Upgrade - 296: You Wouldn't Believe The Stuff I Know

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman joins Myke and Jason to discuss how Apple's responding to the pandemic, the current state of iPhone development, and how he handles breaking major Apple news. Then Myke and Jason discuss the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Jason finally gets to tell his tale of Drobo devastation.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 296 today's show is brought to you by squarespace linode and kiwi co my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley how are you good big show today new after products New Apple products. We're speaking to Mark Gurman later on. We've got loads of stuff. Lots of stuff. But that doesn't mean we won't break from tradition. I have a hashtag Snell Talk question. Carlos wants to know, Jason, still or sparkling?

Oh, boy. You can take this question however you want, really. Isn't this what they used to do when you went to a, what's the word I'm looking for, restaurant? I don't know what you're talking about. No. Is stop like is that what you mean yeah yeah um the answer is this is this is funny so at a restaurant i'm cheap i will always just get uh like tap water i don't want to buy i want don't want fancy bottle water at home um i think it's probably fair to say that i drink more sparkling water than still water only because um i we have cans of um you know lacroix basically or store

brand off brand whatever but like seltzer in cans uh and i i interleave that with my caffeine soda so um but i also will just drink you know tap water and that's fine too so um i guess in a in restaurant context please bring me the tap water in a cans in the refrigerator context i will have i will have your fizzy water so i guess still is really the one that's out of the equation for you then i i don't see any purpose of buying a bottle of still water. I'm not a believer in the kind, oh, it tastes, oh, this is water. This water came from Fiji. It is still water.

I'm just not one of those people. So that's what still means. It's still just water. I like that. That's good. If you'd like to send in a question to help us open an episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk you can tell it could be about anything i want to do a quick uh piece of follow-up for ios and apple regards to coronavirus covered 19 ios 13.5 the beta came out last week this was previously 13.4.55. This is like beta three of that release, but is now being

referred to as 13.5. And many people are calling it the COVID-19 iOS release because it is effectively completely focused on that as well as I'm sure some other bug fixes. But it includes the exposure notification API for developers to be able to write their apps to, which we knew was coming, but also two fixes, amendments to iOS that clearly address some frustrations that people are having using their iPhones in different ways because of COVID-19. One is face ID mask detection. So if you have a face ID device and you're wearing a mask, the device will detect that you're wearing a mask. And then instead of trying to get you to, like instead of trying to authenticate you a couple of times to face ID,

it will immediately show you the passcode on the first failed scan, which is great. I'm happy about that. That'll make that stuff faster. And in group FaceTime, when you have group conversations, the order of the group, like they're all in these little bubbles, basically, square bubbles. They move around and resize depending on who's talking, which seems like probably quite a nice demo,

but most people found it very frustrating in additional use and additional focus on having FaceTimes in groups. So there's now an option to turn this off in 13.5. Yes. So I'm happy to see Apple doing this stuff, right? Responding quickly

to real life issues that are being caused because of the new world that we find ourselves in at the moment yep yep i like i like to see that they prioritize this stuff and are trying to get it out fast yeah yeah definitely all right uh i want to do a bit of follow-out if you allow me jason to a relay fm members show called backstage um it is both a behind-the-scenes of RelayFM show hosted by me and Stephen Hackett. And also we are combining

our 19 years of joint experience in podcasting to help listeners start their own podcasts. So every episode, it's a monthly show for RelayFM members. We go in depth

on each part of the podcast creation process. The first is about how to pick a topic. On our next episode, we're going to be talking about how you pick guests or co-hosts and what might fit for the show

that you're trying to make. I kind of like the thought of like, we give you a, if you're starting a show, you get a month's homework, right? Like work out this thing in a month and come back and get the next part. We've made the first episode available for free.

There'll be a link to that in the show notes for this episode of Upgrade, but it's on our RelayFM B-Sides feed. And so you can get a taste for it. Subsequent episodes will be, as I mentioned, for RelayFM members only. So if you're an existing member, you will get this in the RelayFM members feed.

If you want to become a member, you can do that no matter what show you support or what plan you choose, you will get this benefit. But if you do choose to support backstage, when you sign up for backstage like membership, that goes towards supporting the day to day running of RelayFM. So you can choose to support any show you can choose to support backstage, it's completely up to you. You can choose to support upgrade. And this is another moment. I think right now, just with everything that's going on in the world, directly supporting the content that you enjoy

is important. And I don't mean that just for this show or for RelayFM. If you have extra money to give for content, you should support independent content creators because it is a difficult and uncertain time for all of us, like it is for everybody else in every type of job around the world. So I encourage people to think about that, like find Patreons for you to support, YouTubers, you can join the kind of like, have those YouTube join button. And also if you like Real AFM podcasts and become a Real AFM member, support your favorite shows. And this is the first of a series of things that we're working on over the next,

maybe six months or so for RelayFM members. So it's a good time to start. Relay.fm slash backstage to learn more. You were busy a couple of days ago. Yeah. Because it was Apple's Q2 results. Yes, on a Thursday.ursday why i don't know uh yes apple's results were out and it was weird because the they had china things early and then china kind of came up late but then the rest of the world shut down and

there's a lot going on there um revenue was was up year over year, but, you know, this is the beginning. The way they put it was we had the first part of the quarter where everything looked great and we were going to set records and beat our expectations. And then, you know, China shut down and then the rest of the world shut down and they've gotten their product, you know, pipeline kind of back up and running, but they're working at home and they gave no guidance for next quarter. And I think that's the big actually top line story here is that Apple has like $90 billion in cash. It's not hurting. It can go for a very long time. But in the short term, they said they can't even predict what their results will be for next quarter because nobody really knows how this is going to go over the next few months. And so they are supremely confident in the long term. And in the short term, they are not confident in their ability to predict how it's going to go. So that's the short version of the results.

It is a good time to be Apple and have $90 billion in a couch cushion somewhere. Yeah, because this was supposed to be, was originally going to be a really massive quarter, right? And then obviously Apple had to change the guidance on it for good reason, because they had no idea what was going to happen, right? It was a surprise to everyone um but they still ended up being in in revenue uh services and

wearables of course were up uh iphone ipad mac all down um but one of the things that that was mentioned on the call uh which you wrote about in a macworld article is they are actually expecting ipad and mac sales to to be up in Q3 because of remote working. So that's probably going to be their champions of the next quarter for good reason. Yeah, they figure that people are settling into their remote lifestyle and realizing they need to upgrade their stuff.

And so Mac and iPad are seeing a boost, whereas iPhone and Apple Watch, not so much. So that's one of the things they're looking at, as well as sort of, you know, Tim Cook says the supply chain is up in force, right, that they're rolling again on making things. I thought it was interesting. He talks about people's perceptions of Apple's supply chain. people's perceptions of Apple's supply chain. And somebody basically said, boy,

having your factories in China really bit you didn't and in kinder words than that. But what Tim Cook said is, it's not really fair to view Apple as a company that just makes everything in one place. Our supply chain is global. We're sourcing from all over. We assemble in China and a few things in the US, but we are sourcing this stuff. And the fact is, it's up and running. So it's pretty resilient. to read that as, you know, maybe we ought to have two places we can do a lot of key things in case there's a natural disaster or whatever in one of those places. But, you know, he's pointing out that this was a pretty severe situation and their global supply chain is actually up and running. So I think he's not in agreement with the people who think this shows that Apple's decisions are questionable because of, you know, this situation kind of getting them in the weeds a little bit. I don't think he feels that that actually happened. Yeah, I get that point about stuff being made all over the world.

But the most important part is the manufacturing. And that's, by and large, all done in China. Right. And I think that is an important thing that Apple need to. And they know they do now. They know. They need to think about it. Right.

Yeah. I think that's why I said, like, I chose to read into the we always are going to contemplate ways we could do this better as them not wanting to make any announcements. But like, I mean, let's be serious here. You still have the issue of if you only have one provider, if you only have one location that you can build an iPhone, that if something happens at that location or to that provider, you're kind of out of luck. And Apple doesn't like being put in situations like that. Like, you know, we talk about Apple wanting to control its own destiny, but in terms of making an iPhone, they don't control their own destiny in the sense that they haven't kind of hedged against the assembly in China. So I would imagine they will continue to try to find other alternatives

for that. Like that said, there are certain kinds of natural disasters and things like this pandemic that nobody can you know necessarily reinforce their their systems to withstand but um their confidence surprised me a little bit i i expected them to be a little bit more hesitant but tim cook was he he was acting really like vindicated about how great their logistics is which it's his baby i i can see why he would feel that way yeah like if they are actually at a point where they're making stuff again i mean they're releasing new products that are definitely making stuff um he's got to feel good about that right like that's his thing you know yeah oh i mean he was in his element there was there was a question about component prices in the long run and like if some prices were going

to be volatile or if they were going to go down and if that was an opportunity for apple there was a very in the weeds question that i felt was certainly going to be answered by luca maestri who is the cfo and tim cook answered it he was like yeah well nan prices are you know are are going to be flat and this other components prices are going to be uh are going to be down a little bit and he was going into the details and then i thought it is tim cook like this is his stuff this is this is what he uh is great at is this part of the business so of course he's paying attention to that part all right we're gonna take our first break and then after this we're going to be joined by mark german of bloomberg which i'm very excited about. Today's show is brought to you in part by our friends over at Linode.

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apps including wordpress and game servers for minecraft there's so much more and you can go check it out right now by going to linode.com upgrade and using the promo code upgrade 2020 when creating a new linode account and you you'll get $20 towards your next project. So that is linode.com, L-I-N-O-D-E.com slash upgrade, and the promo code upgrade2020 to get that $20 credit. Our thanks to Linode for the continued support of this show and all of RelayFM. All right, so we had the pleasure now of being joined by Mark Gurman. I was thinking before I was preparing for the show today, like what kind of introduction, but you know, like that, it's that often used phrase of

you need no introduction, because whenever you write anything, we talk about it on this show, so I think Upgrade listeners are very familiar with you. So Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. No, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I listen to you guys from

time to time. And I have a few close friends who are very religious listeners. And they tell me that, you know, Mike and Jason are, you know, always talking about my story. So, you know, maybe you should go on there and, you know, maybe talk about them. It's time to get it from the source. Yeah. It's after you. Pretty much Ming-Chi Kuo is our only other frequently mentioned person to get on.

That's funny. We're halfway there. 50% down. You should try to get him. Yeah. And this is an interesting time. I mean, I think this is one of the good reasons to talk to you right now. Because not only is this typically an interesting time of the year, and I'm sure that we're going to see from from you, I expect at some point soon, a lot more about iOS 14 tends to be your way of doing things, but I'll leave that surprise

for you later on. But even more so than it typically being an interesting time of the year, it is an incredibly interesting time for everything right now, including Apple. And I was wondering from your perspective right now, what do you think are some of the biggest products or initiatives that Apple have on the horizon for the next year? Because I know you've reported on a bunch of things that could be coming, but stuff's changed. So what do you think is like some of the most important, some of the things that they will be focusing the most on maybe over the next six to 12 months? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, I know this is an obvious one, but you know, all hands are on deck to get the iPhone out the door

by, you know, late October, early November. At this point, it's a incredibly challenging situation. It was already hard. I don't think a lot of people realize this before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Apple was already racing against the clock to get this phone out the door because of the entire 5G modem situation. Obviously, these devices are in development for years on end, and they only really struck the deal with Qualcomm to get the modems working in these years, in this year's iPhones with 5G, so I think about a year ago. And that already makes it difficult integrating, you know, a custom antenna to go with the Qualcomm 5G modem, having different types of modems for different devices, standard 5G versus millimeter wave. So that whole situation is already going to be

difficult. And then you throw COVID-19 in the middle and that's just another wrench in the in the situation so I think they'll be on track to get the phones out by October November which is typically their normal their normal time period right usually they announce the phones in September but you've seen the XR you've seen the iPhone X released sort of late October early November in the last few years or so. So I think they'll still hit it. But getting these phones out the door is certainly going to be a challenge they haven't faced in the past. In terms of longer term initiatives, right now, 2020 is a really key period for development of products that's going to hit in 2022, 2023. for development of products that's going to hit in 2022, 2023.

So what you might see are some delays to future products that are not going to be released for several years or several months on end. And the question is going to be, is Apple going to be able to make up that lost time once they do return to work, probably at this point in mid-June? Yeah, I was going to go down that path with you a little bit. Last week, Tim Cook said on the analyst call,

lots of positive things about their supply chain and how it's global and how they feel like they're doing pretty well. But you got to think that something has taken a hit. Is it too early to get a read on what might be the products or projects that are slowed by the virus's impact on the supply chain and also by the people at Apple who work on these products who are all at home now? Do you have a read on that or is it too early to tell? I think it's too early, but speculating, probably any hardware product that was due to be released in the later half of 21,

anything in 22, 23 and beyond. I mean, obviously, I would say that it probably took a three, four month development hit. And the question is, what is a three to four month development hit translate to in terms of release timing? Is that an equivalent? If you lose three months of development time, is that three months delay for a product launch? Or is it six months? Or is it a year, right? Or does it really not have an impact? So, you know, it's still too early to tell.

But in terms of machining, prototyping, collaborative designing, those are all, you know, much more difficult in this environment. If you think about Apple's push into audio, right? So the smaller HomePod for later this year, the over your headphones, the next AirPods, those are probably all okay. But the amount of time and effort that goes into the testing of those products and anechoic chambers and all that, that's a very, you know, intensive process. So it's probably, you're probably seeing a little delay on, you know, future iteration to those products. You know, what about the iPhones in future years, right? The idea that you need to test those things in antenna labs for a long period of time,

right? So there is some sort of delay that's very possible. But on the other hand, we don't know what kind of overtime Apple's going to work to sort of make this up. Sort of like if your flight gets delayed, the pilots like to say, okay, we're going to make this up in the air and we'll get you there at the same time, right? So, you know, I think it's very difficult to bet against Apple being able to do that. So I wouldn't put a firm uh impact uh you know percentage of impact on this at this point every single day uh all of the websites that i read like the typical high volume apple websites they have a different delay period for the iphone like every iphone is delayed by a different period

sometimes it's better sometimes it's worse you mentioned about like october november do you expect that to be the entire line like what is your read on that right now do you think all iphones will be delayed some do you think they will be staggered anyway yeah that's a good question i think there's going to be some staggering uh in between the the low end and the end. So the 12 versus the 12 Pro. But the reason you're seeing different, you know, indications of how long a potential delay is going to be is because there's two things at play, right? There's when is Apple going to announce it? And when is Apple going to actually ship it? Which, as we know, are two different things, right? They

can announce a phone in September and ship it in November. The other factor in addition to those two is not taking into account what a production delay means, right? If Apple pushes production back for a device for, let's say, a month, does that mean they're going to release it a month later? Or does that mean they're going to release it at the normal period, but in smaller quantities and sort of ramp up to their normal set of quantity? So there's, you know, a lot of factors that come into play here. And it just comes down to which decision is Apple going to make? I've seen both happen, right? Yeah. For the iPhone 10, they, you know, started producing it quite a bit later, and then they released it about a month later than usual. I remember the early November release in 2017 for the 10.

But there's been other situations where they've actually released products in small quantities and ramped up. I remember there were iPhones in the past. One that comes to mind is the iPhone, I think, 6 Plus. This is already six or seven years ago but that phone you know it was very very hard to get it for one to two months but what they did do is they released it at the same time as the regular iphone 6 so they've shown both ways of doing things and it's just about which one they choose and i don't think those decisions are made until a lot closer yeah i mean remember we're still in may and so we're about four to five months away from any of those decisions it doesn't

feel like it's that far but it is very far still it is quite a bit far and it actually does from a feeling perspective it does feel earlier and earlier each time right i mean as soon as one iphone is out the door the next one is already you know deep into development these things are finalized like the iphone 12 they've finished development of that thing uh probably four or five months ago already yeah fully finalized and so it's just about a production thing and we're pretty close to these phones actually going into small scale production it could have already happened for all we know i wonder also about the not only just the supply chain, but the delivery to customers aspect and how that will, we don't know what Apple stores are going to look like in the

fall. And even if they're reopened around the world, is Apple going to want people lining up at Apple stores to get iPhones? Or are they going to, because, you know, traditionally it's been, if you don't get a, your order online is going to be pushed out. You can often go to a store and get one, but I wonder, you know,

will they rejigger that whole thing? Will they try to have everybody order online so they can just ship them direct rather than having them in stores? And we don't really know what stores are going to look like in the fall. No, and that's a very good question. And I think it's too early even for the world to know or for apple to know i mean the very scary thing is i'm reading all these articles and following obviously like

everyone else this covid situation very closely and there's lots of fears of these second and third waves what what happens when you know at this point i would say the assumption is that apple would have all apple retail stores sitting here today reop by end of June globally. All 500 plus stores open by end of June. There's going to be a ton of them, probably hundreds opening between now and the end of this month. In fact, Austria opens tomorrow if you hadn't seen that. And Australia will be, I believe, later next week. And so what happens if a second wave hits in September, October, November, right? They have to close all the stores again.

You're back to where we were two months ago, right? So I think it's an extremely fluid situation. And to Jason's point, I think that could be a reason for sort of ramping up in the online retail focus. Maybe for this year, they say, if you want to get one of these phones, you have to push towards online retail. When Angela Ahrens was in charge of retail up until beginning of last year, she had this really big push to the appointment only experience coming in when the phone is ready for pickup, they text you when to come in. And what the new retail chief Deirdre O'Brien was

sort of wanted to do was push back to some of the old school approaches, bringing back lines, bringing up hype, not having to have an appointment to pick up a phone, which, you know, in my personal opinion, I think that approach is much smarter from a marketing perspective. It's better for Apple. And quite frankly, I think the consumer likes that too. They don't want to have to come in at a specific time. They want to be able to show up and buy the phone when they want to buy the phone. They want to line up, et cetera, et cetera. But because of the coronavirus, to both of your points, I think that's going to have to be held back probably for another year or so. How would they do a line now?

It would go through the whole shopping mall or down the street. All the lines across the globe would start intersecting at some point. Yeah, I mean, six feet. And I'm no health professional, mean six feet you know and i'm no i'm no health professional but you know six feet is not much you know yeah those lines seem like an a bygone era now a little bit i i mark i have to ask you this question which is what is the deal with air tags like seriously like you look at the u1 chip in the phones last fall and this persistent rumor about air tags as a product and uh it seems like a very strong suggestion that this product does exist we saw a a mistake

in a screenshot in a beta where they mentioned the product name and you know it's been almost ready to ship it seems in our minds for a long time now, and it just hasn't happened. You know, where are they? Yeah, so the AirTags, they're definitely a product. This is probably one of the most discussed Apple products in recent memory that hasn't been released. And it's to the point, like you said, where I feel like some people at Apple think that it already came out, given the Apple support video from a few weeks ago. But my belief is that they were delayed.

They were supposed to launch last year, probably alongside the iPhone 11 line, right? That's integrating with the U1 chip and all that. But they should be coming this year. It should be a little bit later this year. And I wrote, it was recently, that these things are going to be like all other Apple stuff. You know, it doesn't take a genius to tell you these are going to be high priced and premium. And, uh, they'll be coming in like these little leather pouches. They're primarily for keys. Uh, but I think that they have a lot of good use cases. Is it really going to impact

tile? I think that's the big question. I think to some extent, yes. But, you know, Tile has, you know, the subscription pricing, I think at this point they have, you can buy a stack of them for a pretty good price, whereas these Apple ones are probably going to be more expensive. I'm curious, what do you guys think? How do you think they're going to do it? You think they're going to charge, you know, individually? Do you think they're going to do three, five packs? What would you pay for one of them? We had a question about this a couple weeks ago where somebody was asking about it as a service.

And I thought, I don't think it's going to be a service. I think you're going to be able to pay. But I do think it's going to be, you know, my rule of thumb is always, what would you like to pay? Now increase that and now round it up. And that's what it's actually going to cost like the double increase so i kept saying like i don't know this is a three pack for 50 or 75 or something like that i don't think it's going to be cheap but i think apple's going to say but our system is better and you know their system is better assuming that these things um as we've read about the the covet 19 stuff, they built a system where every Apple device in existence that's of a current OS generation will be able to find these things.

It should be an incredibly powerful system, and they'll promote that, and they'll say, this is why you want to get our tracker, and it'll have presumably ultra-wideband in it so that it'll have the precision locations. I don't know. I think expensive, but probably not a service is my guess what what if they did both so what if they charged i don't know 29 or 39 or 49 per puck uh and then they you know made find my service or they're gonna charge you i don't know 2.99 a month to use it i i think it's possible it's possible for sure what do you think they would add like for that like if it was a service what would be different that's a good question maybe you can use one for free but you're gonna have to pay if you want to track multiple devices maybe

yeah i also wonder they could also do something where if you're on a higher um iCloud tier i've been waiting for them to do some of this. And actually, I think the secure video feature is like this already. The idea that if you're on a higher iCloud tier, you get it. And otherwise, you've got to pay some amount to have it. Oh, that's a really good point. Okay, so maybe they do that.

Maybe they tie it to the iCloud account. And this gets to the other thing. You guys asked for some bigger initiatives that they've been working on. I mean, this whole idea of bundling their services together uh is something that they were thinking of doing as early as this year so icloud apple music apple news tv plus all of those together but the other thing is i know jason follows the the uh the earnings calls very closely with his transcripts but tim cook's comment about how they're gonna allow purchases other than the iphone other apple hardware purchases to be spread over your apple card

monthly payments right uh so that's going to be that's going to be quite interesting um speaking of which we should talk about the the macbook pro um did you i'm sure you guys are going to hit that in your yeah i mean we're gonna we're gonna talk about it later if you've got anything you want to talk about we can talk about it, we're going to talk about it later. If you've got anything you want to talk about, we can talk about it now. We're going to go into detail later on. Yeah, I mean, I found it interesting that they went with 13-inch versus 14-inch for this iteration. Do you have a rate on that? Because I feel like it seemed like it was obvious it was going to be 14.

See, I don't know. I look at this and I think, well, this is an interim step. This is literally just how quickly can we get that old keyboard out of the line. And in fact, they barely did anything on the low end of those laptops. So that's what struck me. I mean, the MacBook Air is the same way. It's largely the same computer with a different keyboard instead of it being like a whole brand new computer. Yeah, that's exactly my read uh jason that there is going to be a 14 inch a bigger redesign with what there's no wi-fi 5 on this one right and they're missing some of the the bigger features

some of the features that even the 16 inch macbook pro guy i would correct me if i'm wrong i don't know if this one even has the higher endend speakers. Oh, I didn't see that mentioned anywhere, which means it probably doesn't, because Apple really like to talk about those. Yes, that's true. And the microphones, right? I'm not entirely sure that it has any of that stuff. So, yeah, I think this is a very minor keyboard swap type of update. And you'll see the 14-inch end of year maybe early next year do you

think that that could be i mean there's been a lot of talk about mini led do you think that they may wait to put that technology in this product do you think it's too early for that technology no mini led is coming it's just a matter of when that could be something that's interrupted by covid because anytime they make some, you know, massive supply chain transformation, obviously that's, uh, that's a big deal. I think that if they needed to push some stuff back, they'd be pushing back some of the Mac stuff and prioritize the iOS device stuff for later this year. Uh, speaking like of the iPhone and the, the accessories, which is their, their biggest, you know, one of their biggest growth markets right now.

Uh, so, you know, mini-LED, probably a next-year thing. That's obviously an across-the-line type of deal. I think you'll see the next iPad get that too. iPad Pro, I don't believe there's going to be another iPad Pro this year. I think that's also a next-year thing. So those will probably get mini-LED as well. Going back to the call last week, because yeah, I absolutely do. Every now and then they put tidbits in there. It's worth digging

through it to find little things that they're willing to disclose. And one of the things that I thought was fascinating was Tim Cook saying, Apple's shifting to an entirely work at home environment, that some jobs and some groups are doing better than than normal, that like being remote has actually improved their productivity, which I thought was fascinating. And I immediately asked myself, are you going to insist that they all move to Silicon Valley and going forward, or you might be more open to remote workers, but he said, some groups are not as productive, and it's a mixed bag. I'm just, you know, based on what you know, I'm curious, how is it working for the people working at Apple right now? Because they're all at home, you know, and I'm sure that there are tasks that are completely capable of being

done remotely, but there have got to be other tasks that are very hard and they've got a lot of secrecy stuff. I would imagine there's a bunch of stuff that you're not supposed to ever see if you're not on campus that now people off campus have to see. And that can be a security problem for them. I just, you know, what's your feeling

about how they're handling, you know, not being in the building? Yeah, that caught my ear as well in terms of stuff being productive and stuff being less productive. That seems more like, you know, unplanned slip up, they never stay safe, stuff like that, as you guys know, in terms of more productive, I bet, you know, marketing, software engineering, to some perspective, all those types of things that, you know, you can really just hunker down in your room and, you know, get done on your computer. In terms of less productive, that takes

you down to hardware. Now, hardware is really split into, and this is a really rudimentary way of explaining it, but split into two parts, right? There's the actual hardware perspective that requires, you know, hands-on work with screwdrivers and playing with things and, you know, building stuff with your hands and testing and labs and antenna work and all that. And then there's the underlying CAD drawing software engineering component that goes into hardware, right? A huge part of chip development, right, is software-based, right? The software programming that goes into the chips that are you know you know embedded in the actual processors that go into the devices so i'd imagine the software component of hardware engineering cad drawing analysis is going well but there is so much stuff at apple that really requires you to be in the lab be in a room be in a group that's just

simply not happening that takes us back to the point in which, you know, why this work from home situation is so difficult for so many companies. And is this going to be stuff that Apple is going to be able to make up in the air? And, you know, my perspective is yes. Right. But at the same time, if there's other additional waves that keep hitting, you know, who knows what's going to happen? Right. You know, another tidbit on this is that they have had people working at, you know, the Apple offices, right? There are, you know, these, I don't know if these qualify as essential workers in the terminology that local governments use in terms of what's allowed to be open and not allowed to be open.

But there's people that need to be there to do some testing, right? This is a trillion dollar corporation and this is a global pandemic and it's a horrific situation, obviously, to say the least. I don't need to say more. But they have a responsibility to keep going in some respects. So those things are going to keep happening. Certain amounts of testing. You have operations that need to keep going, data centers, et cetera, et cetera, that need to have humans there to keep these things up and running. I think there's many companies that still have people going into the office, maybe just a few people with strict social distancing. And I don't think Apple's any different from that one. On that note, do you have any sense for what WWDC is going to look like? Yeah, no, that's a good question.

In terms of announcements, I'll hold off on talking about anything I haven't written about. But there was a an accessibility seminar a few weeks ago online, they did it over the course of I think, April in India, they did a few of them in India, they did one in the US, I think two weeks ago or so, where you were able to sort of send in questions and stuff like that so i think that's really what it's going to be i think there's going to be live uh integration um with the viewer and this is in terms of the individual sessions i think you'll see um you'll see lots of resources to be able to interact with online i i don't know precisely how it's going to work. My big question is, how is the keynote going to go? Are they going to do a live streamed keynote

that looks like any normal keynote and stream it with just no one in the audience? Are they going to do something a little bit more unique where they pre-roll a bunch of videos? Are they going to do a full normal keynote but shoot it in advance and edit it? I think it's going to be very fascinating to see it's sort of unprecedented for them and but personally i'm excited to see how it shakes out

yeah they got a chance to reinvent it a little bit if they want to i mean they have to but it's also an opportunity to say why don't we do it this new way instead of just going through the motions of what we always do that's my fear with this is they may get some ideas that like, like more than having these live, like, Oh, if we just edit this, there can be no mistakes.

Right. I think that's what you're probably going to see. I think you're going to see a mix of both. I mean, I think it's a resource thing, right? Like getting these operating systems done and all that from home. It's a very,

you know, it takes a toll on all of these software engineers. There's a lot of them who have been complaining about this and just like any other environment, right? You, it's hard to do your best work when you're in a situation where, you know, with your family at home, some of them have kids, et cetera, et cetera. So it's definitely not easy for anyone, but I think we'll get it done. And my big question is when in June is is this happening i think they were pretty specific and really only saying june versus a specific date because it's a little bit more fluid and because you're not having a physical location i think you have the right to

be a little bit more fluid so i wouldn't be shocked if this was later in june than earlier and you know it's possible that wwdc is still like almost two months away right like we're in the beginning of may right now usually we're talking like the first week of june it's like a month away but you know very early may very late june that's about two months so we could a little we could be a little far off from this thing we'll see though uh i want to shift gears a little bit and talk about talk about you and your job um and you made that you made the big move from nine to five mac to go to working at bloomberg um and bloomberg is a very large news organization i know a bunch of people who work at bloomberg um it's unlike a lot of

other journalism outfits too because of the financial background and the terminal and all these things that if people don't know like like Bloomberg is a different kind of place. And you were working at 9to5Mac before doing these reports, I think while you were going to school. So how has your job changed being a part of this large business and financially oriented news organization at Bloomberg. Are you, obviously your bylines, you are often sharing bylines now. So I imagine there's a lot of collaboration going on that, that maybe wasn't there before. Have they challenged you? You know, I just, it's a big open-ended question. Like how has your, how has your process and your work changed working for Bloomberg? Yeah, no, that's a, that's a good point. I actually do know at

least, I won't get into personal names or anything. I do know at least one of your friends there and he's very cool. But Bloomberg for me, like you said, it's a big news organization. It's a fantastic news organization. The resources are immense. Being able to travel and go to events, the name has been very helpful for you know, for getting in the door with certain meetings and such. But in terms of the news, what I do specifically, nothing has really changed, to be honest with you. I mean, there's a lot of things that I don't immediately report, like maybe very small, minor things. Sometimes I'll, you know, save a couple things and bundle it into a story. For example, I had a story a few weeks ago that had details about the iPhone 12, the timing, the smaller HomePod, and the AirTags. Instead of breaking that up into,

you know, three, four, five stories where I may have done that in the nine to five Mac days. That was one story about it all bundled together. So that, that is one change given being at a, you know, bigger news organization with the bar being much higher. But in terms of, you know, the seriousness of these things,

I think I always took it pretty seriously in terms of accuracy and reliability. So not a ton has changed from there. It's a great organization. And like you said, there's lots of people that I get to collaborate with. You know, Debbie Wu, who works in our Asia supply chain, she's awesome. And it's a big help to be able to have both perspectives on things right from the supply chain perspective, but also from the, you know, the Apple corporate perspective and sort of blending it together and, you know, double checking things on both sides.

I think that's a really good way to get as much information into a story as possible. We have people who, you know, focus on, you know, chips and processors and, you know, Intel, understanding the Intel perspective of this big Apple transition is going to be, you know, important part of understanding the next, you know, six months, a year of the Mac for Apple. So, you know, it's important to have all these experts, not that I, you know, I don't particularly know these things and I'm an expert in these things myself, but it does, it does help a bit to have, you know, additional people in the room who are like-minded and understanding of these topics and, you know, pulling it all together. And it's a great team that I'm lucky to work with. But, you know, long story short,

nothing has changed, you know, in terms of my process or anything like that. And it's exciting to still, you know, work on this stuff. I think that the difference is the audience is very financial oriented and it has been a balance trying to strike the you know writing for a financial audience but also for retaining that sort of online and twitter audience i think early on uh i focus you know there was a lot of focus on the financial side but i think that we've really struck the the right balance i've been doing this for you know four years now and so i think it's great yeah i'm happy with it do you feel like especially with your access to people in in different industries debbie woo being a obviously a key um collaborator of yours debbie's you typically share bylines and

stories do you feel like it's changed your accuracy for reporting uh not no not really uh i don't think anything has really changed in terms of accuracy no i mean obviously when you're writing for bloomberg you want an increased comfort level and you want an increased amount of people you talk to but before putting a story out because you know about the the financial impact so you might corroborate a little bit more as such behind the scenes uh yeah not to get you know into deep into about the how the sausage is made but yeah the the standard to answer you know the first question the difference between nine and five and boomberg the standard might you know the standard was always very high at nine if i mac like we would never put anything out uh that we weren't

comfortable with or on very solid footing with. So, but the difference is, is that the responsibility to the financial readership is, it's a lot higher as you can imagine at a Bloomberg versus a notify Mac. So yes, you want to be as comfortable as possible and the more corroborations you get, the better. But I don't think the accuracy itself has changed. I think we're still doing pretty good. Yeah.

I wonder about just being higher profile. I mean, you mentioned your, your audience is different. I've definitely noticed that your stories have to put the information in a context that obviously at 9to5Mac, I think your readers knew the context. And in Bloomberg, I can definitely see the effort going into placing the new information in the bigger story of Apple in a way that you didn't have to do before. But I'm just curious, being at such a high profile place, how has that, in terms of your access, in terms of your information that you get, has it helped or hurt to be part of such a big brand? I think it's helped tremendously, right? The Bloomberg is you know synonymous with the financial industry right and it's extraordinarily well respected and well regarded i think there's a long tradition of being

you know accurate and having a good understanding of the atmosphere and i think people really respect it and it makes it easier to you, get in the room with, you know, companies, whether that's Apple or Google or Amazon and such to to really get their perspectives about what's going on to help inform your stories and find out about stuff early to be. And, you know, the most pleasant thing to me was, I think there was sort of this fear when I made the transition four years ago now that I may lose some of the, you know, the online audience and the people following along on Twitter and all that, but that really has not been the case at all. I think people really like, you know, Bloomberg and I hope that I've, you know, at least brought some of my, you know, former audience along to Bloomberg to understand, you know, all the great stuff we're doing. Not to sound like an ad or anything like that, but, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm ecstatic about the work we're doing. And, you know, it's very exciting every day to wake up in the morning and do this stuff.

And I also feel very grateful to be doing this, right? I mean, I'm sure you guys are in the same boat, but being able to, you know, write about technology, talk about technology, Apple for a living is tremendous, right? I grew up as someone who was, you know, a massive, you know, Apple fan and fascinated about a company and be able to turn that into sort of a job. And on top of that, I mean, this community of people is tremendous, right? Some of the people you see tweeting or you talk to on podcasts or comments and stuff, people that email you, the people who really follow this Apple stuff are some of the smartest, the people who really follow this Apple stuff are some of the smartest, understanding, kindest people. And so being able to, you know, interact on Twitter and with this community, I think is it's been tremendous. I wanted to ask again, like without, we're not looking for specifics here. I understand that like the difficulties of some of this stuff with what you do. I wonder if, like, do you feel like there's a lot of pressure

with the information that you receive? Like, I assume there are a lot of steps that you need to go to to keep stuff close to your chest. Is that, like, do you find that high stress? Do you deal with that a lot better now? Like, has it, like, grown over time more there's more kind of focus on you like i'm just intrigued in in what it's like to have access to the kind of information that you do and how it feels you wouldn't believe the stuff i know right now that i haven't reported now i'm just

so well i mean am i joking i'm not joking i'm sort of joking. I don't know. You'll see. Early on, it was very, the line of work was very stressful. You know, looking back at it, I try not to look back too much, but it was the balance that was really challenging, right? Being able to do this in high school, right? Being able to do it in college while managing schoolwork and all that, I think that might have been the most challenging part and difficult part. I think that contributed to a lot of the late nights, early mornings, sleepless nights, et cetera, et cetera, worrying about not only this stuff, but schoolwork and all that. Whereas now I have, I guess before coronavirus, the singular thing I was able to think about was this. Now this is sort of, you know, messed with everyone a little bit, made everyone a little stir crazy. But, you know, other than that, it's been much better. Is it stressful? Is it high pressure? Not going to lie. Yes. I think that if it was easier, there'd be a lot more, you know, people doing it. I think there's so many people who've tried to get into the space. And obviously everyone tries to carve a different niche in sort of the, you know, the Apple news game, right? Like Jason with, with Macworld for so many years, you know, that was, that was,

you know, your thing with, with reviews and running that organization. And now with six colors, your analysis and reviews and all that, that your thing keep scratching my chin that's what i do a lot of nodding and thinking and that's what i do my job now that's great you know jason has his area right mike with the whole podcast situation and you know you know obviously you guys know my area so i think everyone is just trying to do the best they can in their own individual area right i'll never be at the point in terms of you know analysis that jason might be i'm not going to have a podcast organization like mike right but i have my thing so you know everyone is just trying to do their best and i'm sure you know your environments are high pressure high stress as well for for your in particular

the angles that you hit i gotta say i i always i mean so the the legacy at mac world was that we didn't we didn't do a lot of um a rumor coverage a lot of a lot of trying to get sources to give us information about what was to come historically that was because mac week existed for a long time and that was their bread and butter and that was how back in the i'm gonna go way back here back in the old days that was the firewall that they tried to create between, at Ziff Davis, between the people who were breaking stories and the people who had NDAs with Apple, is Mac user had the NDAs and MacWeek broke stories. And the two groups were not even in the same city for the longest time. They kept them separate so that they could do both. And I think that even at Macworlds, because the MacWeek came over as a part of the

merger, we definitely had between that and especially when we were more magazine focused and less online focused, it was just something that we didn't do. And I remember thinking, that's great because that's not a job I wanted. So I have always appreciated people who do the job that you do because that's a lot of work. And actually, there is a question here that I wanted to ask you, which is something we talk about on this podcast a lot, which is when information comes over the transom, or it's somebody that you're talking to as a source about something that's going on, what I always say is, ask yourself why they're leaking the information because oftentimes leaks will happen because somebody's motivated or somebody's mad that their project got killed or

something like that like when the verge did that that microsoft project that was the the the i can't remember the name of it now is their fancy yeah yeah courier that was very clearly somebody whose project got killed and they were really angry and they gave them all the stuff. It was very clear. Sometimes it's not so clear. And this is my question for you. I imagine that a lot of your sources are people that you know very well and the information is clear and why they would know it is clear. But I would also imagine that you get people coming kind of out of the woodwork. And how do you apply your own skepticism to information you're receiving? Because you have your names on it when it gets reported in Bloomberg. So what is your, without going in,

I'm not going to say who are your sources, tell me your sources, more like how do you apply skepticism to what you hear and what you decide is you're confident enough in to report? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, listen, it's been 10, 11 years now. So, you know, there's been hundreds, if not thousands of stories and news items over this period. And, you know, everything is always different, right?

So things have changed over the years. You know, some stories come out for certain reasons, other stories for other reasons. And to be honest, I try not to get into the machinations of why and all that and just focus on the actual news itself. I think that Apple is one of the most discussed companies, one of the most invested companies, one of the most important companies. Do you get most invested companies, one of the most important companies.

Do you get information, though, from sources where you're like, I don't know if I believe this? I don't know if I, you know, that level of it where you're like, yeah, this doesn't sound right. And then I guess you have to cross-check it with other people and say, is this a real thing or is this made up? Because you don't want to go out with something that's from a source that is, you know, okay or has provided okay information in the past, but like that you are not, you know, they tell you something, and you're like, I don't know,

that doesn't really track. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you one example. Several months ago, I got a tip about the magic keyboard for the iPad and trackpad support across iPadOS. And my first reaction was like, okay, there is no way this is true. Like, what world is Apple going to turn the iPad into a, you know, into a laptop with the trackpad support and all that. And obviously, the standards for putting information out, like, let's say, if that came from someone who I've worked with in the past, you know, I would understand that it's reliable. Okay, let's do this, right. But if something like that came from, you know, a brand new source, my first reaction was like, okay, wait, there's no, there's no way this is true.

Unfortunately was not able to get enough corroboration in time before the, you know, the keyboard was announced and the news came out about that. But yeah, that is an example. And I think that shows that, you know, how, you know, how high the level is, right? We're not going to just run something because someone says it. It has to be something that you're corroborating with multiple people. And sometimes you're going to take the hit anyway, because you're reporting about things that are coming down the road.

And sometimes they do the sand shift, right? Sometimes you're reporting on plans as they're, this is the thing that kills me is when people are like, aha, you got that wrong. And it's like, I don't know, plans do change. Sometimes you report on something that is the plan and then it changes. And that's like, oh, well, that happens too. Yeah. I mean, I always include that line in there saying, you know, the plans could change, blah, blah, blah.

And people like to say, yeah. And then like people say sometimes, oh, that's just a throwaway. Like it's a cover. You know what line. Right. But like it's actually true. Right. what line, right? But like, it's actually true, right? There's plenty of situations where things do change, whether that's timelines, whether that's feature set. There's a number of things that really can't change, right?

But, you know, at the end of the day, like Apple could be having a keynote tomorrow. The iPhone could have this feature and Tim Cook could wake up and be like, all right, we're not including this feature in the iPhone due to be announced tomorrow, right? And nothing stops them from just stripping it out of the keynote and then, you know, removing it in a software update or delaying the shipping, you know, for a few months. So I like to say literally anything is possible. So I wanted just to wrap up, you mentioned hundreds to thousands of stories right that you must have published over time are there any that stand out specifically to you as favorites or things that were like particularly exciting like are there any when you think back of the

stuff that you've published over the years that you remember specifically for a certain reason? Ooh, some good ones over the years was the iOS switching from Google Maps to Apple Maps. This was back in 2012. Wow, that's old school. Yeah, the 12-inch MacBook in 2015. We had a quite detailed story on that. What other ones? Okay, this was a good one the iphone

10 story we had a few weeks before the phone launched in 2017 or was announced 2017 sort of how the interface was going to change the more gesture focused interface the uh the the 12 inch macbook one stands out to me specifically as like a very very detailed incredibly accurate out of nowhere report like it was just like i remember that one that was i think you were a nine to five mac then i think that was a nine to five back report and i remember like it was so much detail about something nobody had spoken about before like i remember that one specifically thank you yeah that was that was a good one. That was an interesting one. Well, before we let you go, I want to

make a request, if I could, which is please break as much news as possible on Monday mornings, because we love it when you give us stuff to talk about before anybody else gets a chance. I'll keep that in mind. I really love your podcast and all the work you guys do.

I mean, I read Six Colors all the time. I follow some of Mike's podcasts so uh this was really great and you guys have an amazing community following along too so that's what's really important and fun and i appreciate i really appreciate it so thanks we appreciate the work you do you definitely like you know there's often people out there with skepticism like oh oh, Mark Gurman and the rumors and all that. These are really reports, not rumors. He's talking to people who know, and he's really accurate. So I appreciate the hard work you do. Like I said, I thought about doing stuff like that, and I was like, wow, that's not a job that I want to do. It's hard work.

It's kind of on a tightrope a little bit sometimes. You've got to get it right. And basically, people probably don't say this as much get it right. And, you know, basically, people probably don't say this as much, but I appreciate the work you do. And thank you for doing it. No, thank you. Thank you guys.

Really appreciate it. So I guess at Mark Gurman, this is probably the best place to follow along with the stuff that you're doing, right? You link to everything that you're writing and stuff like that. And one of the things

that I like about following you on Twitter is there's sometimes some additional little details. So it's definitely worth getting that little extra. That's the cutting room floor. Yes, you know what? Sometimes it is the cutting room floor. That's a good way to say it.

Yeah, I definitely notice it. I'm like, oh, that's a tidbit. I can see why that didn't fit in the story, but I totally, you know, but for us, we're like, aha, that's a tidbit. That's a really nice little bit. Well, thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'll see you guys. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Squarespace. You can make your next move with Squarespace. They would let you easily create a website for your next idea or project with the ability to register a unique domain name, customize award-winning beautiful templates, and so much more.

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purchase. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM Squarespace. Make your next move, make your next website. Alright, so new MacBook Pro. It is a new MacBook Pro. It's not the MacBook Pro that we were expecting. We kind of mentioned this a moment

ago with Mark, but I want to give a very brief overview of what this computer has and then we can dig into it a little bit so sure it has the new magic keyboard so the butterfly keyboard is no longer sold on any of apple's laptops so it's gone technically the butterfly keyboard exists in the smart covers for the ipad pro but it that works great because it's a covered mechanism it's fine so no more laptops are sold with a butterfly keyboard. They're all the new Magic Keyboard.

This revision to the 13-inch includes the option for 10th-gen Intel processors. The base model is 8th-gen. You're looking at 80% faster graphics, 256-gigabyte SSD as standard. You can go all the way up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, which is the first time on the smaller MacBook Pro, and a four terabyte SSD, which is wild if you put all of that in one of these things. I don't think it would take off.

It is still the 13-inch. No visual changes, so it's not got a larger screen. It doesn't look any different. There are no internal changes from an architectural perspective i believe that the 16 inch had a new thermal architecture this one doesn't have that so what do you think jason i i think this is very clearly an interim step i mean i feel like there were so many rumors about a 14 inch macro pro you kind of got to put them out of your mind because those were rumors it was unclear they were really Pro, you kind of got to put them out of your mind because those were rumors. It was unclear.

They were really unclear about when they were going to happen. We saw some conflicting things about a 13 and a 14. I think clearly, even if they're doing something like that, that is a new product later. This is a quick revision of the 13 to get it to be a more current design, so the butterfly keyboard being out. It's closer to the MacBook Air really, isn't it?

Than it is to the other MacBook Pro. I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. So there are some substantial differences there. First off, I want to be clear. There are two models here, essentially, just as there were the last time. There is the low-end model with two Thunderbolt 3 ports

and the high-end model with four Thunderbolt three ports and the high end model with four Thunderbolt three ports. So if you think about it back when we had the MacBook escape, that was a 13 inch MacBook pro, but it didn't have the touch bar. They in the last revision, they all got the touch bar, but it was still like a low end model and a high end model. And the high end model costs a lot more than the low-end model. And that is still the case. They basically didn't change the processor and the low-end model. The low-end model's difference is really a couple of things.

The keyboard is different and there's more base RAM and there's more base storage. So it went from 8 to 16 and from 128 to 256. Price also went up to $1299. But I think that that is an effect where they are lifting the Pro above the MacBook Air now because they can. There was a vestige there of the fact that the MacBook Escape was kind of also a MacBook Air replacement, just like the 12-inch MacBook was sort of trying to be a MacBook Air replacement. Now we have a MacBook Air. So I feel like they're now kind of lifting this up. But they're still keeping it at $1,299. Like, this is still a price-conscious pro laptop.

And that's why it's got the 8th generation processors. That said, even though the Air has a 10th generation Intel processor, it is of a lower uh performance type so these are going to be faster than the macbook when i said more like the air i meant more and what they changed then like oh yeah sure right then closer to it you're right they've actually thankfully pushed them further away from each other like the macbook air it is a small update but they but they're definitely also trying to pull these two away from each other and the air and my point about the air's processor is just it's really easy to say oh well this is a 10th generation processor this is an 8th generation

processor the 10th is better but um i think the class of the processor matters. And so even though the Air is using a 10th generation processor, it's using a low power version. And then this is the much more powerful version that's in these. I don't love that they didn't touch this processor. It feels very much like this 13-inch MacBook Pro is still living the life of the lowest of the low end. It's living the life of the MacBook Escape. But that's, you know, the fact is, if you wish that the 13-inch MacBook Pro was more, you know, modern and had more stuff, it is also that, right?

The top two models are 4-port and have the 10th generation processor and so you you know it's interesting that apple has decided they want a cheaper option in the 13 because there are people who don't want to buy a macbook air they want to buy a macbook pro and they need to make something available that sort of fills the gap between the Air and the higher-end 13. And so this is this product. But it is definitely a mostly old tech product with some souped-up defaults and the keyboard. And, you know, again, I think clearly the message here is we got to get the keyboard out of there, everybody. Like, that's the number one thing.

The high-end one is updated and uh but it's an interesting story there so they've got the 10th generation processors um but if you go from a ninth generation processor to a like like the the high-end has ninth generation processors if you go uh from the old processor to the new processor intel Intel didn't really change the CPU power. So it seems like, you know, you know, the suggestion I've got having not tested this is that these new high-end 13s are going to be about the same CPU speed as the old models. It's not a, even though they're going to 10th generation processors, the CPU power itself is going to be comparable but um the big thing that intel put in the ice lake generation of processors is graphics so the

integrated graphics should be a lot faster i think apple's playing something like 80 percent right so that and the memory is faster and the um along with that, they are offering up to 32 gigs of memory for the first time. So there are some other benefits that come along with that. Pro Display XDR support in the high-end model is a part of that. It is worth noting as well, because there is low-end and high-end, but there's two configurations of each. low-end and high-end, but there's two configurations of each. So it's like if you go to Apple's website,

low-end model is both of the 1.4 gigahertz quad cores and the high-end model is the two gigahertz quad core processors, but they sell them in different configurations. And it's a 1299, 1499, 1799, and 1999. And so when I talk about the legacy of the macbook escape this is part of it it's really two computers right the 13 inch macbook pro is two computers and that it's not it's not one computer with four variations it's literally two different computers with two base model variations uh you because you normally Apple wouldn't have one computer with four variations,

right? But it doesn't really. These are 13-inch MacBook Pro. It's really two different computers. The good news is that even the cheaper one has the keyboard change, but it doesn't have a lot more than that. It's got upgraded specs. I mean, everybody's going to agree, more RAM, more storage on the base model. Yes, 128 gig storage on the base model yes 128 gig storage on the base model it's not really acceptable i'm glad they boosted that i know that they boosted the price by 100 but you're getting more ram and more storage for that but really that is you know for those who remember that's the old macbook escape except now it actually does have a touch bar and they all have escape keys now because this has got the new layout because it's the

magic keyboard it's got the inverted t for the arrow keys this has got the new layout because it's the Magic Keyboard. It's got the inverted T for the arrow keys. It's got the physical escape key. It's got the separated power key next to the touch bar on the other side. And it's still got the touch bar. So this is not a revolutionary update. It really is a, for one of them, an almost, you know, impossible tosee update other than the keyboard. And then on the other end, it is a bit of what I think we would call traditionally a speed bump, although most of the speed bump is going to happen in memory and in GPU.

But at least it is a new processor kind of thing. But we all know bottom line is going to be that it's about the keyboard. And that really, I think, I look at this announcement and I think, this is all about Apple doing what everybody, I will say everybody said since the 16-inch got announced, which is they got to get that keyboard out of every other laptop they sell. And if that was their priority was we could either ship a fancy new laptop in the 13 slot, but it's going to take us another six months or in may, we can get it out with this, uh, new keyboard and ship that first and then work on the next thing. I, I would choose, get it out of the key, get the

keyboard out. Like first thing you do get that keyboard out of there. And, and they have done that. And that clearly was their priority. Also, you look at the 16. We talked about it. Remember when I went to New York and all of that? They had the speaker upgrade, the microphone upgrade. None of that is in here either. It still feels to me like they could take this product and do what they did to the 16 or what they did to the 15 and making it the 16. And that is a rumor.

And that product may yet happen. But this isn't that. And that is a rumor, and that product may yet happen, but this isn't that. This is just a, I'd say, welcome little update that gets the keyboard right after the dark times before. And so now if you want a MacBook Pro with a keyboard and you did not want the 16 you were holding out um this product will get you that i think the fact that things like the speakers and the microphones not being in this machine i think is a pretty clear indication that there is another one coming at some point in the future who knows when purely because like the macbook air has improved uh speakers and microphones right like because that was like a new design so they put that new tech in there and apple seemed really proud of what

they did for the laptops with that stuff so even something that seems on the face of it may be quite simple that is more of a tell to me than the screen because they could keep they could redesign this product and keep the screen at 13 inches, right? Like we don't know that the screen has to get bigger. Like they may choose to keep it at 13 and make it a little bit smaller. Who knows, right? Like if and when they do change this computer.

But there's just like a few like telltale things to me like that. I was like, okay, that's not here. Suggest that there might be something more and i do wonder i mean and there i'm sure there's a simple answer for this because in the answer being like because why not but it is interesting to me that they they they revised that 15 inch so aggressively like really did a lot to it and made it like a vastly better computer in so many ways i wonder why they did that then if they weren't going to do it to the smaller one for a while like that is just intriguing to me as a

thing to do like i wonder if it was the original plan i would assume so because i can't you know i'm sure there may be some people like oh you know maybe because of covid19 like that no no you have to do some real work to get the new keyboard to fit in there it's not like they can just pop it out and swap it in again right like that's gonna gonna take some work this wasn't a thing that just came about a month ago because they they couldn't make the new one yep but it is just intriguing to me do you know what i'm saying they really have made a gap but in this line between those two products from a functionality perspective which is interesting but that is what that's where they are i you know whenever i'm able

to go back to my studio i've said this before like i want to have a laptop right and and that we recording from that laptop using the same one to travel. I have no idea what I'm going to get out of this or the MacBook Air. There are benefits and disadvantages to both in my mind. I really have the time

to think about it, but I'm going to spend that time thinking about it. Because as I mentioned about the 16-inch, I really like the touch bar. I think that's a cool thing, but I also really loved the speakers and how great they were. And yeah, I thought it would be an easy decision for me because the MacBook Pro would get bigger and I didn't want bigger, but that didn't happen. So now I'm back in unsure territory again. But I think the key thing here, the key message to take away is they changed the keyboard and they've done it. And I think that's great.

Like if there is an update to the 13-inch, maybe, you know, Apple knew that they wanted to do something else with that. They wanted to do something more with that. And that was going to come later. I'm pleased that they didn't wait before they updated this computer because the butterfly keyboard was a mistake. Apple knows it was a mistake now. I'm sure they had good intentions,

but it didn't pan out. Sometimes things don't pan out. And replacing it finally, like and now having all of the laptops have a much better, hopefully more reliable keyboard like that needed to be done and i am really pleased that they have done it right like that's the good story here yeah yeah for sure jason you have had a tale you have wanted to tell

for many weeks now and we kept bumping it we kept bumping it and we decided in fact i made a promise to you last week that no matter what happened today, and what has happened is we had an interview and Apple released a new laptop. But I said no matter what happens, you're going to get to tell your story this week. So, Jason, please tell your story. Oh, boy, no pressure. God, I want to tell the story. me laugh is i had this happen to me and then in in atp episode 372 a few weeks ago casey liss um had the same or a very similar thing happened to him um which is that we were recording episode 290 so i guess you can place that at six weeks ago so the early days of the lockdown and as we're talking um dropbox starts listing every

folder that i have that's shared and saying i've deleted this folder and and fortunately this was in the episode where you were talking about your 16-inch MacBook Pro. Yeah. And so I could just not pay attention and wonder why all my files were being deleted for a while, which was great. Otherwise, I would have had to stop the show and be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So I don't really know why this happened. Uh, what happened on my server, which was also on my Dropbox account is that my, um, my giant hard drive, which is a Drobo 5d died, it died. And so it was no longer mounted. And I don't know why Dropbox would do this, but since the drop Dropbox file was on that server, it decided to interpret that as me deleting all of my files, which doesn't make any

sense. So I, good news is I can rewind my Dropbox and I got all those files back and it wasn't that big a deal. Eventually I figured it out. However, my Drobo died and I have like 10 terabytes of data on it. It's gone. I use that to store my podcast archives, my works in progress, things that I don't need to edit immediately, but I do need to work on. My whole Plex library is on there. My time machine backups are on there. And when I try to figure it out, what, what I would do is I turn it on and it would do this thing where it lights up and it shows all the drives and then it has a little progress bar at the bottom and it kind of goes across and then it lights up and shows all the drives. And then it has a progress bar that goes across. And I thought, Oh no, like it seemed like it was trapped in kind of a boot loop where it was trying to start up, but it was failing.

So this is terrifying. I ended up contacting Drobo's support, and they gave me some tips for free, which was nice. I didn't have to pay for a – I was going to pay for a service, you know, ticket, but it turns out that they figured out what was going on and, and, and turned actually refunded my money. I was going to, I already had paid them. Um, but they said, okay, reboot, take all your drives out and reboot, and then run this diagnostic and send us the files. And the good news, good in quotes, that they came back with was, your drives are probably fine, but the Drobo hardware is bad.

Something bad happened to it. And I've had this for, I don't know, seven years, something like that. It's a long time. Okay. So this is not good because even if my disks are fine, I can't get to them. I did have a backup.

I have a Backblaze backup. And that was intact. So about seven terabytes of data, which is what i considered my essential files um i didn't have things like my plex library on there because the way i figured it and my rationale was why would i back up a movie that i ripped from a dvd that i have in my house so i could just rip it again um it also and i didn't realize that this at the time, I think by default, Backblaze doesn't do things like disk images. So I had some virtual machines for old versions of macOS and stuff that were also not backed up. But it was 7.

That's fine. You know Stevens. Yeah. It's 7.2 terabytes or something of data that I did backup to Backblaze. And for those who don't know, Backblaze has this feature, which I'd never used before, which is you can order a USB drive with your backup on it and have it sent to you in the mail. And then actually, if you then wipe the drive and send it back to them, they'll refund your money or most of your money. So it turns out there's a seven terabyte limit because it's an eight terabyte drive in there. So I had to uncheck a few things and not restore those using the hard drive. Although that's fine because it was a few hundred gigs. I could, I could probably

download that if I really wanted to, but I loaded it up with about seven terabytes worth of my data and I press the button. And what it does is it sort of like does a Backblaze restore of seven terabytes to the hard drive. And as you might imagine, especially if you use Backblaze and done a restore of any kind, like that takes a while. And I get the sense that it took days for that to actually like process. So it was a while before I even got the note that said, we've, we're going to ship you your drive. But I started that process. I said, please restore this because I know that you've got this data. I'm not going to download seven terabytes of data. Please put it on a drive and ship it to me. Also, this is in the earliest days of the lockdown. So

there's this feeling of like, you know, when, yeah, let's do it now to see if they will give it to me. Will they even be working? Who knows? I have a second backup though, which is really great. I use Arc, which if people don't know is a, it's basically a third party backup utility. And then you can point it at a data source where you want to save your backups. And in my case, since I have two terabytes of Dropbox space at the time, I actually had three. I went down a plan on my Dropbox. I actually use a big chunk of that for an Arc backup.

So it's files that I don't see. I've turned them off on my Mac so it doesn't sync them at all. And Arc just saves the backup stuff to Dropbox. And that was for my works in progress. Because what I wanted is I wanted a second backup. Like if I'm working on a project and it's not done, it's more important than the archive project. The archive projects are important, but the ones that I I'm still working on and need to be done soon are more, uh, important. So good news is, um, and, and if i'm being honest i kind of forgot what the arc backup was doing or that i had it and then i was like don't wait a second don't i have another and

i opened arc and it was like would you like to restore and i'm like oh yeah right great great i found i found that backup that i had forgotten i was even doing. So thank you, past me. However, there was one project. So that meant I could get those right off of Dropbox immediately. It was great. I restored them to my Mac and I had them. Fantastic. But one project I did that Sunday before the Monday where it died overnight.

And it turns out that I figured out when the drive died because I had Arc set to back up my works in progress folder at 11 p.m. every day. And the Sunday project didn't get backed up. So it died before 11 p.m. Ah, okay. So it died before 11 PM. Um, and so that was a file that I still had like some Dropbox links from files people had sent me. And I had some zoom files for this podcast project. So I could kind of like reconstruct most of it, although not all of it enough to do it enough to do the project, but I w I was missing, uh, that project because it fell through the cracks. So that was a bummer. So now I'm sitting here and I'm like, okay, I've got Backblaze sending me a drive sometime from somewhere. It's still kind of a mystery. I've got my arc backup of a couple of things, my work in progress folder, less one project and a couple other folders on the server

that I was able to restore. The robot or not folder was there. You'll be happy to know. So I was able to continue my work producing robot or not. But now I've got a bunch of drives with data on them, but only in Drobo format and a dead Drobo 5D, what do I do? And I decided, first off, that even though I said, remember what I said earlier about how it's fine, I don't need those movie files. I'll just re-rip my entire movie collection from the discs again. I decided I did not want to do that. And I decided I did not want to do that. So I went on eBay and I found a Drobo 5D and I bid on it. And there was another Drobo 5D that was buy it now. And so I put the buy it now price on the one that was on an auction. And like a day later, I got outbid for it and I just bought the other one. I was just like, no, forget it. Just buy it now. And it was a buy it now link.

And it was from a company that it was free returns up to 30 days. And I thought, well, maybe what I'll do is I'll buy it, put the discs in to get the data off of it and return it. And then get something else. Yeah. And I felt a little bit guilty, but well i decided i didn't want i didn't want a used drobo because i figure it's probably gonna die because they're all of the same vintage more or less this model i see okay this this shows because i don't do any of this stuff and honestly listening to casey's stories and your stories i'm pleased that i don't manage one of these things but you the drives that you had you they had to go back into another drobo 5d for you because they have a proprietary raid like technology so you have to

stick them in the same model basically or it won't they might have another model but like i just wanted to get the drobo 5d and read those read that data and get all my data back off it was if it was truly intact like they thought it was so i felt a little guilty about buying it from the place that said free returns because i thought i'm kind of abusing the return policy here i'm basically renting a drobo um although i would be paying shipping and i actually um offered them like stuff that they didn't provide me when at the end of the story i'll i'll tell you what happened there but um but i ended up buying that so now i've got that part of it. But I'm thinking to myself, I don't want to buy a new Drobo. Drobo has a reputation. I've actually

been really well taken care of by my Drobo. It lasted a while. When a drive died, I could pop it out, put in a new drive. It worked really well. It was a five disk array. So I had a huge amount of storage. And if one drive died, all the other drives still had the data. So you pop in a new drive, it brings it up, and you didn't lose anything. And that worked. I had like three or four drive failures over the course of the time I had it. It always worked perfectly. At the same time, I thought to myself, maybe what maybe what I should do this time, this is an older piece of hardware, is maybe I should just buy a disk array of my own. Maybe I should just buy a RAID and some RAID hardware or RAID software and just do it that way.

Can I ask why that would be better? Why than a Drobo? Drobo's super proprietary and also the older Drobos are going to have a limit on the size of the drives i believe you can stick in them and there are bigger drives that that are made now and i guess if you made your own if you got an enclosure and then used software on the mac if this kind of thing happened again you wouldn't have to jump through the hoops that you had to jump through because nothing's proprietary right in in theory or at least the the software would be proprietary but i could get another enclosure and probably still read the data but you're controlling the software though

yeah also it's cheaper yeah also it's cheaper because the drobo hardware is expensive and drobo got sold and i don't you know like i don't i i'm not a believer in that in that company to be honest i like i don't i kind of just don't want to be in that space anymore that it served me well. I don't have an anger toward Drobo that a lot of people have, but I don't want to do that. I feel like I only ever hear about Synology anymore. Like I don't hear about Drobo anymore.

So here, so here's the thing. And I don't play in that world because I have a Mac mini server. I'm not interested in a, a NAS, a network attached storage, a server, not interested in it.

I want a big drive on my Mac mini. My Mac mini is my server. I already have a server. So Drobo makes a NAS, a network attached storage, a server. Not interested in it. I want a big drive on my Mac mini. My Mac mini is my server. I already have a server. So Drobo makes NAS and they also make, or at least made attached storage, which is what the 5D is. The D stands for disk. It's a disk.

It's not a server like the 5S. I don't want a Synology. I don't want a Unix server. I have a Mac mini. I bought a new Mac mini a couple of years ago. That's my server. Not interested. I am comfortable want a Unix server. I have a Mac mini. I bought a new Mac mini a couple of years ago. That's my server. Not interested. I am comfortable with a Mac.

Having a Mac as a server can do a lot of Unix-y things. And it can be a Mac that I attach to from my iPad when I want to. So what I ended up doing is I bought a Thunder Bay, which is a four-disk enclosure from Otherworld Computing. which is a four disk enclosure from other world computing. I had a couple of drives that I had not even opened that were backup drives for the Drobo that I just was keeping by in case a drive died. I ordered a couple more drives

and then I set that up. So I actually, and it comes, the Thunder Bay came with a SoftRaid license, which is Mac software, very straightforward. It does RAID with redundancy so that if one of the drives dies, I can pop it out and pop in another drive. It's the same idea.

It will rebuild it. So you give up some space on each drive, but if one of the drives dies, one of the physical drives dies, you just pull it out and pop a new one in. Plus, it gives me actually a little more control, I feel like, than Drobo did in terms of my different disk volumes and all of that. So I got that set up. So now I have a big disk with not a lot on it because I haven't gotten my Drobo back. But I get the Drobo from eBay. There was a lot that happened this is why i want to tell this story before i forgot it i have a drobo from ebay um i plug it in it's like the moment of truth i put all the drives

in you got to keep them in the right order put them all in in the right order turn it on this drobo didn't even have a power cord but i have my power cord for my other one plug it in it mounts all my data is there oh great by the way the day before this my drive from back place showed up so i copied all that onto the thunder bay raid and then i got this and i thought well do i want to copy it all again um and i did i i had to like find software to like compare so i could make sure that i got everything off the Drobo before I wiped it. How did you do that? The software? Yeah.

What is that? Dan wrote about it. I don't have that in front of me. Okay. If Dan wrote about it, I'll find it and put it in show notes. Dan wrote about one piece of software that's kind of ugly, but it was like a file comparison tool. And I used that for the most part. I used two different ones, both of which were kind of unsatisfying, but did enough of a

job for me to figure out what files were missing. Beyond Compare. Beyond Compare is one of them. What a great name, right? And I think I also used Chronosync and both of them were frustrating, but also helpful. Beyond Compare feels like very much a Unix, or like an open source tool that was ported to the Mac in the 2000s. But like, you know, for the job that you're wanting to perform, what else do you expect? Yeah, it's not super slick. It feels like a very first decade of Mac OS X kind of app.

So I did all that, and then and then i had it right then i've gotten i've got the thunder bay set up and then i've got this drobo that's still got all my data and i think well what do i do now thunder bay makes me laugh every time you say it i know right well it's a it's uh ontario thunder bay ontario it's uh it's a city in canada it's where Paul Schaefer is from. So what do I do with the Drobo? And I decided, like I said earlier, I didn't want to be in the Drobo business anymore. I didn't want to use the Drobo as a backup for the Thunder Bay or the Thunder Bay for a backup for the Drobo. I just didn't want it anymore. So I ejected all the discs and I packaged up the thing. And it's actually kind of funny. I went to the people who returned it, who said, we'll take free returns.

And I said, I would like to return it. They sent an email saying, sorry, you can't return it. It was sold as is. And I reply back and I say, well, no, actually, if you look at this listing, it was like an auto reply. I said, if you look at this listing, you'll see that it was not sold as is. It was sold with free 30-day buyer pay shipping. I would like to ship it back to you.

And I said, I'll sweeten the offer. I have the little front plate for it that you don't have. And I have the power cord for it that you don't have. I'll throw those in and you can just resell it and you'll make out. You sell it for more. And their reply, so I'm waiting to see what they say. And they say, and their reply. So I'm, I'm waiting to see what they say. And I did not expect their reply because their reply was,

what if we refund a hundred dollars and you just keep it? What? Literally? They're like, if you don't return it, it was like $350. I want to say bananas. So they give you a 30% back if you just keep it.

They really didn't want it back. And I was already feeling a little guilty about playing the I'm going to buy it, use it, and return it game. So I was like, okay, fine. Fine. Give me your $100. Because I know what Drobo's cost on eBay now. And I've got the face plate and the power cable.

So I'm just going to put those up on eBay and I'm going to put them up for, uh, an amount that I think I will get. And I actually put, I said a buy it now price and the buy it now price was basically, um, it would fund the entire thing completely start to finish. I would end up ahead slightly, actually, if somebody pressed the buy it now button. I put that up and it's eBay,

you're selling things on eBay. It's like, you don't know how that's going to go. And I thought, is anybody going to want this? But I just lost an auction for one and then did a buy it now on another one. And mine is better because it's the totally functions because i just used it that i got from these other people plus the power cable which they didn't sell plus little magnetic face plate that they weren't selling so mine's a better product than their product because it's got all the accessories right out of the box but you never know so i put it up on ebay it's like the fifth thing i've ever sold on ebay mike i'm expecting a week of torment as people bid on my my this drobo that i just bought that people gave me

a hundred dollars not to send back to them in two hours somebody just did the buy it now and i made a profit on the whole thing i i don't understand. I mean, I do have this vision that there's one Drobo and it just goes from person to person to person to get their files off of it. And it gets new things, loses new things, gets new things. I keep thinking that what Drobo should do

is they should have loaner ones that they charge you 100 bucks for plus shipping or something to take to offload your data but they don't do that so ebay is where that happens so anyway yeah i ended up making a profit on buying a drobo using it to copy my data off and then immediately selling it again and and then i've got my old one that's broken here and it'll go to the electronics recycling oh by the way um there's a little door underneath the Drobo that has an SSD in it that is used as a speed cache. And I bought that like a year ago. So I then bought a little enclosure on Amazon, a USB-C aluminum enclosure. And now I have a 256 gig USB-C SSD

attached to my, that's actually backing up my boot drive on my Mac Mini now. Because why not? What are you doing with the old drives? So here's what happened. The next thing I did is I bought a two-disk enclosure, old one. It's actually got like eSATA on it. And it's USB. It's just usb3 i think so it's an old model but it was cheap from other world computing two disk array and i just put i put

the two big disks that were the same size two big disks that were in the drobo in there and i just made that a straight up um straight up array of those two discs added together and i'm using that as my periodic it's not plugged in all the time but like my weekly backup of the entire uh raid that i've got okay so i Because those two disks are big enough and they're not redundant. They're just purely kind of just summed in terms of data that I can use those and always know that I've got like another drive that's got all my old and comparable files on it

or whatever and all my movie files. And I also updated the Arc backup to back up every like four hours to Dropbox instead of every day to reduce the chance that I'm going to lose something that's a work in progress and a failure. And so, yeah, I basically didn't lose any data, but I could have.

So it taught me a lesson that I do actually need to back up that Plex library because I don't want to rip every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer again. I don't want to do it. Every HD movie on Blu-ray, I don't want to do it. I want to keep those around in some way. I was happy, it turns out, to pay a couple hundred dollars that I didn't end up having to pay because of making a profit on the Drobo. I was happy to pay that so I didn't have to sit here over the course of weeks feeding disc after disc after disc into my DVD player and ripping those in order to rebuild my Plex library. I was happy to just pay money to get it back. So I'm glad I was able to do that. Turns out that was a decision I made that was wrong. I don't need to cloud back up that stuff, but I do want to have a physical backup. And basically, it was almost like a smoke test for my backup strategy, where doing this in the end, I didn't lose any data, but I did see all of the holes in my strategy. And now I have that extra... It know, it cost me, it did cost me because I had

to buy a new RAID and new drives, but it didn't cost me as much as I thought. I didn't lose any data. I now have more data available for backup on my server than I used to. And I was really happy that I used Arc. And if you're not doing this, consider it. If you've got extra cloud storage space on Google or on OneDrive or on Dropbox, and you've got key files, it is an extra place to back things up. And that saved my bacon for a bunch of stuff to have the Arc backup available immediately on Dropbox. So plus I had Backblaze and I had stuff that I backed up on Backblaze and I could get it that way too. But I was happy to have both of those options. So yeah, it was harrowing is what I'm saying. I can't believe I made a profit on eBay.

I didn't lose any of my files in the end. And now I have a new four-disc monstrosity that is Thunderbolt 3 as opposed to my old thunderbolt 2 five disc monstrosity from drobo so in the end that's my story i made money on ebay because they they paid me to not send the to drive back to the best bit i will say again like i will state again I am so pleased that I do not have something like this in my life to have to. Well, the reason I do it is because I need to store like 12 terabytes. And I've seen the argument on ATP was, why don't you just store that across a few drives? I used to have a big stack of hard drives attached to my server and I hated it. What I like about it is the redundancy, which is instead of having like a big drive with my

movies on it and a big drive with my podcast files on it, and then another big drive that's the backup of the podcast files. I mean, that's essentially what I've got by having the RAID is that I've got, if one of those drives fails, I've got redundancy. And I really like that because that's happened to me multiple times where a drive has failed and I haven't lost any data. I like that. And I like having a huge, just a huge giant pit in which I can pour files. And I always hated it when I was like, well, I've got a terabyte here and a terabyte there and another terabyte there. But now I have to move things around and split things up.

And I don't like that. And with this approach, I don't need to do that. I just have a giant server full of files you see if i did have 12 terabytes of data i would do something like what you and casey are doing my point is i just don't have it um i don't keep stuff like especially project files there's only one show that i keep uh logic projects for but i just keep them in dropbox and on time machine and a backblaze like that's it um i don't keep the logic projects on my other shows for more than a couple of weeks because in 10 years i've never needed one so i delete i have a little hazel actions written, uh, and set up that actually do delete

a bunch of shows after a while, but some of my stuff I keep because I have gone back to it. Like the incomparable, I absolutely do go back to those. I have a clip show every year that I do. And, um, I will sometimes have to reach way back in the archive. And I've got most of other than the first like 70 or so episodes, I've got all the files for those. Total Party Kill is the same way. So those are the ones where I just have, I'm going to keep those files. And that's, I could store those somewhere, but those two shows together are

about three and a half terabytes of archived material. So I'm not going to put that on a regular cloud service provider. But I totally get your point, which is if you don't store those files, you don't need that approach. And then that leaves aside the whatever six terabytes, seven terabytes of video files that I have on my Plex server, which again are replicable, but i don't want to replicate them so what i will say though this is this is my addendum to this my asterisk i don't have any media files nor do i have any physical media right just don't just don't have any blu-rays i have a

few like barely any blu-rays yep and i don't have a plex server or anything like that no you're you're you barely have any possessions at all. Yes, I'm like Steve Jobs in that room, you know, sitting on the floor with another. I spent two days this week without any internet. My Wi-Fi was down. Ah, yeah. How'd that go? We couldn't watch anything.

Yeah. So that is like, this is the only thing where I'm thinking that maybe there needs to be an introduction of something like into my life, but I don't know what it is yet of media in some description. Because also where we live, LTE isn't that good. Like you can watch YouTube videos, but we couldn't watch any Disney Plus stuff. Like that just would not work because we're trying to watch any apple tv right like i don't think the apple tv has any sense of uh not playing at full resolution i just don't think it could even comprehend such a thing because i could watch the same content on my phone but if i tried to watch it on the apple tv it would not we just would not work so that made

me realize that like maybe i need something but i don't know what it what it is right because like i was like why don't you just watch some of the stuff you've bought and it's like well but i don't have it saved anywhere yeah right like it's just i bought it on itunes and it's it's up in the cloud what i do oftentimes is on my iphone and on my ipad i will occasionally just download something using either plex or using the tv app just to have like i do have usually it happens when i'm on a going on a trip i'll download some movies for that for the airplane and then i will just keep them on there and then if i'm in a no connectivity situation those are still there and it's sometimes a delightful surprise like what did

i download eight months ago my smaller ipad which is the one that i use when i'm when i'm traveling has some movies on it but like it's most it's like stuff i've seen like it it still isn't like that is not a solution which is long term or whatever like i need a if i want to do this it needs to be a little bit more considered than that which is just like a random crapshoot it's like yeah that you know if we had no internet for a week we would have turned to that but for two days we just played animal crossing like whatever um but it did make me realize i don't have anything which was just like an interesting thought but i will just say i'm happy that i don't have anything, which was just like an interesting thought.

But I will just say I'm happy that I don't save tons and tons and tons of data. Yeah, well, I went through that a while ago where I took, like I used to have everything of shows that were ephemeral. And those are all now, you know, it's been 60 days or 30 days or something and it just deletes them um and with the shows that i'm keeping it actually goes through and it it archives them it like compresses them and saves them off um just to it takes up less space that way but still they're they're they're there because i do go back and uh and pull that stuff out and we end up the incomparable they're like recurring jokes and things that happen and i just want to keep those those i want to keep around i i've found that i've regretted losing the most of the first 75 episodes so i'm just not going to do that now

are you happy that you got to tell your story i feel like you know if just for me now i've gotten it while i still remember the story it's still near and dear to me um with enough remove that some of the real pain of worrying if i lost you have those moments right you have that moment where you're like oh no right like and no is not what i said uh and so it's good uh to have a little remove from it and it's all worked out um i would have been okay if the drives had been dead because I could have just re-ripped my complex library. And that would have been annoying, but I could have done it. It taught me some lessons about holes in my backup strategy.

I think raids with redundant disks are fun and awesome. And I recommend them. But also disks are enormous now now and you could just buy a couple of enormous discs and use those all right this episode is brought to you by KiwiCo KiwiCo help get your kid to put down there's a cell phone video game do something more do something different something that engages their brain in other ways if you have a child grandchild niece nephew cousin learning at home right now, this could be the perfect product for them because this is a science and art subscription box for kids tested by kids.

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And they don't just provide you with everything you need. They also provide you with little extra things like guides for you to put over something to understand where some stickers need to go. Like really thoroughly thinking through the process to avoid frustration for younger people, whilst also making it engaging and fun and exciting at the same time. It's really, really awesome. There are different crates for kids of all ages, so there's something for every person, from the panda crate for ages 0 to 2, to the eureka crate for ages 14 to 104. There's a KiwiCo crate for everybody. KiwiCo is redefining play with hands-on projects that

build confidence, creativity, and critical thinking skills. There's something for every kid or every kid at heart with KiwiCo. Get your first month free on select crates at KiwiCo.com slash upgrade as K-I-W-I-C-O.com slash upgrade. Our thanks to kiwi co for their support of this show and relay fm hashtag ask upgrade to finish out today's show steven asks which streaming music services do you subscribe to and do you still buy music downloads or physical media apple music and and no nothing uh occasionally there'll be an artist who i like who does like a kickstarter or has a rarities thing and i will buy that from them directly like something on band camp or something like that um otherwise no i don't buy music anymore uh i subscribe to apple music and spotify my spotify subscription is like legacy at this point um it's still in i don't

like i have like a few family members that use the login um and then also for me now like there's there is a podcast that i do listen to on spotify i that show, The Besties, that I mentioned that went, that was like a video game show that I like that went to Spotify? Right. I listen to it on Spotify now. Like, I thought I wouldn't, and I have started it, and now I listen every week. The way I get around this, by the way, is like, how do I remember?

I have an email newsletter, which they post every time an episode comes out. So I just leave that email in my saying later folder in my email. And then I'll just, when I listen to it, I get rid of it. And that's how I remember to go there. Cause like I wouldn't remember otherwise.

So that's that. I do, I don't buy music similar to you. I don't like if Apple Music's where I do my listening. If I find an album that I like, I don't buy it. But there is still music that I buy for similar reasons, like somebody who's not on streaming services, but they have Bandcamp or whatever, right? Like then I'll buy it that way. Like, you know, I have a couple of independent musicians that I like for music and stuff for like that I work to. Louis Zong is my favorite person. I'll put a link to their band camp in the show notes

because I know people will ask. And so they sell a bunch of music there and I'll just, I buy that, right? Like that's, because they don't, they have a few things on Apple Music, but nowhere near their full catalog. But that's the only reason that I will buy music these days. Either, you know, the occasional vinyl will find its way

into my collection but that's rare james asked this is probably mostly for me jason but if you have any thoughts you can share them too of course i'd like to hear your take on the nhs's decision to not adopt the apple google contact tracing exposure notification uh option yeah so the nhs after previously saying that they would uh are now saying like lol no we're just gonna make our own contact tracing thing i'm really disappointed about this um you know there's there's more governments like i saw that like after everybody thought france was going to get on board and then they decided again like no we're not gonna like we're going to do it ourselves even after praising apple's method the praise of apple's method made everybody think that they were gonna do it but

they're just like nah don't worry about it uh i i find it just it's ridiculous i think that that it's very clear that apple and google's method is the best baseline to build upon because it integrates cross-platform it has deeper tie-ins with the system um i think it's honestly yeah i find it quite quite disappointing um and i hope that when it becomes more integrated into the system later down the line that a lot of these countries will will change their minds but i honestly, most governments want the data. Honestly, that's what they want it for. And so, I mean, when the NHS launches their app,

I probably will go for it, even though I am opposed to their thinking, because I think it's important. i'm conflicted right like i'm i'm more conflicted now because i want the privacy that that google and apple were going to give but at the same time i also want to know if i'm coming into contact with people so i don't know but the jury's still out for me a little bit, but I am disappointed. I think it's really ridiculous.

I wished that politics weren't getting in the way of this, but they are. Stupid. Ask UK. Upgrade. Stefan asks, I want to use my iPad and MacBook Pro at the same desk with the same keyboard

at different times of the day so I'm looking for a keyboard that can switch between them easily, what would you recommend? Do you have any recommendations? I found one Oh, what did you find? The Logitech Craft I know that both John Voorhees and David Sparks use this

It's a Logitech keyboard, I think Federico uses it too actually, it's a Logitech keyboard which apparently is pretty nice, and it has multiple Bluetooth profiles built into it with dedicated buttons that you can tap, and it will switch

to different devices. And I know Logitech make good stuff, and this one has this little wheel on it that people seem to like, too. It looks like a nice keyboard. I don't own one but uh i know multiple people that do and they're happy with it yeah i haven't used one of these kind of keyboards in a very long time i used to rely on the logitech uh easy switch keyboard logitech has been making multiple bluetooth uh keyboards for a while now they know how to do it. Yeah, exactly.

If you want a mechanical keyboard that does that, you get one of the Keychron keyboards. My Keychron's on the way, Jason. My Keychron K6 that I backed on Kickstarter. It's on the way. Yeah, I have the 2 and the 4, I want to say. But I've got two Keychron keyboards. And although I prefer my Vortex Race 3 keyboard, and that's the one I use at my desk every day, I have a Keychron Bluetooth mechanical keyboard that I use with my iPad.

And it's great. And it's got a shortcut that lets you switch any USB keyboard and turn it into a Bluetooth keyboard. And I think it's got a toggle. But anyway, yeah, the simple answer is Logitech makes some very nice keyboards that have switchable Bluetooth things. So check those out. switchable bluetooth things so check those out and jonathan asks if you could magic wand one feature into ios 14 what would it be i added not audio related into this because we always pick the same thing audio hijack audio hijack or like more audio support for me there's an easy one which i've found more and more recently which is the ability to create

my own custom keyboard shortcuts in ipad os so i could you know i could have a keyboard shortcut for this or that right like one to pull down uh one to like i don't know open this in split view on the left side or this one to like just you know hit the escape key just to take me to home, that kind of stuff. That's what I would want. It's something that I genuinely hope and kind of think they might do. It seems more likely now than ever, I would say.

The more keyboard shortcut stuff and customization on iOS. Right. Well, you could see how, and we talked about this when the magic keyboard came out that you could if you added some features for things like media controls you don't need to have that function row if i can map um a different key combination to play pause or next track or previous track or brightness up or brightness down, if I care, then it's solved, right? Like just throw in things like executing a shortcut when you use a keyboard.

Or it would be even better if you could do it per app, but certainly system-wide keyboard shortcuts would be good. So I'm with you there. I'm going to throw in another iPad feature here for my magic wand, which is full-on external display support so like if you plug in an external monitor it's a second screen like it is on the mac and you can use your mouse or trackpad and keyboard right now it's all just kind of mirrored it would seem now that we've got this full cursor support on the ipad the next step is to let people plug it in to a big display and use it like you would

a laptop. Again, these are two things that feel possible, like more and more possible now, and I really hope that we see those in iPadOS 14, which we could be four weeks away, or as Mark said,

like eight weeks away. So that's actually a good time to thank Mark Gurman again for joining the show I was really really pleased to have that discussion with him it was fascinating and I really appreciated having him on the show so thanks again Mark thanks to you for listening

as always thanks to our sponsors KiwiCo, Squarespace and Linode for their support of the show. You can find links to this episode and much more at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 296. And of course, you'll find those in your podcast player of choice. Don't forget, you can become a RelayFM member. You can support any show you like. You can support this one just by hitting that link in the show notes. There's a link right at the very top of our show notes every week where you can select to become a member

and you get access to tons of great member benefits and growing all the time, all the time. Go to sixcolors.com where you can find Jason's work and Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter. I am iMike, I-M-Y-K-E, and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Bye, everybody.