Upgrade - 293: Opt In Your Face

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Apple and Google join up to start tracing COVID-19 contacts, Apple makes a bunch of TV shows available to watch for free, Disney faces strong headwinds, and Bloomberg adds a bit of normalcy with a report about the next generation of iPhones. Then Myke at the Movies is sent back in time by whales to watch "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 293 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile pingdom hello i'm roger meber my name is mike hurley and i am joined by the one and only mr jason snow hi jason snow hi mike hurley how you? I'm fine and dandy, my friend. Fine and dandy indeed. You know, we're locked inside. Yep. As usual, really, for us. Yes.

Yeah. I have a hashtag Snell Talk question from Jordan, and Jordan wants to know, Jason, what is your Kindle font of choice? Kindle font. Okay, I do read my books on a kindle and kindle has comes with fonts exciting for those who don't haven't been paying attention you can now actually sideload fonts onto the kindle well um you can you can get fonts and put them onto the kindle and and use them well it's a feature that I wanted for a long time,

and then I went and got some fonts and put them on my Kindle, and you know what I discovered? Yeah, they're not that great. The third-party fonts. How does the licensing work? I don't know. If you've got a font file on your computer, you can copy it onto the Kindle, and then it shows up.

It's like your problem if there's a licensing issue there. I don't know. Anyway, my point is that the Kindle fonts that are made by Amazon or put on the Kindles expressly by Amazon tend to be good because they were put there with the Kindle in mind, with that being screen in mind.

And so I have two. I find them very similar and I do switch back and forth between them a lot, which is Ember and Bookerly, which are both on the Kindle. They come with the Kindle and I use those most of the time. I get it. Waka waka. Ember Kindle. Yeah, it's Amazon Ember font.

I think that's their custom. They may both be custom Amazon fonts. I usually use those. They may both be custom Amazon fonts. I usually use those. Another thing you may not know about Kindle eBooks is that they often come with a font embedded because the publisher is very clever and is like, oh, we have the license to include the font that we used in publishing the print book. And so we'll embed that in the Mobi file. And so you can read this book with our fancy font that we have that'll make it feel like a totally new experience. And the truth is, I have always found those publisher

fonts, because that's what it's called in the font interface, publisher font, not very good on an e-ink screen. They're bad. They're usually weirdly sized and fuzzy, and they're not good. They're good for printing, and then on an e-ink screen, they just don't render very well. However, I am currently reading a book with the publisher font and it's a good publisher font. I don't know what it is because it's just called publisher font. And it's kind of a nice change of pace for that reason. The idea being that when you read a different book, it has a different typeface and it feels like a different book. And when you read every book on the Kindle with the same font, it does feel a little samey,

like it's all just the same book. Even though the words are different, it all looks exactly the same. But it's a rare publisher font that's actually decent. So hats off to the publisher of the book I'm currently reading. Your font is decent. Maybe later on in this episode, we're going to find out what book that is. We'll see. Thank you so much to Jordan for sending in that hashtag Snell Talk question. You should send in a question, dear listener,

to help us open a future episode of Upgrade. Just send out a tweet into the ether with the hashtag Snell Talk included and it will get collected up and we may talk about it at a future date. And we may also, later on in the episode, talk about exactly how those tweets are collected. Lots of foreshadowing to ask Upgrade later on in today's show.

But we do have an item of follow-up, which is the Bridge Pro Plus. So this is the keyboard that we've spoken about a few times. Both Jason had a pre-production unit. We spoke about it in relation to Apple's upcoming magic keyboard of trackpad the bridge pro plus is the keyboard which is it's still in the works it's i believe going to be shipping apparently very soon from uh bridge people which includes and is their first uh ios focused keyboard uh that includes a trackpad jason has got his hands on a i believe final unit right like i think that's

what they said yeah right so this thing is as close to what will make it into your hands if you bought one um as is possible uh long and short of it is unfortunately you may not have wished you didn't buy one right yeah that's that's it. It's a product that was designed for the assisted touch era before iOS 13.4, where it's like, well, we have a cursor sort of, and it's a virtual finger, but it's something. And I think this product was always going to be a little bit esoteric. It was really designed for people who really, really, really wanted that pointing device and were willing to deal with the fact that it was very limited, that the hardware access to the operating system was limited. You basically could only use a mouse, so it's a trackpad that emulates a mouse. And you have the touch finger, which isn't very good. very good. But Bridge decided, they made a business decision, like, we're going to sell this. We're going to go ahead and do this. And it was a gamble. And unfortunately, I think it's

really just backfired because iOS 13.4 came out, which has a much more traditional cursor kind of thing, a full cursor support. And it supports trackpads. It supports Apple's magic trackpad too. And the support there is perfect. It is exactly what you'd expect. I imagine the new magic keyboard is going to have a similar kind of feel. It's going to be, it's going to feel like a MacBook basically. It's going to have that kind of feel. And the bottom line is that that trackpad on the bridge pro plus just isn't that good. It's it, it, it was sometimes I would, I would move my finger across it and it would sort of like take a, take a part of a second to like wake up and then start moving the mouse.

So the, the, the, or the cursor wouldn't move immediately. And then other times I would move my finger across and it would kind of hesitate scrolling with two fingers was not smooth. And that's part of the finger gestures don't work at all, right? Yeah, you can't do any of those things that the Magic Keyboard supports.

It's just not there. And although it is theoretically possible that Bridge will be able to do a firmware update of some kind at some point to make it more functional, I don't think you can ever buy hardware in the hope that it might get better later because it usually doesn't. hardware in the hope that it might get better later because it usually doesn't. And so for now, I just, you shouldn't, I don't think anybody should buy this because it's just not, it's just not very good. In fact, I was using it and I was actively, I found I was actively avoiding touching the trackpad because it would, it would just get, they would make the cursor come back and it would not work right. And it was frustrating and I was like avoiding it. So I have their other keyboard and I like it. But in terms of, unless something material changes in their firmware at some point, I can't recommend this product. And I'm looking forward to seeing the Magic Keyboard because I think that's going to have to be the solution if you want a laptop-esque experience including pointing device

on iPadOS. Because we'd spoken about like you know this might be an option because the Magic Keyboard is like a hundred and something dollars more expensive but honestly it feels like the the gap in functionality between the two will be greater than a hundred dollars in value right yeah it just doesn't it doesn't uh i think there's a product here right if it worked fine i think there's a there's a reason for this product to exist because it's more traditional laptop feel than the cantilevered kind of thing that apple is doing and it's cheaper it's cheaper by more by a hundred dollars in the 10 uh in the what in the 11 inch one and the 12.9 is uh 130 i think cheaper like they're both a lot cheaper but unless they can get the trackpad to work better i just can't recommend

it i mean i i would i just't. Which is a real shame. I mean, kind of the thing was, if this would have shipped before or shipped when it was originally intended to, I think the reception would be different, where it would be kind of like, this thing isn't great, but it is giving you the option

that you don't currently have, right? Where it's like, it kind of works. I mean, the gesture thing wouldn't have been a thing at all, right? Because they didn't exist. So it'd be like, you know, it's like this, you know, it kind of works. I mean, the gesture thing wouldn't have been a thing at all, right? Because they didn't exist. So it'd be like, you know, it's not great, but in a pinch I now have a trackpad there. You know, awesome. If you're on the edge case, this is an edge case

for the edge case. Great. Good to go, right? But now it's a very, very different landscape where there are lots of possibilities for you now because any mouse, any trackpad will work in some cases, right? And if you use Apple's trackpad

or practically any Bluetooth mouse, you're going to have a great experience. And then when the Magic Keyboard comes out, that should, in theory, be an outstanding experience. And so, unfortunately unfortunately Bridge can't compete with that where if they would have been able to ship something where the trackpad worked like Apple's trackpad you would

say alright this is close and it's a different form factor and it's $100 cheaper great option but unfortunately they haven't been able to hold that up and it's probably because they designed it for a different world they were taking a gamble they were taking a gamble on how

apple was going to implement now support on the ipad and then they got delayed um and shipped the product late and the world changed in many ways while that was happening. And it's a tough situation because they've been making these things and they're just not there. So I hope for the sake of the people who made another product that I liked a lot, the original bridge keyboard for iPad, I hope they can figure out a way to make this product more viable. But, you know, it's because, you know, but they made they took a gamble and they knew that it was pretty risky and that this product was potentially a very esoteric product. And you'd think that 13.4 would make it more mainstream, but it hasn't. In fact, you know, the implementation at this point is I with Apple's product laying out there. It's very hard to see how anybody should buy this product because it's it's not good enough the cheapness of it you know and it's relatively speaking it's cheaper it's still not cheap um i i would recommend that you buy the regular bridge

keyboard which is a good keyboard and doesn't have a trackpad and is cheaper and then in certain circumstances use a bluetooth mouse or a magic trackpad and is cheaper and then in certain circumstances use a bluetooth mouse or a magic trackpad or something like that if you want that kind of more of a desktop feel but and i know that you can't do that if you're traveling and it's on your lap but i just don't i just don't think that that as a touch device moving the pointer around on screen it's viable right now all right let's do some upstream headlines. Martin Scorsese is in talks with both Apple and Netflix to fund his next movie, according to the Wall Street Journal. It worked well for the Irishman, right? They got a lot of award nominations,

and it seems like everybody's been pretty happy with how that went down. And it's funny that you mentioned the Irishman, actually, because it's the same situation so this film which stars leonardo dicaprio is called killers the flower moon was in development with paramount but paramount don't want to progress because the budget was getting too high like it was costing too much money so it's the exact same thing that happened with the irishman um they were spending too much money so paramount sold the movie to netflix and it seems like we're back here again. Oscar says he's spending too much of everybody's money and now needs a suitor with deeper pockets.

I would be very surprised if Apple doesn't get this movie because this will give them something that they want, which is a consideration in awards season. They will put this movie into cinemas like they did with the banker or they were going to with the banker um and they will want to put it in front of the academy and they will bring it out on apple tv plus and everyone will watch it and will be excited about it and then they'll hope it will be good it will at least get them the nominations that they want because scorsese is involved and dicaprio is involved

i could see that. I could also see the Netflix scenario where they've been through this together before and Netflix marketed it and they did get a lot of nominations. And maybe there's some comfort in working with the people there. And Netflix has got money to spend too. So I imagine that there will be a bidding war there. One of them is going to pick it up because Paramount doesn't want to do it anymore, right? Yeah, exactly. And both of those companies will want it.

But I mean, I don't know if Apple were in consideration for The Irishman. Probably not because of the timeline. Probably too soon. But my thinking would just be that if there's going to be a bidding war, I would be really surprised if Apple let this one go because this is the exact type of thing that they want where Netflix, they saw great success for it, but they're going to have other options to them, you would expect, but we'll see.

Bob Iger's back. So we reported a couple of weeks ago that Bob Iger had stepped down as the CEO or is in the kind of transitions to stepping down um and staying on the board executive chairman now and would be kind of running some of the creative stuff but handing over the uh day-to-day running to bob chapek is chapek right yeah i think so but reportedly uh through the new york times eiger has retaken control of the day-to-day running of

disney to help them understand how they're going to change post-pandemic because disney and eiger is expecting that the company will be run very differently past right well yeah it's an interesting the time story is interesting because it is very much like everybody was speculating that maybe eiger stepped down because he saw the coronavirus coming. He's like, I'm out of here. And in the article, they email Bob Iger and he's like, no, it's really not that interesting. There's no secret behind it. We thought that this was the right time.

But the story is basically he has reengaged as executive chairman to run Disney in this crisis. So although Bob C, Bob J. Peck is still there, Bob, Bob Iger doesn't have a last initial. It's Bob. Everybody knows who Bob is at Disney. He's apparently being really steering the company in this because if you think about it, Disney, so when we talk upstream, right,

we're talking about Disney Plus and there's some news about Disney Plus, very impressive, that we'll get to in a minute. But what is the rest of Disney's business? It's movie theaters and amusement parks. Both of which put, pack a lot of people in a small space or a series of small spaces, some of them enclosed. or a series of small spaces, some of them enclosed. And you got to think that pandemic-wise, even post-lockdown,

that is a business that is going to have some real challenges. And that's a huge movie business and the parks business. And oh, sorry, also cruise ships. There's a problem with all of these things, so the cruise ship business is done um right and they're gonna struggle with the parks especially because disney was re-engaging and like putting a lot of money into the parks yeah like not only are they building more lands they've taken back the ownership of disneyland paris and were investing heavily into disneyland paris over the next couple of years and like what's going to be the plan now yeah yeah so so that's all bad for disney because disney there's a huge amount of uncertainty

and there's gonna they're gonna have to reconceive based on whatever we world we end up living in in a year what their business is like in those areas so uh it's a huge challenge for them and bob eiger knows those businesses well and is well respected and even though they were doing succession this is interesting because bob eiger i feel like has tried to retire multiple times in the last five ten years because he's got all the money you you know, he could walk away. But every time there's been a crisis and he's like, well, you know, we need to pivot to streaming and we're going to make that happen. And we're going to buy intellectual property from, you know, we're going to get Lucasfilm and Marvel. And there always seems to be a thing where he's like, okay, I'll come back and do it. And it seems to have happened again, where even though he's not

the CEO, he basically is trying to save the company and be much more hands-on about it at least according to this story so we'll see how it goes um the good news for disney though this is a segue mike the good news for disney disney plus that part of their business which is perfect for this era yep is doing great booming booming they passed the 50 million subscriber mark so this has taken five months to put this into perspective disney had originally forecast that they would achieve between 60 to 90 million subscribers within five years so yep they probably will hit that 90 before two years. So this is a big, big thing for them. Disney is perfectly placed from a content and pricing perspective. I mean, that's why they're doing so well, right?

Like people want that content. And at $5 a month is an easy buy for a lot of people. And I will say, I mean, I'm a few weeks into Disney Plus now. Oh man, I'm loving it, Jason. We're watching the Imagineering series which is fantastic but similarly for reasons I can't understand they are rolling that out weekly here we haven't got the whole thing um yeah you can't wait to you won't believe how it ends they launch a Star Wars land oh I spoiled it for you oh no so you know excited for the rest of that. We're four episodes in.

Very good. Can't help but draw so many comparisons between Disney and Apple when watching this series of like there is the visionary and everyone follows the visionary even though the visionary is not around anymore. Very interesting.

I recommend that series if you haven't watched it. I was watching a bunch of movies. Watched Moana last night for the first time. It's a great movie. So yeah, Disney Plus is perfect right now for me. And just to put that 50 million number in perspective, that's a third of the Netflix number,

which is, again, in a few months. It's pretty good. I think that's unbelievable that they've gotten that far. It is pretty good, yeah. Because, you know know it's like netflix and it is basically in its own business it's so big right like you have netflix and then you have all the other new streaming providers they're like different businesses the scale's so different right and especially because it's like you think of streaming you think of netflix

netflix are a thing and then you will choose your other streaming services i can't imagine there are that many people that like sign up like disney plus and apple tv plus but don't also sign up for netflix like netflix is just like a given right for lots of people for good reason it is wild to think that in that period of time they've been able to amass a third of the user base. That is very impressive. Very, very impressive. All right, today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at Rogue Amoeba. And I want to talk to you about their product that they make called SoundSource. SoundSource is a sound control utility that is so good, it should be built into macOS.

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wizards at Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this show and supporting RelayFM. Cats and dogs living together jason snell yeah apple and google have partnered on covid 19 contact tracing technology now this is there they are this is complicated stuff i want to see if i can do my best to break it down you can correct me if i'm wrong i was reading a lot of stuff for this to try and concisely explain what's going on here then maybe maybe we can talk about it in much broader terms. So in essence, contact tracing is a tool which public health authorities will use to track how

diseases are spread, and they can also be used to alert people if they've been in contact with people who are affected. Apple and Google have not created this idea. This is a contact tracing is a methodology that is used in different ways in different countries under different means. Apple and Google's effort is going to be a two-staged approach. First, there will be a cross-platform or at least adopted on both Android and iOS API that public health agencies will be able to implement into their own applications. This will be released in May. So here, the NHS, we're going to talk about this a bit more in a minute, they could implement this API into the NHS app, and then people could use

this information using the APIs with the system and stuff that Apple and Google are building. Then phase two is a system level contact tracing system integrated into the operating system. Both of these methods are opt-in. Clearly, the second stage has fewer barriers to entry because it does not require an app from a health agency or government agency to be required and will also be more battery efficient. The contact tracing system works by using Bluetooth radios inside of our devices to transmit an anonymized cycling identifying number to the devices of other people. So if two devices, i.e. two people, have spent a significant time in the same place,

these anonymized IDs are exchanged and stored on device for 14 days. If somebody tests positive for COVID-19, they alert the system or a health agency will alert the system, which will then alert anybody else who's been matched with your identifier. So if me and Jason have been hanging around of each other

and we're talking for like 20 minutes in the park and Jason tested positive, sorry, Jason, I would be alerted as being spent too much time near him so systems like this have existed in the past but not at this scale this is a privacy first solution which was inspired by apple's find my technology yeah this is this is something i wanted to mention which is apple and wire did a detailed story about this last year. Apple revamped Find My.

And one of the things they added, and all of us assume it's because of these AirTags that still have not been shipped, that are little passive trackers. But the idea is the new Find My technology uses cryptography and Bluetooth beacons. And it's looking for Bluetooth IDs, and it logs them. And there's a whole system that Apple built. And the whole idea here is they want to be able to find your device if it's not on the network and it's lost somewhere, but other Apple devices are going by and they see this ID and they log it and you mark it as lost and you get the data of where your thing was seen and boom you've got your device was found and it shows up on a map um that that stuff rolled out i think last year in find my in anticipation of the air tags product

that still hasn't come but when you read the descriptions of this system, it's very similar. And basically what this means is Apple already did a lot of research about how you do a tracking system while using cryptography and rotating IDs on the Bluetooth devices. And a system that's built up around that ensures as much anonymity as possible and makes everything opt-in. And clearly the Apple side of this Apple-Google alliance came to the table with a lot of work they'd already done saying, here's how we can do this.

And that's good. And Apple and Google, that's every smartphone essentially. And they want that. They want everything to be interoperable because Find My is just Apple devices. But this contact tracing stuff should be completely interoperable because Find My is just Apple devices. But this contact tracing stuff should be completely interoperable between Android devices and iPhones because that's the only way you cover the maximum amount of the population.

So a system like this is useful in the long term, really, as social distancing measures will change from country to country. Yeah, this is a phase two kind of thing where it's like well how do we loosen up the social distancing and the stay at home orders and things like that and one answer is you do contact tracing where if somebody is diagnosed you can quickly find out everybody who is close to them this would be a tool in doing that and then you can quarantine those people and you can stop it. You know, you can stop a little outbreak from spreading exponentially and becoming a huge hotspot. But you need to do that. You need, and in the past they've had relied on the memory,

faulty often of people and like, where were you and when were you there? And then how do you reach the people who were in that park on that day? How do you know who they are um and this technology would allow that to be a lot more straightforward first by apps um and second ultimately what they're saying is in the operating systems themselves that there will literally be android and ios updates that would make this work at a system level so you wouldn't even need to download an app to enable it but that's not going to be step one no and there's there's a lot of like questions around that which obviously we're not going to know for a while because like stage one is may so it's not like today right it's close but it's not a media so we don't know when stage two is going to be but you would expect it

to be i mean before the you know this won't be an iOS 14 thing, I don't think. This will ship sooner on both platforms. And I've seen speculation that says that this is an example of Apple probably taking people off of working on iOS 14 and having them do this instead. Which they should. Which they should. Of course.

So I would imagine this is going to be an update that happens this summer and that who knows what will happen with iOS 14 in the long run but they need to do this first and so they're working on it. And the exact implementation of that is going to be interesting like how it's going to be into the

system and how you're going to be alerted to it because this is all opt-in so you both obviously the phase one is like a double opt-in because you have to get the app and then opt in so that's why you know obviously and i believe the second uh phase of this is vital to make sure that the system works uh so the nhs here in the uk has already announced that it will adopt this technology.

They're going to be actually, which I found interesting, they're doing a pre-release test of it next week in a part of the country. So this isn't like an API that is going to be available for anyone to use. You have to be in a relationship of Apple and Google to be able to use this technology. Something that's happening here, though, is there is also going to be a self-reporting option built into the application, which I'm seeing a lot of people criticize, right?

Because self-reporting is obviously not information that you can rely on and also is open to trolling or whatever. I saw somebody on Twitter speculate that you could just go to the supermarket and hang around there for a little while and then go home and self-report. And now everybody who is at the supermarket

is going to get an alert saying they might have been exposed. Yes, and every system needs to be guarded against terrible people because there are terrible people. But I think the idea of marking it as self-report or having it have to be validated by the health organization before it goes out, combined with – I'll put this out there too – combined with penalties for lying about that. If you file a false self-report, that's like a false police report.

You should actually be probably held accountable for that, like, legally. So, you know, there's a combination of things that will need to happen to prevent, you know, or really disincentivize trolls from doing it. But, you know, I think having it, having, you know, going through your local health channels is probably the right way to go. you know the reason that we're doing that here is because the testing just isn't widespread enough so you know you can adopt the technology and i actually quite like the way that they're doing it you know on paper so there's two there's gonna be two alert stages if somebody self-identifies and reports to the system you are given what they're basically calling like a yellow alert right like you were being told that somebody is self-reported for this right so then you can monitor your own symptoms

but if then if they then or somebody uh is coming through the health service this is like a red alert like you have been in contact with somebody who's tested positive for covet 19 you must self isolate right so like it's kind of a situation of you can get into the politics as much as you like, and that's fine. This is a very politicized thing. But my kind of read on the way the NHS is implementing this is this is the best that we can do right now, so we may as well do it.

And I'm fine with that. There was also a lot of conversation as to whether Bluetooth is actually good enough for this like accuracy concerns like you know two people next to a thin wall i mean but it's like what else you're going to do right well that's that that's it and i think that they've tried bluetooth le you know its range is limited it's supposed to be nearby and the way this works it's these rotating blocks where it's like every 20 minutes or something like that. So you need to be, the idea here is you need to be in close proximity. It's not just passing by

someone. It's like close to them so you can see their thing for a long time is what they're going for here. Like, you know, it's not supposed to be, They're trying to get some of the noise out of it while still keeping up what a contact is. So, yeah, we'll see. We'll see how that goes. But, you know, clearly whoever engineered this has been thinking through these issues. But you're right. It's not pinpoint. It's the technology that we have in all the phones right now.

So it's what needs to be used because you need to really roll this out to all hardware possible let's talk about the privacy concerns because you couldn't have them right like google and apple are being very forward in their approach talking about privacy first right and the partnership between them is probably a good thing, right? Like, you want Google and Apple to do this and take a privacy-first approach because it's better than governments doing it, right, in theory. And also, they're being very open with that. So, I think that's really great. There's a zero use of location data in this information. So, it's just these identifiers right like the identifier is not then tagged with where you were when the exchange took place which i think is really great because really location data at least right for this right now is not

necessary you know um i think that no and as well like no data leaves your phone unless you explicitly say like report me right like report and and move right like my data is not leaving my phone unless i'm saying to the system it should yeah like if there's going to be a tinfoil hat crowd who are going to say this is all just a way for the technology government industrial complex to track all of our movements. And it is a tracking system. if you look at the way it's built, it's trying to use cryptographic techniques to separate the data so it can't be analyzed. So a lot of the stuff stays on your device until there's an incident, right?

So you have your codes and then if you test positive, you share your codes, which are then used by other people to look up if their codes match. But it's not like there is a centralized repository. They're trying to sort of keep it separately and keep, you need both pieces of information in order to understand what's going on. It is true that this system, once you say I've tested positive, you're entering that into the system.

And then somebody, your local health department or whatever, knows that you have reported. And that is a loss of privacy at that point. And you can choose not to do it. But again, this is the whole kind of idea here. There are absolutely issues here. And I think it's instructive for those who remember back to post 9-11, where in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, a lot of rules were changed and laws were passed that were essentially supposed to be temporary measures for security during the crisis that never ended. And so I think all of us need to be wary of that, that this is the perfect opportunity for governments especially to take more control over our lives in the circumstances where we're willing to give it to them and then keep it forever. It's always worth doing that. That said, you do have to balance that with the serious public health issue. And the story of governments is the story of balancing the personal need with the societal need. You can read about that in your college philosophy textbooks. If you like people, go look up Rousseau sometime. But I think it's a very

strong social need here. And I actually kind of appreciate Apple being involved in this because Apple is trying very hard to walk that line of functionality without having it be a giant privacy loss. And that's good. I do believe that this is an attempt to make this as non-invasive as possible. But we should all keep an eye on it. And I think there's an argument to be made that them making this announcement now also gives an opportunity for everybody to scrutinize it and say, well, what about this? And what about this? And maybe make them make changes. And this is not a kind of thing that if just governments rolled it out and said, this is what we're doing now. We're taking over your phones and we're reporting where you're

located and it's for your own good. That's a lot more scary than all the white papers being posted on Apple and Google's websites with detailed technical documentation, where they're really saying, here's what we plan on doing. And they know that people are going to scrutinize that and they welcome it. I like that about it. And there is a severe public health need. If we want to unlock the world and go back to something that at least allows us to move around a bit more testing and tracing is a it has to happen that that's that's how we get out of this so uh without it being just another huge flare-up so you know i i'm encouraged by this but yes it should absolutely be scrutinized like It's a very dystopian thing to think about,

but it's kind of even more dystopian to be forced to stay in my home. And I would like to not do that. I would like to be able to leave my home, you know? So I welcome this personally, right? Like I even, again, just thinking aloud here, right? Like even again just thinking aloud here right like i'm just thinking like i question if opt-in like that you have to opt-in is the right move for this like ultimately like i wonder if it should be an opt-out situation my my feeling is that it's opt-in but it's opt-in your face um which is especially once it gets on the phones like i imagine it's going to be like a like a an emergency alert you know one of those

things i want people to be told multiple times to opt all right well i mean right i'm sure i'm sure that they will they will have a debate about that internally but certainly it's going to be one of those things where you're not going to have to go to a setting that you don't know exists and flip it i think it's going to be a thing that pops up in your face in on the phone that says you know contact tracing help stop the spread um you know you you're going to do this unless you say, I don't want to be involved and then you have to tap. I don't want to be involved. And then yes, perhaps at that point, you even get bugged a couple more times saying, we really need your help here. But I do think it'll be that kind of a thing. It's not going to be, you know, find it in settings or download

this app, which is how it's going to start. Ultimately, it needs to be a foundational part of using the phone that it's going to get in your face and say, we need you to do this. And you're opting in by not saying no, but it's as close to an opt-out as you can get. And I think that's probably the right balance to strike is you want people to be able to say no, but you want to strongly encourage them to say yes. Because like, I think that a lot of people that would say no or would not opt into this are the same people that would also not respect social distancing measures. So they're like the people you need to be monitoring with this system, right? the people you need to be monitoring with this system, right? Like that is not a one-to-one correlation,

but I expect people that would not choosably opt into this system are maybe also thinking like, I don't need to worry about this, right? And they are the exact people that we need to be worried about. Yeah. And because they need to be protected from themselves and also we other we need to be protected from them yes and so that's what gives me like i i am like perfectly happy with this what is being announced here i'm so proud of these two companies for getting together to do this like this is the way it should be done but i really hope that they are

leaving things on the table that they might pick up again later on which is a stricter approach right like because it's for people's good and if they are saying they're doing it right and like they're not going to give these keys over to the governments afterwards like maybe we do need them like as a social responsibility to eventually make this more of a thing. And like I'm really happy to see that it's not just an API, right? That it is going to be a system integrated feature to the devices because it's like, you know, like Tim Cook. We were talking about this last week, talking about like at Apple, we are trying to find the ways which we can make the biggest impact based on what we do i mean this is it right like these are those things right and the counter you know the counter argument

again is the idea of you're enabling the surveillance state by doing this and i i really see that argument but what a couple of things one is the fact that the system is being built with privacy in mind is a good start. And the fact that it the counter argument is, but governments will take this and say, why don't we? You know, you can see the FBI argument, right? Like we've had this conversation on this show before. The FBI argument is, well, if we had tracking turned on on everybody's phones, we would know where the terrorist, who the terrorist came into contact with. And that would be an important piece of information for law enforcement. Even if it turns out that it's not, they would make that argument and it would be, you could do that. What I'd argue is governments are going to do that. And it's up to the people in democracies, at least, and the judiciary and everybody else to fight it if they can. It's up to these companies to build these things around things like cryptography so that it's a little bit out of their hands about what happens that that it's not one of those things because as we know with end-to-end cryptography uh you know encryption stuff um you know they they try to legislate it

and the answer is you can't because it's math like you actually can't open that that hole and and use the magic golden key to unencrypt things in certain circumstances. And I know this is depressing, but the bottom line is oppressive governments are going to use this tech anyway and already are. The solution is not to not use the tech because the tech is going to be used regardless. It's culturally to fight it as citizens, as companies. And I think that's what Apple has been trying to do all along with stuff like this. And also this feels just very necessary. picked up in two years and turned into a universal surveillance where if the police want to find out every single person that you've been in contact with over the last 30 days, they can get a court order and they can do that. By the way, they can already do that because they can use cell phone towers and there's other ways to do it. There's a lot of surveillance that already goes on. We all

know about it. This doesn't necessarily need to be in addition to it, but if you're troubled by surveillance saying, this is where I draw the line is protecting the public health, I think that that argument is bad. So scrutiny is good. But this sort of thing does need to happen. Trying to build it with privacy and transparency in mind is the right way to do it. And that's why I'm pretty positive about what's going on here. Because you could imagine another scenario where some government somewhere just demands that all operating systems of smartphones immediately start tracking everybody and dumping it in a central database, right? And this is kind of an end run around that. Not to say that the government of China won't do that if it hasn't already.

That'll still happen, but this might not be the vehicle in which that happens, and that's good. We still have other things in regards to Apple's response to coronavirus that I wanted to touch on real quick. A bunch of headlines. A selection of Apple TV Plus shows have been made free in many countries around the world so if you haven't yet qualified or for that first year promo by buying a device you can check out dickinson ghostwriter helpsters servant snoopy in space the elephant queen and for all mankind for all mankind is apple's crown jewel in my opinion so i'm happy that's in there watch it watch for all mankind if you haven't seen it because you haven't wanted to pay or whatever go go watch it now. It's free and I think everywhere pretty much.

And I think you need to use the app, one of the apps and not the website. It's unclear whether they're rolling that out on the website or if you need to be in the app. But there are all of those Apple TV shows and those are worldwide or free. In the U.S., Apple is, among other providers, enrolling out some other free content that I wanted to mention. All of Epix, which is an Apple TV channel, is now free in the US for a limited time. This is all limited time offer kind of stuff, but it's also free. And there are some great shows on that. Get Shorty, which is based on the Elmore Leonard novel.

You may have remembered there was a movie based on it as well, but this is a TV series that's very good and that's available for free. So you should check out that. Pennyworth, which when I describe what the show is, you're going to roll your eyes a little bit because it's the past, sort of past of alfred pennyworth batman's butler um but it's a really good show it's actually a very stylish spy kind of show and its relationship to batman is not relevant uh so you should check out pennyworth and if you're a fan of patriot also called sad spies on amazon prime check out perpetual grace limited which is by the same people and stars many of the same people

plus jimmy simpson from westworld and ben kingsley and it's bananas if you like patriot you may like perpetual grace limited it's not for everyone it's a very strange show okay but. If you like Patriot, you may like Perpetual Grace Limited. It's not for everyone. It's a very strange show. Okay. But if you like Patriot, you should watch it. Because it's essentially like the Patriot people. What's their next show? And the answer is Perpetual Grace Limited was their next show.

And they did a season of it. I don't know if there's more ever planned ever. Who knows anymore? But that's also available for free. ever planned ever who knows anymore but uh that's also available for free and in the u.s hbo now did a a big unlock which you can get via the apple tv channel or by downloading the hbo now app or going to hbo now's website and there there's an enormous number of shows that they've completely unlocked like the sopranos yourself to the some of the best television ever made yes actually so the sopranos uh big little lies the wire the greatest tv show ever made veep one of the best television ever made. Yeah, seriously. So The Sopranos, Big Little Lies,

The Wire, the greatest TV show ever made, Veep, one of the greatest comedies ever, Succession, which is a hot show that everybody loves and they're talking about right now, True Blood is in there, Barry with Bill Hader, which is a really good comedy drama hitman show that you should check out.

Elizabeth Warren's favorite show, Ballers, is available. Silicon, it's true. Check it out. Google it. Silicon Valley, which just finished, like Veep did, and is extremely relevant for our listeners. That's all available for free. And Six Feet Under is also free.

So lots of free HBO stuff, at least in the U.S. And if you're not in the U.S., look around. There may be stuff that got unlocked in your country too. But it's a really, literally, if you've never had a streaming service before, get something attached to your TV

and watch this stuff because it's free and there's a lot of good stuff. You'll find something good that you like. I would just like to add to that that I think that Sopranos is the greatest television show ever made. I mean, a lot of people do.

And it's there. All of it is there. So go watch that. And The Wire is in HD now. They did an HD revision of it with the creators of the show. So it's all approved and not a weird squirrely HD version. And yeah, in terms of the Apple stuff for all mankind. So there's just so much.

Just of those shows I mentioned, there's a lot of great free stuff right now the apple has published their most bizarre like bizarro world uh support document um which is how to put together the face shield that they created uh for medical professionals um including like some gifts and stuff it's just you you know today in things you never thought you would see this is one of those um they made an ad uh which called creativity goes on which is just a nice little ad but it's just showing the way that many people are continuing to use technology to spread creativity and joy to people um just like a nice little ad you can watch if you want but the thing that i found the most interesting is apple uh retail have created a selection of video materials called today

at apple at home so teaching some of the like today at apple uh type things so like you like how to use your camera well and all that kind of stuff right but the thing that i found interesting in this is it is an indication of the fact that apple can and are able to create high quality video quote unquote from home which i think is a good sign for wbdc ah yeah right so they're still able to do it right so that these are very well produced videos that you know i don't know exactly how they're being done um like i don't know if the people that are talking like are literally at their own homes or not you know what i mean like it's it's i can't tell that but however they're being done they are being done in environments which are deemed to be safe so when you're thinking about how are Apple going to do WWDC videos and sessions and keynotes and stuff, well, they found a way.

So I think that's a positive sign to see. All right. Today's episode is also brought to you by Pingdom from SolarWinds. While you've been listening to this show, how would you know if your website had gone down? Would you know if your customers couldn't click that Buy Now button or access your content? You might stumble across that problem by luck, but that's no good, right? You want an actual system to tell you because you want to know when something's not going well on your site, but you also want to know if things are running well. Pingdom will tell you all of

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Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. Okay. Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu reporting at Bloomberg about the iPhone 12 or the 2020 iPhone lineup, along with some other little tidbits of information uh this stuff is good because it you know it's it's it's a good sense check as to all of the rumors that we've heard where are they going towards i i enjoy it as a as a brief return to normalcy too to have a mark german report about future apple hardware like that's all i want just like feed me this information yes inject it right into my veins yes uh so we'll

break this down the iphone 12 pro so this is the expensive phones right we'll call the iphone 12 pro on the way later this year with a refreshed design quote borrowing cues from the latest ipads with stainless steel edges that are flat with sharply rounded corners flat screens meaning no curves on the edges so imagine your 2018 2020 ipad pro but now an iphone it's a phone this is what we want right the iphone 5 design too but yeah yeah yeah i think that could be really good this will be a a strong contender i think for the best looking iphone like ever like because i know that phones in theory get better every year but you look back at them right like people look back at the four and five as being the best looking iphones and i think that this one will be in the contender like

in the future if it does look this way in on paper because people like that boxy design and i mean i i've said it before i think we both have the 2018 ipad design is my favorite apple hardware design of all time it's so good and the iphone 5 is up there for me too so like i think this is i think this is a great look and i i'm i'm very excited i mean the moment they showed those ipads right we're all like whoa wonder yeah is that a is it but yeah well i mean it's like wow look at that but it's also like this is interesting is this a new um design direction that we're gonna see elsewhere and i think i think uh this at least suggests that we are and i'm happy about that and i think it would be really interesting to have the pro and the regular phones look different like significantly different not color

right and not just camera but like that is you look at it like oh that's a different phone right differentiating the models is not bad right like you want a reason to buy a pro phone you want enough reasons that you don't just go and get the 12 or whatever yeah and one of those reasons a valid reason for many people is like, I think this looks better, so I will spend the money on it. Three cameras and a LiDAR sensor. So it will be a combination

between what we have on the current iPhone and the iPads. I can imagine a real stovetop array, right? Like the four, you know, it's probably what we're going to end up with. There will be two pro phones and the larger, the Max, will have an even bigger display. So a slightly larger than the 6.5 inch display. This mirrors some rumors that we've been hearing for the best part of a year now. I think even before the 11 line was shown off, and we'll bear this out a little bit more in a moment,

but there will be changes to the physical sizes to some of these phones. And this was one that's really interesting to me, and I'd be super intrigued to see how this goes, but it is expected that Apple will debut a slightly smaller notch design on the Pro line because they are, as you would imagine, trying to remove that notch over time. Sure it was still feature face id there's no rumor of touch id um and of

course 5g on this phone line as well i will say that lineup that is an exciting phone that is a much more exciting sounding phone than i thought we were going to get from the 11 Pro to the 12 Pro. Yeah. Yeah. And a more maxi max, you got to love that, right? You love to see it, Jason, if you're me. If you're you, yeah, sure. You love to see it. Then as well, this is another really interesting thing. So this is a difference. Two lower end iPhones to replace the 11 so the iphone 12 and the iphone 12 max we'll call it yeah and the rumor here i think was that it's it's we can call it the

12 and the 12 max but i think the rumor is that the it'll be a smaller phone than the current 11 something that is that is more because if the 11 uh again is originally was the the 10r and it was a mid-size phone between what is now the the pro and the pro max and so i think the idea here is get use that as the big 11 but have a smaller 11 too because some people like the 11 concept but it's still a big phone, and some people want a smaller phone. But, like, you know, it is possible. I would be surprised if they didn't call those 12 and 12 Max. Like, that doesn't make sense to me.

Yeah, I mean, it makes perfect sense. But in that case, the scenario there is that what we think of as the 11 would be the 12 Max, its successor. And the new 12 is a lower end, or at least a smaller, not a lower end, but a smaller version of the bigger 11, 12. But this is not the SE, though. No. That's a different thing. It still hasn't happened yet. But it probably will.

And then I think the thing about the SE is not size anymore. SE is price, and that's the way that that will differentiate. The iPhone SE is not the small iPhone because it's that will differentiate like the iphone se is not the small iphone because it's not going to be the small one anyway that you know you may already have seen the se by the time you're hearing this people are saying that it's going to come out this week but that's not going to be an iphone 5 sized phone or whatever it was right it's going to be like an iphone 8 size phone um so uh the the ip iPhone 12 and 12 Max will have two cameras. So we'll expect that all the cameras will get better,

but it won't be gaining a telephoto lens or a LiDAR. So that makes a total of four iPhones at the end of the year, which is a lot of iPhones. Plus an SE, theoretically, coming now. which is a lot of iPhones. Plus an SE, theoretically, coming now. Both lines of phone are going to see what is quoted as significant processor upgrades with an emphasis on AR and AI,

so artificial intelligence and augmented reality. I mean, that's what all of Apple's chips have been focusing on for years. I mean, they get more powerful in other ways. The A14, presumably, and it'll be more powerful in other ways but the a14 presumably and it'll be more and then all those ways because it doesn't say either way like this would suggest to me that we're going to see a similar uh line to the 11 and that really like you know the cameras and the

chips are the same in both phones but they differentiate in other ways yeah more cameras in the high end uh different design now 5g different design smaller uh notch all those things right um we obviously as well you know as you would expect a staggered release due to uh coronavirus some phones will launch weeks after but apparently apple is not expecting currently significant delay but it will be staggered i think of like iphone 10 right like the iphone 10 can like a month later or whatever um probably a similar thing where like these phones will be available on these dates these phones will be available on these dates that's that right um so that's the phones cool to have that lineup super excited about that 12 pro max right like

that seems like an amazing phone microphone it's the microphone that is like the most microphone that could be um i wonder about like thickness and stuff uh that's going to be interesting to see what they do there like what is going to happen there i'm intrigued about that um i would love to see more battery gains but we're probably not going to see those like i have no problem my phone's battery so it doesn't matter anymore i'm not going anywhere so my phone's battery can do whatever it wants batteries just remove the battery why not just constantly just let's just tether it to the wall and i'll walk around uh but we got some other stuff so a smaller cheaper home pod is in development expected for release in the second half of this year. About half the size, but a similar design, and of course a lower price.

Let's imagine, for the sake of conversation, half the price. Half the size, half the price. Could you imagine a $100 HomePod? I can't really. Because in my mind, I've turned that into a $150 HomePod. Just now. I just did it but uh yeah cheaper home pod smaller cheaper home pod great let's do it can't you get the current one for like 150 on on sales you know you yeah you can get it for cheaper it's it's a i mean the current one it's a

much better product when it's cheaper like it's not a it's not a bad piece of hardware it's just uh you know overpriced so a smaller version that is all presumably doesn't quite isn't as maybe over engineered with as many speakers and all that as smaller one that they can make cheaper and and uh and drive into more places and you know great great and you know if the rumors of the video believed it will be a very different product as well come iOS 14 time. You might be able to set default music streaming and stuff like that. So it could actually be a much more compelling product for more people at a cheaper price point with different software in the inside.

And then Apple Tags, our friend. Good old friend, Apple Tags. Yeah. Still there. I'm not dead yet. Not dead yet. good old friend apple tag yeah still there i'm not dead yet not dead yet this you know i i don't remember if i spoke about it here it may have been unconnected about like i just think apple's delayed this because it's pointless bringing out this product now we talked about that here

it's it's a series of delays that have now reached the point where nobody's leaving their home so or at least many people aren't leaving their home and it's less uh urgent to have a product like this so at this point sort of why don't you delay it i think that we all agree that this it seems like this product is probably ready to go or or or close to it and they might announce it or they might just hold it for a little while but but yeah yeah and i think it would be a fine thing to announce in september anyway because you September anyway, because things will have changed one way or another by then, you'd expect. But we've learned that these will be bundled with a little leather sleeve and a keychain and will be thin, small, and puck-shaped in design. It's that Apple touch. That's why they'll be so expensive is that they'll have all those

nice touches to it but but yeah i think for the actually the thing we talked about earlier about contact tracing like the way this tech is built these will be the ultimate trackers in terms of being able to find stuff that you lost and you throw in the ultra wideband chip that's in the 11s the u the u1 chip in the iphone 11s and there you're going to be able theoretically to have it be pinpoint accuracy of where that thing is in your house or wherever but uh in a larger scale if you lose it it's going to be like a lot of these tags that we've talked about over the years with the with the difference being that the identification network for these is every apple device, basically. And that means you're much more likely to find it

unless you left it on the top of a mountain. There's going to be a hiker with an iPhone up there who's going to find it. This is going to be like an ultimate product. I'm super intrigued about this product. I wonder if... Because even people that don't use an iPhone, if you have an iOS device in your home that you compare to this thing, like you'd be crazy to buy this over a Tile, right?

Right. Which is why Tile are taking them to court, right? Like that's why. I wanted to call your attention to the last sentence in that article. Let me read it to you. This is just, it's so tossed off. And I don't think there's another article about this.

It's just tossed off at the end of this. Apple is also working on a new version of the MacBook Pro, Apple TV, refreshed budget iPads, and a new iMac. People familiar with its product roadmap said. Bloomberg have reported this. I think this was a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about, like, potential product delays. They threw this out before. This exact thing. Yeah, so here it is.

Again, I've yet to see details of a new iMac and whether that's a speed bump or whether it's really a new iMac. And is that an ARM iMac or whatever? Same with the Apple TV. There's no detail about any of these products. A new version of the MacBook Pro doesn't state what size or whether it's going to be...

Is that the 13 with a new keyboard presumably but but maybe there's speed bumps to the other macbook pro as well refresh budget ipads make sense right like at some point you would just upgrade the specs on the budget ipads a little bit and keep them going new imac what does that mean i just i'm fascinated by the fact that it's just uh like not imac people who are interested in the iMac there'll be one we're not going to give you any details maybe they have no details to give that could be yep but uh there's uh they're not sitting down well yeah they're still they're still moving forward and I am I'm still remain very excited about what products could be released this year seems like there's

a lot of cool stuff still to come all right right, we should do some Ask Upgrade before we do our mic at the movies today. Yes. Before we do our questions from our wonderful upgradians, I want to thank Hullo for their support of this show. Hullo make insanely comfortable buckwheat pillows. I don't know if you've ever tried a buckwheat pillow.

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Hashtag ask upgrade questions. Flying Maltese wants to know, what is your choice of task manager? What does this mean, Mike? Are we going existential here? What is it? Well, I mean, there are like computer task managers. Like, I don't know what those would be but like focus to do the doc remind oh you oh you mean to manage my personal tasks not like oh you're

thinking like control delete like what are you thinking about here yeah yeah launch bar the doc no those are my task managers no okay this is so interesting to me jason because i never ever could have imagined somebody interpreting the question differently to the way that I did. Because, like, task managers are so ingrained in who I am as a being. I've heard Cortex, Mike, yes. It's important to my life, but that's just hilarious to me. I mean, so I guess take this question as you will. Let's start with you then.

What's your choice of task manager? Todoist. I think that it is the option most people should try. You can try it for free. It's on every platform. It has all of the features that most people would want. You can go higher end, you know, like deeper with a product like OmniFocus, but I will recommend Todoist.

So what is your choice of task manager? The, I sort of use two i have so i use apple's reminders app yeah as first off as a place i actually do use it as a place for reminders like if i come up with an idea for a present to give a member of my family for their birthday or for christmas i actually have a list and I put it in there. I'm like, remember this, right? It's perfect for that. It's a literal reminder. I also have a reminders list called Story List.

And I've talked about it here before. If I think of an idea for a story I want to write, it goes in Story List. So that's my running list of ideas for things I might want to write about, whether it's for my Macworld column or it's for Six Colors. That's where that goes. And sometimes I look at, I'm like, oh, I want to write an article today. And I'll look at it and I say, that one is a Macworld column and that one is not, right? But I put them all in there. In terms of more traditional tasks, I am using Todoist. At your behest, I started to use it. And I do use it mostly for recurring tasks,

because I have a lot of recurring tasks, monthly or weekly recurring things I need to do that I used to have as calendar entries. Because calendaring, one of the ways I block out time to do work is I put calendar events and saying, write this article, write my Macworld column on Tuesday at 2 p.m. It's a real thing. But now I use Todoist and I have a recurring event with a checkbox for Tuesdays that says, write the Macworld column. And with the new version of Fantastical with Todoist integration, it's just in my calendar app. So I'm back in my calendar app, but with Todoist to-dos. And the difference there is that I can check it off when I'm done, which is pretty sweet. my calendar app so i'm back i'm back in my calendar app but with todoist to do's and the difference there is that i can check it off when i'm done which is pretty sweet because like i think reminders is like excellent an excellent like to-do list or a to-do app

kind of i know this sounds weird but kind of different uh from a task manager task manager has way more to it your projects and there's the new reminders can do more of that but i don't i don't do it there and i will say if you're talking about like projects with lots of steps i don't do that i don't have that i don't have projects with multiple steps in them i just don't i don't even even something that actually has multiple steps it's multiple like the six colors newsletter that we do every month. I've got a recurring monthly event for the middle of the month that says basically prep the document and ping Dan and Steven and say, it's time, here's the document. And then I've got another to-do item that's

monthly toward the end of the month that says you need to write your stuff for the newsletter. And then another one that's at the end of the month that says you need to write your stuff for the newsletter. And then another one that's at the end of the month that says you need to send the newsletter out. But it's not like a project that has multiple, it's just three to-do items that repeat monthly. So again, this is my failing, but the last time we talked about this, I just put things on a calendar or in my brain, and I'm trying to use the infrastructure a little bit better. So who knows where I'll go from here, Mike. But I think I'm doing better. Gary, you are. Gary asks, how do I convince my family that their phones aren't secretly listening and sending data to Facebook and Instagram for ad targeting? Explain the algorithms,

look at their posts and all their friends' posts, and what you talk about online is what you talk about in person, but they're not believing me me this is a difficult one because it is like this stuff it's like it's creepy sometimes right how good it is you know like it's like i was thinking about this thing and now i've got an ad on instagram for it and i knowing how the technology works to a degree like accept it and kind of shrug it off as like a funny thing that happens like coincidental but it's not coincidence you know i don't know how you recommend to people joe in the chat room has said something that i understand it's like reply all did like a big thing about this once um if somebody can give me that link i'll put it in the show notes but i remember that episode going around that they did like a big deep dive into it but do you have one what is your opinion yeah i

mean what i would say is you need to tell them that apps don't record audio unless you give them permission and you can give them not permission and then they can't and that's because apple wants to protect you and um as for the one thing that is listening which is Siri I would explain to them that the way that these assistants work is they're listening for the trigger word and that's on device and then if they hear the trigger word then they record you and send that information but you can opt out now and you can turn siri off or turn siri off as listening for the trigger word and if they still think that uh that's all just mumbo jumbo and the truth is that those microphones are listening all the time i would say uh I don't know, that you can either buy them like a tinfoil hat or you can buy them a Faraday cage case that they can put their phones in that will block all signals. Or you can tell them to turn off their phones when they're not using them.

I don't know. But like beyond a certain point, like what can I tell my family member about who thinks the earth is flat? Like there is a point beyond which you just have to be like, okay, I can't convince this anymore. But like, there's been a lot of scrutiny here. There are a lot of things you can turn off and the separate apps on the iPhone. That's the beauty of it is they have to ask for permission and you can just deny it. This is an interesting spin on the question because usually it's about those personal assistants that are, you know, like an Amazon Echo or something and that they're listening to you. And I always point out to those people that you have multiple devices with microphones on them around your house all the time. They're your phones and iPads and Apple

watches and things like that. But this has gotten to the root of it, which is, yes, those things are listening to us. What do we do? And the answer is opt out, turn off permissions, turn off Siri. opt out turn off permissions turn off siri and and you know beyond that i guess hope like trust apple or don't use a dumb phone then or something i don't know like beyond a certain point i don't know what you can say to them yeah i mean honestly like i would say that gary has explained it the best way it can be explained, right? And if someone's not willing to believe that, I don't know if you could ever convince them otherwise. Anton wants to know,

is there some way to keep the iPhone from unloading certain applications? For example, payment apps that remind you to pay an invoice every now and then. So this is that thing that you may see where uh you you see like uh like cleaning or it removes from a device or something right and then you have to download the application again which is a can be a useful feature if you want to save storage on your phone that kind of stuff uh but i looked it up there is a way to do it if you go to settings general iphone, you can disable the feature Offload Unused Apps.

This is a good screen to just look through because the iPhone storage screen got way better over time, and it will recommend to you things that you could just have saved in the cloud if you want to save space. It's also where you get to a feature that I always disable, which is to have some photos stored in iCloud only. I have the big phone storage space because I want to keep all my photos on my device.

I just like that. I like being able to get to them quickly. I like being able to get to them if I don't have great coverage and I don't have an absolutely massive photo library. So, you know, that's is like a good screen to look through but if you look if you want that to stop happening to you that's where you go to do it jason ann wants to know do you have any book recommendations to help with lockdown boredom oh boy i do i do um how should we do this Mike

do you want me to just list them out and we'll put them in the show notes that is exactly what I want you to do all right um I recommend a bunch of books um I just recent books that I've really loved I loved a memory called Empire by Arcady Martine

this is a space opera ish kind of book also kind of uh society it's a space opera in the sense that it's about a star empire um but not in the sense that they're like lots of spaceships firing on each other and stuff it's not that kind of uh of book uh more of them, if you want a page turner that's not particularly deep, but is just a fun outer space adventure, I recommend The Long Sunset by Jack McDivitt. It's part of a series, but it doesn't really matter. And that was fun. I read that recently. I liked, there's a couple of uh, time travel-ish books that I have enjoyed recently that are both fairly short.

Uh, The Future of Another Timeline by Annalie Newitz is really great. Um, and This is How You Lose the Time War, which just got a Hugo nomination. That's by Amal El-Motar and, uh, Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone. Uh, we did an incomparable episode about that. I liked To Be Taught of Fortunate, which is another novella, so short reads, and that one's on sale right now

as we're recording this for two bucks. To Be Taught of Fortunate by Becky Chambers, that was pretty great. I liked The Cruel Stars. I read that last year. That is a space opera of the truest kind by John Birmingham. I'm listing a lot

because everybody's going to have a different thing that they're into. And if I can like blow through a bunch of them, you've got some different things to check out. The 10,000 Doors of January by Alex Harrow was a lot of fun. That's a kind of fantasy novel about a world where there are like many worlds with doors in between them and the characters travel between them and uh it's it's nice and uh i enjoyed gideon the ninth by tamson muir which is a very weird book about sort of like goth skeleton wizards who are on a planet run by a evil galactic emperor and it's just it's bananas but it's really good and then one of the best books i've read in the last

couple of years is a series there are two books out now and i enjoyed them both uh rebecca rowan horse's trail of lightning is the first book in that and that is on the navajo reservation post-apocalypse and they're supernatural creatures and the main character is kind of a buffy the vampire slayer-esqueesque young woman with a power to destroy monsters and it kind of messes her up, but that's her power. And I enjoyed that too. So there's a bazillion books to recommend

to help with boredom. Dan wants to know if I have the, that different Dan, if I have the, probably, if I have the 10.5 inch iPad Pro with the bezels in it, should I upgrade to the brand new 11 inch that I deeply want?

Yes. You should. We're going to be your enablers we're going to take a page from marco armand here and just be your enablers yeah yeah new brand new came out they're not probably going to revise this for a little while it's the 2020 model you've been waiting with the the bezeled one and looking at the awesome look of the new modern ipad and do it. Do it. Say goodbye to that home button. I genuinely think the thing that sells it for me is the desperately want. If you've been waiting for this thing,

now's the time. Yeah, if you desperately want it and you've been deeply waiting and waiting all this time and they just did a revision, go. Now's the time. And a bigger screen because the it's it's in a bigger screen because the no bezels it's a bigger screen in the same size ipad it's just yeah do it now's the perfect time any of the accessories they're all better uh especially the upcoming accessories

right because you get the ability to be able to use the magic keyboard which you wouldn't on the 10.5 and i would say if you find a used or refurbed 11 from 2018, you can get that too for a deal because they're not that different. That's another thing you could do. I actually recommend that is what most people should do. If you can find it for a deal, do it. Otherwise, just get the new one. And last Ask Upgrade question today,

Ethan wants to know, how do you get these questions into a spreadsheet automatically? So I do it by using a tool called Zapier. Zapier, sorry. Zapier is the correct pronunciation. And it basically, you can hook up Twitter to look, you can have it look for hashtags

and then you can pull in information from a tweet, which you can say, this is the information that I want. So I ask for the name of the person, the tweet content, because you can actually ask for the person's name, not their username. The tweet content and the date to be put into a Google Sheet. So you just connect all those together. It's really great, but I pay for Zapier to do this. IFTTT will also do it, but what IFTTT does not do or didn't do when I used it at the time was it would pull in only the username, the Twitter username,

which I didn't want. I wanted the person's name because I would be going in every single time, opening the link to the tweet, getting the person's name, and then putting the name in the document. And I use Zapier for a bunch of things, like for multiple shows doing this stuff, so pulling in tweets to put into spreadsheets, but also for business stuff. We have tools because you can use it to effectively in some ways, like build your own little Slack integrations. It's a very, very powerful tool. And that is the tool that I use for this. Otherwise I would be crawling through Twitter searches, which also don't work very well in the longterm. So this is a great system. It keeps them

all there and I can just pick the ones that I want. I recommend if you're interested in, if you use web services, Zapier is a great way to tie them together. It has plugins for lots of services, and I've been able to surprise myself with the things that I've been able to do because their interface is also very IFTTT-like. It's very visual, and it's easy to plug stuff together

and they do lots of testing for you as part of the process which I like so it's really good it's a really good tool alright we are going to talk about Star Trek 4 what is it called? The Voyage Home after this break as we thank our final

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and RelayFM. Star Trek IV The Voyage it's from 1986 yes so going into this uh i knew what did you know about it well i knew whales it was all i knew i knew whales the one with the whales the one with the whales uh i don't know exactly why i knew that but i just knew it i guess it's just one of those it's out there pop culture things that somehow got to me there was the one with Khan and there's the one with the whales and those are the Star Trek movies people have heard of

yeah and I knew both of those things I also knew the characters right and I knew from what you had told me because I asked you yeah and we did and we watched Star Trek 2 so you've seen a Star Trek movie and I needed to know what was filled in in the gap right which is they searched for spock and they found him so

this movie was very confusing to me in a lot of ways and i think it's because i didn't watch the one before right so like i didn't know what happened to spock yeah we did hear from somebody who said you should really watch star trek 3 and it's true true. Star Trek 2, 3, and 4 all run together. And I just didn't want to assign you homework, and I didn't want to do Star Trek 3 for the money. I didn't want to watch two movies. So, I mean, I could have summed it up a little bit. Basically, the Enterprise gets destroyed, and they steal a Klingon ship, and the Genesis

planet blows up. But they find Spock's body, and they are able to put his mind back in his body, because his mind has been hitching a ride with Dr. McCoy. Yeah, that was confusing for me. Secretly, since yeah that was confusing to me too i picked that part up but when he mentioned that i have carried your soul i was like what happened in that previous movie yeah before spock goes in to the death chamber essentially in star trek 2 he puts his hands on mccoy and says remember and that's the you know he's transferring his essence to mccoy in that moment before he sacrifices himself so yeah in, in the,

in the end though, they're like, they're on Vulcan and Spock is back, but a little bit weird and they're going to, they have to go home and face judgment for, uh, all the things that have happened. And in fact,

at one point, yes, yes. The Klingon angry Klingon ambassador, uh, in one of my favorite moments in Star Trek four decides to show them the two previous movies on, on a screen,

like federations, like, why don't you watch Star Trek three? And then we'll talk. And they put up parts of Star Trek three on the screen it's like great that was great thanks klingon ambassador who's angry that that moment like that whole thing just it just proves to me that all space franchises eventually lead to political council debate like yep they will all trend towards it eventually there will always be confederations there will always be debates there will be procedures there will be laws there will be rules and there will be judgments angry angry ambassadors who demand justice sure did this did these movies have big

budgets i can't tell i would say well i don't think Star Trek movies after the first one ever really had a big budget until the J.J. Abrams one. They had mid-sized budgets, but not big ones. And I think it's very clear here that the decision to do a movie largely set in what was then the present day is a real budget saver, right? Clever. Major budget saver. Can I just say about the premise of this movie? I have no idea how anybody came up with it and I have no idea how it was agreed to,

like how anybody accepted it. Now, this is not me saying that the movie is bad. I can maybe get to my thoughts about it in a minute, but just like, all right, so Earth is under siege from a probe, which is never really explained. The serious alien probe that leaves as soon as they solve the problem and never we never hear about it again and nobody

knows where it came from or where it's going yeah don't worry about it nope and so and the probe is trying to contact whales whales and it can't find the whales so it's sucking they've gone extinct the water out of the planet trying to find the whales which is i guess everything i guess or it's punishing the people who live there for killing the whales it's again it's unclear it is a sci-fi premise that it's like a water-based attack right because it's like messing up the atmosphere the clouds and and they've they've all used solar power now so they can't survive if there are if it's cloudy so it's like clouds are the are the true villain here so but it's actually we're the true villain to fix it because they're extinct

is to time travel back to the 21st century from the 23rd century to the 20th 20th century 20th century sorry to steal some whales yes and then bring them forward in time so that they can say, hey, we're here. We're okay. It's fine. Go away. This is one of the most bizarre premises for a movie. So what I would say is two things. First off, it's the mechanics to get to the fish out of water story, which is that our crew has to go back in time and navigate the 20th century in order to find the whales. And quite literally take the fish out of the water. Yes, exactly right.

They're the fish out of the water, but then they have to take, but they're not fish either. And it's because they're mammals, as is explained in a scene later. They're not fish. That's a common misconception that is explained. It is a framing sequence in order to generate the plot.

So it's a little bit silly. I will also say you're right i watched this movie and i think who thought this was like who is like yeah that's a perfectly reasonable premise for a movie because it's bananas at the same time it's i think it's very star trek because the original star trek especially had so many strange episodes that were because it was in the 60s that were like you know like there was one with space hippies and stuff like that like there have been a lot of strange episodes so i think in that way it's actually kind of very star trek to say in this episode we or in this movie we save

the whales but yes it is it is a a time travel premise you know like how in back to the future there's we have to set everything up in the present but really in the end it's just about the mechanics of getting him back to the past to have that story. I think that happens a lot with these time travel movies is you have to sort of set it up to give your characters a reason and a mission and a plan that puts them back in time. So, yeah, that's the setup. I think that's the weakest part of the movie is the setup and the frame on both sides of it, right? movie is the setup and the and the frame at the on both sides of it right that that the really it's all about seeing all the star trek people trying to figure out what it's like in 1986 san francisco and how you work and how money works and what how buses work and things like that yeah and i will

say i'm sure this will make very a lot of people upset the whales thing was it didn't work for me it was super weird and it just i really feel like what the idea of the idea of saving the whales no or the actual whales no no no the idea of like the key is the whales is just like i couldn't get on board of it well okay that's gonna be a problem for this movie then because you know you just you do have to go with it it's like they need to save the whales this is a this was really a thing right like in the 80s this was a an environmentalist message essentially that the whales are going to go extinct and today if they made this movie it would be i don't know a rhino or something there'd be a rhino probe that came and tried to speak rhino and they're like oh no that's the problem

like we don't have the rhinos anymore it's like i appreciate the message i there was a lot of gruesome whale slaughter in this like images in this movie right like there are a lot of positive messages about like uh environmentalism and and like trying to stop the extinction of animals i appreciate all of that but like as a setup for a time travel mechanic in a space movie it's like i don't know why we're here like why who is like what but like why though like what alien was looking for the whales yeah i don't know because it's it's i don't know star trek man it's too yeah also actually my my my thing is why don't you go back to when there were no people and there was just whales and then

beam up some whales and then go home but so here's i need to understand what is the time travel rules of star trek are there any established before this point yes and what are like the general ideas because like i assume they spent an entire movie in the last movie, like trying to make Scott, uh, spot good, but why couldn't they just go back in time and save Spock? Right.

Like what are the rules of time travel in the Star Trek universe? Uh, well, okay. The rules are it's time travel. It's a mess. It's basically it. But the idea,

I think the idea is you want to, uh, if you make a change back in time, it's going to have a horrible effect on on the past and so you don't want to do that you but in a lot of star trek it ends up being that the things that they do actually cause history to happen as it was recorded so there's a suggestion that they make reference to that in a couple of points in this movie yeah because there's some original episodes about that so the idea here yes the idea here is that they're they're trying to you can't just go back and save spock because that's not what happened and you would change the the entire flow of time here what they're trying to do is just steal a couple of whales who are going to get harpooned anyway as it turns out and bring them forward and yeah they passed on a secret bit of scientific

information to a guy and the glosses right it like i'll get them back right but they're creating a time loop and those are all just kind of for jokes because it's time travel you can't again i don't think you can take it seriously this is a wacky time travel movie involving saving the whales not trying to take it seriously at all like my my point of this is like it's my issue with the whales thing is not that like oh this is ludicrous it's just that like, I couldn't attach myself to this as like a framing device for the entire movie. Okay.

It just didn't click for me because it was like, this is too weird. And like, maybe it's because I don't have enough base in this Star Trek, right? Which my understanding is, is campy and weird, right?

Like that, that this kind of band of crew like in all of the tv show weird stuff weird stuff happens weird stuff happens i expect that like i do think it's a very star trekky thing that the alien whale pro i will say audience film audiences in 1986 did not have a problem with it this was the biggest box office hit of any of these star trek movies it was a certifiable hit so everybody else was okay with it rathacon was good like no but star trek 3 came out and it did okay no it's because this was a word of mouth hit because it was a it was it was funny and it was whales it was considered more except more accessible

than your average star trek movie because it was set in the present day and it had jokes. It is funny. It was entertaining. I didn't dislike this movie. Like, do not get me wrong. I'm not saying that I dislike this movie. I get what you're saying,

which is that for you, this premise seems so out of the blue and random and doesn't really connect with you. And I see, and we have this, Scott McNulty and I do a podcast about the new Star Trek series

that are rolling out on CBS All Access in the US. And every now and then we have a conversation that basically ends up being, this is a really ridiculous thing that they did, but it's very Star Trek-y. And I think that comes to the core of it is that maybe we've internalized a little bit that Star Trek is not above completely bizarre scenarios and leaps and you just kind of laugh and go with it because it's

like all right it's star trek i guess i'll you know in a recent i won't spoil it too much but in a recently aired star trek series um at one point big flowers attack spaceships and and scott and i were both like yeah star trek okay flowers attacking spaceships got it right so i never really i never watched any star trek tv really and my main i mean i'm very familiar with star trek as a franchise and its characters and like just from general pop culture right and i've watched most of the abrams movies right sure but so i think like there's there's three it's not it's not that hard i've watched two of them though right that is most of them so i didn't say all of them or one of them uh but so like i just think that this premise is like too much of a is like too much of a jump for a cold viewer i would say and and this is coming out in the chat room too i think i do think the idea of saving the whales and all that like it was easier to

buy into this in the 80s whereas now we feel like you know we sort of save the whales the whales are going to be okay they're still wailing and it's bad, but the whales are not. Those are not the species that are going extinct. And I made the joke about the rhino probe. Again, that would be bizarre, but at least it would have that currency of like, oh, this is a topic. This is like a hot topic right now. And it's not now. So it seems that much more bizarre than it would maybe in 1986. Because the idea of needing to save the whales

is not like forefront in my mind. Right. But it was a real thing in the 80s. Like there were all these discussions about how the humpback whales were going to go extinct because of whaling and all that. And there was an international movement to stop whaling and outlaw it.

Now it is outlawed in most places and the whales have bounced back. All right. That context helps make a little bit more sense it's not what i thought would stop you about this movie but there we are like so the thing is like i think the thing that stopped me from like really enjoying this movie was that and it was maybe lacking some of the context because like there are things that are happening emotional things that are happening that like i just don't know why they're a lot of there are a lot of spock

jokes that are about the fact that it was very sad that he died and then they brought him back but he's not quite right yet like i can't understand why exactly mccoy hates him so much like really just like that's just spock mccoy yeah but he loves okay again he loves spock but they have a they they have an adversarial relationship they enjoy jousting with one another that's just a thing about them i i love mccoy because he's just so cranky he's just a cranky man and my favorite scene i think maybe in this entire movie is the scene where they have their the wacky hospital hijinks where they have to get checkoff out of the hospital which has it's got the wacky music they're rolling they have a fake patient they're rolling down the. They got all this stuff that's going on. My favorite part of it, though, is that McCoy is aghast at 20th century medicine.

And at one point just says, this is like the Spanish Inquisition to this. And he gives an old lady a pill that grows her a new kidney. That happens in passing. It's like, OK, I guess we're doing that now. And he's to doctors in a clean operating room. He's like, this is barbaric. And then he puts his little sci-fi thing on chekhov's forehead like i love that because it allows mccoy to be peak crankiness and because i i love that i love that he's a grumpy guy yeah i enjoyed that

scene but it was just like really like jarring and he was just like really taking pleasure in like any failure or potential failure that spock could go through hey spock we saved your life now you're back jerk yeah it was really weird yeah it was like it was it was a very strange thing for me to try and come to grips with because it was like i got the idea that he helped save his life but then like seemed to really begrudge it and it was like a very strange oh the animations in this movie there is that that moment when they do the time travel what oh is that isn't that bizarre i think they want to get across that like time travel is weird and strange and so there's this very it's very strange and there's a whale and there's like a mannequin and you hear dialogue from later in the movie it's play because it's

like oh time travel is very strange yeah that's that's that's there's a lot of weird stuff in this movie but you know then again there's also like there's that section of the movie where they go to the they first off they have to sell his glasses they get the money they have to go they have to go on the bus they don't have exact change of that when he was like well you guys break up and they like can't do it and they just don't know what to do they're just looking at each other and and uh chekhov who speaks with a russian accent at the height of the cold war is like there are the nuclear vessels and they're like uh uh yeah i got because i was like why is nobody helping him like it's not like he can talk in a way that is completely it's like oh because he's r Russian. Because it comes out later, right? Because they call him a Rusky.

Yeah, they do. Also, such bad security on that naval ship. He just gets up and runs out of the room. He does. He throws his phaser that isn't working at the guy and then runs the other way and somehow almost escapes an entire nuclear vessel. And of everything that could have happened in that thing,

what actually happened, I never could have guessed. falls off like and i hurt himself real bad it's like that's a way to to resolve this situation so the core the core of this movie is the is the stuff with the whale biologist um who is only in this in this star trek movie um but she is uh and they shot this at the monterey aquarium there isn't there's no whale uh thing at the at the Monterey Aquarium. There is no whale thing at Sausalito. Because it's too expensive. We've learned this. And you can't do. There are no whales in captivity.

That's just made up. But they have, or no humpback whales anyway. But when they get there and they're on the tour and then spock jumps in the thing and does a vulcan mind meld with the whale and then they pull him out but she's and the scientist is intrigued like you are weirdos and yet like you you also know things and then they end up she picks them up as like hitchhikers and gives them a ride and then she has dinner with kirk and spock explains that the whale is pregnant which she doesn't know how he knows that. Like that to me is the core of the movie because it is these familiar outer space future characters having to explain themselves sort of and sort of not to a person in the present day. And how would that person react?

And the answer is she thinks they're weirdos. And yet there's something about them that makes her kind of want to believe them and i just i every time i watch this movie i i enjoy that part which is like how much does she believe them and how much does she think that they are just crazy people and how does that how does her belief progress over time didn't like the restaurant scene it was really weird um but like i enjoyed the three of them together more than kirk and the biologist together like kirk drinking a mickelob and ordering product placement and ordering a pizza and uh yeah that scene that conversation is just strange like the way that they're talking is just like really weird it's it's it is a little bit weird like it's the that's the i'm in iowa

i only work in outer space that line makes me laugh but um but yeah that is i loved that scene as a kid because it's like oh my god captain kirk is just having dinner with captain kirk what is that about in a in a pizza place in san francisco i find it i find it upon re-watching very strange that she calls it italian because they just get a pizza like you'd say get pizza not get italian pizza is italian but i don't think you there's a question for robot or not we'll move on um but uh yes in hindsight that scene seems less less necessary because it gets truncated right he immediately is like oh they're leaving now well we you know we gotta we gotta go and and they're out of there and then and then captain kirk gets dropped off at the park and he holds this is another thing i didn't notice at the time

and then he holds the pizza box vertically it's like this is a man who's never seen a pizza box before that's a nice touch though right because why why would he hold it horizontally or not but it is hilarious to me yeah because it's like he has no idea how pizza works. Talking about... Replicated pizza is all he's ever had. Horizontal and vertical. The end movie, like the end of the movie where the whales and the probes are talking for way too long. It's just way too long, that part, right?

It does go on a while. Let's show the whole conversation with the whales and the and the space probe because we want to i can see the argument which is like we can't just have them go and they're like all right i'm out of here and disappear right oh and the answer is you probably could just like fade away like suffice it to say that they they had a conversation in the end but they're like no let's show the whole thing when the whale goes vertical the probe goes vertical i was like i don't understand why they feel the need to to do that like why is that a thing but then also like the whole problem is really weird too because the probe is like a tube with a ball that comes out of

it and it's like okay that's really weird but is it a ball i thought it captured earth and the earth was the ball oh no no i think that's the no because it sucks it into itself at the end it doesn't do that with the earth no that's just like the the probe transmitter or something i don't know i always thought that ball was suspicious i also like thought they put in a lot of faith in the whales what are the whales you don't know maybe these are jerk whales maybe they're gonna say the wrong thing but by the way i was trying to imagine what that conversation is and it's like yes they are hunting us to extinction exactly but there's only two of us left right they should have gone further in time because because the probe yeah the probe should be like wait a second there's only two of

you left yeah what is wrong with you people um they should have been no it's like oh no it's fine to when whales were aplenty so the whales wouldn't be mad about their existence right yeah like what is it like that the the whales just like no but don't worry because i'm pregnant like so we're all good that's right we're starting a family there's going to be more whales hooray we're going to repopulate this entire planet. Team in with whales here. You won't be able to move for whales. And the probe says, I did not get you a gift. I am sorry. I'll return in years.

I will not destroy your home. Very strange. Also, it's like the presumption that the probe would have been happy anyway about there being whales. You know? I don't know. Maybe the probe didn't want there to be any whales. Maybe it's looking for the whales because it hates them.

Yeah. It's like just really looking and it was nearly done and it would have left. It was like, oh, you got these whales? Blow up the whole planet. Maybe.

It's a funny movie in a lot of ways. I did not dislike this movie. That's why I suggested it. It's a weird and wacky movie, but it's light and fun and I think that's one of the great things about it. It's a weird and wacky movie, but it's light and fun, and I think that's one of the great things about it is it is not like other Star Trek movies because it's goofy. Oh, we have to mention before we wrap up

there is a Mac in this, and it's funny. Yes, that's the big scene. Scotty is given a Mac to talk to. And use a keyboard in the most weird way anybody's ever used a keyboard on film. Yes, yes. Well, he generates whole 3d diagrams by typing on a keyboard but also just like the way he's typing i couldn't tell if it was either a the actor playing scotty has never used a

keyboard before or b scotty was supposed to look like he'd never used a keyboard before but that also probably true but that wouldn't make sense because he uses it so proficiently i uh but the best part of that about that scene is that um is that first off he talks to the computer and then dr mccoy picks up the mouse and hands it to him and this is the original mac right and hands it to him and he goes oh okay and he says hello computer into the mouse and that doesn't work either he's to used the keyboard it's like oh keyboard how quaint and then he goes tap tap tap tap and intense like 3d diagrams appear uh somehow which is hilarious so that whole scene is is very funny um yeah and the my favorite part favorite weird part people who've listened to me talk about this movie before will know what i'm about to say which is at some point during this when they're offering him the secret to transparent aluminum a lady walks into his office and he just

shouts at her not now madeline and she walks out and that's the whole and on one level it's like why is that in there on another level it's hilarious that's why it's in there yeah this this movie is full of little things like that though like like why is this happening right now i guess but i guess this is just happening right now like you know why is spock answering so many questions to those computer screens for so long and also like why testing him to see like is he no no i get what's happening but it's very long as a scene and it's a movie made in the 1980s. It's a much slower pace. I love that.

Uh, okay. It's not sure it was two hour movie and it's like padded out with like these things. And also like those screens are funny, like projection screens. Right. But as we are behind them and we can read them,

which means they're backwards for him, the words, which is just another one of those fun little movie things. Uh, but yeah, this is, this is a very strange movie also spock looks older than his dad yes that is well they weren't that they weren't that different in age i can imagine that because there is a funny thing of like like time like age and time and how it changed because everyone in this movie looks so old but they're not but like in this movie they all look very old so the actors who played spock's parents were in the original series as spock's parents in one episode so they brought them back and this is the only

other time for them both to appear they don't have a scene together um mark leonard who plays spock's dad uh was seven years older than Leonard Nimoy. So they gray up Mark Leonard. But yeah, I had that same thought every time I watched this movie. I think I have that thought, which is when the original series was on, Mark Leonard played a little bit older and Leonard Nimoy played a little bit younger and they could swing it. But now that it's 20 years later they can't it's it's it's much harder for for that to do so yes box dad it's vulcans they age differently whatever it's star trek man star trek i love this movie i love this movie we did this for the incomparable it's a christmas episode

because it has those kind of feelings to me it It's just a warm, fun, silly movie. It's escapism and goofy and not serious in the way that most other sci-fi movies are. It's just a silly, it's like a silly 80s comedy except with Star Trek. And I like that about that.

I wish there were more movies like this that are just fun adventure stuff but the stakes you know there are stakes but who cares it's just it's just a goofy movie and and star trek did this the one time and uh and they were successful with it which is kind of funny so yeah there we are star trek 4 thanks so much for listening to this episode of upgrade i. I want to thank our sponsors one last time. Smile, Pingdom, Holo, and Rogamiba. Please go check out their products. And our thanks to them for supporting the show.

If you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com. Jason is also at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. You can find links to things discussed, including all of those books that Jason mentioned over at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 293. But you can also find those links in your podcast app of choice.

We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Live long and prosper. Oh, it's a whale noise. Okay. I won't destroy your Skype call anymore.