Rogers and see what other stuff she's got, because maybe I should listen to other stuff from her. And I found first off, one of my favorite things that happens in the streaming music era, where I'm picking up songs here and there, just based on their appearances in various playlistslists is I discover later, not that they're related to somebody from U2, although sometimes that happens, but I discover later that I've actually liked several of this person's songs, but didn't know it was the same person. And that's always a great sign. Like after the fact, it's like, oh, this person's music really works for you. You should explore them

further. And that's happened to a bunch of artists and i found with maggie rogers that in addition to love you for a long time um she had the song light on which was also in the playlist because i really like that song at which point i finally uh read up on her history and discovered that that viral video where she plays her song alaska for pharrell williams and he starts to cry because it's so good and he has nothing to teach her about being a musician other than keep doing what you're doing which was really great so i've added her album now to my library and i'm gonna listen to it so she's great her the the album that she put out uh i think it was i think it was last year it was at the very end 2018 but i heard it in a past life is just absolutely wall-to-wall

incredible like if you have not listened to that album you should listen to that album because it is absolutely fantastic it's a great example too of somebody she was born she grew up in in rural um like tidal maryland and uh spent a lot of her formative life with she's born in 1994 she's she's pretty young um around folk music and she was like a banjo player and then she comes to nyu and is um in their you know creative arts program basically their music program the clive davis school and you can hear her folk music background and her you know in in her music but but it's modern music like she she is synthesizing this classic kind of folk music and then taking it to a completely different place which is that's what makes a somebody a great musical artist so yeah

i it was great that i saw her in your list here because i just was uh digging in on her on friday because i like her a lot uh my my other like the top list is also dominated by vampire weekend's most recent album which i absolutely loved it features um daniel i think it's danielle heim from the band heim yeah also one of my favorite like she's on like three or four other songs i didn't know that i'll have to check that out because i like that album is like it's an absolute return to form for vampire weekend fire for the bride is the name of the album that was my most listened to album of the year it's funny how time works it's like most of the songs are maggie rogers but i'm listening to the album

but whatever uh yeah that they're they're my two they were my two favorite albums of last year um i also loved false alarm by two dollar cinema club so there's more recommendations for if you want them marcello asks do you use multiple volumes in your internal macbook disc one for system other for documents or whatever or do you just use one big volume and are there any pros or cons to one method over the other after reading about i forget who it was now um somebody's approach to photos i actually have finally embraced apfs and so i have well first off one for system one for documents catalina means that you have a volume for system like catalina enforces that you have a volume for system it's called the name of your volume space dash space system i think right like that's that's everybody gets

that now in catalina but i also have an apfs volume called um photos that has a maximum size and the idea here is that all these apFS volumes share space you don't have to like commit 10 gigs over here and then you don't get that 10 gigs anywhere else they all share space which is great um but you can enforce a quota and what that means is I've got my photo library set to um you know only download what it needs It's not syncing the whole library because it won't fit on my SSD. And those, but as it's downloading what it needs, it's waiting until it gets to a certain percentage before it starts deleting stuff. So it'll fill up a lot of your drive before it'll start deleting stuff. And the tip that I got from somebody who I can't remember

now, sorry about that, is make a photos volume, give it it a quota a maximum size it can be and then when it reaches near 10 of that it'll it'll start deleting files and it won't expand to fill all the space on your hard drive and so i am doing that and that's the first time i've done something like that but that's it i don't i don't do a lot of partitions i generally just kind of want everything in one place yeah i don't i don't do anything like that i just i feel like i would start to lose track of where everything was being kept and then it would just become more of a problem i would say that now with apfs this is a great time to do that if you're a kind of person who wants to do these partitions because they don't

steal the space and that's huge right again you don't want to have this, oh, God, why did I make that partition, you know, 50 gigabytes, because I need I really could use another 30 gigabytes now. And it's over there, it's empty. But I'm over here, like APFS, that doesn't happen. So it's much more kind of free, but I never did because I don't need more places to look for stuff. And in the end, it's one logical volume. it doesn't it's it's literally one disc so it kind of doesn't matter but uh with a photos thing i'm trying that and that's actually pretty cool all right and our final question today comes from brian do you use your left modifier keys or right modifier keys more often and do you think it aligns with your general handedness oh brian brian i told

brian on twitter this was a good question and i have a little bit of a weird answer too i discovered um that i always use the left command key always i never use the right command key the right command key the right control somebody was talking because there was a keyboard back to keyboards there was a keyboard that didn't uh what was it it was they had Somebody was talking because there was a keyboard back to keyboards. There was a keyboard that didn't. What was it? It was they had moved. Oh, it was there was a keyboard that had a little tiny command key or control key and they had moved it like one was only on one side and not the other. And I realized the first moment I use this keyboard, I can't use this keyboard because this keyboard prioritizes this right command key or

control key or whatever, and not the left one. And everything I do, and as somebody pointed out in this Twitter thread, all the good stuff like command S, command Q, command A, those are all over there on the left side of the keyboard anyway. And yeah, if I want to print something, my left thumb goes down on the command key and my right index finger or middle finger goes on the P. I do not switch to the right command key and then with my right hand do command P. I can't explain it. I can't explain anything about how I type.

I'm a self-taught typist. I type fast, but I don't type conventionally. I just pot myself. It's not a system you learn. It's a system I made up and i can't explain the the command key other than maybe it goes back to when i had an apple 2 and there was like the open apple key and the closed apple key and they were different i don't know the answer is my left thumb does it all so i was trying to pay attention to what i'm doing and the only the only like real patterns

that i learned is that i use the left command key most often the reason that i think i do this is because most of the shortcuts that i want to use command for are located on the left side of the keyboard yeah so like command a command c that's where all the good ones are yeah right so like i'm used to doing that and i use the right shift key the most because a lot of the time when i'm using shift i'm selecting things and the arrow keys are on the right hand side so they're the only two that i've noticed that like i was using those consistently in that way i i use the shift on the on the left side most of the time i i think there are times if i'm i think if like i'm capitalizing a letter on the left side maybe i use the right shift key

but I for the most like using arrow keys to select stuff I don't use like a finger of my right hand to hold down shift while I also use my right hand for the arrow keys I do not do that I I'm using the right hand for the arrow keys and the left hand for the shift key this is surely there have been like uh graduate student theses written on on keyboarding methods right where they just photograph people using their keyboards and come up with like what the different populations are about that but uh it's a great question brian because it's it's super weird right it's and i don't think it even has to do with left-handed or right-handed because i'm right-handed and you're left-handed and we both use the left command key so yeah i don't know yeah i when i

saw this question i was like that's a silly question brian nobody does that and then i was like paid attention to i was like oh i do i have ways that i work so great question brian brian hamilton thank you if you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade and it will be uh sent into a list which may be included later on. I want to thank our sponsors again for the support of this show. ExpressVPN, Hello and Booz Allen. If you want to find Jason online he is

at jsnl. I'm at imyke. This show is a part of RelayFM. You can find this show and many more at relay.fm. You can find Jason's writing online at sixcolors.com and of course Jason hosts shows over at theincomparable.com as well. So you can get your fix for all of the pop culture stuff that you love in your life.

There is something at The Incomparable for you. Thank you so much for listening. And we'll be back next time. I think we have a bit of a special episode planned for next time, right? I don't know if we want to give it away but we can tease it we're working on something fun for the next week yeah i think we're in serious danger of doing a draft next week with a special guest so there is no apple event that we're aware of no this is a this is a historical draft out of canon uh but we'll

be back next time until then say goodbye jason snell Goodbye, Mike Hurley. Enjoy Hollywood. Thank you.