Upgrade - 327: The Future Doesn't Apply

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Myke and Jason have spent a week running Big Sur on M1 Macs and are here to report back on what the future feels like. Also, HBO Max gives up and plans a streaming release of "Wonder Woman 1984" so everyone but Myke can see it, and Apple pulls a PR move that gives a raise to small developers while enraging its loudest critics.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 327 today's show is brought to you by express vpn sane box and mail route my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley we're back we made it we made it through this is a normal episode of upgrade i'm promising even though we have just started it it feels like a normal episode of upgrade after so much going on the last few weeks drafts events post events embargoes interviews reviews now it's just you know just it's your it's your upgrade it's just an upgrade it's good although we do have an operating system to talk about today i guess we do did that come out kind of is it have we reached mac os 12 yet maybe we have a hashtag snell talk question from

dylan who is inspired by last week's snell talk question and asks jason what is your favorite pro so last time we had what is your favorite mini what is your favorite Pro? So last time we had, what is your favorite Mini? What is your favorite Pro? Oh, this is a hard one. So some could be iPhone Pro, iPad Pro, AirPods Pro, Final Cut Pro. Yep. Mac Pro, iMac Pro, Logic Pro X,

which is this, I guess Pro, they took the X's away. They stole our X's. Because it's not Mac OS X anymore. I guess that's what those meant. Get the X out. You got to X them out. I'm going to say the iPad Pro. Because I've used the iPad Pro as my mobile computing device since it was released in 2018.

To this day. Still use it. So, 2016, right? For the original one. So, gosh, it's been a long time now. The original was 2015. Five years of me and the iPad Pro being BFFs. So, it's got to be the iPad Pro.

That's the answer. Five years of Apple Pencil, Mike? Five years of Apple Pencil? I know. Yeah, it happened not too long after we started the show. It was like the next year yeah okay wow that's my choice what's your choice iPad Pro is up there

AirPods Pro are up there as well oh they're great my relationship with AirPods Pro is more limited and not as long running as the iPad Pro the reason I knew about the 5 year thing is from Apple's photo widget because it reminded me of the first time that me and Federico met in person

when he came to London to pick up a review unit of the original iPad Pro. Oh, right. I remember that. It was around now, and then I looked at the day, and I was like, wow, five years. Did you pick him up at Heathrow or something? Did you pick him up at the airport? No, not that time. No, i met him outside uh apple's offices i pick him up right i have picked him up at heathrow um i think i took him to heathrow that day oh that's right that's right took him back uh and i was waiting for all of the five years of ipad pro

articles but nobody wrote them i think everyone's too busy yeah there was too much else going on right well now it's time. That'll be my next project. There you go. 20 articles about one iPad Pro. Five iPads for five years. All right, thank you to Dylan for that Snell Talk question. If you would like to send in a question to help us start the show,

just send a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk question. I'll use the command question mark Snell Talk in the Real AFM members Discord., question mark, SnellTalk, in the RelayFM members Discord. You can get access to the Discord, by the way, if you sign up for Upgrade Plus. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com. You get a ton of wonderful benefits, including ad-free longer episodes of Upgrade every single week. So we provide those to subscribers of Upgrade Plus.

Go to GetUpgradePlus.com to find out more and sign up. Jason, it is nearly that time again. The Upgradeys are coming. Our annual award show, the seventh annual Upgradeys, is going to be happening towards the end of December. Exact episode date to be determined but i'm expecting it will probably be december 28th i reckon it's probably when we're going to do the upgradies but vote that means voting is now open so we will call on you the upgradians to help us as you have

done many years in the past to go to upgradeys.vote. That is where you can go. And I'll have a link in the show notes in case you're not sure how to spell that. So you can just go and click it. What we want you to do is go in and fill out all of the categories that you want. You can write in your responses or choose from the drop downs that may exist on these pages to help us decide best apps, games, products, stories, loads of wonderful stuff that we will be looking at for the seventh annual Upgradees. Jason, there is one category that I

was thinking of because I've been starting to think about my upgradies, my nominations. I should note, in case you're not too familiar with the upgradies, we ask for the votes of our audience, the upgradians, and we use that along with our own picks to decide the winners. So me and Jason bring our own nominations to the categories. We take into account what our listeners like and what they think, and then we use that to discuss and decide who or what wins the vote for that year and you can find a history of all of the past upgradies winners at upgradies.com we have a wonderful hall of fame there for you to go and peruse through so you can see who or what

has won each category or each year which is a really cool thing that me and zach work together on yeah built by upgrading and zach who also does the draft report card or draft scorecard so very very good it's again i'm taken back to the fact that we did this the first time and you tried to make it the first annual and i said no no no no it's only annual after you do more than one well look at us now it's seven annual but as as i was saying there was one category that i think is going to be particularly difficult this year which is the best movie category because there's not been a lot of movies um i think it's going to be a little trickier than normal because i actually couldn't think of any

new movies I've seen this year. Get in your votes for Wonder Woman 84 now, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But like the Oscars, the upgrade allows movies to not be released in theaters and only on streaming this year, just for this year. My problem isn't that movies have been coming out, it's that I haven't been seeing them. Okay, well, that is a problem. And let's move. So we can actually pivot that straight into talking about Upstream. But yeah, just before we leave this, if you go to upgradies.vote,

you can go ahead and cast your votes. We will give you ample notice as to when we're closing the nominations. You've got a good few weeks to go and get your voting in. So let's talk about a couple of upstream headlines. Upstream is where we take a look at news in streaming media and the technology companies that surround it.

So talking about movies coming out and movies I can't see, Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman 1984 is coming to HBO Max on December 25th. 1984 is coming to HBO Max on December 25th. Huge news in terms of movie industry strategy. And we talked about it here a few weeks ago. The idea that you're taking a movie that you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on and are going to put it on hbo max is i mean it's never it's never going to directly earn back the money you put into it right they're taking a huge loss on this what they get is promotion for hbo max

which it seems like hbo max kind of needs hasn't really seems to have gone the way that they want it i think so i don't know i mean it it i i see a lot of negativity about hbo max i use hbo max a lot but then again i paid for hbo before and i get hbo max with my cable subscription so because i pay for hbo so for me it's like well yeah i just keep getting it and there's more stuff on it and i'm actually pretty happy about it but but sure they're in a tough battle and the more um reasons you have to sign up for hbo max especially i think for for them right now they've got a lot of people who get hbo on cable and haven't signed up for hbo max and they really want those people to kind of come over and become hbo max customers they couldn't like i know that it's been a thing that

like it wasn't available on uh was it the amazon stuff, and it's just become available. If your TV solution was using a Fire TV stick, you just couldn't watch HBO Now until now. HBO Max until now. That's what I meant. HBO Now until Max. Yeah, and it's not on Roku yet, but I think that is an issue.

But I'm talking about, like, I've also read that they've got all these people who are eligible for HBO Max because they get HBO on their cable company and their cable company has a deal with them to turn that into an HBO Max subscription. And that's what I'm on. Who haven't done it. Like, who haven't signed up and said, yes, connect my cable to my HBO Max and get me HBO Max. And they want those people, right? They want those people to be discovering the wonders of HBO Max. And so maybe this will be a motivator for that too.

But yeah, they need attention and this is a good way for them to get it. How do you quantify that in terms of money? Because HBO Max is obviously a very important thing for Warner Brothers, WarnerMedia to have, and they want to grow it, but it's not money in the bank today like movie theater ticket receipts would be. My understanding is also that they're going to have to pay. Probably there had to be a negotiation here where they're basically paying a fee that's gonna go to the people who have a part of the of the um the profit of the movie or the gross of the movie because um it's not gonna make that like the assumptions that people made if you're a producer and you've got a little piece of the

of the net of the movie you aren't going to get it now like you negotiated that thinking it would be in a theater so it's it's it's a mess and the fact that they've done it difficult to work out the attribution of people that signed up for hbo max to see this movie you know like so they're just like we'll just write you a check i guess yeah i think that that there's some of that going on so it in the end it's a move where they don't want to let it sit for another year and hope. Because keep in mind, it's not just that in a lot of places, especially in the US, movie theaters basically are shut down or if they are open, nobody's going to them. But there's this anticipation that that's going to be the case for a long time. that that's going to be the case for a long time. And there are a bunch of movies that are stacked up now that are made and sitting. And so they've decided to pull the trigger on this.

Everybody's, you know, Black Widow is delayed by Marvel. They aren't putting it on Disney+. They're like, no, no, no, we're going to wait and we're going to put it in the theater. Wonder Woman, which is, I would say, a much bigger movie than Black Widow, given the track record of the previous Wonder Woman movie. It's a big move, and there's a little bit of desperation, but there's a little bit of wanting to prop up HBO Max and also get the movie out there.

It will show in the rest of the world, which there are places. If you're in Australia or in Taiwan or something australia or in taiwan or something movie theaters are open and it'll be fine you can go see the movie uh in the uk where you're locked down i guess you won't get to see it but also one of them are major chains it's just they're closed they're just closed yeah so this is what's so frustrating to me this u.s cent-centric way of doing things. We'll all agree that coronavirus means you can't go see the movie, right? So why do they offer no option for me in the UK?

Why can't I pay $25 on iTunes? It's just like, oh, you just have to work it out on your own. This takes us to another thing that's happening here, which is, in December for a month december 25th to january 25th wonder woman 1984 will be on hbo max then it disappears so what they're using this as is a simultaneous with the theatrical window in parts of the world where they have a theatrical something to happen, it'll be on HBO Max.

And then it goes away from HBO Max. So presumably on January 26th or 25th, it slides into the premium video on demand window, which means that that's the moment where if you don't have HBO Max or you don't want HBO Max or you can't get HBO Max, it will become a for rental and for sale. Or maybe what they do, the staggered, where it'll be for sale for two weeks and then it'll be for sale and for rent after that. It's going to go into that window. So it's only unlike most movies that come to a streaming service and then they're just on that streaming service forever and that's it. most movies that come to a streaming service and then they're just on that streaming service forever and that's it they they want they want their money from blu-rays and from online sales and from online rentals they do want that as much of that as they can still get so that will still

happen with this movie it'll just happen after the hbo max window so really interesting it's like the hbo max window exists in America. Yes. There is no window here. Well, I don't know what's going to happen in the rest of the world. I think in the rest of the world, if you're in a place where the movie theaters aren't open, you can't see it. And then in a month, you'll be able to rent it on iTunes, basically. It's wild to me.

These kind of strategies just really, you know, obviously I am sensitive to it, but they become frustrating. Like Warner's whole thing with HBO Max has been really annoying to me anyway, because they're making content and they're locking up stuff and they have absolutely no known plan for international distribution of anything. Yep. You own it, HBO, right?

Disney made it work. Make it work. Well, their challenge is that they have some stuff that they don't own because they sold it internationally, right? It's the same problem as CBS.

They're into some of the same deals as CBS. Every service has this, but like Disney planned it. Right. They actually had a plan and they waited until they could get

the rights back and then they, like Warner had no plan. They just rushed it rushed this is the thing disney had a plan warner didn't have a plan and and they they did rush it because they knew with disney coming out into the market that they couldn't wait and launch their if if warner media had said well we're gonna launch hbo max but not until 2022 everybody would be like, wow, you're dead in the water. You're doomed.

They knew they had to get something out there. And that's why it's imperfect, especially internationally. But I would argue it's really no different than CBS All Access, which is about to turn into whatever Paramount Plus is. Some of these companies are doing that now. Also, some of these companies are doing that now. Also, some of these companies are doing that now and have to struggle with their international deals and their international rollouts are going to be slow

and it's going to be super awkward, but they're at least kind of learning and starting in the U.S. territory that they're most familiar with. Disney's situation is different in that Disney Plus isn't like an evolution of existing cable or broadcast properties. And so their rights encumbrances are less and they had longer to plan it. So I would argue, I mean, this is the thing, Disney is a better rollout. Disney's a better

rollout. Apple is a better rollout because they're right? Disney's a better rollout. Apple is a better rollout because they're not encumbered at all, even though they're also not encumbered by familiar intellectual property, but they're not encumbered by a lot of deals from previous iterations of their company that didn't care about streaming

and didn't care about international streaming. So I would say Warner is in the same boat as something like CBS, Paramount, Viacom, and NBC as well. These big American companies that have so many complicated deals that it's going to be very hard for them to try and compete internationally, compete worldwide. Whereas Disney and Apple and Netflix and increasingly Amazon, they are playing a different game because they can be everywhere in the world. So yeah, it's fascinating. It's fascinating to watch this.

There's like a sliding scale of frustration though, right? For me, because CBS, they know they have no plan. So they've made their content available on Netflix, right? Like I can watch the Star Wars show, the Star Trek, oh dear. I can watch the Star Trek shows like discovery here on netflix right yes because they know they don't have a plan but yes peacock and hbo max it's like yeah yeah but here's but here's the thing they taking a feature film like this they know that they could sell it to somebody in the UK, but they're going to then forego all of the money that they might get from rental and purchase on DVD later, or I mean on like, or Blu-ray, but like of money that you would need to be compensated by a streaming service that works in market in order to balance it out because you're not going to get HBO Max subscribers out of it is probably more than anyone would be willing to pay. So I understand why you're sad about it, but it's like there's no option there.

They should just sell it on December 25th outside of America. Well, the problem is lots of parts of outside of america have movie theaters open it's just your country that doesn't so that's part of the problem well yeah anyway moving on apple have aired a charlie brown thanksgiving the animated uh show on pbs yesterday and they're going to be doing the same for Charlie Brown Christmas on December 13th. You may remember Apple acquired the rights to these properties as well as doing a deal for more original Peanuts content. Apple kind of knew that they were taking a tradition and owning it, so they made the announcement that they would offer these shows for free.

You could even, in the Apple TV app, if you had an Apple TV, you could watch them online or on any smart TV, anywhere Apple was, they had a window of time where you could go and watch Thanksgiving and Christmas for free.

Nevertheless, Apple received some criticism for this and have ended up doing a deal to show and now we're seeing it, Thanksgiving specials and the Christmas specials on PBS with no commercials. There's never any commercials on PBS.

Okay, well I don't know. I'm just doing what the article tells me. And they also put a note at the front and said like hey we are uh giving we're apple and we're giving this to you yeah and pb they used to be on commercial tv they were on cbs originally and then on abc but pbs didn't have commercials so it's not like apple's like apple's gift here is that if somebody wants to watch this and they only have free over the air tv it has gotten an airing on free over the air tv and the christmas episode on december 23rd the charlie brown christmas the classic the thanksgiving one by the way is for those outside the u.s who don't understand thanksgiving suffice

it to say the charlie brown thanksgiving is awful it's a terrible it's bad it's bad it's real bad my kids used to watch that all the time we had we had all the charlie brown specials and they used to watch them on long car trips when we were going down to southern california to visit grandma and grandpa for thanksgiving and they would sit there with their ipods their ipods and watch videos on them that's how long ago this was when my kids were little and they watched that charlie brown thanksgiving and they would demand it at various times all through the year they'd say oh let's watch the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. It's bad. It's really bad. Charlie Brown Christmas, that one is really good.

It's brilliant. It's a classic. So if you're just doing over-the-air TV, December 13th, you can get it. If you're not an Apple TV Plus person, December 11th through the 13th, it will be just free streaming on Apple TV Plus. You don't have to be a member. The Thanksgiving one, don't watch it, but it will be just free streaming on apple tv plus you don't have to be a member um the thanksgiving one don't watch it but it will be streaming free later this week don't watch it it's bad it's kind of funny right because like apple clearly wanted this because it's like a good hook to get people to sign up and then they ended up just putting it on tv anyway

it's like oh man they tried so hard you know it's very funny to me they did they did It's like, oh man, they tried so hard, you know? It's very funny to me. They did, they did. All right, this episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at SaneBox. One of the biggest time wasters for work is email. You don't even, you don't have to blink twice, you don't have to think twice to answer that question.

We all know that we spend so much time in email, so much time is wasted. Studies have been found like so much of our time, right? Managers are spending hours and hours a day looking in their inbox. They're spending time on emails that should never have been sent to them, stuff they didn't need an answer. This is things that we can all relate to, right? That you're getting these emails coming in it's like why did i even get this email or like was this email even meant for me because it doesn't apply to me at all let alone stuff like newsletters that you don't want or spam that you're getting all the time you don't want to deal with any of this time wasting email that's why you need sane box if there was a way to magically press a button and only ever

have the email that you wanted, we'd all press it, but that button doesn't exist. But SaneBox provides you with these features. In just a few clicks, SaneBox can automatically get your email under control, filtering out all of the messages that you don't need to focus on. You don't have to switch email apps because it works in whichever client you already use and has some really fantastic features like the same black hole. So if somebody emails you and it's nonsense, you don't ever want to hear from that person again, or maybe you've got multiple emails from someone and it's all rubbish to you, just drag that email to the same black hole and you will never see emails from that person ever again. They have sane reminders. So if you get something like, oh, I want to remember to do this later on, Sane Black Hole, and you will never see emails from that person ever again. They have Sane Reminders.

So if you get something like, oh, I want to remember to do this later on, you can send it through in the Sane Reminders folder, and you'll be able to get an email reminder for your future self. A couple of features that I absolutely adore with SaneBox, Sane News and Sane Later. These are two other filters that you can get. Sane News looks at your email coming in, and if it seems like it's a newsletter, we'll just filter it away, which is great because then it means that all my newsletters are in one place,

so I can go and read them at my own leisure. And Sane Later tries to assess if an email is not worth your time right now. Maybe it's from a new sender, or it seems like it's got content. It's very clever the way that SaneBox filters this stuff. It will put it into the Sane Later folder folder so you can do it at your own leisure. And you can also train SaneBox.

So if you get something in your inbox and you drag it to SaneLater, it learns from that and can, over time, it will apply these learnings to your email. It's really, really awesome stuff. You can see how SaneBox can magically remove distractions from your inbox with a free two-week trial. Go to SaneBox.com slash UpgradeFM and you can start your free trial today and get a $25 credit. That's S-A-N-E-B-O-X dot com slash UpgradeFM. Our thanks to SaneBox for their support of this show and RelayFM. So Jason, last week, Apple introduced the App Store Small Business Program. As a very quick refresher for anybody that's not familiar with this by now,

basically any developer that earns under a million dollars a year can qualify for a reduced 15% commission on sales in the App Store. So Apple are slicing their cut in half from 30% to 15%. There are still some more details to come, but in a nutshell, you get that 15% if you earn under $1 million a year. If you cross $1 million in a year, the 30% will kick in for anything on top of that $1 million of revenue for you. So that Apple will take that cut at a larger rate if you do cross a million dollars in a year where you're a part of the program the next year you will go to 30 and you can reapply to the program if you fall below a million dollars again and then you're back in the program the following year i wanted to just get your thoughts on this like how does

this deal strike you especially now it's been a few days so we've seen a lot of uh people talking about it and stuff like that it's interesting that it's um not just a cut but it's a special program right it's a little like saying hbo um hbo max wants you uh really wants you to sign up for it even though you get it like you get it you're you just have to sign up for it well this is you get it. Like, you get it. You just have to sign up for it. Well, this is the other version of that, which is you get a big cut, but you have to apply for it. You know, reduction in this.

This is a 20%, what? 20%-ish? A little more than that? Increase in revenue from the perspective of the small developer. We've all been saying that Apple should do something like this especially in the face of all of its criticism it's very clearly a move that is happening because apple is feeling

the pressure um it's also a so it's it's about pr it's about um changing people's perception of apple and the funny thing is for those who have been criticizing Apple, and that is things like Epic Games and David Hedemeyer Hansen from Basecamp, they were all really infuriated by this. And like DHH went on this Twitter rant that is like hilariously out of control. And the Epic Games guy- Tim sweeney tim sweeney

similarly and i'm not surprised they reacted that way because they're essentially in a political and pr battle with apple where they want governments essentially to step in and change Apple's behavior. And so any move Apple makes that makes it harder for them to do that, they are going to attack. What's frustrating to them about this move is that Apple is legitimately improving the lives of all of its small app developers, giving them a 20% raise. These are the heartwarming indie developer stories and small business stories that we've heard about before. And we will definitely hear about more now that Apple has done this. It also puts people like Epic Games in opposition to those people, it reframes this conversation from being Apple's taking too much money from developers to Apple's taking too much money from big slash rich developers.

And it reframes the story as a couple of rich guys fighting over a quarter they found on the street, right? Which is sort of like, who cares? It's a couple of rich guys. over a quarter they found on the street right which is sort of like who cares it's a couple of rich guys i don't care and again i'm not saying i'm just talking about perception here right i'm talking about perception here it makes it harder for epic because apple is going to be able to cart out all sorts of uh small developers who are so helped by this. And it makes Epic seem even more like, you know, we, we make a lot of money, but not quite enough. Uh, Apple should give us more money because why not? Because we want it. Um, so, so I understand why they reacted the way they did, because this is a really good PR move by Apple. Now, is it a PR move? Yes, it is. It also is really good and helps a lot of people.

There are lots of issues. I thought it was really funny. A lot of people have been picking into the details of this and saying, it doesn't really make sense in a few places. Apple's statement on this specifically said that details would be revealed in December. So I feel like maybe some of the details everybody's asking for are details that are just not announced yet i wouldn't have been surprised to if they took a a view here of like let's see how this is received and then we can tweak it a little bit if we need to well yeah don't don't be specific about it and see what people criticize about it and then address those criticisms when you officially launch it. Because the big criticism is that the way it works is very bad if you're somebody who is, if you're a small business, and it wouldn't be like an indie developer probably, but like a

small development shop and you've got apps and you're about to go over a million. It's really bad. Like if you go over a million, but your business just hovers around a million, if you go over a million, the next year you are at 30%. And if you go under a million, then you can go back, but you've lost a year. You've lost that 20% raise basically for a year. And so a bunch of the criticism of this is Apple should probably phase this in and say, the first million you make is taxed at 15%. And then thereafter, it's 30%. But Apple seems to not want to do that because they've cast this as a program that you have to apply for. And also, I think that means they really want to take every dollar they can

from the big developers, even if it's their first million, which fair enough, fair enough. But I wonder if there's some other way to tweak this so that for developers, I mean, it could be as simple as saying, it's when you're in the program, the program takes your first million at 15 and then the next half a million, let's say at 30. But as long as you stay under half a million and a half, you're eligible for the program the next year or something like that.

There are ways to make this a little bit less punitive because you may end up in a situation where a company gets to December and is almost at a million and they almost want to sabotage their revenue, right? They almost want to like remove their apps from the store for the rest of the year so they don't go over. is going to end up losing a large chunk of their revenue for one year, whereas somebody who makes $999,999 doesn't. I know these are edge cases, but this is the stuff that's come up. And I would imagine that Apple is looking at that and saying, how do we soften the blow so we don't

have people in this really weird in-between case? Because honestly, not only is that kind of unfair, it's also potentially bad PR, right? Like the last thing you want is a sad story about how a successful app developing company had to lay off people because they fell over the million dollar mark and therefore are going to see their revenue go down. That's a bad, you don't want that. You don't want that kind of story. You just want it to be that the rich guys in the store keep paying you 30%.

So I think it's a brilliant move that's going to be great for all the people we know who are small developers. I think it's a brilliant move for Apple in the sense that it makes the arguments of their opponents tougher. I don't know if it necessarily is going to actually get Apple, allow Apple to escape from the various regulatory scrutiny,

scrutinies that they have invited from you and from the U S and elsewhere, but it makes, it makes it less likely. And I think that it's not just a matter of can governments step in? It's also a matter of what is a government's priority in terms of regulating big tech. And has Apple diffused this situation just enough that it's dropped even lower on the list below Google and Facebook and social media, you know,

Twitter. Like it has Apple done enough there. I don't know if they have. Well, it's a shrewd move, right? Because it, it,

it really severely undermines the arguments of people like Sweeney and Hanamaya Hansen, because what are they arguing? That the rich should continue to get richer? Because that's the argument now. Yes, yes. They're forced to make that argument. And you can cast it differently. You can cast it as, but it's still unfair.

But they can no longer say, oh, but what about the little guy? We're the champions of the little guy. Apple's like, we took care of the little guy. You're standing on your own now. I think I've made my point very clear many times in that the my main issue with this has always been apple telling not main but one of my main issues apple telling big businesses how to run their businesses like that's always been a big

problem for me because you know it feels to me like there are two big issues here one is the one that apple is now trying to fix and then there is the other one where you've got the Sweeneys and the Hanamaya Hansons of the world. They have large companies. And why should Apple as another large company be able to dictate rules to them? Like that's one thing. Right. But that's the rules thing. The money thing.

Now the money thing affects people that don't have so much money. Right. And so like it's it's it gets a lot trickier now, especially because what this is affecting is that middle band, because there is a top tier, which we know about, that can get special deals, right? Like if you're a big enough company. But it does definitely

diffuse their argument a bit. Like they can still make lots of very valid arguments about Apple's control and all that kind of stuff. But if you look at the stuff that Apple started to put into place over the last few months,

you can see them starting to really make some holes in areas that they think is important. So one is this. One is this. There was some leaked code which suggests that start up on iOS 14

with a new phone. You will be recommended third-party apps to try out. They've done that thing now where you can change some default applications. These are little release valves that Apple is choosing to let go, which starts to deflate the arguments

of these larger individuals. It's what we've been saying for a while now while this story has been going on, which is the great threat to apple is that they the threat is not oh no um we we don't want to change anything right because something has to change the threat is can apple change itself enough in small ways to avoid an outside entity changing them because what you really don't want avoid an outside entity changing them. Because what you really don't want is an outside entity telling you what to do. Laws being passed, regulations from regulators

being applied to you, court cases being lost that lead an external force to dictate how you run your business. Nobody wants that. Apple especially does not want that to happen. And I always was baffled about why Apple seemed to be not doing anything because that's an enormous threat to them. So here we are. And the answer is they were working on it. And their plan is to make very small changes at the margins that they think will give them enough of a PR win to make it much harder to argue that Apple needs to be regulated, which is interesting because I think that they are being very conservative in what they do about this. They're not going to give away the store.

It would have been way easier, actually, for them to say first million is 15, and then your second million and up is 30. And instead, they're like, well, we're going to do this program. And once you go past it, then you're not in it anymore. And that's a conservative way of doing it that they didn't necessarily have to do this program and once you go past it then you're not in it anymore and like that that's a conservative way of doing it that they didn't necessarily have to do but it shows that they they wanted to they still want the money from everybody else right at 30 so it's it but it is a uh an interesting strategy i think it does take the wind out of the sails of their of um a lot of their critics and will it be enough probably not but there's probably more they can do around the edges but

it definitely like i understand like was it i think it was tim sweeney that likened their struggle to the civil rights movement and uh suffice it to say he got a lot of blowback for that one it's like what are you doing man yeah that was a bad quote it's an own goal uh pr move and this is the thing is though like i said i understand why they're upset it's because apple made a really good chess move here and their position is weaker now doesn't mean that they can't win doesn't mean that they don't have more to do but i can see them getting furious on the internet and uh i get it because they're angry with Apple because Apple has made their job of fighting Apple harder by doing this. So anyway, it is I just want to like it's a funny story. To sum it up, it is a PR move by Apple.

Apple wants to avoid regulation. It is a PR move by Apple. Apple wants to avoid regulation. Apple wants to clamp down on criticism of Apple taking too much money away from developers. In doing so, Apple has given a windfall to small developers, to the smallest, but I would say probably the largest number of Apple developers, while not having to actually give away a whole lot of money because these aren't the big fish. These are the small fish. The people we know, but it's the small fry here. And so

it's quite a move because it gives them a PR win. It makes them be able to tell all these heartwarming stories about small developers. They don't give away a lot of their money in doing so. And we'll see. We'll see how it plays. So I think it's fascinating from that perspective. If you're somebody who fundamentally believes that there's nothing Apple provides

that's worth 30% cut, then I don't think this changes your opinion about it. But I've heard from a lot of the small developers who are pretty happy with this because, and they do say like even a 15%, it's like, well, there is a lot that Apple does do for a small developer that they're grateful for. And that's the other part of this is that a big developer probably has no problem hiring lawyers and accountants to get them taxes in every country and certified in every country and all those things. And little developers can't do that either. And they rely on Apple for that. And Apple is providing a very nice service for that now 15 that they're taking but um as i think it was john syracuse on atp last week pointed out what this doesn't change is apple's absolute

power right which is what apple wants apple wants to be a benevolent uh ruler of the app store and grant more money to its smallest developers but make no mistake Apple has not ceded any control over its world here by design

so the M1 Macs have been around with the public for a week with people like jason for a couple of weeks and there was just a few things i had some impressions that i wanted to go through but i wanted to just mention a couple of uh interesting things that have been that have come my way in the last week or so and there was a really interesting uh very in-depth interview on oz technica and it was with jaws federighi and suruji talking about the m1 mac and the transition to apple silicon for the mac and there were a couple of things that i really liked that i wanted to point

out one of them was from johnny suruji talking about the m1 saying it's not like some iphone chip that is on steroids it's a whole different custom chip but we do use the foundations of many of these great ips and i think that really that i think that answers from what i what i think many of us have been asking which is basically that the m1 yes you can say that the architecture seems very similar to what they've been doing with their iphones and ipads but just in the sense of like that's how apple knows how to make chips now yeah i view this as being something that can be over interpreted like how do we think this went okay so they've got the a12x which then becomes the a12z i mean literally it's from seven gpu cores to eight so you can see that in the macbook air with the m1

right core counts the same between those two chips the m1 and the a12x slash z um so what he's saying here is we knew these chips would be in max and we need to put things in them that max would need and we needed to be aware of mac uh usage like how code executes in mac os so that that it was efficient and actually worked with mac os stuff like of course of course i don't think that changes the fact that it in all likelihood the m1 really is just an evolution of the a12x and there's nothing wrong with that no there's nothing wrong with that but i feel like i feel like it's an interesting statement here because what he's really saying is no we didn't just take a chip we made for the ipad and stick it in a mac yes of course and that's what that is what i'm trying to get at too because i mean i think there's been quite a lot of conversation where people

were just saying like oh it's just a beefed up iphone chip in a derogatory sense where like i don't think that's the right way to look at it it's like apple knows how to make chips in a certain way that do what they want but i believe i believe that the mac chips are gonna go in their own direction now and like this is just a starting point because if we're gonna say these are always iphone chips we're gonna start to bump into some real weird stuff when we start scaling these chips up to get into the Mac Pro. Does it mean that then my iPhone could also somehow support six Thunderbolt ports? No, I think it's the same as saying that the A12X is just a scaled iPhone chip a little bit, right?

Which is, well, they added a bunch of cores. And over time, I think what's really happening is Apple is taking that architecture and it's spreading it apart. And this is really not any different from what you just said. It is, they're spreading it apart. Of course, a high-end chip for a Mac Pro

is going to be different from an iPhone chip, even if the fundamental architecture is the same. The cores are the same, you're going to add, as you grow that thing, you're going to add features to it. So maybe the, uh, the next step up, which is the M one has, uh, you know, they've integrated Ram on the package and, uh, it's got more cores. There's maybe a future one that the ram is off the package and or or the ram ceiling is higher maybe there are more thunderbolt lanes for it to take advantage of as opposed to just sort of the two lanes that are that are on the m1 maybe there are other external things but they like they build

modularly up so you could you know you could look at a mac pro apple silicon chip probably and look at it and see it's like the lizard brain in a human being right like you can see the part that is the same in the human brain in the lizard brain but it's the whole lizard brain and the human brain's got way more stuff on it it's kind of like that think, where it's like you'll be able to point at a Mac Pro Apple silicon chip and say, there's the A16, whatever. But around it is all this stuff that the A16 doesn't need because it's just for the iPhone. And then and I think the story of of the Mac product line over time and Apple's product line over time entirely is probably going to be there's the chip the a whatever chip that's in the iphone there's a chip that's a step up from that that's in probably the ipad pro and the low end max um whether they call it that or not but it's probably a very similar chip and then there'll

be like another step up above that and maybe another step up above that and that's how they'll do it but i think it's interesting that like i don't think this is a matter of them saying oh well we now it's time to make a mac chip i think what they did was they they took the the a14x and that was like their we're on our way to making a mac chip but there's more work to be done and anybody who used the developer kits over the summer they were on an a14z there were some features that they didn't have and the performance wasn't the same, but it ran. And in the meantime, over two years, because I'll also point out, so there's the A12Z and there's the M1.

There's never an A13X, right? I'm starting to suspect the reason there was never an A13X is because they took that two years to build the M1, to evolve that A12X slash Z into something that wasn't an A14X, but was the M1. But still, I mean, it's the same course. I think that that was what they were doing all along. Anyway, it's great.'re they're they overshot right that was the other line that made me laugh is in that federighi article uh was uh you know we knew they were going to be good but we kind of overshot it a little bit like they're that how good the performance is on them there's also an important part which is something that we'd all piece together i think but it's now good

to hear apple say which is effectively that Windows on M1 is now the ball is in Microsoft's court so the full quote from Craig Federighi we have the core technologies for them to do that to run their own version of Windows which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications but that's the decision Microsoft has to make to bring to license that technology for users to run on these Macs but the Macs are certainly very capable of it. So there is an addendum that I will make, which is you don't want to run it. Like if you are thinking like I want bootcamp,

you do not want the ARM version of Windows because the ARM version of Windows runs x86 applications very poorly. So, you know, if you need it, if you think you want it because like it will get you out of a jam then yeah maybe but if you want it because you want to play games you're not going to have a fun time no don't if if you care about windows compatibility do not buy a mac with apple silicon for the foreseeable future until they do something that really changes the story just don don't. Apple makes a lot of very capable Intel Macs. You may have one

already. I would stick with that. I would stick with that because although I have a lot of enthusiasm and optimism for Windows somehow coming to Apple Silicon at some point because I think

there's, think microsoft is motivated and apple is motivated to make it happen very motivated to put to get like windows on arm a thing but it's just yeah their development the development community is not for some reason not embracing it in the same way that they have for uh apple silicon so like like as Carl's saying in the chat room, there is not I don't believe there is a Chrome version for Windows on ARM, but there is one for Apple Silicon already. And Windows on

ARM has been around for a while. Microsoft have released their own Surface products with ARM chips in them. The Surface X, which I think is like over a year old at this point, runs the ARM version of windows but just very badly so yeah it's interesting i don't know what apple's doing to convince them we pit microsoft and apple against each other uh even now and i i don't think that's right it's

like microsoft looks at what apple is doing and first off i think microsoft looks at what apple is doing and says oh well that'll help motivate people to build um arm pcs right like oh yeah maybe intel is not going to do it for for a lot of people and they're gonna they're gonna uh move toward more arm pcs so that that gives some more wind in the sales of windows on arm and then secondly you know it's not their core audience, but like a portion of the Windows audience does want to run Windows inside of virtualization or on a partition on a Mac. And Microsoft, I think, is into that and is okay with that. And like, that's not, that's just another Microsoft customer and they like that.

So I think the issue is that Windows on ARM is just too early days right now. And they don't even sell a copy. It's only on systems that are ARM systems, right? So they don't even have a box you can buy or a license you can get to download an image to put on a Mac if they could run it. Like, they're not there yet. But I feel like they probably will be. run it. They're not there yet, but I feel like they probably will be. And given that Parallels and VMware are going to do virtualization of ARM-based operating systems on Apple Silicon, and that that's already underway, the logical next step is probably that at some point here,

Microsoft will make a version of Windows for ARM that will run on those virtual machines inside Apple Silicon. I think it's going to happen it's just going to take time and the good news is intel max still exist if you care and pcs exist i mean yeah i mean laptop honestly that's for a lot of options this is probably the best choice right like uh because as well with the power of apple silicon chips you might not need to buy as expensive a mac anymore so the money you save, just buy a Windows laptop. Is AppleSiliconReady.com? Terrible name to say out loud,

but it could be a useful resource for you if you have a specific application that you need to know if one, it runs in Rosetta 2 because not every app does or not every app does very well. Or if you want to make sure if something is Apple Silicon optimized you can go to this website it has a large selection of

applications and you may be able to check if your one is there again like you know I have very fond memories of the original transition right this is I'm probably going to keep bringing this up a lot now because it's just, it means something to me. It's like my first real foray into the Mac. I remember all these types of websites for the original Rosetta, right? Like does it run, how well does it run and that kind of stuff.

So it's good to have these kinds of resources around, I think. Yeah, it's great. It's, yeah, it's not the best name. I like, it's all those words run together too. So you can say whatever ISAP, the Silicon Ray die. I don't know. I mean, there's many ways you can pronounce ISAP, the Silicon Ray. But it's good to see that. And it's funny, you know, the short version we're going to talk about, you and I have both been using these a lot because we both bought our own too so i got out of reviewer mode and have spent the last week as user mode and then you got yours and you've been using it too like there are the short version is is apple silicon ready for almost everything the answer is yes even if it's just running in rosetta it runs fine there are some very peculiar like i said last week edge edge cases where something doesn't quite work right. Some of that stuff is Big Sur related,

and some of it is Apple Silicon related, but it's all headed down the path. The fact that day and date, there was an Apple Silicon beta Photoshop available that you could run side by side with a regular Photoshop if you wanted to, to use use this and when it doesn't do something right, you use the other one. It's all happening fast. So it's a good site to look at, but it's going to be like there's a music plugin that doesn't work

or there's something very technical and specific. You should check first before you move house to an Apple Silicon Mac. But for most people, it's just going to work. So I have had my macbook pro for six days and over that period of time i have made it my main machine so it's very easy to lift off list off the specs it has 16 gigabytes of ram and a one terabyte hard drive ssd uh it's funny this day i don't have to check anymore you know like you'd be like oh what chip did i get like nice it's easy

now very easy to remember um and yeah so i have all day been using this machine i have issued every other machine i have except for recording audio because the audio recording problems are big sir related it's a little bit shaky with some of the tools that i use so rather than uh putting that to risk i'm just recording on my iMac pro um Rosetta 2 is unbelievable it is unbelievable for in pretty much every instance there is no way for me to know if an app is not native. I don't know. I have to check by going to get info

and seeing if it tells me. That's the way I know if an app is native or not. For those who don't know, if you select an application and choose command I to do get info it actually says what kind of application it is. Intel, Apple Silicon, or Universal. Yep. And you can see it right there. Just like in the old days of the Intel transition do get info it actually says what kind of application it is intel apple silicon or universal yep um and you can see it right there just like in the old days of the intel transition 15 years ago and and something else that has come up that i realize now is exactly what i said 15 years ago

is not only if you buy an apple silicon mac will all this stuff just basically work it is the very rare case where things will get faster over time yeah because updates will come out that turn your rosetta apps into native apps and they'll just be faster then so they'll start a little slower and then they'll just keep getting faster which is pretty unusual for computers right and it's pretty great yeah so on that note apps load just unbelievably quickly like if i open logic on my imac pro and i have a like many of our friends do uh a eight core mac pro from 27 imac pro sorry from 2017 with 64 gigabytes of RAM. That's what I'm using right now.

When I open Logic on this, it takes a few seconds. And it's always been like that. Logic has always taken a beat to open. But on my Mac Pro, one bounce and Logic is open. Which I have never seen that before. I've just never seen that. I've got to think that that is in part this new unified memory architecture that it's just has the ability to

load stuff into memory so much faster yeah it's just there waiting all the time right yeah it's done some advanced machine learning it's using a camera to look at your face and it recognizes that your face looks like it's about to launch logic and so it just starts loading logic in the background so when you click the button it's like oh there it is that's not actually what happens yet but will probably happen in the next few years so i i ran some bake-offs and uh logic pro exporting on the m1 is slower than my imac pro so you know i i did some like like right i'm racing these machines against each other and and it's slower i just to be clear you're you're racing an imac pro against the little laptop i know i did this because you know there are lots of examples like all of our developer friends you know like

it's the opposite for them that you know like their apps are compiling and you did this too faster on the m1 no i just think it's funny that we're we're talking about a iMac pro against a little laptop because there's a huge imbalance there but that's this is where we are because i did the same reason that i even thought i could try this jason is i have never experienced in-app performance in logic like i have experienced on this machine it is absolutely fluid and responsive in a way I have never felt. Like zoom in and out, panning around, dragging, like everything is instant and is moving under my mouse perfectly, right? So something that I will very frequently have is I select all of a thing

and will drag it and I'll have to kind of wait for it to catch up this is very normal for my mac pro and this is because i am dealing with sometimes very large files like four five gigabyte logic projects with 1500 cuts in them right like i'm really pushing logic in a way that it does not expect to be used right like apple apple very frequently is optimizing for you know 15 000 uh instruments but they're for three minutes right uh i am doing things in a very opposite way of that of like here is a three hour audio file but there's only three tracks but it's lots and lots and lots of cuts, lots of things to keep track of. And the performance that I have experienced is just so different. It is so, so different. And honestly, the way I could describe it is it feels like an iPad in that way,

where everything is responsive in a way that I have not seen from a Mac in the past. So that is the biggest change for me. So I did a similar kind of podcasting workflow test on my MacBook Air. And what I found is, like you, there are certain things that are faster on the iMac Pro. There are certain things that are faster on the iMac Pro. I did a denoising test of a long file using iZotope, which is running in Rosetta, I will say. So when it goes to native Apple Silicon, it may be faster on the MacBook Air. But for now, that was a faster.

That's the task I bought the iMac Pro for. Yeah. And it is faster at that. Like it is. That is a fully multi-threaded and that the Xeon processor cranks away on that and it does a great job. So that's faster. Not like spectacularly faster, but it is faster. But you're right.

Everything else that I did felt fluid. And even in iZotope, the denoising app that I use for this, doing all of the like opening the files, saving the files, selecting, all of that stuff was far more fluid and far less laggy. And, you know, please wait, please wait, please wait while I load this progress bar, slow, slow, slow. All that stuff was way faster. So it's an interesting mixture, right, of the stuff that is not as accelerated, I think, because of Rosetta in a lot of cases. And the stuff that is more accelerated, or maybe even some of it is stuff where the particular configuration of the iMac Pro is built for that. Yeah.

And the M1 is trying its best and is doing a pretty good job, but is not up to the standard, believe it or not, of a Xeon processor, which of course it's not. It's amazing how close it gets, though. Yeah, because they're both 8-core, but my iMac Pro is 8 high-performance cores, basically. Yes, they are, basically. they are basically but it's picking up with the memory bandwidth and the and maybe even the ssd speed it's picking up benefits there that show in different places so it is i mean yeah it feels the whole thing just feels so so fluid yeah um in general two of the most taxing things that i expect that i'm doing with my machine are before and the edit process. So one is I bring my files into Adobe Audition and use a match loudness

that they have in Adobe Audition, which I really love. So it basically just levels my audio files to a particular loudness. That and Forecast, which is Marco Arment's tool for taking a file and adding the chapters and also doing the final compression from wave to mp3 those two things all the cores that kills the

cores right that's the whole goal of that but those both for rosetta 2 and they in my tests were doing things at exactly the same speed as my iMac Pro. And I cannot fathom how that is possible. I was a little bit like, oh man, I wanted to see it beat Logic. But the things that I really wanted to see how it would do is forecast and audition. Because these are the things that typically take a chunk of time. And I know that they're pushing machine to its maximum. And they were running as fast. And I couldn't believe that.

machine to its maximum and they were running as fast and i couldn't believe that like ultimately for me like it feels like it doesn't matter exactly what's going on whether this application is m1 or it's rosetta everything works it all works great in a way that is astounding to me like i i'm really blown away by the overall performance of this machine. It's very, very impressive. The one downside for me is that there are far fewer iOS apps available than I expected there would be, especially in the categories that I'm looking for. Like there's a lot of productivity tools that there aren't. The iOS versions haven't been released for them, which is a shame

because the ones that I've been using, they work just as I expected. So WidgetSmith, I now have WidgetSmith widgets on my Mac, which is great because I love those widgets. Overcast is fantastic to have on my Mac because I use Overcast as part of my production process for publishing shows. So I very frequently will take the edited audio

and upload it to Overcast, which you can do if you're a premium member or subscriber. You can upload files yourself. And I will check that the chapters are good and that it all seems okay. I can now do this on my Mac where I am. I'll usually have to take my headphones off, put my AirPods in, get my iPhone and do it

there. But I get to now have that as part of the production process on my Mac. And that's awesome. And some games that I've tried, they work great. Like to me, it's not that they're great or what they work, how I expected them to work. Right. Which is a little bit worse than they do on the ipad but that's perfectly fine because it's now opened up me up for tools that weren't on my mac before and i and i really implore developers to give it a go you know like yeah you know yeah give it give it a try um don't let perfect be the enemy of good yes um i i think if you're a developer who's withholding your app from the Mac, look at it. Could it be better? Yes.

But think about that you're giving access to somebody who loves your app on iPad or iPhone. Easy access to it on the Mac. You're helping them out. Your web equivalent, if you have one, it's not as good. It's almost certainly not as good for a lot of reasons, even if it does all the same things because it's in a web browser window instead of in its own window. And yes, if you want to improve it, if there are things that are wrong with it and it doesn't work right, well, of course, don't put it on the store.

But if you want to improve it, improve it. If you want to add Catalyst stuff to it, great. That's all great. But don't let, I would would say perfect be the enemy of good because my greatest disappointment disappointment with ios apps on apple silicon is that most of them aren't there more than anything else yep it you know it's and as well like understand that the people that are looking for this are your your your biggest fans right of your apps

because they're not very visible. You really have to have decided you want that app and then go and get it. They're not surfaced on the store. You have to search and then click a couple of buttons to get it there. These are the people that are really looking for your application.

Give them the option. We'll see. But but yeah i will say uh i i am excited about the mac in a way that i haven't been for about five years because there's some stuff going on jason and i'm like come on then show me what you got what's what's round two let's see it yeah it's super cool things are happening um you know i migrated my old macbook air that i uh used to use a lot don't use a lot anymore um i think of you when i look at that macbook air mic because it's the one where we had that those new york new york briefings with interviews and i have to like record upgrade and all that and like all right i'm gonna bring the mac for this because this is probably too far for my ipad to go

um and i migrated it after many years of service after like seven years of service uh to the new macbook air and uh it's been fun playing with it and it's just it's it's great and uh you know i'm happy to have a modern mac laptop in my in my collection of tools because every now and then i have to choose do i go out into my cold office that's not heated on the weekend and do a thing and i think oh i could grab the laptop and do that where it's warm and that's kind of fun for things that I can't do on my iPad. All right, this episode is also brought to you by our friends over at MailRoute. Bad actors threaten your business with spam and viruses,

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have mac os 11 and the first well i guess the only mac os 11 probably will be big sir and then we'll go to mac os 12 something else next year which is the expectation based on the way the beta cycle's going yeah there's an 11.1 beta so that suggests that we're going to an ios style uh approach where it'll just march every year now and i didn't really have much experience with big sir um until very recently like i tinkered around one of the early betas uh but now i'm using it on my m1 macbook pro um so i'm living with it now and yeah i know that you have spent obviously a lot more time with big sir than i have i'm very early on in my experiences really i'm kind of like along everybody else has just installed it, which is not the way

that I do with iOS bases, right? Like an iPad OS, I install those myself. But with the Mac, I'm a bit more hesitant because I do so much heavy lifting work that could potentially be upended by a beta version of a Mac operating system. But nevertheless, we have Mac OS 11 now. And I think the biggest, the clearest, most in-your-face and somewhat controversial thing about Big Sur is the design. So there are lots of cues taken from iOS, right?

And there are certainly some rough edges. Where are you, kind of, how are you feeling now about the design of big sir how is it settled for you what do you like what do you not like you know i mostly like it i um i know that there are things that are not great right like they're it's not perfect it's this is what happens with os revisions on the mac which is they do a big design change and they go a little too far and then they spend the next couple of years cleaning it up and that that happens but i like that they're pushing it forward i like that there's they're taking more space um whether or not apple does touch screen max in the future i think that it's also clear that Apple has decided that the decisions they made about how tight everything was in terms of layout were from an

era where screens were much smaller and the average Mac screen is much larger now. Just because, you know, the laptops used to be smaller. The average Mac is still a laptop, but the average Mac now is a 13 inch laptop, maybe a 13 point something, a 13 point something right like it's it's it's and the average mac screen in general is probably like i don't know 14 or 15 inches yeah because again mostly laptops but also a bunch of giant imax um screens get bigger you get a little more room and they decided to take them and so there's more padding everywhere and could that be touch friendly? I suppose. But it's also just design wise. I think they're saying, let's take the space.

We don't need to cram everything in. And some people are complaining about that and don't like that. And running this on an 11 inch MacBook Air is going to be painful. But I kind of like what they've done. The contrast seems nice to have the kind of light windows or very dark windows if you're in dark mode. And, you know, I think it looks pretty good. But there are things about it that are messy and that need to be cleaned up. And that's going to happen.

But after having spent the whole summer with it, I'm kind of used to it now. And I like it. Yeah, I really like it too in general. and I like it. Yeah, I really like it too in general. So there are some parts of it that are... There are some parts that I feel seem wrong and there are some parts that I can tell I don't like because they're different

but doesn't necessarily mean they should change. So like alert boxes seem very different, right? Like they look very different. They are now these kind of things that appear in the middle of the screen and they are more, I guess more square than rectangular, I guess in most instances.

But the point is that they are now like a vertical thing, not a horizontal thing. And all the text is centered. It's like, you know, look like an alert box to me, which is why I think i find it so weird as opposed to not liking the design it's just i'm very used to these things being a certain way

and now they're not that way and i reckon i will get used to it but there definitely are some points of it which are very opinionated and when you make very opinionated choices you will upset people yeah but i yeah i'm with you that overall i am a big fan uh of of the of the design of pixar because it's just you know it's fun and it's and also as well like me, it is more familiar to me for iOS. And so, therefore, I think everything on Big Sur looks more modern. And when I go back to Catalina, it's like, ooh, you look old. Have you had that experience? When you go back to a Catalina Mac, how do you feel about that now?

Well, it's all very nostalgic but uh yeah i agree i i think i think you got to move forward i think you got to move forward you got to um try to modernize the look and feel and people will complain because it's a change and also because you didn't get it right the first time it's a little bit off and then you spend the next couple of years as a designer fixing it and i think that will be what happens here even over the summer i think that the design got a little more consistent yeah um and yeah so i i think it's i think it's okay i the way i i put it in my review is that i feel like catalina was the bad cop and that this is the good cop and like they made catalina

break all the software and all of those things and then uh and then this one gets to move on and say ah but we got new things and apple silicon and it's a big big brave new future and um that's a it's kind of a funny funny funny way to to end up uh doing your os rollout but i do really think that Apple, at least to a certain degree, just decided that they didn't want the rollout of Apple Silicon to be tied up with Big Sur,

to be tied up with incompatibility so that the narrative became Apple Silicon broke my app. And so they just did it all last year. Yeah, iPhone 7 lost a headphone jack. So the iPhone 10 could be amazing and people wouldn't get upset about it. Very similar type of thing. Yeah, like catalina took a bullet for big sir right like everything was horrible but it's so

everybody's first run of big sir wasn't that uh alert box nightmare unless you're doing a migration assistant to from something older to big sir, you'll still get it. How do you feel about the app icons? We spent a lot of time looking at these over the summer. How are you feeling about them now? Does it kind of feel right?

No, I mean, like we said, a lot of them are still just literally an image inside of Roundirect, which is dumb. And they need to rethink them, but that's where we are. no i mean like we said a lot of them are still just literally an image inside around erect which is dumb and they need to rethink them but that's where we are um and all the apps that i use have not updated their icons yet so the dock is this kind of like combination of various weird shapes of icons and i know apple wants everything to be around wreck but and and it'll all get there but you know it's fine it's weirder on catalina as apps are starting to update their icons than it is on big sir because i have more catalina icons

in my dock but now have these like clearly big sirified icons and that looks very strange so a couple of new uh additions are control center notification center uh how useful do you find these additions well like these changes i should say to the way especially for a notification center is more of a change than an addition but how are you feeling about these on big sir so control center got a lot better over the summer um there's more work to do there i like it as a direction because it sort of unifies somebody who runs like bartender in order to slim down how many items I see in my menu bar, I like the idea that Apple is basically going to build Control Center to be this place

that a whole bunch of drop-down controls can go. They need to add more of their controls to it. When the summer started, it was sort of not a modular system, but actually now you can go to the system preferences app and you can add items or remove some items from the control center. And they just need to kind of like keep going down that path because I like that.

I think also the next logical step is to let third parties have access to control center to drop their items in there. That might take a year or two, but just as a way to kind of like simplify the menu bar something that doesn't need to display in the menu bar um but needs to be sort of quickly accessible living in control center is a nice way to approach it yeah um and you can yeah you can add things you can drag things out of control center into the menu bar and you know that it's it's gotten a lot better over the course of um over the beta

version of it but um so i don't mind it i think it's i think it's also it's additive it's not saying no you can never put your wi-fi status in your menu bar if you care about that like of course you can you can do that if you want and you sort of like you can promote anything uh you can think of more or less into the menu bar or you can take it out and put it in Control Center. I like that. I think that's a good way to approach it. Notification Center is a bit of a mess for me. Yeah.

Just notifications in general. They took the buttons away, and now you have to hover and click to get to the actions to accept. It's all a bit... Yeah. and click to get to the actions to accept or like it's all a bit yeah i play a game where i move my mouse over and i try to like click the x and then the x goes away and then i have to move it back and wait and the x comes back and i have to move it but not too far and then click the x to make the notification go away it's it's not good and i don't use honestly i've never really used the notification center sidebar it's sort of out of sight and out of mind and now i go there and i'm like oh boy i got a lot of notifications to clear now and you only get to see like three which is really

strange to me to click to see more like i don't really like what they did to the notification stuff i think that they've made that um it kind of isn't really any improvement there at all and and i think they've they've made everything a little bit worse in my opinion like that has been the one clear thing to me where i can see like no you made this harder and all of the ways in which notifications are handled seem a little bit wonkier uh in big star that there's something that i'm not i'm not that hot on what other things jump out to you like really is the design right the? The design, the sounds. We spent time talking about this stuff in the past. They're like the big, big things.

But are there any other parts of Big Sur that you're finding particularly interesting? Well, messages, it's easy to take messages for granted, but messages on the Mac was bad and old and didn't have a lot of the features that were on iOS. And because they took it and put it in catalyst it's it's good it's not great it's not great like i could criticize some of the behavior there's some quirky behavior in there is it because it's catalyst maybe but like if you compare it to the previous version of messages, it's so much

better on so many different dimensions because of the features. And also because quite frankly, it works better. I, you know, I have so many problems with old messages in terms of like typing in one tab and suddenly I'm in a different tab typing to a different person. It's like that happened to me all the time. It's so frustrating. You're like, either you send the message and they're like, whoops, wrong window. But I started in that window.

It just decided to move me to a different window. All that stuff seems to be gone now because they threw that app out. That's iChat AV. It's gone. It's gone. And instead we have messages. So I think that's a winner. And, you know, Safari, but everybody gets Safari. If you're on Mojave or

Catalina, you get this version of Safari, but they did a bunch of stuff to Safari and added some new features in and translation is in there. And I'm not sure whether it's enabled by the new version of Safari or not, but I've been really loving the new one password plugin that just pops up in the form field. So you can very quickly unlock with Touch ID if you're on a Touch ID system. And you don't even have to bring up the 1Password pop-up. It just sort of does it in line. I'm not sure whether that's enabled by the new Safari or not.

But for me, it ends up sort of coming as a whole. Those things make my Safari browsing experience a lot better. Yeah, I like the new Safari stuff too. I like that YouTube can be watched in 4K now in Safari. This is part of Big Sur. Yep. I have a nice monitor, right? Let me look at it in high quality.

I know. How do you feel about macOS in general now? Are you positive for its future does this just i may be better to say does big sir itself make you feel any different about the mac and mac os uh you know they've been heading in this direction i i i'm this is all part of the same thing which is apple has gone from viewing mac os as a legacy platform which doesn't necessarily mean they're going to kill it, but it means that it is never going to be more than it is

because the people who use it are using it because it provides continuity to the past. And so I believe that there was an era at Apple where they felt like we're just going to not touch the Mac. We're going to use Intel processors. We're going to just kind of keep it going, build. The most we do to the Mac is build our ties to the other parts of our operating systems and other other products that we use but otherwise we're just going to kind of let it float and be what it's always been and it's going

to feel a little old but to the people who are using it that's fine because it's familiar and we had those debates about like what's going on with the mac and does apple care is apple just going to keep it on life support and consider it the legacy platform? Are they going to try to make it modern? And it is definitely a be careful what you ask for moment, right? important part of Apple's whole strategy and has the ability to run iOS apps as well as Mac apps and is going to use Apple's processors and is going to be a big part of Apple's story going forward, it also can't be treated like a legacy platform and left untouched and feeling like it was designed 15 years ago. And so I understand if you're a dyed if you're a dyed in the wool Mac user, as I am, that you look at some of these changes and you say, oh, you know, just leave it the way it was, right? Well, first off, you know, keep running that Mac running Mojave, you know, you'll be

okay for a while, but this is Apple caring about the Mac and you may not like it. I mean, this is Apple caring about the Mac and you may not like it. I mean, this is again, if you've been on the Mac a long time, you'll know, um, the most annoying time times in Mac history are when Apple was really trying to iterate and innovate and do new stuff. And let's try this out and let's try that out. And what if this was translucent and what if this was shiny and what if this would have a 3d effect on it? And you roll your eyes at a bunch of that stuff. But that was also when Apple was investing thought into it. And it did move the platform forward. And a lot of the bad ideas just kind of fell out after a while. That's where we are now is Apple's actually trying stuff on macOS. And they're not all

going to be great. Some of them are going to be annoying. And some of them are going to be annoying for good reasons. And some of them are going to be annoying because we're used to the way it always was. And we'll have to figure out whether the new way is better or worse or just different. But I'm excited about what Big Sur represents because Big Sur represents a new era of Apple caring about the Mac and having the Mac be a huge part of its technical strategy instead of the Mac being kind of floated away on a, on a, like a slab of ice,

like you live, live as long as you can, but away from the rest of us. And that was, that was sort of where it was. I feel like a few years ago that, that it may be weird and different and scary and annoying, but the Mac is relevant and important to Apple's whole strategy now.

And that's great for the Mac, I think, in the end. Yeah, that's a beautiful way of putting it. And it is that kind of thing of, like, can't have both, right? You can't ask for the Mac to move forward and also for it to stay the same. It's going to move and it's moving. Yeah, that's it. And the fact is people maybe forget a little bit

about how annoying it was in those eras where the Mac was really changing and moving. And it was annoying and people were annoyed by it. But if you've got to choose between, and I do believe this is not a false choice. I think this is a real choice. It's like, you can't say, oh, well, the Mac is going to be central to Apple and it's going to be a part of their core and they're going to invest a lot of time in it, but it's not going to change. Like, it's not how it works. So I would rather it change and adapt and continue to be a part of apple's big structure i actually you know you and i have talked about um ios laptops

for a while we we talked about like what if there was an ios laptop yep the whole premise behind the talk about an ios laptop or an ios, well, it can't be the Mac. If we wanted to run iOS apps and have touch and have Apple's processors and all of those things, it can't be the Mac. So we're going to have to have Apple, you know, have the Mac over there and then build these things over here. Yeah. And that's not going to happen. It felt like they wouldn't do anything. Right.

Yeah. Right right this is the only way we're gonna get this stuff because apple aren't doing it right and now i i think that's just that's not the way it is now now the uh traditional computer shapes are max but they're also part of apple's overall strategy and i think in the long run the you know you're gonna have two choices right i mean as of today you have two choices, right? I mean, as of today, you have two choices. You have an iPad Pro or Air in a keyboard case made by Apple with cursor support that you can use that's completely on iPadOS. Or you get a MacBook Air also running on an Apple design processor and runs some iOS software as well as Mac software. And if that story changes over time, then you're

really sort of just making some interesting decisions about the hardware. I think that that's where Apple wants the Mac to be, is part of its whole product line and that there's a really nice continuum from iPhone all the way up to Mac Pro. And if they hadn't done this, that's not what it would be. If they hadn't done this, they would be, would be if they hadn't done this there would be the mac is available it remains a product in our lineup and then over here we start at the iphone and go up to a desktop ipad thing yeah um but we're not they made the choice not to do that i think this episode is also brought to you by express vpn there are so many vpn providers out there you bet you've heard of loads of them some you may have used before there's a reason i use express episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. There are so many VPN providers out there. You bet you've heard of loads of them. Some you may have used before. There's a reason I use ExpressVPN.

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slash upgrade to learn more. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of this show and RelayFM. It is time, Jason Snell, for some hashtag ask upgrade questions. And this week we're going to start off with a question from Kevin. Kevin says do you think that any of the just introduced M1 Macs will be refreshed

during their two year rollout plan? So Apple is saying that in two years they will have transitioned the entire product line over do you think that we might see any changes to the just released products during that period of time? I do seems possible right

I reckon within the next 12 months there will be an update to some of these products at least in fact I'm going to guess and we don't know that's the beauty of it we don't know I'm going to guess that a year from now these Macs will all be updated for the M2

mmm right the only one from now, these Macs will all be updated for the M2. Right? The only one that I would pause on is the Mac Mini. Maybe. We'll see what they do with the Mac Mini, right? It's possible that they're going to do a high-end Mac Mini configuration, but they could even do that potentially and say, now you can choose your mac mini there's the m1 and the m1x and all of that but i don't know we're going to see i keep feeling like since these are apple's processors that they will just put all of these products on a annual or

18 month cycle and just but in the next two years i would say for sure that in the next two years probably within the next 18 months if not the next months, they're all going to get whatever the next generation chip is just like the iPhone does. So, you know, it might be more like the iPad where it's every 18 months. That's fine. But I think the days where Apple is intransigent, easy to say, the days when Apple is intransigent with their Mac updates, because it's like, you know, we're not ready, Intel's not's not ready whatever i feel like they're gonna have extra motivation with these new chips like they're not gonna want to keep selling the old chips when they got the new chips since they made them so definitely within the next two years a little more loosey-goosey than they were before in a good way right like we might update it in a year it might be in six months

might be in 18 months but we'll do it when we're good, and it's our decision, rather than we have to do it now because we've waited for so long. I don't know if we're going to get yearly product updates. I would say, as you said, probably we'll end up closer to 18 months, like a year and a half. My counter-argument would be, if the MacBook Air is your most popular computer, you could argue that you should just put it on an annual cycle

and every fall you announce the iPhone and then in the next month you announce the MacBook Air with the M iPhone chip minus 13 processor. But there are different reasons that you do yearly product updates than just we have the new chip, right? And I'm not sure that the MacBook Air user is desperate and hungry

for the next generation processor at this point. And I think you're more likely, if you're Apple, to want to upgrade iPads more frequently because they get additional features, hardware features to them that the Macs might not get. I don't know. Even the iPad Pro is on an 18-month cycle, right?

Exactly. Even like that. So I agree with you. I'm going to put a wrinkle in there too, which is, but what if these models are all the transitional models? Definitely. these models are all the transitional models definitely the next and the next wave has hardware changes yes then you're even more likely to see it i would say sooner because apple's going to want to sweep away maybe next fall sweep away the macbook air with their new fangled macbook

although the macbook air may actually be a bad example because they did redesign it for retina and i feel like maybe that is the retina the macbook air now but um we'll see we'll see but i i think it's also possible that we're going to get a faster pace here in the first two years and then it'll slow down a little bit because they will introduce some new hardware designs and then they'll iterate for a while yeah this first two year period there's there's a the future doesn't apply right in that sense like in the future i imagine it will be probably 18 months to two years for for significant mac updates but within the first two years i mean we could have a new 14-inch macbook air in six months that replaces the 13-inch that i just bought and i was fully uh expecting that to happen right like something like that

happened because these first two years. No, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro. That's what I meant to say. The MacBook Pro, not the MacBook Air. But like a 14-inch MacBook Pro, I imagine would come along as soon as they update the 16-inch. I don't think it's going to sweep away your 13-inch because I think they're going to have a 13, a 14, and a 15. Or 16, but we'll see. For Mike Hurley, though though it will probably be a new

yeah well so what i'm saying kevin is you know don't wait yeah just go just go buy buy an m1 mac now i don't think he's actually asking that but i do think that we'll see another refresh in the next two years i think that setting the over under at two years makes this an easy yes if it was a year or 18 months it would be a little bit trickier. But at two years, I think absolutely. Brian asks, do you think MagSafe could ever come to the iPad? This is the only way I could imagine wireless charging coming to the iPad is MagSafe. Yeah, I mean, there's already an array of magnets on the back of the iPad. So building an iPad where the magnets use MagSafe and also are there for mounting on cases and stuff isn't unreasonable.

And with the MagSafe puck, you have, unlike a charging pad, right? You can attach that thing and then lean it against, like I lean my iPad against my nightstand when it's charging. Upside down so that the charging plug is at the top, right? It would not be a big difference to stick the charging plug is at the top right it would not be a big difference to stick the magnet on the back and then lean it there and you could sort of lay it in any configuration and it would charge it's a big battery though right like i think there's that's the challenge is do you really want to slowly charge it with that versus a really fast charge with a usbc. That is the problem.

And so. I could imagine maybe it coming with. There could be more power. Through MagSafe in the future. As the technology improves. But I don't know if we're going to see it yet. But this is the only way. I imagine non-USB-C.

Charging on an iPad. I wouldn't put money on it. I think it's not a solution for the iPad. It doesn't need to exist. I think the iPad is fine. I also think, let's just say, they'd be better off doing MagSafe on the iPad and the Mac. That's more like old MagSafe.

Correct. Yes. Yes. Derek asks, I'm currently using a 2018 iPadad pro of a magic keyboard someone who mainly uses the ipad as a laptop replacement is the m1 macbook air now a better choice well i've been thinking about this question which i looked ahead in our show notes as i do as a professional podcasters i've been thinking about the whole episode. Oh, really? This is really the question, right? This is really the question.

I've gotten this from a bunch of people, which is like, well, now that the Apple Silicon Macs are out, you don't need to use an iPad anymore, right? Which again, is not what Derek's saying, but it's a fundamental misunderstanding of why people use the iPad. But I think it's worth talking about here

because this is really the issue. Apple now makes this amazing touch tablet that you can stick in a keyboard case with a trackpad on it or do whatever you want with it. And it is running iPad OS. And now there's the M1 MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, and they are light and they're running Apple Silicon and they're really fast. So is the Air a better choice than the iPad? And the answer is no. They're the same. Or at least they're different enough that you just need to choose what you prefer.

And this is the thing. The iPad, you use the iPad because you like the software on it, because you like the ergonomics of it, because whether it's holding it in your hands or being able to pull it out of the case and walk away or using it in the case, having cellular networking, like there are a whole bunch of things ergonomically about it and kind of side features about it that are great. And the software is great and works for you.

If the Mac is a better fit and having something that's always a laptop and runs, you know, a few iOS apps, but mostly Mac apps, then the Mac is a better fit for you. Right now, I just don't see, I don't see any crossover here. Like if you could literally run, if the Mac had a screen you could fold back or take off and was touch and also had the ability to run every ios app it would be a much more interesting debate about exactly what you want from it but right now i think it's really clear and hasn't changed do you want to use an ipad or do you want to use a mac and i i think a mac looks better now than it has for a while. But like I wrote a piece last week about the Mac, my Macworld column last week. I wrote it on my iPad because that was the right choice for that in terms of the ergonomics,

in terms of the apps I was using. It was the right choice for that moment. for that moment so i think that they're to me this is not a question that has a clear answer now it it's we're still back in do you prefer using the ipad or not the ipad is not a a again i'm not saying derrick is saying this but i do hear this a lot it's like well surely eventually apple will do enough to the mac that you won't have to resort to the ipad and as people like federico have talked about federico vatici for a long time um ip users aren't, or at least a lot of them aren't resorting to the iPad, aren't coming down to the iPad or having to use the iPad because it's the only thing which offers that they like using the iPad. And the iPad Pro with the magic keyboard is even

better and offers even more options now. It's not a Mac. Mac users who rely on Mac software are not going to want to use an iPad. And iPad users who rely on iPad software are probably not going to want to use a MacBook Air because they're different. They're just very different. So that's my answer is you should get the one that you like. And if you've been using the iPad because you really like the ergonomics of it, but you've been struggling with the software and have to go back to your Mac a lot and really would rather have a Mac,

yeah, you should get a MacBook Air with an M1 because you're going to be happier, but you're also going to lose your tablet and it's just going to be a laptop and have to stay permanently as a laptop. That's just how it is. There is a world in which these devices would have been closer but that hasn't happened you know like if just every

ios app ran and there was nothing developers could do about it the stores were the same it would be closer but it isn't it isn't that close um but as you say, they're like... I think even if you put the same operating system on these two different things, it's still not one or the other. It's like

an iMac is different to a MacBook Pro. They both run the same operating system. They both can do the same things. But they're different because one is a laptop. And if you put macOS on the iPad Pro, it's super different because the iPad Pro can be used without a keyboard on it at all.

It's thinner. It's lighter. It has Face ID. It has Apple Pencil, right? Like if you kept those hardware features different, they're still different products with different ergonomics and different use cases, different battery life, different ports. They're different.

Just because one is closer than the other, it doesn't necessarily mean that all the choice is removed. And finally, Kevin asks, given the speed of even the M1 MacBook Air, do you think that the iMac Pro goes away and the top-of-the-line iMac M whatever takes its place? Is Kevin double-dipping, or do we have two Kevins? Kevin is asking two questions.

Kevin has lots of good questions kevin has the same kevin it's the same kevin oh man kevin jackpot you started and ended ask upgrade congratulations uh kevin has a lot of m1 questions is the answer i we talked about this when i reviewed the imax last time which is it's feeling to me very much like apple is happy to build high-end imax yep and therefore you don't really necessarily need an imac pro anymore also don't forget the imac pro was the replacement for the mac pro and then they changed direction and brought back the mac pro so the imac pro is kind of not apple strategy i okay so is there ever going to be another imac pro i'm not sure no there isn't thank you mike people love it when we whisper i think it's one and done here we wondered if it would be i think

here's the thing i think it's the same question as is there a higher end mac mini in space gray i don't know the answer like Like, I really don't. There's room for one, but will they bother to make one? Will they make a more feel, or will they just replace this two-port, two USB-C port Mac Mini that we have now? Next time it'll have four,

and it'll just be the Mac Mini then. I think there's a possibility for marketing, and I know this is what we talked about when we talked about the iMac when it came out. You market the high-end imac as an imac pro and give it a different treatment and put space gray on it or whatever if you wanted to or you could just make it a high-end imac high-end imac is simpler if they see that there's some some advantage to calling one of the models imac pro i think they. I probably wouldn't bet on it. I probably would guess

that they're just going to make the iMac and the iMac is going to be so awesome that they'll just be like, it's awesome enough as it is. And then if you need expandability, that's what Pro is for. That's my gut feeling. But I think there's a possibility

that they will take the big, high-end souped up imac and call it imac pro and maybe make it look a little bit different but that's extra work that may not be necessary because the imac has is capable of doing that heavy lifting and they do have a mac pro up above it i just you know i think it was obvious to me, to us. We've spoken about it for a while. The iMac Pro is like a... It's like a vestige of a bygone era in the sense of it was supposed to be a thing and then they had to change course.

The iMac Pro was supposed to be Apple's top- the line machine yes that was its whole reason for being right and by the time it came out it had already been undercut right they'd already changed their mind and then they've made the regular iMac more powerful in some ways and let's be clear the next iMac knowing what we know now about the M1 the next iMac will blow away the iMac Pro in terms of now about the M1 the next iMac will blow away the iMac Pro in terms of performance absolutely destroy certainly yeah the the low-end iMac right the the 21 inch iMac or whatever will wipe the floor with the iMac Pro the only thing is if

they decide that there's a marketing value in calling a system pro um that's essentially just a high-end system yeah i doubt they will do it because that's added complexity they don't need and takes away the focus from their other pro mac yeah which is the actual mac pro there are two questions here i think which is one will apple ever call a machine imac pro again or, will Apple make a machine that's clearly the evolution of the iMac Pro? I think question two is no way, question one may be. You know, like the iMac Pro

has very different internals to make it as powerful as it is. I don't think that's going to happen ever again. That doesn't need to happen anymore. They may call an iMac an iMac Pro, but the idea of what the iMac Pro is, there's a reason they released this machine in 2017

and then didn't change it. Oh, I will say, unless they completely redesign the iMac, which maybe they will, and I think they should. They better. If they don't, I will put money down that the cooling system in it will look like the imac pro right although they m1 will they need to cool it but

it'll be like m1z or something like that i feel like i feel like this is exactly it right it's so much that cooling system might be overkill you might not need cooling for the whole thing right no i'm i take it back I'm not putting my money down. I'm not putting my money down. Oh, money's come back. None. The money's off the table. I never took my finger off the money.

And so I'm going to take the money back. All of these iMacs have these huge cooling systems because of the Intel processors that are in them. So either they're going to be empty shells or they really are going to redesign these. And I think that's why they're really going to redesign the iMac. It's like, not only has it been a design that's been out there forever but like so much of it doesn't need to be there if you only need a small cooling system because you've got cool apple chips imagine how thin sliced cheese with that imac thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of upgrade i would like to once again thank our fine sponsors of this week's episode, ExpressVPN, MailRoute, and SaneBox.

And a huge thank you to our members. If you would like to get ad-free, longer versions of Upgrade each and every week, go to getupgradeplus.com. Thank you for your support if you do that. You can find Jason online at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. And Jason hosts many podcasts here at RelayFM. If you have yet to check out 20 Max for 2020, the podcast version here at RelayFM, please do that.

It is sublime. I love it. Jason is also at J Snell. I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. I host many shows here at RelayFM. And I also live stream at Mike.live, where currently I've been building and playing around lots of mechanical keyboard

stuff, if that's your thing go check it out we'll be back next time until then, say goodbye Jason Snow thanks for all the questions Kevin