Upgrade - 33: Personal Electronic Notebooks

Episode Date: April 20, 2015

Stephen Hackett joins Jason to talk about John Siracusa's semi-retirement, online shopping, the future of the OS X brand name, Photos for Mac, and Myke's trip to Atlanta.

From RelayFM, this is Upgrade, episode 33. Upgrade this week is brought to you by three lovely sponsors. Igloo, an intranet you will actually like. MailRoute, a secure, hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam, and GoToMeeting, the best tool to meet from anywhere without travel expenses or hassle of traffic. I'm, uh, Jason, I'm not Mike. What? Oh my gosh. What happened to your accent? Mike, Mike, you've been in America too long. Four days, you've gotten, you've gotten a totally different accent. Yeah. Uh, so I'm, I'm, I'm Steven. Hi, Jason. Hi. So Mike is in America. He's not with me,

but he's also not with you. Yeah, that makes me sad. It's a very confusing time in the Relay universe. I don't know much about comic books, but I think at some point in comic books, there's multiple universes. And that's kind of how Relay feels like the last two weeks. And that's kind of how Relay feels, like the last two weeks. Yeah. Yeah, this is, we were, what is it, the Flophouse and a bunch of other shows that are on that Maximum Fun Network, they were talking about how they want to do a fun drive thing that is the crossover week, where they switch all the hosts around. And I figure we just did that by accident on Relay.

All the hosts are on different shows and because Mike was traveling in, he had his vacation and he went to Ireland and now he's in Atlanta. And so we've had guest hosts and you've been popping up everywhere. You were on with Casey. Now you're on with me. And I know people are feeling like unsettled out there. I think starting next week, everything will be back to normal. I think so. This is the, I think actually today, I think today's the last day because Mike flies home. Those listeners of Clockwise will find that I'm not going to be on Clockwise this week. But after that, Dan and I will be back together too. So soon.

So soon. I know. I have the, I have John Syracuse's yard crew outside my house, outside my neighbor's house. Like a little lawnmower, like a blower. Yeah. He's on a leaf blower right now. That is classic hypercritical, by the way. That is a old school hypercritical, the John Siracusa complaining about the lawn guy.

It is. So I have studio space in town that I use. I actually share it with my brother. And I was going to go there today to record, but I drove like eight hours yesterday from Atlanta. And I was like, well, I'm going to sleep late. I'll just wake up my family. They're all out today.

I was like, I'll record at home. What could go on in my neighborhood? I'm never home at 10 o'clock on a Monday. I'm at work. What could happen in my neighborhood at 10 o'clock on a Monday? And apparently all of the yard work. The yard guy. The yard guy's here.

What can we do? Yeah, I don't know. I see those people when i'm walking my kids um to school when i'm walking my son to school in the morning i see i see the yard guys out because they they get out early and do that it's funny for me because we don't we don't have a yard guy i'm the yard guy yeah same with me i'm like the only yeah i'm the only guy on the street he's like mowed his own grass still i need i should change that yeah well i i it's not gonna be a problem for me because you know all my grass my grass is going to die because we're not going to water anymore.

Oh, yeah. Y'all don't have water anymore in California. That's right. So why, you know, who needs... That seems bad. I could mail you like a jar of Mississippi River water once a week. Did you see that William Shatner wants to do a Kickstarter for like a billion dollars? I think he doesn't know how Kickstarter works.

To build a pipeline, a water pipeline to California. Which on one level i think it's like that's kind of brilliant right because there are other places where there's lots of water but not here but for that i think they could just build like desalt plants but does that actually fix the problem like where's the water coming from will those people be thirsty because you've taken all their water well i mean that's look at the colorado river there isn't anything left of it because we drained it all it's like you stick the straw in and then you just keep sucking until it's dry is that how they do it it's a giant bendy straw yeah into california

interesting you live you basically live in a foreign country to me it's very strange it is well you know we we joke about this because in the people don't know this um this is the this is the first segment this is before follow-up this is random talk um in the relay uh slack chat uh i i've taken upon myself to educate Casey about California facts, because it turns out Casey knows nothing about California, like literally nothing. I superimposed a map of California on a map of the East Coast once and said, Casey, this is how big California is. And he was like, wow, that's really big. I'm like, yes, it's really big. And he was like, where is Yosemite? Because I'm going to Yosemite today

in relation to the Bay Area, because I don't know. And I did a little, I used napkin, I think. And I drew like little circles and arrows. And I'm like, this is LA. This is San Francisco. This is where the cows are in between. And over here is where Yosemite is, which is where I'm from. Up where the trees are.

Oh, so your sidebar is translucent already. Yeah. It was born translucent. Wow. You should change that setting so your sidebar is translucent already yeah i was it was born translucent wow you should change that setting so your computer looks like a mac again i'm not angry about no somebody no we should do um some follow up slash out we should follow up we should out we don't have sound effects on this show that was yeah i don't need there anymore that was yeah i know that that was a particularly prompt related thing i kind of missed the sound effects but mike took them away well he said he says follow up now and i think follow up but every way yeah yeah he

can't he cannot do that um actually the follow out is connected oh um i wanted to mention episode um 35 of connected which uh which I was on. And so people who like to listen to me talk and to you talk. Yes. But not to Federico because he said very little in that episode because it was about photos for Mac that I talked about. And the Mac does not interest Federico. The Mac is a device used to talk on Skype. Yes.

And nothing else. But they should check that out if they want to hear me talk about photos a lot. There are a couple things that made me very sad. There are a couple things in there that I said that were wrong. I said that there was no brush tool at all. And there is a little, you know, the spot healing kind of thing is there,

but that's it. There's no other kind of, you can't like brush on adjustments or anything like that. So, you know, people, the truth squad was out and bless them for that. So, it's uh photos for photos for mac is fascinating i keep uh i keep working on that book and discovering weird things that it does and then lots of things that it just

doesn't do and i think you know some of them are baffling like not being able to put your photo on a map from within the app it's like everybody is complaining about that and i've got all these annoying i've got all these slr pictures and i'm like i know where they were taken and they were taken at the same time that these three phone pictures were taken i'd like to put them together nope can't do it it's frustrating but anyway we mentioned that on connected episode 35 people should check it out you should check it out and we have some some listener questions about photos yeah i thought I thought we'd collect them here. Yeah, because we've been talking about photos a little bit here. Listener Darren asked, what's the better photo solution with the new services iCloud or on Dropbox?

I know a lot of people are using Dropbox, and especially since if you pay for Dropbox, you've got like a terabyte now. It's a lot of room. I think it depends on what your photo approach is. iCloud is expensive compared to most other cloud services, but you get it integrated in with all of Apple's apps. And that's what you're paying for, essentially. The apps are free. You pay for the cloud storage. And I've got about 500 gigabytes of photos and videos now. So, you know, that's what you're paying for. Now, Dropbox, you know, I feel like that's something that you do if you want to take everything into your own hands. I think at that point,

you should probably be using something that really truly uses the file system as the management tool. And photos will let you drag photos in from the file system. But boy, starting to fiddle with like things changing in Dropbox underneath the Photos app with referenced photos, it sounds pretty scary to me. So I'm using iCloud right now and I'm kind of happy to spend the money because it's super easy and it's automatically on all my devices. But you know, there's no right answer here. It really depends on what you're willing to pay and what your, um, what your strategy is and what your, what your family situation is too. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I use Dropbox for a long time. Um, using, you know, just using the file system, had it structured into folders and I liked it because it was,

it was super fast to sort through things and I'd Hazel rules naming images by the date and time. super fast to sort through things. And I had Hazel rules, naming images by the date and time. And it was nice. But what for me moving to photos, what it's given me is that, that visual way to scan through images. Now,

yes. And finder, you could use, you know, the thumbnail view or whatever, make it bigger. But in photos, that's just,

it's a very visual way to store things. And I've, I've come to appreciate that approach again. And even though I'm not sold, like we talked about connected, not sold about all the iCloud stuff quite yet. It is nice to, to be back in a more sort of, you know, visual way. I can just, I can just, you know, thumb through a bunch of photos really quickly and find the one I'm looking for, as opposed to like clicking through and finder and waiting for finder to do its thing. But, um, you know, we'll see,

we'll see where I land long-term. I don't promise that I'll stay in photos, but we'll see. That's why follow-up exists, Jason. We can come back when we change our minds. Exactly. I think, yeah, I'm really enjoying the fact that suddenly for the first time in a while, all 55,000 photos that I've got in my assorted iPhoto libraries are all in one photos library. And photos has now slowed down a little from what it was when there were only 10,000 photos in there, but it's all still really navigable. And it's not nearly as slow as iPhoto was with even 10,000 photos in it. It moves pretty well. And I was just discovering the other day, these pictures that I know that

we took of my kids when they were really little, And I know the one picture and I'm looking and I'm like, oh, we took 15 pictures then. And I'm looking through and it's like, you know, it's almost like a supplementary, like bonus material from my life. It's like, you only know the one picture, but there were actually all these other pictures too. That was pretty awesome. So I'm enjoying having access to all that. And the videos too, since the videos are in the cloud as well um and there's a videos view and photos i'm seeing all these videos of my kids that i took on like a phone when they were little and i've not even seen them in years and they're all in the videos view now which is pretty cool too yeah it's i like some of that it's i mean they're not smart albums but you know kind of like i can see all my time

let's do stuff in one place, which most of mine are my kids running around and dancing in the yard. I just love all of those, and I can just see them all in one little place. There's not many of them, but it's really an enjoyable little corner of the Photos universe. So a couple other quick bits of Photos-related follow-up. Listener Mark asked, when does iCloud photo library, when it's full, does it stop working? Does it purge old files?

Or does it auto-upgrade size? The answer is, once your iCloud photo library reaches your maximum amount of storage, a dialogue comes up from Apple and says, would you like to buy more storage? Yeah, insert another quarter to keep playing. And in fact, if you try to add a large library to a library larger than your size will fit.

Apple stops you and says, you can't really do this unless you pay more. And so, yes, insert quarter, which is when I went up to a terabyte, which I'm now only using half of. So I've got to figure out whether I want to remove some things from the cloud, like the videos, and go back to half a terabyte. Or if I just want to embrace the fact that I'm putting everything in iCloud. But it tells you. I mean, Apple does. And it's doing some deduping, too. It looks like it is doing like a checksum or something on every piece of media and then asking the server, do you have this already?

And if it says yes then it's then it de-dupes that no that doesn't always work i got a bunch of things i i um my first digital camera was a canon power shot i got like s110 or something and it didn't have that was when that was my first digital camera uh it was a point and shoot and it was back when when um the accelerometer was not a standard feature on digital cameras so you had had to, when you shot something in portrait, you had to import it and rotate it because it didn't know that the camera was being held in that orientation. So I found a bunch of pictures of my parents holding my daughter

right after she was born in the hospital where there are two of everything, one with them rotated and one not. And apparently I just had like the originals and I don't know what happened there, but that was an example where it couldn't de-dupe them because they look different because one of them is a portrait and one of them is a landscape. But if they are the same photo exactly or the same video, it does a good job. It looks up online and says, oh, I don't need to do anything with this. This is just a dupe and it drops it. It looks up online and says, oh, I don't need to do anything with this.

This is just a dupe. And it drops it. So it tries to be efficient at it. But it will warn you if your library is too big to go up to iCloud based on what you've purchased. And then you just buy more space. That's how that works. Or you don't do it. You turn it off. Those are your choices at that point.

And listener Jim asked, in the Photos app, is there a way to sort the pics within the new albums view in both ascending and descending order you can reorder an album view i'm not sure you can do a man an actual like sort photos really wants it to be old on top and new on bottom really like really really i imagine that might be something that they'll change at some point so you can reverse the view but that's what they want but in in albums you can drag things around. You can order an album any way you want. So you could do that, but I don't think there's an auto sort way. I haven't noticed that to sort it the other direction. I think basically you can free form it, just freestyle, or you can say sort by date. And those are your choices. That's all I've seen. So if you do it manually,

is that order reflected on your other devices? Oh's that's a good question i should check that out it should be but i don't know if it is there are some weird things some things don't translate to ios it's very much one of those not very apple like things where where there's there's things that just don't come over like uh to a second mac uh the faces don't come over the face the face tagging comes over so if like one Mac has said, this is Jason Snell, the other Mac will have that tag, but the face identification stuff doesn't come over and smart albums don't come over. So it's possible to iOS or Mac actually. So they just don't sing on iCloud at all. So it's possible that they don't, but I would think, you would think that they would. I just haven't tested that. That's a

great question. You stumped the band. Congratulations. If only there were some sort of book I could buy. Indeed. Well, if there was only some book that I could finish writing so that it could be published. There it is. I'm getting close. I'm getting close. Yeah. And so a listener, Matt wrote in, I have some feedback on the magic mouse. Yeah. Yeah. We, we, Mike mike and i it was that two blind men trying to figure out if it's an elephant kind of situation where it's people who don't use the

magic mouse comment on the magic mouse do you use the magic mouse no i use the same mouse uh mike uses the logitech uh revolution mx well listener matt has because he uses the magic mouse has told us there's an app that you can get at magicprefs.com that lets you set up taps to work as clicks on the Magic Mouse. He says it's great. And that it doesn't physically click. There's a small speaker that makes the sound of, because a silent mouse was freaking out the original testers. So that's one of those fake, like the MacBook, when you click on it, it actually makes a sound because the surface vibrates. But apparently the Magic Mouse provides audio feedback. This is what listener Matt says.

Regardless, we don't use it, so we don't know. But sure, a Force Touch Magic Mouse would be great, we think. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I don't't know i haven't used force touch i mean except in the apple store so uh and i could see how you know once you get used to it right like it could feel like me you know i've got a macbook pro right now i'm using it by itself just plugged into a bunch of stuff at my desk at home but at work it's you know on a stand with a display and keyboard and mouse and i could see once you get used to force touch somewhere you would want it everywhere right like the gesture so for me it's the gestures and the trackpad then i go to the logitech mouse and i have no gestures and i've gotten used to that i've mapped it was

nice with logitech you can map like thumb down to various things and you can kind of fake it a little bit but i could see once you're you know you want yourself to kind of be the same as much as possible so at some point i think it'll show up other places i don't know how it would work in a mouse is it are those modules you know the magnets and everything small enough can you power them on double a batteries i mean there's lots of questions there but one day I think they could show up everywhere. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

My knowledge of Magic Mouse is zero, but thanks to Matt for the report back. Well, I think we can move on to regular topics, but first it would be great, since you're being mic'd today, it would be great for you to tell us about a friend of the show, if you could. I would. I would love to tell you about Igloo, the intranet you will actually like. So, Jason, why invest in the latest, sleekest devices if you're going to use them to stare at an intranet website that was built in the 90s? Woo, 90s party! I've used these things.

A lot of corporate int internets are really terrible, and that's where Igloo comes in. Not only can Igloo be customized to look exactly like your brand, but it's responsive, automatically optimized for any device you're using, even if you're in the 6 Plus club like Mike and I and all the cool kids. You can use your favorite Apple devices because Igloo just lets you do your best work. Share files, coordinate calendars, provide status updates, and manage projects.

Igloo is not just for traditional internet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It gives you the tools to work better together with your team. Igloo's latest upgrade, Viking, revolves around documents and how you interact with them. You can gather feedback and make changes. And there's an ability to track who has read critical information. So if you send out training and you really need Jason to read it, and Jason's a slacker, you can see that Jason hasn't read it.

You can deal with it. It's like read email receipts, but way better. If your company has a legacy intranet that looks like it was built in the 90s, you should really give Igloo a try. But, you know, Igloo, those guys are are super smart they understand that love doesn't happen overnight so if you sign up now you can try igloo for free with a team of up to 10 people for as long as you want sign up right now at igloo software.com upgrade thank you so much to those guys thank you igloo for sponsoring upgrade and all of relay fm yeah our pals our friends our friends so um our first topic is the mic vertical or the podcasting vertical but i wanted to just just really quickly say so you saw mike this weekend in atlanta you did the the pen

attic live you and i had some text messages because you you got you were like you did you set up the equipment you did uh live audio stream, you did videos. Tell me a little bit about what – I assume that you'll talk about this on other shows too, but I get you first. So give me some of the lowdown from Atlanta. Yeah, so if people might not be familiar, The Pen Addict is a show here on Relay that – fountain pens, fancy writing utensils, notebooks, paper, that sort of thing.

My wife's feedback, by the way, she said that every time I say pen addict, I say it's about pens. She assumes that that's a tech acronym, like P-E-N. It's like personal electronic notebook or something like that. I said, no, it's the things you write with. She's like, really? A podcast about that? Yep. Yeah, it's very real.

The listeners in that show funded a Kickstarter, which is super great, to bring Mike to Atlanta, Georgia for the Atlanta Pen Show. So it's like a hotel conference center, and there's a couple rooms, and there's vendors. Brad Dowdy, who's a host on the network, also owns a company called Knock where they make pen cases. And so the Kickstarter was very successful. And we flew Mike over, I came down, drove down from Memphis with my brother who is in the nonprofit sector, but his nonprofit does a lot of video work. And so they came weekend and we did a live audio podcast. So we bought some XLR mics, bought some Shure betas,

and we bought a little USB XLR interface to put all those together, live streamed it, and all of it's a video that the Kickstarter backers will get. They'll get that next month after it's all edited and put together and everything. So it was a heck of a three-day thing i'm really tired yeah i bet but it was a lot of fun i bet you you know i listened to the show live it was episode 150 of the pen addict so it was perfectly timed too which is um it's a bunch of episodes that's a lot of pens it's a bunch of episodes. That's a lot of pens. It's a lot of pens. It's a lot of pens. A lot of ink spilled. I was fascinated listening to it because I felt like this is how people who aren't into tech stuff think we talk, which is you throw out acronyms and technical terms. And they were talking about like I was writing on sandpaper so that the nibs with the widgets are biblis and the i'm just making things up now but it was like i have no idea what they're talking about like i i like for me the pen has got the

little part that you can attach to something and then you've got the little clicky part um and the part you write the end you write with and that's my pen knowledge is just that you point it at the paper and it writes. But they were just like going deep down and super enthusiastic. And I love that. I love how enthusiastic they were about it because it's like those documentaries like The King of Kong or things like that. But I love documentaries about people who are super excited about anything, even if I don't understand it. And the pen stuff I totally don't understand.

But it was fun to listen to them be excited about being together and talking about pens. Yeah. You know, it's, it's one of the, one of those worlds where it's, it's very much in parallel to the nerd world that you and I run in of the, you know, sort of Apple centric stuff. And, you know, you also with the incomparable have sort of the pop culture, sci-fi nerd kingdom as well that I have kind of half a foot in, don't really spend a lot of time in that world, not as much as you do.

But what's great is that passion. I think that's really what defines being a nerd is being passionate about something really specific. And for all these people who showed up to Atlanta, people like flew in. Mike wasn't the only one who got on an airplane to come to this. And people like flew in, like Mike wasn't the only one who got on the airplane to come to this. You know, we're at this party at Knox Workshop and there's like a field note swap going on. And there's like, there's pictures of it, you know, that'll be in the video of these

guys with these huge boxes of field notebooks, which I use and I'm interested in. And like these guys, you know, they keep them, you know, in order of the various issues and have complete collections and everything. And it's just great. The enthusiasm, the excitement, the passion for these things is really what is the common thread between the various types of nerd, I think. And so it was a lot of fun to see that and to be a part of it for a weekend. And I've known Brad for a long time. I've been on their show a couple times of various things but um yeah i had that that thought right through my mind of like this is what people like look at

all of us at wwdc and like huh those guys are kind of like passionate about things that i'm not and uh it's just the same thing right like it's the same type of, of, of passion. Yeah. That's exactly it. I recognize, I recognize the passion, even if I don't recognize what they're talking about, I can appreciate the passion. And I love to see that. I like, I just love it when people are excited about stuff and they love stuff. That's much more interesting to me than people who hate stuff and are bored and the un-we and Oh God, why am I even here? That's not so fun. But the enthusiasm, even if I don't understand it or share it, it's just kind of contagious to be around people like that. So that was a cool little view into another world.

And I think it's really cool that the listeners pitched in to get Mike to fly out. Oh, yeah. And they made the video possible. And I'm looking right now at the Kickstarter page, 479 backers. And a bunch of those people were at the party, which was a lot of fun just to meet some people. A lot of people were like, oh, I doing the super meta podcast thing but we'll stop in a second yeah um like this is why we made relay a thing like mike and i from day one like we want to try things we want to do things that are beyond just putting out an hour of audio week and this is really one of the first like big things we've done and there's another one actually following on it's another kind of weird exciting thing we're going to do like announce later this week but it's it's very much like

this is why we did this because we can just go out and do stuff and see if it works and the kickstarter was very successful and we fully plan to do more of this type of stuff with with various different shows all the great shows all the great shows really um so yeah it was a lot of fun so thank you to everyone who came out and said hi and backed us on Kickstarter it'll be fun to get that video out into the world some of the stuff is just like

we have this shot of this box of Retro 51 which is a brand of pen I bought one and it's like every color in the rainbow plus every pattern you can think of all laid out just beautiful stuff made with care, sold with care, people who use them care about it. Like it's just that – again, that passion, that excitement is just really contagious when you come across it.

Yeah. I should mention that – it's funny that you said I recognize your voice. This is a story – speaking of excitement and passion, this weekend Dan Morin was at the Star Wars celebration, which is the big Star Wars convention, and it was in Anaheim. And he said he was standing there and heard a familiar voice from behind him and turned around, and it was David Sparks from Mac Power Users, who was also at the Star Wars thing. There's a picture of them that I'll put in the show notes, but, um, it was, that was kind of funny. And I've had that too,

where it's the voice thing where you, you, you realize, Oh, there's somebody I know from a podcast is standing behind me because I hear their voice. Um, I have one other short topic before we talk about our next,

uh, our next friend, uh, which is, um, I wrote this thing on six colors last week about buying beer. Yeah. I saw that, which people are like, well's that's different that's not your usual uh that's not your usual subject i'm like well one of the things that that six colors affords me is the

ability to write about whatever the heck i want to write about if i think that it's sort of relevant and i thought this was sort of relevant because i was standing in whole foods because the whole foods is right next to my house essentially and uh it essentially. And it's easy to walk over there and we were getting something else. And whenever I'm in there, I like to look at what beer they have because they, you know, and then your brain is doing the processing, like you're just looking down a row and then you look down the next row and you're trying to read the labels, but not study each of them because there's a whole bunch of them. And it struck me that this is exactly how I used to shop for books, for CDs back in the day when there were record stores,

and all sorts of other things that back when things were scarce. And with beer, there is not, at least in the U.S., it's not like there's an Amazon for beer where you can literally get anything that's available and see what's not available. It's old school. And it just, there's not a whole lot to this other than to say that it struck me that this is old shopping style, but it still remains for a few categories. And in other categories, it's been completely blown away. Because I remember looking for, you know, that particular Peter Gabriel album, you know,

You know, that particular Peter Gabriel album, you know, in cassette or CD form for several years, for like two, three years before I found it in a record store in Ashland, Oregon, when I was on a school trip. And I remember that moment of like, hooray. And I have people say to me nostalgically, like, wasn't that a great moment when you finally found it? And wasn't it fun to hunt for it? And I say, well, I don't know if it was fun to hunt for it, but it was something I could hunt for, something I could do in a record store. And now I walk into a bookstore and I'm like, yeah, I have nothing to look for here. I mean, I can look at the shelves, but I'm not going to buy anything. I probably already got it on a Kindle and whatever. But you know what would have been better than finding it in the record store in Ashland, Oregon would have been having it two years before when I discovered that

this album existed. That would have been better. And I know that's not very nostalgic to say, no, the thrill of the hunt for the thing that's missing and all that, but I would rather just have it. Yeah. I'm the same way. Like I'm why those stores don't exist anymore. Um, also I was one year old when you, uh, bought that, that cassette tape. I was, I was, uh, I was, I was 17, I think when I found that or, or i was i was uh i was i was 17 i think when i found that or 16 but but yeah i was a uh senior in high school when you were a little tiny baby it's true looking for a tape and i did find that on tape i i that was an era where not everything was on cd yet right and that that was an obscure solo album from 1978. And it was available on cassette.

And I found a cassette. And that was a great score. But, you know, I would have rather just had it. And it just struck me that with beer, like, there's a beer that I found that I really liked. And it's hard to find now. And it was a limited edition. So it's probably just not being made. And that's fine.

But I realized there's no way to know. Some places might have it in stock. Some might not. There's no, you know, it's just a craps being made and that's fine. But I realized there's no way to know. Some places might have it in stock. Some might not. There's no, you know, it's just a crapshoot. And that's fine. It is kind of an adventure. Although if I find something I really like and then I can't get it, I just kind of want to have it and I can't get it. And that frustrates me.

But it was just the bigger picture of this is how shopping used to be. And, you know, we can look at it through nostalgia. But I was like, that kind of sucked. I really like that if there's a book that exists, I can get it like infinite loop. We were talking with John on this show and he said, that's the one to read. That's about Apple and about how Apple kind of loses its way when, when, uh, in the Scully era and after. And, uh, it's, it seems to be out of print, but I got one in, I went on Amazon and I got a used copy in like two days. I did the exact same thing listening to that episode.

It's sitting on my nightstand. Yeah, it's right behind me here. And that's kind of awesome. And yeah, I could have darkened the doors of every used bookstore ever and not found it because I didn't go to the right one. But there was a used copy at this other bookstore that was a little further away. Or I could just press a button and say, okay okay now i've got that book that i want to read i i prefer call me uh not appropriately nostalgic but uh i prefer to just get the things i want instead of spending years hunting for them yeah yeah i'm the same way i think it it depends a

little bit like going back to the field notes guys this weekend, or like if I'm looking for, there's some things that you have to hunt down, right? Like if I'm looking for a particular Mac or something to add to the collection, I need to, you know, do my homework on that. But, but for instance, like all the audio gear we bought for Atlanta, you know, the, the nice thing about like shopping online and is that I can do all this research, right? Like, yeah, I knew exactly what I was buying and knew exactly what I was getting into with it. And it was all mapped out and planned out. So when I set it up, I had no doubt that would all work the way I expected.

And that's that's the huge upside for me as someone who, you know, I'm not a usually not an impulse buyer, especially when it comes to like, you know, stuff like audio equipment or, you know, I'm not a, usually not an impulse buyer, especially when it comes to like, you know, stuff like audio equipment or, you know, big ticket items. I'm going to do my research and do my homework. And I know that when I hit purchase that I'm not planning on using Amazon's very generous return policy. And so that's the huge upside, right? Like 15 years ago, I'd have had to go and there were several local audio, you know, AV music stores in town. I could have bought those microphones and cables and stands from, from any of them. But you know, you're, you're just talking to the sales guy and maybe the sales guy is not super knowledgeable about vocal mics. Maybe he's a guitar guy and he's just in the mic section for some reason. And you catch him, right? There's all those variables that you,

that just don't really exist anymore. Like, yes, there are people who review things that don't know what they're talking about, but you can read such a wide cross-section of reviews and articles and comparisons that you can make a really informed buying decision. And that, as someone who cares about that sort of stuff, is great for me. When I bought my USB interface from my microphone, I bought two of different ones,

and I tried one out and tried the other out and then sent one back. That was great. When I bought my USB interface for my microphone, I bought two of different ones. And I tried one out and tried the other out and then sent one back. It was great. That was really great. And because I couldn't decide. And, you know, you could do that before. But, you know, you'd have to go to an audio store and hope they had it in stock, both of them or one of them, and see was, it was not a story. My story was not really about beer so much as how I think our expectations for shopping have changed and how, you know, shopping for beer feels very 20th century. And, you know,

there are reasons for that. There's the 18 restriction. There's the weight of the cost of shipping. It's like, it's serious pets.com kind of stuff where it's like, why do we want to ship this? It's really heavy. And there's lots of interstate in the U.S. There's lots of interstate transport of alcohol kind of laws. So it's totally understandable why this is not a thing that has been revolutionized like some other areas. And it's sort of quaint in that way. And I suppose nostalgic. But I'm happy with a 21st century way of shopping. nostalgic but um i i'm i'm happy with a 21st century way of shopping yeah yeah totally agree all right uh it's time for uh another sponsor break i guess this is my job now because i always read this one so you get to take you get to take like mike you get to take a little moment to reflect as i tell you about our next sponsor it's our friends at mail route uh you've heard me talk about them before. MailRoute is a magical thing that lives in the cloud. And it's like a friendly monster that eats spam,

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Give me a mailbagging, Steven. I feel uncomfortable with that. Mailbagging. Okay. How about this? How about this? An outbound relay. Relay.

Okay. You don't want to step on Mike's thing. You think mailbagging is Mike's thing now? I think so. Okay. Well, you can be excited about outbound relay. It's the name of your... You're the co-founder of something called relay.

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by going to MailRoute.net slash upgrade. That's MailRoute.net slash upgrade. Go there now. And thank you so much to our pals at MailRoute for supporting Upgrade and RelayFM. And thank you so much to our pals at MailRoute for supporting Upgrade and RelayFM. John Syracusa retired from writing reviews. He did.

I saw that. I was at an NBA game. And I was at a baseball game. We posted pictures of sports things in the uh in the relay chat while we were just sportsing all over the place yeah and uh yeah so i you know pick up my phone for a second it's like uh someone had texted me did you see the news about john syracusa i was like what what is that is he okay yeah yeah that was actually my first i was like oh my god like and uh so yeah so there's uh he's been doing this what 15 years it's it's yeah yeah since since the uh since the 20th century wow actually yeah yeah it's been a while i had that

moment where i looked at um the first bylined os 10 review that i wrote was 10-1 so that's october 2001 so um that i i am considered older than dirt by a lot of people because i've been i've been writing about apple since 94 but um john john was out there with his os 10 reviews before i was i mean i i because i like to think that i basically have written a review of everything since 10.0. But the fact is the first few articles that Macworld did on it, I was the features editor. So I was editing them. And I did a lot of rewriting some of those articles because we ended up having really technical people write them. And then the job of the editor was kind of to shape them into an article that was less technical and understandable by other people.

It was a funny era because we were all kind of bogging down in the Unix stuff and all of that. So, you know, I've got my 10.1 review and it's still online. And that one is very much like the it's safe to go in the water now review. But to think that John, I mean, that's just one of those things. Like John was there from the very start writing that stuff yeah the early ones are before Aqua so when it still

looked you know like the classic Mac OS it's really a wild wild time to flip through those yeah it's it's amazing that James Thompson at UL his presentation talked about how Syracuse criticized his version of the doc that was in one of the developer previews. It's just amazing.

But people forget that John doesn't do this for a living. I do this for a living. Even now, my job has changed quite a bit, but this is what I do. This is what my job is. John's job is he's a web developer. That's his job. Everything we know him for, everything that – unless you are one of the clients of John's job is a, he's a web developer. That's his job. Everything we know him for, everything that, unless you are one of the clients of John's company, you know John for his side projects. You know, that's just the facts. And we think he's a fabulous, famous star.

And he is in our world, as Andy Yonatko often likes to say, world famous in Poland. He's got that narrow fame. And he does fantastic work. ATP is my go-to tech podcast. Those reviews are spectacular. But it's important to keep in mind that he's got a family and he's got a day job. And I thought I really liked in his story how he said it's not just about feeling like he's done this job and that it's time to move on, said, it's not just about feeling like he's done this job and that it's time to move on, but also having the prospect of a summer where he's not catching every spare moment when he's at home to write chapters of a book about OS X, essentially, is something he's looking forward to. And, you know, that's a huge amount of work and that's work on top of his work. And then going to WWDC, that's a week's vacation he takes to go there. It's a, it's a big thing.

It's, it's not, you know, and, and yeah, we could talk about like, could John quit his job and be Mac pundit full-time? I think he could probably, but I think he would be uncomfortable doing it. And I think he takes a great pride in his profession, in what he does as his profession. And I don't think he wants to give up being a professional developer to be an Apple-themed pundit, as good as he is at it. So I totally, I'm glad he wrote it the way he did about the, you know, recapturing some of his time for his family, for other projects he wants to do. And it's not like he's going away. When he started, this was his entire outlet. And the fact is, ATP is a great weekly creative outlet for him. And he's on a lot of incomparable episodes,

too. And that's a great outlet for him. The podcasting has made it so that this is not his only way of expressing his interest in these subjects and since he's got rsi so he was dictating this stuff all along podcasting is better right there's very little typing when you're podcasting right no it makes a lot of sense you know on this week's uh atp or last week's i don't know what day it is anymore um when he announced it you know marco was like you know from like the reader perspective, I'm sad, but as someone who knows you personally, like I'm not surprised and I'm almost relieved that you're making this change.

And it is, you know, I made a joke on Twitter that you should read these to your children because they're, I mean, these reviews are part of our subculture. But at the same time, like clearly clearly, if you listen to John, a podcaster, you know, read his site, clearly, these are taking a toll. And it's like, that's just not worth it. And clearly, you know, he came to the point where, you know, this thing, it's time for, you know, this to end. And any of us who have side projects, and I'm in the same boat John's in, where podcasting writing is not my full-time job. And I'm, you know, carving out of, you know, family time and time that I could have if I had any hobbies,

you know, that weren't this. So I definitely understand it. And there have been things that I've done, you know, I used to do this monthly like magazine for members of my site in iBooks, and it took up so much time. I was like, you know, like, this is great. I really enjoyed doing it. I just can't do it anymore, you know, and maybe one day that'll come back, but it was a, you know, the time in and the value out that equation was just off or sometimes you just know it's time, time to move on from something. So, um, and that's really hard to do. It's really hard to step away from something that you care about and so my my my hat's off to him for not only for writing them but knowing when it was time to stop so well and

anybody who who knows john and anybody really who listens to john knows john i mean that's john john john that's john um he's not gonna half-ass it that's the other thing it's like if he's gonna do it he's gonna do it and i think I think that's part of it, too. It's like, you know, could John... John... Because I was thinking about this. Who wants to follow John Syracusa doing those reviews at ours? Like, I thought about it

because I'm a free agent now. And I don't want to follow that act. But more than that... So that's interesting. Like, who wants to follow that? I mean, I'm going to cover the next version of OS X, and I'll do it in my own way on my own terms. which he could do, of OS X, because that would not be the John Syracuse review. It needs to be 20,000 words long. And so for him, it's like you've got to be all in or all out. And he's all out.

And I think that's good for him. It's sad for us that we won't have that definitive piece, but it's not like we're losing his voice. have that definitive piece but um it's not like we're losing his voice so you know that's that's i'm happy for him because that is i mean literally you imagine taking up all of your spare time for the entire summer uh with this project that's he's been doing that for you know 15 years now right which i mean it really is i'm sure if you add that up, and I'm sure he has, it's really crazy. Yeah, and the annual pace now. It didn't used to be an annual pace, but now that it's an annual pace, it is every summer.

Yeah, I mean, back, you know, Demi Tiger was out, Leopard was out, you know, for multiple years. And, you know, I agree with you. You know, I didn't really consider it because I know that gig is beyond what I could do, probably both professionally and time-wise. But I've reviewed Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite on my site, and they're not 2,000 words. They're longer than that, but they're definitely not Syracusean in length or in detail. In fact, my Yosemite one is really just a design review. I

didn't really get into the features of Yosemite. It's mostly, um, what's new visually. And I think that was a nice angle. See, that's one thing you can do if you're not following, you know, if you're not John having to do what John does, you can say, what if I just looked at the design? Right. And, um, and so that's, I think I will continue to do that is find, you know, mountain lion and Mavericks were, you know, feature by feature, what's new screenshots, that sort of thing. But Yosemite was easy because, you know, the visual ever change was so massive.

And I'll continue to do that sort of thing. It is enjoyable, but I know that just these, these smaller ones that I'm doing, how much time they're taking, especially the Mavericks one, uh, took a long time and Yosemite was shorter because it was mostly visual. And I waited until, you know, we were pretty far along, um, in the, the betas. Cause the first dark mode didn't even ship with the first couple of betas, I think. So I was like, well, you know, I can outline, but I can't write or really talk about it until I can use it. But it's one of those things that John's content is not going away.

He's going to be talking about it on ATP and on Twitter and everything. And so I will miss reading them, but there's still a lot of ways to experience new versions of OS X before installing yourself. A lot of people are still going to be doing this. It's a much richer environment for that than it used to be too. That's also true that there was a time when there were not that many people reviewing OS X. You know, it was, it was, I feel like, and maybe I'm wrong at this, but I feel like there was a time when, when I would write a review of like 10.2 or something, there were very few others that I could even look to and compare my Macworld feature story to.

And John was one. And there were not often a lot of others. And now there are a million of them and different angles. And it's a much richer world than it was when he was doing this, you know, even 10, 5 years ago. Yeah, it's definitely true. You know, it's, I mean, 15 years is a long time. You know, my site's going to be seven uh this fall and and that's really i mean you know i've been doing os10 reviews for three

so it's you're definitely right the space has just grown um has grown so much and and that's that's great because it is richer but it is um it's hard to find that definitive review now you know right so see all right um i think we can move on to ask upgrade which has a sponsor this week can you tell us about our friends who are sponsoring hashtag ask upgrade absolutely they are our friends at go to meeting so think about the time, and hassle it takes to hold a meeting. You know, I'm in meetings, in and out of meetings all day, almost every day at work. And it can be a real resource hog to bring a bunch of people into things, especially if there's travel time and that sort of thing.

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You can go do it now and have your first meeting set up and running in just a few minutes. That's GoToMeeting.com. Go check out your free 30-day trial. Hashtag AskUpgrade. I'm excited to do this. You're going to – well, you should hand them off to me. Let me – well, before we've talked about before, had another tidbit that this person wanted to share, which is Mike described the terminals at the Apple

store, the E-Pay terminals, they're called, this person says, Isaacs now? Yes, I've heard that as well. And they were upgraded to iPhone 5s last year, at least in the U.S. And this person says, I'm glad you both enjoyed your try on appointments we trained for weeks on all things apple watch so did you you did a try on did you i did i did do a try on i did the first day so i was up at 3 a.m ordering and then at the apple store at 5 p.m to try it on and it was it was really great you know it's it's like to try it on. And it was really great. It's like everyone says, it's really personal. It's really helpful. I still know, even though I've been gone for seven years, I still know quite a few people at the Apple store.

And so one of the managers came over and was talking me through it. There was a trained employee actually doing the try-on with me, but a manager came over and we were talking and the, the level it's, it's a very high touch experience. And I think it's something that the Apple store used to be known for before they got so busy. Um, and it's nice to see that return to form of really nice, rich one-to-one interactions. And, uh, I think it's great. I think the whole thing is very well done, you know, very high class. It feels like you're not in a computer store, you know, it feels nicer than that. And so I think it's a great little program. And I would say, even if you're not going to buy an Apple Watch, if you're remotely interested in it, you should go just to have the experience of,

you know, taking 15, 20 minutes to try some on and ask questions and use it because it really is an interesting product and a pretty nice program from Apple Retail. Yeah, something that I mentioned last week is the idea that Apple stores with this kind of chaotic, like there's no line, there's no register, you've got to flag somebody down. That's very, you know, it's the future of retail. And yet, it's also really frustrating when you just want to get something done. And you, you know, it's the future of retail. And yet it's also really frustrating when you just want to get something done and you, you know, there's no, it seems chaotic. And I like, I like, I think that's a challenge for the Apple retail experience. What I like about the try on stuff is that it feels again, like they're introducing some structure and something that feels like really good customer service into the Apple retail store experience because it's, frankly,

it's been a while since I felt something quite that different from the Apple store. Now it's sort of, you know, like I said, it's a little frustrating to flag somebody down. It's not like it's bad service, but this felt like a cut above. And yeah, I think it's worth doing if you're curious about this stuff, even if you're not going to buy. There's no hard sell here. It's just, you know, they're well-trained. They've got their little rag and their two watches at a time rule and all that, and they'll make it happen. Yeah, so listener Chris writes in to say,

On Google+, the Verge is commonly known as iVerge due to Apple bias. Do you think that's fair? This comment made me laugh. This is a little inside baseball. Yeah, but basically what I would say is anybody who covers Apple is accused of Apple bias. Anybody who covers Android is accused of Android bias. If you're not a site that is catering

to a particular audience, like, you know, I'm writing to people who like Apple stuff, and I write about it in that context. I'm not interested in or qualified in doing a shootout between Apple, you know, between iOS and Android. I'm just not interested in it. I tried that for a little while at TechHive, and I decided I'd rather not do that, and that's not what I'm trying to do. But if you're the Verge, you've got to do that. And yeah, anybody who says anything positive about vendor A is going to make the people who are fans of vendor B angry. Do I think the Verge is biased toward Apple? Is it iVerge? Well, I don't know. As somebody who knows a lot about Apple stuff, I look at a lot of The Verge's coverage about Android stuff and roll my eyes.

So, you know, I think it's all in the eye of the beholder. I think The Verge has a difficult job, as all of these multi-platform sites do, because first off, they have to cover all of this stuff, and that's hard. And second, you know, it depends on each individual reader and their needs. So, you know, if you're somebody who can't decide, then that's a very different story than somebody who's invested into one platform or the other. And if you're somebody who's just looking at stories about the other side as fodder for your, you know, long twilight struggle with the enemy, then sure, you'll be disappointed if an article doesn't provide you with that material because it says something positive about something. So also, let's be clear about watch coverage. Nobody is deciding

between an Android Wear watch and an Apple Watch because they're both extensions of the platforms. Right. Nobody is saying, which one should you get, a Moto 360 or an Apple Watch? Because nobody, and now I've said nobody, somebody's going to say, well, actually, I'm buying a new phone soon and I'm on the fence about Apple or Android.

Okay. Essentially nobody, how about we say it that way, is going to use the watch right now as the differentiator. Maybe that'll happen someday, but I feel like if you've got an Android phone, you're looking at the Android watches.

If you've got an iPhone, you're looking at the Apple Watch. There's really no other game other than the Pebble. Hi, Pebble. Hi, those guys. So I think, you know, I don't think it's fair. I think it's a tough job, and I think there are a lot of people who are always out. The people who are calling the Verge iVerge are people who want the Verge to bash Apple

and are disappointed that they say nice things about Apple from time to time in addition to saying not nice things about them. But those people aren't interested in unbiased coverage. They're interested in their bias. Yeah. I'm putting the link in now. There's some roommates, I think. So good. Such a funny story.

Got into a um a fight in a fight in a parking lot a guy hit another guy with a beer bottle over iphone versus android yeah i mean that might be taking it a little far i mean i don't want to tell anyone how to live their life jason but i feel like if you have assaulted another human being over their phone choice maybe you should think about things reconsider your life although i will say that story says alcohol is said to have fueled the escalation of this oh shockingly so less than smartphone dispute yeah uh yeah i'm i'm shocked that that might be the case it's crazy don't you don't say that is taking it a little bit far and you want people to buy beer on the internet come on on. Well, yeah. I don't want the internet vending the beer directly to them.

I just, you know. There you go. So, listener Jimmy, our friend Jimmy. Upgradian Jimmy, perhaps. Perhaps. I don't think I'm equipped to bless somebody as an upgradian. People can be an upgradian if they want. I have to make something up if they don't identify themselves as an upgradian or a listener.

Yeah. have to make something up if they don't identify themselves as an upgradian or a listener yeah so he asks would it make sense for apple to make an all-inclusive subscription unlimited iCloud storage beat streaming iTunes match etc so so right now you buy iCloud space that can take care of your photos but if you buy iTunes match it's a separate charge iTunes matches what 20 30 bucks a year. Beat Streaming at some point is going to be more into the Apple fold. Right now it's a separate thing. So Jimmy's asking, does it make sense to just have, hey, I want to pay for just Apple Cloud services, check some boxes, I get what I

want, I get one bill. Sounds great. Yeah, it's a nice idea. This is like Amazon Prime, like Apple great. Yeah, it's a nice idea. This is like Amazon Prime, like Apple Prime. I think it's a great idea. I do get frustrated by the fact that I've got an iCloud subscription that renews at a different time than the iTunes in the cloud subscription, iTunes match subscription, and the beat subscription. I have all of those. They all renew separately. I think it would be great if Apple offered something like Amazon Prime, where there was like an all-in Apple thing. And this is Apple we're talking about.

Apple wants people in their ecosystem. It seems to make sense to me to offer people a, you know, just fully commit to Apple services kind of thing. And offer, you know, a la carte too. So I think it's a good idea. I wonder, I imagine that Eddie Q and company have talked about this. But it makes sense to me. I would much rather just write them one check, put one auto-renew on my credit card and walk away and not worry about it instead of the whole how much. And adjusting their storage options, offering an unlimited tier or a very, very high storage tier, I think would be great too as a part of that.

Because that's one of those places, I mean, we talked about Apple retail customer experience. That's one of the places where I feel kind of nickel and dimed by Apple is in the storage. Like they have all these little tiers and they're way more expensive than their competitors. And it just feels very un-Apple to do that. And I'm not saying Apple shouldn't charge people. I'm just saying the way they do it where it's like, well, you get five for free, and then you can upgrade to 10 or 20. It seems very bureaucratic. It seems very Microsofty. It does not seem like, and the way their competitors are going is very simple. Like Dropbox literally now has, you get it for free or you pay. And that's it. There are two tiers.

There's a terabyte or there's the free tier. That's it. That's the whole thing. So yeah,, yeah, that's a great idea, Jimmy million mil. As I like to say, that's a million dollar idea. He's going to get a, it's going to cost a million dollars. Unfortunately. Sorry about that. Well, listener, Jimmy can maybe get some sort of a percentage, you know, right off the top from Apple. I think that's only fair. Yeah. It's like an affiliate revenue thing for the idea. Yeah. All, all future, uh, Apple prime accounts will be an affiliate deal for Jimmy. Yeah, I do agree that the nook and diming definitely feels real. And what's nice in Yosemite, I think in Mavericks as well, in the iCloud preference pane, you know, you can adjust your billing right there.

But for anything iTunes, you have to go into iTunes, go into your account. You have to authenticate like three times and your app subscriptions, like if you have like Evernote Premium or something that comes out once a year or every month or something, that's all in there too. I would like just sort of a dashboard of my accounts and have it all in one place. I think there's room for improvement there. I think they'll get there. I think Apple, surely someone at Apple knows that that's sort of a janky experience and Apple doesn't really like janky experiences. So I think they'll come around. Yeah, I hope so. I think some of it too

is that it's different parts of the company. Sure. And Beats obviously was completely not part of the company, but I think there's different parts and they're out of sync and somebody needs to come in and say, OK, here is our plan. Presumably there's somebody in charge, like a revenue person who's in charge of all of this saying we need to do a better job of marketing our offerings and put something together that would be better. That's a good kind of marketing, by the way, is when they're like, how do we bring things to market in a way that people will understand you need those people? Anyway, Lister Kevin had a comment, a really good question. He did. So Lister Kevin says, and I'm going to use his pronunciation.

Okay. So Kevin asks, will we ever see an OS XI or is OS X the permanent slash final Mac OS? So I would probably think they would never pronounce it OS X-I because they don't pronounce it OS X, except if you're listening to the audio book of Becoming Steve Jobs, in which case they do. But this is the constant OS 11 question, which is, is OS X the final? Are we going to truly have OS X? We already have 10.10, right? Is there going to be 10.11?

Do they change it? And what I would say is it's easy to get hung up on the numbering thing because it came from 9 to 10, but it was always a marketing term. It was always the Roman numeral and the big X. It was always marketing and the number didn't matter, which is why it's 10.10 now. So I don't think personally there will ever be an OS 11. I don't think that's going to happen. Also keep in mind, iOS in a couple of years is going to be iOS 10, which is also going to be weird. So here's my theory. I'm going to, I'm going to throw out a theory here. I think OS 10, first off, could just stay as the Mac OS name forever until there's no Mac anymore, until they do a huge operating system shift in 10 years. Somebody who's not John Syracuse

will have to write Copeland 2040. Oh, no. So here's my theory. I think OS X is an old name. It doesn't have the resonance that it used to, and we're about to have a collision with iOS. So I'm just going to throw it out there, just a wacky idea. I think at some point soon, in the next couple of years, Apple is going to start referring to OS X as Mac OS again,

and we'll have Mac OS and iOS. And at that point, you might have Mac OS version 11.0, And at that point, you might have Mac OS version 11.0. Right. Mavericks or whatever, you know, Big Sur. Yeah. Arcadia. Yeah. So a couple of things come to mind.

A, OS 9 wasn't going to be a thing. If you go back, like it was going to, they were going to do a bunch of releases of OS 8 and they were going to go to OS 10, OS 9. I was like, oh, we need a thing, which is really my favorite part of Mac. OS 8 wasn't even going to be a thing. OS 8 was just going to be 7.7 or something until Steve Jobs figured out that's how he could get the clones out. Was to say, oh, your license is only for System 7. This is OS 8. Goodbye.

I'm just going to change the number. Yeah. And then 9. 9 came actually after 10, which is the other funny thing is that 10 was already out. And they did 9 as the bridge release for 10. And 10 ran 9 in Classic. And yeah. So it's all weird. It's weird.

So there's that. And, really, that was my favorite part of Apple people mocking Windows. I'm going from Windows 8 to Windows 10 because Apple did basically the same thing. But also, too, if you look at the way Apple markets them, starting with – really starting with Lion and Mountain Lion, but especially now, you don't see Mac OS X 10.10 written out or referenced very much by Apple. The marketing label is Mac OS X Yosemite. It's not even Mac. It's OS X Yosemite. Yeah, OS X Yosemite.

And so they've already adjusted course a little bit. I mean, back in like Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, it was very heavy. This is Mac OS 10.3. Like that's what it was called. That's what Apple called it. And then you got into the like, you know, 10 point whatever name where they kind of mixed them together. But they've pushed toward the Yosemite Mavericks kind of thing,

which is why one thing they could do is continue to call it seriously. They could consider calling it OS 10 and rev it to version 11 and nobody would care except nerds who would be like, well, actually, 10.10 is not a possibility because it's a decimal system and those people are already dead because Yosemite is 10.10. Yeah, so I do think they they're gonna have to do something i think i think ios 10 is a problem i i think you don't want ios 10 so that that's that's when things get weird so i would you know that for me that would be i don't see how the 10 is is important branding anymore you know you've got mac everything is mac now there's mac and there's iPhone and iPad. So iOS probably sticks around because iPhone and iPad are products. They all have the I in front of them. Even though Apple's moving away from the I, they all have them.

So OS X, could it just be macOS? So then you've got macOS 11 and iOS 9, maybe? It's hard to say. I don't know. I'm sure there are people who this keeps up in Cupertino, realizing they're in some sort of weird collision course with names. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is just like when they introduced the new iPad that one time, and they didn't want to give it a number because they were, like, making arguments that we should just always call it the iPad. And they realized, yeah, that's not going to.

Also, they keep old versions around now, so they need to have the numbers so that they can explain. No, no, this is the iPad Air 2. iPad Air also available. iPad Air 2. Faster. So we'll see. We'll see. But I am coming around to the crazy theory posited here that maybe OS X as a brand will get transmogrified into something more like macOS again.

Like in the old days because you know os 10 was intended as a reassuring transition from previous mac os generations and an exciting step into the future but that was a long like we talked about john's reviews that was 15 years ago man it was that was a long time ago it's just the mac now what differentiates os 10 is not the 10 it's Mac. This is the operating system that the Mac runs. So call it that. Yeah. So we'll see.

We'll follow up in three to six years. Yeah. Check back right here. Yeah. That's the beauty of making really long-term predictions is no one remembers them. So if you're wrong, it's fine. Yeah. So check back.

That'll be on upgrade number 190. We'll check back then. Check pot. Listen listener mark writes in says regarding apple watch accessibility could a blind person use one and have the taptic engine tap out the time it's uh it's interesting there's a there's an accessibility page up that that just this just came up this weekend or pretty recently or last week yeah yeah it's a recent edition about accessibility apple's talking about accessibility on Apple Watch now. Which is great. And before we dive into it, I definitely love that this is such a big point of concern for Apple, where so many companies just don't do anything about it.

So it always makes me happy to discuss and see what Apple's up to in this area. happy to discuss and see what what apple's up to in this area and and the watch you know it's it's little right like it's it's i would imagine a hard accessibility thing to to solve but you're looking at this web page i don't i don't see this particular suggestion listed but there's a lot of stuff on here that that should make this easier to use for people with uh both vision and hearing issues going on. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about the idea that the walking instructions being able to tell you to turn left and right and things like that. I imagine this is going to be early days.

It's great that they've got an accessibility story now. I think the idea of like tapping the time and things like that is a really great idea too. I think this will get better. I think between voiceover, because even if you're blind, the watch is a speaker on your wrist attached to iPhone apps so it can talk to you and you have a touch surface that you can use to navigate a little bit. There are going to be some really great applications for that down the line. It's probably

going to be rudimentary to start, but I do think there's a lot of potential here. And Apple does care about this. Apple knows that this is one of those areas where it can actually lead. And it fits, as we've talked about on Upgrade before, it fits with how Apple sees itself, which is as a force for good. And that's not just marketing. I think that's like one of their things that they ask themselves is, how can we make this product that we're doing, how can our presence be a force for good and change in the world? So I think there'll be more there,

but it's a start. And the fact that there's a page about it, I think is encouraging too. And Apple's not going to even know. I think as with so much with a watch, it's going to get out in the market and then everybody, including Apple, is going to learn a whole lot about what to do. I would not be surprised if the Apple Watch software changes dramatically over the first year just because,

in the same hardware, just because they're going to be learning things and realize, oh, nobody uses this. And oh, what a great idea that we didn't implement. And it would just not surprise me if they change a lot in that first year, because they're going to learn so much. Yeah, I mean, the iPhone OS definitely did that. And what's nice, you know, now iOS, those accessibility tools are really rich. And as well, on the Mac, you know, there's a lot of stuff. And, you know, the things like reducing transparency, like, not just for accessibility purpose, but I use that because I don't like, I don't care for the transparency and it makes, you know, it makes weird little edge cases happen.

And so it's not just for people who necessarily need it, which is nice. It gives you some other options if you don't care for something. But yeah, I totally agree. I think watchOS is going to have some pretty significant iteration. So, you know, they did it on the iPhone, right?

The original iPhone did very few things. And the App Store was out the next year on the same hardware. And all of a sudden, your phone could do a billion things. And even though this is launching with WatchKit and native apps are coming at some point, you know, if you look back at those original, you know, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 iPhone OS releases, some pretty significant changes. I think this will just follow in those footsteps. Yep.

I agree. We have one last bit of, uh, of listener feedback. Now, again, the, there is an ask upgrade element to this,

which is listener. Eric sent us a tweet from astronaut, uh, Sam Christopher ready on Twitter. Uh, she posted, uh, from the international space station,

a tweet pointing at the Dragon capsule, which was coming to load up the station. And there's coffee in that nebula. I mean, that dragon. So Italian. And as Lister Eric points out, the Dragon spacecraft was carrying an espresso machine designed for zero gravity, which is kind of amazing. And I can see why an Italian astronaut would want that. But Lister Eric's question is, is this the first Star Trek uniform in space? Because she appears to be wearing, she is wearing essentially a Star Trek Voyager uniform, which I noticed. And I thought that is one of them. And it's got a pin that's not like a, it's not the Star Trek comm badge, but it's something in that spot. And it just made me laugh because that's awesome that

there's somebody wearing a star trek uniform in outer space that is really funny and you know what she wants her coffee damn it yeah i mean i would think you know i've i've read nasa nerd read a lot about like life on the space station and coffee seems like a pretty central part of it so yeah um i know uh you know our our italian co-host on connected is would be very happy to see that this is going on. Now we can send Federico into space. Done. Because now there's zero gravity espresso.

This was the only thing holding it back, really. This is it. Get to the Cosmodrome, Federico. Yeah, iPads work on the space station. That's right. So he can have espresso. He can do his thing. That is the most mobile workstation ever. space station so that's right he can have espresso he can do his thing um i think he could he could

that is the most mobile workstation ever he could just to bring his ipad he could do mac stories from space yes all he needs is an ipad an internet connection which they sort of have and um and espresso i think this is a new exciting direction for mac stories i suspect that federico won't be wearing a star Trek uniform, though. Unfortunately. Probably not. Probably not. But thank you, listener Eric. I thought that... I don't know if that's

the first Star Trek uniform in space, but that was pretty... That was a pretty great tweet on so many different levels, so I'm glad that you sent it in. It was pretty good. Well, Stephen,

I think we're at the end. I think we did it. I think we managed to do a show without Mike. I think so. I think we're both still I think we managed to do a show without Mike. I think so. I think we're both still here. Yeah, it seems so. Nobody died. That's my number one thing with podcasts. Did anybody die during the podcast?

Do many people die on podcasts with you? I don't like to talk about it. It's just my baseline. It hasn't happened. Okay, it hasn't happened yet that people have died. But I figure if nobody dies, then it's probably a pretty good show yeah i've listened to some of your star wars episodes it's amazing no one is just like

blown a blood vessel oh that's true that i think that's as close as we've come as you know john john are you out there you know yeah just gurgling on the floor he's on the floor he's like i just need to gather myself for a moment yeah exactly well this was a lot of fun we should uh we've got dan moran is really jealous he's like when do i get to guest host upgrade and it's like i do talk to him every week on on uh on another show on clockwise but um but it's fun to have it's fun to have special guest stars so i'm glad you could do it while mike is busy schlepping around pens in atlanta yeah well thanks for having me it was a lot of fun. And we should not only

thank each other, we should thank our three sponsors before we go. We should. Sure. Igloo, MailRoute, and GoToMeeting. Go check them out. There's links in the show notes. All of the links we have spoken about today, you can find in your podcast app of choice or in any web browser you might find yourself sitting in front of at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 33. Very nice. You podcast out of choice. You got it in there. It's like you listen to the show.

That's nice. It's true. I do every week. Have you seen this as Spinal Tap? A long time ago. Okay. Only once. That's fine.

That's, that's. Which was a thousand percent time more than Mike. So. That's, that's right. Now, now, now you guys are equal. He just reached you last week. So, all right,

well, this was, this was great. Thanks to everybody out there for listening to upgrade and, uh, Michael be back next week. Steven, thanks for being the guest host and,

uh, we'll see you next week, everybody. Adios. Thank you.