Upgrade - 307: Big Sur Sosumi

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

Apple's big design changes in macOS Big Sur aren't limited to visuals. The system's alert sounds have changed, too. What better way to run down those changes than on a podcast during the Summer of Fun? Also, Apple News adds some audio features Myke likes, while Jason remains skeptical of whether Apple News can really help the sad state of the news business. Plus: Peacock Premium... Plus.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 307 it is still the summer of fun summer of fun and today's show is brought to you by expressvpn mint mobile and pingdom my name is mike hurley i am joined by mr jason snow hi jason snow hi mike hurley it is the summer of fun and we got something fun today Pingdom. My name is Mike Hurley. I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. It is the Summer of Fun, and we've got something fun today because it's the Summer of Fun. Of course we do. We're planning. We're planning our attack for Summer of Fun. Yep. Not going to reveal

anything yet, but we've got ideas. We've got plans. The Summer of Fun planning document is stretching out across the summer. At the moment, it runs until mid-August, where I think we're going to need a lot longer than that. We need more ideas. We do. We do. I have a hashtag SnellTalk question from Arjan, who wants to know, Jason, where do you start reading a book? Do you look at the cover and all of the preamble,

or do you go straight to the first word of the first chapter? And is this different for analog versus eBooks? the first chapter and is this different for analog versus ebooks i don't okay um i start at the beginning and read to the end and uh in terms of like the front matter i i always want to have whatever uh you know i want to know what the setup is from the writer so like if there's a quote or something like that i mean if it's like a list of acknowledgements, I'm not going to read that. Things that are part of the work, I will absolutely do it. And do I look at the cover? I mean, yeah, I've seen the physical object or if it's a Kindle book, I've at least ordered it. What I don't like about reading on the Kindle is sometimes it takes you, it always takes you to the first page of the text, but you

often will miss like the name of the section or a quote that starts it or things like that so i always sort of back up from the beginning just to see if there's anything else there but mostly it's pretty straightforward i will also say that i have a i have a no maps policy um there are a lot of especially like fantasy novels that have maps or, or genealogies in the back. Sometimes that happens too, or even in the front, no maps, no genealogies. I'm not interested in your maps and genealogies. If you can, if you can't tell the story without a map, you have failed as a writer.

I don't, I don't want your map. I, uh, I know you're gonna hate, you're gonna hate this so much. I read the last line. You do? Yeah, I do. You're like Harry, and when Harry met Sally, you've got to read the last line in case something happens? No, it's because I get impatient or whatever,

and it's kind of like the temptation is too strong to do it. Is this like differential privacy where you if you read the first line in the last line you can use ai to synthesize what happened in the entire novel and you don't have to read it it saves me the time of reading the books yeah but like frankly the last line so rarely gives away anything right like it just you know it doesn't really give anything away there was a harry potter book one them, where it kind of was like, oh, whoops. But, you know, I just, I feel better that way by doing it. But the real trick is I don't read books, so I don't have to read the last lines.

So there you go. Well, yeah, that solves everything. And a lot of map fans in our chat room who are very angry with me. Look, I enjoy a fake map. I read the Strange Maps blog for a long time. A fake map, a fantasy map, it's fun. Like I know where Mordor is, okay? I get it.

For as much as people are angry at you, it's like four times angrier at me right now for the- Oh, well, that's because you're a monster. But I just want to be clear to all my map fans out there that fantasy maps are fun but they can't be essential and when I haven't started the book yet I'm not going to look at the map I'm not going to I'm going to be like all right oh wow there's a map here I better get some geography lessons of this fantasy world before I start so I know where I am it's like I don't want to do that

if I want to refer back later to the fantasy map okay I don I don't, but I could. Why would anybody read the map before they read the book? I always thought the maps were there for reference. Yeah, and even then, I'm not a huge fan of it because if you have to consult a map, I think you failed as a writer. The genealogies are the one

that really get me, though. I was on a book episode of The Incomparable recently where people were talking about how they had read the genealogy in order to understand how all the characters were related to one another. And it was a book I enjoyed, but I said, no, are you kidding? No, I'm not going to consult reference material for

the novel I'm reading. The storyteller really needs to do their job in the novel and not say, oh, well, you don't know who this person is. Go at the uh at the at the back of the book also i read it on a kindle and so looking at the back of the book is hard if you would like to send in a possibly less controversial snell talk question just to be clear more less controversial than where do you start reading a book where the clear answer is at the beginning and then i go to the end and we both managed to mess that up. So thank you. Thank you to our Snell Talk question. Thank you, Arjun.

Hashtag Snell Talk. You just send out a tweet and it will be included in a list or you can use the command with the question mark Snell Talk in the RelayFM members Discord. I have a very short article that I wanted to refer to, or at least it's a short point from an article written at Bloomberg, basically just stating Apple's current policy for working from home. So as COVID-19 cases continue to spike throughout the world, Apple has been reclosing retail stores. We've seen that. They opened a bunch in America, closed them right down again. And now Apple are urging their retail

employees to work from home wherever possible. And you would say to yourself, how can a retail employee work from home? Apple's created a kind of thing called a retail at home program where they're basically moving their in-store retail stuff to online stuff, whether it be customer support or other services which are related to online. it be customer support or other services which are related to online because as you can imagine apple's uh need for online retail was increased right like everybody else because if you can't go to the store you've got to get the stuff done somewhere people are doing it online so they're trying to remove people around for that and also uh they're not going to be uh doing a full return for u.s offices in 2020 so they do not expect any point doing a full return for US offices in 2020.

So they do not expect any point in 2020 to bring all of their stuff back to the office. I think this makes sense for many reasons, for lots of companies, but I think especially for Apple, as a company that wants to ensure that some people are able to be at the office. You know, like I think with a lot of companies, it's like, you know, we want some people to be back, we'll bring those in but for apple we spoke about it before with like the secrecy and the product design labs and stuff that stuff has to be done at apple park so they

want to keep everybody away to protect that small group to be able to be there and they specifically said uh in the in three months ago because we're coming up to a new analyst call and quarterly results, so get ready for that, that some groups were more efficient remotely and some were less efficient remotely. And if you're trying to bring people back who are important for your business and are less efficient remotely, what you want to do is bring them back and one, give them room to spread out and separate them perhaps much more than they would have been otherwise. And two, put them in an environment where they're not running into a lot of other people. It's not just the space. It's also like if there are

80 people in Apple Park or 150 people in Apple Park versus like a thousand people in Apple Park, the chances of exposure and things like that go way down as well. So that actually kind of makes sense. I would imagine the people that have to be at Apple Park are going to come back to Apple Park and be spaced out, presumably. And that'll be what it's like for a while. be spaced out presumably and that'll be what it's like for a while yeah i i think that there's also a benefit to large companies being very upfront with their employees if they've made these decisions because it allows people to go to other places you know like if if you're like uh lease is being renewed and you only live in this city because you work in the building which is close to it maybe you could go back home for six months or something right instead and deal with it later on

you know what i mean right like where if you look at some of these like some of the larger cities where a lot of tech companies are rents are really high and if you're only there because you work at the company then maybe giving you the ability to to go somewhere else for a bit could be useful. So I think it's good for companies to be pretty upfront about this stuff, considering where we are. And who knows, maybe it will actually change Apple's corporate culture

in some ways where some groups that were mandatory in person never go back to being mandatory in person. I think so. The genius is out of the bottle, right? I hope so, because as somebody who knows people who work at Apple and has talked to people who are hiring managers at Apple in the past, some of their groups, their

insistence on them being in person don't make any sense. Some of them do and some of them don't. And I'm a big fan of distributed workplaces and I think you get better people who are happier and more efficient and they can you know handle forcing them to move to an incredibly high cost of living place is not necessarily for a job that doesn't need to be done there is uh is not great so i hope that they change their tune a little bit upstream time uh i have a couple of uh acquisitions that apple have made for apple tv plus or deals at least that they've signed. They have signed a first look deal with Idris Elba. So there's not really much more to say than that.

So Idris of The Wire, Luther, he was in the Thor movies as well. And also Apple have acquired another movie called Palmer, starring Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Academy Award nominee June Squibb, and Alicia Wainwright. This one was actually announced by Apple themselves. They had the website that I love, which is apple-tv-plus-press.apple.com, which looks like a fake website, but is a real website that Apple run and maintain. They announced this one uh rather than where most of our headlines

come from uh sites like deadline or the hollywood reporter or variety but this one came up from apple uh the movie stuff is particularly interesting because it seems to actually be doing pretty well for them so we've mentioned greyhound a bit recently. A report from Deadline is stating from their sources that Greyhound is reportedly Apple's largest opening weekend success, larger than any of the series or anything else that they've done before, with apparently over 30% of the viewers of Greyhound being new to Apple TV+. Yeah, how about that? That interesting that um that it had that appeal and although i mean this is this was a father's day movie so this was not like a summer

blockbuster per se but it's got a big name and it's got kind of potential for broad appeal and all of that and i think it's interesting that it did well, and they have other things in the works that are more likely to be blockbusters down the road. But this is encouraging. And we've seen from Netflix, and I just watched Palm Springs on Hulu. Films on streaming services is a driver of engagement just as much as TV shows are. So I think that's interesting. Switching gear to another company. But on a similar vein.

I wanted to just mention this Netflix news. That they are developing a spy series. Based on the Greyman. Book series. The reason I thought this was interesting. Is because of how big they're going with it. So they're making a movie. They're putting over 200 million dollars.

Into it. They have signed the putting over $200 million into it. They have signed the Russo Brothers to direct it. This is the Russo Brothers' first movie since Avengers. They have Ryan Gosling in the lead role with the hopes of turning this into a franchise where Gosling will star as the Gray Man in multiple movies with Chrisans as the quote-unquote villain for this movie basically all of the reporting is saying that netflix are trying to build a james bond like franchise right i think of it maybe more of like born but anyway sure no i think it's an interesting idea and so we i just mentioned tv and film right so? So I look at this and I think, okay, like, I get it. You're spending $200 million and you're going to make a big blockbuster movie and you're going to put it on your surface.

If this is a franchise going forward, what's the right way to play it? And I don't have an answer here, but I'm just saying, what's the right way to play it and i don't have an answer here but i'm just saying what's the right way to play it because you could do another one of these every two or three years and it would be like a born or a james bond um could you do something different you're on streaming so i also start to think could you do something more like, think about how BBC did Sherlock with Cumberbatch, where it was like, all of those were like 90 minute long episodes. They're basically movies. They're basically movies, but shorter than two, two and a half hours, like so many theatrical

movies. And they would do a handful of them. And I look at this and I think, okay, well, if you want this to be a franchise Netflix, is your next step wait three years and get another movie for $200 million? Or is your next step, you know, work up two or three scripts and have two or three shorter runtime movies that roll out over time because it allows you to and i don't know the answer maybe the answer is no making people wait two years and then having a big blowout is the right way to do it and i'm not saying they should turn ryan gosling's uh spy franchise for

netflix into a tv show but i'm saying with streaming there's like a middle ground right like they could do they could break the rules of like, well, no, no, this is a feature. And oh, well, this is a TV show. You could, if you're Netflix, try to get a little creative and play250 million on making, you know, two. And the Russo brothers know about making two-part movies, right? Because they just did it with Avengers. But even if they were standalone stories, like maybe that would give you a better return, or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it's all about a huge marketing blitz for a giant thing and everybody comes to watch that and then they go away for two years i just wanted to ask the question because i think it's interesting that there are there are things in between what we think of as film and tv and if you're ever going to explore that a streaming service like netflix is where you could do it i i say i agree with your concept but i think for

this specific project i for some reason like the idea of it being a movie i can being big called a movie and being a big like quote unquote summer blockbuster like netflix's attempt at a summer blockbuster and also i would assume for similar reasons like they maybe want it they're going to put all this money into it maybe they want to pick up some movie awards right which netflix doesn't have so many of those yeah but they could but if they again if they structured it if they had two good story ideas they could make two 90 minute movies with two good story ideas and release them a year apart and it would be more movies i think they may do that after the first one so like if the first one works for sure you know of course i'm not i'm i'm not talking about the first one i'm saying sort of sort of like if this is a franchise and you're going to continue it, how do you replicate it?

Because the James Bond model, the Bourne model is every few years you make a big Hollywood blockbuster. But you're Netflix. You don't have to do it that way if you don't want to. You could release somewhat smaller movies that were still super big, especially if you need to schedule Ryan Gosling, right? Schedule him to shoot two of them back to back and roll them out over successive years. And you've got a new Gray Man movie and you'd call it a movie,

but it would be every year instead of every two or three years. And is that a different model? I don't know. I'm just fascinated by the options that these companies have. And not everything is a TV show. Not everything is a blockbuster movie,

but sometimes those things are the right format. I looked at this and I thought, how do you build a film franchise on Netflix? And what are your options? Because I think they've got a lot of different options. And maybe the creators, right? Maybe the Russo brothers and Ryan Gosling and whoever else is producing this, maybe it ends up being in their lap of where do they next? And what do they have a big idea that requires two hours? Or do they have something that has a natural break in it where like Avengers end game or an Avengers infinity war, you could actually like play into the fact that there's a delay between

and leave everybody hanging. It's up to them creatively to decide, but they've got, I like that. They've got the options in a way that the old kind of, it has to be a major motion picture release uh that those rules don't necessarily apply at least as much to netflix uh peacock premium has launched to everybody oh has it yes what are your experience so far so this is the streaming service from nbc universal which is owned by comcast which means

that it is a streaming service from a cable company which is interesting because we view streaming service as sort of the future and you can cut the cord from your cable company your tv provider your traditional linear tv provider and uh so what does it look like if you if it's a streaming service from the linear tv provider? And the answer is, I got it free because I have Comcast cable. Which is, I think, just such a cable company move, right? They're like, oh yeah, cord cutters, you just buy it and you got our streaming service. Great. There's even a free tier.

And then there's like a $5 a month tier that is Peacock Premium. And then there is a $10 a month tier called is peacock premium and then there is a ten dollar a month tier called peacock premium plus mike are you being serious premium plus yes it's called peacock premium plus premium plus and that's the ad free version of peacock premium is that i feel like we didn't know that right because we were calling it peacockock Plus before, which was the joke. Yeah, I wasn't aware of it. It may have been out there, but I wasn't aware of it until it launched. And I clicked because I have Peacock Premium. And what I found is that if I would like to make the ads on Peacock go away,

as a Comcast subscriber, I can pay $5 a month to upgrade to Peacock Premium Plus. And then I don't see the ads. That is ridiculous. And for everybody else, it's whatever. $10 a month without the ads. $5 a month with the ads. Why not just call it Peacock Plus? Why Premium Plus? Silly.

It's more... There's some interesting stuff in here. NBC has moved all of their Premier League content. So NBC has the Premier League in the US. This is football slash soccer. Everybody, British soccer, English soccer.

It's more than English. It's more popular as football than American football, just, you know. Yeah. No, but it's English football because it's literally, it's the English Premier League. It's only England and like and sometimes a team in Wales.

It's not even Scotland. They have their own league. And I assume Northern Ireland has their own league, but I don't know. Anyway, soccer talk. But in the U.S., NBC's got it. And what they did a few years ago is they, I think last year, two years ago, they took all the games that were not on their network or on their cable channel, NBC Sports Network, and they put it on a streaming service called NBC Sports

Gold, which costs $65 a year. And what they've done is they put all of that stuff into Peacock, or Peacock Premium. And so what that means is essentially that I get all the soccer matches now where I wasn't paying for NBC Sports Gold, so I only got what they chose. And so that's kind of interesting. So they're pushing a lot of their sports stuff that they used to have on these more esoteric niche services, and they're just pushing them into Peacock, which I think is the right thing to do, right? They want to load up on the content in Peacock and that's the product they want to sell to people. So they pushed all their soccer stuff in there. It's got a few features that I really like

that other streaming services and other apps have tried, but I like that they're giving it a go. They have this thing called Channels that's not like Apple TV Channels or Amazon Channels. This is like television channels. So it wants to replicate the experience of flipping to a channel and seeing what's on. So it's a live stream channel. I have suspicions that they developed this technology because they were going to launch

with the Olympics this summer, which ended up not happening. But the idea there that they would have these live various live stream channels of different things happening at the Olympics. And they don't have that, but they do have things. So there's a Jimmy Fallon channel where it's just different Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon shows streaming endlessly. There's a Bob Ross channel, The Painter. That's a good idea. Right? So you just flip on it.

If you want to be calm and relaxed, you flip on the Bob Ross channel, and it's just endless streaming Bob Ross. There's an 80s Rewind channel that's got a bunch of 80s comedies and detective shows and stuff. There's an Office channel. So you just flip it to The Office and it's episodes of The Office forever. Fox did this for a while with their Simpsons app. They had a Simpsons app where you could just stream and it was endless stream of The Simpsons too. So I think it's a clever idea. And it's good for sports. Like they're using this for the soccer stuff now. They use the channel interface for that. That's where you're watching the live soccer match as you flip to that channel that's showing that match. So that's an interesting idea. Tries to get to the thought of maybe sometimes you just want to kind of dial in a particular thing and then just

not fiddle with the interface like there's no autoplay or anything it's just literally it just plays forever i think that's uh an interesting thing to try they they have a bunch of or they've got some original content but it seems kind of cobbled together from various parts of the universal nbc empire they've got this show brave new. It sounds very much like it was built for the sci-fi channel and then kind of repurposed into Peacock Premium. Although there is a show that I like, AP Bio, which was a sitcom on NBC. This is the story we talked about a while ago and got some good laughs out of it, which is that NBC canceled it and then Peacock saved it. And there was a real question of like, why did you not just come hello like have a conversation about maybe we should put this on that's not how they did it they just canceled it

and then they saved it from themselves uh it's so weird um so i'll watch that because that's coming back this fall um and and that's an original that they're presumably just producing like they did for the network except it's going to be on peac instead. And I think a twist that will be fun when it happens is that Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers' late night shows, which they record those at like five in the afternoon in New York City, and then they air at night, 11.30 and 12.30 at night. They are going to be released at eight Eastern,

so in prime time. So if you're a fan of a late night talk show and you don't want to stay up and watch it in late night, you can watch it much earlier, like three and a half hours earlier on Peacock. However, they're not doing that yet because of COVID-19. In fact, Fallon just went back to his studio last week, but it's with a skeleton crew and the production logistics of getting that show ready to go by 8 instead of 1130 is a bit much right now. So they say that will happen in the future. But I think that's an interesting idea, too. The idea that they've got this original content that they've built up for linear broadcast.

So it's like, well, that's got a time slot. It's 1130. And 8 o'clock is for dramas or sitcoms or reality shows. And with Peacock, NBC can say, or it's for Jimmy Fallon or it's for Seth Meyers. Like whatever, whatever you want to watch at eight o'clock at night or nine o'clock at night, go right ahead on Peacock. So interesting. We'll see how that goes when they try it out. And I got to use the apps. I use the iPad app and I use the Apple TV app for Peacock. So interesting. We'll see how that goes when they, when they try it out.

And I got to use the apps. I use the iPad app and I use the Apple TV app for Peacock. I was frustrated by the Apple TV app because they're doing that thing so many, not as much as before. I think, I think this is, is I think every Apple TV app developer has this great idea that they're going to reinvent how video works on the Apple TV. And then they realize that they probably should stop fighting it and just do what Apple does. But here it is again, Peacock doesn't really use the UI conventions of other Apple TV apps. So you kind of have to learn how to use it, which is super annoying. I did find a funny quirk, which is in their movie uh interface on apple tv they have like movies that are available they show you the rotten tomato score but only if it's good

i mean you can click through and you can see it for all of them right but on the top level where it's just the tiles it'll be like jurassic park 80 jurassic park 2 also a movie jurassic park 3 yep this is a movie or the matrix 98 the matrix 2 64 and the matrix 3 is a movie that's available here uh that made me laugh like somebody had that like don't show it if it's a bad review we want them to click like all right okay we can do that um a bigger interface problem is that they don't have dates on the episodes it doesn't say like when this episode dropped and um that makes it hard to tell is this this week's is this new or you know or is this today's is this today's jimmy fallon or yesterday's jimmy fallon i don't know that is particularly difficult when they do lean on

late night talk shows right well this is this is an example where it's the worst right but um actually and it's worse than that because they also sort their seasons uh with the first episode of this season at the top which means if you want to get to the if you use that navigation to get to jimmy fallon or seth myers you have to you have to go in and scroll endlessly to the bottom because bottom because the most recent episode is at the bottom of the list. It's season whatever, episode 125 or something. So there's some clear mistakes here where they, you know, I don't know. It's not as well thought as it should be.

And again, coronavirus-related stuff, and they were planning on the olympics and they've had to scramble and i get all that but there's like a lot of questionable decisions in here i i imagine they'll work uh work it out coronavirus isn't the reason that you slit your episodes that way well no but i'm saying that they're they're but their development team could have been quite disrupted by it right like and and they ended up having to ship something that was not as far along as they would have liked because they had to send their people home.

And I'm willing to give them a little bit of a break because their entire strategy had to change because the Olympics got moved. And presumably their development team got sent back to their houses. But yeah, it's a great example of somebody making a very simple UI decision saying, oh, yeah, we'll just sort the episodes this way and not thinking through what that meant in terms of something like a talk show. Because I went there and I was like, oh, I hear Jimmy Fallon went back to the studio this week.

I want to see that episode. And I couldn't tell what episode it was, when it was from. to see that episode and I couldn't tell what episode it was, when it was from. And when I went to the, to get the definitive answer, which was to look in the list of episodes, it was at the very bottom of a very long scrolling list, which, you know, this is all fixable, but it's dumb. So it's a work in progress, Peacock premium. And when, uh, if there's a show that I'm actually going to watch on it, like AP bio Bio when that comes back. I'm going to watch the English soccer on it now. But when AP Bio comes back, I might sign up for Peacock Premium Plus so I don't have to see their stupid ads. This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile.

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iphone it was super easy to do and they have they have an app too but i actually just use their website and you put in the code on the card and um and and that's it now if you're moving your phone you do there's a little bit more to do in order to move your phone number in this case they just generated they told me they said where are you and then they generated a phone number based on my area code and which was super convenient and and that was it i had a new phone with a new phone number oh that's nice that you can just say like give me a number with this code oh yeah yeah and i i'm now thinking that you know should i have made it some you know like a like a new york area code or something so like alaska or something

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Mipmobile for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. We knew it was coming, and it is here. Apple News Plus Audio Stories. There was a few things related to Apple News in the audio department that happened

in the middle of last week. The most interesting one is their podcast, which we'll talk about in a bit, but I'll give everybody the rundown of what they're doing here. So Apple News plus audio stories is available. It was available with iOS 13.66 which i expect will be the final point

released to ios 13 but who knows at this point you never know you never know around 10 stories per week uh was it oh sorry it's 20 20 around 20 stories per week um are going to be professionally narrated by professional voice actors, as Apple has said. Voice actors. You can switch between reading and listening at any point. So if you're reading an article that has the narration, you can choose to pick it up as audio or vice versa and go back to where you were in the story,

which is just nicely done. Didn't have to do that. I don't think that was required, but that's good functionality. US only for the moment moment which is peculiar to me because apple news plus is only available in three markets or four markets which is u.s uk australia and canada and i don't understand why they haven't made it available everywhere i mean i would understand if there's maybe some publications that they only have in one market but i surely there is a crossover for at least some of them and considering everybody is paying the same amount

if they're a subscriber i don't understand why they wouldn't have either a made it available or b it's only four markets right like you don't you know have an option for everyone so that's a weird that's just like a weird wrinkle in this to me um i think that it potentially shows that that maybe potentially shows apple's hesitancy with anything news plus related because it really seems like it's not gone the way that they wanted but um yeah that's peculiar i find that strange especially because apple news today the podcast hosted by shimita besu and duarte geraldino who are named their artwork is in the show like but they came from a wnyc show to this so like they are known as producing daily news shows.

It's hosted every weekday. We'll talk about that more in a bit. But that's available everywhere except, well, not except, but in the Apple News app, it's only available in the US, but it's on Apple podcasts and podcast apps around the world. Right. So I think that there's some elements to that, which we'll get to in a minute as to why that's the case. Apple News has also been added to CarPlay, which makes sense to support the audio features that they've added.

And then the last component of the Apple News Plus stuff is a new focus on local news. It's currently in a handful of major US markets and features, quote, a diverse collection of local publishers, including a major newspaper in each region covering sports, culture, dining, weather, politics, that kind of stuff, which is local to those areas. There is still going to be curation from Apple News editors,

and there'll be an element of personalization for everybody. What do you think about the local news pivot? It's an interesting idea. I have the same concerns I've always had about Apple News+, which is that I'm not sure it solves

the problem of how you fund journalism. Modern journalism has lots of issues of how the money comes in now that they're not getting, newspapers especially, are not getting the money

that they used to from advertising and print classified ads and things like that. And it's a decades-long issue for local journalism. And I think that Apple News+, there are scenarios where Apple News+,

could help. I'm not sure if they've got it here, because it sounds like they're basically making a partner. So in the Bay Area, it seems to be that the San Francisco Chronicle is their partner. The Chronicle is presumably getting money for this. And then they're backfilling with other stuff, sports blogs for the region, sports, you know, and other local blogs and things. I don't know. Like I want, I feel like there that Apple news plus there's some aspect of Apple news plus that might actually benefit local news, but I'm not sure this is it. I'm not sure that this really solves anything because in the end, you're getting some curation. That's nice as an Apple News user. But in terms of who's supporting the reporting that's going into generating the data sources for the curation, I'm not entirely

sure. This is something I joked about, half joked about in a previous episode about how if Apple really cared about local journalism, it should fund local journalism. I'm not sure this is the way, based on what we know about Apple News+, especially, I'm not sure this actually does that. And that's the problem. I would love Apple to more actively fund local journalism and then have that result pour into Apple News Plus.

But they aren't doing that. And I understand their business reasons why that may not work for them either. But I'm not sure like the San Francisco Chronicle is going to ultimately benefit from being the hub of content at the center of the Bay Area regional for Apple News Plus. content at the center of the Bay Area regional for Apple News Plus. I just, I, so file it under the same thing as all the other stuff, which is I'm having a hard time seeing how Apple News Plus benefits publishers. I think it's at least like something else to, to try, like in a way that maybe a lot of local news agencies do not have good monetization strategies and like this may this may be a better thing for local news than than the large publications the problem is that a regional anytime you've got so they're talking about like u.s cities here right so you've got

the newspaper in the city i mean they probably have a subscription plan for access they probably have a paywall on a subscription plan i'm not sure getting your local people to sign up for apple news plus and get your newspaper that way is remotely as good as getting them to sign up for you directly that's that's always this like that's the same in every instance yeah that's apple news plus which is why i i've said uh before and i i'm actually kind of serious here is the solution to uh local good local news is somebody needs to put money into good local news and if apple thinks that apple news is a strategic thing and i would actually argue that apple if apple felt like one of the ways that it wanted to leave the world better than it found it was by informing its its people about what's going on in their regions,

that this could be a fundamental like tenet of Apple and Apple news, where Apple is more aggressive about funding local news organizations, whether it's the existing ones or new ones in order to generate content that feeds into Apple news plus. organizations, whether it's the existing ones or new ones, in order to generate content that feeds into Apple News Plus. But what they're doing is they're trying to kind of like have existing organizations subvert their own business model for Apple's model, which is really rigged to benefit Apple. And I don't think it works. So that's the problem I have with it is that there is a solution to be had here, but it doesn't seem like Apple's actually trying to solve it. And this doesn't feel to me, it feels better than what they were

doing before, but I'm not sure it actually solves any of the fundamental problems with Apple wanting to insert itself as a middleman between the publishers and the readers. So I'll ask though, is there like a good business case to doing that funding local local news? What will Apple get out of it? but it would also be saying we're also improving the quality of journalism in the United States, let's say, because everything they do for Apple News seems to be just in the United States. But it would have to be kind of a long game, kind of a, you know, we're going to do this because it's right and we're going to figure it out as we go and we're going to build a business here. And honestly, Apple News Plus is not that. Apple News Plus is a somewhat cynical aggregation play for Apple where they want to

take a big chunk of money off the top and figure that the accumulated glow of being inside an Apple app is going to benefit these news sources. And while most of these news sources don't have very good apps and don't have very good websites, Apple News isn't a very good app either. So, just to call it what it is, this is Apple trying to sneak money out of a market that is dying and desperately trying to find a new business model. And it feels to me and has felt all along a bit like what Apple's trying to do is claim that they're coming in to save journalism. But what they really want to do is pull money out of the reader's pockets and not share much of it with local journalism. And that's why Apple News, that's why I think ultimately, unless they really rethink it, Apple News is a failure. All right, let's talk about Apple News today,

which is the podcast, because that's maybe even more interesting to me. And you, we've been talking for a long time, what are Apple going to do in the podcasting space? We mentioned the Zane Lowe interview series, and that was something they were bringing over. But that was like a half step. This is a full-on step. This is a brand new show daily, right? So this is a big production.

Now, we were wondering, how are Apple going to do this type of content? Are they going to make exclusive content and be like Spotify? Are they going to embrace the open web and give it to everybody? Let's say it's a little bit in the middle. Apple are saying this is available on Apple Podcasts. That's the only place that they're going to say it. That's not a surprise to me, right?

That even if Apple made something that was available everywhere, that when they promote it when they talk about it they say it's on apple podcasts i mean why not because so much of the podcast ecosystem just says that anyway at the moment right like i i don't have um any issue personally with them choosing to market their show as saying it's on apple podcasts but it is not exclusive to apple podcasts as it stands right now it's on Apple Podcasts. But it is not exclusive to Apple Podcasts. As it stands right now, it's not the only place you can get it. It is searchable and subscribable in every third-party app that I've tried. Pocket Cast, Overcast, Castro. You can search for Apple

News Today, find it, subscribe, you get the episodes. Because it is based on RSS. Apple have done a little work to obscure the feed. It's not in like the usual places that you would find it when you subscribe in the podcast app or iTunes or whatever, but it is based on an open RSS feed. Third-party apps have been able to add it to their directories. You can subscribe and you can listen. So they may not want to encourage you to listen to apps that aren't Apple podcasts, but you can,

which I think is a pretty good compromise, personally, because they're not warping what it is to be a podcast, but they are using their marketing to promote their own service. I think that's a fair enough compromise. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, Apple's always going to promote Apple Podcasts. I would say,

I don't know to what degree they're hiding the RSS feed here, but they shouldn't try to hide the rss for it and i've seen reporting from lots of people that like the rss feed is not in the typical place in the apple podcast direction like it's possible to get the feeds out and you kind of can't do that okay well i mean that that's my only my only real complaint is that if they are also making this available to other podcast apps, there should be some link somewhere. If there is, then great.

There should be some link somewhere on their website when they're talking about this where maybe it's a footnote, which is, you know, or any other podcast app using this feed. But they're primarily promoting Apple Podcasts because, you know, step one is, yeah, it's not just in Apple podcasts. Great. Step two is you should probably not try to hide it in the, you know, in the bathroom, uh, behind a locked door in a filing cabinet with a sign on the door that says, beware of the leopard leopard. That's a reference. Um, right. Where it's like, no, no, uh, it is on Apple podcasts secretly. It's also elsewhere is not a great look i think that they should should like i said put in a footnote somewhere don't try to hide it yeah i would prefer them to do that but better than than wiring it into apple podcasts

and then not having it be available in any other app yes absolutely better than that and that's kind of one of the very conceivable things that we expected them to do right but i am actually really happy with the fact that they have done whatever work they needed to do to create a podcast which is delivered via rss they did that now this this didn't happen like within a week like apple know they've been doing this for a while they could have very easily made the whatever not but they very well conceivably could have done whatever they needed to do to make this exclusive to them but they didn't do that um you know i saw a lot of technology outlets reporting on this saying it was exclusive to apple podcasts which

kind of irked me a little bit because like it wasn't hard to do the work to see that that wasn't the case um but people just kind of read the press release and then just reported on it that way. That kind of stuff frustrates me. I find in a lot of technology press, the reporting on the podcast industry to be pretty bad, honestly, which is just a little beef that I'm picking here for no particular reason. But there's a lot of like,

we got a press release, we're just going to say what the press release said and move on when I feel like this stuff should be covered a little better, a little more nuanced. Anywho, I listened to the podcast itself, Jason. It's actually pretty good. I'm not surprised. I enjoyed the variance of the topics.

It is too US-focused for me, especially because this isn't region-locked. You can get it anywhere. I would love to see them build it out a little more, for me, especially because this isn't region locked. You can get it anywhere. I would love to see them build it out a little more, but so far it's been pretty US focused. The stories that they get into in detail are in Apple News. So they do a kind of like a headline rundown at the start where they don't particularly talk about any specific news story but they'll cover like they'll talk about briefly like what's going on in the world

but then they they link to and talk about the stories that they talk about in depth they link to apple news stories which makes sense it's like a vertical integration absolutely you can tell they've hired professionals across the board it is entertaining it's informative and it's produced well in my opinion they use a lot of audio clips and they're mixed in really well um they do that typical like uh mainstream podcast sound design if they're always being music playing but oh i don't like that but they do a good job of it i think um like it's not it's not really in your face but there is a little bit of it, I think. Like it's not really in your face, but there is a little bit of that in there where they have music interstitials

and they have sometimes music beds. And they're not constant, but they're there, right? All right. But I think that the sound design is good. I think that they've done, in my opinion, an especially good job considering, I bet there's a studio they're supposed to be recording in that they're not right and uh so i've been i follow both of the hosts on twitter now and they've been posting

like lots of pictures of uh of how of like their setups and stuff which i think is fun you know in general i'm i'm kind of just pleased that they are allowing shimita and duarte to be public figures that produce the show and they they actually have interactions with each other like they're not just reading news stories like there it feels like there is an actual personality to the program which i think is important and i'm pleased that they are doing that because i don't think i could have told you that's exactly what Apple would have done if I would have. And it's going to live or die based on that. And Apple is the brand. But that's not how a podcast that was not driven by personalities like that would not be a successful podcast. So they've hired people who know what they're doing, clearly, here.

It was really interesting to me that they basically wholesale hired a team from WNYC. I find that to be very smart, honestly. Just get some people that know what they're doing if you want to do this. Don't rebuild the wheel. Let them do this. And I can tell you, as somebody who has worked in the media for a long time, that Apple coming to you and the media so economically pressured, as we've been saying all along here, it has been a tough couple of decades in the media.

And you have the world's richest company roll in and say, we want to set this up and we'll hire you. Those people are getting probably better jobs, better pay, better benefits, better working conditions. benefits, better working conditions. Like this is one of those things where being hired by a giant company to do essentially what you already do, that's a pretty sweet deal. It's kind of hard to turn that down. So it's not surprising that they were able to kind of go in and just hire those people

away. It's also probably the right thing to do. You're right. Because that's the kind of content they want. Yeah. If you can find people that are already doing it, then go for that. I think it makes sense. I'm going to keep this in my rotation.

I listened to a couple of episodes so I could be prepared for the show, but today I was like, I want to hear about that. It was about John Lewis. I feel like I haven't had much exposure to him as being someone from the United Kingdom but like I'm kind of

aware of him and some of the stuff that he's done but I was like no I would like a little bit more background and it gave me that so I'm going to keep this show around and keep this because I have genuinely been enjoying it so I actually think that they've done a very good job and I'll at least

say that I'm happy that they didn't go for the complete bad timeline with how Apple would produce podcasts of their own. So you know what I mean? This isn't completely locked down. It's locked down a little bit, but it's locked down in a way that I'm personally comfortable with. Market it however you want, but just let me get it the way that I want and don't completely ruin what OpenRSS is all about.

And I'm pleased that they've taken that slant on it for now, at least. I hope that they continue that way. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Pingdom. Today's internet users expect a fast web experience. No matter how good your content is, no matter how good your marketing has been to bring somebody to your page, if it's loading slowly or not at all, they're just going to leave. With real user monitoring from Pingdom, you're able to discover how website performance issues affect your visitors' experiences

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free trial with no credit card required. Then when you sign up, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get a fantastic 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, Mr. Jason Snell, it is time for our Summer of Fun topic today. We've been talking quite a bit about macOS Big Sur recently, and we are this time, and next time, actually, we're going to talk about Big Sur during the Summer of Fun, because it's a fun operating system. But along with the vast visual changes in Big Sur during the summer of fun because it's a fun operating system. But along with the vast visual changes in Big Sur,

which we've been talking about and many of our podcasting colleagues have been talking about, Apple also completely changed the typical sounds you hear when using the operating system. So considering this is a podcast, which is an audio medium, why don't we review those sounds? Yeah, this would be less useful if I wrote a story about this on Six Colors, right?

Yes. Like, let me describe how the sounds have changed. And you can picture it in your mind or listen to it in your mind, how you imagine this. Or we could use a medium like a podcast and actually play the sounds so for the record these are found in slash system slash sounds and slash system slash library slash component slash core audio dot component slash shared support slash system sounds yep yep so system the slash system slash sounds is where your beeps are. And then you can do custom beeps like my voice that says beep from Sound Master. I think that's user directory library sounds, I think is where you put those.

But the defaults are in slash system slash sounds. And then the other sound effects are found in that long chain that's down in components, core audio dot component. And that's where you get things like emptying the trash. Those live in there. Now, there's been lots and lots of sounds that have changed, but I don't think we're going to listen to all of them, right? Yeah, we are, Mike. We're listening to all of them.

Oh, okay. We got all of them. Great. Then let's go for it. All the ones that I could find. Oh, okay. So we're going to start with the beeps, and then we're going to move on to a few.

Not a lot of the system sounds have changed, but some of the most obvious ones have. But Apple has redone all the beeps. And what's really interesting in my research for this is Apple has redone all the beeps without changing their file names. But they have changed the names in the sound control panel, which is super weird, right? So they have... What is that? Yeah. So I'll give you an example.

Okay. So there used to be an alert called pop. If you go to system preferences and click on sound and choose an alert sound, there used to be an alert called pop. It's now... And the file, the corresponding file in slash system slash sounds was pop.wave or pop.aiff i don't remember it's pop was the name of it now there is still a file called pop it has a different sound in it and the name pop doesn't appear in the system sound control panel anymore. Instead, the name Bubble plays the sound file called Pop. And you're asking yourself, why not just rename the files and have those names appear rather than using the old,

rather than changing presumably the system preferences app somehow to map new names to old file names? And my answer is, I don't know. I guess they had a reason. I can only assume that there's some like compatibility thing, right? Or like it's hard-coded into something somewhere. Yeah, if you've got an app or a script or something that says play the sound file pop yeah um it'll play it even though now in the ui it says bubble that's hilarious but i don't know if i write a script and say play bubble will it play pop or will it fail i don't know something to check in the betas i guess so are

we gonna uh we're gonna compare the old to the new? Is that how we're going to do this? We are. Fantastic. We are going to do that. Thank you. Are you ready? Yeah.

All right. So we're going to start with Catalina. And this is a sound called Basso. And it will be followed by Big Sur, where Basso has been renamed Mezzo. Ready? Yeah. Here's Basso. How'd that sound?

That's my error sound. Okay, get ready for Basso Mezzo. Oh, no. No, that's not the same. It's Mezzo now. It's not Basso anymore. It's Mezzo. Because what I like about basso

is in my mind my computer's going ah right like right you know that's what i like now it's going you see i don't like that can you play that one again for me get basso that's so no i don't like it for some reason i'm so mezzo sounds like the older sound that one sounds like it came from like the 80s or something i don't like that one all right should we move on yeah i mean i i i kind of agree with you that that the use of basso is to get your attention is like oh something bad happened and the new one's like like i guess it's sort of sad trombone like a little bit but yeah it's not aggressive enough i think all right here's a sound called blow except in big sir it's called breeze okay so

they're related they're some of those some of these are related yeah where they it looks like they're having fun like basso and mezzo blow and breeze others don't make any sense at all so anyway here's blow in catalina and here's breeze in big sir oh that's much nicer you like that yeah less of blowing on the less of blowing on the um on a bottle which is what blow definitely is yeah i don't i don't really like the blow sound very much but i actually really like the breeze sound i think that's just a good sound there's a good interface sound all right so that's a thumbs up that's a thumbs up okay so they're they're one for two now one up one down just to confirm these sounds do they all have a place in the operating system or you just choose for your error sound i think you choose for

your error sound um although they there may be apps that play them as well right but these are all available to you and in certain instances you might hear one or the other i mean and there are some that are specific that we'll get into later on but the error sounds mostly like you can choose them okay that's fine yeah that makes sense all right here we go this is this one is called bottle not to be confused with blow now maybe this we understand why they renamed these although not why they renamed them only in one place and not in the files themselves this is the catalina bottle and then it'll be followed by pebble which is what bottle is now called in Big Sur. Bottle. Pebble.

I like that because pebble sounds like you're dropping a stone into the water. And it sounds quite like bottle, but it's better. But more. Yeah, but more. More texture, more nuance. I agree. I think that's actually a nice thing about it. Can I hit pebble again? Sure. You want to hear the new pebble? Here it is. Yeah, I think that's actually a nice thing about it. Can I hit pebble again?

Sure. You want to hear the new pebble? Here it is. Yeah, I like that. That's a good one. That's a good sound. All right. That's a like.

Okay. Apple's up two to one now in the new sound derby. This turned into a different kind of game than I was expecting, but I'm enjoying it. Okay. into a different kind of game than i was expecting but i'm enjoying it okay this is a this is a sound called frog uh except in big sir it's called jump that kind of makes sense right so here here's frog this is uh this is a good one and here's jump oh no that's not enough there's not enough noise there i don't particularly like frog right it's it's fine i don't like i i don't particularly like it but there's just not enough noise in jump it's too short i like frog i actually use frog in one of my scripts to say this script is done um and i've used it in other i use it a lot because it's really not obtrusive i'm worried the jump is so not obtrusive as to have become invisible

i think that that's a similar problem with mezzo like jump and mezzo they are you might not even really notice them yeah they're too doesn't alert sound work if if you aren't actually alerted by it if an alert sound falls in the forest but there was nobody around to hear it right that's the problem sure yeah yeah that could be all right this Could be. All right. This is a sound called funk. Yep. However, big news, breaking news here. Breaking news in Big Sur. It's called funky.

Well, okay. I'm expecting more if you're going from funk to funky. One letter more at least. Okay, here we go. Here's funk and then funky. Okay, that's too much more. Too much more at least. Okay, here we go. Here's funk and then funky. Okay, that's too much more. Too much more. Okay.

Funk, I feel like is a pretty classic one, right? Like I feel like I hear, maybe funk is mine. Yeah, funk is mine. I use funk for my typical alert sound. There was one that I said already that I used for. I must use it somewhere else because I hear it a lot. But funk've just looked now that's the sound that i hear and that's a good one it's like a dunk it's like that feels pretty pretty like classic the mac for me um funky's too much i think i think there's too much noise going on there they've added a little bit. It's sort of a single blip versus this little mini music composition.

And as with Frog, I kind of just want it to be a blip. So we got a dislike for that. Uh-oh. Apple's down now, two to three. Uh-oh. It's not trending well. Okay. well okay we're moving on to uh a sound called glass which has been renamed crystal in big sir so from glass to crystal you can see the family resemblance here they are

good yeah yep it retains the good part of glass, but makes it sound more modern. As Joe Steele in the Discord says, more expensive sound. And I would agree. Sounds like crystal was a more expensive sound. Yeah, we fancied that glass sound. I like that it is. I never really liked that glass sound. And it's because it's maybe a little too unpleasant and jarring.

But then again, I also leave the room when somebody else is emptying the dishwasher because I find those sounds really unpleasant. And Crystal is better because it's a little less of that, a little less jarring, I think. And it's more expensive. It's a more expensive name. All right. Here is one that I really enjoy what Apple did with the naming system because it's a sound called Hero. And in Big Sur, it's called Heroin.

Good. That's good. I like that. That's clever. Okay, well, the naming convention is clever. Yeah, let's see what they did to the sound. Let's see what they did to the sound. Here they are.

Ooh. Ooh. Can I hear those again? Okay. All right. to the sound. Here they are. Can I hear those again? Okay. Alright. So it's basically the same sound, but there's a little prelude to the sound. I didn't know that alert sounds needed a little percussive roll in, but I think I like it. Here we go. I like

that one. I do too. It's a little sauc it's it's a little saucy it's a little uh little personality it's like hey you know that hero sound well i'm gonna jazz it up a little bit it's kind of got like an island feel to it you know yep it's like we're taking the hero to the caribbean or something uh that's i like it it's good she's a heroine now but yeah exactly right well i mean like you took hero to the caribbean and now it's heroin yeah okay our next one is called morse like morse code yeah and it has been replaced with a sound called ping. No, pong. Oh, sorry. A sound called pong.

Yeah, I know why you did that, because the next one's called ping. The next one is called ping, and there's also a pop. There are these names. I mean, I don't want to be the person at Apple who has to name sounds, okay? Because it's hard. And then people like us make fun of them. But still, it is worth making fun of. Okay, so it's Morse, which becomes Pong, not to be confused with Ping, which became something else, and we'll get to that. Here is Morse, followed by Pong in Big Sur.

Okay. I'll play those again. It's a little more poppy. I actually think it's better because you can miss Morse, but Pong, you can hear it. Okay, it's better. It's audible. It's still not a good, like, for me, it's not a great sound but it is not a good sound but it's an improvement yeah i think that's all we're really measuring here is did you did you improve these sounds for some

people uh so okay all right now we're going to move on to ping which is not pong and has been renamed sonar also by the way sonar not to be confused with submarine which is a totally different sound this is ping it has become sonar i guess hunt for red october fans might enjoy it here it is ping followed by sonar that's interesting because the ping sound honestly feels like it belongs in the new sounds. Can I hear them one more time, please? Okay. Oh, sorry.

Hang on. A little mezzo there for you. No, I don't want more mezzo. That was an error. Okay, here we go. Yeah, okay. I'm fine with that. I like it. It's a good sound i am gonna say i dislike it so we're gonna we're gonna make this a split decision right um i like the purity of the ping it is just it is

just a tone and i don't think you need to bubble it up with like a with like i don't okay so here's what i'll say then i prefer ping but i don't dislike sonar so maybe we could but maybe we could call that dislike though because i like the sound that it had before oh well all right so you you prefer the old sound i prefer the old sound but it's not like with some of them where i dislike the new one but i i think that it is a regression because i think ping is a better sound so we'll say we'll say we'll just call that dislike so we don't have to create another scoring category so now submarines use pings and sonar and also can generate bubbles and they submerge these are all of sounds, but this is the sound formerly known as pop, which has become bubble.

A bubble is a thing that pops, so that kind of makes sense. Yep. So here they are, bop, bop, and bubble. No, pop and bubble. Here they go. I prefer bubble. Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Because I don't really think pop is much of anything. Right. I think that's it is that although bubble is showy and I've said it a couple of points that I think you don't need to just dress necessarily dress up a sound, but sometimes it is either delightful or it like goes from being something you'd miss to something you might actually notice. Yeah. I'm not really sure why anybody would use the pop sound.

It's too, that's way too easy to miss, that one. Yeah. Yeah, I don't like that one. Okay, so if you're scoring at home, thank you. It's six to four in favor of Apple's new sounds. We're moving on now to Purr, which has been renamed pluck. We need to talk about this one.

From a cat to a chicken, apparently. Or is someone doing something terrible to a cat? I'm not sure. I don't know. I mean, maybe we'll find out in the sounds, but this one of all the naming ones seems rather peculiar. All right, here we go.

Purr followed by pluck no no i i agree with you i love the sound that i didn't even know was called per but i i like it it's like uh i like per again it's funny, really, because there are sounds that I sometimes hear on my computer. And I know some of these sounds, but I don't know where I'm hearing them. But I guess that's what you're saying, that some apps use them. Some app is using it as an alert, yeah. Yeah, I think I much prefer purr to pluck. Oh, yeah.

Pluck sounds like somebody hit a golf ball pluck honestly sounds quite similar to um i think it's pebble the one where it's dropping in the water uh-huh that's this one yeah yeah not super similar but they sound yeah they both sound to me like dropping a ball into something or whatever yeah i don't like that one okay we're gonna move on to sosumi now sosumi is a beep sound with a or at least name for a beep sound with a legendary history because there was a lawsuit from apple records to apple computer because when apple was founded they ended up having to reach an agreement with the beatles about apple records apple music uh involved basically saying they wouldn't get into

music and sound related things and of course as the computer evolved they very much did that and there were some lawsuits ultimately apple basically bought them out and that's why there's apple music and stuff like that now is apple basically wrote a my understanding is a huge check to the the beatles estates uh and apple records to do this but the joke was that they put this sound in there as a reference to that by naming it so sue me but they spelled it so sue me. So this is a classic, very old Mac reference. And they left the name.

Sosumi continues to be the name, but they changed the sound. So you're going to hear Catalina Sosumi and then Big Sir Sosumi. Sosusudio. Big Sir Sosumi. Big Sir Sosumi. Sosudio. Here we go so old sasumi is like ah and new sasumi is like tink ah yeah it's like ah i guess

yeah can i get those ones again please please? Yes. Here we go. The Susumis. I don't like it. I like the last half, which you can hear is a modernized version of the one that it's replacing. But I don't know why it does that part at the start. I don't like the part at the start. I feel like just a modernized version of Susumi would have been better rather than trying to change it.

Yeah, they put a little too much action on something that was fine. All right, we're going to move on to Submarine, which is one that I've used a lot, and it has been replaced with something called Submerge. See what they did there? Here we go. Yeah.

Okay. I mean, I would just say that that was Sonar, right? I know. Well, I was just as surprised as you that this is what this was. I use Submarine sometimes. It's a very stereo sound, by the way. It does a left right pan kind of thing that submerge doesn't do so much um i think this is funny because they backed off of

the like reverb and stuff that's in submarine and they've like simplified it with submerge which i think is funny since they said that oh that we changed the sounds because modern mac sound systems and it's a more immersive kind of thing. But in this case, they kind of went away from the like super skeuomorphic, I guess, sound to something that's much more almost like a very simple alert tone. And I'm not sure I like it. Not sure I like it. I'm going to play it again just so we can ponder a little more. The original's better. Yeah, I appreciate the simplification there, but I like the original. Okay.

Apple is, we're tied now, 6-6. Okay, we have one last alert, and then we're going to move on to some system sounds. We have a handful of system sounds. This is Tink, which has been renamed in big sir boop from tink to boop everybody from tink to boop here we go i mean there's not a lot to go on no it feels now it feels like we're there's some sort of psychological exam that we're going through i mean i prefer boop i guess because it's just a

more pleasant sound i agree with you actually that it is less ear splitting and annoying whereas tink is so high pitched that it makes me want to you know swat whatever insect just buzzed past my ear yeah i wouldn't use either of them no neither would i but but tank suffers from that like you would never hear this problem and boop is at least a little bit more um noticeable but they didn't really go very far away to create boop all right we're gonna move on to some system alerts um these don't have names although they do have file names i find that the file names don't always describe what's actually happening when they're played we can talk about that if you want but but i'm going to just introduce them by their names their file names and then you can judge just how they regardless of how they're used whether the new sound improves on the old sound so this sound is called drag to trash and the new one no no no no

no i don't like that no yeah i mean it's so dramatic oh trash it's in the trash versus that's a bad sound like that's like i actually would say that even the ones that i don't like they're not necessarily bad that one is just bad like it doesn't sound good at all not up for that yeah i'm with you i don't i don. And that drag to trash sound is like, it feels iconic. I know. Well, they did something to the icon. By the way, if they change any of these sounds before it goes final, we are taking full credit. Okay?

Yeah. You and me. Oh, of course. A little pact right now. Who else is going to do this? No one else now. We got there first. Yeah. I think nobody else was ever going to do this, but definitely we got there first.

It's only the kind of thing ridiculous thing you find in the upgrade summer of fun here is empty trash you ready yep and what so so empty trash used to be like the rustling of trash or like you were crumpling up a piece of paper the new empty trash seems to be opening a door or something i don't know what that no i don't like that one either yeah i don't i don't appreciate that i i feel like and i appreciate that i've been hearing this one for like a couple of decades now but it does have a kind of crumpled up garbage feel to it. And this, it's like, there's some crumpling there, but also like, what is that clunk? Like, what is your trash?

Is it a door to the trash bin? I understand how they're going from one to the other, right? Because they've removed the like, this sounds like it's going into a trash, like waste paper basket yeah right but the problem is the crumple and the door close are happening simultaneously which wouldn't happen right you can't crumple up your trash and and close the bin door simultaneously or your trash won't go in the bin so i have some logic problems with this sound is

what i'm saying i have some questions about the continuity i don't like it yeah no i don't like it i don't like it okay we're going to move on to something this is this is a little weird so there's a sound called grab which is named after the utility that i think no longer exists that was the screenshot utility in os 10 for a very long time that nobody used but it was there from the very beginning and then there's a a sound called screenshot and this is basically the new default sound when you take a screenshot so the the files are actually different files but this is we're going from the old default to the new default okay are you ready yeah and so how do you feel about skeuomorphism

i'll just point out the sound of a film camera winding its film after taking a shot lost lost on younger users right but what's happened to ios i don't know i know. I haven't tried that. Have they changed the sound on iOS? Let me find out. No, they haven't. So why did they do that? I think you've asked a very important question, which is why would you change the screenshot sound on one

and not the other? I have no problem with that sound. And honestly, the screenshot sounds, it's like, what's the point of the screenshot sound? Like, I have no problem with that sound. And honestly, like, the screenshot sound, it's like, what's the point of the screenshot sound? Like, sounding like a photo being taken from a film camera. Like, there's no point. And the same is like, you know, I know why. So what I say is I know why the camera has that noise.

Like, the cameras are supposed to make that noise in certain regions of the world. Like, it's actually a legal requirement. But a screenshot isn't a camera exactly i mean and neither does really the i don't think the camera has to make that exact sound right you can make any sound i like the noise if that's what we're judging it on yeah i i i think i prefer it i'm i'm torn about this because as a as a media computer tech media person i take a lot of screenshots. And so that sound is like an old friend to me. At the same time, it doesn't make any sense and it's kind of unpleasant.

And the new sound indicates that you've taken a screenshot. So I'm going to say I like it. Change is hard, but I'm going to go with it. I think that they're okay in changing that one. Yeah. Yeah. they're okay in changing that one yeah yeah and mike that brings us to our last sound this sound this filing is called volume mount but i think of it as the volume network volume dismount sound maybe i'm getting that wrong but anyway this is a sound that changed that involves external drives on your mac right yeah wait okay yeah i hear that noise a lot yeah i think that's the noise when i drag my external drive to the trash and it ejects i get this yeah i hear that or like when you drag something somewhere else in the system yes james isn't saying in the chat room it's the copy finish

sound oh it's the copy finish well it's, it's called volume mount. Okay. So, I don't know why, but it changed and now it sounds like this. Ooh. Ooh. Can I get those again? Like one after the other? Sure. And I don't know. Again, there may be some confusion here where they've

kept the name the same and changed where you hear it. But this is the volume mount sound. I like that one more yeah the the old one is like you shot your file with a laser and it's dead now yeah and the new one new one is like sounds like it appeared it's moved it's like transported itself you know yeah i like that one well i have some good news for apple sound designers because like has beaten dislike but it was nine to eight so half of your new sounds we like the good news is you won the bad news is it was by one point okay so i think overall like even though we're pretty close to like dislike i would say that i think overall the sounds are good but i

think the problem is that sometimes the replacements are not good right like i think that's something we can agree on that like there are actually more good sounds than there are bad sounds maybe even nine to eight but in some places the sound that it this the new sound isn't a good replacement for the old sound right i think that is that is more of a an issue there i guess yeah that's what we're measuring is was it an improvement and um because i i agree i think that there are a bunch of these sounds that are fine but um we felt like eight of them were not improvements on the old sound yes yeah it's it's tricky because change i mean that's one of the things i'm trying to fight

here is like i took a screenshot on on big sir and heard that sound and i i thought oh no no no no what did you do what did you do and i've had to think about it and like okay do i really like the old sound or is the old sound familiar and the answer is it's familiar and i don't like it and i'm okay with the change and likewise that volume sound, I think the new one is better. The old one is very familiar. But then the empty trash sound, I don't think the new one is a better sound. But it's hard to unravel our history

with using the Mac from seeing these new sounds. But that didn't stop us, did it? It most definitely didn't. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. It's fair to say we all want to browse the internet without everyone in the world being able to know what we're doing. We can use incognito mode, but even in incognito mode,

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Oh, it's the lasers, huh? Is that what that was? Yeah, I was trying something. Very nice. I liked it. I don't know if we're going to make that a permanent stay, but... No, we're not. We're definitely

not good good um first question comes from paul do you think of apple silicon hardware updates do you think that we're going to see more frequent or regular updates than we've seen for the mac in in the past few years i think they're not going to have to wait for for intel right so that's good my guess is that we're going to see an annual cycle for most Apple products, and maybe some of them will be 18 months or two years, just like with the iPhone. Look at the iPhone and the iPad. There's a new iPhone every year. There's a new iPad sort of, there are different iPad models throughout the year. iPad Pro seems to be on an 18-month cycle. I would imagine there will be some regular cycle like that, and the ones that Apple feels the need

to revise, they will revise. I think the real question is if they come out with a new processor in the fall on the iPhone, when does it hit the other products? And is it right away? Or do they choose to roll those out? They can't release every new product at the same time, right? They have to stretch it out because they can't release all their products in the fall. They can't do it. But I imagine we're going to be in a scenario where the new processor year starts in the fall with the iPhone. And then for the next year, you're going to see variants of that chip in all of their other devices. So in the end, I mean, some of these products have gotten to the point where they're sort of annual updates already. And I imagine

that'll continue. And then there are some lower priority products that won't be, but for the ones where it matters, yeah, I think if they're already releasing a new chip for the iPhone every year, why would they not use that opportunity in that cycle to have a version of that for all of their other products too? So I think it will be more regular and it may or may not be more frequent, but it will be more regular because apple controls it and intel uh apple couldn't control yeah i think that i i pretty much agree with everything you said there right like i think that we will see more frequent updates and it but no matter what we do see it will at least be on a schedule that Apple have decided for themselves, by and large, right? That maybe one of the biggest things was the fact that they needed to wait for Intel,

or they even had features that they wanted to add, but they couldn't because of Intel as well, right? So I think that we're going to see a more, maybe more consistent for Apple schedule than what we've seen over the last few years, especially. Yeah. Rajiv asks, does iOS 14 include a Find My widget like the one in iOS 12, or added to iOS 12? I checked, and there isn't a new Find My widget on iOS, which I thought was peculiar. I don't remember if – does Big Sur have a Find My app?

I think it does, right? Yes. Oh, well, Catalina has a Find My app. Catalina added the Find My app. Okay, because I remember on Mojave and before, the only way that you could use Find My Friends was through the widget in the notification center. Yeah.

But I find not having a find my widget to be peculiar. It may be that like a find my widget. Isn't that useful with the way that widgets are built? Like it wouldn't be able to update quickly enough. I think that's exactly it. Is that, is that the, you know,

they could add a find my widget that like showed people's faces and then you tap, tap to launch it and it will show you that. And maybe they will in a, in a future beta. i bet you could make a a shortcut did that maybe but um so thank you for looking say like a find my widget might be really nice when they have their own devices or that api for devices to uh to tie in so you could like have a little icon of a device and you tap it and it will either make a sound or go to that the little tag right that's being searched for um but yeah but it is it is a peculiar omission to have nothing

um because now there will be no widget anymore where there was one before and that feels strange maybe it'll come back it's famous sam asked do you think mac developers will be getting on board with the new design for big sir as well as the work needed to support apple silicon yeah and i think sam's implication here is if they're busy doing apple silicon support will they prioritize that over the design they inherit a lot of the design um it's not quite the same but like there is a default like the the default window of old looks different in Big Sur. It also looks wrong.

Like it's centered instead of left aligned. And like, it's not, it clearly is not right for the Big Sur design. I do think that Apple Silicon support is going to come first and then UI support will come after that. And it depends on how easy it is this summer for them to convert their apps to Apple Silicon. If it's easy, then that gives them more time to support other features or make it look good using the new design. But I think that will always come second. And you know, it's going to be your typical thing where some apps come out with

new design support immediately and others kind of lag behind. And that's the way of things. But you'll be able to tell because the new design is different enough that it's not, again, not like the old one will look like old Windows. It'll just look like the more generic version that it's sort of center and the toolbar is below and things like that. Whereas new ones will feel very very new but everybody will get on board eventually i think i think though apple silicon's the priority there the design's gonna wait you gotta you gotta make sure your app runs and runs natively before you worry about ui conventions yeah that is important it uh you know i do hope that developers will do the additional work at some point. So the apps look and feel at home.

I mean, that's always the case. You want to fit the platform design, right? So you always want to do that. I think maybe more so than iOS, though. I think that there will be apps that people will use frequently on Big Sur that will take a long time, if ever. You know, just because because there are maybe more, legacy is not the right word,

but applications that are maybe just in maintenance mode on the Mac because it's an older platform. I don't know. But I hope that we'll see a lot of applications do what they need to do to make that work and to feel good. Charlie asked, do you think that Microsoft will create original tv content like apple and amazon so my initial thought to this is that microsoft seems to be playing a different

game and then i realized that was a good pun because like quite literally microsoft's entertainment stuff is xbox right they are yeah they make games and i think that that is a big enough business for them that requires a lot of focus and is already on the outside of the rest of their company to a degree. I don't imagine we will see Microsoft in this business for a long time, if ever, because they have a whole entertainment thing. They tried and failed to take some of their Xbox content and turn it into TV shows and stuff before. They were going to do a Halo TV show and stuff and they pulled the plug on all that stuff. So I think they've been there.

They've been there, didn't do it, right? Like they've learned their lesson. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that's a... I don't think such a Nadella thinks that's a focus for them. I think there was like a Microsoft TV product thing at one point too. Oh, sure.

I mean, they tried all sorts of different things there, but in the streaming world, it seems pretty out of what microsoft would be interested in doing a good point that matt's made in the chat room they do own the minecraft license you know there's stuff you can do there and i think they have done some stuff but anyway it's this is not a case of like what apple's doing no and that's and that's over they i think they've regretted everything they've done and aren't going to do it going forward, I would say. It's highly unlikely. Koshak asks, would you personally prefer a watered-down version of Logic on the iPad or a full Catalyst version of Ferrite on the Mac? ferrite on the mac because ferrite uh which is the app we use or i use to edit some podcasts i think it is everything it has every feature that i need as a podcast editor logic's a music app and

my my guess would be that if logic went on the ipad instead of the garage band which is sort of based on logic but if they did logic on the ipad their their primary focus will be music features so we might be able to use it and that might be nice. But my guess is that any place where it's falling down on the iPad versus the Mac is going to be on things that podcasters use because their goal is going to be to make it a music composition and editing tool for musicians to build and produce songs so we might be able to use it whereas ferrite is a podcast editing app ferrite just does exactly what i need and so a mac version of that is going to be exactly what i need so i i would choose the product that is designed

for people like me over the product that is designed for people who are not like me but that i occasionally can use sneakily because it's better than the other alternatives, if that makes any sense. Like, right, Apple is aware that podcasters use Logic, but it doesn't care, I think would be the way I'd put it. Whereas Ferrite, that's what it's about. Yeah, I would prefer to have the Logic experience

that I'm used to on my iPad. So I didn't have to rerun a new tool, but I don't think I agree with you. Like if I made logic for the iPad, they would probably, well, they probably best if they, they streamlined the project,

like the product in some way, which could remove things that I'm used to, even though I'm a surface level user. But anyway, I think that, right. Cause you're not the priority, right? remove things that i'm used to even though i'm exactly surface level user but anyway i think that right because you're not the priority right so they could remove some things that are like not big deals to their audience that kill your use of it because they're not they could get rid of markers or something who knows right um but what what i what i think is that when if and when

is that if and when Ferrite comes to the Mac, that's probably when I will try to move to Ferrite. So then I have that experience across all of my devices. I hope I'm not stepping out of turn here, but I think the developer

of Ferrite has said that he's investigating Catalyst and the Mac and wants to do it. But I think there've been no statements beyond that. And it hasn't happened yet, which would lead me to believe that since it hasn't happened yet, it probably won't happen until the Big Sur era, right?

Because if it had been something that could have been done for the version of Catalyst that's in Catalina, we would have it now. So I suspect it's going to be, if we get that much hoped for Mac version of Ferrite, it'll probably be this fall at the earliest and maybe later than that. But I'm with you. I feel like the value of being able to round trip between iPad and Mac for podcast editing is a big deal. So for me too, because I'm used to Logic and use Logic on the Mac all the time now. is a big deal. So for me too, because I'm used to Logic and use Logic on the Mac all the time now.

But if I can take my projects and move them, just move them to the iPad, that's a reason enough for me to switch to have the same app on both. And this isn't an application that I want to experience the iOS version of on my Mac. For a tool like this, I would want personally to have a at least catalyst version of it, right? So like when Apple Silicon comes over, like I don't think that for me, I want my audio editor to be an iOS port running. Like, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that. I would need to see a lot more about exactly how that's going to work. You know what I mean? Yeah. But I feel like I would prefer something built

for the platform that it's on if I'm going to be producing my shows in it. Yeah, there are keyboard things, but it's got a project-based approach where it's like all in the app bundle. And so there's going to be questions of like, how do you get things in? I'm sure it will run on Apple Silicon, right ipad os version it'll just run i'm not

sure that's i'm with you i i think that that's the beauty of catalyst and i honestly i think that developer is so careful and considerate when it when when they're building features that um they wouldn't be satisfied with just chucking out the iPad version. So I would hope that may also be a motivator. Like, no, no, no, no. Please don't run the iPad version on your Mac. Run this Catalyst version instead. Also, a lot of us are still using computers that are not going to be able to run those apps because we're on Intel for a while.

Especially podcast editors. We've got our, you know, iPad or iMac Pros and stuff. So yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do think that it's less likely I would get anything out of Logic on the iPad, although I would like to see it than a Catalyst version of Ferrite. And lastly, this question comes from Stitch.

Does Summer of Fun come with arm-waving motions? I guess almost in like a muppet like fashion uh for me it is just leaning back and shouting in the upwards direction so i don't destroy my microphone and your ears in the process yeah i think part of the fun of the summer of fun shout is that it's at a distance because we're shouting up into the rafters and i i similarly i'm sort of turning and shouting upward and that's what it is. So I just did it and you just did it and I didn't wave my arms. So that might happen occasionally, but it's mostly just the act of turning away from the

microphone and shouting. It's fun. If you would like to send in a question for a future episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade or use the command, the question mark and then askupgrade in the RelayFM members discord, which you get access to if you are an Upgrade Plus subscriber. If you are an Upgrade Plus subscriber and you support the show,

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Hooray. Thank you everybody. We've done it. Yeah, so thank you everybody for that. We really, really appreciate your support. If you want to find show notes for this week's episode, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 307 and you can find them in your app of choice.

And I would also like to thank ExpressVPN, Pingdom and Mint Mobile for their support of this week's show by sponsoring us. If you want to find Jason's work online, you can go to sixcolors.com, theincomparable.com. Jason also hosts other shows

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and Jason is at jsnell. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley! Nice, nice.