Upgrade - 331: Mandatory Turkey Holiday

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

It's the Upgrade Holiday Special! But first, Myke reviews the AirPods Pro Max and Jason reviews Apple Fitness+. Then we get into the spirit of the season with a holiday-themed #askupgrade, and Myke watches "A Charlie Brown Christmas" for the very first time!

from relay fm this is upgrade 331 the upgrade holiday special my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell and this uh wonderful holiday special is brought to you by squarespace smile pingdom and sanebox ho ho ho jason snell ho ho ho santa mike hurley and believe it or not the holidays are here they are here and we're gonna try our best to enjoy them and we will partake in the tradition that is the Upgrade holiday special and like all good traditions there are traditions inside of it

every episode of Upgrade has begun with a Snell Talk question and I have a question from Ryan today who asks Jason what finger do you use for Touch ID on your laptop? Good question Ryan, good question the answer is my right index finger it's the only one, right?

Yep. I can't imagine there being another one. Is there some perverse person out there who's like, I'm going to make it my pinky finger. Why would you do that to yourself? But maybe. Oh, God, we're going to hear from that. We're going to hear from pinky people now. Pinky unlockers. I don't want to hear from the pinky unlockers, Mike. No, actually, if you can get the feedback in by next week, before the end of the year,

I will accept feedback from pinky unlockers. There's not going to be any follow-up on next week's episode. You're right. Okay, then I don't want to hear about it. Pinky unlockers, hold your email. Well, yeah, don't worry about it because we're never going to address it, right? We could get a million emails from pinky unlockers and I'm not going to leave that feedback for two weeks, right?

Like, oh, we'll talk about it in January. No one will remember this conversation in two weeks. Is that like a really proper, like an English person, like when you're drinking tea, do you extend your pinky fingers and then you use it to unlock your Mac? Because you've always got the finger like free, I suppose. Extended, if you're posh. fingers and then you use it to unlock your mac you've always got the finger like free extended if you're posh i wouldn't mind if somebody also used their pinky finger right like it's also registered but it just feels like like if you're pressing a button right uh-huh you use the index finger it's the pointer that's what it's like the other name for it is the index finger. It's the pointer. That's what it's, like the other name for it. It is the pointing finger.

Like, would, so I want to know the only thing I want to know from pinky unlockers if you're going to contact me is what button do you use to call an elevator? Like what finger do you use to call an elevator? Use your pinky for that too? I think they're pink, yeah. Well, let's

find out. But I would say yes. I guess we'll find out. I've invented what I think a pinky unlocker looks like. And there's somebody who is always extending their pinky finger to do things. Right. If you would like to send in a question to help us answer, to open an episode of Upgrade, just send in a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk, or you can use question marks Snelltalk in the Real AFM members Discord.

Next week, we are going to be participating in the 7th Annual Upgradees. Voting will close on December 23rd. So if you have not got your votes in yet, you have just probably a day or two by the time you're hearing this. So go to upgradies.vote or click the link in the show notes to make sure that you get your nominations in and you can join the many, many upgradians who have nominated maybe some of their favorite apps, some of their favorite content, some of their favorite stories. I'm going to be going through all of these towards the end of next week and tabulating the results. They will be brought along with mine

and Jason's own nominations for those categories. And on our next episode, we will be going through every category, talking about the three most nominated from the upgradies for every category, three most nominated from the Upgradees for every category, bringing our own nominations as well. And you will hear as each award is decided in the seventh annual Upgradees. If you want to prepare yourself in advance, you can also look through our previous award winners at theupgradees.com. And I'll put a link in the show notes to that too. That is our beautiful, wonderful Hall of Fame helped to be brought into life by a friend of the show, Zach Knox. I am so excited. I can't wait to find out who won the upgrade.

Nobody knows right now. That's the beauty of it. I can't wait to find out what got nominated by the listeners. I also can't wait to actually consider what I would choose. Oh, I've been i've been keeping my notes i have some nominations already great upgradees.vote is where you can go to put your nominations in and i recommend that you do that immediately please follow up full screen ios apps on m1 max what is going on here, Jason Snell? They updated Big Sur

to 11.1 and it includes a change to the way iOS apps run on the Mac. So like HBO Max which previously you could only watch in a little window, you can full screen it now, which

you'd think would be good for like video playback um it's not it it's it's it's bad this is like this is literally the worst thing about the m1 max is that the running ios apps on it is not very good and there aren't a lot of good apps that you would maybe want to run aren't there and the ones that are there aren't implemented very well. And this is an example of that where there are all these stories that came out, not to malign the people who wrote these breathless stories about, well, maybe a little. Big Sur 11.1 coming out. And it's like, aha, now they've solved this problem of HBO Max. You can run it in full screen.

And I have to ask myself, did any of them try that? Because I tried that. And what happened is it went into full screen with the app window in four by three, which is the shape of an iPad screen because it thinks it's on an iPad and you play video. And what you get is a letterboxed video with black bars at top and bottom inside a pillar box, which is black bars on the left and the right, because it doesn't stretch the, you watch a widescreen video on a widescreen monitor. It doesn't stretch to fill the screen.

It stays in the box in the center. That's the shape of an iPad. It's dumb. I get, you know, they're working on it. This, this is obviously the most underbaked,

uh, part of, uh, M1 Max and Big Sur. But like the experience was already bad. And I don't know, there's something about them like making this improvement that actually doesn't improve anything very much. You just got to laugh.

It's just not good. It's just a bad experience all around. All right, let's also do some upstream headlines before we get into our topics for the day uh ios and tv os 14.3 have added a tab in the tv app to get you to apple's tv plus originals easily uh this is a very welcome thing now look i applaud apple for not trying to like shove its content down our throats too much. But the problem of having an application which does two things, which is have all your original content and also try attempt to be an omnivorous content provider. If you're not going

to heavily weight your content too much, which I feel like you do a good job, it means it actually makes it hard to find it. Like when I go to netflix i don't have to like struggle to find what netflix makes it's all there right it's all there um so i'm pleased that they've added this apple has struggled with this because they want to be this curator of all the stuff and they've got all the apis so they can say oh you should watch this next episode of something on hulu or whatever or you know all these different services that tie into their API. By the way, this is also on Big Sur 11.1. This is another thing that is added there as well. So they want to be this front end interface,

but then they also have their own service. And you end up in the situation where either they tilt too much to promoting Apple TV Plus stuff, or you can't find Apple TV plus stuff. And while I was watching Ted lasso, while that was rolling out weekly, I would regularly go to the TV app and not be able to find where to click to play Ted lasso. It's like, this is bananas. Why is this happening?

So yes, now there's an Apple TV tab that's just devoted to Apple TV plus. And in there, you'll find all the stuff that's actually on the service which should have been there from the start but i get why they didn't do it i guess but this is better this is it actually i think in the long run will hopefully allow the watch now tab to be um less apple tv plus focused than it had to be because it had to do all the heavy lifting for the service yep now now they don't really need to put it there at all because

it's got its own tab in the uh in the application uh the apple tv app itself will also be coming to google's chromecast devices in early 2021 i had forgotten about this like in my mind it was like oh apple's everywhere i hadn't really considered chromecast because i i don't really think of chromecast like a streaming box but i know it's become more like that over time like my mental model of chromecast has kind of remained as like airplay but i know it does more now than that right i kind of forget that that's the case so this is cool though like this is again like this is exactly what we wanted apple to do which was to make sure that they were everywhere this is what they have to do uh and i'm pleased to see them continuing to move in this direction yeah for sure for sure. My Roku TV got the Apple TV and AirPlay update the

other week. Nice. I actually AirPlayed to it for the first time over the weekend. And it was super easy. It's really nice to have it there. It does make me wonder from time to time why I even have the Apple TV hooked up to it. Yeah, I've felt that with with the um the lg tv that we have i mean really at this point the only reason i still use the apple tv is so i can use the home pods as my stereo pair because that's a good one it's so much easier to airplay directly to my television it's really easy to do it uh and it works seamlessly so you know i'm very happy with that apple is in talks to acquire the rights to two animated features from skydance animation both of these movies are produced by john lassiter so it was previously at pixar and disney um previously because he had a history of

sexual misconduct which came out a few years ago and he took a leave of absence from disney when these allegations came out and what proved to be true and he acknowledged them and took a leave of absence and then never came back and then went on to uh i believe run skydance um their animation division this doesn't feel like a good idea uh for yeah i i definitely saw a bunch of uh uh talk about this in the last week that you know there are these issues with his uh you know his missteps is what he said and he and and skydance brought him in and everybody was sort of like okay like do you you know do you want to work with this guy? He's very creatively, he's got a great creative resume, but at the same time, he has had this history of questionable behavior. There are definitely people who left projects after he arrived, including, I remember Emma Thompson quit when he was hired.

And so, you know, there are a lot of people out there who look at this and say, this isn't a great look for Apple. The Skydance stuff is tainted because Lasseter himself is tainted. And I mean, it's their decision about how they want to spend their money. And on one level, I want to say you're an entertainment company, you're acquiring movies, and if the quality of the movies is good, then you should evaluate them that way. On another level, I think you have to look at who is responsible and say, do I want to be in business with this person? And, you know, the fact is, if you are if you are buying movies from Skydance, what you're saying is Skydance was right to hire a guy who was kind of disgraced and just stick him in opportunistically in order to improve your your outcome of your movies. And then that's what they're going to get. And does Apple want to be a part of that or not and i don't i mean from this report it sounds like apple has just decided that it's the you know whatever the stink is it's like too many layers away for it to

matter to them and i'm not sure i mean everybody's going to have a different opinion about that i i looked at this and went i don't know i don't think i would give my money to john lassiter at this point but it's not my money it's really complicated right like there are so many layers to this onion where it's like you know obviously it's not like john lasseter's not responsible for every part of these movies being made and by commissioning these movies like there's people in the industry that get work right which is important and it's you know it's like it's really it's a very tricky it's like a minefield right it's there's like a billion decisions that have

to be made to go into a situation like this and my argument would kind of be like do you need to do this like apple are these the only movies like do you want is this is this the minefield you want to walk into like right these are you know i know i'm aware i'm aware that he's he's actually very you know incredibly talented brilliant person but at the same time there's this feeling like societally that it's like well he he did some bad stuff to a lot of people and his punishment was that he had to leave the job that he was in which is a sort of, although he still gets to be rich and successful and creative, have Oscars and stuff like that. And get more jobs. And then also apparently get more jobs that allow him to do this.

And there's a question of like, did he really, you know, did he get punished for what he did? Whose job is it to punish him? Nobody's. get punished for what he did whose job is it to punish him nobody's um and the answer is well you know one way you punish somebody like that is by making them a bit of an outcast and saying you know what you're doing for a while if not ever is going to be um thought of poorly and you're going to have to kind of walk in the in the wilderness and skydance was like nope we're going to give him money and give him a job and you know it's it's one of those things where i see the i see the sort of the letter of it the detail of it and i go okay you know it's your money and then on on another level i'm like

but personally i don't i don't think i could i would champion that person so difficult right that person at this point yeah you know there i mean this is this is like a real question for our time and it's like are we saying nobody can change right like that's that's the question right and i don't i don't think i agree with that and if he's never really punished formally yeah there can never be a sentence there's never a an amount of time and this again this is getting into big picture stuff is like is there a is there a a period of time do they have to admit and and be forgiven do they do they serve their time this is the argument about anybody who's been convicted of a crime serves their time and then comes out some people

are like well you should never work with them because they were a criminal they did this terrible thing and then the counter argument is but they did their time they should be able to re-enter society not everything should be a life sentence and the challenge with somebody like lassiter is a little broader because the issues are complex and there was never really any punishment his punishment was possibly paying out people in lawsuits i don't actually know if there was anything and it may all have been settled and hushed up. And he lost his position at Disney. But, you know, he doesn't, I would say it might be easier to gauge something like this if he had to go to jail for a few years and then came out and people said well he served his time but there's this like and i don't know because it while it's one of these things to say he's rich and famous and kind of got away more or less uh free from this other than losing his job and and that's not much punishment at all and he didn't seem to make a particularly contrite admission. I'm also really hesitant to say that whatever he did, the punishment is he should never be heard from again.

Because that seems awfully extreme too. The problem is, I think there's, you know, what is the in-between? This is very heavy stuff for the Christmas episode, Mike. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I really wanted to bring it up though. It felt like it wasn't something i wanted to just let go by um it's very complicated it's because this is a relatively new phenomenon you know of these types of things happening in the public eye

and there being public outcry for them yeah it's not a new phenomenon but it's a new phenomenon that that in the way that that that there is an attempt to deal with them but there is this question of like what is the acceptable amount of rehab uh for somebody's image and somebody's and and what goes into that and and there are lots of different opinions about that and that's the minefield that somebody like apple has to walk like skydance i think is like they just snapped him up they're like ah we know you had a history of problems but you know we'll hire you and that you're like really okay and then apple's like we will we will talk to you again apple hasn't signed anything but we will talk to you about doing business with you here

and that's like i said it's a layer of of of stink removal there but is that enough one layer is that extra layer enough or or not it's very difficult situation what you know what is what is tainted by his presence or should he be allowed to get on with his life and that you know he already paid the price by losing his uh plum job at disney and pixar um a lot everybody's going to draw the line i I would argue, somewhere different. And I'm not going to say what Apple should do here, so much as to say I have to think that Apple is aware of the issues here and is weighing the value of the films with the value of being in business with John Lasseter.

The one thing I just wanted to clarify, when I said it being new, the new thing, what I'm talking about is like, I don't like the phrase, but like canceling, right there this is this is this effect of this is unacceptable behavior and you you know you can't be here and that's great but now what yeah wonder woman 1984 will get a pvod premium video on demand release in the uk love a good pvod we'd wondered what would happen. It's one month after the cinematic release, so from the 13th of January you will be able to rent this movie from places. No one's actually said where,

but the fact that it is PVOD seems to suggest to me anywhere. So it's not going to be Sky as we thought. It's going to be like iTunes, wherever you get your rentals. This is the iTunes window. This is where Wonder Woman 1984 will go. wonder woman 84 will go here in the u.s 31 days after uh christmas when it comes out the same thing and it'll be probably available to buy on itunes and then like two weeks later available to rent or that thing it'll it'll as if it ran

in cinemas for a month which in the uk well i guess maybe some parts anyway let's pretend that it ran in cinemas for a month and then it goes on that second window which is the premium video on demand which is not on a streaming service but rather you can buy it or rent it and that'll weirdly inverted in the u.s that is what will happen it will go off hbo max and enter that window but the nice thing about that is if you don't have hbo max inverted in the US. That is what will happen. It will go off HBO Max and enter that window. But the nice thing about that is if you don't have HBO Max, or in the case of many countries, you literally don't have HBO Max in your country,

you will just kind of bypass that first thing. And then you will also go to the second premium video on demand release. Pavod. Good Pavod. Pavod. Pavod cast. Pavod. Like two Ps in a...

Pavod. Pavad. Pavad cast. Pavad. Like two Ps and a... Pavad. Pavad. The Office debuts exclusively on Peacock in the US from January 1st. Upgrade upstream listeners know that this was a thing that was happening, but there's some details around this which I thought were really interesting. So NBC have announced that the first two seasons of the office will be available for free with ads but all of the other episodes will be on peacock premium only which is interesting on many layers right like this is maybe what nbc's model is going to be because they have their

free with ads and they also have their paid plan this is part of the complexity of of peacock is there's a free free tier with ads there's peacock premium which is pay unless you're a comcast subscriber you know pay with an asterisk some people don't have to pay with ads and then there's peacock premium plus where you don't get the ads so there's the the three tiers. But what this means, and this is going to happen on other services too, HBO Max is probably doing this as well at some point, is there is the argument that what you do is you get people in the door with a free tier that's absolutely free.

And not all of your stuff is on it, but some stuff is on it. It's like a little teaser. You can watch the stuff for free with ads. And then if you want the the rest of the office after the first two seasons you have to pay something or be a comcast subscriber yeah so the seasons three to nine they're on both of the paid tiers the pay with ads and plus premium or premium plus yeah they're also introducing what they're calling super fan

episodes that feature never before seen footage and deleted scenes which is very smart right yeah some of these some some extended episodes appear on itunes but i think it happened later in the run it sounds like this is maybe i i want to find out what the workflow is for this because i really do wonder is this something that was always there that they always built these extended cuts and then they just uh didn't put them anywhere or did they actually contract with the producers of the office to go back and essentially restore the the cut before they cut time. And when did that practice start? Because I know that that became a practice with Greg Daniels and with Mike Schur, the producers of The Office and all of their further shows, all of Mike Schur's further shows. That they actually were so savvy about digital, they realized at some point when the show was on iTunes for sale, that they could take their longer episode that was what they wanted it to be,

but not fitting in NBC's time window and save that out. They would save that and say, that is our creative episode final. And then they'd cut it. I just wonder when that started in the run of The Office and did they have to go back and kind of re-envision this? I'm also fascinated from a technical standpoint like do they back up all of their all of their uh projects they're editing projects or do they only have like footage and logs or like because i don't know i don't know how you reconstruct this and how much work this would be or whether there was something already in the can i'm fascinated by that but i love this idea because every tv show that's ever broadcasting to a place with a time constraint i think this happens now but every one of them they should

make a locked version that's the right version and then cut it to fit so that you can have the your good place episode that's two minutes longer and keep some jokes in that only got cut for time nbc are also creating the office zen a 24 7 channel of ambient noise devoted to the sights and sounds of the office for anyone working at home genius there's some smart people working at nbc this is when i was talking about these the channel idea in in peacock where they've got these channels that just stream things which is very similar to an idea that um back when the fx app existed before it all kind of got subsumed into hulu and disney plus the fx app had this had channels for like the simpsons um and and i think maybe other things

where you could basically put it on it's basically a streaming 24 seven streaming channel trying to replicate the serendipity of flipping around on a, on a TV. And so Peacock has this for a bunch of stuff. This is an interesting take on that where they've built it's like those, you know, those fire log videos, videos.

It's that same concept too, which is it's a very long, or, you know, there are lots of these on YouTube, right? things a draw a long drive like even gray our friend gray has posted like his drive in his in the tesla to utah for like hours and hours and hours and people like to put it on it's soothing it's background noise it's it's interesting but not very interesting so you can kind of keep going so i can only imagine that they've taken some images and their background loops and their sound effects and had somebody build several hours of office of like the office yep that's hilarious very cool all right this episode is brought to you by our friends over

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Nothing's happening at this time of year. So we would create like weird things to do for this episode. But this year has seen so many weird delays in product cycles. We have new things to talk about now. So later on in today's episode, we're going to be doing what we spoke about we would do. So we're going to have our holiday ask upgrade. And we're also going to be doing a Mike at the Movie segment on a Charlie Brown Christmas special. But we have new things to talk about.

AirPods Max and Fitness Plus. These are two things that came out. And I think, if I'm right, we have a 50-50 split on this. You don't have AirPods Max, correct? Correct. I do. I have not yet tried out Fitness Plus, but you have, right? Yes, unlike the hosts of Connected, all of whom bought giant, expensive headphones.

You didn't. Again, listeners to Upgrade know this already. I'm fascinated. I've listened to several hours of podcasts with other people talking about the AirPods Max, and I am interested in knowing what people think of them, while at the same time just not being interested them at all again so to reiterate it's great you just don't there is no headphone product like this that you would want because you don't like over ears right i don't like over ear headphones of any kind that's exactly

right not interested not a knock against airpods max it's not like oh it's too expensive it's the whole category it is a category i don't care about which is why i've loved the fact that apple's headphones up to now have all been kind of little things you stick in your ears um airpod max isn't that that's fine uh there was a time when i did buy a pair of sony noise canceling headphones because i was going on a trip to hawaii and my for various medical reasons um i had been suggested by my doctor that i not have my like big in-ear headphones in my ears on planes because it was it was giving me like headaches and stuff and and so i was like okay i'm gonna get over your headphones and they were fine i don't like them but they they did the job and then the airpods pro came out that were able to pass air through and do noise canceling.

And that was that. The AirPods Pro was enough for me. So you had like pressure. It was like pressure problems. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Inner ear issues. If you completely block the inner ear and then you've got pressure problems, it blocked the ear.

It was like,'s probably probably contributing to uh this so i stopped doing that but then the airpods pro actually let the air pass through and i didn't have any issues with them so i don't use this anymore that's why i'm interested in what you have to say about airpods max which is great because there are some listeners to upgrade who say i want more jason and there's some listeners to Upgrade who say, I want more Mike. Most listeners to Upgrade, I think, are like, it's perfect the way it is. Right? Right?

But anyway, this is a, so I'm going to talk about Fitness Plus and you're going to talk about AirPods Max and we're going to like divide and conquer. I love it because it's less work for me. Let's do it. So AirPods Max sound fantastic. Music, podcasts, they're the best headphones i've ever owned and i'm happy with that because it's what i expected like from an audio perspective i was expecting these to sound the best and they do sound the best um i do not have a pair of

wireless over ear headphones made by any other company. You may remember, I remember, Jason, sitting in the Beverly Hills Hotel in LA in January talking to you about this product because that was when there were more rumors going around. And even then I was saying, I want some noise-canceling over-ears because I love my AirPods, but I'm going to wait

for these. So I haven't bought these products, any of these products. I don't have any of the Sonys or anything like that. This is not the podcast for audio comparisons. I'll tell you that right now because I am not your man, right? There are many

hours on Connected and many hours on ATP of people that have vastly varying views on audio. And you can go and listen to Federico. You can listen to Marco talk about that at length. I've said on Connected, and I'll say it here for the record as well, I kind of don't really subscribe to a lot of this thinking because I don't hear it. And I think everybody hears differently. And I don't think that it's really accurate to tell people how they're going to hear something because I hear people having the same product and describing that product differently.

So ears are weird, right? It is. In fact, I was listening to ATP and laughing at something Marco said that's totally true, which is headphones don't break in. In a break that our brain, we're not seeing the raw or hearing the raw input, right? Our brain is a signal processor and does a lot of things to interpret the raw info coming from outside of our bodies. And it's a little weird to think that the world as we see and hear it isn't really the world. It's our brain's best approximation of the world as we see and hear it isn't really the world.

It's our brain's best approximation of the world that makes sense. But there's truth in that. And that means that not only are people's ears different and their hearing is different, their frequency ranges that they can detect is different. Then there's personal preference. Then there's their brains applying, essentially for computer people, the preferences to the input uh it's it's bananas

so it's hard it is a very hard thing to do i i learned this lesson um a friend of mine who has since passed away was an expert in in color it's like a photoshop expert and introduced me to the concept of memory color which is literally if you see an object that should be one color and it's not that color your brain just makes it that color that it should be and so you can't if you're trying to test is this color right or not on a printer or a monitor you can't use that technique of like well that's that's an apple. I know what color that apple is, what shade of red that apple should be. Because your brain is like, nah, I'm going to use my color

instead of what the eyes are telling me I'm seeing there. And it works that way for sound too. It's bananas. Yeah, it's like the way that MP3 compression works is they just take parts of the music out and just let your brain fill them in. That's how it works. If you ever listen to uncompressed audio and you're like oh i heard something i didn't hear before i said yeah

because it doesn't exist in the mp3 that's why right like that's how it works you know there aren't the differences of like compressed and uncompressed audio they are there because there is literally different data available to you right so i understand why people like lossless and that kind of stuff but i just you know basically the most you're going to get out of me is these headphones sound great the rest of the stuff that i have to talk about is not about sound it's like the product itself because i don't i don't even know how to explain it to you right as an individual it's just like they sound really great i hear things in the audio that i don't usually hear that's like the mark of a good product for me because you know like the separation the stereo is really good so like you can hear things more differently like i

kind of described these like if you've used a home pod these are like home pods on your head right where like the home pod experience for me was like, oh, like I can hear stuff differently. This is really cool, right? Like surround sound or whatever, like you hear things differently. And the AirPods Max do that for me too. And I'm happy with that. By and large, I do find them comfortable to wear. I'm not sure that the weight bothers me yet. I think this is going to take sure that the weight bothers me yet. I think this is going to take longer testing for me to know. I've used them for many hours at a time, and I haven't found myself feeling like, oh, these are so heavy. I haven't had that. But I do use big, heavy headphones for recording podcasts when I do my Twitch streams and stuff,

the headset that I use is very similar in weight to the AirPods Max. So I am potentially an over-indexed person in this field because I tend to use quite heavy headphones in general, which is just a thing I didn't know I was doing, but it's just a thing that I do. So I might not be your best point on that, but like these are heavy. They are heavier than most headphones that you would experience. So your mileage may vary on that one. And unfortunately, there isn't really a way that

you can test them yourself. Like I don't really, I can't imagine. I mean, most listeners, I think, can't even go to an Apple store at the moment. So the noise cancellation is superb. I love it. I have spoke before about just using AirPods Pro for silence when I'm working at home. The AirPods Max are even better than that. They cut out pretty much every noise that would be in my house. And it really, like, you know, when you activate the noise cancellation and Apple has that beautiful sound and they fade it in

and it kind of feels like the world just envelops around you, you know? Yeah. It is so much more effective with the AirPods Max. Because, like, I honestly, like, I imagine in my mind there's like an animation that plays in my head of everything kind of just like a spotlight is on me or something. And everything else is dark around me. It's very impressive. On the AirPods Pro, I think of that sound effect, that little boop.

And I think of it as like a door closing. That's how I envision it, is that that's the door closing and now there's no sound. Okay, well on the AirPods Max, the door's closed and all the curtains close. Lock up the safe and all of those things. It's all shut. It's very, very, very good. Very good. And transparency mode is unbelievable.

It is unbelievable. It's so much clearer. You can hear things that you otherwise wouldn't hear. Both of these are kind of what i hoped and expected right like transparency and noise cancellation are really good on airpods pro they should be even better when you have more hardware turns out it's true so much better in both in both instances uh the case sucks but like whatever for me like i'm kind of like whatever about it like i use it because like i have it so like when i'm done with my airpods for the day i just put them in the case

because i have the case so like why not um it's good that apple have clarified now if you've missed this like because there was a lot of confusion about low power mode and if and when and how that was activated. And it basically turns out that it's all of these things. So there are two low power states for the headphones. There's one when you just take them off. And then there's one which happens after a period of time. And basically, in the case, it hits this period of time where it goes into the ultra low power mode faster so really kind of doesn't matter like it will go into that low power mode

the ultra low power mode um but the main low power mode is the one that's most important and instead of it happening immediately when you put it in the case it's after five minutes when you take them off your head i really my favorite summation of this is something that federico tweeted and he said if you're the kind of person who buys airpods max you're not going to ignore them for three days so the more important low power mode is the one you get after five minutes outside of the case so like i and i completely agree with that like i think the typical person who is used spending the money on these headphones and using them is using them frequently. So the fact of this, like, ultra low power mode happening after three days or a day is not really that much more important.

And that's the storage. I mean, essentially, that's you only use these when you're on planes and you're not going to be on a plane for another two months. And so you store them away. Yeah. Sure. And so, you you know i just think that it's it's kind of a non-issue there was also this um interview that went around from a a japanese publication uh which is called casa brutus and i've seen some translations of it

um going around you can you can find them quite easily for yourself every apple website's report on them but basically in a nutshell uh the designer one of the designers behind this product eugene wang said that apple basically are happy with the case they think it's minimal and efficient for traveling with you can kind of make up your own mind on the case like i kind of feel like the case really isn't fit for case purpose but i also never put my headphones in a case i just put them in my bag i've never destroyed a pair of headphones um again like i think you are you already know what kind of person you are right and if you feel like you need a hard case for your headphones because you're always breaking headphones then either don't get these or wait

until there's a good third party option if you are like me where like i just have the top of my bag which i put my headphones in nothing else goes in there except other soft things i've never broken a pair of headphones i'm kind of cool with it like whatever the case isn't great as as a case i think of it as more like a sleeve for the headphones and even at that it's not great but it works and I'm fine with it, and that's that. I had a thought about the price. A lot of questions about the price, right? Everyone brings up, oh, it's so expensive. Why would you pay $500 for a pair of headphones?

So I kind of had the thought, is an iPhone worth $1,000? Is it, like, you can get phones for $200 that ostensibly have all the same features? Why do you choose to spend $1,000 on your phone and not $200 on your phone? And so I don't really have a point to that other than what I've exactly just said. It's kind of all relative these days. What are you buying this product for, right? Are you buying it because you like its integration with other services? Like I want Apple's headphones because I want headphones that work like AirPods because I'm a big fan of the switching from device to device. It's not perfect, but it's frigging magic,

right? Because I have this a lot. I'm like watching something on my iPad. Maybe I'm watching a Twitch stream and then I'm on my iPhone because it's kind of in the background. You know, we talked about that background audio earlier, Twitch streams are kind of like that too for me, kind of have them in the background, I see something on my phone, maybe I'm looking at Instagram, I want to see a video, I just press play, it starts playing on my iPhone, and then I go back and press play on my iPad again, switch back, magical, right, I want that kind of experience in all of my headphones. And if the only headphones that are available for that cost that price, well, that's the decision that I make, right?

I don't have to buy an iPhone. I don't have to buy a Mac. I can get products in these classes that are much cheaper. But there's choices that I make to be in the ecosystem. And I want all those products to be in the ecosystem. So this is the decision I make. Price is relative these days. Right.

And it's one of those things like what kind of, and this is not, I was going to say, what kind of person are you? That's not really accurate. What is your priority in a particular area? Do you want the nice thing? Because Apple is very good at making a nice product that fits really well into its ecosystem that has some things that nobody else has and you pay a premium for them and we talked about my rules of pricing last week but um in many of those cases it's also possible to just buy a cheaper product that won't

be as nice and that's down to everybody right like? Like you tell, you lay down some Sony or Bose headphones and the AirPods Max in front of somebody and you say, this isn't as nice for these reasons, you know, integration with the ecosystem and the H1 chip and, you know, blah, blah, blah, all those things. And the difference in price is $200 or $300 or whatever the price difference is between those two models. And some people are going to say, yeah, it's never going to be worth it for me to have nice headphones like that. I don't use them enough or I don't care about that enough. I'm never going to buy that. And other people are like, oh, well, if they're, yeah, this is the Apple product and I want nice headphones because I love my headphones and

I'm going to get the Apple product. And that's why all the arguments about are they overpriced or not are stupid. And all those people who announced that it was overpriced, having not heard them, were misguided is because it is relative. Like they would be overpriced if after all the reviews came out, people said, I don't see why you would buy these. The answer I don't see why you would buy these. The answer is there are reasons why you'd buy these, but that's your priority talking there. And if I was in my position that I was in a few years ago where I realized I needed over-ear noise-canceling headphones for a trip and I had to buy some, would I spend a few extra hundred to buy the apple pair gotta say no

wouldn't do it but that's because i would be buying them for a specific reason and wanting a base level of feature but really wanting to pay as little as possible because it's not my priority and that's fine that that's fine too. Apple priced it the way they did, I think, knowing that they were trying to capture this very particular part of the market that was going to pay that price and that they could make a lot of money from that.

And so they did. And those who really hate the price and think that it's bad, I would say if it sells poorly, Apple will have to do something to change their price uh if it sells well then they won't and it's like you know for me i wear i will wear these headphones multiple hours a day now and uh i want the them to tick all the boxes that i want to tick and these ones do well and apple is not apple is not going to forego a lot of profit margin in order to pump up this product because this is an accessory product, right?

Like you could argue that if Apple wants the masses to buy an Apple Watch, which is also still an iPhone accessory product, but like if they want to pump up sales for the masses, they will be more aggressive on price. pump up sales for the masses, they will be more aggressive on price. But this, these headphones are kind of like their cases. And some of the other stuff they make, the leather slip case for the iPad and for the MacBook, like... The one they just made for the iPhone with the window.

Yeah, they are products where there are always alternatives. They are always cheaper. Apples are expensive. They're nice, but they're expensive., they are always cheaper. Apples are expensive. They're nice, but they're expensive. But they're from Apple, they might have the Apple logo embossed on them. They're available in Apple stores and on the Apple online store. And some people will buy them. And that's Apple's accessory strategy. And I would argue that's kind of the AirPods Max strategy, which is this is not a an ecosystem growth product. This is a make more money out of the ecosystem product.

And that's why it's priced the way it is. But I think your experience shows there is a market for it and they're a nice product. And then it's up to everybody else to decide if they want them or not. As far as I can tell, people are having a hard time getting them. It's not PlayStation 5 level, but people are having a hard time getting them it's not playstation 5 level but people are having a hard time getting them so there's clearly a market for what remember when we debated like should apple even make a set of headphones or should they just make beats and stuff like of course there's a market for an apple branded set of over ear headphones of course there is and you know we'll see where it goes in the long run and how how big it gets and whether it's

just a niche product or if it has more followers. But it sounds like they didn't blow it, right? The case is, as you said, sucks, but whatever. But beyond that, the product seems like it's actually a decent product and you could see why some people would pay that price for it. The case is only getting so much focus from the reviewers because everything else about it's so good right people aren't complaining about like another thing about the product it's because like the case i think is the only bad spot of the product itself right so it's just getting a lot of air time because it's the bad part and actually winter charm in

our chat just made a point that i want to mention because i think it's really good and it's another part of buying psychology from apple which is some people buy apple products that's what they buy the apple stamp is like this is an apple product and there's a portion of apple's customer base that's like well if it's from apple i'm interested in it even if it's in a category i've never really explored before so you can also imagine those people right right so that some of the people who would have never bought like even mid-range over ear noise canceling headphones they're just using like little foam on ear uh you know things from the 80s and they're like well i don't know it's from my walkman right they look at this and they're like oh apple, I don't know. It's from my Walkman, right? They look at this and they're like, oh, Apple makes one of those. Well, maybe I'll try that.

And so you will also get the case where people, as Winter Charm pointed out, have never bought this kind of product category before, but will buy it because it's from Apple. And it introduces them to this concept and Apple didn't invent it, but Apple put its stamp on it. And it makes people sit up and say, oh oh maybe there's something here that i should pay attention to because apple thinks it's good enough to make a product in this category and that's not that's a little section of the market but i do think that's an interesting little section all right this episode is brought to you by our friends over at smile get ahead of your productivity for the new year with the power of TextExpander. TextExpander removes the repetition from work so you can focus on what matters most.

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for their support of this show and RelayFM. So tell me about your experiences of Fitness Plus. Fitness Plus. I used it. I really did. I've done three classes because i do i live in a place where i can run outside and so i do run still but i did a 30 minute bike workout i have a recumbent a very old recumbent stationary bike that doesn't get a lot of use now because i work at

okay we'll call it that it It's almost Skeletor too. I like that. Skeleton is when Skeletor leads your bicycle workout group. Have you ever thought about Snellator before? Have you ever thought about that? No, never. And I never will again. So because I run, I don't need it now,

but I used to work in an office and try to find time to exercise outside of the office hours. And when it's dark and cold, I don't really want to go outside and run or anything. So I have it. So I did a class with that. And then I did two beginner classes of high intensity interval training and core, just their introductory classes. And I have never done, and I have never done, how shall I put this? I've never used any of the competing products. So I cannot give you a comparison to the Peloton, either the live classes or the Peloton recorded classes that they offer or other third-party video based classes. In fact, I've never really done a fitness class

since I was a sophomore in high school and had PE. So guided physical activity is not a thing I know anything about. This is kind of great, really. I had the headphones.

I'm not a headphones guy. You did the fitness thing. You're not a fitness class person. Yeah. But to be honest, isn't that better? This is back to what we were just saying, right? Which is sometimes Apple stamp Apple's entry into something. Especially if you are, as we both are, I think, the Apple One premium level, the high level of the Apple bundle.

And so just a new fitness thing just rolls into your bundle and you're like, well, I've got it. Maybe I should try it out. It's from Apple and it came to me and it's essentially free because I'm already paying for the bundle. Maybe I'll give it a try. so i did and um what i learned is that it's pretty good it that the um it seems to fit apple's brand in a way that you know in the early days of steve jobs's return they tried a bunch of content initiatives of like reviewing websites and stuff and it was bad and it was just completely out of apple's range remember back those were the days where apple trying to do things like like cloud services and websites and stuff was just clearly outside their competency and over the over the years over the last 20 years they've gotten better at a lot of that stuff and fitness plus is one of those areas where like the

videos themselves the way the people the presenters have been trained. It's, it's very high quality. It's not, it's, it's clearly fitting with Apple's brand promises. You don't, you don't watch it and say,

Oh brother, I can't believe Apple made this. Like, Oh no, you, of course this is Apple. Like the way it's shot, the way the smiley people.

And like, it is so in keeping with what Apple kind of represents. So good job on that because that's a place where you could make a misstep and be embarrassed and embarrass your whole company

if you don't execute it properly. And I think they did a good job. Okay. I think the content is good. It's integrated with the Apple Watch, mandatorily so. And I have two thoughts about that one is I really like it

it's a gimmick but it's a good gimmick like when I'm doing the stuff that's out in my living room floor in front of the TV on the Apple TV so the high intensity interval training and the core stuff you know my watch buzzes

to say the workout has begun and it automatically ends the workout at the end and that's kind of fun and i can see my heart rate and my rings on the screen while i'm doing it and that's nice um and i i will grant you these are introductory exercises but it's like it's nice it's not super necessary but it's like, it's nice. It's not super necessary, but it's nice. My, my first thought. So my daughter's home from school for a few weeks and she was interested in it and she can't do it because she doesn't have an Apple watch.

And that was one of my immediate thoughts was that's dumb. Like I know they want, they, they perched this on the Apple Watch and they want it to be a part of the Apple Watch, but my first take on it is it doesn't use the Apple Watch interactively, right? It's not like the videos change

based on your Apple Watch data. My understanding is they just play the videos and your data is there. That should be version two, by the way. Right i imagine i imagine they will go there right the the idea that it will adapt to you and and you'll get the you'll get more whether it's the video or whether stuff comes up on the screen or audio plays that it is more interactive directly to your data eventually other than just like the little burn bar and stuff. Like I imagine they'll get there, but for this round, it doesn't really matter. You could literally sit on the couch and watch the video

and I think it would just, I suspect, I didn't try this, I should try this. I suspect it'll just play the video, right? And there'll be like, you know, low heart rate, no rings, nothing. And it'll just, you'll be at the back of the class in the burn bar, it won't matter. And if that's the case, what I would say is you should have a guest mode for somebody who doesn't

have an apple watch that just lets them watch the videos since they have access to the to the fitness plus videos because like that there's a great example of my daughter might be interested or i mean she could do it like we could turn it on and have it be my wife's watch or my watch and then she could do it but um it just seems dumb to me that they should be selling watches based on people having this is it. Right. And you're not, I don't think a lot of people will buy the Apple watch for fitness plus if

they've never used fitness plus. I think it's, it's more of the other way around of like, Oh, I want to try this out on. It'd be so much better if I had an Apple Watch. Yes, exactly. I think it could work both ways.

And I admit, in the long run, Fitness Plus should take that data and do smart stuff with it. And they should build branching workout videos that will actually adjust. And they'll toss up a little close-up of the instructor saying, hey, you're slowing. Pick it up. Pick it up a little bit. Whatever they need, a closeup of the instructor saying, you know, Hey, you're slowing, pick it up, pick it up a little bit, right. Whatever they need to do. You could, you could do that, but it's not really doing that now. Now I will say the bike class I did, I was super impressed. Haven't been on the bike in a while, um, but I do run. And so my cardiovascular fitness is probably the best it's been since I was a teenager because i you know after i went to college i i and didn't have to take a pe class anymore i sort of ceased anything but i have like play tennis or you know go for hikes and stuff but not

serious like i am going to go run two miles stuff that i do now two or three times a week um so i i'm not a physical specimen in any way, but at least I, if I tried this a year ago, it would have been very bad is what I'm saying. Right. So it's a little bit better, but the beauty of having run is that I kind of know what my heart rate range is. And I know what it is when I sort of peek out at the, I can't really push it any further and the way, and I imagine this is standard technique for a lot of these classes because you've got different people at different levels so the way they structure the the the bike class is they they have um in that class she's got uh the trainer has people around

her in this case i had a woman trainer um and and so there are other trainers around riding with her and it's kind of like you feel like you know she like you're in a class i think is what they're trying to go for it's very clever um and then what and unlike the uh the floor classes where there are three trainers and essentially there's the main one and then the main one is sort of medium intensity and it's like the person to the right is going to do this a little bit easier like the person to the right is going to do this a little bit easier. And the person to the left is going to do this a little harder. And it's how they sort of structure it. So that based on your level,

you can choose what one you want to do. That's cool. Although I think to myself in the long run, you should choose and it, or it should know, and it should just show you the video that's of that. But I realized it's more videos. It's more complex.

I get it on the bike. Instead, since there's no feedback from the bike, right? The bike isn't connected to Apple fitness plus it's just your watch. The way the instructor has to give the feedback is all based on you making decisions. And it's not only hitting the limitation of what they can do, but it's also very clever and i imagine this is a technique that all trainers do which is she would say we're going to pick this up now increase the the resistance on your bike now we're going to take this down a little decrease the resistance on your bike and then we're going to do this pace and you can watch the video and the pace of the music because there are playlists that play behind this which is very clever you can go get those songs on apple music afterward yep synergy um the so you're doing the pace uh and you're

doing the resistance but it's not like you should be at resistance level whatever it's like you should increase the resistance a little you should decrease the resistance a little and you get to make the decision as i did while i was going you know is this too much and is this not and the best part and this is the the best use of the apple watch that i found in the whole thing is that the bike trainer said when we were in a medium kind of bit she said in this part this is not the hard part so if you are working really hard and your heart rate's way up, you're working too hard for this part. And that was great for me because I was able to look at my heart rate on the screen of the iPad, not looking at my Apple Watch, even though that's where the data was coming from, and realize I should target my heart rate based on the feedback of how hard this part of the workout is. And I thought, this is really brilliant because I'm doing a self-guided workout with a trainer, right? Because the trainer doesn't know what I'm doing, but I have enough information between the trainer's explanation of how this is going to go and my heart rate on the screen that I can figure out

this is going to go and my heart rate on the screen that i can figure out whether i need to be uh more resistance less resistance or whatever because if my heart rate's 160 and it's the middle part i have nowhere to go up from there and that's a mistake i should be down at 120 so i've got room to grow and get you know and get exhausted later in the workout i don't know it was again for people who are old hands at this they're going to be like well yeah you've just described literally every class and that's probably true other than the live apple watch data which is a nice gimmick and even there i'm sure there are fitness things where you compare a sensor and you compare your bike data and all of those things are probably true but coming at this from the other side i'm like the content was good the apple watch while unnecessary at this point was fun to have it there and i do track

all of my workouts on the apple watch so having it do it automatically for me and give me credit was a nice little bit of integration but but it feels like there's a lot more if they're going to require the apple watch there's a lot more they could do with it um and if they're going to not require the apple watch i think that would be smart because i think a lot of their stuff doesn't need it and it would sell people apple watches and then my only other complaint would be i think they need some more organization in the classes i I think I actually, it's one thing to kind of like pick through the classes, but I kind of like be able to fit almost a fitness profile of myself that says I'm at this level on this kind of exercise and this level on this kind

of exercise and get some sort of like easy filtering of what is there for me. Also, I get the sense that they're going to be producing new episodes regularly. And so I'm unclear if you can like say i love this trainer i love this i love this uh level and have those pop up too and i just i feel like it's a we were just talking about the apple tv plus section of the tv app and how apple has struggled with organizing categories of videos and stuff like that and i think they're struggling on fitness plus and it's not exposed right now as much because there aren't that many videos but it's only going to get worse i saw because i was poking around in the app today

and they had a new badge next to a bunch of videos so you know they're gonna keep adding new ones which is good because you want you don't want to keep doing the same workout all the time it helps with variation um i was planning to to try this out on the weekend but our weekend went a little bit wild here in the uk and i had a lot of stuff i needed to take care of uh-huh yeah um and so all i've done is like poke around in the app and the thing the main thing that i didn't like is that the classes don't really seem to be organized or grouped in a way to help you understand who they're aimed at so like what i said is like i wanted to do yoga that's the thing that i'm most interested in and i've tried other yoga apps and i've had good success with them in the past and i wanted to try yoga with with Plus. There's many different types of yoga, and it's kind of difficult to understand

what exactly you're going to be doing from the preview information that you see. Like, what is the difficulty level of this type of stuff? You know, like, there's still going to be a, even though, as you say, like, I think it's super cool, I didn't know that, about, like, the multiple trainers, and you kind of pick, there's still different types of these activities, and you might be I think it's super cool. I didn't know that about the multiple trainers and you kind of pick. There's still different types of these activities

and you might be looking for one or the other. And my expectation is that you find this stuff out by trying it. And that's cool if it stays that way. And it's version one and the catalog right now is very small. So they can afford, I can see why the argument is we need to launch this.

Yep. And the content is our priority and getting this basic functionality is our priority. And then we'll go from there and build it out. I get that. I get why they might do it that way, but I agree with you. I just,

just sitting here talking to you, having used it three times, I could come up with a list. Like, you know, I want to subscribe or I want to set a filter to trainers, to levels. And maybe if there's stuff like this in there, my apologies, I guess that

means it was less obvious than I would like. And I have to figure that out. But I was also thinking like exercise classes and making an appointment. Like some of us, you know this about me, Mike, some of us are motivated by appointments, right? Like I make an appointment to write an article in my calendar. Sometimes I think, wouldn't it be nice if you could say, I want to do this class on this time and I get a push notification or I open the app and it says, you're, you know, you should do this class. You haven't done this class this week. And like, there's some more motivation they can do as a part of the organization to get you to go to your classes and, you know, go to virtually and, and do this stuff. But, you know, it's a, it's a 1.0. And, and overall, what I would say is I think the content is very good. And, you know, it may not be to your taste. You know, people who do Peloton, some people love it

and some people hate them, hate the trainers and hate the classes. And it's like, everybody's looking for something different out of fitness and exercise motivation. And in the end, I may very much have opinions about that, which I don't right now because I haven't done very much of it about like this trainer bothers me and this trainer doesn't. Are they too smiley or are they not saucy enough? Is it a problem that they don't swear? Or is it good that they don't swear? Like on Peloton, where they apparently swear a lot. Like, I don't know all of that. But at first blush, it seems professionally done.

The content seems good. The people seem friendly and likable right at the beginning, which I think is important. If you're like, well, who the heck is this guy, right? And like Apple has cast this, because it's basically a TV show, has cast it pretty well in terms of the people. And it also looks, the studio is beautiful. It's in Santa Monica, their Fitness Plus studio. It's gorgeous. And I would say also, I kind of like the idea that these people, these trainers are kind of the stars and they're working for Apple and they're, they're getting compensated well for being the stars. And I say that because I actually read an article about how one of the trainers finally got to buy a house for the first time. And I get the strong impression it's because she works for Apple now and she gets to do that. it's like that's cool kind of in the background too so i don't know it at first blush it seems pretty good but there's a lot of room for improvement especially on ironically on the tech side where they don't and and somebody who's more into fitness stuff may be able to come up with some specific critiques about like where their holes are in terms of what they offer but

um and i would be interested in that because presumably they need to do more content development as well but on the tech side and the interface side i i can see where they're where they're lacking i'll also say as much as i like listening to uh podcasts when i run and i'm gonna say like there's there are apps out there like zombies run is one where there's like to podcasts when I run. And I'm going to say there are apps out there like Zombies Run is one where there's like motivation audio along with your music playlist

that happened that let you kind of like entertain you and motivate you while you run. And that seems like an obvious thing for them too is I'm out there running with an Apple Watch and a pair of AirPods.

It seems like it's only a matter of time before they offer audio trainer stuff too right like right now it's all about video but it seems to me like what's missing is they don't have a companion apple doesn't have a companion for when you run i know like there's nike stuff and there's Nike stuff and there's other stuff out there, but that would seem like another product area for them that I would be kind of intrigued by is the idea that the trainers are now coming with me when I go outside to run. This episode is brought to you by SaneBox. When thinking about the biggest time waster at work, we all know it's email, right? We can all agree with each other. How much time do you spend in email every day? How many emails are you sending that kind of you really don't want to have to send? Or how many

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puts them all in a folder, and I can peruse them at my leisure. You can see how SaneBox can magically remove distractions from your inbox with a two-week free trial. Go to SaneBox.com slash UpgradeFM and you can start your trial today and get a $25 credit. That's S-A-N-E-B-O-X.com slash UpgradeFM. Our thanks to SaneBox for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, let's actually get into the holiday-themed portion

of the holiday special episode. Oh, hooray. Can we get some... We're going to do some holiday-esque upgrade. Can we get some special holiday-themed lasers, Jason? Perfect. some uh we're gonna do some holiday ask upgrade can we get some special holiday themed lasers jason perfect look at that you're welcome that was beautiful yes i do have sounds of jingle bells on my hard drive i do

i do who doesn't everyone rick asks what is the preferred snail zone holiday meal ham turkey do you what do you do what is what is your thing i know that ham is your thing i know that because my wife doesn't eat pork so it's it's not ham i i eat ham when i was a teenager i remember telling my parents that i was i was tired of turkey and could we have a Thanksgiving ham, which we did, which is funny now thinking about that. We have two preferred holiday main courses. One of them is a turkey. I do a brined roasted turkey. That's very nice. And the other is a flank steak, marinated flank steak on the grill. Very nice too. Those are our preferred, I would say holiday meals. We had the flank steak for Thanksgiving and for, we're going to have the flank steak for Christmas Eve and a roasted turkey breast

for Christmas day, along with a bunch of sides. We did a, not quite a draft, but we did a family collaboration, or as they would say now, a collab, about what all the sides were. So our idea here is that since we're not having guests, everybody, as we did with Thanksgiving, everybody's just sort of picking stuff that they want, and we're making it for ourselves, and we're going to make sure everybody is delighted by all the sides. The ultimate holiday meal.

That's right. So Brussels sprouts are in there, and there's bread that we're going to make, and there's going to be pie, and there's cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes. And I've got this sort of like stir fried potatoes thing that I did for Thanksgiving that I'm going to redo. And, you know, we'll have a good time. Mike, do you have do you have any traditional? Is it the traditional English turkey? Yeah. Turkey is the is the meat because we don't have thanksgiving right yeah so see we

already have a mandatory yeah turkey holiday so our turkey holiday is christmas it's christmas yeah due to many family changes that we were going to be making our first christmas dinner this year anyway i think it isn't just covid that is forcing us to me and adina to make our own christmas dinner we were going to be cooking the family christmas dinner anyway and um so i am excited about that we're doing the whole nine yards um even though we're having a much smaller christmas than we had imagined even up until three days ago our chris uh our family christmas just keeps shrinking and shrinking i think at a certain point i might just be cooking for myself i don't even know anymore uh but that's kind of the way it's going i understand why but it's it's

still a shame um but we're gonna be cooking everything the whole nine yards we're doing like we're doing turkey and pigs in blankets you know sausage wrapped nine yards we're doing every like we're doing turkey and pigs in blankets you know sausage wrapped in bacon we're doing brussels sprouts with bacon on them uh we do it what else have we got uh excellent roast potatoes yorkshire pudding we're doing the whole nine yards i'm very very uh excited for our christmas meal this year to be honest we already cooked a a trial run of this a couple of weeks ago because we've never done a meal of this kind of scale before as the two of us like we don't really cook meals that require timing to be so important right you

know like we've never done a meal that way before when you've got multiple sides and the main course and you have to time them all out yeah that. That's hard. You know, like when we cook, we're cooking maybe with like two things on the hob and one thing's in the, one thing in the oven at most, you know, like it's not how we normally cook. So I'm very, very excited. Very, very excited. It's actually good that you're doing, it's such a small scale because that's a good, that's a good practice run. That's a good test. As somebody who has made that meal for 12 people in my house in the past it's like that amps up the stress a lot and there's too many cooks at that point there's like you know my mother-in-law is coming into the kitchen to do a thing and i'm like no don't

throw away i need it i need that yeah it gets stressful so uh that's that's good it's good it's fun i i mean we we cook a lot for ourselves at home. We mostly just eat. We're not a big takeout order out family. We're not. But this is amped up, right? special and when in this case we're isolated and it's just us and there's there's no guess um it's uh it's something to make it feel special and different and like a holiday i think that's good next question comes from andrew if you could entice apple to create a messages send with effect screen like confetti lasers that was christmas themed what would it do well my the obvious one is like a snowstorm that's what i was gonna go for to snow that would be yes and with snowflakes and with snow and there would be like little drifting the snowflakes would drift and you know if you want a little sleigh or something to fly across the top of the screen that'd be okay but i think a more generic just winter snow kind of thing would be super christmassy but also applicable

whenever you have snow you could send that along so that's what i would imagine maybe some fairy lights dropping down from the top of the screen or something could be could be a cute little thing to do but snow is the snow is the is the way to go there, I think. I always forget to send messages with effects. I always forget that. I do it quite a lot. And I am actually a fan of the fact that Apple just does some for you, right?

Like if you say congratulations, they just send the confetti. Like, why not? Prem asks, fake Christmas tree or real Christmas tree? Real Christmas tree. I'm a fake Christmas tree guy real Christmas tree? Real Christmas tree. I'm a fake Christmas tree guy. We don't have a lot of space. We're in an apartment, right?

Like, we have our Christmas tree is called a slim Christmas tree. It is a very weird tree. It doesn't really go out very much. And it's just under six feet tall. So it's not a big tree. I would love a real big tree. It will be something we'll do in our future. But not right now.

I just got a message sent with lasers from Jason. You did. From my Mac. Although I'm on Catalina. So it just says effects. And then in brackets, sent with lasers. There were no lasers. Well, you ruined it all.

Sent with snow. Just imagine that it was sent with snow. Yeah, I've always had a real Christmas tree and we go out and get one and bring it in and that's it. It's nice. It's a nice tradition. It makes the whole house smell nice.

It's great. And the cats. Oh, the cats are fascinated by it. So that's extra fun. And then on that that building on that uh steve asked what is your favorite christmas ornament on the tree what is yours um mine is a uh or we got early on i don't remember exactly when but it was a long time ago very early on in our marriage and it is this white i think lauren got it for me it is a white i want it i think it's a gibbon it's definitely an ape or monkey of some sort and it's in two pieces it's got the sort of the flat

part which is the body and the face of the of the gibbon and then there's a little curved part in front of it that's the two arms. And that means that as it sort of dangles, the arms kind of go side to side, like monkey-like. It's great. I love it. It's my favorite.

It's not that big. It's just, it's very subtle, but it is my favorite and all. And if you do come to my house, don't come to my house. But if someone were to see my Christmas tree, they would notice that there are lots of monkeys on it. There are very many monkeys on that Christmas tree.

We have a quite eclectic selection of decorations too. And our favorite one was actually immortalized recently in one of Adina's comics. So my wife Adina is an illustrator and comic artist. She has an account on Instagram called Sticking Out Comics. I'll put a link in the show notes so you can see it but there's a couple of things going on here with our tree so our favorite one sits on the top and it is a stegosaurus with a stocking in its mouth oh man that is our topper but a new favorite is the one that adina's character is holding in the in the comic which is a stosaurus. So this is the one with the

pointy parts on the back, wearing three Santa hats. So we have lots of dinosaur-themed ones, and we have some weird Christmas decorations, but we like the dinosaur Christmas decorations. They're very, very good. Eric asked, money no object,

what is the best technology gift for you money no object why don't you answer this one first Pro Display XDR because it feels like the most frivolous technology purchase I could imagine

for me because like I don't really have a use for it at all and I don't care enough to own one you know like I have a like an LG display that I use and I really love the LG display it's one of their ergonomic ones and it looks great to me but it but I know it's not a 6K Pro Display. And so for me, a Pro Display XDR, it's something I would never buy for myself. I just would never buy that.

But I would love it if someone bought me one, the one with the matte screen as well, because let's do it, and a stand, of course. So I think that would be mine. All right, A Tesla. That's a good one. I'd like a Tesla, please. I'll pick a model if you want me to, but you could also surprise me.

It's fine. I'll take whatever. I'll take your Model 3. I'll take your Model S. I'll take your Model X. I'll take your Model Y. I don't care. I'll just take a Tesla. What would be the one you would potentially think

about for yourself though i don't know i i dream of one day having to have this conversation um and i it's i think realistically it's more likely going to be a model three because it's the cheapest one but i i actually think that it's a possibility that it would be the model y which is the crossover mostly because we do have like a dog and we have a minivan right now. And so having a vehicle with a little more space and a little more flexibility rather than just a standard sedan is probably what.

So I guess I would probably ask for a maxed out Model Y because it's very expensive. No Cybertruck, please. Not interested. Yeah, I mean, if you wanted to go for expensive, that would be the one, or a Roadster, but none of those things are what you want. No, thank you.

Sam asked, what was one of your favorite holiday gifts as a child? I gotta say, I thought about this, because there are a bunch of, like I got a bike, I got a little, um, battery operated scooter when I was little,

that was, was like, you could sit on it and drive around the driveway at two miles an hour, which was pretty awesome. I think I got a go-kart at one point, which was pretty great. But I think my answer has to be the Atari 2600 because that was, I don't, I actually don't, I was thinking about this. I don was thinking about this i don't know i should look at my mom's pictures when i got the atari 2600 1980 maybe 79 but it was

absolutely the thing i wanted the most and um my parents had put up a front about no video games in the house mostly because my dad used the excuse maybe he thought this i don't know that it would break the tv he didn't want to break the tv by attaching one of them newfangled video game things onto it was that a thing that people thought would happen no oh no he was just i don't know what i i don't know whether he was worried or whether he just made that up as an excuse to not buy one but i did get one for christmas one year and it was the most amazing thing ever so i'm gonna go with atari 2600 in fact jonathan colton has a song called 2600 that is on his fantastic christmas album album great Christmas album with John Roderick and that song

perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being a kid wanting an Atari 2600 under the tree absolutely I usually give that album a good listen every year and I have forgotten I have several of those songs on my

sort of master playlist of Christmas songs. And so they come up and I laugh because my daughter was pointing out yesterday that there are probably some Christmas songs that my kids think are popular, well-known Christmas songs that actually nobody else knows except us because we like them because we put them on that playlist. But yeah, there's several Colton Roderick songs in there. I will ask you at this point, we'll come back to my answer in a minute,

but just while I'm here, do you have a favorite Christmas song? Favorite holiday song? Favorite Christmas song? Like a favorite, your favorite song? Yeah. Well, if I have to pick one song, I'm not going to pick one song.

I'll pick the modern version is Last Christmas by Wham. And the classic version is going to be the Christmas song by Nat King Cole. Okay. And then I'll throw in some favorite Christmas albums. The Vince Garaldi Trio's Charlie Brown Christmas album is probably my favorite Christmas album. But I will admit to loving the Nat King Cole Christmas song album and also the, I forget, was it Jolly Christmas with Frank Sinatra? One of the Sinatra Christmas albums where he's tossing it off. He doesn't care. There are lots of background singers filling

in for all of Frank's weaknesses, but I kind of love it. I kind of love how ridiculous and, and, and I don't know, Sinatra it is. So I listened to that one every year too, but if I had to pick one album, it would be the Vince Giraldi, uh, Charlie Brown album. My favorite Christmas song is Step Into Christmas by Elton John. Really underrated Christmas song. It's super super fun it's not like other christmas songs i love it my uh going back to the original question that was from sam my favorite holiday gift as a child was the year when i got a game boy pocket with pokemon blue best christmas i was so excited i didn't sleep the night before i just did not sleep the night before christmas because i was so freaking excited to play pokemon because by that point i'd started watching the

anime and like i'd gotten books and stuff but the game i didn't have the game right because the the game was going to be my christmas gift uh i was so amped for that game and i freaking loved it and i have so many vivid memories of that Christmas. It's one of my only childhood Christmases that I really remember. I would have been like 10, maybe, around that kind of age. So what you're saying is both of us answered the same thing, which is a video game when we were 10. Yep.

The video, I mean mean that's clearly there's clearly something very formative about that experience i think so ryan asked what are you looking forward to in 2021 oh being out of 2020 seeing people uh covid vaccine um i mean i'm hoping the world is a better place in 2021 and you know you say that every year around around new year's but i have never met it more yeah this one i just hope the world's a better place. Particularly rough. Like, just to double down, like, you know, like so many people, you know, I have spent the longest time away from my friends than I have ever. And, you know, I would imagine some people have been able to have,

like, some outdoor experiences with some friends, and I've had that, right? Like, I've gone for walks in the park with some friends and stuff. But most of my friends people like you I have not gone this long without seeing you in five years and so that is going to be a big thing for me is being able to see people I care about yeah uh Tom has asked I've never had eggnog and I don't drink dairy do you like eggnog? I don't know if Tom's trying to get us to convince them

to go hard on the dairy but I love eggnog it was a thing that we started drinking maybe two years ago I'd never had it before and we followed a recipe from Binging theBabbish, which is one of my very favorite YouTube channels,

and now we have made the Binging McBabbish eggnog part of our Christmas tradition in the Holy Household. I don't like eggnog. I'm not interested. You know what, Jason? I kind of figured that you were going to say that. I don't know why, but I just kind of felt like that. Eggnog doesn't really feel like a Jason Snell thing to me it's not it's not it's pleased that I got that right but I recommend it I love it it's it's a lovely holiday drink and Steve asked how do you prefer your Christmas tree to be lit white lights colored lights or

real candles uh does anybody light their christmas tree with candles is that sure people in the people in the 18th century yeah i do you know what jason i bet there's a correlation between people that unlock their uh computers with their pinky fingers and real candle tree people so people so can't pinky unlockers are are candles from real candle people yeah it feels like there would be a correlation there to me it's like an unnecessary fanciness the answer is colored lights that's the answer okay colored lights not blinking no not blinking i have white lights but it's's not because I really care. They were just the lights we bought.

Because Batsa happened to buy some. See, they could have been colored lights. It would not have bothered me. Maybe, I don't remember, but maybe Idina wanted white lights. I don't remember. Because I don't feel like I have a preference. So the fact that we have only one maybe seems to suggest that there was like, you know, she cared more. Because I grew up, Archery, when we grew up, had both. So I was pretty used to both.

You know, we had the kind of, I mean, I don't know if this is a thing anymore. It probably isn't actually. Like the kind of lights that sometimes they go off and you'd have to screw every single one of them, right? You have to go around and check that they're all screwed in. I bet that isn't a thing anymore. Light technology has improved vastly with LEDs.

Things are, it's way better than it used to be so much better than it used to be. That was our holiday themed hashtagemed hashtag AskUpgrade. Thank you so much to everybody who sent one of those questions in. I'm really pleased that we got to do that. If you want to send in a question for a usual episode,

it can typically be about anything. You can send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord. We have lots of technology-focused AskUpgrades that have been building up, so we'll make sure that we get to those in a new year we won't be doing any next time because it's going to be

the upgradies we have one more special segment for this week's episode where we're going to be reviewing a charlie brown christmas special but before we do let me thank our final sponsor of this week's episode and that is our friends at squarespace make your next move with squarespace they let you easily create a website for your next idea or project. They'll give you the ability to register a unique domain name, customize beautiful award-winning templates to make your website look fantastic, and they will be on hand to help you with anything you need because they have award-winning 24-7 customer support. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform to let you build just about any website that you want to make.

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our thanks to squarespace for their support of this show and all of relay fm squarespace make your next move make your next website okay let's talk about a charlie brown christmas now i mentioned our previous episode much to the dismay horror of many upgradians i had never seen this before and my typical response to people that that got in touch about this was typically to just send them a uk flag because this is a very american thing and one of those things that americans i love you but you get that mindset right where you're like well we do it everyone must do it now like charlie brown is a very american thing and so it's never been so i've never even seen it on television in my life amazing amazing yeah

absolutely a christmas tradition and uh on uh aired every year and everybody would sit down and watch it and it's a real it's a real thing it's it's uh yeah i i love this i love that you it's 2020 and you just saw a charlie brown christmas i guess we can thank apple right we do the anti-petition on the show that was the that was the impetus i would say, for us choosing this. So it came out in 1965. It is interesting, I think, to me that it's based on Peanuts. Peanuts is the name of the comic strip. Legendary comic strip. I'm allergic to Peanuts.

It's another reason I haven't seen it. There you go, right there. But they don't call it the Peanuts Christmas special or something. It's a Charlie Brown Christmas, which has a meaning. Do you know why? Because I think the show was called Peanuts was it called charlie brown like the actual there's no there's no show oh i thought that there was a show okay no show just a comic strip just a comic strip interesting um and then a bunch of specials hmm uh peanuts is a weird name i think charles schultz didn't like it it just was a name that i think

maybe even was selected for him by the syndicate so uh everything is branded as charlie brown and people know charlie brown and snoopy and stuff they don't really know peanuts so peanuts doesn't get a lot of play which is fine but it is a comic strip it was legendary and popular uh it lasted lasted, what, 50 years, basically, in daily newspapers when that was a thing in the last half of the 20th century, which it was. It was huge. And Snoopy was huge, and I had a stuffed Snoopy as a kid. Like, just, it was everywhere on T-shirts and mugs and TV specials, and, like, it was an enormous phenomenon.

So just to put that in context. It's interesting because very i'm very familiar with snoopy as a kid there you go snoopy snoopy was one of those characters that just i think in a lot of places just transcended where it came from you know like a like a mario or a hello kitty or a bart sim even, where it's like now it's just a thing and there's merchandising that you can just purchase not knowing anything about this character. I think the big example is Mickey Mouse, right?

Who is far better known as a symbol and a character than from his animated stuff. And so, yeah, Snoopy especially has transcended that um the other thing i want to mention before i i we we tap into your brain and see what you think about this and what i was thinking of every time i watch it now as an adult i think of this which is this is 15 years into the into the run of the peanuts comic strip it is based on the peanuts comic strip some things you need to know about the peanuts comic strip it is for for a theoretically a comic strip about a bunch of kids it is kind of dark it's depressing af is what it is especially especially for mid-century it's it's kind of dark

it is psychological charlie brown is a put-upon sad sack kind of character that's kind of dark. It is psychological. Charlie Brown is a put-upon, sad sack kind of character. That's part of the fun. In 1950, the first Peanuts comic strip ever is two kids sitting on a stoop. And they go, hey, here comes good old Charlie Brown. Good old Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown walks by. And then they're watching him go. And the one kid says, how I hate him.

Oh my God. And that's how the strip started. So it's got some interesting baggage that comes along with it. And the other thing I wanted to say about Peanuts is it's comic strip, which means it has a style like you'll do a week of strips. And for those who don't know about reading like newspaper comic strips or web comics are kind of like this too but especially the structure in newspaper comic strips six days of strips monday through saturday three panels a day so what you get is

this week it's going to be jokes about snoopy decorating his dog house and there's going to be set up punchline set up punchline set up punchline throughout the week and then the next week it'll probably be something different and knowing that you watch a charlie brown christmas and you go oh that explains a lot about why there are just scenes where somebody walks in there are a bunch of jokes and then they walk out again because it's literally just the setup punchline structure from the comic strip brought to life in animation yeah and and and as a result i think the charlie brown christmas special is parts of it are feel more like uh more like a comedy sketch i that one of my notes that i wrote down was this just feels like

a selection of sketches like i got that feeling from it where it's like there is an overriding theme to this special but all of these situations that are occurring within it they're kind of mostly unconnected and they feel like sketches running through it as opposed to it being like one story so i definitely got that feeling yeah it's it's episodic there is a story but so much of it is just outside of that because they want to show you all these characters and they want to seem like they're the ones that are in the comic strips or i think even less about the marketing and more about the structure like this is our chance to make the comic strip come to life and it's 1965 and they're not like we're gonna reimagine peanuts it's like no we're gonna play some of the hits from uh these characters that you know and so that's what it is

so there's the there's the uh lucy at the uh her advice psycho psychological advice thing and that's a bit and Snoopy at his doghouse and that's a bit and Charlie Brown's sister Sally making her Christmas list and that's a bit and then like there's a bunch of that and then there's if there's a plot it's

the Christmas he's directing the Christmas play and then has to get a tree I mean that's the plot and then the christmas he's directing the christmas play uh and then has to get a tree i mean that's the plot and then the tree is bad and everybody laughs at it and then the tree is turns out to be nice and they all dance and that's the end because there's not a lot here it's also 20 minutes long 25 minutes long so i was i was wondering if i was gonna be like all right so let the backstory of this i think, so let the backstory of this. I think we should tell the backstory of this.

Okay. So we were trying to pick a thing. Yes. For Mike at the movies. We wanted to do a Christmas thing and Jason recommended Charlie Brown Christmas. And I was nervous about this because I'd never seen it.

No affiliation to it. No particular love for Charlie Brown. And I know just how dear many of our listeners hold this to themselves i didn't want to watch this not like it and then come to the episode and be like this was boring and sad right so here here's the plot twist is i told mike why don't you watch it it's only 25 minutes long and if you don't like it we'll pick something else and we won't talk about it and this was two weeks ago so i liked it enough that we that we're here but now we're here uh i did find this kind of funny that when i went to the screen in in apple tv it had

these two words next to each other 1965 4k dolby vision now i don't think those two things match i'm just gonna say uh well it's on film and they scanned in the film and restored it i know but it's still animation from 1965 it didn't really i mean you know it looks like animation from 1965 it doesn't really look like it was presented in 4k dolby vision this is not a criticism but because like what are you gonna do but it was just funny to me anyway right like these two things just next to each other every bit of film grain you really do you can you can see it i immediately recognize the score you know like i've heard these songs i've heard the album right like i've heard these songs. I've heard the album. I've heard all this stuff. It's a favorite. It's fantastic. It really is super sad.

Like dark sad. It is. What is it about? There's certainly a vein of Christmas movies in general. It's a Wonderful Life is like this. A Christmas Carol is really like this. It's all about kind of like getting pretty dark and then having kind of a redemption at the end.

And that, that is not every, you know, Christmas story is just happy all the time. A lot of them are, it gets, it gets real dark. And then at the end,

there's like that moment of like, Oh, Oh, it's the meaning of Christmas after all, Charlie Brown. And this one is, is definitely, if you go in thinking,

it's just going to be a brightly colored, happy, shiny. It's not, it's definitely not charlie brown is depressed that's how it starts right it's charlie brown is depressed he's a troubled kid like he is a troubled kid it's kind of upsetting really because are they voiced by children do you know that yes that's that's one of the interesting tacks that they took

and you can tell in a few parts and it's probably not what uh most animated things now would do but they specifically cast children in all the parts okay and so was this for many people the first time that these characters had had voices i think it was the first time yes right okay the kids so like i'm familiar with some of the tropes of charlie brown though right so like i know that um there's a like a psychiatry element to it what's the character's name violet booth that's uh that's lucy lucy and uh she's mean she's also the one who pulls the football away from char Brown when he tries to kick the football. I know her for that. Yeah. But everyone's mean to Charlie Brown, though.

Yes. Like, even his friend Linus is just like, you're the Charlie Browniest, which I thought was funny. But it's like, oh, man, can't someone give this kid a break? Even his dog betrays him. Everyone. It's rough. I like the dancing scenes a lot. It's not a play, which I also think is kind of funny.

You're talking about they're going to do this play. There's never a play. It's just dancing, which I just thought was kind of cute. But I like the animation. Dancing around a nativity, basically. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. And there's a lot of jokes in this, which, you know,

it's that idea of this is for for kids but the jokes are for adults like it's even in here like what like i can't remember the character was like what would you want for for christmas it's like real estate oh yeah it's like it's like a great punch line yeah that's the that's the sally listing all the things that she wants and please please note the sizes and colors as described here and all of that that she's so little a kid that she can't write the letter herself but she's got very and this is the kind of the message right is it's the uh anti-commercialism like yeah what is going on these kids are so against the commercialism of christmas yeah it's weird it's weird i think this was a

thing in the 60s where there was this trend of like oh christmas is too commercialized and and it's too many like maybe maybe the american economy uh suddenly realized how important christmas was and it all got kind of bombarded and this is kind of a crusty uh rejoinder to that saying let's not forget that the holiday itself and and um i think even if you're not religious the the resolution where um linus does the the bible reading essentially is it's that moment of like have we lost focus on christmas as a holiday and focused it on presents and money um because that's what sally does say is is uh if you if you have a problem with this just give money. Fives and tens are preferable, right? Like it's just, and I think that's the idea is that Charlie Brown's General Ennui

is all about the fact that he's lost the plot or everybody else has lost the plot of Christmas and that it's supposed to be about that particular holiday and also about peace on earth, goodwill toward men, the whole thing instead of present here, present there, commercialism like that. But I think about that a lot, actually, every time I watch it, because it is an interesting theme to have. And every passing year, I feel like I take the temperature of Christmas commercialism again, because on one

level, it's been commercialized for so long that it's sort of baked in and on another level we've been criticizing the commercialism of it for so long so i don't know it's it's uh but it is like a show that's basically saying um if you're just focused on the presence giving and getting you're doing it wrong which is an interesting tack for a animated family holiday special to take and yet it became a classic i have another question that i think might be a a unique thing of the time aluminium christmas trees what's that all about those were the predecessor to our fake trees of today. Oh, okay. Huh. So it's like a little metal tree with little metal branches and stuff,

and it's like a little fake tree. That's what that is. Because that's like a very prevalent thing in the tree part of the special, is that they should get an aluminum one, and I didn't really understand what that's a fake get a fake tree yeah i mean i found it charming i actually had more laugh out loud moments than i was expecting because what was funny to me at most is the way that these kids treat each other right well sometimes it was

shocking to me in a way that i didn't like there are parts of it where because they talk like adults but it's children's voices yeah there are moments where the punch lines are very effective yeah the real estate joke is i think pretty effective that was my favorite that was the elicit the biggest laugh from me real estate i also like um there's a scene where linus and lucy are talking and linus is like or no it's not it's it's schroeder right it's the piano player and he's like i'm gonna do christmas music i'm gonna do bach or i'm gonna do beethoven he's obsessed with beethoven i'm gonna do beethoven she's like nah how about how about jingle bells yeah it's like okay i'm gonna play jingle bells any more classical style she's like no i mean jingle bells you know and he's like oh okay and it's like it is the portrait of an artist and he plays it in just the worst possible way

right it's very good yeah and she's like yeah that's it you got it now and it's like it's the portrait of an artist trying not to compromise and ending up in a horrendously compromised place which i feel like is again part of the commentary about the of the show and about christmas but it's also a really funny interaction between those kids where the one kid is super earnest and is like, Beethoven, I love Beethoven. I'm obsessed with Beethoven. And the other one's like, don't give me any Beethoven. Give me the tinkly tinkly.

He's like, all right. It's great. It's great. Yeah, it's super cute. And it's short and fun and easy. Charming is a good word, too. It's got some funny jokes in it. And it is just kind of charming, I feel like and the music is beautiful and the the the kids and like charlie brown you're rooting

for him that poor guy and in the end he gets a win yeah it's like i can see why people watch it every year because it reminds me of like kind of like a christmas album in that sense right like i don't know just listen to the music but it's short and it's it's easy you know i could imagine people put it on when they're doing something you know like decorating the tree or whatever you put on china brown christmas like i can see how it's become the thing that it is but it is also just interesting because like there are a million of these types of things you know like the special of this animated series or whatever and it's just it's just interesting to me that there seems to have been this real kind of like

cultural like collective around this one it's just it's just intriguing to see how one thing can pull ahead like that yeah it's and it comes from a period in in the 60s where there were three tv networks in the u.s so there were only three things on tv and this was a popular right it's an animated special for the holidays it's a popular cartoon popular comic strip and so i think it got a big audience that time and also hit the spot in a way that it had some sort of resonance and then what cbs did is they just aired it every year and so then it became a tradition they made it a tradition it was which, I mean, the story goes that they thought it was going to be a disaster and nobody was going to like it because it was unlike any other animated thing that was being made at the time. Yeah.

And was darker and had the weird. We appreciate it now. Having a jazz score was not what anyone wanted, right? was not what anyone wanted right that was a such a weird creative choice that turned out to be brilliant but so weird in the moment and so the the story is that the producers and the network and everybody thought this is not this is going to be a disaster and it ended up that people liked it and it became a tradition when they ran it every year and it has you know become this tradition in america so i think some of it is good luck uh and the ball started to roll and it and it once in that era it was so easy to capture attention compared to now and then once you've got it like then then it's uh then everybody

is has got that attention and then it repeats every year at the holidays. And it just, it's like snowballs. It just gets more and more and more and becomes this thing that, you know, as a kid, it was just Charlie Brown was on and the Charlie Brown special. And there were a million others that tried to get into that territory.

But this is the one I think that really stood out as the definitive holiday special that everybody watched every year as a tradition. Yeah, we have, you know, like every family, we have our things that we watch. And I can imagine this one becoming one of them because it was fun and easy. And it's now very available. And you can laugh at Charlie Brown's sadness and like, oh, Charlie Brown, come on. And then, you know, he gets to succeed at the end with his Christmas tree and everybody dances

and they do the Snoopy dance, which people who haven't seen the special might not understand. But now you've seen it. So that was a Charlie Brown Christmas. And this was the Upgrade Holiday Special. We would like to wish you all a very happy holidays, however you're celebrating.

You know, it's definitely a standout year, this one. It's going to be one that's memorable, and I hope that you're all able to celebrate it in the way that feels best for you. I would like to thank our sponsors for this episode, Squarespace, SaneBox, Smile,

and Pingdom. Thank you so much. I'd also like to thank our members, the Upgradians who support us directly. In our Upgrade Plus bonus content for today's episode, we're going to be talking about The Mandalorian, because I have now watched it all and I really want to talk to Jason about it. If you would

like to hear that discussion and you are not currently supporting the show, go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up and you'll be able to get that bonus content and upgrade with also no ads in the episodes as well. And we thank everybody that does that. We'll be back

next time where we're going to be participating in the seventh annual Upgradees Awards. Make sure that you get your nominations in by going to upgradees.vote. Voting closes on December 23rd. If you want to find Jason online, he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L, and at sixcolors.com. I am iMike, I-M-Y-K-E, and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. That's what Christmas is all about, Mike Hurley.