Upgrade - 32: Uncompatible

Episode Date: April 13, 2015

Jason and Myke talk about their Apple Watch try-on experiences and take a look at some of the new PR tactics Apple is employing. Then Jason makes Myke watch "This is Spinal Tap."

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 32 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts mail route a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam pdf pen scan plus from smile the app for mobile scanning and ocr and warby parker glasses should not cost email service for protection from viruses and spam, PDF Pen Scan Plus from Smile, the app for mobile scanning and OCR, and Warby Parker. Glasses should not cost as much as an iPhone. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined, as always, by the one and only Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. Good morning.

Good morning to you, sir. We're doing this a little bit earlier than usual because of other commitments I've got. But that's fine. I'm awake. I've had two cups of tea. I'm ready to go. So we have a big show today. We have Mike watches the movies at the end. Spinal tap. Yeah, we do. So everybody who's looking at the length of this episode and thinking, good God, why is it so long? The answer is there's a spinal tap at the end. As we established on episode 30 with John Syracuse, um, this is a little bit like the post show of ATP. You don't need to listen if you don't want to, because we're going to talk about a movie at the end,

but we hope you will tune in because it should be fun. I have lots of notes. Good. Lots and lots and lots of notes about spinal tap. So I'm very excited about that, but we have a, we have an action packed show anyway. I mean,

this Apple watch stuff that we want to talk about. I think we both well you have seen them already but you've been for a try on i've been for a try on and i'm really excited to talk about that um and we have a couple of other little bits and bobs that we want to talk about today but first as always why don't we dive into a little bit of follow-up a little bit of follow-up yeah um i wanted to mention again i'm still receiving feedback from episode 30 which is not surprising since that was just a week ago um because we did our little interim episode about the macbook that was 31 um messing up all schedules and calendars for upgrade forevermore um that we i continue to hear from people who point out that people did word processing and spreadsheets on phones years before the iphone I'm not sure if we actually said literally it was not available at that time. I don't think we did,

but if we did, we were engaging in a hyperbole. I was typing things in on a palm with an external keyboard years before that. Our point, again, just to say it one more time, our point was that the vast majority of people who were enthralled by the idea of the iPhone were not people who had been using Windows Mobile and demanded a powerful spreadsheet, which is what is the thesis of becoming Steve Jobs. And they're wrong about that. And a few people saying, but I use spreadsheets on my Windows Mobile phone before the iPhone came out, and I relied on it, or I needed to SSH into a Unix system somewhere. And so I was disappointed by the iPhone not having apps. Those people, their experiences are perfectly valid. But once again, what I'd say is that's not what the book's trying to make as its premise. And I think what it's trying to say is not accurate, that the iPhone

did not meet with a negative reaction because it didn't run apps. Because I think that it was actually spectacularly loved, even though it didn't have apps. And I don't think powerful spreadsheets were really what people were looking for and were like saying, well, it doesn't have powerful spreadsheets. I'm not going to buy the iPhone until there's an app store. And that was the point there. Not that there weren't apps. I had a Palm Pre and a Palm 3 before that. I had lots of apps. But that was the point there. Not that there weren't apps. I had a Palm Pre and a Palm 3 before that. I had lots of apps. But that was sort of not the point. But yes, we validate that there were people out there

who were trailblazers who were using apps on phones before the iPhone came out. Yes, absolutely. I lost my place in the audio book. Oh no! It's okay, I found it again. I found it again this morning. This is because of an a phone

restore that i had to do which that's a whole lot of a story for another day um and that day wednesday do you know what i don't know i'm i've dealt with it this morning but i'm too annoyed at my phone carrier to even want to anyway do you file your personal experiences now as that's an upgrade that that's an analog, that's a connected? Do you do that now? Yes. Okay. Especially with topics.

So like try on, that's upgrade. Yay. Photos, that's connected. That is a thing that I do actually go through in my brain. It's an interesting way to live. way to live but um uh so as i was scrolling through the the audiobook the first place that i landed on was the iphone thing again and i got really mad again yeah it was like oh here i am again with talking rubbish oh i'm sorry it just upsets me it makes me really angry i saw somebody interacting with one of the authors on twitter and pointing out a factual error and they're like

yeah we'll fix that in a future edition. And I thought, geez, at this point, do I need to write to them and say, I've got a list of about 15 things you got wrong. Do you want me to send it to you? I mean, I'm happy to send them the list. But I also have now been on the record as complaining about their book. So I don't know. Maybe I will. But the reason you're complaining about it

it was two points is the factual inaccuracies and then this part that we're about to talk about now shall i read this uh this feedback from um did this come from alberto yeah did this come from alberto alberto sent this yeah this was yesterday while i was on uh twit actually i got this long tweet chain from alberto sure go ahead and read it okay so this is this is verbatim from alberto you stated on multiple podcasts that the era of 1985 to 1997 was somehow not a failure for apple you can research their filings at one point they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year i think you're remembering the era sentimentally regardless of the good memories you have of the era of your start in the Apple community, the facts

are that Apple was hemorrhaging cash for a large part of the time that Steve Jobs was exiled. Arguing it in any other way does a disservice to your listeners. You fell in love, understandably, with a computer that was nevertheless a financial failure. You say that because you loved the Mac,

it somehow means that Apple was not a failure for more than a decade. The facts are that it was. Right. It's good. And I went through the trouble of getting all the tweets and putting them all together so that I could get this piece of feedback in there, which was not tagged as Ask Upgrade. It was just sent directly to me.

And I think we mentioned this before, but I'm going to mention it again now. Part of this is the perspective of financial versus product, which is what he's saying is, look, you can say you like the products. It doesn't matter. It was a failure. They lost money, which I don't agree with. I think that you can have a movie that's really great. That is a financial disaster. And those two things are very different. So you could have a company that's really poorly managed and yet make products that you like. On Twit yesterday,

Ben Thompson made the argument that, I mean, it was in the context of something that Leo Laporte said that was really questionable, but he basically said, Jason, you were stupid to use the Mac in the 90s because Windows was everywhere and better. And I don't agree. I don't agree at all. I feel like during this era, I loved using the Mac. I knew how to use Windows and didn't like it and thought it was kind of awful and icky. And was willing to put up with the fact that the Mac was uncompatible with anything. Not just incompatible, Mike.

Uncompatible. It was unable toible with anything. Not just incompatible, Mike. Uncompatible. It was unable to be combated. Because of all the benefits. I mean, it was nicer. And you could do almost everything, but you only had like one or two apps that did it instead of 20, which is what it was like on Windows. 20, mostly crappy, and maybe one that was really great.

But again, I don't want to refight the reason like why Mac users stuck with the Mac even when it was only 10 percent. Other than to say, please don't discount our experience by rewriting history now and saying, well, look, that because Windows had 90 percent, you guys, you know, you guys shouldn't have been using the Mac. Because that's not what it was like when it was actually happening. It was not like that at all. So that's point one. The other point here is that Alberto's doing a lot of, at one point, they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars. For a large part of the time that Steve Jobs was exiled, Apple was hemorrhaging cash. And I have to say, I think Alberto is a little bit of a victim of this narrative, which is that Steve Jobs left Apple. It became a disaster immediately. And then Steve Jobs came back and saved it.

It's like, no, it became a disaster gradually. And at the end, it really accelerated and it fell apart. And they could have made some decisions early on maybe that would have saved the company, maybe not. decisions early on maybe that would have saved the company, maybe not. And that Scully had problems executing, but yet at the same time, he had, as John and I said, the product vision of doing the Newton. I mean, he was not wrong in the grand scheme of things about where tech was going, but they were wrong and too early about a lot of the details. But again, I'm not trying to argue a business standpoint. My point about the Becoming Steve Jobs book is it's written by business journalists. And so it's very easy for Jobs book is it's written by business journalists.

And so it's very easy for them to look at the Apple of the 80s and 90s and say it was a failure. Because from a business standpoint, it was a failure. It was a company that went into decline and then almost went out of business. What I'm saying is you cannot extend that and say that there was not other stuff going on at Apple in terms of the products, in terms of the Mac community that wasn't valuable between 1985 and 1997. I know the mid-90s were kind of a dark time for Mac users in general, not just Apple's business. It started to fall apart. But that is, you know, if I had to simplify my argument about the non-jobs period of Apple, the interregnum, I would say people take 12 years and make it seem like two, the last two.

And that's not accurate. There was a lot of interesting stuff that happened before it all fell apart in the mid-90s. And I think that we've simplified that story. And as for doing a disservice to my listeners, as Alberto claims here, I would say, I'm just trying to be a little bit contrarian here. I feel like there is this common narrative about how Apple was a total disaster while Steve Jobs was gone. And there was essentially, it's getting boiled down to there was no value. And it was a wasteland and tubbleweeds were rolling through. And I don't think that's true, because this is the era where I discovered the

Mac, loved the Mac, became an avid Mac user, started reading all the Mac magazines, and eventually decided I wanted to write about it professionally. So maybe I was a crazy person to do all those things, but I think I saw some value there in that subculture. And it's difficult for me to see that all get collapsed into the Gil Amelio and Michael Spindler era, because that was bad. But there were a lot of good times before it went bad. And I am a product person, so I don't really care about the fact that Apple lost money at the end. I mean, that would have put them out of business. I care more that their products at the end weren't very good and that they couldn't ship a next generation operating system. Again, it's a financial thing versus a product thing. I care

about the fact that their products were really great and then their products weren't great, not that they lost money at some point. And that's a totally valid argument if you're viewing it from a business perspective. But I'm not saying Apple was a great business when Steve Jobs was gone. I'm saying Apple made a lot of great products and there was a lot of great stuff in the Mac ecosystem in that period. And that's the difference between my perspective about Apple in that era and the becoming Steve Jobs perspective. And that's fair enough. I totally get where they're coming from, but I think that there was much more nuance there than... So now I've just made Alberto mad again. So anyway, that's my take on it. That's why I wanted to

bring it up. I feel like what I'm saying is not talked about today. People just kind of throw that whole era in the bin because it ended badly. And it's like, you know, if there's a marriage that goes for 20 years and the last two, it falls apart and they get a divorce, do you look back at the previous 18 years and say that whole time was a disaster. It's like, well, not necessarily. They might have had a good 15 years and then it started to fall apart. And let's not rewrite history, is what I'm saying. I think something that's worth remembering that maybe tries to put this into context a little bit is the parallel with Pixar. Like Pixar was spending and just hemorrhaging millions and millions of dollars

before they did the deal with Disney. Like they were just spending all of Steveve jobs and the investors money right and they were making interesting things but they were just spending spending spending loads of money until toy story right came and say right but nobody like especially in the book they don't call pixar irrelevant and talk about how exciting pixar was even during this time it's just a state of perspective like you you see it you see it differently because you're in in the weeds enjoying right it's it's you you be here long enough and and and in this world and you realize that there are things that you've been around once you're around long enough people start to point things that happened in the past and you

say that's not what happened and that doesn't happen until you've been around long enough for enough time to go past that people's narratives are shaped by the present, and you're remembering things from the past. But the last point I'll make about this is, based on something that was mentioned in the chat room, was the Mac a critical success? The Mac was always considered better than Windows. It just didn't work because Apple was making a single product like they are today that's their operating system and their hardware, and the PCs were cheap and plentiful, and businesses bought them,

and the market share went all to Microsoft. But as a point in my argument, what I'll say is, it wasn't until Windows 95 that the game really, really, really changed, and that Apple lost its upper hand. And I don't think Windows 95 was as good as the game really, really, really changed and that Apple lost its upper hand. And I don't think Windows 95 was as good as the Mac either, but it was close enough. And for people who didn't live through that era, Windows users were furious about Windows 95.

I remember it well. They were furious about it. And you know why they were furious about it? The common complaint from Windows 3.1 power users about Windows 95 was, why did you turn my computer into a Mac? So, you know, essentially in 95, that's when Microsoft was like, we got it. And they totally nailed it, knocked off the Mac entirely, and we're ready to roll.

And that was when the jig was really up for Apple. That was the last. And I think in the book, they say that. And although I don't agree with the book's claim that it made Windows better than the Mac at that point, it made it good enough that it didn't matter to most people. And Apple's differentiators kind of fell away at that point. And that was really, things were bad enough at that point at Apple, but that just made it worse. And then, you know, at that point, they're two years away from going out of business. I hope we don't have to talk about this again.

Yeah, I think that's it it i think we wrapped it up um the only other thing is bad but we i feel like you have to keep yeah no this is i i just i i feel like that was enough because i thought i think alberto made an interesting argument although i disagree with it and i wanted to address that um somebody uh listener john not john syracuse wrote in to say it occurred to me that you and john syracuse and me and john syracuse should write the definitive Steve Jobs Apple book. I don't think this is what we are good at, but I appreciate it. That's very nice. I had two other pieces of follow-up, and then we'll move on.

One is a quote that I didn't mention in episode 30 from the book that just bugged me. There's a guy named Mike Slade who worked at Next, and they're talking about Steve Jobs and Lorraine when they had kids. And he says, they were classic new parents. They did everything wrong. They were both hippies. So the kid was in their bed the whole time. The kid was only breastfed. So what did the kid do? He screamed all the time and was hungry all the time because, duh, right? So within a week, they looked like prison camp survivors. This is Mike Slade. I don't know Mike Slade, but, you know know i like i there's nothing like telling other parents what they should do like you know the answers and they don't um and as somebody who was not a hippie but also co-slept with our baby and breastfed our baby uh hey mike slade uh can you see the finger i'm holding up

here yeah uh boy people love telling other parents what to do. That's not a hippie thing. That's, I mean, come on. And again, you know, this guy seems to think like he knows how to be a parent. And Steve Jobs doesn't. And that guy was a jerk. And I thought that was just an interesting quote in the book where I was like, I don't know who this guy is, but I don't like him now because of that quote.

Judgmental much? And there's the last thing, which is from listener Shireen, who said, I don't know who this guy is, but I don't like him now because of that quote. Judgmental much? And there's the last thing, which is from listener Shireen, who said, I'd listen to the Robot or Not podcast with Jason and John Syracuse, just saying. Which I say, I'm working on it. I'm working on John more accurately to see if we can delve deeper into whether things are robots or not. So that's it. That's all the follow-up. So let me take a quick break before we get into our topics this week. And let me just take a moment to thank our friends over at lynda.com.

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Thank you so much to lynda.com for their continued support of Upgrade and RelayFM. Yay. So, Mr. Jason Snell, you wrote a little piece about buying and trying an Apple Watch. Now, we were all up whatever time it was in your local time zone in the RelayFM chat room, your local time zone in the Real AFM chat room and everybody was talking about how much they were refreshing the web page and using the app and such like that as we were all buying our Apple watches. What did you put an order in for? It was so stressful. Like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? And I'm watching the clock tick because here it was midnight. So I just stayed up.

What am I going to do? What am I going to order? And I kept looking at the different prices and I kept seeing stainless steel and it's like $700. In the end, I went with what turned out to be what everybody went with, it seems almost, which is I went with the space gray sport with the black band. Because I liked how the space gray, I like the black band rather than one of the bright color bands.

And it came with the space gray color aluminum body instead of the more silvery aluminum body. And I liked the look of that too. All of my other iOS devices are space gray as well. I like the look of that too. All of my other iOS devices are space gray as well. I like the look of that color. And so that's what I placed an order for. And at the same time, I made a try-on appointment for the next morning, the first slot the next morning, or the second slot, I guess, 10, 15 a.m. the next day. So now, meanwhile, you also ordered something and made a try on appointment, right? Yep. I ordered the sport with the blue band, um, not to criticize your, uh, choice here,

but one of the reasons I didn't go with the space gray is it limits the bands you can, you can use in my opinion. Um, cause a lot of the attachments for the bands are in the steel color um so you they would kind of clash against each other you kind of end up if that bothers you it might not bother you i i don't know i i don't feel like i feel like the shiny stainless steel is not close to either of the textures of the sport watch. So if it really bothers you, I think that you need to get a stainless steel instead of it. So it didn't bother me. And I did decide to buy an extra band after doing my try-on experience.

But I decided I liked the look of the black watch and the black strap and space gray watch more. But I think your opinion is valid. The blue band is really cute. That was my other thing that I was thinking of in the sport because it's kind of adorable. I like it. Ideally, I would have wanted a black band,

but I also personally do just prefer the pure aluminum look to the gray. This is one of the things I found so interesting. So I read your post about the try on. I've read Steven's and Max Parky's. And the thing that I have found the most interesting is every single person has completely different opinions about the way the bands look about the way the bodies look. And I've never seen it like this before.

That's why you got to try them on. It's reinforcing the fact that this comes down to taste like steven said that he thought that the the aluminium felt cheap and because it was light and i felt like the steel was heavier than i would have wanted and was happy i went with the aluminium like there's so there's so many different like some people say they really love the modern buckle. Some people say the leather feels like plastic. Like, it's so interesting to read everybody's different opinions on this stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, and I wonder whether it ticks over with where it's just fashion and it's personal and people have way different opinions about, like, what they wear on their wrist. It uses different parts of your you know brain different judgments you make than if it's just a computer that you're carrying around or something um i don't i don't know i i i definitely formed opinions about the bands through through trial although they were very similar to the opinions i had before they they uh i i some of them reinforced a few of them changed

but yeah everybody's got got their take on it. I did, somebody asked me to explain what the colors are. And I said, well, the standard sport reminds me most of like the original iPhone back. It's a little, it's not quite like the MacBook Pro aluminum, aluminum. It feels a little bit hazier like that original iPhone. The space gray one is like the space gray back of a current iPhone.

And then the stainless steel is like the back of an iPod Classic. It's the shiny stainless steel. And they all have their value. Although, honestly, we can also overthink this because mostly what you see is the screen. their value although honestly we can also overthink this because um mostly what you see is the screen and what the the metal color is really just kind of on the sides and the and the the crown it's not super prominent i mean it's there but uh you know the face is black and i actually like that's one of the reasons why i liked the uh the uh space gray as well is that it i liked how it went with the black face of the watch.

But, you know, it's fashion. It's because luxury, Mike. Because luxury. So this was my first experience of an Apple Watch. Yes. Yeah, I realized that. Unlike most people who go to the try-on experience, I had tried the Apple Watch on a couple of times before, but it was very different to be in the store with a trained salesperson instead of being with one of the PR people in a crazy media room. So what was your experience of trying on the Apple Watch? So I went to Covent Garden, which is, I think,

the largest Apple store in the world, maybe. It's definitely one of the biggest it's it's insane it's multiple floors and the floors are just huge it's a humongous store but it's a really great store um it's my favorite because there's a lot of real natural light huge windows they have a skylight it looks fantastic in there so it was a really great um i was actually trying on the watch underneath the skylight which was pretty sweet because it just looked pretty good. So I booked the appointment in the morning and I went in and you kind of go in and they check you in on their easy pay terminals that they have. So they just check you in.

And I saw the guy take some notes about me, which I thought was quite funny. Like so that the person who was coming to pick me up could recognize me. So he's like describing what I was wearing. But I was with my girlfriend too, because we both booked appointments. Like she had 130, I had 145. So we could try them on together, which they were totally down with. They're like, yeah, we'll just get someone to take you both

and we'll do them in one. So I thought that was pretty cool. So we were taken over by a guy, his name was Ben. And Ben was very nice. And he took us over to the tables because they're just these blank tables now in stores that don't have anything on them except these like blue leather pads

that they put the watches down on. And the drawers I thought was so cool. They're opened by like some sort of magnetic lock, which is when they put their EasyPay terminal. This is like an iPod touch of a chip and pin machine on the back. I don't know if you have those in America. Yeah.

Okay. So they hold the terminal up to the drawer and the drawer unlocks and they can open the drawer and they can see inside. I'm going to put some pictures in the show notes that I took. So like there's links to some tweets with some pictures in them. So you'll be able to see like what the drawers inside looks like and stuff like that. So I'll put those in the show notes, which you can find in your podcast app of choice at relay.fm upgrade slash 32 um so i basically then we had some time to try everything on and they had they have a selection of models what i found was really interesting they do not have 42 silver aluminium they just didn't have them in the entire store didn't have them all of the drawers had the exact

same configuration they have 38 so i got to try on the 38 they had 42 in the gray and then they had a bunch of steels with all different bands like they did they did not have a lot of the sport they were really pushing the steel because the steel is looks better with the bands, right? Sure. So my kind of overall feeling is the Sport Band feels fantastic. I love it. I think it feels way better than I expected, and I'm really happy that that's going to be the main band that I'll have at least for the first little while. I agree.

I think the Sport Band is softer than I expected. The feel on it is really nice and soft, and it feels much more pliable than I expected. It sort of moves easily, which I also, you know, it's not what I thought. So, yeah, it felt much more comfortable and pleasant to wear than I thought it would. I think the leather loop is the biggest disappointment. Yeah.

And for me, it's mainly in the feel of it was fine. That didn't bother me. But it's the mechanism for putting it on. So, you know, you've got, so I'll explain it. You can go see it. But, you know, you have like the little ridges, which are all the individual magnets, right? To try and wrap that around itself,

you have to put it through this hole, which has a metal ring around the outside. So you're kind of like forcing it through. Like you have to like force each individual magnet through the hole. It's really not a very elegant way of doing it. And considering you definitely will be taking this watch off at least once a day. All right. And putting it on again in the morning.

I don't want a mechanism like that. Like the sport was perfectly fine. Like you just wrap it around clip it in slide it in and i feel like over time that will get so easy to to just do that to do that action because i tried it on and took it off a couple of times uh so this is interesting i've seen some people differently the guy let me take pick up the watches put them on myself take them off myself i could do whatever i wanted with them yeah i wasn't allowed to put them on myself yeah so i i don't know this is so interesting how different people have different things but i was able to pick them up like he was helping me because i was like can you hold them because i was scared i was going to drop it right so i was like can you just put your hand on the back is that sure what do you like you know it's

like you can do whatever you want with it i really like they clean down all of the watches of a cloth as well before before you put them on, which I really liked. But yeah, the leather loop, I don't like. The Milanese, I don't know how to say it. I try and say it like I imagine Federico would say it. That was my favorite. Oh my word.

That feels fantastic. Interesting. I loved the feeling of it. Federico said this and i totally agree it feels more like fabric uh and i also so i have my try on appointment and i'm kind of skipping ahead now but then uh i saw a guy that i've seen a couple of times in the apple store who's a listener of this show and some of our shows on relay and we were chatting and i said to him uh that i would really like to to see what the sport looked like with the Milanese.

Because you're not allowed to change the bands. But he then took me over and we changed the bands over. So I have some other photos which caused a whole big problem. I'll put links to this in the show notes. So what I did, I took a couple of close-up shots with the Milanese with the sport. And I tried to show the different connections because on the face of it, it's kind of like a brushed steel, so it fits quite well with the aluminium.

But then on the side is the polished, so it's up to you if you like it. There's four pictures. The last one, I just want to let you know if you look at it, is my girlfriend's wrist. It's not my wrist. So I caused so many problems for people with these pictures because I took three on my

wrist and then one on hers and she has tiny tiny wrists so like she's got even the 38 is big on her but people were like saying oh the watch looks so large on your wrist no the fourth picture is my girlfriend so bear that in mind but i really liked the way that those actually looked together um really liked the way that those actually looked together um so the trium was really good i i spent it felt like as long as i wanted i don't think that's the case but i didn't feel rushed uh it was kind of like okay i'm done looking now i liked the way the steel uh link bracelet looked uh i like how it looked i didn't like how it looked on me. I can see it. Like Joshua Topolsky in his review, it looked really great on his wrist. But I just don't think it looks good on my wrist. Yeah, but he carries off some different kind of fashion than I do, certainly.

And I've never liked the metal link bracelets. But having hairy arms, especially, it's like they always pinch and stuff. And I didn't like it. I totally see what you're saying about the Milaneseese loop with um with uh wanting it to because that's metal um you the i've been looking at leather bands so i i've not been concerned about the mismatch with the body but that is a case where you really you've got a metal band and you want it to match the body at that point that's a lot of silver that's whereas black leather doesn't match the band the the the watch body anyway so it's not as big a deal so i totally i totally see what you're what

you're saying there so because i i always have my eye on the manazi loop um i'm happy that it went well with the sport i i haven't put an order i'm gonna get that band but i'm not putting on ordering it's backdated till june online and i'm hoping that that before June you'll be able to get one in a store. So what I did was I tried on the Sportband, and I liked it. And I actually had the black Sportband with the space gray Sport, which is what I had ordered the night before. And I thought to myself, well, let's see. If I don't like this, then I can change my order. And I wore that for a couple of minutes, and was super comfortable. I re I really thought it was comfortable and I was concerned about whether this watch was going to feel weird and what,

what am I getting myself into? And, um, after a minute or two, I was looking at it and thinking, I'm really happy with my purchase because this, this actually feels good. I like the look. Um, I like how it feels. It feels really light. I do wear a watch regularly, but I worry, you know, with a new watch, am I going to feel like, oh, no, this is too much? But it didn't feel like it was too much. It felt perfectly normal. It didn't look huge to me on my wrist. It felt comfortable. Then I took the sport band off, and what happened is what happened when I got the Pebble for the first time, and it came with a rubber band, a cheap, crappy rubber band, not the nice rubber band, fluorolastomer, fluorolastomer, say it with me, fluorolastomer band that the Apple Watch did. But it had the same effect, which is when I took it off, I immediately could feel the dampness of the sweat that my wrist had been exuding under the band that had nowhere to go because the band is not

absorbent. And it's icky. And I don't like that feeling. And I immediately thought to myself, let's try the leather classic buckle and see what that looks like. And I put that on. And the leather classic buckle is essentially every watch band I've had since I stopped having a Casio calculator watch in high school. Um, and, uh, I really like the, that I like that, that band style. I I've always, I swapped out my pebble band for a leather classic buckle band. Um, and, uh, I really like the classic buckle that Apple did. It's very quality um i like that the little pins are flat and that the perforations in the leather are um are rectangular and not just little circles which means there's more room for the force to be spread so they should actually last longer

and i thought that the leather feel was really nice on that and so when i the net result is when i went home all i did was place an order for the black leather classic buckle because I want one of those too. And I'll replace my sport band for at least for most purposes. And people talk about, well, yeah, you sweat into the leather band and it absorbs your sweat and all that. And it's like that's the beauty for me of leather is that it will breathe'll breathe a little bit it'll absorb a little moisture and then it'll release it later and yeah it does that mean over time that band is going to age and and uh yeah yeah it is and i kind of like that that's one of the nice things about leather and yeah at some point it'll fall apart and that's fine too but i'm not going to wear it swimming or anything like that but it will be more

comfortable so that's what i'm going for yep i. I agree with that. Like, I can imagine that I wouldn't want to wear, and I don't necessarily want to wear the sport band all the time, but just my band option is just like, I'm not, June seems like a crazy thing to put an order in for. Like, I'm convinced I could buy one before then. Well, I mean, all these dates that everybody's getting for these ship dates here, I am skeptical. I think that Apple is going to beat those dates for a lot of this stuff.

I think Apple's being conservative. That's my guess. Also, they're showing date ranges, which I think is kind of funny. Maybe a lack of confidence over exactly how many they're going to be able to produce. But I'm optimistic that maybe we'll all get stuff a little earlier than we think we will but i still put in the i still put in the order for that band and if if that band my feeling is it's going to be like when i got the the the cover for the ipad 2 or whatever the ipad mini where i got the cover and i had to wait like another week before i got

the ipad i had the cover for nothing I feel like that's going to happen probably. I'm going to end up with a band and be like, I can imagine there's a watch attached to it. I'll make my own little watch out of sticks. Genuinely, that's why I didn't order a band at checkout. Like when I originally bought the watch, I was like, I'm not going through that again. I had my iPhone 6 Plus case for a week just looking at it.

No, I'm not going to go through this torment. One of the interesting things in the stores is these. So the watches that you put on in the try-on are on a demo loop, which is really nice because it shows and kind of goes through everything. And plus, you don't want to be using them at that point. That's how I feel. I think it's the right thing to do, actually. This is about the bands and the feel of the watches. you can start them a loop and it can interrupt you can

look at it when you want to look at it and it's always doing something and one of the things that's really interesting is it does all the tactic stuff so it catches you whilst you're talking to the guy or the girl at the store so like oh like the first time it happened i was like whoa okay that's crazy yeah and that was nice and i like that and it did like the heartbeat stuff so that was really cool but then they have these like devices my understanding is it's an ipad mini uh with some other stuff in the guts and these watches that are attached to an acrylic box and these are like um they're like they're demo units, basically. And what they do is, as you're moving around the interface,

the iPad screen on the left is giving you more information about the Apple service that you're currently using, which is really nice. It's a nice little companion. But I was able to go in and use the watch, and it has the Apple-developed apps, no third-party apps on these. It's going to take a little bit of getting used to, because some of the ways that you interact with the UI is not necessarily as I would have expected. But I think that there are some things that are in here which

was giving me the feeling, the joy feeling of a new Apple product. Like, for example, whatever app is in the center of the screen, you can scroll into from the digital crown, and you can start scrolling, and the elements of the app start to appear, and then you can scroll them away again. So you start scrolling into the watch, and the hands appear, and the elements of the app start to appear and then you can scroll them away again. So you start scrolling into the watch and the hands appear and the dial appears and it all starts to come together

but you can stop it and spin it away. And so you can just zoom in and out and watch the interface come in and go away, come in and go away. And it's like that kind of attention is what I love most. And I think that there are all these little things that i was coming into contact with whilst using the watch where it was filling me with that joy and

excitement um and i've heard contrary from other people but having used this i am i am really really excited to to play around with this device more because there just seems to be some things in here that i just find the details so fantastic like the way you can customize the um the watch faces and the way that you change color so like you you go onto one of the customization things and you can change the color of the elements of the watch face by scrolling digital crown and watching the colors change around like it there are just little parts of it that i love and the screen itself and the way that the apps look they look way better than I expected the quality of the screen is way better

that screen is beautiful, it is an amazing screen and I like the crown I feel like Apple is going to learn from how people use it and already has probably among the Apple employees who have had it, the best ways of using these things. And you know, I think it's a, it's an exciting time because we've got a product that,

that everybody's got some ideas about how it's going to work. But I think in the real world, we're going to find some really interesting things out and that Apple may adjust what its plans are based on that. So I think that's exciting too, that, that we're all going to figure out like, oh, the crown is really good for this, but not that. And I don't use these.

I mean, I was listening to, God, who was it? One of these many tech podcasts was talking about how maybe the apps, maybe apps, it was ATP. Marco was talking about maybe apps as a concept is like, should be even further in the background. Really, most of your interaction should be the watch face and the glances. And the idea of launching watch apps should be not much of a thing because maybe that's too complex an interaction for this. And we'll find out. We'll find out how many apps people use and how they get to them and whether having an app screen, that honeycomb app screen, is even

really necessary as a primary mode of interacting with this thing. We think of it in terms of the iPhone where it's the primary mode. And Apple's already pushed it into the background and sort of said, no, the FitWatch face is the primary and then the glances. And then you can also go find your apps. And it'll be interesting to see it unfold. One of the things I'm most excited about getting it is using it for a while. And actually, I've had a bunch of people say, I can't believe that Apple didn't get you a watch. You didn't get a review.

It's like, well, I was busy with the MacBook and with travel, and it's okay. And in fact, I'm kind of glad because the amount of work that the people who did the embargoed reviews of the watch had to do was, it was a lot. It was a lot. I don't, I thought about it and was exhausted, especially since there's also the MacBook that I had to work on last week. So I'm looking forward to getting it and spending time with it. And the pressure's kind of off. These reviews are out there, right? with it and the pressure's kind of off that these reviews are out there right um and so i feel like i can take my time now and use it and then write about what i'm observing about it instead of having this week where you have to intensively use it and take pictures of it and do videos of it and

write a whole big package and and have it all laid out and you know verge Verge and Bloomberg kind of fancy ways or not. It's a lot. And I'm kind of glad to be able to take the slow-cooked path with the Apple Watch because I feel like it will unfold itself in ongoing use in a way that is very hard to replicate if you just have to write a review in a week. And the thing is, like, even from a business perspective, there's still so much to write after it comes a week and the thing is like even from a business perspective there's still so much to write after it comes out like so oh yeah you know that so for you it's like yeah okay you didn't get the big whiz bang embargo review but it's not like you're i would assume you're not really hurting from it because you still have loads of stuff to write that people

want to see but yeah yeah yeah. And so being able to do that kind of as an ongoing thing instead of just dropping a big review, I think there's some power in that. Should I take a break? Thank a new sponsor to upgrade. Unless you, I don't know if you want to talk about

anything more about the try-on experience or anything like that. No, I got my part out. I had a very nice person who was an Apple Store employee who was showing me stuff. And she knew who I was, which is weird. Because that's still weird. But she was very nice.

However, she seemed to have lost her wipe-down rag. And so she kept grabbing other people at our table because we had four or six people at this table. And so there were other Apple people there and they had their rags on the table and she'd keep grabbing them. And there was this one guy who was like, that's mine. She's like, I just need to borrow it for a second.

And he's like, that's mine. And she's like, I don't have mine. Cause we got to wipe them down. Obviously they were told you got to wipe them down. Every time somebody takes it off, you wipe it down and then you move on to the next one.

Cause we don't want them coming out of the drawer with fingerprints and stuff on them. We want them pristine at that point. But she had lost her rag somewhere. And so that was pretty funny. When I left the store, I definitely felt like I'd experienced something that wasn't an Apple store.

Like, I feel like it was more akin to a jewelry store or a fashion store. It was a very, and my girlfriend agreed, it was a akin to a jewelry store or a fashion store it was it was a very and my girlfriend agreed it was a very different feeling experience and they took so much care um it was one of the first times i've ever filled in like i got a feedback survey and i like filled the feedback survey in because i was really really impressed with the overall feeling and my understanding of this is like the the apple store employees in their training were told even how they are to put the watches down on the counter. Different watches have to be put down on the counter in different ways so that they're really going for the retail thing.

For example, the Milanese, you put it down with the face up so they can see all the band. down with the face up so they can see all the band but the link bracelet you put down on its side with the digital crown pointing up because you can't put the the link bracelet with the face up because it whirls over so they were they were explained like this is how you have to do this this is how you have to do this i found that fascinating because that makes sense like from the jewelry store perspective from the luxury perspective treat the products with care and show them in a specific way yeah it's uh on level, it's not like an Apple Store experience. On another level, it is exactly the kind of thing that fits in with what the Apple Store should be doing.

I mean, I do think this is the influence of Angela Ahrens, who I realized they hired her a year and a half ago, although she, I think, only started about a year ago. But with her experience at Burberry, understanding how you train retail staff in high-end retail locations, I think it's good because it fits in, right? The whole idea of the Apple Store experience is supposed to be this hands-on, personal, elegant kind of experience. And in fact, most of the complaints I hear about the Apple Store these days are the you know, the staff aren't as well trained as they used to be. And it's hard to figure out, hard to flag somebody down. And, you know, lots of complaints about how it feels a

little more like a chaotic experience. And so if I'm Angela Ahrens that would be one of the things that I would be concerned about and I would want to reinstill some of this like really personal well-trained kind of stuff so that when you come out of the Apple store you think wow

that was something and I think the Apple store used to be like that and partially because of its popularity it's harder for them to get that right now and you know i think this is an example of of apple trying to get that experience back into those

stores using the watch and i think i think it's good it was certainly impressive to me um and that that story 10 a.m on a on a what friday morning it. It was packed with people around the watches. It was pretty amazing. All right, new sponsor. So this week's episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Warby Parker. As I mentioned at the start of the show, Warby Parker, I love this little line, glasses should not cost as much as an iPhone,

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And so that was fun. And we got to have our opinions about, well, I like that one, I don't like that one. And we kind of cycled through all of them a few times. And that's good because whenever I have gone in the past to buy a pair of glasses at my optometrist's office, I have those moments of thinking, I have no way of judging whether this looks good or not. And I started doing things like texting my wife pictures of me wearing various glasses and saying, what do you think about this? And then she's judging it from like one angle. And so this was great because I could keep them on as long as they wanted to observe them. And they could say, put that one back on again. And let's compare

these two now and all of that. That all went into the home try-on. And that was good. And then we settled on a pair. And I went, you know, I told Warby Parker what I wanted. And yes. And then very quickly thereafter, I had a nice pair of prescription sunglasses. And they worked with my optometrist to get my prescription. It was all handled. I didn't really have to do anything other than give my optometrist information. They contacted them and got the info and the whole thing.

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be also contributing to a charitable cause last thing thing I'll mention, as for every pair of glasses sold, Warby Parker distributes a pair of glasses to someone in need. Thanks so much to Warby Parker for supporting this show. Go to warbyparker.com slash upgrade. So what else did you want to talk about today, sir? Well, I wanted to talk at least briefly about, we mentioned those reviews, and I think that's interesting that we got those reviews. This whole rollout is fascinating to me for the Apple Watch. So now instead of product, we're talking about sort of like Apple strategy stuff. So they do the pre-order two weeks before they're going to start shipping.

just a couple of days before the pre-order, there are all the embargo reviews drop. And the idea there is just, I think, to keep the watch in the public consciousness. Also, an interesting, either confidence that the reviews were going to be good or kind of an understanding that the reviews didn't matter what they said as much as it mattered that they were all being published. And so it's free advertising for Apple. But those all dropped before the pre-order period. And then about a week before that, or even less, there was this David Pierce did a story in Wired that was like how they did it, where he talked to a few people at Apple who were obviously furnished. You know, Apple furnished him some people for some interviews about some parts of the watch development process, which is a different kind of story we don't usually see Apple do. Google has been doing that a lot with Stephen Levy, where they give him access and let him write these stories about how Google

thought up this whatever thing. But Apple hasn't done a lot of that. And this is one of those cases where Apple's strategy is not the same as when Katie Cotton was there. This is, whether, how much of it is Katie not being there, how much of it is it's Tim, and he's telling this from the top, like, let's play this game differently. But this is a very different kind of game. And it is, I guess, essentially a full-court press. But it's fascinating that they're, you know,

in the Steve Jobs era, Apple was this black box, and then Magic Products emerged from it. And then Tim Cook era, they are, and it's to Apple's, this is all to, it's PR. It's all to Apple's benefit. But they are painting a picture of Apple as this amazing company with all these great people who collaborate on these great products. And some of that is to combat the feeling that it was all from Steve Jobs, which Steve Jobs really liked. Like the Isaacson book makes clear that Steve Jobs really liked, and becoming Steve Jobs says it too,

he really liked the idea that everybody thought that he invented everything. That was part of what he was doing. And when James Thompson does his presentation at UL and talks about trying to get into the about box in the Finder, and he gets in just at the point where Apple decrees, Steve Jobs decrees, that all names will be taken out of the credits of all Apple software. I mean, they say that was to keep them off the list in terms of being poached by other companies. And I'm sure that was part of it.

But part of it is the mystique of it all magically happening from Apple. And who knows how it gets made. It's just magic software that happens from elves somewhere. And so this is different, right? This is Apple saying, we're going to furnish you with these guys who worked on the watch team. And you're going to get to talk to all of them about what they went through and the process involved. And it's still PR, right? It's just a different approach.

It's a different kind of story. Here they're saying, look how smart we are. Look how talented our people are that they do this stuff. Not everybody can do this. This is an Apple. Only Apple has this level of attention to detail as opposed to the old way, which was like, I don't know how they do it. The magic product comes out of Apple. So different.

I just thought the David Pierce story especially, that is not the old Apple at all. That is a very new approach. That is not the old Apple at all. That is a very new approach. And as somebody who is a writer, I look at it too and I think, you know, it's hard to... Gimme, gimme, gimme. It's hard to... Well, if you're David Pierce, you know, who's a good writer and you're wired, it's hard to turn down that story. You've got to do that story.

And yet at the same time, everything in that story is furnished by Apple. So it's a real challenge because it is a piece of PR on one level, and he's got to put his own spin on it and his own take on it. And getting the access, I mean, Apple willing to talk about its product process for a new product that's coming out, I mean, that is big unto itself. That is a huge deal. But at the same time, they are choosing exactly who you could talk to and exactly what information that they're willing to talk about. So it's a tricky thing. But I love that we're getting a little bit of an insight into it, regardless of the fact that it is targeted to promote the Apple Watch.

I love that we got a little bit of the insight. Those stories in that story about what's their motivation and what are they trying to do with the product are really interesting. So I think it's worth a read. I think it's a nice story. But it's also interesting just to think about how that is a fascinatingly different kind of bit of PR than what Apple has done before. Man, did Pierce luck out on that? Like it's maybe his first big piece since he joined Wired? Yeah, because he was at The Verge before.

Yeah. I've always really, really liked his stuff. Oh, yeah. He's great. I hope that he continues to do product reviews for Wired because they were always my favorite thing about The Verge. There was something interesting. I watched Joshua Topolsky's video and realized that I miss him.

I talked to him for a little while at the Apple Watch, at the latest event, the Apple Watch and MacBook event. And yeah, you know, he's got that. I mean, he's got a new baby and all that, but it's like he's been doing management stuff at Bloomberg, setting this whole thing up. And it was nice to get him back in the field a little bit. Even at The Verge, you know, he was the editor-in-chief, and that meant that a lot of his time had to be spent

on management. I know the feeling, right? And so it was nice to see him lend his experience covering tech products to that story. I thought that was good. And I thought that was great, actually, that he got the Apple Watch, because I think that was a question of like, what Apple's relationship with The Verge was always kind of like, well, you know, it was a little rocky at times. And not only did, you know, not only did The Verge get one, but Joshua Topolsky got one at Bloomberg, too. And I thought that was cool to see, because he's got-known for nothing. He is well-known for some really good reasons that you may lose sight of when he becomes the figurehead of The Verge or Bloomberg. I feel like The Verge is for Apple a kind of have-to. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think this is another PR difference, which is old Apple PR would be like, well, we're going to punish them.

And new Apple PR is like, they can say whatever they want. We just need to be there. Yeah. Because honestly, if you're Apple, you've got to have confidence. This happens so much with Internet things, too. I cannot believe that this person who is famous is so thin-skinned about criticism because surely they get it all the time how could they not have grown calluses and realize that people are going to criticize them and they just need to move on surely they've and like like super famous people that you find

like wow how can you not be good at this at this point i think i think apple was kind of like that too where it was like, you know, Apple, I think you're bigger than any of these media outlets that you're dealing with. Just let them, you know, just, I mean, sure, if there's somebody who you feel like is not, you can't deal with them fairly, that's a different thing. But you know, if you give them access, they're going to take it. And you know that they've got a huge following. So just let them say what they're going to take it. And you know that they've got a huge following. So just let them say what they're going to say. And in the end, I think somebody was making this point, like all reviews are good reviews because it's all press. And do people really read the reviews

as buying advice or do they read them as entertainment? I think it's a good question. So, you know, I think it's a good change in Apple's policy to be like, yeah, The Verge is big. The Verge is one of the definitive tech sites, if not the definitive tech site on the internet. We'll let them have it. And also saying, you know, they're going to say what they're going to say. And it's fine. I mean, literally, it's fine. Just let them review it. So that's a different approach, but I think it's good. So just to mention one thing, Joshua Topolsky has a new podcast launching, I think, this week called Tomorrow. Yeah. And I actually don't think it's affiliated with Bloomberg. So I'm very excited about that. Yeah, he talked about that briefly when I ran into him.

He said something about maybe having me on sometime. So maybe that'll happen. Because everywhere he's talking about it it's just tomorrowpodcast.com there's no bloomberg logos nowhere i hope that that's the case uh and i wonder if that might have been a thing for him with box because i he's been mentioning doing a podcast of his own for a long time yeah and i wonder if he was like you know i want to do this thing and they're like no you know yeah well i mean i know again i know the feeling yeah yeah and and i and also if bloomberg's not interested in doing that which is which would be interesting in the sense that um it'd be silly for them it's a it's a question well yeah i mean when they're covering all the rise of all these different podcast things would they not want to do that It'd be silly for them. Then again, Bloomberg's a very kind of like, you know, pro-business, right? It's a business thing. So maybe they're like, yeah, if you want to create your own business on the side, you know, that's totally separate from what you're doing at Bloomberg, then go ahead. But I just don't know if you can report on, this was always the challenge. It's like, if we're paying you to be a tech expert, and then you're going off on the side and creating a whole other business where you're a tech expert, are we really getting all of your tech expertise or are you giving us a little tiny bit but you know regardless of whether it's just just josh's thing

on his own or whether it's with bloomberg or whether it's just part of bloomberg i don't know but yeah i'm looking forward to seeing it more podcasts or that's a good thing yep none of the metadata has bloomberg mentioned anywhere and in the show description says that he's talking about technology culture internet yeah i'm excited about it because i i've always really really liked that guy like i i really look up to him i think he's amazing i don't know a lot of people don't like him or whatever but i have always thought he was incredible like but yeah i i don't know him personally i've had some nice conversations with him at these Apple events. He's always taken time to chat with me at these Apple events, which I got to say, not everybody does. And so I've always appreciated that. Him and Nealey both. I've spent time talking to them, and I really appreciate that. I don't know them personally beyond that, but I've always appreciated that they've had the time to chat and they've been pleasurable to chat with and then their work is good.

I'm happy. Like Neely's story, I've heard a lot of people say that they didn't read it because it was in that crazy layout. I read it in Instapaper. I thought it was really great. I thought it was a good story. I think he did a good job.

I think it's distracting maybe the layout but I think he did a good job and Topolsky, same way. He's a pro. We spoke about it as unconnected i think nilai had some fundamental problems with the way that he was approaching the notification problem or what he perceived as a notification problem yeah oh yeah yeah yeah i'm not i'm not saying i endorsed this review but i thought it was a good read and i get his take on it but um yeah yeah well i laughed a lot of the reviews are like turns out keeping

staring at your watch uh while you're having a conversation with somebody uh when you keep checking your watch it's kind of rude it's like yes this is true um but like what i liked about topolsky's review is he was kind of like but you get to a point where you pare them down like he said i got to the point where i paired them down. Like you said, I got to the point where I pared my notifications down, so I wasn't looking that often. It's like that was the obvious conclusion that Neela didn't address. Neela was like, every time I get an email, I get a notification about it. It's like, dude, don't do that.

Yeah, it's like now I miss the important people in my life. It's like I don't even know how you've jumped there. Yeah, you need to. I think actually speaking as an editorial person, right? One of the great opportunities, I'm sure Renee Ritchie has already written 30 stories about this. One of the great opportunities with the Apple Watch

because that's what they do. And I'm more than right, 30 stories about it. They are so productive. Managing your notifications in Notification Center and what notifications get sent to the watch and choosing strategies for choosing what notifications are. It's really easy to just ignore that and just say no to everything or yes to everything and just deal with it. With the Apple Watch, it becomes even more important that you make some decisions about exactly what you want to see and be notified

by because that's the difference. Like Nealey's story is influenced by the fact that he has got everything pushing a notification to him and that's too many things. Yep. But we'll see. 30 stories on iMore

just written by Rene Ritchie all by himself. I'm trying to find one. I know there's going to be one I just haven't found it yet. Well, I mean, there have been in the past about notification centers

like this is adding a whole other layer. I dealt with this a little bit with the pebble where because the pebble was taking every notification from my lock screen and there was too many and so you know you have to pare it down you use if you're using apple mail you use the vip feature so you only get notified notified by certain people sending you email instead of everybody um and you know you you have to set some limits about what you're going to see. But the difference between the Pebble and the Apple Watch

is you can keep notifications on your phone and turn them off on the watch. That's even better. Yeah. Because you can turn them off in the companion app. Yeah, yeah. And this is going to be part of the strategy for everybody is when do you want to be part of the strategy for everybody is when

do you want to be also also it's personal um it's like self-control like you feel that tap on your wrist you know something's going on you can just note to yourself oh something's going on and then when there's a natural time say now i'll check and see what's going on it doesn't have to be oh tap on the wrist i must look right now right and that's about like personal development so there are like i'm saying all this before i even own a watch but i can foresee some things already i hope that apple continues to push for even more granular control even though it does add a lot of additional things. Because what I would really like is, say, for example, iMessage, right? If somebody's sending me a bunch of iMessages,

I don't need to be notified about every one? Does that make sense? So say you're sending me, like, the people, the way that they use instant message, you send, like, I know that I do this. I send, like, six iMessages in a row or whatever as I'm talking to somebody you don't need to tell me about all of them you know i'd like to see stuff like that it's like

you know notify me once and then give it a five minute break or but anyway this is getting it something we don't need to know no but you're but you're right there is um i think the next frontier for apple maybe it's an ios 9 thing is really overhauling Notification Center to provide much better control over what goes where, including the watch. And because I feel like Notification Center is kind of overwhelmed right now. And it was a good first attempt at notification management, but I think it needs a rethink.

So I'm hoping that might be an iOS 9 thing spurred on by the Apple Watch to do a better job of letting us have more granular control over what we see where and when. That would make a bigger feature on stage as well by saying, and now because of the Apple Watch, right? Then if they would have just done it already. Does that make sense?

Because now there's like more of a reason to do it that will make you happy that it's done. I think there are a lot of things that Apple does where they know that it's something they should do at some point and then the prioritization becomes do i have a reason that i need to do this now and the apple watch i think gives gives apple a reason to prioritize certain features this is what i was saying about like the pen stuff on the ipad and other ipad feature innovations like uh things that are not just big iphone parts of the ipad like if they do a big ipad pro that might be the reason to do

a whole raft of iPad features. Like, well, now we've got a reason to do it because we're going to tie it to this product. And I think notification center and the watch may be that same thing where like this is the impetus to do this overhaul because now there's enough there that we really need to do it.

Should we do some mask upgrade? we really need to do it. Should we do some Ask Upgrade? Yeah, let's do it. Jason Snell, who is helping support Ask Upgrade this week? Ask Upgrade is brought to you by our friends at MailRoute. MailRoute. Imagine a world without spam, viruses, or bounced email. This is a world you can live in. MailRoute has been filtering the

bad stuff out of my email for more than four, it's like I think coming up on two years now. Here's how it works. It lives in the cloud, you don't have to install any hardware or software. It's a it's a cloud service. So you have to do something which is called editing your MX record, which is for each domain, there's a thing called the MX record, which is basically saying what server receives email for this domain. And you set that to MailRoute. So instead of it going to your mail server, all the mail that you receive, all the inbound mail goes to MailRoute.

So all the mail, including the good stuff, but all the junk comes to MailRoute servers. MailRoute takes it in, MailRoute deals with it, uses its intelligent software to figure out whether it's good or not. If it's good, it passes it on to your mail or not if it's good it passes it on to your mail server if it's bad it never gets to your mail server it's held in this quarantine it's like that like the big uh trap in ghostbusters have you seen ghostbusters mike did it yes okay good definitely uh so so that's where they keep the ghosts well they keep the spam in there and uh and and the good stuff comes to you and And they can send you a note every day or every week saying, here's the stuff we filtered out. And you can click to quickly deliver it if they did misfilter something, which very rarely happens, but it happens occasionally. And you can

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all completely protected. It's simple, effective. There's no reason not to try it. You can always switch out and switch your MX record back if you decide you don't want it. And we also have a great deal. All Upgrade listeners will get 10% off, not for a month, not for a year,

but for the lifetime of your account with MailRoute by going to mailroute.net slash upgrade. So go there now, 10% off for the lifetime of your account. And thank you to MailRoute for keeping my inbox clean and for sponsoring AskUpgrade. MailRoute, like the Ghostbusters, but for your email. Yeah, that's right. They're Spambusters. Who are you going to call?

MailRoute! No, no, Mike. Who are you going to call? MailRoutes! No, no, Mike. What are you going to do? Mailbagging! There's something there. We'll work on it. We need to call Lex. He can write some lyrics for us.

This is how we do this. That's going to happen now. Suddenly people are going to come back and there's going to be a Ghostbusters-like song. And then we're going to have to pay Huey Lewis and Ray Parker Jr. royalties. Oh yeah. It's not like white Christmas. All right. No, not at all.

That's totally royalty free. Ask Upgrade. Do you have some questions for me? Oh, you bet I do. This comes from Upgradian Will. Do you think Apple will update the magic mouse for false touch would this be the opportunity to change its physical shape this is this is blue blew my mind i am not so mike are you a mouse or a trackpad person i am

a mouse person i prefer trackpads but i have to use a mouse because otherwise my hands and wrist hurt uh do you have a magic mouse i do indeed because i uh use all the spaces and mission control so let me ask you then can you conceive of how force touch would work like i guess it would just it would just sit on the table and you'd press it and press it harder yeah would that work for you because i already click like i've i've always thought it would be interesting to just, and I've never understood why you can't just tap the Magic Mouse. Like, why do you have to click? Because it has stuff in it. It has some senses in it already anyway, right?

For the scrolling and stuff, yeah. So I've always wondered, why can't I just tap with it? Because I have to use the trackpad whilst recording, so you don't hear, like, I don't know if you could hear that, but lots of clicking. So I've always wondered that. And yeah, yeah i could see that i could definitely see that you could just press harder but the thing is see that's the thing if you press harder it would have to overhaul the entire mouse it didn't have a physical click anymore it would have to be like the false touch so but yeah you could totally do it you could do it in this current shape i reckon

yeah i i uh yeah it would be interesting to see I think the question is does Apple believe that there is much of a market left for the mouse or do they love the trackpad so much that they want everybody to use it I feel like it's almost certain that there will be a force touch magic trackpad but oh definitely

but about the mouse it's an interesting idea I hope so because then it would be I would have a mouse that doesn't make a physical clicking sound, which is like, for a podcaster, that's like the heavenly product. All right, that's good to know. I had some people ask me if the Force Touch trackpad made any noise, and there was somebody somewhere, maybe it was in the chat room, said, no, it doesn't.

And I had to say, well, actually, it does. It does make a noise because the vibration causes this. I mean, it sounds like a click. It does make a little noise. If you're in a quiet space and you click, you hear it go. You can hear it. It's very quiet. But I think that this is a good idea.

Will Apple do it, upgrading will? I don't know. But it's an interesting opportunity, and I do think Apple wants Force Touch to be everywhere. So why not? So when I was having, when I started having wrist pains, I bought a Logitech MX mouse.

It feels fantastic. It's one of those really great ergonomically sculpted ones with loads of buttons on it. But I can't use it on the MacBook Pro because I need to be able to use swiping between desktops and stuff't use it on the MacBook Pro because I need to be able to use swiping between desktops and stuff because it's just the way that I work. So I use that with the editing,

but I wish I could use that mouse, basically. I really love the Logitech mouse, but it doesn't work for me. I used a Kensington trackball for many, many years, but now I use the Magic Trackpad. I've come across the Magic Trackpad. I use uh the magic trackpad i've i've come across to the magic trackpad i do like the magic trackpad yeah well the magic trackpad and the logic mouse make my two-handed editing system that that makes people's minds bend a little bit but no that's

good i i know there are multiple people who have both and use them for different things they use the swipes and stuff on the trackpad and then they do all their precision mousing with a mouse. Yep. As a trackball person, switching to the trackpad was pretty easy, especially since I was already using it on my laptop. I was totally used to it. So I switched and I don't miss it.

Upgrading David, how does photos.app handle video from your iPhone camera roll? It imports it. As you'd expect. I don't know what more to say. It imports it. They're not like video tools in Photos per se,

other than I think if it's a slow-mo, they'll give you the slow-mo handles and stuff. Photos.app is weird in that it handles video, but it doesn't really know what to do with video. And I don't know what they're going to do about that. I assume there'll be linkages with iMovie at some point that are better than what's there now. But right now, your videos are in there,

but they kind of don't do anything. But they are in there, and then you can always export them out to other places. So talking about photos, I think i mentioned this earlier but we're going to have you on uh connected this week ah yes forward promote for the network i will be on with the lads of connected later later this week it'll be exciting because that is that's the photo management show i'll find i'll finally be on a podcast with federico oh wait oh i already had federico on well you can be on a podcast of federico where i don't have a mild heart attack yeah that'll be nice no i love that i love that show and you know i've been listening to you guys

since the prompt days so uh that'll be fun to talk about photo management that's uh that's uh that's gonna be fun since i'm writing a book about photos i am spending a lot of time thinking about photos.app indeed um nick has asked can you give an estimate of the key travel on the new macbook seems to be 1.5 millimeters on my wired apple keyboard yeah my so key travel is the amount of distance you can depress a key before you land at the bottom and uh i don't know exactly what the key travel is but it's it's more in the half a millimeter i think than the one and a half millimeters so it's it's dramatically reduced i would say it's a half to a third of the key travel of the stock apple keyboards It's a lot less.

Johnny has asked, your cut-up podcast radio idea has actually been done pretty well by PRX. You should check out Remix. Yeah, so Public Radio Exchange, which is one of the public radio distributors in the US, has a bunch of these narrative

shows that have little story blocks and they have done this interesting thing where they've created remakes, which is, I was talking about how wouldn't it be great if somebody came up with this idea where there were short segments from a bunch of different podcasts and then you could mix them together

based on people's interest and all of that. But you would have to have short, shuffling through a bunch of two-hour podcasts doesn't help because you're only getting a shuffle every two hours um and so apparently i i looked at this briefly remix is a is is uh from from prx and they have taken those uh those shorter segments from their various shows and put them kind of in this remix format which is very clever uh uh because you've got to own the

material you've got to own the material you've got to have material that's easily cut up into small things and then you have to build this you know a way to remix it and prx did it so that's interesting and i will check it out further but um you know that that is a it's a smart idea but you've got to have the material for it you know you've got to have the the short the short blocks and then be able to mix them together. This comes from Rajiv. Rajiv has asked, what is the difference between the watch apps that will be coming out on the 24th and true third-party apps? Good question.

Yeah, great question. So the watch apps that are coming out on the 24th using WatchKit, the idea there is that essentially it's all embedded in the iPhone app. And the iPhone app is running essentially it's all embedded in the iPhone app and the iPhone app is running and projecting things to the watch. So when you do something on a, on a watch app, that the stuff that's going to be out at launch, what's really happening is all the work is happening on your iPhone. And the iPhone is sending back quite literally sending back images to display on the watch. So it's not really running on the watch. It's this proxy for phoning home literally from your phone. What Apple has said, and we're hoping that we'll get a lot more about this at WWDC, is that by the end of the year, developers will be able to write apps that actually run on

the watch. And I think that's understandable that they're trying to give a better solution than the old iPhone solution of a sweet solution that you write web apps by giving it this sort of like proxy app thing while they build the product and they learn what goes into writing a native watch app themselves. And then they pass that on in a bundled up way to developers. So by the end of the year, hopefully developers will have the tools to write native watch apps. But that's not going to be the case in the short term. In the short term,

you get these things that are like projected things from your phone, which is better than nothing. But it's not, you know, it's not running on the watch like the Apple stuff is. And then we have from Shalini, is there a podcast streaming platform that allows streaming only to selected listeners, not broadcasting to the public? I don't know of any.

Yeah, people have tried this with the subscription-only thing, and it turns out that I think largely, because most podcast things don't support authentication, most podcast apps, that there's a lot of security through obscurity. Just saying, look, don't pass this around. Here's the secret URL. Everybody can actually get there, but they just keep it in secret. Libsyn, which serves a lot of, it's like a CDN for podcasts, a content delivery network. In fact, Relay uses it. Libsyn has this thing that some podcasts, like Marc Maron is using it, where they wall off old episodes and you can only listen to them through their app.

And so you have to pay and then you get access through the app to old episodes. But that's a, essentially it's a proprietary thing where they've built the, the listing app and the authentication in so that you can go back and listen to the old episodes. So, you know, not premium podcasting. There's a reason that premium podcasting is not a, is not a thing. It's just, you know, that technically it hasn't been there and there's nobody. And now it's a challenge because there's no commonly agreed upon way to make it work. So the podcast apps don't support it. So something could emerge at some point. But right now it hasn't. And, you know, right down to the fact that on iTunes, you know, they're all free. They all just say free, you know, subscribe. maybe maybe one day that'll happen but it's

going to be tough because there's no uh central podcast authority that's going to declare a new format and if you did declare it you'd need all the podcast apps to be on board or you're cutting yourself off from a bunch of listeners right mike yeah you don't want to do that i i have no desire from really cutting people off i think that maybe uh shanini might have been talking about live streaming that was how i read it anyway oh interesting no no i mean i i think it's the same thing is that you'd log in and then you'd you'd have a you could have http authentication for something like that um with a lot of these things it's just like the mess and difficulty just make me not want to do anything like that.

Yeah, I think like I've thought about what if I do a like a support thing for the incomparable. And I know what I could do for people who supported me as a thank you would be a couple of streams of stuff that is not, you know, not the regular stuff. And when I think about trying to secure that in some way, I just think, forget it. I'm just going to make it obscure and remind people that they shouldn't share it and probably put something in the stream that says, hey, you got this because you donated. And if you haven't donated, you really should, because that's what this is for. But beyond that, yeah, it's so much complication that I think for most people it's not worth doing. I mean, sure, you could build your own infrastructure and have logins and have it not broadcast to the public. You could do that, but it's just a lot of effort to do that for live streams and things like that.

Right. So that comes to the end of Ask Upgrade for this week. So we're going to go into our extra special segment where I have watched a movie. But before we do that, Mike watches a movie this time is brought to you by our friends over at Smile Software. And today I want to tell you about PDF Pen Scan Plus. It is the app for mobile scanning and OCR. PDFPen Scan Plus allows you to scan documents using OCR directly from your iPhone and iPad camera. It's a super powerful really great looking app but more importantly you have all of this power in your pocket and it's always with you. PDFPen Scan Plus has been recently updated to version 2.0 which is a free upgrade for existing users and now it will help you blast

through those stacks of documents and receipts way faster and better than ever before pdf pen scan plus now automates capturing an image cropping it and setting the size and color depth of the scan so to put to try and explain it a little bit for you basically now all you need to do is you open the app it goes to the viewfinder you point it documents, and it just does it for you. You don't have to press anything. It just does it, which is absolutely incredible. You just point your phone at the document, and off it goes. Of course, you can export multiple documents at once, which makes batch scanning even easier than ever. We have the on-device OCR capabilities that allow you to grab text for copying and pasting into other apps. And OCR also even names the files by date automatically.

And you can export all of these out to iCloud or Dropbox so you can access these files wherever you want. And also on PDFPen, you can access them there as well, which is another great smile app. I just think that these apps are fantastic. And a smile of a new bundle stuff that they're doing so PDF Pen Scan Plus is available in the PDF Pen sorry the PDF Business Kit bundle

along with PDF Pen which is for iPad and iPhone you can get these apps bundled together for $21.99 US now on their own PDF Pen Scan Plus is $6.99 and PDF Pen is $19.99 so if you want to buy one of them you should probably get both of them for $22. Absolutely fantastic. So the best scanner is the one that you have with you.

So go grab a PDF pen Scan Plus from the App Store today. You can learn more at smilesoftware.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to Smile for their continued support of this show. They're awesome. We love them. Thank you, Smile. Spinal Tap.

Yes. I feel like this is the post show i'd be like mike didn't do any research except he watched a movie and took notes yeah we made him watch it we made him watch it all right you watched one of my favorites. This is Spinal Tap from 1984, directed by Rob Reiner, who directed The Princess Bride. And this is a mockumentary at a time when that was not a genre, which it's sort of become now. It's a fake documentary about a fake rock band. And I'm told that at the time people watched it and thought it was real, which I kind of can't believe, but I'm told that that was the case. So this is a rock band with a documentary directed by Marty DeBerge, who's played by Rob Reiner. And the band features Michael McKeon and Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest as the three primary band members in one of the world's loudest bands.

No value judgments. Spinal tap. So what did you think? Tell me about your experience watching this movie. So I have a theory about why people thought it was real. Yeah. Because they decided that it was an English band. Ah, that's true.

that it was an english band ah that that's that's true also the the very beginning of the movie when they're talking to fans and there's like that one woman who's like oh you know you just become one with the music man those were real heavy metal fans that was those people are real yeah yeah i could tell those those little i think they're called vox pops i think that's what yeah it's cool um they they i have in my notes like one so there's two reasons that i think that people believe this they chose an english band so you could as an american conceivably have never heard of them also that especially at the start the it shot so convincingly the vox pops like those little conversations with people the editing looks really good. They use archive footage quite well to show the band's history. And the dialogue is

delivered like a documentary. They talk over each other. They're saying things that don't make any sense. I think the movie was largely improvised. They had a through line, but it's improvised, and you get that feeling.

We're watching real people talk here. They're not through line, but it's improvised. And you get that feeling like this is, we're watching real people talk here. They're not reading from a script and acting this out there. They knew what the scene was supposed to do, but then there was just a huge amount of improvisation. I think legendarily the first cut of this movie was like six hours long because they had all of this stuff. They took out whole subplots, and one of the DVDs has like an hour of extra things

that they cut out. It's just, it's amazing. Well, actually one of the, I think there's a joke that's in the cut scenes that's funnier than any single joke in the movie. But I understand why they cut so much of it. So yeah, I think you're right that verisimilitude is added

from having that improv sort of style because it does feel like you're just watching events occur instead of seeing a scene acted out. So there are, because there are like jokes that happen in the movie that are thrown away.

Oh yeah. They're literally like somebody moves on because it was a bad joke and that is not the type of thing that you would hear. Or like where they say something and you hear them improvising,

like you hear the improvising when they say that one of them choked it's like oh yeah the drummer died because he choked on his vomit like because he choked on vomit on vomit yeah oh no wait no somebody else's vomit like and it was like you know that you could hear them like workshopping the joke and it was like this feels real i can i genuinely see how people could have mistaken that. There's a moment where Rob Reiner is reading reviews of Spinal Tap albums and he gets to, you're going to have to note

the time code for this one Mike, he gets to the point where he says your album is Shark Sandwich and that was a two word review which was just S*** Sandwich and if you watch the guys in the band at that point they were all just laughing. You could see them guys in the band at that point they're all just laughing you can see them smiling in the scene because he's taking them by surprise with these reviews and all they

manage is like oh you can't write that that's not real let me see that it's like that's not a review no one will print that they're just but they're just trying to make them laugh and and uh yeah it's it it's uh but then again i have those moments where I'm like how would anybody believe that's real? But it is completely straight of this happened. There's no real winks or anything like that. It's like, no, this is the story. There's never a reveal that it's all a joke. It's

just that's the movie. So what else did you notice? So basically unlike some of the other movies that we've watched my notes are effectively all quotes so i think my first the first joke that i really really laughed at was so they go they're at this like um like an album launch party or like a tour launch party. And it's been put on by the music label. And for some reason,

and I think it may have just been for this joke, the people giving out food are mimes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dana Carvey and Billy Crystal among them. Yeah. So they're basically just mimes giving out like they're serving food and they're backstage then it just goes backstage cuts to a conversation between two of the mimes because they're talking about what food to serve next and one guy one guy

says to the other guy mime is money mime is money yep so good yeah that's billy crystal billy crystal in a very small part. And he's berating Dana Carvey. Yeah, before he was on Saturday Night Live, I think, yeah. A little bit of research, I found that this actually started as a Saturday Night Live sketch. That is... I don't know if that's true. I read it on Wikipedia, so it must be true. Oh, it must be true.

Yeah, it's possible. I mean, so Christopher Guest and Billy Crystal were cast members on Saturday Night Live, although I thought that was after. Maybe it was just before. I don't know. It is all tied up together in that way, that they all knew each other, I think,

through Saturday Night Live. And in fact, all of the members of Spinal Tap have been cast members of Saturday Night Live now at one time or other michael mckeon much later um but they all have been and then christopher guest has gone on to direct several um well-reviewed fake documentaries in this sort of in this style um about different subjects but this is this is sort of where it all started what What other notes do you have? What other lines do you have? So, well, then,

interspersed throughout all of this movie is they're on tour, right? So Spinal Tap have come to America for their tour to promote their album. Is it Sniff the Glove? Smell the Glove. Smell the Glove. Yeah.

Which is a whole other subplot that I'll get to in a minute, which is fantastic. I love that. So they show songs that are happening. Now, the songs, I found out, obviously as many people, anyone that's seen the movie know, they're all actually performed by the actors. Yes.

And also, I knew about this, because I've known about Spinal Tap for years. It's just something that's in pop culture. They performed a couple of shows in the UK a few years ago. They were at Glastonbury, and then they did a one-night world tour at Wembley Arena. And so one of the songs, this is when I realized what the music is, right? They do a song called, I think it may be called The Bigger The Cushion

it's Big Bottom that's the next quote from the song that I have which is obviously a parody of Queen yeah well yeah Fat Bottom Girls so this is what I note I have another thing after basically every song

is parodying another Britishish band so they have i i noted parodies of acdc beatles queen rolling stones and the who yeah oh yeah so like they're just clear like they're apart and the idea is that spinal tap it's not it's not that the movie is parodying them i think the idea is that spinal tap is completely unoriginal yeah and it's just knocking off every other band. Like the Who one is, I think, my favorite because they're just singing like this heavy metal rock song and then they start doing the keyboard part of like Tommy or something. Oh, yeah.

And it's just like in the middle and then they just carry on. And the Rolling Stones one is really great as well. So then basically one of the big problems that they're having uh in america is that they cannot get their album launched because the cover is offensive is offensive yes and there's a conversation between i think the manager's name's ian yes and a record label executive called bobby i think bobby fleckman yes like because like what's her name again bobby franklin bobby fleckman yes like because like what's her name again bobby frank bobby fleckman it's fran drescher yeah yeah bobby fleckman they're talking

about album covers and then she uh ian said about how important the album cover is and bobby's like what about the white album there was literally nothing on that cover which i really like which then uh leads into later like so they of going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, like Kmart won't stock it and stuff like that, to the point where the album arrives at like a soundcheck that they're doing, and it's just completely black. There's no writing on it. It's nothing.

It's just a completely black cover, which there's a couple of lines that I really love, which we've mentioned, you mentioned here, Tim, before, and this is what I think prompted why this would be the next movie uh none more black there is how much blacker could it be none more black and also death it looks like death death cells so obviously it's the opposite of the white album is what they end up going for uh but the problem with an all black cover as opposed to an all white cover is you cannot read what's on it.

It's like, it just looks like a really nice mirror. And it's shrink-wrapped. So they're like, I don't even know what I'm looking at here. Yeah, yeah. Actual bands have done that too. I think somewhat in homage, but they put like a sticker on it or something.

Yeah, I mean, but there was nothing on it. So what I have skipped out with a black cover bit is it goes to 11 which in context even though i know it it was still really funny so i know the line and i knew what was coming but the delivery of it is excellent because then it goes why don't you just make 10 louder it's like but this goes to 11 yeah yeah no the i think the real comedy the, in the line and everybody quotes the line, the real comedy in the line is that, um, that Rob Reiner as,

as Marty DeBerge is trying to reason with him. Right. He's like, well, you know, whenever ours go to 11, whenever you want that extra bit and go off the cliff and you're at 10, you have nowhere else to go.

Well, you do have one. You can, you can take it up to 11 and, and, and then Rob Reiner says, well, why don't you just make the whole thing louder and make 10 that much more louder which sets up the but these go to 11 like i can't even

deal with this guy that's what makes that funny it's much more funny i think in context so this is uh nigel who is the lead guitarist yes uh solo he solos are his specialty With the violin Where he's playing the guitar with the violin And the other guitar with his foot Yeah My solo's on my trademark That's it And this is at a section where he's showing him around His guitars

And I love the bit where he's like Don't look at this one Don't even touch it No one can touch it It can't be played Don't even look at it So Nigel kind of is Paul McCartney Right Don't even touch it. No one can touch it. It can't be played. Don't even look at it. So Nigel kind of is Paul McCartney, right? Because the other thing that's going on is, is it David?

Yeah, David St. Humbins, his girlfriend Janine comes and is touring with the band at some point. And she's got lots of creative ideas that infuriates Nigel and they're, and they're childhood friends. It's very much Lennon and McCartney. They're childhood friends. And when you see them in flashback, they start out as, uh,

because they keep changing to be whatever is popular. They start out as a Beatles kind of band and turn into a, uh, and then turn into heavy metal over time. And so they're, they're childhood friends. And now the, the, um, the girlfriend has come in between them. Yeah.

And then they're in Memphis and then it's at Graceland and they're trying to harmonize Heartbreak Hotel. Heartbreak Hotel, terribly. Standing at the grave and then, because basically they're struggling, because the Memphis show has just been canceled. And Nigel says to David about how this puts it into perspective,

it's too much perspective, which is really great. Too much perspective, man. Too much perspective. Yeah. There's an extra word in there that you're dropping out. Yep, just to save me editing work. Yeah, but that's one of my favorite. I use that all the time.

Too much effing perspective it's like it puts it all in perspective at elvis's grave um yeah i love that moment and then there's the great so i come i'm basically just jumping to my favorite bits of the movie sure uh like and then there's the great bit where uh there there's so much good stuff happening in this performance when they're in the alien pods. Oh, yeah, yeah. So they're in these, because all of the performances have funny bits in them, but this one is like there's multiple things happening. So there are these alien pods on stage.

And what's really great about these performances is they're doing these arena-level production in tiny halls and like theaters because the american tour is like they're like a thousand people and this actually goes back to there's a part where um i'm sure i thought i had oh yeah i had this in my notes where what's the name of the the guy who's is it de burgh marty de burgh marty de burgh hegy the director yeah yeah who's like the the fake director in the thing as well right so he's you know pretending to be the interviewer and the documentary maker um he's in he's talking to the manager ian he's like is the popularity of the group waning because they've

gone from 10 000 seat arenas to 1 000 seat arenas and i Ian's response is, no, their appeal is just becoming more selective. Yeah. That's some good PR. And the pod scene is rock and roll creation. So that's the Who song. That's where in the middle, they've got the little keyboard solo and they do the weird harmony falsetto thing that happens.

And in that scene, Harry Shearer spends, doesn't come out of his pod and is fighting and is trapped. And they have people trying to free him. And the moment that he comes out, everybody else is going back in. And then he thinks about going back in

and gets like trapped in between. That's so bad. Nigel has a tiny guitar. I don't think it's a ukulele. It's just a really small guitar. And like, it's just no attention is paid to that. But that was the first thing that I know is the guitar is tiny yep nobody knows why there's obviously the running joke of the drummers they have like 32 drummers over the history of the

band that have all died uh in in ridiculous ways right including a bizarre gardening accident yeah which which oh it's one of those it's one of those things where they don't even want to investigate it because it's so weird. It's better left unknown. Yeah. There was one thing I meant to mention right at the start that I didn't. The British accents, the London accents, so good. Everyone. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. Because they are going for regional London accents. And they nail it. Well, Christopher Guest is English. He is an English American. He has dual citizenship and he is actually Baron Hayden Guest.

He is a Baron. He is a hereditary peer, believe it or not. I believe he was raised in America but he's been exposed to enough english i think to do the english accent but like michael mckeon is just an american guy he was squiggy on uh laverne and shirley he's but they and harry shearer likewise so it's good to hear that

the accents are pretty good obviously ian is is actually an english actor but um they they wanted it to be the english rock band right the heavy metal band obscure, strange, British heavy metal band is what they were going for because it was like when I saw it and I saw the cast members why didn't they pick British people why did they have American people I know it's because they wanted to make the movie

but they were the ones who came up with the idea we could be British because at that point I didn't know the inception of it I thought it was just a movie that was cast but they came up with the idea like we could be we could be british because like at that point i didn't know the inception of it as well i thought you know it's just a movie that was cast but no they came up with these characters and they wanted to make a movie out of it but they do an incredibly good job and looking at the imdb trivia there's a bunch of points in the movie where there are like uh they're in like an airport and there's like tannoy announcements which is the actual actors in their american accents ah yeah that's littered throughout it um there's this great scene where nigel is playing the piano oh my god and he so the first the first time i watched this scene this is the moment where

we had to pause the tape and i was literally and this has happened very rarely in my life i literally had fallen on the floor and was laughing uncontrollably and tears were streaming down and we had to stop it for this scene this is the scene that did it to me it is so good so he's playing the piano and he's playing this beautiful piece of music and this is where like you you think that the the plot's about to turn here because nigel's super creative and he wants to go out. And my thinking was, oh, this is where it's going to turn because he's now going to go away and make really, really beautiful music. He's creating this piece and he's humming along

and he's saying that, what is it, I'm a mix between Beethoven. No, is it Bach and Mozart? Bach and Mozart. And he calls it Mark. It's kind of a Mark piece. And it's just beautiful music. And then they're talking about it. It's like, well, you know, what do you want to do with this?

And it's like, oh, imagine this. And this is the horns coming in here. And then it's like, what do you call this piece? Lick My Love Pump. Yep. So good. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Yeah. I really love that yeah on the floor crying just crying so ridiculous a tiny stonehenge is just yeah which is the and the joke there is that they brought on the back of a napkin and they put the one the two marks for inches instead of the one mark for feet and

so they make it in inches instead of feet so it's a 112 scale stonehenge made out of foam but they still use it on stage and they have little people dancing around it and yeah yeah and it's it's just this great thing and then it kind of the movie like kind of goes the way that you expect at this point so like nigel's really upset about the fact that Janine, which is David's wife, is getting she basically becomes the manager of the band. He quits the band. Yeah. Then the band is about to break up because they can't continue about Nigel. And the breakup happens because the tour reaches its low point when they play a dinner dance at an Air Force base. its low point when they play a dinner dance at an air force base and fred willard is there with his uh with his little air force uniform on to welcome them and then they're the it the uh air traffic control signal comes across the guitar and he throws it down and that's the end of the band um and then they're kind of like they're like what songs can we play? So they go to other venues,

like they're in a theme park and it's puppets and Spinal Tap. Puppet Show and Spinal Tap. I specifically asked it to say Spinal Tap and Puppet Show. Like that's better. But you have a really big dressing room. Yeah. And then they're backstage talking about the set and they're crossing off all the songs that they can't do without Nigel. and then they have a 10 minute set yeah which is which is hilarious it's the

time for the derrick derrick derrick smalls yeah yeah and he's like we have a 10 minute set here and it's like we'll do the reformed spinal tap jazz odyssey with their meandering jazz. He wrote this! It's like, oh boy, great, yeah. So then they're coming to the fact that the band is now ending. So there's this great scene of the album wrap party where nobody,

it's a tour wrap party, nobody's there. Yeah, but they're on the top of a building in Los Angeles, which the entire movie was shot in Los Angeles, but this is the moment where they can actually use that.

So they're on top of a hotel or something at a patio pool thing in Los Angeles, but this is the moment where they can actually use that. So they're on top of a hotel or something at a patio pool thing in Los Angeles, looking over the city, and this is the, you know, it's the end. It's obviously not going to continue. And Derek and David are talking about all the projects that they can now take up. Yeah, the Jack the Ripper musical.

Yeah, we're lucky. We can finally do the Jack the Ripper musical. It's like, you're a naughty boy mr jack or something yeah i really it's a line in their song uh and then at the final performance uh that they're at they have a a surprise return from richard um and he says that the that they're at what like number five in the Japanese chart or something? Yeah, isn't it? So, what, Nigel comes back.

Nigel. Why did I say Richard? I don't know. I don't know where that name came from. Yeah, Nigel comes back. It's very British, you see, Nigel. Nigel comes back and says he's got Ian, who's also, Ian's been fired and Nigel's quit. But Sex Farm is on the charts in Japan.

So, how about we go to japan and suddenly um they do the last gig right and and they welcome him back on stage and then you know cut to they're playing japan before excited throngs in japan and uh and ian is back and they're playing they're big in japan the end basically yep yeah big in japan love this movie i'm glad you liked it i i didn't know because this is a very this is a very peculiar sort of movie um and i i think it helps if you if you get some of the jokes of the of the music but i feel like it works even if you don't know a lot of the references of the music, but I feel like it works even if you don't know a lot of the references to the music because it feels authentic. The music feels authentically bad, but authentic. And they're actually playing their instruments and what they're doing is... You didn't mention

when they get lost in Cleveland, which I really like that scene where they just keep on, hello, Cleveland, hello, Cleveland. And they keep coming back to the same guy and he's like what are you doing here it's it's over there that's a real story that's actually in a list of things of um i think they made a list of like famous tour stories like uh like demanding the brown m&ms and all that they've got the scene where they want the little tiny sandwiches with the things cut off and stuff like that it's like i can't use this bread it's too small and fold the thing over and it all breaks in half yeah but yeah i love i love it when they're getting lost it's like don't don't let it go guys go let it go come on rock and roll rock and roll they can't find the stage yeah it's it's it's a uh i love it every time i I watch it, I laugh and laugh. And it was shot in 16 millimeter.

So I've got the Blu-ray. I don't even know. I mean, it looks a little bit better, but it's like, it is shot on low quality film stock. It is a, you know, grungy, you know, mid 80s documentary. That's what it's meant to look like. And, but it is, I'm glad you liked it because, you know, it's people doing fake english

accents and it's from the 80s so i didn't know whether it would work for you or not but i'm glad it did that's my two favorite things yeah 80s movies are fake british accents uh i i didn't really really love this movie i love the way it looked i love the way that it looked kind of grungy i feel like if it was polished up for Blu-ray, it would lose a lot of what it's called. Oh, yeah. There would be no point. And I like this. We're on three for three.

That's good, too. While I'm trying to be careful with the movies I select for you. So I've got a couple bits of trivia for you. So the first DVD that they did of this was a Criterion Collection DVD. And the actors and Rob Reiner are on it talking about how they made the movie, which is really cool. That went out of print,

and MGM did their own DVD of it, and that's got a commentary track that's them in character complaining about how Marty DeBerge ruined their careers with this movie. And it's funny because that Criterion is like the only time they've ever gone out of character to talk about the movie. All the rest of it is in character. So I have both.

And then I bought the Blu-ray too. And then there are bonus tracks scattered across all these different DVDs that are things pulled out of the movie. Because like I said, legendarily, it was this incredibly long movie. And there was a whole subplot about the opening um the opening act was a an all-woman rock band and they were becoming famous as spinal tap was becoming not famous and and and this is a story that happens a lot where the opening act suddenly catches fire and uh they're bigger than the act that they're that they're opening for um and that also there was the implication that the women in

that band were sleeping with the men in Spinal Tap. And you still see that the only part of the subplot that exists anymore is you see various members of Spinal Tap get herpes sores on their mouths. Yeah, I noticed that and just thought it was a funny joke.

So what it's supposed to be is like one of the women in in the in the uh it it progresses because they're all sleeping with the women in the other band and the women in the other band are sleeping with them but that they just took it all out so that that doesn't even exist anymore i saw um i saw cheryl crow open for crowded house and every time i think i think about that subplot, that's what I think of is like Cheryl Crow, right as she exploded and become huge, was opening for Crowded House. And I remember like as that tour went on, by the time I got to San Francisco, it was like she had big hits and had just been on David Letterman. And they were like their album had taken a year to get released in America. So I think about that a little bit. And then the, so the cut scene that I really love, there's a scene with Bruno Kirby, who is the, he's the limo driver.

He's the one who says, who talks about Frank Sinatra all the time. They don't understand the real love that he lost. Like Frank has, then you know what life's about. Just like Frank has, then you know what life's about. There's a scene that they cut from the movie where everybody is in a hotel room and they're getting high and ordering pizza. And I think Bruno Kirby, I think, brings in the pizza and they tell him to stay. And he's like trying to defer and all of that and say, no, no, no. You know, I'm just going to go.

And then there's just a hard cut. And Bruno Kirby is now standing in his underwear. Obviously, he has partaken of the drugs that are available. And the pizza box, I think the pizza box is empty now. And he's singing into a banana or something. I think it's not, you know, or just a pretend microphone. And he's singing a Frank Sinatra song. And it's the end of it.

And it's like, my way or something. And he finishes it. And he points at the band and says, now that's music. And then collapses. And it is the funniest thing. I think it's funnier than anything in the movie. And I understand why they cut it because it goes on forever. And it's the funniest thing. I think it's funnier than anything in the movie and I understand why they cut it because it goes on forever and is not really necessary

but I love the ongoing obsession that Bruno Kirby has with Frank Sinatra and how he ends up in his underpants singing Frank Sinatra in a hotel room and then he passes out and everybody laughs and that's the end of the scene. So yeah, you should check out the bonus, the bonus stuff.

If you can find that there's some good, there's some good stuff in there because they had, and I think they made the right decision to make it short because it's 82 minutes long. I think, I think get in, get out, tell your jokes,

be done. But it is funny that they had the many hours version that came out of the, out of all the improv. All right. Two for three for three. Woo. That's good. Yeah. I love this one. All right, three for three. Woo, that's good. Yeah, I love this one. I'm glad you like it.

Somebody was asking on Twitter what the best succession of three films by a director, three consecutive films by a director is. And Rob Reiner, at the beginning of his directorial career, had a really great streak that includes This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. Do I need to watch the other one now?

Well, the problem is that there's a more middling one in between. So This Is Spinal Tap, then he directed The Sure Thing, which actually is a really good, as a 80s teen sex comedy, it is actually really quite good because it's got heart. And then he did Stand By Me, which I don't know if you've seen, but it's kind of a, you know, that's a nice kind of classic 80s movie with Will Wheaton and River Phoenix. And then he did The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally and Misery and A Few Good Men. These are all pretty good movies. And then he stopped making good movies. But it's a really great collection between 1984 and 1992 where he made some very good movies, including some of my favorite movies of all time.

But not three in a row. They all were kind of mixed in with some of the highlights and the kind of middle stuff. But this is Spinal Tap when Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride are three of my favorite films. So, yeah. I like this one an awful lot. Thank you for recommending it.

I'm glad. And I'm glad to those who stuck around to listen to Mike watch as a movie. Indeed. Brought to you by Smile. Thank you, Smile, for making Mike watch a movie. And thank you all for listening. We'll thank our other sponsors too. Our friends

over at Warby Parker, MailRoute, and Linda for helping us out, sponsoring this episode along with Smile. We love all those guys. They help make this show possible. I want to thank Jason Snell for joining me as always. You can find Mr. Jason Snell. He is on Twitter. He's at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L.

And he's the editor-in-chief of thefantasticsixcolors.com. You can find more there. Don't forget to check out Clockwise on RelayFM and, of course, all the great shows that Jason does over on The Incomparable 2. I am Mike Hurley. I am at iMike. I am YKE.

I am a host of many shows on the fabulous Relay FM, which you are listening to right now. This show can be found, along with many others, over at Relay.fm. But thanks, most of all, to you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody. It's one louder, isn time, say goodbye to Jesus now. Goodbye, everybody. It's one louder, isn't it?

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